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

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

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: [e-mail]

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. 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 new book, The Sirens Call, How Attention became the world's Most Endangered Resource. It's going to be a great show and so excited to welcome. Welcome, Chris. Chris, great to see you. Welcome to the show. It's great to be here. So you wrote a whole book about attention. It's number one New York Times bestseller.

And I just find it funny that a cable news TV guy wrote a book about attention. 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. No, the weird thing to me is. The craft award of it. 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.

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 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 separate out the like content that people are making within the structural confines. and then the overall structure of those attention markets.

And so I think 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 does 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.

Okay, look, full disclosure, I also work in cable news. I'm a CNBC contributor, so I'm on TV about once a week. So I'm not like throwing rocks at the medium. 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. 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 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 new show. Like 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 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. 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 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 to right to be roll right like 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 aesthetic pinnacle was the Charlie Roe 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. 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 and describing the show's early challenges where you said

I'm going to do the show that I want to do and then your ratings suffered and so then you had to learn to listen to the audience yep 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 it's 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

Mattow 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. 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. 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. 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 chart beat and last. Their livelihoods depend on 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. 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. 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 to 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 going to do this in a way that nobody did, maybe with more nuance, and then they're going to respond to it. That's my responsibility. But you are guided by what the audience is interested in.

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 reviewers to people in my life who don't watch cable news are like, oh, I saw that thing. And that can be an interesting metric, too, of a kind of attentional success that is, can be very gratitude. particularly if it's something that you did that you weren't doing because you thought that's where people were going to like, you know? No doubt. I mean, if you're doing this work, you do need a seat-ed-in with things that you're interested in. Yes.

That may not be guaranteed money makers. 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 going to make as much as, like, an engineer would that I cover. So, like, to me, I'm willing to sacrifice money if I'm going to be like, all right, let me try to follow. my curiosity this way. 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 intentional 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. Like, TikTok exists for no other purpose than to maximize the total amount of seconds of attention in the aggregate account. 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 and of itself. 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. Right. 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. Right. But then it's going to take it like one step. I don't want grass mowing as much. Yeah, exactly. But it will show you the videos and then it might show you a video of a dam being cleared.

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. But they're also there are 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.

Right. I guess my... As a definitional matter. Without a doubt, for me, well, actually, no. They do change the algorithm. Like Facebook... Yes, totally. Facebook said we want less news because we want less disputes.

Right. So the entire Facebook platform, which is, by the way, now they want more news again. It turns out news is engaging and has a lot of urgency. So 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 brick. You are editing choices, and you are making those choices.

The same is, 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. Right.

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. Right. 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 a platform for. Although it also is a testament to, and this goes back to the worries about TikTok, right? the pooled and 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? If in the sort of worst case scenario of the kind of China Hawks who push the TikTok bill

that the Chinese Communist Party is like, well, 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. I'm going to let this go in a moment, but this is interesting. And 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 that everything about TikTok is true. You have the Chinese Communist Party who's steering our attention. Then you have news organizations, let's see, 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? Yeah, it's a good question.

I don't, in some ways, I don't think what Musk is doing is that different than what Rupert Murdoch has done. Right. 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 a scale that no one's ever seen before. The ubiquity is totally unprecedented too. You have never had the constant access

day and day out wherever you are at any time to the possibility. of putting your attention on this, right? You could carry a newskeeper or 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 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. 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. Social attention, your definition is when someone says your name, you're paying attention. Yeah, there's like, you know, 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 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 there's a great book by leo brodie on this called um there's a great book by leo brodie on this is just 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 in ubiquity that was completely inconceivable for the entirety of humanity until like 10 years ago. Yeah, so let's talk about this fame aspect because I do have some pushback on that part,

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 now that 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 tradeoffs? I mean the interesting thing about fame in this era is incredibly relative right because different people have different levels of fame so people recognize me because I have a TV show 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

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 or they're like, oh, do you work at Bank of America? Did we go to college together? Where we, like, they're trying to place you and there's this familiarity that doesn't match the fact they don't know you. 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 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, you know, you know, you know, you

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.

So, like, it's a little weird for me to be like, oh, it's weird of, 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? Yeah, is that me?

It's like that experience, that weirdness that you feel like a lot all the time where 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. Right? Right. 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 yeah it is interesting me now i'm on air way less than you like by a tiny teeny tiny fraction but i've definitely had

the experience people recognize you i'm sure 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 you know it is actually this is funny this is funny this is funny this is funny it's 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 was you a Bank of America no Syracuse University where do you let they start to like go through so now it's like if they're like I'm like I have a TV show yeah and it's like that's free 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. Yeah, it's true. So let me just give you some data. About who posts and who doesn't post?

It's from 2015. Yeah. So Facebook, this is from Inc. It was 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. Right. 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. Are lurkers. Are lurkers. Yeah. 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? Yeah, that's a good question. First of all, I think there's also a lot of commenting that's happening. And the commenting stuff that happens is that same sort of social attention from strangers. Like you see so much of TikTok is 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 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 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 the possibility still it 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 it's conditioning the elite as well

even if like a lot of people are lurkers 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. Yeah. There's going to be more news, but it's becoming a for you page. There's this full TikTokification. Yes, it is driving out. Yeah, the TikTokification. 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 TikTokified. It was way more, like, posting about friends and family. Friends and family or even, like, next door or like, you know.

