Your attention span is not broken with historian Daniel Immerwahr | ReThinking with Adam Grant

Daniel Immerwahr 0:00 Sometimes when you read these studies and you're like, "Well, you know, we had people, like, track a ball moving back and forth on a screen and then, you know, we saw how long before they gave up," and I was like, "Give up earlier. That's a stupid thing to spend time on." [laughs] Like, I want them to give up. [upbeat music]

Adam Grant 0:17 What is your thesis about what's, what's going on with our attention?

Daniel Immerwahr 0:22 I, I'm coming to this as a skeptic, so it's a kind of anti-thesis, right? The, the thesis that everyone sort of intuitively thinks and that I intuitively thought as well, which is our attention spans are getting shorter can't be right. And I, I guess one thing that struck me as I was working through this was that we actually say two things about our unhealthy relationship with technology. One is that it's doing cognitive damage and, and it's, um, making it impossible for us to focus on anything. And then we also say that it's polarizing us, and that we're, we're kind of sorted into separate worlds, and now we almost inhabit separate ep- epistemological spaces. Um, and I don't think people have noticed that those are contradictory stories. Because the more that people get polarized, this is true politically, this is true culturally, the more they are in niches, like small fandoms for, like, a K-pop band or, you know, the more they're in, like, political niches like QAnon, those people are deeply obsessive. And, and so the more-

Adam Grant 1:23 Hmm

Daniel Immerwahr 1:23 ... that we're, like, sorted out into, you know, micro tribes, uh, the more we become obsessive and avid rather than sort of checked out and, and unable to focus on anything. So weirdly, the age of distraction is also the age of obsession.

Adam Grant 1:38 Oh, that's such an interesting juxtaposition. I, I wanna talk about this potential moral panic that we're facing-

Daniel Immerwahr 1:45 Yeah

Adam Grant 1:45 ... around attention. And before we, we dive into it, I, I'm just curious about, like, what, what piqued your interest in the topic of our attention and what claims it? I- it's such an unusual topic for a historian

Adam Grant 1:59 to take on.

Daniel Immerwahr 2:00 As a historian, it's hard not to immediately think we've had this discussion rather a lot before. I mean, I know it always feels new and fresh and urgent, and it certainly feels that way, including to me. But, um, you know, I know that there's been round after round after round of the attention crisis with people saying things that sound shockingly modern, but saying them in the 18th century. And it's not obvious what to take from that. Doesn't mean that the attention crisis isn't real, but I, I found that it was resonating, um, with things that people have been worried about kind of throughout informational modernity. That's what made me wanna think through this.

Adam Grant 2:36 Well, take us back to the past a little bit. [laughs] Like, what, what were the, what were the attention suckers of, of prior eras? I'm thinking, like, did, did people think books were, [laughs] were a problem?

Daniel Immerwahr 2:48 Yeah. They thought novels were a problem. So what's really funny is that the measure of our attentional failures today, which is canonically expressed as our inability to read long novels, especially War and Peace, those were the objects of attention panic back then. Priests worried that, you know, women reading these, uh, you know, long novels were, you know, just in- you know, engrossed by them and were, uh, you know, their minds were taken away from prayerful, uh, obedience. I mean, that kind of does something to you when you realize that the thing that we are wistful about and wishing that we could do again used to be the problem, used to be the junk food, uh, of a past era.

Adam Grant 3:27 This is making me think about John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher quality and lower quality pleasures. Now, we would say that a novel like War and Peace is a fairly high-quality pleasure.

Daniel Immerwahr 3:37 Yeah, yeah.

Adam Grant 3:38 Uh, it's, you know, it's complex. It's rich. It forces you to think. Cat videos less so.

Daniel Immerwahr 3:46 I wonder if there's a sort of treadmill by which junky past culture then kind of seems more elevated to us now. Because it's not just novels that people in the past were worried about. There was a whole crisis of the pianoforte. So, you know, pianos were entering people's homes, and this would also [laughs] drive people to distraction and madness. Um, so I mean, yeah, it's just crazy when you think about, like, all the past informational or entertainment genres that were disturbing to people. Because when we look at virtually anything that someone is doing in the 18th century for entertainment, we think, "Well, that's gonna class up the joint."

