Pitinos of the Mind: How Silicon Valley Hacks Your Attention Span, with Chris Hayes

Ever since the invention of the written word, there have been moral panics about how new technology corrupts our brains. But now — as the richest companies in the world pour billions into an all-out war for eyeballs — something very different is happening. So we talked to the author of a new book, "The Sirens' Call," about why a satirized nerd on MSNBC is an ideal authority on how Silicon Valley is exploiting the human condition. Plus: the significance of spam, the Cocktail Party Effect, HammerKing75, a court of Infinite Jest, the piglet advantage... and a hot take from Socrates. Get Chris Hayes' book, "The Sirens' Call": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/719661/the-sirens-call-by-chris-hayes/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Pablo Torre?

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• 1:27Pablo Torre?

  It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io. This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef.

• 2:10Pablo Torre?

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• 2:54Pablo Torre?

  Offer not valid for delivery. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 3:04Pablo Torre?

  Grab. Right after this ad.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.

• 3:24Pablo Torre?

  When something happens like what just happened on SNL, I basically was like, eh, could've been worse.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to MSNBC. I'm Rachel Meadow. And dads, you better hide your older bookish lesbian daughters, cuz, uh, yeah, I'm back on TV. Tonight, for our special inauguration weekend coverage, I'm joined by our panel of MSNBC hosts, basically like the Avengers for your aunt. It's Ari Melber.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Thanks, Rachel.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Joy Reid. Glad to be here. Stephanie Rule. Hey, girlfriend. And finally, Chris Hayes, AKA Woke Sheldon.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Okay, drag me, mama.

• 4:12Pablo Torre?

  You know, one of the weird things about the experience of some modicum of fame, and I imagine that you have experienced this too, is that there is an unbridgeable gap between people's conception of you outside and the person you are in your little head.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  What do you think, Rachel?

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm not Rachel. I'm Chris Hayes.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Usually, we're conditioned to only see ourselves through the eyes of people that we love, or our friends, or our coworkers. But to see yourself through strangers' eyes is to sometimes feel it's unrecognizable. Like, there's all these people outside you that have this vision or expectations of you that is just irreconcilable with who you think you are.

• 5:04Pablo Torre?

  All right. So, the expectation that I imagine you must already have for today's episode is that our focus is going to be all politics, and Trump, and his cabinet, and legislation, and executive orders. Because our guest today happens to be the guy who became the youngest host of a primetime cable news show on MSNBC at age 34, back in 2013. But that expectation would be wrong. I want to set up why you're here, because this is all flowing naturally into-

• 5:35Speaker 05

  My picks from the week, right?

• 5:37Pablo Torre?

  That's right. You have a parlay, Chris, that you're here to sell us.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  We got a custom parlay.

• 5:41Pablo Torre?

  You have Ben Johnson Bear's propaganda?

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:45Pablo Torre?

  I'm sure?

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Let's go.

• 5:46Pablo Torre?

  God.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  Let's go.

• 5:48Pablo Torre?

  No. In reality, Chris Hayes, who is also, by the way, a real Chicago sports maniac, wrote a whole new book called The Siren's Call. And the focus of this book, which I found myself underlining to truly an almost shocking degree, is the science and history and philosophy of attention.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  It's the most powerful and influential resource. It's monetized to create multi-billion-dollar empires. What we pay attention to from moment to moment is what our lives are. And so, we're constantly battling to retain some part of it, which is really a battle to retain control over ourselves.

• 6:27Pablo Torre?

  Which now brings me back to the whole woke Sheldon thing that we started with. And also, my belief that the authority Chris wields on the specific subject of attention is, yeah, partly, but not overwhelmingly, political. Because even the most right-wing pundits in America would have to agree with Chris Hayes, that Chris Hayes is, admittedly, a TV nerd.

• 6:54Pablo Torre?

  And this is going to be a story about what nerds have done to everyone's brains. And how that also relates to television.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  I was such a computer nerd that I, at the very first age when it was possible, 91, 92, I was like, wanted to get my own TCP IP connection. And so I had to dial up through an internet service provider, a very boutique one that was like four nerds.

• 7:25Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  And I was surfing the web on the pre-graphical version of it called Links, which was an all-text web browser. The first version of the mass internet was a commercial internet controlled by AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. And then AOL sort of won that battle. It acquired Time Warner. It was the belle of the ball. It was the biggest company.

• 7:43Pablo Torre?

  There were movies.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  Movies about it. Like AOL.

• 7:46Pablo Torre?

  You've got mail.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:49Pablo Torre?

  All of these noises are still in my brain.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Still in my head, too. Welcome. You've got mail. So that commercial version got defeated by the non-commercial version, the open web. And the open web then got defeated by what we have now, the commercial Web 2.0, social media platforms. But part of my contention in the book and part of my hope is that there's a non-commercial web that can sort of reassert itself.

• 8:13Pablo Torre?

  Right. Hard to imagine at this moment.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  It does feel pretty hard to imagine at this moment. It feels like an addiction, compulsion, regret and shame, bargains you make with yourself. All of the sort of tropes of addiction are there and how we now relate to our phones and the digital world more broadly. And I think that's about deeper than the technology. It's about attention.

• 8:36Pablo Torre?

  Your book is not merely, guess what, we're addicted. It's actually about, I think, to be grandiose about it, it's about what it means to be human. And you articulate something about yourself, speaking of like the feelings that animate us, that I wanted to read to you because you are in fact the host of a television show. And you wrote in your book about yourself, quote, "I have as a core constitutive feature of my personality, the desire for an audience. I want people to pay attention to me and more than that, I want them to like me." End quote. And, uh, me too.

