Factually! with Adam Conover - You Are Being Robbed of Your Attention with D. Graham Burnett and Peter Schmidt

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Would you rather that your attention were a resource freely directed toward your interests, or a measure of how many ads can be propelled into your eyeballs in a single session? Our attention has been commodified, and an entire industry is trying to wring out every possible instance of it. D. Graham Burnett, a professor of history at Princeton, and experiential organizer Peter Schmidt are two of the spokespeople of ATTENSITY!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. This week, Adam sits with Graham and Peter to talk about attention, and how to take it back. Find the Friends of Attention's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. New Year, same extra value meals at McDonald's. Now get a savory sausage-mic muffin with egg plus hash browns and a small coffee for just $5. For limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Kanover. Thank you so much for listening to the show today. And, you know, I really do mean that thank you because your attention is a precious resource.

It's a valuable resource, in fact. If someone like me can get your eyeballs in your ears and the brain connected to them to pay attention to us, that means potential revenue. That is the central idea behind the entire advertising and media business, getting your attention and turning it into money, hopefully by giving you some valuable information or entertainment in return. And, you know, a lot of really wonderful and valuable media has been made as a result of that exchange, a fair exchange. But, you know, in recent years, the race to capture your attention has become supercharged and exponentialized. Tech companies have pioneered endless feeds of algorithmically curated content to keep you watching whether or not you actually enjoy it or get anything out of it. In that way, the media environment of today resembles the one from 50 years ago, about as much as a casino equipped with slot machines resembles a craps game on the street corner. Once something is constant, gamified, and in your pocket, it can become a lot more harmful.

And, you know, one estimate says we've gone from seeing around 500 ads a day in the 1970s to 5,000 a day now. So look, even though your attention has always been worth money and even though there's always been an industry trying to get that attention, I used to work in that industry, in fact, it was called television. Well, that was primitive compared to what we have now. Because, you know, instead of an executive saying, hey, we think you should watch this show about sexy singles in Manhattan or this show about a sexy nerd who explains common misconceptions to you. And then you would decide whether or not you want to watch that show based on whether it interests you.

Well, no, today, a billion supercomputers analyze everything you have ever clicked over decades to give you the exact type of content that will keep you glued to the feed. The TV of the past, you could just turn off. But it is not so easy to do that. with the internet. We are compelled to constantly engage with the super weapon of attention manipulation

that is aimed directly at our brain stems. So, are we just trapped here? The slave of the machine? Do we just park the bus of inattention dystopia for good? Or is there something we can do about it? Because, you know, there's a lot of scolding talk about attention. We blame ourselves and each other for not successfully breaking free from this industry.

but what we really need is to think about our attention in a different way and maybe build a movement to take it back. Well, on the show today, we have some incredible people who have built exactly that movement. Now, before we get into that, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and the interviews we bring you every single week, there's no algorithm deciding who I talk to. It's me using my human brain and you using your human brain to decide if you want to listen to it. If you want to support that type of media, well, head to patreon.com. over five bucks a month gets you out of all the ads we put in this show to pay for our bills. And 15 bucks a month, well, you can support this show even more directly and I'll thank you

at the end of the show if you do. Also, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy, that old-fashioned media format of just sitting around with a group of people and listening to someone say some funny stuff and laughing at it together in a circle, well, head to Adamconover.comnet for all my tickets and tour dates. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Louisville, Kentucky, San Francisco, California. I'm taping my special actually in San Francisco from February 19th through 21st. I'm also headed to Houston, Texas. And later in the year, I'll be going to La Jolla, California, and Kansas City, Missouri.

Head to Adamconoffer.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's guests. Their names are Dee Graham Burnett. He's a professor of history at Princeton. And Peter Schmidt, who's an experiential organizer. They are two of the spokespeople for the new book, Attensity, a manifesto of the Attention liberation movement. and they don't use that word lightly.

These people are literally trying to build a movement to help you and all of us take back our attention. Please welcome D. Graham Burnett and Peter. Graham and Peter, thank you so much for being on the show. Thrilled to have you. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. I was just giving you a hard time before we started rolling.

I won't tell the audience about what. But we're already best friends. Tell me real quick. There's been a lot of talk about our attention spans, how these are being manipulated by the companies that control all the various forms of media. We're all glued on all day long. You describe what these companies are doing as human fracking. What do you mean by that?

I'll jump on that. I mean, petroleum fracking is a way of getting money out of the earth. It's not like old school drilling for oil. Old school drilling for oil, you know, there was like a big oil zit, like under the surface. and all you had to do is kind of poke a little hole, and you had a gusher, and the oil would come up. There aren't any of those kinds of oil situations left on the planet. So fracking was developed as a way to force up to the surface,

widely distributed deep petroleum and natural gas. And the way they get it, this is what fracking is, is they pump down into the surface, high pressure, high volume detergents that break up the deep structure. access this deep hidden petroleum, crude, natural gas, dissolve it and force it back up to the surface. And this is, it's not even an analogy. It's what we would call a homology. It's exactly the same thing that social media business models use to get money out of us, which is to say they pump into our faces high pressure, high volume detergents, break up the deep structures of our

attention and our capacity to regulate our personalities to force to the surface this foam of monetizable attention, which they then auction to the highest bidder. So that's what we mean by human fracking. It's a project to make money out of all of us, and it's the primary business model now of like a $17 trillion industry. And when you say they're pumping detergents, I understand the rest of the metaphor, but specifically what do you mean by what is being pumped into us? Content, right? Like everything that comes out of our screens, this generally pretty low quality flashing

lights, videos, real stuff that's getting shorter and shorter. I understand. Yeah, low quality flashing lights as being pumped into people's brains to make me money. Yes, I understand that. No, no, this is a higher caliber detergent. We're talking the worst stuff, the sludge. Is it? Keep going.

That's what's getting pumped into our eyes. And the kind of fracture point of the metaphor is that we see our attention being diced up into these smaller and smaller durations. And then the way that this actually like turns into money, right? And that's the critical part is that those smaller durations of quick twitch attention are thereby easier to like pull to a corner of the screen and then Instagram or whatever the platform we're using puts an ad there at the right exact moment.

And then because they're predictive models and say, hey, this person's eyes, Peter's eyes are going to be on the screen for a tenth of a second longer. They can then auction off that higher value ad space and that happens a trillion times an hour. You're actually talking about not longer form content like this. You're talking about specifically those like reels and TikTok shorts

and the very high volume, low duration, high attention grabbing kind of content is specifically this strategy to break up our otherwise longer attention compared to say this, you know, hour to 90 minute podcast episode. Totally. And it's also really important to say it is true that as we move around on our devices, we often have the experience of freely choosing the next thing. We sort of determine when we're going to,

swipe. So people can slightly bristle when you say that the content is being pumped into their faces. They're like, actually, no, I like that. And moreover, I'm choosing to keep going and with more. And that's fair. What's super important, though, is that we all keep remembering that what we feel we're choosing is actually the end result of the most sophisticated, AI-driven algorithmic models of what will maximize our screen time engagement. In effect, the most sophisticated military-grade computational technologies with the most fancy AI is all now being directed to drive algorithms, the same kinds of smarts that can beat you at chess and mop the floor with you at Go.

Those AI systems have been given the problem, keep humanity staring at the screen for the longest possible duration. Offer them next to the thing that will hold them a little longer. And that's how, though we evolved to have sensory and cognitive relations richly with each other and ourselves in the world, that's how we now spend, most of us, more than half our waking hours, staring at small screens, which is not a straightforward thing to get, beings like us to do. That's some sophisticated juju.

But that last little thing you said about that's how we evolved to interact with each other was for our attention to work that way. Now you're reminding me of the argument people make about sugar that we were sort of designed to be sugar-seeking organisms because we need that. That was the highest value calorie in a natural environment. And I don't want to get into like evolutionary psychology kind of bullshit. It can get these metaphors can get like a little bit overused. But, you know, now once capitalism realizes there's this natural affinity that we can have people mainline, it sort of hacks our nervous system in a way. And you're making a similar comparison when it comes to our attention spans. It sounds like. Yeah. I mean,

these are real desires that it's picking up on, very, very deeply coded desires. And that's why it's so powerful, actually, because a lot of it is kind of below the level of the conscience. consciousness. So they're real desires. The problem is, I have my desires over here. There's my screen. I think it's just me and the thing, but there's like a trillion dollars and a bunch of really smart Ivy League grads on the other side of the screen who are pulling on as hard on my desires as you can possibly imagine. And it's super asymmetrical, and the asymmetry of it totally falls out when we think about our relationship to tech. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to throw in there like a a broad way of framing this, new technologies make possible new forms of human exploitation.

