Offline with Jon Favreau - Can Democracy Survive the Attention Wars? with Chris Hayes

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes joins Offline to discuss how our society’s commodification of attention has made us miserable while empowering authoritarians like Donald Trump. Chris’s new book, The Sirens’ Call, explains how humans mistake online engagement for social connection, why the media is beholden to flashy headlines, and why no one can bear being alone with their thoughts. He and Jon discuss how Democrats need to operate in this frenetic environment and examine whether fascism offers a reprieve to people tired of engaging. But first! It’s time for a new edition of the Offline Challenge. Over the next few weeks, Jon and Max will be fortifying their attention spans through a series of focus-building exercises. The goal: stay sane, grounded and committed to what matters most throughout Donald Trump’s second term. Follow along as they put down their phones, touch grass and reclaim control of their attention.

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Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash offline. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash offline, netsuite.com slash offline. Hey everyone, it's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, Why is this Happening, New Yorker staff writer, Jonathan Blitzer on immigration in Trump 2.0. The people don't realize kind of how epic the international stakes of US immigration

policy are. Understandably, because they're bombarded with all of this news, and immigration policy itself is incredibly complex and it's multifaceted. You don't experience it as acutely with refugee policy because in that case, the US government is already controlling who gets vetted, how they get vetted, and when and how they arrive in the United States. Whereas with asylum law, you're dealing with people who very much show up at America's door needing protection. The government by law is required to extend that protection to them, but administratively, politically, it's much more challenging.

That's this week on Why Is This Happening? Search for Why Is This Happening wherever you're listening right now and follow. In the absence of attention and when we're conditioned to respond to attention qua attention, you get a lot of pathological seeking of negative attention. Yeah. Just this kind of troll addiction. And that's not, you know, that may sound like- Leads you right to the White House.

Well, that was the point I was going to make. It's like, you may be like, well, that's kind of a, that's true, but like we have watched this break the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world and produced a model of public discourse that is now 100% the dominant model of both the most powerful man in the world who runs the most powerful military named Donald Trump and the richest man in the world,

who also seems to be maybe running the country. And both of them have this as a core part of their personalities now. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, MSNBC host and author of the exceptional new book, The Sirens Call, Chris Hayes. So I actually talked to Chris on this show a few years ago about a New Yorker piece he wrote that ultimately became this book.

Oh, wow. Yeah, which might be- So you're a co-author. So I'm a co-author basically. It might be the most offline book I've ever read. Yeah, it really is. And I know that there have been books we've talked about where you said like this is like an offline Bible. This is it. This is the right It's not just about technology. It's about society. It's about politics

It's how the root of all of that is so much of our digital distraction Yes, and it's framed around attention as the world's most valuable and finite resource of this age Yeah, and specifically how the competition for our attention has made us as miserable as we are. A war for our attention, I would argue. A war. It is a war. Anyway, highly encourage anyone listening to read it, especially if you've enjoyed the

conversations that Max and I have had here. Chris and I talked about so many things in the book, including how our attention economy benefits authoritarians. This is my big fear that I have articulated. Absolutely. I fully agree. How Democrats need to change and operate in this environment, whether Barack Obama could have won an election in this attention environment.

It was a great conversation and we will get to that in a minute. But first, there was obviously a lot of news this week, and you can catch up on all the latest Elon over at Pod Save America. But in the spirit of reclaiming our attention, we're announcing a fun, exciting project this week. A lot of you have asked about the offline challenge. How are we doing with the phone addictions? Not good.

That's so great. Am I hopeless? Maybe. Would we ever do another challenge? The answer is yes. Yes. Starting this week, the offline challenge returns and this time we're going a bit bigger. All kidding aside, since last time we've done this challenge, we have seen some real improvement,

you and I. Yeah. Though I've definitely backslid quite a bit. Especially in the last week or two, it's been really tough. Yes, but I think that we have both learned it's impossible to do our jobs. And even if you don't have jobs like we do,

pay attention to the news without ever being on your phone. So this time, instead of only trying to cut down our phone time, we are going to focus our energy specifically on our focus. For the next few weeks, we're going to be taking on a series of challenges aimed at helping us improve our focus, which is our ability to focus on an individual task like writing or reading a book or being present with loved ones, finding the willpower to

put down the phone after an hour of doom scrolling or just generally feeling in control of our minds and what we pay attention to. We're going to get into what those challenges will look like in a moment, but first, how are you feeling about this? You had a good thought on why this is actually the perfect challenge to do in this political moment. So, I mean, at the most basic level, we've talked a lot about how everybody's first task for the next four years is to get yourself and the people around you through it. You can't do anything else unless you can do that.

