Are You Not Entertained? Host Chris Hayes (The Sirens’ Call) on the Attention Age

For more than a decade, Chris Hayes has been one of our most incisive political thinkers. He joins us this week in New York City, hours before taping his hit MSNBC show, All In with Chris Hayes https://www.msnbc.com/all, to discuss his new book, The Sirens’ Call https://sirenscallbook.com/. At the top, we unpack America’s Constitutional crises (5:30), the editorial inner workings of “All In” (7:00), and how attention became our most endangered resource (12:00). Then, Hayes talks through the challenges of maintaining viewership in the era of cord cutting (14:00), the diversity of his primetime audience (25:00), and how he balances the performative elements of the job with his authentic self (44:00). On the back-half, Hayes describes the challenges of reaching a wider audience in our increasingly partisan political landscape (50:00), his tenure on television (55:00), his formative years writing at The Chicago Reader (1:05:00), and a short story from Albert Camus that keeps him on course (1:10:00). Feedback or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, journalist, author, and MSNBC host, Chris Hayes. For more than a decade, he's been one of the sharpest political thinkers on television, bringing curiosity, conviction, and a healthy dose of skepticism to his weeknight program, All In with Chris Hayes. You may remember that we began the year on the show by talking to New Yorker writer Gia Tolentino, who talked a whole lot about the destructiveness of the internet and how surveillance capitalism is being sold to us as the new normal. We imagine today's episode with Chris as a kind of continuation of that talk with Gia,

• 1:19Sam Fragoso?

  because as the first month of Trump's second term has shown, nothing about this time is normal, and nothing about how big tech CEOs are controlling and pulling the levers of power for him should go ignored. But the loudest question that I've been hearing amongst family and friends is, how do we go about paying attention to all of this when what we're being asked to pay attention to, to witness, is so obviously toxic? How do we remain focused in a political climate designed to disorganize? Toni Morrison once said in a keynote speech that "The function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.

• 2:01Sam Fragoso?

  It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. None of this is necessary, and there will always be one more thing." The same can be said about proto fascism, or whatever we're calling American politics at this moment. Distraction is a feature, not a bug. And its intent, Trump and Musk's intent, is to reduce our capacity and, more importantly, our desire to imagine something different. And so today, that's what we try to do with Chris and his new book, The Siren's Call, which explores how attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us

• 2:43Sam Fragoso?

  and from which we are increasingly alienated. We also discuss the dip in ratings across many left-leaning news organizations, the inner workings of his tenure at MSNBC, and why he believes it will take a holistic framework to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future. With that, here is Chris Hayes.

• 3:23Sam Fragoso?

  Chris Hayes, thank you for being here.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  It's great to be here.

• 3:25Sam Fragoso?

  How are you feeling?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Hmm, how am I feeling? I think it would depend on...

• 3:30Sam Fragoso?

  Whether I really want to know the answer or not?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  No, I just feel very divided. I do and have felt for a while very divided in my answer to that question about how I feel about what's happening to the country and the world vis a vis American democratic and public life, which is something that I worry about and spend a lot of time thinking about professionally, and how I'm feeling about the particulars of my life, which relate to like, my wife and children and family and friends. I feel great about that. I feel very lucky, extremely lucky to be happy. And I love my kids, my wife, and I love my friends.

• 4:04Sam Fragoso?

  So things are good.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's like, it's weird, because if I were to just focus on that and someone said, "How are you feeling?", I'd be like, "Great, awesome." But I don't feel great and awesome.

• 4:13Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Because of what's happening.

• 4:15Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean? I'm joking.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  I took a very deep breath. I was like, how should I?

• 4:23Sam Fragoso?

  What kind of show are we on? We're here in New York City, talking just a few hours before you head on over to 30 Rock to tape your nightly show.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:33Sam Fragoso?

  On MSNBC. It's my understanding that you and the team have your daily editorial call, basically talking through what you're going to cover that night in the afternoon, around 1:30. So as you were walking the three mile loop around Prospect Park with your dog, what was on the top of your mind in that meeting?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Today, the top of the mind is the, I don't know if you want to call it a constitutional crisis, democratic crisis, legitimacy crisis, but the-

• 5:01Sam Fragoso?

  I look to you to tell me what to call it.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  The truly frightening, enraging, and pretty unprecedented assault on the separation of powers and the constitutional order that's being undertaken by the current president in flagrant violation of both tradition, law, statute, and the Constitution. And this kind of question that hangs over all this, that's dread inducing, which is, who and how are they going to be stopped from seizing more and more power? That was the the theme of today's meeting. And the theme of tonight's show, we actually, just before I came here, we did the rundown.

• 5:38Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, you did?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did.

• 5:39Sam Fragoso?

  And what does that look like?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  So we have, we have five blocks in the show, A, B, C, D, and E. The A block is generally the longest. It's the top of the show. You tend to want that to be, it's the cover of the newspaper.

• 5:52Sam Fragoso?

  And the constitutional crisis is, I assume, the A block?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  It is the A block. And the way this works is we'll talk it through and then I will actually, once we've talked it through, once we've set a rundown, I will actually just kind of dictate a draft of the script in that meeting, which we record and then put into the script editing software. But, you know, you basically now have, I think, at least six federal judges who have said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up. What you're doing appears to be plausibly illegal and to plausibly be causing irreparable harm. You have to stop doing it. And in response, you have some evidence they are explicitly ignoring those court orders.

• 6:28Sam Fragoso?

  Especially from J.D. Vance.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And then public ruminations from J.D. Vance and Musk and others about why they're going to just blow through the stop sign.

• 6:35Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, they're not even doing like a rolling stop.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  And it's really weird, too, to watch them all radicalize each other on social media. Like, the thing that happened to your cousin that you would see once you hear.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  At Thanksgiving or whatever, but it's happening to the most powerful people in the world in real time.

• 6:53Sam Fragoso?

  It does feel like a game of poker where someone makes an outrageous bet and they're like, hold my beer. I'm one upping you.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the incentive structure in poker is that at some point you're gonna have to show your cards.

• 7:03Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. And also, it does feel like they're playing with our money, not theirs.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Well said. They are playing with our money and not theirs. And I do think like it's useful that so many courts with so many judges appointed by various different presidents with different ideological profiles have been like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 7:20Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Across political spectrum.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Including a fairly elderly Reagan appointed judge who on birthright citizenship, central, one of the central parts of working the amendment was like excoriating and even asking the lawyers how they could in good faith as good standing members of the bar come before him and make the arguments.

• 7:37Sam Fragoso?

  In the first month of Trump's second term in office, he's been following the Steve Bannon playbook to a T, which is basically what Bannon calls the flooding the zone with a kind of muzzle velocity. Basically, if you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't examine the one in front of you. And it's true. Right off the bat, he's revoked birthright citizenship, frozen federal spending, shut down AIDS and HIV relief, shut down DEI programs, and threatened to deport people based on their political views. And that is an abbreviated.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Very abbreviated.

• 8:11Sam Fragoso?