• 9:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:11Pablo Torre?

  Right?

• 9:12Speaker 05

  I think we're both here, you know, you don't end up in this position, I think, unless something really went sideways. Unless you have that.

• 9:19Pablo Torre?

  But there is this feeling of being somebody who was fighting for attention on, again, an earlier, seemingly almost analog platform of television.

• 9:30Speaker 05

  That attention, that attentional competition has just ramped up so much. I mean, that is the sort of defining feature of all of this, right? That A, that the sheer amount of competition has expanded almost infinitely. At any given moment, you're competing for attention against all the content ever produced by humans.

• 9:50Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Is the library of competition.

• 10:09Pablo Torre?

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• 11:39Pablo Torre?

  Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 11:48Pablo Torre?

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• 12:32Pablo Torre?

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• 13:52Pablo Torre?

  So, we're gonna get to Silicon Valley and what they found out about the human condition in a minute. But I first needed to say something about the last thing Chris told me before the break, which is that we, right now, are competing for your attention against everything anyone has ever made. Because it's true. You could very easily be listening to a Nick Cage impersonator read the Odyssey instead of listening to me. You could be watching a supercut entitled "Top 100 Dunks of the Last 25 Years", or just watching a guy in Japan that I follow on Instagram who challenges strangers to hammer a bunch of nails into a wood block.

• 14:45Pablo Torre?

  The thing that you and I are doing right now and the thing that maybe drove us and our personalities to do the kind of work we do has been wildly democratized as a kind of norm, a cultural norm. Like, people being on social media and performing, trying to get other people's attention, there used to be like a small group of kind of freaks and weirdos. They would like travel with the circus or they'd go out to Los Angeles to be stars. Like, that was a specific thing and even kind of frowned upon. And for this reason, I do believe that cable TV's formerly young generation of professional audience seekers found out something important a long time ago about the dynamic that pretty

• 15:25Pablo Torre?

  much everybody is grappling with right now, which is that attention has always been unbelievably slippery, tragically slippery, in fact, even when you can get your hands on it. And so when it comes to the incentives of the mainstream media, and this part does run contrary to an online caricature of the MSM feeding its personal ideology from on high down to its captive audience, TV shows in actuality have mostly been desperate, thirsty actually,

• 16:04Pablo Torre?

  for your attention. And now they're also desperate to keep you from a Japanese guy named Hammer King 75.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  It's a really important dynamic. I think people outside the media think the media decides where to focus attention and people follow that. And from the inside, it feels like the opposite.

• 16:25Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  That people have, and I'm sure you experienced this. I mean,

• 16:28Pablo Torre?

  If only we had such power.

• 16:30Speaker 05

  I mean, it feels like you're chasing, you're always chasing, and that the audience is moving, its interests and demands are moving in these kind of inscrutable fashions. They're really into this and they're really into that and you gotta run over there. You know, the best metaphor I can come up with that I use in the book is sailing. Because I think sailing captures the fact that the wind to me is like audience attention, which is a real force that's just you can't control. But you can control where you try to take the boat. So as you get better at the craft, it's like, okay, well, the audience is interested in this thing, that's the wind, and I want to go there. And I gotta figure out the technique to tack to get that wind to get me to where I want to go. And that takes some development.

• 17:14Speaker 05

  I mean, you can just be like, well, I don't care where I want to go. I'm just gonna go as fast as I can, so I'll just go with the wind. Or you can just be like, I don't care about the wind, I'm just gonna go right into it, and that won't work. Like, you won't move.

• 17:24Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  So the thing you try to get good at is To try to kind of synthesize those two and develop some technique and craft that allows you to use audience attention and demand and put it into, towards things you think are actually important and worthy.

• 17:41Pablo Torre?

  Right, the desperation of the chase, though.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Do you feel that?

• 17:45Pablo Torre?

  All the time.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:46Pablo Torre?

  All the time. And look, I've had a TV show canceled, Chris.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  Right, yeah. I came pretty close.

• 17:51Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, we're all fighting for our lives out here.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:57Pablo Torre?

  And in fact, like, that same instinct is why, you know, when you, when you talk about Fox News and Dominion, it's because they were chasing the audience that we all just assumed they could direct.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Exactly, and what's so wild about the emails and the texts you read in the discovery of that lawsuit, which was a electronic voting machine maker Dominion, who sued Fox for libel, saying that they had been defamed by Fox's programming, is that that period after the election 2020, the bottom kind of drops out on the right, because people are angry that Trump lost and disbelieving, and what they start to find is that if you tell them that it was stolen, that keeps people's attention.

• 18:44Speaker 07

  Good evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. You've heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines, and this is a real issue, no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  And there's a sort of competitive reason to do it, and so you see those incentives pulling them towards an outright lie, a dangerous lie, a violent lie, that ended up crescendoing in an attempt on the, you know, the Capitol.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  But in private text messages revealed in court documents filed by Dominion, Carlson called the Dominion claims "shockingly reckless." Other texts showed contempt for former President Trump, including one that said, quote- I hate him passionately and of management.

• 19:29Speaker 05

  That's a really, I think, potent illustration of how these incentives work. They're even self-aware in a lot of those texts, like, it's a little like Punches Pilot, right? Before the crowd being like, "You guys sure you don't, eh, eh, alright."

• 19:46Pablo Torre?

  It's a hard business.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  They want Barabas, give them Barabas.

• 19:50Pablo Torre?

