The Formula for Capturing Your Attention, Price of Fame, & Algorithms as Editors — With Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes is the author of The Siren's Call: How Attention Became The World's Most Endangered Resource and the host of MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his No. 1 bestselling book, digging into why he wrote it, how news differs from social platforms (and to what degree), and why We also cover the strange psychology of fame, how figures like Trump and Musk weild attention for political power, and why most social platforms are seeing declining user engagement despite their algorithmic optimization. Hit play for a conversation that reveals why our relationship with technology resembles our relationship with food — a biological necessity transformed into an unhealthy craving that reflects deeper voids in modern life. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  MSNBC host Chris Hayes is here to talk with us about attention, online fame, and what it's doing to all of us. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference costs by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today, we're joined by Chris Hayes. He is the MSNBC host of All In with Chris Hayes and the author of the number one bestselling

• 1:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  new book, The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. It's gonna be a great show, and so excited to welcome Chris. Chris, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  It's great to be here.

• 1:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you wrote a whole book about attention. It's a number one New York Times bestseller. And I just find it funny that a cable news TV guy wrote a book about attention.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Why? Because, because I, well, to me, it makes perfect sense because the whole reason I wrote the book. Is precisely because all I do is work on getting and holding people's attention.

• 1:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, the weird thing to me is.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  The craft of it.

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the weird thing to me is that like, yeah, you're you are warning a little bit about how our attention is being exploited while at the same time doing that in your day job. And look, I understand that you're like the one that would tell us about it the most. But that was this one thing that I found kind of interesting as I was reading it is like all these companies are working to gather your attention and they're exploiting it. And that's what cable news does and you even admit it in the book.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, although I think it actually is kind of different. Like, one of the things I would say, two things. One is that I think it's possible to do do good work in any medium. Like, there are people who do great stuff on TikTok, great stuff on Instagram reels. There are people posting on Blue Sky and X and Threads that I like learn from. There are amazing YouTube videos that I've learned a ton from. So like, I think it's important to strike to separate out the like, content that people are making within the structural confines and then the overall structure of those attention markets.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  And so I think that that that's an important distinction. Like, you can do good work in cable news, the same way you can do good work on YouTube and good work in TikTok. There's a question of what is the overall structural genre do and what its intentional incentives are. But I also think there's something specific about the current universe of algorithmic-driven platforms that's distinct from network TV, from cable news, from a lot of stuff.

• 3:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, look, full disclosure, I also work in cable cable news. I'm a CNBC contributor, so I'm on TV about once a week. So I'm not like throwing rocks.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right.

• 3:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it is interesting and you even talk about in your book, just the way, and we're going to get into big tech, but the way that you hold people's attention through the hour or through a couple hours on TV. So before we move on to big tech, I just want you to share a little bit, because I found it interesting, how cable news does hold our attention. The most interesting thing to me is like, you describe this view that people have that it's up to the anchors, but it's really up to the audience.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's both, right? I mean, I think that basically, one of the things you learn is that attention and attentional flows and interest are these sort of forces that are outside of your control. They kind of like move in and out like the wind and then you try to do with them what you can. But in terms of how you do hold attention, I mean, one of the things I write about in the book is that there's sort of these different methods, even on screen in a cable news show. Like, the, the open to the show is sort of loud, and, you know, I got this loud announcer voice, we're like, "Quick, cut, quick, quick, quick, cut." We're trying to, it's like the headline for a story, right? We're trying to grab your attention off the top. And then on the screen, there's all these like, constant sources of visual stimulus that are designed for attention. There used to be the crawl, we don't have the crawl anymore, but there's like, the

• 4:44Speaker 01

  lower thirds, they're alternating, like, there's constantly some new visual stimulus, right? So that's happening formally, and then what I'm trying to do is like, hold people's attention through, basically, the ancient craft of rhetoric, where I'm trying to tell a story, do it in a compelling way, introduce narrative tension, introduce resolution, have revelations, ethos, pathos, logos, like, all that stuff. And those two approaches are kind of side by side in the square of the screen.

• 5:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was interesting to read you outline some of the things that we all see all the time, but maybe we don't pick up. In that open, that big announcer voice, like, as I've evolved this podcast, this podcast is five years old, and as I started it, I was like, "Welcome to Big Technology Podcast." And then I said, "Oh, no, we need that ramped up opening, because you see the audience data, they leave if there's not this engaging beginning." Also, the TV cuts, like, you mentioned in your book, every couple seconds, it's a cut from a tight shot to a wide shot, to a tight shot, to a graphic.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  To, right, to B-roll, right? Like, that's the, that's the classic cable thing, like, you don't have, you don't have that much visual stasis. Even though I personally love visual stasis, like, I write in the book that, like, I once told a television executive that my, my aesthetic pinnacle was The Charlie Rose Show, where there's just like, black behind him, and then there's him and a guest, and that's it. And I could see this, like, look of, like, terror in the eyes of the executive I was telling this, because it was in a conversation where I was getting my show about, like, what should my show look like? And it was just like, "No, no, no, that doesn't work."

• 6:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and look, even for this show, we've been doing video recently for Spotify and YouTube, and I'm learning to edit, and it's like, "Oh, I'm actually leaving it sometimes on the shot a little too long, we do need to alternate it a bunch." And, you know, to me, I think that, as you were going through this story, you're talking about, how do you hold people's attention? And you really were very forthcoming in describing the show's early challenges, where you said, "I'm gonna do the show that I wanna do,"

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then your ratings suffered, and so then you had to learn to listen to the audience.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I think I thought that, I think I thought incorrectly that the idea that there was some exogenous demand was totally a fiction and that you could just point the audience in the direction you wanted them to and make them care about anything. And I think at some level of genuine brilliance and skill, that's probably true. Like, the better you are, the more you can do obscure topics. I think now that I've done this for 12 years, I'm probably better at getting people's attention for things that they wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. I think Rachel Maddow is like amazing at doing that. Really, really gifted storytellers can do that. Adam McKay did a whole movie about climate change. It was like an enormous hit.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  But you also have to take seriously this sense of audience interest. And you have to deal with it and wrestle with it and work with it and against it however you choose to, but you have to start with understanding it's a real thing.