And we are at a historical watershed in this 15-year period. It was not previously possible directly to commodify the core indices of human personhood, our curiosity, our desire, our love, our need for each other, those things were not previously possible with the available like media ecosystem and technologies directly to commodify. And so we are in a moment that can be likened, I think, to the first great age of the global empires where like 10 guys went out from Europe and boats and they declared the entire planet, Taranulius, land belonging to no one, and then proceeded to say, actually, this is ours because you all aren't using it in the right way. Except now that's not happening with land because you can't go out and just claim land.

But human consciousness itself, our inner lives, personhood, that is now the literal land grab of the new heedless, nihilistic, tech plutocrats. And they're being rational actors, they're just trying to make bucks. It's not like they're not interested in biohacking humanity for some kind of science experiment. They're interested in biohacking humanity in order to maximize return-on investment. And it's working. It's working. It's really interesting to make that empire comparison, that metaphor, because we had Karen Howe on the show a few months ago, wrote a book called Empires of AI, and that's literally her frame for describing the AI companies.

It's a slightly different sphere, still the tech industry. But she's talking about how, yeah, they are sort of treating. the competition between themselves for who is going to rule the world as existential, it's fundamentally extractive, and it's fundamentally a project of sort of domination

of something that was not previously dominable. Yeah, it's an interesting metaphor too. Graham's kind of land grab story, and it extends a little farther that terra Nulius idea, they were like, hey, look at Tenop's titlan. basically empty because these people don't worship Christ. They had this way of sort of rendering whole populations totally absent.

And we see the same thing going. They'd also kill them. That was the other way they'd do it. They'd kill them with disease and with guns and shit, you know. Yeah, exactly. Those go hand in hand. And a similar thing is happening here. It's that the tech companies have kind of engineered a supposed absence in our psychic lives.

and convinced us that there's a very particular kind of attention that counts as attention. And this is why when people are talking about the attention problem, and a lot of people are talking about it, and a lot of people see it as a problem, so much of the discourses around this idea of attention span, I can't get work done, I can't stay with my stuff. Like, I'm just distracted all the time. Super normative idea of what counts as attention. A lot of the work that we've done in the book we talk about this is that

That notion of attention, that idea that attention is kind of time on task, it's quantitative. You can understand it as like a span. That didn't come from nowhere. That came from the exact same place that these technologies that are screwing up our attention came from. And so we have to remember, we have to kind of repopulate the terra nullius here to extend the metaphor. We have to say, wait a second, when tech isn't like engaging us at all times, when it's not pumping stuff into our brains, there's actually a whole universe, a whole ecology, a whole diverse jungle of different kinds of attention that are going on. And we need to breathe life back into all those parts of us,

because those are what make us human. So even the very idea of our attention spans as something that we should be managing in order to be productive is itself a sort of post-colonial attention, a framework of thinking about ourselves. Yeah. I mean, the co-editors of this book all come from different spaces like Peter's an activist, Alyssa Lowe, who's not on this call. So filmmaker, writer-director, and I'm actually by training a historian of science. And in my kind of day job life, I've been working for the last eight years or so

on a very tedious academic monograph on the laboratory. study of human attention in the 20th century. So I'm really interested in the ways that experimental psychologists putting people in front of machines and testing their ability to stay with a stimulus, track and trigger and remain durationally vigilant, that those characters blessed them, because they were scientists, they were trying to do the right thing, make knowledge, they sliced and diced our attention in ways that set it up to be priced in the attention economy. Is the work that they did about attention? Sure. But it's a very narrow and particular kind of human behavior, which was the narrow behavior that the scientists were being funded to study without getting too kind of paranoid

here. Who was funding those American Cold War researchers studying people's ability to track and trigger on? Yeah, it was a military industrial funding and was interested in shooting down airplanes and how long people could monitor radar screens. So we ended up with very powerfully authored conceptions of attention that are very narrow and fundamentally mechanical, cybernetic, mechanomorphic. They were about staying. with the screen because that's what was needed. In the modern, like, control rooms of industry in the military, labor was studying the dials and waiting for an output that you needed to record. Yeah, so those forms of attention were the kinds of attention that mattered to the military

and to industry. And they're real, but they hardly capture what attention is to creatures like us, who daydream, who take a walk, who read, who care for our children, those are attentional activities. We need to, just like Peter was saying, like rewild our attention and remember that attention has been historically many deep, rich things. It remains for us constrictive of our personhoods. It's how we experience and make worlds. And this attention span conception was like pre-stressed to interpolate us with devices. And that's the one that unfortunately, even those folks who are out there worrying about what's happening to our attention, they mostly have the debate in those terms. And we try to say like, hey, don't get into that ring.

Step out of that ring. You don't want another seven minutes of that kind of track and trigger mechanomorphic attention, you know, on your screen time app because that kind of attention can only be used for those kinds of activities. Like, go do something else. Get a pick up soccer game. That's attentional. Do it with some other humans. That's life.

Yeah, and just to kind of connect the dots there, because Graham, I mean, he's a story. So his day job is doing that kind of deep archival work that helps us understand where this stuff comes from. But they developed that form of attention. And how did it get to us? Like, what exactly does it have to do with us? Kind of middle chapter in this story

is a lot of that research was then funneled into casino engineering. Uh-huh. We're coming back, I promise. Casino engineering. All these, uh, all these casino, all these Vegas types in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, were developing the new electronic slot machine, which was a much more powerful slot machine. And so Blackjack and poker, those kind of moved to the edges of the casino. And then they had just rows of these new slot machines that were really sophisticated machines

designed to keep people pulling the lever. And the way that they did that is that they had identified this form of attention that was like really locked in with the machine, really locked in with the screen or the display or whatever it may be. And they figured out how to make machines that reinforce that attention. So in fact, we often think these days about giving our attention to our machines. But our machines are giving it right back.

Our machines solicit very particular kinds of attention. They reinforce very different kinds of attention. And in the early 2000s, when the kind of mobile phone, smartphone wave was hitting us and they were starting to develop these platforms, they were drawing on the same body of research, the same lessons from the casino industry and saying, hey, we can develop platforms that encourage this very particular kind of attention. The anthropologist Natasha Dao Schu'll calls it the machine zone. She did an ethnography of casino addicts, gambling addicts, slot machine addicts.

She was a past guest on an earlier version of this podcast of many years ago. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And so these devices, they're not just aching our attention. They're conditioning us into a very, very, very specific kind of attention, a very narrow kind of attention as it happens, the kind of attention that the machines are best equipped to monetize, to bracket.

and monetize, and that's the one that came out of those military labs. Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, a year from today, who do you want to be? What version of yourself would you like to meet? Would it be one that feels less anxious or feels more like yourself? Maybe your relationship is stronger, or the grief that you might be carrying, feels smaller. What if that thing you've been secretly worrying about just took up a little less space in your mind?

Well, the right therapist can help you get there, and Alma, can help you find them. You know, as I get older, time seems to move faster and that can be scary sometimes. But, you know, one of the things I really appreciate about being in therapy is how it makes me see where I've been and make setting long-term goals for myself feel a bit easier. It makes me feel empowered to make change real meaningful change in my everyday life. And with Alma, finding change can be within your reach too. They have a directory of 20,000 therapists with different specialties, life experiences, and identity. and 99% of them take insurance.

