Attention, Please! An interview with Sara McCrea of the Attention Lab podcast

There's a point in the first episode of Attention Lab, a new 3-part podcast by The Strother School of Radical Attention, where you're asked to stare at the tip of your left index finger. But, as this instruction was coming through my headphones, my whole left hand was swinging rhythmically by my side; I was out for a run. So the fact that this exercise would be unsafe or even impossible felt, at first, like a bummer. But then the beauty of it hit me: this is a show about attention that actually requires my attention.

Last March, I spent $600 to pre-order a phone that promised it could free me from my phone. After months of delays on their end, the phone arrived in November. And then, after months of delays on my end, I started to try it out. I'll spare you my tech review, but just the act of messing around with this thing has helped me rethink my relationship to my phone and the apps that are on it.

I'm pretty sure that puts me in the target audience for "Attention Lab." I'm worried about how much I look at screens, how much my kids look at screens, and how much my kids see me looking at screens. I'm worried about how hard it can be for me to read a print book these days; how writing these newsletters seems to require a Herculean effort to just get started. Is that "the creative process?" Or is it my attention?

Whatever it is, the Attention Lab podcast—and Attensity!, their manifesto on attention—starts by letting people know that those feelings are probably not unfounded.

You are correct: Something is seriously wrong. It has to do with our ATTENTION, our essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world. This precious capacity has been channeled, captured, and commodified by an industry of immense technological and financial power.

If you are one of the people feeling this way, I cannot recommend this show enough. It introduces concepts like "human fracking" and gives you some concrete steps you can take to help reclaim your attention and expand your definition of it. The whole series can be done in under an hour, and they actually suggest that you listen with a friend. So grab a buddy, open a beverage, and give it some of your undivided attention. I really think it is time well spent.

The production duo behind this show are two very good audio folks: Sara McCrea, who produced Paul McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, among other shows, edits Voices in the River, and has a very good newsletter; and Brendan Baker, a sound designer who has worked on everything and generously shares a lot of his knowledge on his YouTube channel and on Transom.

I had a Zoom call with Sara last week to talk about how she ended up producing this show, how she and Brendan and the Friends of Attention collaborated on the sound design, and how podcasting itself fits into the broader attention economy. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Craig: When did you get your first cell phone?

Sara: I got my first cell phone — one of the little open little Nokia ones, not a flip phone — when I was in sixth grade.

And then at some point you got a smartphone.

Yes, I got a smartphone for the first time when I was in ninth grade. The iPhones were really just becoming a thing when I was entering high school; I'm 26, and I came of age with that transition.

Was there ever a moment in your life — or was it a series of small moments — when you started to think that your attention was getting out of balance?

I don't know if I had a certain moment, other than the transformation that the pandemic brought to the amount of communication we all do over screens. I was in college when the pandemic started, so I was suddenly doing classes online, and screens became integrated into my campus life in ways they weren't before. And then, because I entered the workplace as it was already remote, that kind of stuck.

So I think for me, with entering the workforce, but also moving a few years ago to a new city, with a lot less nature around me than I was used to, it's been less about my attention always going to my phone. It's more that I notice where my attention isn't. I've noticed it's not in the the physical space around me as much as it used to be.

So how did you find yourself at the School of Radical Attention?

I heard about the School of Radical Attention on Ezra Klein's podcast, where the founder, D. Graham Burnett, did an interview. Several people sent it to me because I had been working on various podcasts that were covering the litany of issues with social media and AI.

I felt like there was a lot of cultural discourse around what was going wrong with attention and technology, and around how all these devices we have are designed by trillion dollar companies to optimize and extract all of your attention and time. I was really familiar with the problem and what was going wrong. But even after several years of being in that space, I didn't really have an answer for what positive attention could look like, other than like, reading a book — which I do love to do.

So when I heard about the school, it seemed really interesting to me. I showed up for an "attention lab," which is an in-person workshop that the school offers for free on weekend afternoons.

I showed up really not knowing at all what to expect, and then I really liked the people I met there and what they were talking about.