But more broadly, I genuinely come to believe, thanks to Chris's book, thanks to a lot of the discussions that we've had, that lost focus is really at the foundation of so many of the big societal and political problems that we have talked about. And we've also talked about how building a progressive movement has to start with being able to speak to people's needs at a time when people feel alienated, they feel dispossessed, they're isolated, everybody's doom scrolling, everybody's surrounded by misinformation and conspiracies in ways that have led a lot of people to embrace the easy answers from the kind of MAGA cultural

right of grievance, nihilism, selfishness, hypermasculinity. So when we talk about lost focus being at the center, that like focus meaning literally just your ability to control your attention in any given moment and those moments add up to hours, add up to days, add up to a lifetime. Like when you spend hours doom-scrolling on your phone even, I don't mean specifically I mean anyone you will though obviously, it could also mean me. Even though you know you will regret that time, even though you know you will look back and think I would have been better off if I've read a news story, that's lost focus. When you wake up in the middle of the night and your brain starts pinwheeling because your anxiety spiraling about what's in the news,

that's lost focus. When you feel drained at the end of the day because you spent your commute or whatever ruminating about the news, this is something I do a lot, that's lost focus. Where you can listen to podcasts and during your commute where other people ruminate about the news. That's right, ruminate for you, yeah. Which is by... Which I also do, even though I'm one of the ruminators. I know.

Surreal fucking... Well, this, I mean, this week's episode... Human centipede ruminating. That's a beautiful image, John, thank you. And congratulations to everyone on their commute who's imagining that now. But it is like, you know, this week's episode is, it's a testament to the news has gotten so bad

that the show that usually covers tech news now has to be a reprieve from it. But like- There's also one more thing that I noticed is but it's like a daily thing. I am trying to do like a work thing. Yes. And so I'm in the Slack channel or I need to go to the Slack channel because I, because someone put something in there. There's a, there's a clip for me to approve for Pod Save America that someone cut, right? That sound. Yeah.

And I'll go in there, but then I see, oh, all the other channels, there's notifications and I got to check out that. Oh, of course. Suddenly I'm like, what did I come into the Slack for? Oh, I have to approve the clip. Oh, and then I was also writing something for the show, but now I completely forgot what that this is like my whole daily existence. Yes, and this is it's not even just when you're on your devices. Our synapses are just completely burned by being overloaded with dopamine.

People can't read anymore. I mean, it's like literally becoming harder to read because we don't have the willpower to focus on it anymore. And then it's so easy to extrapolate out from that when you talk about people getting more addicted to their phones because of lost focus. We've talked many times about how that leads people to more misinformation and conspiracies because it kind of preys on having a more impulsive attention span. It's driving the rise in social isolation, which then in turn leads to this culture of

hypermasculinity, anxiety and depression among young people. These are all of these huge problems that are really leading a lot of people, I think, to the MAGA right and making it hard to build a progressive movement that are much bigger than lost focus, but resolving our ability to control our own focus, I think has to be the first step to fixing that

because we can't fix any of those other things unless we can take back our own brains really from these tech companies that are using this incredibly sophisticated technology to take it away from us so they can sell fucking ads against it. Yes and even if you removed the social media component from it which is probably the biggest part, you know whether it's podcasts, whether it's television, it's just like we are, it is so now deeply ingrained, which is why Chris calls it like the age of attention.

Yes. It's bigger than even the attention economy, though that's the driver of it. Right, right, right. But it's so ingrained in us now that even without social media, there is a focus issue for all of us. I find if I am, I'm trying to get much better

about taking time to socialize with people and have deep connections, like after talking to Derek the other week, I've really been thinking about how important that is. It's hard to focus in that. It's harder to focus. I feel myself, you know, thinking, what's going on on my phone or like we've been talking for 45 minutes. It's hard to stay focused that long.

That is not a natural state of affairs. That's not how our brains are supposed to work. And that's why we have designed a set of challenges that we're going to go through in the next few weeks to try to relearn how to be present, how to decide what we want to do with our brains and our attention in any given moment. And then I think that is hopefully going to manifest in all sorts of ways. So right before we started recording, our producer Emma, who also had this idea of focus,

which was fantastic, made us sit in front of a painting, or at least a screen of a painting. Yeah. We do have budgetary constraints. It's a way to measure our focus. Why did we do that? And why did I do better than you? Why you did better than me is a,

I was surprised by that one. I gotta give you, what if it turned out that actually all along you've had incredible focus and you're just choosing to put it all on bad tweets? At minute, I don't know, it felt like minute 100, but it was probably minute two in the painting. I suddenly had that thought to myself. I'm like, I just beat Max.