You deserve to feel like that future version of yourself. And a year from today isn't that far away. So get started now at helloalma.com slash factually. That's helloalma.com slash F-A-C-U-A-L-L-Y. You know, I think self-improvements a year-round endeavor. So these days, instead of trying to punish myself with New Year's resolutions, I'm trying to find ways to be kind to myself instead. And you know how I'm doing that right now?

all about getting comfy. And I've been able to bring serious comfort to my everyday wardrobe, thanks to Bombas. The all-new Bombas sports socks are engineered with sports-specific comfort, no matter how you stay active. You know, I love to hike during our cool LA winters, and their socks are perfect for it. They are cushioned where I need it most sweat-wicking and loaded with other high-tech features to keep me comfy and locked in. But guess what? Sometimes you want a different kind of sock. For those every day around the house resolutions, Bombas also has he covered with the comfiest footwear imaginable. Every weekend, I practically live in my luxurious Sherpa Sunday slippers. They're like walking on clouds. And for every item you purchase, an essential clothing

item is donated to someone facing housing insecurity. One purchased, one donated with over 150 million donations and counting. So maybe it's time you started treating yourself nicer. Make a commitment to your own comfort and head over to bombus.com slash factually and use code factually for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash factually, promo code factually at checkout. New Year, new you, right? Well, if we really are what we eat, sounds like you better change your eating habits for the new year, right? And in 2026, do you really want your body to be made out a peanut butter banana sandwiches you ate over the sink or cups of instant ramen that you call elevated because you dropped an egg in? I know that. It was a cool trick in college, but we've

grown up since. Or would you prefer that your mortal meat vessel was constructed out of delicious, organic, good for you ingredients that arrive straight to your door for a reasonable price? I promise you, you will stop worrying about whether what I just said made sense when you try Hungry Root. Think of Hungry Root as your personal grocery shopper and nutritionist rolled into one. They do the heavy lifting like grocery shopping and meal planning while recommending healthy delicious. groceries and meals that actually match your tastes, dietary needs, and health goals. Hunger Root holds all its food to high standards, screening out over 200 additives, including high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and preservatives.

They only source high-quality meat and seafood with no hormones or antibiotics, offer organic produce and non-GMO options, and carry trusted healthy brands like Oatley, Vital Farms, Inthagha, Hamas, harmless harvest, and many more. Whether you're gluten-free, dairy-free, high-protein, focused on gut health or anything else, Hunger Root has meals for you. Just take a quick quiz, and their smart cart technology recommends recommends, tailored to your tastes and needs. It's like having a personal shopper and chef all in one so you can spend less time planning and more time doing what you love. So take advantage of this exclusive offer for a limited time.

Get 40% off your first box, plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to Hungarroot.com slash factually and use promo code factually. That's Hungryroot.com. com slash factually, promo code factually to get 40% off your first box and free item of your choice for life. Yeah, man, the vision that you're painting here is like, it's sort of a meta narrative about the way human activities or parts of humanity have changed over time that I've sort of seen again and again in different areas where a human faculty or a part of human behavior that's sort of organic, fundamental, you know, woolly.

non-quantified, just sort of happening in this happenstance way becomes mechanized, reproduced, capitalized. I think a lot about how, for instance, music used to be something that people played for each other. Everyone played a little bit of music, right? Oh, I have a little instrument, whatever. We're sort of, you know, music is a human thing that we do all around us. Fast forward to today, it's something where a small number of people are paid to produce

something that is reproduced infinitely, that is quantified, that is algorithmic, right? And the sort of organic human version has been lost, I think about romance, where it's like, oh, I run into somebody and there's a spark and like, oh, we start chatting and da-da-da-da. And it becomes dating apps, right? Which are like, let me, let me find an algorithmically sorted list of everyone who might want to fuck me in the area. And like, there's advantages to that, right? The first time you experience that, you're like, that's really useful to have that list

because it was hard to do it the other way, right? The organic sort of small scale way. But, you know, after a while, you're like, oh, wait, we've lost something because I don't know how to hit on somebody in the bar anymore. You know what I mean? And you start a little dead inside, yeah. Yeah, I've lost that sensitivity, that sort of like old way of doing it. There's a million examples like this throughout human society of like the,

here's how it happened before anybody really thought about how to do it better. and then here's the version 100 years later where we've turned it into a science of optimization, right? And we realize that we lose a certain sort of wildness. It's the difference between a forest

and a tree farm, right? Where it's like an organic environment versus a monoculture that's optimized for efficiency. And what you're saying is the same thing has happened to our attention spans that attention used to just be

that's you moving through the world. And no one really thought about how to optimize it and now it's something that not only is it being extracted from us, our own framework for how we think about attention is in the language of the optimizer, of the efficiency person of, oh, my attention is not being used efficiently enough? Is there a system I can, is there a different app I can use?

Is there a new device I can buy? Is there a timer I can implement? Is there a program I can force myself to adhere to that will make, make my attention efficient in the way I want it to be, rather than think, hey, maybe there's a version of your attention that isn't supposed to be so efficient at every moment.

Maybe you could just fucking live and wander and daydream and your eyes could wander around and that would be living, you know? Daydreaming is a great example, actually. So we're part of a community of folks known as the Friends of Attention. Graham can maybe offer a bit of the backstory on that. But we've been thinking about non-commodifiable forms of attention. attention for the past seven years. And one of the forms of attention that we are super pro, super interested in, and we think it

gets a bad rap, is distraction. People think about attention as if it's this like particular kind of time on task where your attention is doing what it's supposed to. And distraction is the flip side of that. It's the you failed at whatever you're supposed to do. But we're like, nah, get rid of that kind of normative, top bottom thing. Let's think about distraction as the free movement of your attention. actually, if we stop thinking about distraction as the opposite of attention and start thinking about

it as a special kind of attention, it has a lot to teach us, you know? Like, it shows where your attention travels of its own volition. Yeah, for some of your listeners, Adam, who really want to kind of dig in on that point that Peter just made, it isn't just a kind of, you know, woo idea, oh yeah, like distraction can also be a form of attention. There's a really beautiful book by brilliant intellectual scholar named Paul North, who's a prophet Yale, the book is called The Problem of Distraction. And in that book, North argues, in essence,

that distraction is the deepest form of attention. That it is what we would call the aporetics, the kind of the empty holes, the contradictory moments, the moments you can't recover. Where was I? Where was I? That's when your attention was deepest. So he does a beautiful reading of a set of works of literature, including Kafka, to find these

moments where kind of the ellipsies and the texts happen, where you lose the storyline and sees in those moments the deepest forms of attention. And it's a pretty powerful idea. If you stop and think about it, like let's just take a really simple example, like a classroom, teacher at the front of the room, kids, teacher gets mad at a kid for staring out the window. Hey, kid, you're not paying attention. Meaning what? You're not looking at the board where I'm showing long division.

Okay, but wait. Like, the kid who was staring out the window was deep in a reverie about sort of the nature of time and like why it is that the like autumn sky, the sun wasn't in the same position that it was in September. The kid is having insights into the nature of the movements of the spheres. in literally the universe. Is the kid distracted? Well, only if you mean, pay attention to what I, person, in power, I'm telling you to look at.

So there is a way in which the distinction between attention and distraction can be figured as simply a question of social authority. Distraction is attention to things other than what the people in power are telling you to look at. Now, that's a little over simplistic, and, you know, there are many philosophical. and techno-scientific accounts of attention that we could get into if you want to. But the reason I go back to that image is that for Paul North, we would want to respect the depth of the attentional form that is the reverie that absents you from the structures of power that have

claims on you at any time. And that's some deep stuff. And I feel a desire at this point to go back for a moment, Adam, because you were just raising, like, one of the deepest questions that we must keep wrestling is that you were asking that, like, basic question about why it is that in certain ways things seem always to suck worse. Even as we also recognize that in certain ways, like, things keep getting better. Like, cars are way better than they were 25 years ago. Motorcycles are way better than they were 25 years ago. But it's also the case that certain features of our project of making empirical knowledge about the nature of things, and then figuring out how to capitalize on the making of products that reflect that empirical knowledge of things, why does that

dynamic have a quality of hollowing of aspects of what we long for from life? And I guess just as an intellectual historian, like, I don't know how much time you got in this podcast, that's one of the great, hard questions. And the way in which our efforts scientifically to understand the world have again and again gotten into bed with the projects of getting rich, to swim with the deep mysteries. Why is it that like making knowledge of things has always sort of found bedfellows with capitalist forms of exploitation and with forms of military industrial violence? This is a puzzling feature of things that we could spend more time on. There are other things to talk about, but it's a rich, hard question. And I guess for the purpose of this podcast, let's just say, human attention, which we have

we have brought you a claim that human attention is much richer, more diverse than we mostly acknowledge or credit or recognize. And we have brought you that claim, and it's the claim in our book, Atensity, because we believe that this is urgently important now for us together as a kind of collective movement to remember because we are being harmed by the scientific command of our attention, which has gotten in bed with capital, and which is producing a world in which it's hard for us to flourish. We are being brutalized by this new form of extractive money making that makes money out of something that is so dear to us, our time and our senses, and our way of being with the stuff we care about. And that's what we're here

to say it is all hands on deck. Everybody already knows that there are problems with their attention. You probably had six people on your show, Adam, talking about the attention crisis. We're not here to do that story. It's really important that your listeners hear that, like, our book is different. It's not about just saying that there's a problem. We all know that. Our book is about a pivot to a positive program where we come together.