And so then you basically were like, "Hey, this should be a podcast?"

Literally the first meeting, as we were packing up the space about to leave, I went up to the facilitators, and I was like, "Hey, this should be a podcast."

I didn't go there for that reason, but it seemed to me that podcasting could be a particularly good medium for these conversations about attention, given the space that podcasting occupies in the digital realm. I didn't think it should be a show where two people have conversations or do interviews about attention; I felt like that already existed—and I listen to a lot of those, and I'm a fan of them, and have worked on them. But I didn't need to add to the pile.

Raiane Cantisano, who became the show's host, and Peter Schmidt, who's the program director—they were the two first facilitators of the first attention lab I went to. They were both so deeply charismatic that it just seemed obvious to me that we could basically record them saying whatever they said in that in-person lab and make it into a compelling podcast.

I started talking and brainstorming with Peter and Raiane about how I heard this in my head, and they told me how they heard it in their head. And then — like most client relationships — you find the end result in the middle.

I would describe the format of the show as a lecture — and not in a negative way. It's like attending a class. I would love to know a little bit more about like arriving at that format.

Totally. There is a kind of interesting tension between a lecture format, which is someone giving you information for you to absorb, and an interview podcast, where there are two people talking and you're listening on the side and you're not super involved. Instead, we were thinking, "Okay, how can we make the conversation actually be between the recorded voice and the listener, actively participating in their own experience?"

Also, I knew from my classes that the School of Attention is structured around three pillars. The first is study, which is the educational element. And then practice, or sanctuary, when you're actually doing the attention exercises. And then, third: coalition building and organizing.

I knew that those three pillars would be really central, not only for thinking about the information we wanted to convey, but for the actual structure of the show.

The show starts with a lecture where you're learning some key principles, some history, you're learning about some of the core values of the school—that's the study part. Then you do a participatory practice—that's the sanctuary. And then, at the end, we close with this almost ritual, where we include voices from listeners and from other people at the school, and they share different forms of attention that matter to them or different forms of attention that they notice, and that's the final pillar, coalition building. To me, that three-pronged structure felt like a nice way to ground the show we were making in the material that we wanted to convey.

In terms of the things that you ask listeners to do in the show, one of them is to reflect over kind of long stretches of time, especially in the audio world. So you had to make a tough choice about sound design: what do you do with silence?

I brought Brendan Baker onto this project because when I had told him about the school, he mentioned to me that he thinks of sound design as a practice of shaping attention. And to me, that felt so smart and exactly like the head space I wanted to be in when producing this show: that, as a producer or as a storyteller or as a designer, whatever your art form is, you're always shaping attention.

For the practices, Brendan and I did have a few lengthy conversations about what is the right kind of white noise or silence to use in those spots. At first I thought it would be weird if you just had the sound completely drop out, and I was thinking maybe we should add some music there or something. But the more we talked about it, the more we were thinking about how when you're doing these practices of looking at your hand, it wouldn't really be fair to shape people's attention with music or other stimuli through the audio. We wanted it to be organic.

We wanted to have enough noise there so that people knew their podcast was still playing, but we wanted the noise from the unique space you're in to be an actual part of the listening experience, too. We didn't want noise that would drown out your own room tone.

I like the idea that people would be doing these practices and for four minutes would be listening to the noise in their headphones, but also the noise beyond their headphones, and that would induce a form of attention that's aligned with the values and practice of the show.

I honestly found the length of some of the silences challenging. You know this as well, but as a producer, it's hard sometimes to listen to podcasts and take that hat off. You're thinking, like, "What is going on here? Are we really going to have silence for four minutes?"

There were some times where I was listening to drafts, and it would be going, and then I would be making notes on the draft, and then I would forget that it was playing. And then her voice would come back and I'd go, "Oh, I totally lost my focus." But with attention practices, like meditation, that's part of the process.

We also thought about how much people play white noise tracks or brown noise tracks on Spotify to create an environment of silence when they don't have silence around them. I think that allowed me to think about that paradox of silence and noise—without getting too theoretical, just about how manufacturing a specific kind of silence can bring you into closer contact with your own attention practice.