What if I can't, what if I am focusing and I am choosing this life? Oh yeah, yeah. No, that occurred to myself. I'm like, I just beat Max. What if I can't, what if I am focusing and I am choosing this life? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that occurred to me when I was sitting around for the hour and a half after I had to tap out because I started thinking about the bad tweets by JD Vance tweets who told me about as we were walking in the studio, which incredible competitive spirit. Literally tweeting at JD Vance, then tweeted,

then told Max about how angry I was about my tweet at JD Vance, and then we started recording. Yeah, yeah, told me about it right before we had to do the focus challenge. That's that winner's spirit that gets you there. No, so okay, so the painting that we used is specifically from a page of the New York Times set up last year where it tests how long you can look at a painting that is meant to demonstrate for you

how badly your focus has been fractured, and this comes from an assignment that an art history professor named Jennifer Roberts gives her students where she asks all of her students to look at a work of art for three hours. Now you and I tapped out at, what was it? Two minutes and four minutes? Three hours?

I know, incredible. So the painting that they- I would rather- What would you rather do? I'm thinking about Chris's book, and we don't talk about this so I can tell the story, but in his book, he talks about an experiment where they put people in a room by themselves.

Oh, I know this one, it's great. And you can either stay there by yourself and do nothing, or you can give yourself a shock. You can administer yourself a small shock just to feel something, to not be alone with your own thoughts. To have stimulation. And people do the shock. A lot., to not be alone with your own thoughts. To have stimulation. And people do the shock.

A lot. A lot. Some people lean on the button. And women do the shock too. I remember that, yes. It's an incredible and incredibly disturbing experiment that is like, it's shocking, but you're like, of course. And then you start to think, would I shock myself? I'm like, I would probably shock myself a little bit

because I don't have a Twitter feed in front of me. Anyway, the painting they picked is the opposite of, I would say shocking yourself, it's a painting by Whistler, Nocturne in blue and silver. It's from 1943, which is kind of perfect because it's this impressionistic landscape of a coastline where it doesn't, it's made up of these very subtle little details that don't have any significance until you look at it for a few minutes. It's a painting that is not rewarding unless you have the focus to spend several minutes

kind of absorbing these little teeny tiny details. And the fact that it's just from the 40s from our grandparents' lifetimes, I think goes to show how much that focus has changed and the fact that our brains work very differently than they do today. So we're using it as kind of a metric, but also as a way to remind ourselves that we're not good at focusing anymore, like as a species. And we're going to come back to that painting at some point, right? Yeah, I think the idea is that every week we're going to come back to it so that's like

Until we hit three hours. I mean, listen, I would love to get to three hours. It's kind of like, our focus is a muscle and our brains and this painting test is seeing how much our attention can bench press every week. It's arm day for our brains, for our attention. Yeah, which not because it's important to look at paintings but because having that focus is better for leading an actualized life.

So in addition to the painting, we're also gonna be tracking our sleep. Why sleep and how have you been sleeping? So, not great, not great. Since the election, the last couple of weeks, especially I've been down to like four or five hours a night just because I'm doom spiraling. Everything that erodes your focus also erodes your sleep.

So it's a very useful benchmark. And then at the same time, better or worse sleep also leads to better or worse focus. It's just at the foundation of a lot of your brain being able to do the things that you want it to do and having control and having like the hormones that you have in your brain are more like, it's more adrenaline if you've slept less,

so it's harder for you to focus. So if we can improve sleep we'll probably improve everything else. I didn't know that. That's cool. Yeah, yeah it's just a different biochemically. It explains a lot. Yeah, right, exactly, because you're on that fight or flight when you haven't slept as much.

So last week I said I was clocking like four or five hours. We have been tracking our sleep on apps. I believe you have an app on your phone. Yeah. What do you have? Emma and I were talking about this before because she did it too, but like I found that just using the app gave me worse sleep because first of all, it was hard to believe that the app, sleep score, sleep score, we have sleep score.