And as in the moment of the environmental movement, diverse people, people with a shared mission say in solidarity, no, we want something different. We want a better world. We don't want the desoliation of something that is a shared good. And then it was the external environment. Now, in a sense, it's the internal environment. And that's the big call of this book. We want this to be silent spring for revolution that we think, I mean, it gives me goosebumps

saying it, man, because I think. we're there. Everybody we talk with about this stuff is like, oh my God, yes, the moms, the kids, the parents, the workers, the people who like are trying to like extract capital from us can't figure out how to do so because like the fraggers have got us not doing our jobs. Everybody realizes our politics and shambles. Everybody knows that this is not working. And we are going to see change in the next decade. I'm going to see change in the next decade. I mean, I hope so. I hope you're right. And I love that you put your message so incisively. I certainly relate to it. My last hour of stand-up comedy was largely about these issues. I did an hour of stand-up that was first on

dropout. Now it's on YouTube, where you can, which is certainly trying to harvest your attention more successfully than almost any other platform. But it was about my childhood diagnosis with attention deficit disorder and my, you know, my wrestling of that throughout my years. And I sort of end by saying, you know, why was I, why was I always so afraid of distraction? Why was I told that it was something that I should avoid? Certainly there have been times in my life, many times in my life. I've wanted to do something and I've been unable to. And I believe the diagnosis to be real. But it's, it's been a strange evolution watching how differently we talk about that condition, especially now that our entire lives are filled with companies that are attempting to steal

our attention from us. It often feels that we have no choice but to adopt the framework of attention efficiency, right? Because we live in a world in which our attention is being mined, you know? And like, how realistic is it to say we can go back to a, we can rewild or we can go back to an older form of attention when, you know, we now live in an era where it's been,

it's been mechanized and it's been extracted? You know, the people who who live in the, the people who lived in the jungle can't go back to an old way of life after the deforestation has happened and it's been turned into a plantation, right? You know, they can't just say, oh, well, hey, let's go back to, you know, living in a small village community, right, and picking fruits off the trees. Like, you don't live there anymore. So I'm going to give this to Peter in a second.

I want to say one quick thing, which is that we don't want to go back. We are not anti-phone. We're not anti-social media. Like, we're anti-a very particular business model. if phones have been designed by like our grandmas, we'd use our phones to call our grandmas. If social media had been designed by like two Buddhist monks, Marina Abramovich and like the faculty of like,

the school of visual arts, it would be like a cool way to like share like our expressive lives. That's what the internet was like in the old days, honestly, it was more like what you're describing because it was created by academics and artists and, and, and, uh, Optimistic technologists.

Correct. So the point stands, I mean, like the original sin of the internet was the advertising model. We have a host of commentators who've been telling us that for 15 years. We know it's true. It's just that now they've really gotten good at it. So my point is we don't want to go back. We're not Luddites. We're willing to be sympathetic with some of the Luddite types because we think of ourselves

as attention activists. And so it's broad church. Everybody get on board. But I guess the point I want to make is simply this. We can't go back and we're not going back, but we are in favor of the human use of humans. And I believe passionately, and I think everybody in our kind of movement, everybody in the Friends of Attention believes that it feels good to be a human. And when you heard us, eventually at a certain point, we're like, actually, that feels,

ow, stop doing that. And there's a rich history of radical politics in which you just, you grind the people down certain amount and they eventually like you get off my back like I won't and if you remind people how good it feels to share a little of like quality of their attention with another human being just a little listening time all talking time that's simple for the next five minutes you're going to just ask me questions that indicate that you have been listening to what I've been saying we're going to keep doing that we bring people together and we do exercises like that it seems so cheesy but people like they come out of their bug-eyed with joy.

You give them permission to look at their hand for three minutes and then to look at the hand of a person sitting across them and they start crying. So we believe in that. We believe that if you remind people that it feels good to use their human attention in human ways, they can't keep us down. And that's similar again to the environmental movement.

If we've been having this conversation in 1961, you would have been like, how realistic is it that we're really all going to get together? and like stopped them from dumping toxic effluvians in the Hudson River. I mean, the big companies here and like there's money to be made. And it's true. But in the end, people are like actually don't like, it just feels good to be able to take a walk like in the woods without like the Hudson River being on fire because of the toxicity of the

effluvians. People like to feel good in the natural world. People like to feel good in themselves. And this is our hope anyway. We could be wrong, but we are optimistic about this. Peter, am I saying this in a way that the judge of you? Totally. Adam, you brought up the question earlier of like, how do we go back from the monoculture of the tension, let's say.

And we've painted a pretty grim picture in some ways. And this is why that pivot to an affirmative vision is so important. Here's a thing. These technologies, the devices have very powerfully reshaped the way that we give our attention first to our machines. And then since we use our machines for so much the day to everything else in our lives, we like put the phone down. We're still in machine zone kind of with our with our friends. and our hobbies and all the rest. But people already have, or rather people still have the spaces in their life where they're

not being fracked, where they're giving their attention in a bunch of different ways. Like, every single one of your listeners can think to themselves, what's something that I do in my week where I'm just doing my thing? I'm not hooked into the internet. I'm feeling good. I'm doing some activity. It's a hobby. Or I'm with a person that I love.

Or going on a walk. Or I'm hosting a dinner party. Or I'm surfing. whatever, where I feel like I'm in the world, you know, like I'm in the world with other people. That's an example of a free space, a space of free attention. That's like the little patch of Queen Anne's lace at the edge of the cornfield, you know, like that's the little bits of attentional diversity that are still in our lives. And what we're saying is know about the monoculture, know that that's there.

but really direct your attention towards the part of your lives where you're actually living where you're actually like inhabiting the full diversity of what your attention can be like basically focus on what feels good and good in a way that like brings you closer to the world rather than closer to your machine if you start there that's a little like taste of the world that we're trying to build through this collective work yeah i mean there's a craving that people have for those activities. I myself, I've already talked on this show about, you know, I've gotten back into physical media the last couple years.

I've like, you know, redone my vinyl collection, which I've had since college, but I've like, you know, started to really pay attention to it. I've been taking up film photography. I've been, you know, realizing how much technology in the internet used to be the most exciting thing in my life, and now it's the most boring. And now I crave activities that are not screenbound at all. and I've started to see the screen as like a, as a thing that I hate.

Really started around COVID, you know, during lockdown. I was like, I hate anything happening. You used to love video games, still enjoy them sometimes, but, you know, less so than I used to. I think a lot of people are having that same reaction. I also think about how many younger folks in their 20s, you know, will post nostalgic memes about like, you know, what life was like in the 90s.

And, you know, oh, look, look at those people just, you know, no one's on their phones. They're all just vibing. And, you know, they're posting that on the internet. Sure, they're posting it on TikTok or whatever. Sometimes it's AI generated nostalgia content. But also, there is something that I think young people are always good at, which is hanging out with their friends.

Like there is a constant pull, you know, when you are between the ages of 17 and 25, there is a pull just. just to go get fucking hammered in a cornfield with your friends. Or to go to a concert or cornfield to get constant cornfield. A cornfield is a monoculture, unfortunately. But, you know, to just like have those organic friend-based experiences. Honestly, in your 30s, you start working too hard.

You stop doing those things. Now when I hang out with my friends, I'm like, oh, yeah, feels good to do that, doesn't it? I forgot. But there is a constant human desire to go back to. Why do people like to have sex? It's because for an hour, you're not looking at your fucking phone. And you're just like present in your body.