There is a line from a Henry James novel that features prominently in the podcast. In the novel, a very busy doctor goes to visit a dying patient. And James writes, "It is so crystal clean, that great empty cup of attention that he placed between them on the table."

How does that resonate for you? And how would you explain that to people who haven't heard the show yet?

What that does for me is, the work we're trying to do here is not saying that one kind of attention is good and one kind is bad, or this is what attention should be, this is what's being taken from you. I think that the School is trying to take the concept of attention and breathe a little bit of space and fresh air into it. Because we hear so much about the attention economy and that your attention is a fungible thing that can be taken and converted into money. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean for someone to take your attention from you? What even is your attention in the first place?

At the school, the first thing they do is have you turn to your neighbor and talk about how you define attention. And everyone has a completely different definition. Like, we don't really know what it is, for how much we say things like, "it's the currency of our times." And so this notion of an empty cup, it symbolizes to me that attention can be many things.

There is another powerful concept in the show: "attention fracking." The idea is that for our attention to be commodified in the way that it has requires a kind of poisoning of our bodies, and of our humanity.

Yeah, this is a key image that the School uses, and I think it's a really evocative one. It's the notion that what companies are doing us is pumping a lot of short form content into our consciousness in order to extract our attention and turn it into profit.

These little bits of content are breaking up our psyches in the way that petroleum fracking would break up shale in order to extract golden oil that they can then turn into revenue. I think this is a great image for many reasons. One, when you say human fracking, people are like, "Ew, that's gross." And that's the right sort of reaction to what these companies are doing. Yes! It is so gross.

But also, on a more sophisticated level, I think there are so many parallels between the crisis that the School of Attention is taking on and the environmental crisis. I was just at their book launch last week, and D. Graham Burnett described it as there being an external environmental crisis and an internal environmental crisis. And how you really can't approach the external environmental crisis until you approach the internal, or, at least, they're very related to one another.

I think that's a really interesting idea, to think of consciousness and attention as an internal environment, but I also think that it explains why the media we're taking in is shifting in a very specific way. Like, why is it that short form video impacts our attention in a different way than a three hour podcast or a book? Why does that lead to more ad revenue, exactly? Thinking about art and media consumption as operating in the internal environment of attention helps me not only understand the crisis better, but also helps me think in a more ecosystemic way when thinking about potential solutions.

Are you still a believer in audio, whether it is a podcast or audiobook, as a kind of slower, more attention-oriented media consumption practice?

I think yes and no. I think that was, in a way, what drew me to audio storytelling—audio's capacity to elicit quality attention. I've always been interested in longform nonfiction writing, and those kinds of longform stories have been happening more in audio, for the last decade at least. And so that's what initially drew me to it.

But if we're talking audio as podcasting, I think we cannot say right now that the general state of podcasting is the most conducive to a deep kind of attention. So much of podcasting is produced to reward ambient, easy, frackable attention; you are not supposed to pay focused attention to 3 hours of Jay Shetty. This is especially true with the encroachment of video. Brendan explained this to me really well, that there's this continuum between text, which is not time-based, and requires a lot of attention from the reader in order to engage with it. And then you have something like video, which is time-based and gives you both the visuals and the sound, and it fully immerses you in that, without you really having to put in as much effort with your attention. And audio is in the center of that continuum; it both can stimulate your attention by being time-based and having someone's voice with you, but it also requires a little bit more agency and imagination in how you engage with it.

However, there's also an argument to be made around the distribution system of O.G. audio podcasting — specifically RSS-feed podcasting — that it is not owned and optimized by a single tech algorithm that's optimizing for your attention. Apple Podcasts is just not a platform directly invested in fracking your attention, not in the same way TikTok is.

So I think there's two different arguments there that would make podcasting a conducive medium for a message like what the School of Attention has to share.

Sara McCrae is an audio producer, writer, and media strategist based in Brooklyn, NY.