  Short list. As someone who has just published this book about attention, how are you processing this opening act of his? Are you prioritizing survival over synthesis? Are you just trying to hold on for spring training and the Cubs comeback? Where are you at?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  It's funny, on my Cubs group text the other day, someone was like pitchers and catchers. And it was like, I'm just looking for some sunshine here. Look, what you are seeing is a kind of form of attentional dominance and weaponized distraction, right? And there's a weird symmetry between these two experiences. The experience I write in the book, which is, you know, the sort of. Notion of constantly being subject to these kind of siren calls through these platforms and forums of kind of attentional capitalism that are constantly trying to beckon us. Call to what is our faculty for involuntary attention, like the wail of a siren going down the street, or the song of the siren in The Odyssey, or the clattering of dishes

• 9:13Speaker 01

  in a waiter dropping at a restaurant, the buzzing of the phone, like that sense of kind of distraction and constant battle for dominion over your own focus is now being matched in the political sphere of discourse. There's like this strange symmetry between those two experiences.

• 9:30Sam Fragoso?

  Say more about what you mean by that, the symmetry.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  The symmetry is that the central tension and conflict identified in the book and in the opening moments particularly is a conflict between a faculty for attention that can operate independent of our will and be drawn to things even before we get to weigh in on whether we want to pay attention to them. If a car honks at you in the middle of the street, a dog barks, a baby cries in the airplane. And then what we voluntarily want to pay attention to, and living in a world in which a bunch of very sophisticated companies have engineered very sophisticated means to call on our compelled attention, to compel it and extract it and monetize it, and often it feels like they're doing that against our will and this battle for our will.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  That's happening in the sphere of like the life we live normally, and then that's also happening in the sphere of politics, where Musk and Trump particularly, and Musk, who's the kind of Venn diagram, right? He bought one of these platforms to do this, and he's also kind of running the country, are basically trying to do the same thing, this sort of constant sense of interruption to capture your attention.

• 10:40Sam Fragoso?

  And you're someone who walks around with an Apple Watch.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I do.

• 10:44Sam Fragoso?

  Does it help or hurt you?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  You mean from the distraction? I don't have any notifications on it, which I think is key, so never.

• 10:50Sam Fragoso?

  Because just looking at it right now is giving me anxiety.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  I do, I am a no notification person, which I think is pretty key. Because to me, the notification system is the ultimate example of what I'm saying here. The haptic feedback of an Apple Watch or your phone, the buzz, engineers hardwiring in a feature to the device that literally compels your attention. You can't not notice when something buzzes in your pocket. And that's on purpose.

• 11:20Sam Fragoso?

  You know, we began this year on the show, talking to Gia Tolentino, about the corrosiveness of the internet, just how bad it feels to move through the world with these devices. And I think your book gets to the heart of it in ways I haven't read in other books about attention.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 11:38Sam Fragoso?

  But people sounding the alarm about emerging technologies is nothing new. The advent of the printing press was criticized. It was believed that only handwritten word on parchment would last more than 200 years. When the post office was invented, there were concerns it would make letter writing too quick and casual. There were worries and concerns about the danger of comic books. That comic books are turning children into addicted hijack zombies, which sounds remarkably similar to how we describe kids in the social media age. Do you believe the internet, especially social media, is more like comic books, which prove to be just fine, or more like cigarettes, which have proved to not be so fine?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  I think it's probably more like cigarettes, but I think it's deeper than that. Because cigarettes are really bad for your health, but they don't fundamentally alter your interior life. They don't take from you something that's sort of fundamentally yours.

• 12:40Sam Fragoso?

  You don't think addiction alters your interior life?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  I think it does, but I think one of the things that's weird about cigarettes is that it's not, I mean, nicotine is kind of mind altering, but it's not really mind altering. And one of the problems about nicotine, its insidiousness, and particularly tobacco addiction, is that you can be fully functional and do it, not hit rock bottom, and then you get, you know, get lung cancer at whatever age. So one of the points I make in the book is it's really important to try to be rigorous about, because I cite the comics example in the book, right? Like, are we going through a moral panic? Or is this thing really dangerous?

• 13:14Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And my answer is like, no, it probably is a little more like the printing press.

• 13:20Sam Fragoso?

  Say more.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Well, the printing press truly was a seismically disruptive technology. And for people who are like, this is bad, I don't think in the aggregate, the printing press was bad. But the people who identified that an apocalyptic change had happened were right. The religious wars that are essentially kicked off by the combination of the printing press and the reformation do kill millions of people, do completely break apart old orders, for instance, the dominance of the Catholic Church, like et cetera, et cetera. And so I think that the level of change we're dealing with here is something more like that than comic books or cigarettes.

• 13:57Sam Fragoso?

  It does sound like in the book, on the whole, that you think most of these analogies fall short when you try to relate them to smartphones. And this book is an attempt, as you write, to quote, "find peace in an era defined by the sirens called the smartphone, the 24/7 slot machine blinking at us." What about these devices make them mostly immune to historical comparison?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  It's a great question. So one is the ubiquity. We've had portable media before in the forms of books, magazines, and the Walkman. But-

• 14:31Sam Fragoso?

  I miss the Walkman.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Walkman's an amazing device. Someone I went to middle and high school with sent me a picture of myself in eighth grade with a Walkman, like my little Sony Walkman in.

• 14:40Sam Fragoso?

  What were you listening to?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Almost certainly in that age, one of the Beatles cassette tapes that I had that I was like obsessive, completist about. I knew every single Beatles song and Beatles lyric at a certain point in my life.

• 14:51Sam Fragoso?

  There is a Beatles quiz at the end of this-

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Okay, perfect. Well, I'll lock in.

• 14:55Sam Fragoso?

  Abbey Road or White Album?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Oh, Abbey Road for sure.

• 14:58Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  We've had portable media before, but we have never had the ubiquity of a attention absorption device at all seconds that we have it. We've never had the global scale of the companies. So no one's ever had a billion users before, ever. Like, the largest corporations, the largest networks, they were just not operating at the scale. They were not operating with the individuated sophistication of machine learning that is very different than the gatekeeping of programming where a bunch of humans decide to greenlight things or not. The algorithmic machine learning algorithms, which really are the first consumer-facing mass use of what we now call AI, machine learning. No one's ever greenlighting anything or making decision.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  It all just gets uploaded and then you run the experiment on the people.

• 15:48Sam Fragoso?

  There's no curation.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  There's no curation. And then the most important and biggest thing that makes it historically distinct is the ability of this form of attentional capture to utilize our weakness for social attention and to specifically talk to us and name us as individuals in a way that no media before was really able to do.

• 16:11Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  The simple tag mention in social media. You tag someone. You get a little notification, that person is talking to you. The TV, the radio couldn't do that. They could try to speak to you as some generalized consumer. The Uncle Sam poster reaches out into the space in front of him to point to you. But to actually be like, no, you, Chris, you are bad, or you are good, or check this out.

• 16:36Sam Fragoso?

  That sounded like a fundraising text.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fundraising text is the perfect example of this.

• 16:41Sam Fragoso?

  That, Sam, we have a problem.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:43Sam Fragoso?

  Sam, we're really disappointed.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:47Sam Fragoso?

  Just hearing someone else be disappointed in me, as if I'm not already disappointed in myself. All the time.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  That specific form of address, which has been scaled.

