Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.

Trump is a master at wielding attention. He’s been owning news cycles and squatting in Americans’ minds for much of the last decade. And for his second term he has an ally in Elon Musk, a man with a similar uncanny skill set. Trump and Musk seem to have figured out something about how attention works in our fragmented media age — and how to use it for political and cultural power — that Democrats simply haven’t. So what is it? What do they understand about attention that their opponents don’t? Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s “All In,” and has written a forthcoming book, “The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.” And he’s a brilliant thinker on how our modern attention economy works and what it’s doing to our politics. We discuss what Hayes sees as a revolution happening to our attention, which he compares to the Industrial Revolution in its scale and impact; why the old rules about attention in politics no longer apply; the key insight Trump had about attention that fueled his rise; why Musk didn’t really overpay for Twitter; and how Democrats can compete in this new attentional world. Mentioned: “Your Mind Is Being Fracked” by The Ezra Klein Show with D. Graham Burnett “The Great Crypto Crash” by Annie Lowrey Book Recommendations: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  On Monday, Donald Trump is going to take the oath of office for the second time. During his first administration, there was a question of how he wields policy in the government, the question of how he wields and uses and raises money. We're used to talking about that with politicians. But there was also the separate question of how he wields and uses attention. And Trump, whatever else he is, he's a master at using and wielding attention. And I'd say he's a disciple, an ally in Musk now. Elon Musk, I think, is probably the most attentionally rich person in the world alongside Donald Trump. I think that Musk's attentional riches might be more important now than his financial riches. And so if you're going to think about politics in a way that is able to predict

• 1:16Ezra Klein?

  what happens in it, you have to look at and watch and think about how attention is being spent and wielded and amassed and controlled. And that's what this conversation is about. It's a curtain raiser on the attentional regime we're about to enter. My friend Chris Hayes is best known as the host of MSNBC's 8 p.m. show, All In. But he just wrote a great book called The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I've read most of the books on attention out there. This one is, I think, the best one at understanding the value of attention today, because it isn't just endangered, it is the world's most valuable resource. And the people who are on top

• 1:57Ezra Klein?

  of the world right now understand its value and understand how to wield it. And if there is going to be a successful opposition to them, that opposition is going to need to understand its value and understand how to wield it. And right now, it doesn't. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:25Ezra Klein?

  Chris Hayes, welcome to the show.

• 2:26Chris Hayes?

  Really great to be here.

• 2:28Ezra Klein?

  So you've got a cable news show. You're in a tension merchant.

• 2:31Chris Hayes?

  I am.

• 2:32Ezra Klein?

  What is different about the way tension felt and worked in the early 2000s, when you were starting out, when I was starting out, and the way it feels and works for you now?

• 2:42Chris Hayes?

  That's a great question. One is just there's more competition, so much more competition. I mean, the notion now that at every single moment, when you are competing for someone's attention, you are competing against literally every piece of content ever produced. Like, I love this thing that happened a few years ago where like Suits, which was a network show that became like the most watched show on Netflix. And it's like, it never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that like, I might be fighting for eyeballs with someone watching Suits. But at every single moment that you are trying to get someone's attention now, the totality of human content is the library of your competition.

• 3:27Chris Hayes?

  And that was definitely not true in 2000.

• 3:29Ezra Klein?

  It's weird going in a lifetime from the problem of too little content to too much. I remember being a kid and I would read the cereal box.

• 3:39Chris Hayes?

  Absolutely.

• 3:40Ezra Klein?

  I would read anything around me. And there was never enough. There were all kinds of times in my life when I was caught without anything to read. And now it never happens. There's so many, so much of my life that would be better if I was caught without anything to read. But in my pocket is this portal to what is pretty close to everything ever written.

• 4:03Chris Hayes?

  Pretty close. I mean, I remember a version of the Elias Sports Bureau's like, sports baseball compendium of stats. And I'd just read, you know, the top 40 ERA pitchers.

• 4:16Ezra Klein?

  When I was a kid, I knew the manufacturer suggested retail price of every single car on the road by year. Like, I could tell you not just, not just what a Camry cost, but what a 93 Camry cost.

• 4:30Chris Hayes?

  Right, because you must have had some book.

• 4:31Ezra Klein?

  I had like the Blue Book, yeah.

• 4:32Chris Hayes?

  Right, yeah. Yeah, and that, and you would, in some ways, right, the lack of choice forced a kind of focus. I think you and I, you know, we're roughly the same cohort. I was at the sort of front end of like RSS Google Readers and blogs and this idea that you could synthesize an insane amount of information very quickly if you kind of curated it and you created processes to feed it into you. And those processes have gotten much harder and they've been totally overwhelmed by the evolution, such that I now have a very hard time even figuring out what the funnel I'm trying to construct is.

• 5:15Ezra Klein?

  So it is hard sometimes, I think, when you've lived through attention and information changing as much as we have to take the long view.

• 5:23Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 5:24Ezra Klein?

  One thing I liked about your book a lot is it takes the long view. And I would say the core argument is that what is happening to attention now is akin to what happened to human labor in the Industrial Revolution. Spin that out for me.

• 5:36Chris Hayes?

  So if you think about labor, right, labor long predates labor as a wage commodity in the Industrial Revolution, right? Human beings did stuff with their effort and toil from the time that they essentially evolved, right? Like if you're hunting, gathering, picking berries, that's work. And labor evolved into an agrarian feudal systems and all kinds of different ways of small shopkeepers that did work recognizably. But what happens in the Industrial Revolution is that that human effort gets embedded in a set of institutions, legal institutions, market institutions, that commodify it so

• 6:17Chris Hayes?

  that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price. And that's an enormous transformation in the human experience, total transformation in all social relations, political relations, economic relations, and also crucially, the subjective experience of being alive in the world. I think something similar is happening with attention. And it started a while ago, the same way that the industrial revolution actually starts sort of earlier than we think of it at its peak. But we're reaching a crescendo where this thing, attention, which predates it being commodified, people have always paid attention to stuff, is now this market commodity that's extracted and sold.

• 7:00Ezra Klein?

  But go deeper. What do you mean by it's a market commodity extracted and sold? So what makes attention priceable and tradable now differently than it was before? Or is that not the ground of the analogy? Like, they go into the specifics of this.

• 7:15Chris Hayes?

  So there's a prehistory here, which is that from the birth of what we would call recognizably modern media, and the penny press and magazines are probably the first place that you would call it that, particularly Benjamin Day's New York Sun, which has the idea that you charge people a penny for a newspaper. You lose money on each newspaper, but you sell the advertising, right? So the thing you're selling is the audience. Modern media has had this model for a long time, and basically, it's all been selling attention. Billboards, newspapers, magazines, radios, TV. There's a few things that make it a difference in kind now, I would say. One is the sophistication of how minutely you could capture people's attention and how quickly and sophisticatedly you could bring it to market.

• 8:00Chris Hayes?

  So you've now got these nanosecond auctions that are auctioning off your eyeballs in the moment you're loading a webpage or in the moment that Instagram reels is going through. So that's one change. The other is just the ubiquity. The TV can't travel with you. Magazines can, but eventually you read everything in The New Yorker and that's it. The birth of the smartphone produces a ubiquity of attention to be captured and sold that just represents a kind of break. Like, it just wasn't like that before.

• 8:34Ezra Klein?

  One of the things happening in this era, the reason I think people are so interested in books about attention, concern about attention, is that the supply of attention is being changed and transformed by this process. It is being trained.

• 8:49Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 8:50Ezra Klein?

  My attention has been trained to want more than it used to want, to be more despairing when it can't get it.

• 8:59Ezra Klein?

  But also, I mean, the internet in a way with a just a much higher level of sophistication turned into a massive experimentation for what works attentionally.

• 9:11Chris Hayes?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:12Ezra Klein?

  It's just this endless gain of function bio lab for attention. Like, I like, I really think of like a lot of social media as gain of function research for takes.

• 9:22Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Ezra Klein?

  Right, like, if you tweak the take and tweak it and tweak it, at what point does it go viral? At what point does it go too viral and it like destroys your career?

• 9:30Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 9:30Ezra Klein?