• 7:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Like for us, I did a bunch of newsletters early on in big technology history about big tech regulation. And I thought telling the story behind the story of big tech regulation was going to be the thing that built an audience. Turns out, nobody cared. Now we're talking about AI all the time. It's very relevant to people's lives, to people's businesses. And so, yeah, there is that listening to the audience, but you can work within what they want a little bit. I think that's an interesting point that you point out as well.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I'd be curious to hear you talk about this because one of the things I think that's really fascinating about how media has evolved is that older forms of media have more layers between the people making the stuff and the people whose job it is to like look at the numbers. And that's all collapsed into one person. So like independent creators now who are on Substack, they know exactly the data. They get the data. This piece I wrote tanked. This piece I wrote did really well. And not only do they get the data, which has been true since Chartbeat and the last, their livelihoods depend on it at a certain point, right? Like, I'm now, my livelihood depends on the Substack. And if I write this kind of article, it generates revenue and subscribers. If I write this kind of article, it doesn't.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  A reporter at the New York Times is insulated from that. Like, they have a salary. Their livelihood doesn't go up or down. Like, there's a certain degree to which traffic is a coin of the realm institutionally. But they don't have like a direct monetary incentive in maximizing attention. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about the new media landscape is that those attentional incentives, which I felt in intense but somewhat attenuated ways in cable news, are now on every single individual creator.

• 9:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, as someone who's doing a Substack, I can say that my life probably resembles yours in some way, in the professional sense, where like, I'm sure you get the print out of the hour, you see which segments did well, which segments didn't, and you adjust. And you, maybe not for every single segment, but you follow what the audience is telling you, and you have to go with them to a certain extent. Now, maybe they're interested in a topic, and you say, I'm gonna do this in a way that nobody did, maybe with more nuance, and then they're gonna respond to it. That's my responsibility, but you are guided by what the audience is interested in.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Do you find, there's also like the interesting surprise and discovery of that. You know, sometimes, a thing that you wouldn't have anticipated blows up, which is always a kind of pleasant feeling. If you do something that, we've done things, and more now I can see this when it like kind of goes viral online, or if I do a segment that reaches out past the concentric circles of like regular viewers to people in my life who don't watch cable news, who are like, oh, I saw that thing. And that, that can be an interesting metric, too, of a kind of attentional success that is, can be very gratifying, particularly if it's something that you did that you weren't doing because you thought that's what people were gonna like, you know?

• 10:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt. I mean, if you're doing this work, you do need a seat in with things that you're interested in, that may not be guaranteed moneymakers.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 10:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right? I mean, you could do the cynical way of doing a Substack or a podcast and do well, but ultimately, I don't know, we're not gonna make as much as like an engineer would that I cover. So like, to me, it's, I don't, I'm willing to sacrifice money if I'm gonna be like, alright, let me try to follow my curiosity this way.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's also because, and this is a key point when I make in the book, someone like yourself, someone like myself, all these different people who are doing this kind of work, right? You're not doing it just for attention in and of itself. There's something else you want to do, you want to say, you want to inform people, you're interested in topics. There's another set of values that are driving these decisions. The decisions are informed by these attentional imperatives. What will get attention, what will hold attention, what will iteratively create these relationships in which people will pay attention to your work? But that is not the end of it, right? That's the means to some end. What's different about the way the platforms operate is that they have no other end.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Like TikTok exists for no other purpose than to maximize the total amount of seconds of attention in the aggregated cam. Same for Meta, it's the same for Snapchat to a certain extent, it's the same for Google. They don't have a purpose other than this purpose. And I think that actually is part of the kind of toxicity or alienation that these platforms produce, which is in other human contexts, attention is a means to an end. In those contexts, it's just the end in of itself.

• 12:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm not going to take the platform side here, but I am going to push back on you because what you're saying makes a lot of sense in theory. But in reality, the discussion that we just had about how we listen to the audience and how we see different things in, it actually works a lot like the TikTok algorithm works, where it follows its audience. And the algorithm will, you know, moment by moment decide, is this a time that I try something new? Like it says, I know Chris likes carpet cleaning, right? So it's going to give you like the carpet, they're going to give you carpet cleaning. This is true, by the way, everybody, this is in the book, that carpet cleaning videos are one of Chris's favorites. And it's going to be like, all right, well, this guy's definitely going to like grass mowing. But then it's going to take it like.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  I don't like grass mowing as much.

• 12:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, exactly, but it will show you the videos and then it might show you a video of a dam being cleared.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Right, but my point is that it's not, that's not, that algorithmic choice, first of all, it's not showing me anything. It's just a machine learning algorithm that's like working on these things, right? But it's not doing it towards any purpose. Like if I'm trying to show my audience things, it's because I, Chris Hayes, a human being, with an embodied sense of purpose and things he wants to do in a world, a set of commitments, a worldview and principles, things I think that are important for people to know in self-governance, is trying to negotiate that attention for that purpose. The TikTok algorithm has no purpose other than that attentional purpose. And this is true even of like media companies, even NBC News or ABC News, or Hollywood producers and directors. Like, they want big hits, yes.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  But they're also, they're also human beings that have like, I like to make comedies. I want to launch this star. Like, there are other things. It is impossible for the algorithm to possess that other thing.

• 13:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Like, as a definitional matter.

• 13:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Without a doubt, for me, well, actually, no, they, they do change the algorithm, like Facebook.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yes, totally.

• 13:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Facebook said, we want less news because we want less disputes. And so the entire Facebook platform, by the way, now they want more news again. It turns out news is engaging and has a lot of urgency. So there are, there are editors. And this, by the way, this always drove me nuts about the platforms, that they were like, we're not editors. And it's just the algorithm, like, give me a break. You're editors and you are making those choices. The same as, and by the way, isn't this the big thing that people are all afraid about with TikTok? That there are editors in China who are making decisions about what our attention now. Obviously, not proven yet, that's the worry. Could they? Will they? We don't know. Still, people want it banned, which I understand.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  But...

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, when you were saying that, I almost, when I was listing off the platforms, I almost included X in that platform, in that. But that's not true, because X very clearly has an objective other than attention, which is the political project of its owner.