  I guess more Barabas?

• 19:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:51Pablo Torre?

  We're getting, the ratings are saying more Barabas.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  They're saying more Barabas.

• 19:55Pablo Torre?

  They're really, the dial is turning up on Barabas. But, but, look, which is to say that all of us, again, we feel it. It's fascinating to see how the period of the fall of 2001 is where a lot of, like, what modern cable television, uh, it's when it learned what it needed to optimize itself to be. It's the breaking news alerts, right? It's the, it's the scroll on the, on the, which every sports fan knows, by the way.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Yes, oh yeah.

• 20:28Pablo Torre?

  But, of course, cable political news embraced it fully. And by the way, the other just suspect in like, this murder mystery of like, what happened to our attention, when you go back to TV, um, I think PTI is in there.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. PTI is, PTI is so well-engineered.

• 20:46Speaker 07

  Pardon the interruption, but I'm Mike Wilbon, and welcome to opening day in this bizarre television experiment.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  And I'm Tony Kornheiser, and if we can have a TV show, you can have a TV show.

• 21:01Speaker 05

  They put the rundown on screen.

• 21:03Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Which, you know, the, the thing that's brilliant about putting the rundown on screen, it's like, um, it's like the signs in the subway that tell you how long the train is gonna be.

• 21:13Pablo Torre?

  It, it anticipates. I tell this to Tony and my-

• 21:16Speaker 05

  PTI is like a gen, like, it's like, one of the most brilliantly engineered formats.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Here's how it works. We yap until the time runs out on each topic. You hear a bell, we move on.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  And then the clock!

• 21:27Pablo Torre?

  Oh, and then, and then the, the [bleep] clock. It anticipated.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:31Pablo Torre?

  In, this was October 2001, by the way, PTI did news.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  Is that when it starts?

• 21:34Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, first episode. It anticipates-

• 21:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:37Pablo Torre?

  -the short attention span, the desire for what's next. It anticipates the, the, uh, the infinite scroll.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  Totally, you're right.

• 21:44Pablo Torre?

  Before every other show on TV.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  You're totally right. And one of the points I make- Is there's a real distinction because of the way that attention works in us biologically, biophysically, between grabbing and holding attention. So grabbing attention is much easier. And here's, here's an illustrative example. Anyone who's listening to this podcast right now or watching it, if I said, look, I'm going to ask you to go through that door and on the other side is an auditorium with 200 people and I want you to just get everyone's attention. Basically, everyone can do that. Go in, you scream, hey, hey, you know, whatever you do, right? You go on stage, you take your clothes off, whatever you had to do, right? Now, if I said to you, I want you to go in there, there's 200 people, I want you to hold their attention for an hour. Go. Well, that's astronomically harder, right? So grabbing is easy, holding is hard.

• 22:32Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Look, the experiment that you hypothetically described is literally a thriving genre on every social media platform. It's the troll who wanders into a mall or a foreign country and just disrupts whatever the good people of that place are doing.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  That's exactly right.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Johnny Somali came to Korea with the obvious intention of making clickbait videos to promote his provocative channel. However, the table seems to have turned as he is now being used to help Korean online streamers generate views. After videos of Koreans, including one streamer assaulting Somali went viral, many Korean YouTubers are seeking out the American in the hopes of causing an altercation so they can either stream or even incite the scuffle.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  So what happens in attention, in competitive attention markets? PTI is a great example. What you optimize for, what the, the sort of process of evolutionary competition drives towards is iterative grabbing. Grab, grab, grab, grab. What is TikTok? What is Instagram Reels? What is X Twitter? What are all these things? They're grab, grab, grab, grab. They never have to hold. That kind of the minutely engineered grab, grab, grab model, what I call the slot machine model, right? Slot machines are the most effective device in a casino and they're, they work the same way. It's like, grab, then a little bit of suspense, then the next one, then the next one. And it turns out, what the slot machine programmers

• 23:56Speaker 05

  figured out is you can keep someone in a seat for eight hours, never telling them a story, never having a beginning and a middle and end, never using pathos logos ethos, like never doing all the things that you might've been taught to do.

• 24:12Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, the hero's journey. Not quite as necessary.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Exactly. You don't have to come up with a hero's journey. It doesn't have to be a screenplay. If you grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, you can add that up to eight hours of sitting in a seat.

• 24:22Pablo Torre?

  Everybody is learning what it's like to be a frustrated television producer, trying to grab and hold attention, finding that, okay, the latter is really hard. The former can be hacked, so to speak.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 24:34Pablo Torre?

  And so what I want to bring it around to is just this idea that, in a sense, this problem, this panic around attention being scarce and attention being commodified, our way of life being disrupted, it is a thing that people have worried about with pretty much every medium that has ever been invented to date. Like, I didn't appreciate that writing, at the birth of the written word, according to Socrates, was something that, quote, in his mind, would implant forgetfulness in their souls.

• 25:13Pablo Torre?

  Writing was video games to Socrates.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  Writing was video games to Socrates. Look, this is a really tricky part of this discussion because you have to not fall prey to presentism and understand that each new technology has come with a set of concerns, sometimes a set of, look, in retrospect, like silly panics. But the flip side of that, and what I'm trying to say here, is that Socrates identifying that writing would transform human communication thinking was 100% correct. In fact,

• 25:48Pablo Torre?