  Right, like, you could escape the lab in a way. But there's something about not, I think, just seeing attention as a commodity, but seeing it as something that is manipulable, shapeable, changeable, such that our collective attention as a resource is changing, that feels important in this.

• 9:46Chris Hayes?

  I agree, and I think, you know, when you had Graham Burnett on the show, who's great on this, and attention researcher, you know, he talks about fracking, right? And, and the point of the metaphor fracking, right, is that you need more supply. So, you know, there used to be a certain category of oil you could get, and then market demand said you had to go get more of it, and they figured out a way. And there is something very similar happening, obviously, here, right? The expanded supply. So like, eating into your sleep hours, that's more supply. Getting children, that's more supply. Looking at two or three things at once, which would have seemed totally like antisocial and borderline deranged two or three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.

• 10:30Ezra Klein?

  Watching a movie while staring at another screen.

• 10:33Chris Hayes?

  Like, if someone did that 10 years ago, you would have been like, what are you, it's, it would be so weird. The qualitative or subjective experience of what attention is, is shifting.

• 10:43Ezra Klein?

  You talk in the book about attention now being the most valuable commodity, the most important commodity, the, the commodity that so many of the great modern businesses, among other things, are built on, like Google and Meta. And I still think we're realizing it was undervalued, or maybe that its most important value isn't selling it off to advertisers. So I've been thinking a lot about Elon Musk, who emerges in your book as a slightly pathetic figure, right?

• 11:11Chris Hayes?

  Yes, the book was written before I think he kind of got a second chapter.

• 11:15Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, trying to fill this like howling void he has for attention. Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter at $44 billion. It is not a business, as he has said himself, worth $44 billion. On the other hand, the amount of attention that he is capable of controlling and amassing and manipulating through Twitter cannot be traded directly for $44 billion, but is clearly worth, I think, more than $44 billion.

• 11:44Chris Hayes?

  Multiples, multiples of it.

• 11:46Ezra Klein?

  So how do you think about this translation that we're seeing happen right now between attention as a financial commodity?

• 11:53Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Ezra Klein?

  And attention is having more worth, frankly, than the money it would fetch on the, on the open market.

• 12:01Chris Hayes?

  That's a great point. Yes, I think he backed into the, he backed into the purchase of Twitter based on a kind of howling personal void. But in the same way that Donald Trump backed into the same insight born of his personality and his upbringing and New York tabloid world, he figured something out that has been obviously tremendously valuable in dollar terms. One of the really important ironies here, which I think does map onto labor, is that the aggregate of attention, like lots of attention, or the collective public attention, is wildly valuable. Right? Volodymyr Zelensky is a great example of this, right? The president of Ukraine, like, he understands that attention on Ukraine's

• 12:44Chris Hayes?

  plight is essentially the engine for securing the weaponry and resources his country needs to defend itself. And yet, even though the aggregate of attention is very valuable, in market terms, each one of our individual attention a second a second is like pennies, fractions. Yeah, not even pennies. Not even pennies, fractions of pennies. And that was exactly what it was like with labor. When Marxists would say labor is a source of all value, they were right. In the aggregate, take away all the workers and the industrial revolution doesn't happen. But to the individual worker in the sweatshop, the little slice of labor that you're producing is both everything you have as a person and worth nothing in the market, almost nothing.

• 13:28Chris Hayes?

  And I think we have the same thing with attention where it's like, it's really valuable pooled and aggregated, like the most valuable. Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless, is pennies. And then subjectively to us, it's all we have.

• 13:47Ezra Klein?

  I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics.

• 13:52Chris Hayes?

  I totally agree.

• 13:52Ezra Klein?

  Certainly at the high levels, right? There are places where money is very powerful, but it's usually where people are not looking.

• 13:57Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 13:57Ezra Klein?

  Money is very powerful when there's not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn't control Republican primaries with money, controls them with attention. And I keep having to write about Musk and I keep saying he's the richest man in the world, but that's actually not what matters about him right now. It's just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that's a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made and Democrats haven't. Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics. And the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.

• 14:34Chris Hayes?

  I really like this theory. I think you're totally right to identify that they kind of, it's sort of a sliding scale between the two, which is to say, politics that had the least attention, money matters the most.

• 14:44Ezra Klein?

  Right.

• 14:45Chris Hayes?

  So in a state rep race.

• 14:46Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 14:47Chris Hayes?

  Right? Money really matters, state rep race, partly because no one's paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been got in.

• 14:53Ezra Klein?

  Money can buy their attention.

• 14:53Chris Hayes?

  Money can buy their attention. So like you could put out glossy mailers, you could, there's a lot you can do that the further up you go from that to Senate to president, the more attention there is already, the less the money counts. And you saw this with the Harris campaign.

• 15:08Chris Hayes?

  They raised a ton of money and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people's attention, whether that's through advertising or door knocking, right? But largely attention and then persuasion, right? I'm running for president, here's what I want to do, here's why you should vote for me. Now you can do that at billions of dollars worth and everything is just like drops of rain in a river because there is so much competition for attention. And so what they figured out, I think, was that-

• 15:38Ezra Klein?

  They being Harris or they being Trump?

• 15:40Chris Hayes?

  They being Trump, and I think Musk, is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere. That in some ways, it's kind of a sucker's game to try to like pop in and be like, I got an ad, hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? You like, what do you like? Like, all that's just gonna whiz past people. That the sort of attentional atmosphere, that's where the fight is. And that's what Musk's quitter purchase ended up being, an enormous, almost like Archimedian lever on the electorate.

• 16:13Ezra Klein?

  I think this is right. I think there's another distinction between Democrats and Republicans here, which is that I think Democrats still believe that the type of attention you get is the most important thing. If your choice is between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention. And at least the Trump side of the Republican Party believes that the volume, the sum total of attention is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention, not only fine, maybe great, right? Because there's so much attentional energy and conflict. So you'd really see this, like Kamala Harris and, and once he became part of the ticket, Tim Walz and behind them, Joe Biden, you know, before the, the changeover, they were just terrified of an interview going badly.

• 16:56Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 16:56Ezra Klein?

  And Trump and Vance and, I mean, they were all over the place, including in places very hostile to them.

• 17:01Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, and Vance had a ton of interviews that went badly.

• 17:03Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but they were everywhere.

• 17:05Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Ezra Klein?

  Because they cared about the volume of attention and were completely fine with the energy that negative attention could unlock.

• 17:13Chris Hayes?

  I, I think this is the key transformational insight of Donald Trump to politics. Generally in politics, you want to get people's attention for the project of persuading them. Friends, Roman countrymen, lend me your ears, Mark Antony says, before he proceeds to attempt to persuade them, right?

• 17:31Chris Hayes?

  What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this sort of war of all against all, that actually just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it. And one way reliably to get people's attention is negative attention. Like, if you insult people, act outrageously, I mean, this is literally, there was a commercial model for this, which is shock jocks of the 1980s and 90s that we grew up with, right? Like, they were in a competitive attentional marketplace in local places. Shock jocks said outrageous things, they weren't trying to get someone to vote for them, they just wanted you to know that they were on the, running the morning zoo.

• 18:09Ezra Klein?

  I don't know how to insert into the discourse a strong enough point that Joe Rogan is much better than Howard Stern was.

• 18:19Chris Hayes?

  Yes, it's true.

• 18:20Ezra Klein?

  Like, nobody quite wants to admit this, because now Howard Stern has become this lovable uncle, who, you know, for liberals, who has Hillary Clinton on his show, and I think Kamala Harris went on his show. But I think Rogan is the inheritor of Stern, basically. And, you know, Rogan has become much more right wing in the past couple of years, but compared to what Stern was, Rogan is just smarter and preferable.

• 18:43Chris Hayes?

  I think that's probably true, and I also think that the general shock jock model has now become a successful model in politics.

• 18:49Ezra Klein?

  Okay, but now I think we need to have like a moment of caution, because there's a tendency right now, because Donald Trump won the popular vote by like 1.5 percentage points, which is a terrible win, like the adols of American politics, right? And yet, there's just like no doubt that Trump and his broad cultural side have won some kind of cultural and attentional victory that is much bigger.