Adam Grant 4:18 [laughs]

Daniel Immerwahr 4:19 And, and there's two, there's two possibilities. One is that we've just become so degraded and debased in our forms of entertainment that anything from the pa- you know, even TV looks amazing to us now. Or it's just there's something perceptual about that, that we, we perceive the media of our time to be, you know, a lower order. But in the past, it all just kind of, you know, through the kind of rose-colored glasses, it all looks great.

Adam Grant 4:42 So as I hear you describe the, the two possible theories, it seems like you can make a case for both of them.

Daniel Immerwahr 4:48 Yeah.

Adam Grant 4:48 But we're under-appreciating the second.

Daniel Immerwahr 4:50 My favorite example is, um, I found a, uh, uh, 1843 complaint by the, uh, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, where he's just, like, going on about some technology that is, uh... It, it sounds like he's describing an iPhone. He's like, "The generation that is born after this, they're never gonna have real conversations. They're just gonna be, like, in their separate corners, and they're never kn- gonna know how to talk to anyone, um, because basic possibility for people existing in community has been eroded by this new technology." And he's talking about the stove replacing the open hearth.

Adam Grant 5:25 [laughs]

Daniel Immerwahr 5:25 You know? Like, that's nuts, right? Um-

Adam Grant 5:28 Wait, so because we can't gather around a fireplace anymore-

Daniel Immerwahr 5:30 Yeah, because we're not forced to gather for warmth around-

Adam Grant 5:32 We're not gonna talk

Daniel Immerwahr 5:33 ... a single heat source. You know, and he's, he's just like, you know, all mortal intercourse will become frosty, and you know, people will just yell at each other. Uh, it sounds just like us talking about our cell phones. Uh, so okay, so it's fun to, like-

Adam Grant 5:45 Wow

Daniel Immerwahr 5:45 ... think about the, how much those complaints resemble ours, but it wasn't just people complaining. There were also people talking back. So there's a lot of novelists in the 18th century who have to defend this, like, new popular commercial genre that they're working in, the novel. And, you know, they're hearing from, you know, tutting priests that, you know, this is gonna wreck everyone's brain. And they're asking themselves, "Mm, is that true?" Uh, and so you start to get, like, a lot of people- Saying, you know, actually, maybe it's good to be distracted. You know, maybe, maybe, like, too much attention is, is bad for the brain, and maybe your brain has to hop around a little bit. Uh, the novel Tristram Shandy is, is all about the pleasures of, like, losing your train of thought. And like, you know, you're thinking about one thing and then something else pops up, and somehow that creates a connection. Um, so there's a lot of, like, real serious philosophical questions about, is it a good idea to pay attention? Like, should... Like, how attentive should we be? And some worries that if we pay too much attention, A, we're intellectually missing things, or B, we just become overly attentive and, you know, we become like schoolchildren or servants, uh, rather than, you know, free intellectuals with, you know, our own kind of autonomy over our minds.

Adam Grant 7:01 This is a hot topic in my world in the present, where on the one hand, there's a paper I really loved by Kim Elsbach and Andrew Hargadon about workday design and the importance in cognitively demanding jobs of having mindless tasks-

Daniel Immerwahr 7:14 Yeah

Adam Grant 7:15 ... that allow for attentional resets and mind wandering-

Daniel Immerwahr 7:18 Yeah

Adam Grant 7:18 ... and creativity.

Daniel Immerwahr 7:19 Yeah.

Adam Grant 7:20 And on the other hand, we have researchers like Sophie Leroy who study attention residue, where if I'm working on task A and then I shift to task B-

Daniel Immerwahr 7:30 Yeah

Adam Grant 7:30 ... my performance on task B suffers because task A is still partially active in my mind.

Daniel Immerwahr 7:35 Yeah.

Adam Grant 7:36 And maybe that's good for task A, but it impairs task B. And so I, I think, I, I guess at some level this controversy speaks to the fact that just concentrating on one thing-

Daniel Immerwahr 7:47 Mm-hmm

Adam Grant 7:47 ... is a double-edged sword.