  Good take by Socrates.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Good. Socrates with a good take, a hot, hot and good take. Same with magazines and the mass media, or radio, or television. Like, television produced a lot of panic about its results, but it absolutely transformed both family life, public life, all these things. So what I think we're dealing with here in this sort of attention age is a genuine transformation. It is along a curve of modernity. That hearkens back to the kinds of things that Thoreau was, you know, decrying when he went and lived on Walden Pond or Blaise Pascal back in the 1600s. You know, there are technologies at each moment that are moving us up this kind of

• 26:31Speaker 05

  curve of modernity, but at each step along the curve, there is something being transformed. And I think we've, we've reached a point along the curve where there's almost a kind of break, a kind of difference in kind.

• 26:42Pablo Torre?

  Money is an enormous differentiator here. I mean, look, the, the whole notion of iterating, but specifically the biggest companies in the world, using all of their resources to experiment on us perpetually, such that they figure out how to use us to make them money. That feels like a new, a new development as a matter of magnitude.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Absolutely. In terms of magnitude, in terms of ubiquity, in terms of, you know, the, um, the scale that it's happening on, both globally and within our own lives. I mean, the hours and hours we're spending on it and, and the fact that the engineering has gotten so good. I mean, you know, Mr. Beast is a great example of someone that is an individual who just kind of iterated until he kind of figured out.

• 27:31Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I read his manifesto that got leaked at some point.

• 27:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's fascinating because he, he's thought deeply about this. He's like a, a master of the craft.

• 27:40Pablo Torre?

  He reverse engineered the engineering.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Every minute, one of these 20 contestants will be eliminated and lose half a million dollars.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Start the timer.

• 27:57Pablo Torre?

  When you add on top of that, uh, the fact that truly like the largest companies in our country are devoted to this practice.

• 28:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 28:06Pablo Torre?

  1961, six of the 10 largest US companies were oil companies. And now you go to Forbes and it's Microsoft and Apple and Google slash Alphabet. It's Meta slash Facebook. It's Amazon and information is what their business is. Data is what their business is. It's not quite the same as oil.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:24Pablo Torre?

  How do you explain the key difference there?

• 28:26Speaker 05

  What, what all those companies are, even more than their information companies is their attention companies. Amazon's a great example. What Amazon is able to pull off at a logistical level is genuinely. Insane, but in terms of the point of sale, why does Amazon have the power they do? Fundamentally, they're an attention company and, and, and an illustration of that is, let's say you want something. The other day I bought for my pickup game, um, like reversible black and white jerseys. So we can like.

• 28:51Pablo Torre?

  I thought you were gonna say I bought a shooting sleeve.

• 28:53Speaker 05

  Oh, no, my son was really into a shooting sleeve for a while. I was like, I can't shoot without a shooting sleeve. So I got these reversible jerseys, which of course I order on Amazon. And how often have you had the experience where you're ordering a product, the brand name of which is like RJ947-T? The only reason that that product captures you, that you're purchasing it is because the expensive attentional real estate of the top of the Amazon search is what they occupy. So what Amazon is really doing, the value they have, is that you go to them and you put your focus on what is on the top of that search. And then you can buy things from Amazon from brands you've never heard of before and will never hear from again.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  They're even like, you have no idea where they're made, how they're made. They're just that it's there at the top of the Amazon algorithm. And so fundamentally, similarly to what Google is doing in some ways in Facebook, they are really monetizing attention.

• 29:52Pablo Torre?

  It also speaks to like the fundamental quality of this resource, right? Which is information in theory is everywhere.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  Replicable.

• 29:59Pablo Torre?

  It is infinite, but attention, like the unit of measurement for attention seems to be units of our time.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  That's exactly what it is. And there's, there is this very famous line by the genius economist, political scientist Herb Simon, who writes this essay about decision-making for organizations in a complex world. Where he says, you know, information consumes attention. This is really the most fundamental insight to understand about the age we live in, because we think about it, the information age. But the information isn't actually the stuff that's valuable. Information is infinite, it's copyable and replicable. Your data, for instance, your data is valuable, but it doesn't make a difference to Pablo if the data is with 10 firms or 100.

• 30:47Pablo Torre?

  And quite frankly.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  You don't even know.

• 30:48Pablo Torre?

  I don't even know.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  You'll know anyway. Why is that data valuable? The data is valuable because information about what you will pay attention to. That's what they're trying to do. They want to sell the data to get your eyes. Right? It's a means to that end. The thing that's finite, the resource that can only be in one place at one time, here or there, is attention. And so if you think about this line from Simon, who saw this very early in the 1970s.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Information consumes attention. You then realize that the more information there is, the more valuable the resource that gets consumed is. And what that resource is, is our attention.

• 31:24Pablo Torre?

  This all then leads to the logical question, which is, okay, if it's not quite the same as television and magazines and radio and video games and the written word and all of that, if it's not like comic books.

• 31:38Pablo Torre?

  What is this? What's it most like?

• 31:41Speaker 05

  So there's two metaphors I use, two comparison points I use in the book for what this is most like. So one is labor.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Labor is something that predates labor as a wage commodity, meaning, human beings have always done stuff. They've always toiled, they've always worked, in some sense. But a very specific set of legal, technological, economic institutions arose in the Industrial Revolution to take labor as a wage commodity that had a price per hour, right, that you had a relationship with an employer for. And that experience of taking something that in some senses is all you have, what you do with your effort, and commodifying it and selling it on a market was alienating. This is Marx's whole theory of labor.

• 32:25Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, this is the part that the right will clip out. It's just Chris Hayes doing a whole long Marx. Prosthetizing about Karl Marx.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Yes, there's a long, there's a long reading of Marx. Although, as I say in the book, like, I'm not a Marxist, and what I think is interesting is you don't have to be to appreciate what he's saying.