• 19:16Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 19:17Ezra Klein?

  In its feeling than the actual electoral victory they want. So some of these things both feel, like, I'm not sure this works as well in politics, but in terms of changing the culture, like, his win has changed the culture immediately in a way that I would not have foreseen and does not reflect, like, if you just told somebody the election results, I don't think they would feel the vibe shift.

• 19:37Chris Hayes?

  So I agree with that, and I want to sort of take those in two parts, because I think the politics is actually worth taking a second with.

• 19:45Chris Hayes?

  Mark Robinson ran for governor of North Carolina. He was already elected statewide as a lieutenant governor. Said lots of outrageous things all the time. He was discovered to be, almost certainly, I think he denies it, but it seems to be pretty plausible, a commenter on the Nude Africa site where he said all sorts of wildly offensive things, including "I am a black Nazi." Robinson lost that race in North Carolina, a state Trump carried. It's probably like a plus one or two Republican state at national level. It didn't work for him. Like, Carrie Lake courted negative attention, lost two successive statewide races. Doug Mastriano, I could go down the list. So there's something really fascinating.

• 20:25Ezra Klein?

  Jay Vance underperformed in Ohio in his senate.

• 20:27Chris Hayes?

  Considerably. So there is something happening where it has not proven to be a replicable strategy, that the old logic that we were just talking about the Democrats having and being outdated still does hold in a lot of races. That said, in terms of influence, I think negative attention is incredibly effective. And I think you're seeing this, shock jock, you can call it shock jock, you can just call it trolling politics. I mean, it is trolling politics. The idea of trolling, and the reason that trolling exists, is it's easier to get negative attention than positive attention. It creates a conundrum for the other side, which is, do you ignore them while they say horrible stuff? Or do you engage them and give them what they want?

• 21:11Chris Hayes?

  And I think this kind of trolling politics, which was really Donald Trump's insight, is the most transformational part of politics now, and you're 100% correct. The media management around Democrats is so much risk aversion. If the choice is negative attention or no attention, we take no attention every time. And that is the wrong choice.

• 21:35Ezra Klein?

  You can frame this as a strategy. And clearly, people who are not temperamentally suited to the strategy, like Vance and Rubio and others, have tried it on with varying degrees of fit at different times. But I think it's better to frame it in a way as temperament. I mean, you write in the book, compliments roll off your back, criticism stays with you for days. But it's not true for everybody, right? There's a certain personality type that is okay with that negative charge. A lot of people would not have been willing to absorb.

• 22:11Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 22:11Ezra Klein?

  The personal polarization Musk has decided to absorb to become as significant as he is. Trump is very similar, right? I think most people take the trade of being thought fairly well of by a larger number of people, even if not thought that much of by them.

• 22:27Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Ezra Klein?

  You know, in general, rather than absolutely hated by half the country to be quite loved by the other half. And I think that's something in people. And I guess what I'm asking you is, does politics now?

• 22:39Chris Hayes?

  Select for that.

• 22:39Ezra Klein?

  Suck for a kind of attentional sociopath?

• 22:42Chris Hayes?

  I mean, I think it does select for a potential sociopath. I would push back a little bit in this respect, though. I don't know how much of the negative feedback gets to Donald Trump and Musk. Like, I do think they have probably created.

• 22:55Ezra Klein?

  But he's sitting there watching MSNBC and getting mad at it. Or CNN.

• 23:00Chris Hayes?

  Yes, that's true.

• 23:00Ezra Klein?

  He's the guy who actually seeks out stuff to make him angry.

• 23:03Chris Hayes?

  Yes, but I guess what I'm trying to say is, like, I think it bothers him and Musk, too. I just, like, I don't, I guess I just don't buy that they don't, that it rolls off their back. I mean, they're kind of obsessed with it also. So that fixation is manifest differently.

• 23:17Ezra Klein?

  It at least doesn't turn them back, right?

• 23:19Chris Hayes?

  It doesn't turn them back.

• 23:20Ezra Klein?

  They don't recede from the.

• 23:21Chris Hayes?

  But the idea that they're sort of zen-like, like, well, you know, people are just gonna hate me. Like, that's not what's going on, psychologically.

• 23:27Ezra Klein?

  Fair enough.

• 23:27Chris Hayes?

  So, yes, I do, I worry, actually, that it now selects for a kind of sociopathic disposition. Or, or just a very, like, broken and compulsive one. Because, like, I don't, just speaking for myself, like, you know, I have the show-off demon in myself, and I, I've, from the time I was very young, wanted people to pay attention to me. I don't love that part of me. I don't think that's, like, the best part of me. I think that my relationship to it is, is a little fraught and intentionally, intentionally managed. And I don't think that, like, I would be a better person if I let that beast run loose.

• 24:08Chris Hayes?

  And I worry that the incentives are to basically do that, both, both for everyone individually, in politics and culture everywhere, and also in the kind of collective public sphere. Let me say that the thing that I think.

• 24:27Chris Hayes?

  Is the deepest problem here. I think fundamentally, the most competitive attentional regimes select for the parts of people that are, in the aggregate and over time, kind of the most reactionary. That's the deeper problem I worry about. Tabloid coverage of crime. Tabloid coverage from crime, which literally goes back to Benjamin Day's New York Sun. He was the first New York newspaper to have a court reporter who went to the court and said, you know, wrote down what he heard, right? Tabloid coverage of crime, 100% has an ideological valence that is conservative, reactionary.

• 25:11Chris Hayes?

  So I think generally competitive attention markets select for negativity, they select for all kinds of things that are generally lead people towards their, their sort of most reactionary selves. And then, the negativity bias of competitive attentional markets also means it's really hard for incumbents. Think about '64, right? LBJ, huge landslide victory. Think about '72, Nixon, incumbent, landslide victory. '84, Reagan, incumbent, landslide victory. '96, not landslide, but Clinton basically cruised reelection. It is inconceivable to me, in our current media environment, for a large majority of our electorate to be like, "Let's keep it going. This is good."

• 25:55Chris Hayes?

  Like, like status quo? Ramp it up.

• 26:30Ezra Klein?

  We've been, I think, talking about attention mostly in terms of social media here.

• 26:34Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Ezra Klein?

  And I want to talk about another way that attentions and the way we think about stories like changed in this period, which is reality television, which is the other side of this that Trump comes out of. One thing that has felt true to me about Trump's second term, much more than the first, is it feels like reality television. It is all these secondary characters with their own subplots and their own arcs. And what's going to happen with Pete Hegseth and over here is RFK Jr. and Musk. In the first term, Trump was the only character.

• 27:04Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 27:04Ezra Klein?

  Of the Trump administration.

• 27:05Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 27:06Ezra Klein?

  Now he's playing a role that feels to me much more like.

• 27:08Chris Hayes?

  Host.

• 27:09Ezra Klein?

  The host. Like, sometimes he comes out and somebody actually is voted off the island. It's like, well, Matt Gaetz is gone now.

• 27:14Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:15Ezra Klein?

  You know, or so and so has gone, people get fired, or he settles like the big plot of that week, right? He's going to side with Musk and Ramaswamy on H1BV says.

• 27:23Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 27:23Ezra Klein?

  You know, or he comes in to announce a new plot like Greenland, right? He's not the only.

• 27:28Chris Hayes?

  This week, we're running a new competition.

• 27:30Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but he's not the only figure. He's the.

• 27:34Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Ezra Klein?

  The host, the decider, the something. Compared to other administrations, even compared to his first, this one is feeling programmed in a very different way. I mean, you're somebody, obviously, who has to follow the plots and report on them night after night and in the eternal purgatory that you are in.

• 27:55Chris Hayes?

  There are worse fates.

• 27:57Ezra Klein?

  Does that resonate for you?

• 27:58Chris Hayes?

  It does resonate. I mean, you know, if you've ever talked to people in reality television, like they selected for people with very flawed personalities, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, because that produced conflict and conflict produced drama and drama is, you know, conflict is what keeps attention.

• 28:13Ezra Klein?

  And those people like attention. Not all of them, but the ones they pick.

• 28:16Chris Hayes?

  They like attention, exactly.