• 14:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? So like, there's a place where like, yes, that attention is being aggregated for a specific political project. That political project is informed by what Elon Musk's politics are and what he wants to use the platform for. Although it also is a testament to, and this goes back to the worries about TikTok, right? The pooled and aggregated aggregated attention of users at that scale is so profoundly powerful that it's profoundly powerful in market terms if you're engineering the algorithm solely for the purpose of maximizing eyeballs, but it can be really valuable in other terms if you're using it for other ends, right?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  If in the sort of worst case scenario of the kind of China hawks who pushed the TikTok bill that the Chinese Communist Party is like, well, we've got, we've got the eyes of 70 million young Americans, we can make them believe anything. Or in the case of X, where I think you really have seen the platform used for a specific political purpose.

• 15:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm gonna let this go in a moment, but this is interesting. I think we should continue to talk about this. I'm not taking the platform side here. I see what you're saying, but how is that different from what the news does? You have Elon who has a political idea. Let's say, let's say that everything about TikTok is true. You have the Chinese Communist Party who's steering our attention. Then you have news organizations, let's say you have MSNBC, which is more left leaning, you have Fox, more right leaning, they have a point of view and they're pushing it that way and they're responding to the audience in the same way. So where's the distinction?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. I don't, I don't, in some ways, I don't think what Musk is doing is that different than what Rupert Murdoch has done. Which are both attentional plays, right? I think there are a few distinguishing effects of like this tier and tranche of digital technology. The first is the scale is truly unprecedented. Like, no one, no networks ever had a billion viewers. Like, you're just, you just have never operated at that scale before. Like, these platforms operated at a scale that no one's ever seen before. The ubiquity is totally unprecedented, too. You have never had the constant access day in, day out, wherever you are at any time,

• 16:57Speaker 01

  to the possibility of putting your attention on this, right? You could carry a newskeeper or a book around with you, but eventually that ends, but you've got this thing at all times, right? So that's distinct, too. And then the third aspect that I really think is important, that's, that really gets a part of our wiring that is distinct, is the social particularized aspect of these platforms that can speak to you specifically as a person, in your mentions, can have you interact with other people.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  I can speak to the viewer, but I'm still doing a broadcast thing. Like, I don't have access to that granular sense of social attention. And I try to speak to them, like I'm talking to you, or like I'm talking across a kitchen table. But it's limited by the technology. The kind of breakthrough moment in some ways is being able to scale social attention that all of these platforms can now do, which I think makes it a sort of distinct kind of operation.

• 17:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Social attention, your definition is when someone says your name, you're paying attention?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like, you know, this, it's called the cocktail party effect. But it's also the fact that you can, um, that the simple fact that people can pay attention to you. And the fact that the only people that really pay attention to you for the formative years of your life are people that you have some relationship with. They're people that you know and they know you. You can pay attention to people that you don't know, like you can moon after a boy band or, you know, have a favorite actress or musician, right? But the experience that you don't have is people you don't know paying attention to you. Incoming social attention from strangers. Very, very, very small percentage of all human beings ever have had it. We call it fame.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  There's a great book by Leo Brody on this called, um, there's a great book by Leo Brody on this, which is the, the sort of history of fame. And it's almost a cliche for a reason that fame makes people go crazy. The reason fame makes people go crazy is because we're not conditioned properly to deal with social attention from strangers. What we have done is democratized the madness of fame for everyone. Now everyone can have an inflow of social attention from strangers at a scale and ubiquity that was completely inconceivable for the entirety of human, humanity until like 10 years ago.

• 19:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so let's talk about this fame aspect because I do have some pushback on that part. Uh, but I do want to hear your experience with fame because you speak about it pretty candidly in the book about what it was like to go from someone who saw people looking at you and you're like, nah, they must not know me to now. Like you can see them out of the corner of your eyes. And you're like, oh yeah, they probably know me from the TV show. So what has becoming a famous person been like? And what are the trade offs?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I mean, the interesting thing about fame in this era is it's incredibly relative, right? Because different people have different levels of fame. So people recognize me because I have a TV show.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  At first, there's something kind of addictive and beguiling, but also strange and alienating about like the gaze of strangers recognizing you. And you could also see in them that they're, they're going through a strange experience because often our facial recognition circuitry is so profound and powerful that we recognize a face before we can place it. And so they'll have this sense where they're like, oh, did you work at Bank of America? Did we go to college together? Were we like, they're trying to place you and there's this familiarity that doesn't match the fact they don't know you. And then there's often this moment of like, oh, right. I don't actually know you. Like, and it's this sort of amazing moment where you're seeing the human wiring that

• 20:40Speaker 01

  was like bored of 250,000 years of evolution hit up against the strangeness of modern technology. In terms of the incoming experience, I think that it can make you, it can make you vain. It can make you very aware of how other people are perceiving you. There's a level at which like, even if you walk, if you leave the house and like you're unkempt, which I never would have thought of before, like, who cares? But you definitely like, the loss of anonymity means that you then are viewing yourself through someone else's gaze at all times, which is a strange thing. Now, of course, I think it's fair to say that like, almost every woman who lives in the world has experienced some version of this.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  So like, it's a little weird for me to be like, oh, it's weird to like, have a gaze upon you. It's like, yes, that is the existence of being female in most parts of the world and through history. So for me, it was new. But I also think that, that seeing yourself through someone else's eyes as a default state can be a very alienating, out of body experience. It's like that moment everyone has when you go into a dressing room and there's a mirror at a weird angle and you see an angle of yourself you haven't seen before and you're like, oh, what's that? Is that me? Yeah, is that me? It's like, that experience, that weirdness that you feel like a lot, all the time, where

• 22:03Speaker 01

  you're constantly moving between the first person positionality. So that's the experience of like fame specifically, but one of the contentions I have is that like, The internet is democratizing and scaling exactly that experience.

• 22:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  That the weirdness of that is actually happening at scale all the time to people who are now, really for the first time, getting that kind of feedback and being seen by others, they don't know.

• 22:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, I'm on air way less than you, like by, I'm a tiny, teeny tiny fraction, but I've definitely had the experience.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  People recognize you, I'm sure.