• 32:42Pablo Torre?

  But we're being alienated from the [BLEEP] that used to give our life meaning.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Exactly. Like, this thing is taken from us and sold out of us. It's extracted. The other comparison to what's having the attention, I think, is what's happened to, around hunger and the way our food appetites work. We've got this biological inheritance. You need food to live. We seek out certain calorie-rich foods, like sweets, sugars, because they pack a lot of calories, fats. And if you unleash the genius of iterative capitalism on the problem of what will people eat, it will get to Coca-Cola pretty quickly, and then it will sell Coca-Cola all over the world. Similarly, the slot machine and the TikTok algorithm are the version of that for our brains, right?

• 33:29Speaker 05

  We've got this biological inheritance. We need to pay attention to the sound of rustling in the bushes because there's a predator there. That's hardwired into us, but then that can be used for all sorts of means by companies that want to extract it. But at the same time, in the same way with food, alongside that physical inheritance, we have all of the beauty and bounty that is human appetites. People eat all sorts of things. You can't even list them. And food has such meaning in families and in cultures. It's connected to history, to tradition, to identity. If you ask, if an alien said, well, what do people like to eat? And you had to explain it, you couldn't list all of it.

• 34:09Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, you'd watch a TikTok and be like, I think they like to eat expired military rations. You know that guy?

• 34:16Speaker 05

  That is, oh, I know that guy.

• 34:17Pablo Torre?

  But like, I'm, we're competing with that guy too, just FYI.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  Right now, as we speak.

• 34:21Speaker 07

  The rye in this is awesome. Amazing.

• 34:25Speaker 05

  And so it's the same thing with attention. Well, what do people like to pay attention to? Well, you know, people will watch, you know, Wagner's Ring Cycle for eight hours. They'll watch carpet cleaning videos. They'll watch the new Bob Dylan biopic. I mean, you couldn't possibly cover the bounty of human attentional appetites.

• 34:53Pablo Torre?

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• 35:37Pablo Torre?

  and I am feeling ready to push through to the end of the day. For a better way to stay hydrated, go to instanthydration.com/ptfo and use my promo code PTFO for over 40% off your first subscription order. It's Instant Hydration's best offer available. That's instanthydration.com/ptfo, promo code PTFO. Life in 2026 is tough. We all have our struggles and we could all use some help. But trying to figure out how to get the right mental health treatment for you can feel overwhelming. Talkiatory helps you move from "I know I need help" to actually having a psychiatrist who listens and a clear, personalized treatment plan. Talkiatory is 100% online psychiatry practice

• 36:22Pablo Torre?

  that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more. With Talkiatory, you can meet with a licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and supports you over time with consistent, evidence-based care. And all 800-plus clinicians are in-network with major insurers, so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly subscriptions or out-of-network costs. Head to talkiatory.com/ptfo to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com/ptfo

• 37:07Pablo Torre?

  to get matched in minutes. Talkiatory.com/ptfo. Cozy makes furniture for the part of life that nobody warns you about. Getting the couch into the room, making the room feel like you, then actually living on it spills it all. With Cozy, your home can grow with you by adapting to new spaces, new styles, and every era of your life. It's modular furniture, so you can actively adjust your furniture to fit any space. It's all built around making the entire home comfortable and easy so that your stuff works with your life, not around it. The covers are washable and interchangeable, so a refresh is only one wash away, and the spill goes from panic to shrug. And it all ships to your door in easy-to-move boxes. Plus, Cozy's free one-on-one design consultations

• 37:50Pablo Torre?

  make the whole home vision a lot less intimidating. Cozy has everything you need to make your home feel like it has a plan because Cozy makes every part of the process easy. So, visit Cozy today, that's C-O-Z-E-Y dot com, and make yourself at home.

• 38:13Pablo Torre?

  But the biological inheritance, right? It's hardware and it's software.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 38:17Pablo Torre?

  So, the part about what it means to be human and why this is not just grandiose gasbagging is because when you look at what a human baby is like, um, they are so comically helpless, in a way that actually is distinct and worthy of our inspection. A piglet, so much better a prospect than us. Like, we can't [bleep] walk.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  I mean, foals are walking almost right away. Most mammals are way more developed than the human infant is, and this has to do with the way that the birth canal and walking on two legs and our big brains all kind of came together in this evolutionary process where, basically, to make it all work, you gotta give birth to the baby before it's really fully formed, and that means that the human infant needs attention right away. And they have this way of getting it.

• 39:07Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 39:07Speaker 05

  Which is the cry.

• 39:09Pablo Torre?

  Because it speaks to the wiring of you must attend to the most important sound in the world, which is your kid crying. But, that need for attention, that core need, it starts at the beginning and it just keeps going.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  And it's our central inheritance socially. So, that's the other aspect of attention that makes it so potent. It's not just that we put our attention on things, it's that people put their attention on us. And in fact, it is the necessary precondition for life from the moment that we come into this world, is that someone, somewhere, is attending to us. Because if not, we perish. And that's the life or death stakes for the infant.

• 39:53Pablo Torre?

  And there are psychology studies, experiments, in the realm of just, um, scientists trying to just suss out how profound our need for social attention is. The cocktail party effect is just one of my favorite things.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  So, basically, the cocktail party effect is...