And you put it on the nightstand next to your bed and somehow it like knows when you're doing deep sleep, less deep sleep. So the whole night I was like, is this really gonna work? And so I just kept being like, anyway. My score was a 79. Okay. Out of 100, that's great. Yeah, but I logged like, what was it? Hold on, I'm sorry.

And what it's scoring is not just hours of sleep, but it's deep sleep, it's the quality of your sleep. Sleep duration, five hours and 50 minutes. Really? Oh man. That's not just hours of sleep, but it's deep sleep, it's the quality of your sleep. Sleep duration, five hours and 50 minutes. Really? Oh man. That's not great. You're supposed to get eight. You are supposed to get eight.

Yeah, I did not. So I have been, so I got a Fitbit because I don't, sorry to be snooty, don't bring my phone into the bedroom. So I wear a Fitbit to bed now to track my sleep. And I had the exact same experience with you where this is the device that's supposed to help you track your sleep so you can get better at sleeping.

And instead I have been having stress dreams about the Fitbit sleep score not being high enough. I literally had a nightmare that woke me up through the day where I was looking at the Fitbit sleep score and was watching the number go down and it stressed me out so much that I woke up and lost sleep.. So sounds like it's working already I am averaging

67 out of a hundred and I've been getting about six and a half hours, but I'm aiming for eight aiming for eight I if I get to seven I'd be thrilled. I don't have kids. So it's I'm coming from a position of luxury I can't even blame them last night. They were actually both angels last night. I just couldn't sleep. Yeah. Well, it's something that I think I'm also going to be watching for myself is how long does it take me to fall asleep, which is partly a focus thing because your brain is spiraling. And when I wake up, am I awake for three minutes or am I awake for two hours? Yep. That's my biggest issue. The other thing we're gonna do is track our phone

pickups. Right, because it's a measure of how many times we are involuntarily reaching for our phone. Yes, and so last week my average was 276 times per day I picked up my phone. I will say that at least four of those have been during this recording. So I can see why those numbers are what they are. I'm at 88, which is still a wild number. It's still so much. So I don't want people to think 88 is low because it is not. It's just the 200, what was it, 276? 276. See if I can get that thing down, huh? All right, so what are we doing this week? Walk us through the challenge.

This week's challenge is inspired by our pal Chris Hayes. We're calling it the Chris Hayes method, a daily walk, 20 minutes, no screens. 20 minutes. No headphones. That's it. It's 20 minutes. Just you, yourself, your thoughts, your brain, nothing to distract you, and just try to redevelop those muscles to be able to, because there's not going to be anything distract you, and just try to redevelop those muscles to be able to,

because there's not going to be anything distracting you, can you control what you're thinking about and not say, do what I'm going to do the first few times, which is just a doom spiral about the news, and like actually kind of try to direct my own thoughts in the absence of all of that stimulus. And this is once a day? We're doing this? Once a day, 20 minutes. Oof! Okay. It's going to be great. All right. All right. In a minute, 20 minutes. Oof. Okay. It's gonna be great. All right.

All right. In a minute, you'll hear my conversation with Chris Hayes on the war for our attention. But before we jump to that, just quick housekeeping. There's a ton of rage bait in the news right now meant to distract and overwhelm us. Today we'd like to focus on something positive, the work being done to fight back and what you can do to help. This month, Vote Save America is making donations as part of their anxiety relief program to black led organizations and candidates of color helping us gain ground at the state and local level, like Kimberly Pope Adams,

who's running for a Virginia state house seat this year, prime opportunity to expand the Democrats one seat majority. You can set up a recurring donation at any amount that feels right for you. And Vote Save America will use it to build progressive power in 2025 and beyond. Go to vote save america.com slash donate to donate now paid for by Vote Save America, vote save america.com not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Up next, Chris Hayes. Offline is brought to you by Armra Colostrum. Everyone's looking for ways to be healthier and stave off winter illnesses. Give your immunity and gut

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Receive 15% off your first order. Go to tryarmour.com slash offline or enter offline to get 15% off your first order. That's t-r-y-a-r-m-r-a dot com slash offline. Chris Hayes, welcome to Offline. It's great to be here. In person, IRL. In person. Offline and IRL. Perfect. Perfect for this conversation.

I love this book. Oh, thanks. Siren's Call. It's so good. Thanks. I thought I would like it and I liked it even more. That's great. And it's great to be talking about attention here on the third week of Trump the sequel, which we can get to. It feels pretty relevant. I know. So I emailed you this, but I think the argument you make is the skeleton key to understanding the last few decades of what's happened to our politics, our culture, our minds. The reason I think it's important is because your analysis of living in the age of attention goes deeper than the problems we talk about on the show that we have with phones, with screen time, with social media.