• 22:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where people are like, I, we work together and it's like, I don't want to be like, you might know me from CNBC, like you might have seen it on the airport, maybe it's on in your office. But it is always kind of funny because like you know in the back of your head.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  You know what it is.

• 22:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is probably what it is.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Actually, this is funny. I had a migration in this because I used to play dumb. And now I just say, because then the interaction can get very awkward. Like, do we, I know, I know. Were you a Bank of America? No.

• 23:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Syracuse University? No. Where do you live? They start to like go through. So now it's just like, if they're like, I'm like, I have a TV show.

• 23:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  And it's like, oh.

• 23:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  So yeah, this idea that it could happen to everybody. I think, let me put this to you. Isn't this assuming that we all post a lot?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 23:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let me just give you some data.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  About who posts and who doesn't post?

• 23:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is from 2015.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, Facebook is, this is from Inc., there's a great story about it, aggregating the information. Facebook has shifted into crisis mode. Original broadcast sharing, posts of, consisting of users' own words and images, fell 21% from 2014 to 2015, contributing to a 5.5 decrease in total sharing. That was 10 years ago.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  We could, I think we could both agree that original sharing from people has fallen dramatically. In fact, most users of social media, I would argue, are lurkers.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Are lurkers, yeah.

• 24:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are lurkers.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, this idea that the internet is making us all famous, you know, like then commanding our attention, is that really true if most of us aren't posting at all?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. First of all, I think there's also a lot of commenting that's happening. And the, and the commenting stuff that happens is that same sort of

• 24:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  social attention from strangers. Like you see so much of TikTok as these sort of wars with commenting. I also think that like teens have this relationship where they're like, Through different circles, kind of regulating these spaces that are in between strangers, but not close people, particularly through the way that Snapchat works. So like Snapchat is basically all user-generated content. Like, people aren't really posting that kind of stuff on Snapchat. And that's where like, a huge generation of people are having their most intense experiences of this. And I think there's a fair amount that's happening there of like, incoming from people that may not be strangers, but are also like, at an interesting remove. The other thing I would say is that like, I think the experience of it for even lurkers

• 25:04Speaker 01

  has absolutely transformed like, social hierarchies and status aspirations. How? There's all this polling that shows like, people want to be influencers. Like, the social status of getting attention has unquestionably risen enormously over the last 30 or 40 years. I mean, particularly if you think back to like, the greatest generation, through the boomers, through Gen X to now. It is, it is, in all the polling we have, the idea of fame, or social attention in the aggregate as an aspiration, has rocketed up in how people think of it. And then, the other, the other way that I think is having this utterly profound effect, even if like, the actual user base of people posting isn't, you know, isn't that broad,

• 25:48Speaker 01

  the possibility still exists, A. But B, a lot of the most powerful people's minds are being conditioned by precisely this cycle. Like, Elon Musk, the most powerful private citizen in America. Maybe in the world? Probably in the world. Yeah, the most powerful private citizens in the world. Everything about how his brain functions, and how his behavior, is conditioned by precisely the kind of like, weird vortex of social attention that is the like, the posters quicksand. And I think that's true for more and more people that you see, across the sort of commanding heights of, you know, culture, and, and business, and all these places. So-

• 26:33Speaker 01

  It's conditioning the elite as well, even if like a lot of people are lurkers.

• 26:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that I agree with. I think it's conditioning the elite, without a doubt. But this idea of the common man's poster, so to speak, is really going extinct. Because we've now even, you take X, you take even Facebook today. It's not friends and family updates. There's gonna be more news, but it's becoming a for you page. There's this full TikTok-ification.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Driving out, yeah, the TikTok-ification, yeah. Yeah, and I think that partly this stuff moves pretty quickly, you know? Like, Facebook used to be, you know, it was way less TikTok-ified. It was way more like posting about...

• 27:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Friends and family.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Friends and family, or even like Nextdoor, or like, you know.

• 27:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  It just goes to show you, though, that if this was so powerful, why did the Facebook Blue app kind of fall out of favor? Because we were all tagging each other. We were getting this attention.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think in some ways that there's a kind of, this sort of learning process. And I basically think that the TikTok model, which is like short-form video married to machine learning, is the like, the way that slot machines out-compete everything on a casino floor, I just think that like out-compete's everything.

• 27:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  That wins. Yeah, I mean, we're gonna clip this episode and put it up on social.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Totally, and podcasts, I mean, it'll be really interesting to see how much that drives podcasts. Every podcast now getting a video. Why are they getting a video? So they could clip it and put it on social. Is, what is that going to do as a podcast as this long-form medium on an open platform? We'll see, right?

• 28:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  I actually, so I have some experience with this. The video that people watch of shows, people will stick around and watch it. It's really crazy, because again, we're talking about this attention world, and I agree with you that we're like, our attention is fractured, and it's being split into these little things. But I think, just like you wrote a book, number one bestseller about this stuff, people have the attention span to sit and watch long podcasts.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 28:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just like this. People will watch this.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Totally. No, no, I agree.

• 28:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if we don't post the video, they're gonna say, "Where's the video?"

• 28:37Speaker 01

  And I write about this, I write about this in the book, which is that... Just because you have these sort of algorithmically optimized versions of our attention on one, in one channel, doesn't mean that all the other appetites go away.

• 28:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  The same way that like, the preponderance of McDonald's around the world means that people don't eat a million different kinds of cuisine, right? Like, the question is, we have different kinds of appetites that can be appealed to in different ways, at different scales. And the set of institutions, the structure of markets, the actual specific technologies at play, the degree to which we have protocols that are open or not, right? Whether they're contained within platforms or actually like RSS, which is open. All of that conditions which of those kind of appetites are being cultivated.

• 29:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. There's one thing that you wrote that talked about this, this phenomenon that I felt was so spot on. I think I captured this accurately. What makes life worth living is to be seen, but we are given a facsimile of that, that we're chasing. I mean, anyone who's posted online knows that it's like, it's so empty.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yes. But it feels close to something profound.

• 29:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Is exactly.