• 40:13Speaker 05

  We have this amazing ability to drown out other sounds and stimuli when we're focused on something. So, one of the ways you test this is you give people headphones and they have two ears and each ear is a distinct track and you give them a task. So, in one, it will be like numbers and you'll say something like, "Count how many times they say the number two" or "Add up all the numbers." And because our focus is so incredible, you will just totally shut out the other ear. But one of the things they've found is that the one piece of stimulus that will wrench your attention back against your will while you're focused is your own name.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  And we've all experienced this, 100% in a cocktail party.

• 41:00Pablo Torre?

  Well, that's the part, we all know what this is like.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Or at a party. If you are talking to someone and someone somewhere else says your name, all of a sudden your attention goes to it. And that's because of the potency of that social attention. It's almost hardwired into us.

• 41:14Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  And in some ways, when you think about the engineering of social media platforms with like tagging this person, mentions, replies, they have hardwired into the architecture of social media, the cocktail party effect.

• 41:28Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  Letting you know when someone in the room is talking about you.

• 41:32Pablo Torre?

  They know our weakness. You can go back to William James, I think, right? It's the Principles of Psychology. His definition for what attention is, it turns out through this lens, limited. What he says is, quote, "My experience is what I agreed to attend to and what these experiments are showing is that it's not quite consensual."

• 41:55Speaker 05

  No, and in fact, James takes up the question of attention precisely because he is concerned with the deeper philosophical question of free will. Do we have it? Can we control our own minds? Do we have free will? And that is why the assault on our attention feels like such a deep assault on our being. Because the extent to which we can control where our mind goes is the extent to which we have free will in our independent consciousnesses. If the attention is being pulled by other people constantly...

• 42:31Speaker 05

  In a very real and tangible second to second sense, we feel like we're out of control, that we're not actually directing our own lives.

• 42:39Pablo Torre?

  There is a stat, just to bring it to the media side of this too. It was this 2014 stat that Chartbeat had found. Which is that fifty...

• 42:47Speaker 05

  And by the way, that's 10 years old, so like...

• 42:50Pablo Torre?

  It's worse now, would be my hypothesis.

• 42:52Speaker 05

  100% worse now, right.

• 42:54Pablo Torre?

  It was that 55% of people who land on a page last less than 15 seconds. It's good to know that we're all just... We're all a Rick Pitino of the mind.

• 43:07Pablo Torre?

  We're all in and out of there.

• 43:09Speaker 05

  Get that shot up. Get it up.

• 43:11Pablo Torre?

  But from that to Blaise Pascal, right? This whole thing of like, why can't we sit with something? Why can't we sit alone with nothing?

• 43:22Speaker 05

  The book ends up being animated by that question. Blaise Pascal writing in 17th century about all the troubles a man stem from his inability to sit alone in his own chamber. That sounds very modern, extremely contemporary, right? We still have that issue. That all of the weird ways we feel, the forms of alienation we feel now are both distinct to our age, but they share something with the experience of being a human in modernity or whatever particular social arrangement you're plopped into. And there's something to me that's very comforting about that. You know, that like...

• 44:03Pablo Torre?

  That we've been trying to figure this out for centuries.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, that the problems I'm talking about at one level are exacerbated and specifically created through a certain set of historical conditions, but are fundamentally related to something that's...

• 44:21Speaker 05

  Deep and inescapable about being alive.

• 44:24Pablo Torre?

  So what's comforting is that there is a commonality to the human experience throughout the millennia. What's less comforting is that Blaise Pascal's take is that what's really unifying us is our fear of death.

• 44:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:39Pablo Torre?

  That we're all just kind of milling around, trying to avoid the unbelievably obvious reality that we're gonna [bleep] die.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  Right, the thing that haunts us and the reason that it's so hard to be alone with your own thoughts is essentially that. That if you're alone with your own thoughts, inevitably where the mind will go to.

• 44:55Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Is the ultimate reality of the impermanence of life. And I think there's def-- I don't know about you, I 100% feel that.

• 45:04Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  I mean, a huge part of my life is just focusing on things so that I never think about that fact.

• 45:11Pablo Torre?

  I realized recently that I like being busy and I was like, oh, this is kind of like a virtue. And then I realized I'm really not getting to the core issue.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:18Pablo Torre?

  Which is that I'm trying to remain busy so as to not have to confront what actually makes me uncomfortable. And I do think at root, what I'm uncomfortable with is the people I love and also just me vaporizing and then meaning ultimately nothing.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think that's, that's when I talk about the thing that is animating all this is something essential to human experience. But I also find something really beautiful about that. I don't have a spiritual practice, but what I do find comfort in is actually just sitting with the magnitude of the inescapability of what we might call the human condition. And we're all kind of wrestling with that. And that's the preciousness of being alive and that there's something just incredibly sublime and beautiful about that. And that when you can take the time to focus on that, when I can look at my daughter's

• 46:15Speaker 05

  breathing as she's asleep and focus on that and just say to myself like, this is the greatest gift, this moment, that I'm here with her, watching her sleep and watching her breathe. That, that itself is the antidote, you know?

• 46:34Pablo Torre?

  I, I feel that so acutely, except you left out the part where immediately after that thought, I go back to watching a rug cleaning video.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  This was stored behind somebody's shed for quite some time.

• 46:51Pablo Torre?

  But the philosopher Blaise Pascal also observes something else that I think you should wrestle with here. He observed, back in the 17th century, that there is a curse that befalls the king.

• 47:06Pablo Torre?

  The king being a figure possessing unique and unparalleled access to diversion, to infinite entertainment in his court. But the king's curse was that whenever he was not being panoramically distracted in his royal court, he found life uniquely intolerable. Nobody, anywhere, was more miserable than the king, missing his infinite jest. To which Chris Hayes now observes in his book, Here in the 21st Century.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  We're all the king now.