• 28:16Ezra Klein?

  Right? You pick people on reality shows who like attention and are willing to absorb negative attention to be the star.

• 28:21Chris Hayes?

  Exactly right. And you don't pick people who are just sort of like shy and go along to get along, because what does that get you? So that model, I think, explains a lot about the personalities that are selected for in contexts of intense attentional competition.

• 28:40Chris Hayes?

  In terms of the programming, I totally agree, although I do think it's totally like instinctual for him. Like, I don't think it's that plotted out, but I do think fundamentally, he thinks he needs the attention at all times. And he just has an intuitive sense of that. And the Greenland thing's a perfect example. And there's been a thousand of them in the first Trump administration. There'll be a thousand more, which is like, what do you do with it? Like, is it attention getting to be like, the incoming president wants to take over Greenland? Like, yeah, it is. Is he serious? I don't know. Is it a good idea? No, it's not. Should we debate it? Should we talk about? I don't know. But we're

• 29:24Chris Hayes?

  all just now inside the attentional vortex of the Greenland conversation. And he's done that again and again and again.

• 29:31Ezra Klein?

  But it's a way in which his sense of it seems to have changed. It was a well remarked on and reported dynamic of the appointments in the first term.

• 29:41Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Ezra Klein?

  That he had a casting orientation to him, but it was visual.

• 29:46Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 29:46Ezra Klein?

  He wanted people who looked like.

• 29:48Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 29:48Ezra Klein?

  A secretary of state, a general, a Federal Reserve chair.

• 29:52Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 29:52Ezra Klein?

  Right? So you got people like Rex Tillerson and Jay Powell in Trump one. He is building characters.

• 29:59Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Ezra Klein?

  And selecting people who are good at going on podcasts, for instance, or being on TV in Trump two.

• 30:05Chris Hayes?

  Yes. I mean, that latter point, I think he is selecting for people that will keep attention and communicate, for sure. I mean, I still think there's a certain amount of casting look to it with all of, we should note, like, all of the biases that come with that, right? Like, if you're looking for a general on central casting, you're looking for a white man, right? Which is part of, I think.

• 30:26Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but you're not looking for Pete Hegseth.

• 30:29Chris Hayes?

  I guess, although I also think there's a certain amount of like, who does he see up on the TV?

• 30:34Ezra Klein?

  No, I think there's that, but I mean, it's a different story, right? I mean, Pete Hegseth is a different kind of character. I mean, he's an underdog in the thing.

• 30:41Chris Hayes?

  Than Jim Mattis, for sure.

• 30:42Ezra Klein?

  Right? He's, you know, it's more the sort of like a soldier who's going to take over and disrupt the thing. Look, I'm not saying it's all planned out. I'm just saying that there has been a way this feels different.

• 30:54Chris Hayes?

  Oh, definitely. I mean, I also think, I think there's also an Occam's razor. Well, I don't know. I also think the man is the oldest man ever to be elected to be president of the United States and like, maybe doesn't want to spend as much time doing everything and kind of, you know, if someone says, last season of the show, you had really long shooting days. This season, we're going to front some other characters. So like, we can cut your shooting days in half. Like, I think there's a little bit of that happening now.

• 31:24Ezra Klein?

  I want to ask about the Democrats in relationship to this. And I guess one way to do it is that since the election, I mean, any room with six Democrats is a postmortem now, whether formally or informally.

• 31:36Chris Hayes?

  Personally, my favorite. I'd like to keep this going for years if we can.

• 31:42Ezra Klein?

  There are parts of the postmortem that are divisive in the party, right? Did they, you know, move too far left? Or actually, did they moderate too much? And what about Gaza? And the one that every room of this I'm in, everybody agrees on is, and it's always said the same way, is that Democrats have a media problem.

• 31:57Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious what you think that means.

• 32:03Chris Hayes?

  Well, I think there's two components to that. One, I think you cannot avoid is that whatever you think about Joe Biden's abilities to be president in the sense of doing the job day to day, he was very clearly, and I think irrefutably incapable of occupying the bully pulpit. Like, I just don't think there's any debate or argument on either side. Like empirically, he gave fewer interviews, he gave fewer press conferences. He, I mean, compare, go watch Barack Obama be president and/or George W. Bush or all these people than Joe Biden. Like, it just was the case that I think largely due to his age, he was not capable of focusing and occupying the attentional space at the center of the presidency.

• 32:46Chris Hayes?

  So you got to start with that. Would it have worked? I don't know.

• 32:49Ezra Klein?

  I believe Joe Biden in 67 wins reelection, that he can tell a story about his own record that, if you want my counterfactual.

• 32:55Chris Hayes?

  That's basically what I, I think I kind of agree with that.

• 32:58Ezra Klein?

  And I'll say.

• 32:59Chris Hayes?

  I kind of agree with that.

• 32:59Ezra Klein?

  Because this is arising with like, all the fury I felt about it all, all year. Going back a year. I talk to people, I will say, because of the way this conversation's happened, at the absolute highest level of the Biden administration. And one thing that they were not shy about saying when I had, was making these arguments, before I even made them publicly, about can this guy really run again, is I would hear something like, "Look, Joe Biden can perform the presidency, but he can't perform the presidency." Was the way it got put to me. And they still thought it was okay to run him again.

• 33:34Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, you gotta do both.

• 33:34Ezra Klein?

  Which shows an unbelievable devaluing at the highest levels of Democratic politics of attention.

• 33:41Chris Hayes?

  So, okay, so that connects.

• 33:42Ezra Klein?

  They thought like, it was okay, that they could just make this argument, like, this guy can't perform it, but, you know, I mean, that's entertainment. This is a presidency. It's not about who's the best celebrity or who can go on Jimmy Kimmel, but of course it partly is.

• 33:56Chris Hayes?

  So that's the first layer, right? But that connects to the next layer, which is the obsession with what is called the mainstream media, the legacy media, all of which is like understandable, but is increasingly a conversation that like, a relatively small part of the country is part of. And they're still laser focused on that. And again, I get that. And they're laser focused on it in terms of not making news. Like, I think about this phrase all the time, like, not making news as opposed to making news. Making news means getting people's attention. Not making news means not getting people's attention. And the goal of a lot of Democrats, always in their communication, is to not make news. And Donald Trump's goal is always to make news.

• 34:38Ezra Klein?

  Something that has been on my mind, is it, in a way, the fact that I keep hearing Democrats call this a media problem, rather than say, an attention problem, reflects

• 34:48Chris Hayes?

  Exactly the problem.

• 34:49Ezra Klein?

  The issue that, I think there's still an intuition, I mean, the media as a linguistic construct, sounds like an institutional thing that people control. Like, one way you might solve your media problem is Chris Hayes decides who goes on the Chris Hayes All-In Show on weeknights on MSNBC, and you get him to buck you. And

• 35:08Chris Hayes?

  Or a Joe Rogan of the left.

• 35:09Ezra Klein?

  A Joe Rogan of the left, right?

• 35:10Chris Hayes?

  That's my favorite phrase to come out of the election.

• 35:13Ezra Klein?

  I think it reflects Democrats still thinking that media is something that broadcasters and gatekeepers control and the way to win it over is to win them over. As opposed to something that you attract, right? Media is something you get booked on. Attention is something you attract. Liberal Joe Rogan discourse actually drives me like insane. Like, I want to throw myself off of a bridge. You can't build Joe Rogan if you're a political person.

• 35:43Chris Hayes?

  If you're trying to back it out as a

• 35:44Ezra Klein?

  Because the whole point of what is meaningful about him is fundamentally, he's not for people interested in politics.

• 35:50Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 35:50Ezra Klein?

  Like, Democrats are obsessed with how New York Times exactly words its headlines about Donald Trump. But Democrats win people who read New York Times headlines about Donald Trump. They lose people who don't read politics at all. And you can't win them by being more and more political and be like, we're going to create a Joe Rogan, but with perfect politics who likes everything Democrats do. Like, the whole point is that you have to go and compete in non-political spaces.

• 36:17Chris Hayes?

