How to Resist the Attention Economy — with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Vox Media Podcast Network
4.4 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
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| 0:00.0 | Support for the show comes from Canva. |
| 0:03.1 | What's your next big thing? |
| 0:04.4 | Whatever it is, you can design it with Canva. |
| 0:06.4 | From presentations powered by AI to social media posts, from logos all the way to websites. |
| 0:11.2 | Whatever your idea is, you can make it a thing in Canva. |
| 0:15.1 | Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. |
| 0:17.9 | Learn more at Canva.com. Welcome to Prop G on Getting Your Life Together, a special series where we're joined by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford educators and best Best Selling Authors of Designing Your Life, |
| 0:38.0 | and most recently, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Gentlemen, welcome, and thanks for doing this. |
| 0:44.4 | Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. We went to our listeners with one question. What's the |
| 0:48.2 | biggest thing holding your life back right now? Today, we try to help. We talk about burnout, |
| 0:53.7 | distraction, purpose, and building a life that |
| 0:55.7 | feels more intentional. All right, let's get into it. Our first question is, how do you build a |
| 1:00.2 | meaningful, intentional life when your attention is constantly being pulled apart by phones, |
| 1:05.4 | doom-scrolling, and the attention economy? So just some data here to set the table. |
| 1:11.2 | In 2025, Americans reported spending an average of five hours and 16 minutes per day on their phones, a 14% increase since 2024. |
| 1:20.7 | A study by Vision Direct projects that the average American adult will spend 44 years of their life looking at screens. |
| 1:27.4 | In 2025, researchers found that randomly moving internet access from smartphones produced a range of benefits, including improved mental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. |
| 1:39.1 | So, Bill, you go first, and then I'll ask for Dave to build on it. |
| 1:43.2 | Yeah, you know, this attention economy, |
| 1:44.9 | and it's horrible. I mean, I'm teaching at Stanford and the undergrads can't get off their phone. |
| 1:48.5 | The grad students can't get off their phone. We're really focused on trying to figure |
| 1:54.9 | how to help them with that. So one of the things is this whole doom scrolling thing, it's a dopamine |
... |
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