That's the best thing about it, right? Is that you're present in your body for an extended period of time. And so I agree with you that we are constantly pulled. Thank you to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. You know, owning your own home can be great. But sometimes it can feel like an abuse of boss, can't it? You know, making unexpected demands that derail your week, throwing a surprise project at you on holidays or weekend.

being uncomfortably flirtatious at the office holiday party. Don't you hate it when your house does those things? Well, then you know that regular homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover a lot of the day-to-day wear and tear on a home. Plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, electrical issues. That's where homeserve comes in. It is like a subscription for your home. For as little as $4.99 a month,

you can quit sweating the small stuff and get back to wondering whether your drunk boss saying, you're a wild animal, was meant with inappropriate undertones. It was Brent. Repairs hit fast and hard. So think of it this way. You can either find yourself searching for a contractor in panic, or you could already be on the phone with HomeServe's 24-7 hotline scheduling a repair.

They've helped homeowners like you for over 20 years with a trusted national network of 2,600 local contractors. You know, I'm lucky enough to own a home that I love, but I still cannot tell you how many times I would have loved to have had something like HomeServe on my side. An unexpected age vac breakdown can leave you shivering, Kind of like your boss saying, sorry for all the sweat in your ear while hugging you goodbye. Okay, this copy has really taken a turn.

So help protect your home systems and your wallet with homeserve against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month. Go to homeserve.com to find the plan that's right for you. That's homeserv.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month, your first year terms on covered repairs. One thing I'm curious to talk about a little bit is you mentioned monoculture. I think honestly, you know, there's a different sense of the word monoculture where we talk about the death of it that we no longer have a mass media.

And I think about, you know, I found this book in a free little library in my neighborhood. And it was called, it was from like the mid-80s or early 90s. and it was called 10 arguments for the abolition of television. And it was just like it. That's gerrymander. It's gerrymander. Four arguments for the. Four arguments.

Excuse me. So you know this book. Okay, great. Very well. Yeah. And I grabbed it off the shelf and I was like, it's, I work in television. It's a funny book spine to have in my house. But I flipped through it.

I didn't read it exhaustively. I just flipped through it. And I was like, man, what a, what an old ass argument. Man, oh, oh, yeah. 30 years ago, people were really upset about television. and they thought that television was really bad for you and they're like, oh my God, everyone's hooked on the tube and it's awful for you.

And now the way people talk about television, they say, oh, I did something really good for myself the other day. I sat down and I watched a whole TV show. It's been a year since I've done that. Oh, it really sucked me in. And it felt really good to do that, right? Because television has actually become an example of like an extended form of attention to sit there and watch something.

And we're all mourning here in Los Angeles, the death of the television industry. Oh, my God. We don't even make TV shows anymore. Like, oh, remember cable? What a great thing that was. Like, we're talking about the great American novel, you know? And I find that transition so interesting. And what it maybe indicates to me is that the invention of television was almost a middle step in the harvesting of attention.

where like, sure, it was capitalistic and mechanized, but it was also like, hey, guess what? What if we put a box in people's houses that has interesting stuff to watch? And sure, it was advanced, but by our modern standards, there was a crudeness to it, right? Where it was like, hey, there's only five channels

and they're all only showing one thing, and there's ads in between, but you can turn the volume down if you want. And when you turn the boxes off, it's just off, and it doesn't watch you back. You know? And I think when we are, when we're nostalgic about that, we're actually nostalgic about the crudeness of the of it,

that there was a thing that it wasn't doing that we miss. Does any of that relate to you? Yeah. I mean, what it wasn't doing was watching us. Yeah. Right? Like it's easy to think about the kind of development of these media over the past, say 100 years as like just progressions in a like series of basically similar things that are only

getting more advanced. And those guys back in the in the day, Neil Postman and all the rest, when they were critiquing TV, they had good arguments and those are worth revisiting now more than ever. However, it's easy to kind of get nostalgic about the television or to look back and say, hey, they were so worried about the TV back then. We're worried about TikTok now. What's the big deal? People have always been worried about stuff.

And I love a same as it ever was argument. I've done those sort of arguments many times. People used to worry that watching horses, horse-drawn wagons go by was, you know, somehow inimical to the human psyche because things were moving too quickly in the cities. Like this is the sort of argument we've seen forever, and it's easy way to dismiss arguments like the ones that you're making. I've made arguments like that myself in the past.

Yeah, and just to say, like, the television wasn't watching us back. And if you use, let's use a similar analogy here, like sports cars of the past 50 years, they have gotten, their max speed has gone up by maybe 70 to 100 miles per hour, if you're lucky. Sports cars are faster than they used to be. Computers over the past 50 years are not just faster sports cars than they used to be. their computational power has increased by a factor of like trillions. Like it's just a new thing. It's a totally new thing.

And it's a thing that has new forms of access to the most intimate part of ourselves and is really, really, really good at manipulating our behavior and, you know, drilling down into our eyeballs. Yeah. I mean, there's so much in all this. And I would really encourage your readers to go check out Jerry Manders' great book for arguments for the abolition of television. I was really like, I found this piece of shit in a box on the street. And it made me laugh because it was so out of date and stupid. And you're like, no, people should go buy the book.

I'm like, fuck. This is what happens when you get into like a historian. Like I'm like still like one of the last 11 guys out there still trying to do the reading. It's a kind of occupational hazard. But Mandar, that dude who wrote that book was a master of the advertising industry. He was one of the masters of the universe. of the sort of madmen world of advertising in its heyday. So he wrote that book from the perspective of somebody who was a master manipulator of collective

human attention. And while Neil Postman was dismissive of the book, Neil Postman comes later, great book, amusing ourselves to death, which is also an argument against television, really, but has a slightly different structure. Postman was impatient with Mandur's argument. he read Mander as just a Luddite and that his argument was sort of policy irrelevant. What do you mean abolish television? That's stupid.

But if you go back, like Mander's core claims are immensely relevant to what has happened with the rise of societal-scale digital platforms. What Mander points out, for instance, is that feelings are more powerful than facts in television journalism. That violence is more interesting than peace. because it's more visual, that there are certain kind of core elements of storytelling that operate in a television framework that are at odds with deliberative democratic procedures. So he's like an old guy who was like, you know, raised in the Bronx here, Jewish guy from New York

City, who was kind of like an expert in the changing culture of television, but somebody who understood the way as it was undermining features of an American democratic project that he believed it. And he took a kind of extravagant position on it. So without doing a kind of like, you know, endless media history kind of thing, I do think that there are some interesting arguments that are not irrelevant that came out of critiques of television. However, this would throw a little French in there. Why not, Adam? You know, like, plus it change, plus it's la meme shows, you know, like the more it changes, the more it's all the same. That idea that like, yeah, yeah, it changes, but really there's no change here at all, right? And we do see that argument.

A very brilliant intellectual historian named Daniel Imovar did that argument in a brutal critique of Chris Hayes's Ciren's Call book for the New Yorker. Imovar was like blah, blah, blah, you know, like back in the old days, Emerson thought that the rise of the closed stove was going to bring human civilization to an end because people wouldn't have conversations around the fireside. But this is. This is a lot. This is really just people like Chris Hayes who think that they ought to get listened to, winging about the fact that now nobody pays attention to them. And like, you know, I got to tell, I respect Daniel, who's actually a friend. My man is deeply wrong. And in 50 years, when people write the history of this moment, they will read that review and they would be like, ooh,

somebody who did not understand what was happening. Because what is happening right now, now is a difference in kind, not a difference in degree. It would be like saying with the rise of the early machine guns, yeah, there's the kind of thing men have always done. They've always like thrown things at each other. They're very violent, man. Not really, actually. Omdurban, like, Undermon was a massacre because some people, like, had guns that were capable of putting forward firing rates that were unprecedented. And everybody else had spirit. years is different. It's like difference in degree that constitutes a difference in kind. What is happening right now is transforming the experience of personhood. And if you have any question about that,

take a moment, turn your phone off and think about it. Like, are you the same person you were? If you're a person over 40 and you remember a world before these devices, you know you're not. And is family life what it was before? It is not. And is classroom life what it was before? No. And did we have rates of mental illness among youth that are like the rates we see now? We did not. And did we have siloing of our political experiences that are comparable to what we're dealing with now, not since the Civil War? So what is happening is the rise of a new set of technologies that make possible new forms

of exploitation that are at odds with human flourishing. And to go back to what we need, you were talking about sex in cornfields. I spaced out for a second and then I was like, wait, who's having sex in the cornfields? No, no, no, getting drunk in the cornfield. Oh, right. I'm sorry, that was me with the sex. Having sex anywhere is good. All right.