• 16:59Sam Fragoso?

  But proven to be effective at capturing attention.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. Yes. And in fact, I write in the book, there's this thing called the cocktail party effect, which is.

• 17:06Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, I love this. Explain this to people.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  If you're at a cocktail party and you're talking, right, and you're, you've got your voluntary attention going, which I'm focusing on you. We're having a conversation.

• 17:15Sam Fragoso?

  You're few drinks and.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  You're few drinks and, and you actually have to do focusing because in that environment, there's lots of stimulus and other conversations around you, which your brain is actively suppressing.

• 17:23Sam Fragoso?

  Right. People talking, music playing. Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  The one thing that will pull your attention out, and this is true in experimental settings, but also anecdotally, I think we relate to is someone saying your name in another conversation. And all of a sudden it's like record scratch, like the beam of focus goes over there.

• 17:39Sam Fragoso?

  And that means what? That we have a kind of active stenographer in our head?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:45Sam Fragoso?

  That is always.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Searching for our name.

• 17:47Sam Fragoso?

  It's, it's command effing for our name.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is wild, like.

• 17:51Sam Fragoso?

  That's insane.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  At a processing level, the fact that we're able to do that and we can't do with other stimulus is so mind blowing.

• 17:57Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think that says about us?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It says about us that core to us in almost a biological and neurological way is this third aspect of attention, not just voluntary attention and involuntary attention, but social attention, which is, and this is one of the things that makes attention so explosively powerful, being paid attention to, not just what we pay attention to, but attention being paid to us. And attention being paid to us is a necessary precondition for human survival, because we can't do anything for ourselves when we're born. And it's also the foundation for all human relationships. And so it's, it's sort of constitutive of us. And one of the strange things about this technology is it takes it, it separates it out from the normal context of bilateral relationships. It makes it unidirectional. You pay attention

• 18:44Speaker 01

  to a person or they can pay attention to you. And it deploys it at a scale, curative, unimaginable for all but a tiny, tiny sliver of people.

• 18:53Sam Fragoso?

  You have a great line in the book, "We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions, anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible, but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club." Which, which I actually, I've heard you have tried to do a few times.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  It's a real go to my.

• 19:23Sam Fragoso?

  You guys get off work at what, 9:30?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:25Sam Fragoso?

  You head down there?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  And then just try to meditate.

• 19:28Sam Fragoso?

  Right. Your wife's calling you, three kids.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Sorry, I'm meditating.

• 19:35Sam Fragoso?

  Your wife may listen to this. Uh, Kate, very sorry. Just blame it on me. That's not Chris. In the book, you describe this attention capitalism as running parallel to what industrial capitalism did to workers' bodies. How do you connect the dots here? Is this about the commodification of our time? I'm curious because I've, the analogy to me reads as a little tenuous, but I want to understand it more.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a question of like how and a lot, like how much this is an analog and how much I'm saying they're actually the same, which I think I'm a little unclear on even my own mind. But basically the parallel is this. I think, A, there's this notion that this economist, Karl Poliany, talks about called a fictitious commodity, which is there are commodities that are market goods, they're extracted from the earth, rubber, oil, copper, and then they're regularized, right? So it's like you have a barrel of oil, light sweet crude, it has these features and every barrel's interchangeable with every other barrel. And that interchangeability, which converts it to commodity, means that you can do all sorts of stuff with that. You can sell it at scale, you can bet against it, you can, his point is that there are certain things, and two examples he gives

• 20:47Speaker 01

  is labor and land, that he calls fictitious commodities, where these things fit very strangely with commodification, partly in the case of labor, because the thing that's being commodified is the sum total of our human effort and toil. Karl Marx says the commodification of labor is this sort of process of alienation whereby this thing internal to us that we kind of own and have dominion over gets taken from us and put out into the world. And poured into products that we then no longer own, that we are literally alienated from. Here's how I think this connects to attention. I think this is the neatest way to understand it. There's a weird triangle of value that Marx identifies with labor

• 21:30Speaker 01

  that goes like this, and it's a paradox he's trying to solve for. During the Industrial Revolution, the sum total aggregate value of all the labor of the workers is enormous. And not only is it enormous, it's the necessary precondition for industrial capitalism. You take away the workers, there's no factories, there's no objects. In fact, that's the logic of a strike, right? So the sum total aggregate value is huge, but the individual slice that each worker has of it is a pittance. And not just a pittance, like you can't, you can barely survive on it, right?

• 22:01Sam Fragoso?

  And it's hard to weaponize it.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And it's hard to weaponize it. And yet, in the aggregate, it's very valuable. Individually, it's not very valuable, but to you, it is the most valuable thing.

• 22:11Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  It's all you have. If you're spending 60 hours a week in a sweatshop, your life is being taken from you. That exact same triangle exists with attention. In the aggregate, when you pull it over a billion users, attention is wildly valuable and the foundation for the most profitable and largest corporations. In the individual moment that you're looking at an Instagram reel, and there is an auction happening in the background in nanoseconds to bid off your eyeballs to an advertiser, it's like fractions of a penny. It's basically nothing. But to you, your focus and your attention is the most valuable thing you have in any given moment. And if it's being taken from you, that something's being taken from you that matters and is very, very dear to you.

• 23:02Sam Fragoso?

  We'll be right back with writer, reporter, MSNBC host, Chris Hayes.

• 23:11Sam Fragoso?

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• 24:42Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about how attention capitalism governs your life, especially within the confines of your show. And to do that, I thought you could read a section from the book here.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. A cable news show is powered by attention. It has no internal combustion engine to make it go. Yes, you can cover whatever you desire, night after night, but if no one watches it, the show will be canceled. This is what almost happened to me. After a lot of trial and error, I now view audience attention as something like the wind that powers a sailboat. It's a real phenomenon, independent of the boat, and you can successfully sail only if you harness it. You don't turn the boat into the wind, but you also don't simply allow the wind to set your course. You figure out where you want to go. In the case of my show, what I think is most important for people to know. You identify which way the wind is blowing and then using your skills and the tools of

• 25:37Speaker 01

  the boat, you tack back and forth to manage to arrive at your destination using that wind power. This experience gives me a certain perspective on how attention functions, I think. Every waking moment in my life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention. And it just so happens that constant pursuit of others' attention is no longer just for professionals like myself. Indeed, it has been democratized to include every teen with a phone.

• 26:03Sam Fragoso?

  There's a lot to unpack there, but I want to narrow the focus first on audience attention and how you go about capturing it. Because leading up to the election, I had to look this over last night, your show received somewhere around 1.4 million viewers a night. But by the time mid-November rolled around, post-election, that number was almost consistently halved.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:27Sam Fragoso?

  Around 700,000. And it's since made some marginal gains in 2025, but it is still well shy of that pre-election number. The same cannot be said about, you know, your competition on the right in Fox News, which has seen a huge uptick since November. What do you think this withdrawal amongst Democrats is telling us about this political moment? And is it in any way changing how you are thinking about your job?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  There's a few things. I mean, one, I would just say that my understanding is in the last, literally the last two weeks, we've seen those numbers go way up, like way past marginal. So 80 or 80% over the last, the previous two weeks. So there's people coming back quite a bit. The phenomenon that you're identifying is a real one. Fox experienced it in 2020 after Trump lost.