• 29:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's so interesting how it resembles it. But ultimately, it's so unsatisfying. And that's why, actually, you talk a little bit about how, when you get thousands of positive comments, okay, rolls right off you, one negative one.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  That hurts.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I also wonder too, I'm thinking about what you said about the sort of like, the drive towards less user-generated content. A wider like poster-to-lurker ratio is basically what you're saying, which is...

• 30:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's my contention.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I wonder too, like, how much... I mean, there's two things that call to mind. One is that the incoming toxicity of that social attention, even if it feels addictive a little bit, also ends up being like, more costly than beneficial, so people stop doing it. See what I'm saying?

• 30:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's 100% why they stop.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just like, oh.

• 30:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  We all posted, when Facebook came out, I know you've been an early internet user, so you've been through this, we all posted on Facebook. Because we felt that facsimile, this is exactly your point. We felt that facsimile of attention, and we thought that it was the real thing. But after a couple of years, we all realized, this is not what I want.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Right. So that, so that, that I think is interesting, because I think it relates to something else, and then finally relates to a sort of final point I want to make, which is, so there's sort of like, there's this appetite it's speaking to, but at a certain point, you start to be like, oh, I feel kind of sick. I've eaten too much junk food, right? Most of the platforms are seeing declines in daily active users. WhatsApp is going up, Snapchat, eh, but like, most of them are going down.

• 31:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Snapchat is going up significantly.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. WhatsApp is the most.

• 31:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Partly because it's a messaging app and not, you know. Snapchat's going up, but the other ones are going down. Even TikTok, right? And I think that like, there is, I, I feel like we're at a terminal point of all the things I'm talking about in the book, like this, this engineered attentional capitalism, for the same reason that like, people started to turn off from posting. I think are going, people are going to start to turn off from the algorithms, from TikTok, like there, we're leading towards a moment of rejection, where people are going to want something different.

• 31:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's a reason why your book is number one. There's a reason why Jonathan Haidt's book sold so well.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's because, even though if I have some points with the main contentions here, people are feeling this disgust with what they experience online.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, and do want change. But there's also like-

• 32:00Speaker 01

  But it's more than online. I mean, the thing about online is like, I, I mean, I-

• 32:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I'm older than you, but like, the idea that there's like this thing online and there's us in the world is incredible, increasingly-

• 32:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it's meshing. It's meshing.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Meshed, you know, like, it's just life. Like, when the, when the thing, when the phone tells you your screen time is whatever, seven hours or whatever, for people, you know, three hours, seven hours, whatever it is, it's like, I was only awake for 14, it's like working for the other. It's like, that's kind of like your life.

• 32:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. But I want to talk to you about one more thing about this, because these discussions, we, we've been talking about how like, the platforms are capturing our attention for 30 minutes already.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  They almost always leave out the agency of people. And actually, what you just broke, brought up about, uh, people spending less time with social apps is like, a pretty interesting counterbalance to this argument, that these platforms are so powerful, like, your book was not a social dilemma type of book, like, they're so powerful that they're holding our attention and we have nothing to do. But be sucked in and they psychologically manipulate us, although there was some of that. Um, but ultimately we have agency.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  You talk about how these things can interrupt our attention flow, uh, just like a waiter dropping a plate.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's like, well, not really, not if we don't let them.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, like we can turn off our notifications. We can, I mean.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Many people don't know how to, I will say.

• 33:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not that hard.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  No, I know, but I'm telling you, I've had these conversations with many people.

• 33:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, then you also said like a couple, uh, maybe, maybe in the same chapter that you're wearing an Apple Watch.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So you have it today.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 33:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  No Apple Watch here. I don't want that to do to me what it can do to my mind.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we make these choices also to engage.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, to my, the, the, the, the title of the book, which is drawn from the Odyssey is, and it starts with Odysseus is on the mast. And the whole point of that is that the sirens that lure the man to his death by warbling him in his ears. And then Odysseus using his agency and will to concoct this plan with Cersei to stuff wax in the ears of his men and bind himself to the mast. Like that binding himself to the mast is the will, right? The, the whole point of the book is that there is a battle between these two imperatives. There's that sort of compelled feeling that both works on the wiring in our brains for compelled attention, which is the haptic buzz of the phone. And then there's the willful part of us that can go into the notifications and turn that off.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And that those two things are sort of in this kind of locked in this tension. And part of the reason that I don't think like we're doomed is precisely because of the willful part of ourselves. Like I, I do think that like, to your point about people not, you know, posting less because it got too negative. Like, I think the fact that people broadly are not enjoying this experience is actually a real problem for, for all of these platforms. I think we're about to have, you know, the, the, I always compare it to food a lot because I think it's attention, hunger function similarly. They're like, they're both biological inheritances, but also reflections of our deep identities, humans. And, you know, I think we're kind of in the like.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Late 70s recipe cookbook Jell-O salad casserole era.

• 35:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  That sounds perfect.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Some people like it.

• 35:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's get some after this. But it's interesting that you bring up food because

• 35:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  sometimes people eat because they're hungry.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oftentimes, people eat because

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Because it's there.

• 35:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, even more so, they want to fill a void.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 35:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  It makes them feel good.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 35:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, America, we comfort food is a big industry here.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yes, totally.

• 35:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there are some parallels, I think, with the phone. So I'm curious what you think about, what it says about the state of the human condition. Or maybe, you know, you focus a lot on the American society, the American condition. That we are so, is it unhappy, that we have such big voids? That we fill them with technology this way? We, you talk a lot about like, how we're so restless, we can't be still.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's wrong with us?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Well, part of it, I think, is, you know, in the chapter that I write a lot about this, in the sort of chapter on boredom, the experience of boredom, like, one of the things I found enjoyable about it is that some of this is just the human condition, or at least the human condition under, sort of what we might broadly call like non-hunter-gatherer life, you know, post-hunter-gatherer life. There's actually some pretty good evidence that like, hunter-gatherer societies don't really experience boredom. But

• 36:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  They don't have a word for it.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  They don't have a word for it. Aboriginal

• 36:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  They just hang.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Aboriginal people do not have a word for it. In fact, I cite this really interesting article by an anthropologist in Australia, who says that like, among the people, the Wapirii people that she studies, when they have to use the word boredom, they use the imported English word boredom, because they don't have the laxia for it naturally in their language.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  So I think there are, it's not necessarily the human condition, but for hundreds of years, going back to non-hunter-gatherer societies, all the way back in some ways to the Buddha sitting under the banyan tree, the Stoics thinking about this, Blaise Pascal in the 16th century, Kierkegaard in the 19th century, like

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Part of our lot is to sit with our own thoughts and figure out what to do with that. And that brings with it a kind of craving for diversion.