Daniel Immerwahr 7:49 Yeah. And, and there's two ways to think about that, right? One, you can say like, "Okay, how good is that for you as someone who's setting out to work?" And you might think the attentional residue might be really helpful, you know. And often we have these, you know, um, accounts of mathematicians who like working really hard on a proof and they can't solve it, and they like step on a bus and they're just like, "Oh, I got it now." You know, like somehow the pushing you into a different intellectual space works. But you could also ask, you know, independent of like how good of a thinker hopping from one thing to another makes you, uh, is it good to be a really attentive thinker? Like, like or might you just as a subject for other reasons other than, like, your intellectual success need some kind of protection? And there's a lot of people by the 19th century who get really worried that capitalism is demanding a just sort of machine-like focus of people, and that's not fair, right? That, like, uh, employers shouldn't get to, um, fix your mind on one thing. And weirdly, uh, we have this, like, concern about, I mean, you know, a huge concern about A- AD- ADHD now, but the, like, hot diagnosis of the 19th century was something called monomania. Like, you have been like deformed by industrial capitalism. This is what Mo- Moby Dick is about. And so you, like, you can just only think of one thing, and you're like thinking too much-

Adam Grant 9:10 Wow

Daniel Immerwahr 9:10 ... of one thing, and that's gonna drive you nuts.

Adam Grant 9:12 Oh. I mean, what a great problem to have [laughs] in the 21st century.

Daniel Immerwahr 9:16 Yeah, it's interesting, right? And, and the concern there is like, yeah, maybe that's good for your employer, like maybe that makes you a good worker, but it, like, it makes you screwed up in the head, like it's not good for your life.

Adam Grant 9:25 It, it strikes me that another, I guess another variation on that theme is that at some level [laughs] if your employer gets the best of your attention, what's left for your family and your friends?

Daniel Immerwahr 9:36 Um, yeah, the model there is, like, you have a certain amount of attentional resources. Those are extracted in the workday, and then you come home and, like, all you've got left is, like, drinking a beer and going to sleep.

Adam Grant 9:48 I think there's some good news on that front, which is, uh, for a number of years in psychology, the ego depletion model of willpower was popular, and the idea was that self-control and focused attention were limited resources-

Daniel Immerwahr 10:01 Yeah

Adam Grant 10:01 ... that were drained and had to be replenished. And my read of the evidence is that effect has consistently failed to replicate. Um, and it's considered debunked at this point that it's not ability, it's actually motivation.

Daniel Immerwahr 10:15 Yeah.

Adam Grant 10:15 That over long periods of time of having to concentrate, especially if you're doing something tedious or painful, at some point you lose interest-

Daniel Immerwahr 10:23 Yeah, yeah

Adam Grant 10:23 ... in sustaining your effort. Uh, and at that point you disengage. But if there's enough desire, then you can, you can basically reboot your focus.

Daniel Immerwahr 10:33 That seems intuitively right to me. Like I, I can think of times when I've been, had a sustained interest in something and, uh, and like I don't burn out on it, and I can think of things where I have zero interest and I burn out within two hours.

Adam Grant 10:46 That sounds oddly familiar.

Daniel Immerwahr 10:48 Yeah. [laughs]

Adam Grant 10:50 So this, this goes to the one thing in your article that I had to challenge. You wrote that psychologists can't measure attention spans.

Daniel Immerwahr 10:58 Yeah.

Adam Grant 10:59 And I beg to differ-

Daniel Immerwahr 11:01 Yeah

Adam Grant 11:01 ... because-

Daniel Immerwahr 11:01 Tell me about that

Adam Grant 11:02 ... in 2024 there was a meta-analysis, a study of studies of attention spans over time. And I wa- I wanna get your reaction to what the research found. But first I wanted to hear why, as a historian, um, you thought that psychologists couldn't do this task, 'cause I think we are up to the challenge.

Daniel Immerwahr 11:18 Yeah. So my understanding, and I'm happy to be corrected or educated on this, is that there just isn't the kind of thing, attention span, that can be me- This is a, this is not a failure of psychologists.

Adam Grant 11:31 Yeah.

Daniel Immerwahr 11:31 It's, it's a conceptual failure. Um, we can measure people doing tasks, and we can see how attentive they are to those tasks, and we could even measure over time are they growing less attentive. Um, and so there's a lot of studies where, like, you have someone do a task and then you, like, put the smartphone near them and, like, does that make it harder for them to, to keep up with that? Um, but that's not an innate capacity called attention span. That's a task-specific thing. And weirdly, a lot of the tasks that we measure are people doing things like playing video games [laughs] you know, as, as some kind of psychological test that resembles a video game. And I think it c- you know, it, like we can't... My understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that it would not be- ... proper to say of someone, "This guy's got an attention span of three minutes, whereas she has an attention span of two minutes and 45 seconds," because all attention spans are task dependent. Uh, which means there's no kind of central just, like, concept of an attention span in the way there would be a concept of someone's height or weight or something like that. Is that different from your understanding?