• 27:22Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And in fact, one of the things that we learned from the Dominion lawsuit, and what I write about with some length in the book, is that they were freaked out and desperate to keep the audience's attention in an atmosphere in which people were demoralized and didn't want to pay attention to political news. And one of the things they tried to do was basically play up the story of election fraud, the false story of election fraud, which led them to this lawsuit and then a settlement. I think what I would say there, to go back to the metaphor I started with is, you know, and I've read accounts of life at seas in the 17th and 18th century. There are times where boats just sit on a dead calm sea. There's nothing the sailor can do. There's no technology in the boat.

• 28:05Sam Fragoso?

  No matter how skilled they are.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter how skilled they are. And if you don't accept that that's part of what happens and the wind's going to come back, you can't be a sailor. And if you start being like, well, the boat's broken.

• 28:18Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  We gotta change. What if we start ripping, the boat's too heavy. That's why it's not moving. What if we start ripping up some of the floorboards? You're gonna court disaster. I have been doing this now for

• 28:31Sam Fragoso?

  27 years.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  I've been a journalist for 27 years. I've been a television host for 13 or 14 years. 14 years. At this point, I understand that like, sometimes the wind's not gonna blow.

• 28:41Sam Fragoso?

  And how do you feel about that?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  I truly have gotten to a place, I think through sheer experience and raps.

• 28:47Sam Fragoso?

  Equanimity?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Where I have total equanimity about it. I just know that I can't control that. When something is happening, when that, when the numbers you're talking about, like that level of attention.

• 28:57Sam Fragoso?

  Right, get halved.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  It's not, it's nothing you're doing.

• 29:00Sam Fragoso?

  Right. And you don't feel bad about that?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  No, I don't. Because

• 29:03Sam Fragoso?

  And you don't panic?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I don't panic.

• 29:05Sam Fragoso?

  The team doesn't panic?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:06Sam Fragoso?

  No one at the office is panicked.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  I can't speak for other people.

• 29:11Sam Fragoso?

  The people near you that you work with.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I think no one likes it when that happens.

• 29:16Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Because it doesn't feel good. But no, I don't think there's panic. And I know for myself, you know, one of the things for me is I stopped looking at ratings in 2020 during COVID. And I haven't looked back. I will hear from other people and stuff about what's going on. I know, for instance, the numbers you cited are roughly in line with what happened.

• 29:37Sam Fragoso?

  I don't hear about it until I go on a podcast with Sam for Goso and then

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yes, then I hear. But a hard fought piece of wisdom I've achieved is understanding what I can and can't control. And more than that, to go back to that Fox example, or the idea of deciding you need to start throwing things off the boat because it's too heavy and won't move, if you start to panic, and if you start to try to control things you can't control, you'll start doing bad stuff.

• 30:02Sam Fragoso?

  I would really love to see your version of panicking. Is it just like more interviews with Wallace Shawn on your show?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Wow, that is an amazing deep cut.

• 30:11Sam Fragoso?

  It's a great interview.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I love that interview.

• 30:14Sam Fragoso?

  The editor in chief of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has said that "public distrust of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal are at record levels. Our ratings are a misery." The same could be said and applied to MSNBC. Why is that? Why are people so distrustful of journalists and institutions that seemingly operate in good faith with clear, rigorous editorial standards, as I know you and David do? Why doesn't that read?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  I think we're in a little bit of a different category than those others you mentioned, in a way that I think is somewhat helpful, because I think there's a distinct ideological profile that we have that I think is pretty transparent and means that, you know, you can go back to the 1950s and 60s, you can go back to the 20s, and there's like The Nation Magazine, The National Review, and the idea of like opinion journalism or point of view journalism is as old as the country. I think in terms of the categories and how people feel about the media and distrust, we're in a little bit of a different situation because of that. That said, one of the things that I don't think people really understand

• 31:26Speaker 01

  is that over the process of literally probably 40 or 50 years, everyone right of center started dropping out of non-conservative media as consumers, as subscribers, as viewers, to the point where

• 31:44Speaker 01

  All media that isn't Fox, Newsmax, et cetera, is competing for basically half of the country that is the center-left. And sometimes where people are like, well, what did they do to lose that trust?

• 31:59Sam Fragoso?

  Uh huh.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  I don't think they did much to lose the trust.

• 32:04Sam Fragoso?

  Did they do much to retain it?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I think there was a war on the mainstream media and the idea of the media from the right that starts in basically the 50s and 60s.

• 32:14Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  And was waged for many years and was successful. It's not like, look, if we were having this moment of like distrust against the media after the Iraq war, that would be one thing. But we're not having it after the Iraq war. And there was a moment of reckoning after the Iraq war. But again, the partisan valence of how that that kind of distrust shook out,

• 32:33Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  what isn't predicted by getting the war wrong.

• 32:36Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I think there's tons of stuff the quote media has gotten wrong, although that term is like so amorphous, has to be useless. But mostly, I think what's happened is a reactionary project to attack independent sources of authority. Science, the academy, journalism, which are all independent sources of authority. Rush Limbaugh once referred to government, science, the academy, and journalism as the four corners of deceit. And I think it's been a successful reactionary project to cut people off from from trust in independent sources of authority so as to epistemically dominate people.

• 33:15Sam Fragoso?

  It has been successful. It just won.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Wildly successful.

• 33:19Sam Fragoso?

  And I'm pressing you on this not because I don't like what you do.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:24Sam Fragoso?

  I've obviously spent an inordinate amount of time with your work for a decade now. Is there something in the approach, the editorial considerations, that make it less appealing to a wider audience? And do you see anything in the way that? Left-leaning media fails to connect to a larger audience, the way the Democratic Party also failed this past election. Are the two tied at all to you?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  I think they might be, although they're such different proj- or they should be different projects.

• 33:53Sam Fragoso?

  I don't disagree, they should be different projects.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:55Sam Fragoso?

  But they are not different projects on Newsmax and Fox News.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Correct. I mean, those are more explicitly and flatly partisan outlets.

• 34:02Sam Fragoso?

  They're in harmony.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I guess I'd take this in a few steps. One is, it's really challenging to communicate to people at the scales we're talking about. Like, what's something that a million people want to listen to? What's something that 10 million want to people listen to? Or what's something that 75 or 80 million? Like, these are wildly different scales.

• 34:23Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  So, when you're talking about a presidential campaign, you're talking about the biggest scale possible. It's 150 million voters here or there, you know, more or less. We're talking to, like you said, maybe one and a half million and a half.

• 34:36Sam Fragoso?

  Right. We're in the first group, and Joe Rogan's in the second group.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Right. So it's just like, these are different, these are totally different scales.

• 34:42Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  But it also means you're going to communicate differently. And also, your messaging is going to be different. Like, what would be good for my show? I wouldn't necessarily say, here's my A-block, and give it to a Democratic presidential candidate, and be like, this is the way to reach the median voter. They're different audiences.