• 37:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  It hurts.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 37:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  It hurts.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  It hurts, and I think different technological circumstances cultivate different ways of dealing with that. In the particulars of the American condition, I do think the fact that we are spending more and more time alone as an empirical fact has a fair amount to do with it. And that's both happening here and also generally a trend in societies as they get richer. People spend more and more time alone. And I think there's a pretty profound connection between people spending time alone and people wanting the diversion that the phone or the screen provides.

• 37:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  You had a great anecdote in the book where they asked people if they wanted to just sit in a room alone, or if they wanted a shock.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  They could shock themselves, yeah.

• 37:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And one person decided that they would take 190 shocks.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And in a very short period of time.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yes, like over like 15 minutes or something.

• 38:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  As opposed to sitting with their thoughts.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's another interesting thing about that. There's a big gender divide in that experiment, a psychology experiment at University of Virginia, where like, it's like one-third of women choose to shock themselves and two-thirds of men. Which I think is pretty interesting, and I feel like that dynamic plays out across the internet in all kinds of ways.

• 38:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why do you think it's interesting?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Because I think that there is a pretty profound gender divide in how people relate to technology, and particularly this kind of dopamine-seeking behavior around, like for instance, sports betting right now, which we know is, you know, rocketing up in use and also has an enormous, probably nine-to-one gender divide in who's using it. But it's also true with, I think, other forms of technology. Gaming is one of them, pornography, that are like hitting the button, basically.

• 39:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so you think men are just like, are more masochistic and therefore happier to

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I think men, men, I think for a bunch of complicated reasons, having to do with like, how masculinity is defined, how we're raised, maybe some biological substrate, have a harder time sitting with their own thoughts. Yeah.

• 39:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Would you shock yourself?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  No. But I would be, I would be tempted. I probably would try it once. Yeah, I'd probably try it once.

• 39:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe twice.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think it would depend on how good it felt. I mean, the question is like,

• 39:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Chris, statistically, one of the two of us is gonna sit and shock themselves in that room.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. One in one-third of us, actually.

• 39:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, it's, it's a really interesting question. Like, would I shock myself? I think I probably would just to see. But I do think like, a bunch of people, when I wrote that, when that UVA study was in a, a essay I wrote in the New York Times, it was really interesting, the reaction to that gender point. Like, a lot of people really caught their eyes and there's a lot of sort of interesting discourse that flowed from it.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, speaking of pornography, while I was reading your book, I like, wrote down this kind of snarky thought, but I'll just share it.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is, is it good that we're moving from like a manufacturing economy? We've already, we've, we've left that behind in the US mostly, to an OnlyFans economy?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think,

• 40:35Speaker 01

  I think meme coins and OnlyFans are like the ultimate monetization of these processes. You know, like,

• 40:44Speaker 01

  and they're, they both, I mean, the Haka Tua trajectory was sort of the perfect example in every way. Like, she was not on OnlyFans, but like, she had, she's like a young, conventionally attractive woman. She has a viral moment saying something that's like, related to sex, that has this kind of sex appeal to it that is part of what catapults it to virality. She then like, launches a podcast. She then launches a meme coin. And it's like,

• 41:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  With an online betting company?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  With an online betting company. It's like, all of the different ways to try to, like, in this particular form of attention capitalism. So, yeah, there feels like, it does feel like an apex. I, I don't know. I guess I have complicated feelings. Like, I don't wanna be,

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I don't want to be knee jerk puritanical. I don't feel like those women should be ashamed of themselves, but it also doesn't feel like a great situation.

• 41:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let me broaden it out.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Is how I would describe it.

• 41:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm gonna broaden it out a little bit.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, we've really moved from an economy.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  And it's purimetal, which is the other really important thing, right? Like, it's one of these things where

• 41:53Speaker 01

  it, the, the, the dream is to hit it big, but a very, very small people are making a lot of money and most people are not.

• 41:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Power laws of online economics.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Power laws of online.

• 42:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's the same thing like Substack. They'll always come out and they'll talk about how much their creators are earning.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, there's 10 that are making up half of that.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 42:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know if it's the same on OnlyFans.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  I think it's probably similar, yes, right.

• 42:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  But pretty close. Uh, but I'll broaden it out, which is that

• 42:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  we don't spend as much time as we used to making things and a lot of our time is spent in this attention economy. Uh, like you talked about influencers are, you know, this is a new thing that, that kids want to become more than an astronaut now.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, I mean, Lord almighty, I'm doing it.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 42:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  So.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, no shade. I mean, I talk for a living, like.

• 42:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, all right, we're in it. But it's also interesting that like, there's, there's something like you talked about, a little bit spiritually off putting, I think about having to be, you actually had a really interesting point.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Spiritually off putting is well said.

• 42:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, uh, all culture, from art to music, requires relentless, relentless self-promotion.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  This can't, this can't be good.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that like, one of the things that's weird is like the inversion of the making and the attention seeking, seeking for the thing you made. Like, I, I saw this, um,

• 43:07Speaker 01

  I saw this interview with Bobby Althoff, who I like, and I think is like.

• 43:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Her interviews are fun.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's, her interviews are fun. She's like genuinely talented. Um, but someone's like, why did you start a podcast? And she was like, oh, just because it would get more money. I could make more money.