Adam Grant 12:40 Fascinating. We don't disagree.

Daniel Immerwahr 12:42 Great. Yeah.

Adam Grant 12:43 Disappointing. Uh, no, I think you're right. I think that the, the- this actually, this underscores the point about motivation versus ability.

Daniel Immerwahr 12:50 Yeah.

Adam Grant 12:50 There's no such thing as a fixed capacity for attention in a human brain because how long you can sustain your attention depends entirely [laughs] on the task you're doing-

Daniel Immerwahr 13:00 Yeah

Adam Grant 13:00 ... and, and what, what you feel about it.

Daniel Immerwahr 13:03 Sometimes when you read these studies and you're like, "Well, you know, we had people, like, track a ball moving back and forth on a screen and then, you know, we saw how long before they gave up," and I was like, "Give up earlier. That's a stupid thing to spend time on." [laughs] Like, I want them to give up.

Adam Grant 13:17 Although that, that makes it really hard then to, to track what, you know, what raises and lowers attention. But-

Daniel Immerwahr 13:23 Yeah, yeah

Adam Grant 13:24 ... I, I'm with you there. Okay,

Adam Grant 13:25 so this, um, Andrzejewski and colleagues did this meta-analysis where they, they, they had data across s- 32 countries, three decades, over 20,000 people that are given the same tests of concentration.

Daniel Immerwahr 13:39 Yeah.

Adam Grant 13:40 And they ask you to pay attention to various kinds of tasks and then measure basically how long you can sustain your attention-

Daniel Immerwahr 13:47 Yeah

Adam Grant 13:47 ... in that task and then what's your processing speed and how many errors do you make. According to the theory that, uh, the digital world is destroying our capacity to pay attention-

Daniel Immerwahr 13:57 Yeah

Adam Grant 13:57 ... we should see a drop over time.

Daniel Immerwahr 13:59 Yeah.

Adam Grant 14:00 And their data span 1990 to 2021, and what they show is that performance has not gone down over those three decades among children.

Daniel Immerwahr 14:10 Ooh.

Adam Grant 14:11 And it's gone up among adults.

Daniel Immerwahr 14:13 Ooh.

Adam Grant 14:16 And I just, I read this evidence and I thought, "Okay, here are psychologists landing at the same conclusion that you reached as a historian."

Daniel Immerwahr 14:22 Yeah, I mean, it... So, I, look, are we having a weird moment with our attentions? Absolutely. We all feel it, but the way that we normally say it, which is our attention spans are becoming shredded, we can focus for shorter and shorter amounts of time, we've lost the capacity to do, you know, things that would take long amounts of concentration, that I find completely uncompelling. Um, and the reason I find it uncompelling is that u- usually when we phrase that, it's like no one's reading War and Peace anymore. I'm like, "Okay, maybe that's true." I mean, I, I, I'm actually unsure how true that is. War and Peace made it onto the bestsellers list in the 21st century after a, uh, TV adaptation came out. But like, okay, let's just imagine that it's probably true, that people are reading fewer [laughs] 19th-century novels, I guess. Have you watched anyone play a video game? Like, that's attention. That is a deep-

Adam Grant 15:12 Intense

Daniel Immerwahr 15:12 ... profound attention. And we might not be excited about what we're paying attention to, but, like, uh, you know, the thing that people usually interpret as a lack of attention, which is a teenager on their cellphone, you could just as easily interpret as someone intensively reading.

Adam Grant 15:26 Yeah. And to your point about video games, the parents who are complaining about their kids usually can't wrestle their attention away from the screen.

Daniel Immerwahr 15:35 The parents are having the attention crisis. [laughs] They're the ones who are-

Adam Grant 15:38 That's right

Daniel Immerwahr 15:38 ... upset about where their attention is going, and kids might have fewer, uh, issues about that.

Adam Grant 15:43 Exactly. Yeah, you're complaining that your, maybe that your kid is paying attention to the wrong thing-

Daniel Immerwahr 15:47 Yeah

Adam Grant 15:47 ... and not that they lack the capacity-

Daniel Immerwahr 15:48 And that's a different complaint

Adam Grant 15:49 ... to pay attention.

