You might want to try pausing mid-story to ask the other person a question just to see if they ask you how that story ended or to find out that they were tuning you out the whole time.
Both agree that noise cancellation can help, although, if you're using noise cancellation as an excuse to tune everything out and then turn up your music, don't do that.
Though, unfortunately, as the movie seems to somewhat pessimistically put forward, it might be exactly at this point of the message, that people will tune out, in search of something more exciting.
And if scientists figure this out, fine tune it, and harness this capability, we could potentially power our entire house from essentially, a glass of water, forever.