My point is more like, what do we actually need is friends. The reason that our coalition is called the Friends of Attention, throwback to that idea from the Quakers of the Society of Friends, is that this is not about you and your device. This is not about you having a disorder or problem. This is not about the shame you feel when you went down an internet hole and lost those two hours. You were going to do something else. We have to lose all that sense of it being like a me thing where I have to regulate myself and do a little mindfulness and get better at my detox and device medicine.

No, no. We need solidarity. We need collective action. We need together to talk about how we want a different, world and we can make it together. That's the power of the movement, that we have to remember that this is not all of us. This is the bullshit that neoliberalism has sold us, that we're like rational individual, the self-maximizers. This is only true for economists, and who parties with economists? We are human beings who we need each other. And when we begin to talk openly

about the worlds we want to bring into being, by the forms of attentional life we want, it starts real simple, setting some guidelines on how we're going to relate to our devices when we're together. It's not complicated. It's the little things that begin, but out of those little things, journey of 10,000 miles begins with those single steps. We're going to reshape the world. And in 30 years, people will look back at this moment and they'll be like, you guys didn't think about attentional wellness? That's so weird. How did you have a world in which, like, attention to health and well-being wasn't something that communities took seriously. It'll be as weird as it is for us, we talked to our grandparents and they were like, yeah, we used to eat just pulled pork and

then sometimes we would have marshmallows on our jello salad and we didn't know that it was causing heart disease. And the doctors were telling us we should smoke cigarettes. So we smoked cigarettes because we thought the mentholated ones really helped our respiration. It'll be that weird where we're like, how did you not know that that was really bad for you? People, our kids, kids will look back. That's insane that you gave seven-year-olds, these supercomputers that are like surveillance devices in which they could be slipstream. No, no. The Mad Men of the future where, and Mad Men, I think has a mixed record on this,

honestly, but there's those scenes in Mad Men where they were like, oh, isn't it funny that everybody was smoking? Isn't it funny that everybody littered? Isn't, you know, these were things that they weren't aware of at the time. That 70 years from now, they will be a baby with an iPad in its hands. it'll be people at the bar looking at their phones instead of talking to each other. And honestly, there'll probably be examples

I'm not even thinking of because I think the baby with the iPad in the hands is something that we are currently judgmental of today. But there'll be something worse that we're all doing. It'll be the dating app dates. It'll be the whatever, the various other forms of addiction. And I think what this has in common with those things is that you're talking about

how do they not know that cigarettes were bad for you? Well, mass market tobacco on that scale was actually a pretty new thing. It had, you know, it had around, you know, tobacco had been around for a while, but the mass-produced cigarette with the filter tip that was advertised on a wide scale was, you know, an invention of the 20th century. And we are living through something that new right now. Like, we're at the dawn of this, you know, the, I mean, Instagram reels is what,

six years old? I remember, I remember when my friend, I'm old enough to remember, My friend showed me his iPhone and the way like when you turned it, like it kept rotating the screen. And we were all like, that's insane that it like can like orient. Remember? We were like, whoa, that's cool. That new. Yeah.

And well, I remember when I first installed TikTok in 2020, which was my first experience with that kind of algorithm. And I loved it because I was like, the internet's boring. And here's something that's giving me serendipity and delight in a way the internet used to. But it was also a mechanization and a professional. and a, you know, a reproducibility of that feeling to a degree that, you know, had an effect on me that I didn't, I didn't realize until a couple years later, the effect that it was having on me. Now, now it dominates my entire life. My entire professional life is about feeding that beast. The clips from this are going to be put into that very beast itself. Now, something that, that, you said that, yeah, we're part of the algorithm, baby. We can't escape it. They use the master's tools to take down the master's house. We understand, we are going to have a national mass movement in which people like rise up for attention activism. It's not like we can not use TikTok and Instagram.

So we'll be fine with that. I don't consider that any kind of contradiction. Well, something that I think a lot about is that what you're talking about, the return to doing things in solidarity with other people, to the sort of small-scale human experience of being with other people is in fact something that we naturally must return to in our lives constantly. Something that I talk a lot about in this era of the entertainment industry being disrupted, my business being disrupted by technology, is I say, hey, why do I do stand-up comedy?

It's because people are always going to want to go sit in the dark with a date, drink some alcohol and hear a live person make them laugh with other people. There is something about that experience. I want to be around 70 to 300 people and I want us to all have the same experience simultaneously. I want someone to make us laugh about what is happening in this room right now. Not something that's happening in a movie. Not something that's happening somewhere else. I want to be part of that communal experience.

People will always want that. and why do I post reels on Instagram is to get people into that room so we can have that experience together. And maybe people will be distracted from it and they won't do it as often as they used to. But if we can remember that that's a human need, we can always go back.

So when people are talking about the movie industry is dying, I'm like, remember that people do need a place to take their kids to sit in the dark on a Friday night, you know? And if the movie industry can remember that and that human piece of the experience, that's something that can be used to revitalize it in the era of, you know, TikTok and et cetera. When I think about, you know, the organizing work that we do in the labor movement, why is the Writers Guild successful as a union where other unions are not, perhaps? Because many unions have structures that reduce their power.

Well, you know, we're a union of about 10,000 members, but what's the basis of our organizing? it's not sending out an email blast. It's not putting videos on the internet, though we do both of those things. It's that we make sure that every single member of the union has another member of the union that they can talk to, that they can call on the phone, right? That every single member is assigned to captain.

Every one of those captains can call a board member, right? And we have constant small-scale meetings because the soul of the organizing is that even though there's 10,000 members, we're constantly in small groups hearing from each other. You know, what do we do before our negotiation every year? We get, or every three years. We have in-person meetings where we sit and listen to each other for five or six hours.

Literally all of us in leadership sit on the dais and anyone who wants to come up to the microphone and speak not just to us, but everyone else in the room. And that's the most important thing that we do. Everything else is important to, but it helps. But that is the main experience. of being a member of the union. And that's where the power comes from. And that's why on the picket line,

we were there for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of days, you know, without fail, because we had those human bonds with each other. The basic social shit that's, you know, apes in the woods, right? We are leveraging that kind of bond with each other. And that kind of bond is like inescapable for us as humans.

We have to have it. We will always return to it, no matter what capitalism does to it, no matter does to us, unless you're literally in prison and, but fucking even prisoners have social structures and social systems and social organization and human connections with each other.

Like, no matter what, no matter what capitalist prison we're put into, we always must have it. We will always return to it. And if we remember it, that's always something that we can draw, draw to return.

Is any of that track for you? Give it to, I want to give it to say one quick thing. I give it to Peter. I just, say, like, when you talked about doing your comedy routine and the way that that trades on a certain kind of IRA presence, like, we would claim you as an attention activist in that regard. We would be like, that's like what we need is a world in which that aspect of your work,

you understand in another three or five years as a form of attention activism. Just like somebody might have liked having homegrown carrots in 1958, but that wasn't understood is environmental activism because environmental activism wasn't a thing. That was just a person who liked to have homegrown carrots. By 1968, the fact that they liked to have homegrown carrots was part of a larger vision of the world we wanted to inhabit together. So people can be doing different things. And what we need is for them to understand that aspects of what they're already doing,

they already understand the vitality and centrality of this to their lives. And then I want Peter to talk to the organizing part because what you said there just warms our hearts. That's like a pillar of attention activism is organizing. Totally. Yeah. I mean, Adam, you kind of sketched out for us a nice analogy for what we need to see around attention. You know, I run the school of radical attention.

And Graham is a co-founder there. A bunch of the friends of attention who made the book have been a part of this kind of IRL bricks and mortar space where we do a lot of the stuff. We have these conversations. We have classes where we think about, you know, what this. new moment requires of us. We have workshops where people get together and do different kinds of attention practices with each other just to kind of reframe a little bit their experience of attention and come to look at it from different angles and feel it in new ways. We think about attention activism as having these kind of three columns and you got at them already. The first is study.