Daniel Immerwahr 15:49 And if that's the complaint we wanna make, let's make it. Um, one, an interesting, uh, reaction to, uh, the article when I wrote it was a lot of older people wrote in and said, "How dare you suggest that a video game is at all an appropriate, uh, object of attention, especially compared to an opera?" And I was like, "Okay, I mean, we can have that conversation if you want, but my point is like," you know, the, one of the most popular video games, uh, it's called Baldur's Gate 3, uh, and this is not unusual in video games, uh, it, it takes, like, 75 hours to play through quickly and easily twice that, uh, to play through the kind of, like, take-your-time way. You know, we used to say that, like, getting through Wagner's Ring Cycle, which is 15 hours, was, like, amazing. We were, like, really impressed when people... You know, "I've listened to the entire Ring Cycle." We're talking here, like-

Adam Grant 16:43 Wow

Daniel Immerwahr 16:43 ... 5 to 10 Ring Cycles, and we're talking way more people doing it than ever listened to those Wagner operas.

Adam Grant 16:47 I mean, we, we did a whole podcast with, uh, with Ash Brandon about the science on video games, and I don't know that there's any other activity that as reliably builds self-control, focus-

Daniel Immerwahr 17:00 Yeah

Adam Grant 17:00 ... grit in a video game-

Daniel Immerwahr 17:02 Yeah

Adam Grant 17:02 ... where you lose and you immediately then have to regroup-

Daniel Immerwahr 17:05 Yeah

Adam Grant 17:05 ... and figure out how to improve and try again after you've failed, uh, and manage [laughs] the, the emotions of frustration-

Daniel Immerwahr 17:13 Yeah, yeah

Adam Grant 17:13 ... uh, when you don't hit your goal. There are a series of cognitive benefits, too, and I think, I guess it, you know, it makes me wonder what, what are people attributing to the opera that a video game lacks? There's the, [laughs] sort of the sense of class and, you know, refined taste that you're describing.

Daniel Immerwahr 17:30 Yeah.

Adam Grant 17:30 But you're also sitting there a little bit less interactively-

Daniel Immerwahr 17:35 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Adam Grant 17:36 ... um, when you're listening to music than you are playing a video game, and to me, that's a point against the opera, not a point in favor.

Daniel Immerwahr 17:42 It's, it's genuinely unclear how interactive our art should be, right? Because you can make the argument, I want art that gives very little, like a poem, right? So, like, you have to put in a lot to, to make that work in your mind, and there's a great joy in that. Um, but also you get bored, your mind wanders. P- you know, that doesn't, a lot of people don't really like poetry that much. [laughs] You know, you can make a just-so story about, like, why the opera is, like, cognitively or spiritually better. Uh, it's just not ... obvious to me that you can't make a similarly compelling case about a video game.

Adam Grant 18:20 So I think that underscores your point then, that if we're gonna panic about something attentional, it should be that we're paying attention to the wrong things-

Daniel Immerwahr 18:28 Yeah

Adam Grant 18:28 ... not that we can't pay attention anymore.

Daniel Immerwahr 18:30 That's right. That's right. Yeah. And, and, you know, then the case becomes a little harder to make, right? Because you have to say things like, opera is better than a video game, and then you have to explain why, and, like, maybe that's a little hard to do. Um, weirdly, you also have to explain why it's bad. Like, one of the things that the internet does is create these sort of participatory feedback loops. So it's not just that you're watching something on the idiot box or that you're, like, participating in a TikTok trend. Uh, you know, there's all kinds of ways that, like, technology not just elicits, but, like, has profit models that run on our participation. And so you also have to explain why this kind of upsurge of certain forms of democratic participation is a bad thing. That's a harder case to make.

Adam Grant 19:17 Yeah. You can call it, you know, creative self-expression and opportunities to gain status and influence. You can also say, "You now get to become the idiot box."

Daniel Immerwahr 19:26 All the complaints about TV was that it turned you into a passive zombie. I think we just have to acknowledge, that is not what the internet has done to us. I mean, yes, there are moments we've all had, like, you know, the like, you know, doom scrolling. Like, you know, you know, sort of this, like, a little thin thing of drool coming down from your mouth. But, like, we've also had moments or seen others have moments where the internet, like, riles you up into this, like, weird frenzy of, like, do your own research and, like, having all kinds of heterodox opinions, which is exactly what the idiot box was supposed to prevent.

Adam Grant 19:53 Oh, it's, it's such an intriguing way to reframe and, and rethink the conversation we're having about attention.