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? Right. Because we were all tagging each other. Right. We were getting this attention. 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 outcompete everything on a casino floor I just think that like out competes everything that wins yeah I mean we're going to clip this episode and put it up totally and and and podcasts I mean it'll be really interesting to see how much that drives podcast every podcast now getting a video why are they getting a video so they could clip it and put 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 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. It's amazing. Just like this. People will watch this. Totally. No, no, I agree.

And if we don't post the video, they're going to say, where's the video? And I write about this in the book, which is. is that just because you have these sort of algorithmically optimized versions of our attention in one channel doesn't mean that all the other appetites go away. Right. 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. 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. Anyone who's posted online knows that it's like,

It's so empty. Yes. But it feels close to something profound. Yeah. 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?

Yeah. That hurts. 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. Yeah. That's my contention. Yeah. Like, I wonder, too, like, how much.

much, I mean, there's two things that calls 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? Oh, that's, that's 100% why it stopped. Yeah, it's just like, we all posted. When Facebook came out, I know you've been the 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. 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 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, but like most of them are going down. No, Snapchat is going up significantly. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. WhatsApp is the most, 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 feel like we're at a terminal point of all the things I'm talking about in the book. Like this engineered attentional capitalism for the same reason that like people started to turn off from post- I think people are going to start to turn off from the algorithms, from TikTok. Like, we're leading towards a moment of rejection where people are going to want something different. There's a reason why your book is number one. There's a reason why Jonathan Heights's book sold so well. 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 and do want change.

But there's also... But it's more than online. I mean, the thing about online is like, I mean, I'm older than you. but like the idea that there's like this thing online and there's us in the world is increasingly 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 yeah but I want to talk to you about one more thing about this

because these discussions, we've been talking about how like the platforms are capturing our attention for 30 minutes already. They almost always leave out the agency of people. And actually what you just brought up about 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. But ultimately, we have agency. Yeah.

Like, you talk about how these things can interrupt our attention flow, just like a waiter dropping a plate. Yep. And it's like, well, not really, not if we don't let them. Yeah. Like, we can turn off our notifications. We can, I mean. Many people don't know how to, I will say.

It's not that hard. No, I know, but I'm telling you how these conversations with many people. I mean, then you also said, like, a couple, maybe in the same chapter that you're wearing an Apple Watch. Right. Okay, so you have it today. Right. No Apple Watch here.

I don't want that to do to me what it can do to my mind. So we make these choices also to engage. Yeah, I mean, to my, the title of the book, which is drawn from The Odyssey, 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 Circe 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 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 bugs of the phone. And then there's the willful part of us that can go into the notifications and turn that off. 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 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 all of these platforms. I think we're about to have, you know, the, I always compare it to food a lot because I think it has attention, hunger function similarly.

They're like, they're both biological inheritances, but also reflections of our deep identity as humans. And, you know, I think we're kind of in the, like, late 70s recipe cookbook, jello salad, casserole, era. That sounds perfect. Some people like it. Let's get some after this. But it's interesting that you bring up food because sometimes people eat because they're hungry. Oftentimes people eat because it's there. Well, even more so, they want to fill a void.

Yeah, right. It makes them feel good. Totally. I mean, America, we comfort food is a big industry. for here. Yes, totally. 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 the, 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. You talk a lot about,

like, how we're so restless. We can't be still. What's wrong with us? 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-gatherers societies don't really experience boredom, but they don't have a word for it. They don't have a word for it.

They just hang. Averageal 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 Wapiri 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 import naturally in their language. So I think there are, it's not necessarily the human condition, but for hundreds of years going back to non-huntergatherer societies all the way back in some ways to the Buddha sitting under the banion tree, the stoics. thinking about this, Blaise Pascal in the 16th century, Kiekegaard in the 19th century, like, 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. It hurts.

What's that? It hurts. 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. You had a great anecdote in the book where they asked people if they want to just sit in a room alone or if they wanted a shock. They could shock themselves. One person decided that they would take 190 shocks in a very short period of time. Yes, like over like 15 minutes or something. As opposed to sitting them with their thoughts. Yeah. And there's another interesting thing about that.

There's a big gender divide in that experiment. It's 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. Why do you think it's interesting? 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. And so you think men are just, like, are more masochistic and therefore happier to shock themselves?

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. with their own thoughts. Yeah. Would you shock yourself? No. But I would be, I would be tempted. I probably would try it once. Yeah, I'd probably try it once. Maybe twice. Well, I think it would depend on how good it felt. I mean, the question is like, yeah, Chris, statistically, one of the two of us is going to sit and shock themselves in that room. Yeah. Yeah, one in one-third of us, actually. That's right. Yeah, I mean, 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 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. Yeah. 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. Which is, is it good that we're moving from like a manufacturing economy? We've already, we've left that behind in the U.S. mostly to an only-fans economy. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think meme coins and only fans are like the ultimate monetization of these processes.