  And you also have to get the attention of people at the periphery of politics. I mean, how do you get messages to people at the outer periphery? And part of the answer is, you need to draw a lot of attention generally. And it's not like they didn't know this. I mean, the idea of Beyonce, the idea of like using celebrities, like, wait, well, these are, these are attentional magnets. They're sort of avatars. But increasingly, it just doesn't work that way anymore.

• 36:39Ezra Klein?

  I do think a little bit, I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure I think what I'm about to say is right. But I think a bit that the media attention cut I'm making was actually there in who the two sides treated as celebrities. Because Democrats treated as celebrities, celebrities.

• 36:57Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 36:58Ezra Klein?

  Beyonce and Taylor Swift. And, and there was this kind of mocking, like, well, look, they've got Kid Rock over there at the RNC.

• 37:03Chris Hayes?

  Right, yeah.

• 37:04Ezra Klein?

  But the actual celebrities that Republicans were relying on were UFC influencers.

• 37:10Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 37:10Ezra Klein?

  And random podcasters. And I do think there was a way in which this election, in a background fashion, Was testing this question of, well, actually, who are the celebrities today? At least in a persuasive level, who are the celebrities? Because there were these very buttoned up celebrities where you would get one post from Taylor Swift, or maybe Bad Bunny came in at the end. And I'm not saying that stuff didn't help Democrats a bit. And again, you can overstate how much any of it mattered.

• 37:35Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 37:35Ezra Klein?

  But I do think there's a way of not seeing that in this world, like, there are a bunch of people who are not named celebrities by the media, but they are influencers of massive power now. Because they're just like, they're good at competing and getting attention and building direct relationships with our audience.

• 37:53Chris Hayes?

  Steve Jobs had this saying that it's not the customer's job to know what they want. And I do think there's a little bit of like Democratic, like, obsession with numbers and market research. That's like, well, what do the numbers say? And part of this is just innovation and improvisation and trying new stuff that hasn't been tried before, as opposed to backing out what you think the expectation is. And that's really true, I think, with attention entrepreneurship. Which is not just to like, look what does best in the algorithm and not just look at the data, but to try new things. Like, I don't love Joe Rogan's politics, but Rogan's a really good podcast. It's a really good show. I have listened intermittently for years, particularly, I used to more than I do now.

• 38:38Chris Hayes?

  You know, I've listened to Rogan podcasts where he does two and a half hours with an astrophysicist. And they're totally fascinating. I mean, part of the problem too, as I sort of think this through, right? There is an asymmetry about risk. It just is the case that like, a gaffe for a Democratic politician is gonna kind of stick out more and stick more. Partly, I think, as a self enforcing cycle, which is that if you do less media, then the gaffs stick more. And partly because, I'll do this take and then you can cut it out.

• 39:14Ezra Klein?

  We're definitely not cutting it out now.

• 39:16Chris Hayes?

  Well, this take has nothing to do with attention, but here's my take. Okay. You're at a restaurant with your kids. And the kid over there, the other table is just same age, just acting like crazy, watching a screen, doesn't have their napkin, making a mess. And your kid says, well, they're, they don't have to do it. And I'm like, I don't care about them. It's not my kid. I feel like that's how the mainstream media basically treats the Democratic Party.

• 39:43Chris Hayes?

  And I think that's partly, it's partly the flip side of a correct conservative critique, which is that the vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are products of a cultural milieu that is generally center-left in Democratic voting. But it, it means that they hold Democrats to higher standards. And like JD Vance and Donald Trump are those other kids at the table. I don't care what they do. They're not my kids. And I, I truly believe this is true. This kid got me in trouble. I don't care.

• 40:13Ezra Klein?

  I do think there's something to it, but I think there's one more link in, in the chain, which is that the issue is that the people who vote for Democrats are influent, like to them, the mainstream media's influences, right? It is the case that there are things Republicans can do in the media that are problems for them, like in certain ways, not be anti-immigrant enough.

• 40:34Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Ezra Klein?

  Right there, you know, or say Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.

• 40:39Chris Hayes?

  They, they have their own gaff.

• 40:40Ezra Klein?

  They have their own gaff. They're just different. And, and they're, because the mainstream media for them is in the role of enemy, for the mainstream media to be mad at them doesn't, like that's already the storyline.

• 40:51Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 40:52Ezra Klein?

  So I, I was running these numbers because I was going to write a column about this, but I don't think I am now, so I'll say it to you instead, which is that by 2000, Fox News is fairly, it is a big enough force that one can take it seriously. Conservative talk radio is mature and is a, a big deal. So look at the seven elections since 2000, presidential elections. Republicans win the popular vote in two.

• 41:15Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 41:15Ezra Klein?

  In the seven before, they win it in four.

• 41:18Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 41:18Ezra Klein?

  Now, we know that Fox News persuades people to go right. And we know that Fox News is watched by people. And yet, we also know that Republicans are performing worse as Fox News and right-wing media become more powerful. And I always think the reason for that is that Fox News has made Republicans weirder.

• 41:37Chris Hayes?

  Oh, yes.

• 41:38Ezra Klein?

  And detached them from the center. I don't think Donald Trump is electorally optimal himself. And so, there's this weird way where you've got to be very careful with this idea of, "I want this propaganda machine." Because the first person the propaganda machine is going to convince is you.

• 41:54Chris Hayes?

  That's exactly right. And we see this in race after race after race. This has really been one of the stories of the MAGA era, is bad Republican candidates at all levels losing winnable races that they probably should have won because they were adhering to the exact same attentional incentives that produced Donald Trump up at the top. So, part of what's happening is this malformation of the public, right? This malformation of different publics, of parties, of different audiences, is producing real pathologies that are, in many cases, again, among Republican candidates, rejected by the people who are outside of that particular audience sphere that is being formed by that

• 42:39Chris Hayes?

  kind of propaganda.

• 42:40Ezra Klein?

  I mean, there's been all this post-2024 talk, some of it by me, about the problem of the groups on the Democratic side and the way they pull Democrats, not just left, but into a distance from the median voter. They convince Democrats of things about the public that are not true. The group that is saying, "We represent black voters. We represent Hispanic voters," does not. I think conservative media is like that, but much more powerful for the right. It has given the right a very malformed view of the public.

• 43:11Chris Hayes?

  Oh, I agree with that, yes.

• 43:12Ezra Klein?

  And enforces that view in a vicious way.

• 43:16Chris Hayes?

  One place I think this is really true is on trans issues. I think people are conflicted on questions of policy around this. But I think one thing that is pretty clear, both from electoral results and from polling, is that the public writ large is nowhere near as obsessed.

• 43:37Chris Hayes?

  I mean, obsessed with this issue and with the lives and bodies of these fellow Americans of ours as the propaganda machine and the attention merchants on the right are finding. And again, they're covering that because it rates. And to be clear, like, there's a feedback loop here. They're not just like telling people to care about this. There's a small group of people that do really care about it. But I think it has been distorting for them. And I think there's all kinds of races where they have, they have like closed with this message.

• 44:04Ezra Klein?

  I think that this issue is some where, where, as you say, people are conflicted. So if you can split the electorate, or make the electorate think, think about the part where they side with the right, you know, um, sports teams, right?

• 44:19Chris Hayes?

  I think that's probably their, their, their best message.

• 44:22Ezra Klein?

  But the issue, I think that, and I've said this a bunch, that one reason, I mean, just even just politically, I think Democrats should be thoughtful about not veering too far is that what's about to come is cruelty.

• 44:32Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Ezra Klein?

  And people don't like cruelty.

• 44:34Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Ezra Klein?

  Um, and

• 44:36Chris Hayes?

  Most people don't like cruelty.

• 44:37Ezra Klein?

  Most people don't like cruelty.

• 44:38Chris Hayes?

  Some people like cruelty.

• 44:40Ezra Klein?

  When I think of the damage Twitter X did to Democrats, it came from 2020, not from 2024. It was this time when Democrats actually dominated Twitter and used it to do a lot of in-group policing and persuade themselves of a lot of electorally ruinous or unpopular ideas that then Republicans weaponized, you know, in 2024. Like, the fact that Republicans now have X and I guess True Social and it's run by, you know, Musk and, and Trump, it's not obvious to me

• 45:14Chris Hayes?