Adam Grant 20:00 We talked about novels-

Daniel Immerwahr 20:01 Yeah

Adam Grant 20:01 ... earlier.

Daniel Immerwahr 20:01 Yeah.

Adam Grant 20:02 And my read of the data is that novels do have benefits that other forms of reading don't.

Daniel Immerwahr 20:09 Yeah, let's talk about that.

Adam Grant 20:11 So I think the, the clearest findings have to do with empathy.

Daniel Immerwahr 20:14 Mm-hmm.

Adam Grant 20:14 Reading a novel versus more traditional nonfiction-

Daniel Immerwahr 20:18 Yeah

Adam Grant 20:18 ... or watching TV or a movie-

Daniel Immerwahr 20:21 Yeah

Adam Grant 20:21 ... um, it puts you in the protagonist's mind.

Daniel Immerwahr 20:23 It's an empathy machine.

Adam Grant 20:25 It is.

Daniel Immerwahr 20:25 Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Grant 20:26 Um, in a way that, you know, watching as an observer on a screen, it's, it's hard to imagine yourself in somebody else's shoes. And that perspective taking, the theory of mind that, that comes from that, it's not a large effect, but it is a robust one. I don't wanna lose that, and I hear all these teachers saying, like, you know, "Our students won't finish a novel anymore." How do you think about that problem?

Daniel Immerwahr 20:49 First of all, I am one of those teachers, so I know that feeling. I, this, what my students will permit for assignment length is about half of what I read when I was an undergraduate. We can talk about why that is.

Adam Grant 21:01 Did you say permit as if the students are in charge?

Daniel Immerwahr 21:03 Yeah. Because, you know, in some way they are. Like, it is an actual democratic feedback process. You can give students longer assignments than they will allow, but pedagogically, it's gonna be a mess. They won't do it. They'll randomly read half the stuff you assign, but not the half you wanted, and, and you lose a lot of control, and they learn less. So, like, you can push, but, you know, you know, there's some negative consequences for the, the thing you're trying to do, which is teach them stuff. It seems like people are paying less attention or less appreciative of long texts and more interested in long audio and video, and you could argue that audio and video podcasts give you an affective dimension. You get to hear someone's voice. You get to see what someone looks like. You get to see the visual presentation, and that might be meaningful. You might argue that, like, text in the novel is actually a fairly lossy medium, um, and that, like, just someone talking to you on TikTok, you're getting a sort of real hit of someone else's point of view in a way that it's harder to access through a novel. Is that too much? Would you agree with that? I don't know.

Adam Grant 22:10 No. To your point, I think you're illustrating a, a trade-off that has some data behind it. Listening is better for immersion and engagement, or watching for that matter. Um, but reading is actually better for critical thinking for the very reasons you described.

Daniel Immerwahr 22:24 Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Grant 22:25 There, there have been a s- a whole series of experiments that, that show that you're, you're better at retaining information when you read it than when you listen to it because you have to work harder to process it. And also, you know, you're more likely to, to stop and reread or to pause. It's a little bit less natural to do that in a, an audio or a visual medium. And so there, there is a risk to the quality of our thought. Now, let me, let me get your reaction to something that, that I've found puzzling from an attention perspective. Lots of, uh, members of Gen Z not wanting to read a novel. On the other hand, there's also seemingly a generational trend to have subtitles on when watching TV and movies.

Daniel Immerwahr 23:08 Ooh, yeah.

Adam Grant 23:09 What is that? What's going on here?

Daniel Immerwahr 23:11 Yeah, that's really-

Adam Grant 23:11 They're reading

Daniel Immerwahr 23:12 ... really good. Yeah.

Adam Grant 23:13 They're choosing to read when they don't even have to.

Daniel Immerwahr 23:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Grant 23:15 I wanna know why. How do you make sense of that?

Daniel Immerwahr 23:18 I think a lot of the, like, attention crisis people haven't acknowledged that, or the reading crisis people haven't acknowledged that, like, we are seeing a recursion to text, uh, and that videos are more likely to have text as part of them and maybe as subtitles, but maybe just, like, as an inbuilt part of it. And it seems like the idea that all we just wanna do is watch The Honeymooners, you know, like the, like the dumbest form of TV. No, it turns out that we're interested in all kinds of complex relationships between text and videos, and, uh, we haven't descended to the point where all we're doing is watching, like, three-second clips of, like, the most sensationally, like, in-your-face things that you can imagine. That's not where this is going, and it doesn't seem like it's headed in that direction.

