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The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

How to Resist the Attention Economy — with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Vox Media Podcast Network

Business, Careers, Entrepreneurship

4.45.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the first of a two-part special Office Hours series, Scott Galloway is joined by Stanford educators and bestselling authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to help listeners fight the attention economy, build better habits, and live more intentionally. To learn more from Bill and Dave, get their latest book How to Live a Meaningful Life at: https://designingyour.life/how-to-live-a-meaningful-life/ Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to officehours@profgmedia.com, or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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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