• 34:59Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  The same way I wouldn't, like, take my Nation columns, and like, walk into Barack Obama's White House and be like, this is the way to keep Iowa in play in the 2012 election. What I will say here, which I think is important, a few things. One is, I've occasionally gotten to meet with, like, our audience research people. Our audience is way more ideologically diverse than you would guess. Like, truly, huge chunks describing themselves as independent, or moderate, or conservative. It's a big audience with diverse views. I know this because I run into people all the time.

• 35:32Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Who I know their politics, who are like, mention something they saw on my show, or watched my show. People who are friends, family members, who I've heard of for years, and I know they are not my politics. And I meet them, and they're viewers. And I always love that.

• 35:49Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Cause it's like, oh, wow. Did you, you see that commentary I did last night as you're like eagerly shaking my hand?

• 35:55Sam Fragoso?

  But to me, that tracks because the show and your podcast and this book is driven by, I think, a natural curiosity. I wonder though, like if form is related to function here, which is you started doing TV back in 2011 and you and your staff had this mantra. I think it was called, the content should be simmer, not boil. Do you still believe that approach is effective in reaching people? Like, can you make a meal simmering? And maybe not unless you're having soup every day.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Simmer not boil was a phrase that we used for the level of kind of political ideological tension or conflict we wanted at the table. So in the context of a format, you know, form is function, like the format of a panel show, there's me and four guests. You always wanted there to be like a little, like simmer not boil means you don't want people shouting at each other because I hate watching people shout. And I hate watching people interrupt each other. You also-

• 36:52Sam Fragoso?

  Is that true at the dinner table as well?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  That's true everywhere. My mom tells a story of me watching Siskel and Ebert as a kid while my parents having on him and just being like, why are they arguing all the time?

• 37:02Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. She said, quote, he gave it two thumbs down.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  I thought your research is so thorough. I thought you were actually going to bust out a quote from my mom about me watching Siskel and Ebert. Cause I'm like, Jesus, I don't know. Maybe I said that at some point. You seem to have read everything. No, simmer not boil was a sort of the place that we wanted that conversation at the table to live, which is not everyone just agreeing with each other and not people yelling at each other, but like a frisson of tension and disagreement that was still managed.

• 37:31Sam Fragoso?

  So you compared it once to Joe Pesci and Goodfellas.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Did I?

• 37:37Sam Fragoso?

  That scene when he's like-

• 37:39Speaker 01

  What do you mean? I'm funny?

• 37:40Sam Fragoso?

  You think I'm funny?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  You think I'm funny? So I wanted, we wanted that on that show, but again, that format of that show was a two hour show. It was a panel show. It's just a very different thing to do one hour with fewer blocks, shorter, you know, longer commercial breaks, all that stuff. And to get back to your sort of original question, which I think is a really important one and one that I take very seriously. Like, I think there are a bunch of structural reasons that a lot of people are never going to listen to a thing I say and aren't going to trust me. But I really do try to engage in good faith and I really do believe in rhetoric and persuasion, meaning-

• 38:16Speaker 01

  I do try to make arguments to people, to give reasons and cite those reasons in support of my views, and try to persuade people to agree to the things that I want them to agree to because I think are important and see my way of things. There's a limited audience for that because of these structural factors and probably my own shortcomings, but it is a project I'm engaged in.

• 38:39Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think are your shortcomings?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think that my shortcomings are probably, I'm not, I'm maybe not the best instrument for a lot of people. I'm from New York City, I'm from the Bronx. I have the education I have, I have the social milieu I have, I'm now like a dad in Park Slope, and all of those identity signifiers, cultural signifiers, class signifiers, they come with so much weight these days because of how polarized we are along these lines, that I think there's probably people that are just like, put me in some mental category about who I am and what I believe. And sometimes you see people say that about you that so

• 39:21Speaker 01

  profoundly misrepresent you that you realize just, and it actually gets you thinking like, oh, are there people on the right that I have that view about that I also actually don't know anything about?

• 39:33Sam Fragoso?

  I think it goes both ways.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  I think it does, yeah.

• 39:35Sam Fragoso?

  I think we do ourselves and other people a great disservice when we think it's just the right. It's just, oh, those people on the right, those assumptions we make based on aesthetics, education.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Or another really important thing, social media voice. There are people I know, who I love as people, who sound like utter psychopaths on social media.

• 39:59Sam Fragoso?

  So are my closest friends. I would never be friends with them.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  If that was what they were.

• 40:03Sam Fragoso?

  If the version they are online was the version they are at a bar.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  A great example of that in public life is J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance on social media sounds nuts and nasty. When you saw him

• 40:16Speaker 01

  In the debate with Tim Walz, it was like, oh, I just suddenly got this image of this guy who is able to kind of code switch, who's able to talk about things in a way that sounds reasonable. He just was like, I was like, right, this just, there is such a difference in his persona and profile. The one person I think this is not true of is Elon Musk, who I think is probably the same both.

• 40:37Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. When MSNBC launched All In with Chris Hayes, I heard that you would tell your guests before they went on air that, quote, "The most important principle of the show is that we are not on television." What that means is no talking points, no sound bites, no point scoring. 12 years into making All In, has that guiding philosophy changed? Are you thinking about it differently in an era of attention capitalism where content creation has been democratized?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  So that spiel started on Up, which was a panel show with longer time blocks and conversation. I gave this whole thing that was like, don't talk like you're on TV. And I will be totally honest that one of the things I've learned over the time in primetime TV is like, people talk the way they talk on TV for a reason. And the biggest reason for that has to do with timing. And this is actually something, this is a real bedrock, form equals function, or form, form determines content. And Chomsky actually makes this point in Manufacturing Consent.

• 41:40Sam Fragoso?

  We're getting dangerously close to a math class I can't take.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Well, here, here's what he says in Manufacturing Consent. He says, "The imperative in TV of concision requires people to, to basically utter either simpler ideas or ideas that are, that require less explanation." And the, the concision of TV is a real thing, particularly compared to the form that you and I are in right now. People don't realize how long they speak for and how quickly TV goes by. And that pace issue, which is a formal constraint, can be really hard to negotiate unless people have some reps speaking on TV in what we call sound bites, because the time goes by really fast. And so-

• 42:26Speaker 01

  I think I have come around to like, I want people who are on up. I was like, I don't care if you're good on talking on TV. I just want you to be good at talking. I still feel that way about the podcast, but on my primetime show, people kind of have to be good at talking on TV.

• 42:41Sam Fragoso?

  Have you gotten better at talking on TV?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yes, much.

• 42:44Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, because you know, like before journalism, theater was your first true love. You're at Hunter College High School. You acted in plays. You wrote plays. You even directed a play starring your classmate, Lin-Manuel Miranda. And in many ways, your theater dreams kind of came to fruition with the show of yours. You perform four nights a week in front of a crowd that you can't see. How do you balance delivering facts on a show that necessitates a kind of performative fiction?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Well, I would say it's performative, but not performative fiction. And in fact, the key thing is to, the hardest thing to be on TV is yourself. And it's also the most important thing and the thing that takes the most practice and reps to be. If you go back and you look at early David Letterman, he is way tenser, way jumpier and way less himself than Letterman 20 years later.