Daniel Immerwahr 24:01 I mean, I guess I wanna ask, like, what are your worries?

Adam Grant 24:05 Mine? I think I have two worries. One is that people will regret where they place their attention.

Daniel Immerwahr 24:12 Yeah.

Adam Grant 24:13 That there are better uses of my scarce focus, and I didn't keep them in view. And the other is that [laughs] the, the perception of an attention crisis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And people just take for granted, well, attention spans are shortening. There's not a lot we can do about that, and so we should give up on, you know, on [laughs] encouraging kids to read novels, as opposed to being creative about how we engage with them.

Daniel Immerwahr 24:43 Do you, do you have, like, individual practices that are about attention and, like, sculpting your attention?

Adam Grant 24:49 Yeah. Uh, many. My, my favorite one is just a simple to-don't-list. Don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I wanna watch.

Daniel Immerwahr 24:55 Ooh. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Grant 24:57 More recently, don't scroll on social media unless there's nothing else I could be doing, like if I'm sitting on a plane waiting for takeoff.

Daniel Immerwahr 25:03 Yeah, yeah.

Adam Grant 25:05 And those, those practices are really simple, but they're set up in advance, and they give me freedom to control my attention in ways that I didn't have before I created them, and they seem like micro versions of your macro no Wi-Fi at home.

Daniel Immerwahr 25:23 Yeah, yeah. I took a, a theater class a while back, uh, with, with someone about, like, storytelling and that kind of stuff, and he, he told this story. He's like, "I went to a doctor's office, and I sat down, and I, I like turned the television off, and I sat down. And I didn't take out a phone, and I didn't do anything. I just sat down." And he's like, "At the desk, they freaked out. They were like, 'Do you need a magazine?'" He was like, "No." Like, and, and just the idea that he was like, "No, I just wanna sit here. I just wanna sit here and think thoughts," was, like, very, like, upsetting enough that other people felt like they had to mobilize around it. And I've, I've thought about that a lot. I'm like, "Oh, is this, is this a moment?" I was like, "I, I," like I'm waiting for someone.

Adam Grant 26:11 It's fascinating to think about, like, people being troubled by the fact that you might just be willing to sit there and-

Daniel Immerwahr 26:18 Yeah

Adam Grant 26:18 ... let your mind wander-

Daniel Immerwahr 26:19 Yeah, yeah

Adam Grant 26:19 ... or let your attention go wherever it goes.

Daniel Immerwahr 26:21 Yeah,

Daniel Immerwahr 26:22 yeah.

Adam Grant 26:22 Okay, so, uh, Daniel, just, uh, zooming out a little bit, uh, we've, we were talking about what may be a moral panic.

Daniel Immerwahr 26:30 Yeah.

Adam Grant 26:31 I think more likely than not, um, you know, overblown. Like, attention is not a crisis, uh, at least in the way we're talking about it. I feel fairly confident in that thesis, like 68%.

Daniel Immerwahr 26:44 [laughs]

Adam Grant 26:44 [laughs] So it's gonna get really annoying really fast.

Daniel Immerwahr 26:47 We got more than two-thirds. Keep going. Yeah.

Adam Grant 26:49 Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's real conviction for me. Um, I think what... It raises kind of a broader question. Explain to me how you think about evaluating, like, a, a current event through a historical lens that allows for the perspective that you bring so, so skillfully.

Daniel Immerwahr 27:06 Yeah, so first of all, you know, let's talk about why historians have a kind of 30-year rule before they are often willing to weigh in on something. It's partly because it takes a while for all the documents to shake out and the things to get declassified. Although, you know, at the rate things are getting declassified now, we, uh, shouldn't be able to do anything before the '60s. Um, s- it, it is more for the deeper reason, which is that the present always feels so emotionally gripping that it's just really hard to separate the deep feelings of urgency that you have from any kind of analysis. So, like, are we in a panic? I mean, there's a lot of things that we're really concerned about, and the question is, are they panics? Panic is usually the term we use for, like, well, we got a little overexcited about that one, didn't we? Uh, or are we in an emergency? In which case, you know, freaking out is exactly correct. I mean, if you were asking me, I would say, "Okay, climate change, that's an emergency. Short attention spans, that's a panic." Um, but other people clearly feel differently. Um, so I think the question that you have to ask, which is hard to do, is to be like, all right, like, what are the things that I'm worried about? Let me just, like, take each of them one by one. Let me, like, try to produce the counterargument. If I were, like, paid to, like, argue the other side of it, what would I come up with, and could I come up with something that actually now, now that I've done it, said it out loud, sounds compelling to me? 'Cause I started w- w- with this attention crisis thing feeling exactly the same feelings that the people I'm arguing against still continue to feel.

