I think there's something very profound and maybe irreversible happening to human attention in the digital age. I think it's more than just distraction and it's more than even just addiction. It could actually be the defining political and moral challenge of our time. I want to start with kind of clearing the ground with an observation that Herbert Simon made in the 1970s. When information becomes abundant, attention becomes this scarce resource. This is an observation that I think we're only just starting to understand what it means for human life and society. But this whole environment that has emerged in the last several years to compete for our attention in scientific, systematic ways is often called the attention economy. If you think about the goals that you have for yourself, your life today, this week, this year. Usually things like I want to spend more time with family, I want to learn how to play the piano, I want to take that trip I've been thinking about and reflect on my life. These are real human goals. But if you look at the goals that technology has for us, they're not usually these things. They're things like maximizing the amount of time we spend with them, time on site, or the number of clicks, the number of times we can scroll or tap, the number of page views or ad views, things like this. There's a deep fundamental gap here between the goals we have and the goals we have in the goals our technologies have for us. And so I think there is this kind of inconvenient truth that we either kind of ignore or maybe don't know about a lot of the time, which is the attention economy by and large is not on our side. Its goals are not our goals. We kind of trust these things to be GPSes for our lives. But really, they're directing us toward these petty kind of engagement goals. And this is very well known by the people who create them. The CEO of Netflix, a little while back, said in addition to Snapchat and YouTube, one of their major competitors was sleep. Steve Jobs did not let his children use the iPad, right? So broadly speaking, what's happened in the last couple of decades is our knowledge of psychology, particularly our non-rational biases, kind of these vulnerabilities in our brain, you know, non-rational dynamics of decision making. We've developed an enormous catalog of these things. And at the same time, this system has emerged on the internet, a system of measurement, message delivery, optimization, experimentation. And these two kind of trends have come into conversation now in the attention economy. What this means now is that this industrial scale persuasion is now the primary business model of our first really major global communications medium. And this isn't widely talked about. You know, we still call companies like Facebook or social media companies, but they're not selling social media. They're selling our attention. But I think another factor that makes this so urgent, because this power to shape people's attention to persuade people toward one end or another is increasingly centralized in the hands of just a few people, a few companies in one state, in one country. It's a weird irony that the whole point of the internet was that it was decentralized in its infrastructure, but then the platforms that have emerged on it have been so centralized. So literally, there are people who would probably fit in this room who have their hands-on levers that can control the attentional habits of over two billion people on planet Earth. What I realized when I was working at Google, looking across the industry at the state of the attention economy and how little it was being talked about in society, and then feeling its effects in my own life, honestly, that there was more technology around me than ever before of it. It was harder somehow to do what I wanted to do. I felt we had made the same mistake that all this Huxley talked about when he was lamenting that defenders of freedom in his own time had failed to take into account, man, almost infinite appetite for distractions. I want to suggest that, you know, if we're at all serious about promoting freedom or autonomy in the digital age, it's really urgent for us to look at this situation and to start taking into account our infinite appetite for distractions. I think what that would entail is starting to assert and defend our freedom of attention.