• 43:43Sam Fragoso?

  We're talking like weatherman and Indiana Letterman?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  No, I mean, early, early Letterman, late show. And I think that one of the things I've gotten better at is the irony of television performance, which is a little different than theater, is you want to be biophysically in the calmest, non-fight or flight place. And because like your resting heartbeat is something you can't really control, except through practice. It takes a lot of time on camera to get there, but you get better the more relaxed you are, the more yourself and the more comfortable you are. So it is a kind of performance. So it very much is performance insofar as we're

• 44:28Speaker 01

  using the tools of rhetoric. I'm punching certain words. I'm doing certain things with my body and my voice. Like I am performing intentionally, but fundamentally, I'm performing myself. And if it weren't that, it would not work.

• 44:42Sam Fragoso?

  Are you performing now?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I think all at some level of distraction, all talking is performing. But one of the things that I would say, and I think anyone that knows me would tell you this, and people have said this to me, they're like, at the bar, talking about what's going on is basically exactly what I sound like on the show.

• 45:03Sam Fragoso?

  Probably a little more profanity at the bar.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  There's more profanity at the bar, for sure.

• 45:06Sam Fragoso?

  Which you're welcome to put out here.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  We can use here.

• 45:09Sam Fragoso?

  Absolutely. Winding our way back to the book. As an attention merchant, I read this book and I thought, like, is this book an act of atonement, self justification, or a roadmap to do this job differently?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  That's really interesting. I mean, I think it's some atonement and it's some self justification. But I also think, like fundamentally, I'm proud of what I do and believe in what I would do, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't. My dad is an amazing guy, and he was a community organizer for years. And he once said this thing to me that I always think about, because I think he's, he's both a really righteous and virtuous person, spiritual person, and spent his whole life doing really good work. But he said this thing to me of like, there's no such thing as purity in this life, but there is such thing as integrity, which I think about all the time. You're going to be making compromises in the world where you have to deal with two competing imperatives that are in tension

• 46:06Speaker 01

  with each other. Your fidelity to your journalistic vision, or what you think is most important, and where the attention flow is. Politicians have to face this. All kinds of people, lawyers, right now, civil servants in the federal government, who may be getting told to do things they think are flatly illegal. You can't escape those. All you can do is like act with integrity and good faith and honesty. And so I think I've actually weirdly, through the process of writing this book and doing the show, I feel as good about the work as I ever have, partly because I think I have wrestled some of these things to the ground. I think I've developed a sense of judgment and sense of self and confidence in myself where I don't feel,

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I don't quite feel as lost and I don't quite feel as panicked. And that I think makes me better at doing what I'm doing, both in the sense, interestingly enough, of that intentional imperative and also in doing the best journalism I can do.

• 47:03Sam Fragoso?

  When did that change?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I think COVID was a little bit of a turning point. I think it's partly also a slow, it's a slow process over time. I felt really lost the first four years for a bunch of reasons.

• 47:18Sam Fragoso?

  Which were?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  The adjustment to the new format, the dealing with ratings that were not great, different imperatives from people I worked for who had ideas for why it wasn't working.

• 47:31Sam Fragoso?

  You said on Longform in 2014, "Making the show was like playing a first-person shooter." There's another quote where he said, "The flip side is that the unrelenting metronomic regularity can wear on you after a while."

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Sam Fragoso?

  Another quote was, "It felt like I was in a cage with a wild animal."

• 47:49Speaker 01

  My wife always told me I looked hunted. She's like, "You got that hunted look in your eyes."

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just had like a real, I had a solid three or four years there where I felt basically constant fight or flight, somatic engagement, adrenaline system pumping. We also had just given, had young children, not getting a lot of sleep in the new world of being a parent, which is its own sort of dislocating event about who you are and what you are and what your schedule is. And so the combination of those two, I think I just was like a little, just kind of out of body experience of just a lot of stress response, almost constant from the moment I woke up in the morning to going to bed, just like the faucet all the

• 48:38Speaker 01

  way open on the stress response. And over time, that just started to trickle and then got kind of shut off. And now I don't feel it at all.

• 48:47Sam Fragoso?

  I feel like that image of the faucet being turned off is what you're working towards in this book when it comes to social media and the internet and our attention. And, you know, this book is in a long line of books in the past decade about attention. And there's a review of your, of your book in The New Yorker. Did you read that?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I did, yep.

• 49:13Sam Fragoso?

  There's a part in it where the critic didn't, I think, didn't totally track the argument or didn't, didn't believe the argument was relevant. And he wrote, "A large part of the knowledge class problem is that cultural creators, especially those in legacy media, fear that smartphones will lure their audiences away. In this, they don't seem vastly different from the 18th century priests decrying novels for turning women away from prayful obedience. Is the ostensible crisis of attention at bottom a crisis of authority? Is people aren't paying attention just a dressed up version of people aren't paying attention to me? Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction,

• 49:54Sam Fragoso?

  of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis." What did you make of that when you read it and when you heard it now?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  I think he's wrong. I understand the point. I mean, I think the historical evidence he marshals, basically, the thrust of that review is, this is kind of a moral panic. And not just a moral panic, but it's motivated by the fact that a set of gatekeepers can no longer kind of control either public discourse. And there is something to that, but I also think, A, I just think it's so, there's a little bit of look out the window and look, tell me if it's raining or not feeling to this. Like, does this all feel good to you? I don't think it does. I think most people feel it doesn't. And I think they're right, and I think I'm right. The gatekeeper question, I think, is actually really interesting, but more complicated.

• 50:50Sam Fragoso?

  More complicated than he explored.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Well, more complicated in this sense. I do think part of this, at least in the context of public discourse, is about a kind of ethos around news and journalism that's being destroyed. And I think that ethos is actually a really useful and important one. And I think the notion that Elon Musk says you are the media. And he's right in the same way that like, the residents of Salem were the media during the witch trials. Like, yes, congratulations, you have reinvented the village rumor at scale. Great. But actually, having a set of people that attempt to marshal attention for some other end that is civically minded, with a professional ethos, which is what journalism and the news is about,

• 51:37Speaker 01

  is an incredibly important thing in democratic self-governance. So this idea of like, you're like the priest that doesn't like the novel, I think just actually misses the centrality of journalism to modern democracy. I also think there's weirdly an academic consensus, like there really is this academic, non-academic divide on this issue. It genuinely is the case that there is, across many fields, a kind of academic consensus that it can't be that some new technology is actually changing things that much. And that-

• 52:07Sam Fragoso?

  Why do you think that is?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, the author of that piece, who's an incredible writer and wrote a really great book called How to Hide an Empire, is a historian. And, you know, in the same way that I think he views me as being predisposed by my profession to like, be a gatekeeper and not like the people, I think historians tend to be pretty predisposed to say, ever was it thus?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Like, that's also over determined. If me as an attention merchant is over determined, like being a historian sort of over determined in the same way.

• 52:38Sam Fragoso?