• 47:43Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, it's a real monkey paw situation.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Like, if only I had... I mean, when you think about the drudgery of feudal life in the 1600s, right? As Pascal's writing this.

• 47:53Speaker 05

  That most people, I think, who are listening to this podcast have been liberated from. We're not feudal peasants.

• 47:59Pablo Torre?

  But we will take you, if you are still in a feudal society somewhere, just like and subscribe.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, like and subscribe, absolutely. Smash that like and subscribe button. In between your wheat harvesting. You're packing your salted meat for the winter.

• 48:13Pablo Torre?

  That's right. As you put your salty stone into a broth and then drink it, just know that we're interested.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think that king's paradox... Pascal put his finger on it 400 years ago, but it's what all of us live with now. And that feeling we all have, which is, the more diversion you have, the more you need it. The moment that you are away from the diversion, you suddenly feel panicked, claustrophobic, trapped. That feeling that the king has, we all now feel.

• 48:44Pablo Torre?

  Raw dogging is a thing because of this. When I'm watching Erling Haaland, the Man City star, post about how, guess what I did?

• 48:53Speaker 05

  Did he raw dog a flight?

• 48:54Pablo Torre?

  For seven hours and was very proud of it.

• 48:56Speaker 05

  I mean, that is genuinely impressive. Although, don't you always feel with the flight raw dogging videos that you just can't trust that it's true?

• 49:03Pablo Torre?

  I agree. I agree.

• 49:05Speaker 05

  We need some raw... We need flight raw dogging verification.

• 49:10Pablo Torre?

  I want the Snyder cut of your raw dogging. Um, which reminds me of this Russian philosopher that you quote as many segues go. I don't pronounce his last name, but Alexander.

• 49:22Speaker 05

  Kolyev. What Kolyev says, and he bases this on Hegel, is that the fundamental human desire that makes us human is desire of recognition. We want to be seen as human, as people, by other humans.

• 49:35Pablo Torre?

  It's a real fine print scenario.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  Exactly, right?

• 49:38Pablo Torre?

  Like a children's fable of like, "Well, the good news is that you will get adoration. The bad news is you won't give a [bleep] about anybody who gives it to you."

• 49:47Speaker 05

  Exactly. And that is exactly what the internet offers, right? That, yes, you can have all these people paying you attention.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  It feels very close to recognition. It's firing something in you, but it's actually not quite recognition. Part of the reason it can't be recognition, Kolyev explains this in another context, is that you don't actually see them as human.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  The necessary mutuality isn't there.

• 50:17Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  So, all of this influx, strangers' attention on you, whether it's someone smashing that like and subscribe button, which of course you should do.

• 50:25Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  Always.

• 50:26Pablo Torre?

  Always.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Uh, and, or they're replying to you on a social media site or whatever they're doing, it's a simulacrum of recognition. It's a synthetic form of it.

• 50:39Pablo Torre?

  It's fugazi recognition.

• 50:40Speaker 05

  It's fugazi recognition that feels close enough to leave you almost nourished, but kind of wanting more, but never actually kind of making you feel sated.

• 50:51Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  And that, that nearness of it, the fact that attention is right next to recognition and we can mistake one for the other, that is the trap of social media. It's a trap of, of, of all kinds of people, up to including the man who just took the oath of office.

• 51:05Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  Donald Trump.

• 51:06Pablo Torre?

  It's an incredible, it's an incredible sales pitch that Mark Zuckerberg, to bring him into this too, that he always makes. "I want to connect the world while also making the world feel somehow more disconnected. I want to give you all the food you can eat while also leaving you feeling starved."

• 51:22Speaker 05

  But the, the amazing thing about this Zuckerberg connection point is when you go back to the original technology of Facebook, the point of the Facebook, the physical analog version and then Facebook, was to take the mutuality of connection and separate it into two constitutive parts, gazing at and being gazed upon.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  It's precisely that separation that produces the strangeness of social media, right? But the separation of those two takes what is relationships, the stuff of human connection, and turns it into mere attention.

• 52:10Pablo Torre?

  I'm the guy who was number 199 to join Facebook.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Really?

• 52:14Pablo Torre?

  Which means that I made zero money.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 52:16Pablo Torre?

  And was just complicit enough to make it a problem. And I was like, "Yeah, I'll join Mark's site."

• 52:20Speaker 05

  Were you guys the same class?

• 52:21Pablo Torre?

  He was a year ahead of me. Priscilla Chan, his wife, lived in my freshman dorm.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 52:26Pablo Torre?

  So she sent an email, "Hey, sign up for Mark's website." Cool, I did. Never anticipating what would come later, which was truly an avalanche of people who worked on the product, it seems like, telling everybody, these whistleblowers, "You probably shouldn't use the product."

• 52:43Speaker 05

  It is crazy how many people inside that world have their misgivings about it. And not just because of, you know, whatever Zuckerberg's politics are at this given moment.

• 52:52Pablo Torre?

  No, I just mean, again, on this level of the biology of human attention and the way that their technology exploits it. Sean Parker, founder of Napster, one of these people, he says, quote, "God only knows what it does to children's brains," end quote. A former Facebook employee in the New York Times in 2018, quote, "I am convinced that the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children," end quote. And then you have the dude who invented the infinite scroll.

• 53:21Speaker 05

  Oh, I love that quote.

• 53:22Pablo Torre?

