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The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I’m convinced that attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. And we lament our attention problems all the time: how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene, or spending, or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying attention. So for the start of the new year, I wanted to have a conversation with Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, author of the book “Attention Span,” and one of the few people who’s deeply studied the way our attention works, how that’s been changing, and what we can do to stop frittering our attention away. Mentioned: We’re looking for a researcher to join our team. Learn more and apply here. And we’re looking for an associate engineer. Learn more and apply here. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. Hello and we are back from the holiday break. So before we begin today we have a couple of
0:27.9	open jobs on the show, one a researcher role which will be central in our political and policy coverage in
0:34.3	2024 which is going to be a big politics and policy year and an associate
0:39.2	engineer role who will be helping to engineer the show, making this whole thing happen, making it
0:44.0	into actual audio that sounds good. If either role seems up your alley, you can find the links to
0:49.2	them in our show notes. But today, I like to begin every year by doing some shows, not on
0:55.2	resolutions which I don't really tend to believe in, but around some questions that I
1:00.4	am thinking about and trying to work on as we enter into a new year.
1:04.1	And foremost in my mind right now is attention.
1:07.9	And I think it's foremost in my mind because it is literally foremost in mind. Whatever you're paying attention to is what is foremost in your mind.
1:16.2	And I am so convinced that attention is the most important human faculty, that at the end of your life what was your
1:23.9	experience of your life it was the experience of the sum total the things that you
1:27.1	paid attention to and yet we treat our attention so poorly. We dissipate it, amid so much garbage. And the modern
1:39.4	world is simply exhausting for it. And yet for all of the specificity we have when we talk about how to get stronger or how to run a
1:47.8	marathon or how to work on our sleep hygiene, I actually find that there is very little good information about
1:54.4	attention. There's a lot of lamenting it. There's a lot of feeling bad about it. But really good
1:59.2	scientifically grounded information about how it works, how it functions, and what we can do to
2:04.2	build it, to replenish it, to attend to it is rarer. But rarer is not the same as
2:10.6	non-existent and there are people who study this and study it
2:13.3	really deeply one of them is Gloria Mark a professor at the University of
2:16.9	California at Irvine she is one of the foundational most significant
2:21.3	researchers in the attention field and the author of the book,
	...

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