  He did bring up the priests.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Yes, so like, I think partly it's that. It's interesting, too, like, it was really interesting. I don't know if you track this, but when the Jonathan Haidt book came out, the anxious generation came out, there was this enormous backlash against it from academics who study online life that really accused him of engaging in moral panic. And some of their arguments, I thought, had some merit or were interesting, but by and large, there has been a kind of academic fashion of late to sort of jettison an older framework that viewed the actual forms of media as causally salient in favor of a kind of audience centered version in which it's all about the audience and not really the the formal mechanisms of the media.

• 53:28Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from Chris Hayes.

• 53:55Sam Fragoso?

  As we get to the other side of this moment and this book, how are you thinking about what we do with our attention and how we better use it?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  It's a great question. You know, one of the things I keep this mantra we've just, we've said on air on the show and we say in the meeting all the time is focus is power, focus is power. And trying to focus, stay on stories, don't just pick them up and drop them, which happens so much in our news environment. And, and I do myself, fully copying too. Like, I, in the same way that you can tell yourself you're not going to scroll and then you do, like, we all, I have the same issue with trying to produce the show.

• 54:37Sam Fragoso?

  You've only checked your Apple Watch a couple of times.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's true.

• 54:41Sam Fragoso?

  Which I'm grateful for.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  So focus is power, which means trying to be willful and intentional about where we shine the flashlight of our attention. That's really important. I think people incorporating that intentionality into their lives, like one of the things I say is that you should spend 20 minutes a day with your own thoughts every day. No phone, no podcast, no nothing, like you and your brain. It's on the commute, it's on the drive, it's on the subway ride, it's walking your dog, it's the walk back from dropping your kid off, whatever it is. You go to the drugstore, you know, and you don't put the podcast on in the car. I think re-acclimating our brain to being alone with itself is really important.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And then I think people should not allow the intentional weaponized distraction to render them impotent and paralyzed.

• 55:34Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  If it feels like the news is too much, just pick a thing that you really care about. Maybe it's NIH funding, maybe it's USAID, maybe it's abortion, whatever it is. And like, talk to other people about it. See if there's a group in your area, move on indivisible, other groups that you can sign up for. Call your members of Congress to tell them that you're really concerned about this. And just focus on that and do, do a few small things as opposed to thinking that you have to do everything and pay attention to everything.

• 56:07Sam Fragoso?

  Tell me about the models of consumption that you think will, quote, "seek to evade or upend the endless attention commodification we're living through." What large-scale responses do you see in the spirit of markets for natural food that began in the 1970s that you think could come about now?

• 56:27Speaker 01

  So I think they're gonna not be large scale. I think they're gonna start small scale.

• 56:30Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  So we're seeing this already being done in schools, we're seeing it in day camps for kids. I think the next step is for adults. So I think one of the things we're gonna start to see is People just putting phone cubbies in public spaces, coffee shops, restaurants, stores, like different places where it's just like, oh yeah, we're just, it's not a phone space. This is not a phone space. You just throw it there, get on your way out.

• 56:53Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, like some stand-up shows.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, like exactly. And we've seen it at stand-up shows. There's other places. There's, you know, certain like elite restaurants don't let you bring your phone in. But so I think that just behaviorally, that's one thing you're going to start to see. The other thing I think you're going to start to see is a veer towards paper and like dumb phones. I think people are going to start producing technology that is more stripped down that people buy. I think that print is going to make a comeback. I know that sounds crazy, but I really think it's going to start to happen in the same way vinyl did. It's going to take a little while. And that means print magazines. That means hopefully print newspapers, print books, which are actually doing quite well and were not killed off by, you know, e-readers.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  The other big thing I think you're going to start to see is people coming together to experiment with forms of digital life that are not, that get the great stuff about the internet without the ceaseless attention monetization, which is open protocols, open spaces of internet life, forms of platforms that are not controlled by four or five dominant entities that try to relentlessly maximize your eyeballs. All that's possible. You can build open social networks. You can build open protocols, RSS, which is what podcasts operate on, is an open protocol, and thank God it is. So rebuilding or building anew a kind of civic and open internet. And then I think there's going to be like real political movement behind breaking up and regulating.

• 58:22Sam Fragoso?

  You think there'll be laws?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, regulating attention the way we regulate labor hours. I think people hear that and they're like, that's insane. Obviously, we can never do that in America. But we thought that about labor hours, too.

• 58:30Sam Fragoso?

  Well, tell me how you think it would work.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think you could just, you could have hard caps on screen time. You could have caps per hour on the app. One way that if you want to avoid hard caps, I thought this is really an interesting idea Lawrence Lessig said was like. You can just put an accelerating tax on each minute over a certain amount for the company to pay, where it's like, at a certain point, you're doing something that is taking away from the collective that you then have to pay for. If you have users who are doing this many hours, like you then have something to pay. And I thought that was sort of an interesting way, because then that's not a hard cap. It would just like change the incentive structure. The other thing that you could do is you can force these companies to A, be transparent about their algorithms, which they're not now. You can, one of the things that would be really important in the AI era is transparency

• 59:16Speaker 01

  about whether you're talking to humans or bots, which is going to be an enormous issue. Because if you take the weaponization of social attention and you put it in the hands of extremely intelligent LLMs, there's an entire universe of things that can be preyed upon your, like that individuation we talked about before, by things purporting to be human. So I think that's really important that we have like total transparency on that. And then I think you can also just break the companies up or also force the opening up of our social graphs, which is to say, have some version of your social graph, who you're linked to, that is yours, and you can transport from platform to platform.

• 59:59Sam Fragoso?

  You mentioned labor, which I think is a comp you're using. In the beginning of the eight-hour workday, they said, eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will. That phrase, what we will, is such a good one and a poetic one.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Sam Fragoso?

  Uncommonly poetic for something that's like government issued. Where do you land with that? Like, I don't know what we will in this moment. It doesn't feel like we will a whole lot.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  That, I think, is precisely the question. I think if you had to identify the source of the argument I'm making in the book, and what I think is the source of our alienation, is that in those eight hours, or whatever amount of time that we have for what we will, we feel that we are not doing what we will, but rather is willed upon us. And part of the project here is reclaiming dominion over our own minds, over our own attention, to put it towards what we will, the things that we love, the people we love, the people we want to be with, the hobbies or interests we want to pursue, and not to have it taken from us.

• 1:01:00Sam Fragoso?

  How have you thought about what you or how you want to spend your time?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Really like being a parent. I really like spending time with my kids. I love spending time with my wife. I absolutely love spending time with my friends. I've got an amazing crew of friends, some of whom I've known since I was 12. We've been together for 30 years.

• 1:01:20Sam Fragoso?

  I noticed, reading about basketball trade rumors is not on there.

• 1:01:26Sam Fragoso?

  Which I think it should be.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Is that how you like to spend your time?

• 1:01:28Sam Fragoso?

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. My brother is like a big basket. My brother's the kind of guy that like sends you the, a trade machine trade.

• 1:01:36Sam Fragoso?

  Bill Simmons like.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Who says no?

• 1:01:39Sam Fragoso?

  Who says no? Everyone, because it will never happen.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Well, except in the case of Luca for AD.

• 1:01:45Sam Fragoso?

  I'm so, so glad. We really covered meditating in a strip club to, which actually is probably why Luca got traded from Dallas.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  I don't know, man.