• 43:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's such a Bobby Althoff response.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yes. And like, it was both honest and also sort of captured something essential about this entire universe. Like, if you listen to It's really interesting to listen to interviews or read profiles of Mr. Beast. Because when he describes, and the guy's like genuinely a genius, like he's a savant. When he describes like, oh, how did you end up making this specific form of content? And it's like, I just studied the algorithm. Like with an incredible degree of technical skill and patience and like figured out what it selected for and like maximized and utilize. And it wasn't like, and I'm not, again, this is not shade on Mr. Beast. Like what he's doing is cool and good for him, but it's like, I have this kind of Gen X sense of, well, what did you want to make in the world?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Like, there's a little bit of this reversing. Like what will sell out there? What will get attention? And then you reverse engineer and make that content as opposed to, I have this to say. I want to write this poem. I want to make this song, like I want to make this thing. And there are still a lot of people doing that. Like, I have to say, one of the things I like about TikTok, and this is diminishing when you're talking about like the sort of death of user generated content. I've seen that happen to TikTok even over the last three or four years. I don't know if you feel the same way, but like, it used to be a lot more people talking, people doing dances, funny quips, little like, almost kind of like little sketches people did. And now it's just.

• 44:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's all professional.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  It's all professional.

• 44:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  For TikTok ripping podcasts.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  These people out there doing their hustle.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, yeah, it is a shame that that's gone away, but I guess that's the cycle of all social media. All right, very quickly on ad tech.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  You had a really interesting critique of ad tech. So for context, I worked in ad tech for a year before I decided to go into journalism. You said that it's not the data as much as it's how it shapes your attention. What's your critique of ad tech exactly?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Well, mostly, I mean, there's two critiques. One, one with ad tech is that like, I weirdly feel like it hasn't actually solved the problem that it should have solved, which is kind of weird. Like from the beginning of attention markets, the penny press under Benjamin Day, magazines, billboards even, there's some great stuff about how like. People would do audits of billboards back in the 19th century by walking, standing on the corner with a clicker, because it's like, well, how many people are going to see my billboard, right? The question that's bedeviled this entire industry is, okay, I have a product that I give away for free, and then I sell the audience against that product, where I charge a nominal fee. The audience is the thing I sell to advertisers. And the advertiser

• 46:04Speaker 01

  is like, did people see my ad? Did it actually affect them? Did the magazines in circulation get read, or did it get thrown in the trash? And you would think that in the 21st century, with the digital technology we have, you would be able to definitively answer that question. Like, are people seeing the ads, and are they working? So I think one of the interesting critiques of ad tech is that, like, it's still a lot more opaque than you would imagine. The answer to this question, like, there's a lot of indications that there's just a lot of chum, and maybe fraud, fraud's a legal term, but like, a lot of opacity to whether the eyeballs you're paying for are the eyeballs that are there.

• 46:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. I would argue that ad tech has never really been about the impressions, and always been about the conversion. So like, is your ad leading to somebody going to buy?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's why what Apple did to Facebook momentarily was a $10 billion blow, and why we're also seeing

• 47:07Speaker 01

  When they cut off the backend.

• 47:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  You cannot now check whether somebody went to the website that you directed them

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  to, and made the purchase.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that was, but they've figured that out, although they're less, they're performing well, but they're less specific than they used to be. But it's interesting, because in your book, you also wrote, there's a duopoly, Facebook and Google.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that also seems to be a term that's changing, particularly for the reason that you just mentioned, which is that people want to know whether the ads led to anything, and we're seeing Amazon as the third right now.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Right. They're now entering in a big way. And I think, again, I don't think the data here is so, like, in some ways, that

• 47:45Speaker 01

  The thing about ad tech is that it's just a new way of doing the same thing it's always been done. Like, the thing that's really changed the most is the attention. But the selling it has always been done. Now it's done in a more sophisticated way. It's done with more data. You can check that throughput more easily. Although, again, they came up with, you know, use this code was the one of the first ways to do that throughput check, right?

• 48:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like button.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Like button.

• 48:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's what it was there for.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Speaking of ad tech, we're going to take a quick break and be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without

• 48:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  scaling risk. Avpoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise

• 49:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com ...com slash big technology, fill in the quick form and request your free risk assessments. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com slash big technology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes. And we're back here with Chris Hayes. He's the author of The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.

• 50:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Chris, like, I heard you had a book coming out and I was like, okay, well, Chris is into politics and I write a lot about tech and talk a lot about tech. And then I was like, oh, he wrote a tech book. But there's, there must be a political message contained within this if you're going to write a book like this. What is that message?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  It's not a message so much as I think a sort of analysis about how this pursuit of attention has restructured American politics as well, and particularly sort of public discourse. I think there's, you know, we're really seeing it in the first few weeks of the Trump administration where Trump, Trump's core insight is that attention's the most valuable resource and getting it at all costs is the best way to dominate politics. And he's set himself to doing that in a bunch of novel ways. I mean, even just the first few weeks of his presidency, making these choices that no other president I've ever seen made, which is, I'm just going to come out to the Resolute Desk and like, we'll wing it for 45 minutes every day. And I'll, I'll come out and do like three things a day where I'm talking to the press, I'm taking questions, we're making news, we're making news. Some of it's real negative news.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Some of it's like wildly, to my mind, like, unthinkably offensive, like coming out while they're still taking the bodies from the Potomac to blame DEI. Like basically to blame black people and women for a plane crash when there's literally no evidence of that and the bodies are still in the river?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  But it got a lot of attention. And I think that like, what we are seeing is an ascendancy of a kind of troll politics. And that, that Trump insight has now been built upon by Elon Musk, who's the most, the most distilled essence of the age. Like, a guy who clearly is a compulsive and venerate poster, clearly living his life entirely, and we have the evidence of when he's sending his posts online. It's clearly, completely changed his brain chemistry, I think it's pretty clear to see, or the way that he relates to the world, and is now implementing like, a posters madness on, on America.

• 52:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, there's no question that both of them post a lot, talk a lot. They are masters at gaining attention. There's no doubt that attention has changed them in their own way. The pushback to your-

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Musk more than Trump, I think.

• 52:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  You don't think Trump is, I mean, Trump has been living this his whole life?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  No, no, that's what I'm saying. I think, I think Musk has been changed by it more than Trump has.

• 52:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, you're saying Trump was born this way?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I think, well, no, I just think he's been this way from an early time. Whereas Musk, there's an interesting, over the trajectory of his career, it was very hard to like, get Musk to talk to the press, or be public savings facing for a while, and then that changed.