So we need to know what the hell we're talking about when we're talking about attention, right? Because we've already said on this podcast that what we're often talking about, about when we're talking about attention span is actually this like super narrow time on task thing that has been taught to us by our machines. We need to have a much broader sense of what attention is for that study. We need to organize. So we need to have these relationships. We need to have people that we can call in the middle of the night. We need to have the experience of all being in the same room or knowing somebody who's been in the same room with somebody on the other side of the country, have those networks of trust, of people who are brought together by the understanding that our attention

is like the environment. It's a shared good. If you mess up the environment, everybody suffers. If you mess up attention, everybody suffers. We're responsible for that. And then the third thing, and I think this is kind of most on my mind in the context of the stand-up, is this idea of sanctuary. Like, we need spaces, literal spaces. We need places where people can go where they're not getting their eyes just like

punched by their phones, where they can put their tech away. where they can be with each other, where they can practice different kinds of attention, right? The kinds of attention that you say, like, we really deeply need, and that's true.

And where they can remember, like, hey, yo, a different world is possible. Like, this feeling of being in the dark with my date,

looking at this funny person on stage, this feels pretty good. And actually, imagine if my entire waking life had some of this quality of presence, you know? I mean, maybe we don't want to be our entire waking life

to be kind of listening to stand-up jokes in the dark. But there's something there. Sorry. Professional dig. The point is, we need spaces. And, like, Graham made that big, beautiful kind of historians point that people can be doing the same thing.

And when the conditions around them change, the meaning of the thing changes. So you can be doing something. And all of a sudden, like, politics changes. The world turns on its head. Suddenly, the thing that you're doing is, like, political. It's literally political. we saw this in the Industrial Revolution. Like, you know, in feudal times, if peasants didn't go to work, they were just hungry peasants.

There wasn't anything overtly political about that. They were just unhappy. But then you had the whole nature of work change that got oriented around these machines that like sucked up labor and turned it into money in this very particular way. Suddenly, people not going to work in a coordinated way was a strike. That was politics. And so what I'm saying, Adam, is you are a political actor as a comedian, as some of the who brings people together if you want to be, and you've got to choose the label,

but it's right there for you. I mean, you just made, I think, the best pitch for someone to come to see one of my shows that has ever been made on this show. So just want to remind people, February 19th through 21st in San Francisco, California, earlier in February,

will be in Houston, Texas, Adamconover.net for tickets. If you want to rewild your attention and reclaim your humanity and fight, back against the capitalist attention frackers, head to Adamcotiver.net for tickets and tournets. No, seriously, that is, it is literally, I'm joking, but that is literally why I do what I do. And it's, it's part of why I've always felt that, you know, I do this shit on the internet,

I do television. Part of the reason I've done it, though, at the end of the day, I'm like, I want, I want people to come see me live. I'm trying to, like, why do you want to be on TV in the first place? maybe I'll sell more tickets and maybe those shows will be better and they'll feel like something more special. And something about it has always drawn me back to that as the goal. And I think it's part of what you're saying is the human experience of being in that room has always been one of the most exceptional experiences of my life. When all of us laugh together at something

that we are all in the room for that's irreproducible. When you watch it on television, when you watch it on Netflix, when we watch it on YouTube, that's not the thing. The thing only happens in the room among the people who are there. You can watch a simulacrum of it, just like you can watch a recording of a concert. But you know that if you're at the concert, you know that if you're at the event, it's, there's a different texture. Go for it. So I'm going to just pick up on that and like pivot from that image, which is so real, so rich to the implications of that for like, you know, my day job. I'm a teacher. Yeah. Like education. Like right now, we've got these new increasingly powerful AI systems, which are displacing much of what has traditionally been

our educational world, we have the capacity increasingly to render education highly instrumental and deploy the same attention-capture techniques that have been perfected within the human fracking industry. The ed tech entrepreneurs want to deploy those same techniques as our educational systems. I want to put in a plea to those of your listeners who care about human freedom, care about education as the holding space for the taking shape of persons equal to the conditions of freedom, that we continue to remember and understand that real education involves that same experience, the same thrownness of people in a room coming to understanding together in real time in that improvisational anything can happen way. I mean, you know, not to get

too fancy, but there's a beautiful Greek term, chiros, you know, the form of time that is a conjunction, not chronos, which is time that just unrolls, the time you can count one minute, two minute, three minutes, that's chronos. Kairos is the time of bang, it happened, the event, something that had to be there. That's not countable. And that's education. It's not just entertainment. It's just the Great Blues Concert. It's also what happens when people come together to try to understand who they are and to think about the world together. And that's education. So I want to like, our book is partially a book about the intimate relationship between real human attention and human freedom. And we talk in this country is shit ton about freedom. But if you are not

capable of living truthfully and in community with authentic attentiveness, the things that you care about and use your attention to make the worlds you want to inhabit, you are not free. True freedom of attention, true freedom of attention is freedom. And so that's like, you know, you just, you move my heart with that because I want to, again, make clear, we're not Luddites. We love to distribute the messages. But as these AI technologies become more and more powerful, the question of what the human use of human experience is is sharpened and lifted up.

And hopefully the best part about this tsunami of AI that's coming for us is that it lifts up the little foamy bit of like styrofoam cooler of actual humanity up on top of that cresting wave. And we get to look at that together and be like, well, what do we want from being the, the kinds of beings we are. And our claim is that attention is at the heart of that. Yeah. That's beautiful. Graham's doing a shout, a hardcore shout out to the educators out there. That's because he is an educator. In fact, he used to be my teacher. That's an origin story. Whoa. Hold on a second. Okay. Wow. So that's like, that's like where he's speaking from. I'm a mere mortal out in the world. So I'm going to extend that to everybody else. This talk of creating the conditions for our own freedom, setting ourselves up to be free together

is something that everybody can do. Anytime you bring people together, get them in a room, get them at a comedy show, or throw a party. Like, we have the tools that we need to be with each other and to kind of be with each other in a way that is good for us and that is good for our attention. And we'll know we got it right because it's really, really fun and we feel connected to each other, you know, all the good stuff. So that work of like creating freedom, creating the conditions for freedom through the freedom

of our attention, something anybody can do, throw a party. And even if it's in a cornfield, you can make it work. You know, like this is the work that we're endorsing. And it is, we believe, a form of activism. It's a way of pushing back against the conditions that have been served to us. You guys are really thrown by the cornfield thing. And I just think I must have grown up in a more rural area than you. I'm from Missouri, man.

No, you're speaking my language. I'm from Indiana. I'm on a cornfield in my backyard. We're going up on Long Island. It was actually a sod farm. But, you know, it's... They have those out there. We're in New York.

We don't actually get to talk about cornfields very often. So you struck a nerve with us. You sent us back to our childhood. Look, I think what you're saying partially is... I was talking about a comedy show. And a comedy show is still... It's a little bit mechanized, a little bit professionalized. There's capitalism at play.

Someone's making money. There's a business that's trying to... to get you in the door they're trying to sell you drinks, right? It is a human activity. It's both things. But sometimes I think, you know, some of my, some of my closest friends who I value the most are the ones who say, hey, come over. We made soup and we're drawing, you know, and we're, and you know what else they have?

They have a piano and they have a guitar and we fuck around with and play a little music for each other, right? And sometimes when I'm over at their place and I'm doing that, I'm like, I'm like, like this feels like the most radical thing that I could do, you know, or when I, you know, I love to cook for people and when I make a meal just for five people, I spend like two hours on it, you know? And sometimes I go, why am I spending two hours to make four people happy when I could spend two hours making a podcast and make 100,000 people happy or whatever, right?

Or I have a friend who, a really good example of this is a friend of mine who's a wonderful TV writer is also a wonderful role-playing game game master, right? And he will spend whole weekends, you know, or he'll spend a week creating an experience for us on the weekend where we're just going to spend five hours. He's going to entertain us. And part of me goes, hey, man, why are you writing a screenplay? So you can make some money off of this and further your career. Why are you spending all your creative energy for this thing that's going to dissipate in a

moment that's just for the four of us, you know? but like that's there's there's truth to that because hey the guy's got to make a living right but but at the same time what is more important than than that smallest of scale human interactions and what texture is there like something that i've felt recently bringing it back to food is a take that i have lately is that home cooked food is just better than restaurant food always i don't care how good of a cook you are It's always better than restaurant food. Why? Because restaurant food is made in a factory,

no matter how small the restaurant is, for anybody who comes in the door. A home-cooked meal is made for one person, or made by one person for a small number of people. It's never made again. It's like just, and it's not even, it's made with love. Fuck that. It's that it was made.

It's lumpy. It's strange. It's just for the people that, oh my God, we had to make a separate entree because someone's gluten-free. You know what I? I mean, like it's that, it's the specificity of it and the small scaleness of it that gives it a different texture that makes it actually better or it makes it fulfilling in a way that the restaurant meal will never be. Both of me and Peter worked in restaurants in our college years.