  That it's a net benefit for them?

• 45:15Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think that it's pretty clear to me that Musk's takeover has produced a kind of vibe shift and cultural influence for reactionary ideas that I think broadly benefits the right writ large, even if it sends a few Republican candidates over the cliff. So I think there's sometimes there's trade-offs between that. Honestly, and I think that's probably true, that's true for Democrats, too. Like, sometimes there are trade-offs between ideas moving public opinion in one direction or another, or normalizing things that seem ultra or radical that may cost a few candidates' elections. And I think that those trade-offs go in both directions. The other thing is like, there's

• 45:58Ezra Klein?

  consequences here that are more than political. Like, literally, tens of thousands of people die that shouldn't have died during the pandemic because they didn't get vaccinated.

• 46:06Chris Hayes?

  So there's like real tangible results to all of this that transcend politics. And like I

• 46:14Ezra Klein?

  Well, to me, that's one of the ways, though, that this might not play out well for the right.

• 46:19Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 46:20Ezra Klein?

  That, for instance, a good possible example of this is that if the embrace of crypto culture leads to unwise levels of, I wouldn't call it deregulation, but because these things aren't regulated really now, but structures of regulation that are shadowy. So you have huge amounts of risk pooling in weird places. You might have contagion in the financial sector because my, Annie Lowry, my, my wife wrote a great piece about this in the Atlantic. You might have contagion in the financial sector because financial firms begin reconstructing themselves as blockchain assets in order to go into lighter regulation. And then you have something that somebody doesn't understand, or the regulators don't understand, blow up.

• 47:04Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 47:05Ezra Klein?

  And now you're blamed for it in the way that, you know, Bush and Republicans were in 08. There's no guarantee that that happens. It might not. But that's the kind of thing where

• 47:13Chris Hayes?

  That's the risk you're running. I'm biased here and people listening to this who don't share my politics are free to write this off or not. But I think the center left, which still broadly consumes what we would call the mainstream media, legacy media, institutional media, that there's just more of this reality checking happening there. I mean, you know, there's a big fight about like, is inflation happening or is it not? And then it was clear that inflation was happening. It was very high. And there are people who were talking about whether the inflation was the cause of the American Rescue Plan, or whether it was really politically salient. But you didn't get a bunch of inflation truthers saying that the books were cooked or they were wrong, or like inflation was high and that was a, that core fact suffused the coverage of

• 47:59Chris Hayes?

  All the people in that media ecosystem and sphere. But I think if you saw 9% inflation under Donald Trump, I think you would have had a kind of similar reaction to the election, to the election, which is like, it's not happening. I think there's just a mechanism of denial, a mechanism of like sheer sort of cleaving off from reality in that attentional ecosystem that is distinct.

• 48:54Ezra Klein?

  So the political scientist Henry Farrell had this good piece on a Substack, an essay about, he's saying we misunderstand the problem of social media. And he had this analogy to porn. And he says that the way he's working off somebody else's argument about porn, but he says internet porn is tuned not towards people who watch it, but people who buy it. What internet porn is trying to do is not get you to consume it for free, but to pay, you know, $9.95 a month or whatever. And the people who will do that have more extreme tastes. And so you have this ecosystem of pornography that is tilted to be more extreme because it's trying to get this actual conversion.

• 49:36Ezra Klein?

  But it then creates this mass sense among the porn watching public that tastes are more extreme, that everybody else is into things that are more extreme. It arguably changes people's tastes because you just get used to things. And in that way pornography malforms the public. And his sort of argument is that social media is doing the same thing. It is making everybody think that everybody else's tastes politically are more extreme than they are.

• 50:00Chris Hayes?

  Are more insane than they are.

• 50:00Ezra Klein?

  That, you know, everybody else is obsessed with a, you know, UK gang rape scandal from more than 10 years ago.

• 50:06Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 50:07Ezra Klein?

  The effect is not just what it does to the public, but the way it warps particularly the understanding of politicians and media figures who are looking at social media as if it is the public.

• 50:18Chris Hayes?

  And his key point here, which I think is just the bedrock to, for this analysis, and so often left behind and so important, is that we're talking about collective understanding and collective publix as complicated organisms that are greater than the sum of their parts. Because, as he writes in the piece, like, a lot of this discourse is about individuals, like, a bunch of individuals hold these wrong beliefs. But democracy is something we do together. It's not a bunch of aggregated individual choices. And I think this argument is completely correct. And partly it's because we're also being constantly pulled towards things that are the most intentionally salient, which is just a distinct category from, like, at a

• 51:03Chris Hayes?

  bedrock from what we think is important. I cannot stress this enough. Attention is not a moral faculty. There's a Lippman writing in 19 teens that I quote in the book, it's during Versailles. And he says, "The American people have a great deal of interests in what happens at Versailles, but they're not interested in it." He's like, he's like, in the same way that, like, a child has a real interest in his father's business, he's gonna inherit, but he's not interested in it. He's like, "What we're interested in is like the gowns of the queen," basically.

• 51:38Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Chris Hayes?

  And, you know, it's pretty funny, because it's bang on. And the point is that we all understand, we have a category of words, going back to porn, like, titillating, prurient, lurid.

• 51:52Ezra Klein?

  Obscene.

• 51:53Chris Hayes?

  Obscene, that describe the category of things that we think, that we both know draw our attention, but are morally dubious. And what happens in the sort of collective malformation around attention as the most signature value, is the only thing that matters in this competitive landscape.

• 52:14Chris Hayes?

  Is a kind of moral degradation. Because it's pulling us towards things that we know at some level aren't that important or morally defensible, but do get our attention.

• 52:27Ezra Klein?

  Okay, so I think this actually brings up a good, very counter to this conversation question, which is maybe the optimal strategy. If your vision, your sense of the public, your politics, maybe your own moral faculties are so warped by competing for this volume of attention is to not play. So in 2020, Joe Biden is the least online.

• 52:53Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 52:54Ezra Klein?

  And the least attentionally sophisticated or even interested.

• 52:57Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Ezra Klein?

  Of any of the Democrats running for president. And I don't think that is unrelated.

• 53:04Chris Hayes?

  To him winning.

• 53:05Ezra Klein?

  To why he won in 2020, certainly won in the primary and possibly even won in the general, because he had lots of problems as a candidate. He was, I think, too old to be running, you know, effectively even then, or at least very much on the edge. But, and he was diminished from what he once was. But his sense of the electorate had not been driven mad.

• 53:26Chris Hayes?

  Malformed, yes, that's a great point.

• 53:28Ezra Klein?

  And so he didn't get on board with a bunch of dumb things other people are getting on board with.

• 53:32Chris Hayes?

  That's a great point.

• 53:34Ezra Klein?

  You know, we're kind of implying that like the right strategy here is an embrace in the way, some kind of alternative, but still embrace like what we're seeing from Trump and Musk. Maybe it's the opposite.

• 53:45Chris Hayes?

  And think about this for, you know, after Bush won in 2004, when there was a version of the discourse we're going through now, the idea is like, you know what we need? A black guy with a foreign sounding name who is a former professor and community organizer.

• 54:02Ezra Klein?

  Constitutional law professor.

• 54:03Chris Hayes?

  Like, that was ludicrous. Like, what we need is like a guy you can have a beer with who also has a ranch. And like, that's what we need. And it was like, no, we needed something totally different.

• 54:13Ezra Klein?

  Two things. One, I think it is important, again, to distinguish between like, what is this doing to people more broadly and what is it doing to political professionals?

• 54:20Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 54:20Ezra Klein?

  You know? And I think it's extremely dangerous for political professionals to read social media as representative of the public. I also think you shouldn't just ignore it as online or Twitter is not real life, because increasingly there is no distinction between the two. But.

• 54:36Chris Hayes?

  There are different selves that we have. There's a self that wants to read a novel and the self that scrolls Instagram. There's, you know, the self that doesn't want to eat that third cookie and the self that does eat the third cookie. There are different publics too, in that same way. Within the public, there's a public that feels very compassionate towards immigrants, feels proud of America being a nation of immigrants. And there's a public that is, feels like they're being ripped off and invaded. And sometimes it was the same people, often they're the same people. But Farrell's whole point is that these, these publics are formed collectively. So I think it's important, A, that political professionals don't make this simple representational mistake, which I agree with you, has led to a lot of poor choices.