You know, like, and they're both, I mean, the Hock Tour. trajectory was sort of the perfect example in every way. Like, she was not an only fan, 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 into virality. She then, like, launches a podcast. She then launches a meme coin.

And it's like... With an online betting company. 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 don't know. I guess I have complicated feelings.

Like, I don't want to be, 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. So let me broaden out. I'm going to broaden out a little bit. Yeah. I mean, we've really moved from an economy. And it's pure middle, which is.

is the other really important thing, right? Like, it's one of these things where the dream is to hit it big, but a very, very small people are making a lot of money and most people are not. Power laws of online economics. It's the same thing like substack. They all always come out and they'll talk about how much their creators are earning. There's 10 that are making up half of that. Totally.

I don't know if it's the same on Onlyfans, but pretty close. But I'll broaden it out, which is that 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. Like, you talked about influencers are, you know, this is a new thing that kids want to become more than an astronaut now. I mean, Lord Almighty, I'm doing it. Right, yeah. Yeah, no shade.

I mean, I talk for a living. So, all right, we're in it. But it's also interesting that, like, there's something, like you talked about, a little bit spiritually off-putting, I think, about having to be. actually had a really interesting point. Spearsely off-puttings well said. Yeah, all culture from art to music requires relentless self-promotion. Yeah. This can't be good. Yeah, and I think that, like, one of the things that's weird is, like, the inversion of the making and the attention seeking for the thing you made. Like, I saw this, um, I saw this interview with Bobby Altoff, who I like, and I think is, like,

very... Your interviews are fun. Yeah, she's, her name is fun, and she's, like, genuinely talented. 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. That's such a Bobby Altuff response. 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's selected for and, like, maximized and utilized. And it wasn't like, and I'm not, again, this is not shade of 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, what did you want to make in the world? 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 data.

dances, funny quips, little, like, almost kind of like little sketches people did. And now it's just... Yeah, it's all professional. It's all professional. Made for TikTok ripping podcasts. Exactly. These people at there doing their hustle.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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? Well, mostly, I mean, there's two critiques. 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 is like, did people see my ad?

Did it actually affected 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, like, 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, are, 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.

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? Right. And that's why what Apple did to Facebook momentarily was a $10 billion blow. And why we're also seeing. When they said you cannot. off the back end. You cannot now check whether somebody went to the website that you directed them

to and made the purchase. Right. So that was, but they 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. Right. 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 they, they, the ads led to anything. And we're seeing Amazon as the third right now. 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 the thing about ad tech is that it's just a new way of doing the same thing that'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, you know, use this code, was one of the first ways to do that throughput check, right? Like button. Like button. That's what it was there for.

Yeah, exactly. Speaking of ad tech, we're going to take a quick break and back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or like. and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show

and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here with Chris Hayes. He's the author of The Sirens Call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource. 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 must be a play. political message contained within this if you're going to write a book like this? What is that message? It's not a message so much as I think a sort of analysis about how this pursuit of attention has restructure 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's core insight is that attention is the most valuable resource and getting it at all cost 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 three 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 resolution desk and, like, we'll wing it for 45 minutes every day. And 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. 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. 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 a veteran 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 poster's madness on America. 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- Musk more than Trump, I think. You don't think Trump is, I mean, Trump has been living this his whole life. No, no, that's what I'm saying. I think, I think Musk has been changed by it more than Trump. Oh, you're saying Trump was born this way. 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 for facing for a while, and then that changed.

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. Right. 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 going to talk about, is this again, like, going to be, oh, it's the platform's fault? Right. Whereas it's not fully reckoning with what actually happened. Well, the thing about what actually happened in politics is like they're always multifactorial, right? Like just the nature of the issues matter.

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 elections specifically and only for this reason. Right. 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 range from five to ten 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, um, 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 U.K., to the U.S., but I also think it's just 100% the case that Trump's relationship to attention is totally distinct of any president we've 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. 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 think ahead that this was actually a good move by Musk and would, I mean, it might have been before he and Doris Trump, but it was good or bad, whatever. It was effective. Yeah. He's standing in the White House next to Trump every day. 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 B or, you know, ding the Babylon B for, for some infraction and that he is the world's richest man and was like, I'm going to buy that. He then very clearly in the beginning bought it because he wanted to be the main character on Twitter, 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. Oh, yeah. 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. 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. Yeah. He's been doing it for a while. Yeah, I mean.

I mean, I'm not, look, I'm not saying it's the good thing he's done. I'm not saying it's, I'm just like pointing out what's happened, which is that. Totally. I mean, the question of is, is, should Tesla be valued at 25 times Toyota? No, it's been a story stock the whole way through. Yeah, it's a story stock. Yeah. 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, the people who buy Tesla's. And whether there's a good fit between what he's doing now and that. And I think it's sort of interesting. All right. So I don't want to get out of here without talking about the solutions. Yeah. 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? I don't think that's a crazy idea I mean I don't want the Chinese model for a lot of things but 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 at first the Supreme Court says, no, it's unconstitutional. It's an 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. I think it was really interesting that 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. 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.