And if anything, we'll cure you for desire to eat in a restaurant. It's, you know, running dishes back and forth. Yeah. And watching the guy behind the hotline, you know, pulling the hair out of that. grab melt and just let me like, all right. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, take that back to 13. Yeah, I do want to say like something about like capitalism because this question of like, is money being made has come up a couple of times. And like, I'm just speaking with myself, like, I'm personally not a Marxist. I'm actually totally good with market-based solutions to a lot

of complicated social. You lost our audience now, I'm afraid. They don't like you anymore. I just fucking around. Market-based solutions to complex social problems. There's a lot to be said for them. By the same token, there have to be limits and constraints on how we think about what we're willing to do to each other to make the mean green. You know, I'm here on 157th Street. I saw a guy in my gym just the other day, and he just had his shirt on in the gym. He was lifting, and it just said, greed kills. And I was like, that's actually, like, better than a great deal of, like, Marx's

euvre. Like, just that actually says a lot. And so to the point, folks making a living, it's all good. Heedless, nihilistic, greedy systems to maximize the dollar value of humanity at any price, unregulated? No, that's not okay. And it just turns out that rational actors going about the business trying to maximize return on investment will literally do anything to each other. This is chattel slavery. So if you don't stop the peoples, they will literally do anything to each other for the mean green. And we're just in a funny little hiatus here where the

regulatory system has not caught up with a new way of doing harm to peoples. And we got to like rise up as the peoples and be like, not, not that. Now, I will also say that we are as it happens, a nonprofit coalition. And it's good for your listeners to know that the friends of attention or a nonprofit organization, and crazily enough, this book, all the proceeds from the book, all. We signed the book as the nonprofit, collectively authored book manifesto, and all the proceeds of sales of the book that come to us as authors, all that goes to support the nonprofit work we do of attention activism.

So as it happens, we are like really all in on this thing in a pretty serious way. And that's a way of showing like our colors on the question. but everybody making a living, like, we're good with that. And by the way, my 17-year-old kid has like 25,000 followers on TikTok. She's a very creative maker. I like go to her and I'm like, can you help us with our social media post? So it's perfectly, and it's interesting. And she's herself an attention activist.

She understands like the limits of the thing, but she's a creative user of the systems as well. And there are all kinds of interesting ways to think about your attention in relation to the devices. Like there was that trend for a while of like imagining licking, something across the room. Did you ever on TikTok? It was like such an interesting like attentional exercise. Everybody would like, they would post like reveries of licking a thing within view on TikTok. And it was like I was like so interested in it as like a strange kind of collective manifestation of imaginative attention. And the thing about TikTok that always made it appealing to me in a way that actually Instagram reels for some reason in it isn't.

and AI scrollers like SORA definitely art is that there's a humanity there, right? That especially in the early days of TikTok, this is just somebody with a front facing camera having a thought or showing you a piece of their life. And that's the most engaging stuff. Oh my God, did you see this fucking kid? My favorite TikTok I ever saw,

there was a 17 year old kid in Fresno. He was digging a hole. And he was like, hey, you guys. His username was Big Fat David. I think I've talked about it on the show before. And he was like, hey, you guys, I'm digging a hole. and I was like, what the fuck is this kid doing? Like, here's a piece of humanity I didn't know existed.

He lives on like an almond farm, this kid, right? He's like his life is so different from mine, but I'm learning about him. He's a real person, you know, and that's what would bring me back to that platform was I felt like I was getting that piece of real humanity. And I think the most successful people on those platforms or the ones who people have the most love for.

Maybe they're not the most successful financially or numerically, but the ones where people are like, I really love that. I really love that person, you know, is when their humanity is expressed in that sort of small-scale way. So let's bring this in for a landing. I think you guys have made a beautiful case here. I think you've made a, you've said your call to action on what people can do so many times that like returning our attention to the small scale human experience of being alive,

the infinitely textured and non-capitalized, non-extractive. experiences of of being in the world that you can have with yourself and with friends and with community. That's that's the radical way to fight back. That's the version of growing the garden in your backyard to get away from the mechanized food system of capitalism to grow a little something is to get together with your friends and play a little music and do some drawing and talk about how to make the world a better place. And you got something else, Peter. It's also it's it's growing in your backyard. But let's remember how the end of works, this is a multi-trillion dollar industry that's built on one thing that's been commodified,

which is attention. Where does attention come from? It comes from us, you know? So if we create spaces away from it, it's not like we're just getting away from it. We're actually like pulling the rug out from under the industry. Now, we're doing it in small ways. And so there's a theory of change that needs to happen here. There's a kind of scaling and there's a gradual culture change behind that very slow pulling of the rug. But we are actually depriving the machine of the thing that it runs on. And that is like direct action. That is like workers withholding their labor and making the mill stop. So we need to create spaces away and we got to remember that that is both like starving the machine and it's also creating these other worlds where we can imagine what the hell it is that we

want life to look like and to feel like. And that's what's really important about this moment is you got to be against, but you've got to be four and you can do them at the same time. It's an intentional strike. Like something that I've been doing lately, I've been trying, I've been taking film photos. I've got the photos printed. I put them in a physical photo album. So it takes me a couple hours to put my photos in the photo album. And sometimes I'm like, I'm wasting time. But actually, those few hours that I'm spending not scrolling on Instagram, right?

Not even watching Netflix. I'm spending it by myself. That's an attentional strike. I'm taking that time away from the machine and I'm spending it in an organic way on myself and on my friends. Same thing when I'm at the union meeting. Same thing when people are at the stand-up show

and they've got their phones in the yonder bag or whatever the fuck. And they have their attention as part of a group mind as opposed to, you know, being harvesting. It's such a beautiful vision. I've rarely had guests on who have made such a clear case with such a clear, beautiful thing that we can do about it. And so I'm so grateful for you coming on the show.

The name of the book is Atensity, a manifesto of the attention liberation movement. Oh, there it is right there. Folks can, of course, pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. When you buy there, you'll be supporting not just the show, but your local bookstore. Where else can people find the book and your work?

Graham and Peter. We're all over the place. If you're in New York City, come check us out in the Strother School, which is in Dumbo. And the books for sale every place. And the other thing is that we built a coalition. So people are really interested in this stuff. You want to follow us? Check us out, Schoolofattention.org and get into the, like, join the coalition.

Check out our online classes on attention activism. This is the stuff we do. Peter, you want to add to that? Yeah, that's right. Go to School of Attention.org, and you can find the join our coalition page. And we've got, like, at this point, a hundred or so regional organizers around the country who learned about this stuff and said, yo, I'm an attention activist. Like, let me do that out here in Clayton, Missouri.

And so we have a network where people get together and talk once a month and work on this stuff together. So if you want to get involved, there are people out here waiting to hang out with you. Peter and Graham, I can't thank you enough for come out on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you, Adam. Thanks, Faye. Well, thank you once again to the writers from Attensity for coming on the show. And thank you for listening. You know, this show only survives because we are trying to bring you information that actually makes your life better instead of just keeping you hooked. If you would like to support that kind of human to human media, please head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

Once again, five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the very credits of the show. This is we're going to, I want to thank Yuri Lowenthal, Adam P., James Forshler, Aros Harmon Callan, Hey, look a distraction, Uber Elder, and Avaro Egg Burger. Thank you so much for your support. If you'd like me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues, head to patreon.com, slash Adam Conover. If you want to come see me on the road, coming up soon, I'm going to be in Louisville, Kentucky, Houston, Texas, San Francisco, California from February 19th through 21st, where I'll be taping my new special, La Jolla, Kornah. California right outside of San Diego. If you live down San Diego way,

I'm going to be in Kansas City, Missouri. Head to Adamcanover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producer, Sam Roundman and Tony Wilson. Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Of course, I want to thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I'm Drew Offalo.

And I'm Jason Offoallo. And we host the HeadGum podcast, Two Idiot Girls. Each episode, we're discussing plenty of topics that you would be giggling at at a sleepover with your weird cousins. We talk about all kinds of things, like weird dating horror stories, maybe a really bad wedgy you had once, or even a show you're loving,

and anything in between. So you can listen to Two Idiot Girls on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube. New episodes will be posted every Tuesday.