• 55:17Chris Hayes?

  Like, people on this social media platform are screaming to me about this means there's some constituency behind them. And yet, as the line between reality and online breaks down, the vanguard of people screaming really do have cultural significance.

• 55:37Ezra Klein?

  That's true, but here's one of my big theories, and we'll know in four, eight years if I'm right. I think we are ready or very near ready. And I see it in the states and counties banning phones in schools and just like the discourse for true backlash. And

• 55:54Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 55:55Ezra Klein?

  I think that the next really successful Democrat, although it could be a Republican, is going to be oppositional to it. In the way that when Barack Obama ran in 08, and I really think people forget this part of his appeal, he ran against cable news, against 24-hour news cycles, against political consultants, right? People didn't like the structure and feeling of political tension then. And I don't think there was anywhere near the level of disgust and concern and feeling that we were being corroded in our souls that there is now. And I think that at some point, you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling, right?

• 56:37Ezra Klein?

  That they are going to run not against Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up.

• 56:41Chris Hayes?

  But all of it.

• 56:41Ezra Klein?

  They're going to run against all of it, that like, society and modernity and politics shouldn't feel like this. And some of that will be banning phones in schools, right? It'll have a dimension that is policy, but some of it is going to be just absolutely like radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves. I mean, your book has a lot of this in it. I think that political space is weirdly open, but it seems very clear to me somebody's gonna grab it.

• 57:09Chris Hayes?

  I, I could not agree more, even before we get to politics, you know, thorough for president.

• 57:16Ezra Klein?

  But not thorough, I, I really think this is important, right? It's not somebody.

• 57:19Chris Hayes?

  It's, well, you can't drop out and run for president.

• 57:21Ezra Klein?

  It's not somebody who is withdrawing and wants to live on a leg.

• 57:24Chris Hayes?

  Obviously.

• 57:24Ezra Klein?

  There are people like that, right? It's more like John Height.

• 57:27Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Ezra Klein?

  Right? It's more like what he is channeling, I mean, but channeled into politics, which is an actual anger at it.

• 57:33Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Ezra Klein?

  It is not supposed to feel this way, right? I don't think, it's just gonna be like, we're gonna get rid of tech talk, but it is gonna be something about this culture and society has fallen.

• 57:45Chris Hayes?

  I, I think it's a keen insight, I agree, and what I thought about is like, sometimes you'll read historical dispatches from like, peak industrial London, and people are just being like, this is the most disgusting place that has ever been put on God's earth. Like, it's, it's just sewage and coal ash in the sky.

• 58:07Ezra Klein?

  Satanic mills.

• 58:08Chris Hayes?

  Just satanic mills, the just, the sheer stench, and just like, what have we done? How far from God we have fallen in this shit? And they were right, like, it's genuinely, it was genuinely disgusting. And, you know, it did reach a point with all of these things, particularly the worst depredations of the industrial revolution, where people had enough, and they, you know, having enough represented in a million different political tendencies, cultural movements, manifestations, and in the course of writing this book, I mean, literally, from the conceptualization of this book for an essay that I wrote, you know, 2022 to this book coming out now, we've already moved a tremendous amount. I mean, when I first started telling people about this book, they're like, huh, attention, huh?

• 58:53Chris Hayes?

  And now it's like, right.

• 58:54Ezra Klein?

  Saying, I've been obsessed with this for years.

• 58:56Chris Hayes?

  Well, you have, for sure, yes, yes. And I think you and I are predisposed to be obsessed with it because the universe in which we operate is like...

• 59:05Chris Hayes?

  We're constantly trying to sort of screen information, get the good information, protect our attention, try to think in a way that's productive. But I just think the ubiquity of this, I mean, yes, I think there is an unwellspring, an untapped wellspring for a total rebellion against the way it feels to be inside your mind at this particular moment with this particular form of attention capitalism.

• 59:32Ezra Klein?

  And the way it feels to be inside, like the collective's mind.

• 59:36Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 59:37Ezra Klein?

  Even, I know a good number of Trump supporters, and they may like him, but they don't like how, not how he feels, but how all this feels.

• 59:44Chris Hayes?

  No, no one likes it.

• 59:45Ezra Klein?

  Right, nobody likes it.

• 59:46Chris Hayes?

  No one likes it.

• 59:47Ezra Klein?

  And that, like, that is there, right? It's a thing that Obama was very good at working with. That is there in its modern version, I think, to derive energy from. Before any of that happens, though, he's going to be president again, you've probably heard.

• 1:00:01Chris Hayes?

  I'm just, I'm just hearing this now.

• 1:00:03Ezra Klein?

  I'm sure you're thinking about this. How's your coverage of Trump in 2025 and his White House, knowing everything we know about the way attention works under his presidency? Going to be different than it was in 2017?

• 1:00:16Chris Hayes?

  The one thing that I tried really hard in the first term, which I thought was important, and I think I mostly succeeded at, but certainly not always, was modulation. That, to me, is a central question of modulation. If you turn the dial on the stereo to 10 and leave it there, it will sound like 5 eventually. And then you can't turn it up past 10. And this was something I, I was intentional about the first time, but I think even more intentional now. And I think you see some of this, like, literally no one's saying anything about Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. It's fine, that's fine.

• 1:00:52Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Chris Hayes?

  That's a perfectly, that's fine.

• 1:00:55Ezra Klein?

  I mean, wouldn't be my choice, but I don't get to choose and wouldn't be a Democratic president's choice. And that's not to say that like, no one should raise any concerns. Let me ask you something about the negativity bias and the incentives it sets up. Obviously, the future of the Republican Party is not highly determined by what MSNBC hosts say about different Trump appointees. But there is something about a world where Marco Rubio gets no coverage for being a, who knows what kind of Secretary of State he'll be, but plausibly a more normal, thoughtful. Marco Rubio as a politician works hard and like tries to think about ideas. Is also genuinely qualified for the job.

• 1:01:35Ezra Klein?

  Yes. Compared to a Pete Hegseth, or a RFK Junior, or Tulsi Gabbard, right? In this world where we say that there is value to attention, and we give all this attentional resource to the worst people, making them more valuable to Trump and squeezing out the like, is there actually like a bad incentive system being set up by that? Like, I've never known what to do with this thought, which I've had for a long time. Because on the one hand, you can't just ignore the terrible things happening in government. That's a dereliction of what we're here to do. Right. And on the other hand, if you believe that just giving things attention is to give them energy, to only cover the terrible things happening in government, is to not empower like the Doug Burgums and Marco Rubios in the future. Like, there feels like some

• 1:02:20Ezra Klein?

  tension here that the media's never known what to do with. I think that's interesting. I mean, I think that, I don't have a worked out theory for how to deal with that, but I think it's a good point. I have a broader thing I've been thinking about a lot. This phrase that is like on a brainstorming notepad of mine, and I've thought about a million versions of it. The phrase is the opposite of doom. And I think about this a lot, because I think that we live in a doom-obsessed time, doom scrolling.

• 1:02:49Chris Hayes?

  We do not live in an age in which we have a conception of the opposite of doom. We do not live in an age where we have a lot of conceptualizations of utopias. You know, there's different ages where all sorts of different people are planning their utopias. Spiritual leaders, architects, political leaders, this is it. This is what it's going to look like when we figure it all out. No one does that anymore. I mean, literally, no one does that. Like, I can't think of a modern, contemporary version of utopia. Maybe in some version, the sort of Trump, I'll fix everything, personalist is the closest we get. Personalist vision of fixing everything. And the reason I think about this is I think it's probably really important to us in our collective

• 1:03:30Chris Hayes?

  public and individually to put our attention towards a vision of what we think something great would be. And it relates to this question about the individual coverage decisions, which are absolutely affected by negativity bias, like 100%. And conflict, too. Like, there's a fight over Exath, as there should be. And there's not a fight over Rubio, and the conflict drives the news. I mean, that's as old as news. But the reason I bring all this up is because I sometimes think about it just in terms of, like, putting attention on things that have worked as opposed to things that haven't worked. So not so much about individuals or members of the cabinet. But like, I was thinking about this the other day.