• 1:01:56Sam Fragoso?

  Breaking news.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Don't you feel like it's a little bit of weird character assassination happening against him? That's like through, like, no one's ever coming out and saying things, but then there's this weird by implication.

• 1:02:05Sam Fragoso?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  He must have been doing something so terrible.

• 1:02:07Sam Fragoso?

  A hundred percent. And as much as I want to end this podcast, talking about Luca and the, and the.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  The second apron and the super max contract.

• 1:02:13Sam Fragoso?

  This is actually such my wheelhouse. I'm getting sweaty just thinking about this. I do want to go back to something a little more pertinent to this conversation, which is how you've spent your time. Your first story was in the Chicago Reader. You started writing for them in the early 2000s. You were in Chicago. And there's a story you wrote early on that was called Trapped. It was a domestic abuse case. And I believe at the time, your wife was a domestic abuse counselor.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:02:47Sam Fragoso?

  And you wrote this piece and in the aftermath of it, this woman who was in prison received clemency. Like there was a clear, quick resolution. You, you wrote something, something happened. And I imagine some part of you went, is this how it's going to be?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:03:07Sam Fragoso?

  So walk me through this moment, like the story comes out, it's winter, you're south on Clark Avenue, you travel south by train until you hit a bookstore that you know the van will stop and deliver the reader at. Take me back to that morning when you pick it up.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I think what ended up happening, that my first story, I took the bus down to a bookstore on the north side, from the far north side. I think with the Joy Brown story, that was her name, and she was, she'd been convicted of assaulting her abusive partner by pouring hot grease on him. She said it was both an accident and that he had sexually assaulted her. She was trying to get him to leave after she sexually assaulted her. He denied that. With that cover story, I went all the way down because I was so anxious to see it. I actually remember this. I went all the way down to the reader headquarters, offices, which was the first place that got them, because I was unwilling to wait for my first cover story, for it to creep up in the van up to the north side. So I went down to, I

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  want to say it was on East Illinois Avenue, in the Loop, there's a Thai restaurant on the first floor called Star of Siam, I want to say. And I went into the lobby and it was there. And I remember, I think I brought a camera with me to take a picture. I was so excited about it.

• 1:04:24Sam Fragoso?

  How did it feel?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  It felt incredible. It was months of work. I talked to so many people, I've visited, and Kate and I worked on it together, and then she ended up sort of backing off of it and taking her name off it because she had this job. And it was going to be complicated to publish it. And at that point, George Ryan was the governor. He had done this incredible thing where he had given clemency to everyone on death row in Illinois. And then I think it was, I forget how long after that cover story, but it was in his last day or two, probably his last weekend on the job, that we got word that he had given her clemency.

• 1:04:59Sam Fragoso?

  Your reasons for writing that story, the hours and days and weeks it took to make that story, are those the same reasons you have for the job you do today?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  They are remarkably preserved. One, it was cool to see my name in print and be on the cover. And there's some part of me that likes to have my own TV show.

• 1:05:18Sam Fragoso?

  The theater kid?

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Theater kid, exactly. Two, the work itself was incredibly rewarding. The actual, I love the reporting and the writing and the revision and being told by an editor, like, you can't use that quote anonymously. If you want to use that, you got to go back to that guy and get it on the record. And how is the piece going to be structured? And is it too long? And all of the work itself, like incredibly rewarding. And then, three, to try to make the world a better place and have some positive impact in the world. And the thing about that story was that was the most immediate cause and effect I've ever had with any piece of journalism. And it hasn't ever happened as directly since.

• 1:05:55Sam Fragoso?

  It really is like the first time you go into a casino and play blackjack.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  And winning like an insane amount of money.

• 1:06:01Sam Fragoso?

  And you leave with your friends going like, I think this is great.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Sam Fragoso?

  Is this how?

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Sam Fragoso?

  Is this how it is?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. But those three reasons, like, there's some part of like, you know, liking my name in print, liking showing off, some part of the actual process of the work itself is incredibly intellectually stimulating and rewarding, and some part of wanting it to have some positive effect in the world. And it's those three things then, and it's those three things now.

• 1:06:24Sam Fragoso?

  The third thing you said is the last thing I want to talk about in my last question, because the work you make is fundamentally offering people a way to process an era that feels ungovernable, often indecipherable, confusing, scary, vexing, whatever adjective you want. And I get the sense that every day you wake up with a mission of seeking and producing clarity and focusing attention in a certain way.

• 1:06:56Sam Fragoso?

  But I gotta say, like, as optimistic as you've been in this conversation, there are many more people listening to this right now that don't really know how they can keep going. And not just like, am I tuning into All In? Or if I'm listening to Talk Easy, but like, how can I even keep up with this? How can I ingest something that feels so toxic? And I wonder if the last thing we could hold together is your father's favorite short story, which is The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  The Myth of Sisyphus is an essay by Camus that sort of is the purest distillation of his moral philosophy. It's the same ideas that appear in, for instance, Plague, a novel he wrote, which is a kind of willful humanism in the face of the absurdity and uncaringness of the universe. And he talks about the Greek mythic figure Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods to roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down over and over and over. And Camus basically says, that's what we're doing here on earth. He doesn't believe there's a benign god. He doesn't believe there's a heaven we're going to. He's a atheist and a secularist.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  But he basically finds meaning in the struggle of the work. And the last line of the essay, after he sort of described the means by which one can wrench meaning from an unfeeling, an absurd universe with no god, that that's our project in life. He's, the last line is, one imagined Sisyphus happy. And, you know, my dad really loves that essay. I really love that essay. And the reason I really love it is because it captures whatever source of unflappability I have, which is like, we're here, we're here once. We set our will.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  To do things that we think are good and righteous and joyful with other people we love, and that there's something sublime and meaningful and transcendent in that. And that's kind of all we can control. We can't control the circumstances, whether the rock's going to roll back down the hill. We can just control whether we're going to push it up or not.

• 1:09:26Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I think you're due to push the boulder up the hill in about two and a half hours. So, thank you for the time and for this conversation. It meant a whole lot to me.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I can't tell you, I so enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for hosting me.

• 1:09:41Sam Fragoso?

  I'll see you tonight.

• 1:10:40Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Chris Hayes, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your podcasting. If you want to go above and beyond, you can share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. All this helps us continue making the program each and every Sunday.

• 1:11:02Sam Fragoso?

  I want to give a special thanks this week to the teams at Penguin Press, MSNBC, and of course, our guest, Chris Hayes. His new book, The Sirens Call, is available wherever you do your reading. To learn more about Chris and his work, visit our show notes at talkeasypod.com. For more episodes like this one, I'd recommend David Remnick, Gia Tolentino, and Jake Tapper. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com.

• 1:11:45Sam Fragoso?

  If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy. You can do so at talkeasypod.com/shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was taped out of City Box here in New York City. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shennoy. Additional research this week comes from Pierce Harvey. This episode was made in partnership with Lemonada Media. And I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

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• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G R O U N D N E W S dot com slash R C for 40% off unlimited access Vantage Plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast, What It's Like to Be.