• 53:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, so here would be the pushback to your argument. Really not the pushback, just the criticism of it. Someone who's criticizing it might just say, this is a way to sort of redirect the conversation away from the issues that Trump and Musk brought that attention to.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  That they brought attention during the campaign to immigration, Trump in particular, to inflation, and that resonated with the American people, and they won. And so, it seems like, you know, if we're gonna talk about, is this again, like, gonna be, oh, it's the platform's fault?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Whereas it's not fully reckoning with- What actually happened?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Well, the thing about what actually happened in politics is like, they're always multifactorial, right? Like just-

• 53:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Without a doubt.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  The nature of-

• 53:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the issues matter.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the issues matter. But I mean, when you're talking about the aggregated decisions of 150, 160 million people, right? There's like, a whole bunch of threads running through it. You know, in terms of like, I don't think the argument, I wrote the book before, the book closed before the 2024 elections. The book's not saying like, Donald Trump won the 2024 election specifically and only for this reason. Like-

• 54:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  I actually think that Biden was old and inflation was high, gets you like, 85% of the way there, the causal story. And I think if you look across basically every democracy holding elections in the post-COVID age of inflation, the penalty against incumbency was like-

• 54:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  High.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Range from five to 10 points, basically. In fact, Democrats are on the lower end of that. Even Narendra Modi, who's got like, 65% approval ratings, got his butt kicked in an election in this period in India. So like, yeah, I think the causal story of 2024, a lot of it just gets you there. I think the rebellion in OECD-rich democracies against increased migration has also been a consistent theme. You see it everywhere from Sweden, to Germany, to the UK, to the US. But I also think it's just 100% the case that Trump's relationship to attention is totally distinct of any president we've

• 55:17Speaker 01

  seen. The way that he's operated in the office has been totally distinct. The, in my view, threat he poses to American democratic institutions is actually quite distinct. And I think there is some connection between all those things.

• 55:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  You wrote in the book about Musk's purchase of Twitter, that Musk wanted the recognition of others, but all he got was their attention in purchasing Twitter. And even that will fade soon enough. Chris, how did you, as a person writing a book about attention and how powerful it is, not-

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Anticipate?

• 55:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  -think ahead that this was actually a good move by Musk and would, I mean, it might have been before he endorsed Trump, but it was good or bad, whatever. It was effective.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's standing in the White House next to Trump every day.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  I failed to anticipate how effective it would be. I was thinking it more in dollar terms. Like, at the time, I was thinking of it as a, at the time that I was writing this, and again, this was written- You know, there's a lag in publishing. I was thinking of it as a business transaction. I think this is still true, actually, because I think, like Trump, these insights are things he backed into through pathology. Like, so it's like, he, we know he bought Twitter essentially as an impulse purchase because he'd become, he didn't like the, you know, that it censored the Babylon Bee, or it, you know, dinged the Babylon Bee for, for some infraction, and that he is the world's richest man and was like, I'm gonna buy that. He then, very clearly in the beginning, bought it because he wanted to be the main character on Twitter,

• 56:47Speaker 01

  which he succeeded at. And he also succeeded in imposing a set of, sort of, content moderation policies that really did, like, light tens of billions of dollars on fire. So like, I was thinking of it in the narrow, like, monetization, but then, what it did was it created a kind of political power that then created financial rewards on the backside. Because once you get Donald Trump elected, all of a sudden, everyone wants to be your buddy, and your stock price goes up. Although, I will say this, I think he's also running some real risk, right now.

• 57:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Negative, like, there is a reason that business leaders with huge fortunes don't want to become enormously polarizing public figures. And I think that Elon Musk, even though this has been very effective for him so far, is about to learn a little bit more about the downside risk.

• 57:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it's funny, because, I mean, that's something that's been talked about for a long time, about how Elon's flying too close to the sun.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's been doing it for a while.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean-

• 57:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I'm not, look, I'm not saying it's the good, the good thing he's done, I'm not saying, I'm just like, pointing out what's happened, which is that-

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, the question of, is, is, should Tesla be valued at 25 times Toyota?

• 58:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it's been a story stock the whole way through.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a story stock.

• 58:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  But, does the story change if you have hundreds of people showing up to protest his dealerships around the country every week? And I think that, like, that story might change. Look a little bit into the data of who, what the politics are of the people who buy Teslas. And whether there's a good fit between what he's doing now and that, and I think it's sort of interesting.

• 58:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, so I don't want to get out of here without talking about the solutions.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I've been listening to your tour and reading, of course, reading the book. And to me, the most radical idea that you have is that maybe we want to just have a regulatory cap on the amount of attention we can spend on things. And it's a very interesting idea. It's also kind of a Chinese idea. Like, in China, they have a cap, a limit on the amount of time that kids could play video games. And it's actually, it's implemented. So is that what you favor?

• 59:08Speaker 01

  I don't think that's a crazy idea. I mean, I don't want the Chinese model for a lot of things, but, you know, there are certain things the Chinese are pretty good at. I think that we can, if we can regulate, you know, the argument I make in the book about like, it seems crazy to regulate attention or have a cap on it. And at one point, that seemed true about labor. In fact, there's a, you know, iconic Supreme Court case about Lochner, which is whether it's constitutional to have a maximum cap on hours for bakers. And our first Supreme Court says, no, it's unconstitutional. It's interference in the private right of contract and substantive due process to have this. And, you know, later that's overturned, which is basically what sort of allows the New Deal state to be created.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  I think it was really interesting, the TikTok ban passed 9-0, and that the court's analysis said that because it was totally content independent, which I think is really important, right? You're banning this platform, it doesn't, all the content, whatever it is, right, is getting banned because of these concerns about the platform, does not trigger strict scrutiny, which is the highest level of constitutional scrutiny. It's interesting to see the court say that because if you thought about something like that hard cap, right, which is totally content independent, that it would be in a similar constitutional space.

• 1:00:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, Chris, I'm so glad that you came here to discuss the book. I enjoyed reading it. Great. And we talked about one solution, but there are some others that I think people should pick up the book and check out. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening and watching. If you're here with us on Spotify or YouTube, the book is called The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Definitely go check it out. And we will be back on Friday to break down the week's news. Until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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