• 1:04:11Chris Hayes?

  Like, 30 years ago, it just was inconceivable we would cure HIV/AIDS. It's amazing that we essentially have. And we've done it through the labor and work of people across all sectors of society over the course of decades that took a thing that just felt horrible and intractable and made it so much better. And there's just so much less attention on those stories. And I think it is making it harder and harder for us to conceptualize that it is possible, even.

• 1:04:48Chris Hayes?

  To do good things and to solve problems.

• 1:04:50Ezra Klein?

  All right, I have a lot of thoughts on this.

• 1:04:53Ezra Klein?

  One is that, I mean, you and I both know, there have been a million efforts in journalism to do solutions-based journalism.

• 1:05:00Chris Hayes?

  Yes, good news.

• 1:05:01Ezra Klein?

  Good news journalism. And they don't work in part, not that they don't work at all.

• 1:05:05Chris Hayes?

  No, but they're.

• 1:05:07Ezra Klein?

  And this is a, as you make the point of, you know, at the beginning of this conversation and often in your book, attention is a business. So when they don't work, your cable news show gets replaced, right? With somebody who will do doom.

• 1:05:20Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 1:05:22Ezra Klein?

  On the other hand, one of the things I really believe about the podcasting world, one thing that makes me very hopeful about it is these podcasts have built huge, unbelievably huge audiences, not being primarily about doom.

• 1:05:36Chris Hayes?

  Agreed.

• 1:05:37Ezra Klein?

  Right? They don't actually have a big negativity bias. They're very hopeful, they're futuristic. The obvious thing to say is the opposite of doom is hope. But I think the opposite of doom is curiosity. At least in this respect. I don't think it's utopia. I think it's something about curiosity, interest, beauty. Doom is a belief that we know how things are going to go.

• 1:05:56Chris Hayes?

  Mm hmm. Comforting in its own way because of that.

• 1:05:59Ezra Klein?

  Comforting in its own way because of that. And mystery feels to me like an opposite of doom.

• 1:06:05Chris Hayes?

  That's good.

• 1:06:05Ezra Klein?

  And that there is a dimension here where I think what has gone wrong in a lot of this journalism is it feels hokey and cliche and it has, you know, it is actually too much the opposite of doom. When the problem is like, you want to be on another dimension entirely that like, if the only question is, things go good, things go bad, things go bad is more tension grabbing. If the question is, things go bad or are there UFOs?

• 1:06:33Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 1:06:34Ezra Klein?

  Things go bad or like this novelist speaks unbelievably beautiful. Cause I see the known, you know, the ratings of this show.

• 1:06:40Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Ezra Klein?

  I can get very high downloads for Trump episodes and very high, pretty over time, downloads for a novelist who describes a world in a really beautiful way. I don't think the opposite of doom is hope or good things or utopia. I think for this, for attention.

• 1:06:56Chris Hayes?

  It's curiosity.

• 1:06:57Ezra Klein?

  It's curiosity, it's interest. Like, it's like, oh, have you ever thought about it this way? Or isn't that weird?

• 1:07:02Chris Hayes?

  I want to make a point that I'm afraid is like boringly technical after what you just said, which I am chewing on. I also think the technological infrastructure of podcasts matters tremendously. That line from, I forget who wrote, wherever you get your podcasts is a radical statement. That the fact that podcasts have built audiences largely outside of algorithmic feeds, have built them through an open protocol called RSS, that that technical backbone actually matters for precisely what you're talking about. Part of the reason podcasts have flourished, two, three hour podcasts, podcasts with novelists about obscure topics, long solo monologues about history, I mean, all sorts of stuff,

• 1:07:46Chris Hayes?

  is because they're not embedded in the same technical attentional marketplace. And I think that really matters a lot. And I think it's actually really hopeful, because I think one of the things to remember here, and this is really an important point. Everyone has wiped this from their memory, but the first version of the mass internet was an entirely commercially engineered mass internet with Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. AOL emerges the winner. AOL acquired Time Warner. AOL was the belle of the ball in this huge company, and it was a walled garden, and you dialed up and you were in this little world that was curated by these large commercial entities. And that was destroyed, partly ironically, because of Marc Andreessen's development

• 1:08:27Chris Hayes?

  of a graphical user interface to open internet. That rewarded curiosity. That rewarded people connecting about obscure topics. It rewarded hobbyism. It rewarded obsessive, small, little corners of knowledge. It's already been the case once that open internet, animated by curiosity, defeated a closed commercial internet. It doesn't have to be the case that the version of the commercial internet we have now is still the same one. That, to me, is really hopeful, though, you know? Because it's like, we have divided selves, we have divided desires. There's different parts of us that want different things, and different market setups,

• 1:09:09Chris Hayes?

  technical setups, institutional setups can cultivate different parts of those selves. It's not like we lose one part or another. The other part is still there. It's a question about... The systems around us drawing forth those different parts of us or not.

• 1:09:25Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:09:31Chris Hayes?

  So first I'll start with a classic, which is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

• 1:09:34Ezra Klein?

  The Goat.

• 1:09:35Chris Hayes?

  The Goat. In this discourse, I think it still totally holds up. The first chapter, which is-

• 1:09:39Ezra Klein?

  Somewhat predicts Donald Trump.

• 1:09:41Chris Hayes?

  Yes, totally.

• 1:09:41Ezra Klein?

  In an explicit-

• 1:09:42Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 1:09:43Ezra Klein?

  Way.

• 1:09:43Chris Hayes?

  Yes. Totally. Yes. In an explicit way. Also, you know, the first essay, which is just about different versions of dystopian future between 1984, which is information constraint, and Brave New World, which is overflow of entertainment and information about how we ended up in the Brave New World. Great. Another book that has been mentioned on your podcast a lot and relevant, which is, again, I feel like I'm sort of citing canonical texts here, and it's important for me to do because I want to be clear, as we all are as authors, you know, lots of people have been thinking about this very well and very hard. But Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing is a fantastic book. It's strange and distinct and is much more, I would say, like spiritually omnivorous than the book

• 1:10:27Chris Hayes?

  that I've written. More sort of interior in its focus, too, about how you do this work with yourself and with other people as a kind of like collective radical undertaking.

• 1:10:38Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, the form of that book is also the function, because I feel like so much of what books about attention are about is how it homogenizes all of us. And that book, I love that book so much. It is a completely distinct product-

• 1:10:50Chris Hayes?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:51Ezra Klein?

  A completely distinct mine. Like, no other human being would write that book.

• 1:10:53Chris Hayes?

  No other human being would write that book. There's no comp for that book. It is its own thing. And it's also-

• 1:10:58Ezra Klein?

  I love books like that.

• 1:10:59Chris Hayes?

  I love books like that, too. And I also think it's a rare thing to write a nonfiction book where you can't get 85% of the way there by just like hearing the author on a podcast or reading a review. Like, you gotta actually read the book. And then my final is a work of fiction. It's by an author named Tony Tula-Tamudi. It's a book of short stories called Rejection, and it is the bleakest.

• 1:11:22Ezra Klein?

  Not, not, not safe for work, friends.

• 1:11:24Chris Hayes?

  Not safe for work. It is the bleakest and one of the most unremittingly punishing pictures of the hell that we've built for ourselves. And yet, I say this, that doesn't sound like a book you want to read. I absolutely tore through it. I read the whole thing in basically a day and it just stuck with me and I really recommend it highly.

• 1:11:44Ezra Klein?

  One of the most intense reading experiences.

• 1:11:50Chris Hayes?

  There is, there is a 10 to 12 page granular description of a sexual fantasy in this book that your full body will be basically, you will like hit a point of physical paralysis as you read this, but also can't stop reading and also are so amused. It's so funny and it's so dark. I've never read anything like it.

• 1:12:15Ezra Klein?

  Chris Hayes, your book is great. I recommend it to everybody. Thank you.

• 1:12:18Chris Hayes?

  Thank you.

• 1:12:38Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klontz Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with the team Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristen Lynn. We've original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samulski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.