  Yes. He sounds like [bleep] Oppenheimer, Chris.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yes.

• 53:26Pablo Torre?

  It's all about the combined total of 200,000 more human lifetimes just absorbed, taken by people scrolling infinitely.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  And this point, which I should shout out Johann Hari, whose book on attention's very good and who services, quote...

• 53:46Speaker 05

  This point, you're probably old enough to remember when webpages ended.

• 53:50Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  You would get to the end of a webpage.

• 53:52Pablo Torre?

  You'd get to the animated GIF counter.

• 53:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And then you'd go to the next page, or like, and his design innovation was simply to take that away so that you could scroll infinitely and you would hit no resistance. And that is now, that, that infinite scroll is the, the way that we pass our lives.

• 54:11Pablo Torre?

  Right. And now that, uh, all these platforms are full of bots, right? Again, 2018 Adobe study found that nearly 30% of all web traffic showed strong non-human signals, which is obviously worse now.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  I mean, the fact that Meta announced that they were creating AI avatar bots to populate their social network to me was like this amazing reductio ad absurdum.

• 54:36Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 05

  Like, is the problem with the internet, there's not enough people on it? Has anyone ever thought for a second that we need fake people to interact with on the internet?

• 54:48Pablo Torre?

  We need fake people sending us fake email. And by the way, the rate at which 50 to 90% of the daily email traffic in the entire world is spam.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. Spam, spam to me is really important and an important thing to understand in the context of the attention age. Because if you go back to that Herb Simon insight, which is information consumes attention. Spam is the pollution of, of, of the attention age. And you could think about spam in this narrow sense of the emails you don't want. But actually, if you think of it the broad sense, which is people attempting to abuse your attention for their own profit.

• 55:22Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:22Speaker 05

  It costs them very little to waste your attention by showing up in your inbox. It costs you something. Like, for instance, inboxes become unusable unless they're constantly managed, right?

• 55:33Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  Phones with texts, like, the, the totality of pollution.

• 55:40Speaker 05

  Of spam, of people cheaply attempting to acquire your attention because if they acquire it, it'll be monetizable for them and it costs you something to yourself, but costs very little financially. That is one of the, the sort of endemic problems of the time. It's in a way that's similar to the way that air pollution in the industrial revolution was the, you know, endemic problem.

• 56:02Pablo Torre?

  Right. They waste our time for their benefit.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 56:05Pablo Torre?

  Is the quote. And that's like, yep, that nailed it. Um, look, the whole thing that we're gonna live in this Orwellian age, Neil Postman, who wrote the seminal texts, using ourselves to death.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 56:17Pablo Torre?

  He's the guy, I think, who saw this with a disturbing clarity.

• 56:19Speaker 05

  Yep. And he's writing in 1984 on two dystopian visions from two writers of a generation before. Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell's contention was-

• 56:31Pablo Torre?

  That the truth would be concealed from us.

• 56:34Speaker 05

  Totalitarian restriction of information such that all you saw was propaganda. Huxley's vision was a proliferation of boundless delights and hedonistic pleasures and entertainment and distraction that meant that no one even wanted to read or think seriously about anything else. And the contention of Postman is that Huxley's the one who nails it, right? That's the actual dystopia. He's writing this in response to TV, but also this true prophetic insight.

• 57:01Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. So, look, just in terms of what we do in our own lives, near the end here, right? We're bad at dealing with boredom. Um, we are being exploited and abused by all these platforms that are promising one thing and giving us, again, the illusion of it. There are legal consequences that could be possible, age limits, just outright bans, all of that stuff. But in terms of a more practical solution, you write about your constitutional, your daily constitutional, and I do the same thing. I just can't recommend it enough. Going on a walk.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Go on a walk, spend 20 minutes with just your thoughts every day. That's my one big takeaway. And sometimes I allow myself to be interrupted. I want, I like, I don't want to front here, you know? It's a little like writing a recovery memoir when you're still drinking. It's like, I don't want to pretend that I'm not as, you know, pulled in every direction as I think we all find ourselves. But that is one thing I do every day. Take a walk and spend 20 minutes. That is one concrete place to start.

• 58:00Pablo Torre?

  Yes, literally. Go on a walk.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, without your headphones.

• 58:04Pablo Torre?

  Without your headphones.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:05Pablo Torre?

  Um, do you think this technology is so addictive that the pendulum will not crash back in the other way?

• 58:10Speaker 05

  I feel the backlash brewing unlike anything I've ever felt in my life.

• 58:14Pablo Torre?

  I agree.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  In the course of the year or two of writing the book, it feels to me like a spring is being pushed and pushed and pushed and crammed. And now with this turn where the sort of troll in chief, the president and the co troll in chief, the co president Elon Musk dominating public discourse with a row of billionaires who control the attentional platforms, all coalesced in this tight package of power only is going to focus the backlash more intensely and give it more energy.

• 58:48Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I said this wasn't really going to be a politically focused episode, but it does feel like at the end here, we should probably just say aloud, "The people we've just been talking about, who ruined our brains, maybe we shouldn't let them run the government."

• 59:02Speaker 05

  I think it's probably a bad idea.

• 59:05Pablo Torre?

  Um, Chris Hayes, noted sports dad.

• 59:09Speaker 05

  Noted sports dad, sports fan, Pablo Torre fan. I gotta say, I love the show.

• 59:13Pablo Torre?

  Thank you for your compliments and for liking and subscribing.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  I like and I subscribe.

• 59:17Pablo Torre?

  Thanks, dude.

• 59:26Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.