Adam Grant 28:37 Wow.

Daniel Immerwahr 28:38 Like, I have all those instincts. I would've said every single one of those things, and because that's w- how it feels. Um, and that's part of, like, what it is to live through a panic is to just f- just have a kind of intuitive and urgent sense of rightness about, like, a set of propositions which retrospectively you're like, "Ooh, [laughs] maybe this weren't so correct."

Adam Grant 28:56 So you, you really just, like, you just took the null hypothesis seriously.

Daniel Immerwahr 29:00 Yeah.

Adam Grant 29:00 Like, instead of strawmanning it, you, you really went with the steelman-

Daniel Immerwahr 29:04 Yeah

Adam Grant 29:04 ... and changed your mind along the way.

Daniel Immerwahr 29:06 Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing the past is really good at, one thing that's, is cool about being a historian, is that it allows you to look at a, like, maybe similar situation without the same overriding sense of what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. And so that sometimes can give you a, a helpful perspective.

Adam Grant 29:26 Okay, so let's take an example. This is not my view. Disclaimer.

Daniel Immerwahr 29:30 Great. Okay. Yeah.

Adam Grant 29:30 But I, I think I know people in Hollywood who would subscribe to this view. So comic books were on your list of things that people freaked out about once upon a time, and then we decided, eh, probably not that big of a deal. And yet some of my Hollywood friends would say, "No, the second-order consequence of comic books is that they gave us Marvel movies and ruined cinema, and we under-reacted."

Daniel Immerwahr 29:55 Yeah, I mean, the comic book... What, what is, by the way, interesting about the comic book thing is that there was a guy called Fredric Wertham who wrote a book called The Seduction of the Innocent in 1954. Uh, that was, like, the anti-comic book book. We've now had, you know, decades worth of comic books, and of all the things that make us dumb and awful, like, comic books seem pretty low on the list, and so it seems silly. If you go back and look at what Fredric Wertham was complaining about, he was complaining about the racism in comic books. He was like, "These things are crazy," and he, he was not wrong about that. And so, like, looking back on that, you're like, okay, like, the medium itself wasn't really the problem. But there is something to our eyes objectionable about rendering really gross racial stereotypes in visual form and then feeding them to children without any parental supervision.

Adam Grant 30:46 Yeah.

Daniel Immerwahr 30:46 Like, I'm, I get it.

Adam Grant 30:48 Agreed. Okay, and then what about Marvel movies?

Daniel Immerwahr 30:51 Yeah. I mean, they're not amazing, right? Uh [laughs] but let's talk about how they're bad, right? Like, they're not dumb. They're actually, like, overly complicated, you know? And they, like, go on for a long time, and you have to, like, watch all of them to get it. So by a lot of the measures that we invoke when we're talking about, like, good art and, like, can't we get back to a time when we were reading long novels, I was like, "Well, I got some really good news for you [laughs] about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is long and complicated and takes an enormous amount of patience, and, and has all kinds of, like, complex allusions," because then you have to be like, "Okay, well, the comic book version says this, and then the filmic version says that, and then Sony Pictures did it like this, and all the Spider-Man movies are, like, jammed together because the multiverse, and now they're, like, making, like, knowing jokes about intellectual property when they're, like, combining the different Spider-Mans." Um, yeah, I mean, are those great movies? Like, probably not, but also, like, most movies are not great movies.

Adam Grant 31:49 Well put.

Daniel Immerwahr 31:50 Um, what a pleasure having this conversation.

Adam Grant 31:52 Oh, this was, this was a joy for me. Daniel, I can't thank you enough for joining. Your mind is every bit as, as riveting as I thought it would be and maybe even more so.

Daniel Immerwahr 32:00 You are being totally flattering. Um, but it's really good to talk about this stuff.

Adam Grant 32:04 My biggest takeaway from Daniel is that we have not lost the capacity to pay attention. What's shifted is our motivation. It's not that we can't focus. It's that we're interested in focusing on different things than we were in the past. [upbeat music]