And your view is that the critique of the attention economy actually doesn't go far enough. And you write, my contention is the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource, our attention, is also the very thing that makes us human. Just to give people who might not know what that means, a quick explanation, why is attention the most important resource right now and why is it the very thing that makes us human? Great, so why it's the most important resource I think has to do with the structure of American

economy and society and what we call the information age. We all sort of intuitively grasp it's conventional wisdom that like we had an industrial economy and now we have an information economy. And we used to move atoms around through manufacturing, now we move bits around, right? So, and I think we all get that. The key insight I think is that information is not actually the valuable resource

of the information age. Information is finite and replicable. There's maybe a hundred firms that have my data and information or maybe a thousand, but it doesn't really matter to me personally. So information isn't the key scarce resource. In 1972, Herb Simon, a brilliant political theorist and economist wrote this, gave this lecture called, Designing Decision-Making for Organizations in an Information-Rich World. And his key insight is that information actually consumes something,

and what information consumes is attention. And this key insight, which is a 50-year-old insight, is really, to me, the kind of skeleton's key. Because once you think, okay, information is really important to this economy, there's more information than ever, that information is competing for something scarce and consuming something scarce, which is attention, all of a sudden it's like, oh right, it's actually the attention

age. The information is key, but the thing that is being competed for is the attention. And the way that I describe in the book, I use a metaphor that Lawrence Lessig used in a book about intellectual property, where if your neighbor steals your idea of having a picnic table in your backyard and puts his own picnic table in his backyard, it doesn't really affect your life. Like, but if he steals your picnic table, now you've got a real problem. Information is like the idea of the picnic table. Attention is the picnic table. If so, if your attention is taken, it can't be copied,

it can't be replicated. If someone takes it, they have it and you don't. So that's the key sort of insight of like why it's so important now. And then the part of what it makes us human is our consciousness is the ability to direct the beam of thought where we want it to go. That's attention.

That faculty is the faculty that defines us as conscious human creatures. And if people are taking it from us, we've lost dominion over our own mind. And it's what makes us unique as social animals. Absolutely. Right? No, I thought that was, I thought that's so interesting about information and attention because we are also a generation that has now known what it was like before the information age growing up that way

and now are very much in it. And it made me realize like, yeah, when we first, you know, when there was first, when there is the internet and we went online, there was like all this information. It was great. It's like, now I'm gonna be able to know everything. And now there's so much information that we've all experienced

the challenge of figuring out, okay, what information do I need? When do I need it? How much do I need? And even that, like, we're basically the same cohort and I think that our cohort experience is kind of key to some of these insights precisely because of what we went through and the sort of experience, this sort of feeling of adventure that was the early internet, which is like the feeling you have

where you land somewhere new that you're visiting as a traveler and like you get out of the hotel and you're like, okay, yeah, what are we gonna go do? Like that's how the internet felt. And now the feeling is like the feeling of car sickness and stuck in traffic. It's like the complete opposite sensation feeling of like vertigo woozy, kind of like not quite in your right body.

And it's just, it's, it is a 180 from that thrilling feeling of adventure. No, I mean, I'm sure you feel this as well, but as I prepare for every Pod Save America, I feel like if I just keep reading the news and read everything there is on the internet about the news that we're gonna talk about on the show, I will be prepared. And that's insane. So like I've transitioned from, I'm like,

all right, I read the stuff that I need to know and now I need to just think about how I feel about the news that I read. And that, taking space, I mean, this is something I write about in the book, and this idea of being comfortable just sitting with your own thoughts, and how that's an old problem for humans,

it's part of the human condition, it's part of what the Buddha is wrestling with in 600 BCE. It's, Pascale writes about it in the 17th century. Like this is not just an intention age problem, but it's a human problem, but it's one so exacerbated by the attention age where we acclimate to conditions where we have endless diversion, a bounty of diversion before us.

And the more diversion you have, the more diversion you need. And it's never enough. And so when it's taken away, everyone has had the feeling of you double park the car, you put the hazards on, you go in to get a cup of coffee, you're like four people deep in a line, you pat your pocket, your phone's not there. And it's like, oh my God, I'm so I'm screwed. I'm screwed.

What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What I'm just going to be here waiting on this line? My own goddamn thoughts. You know, I can't, I can't. It's like that flare of panic. But the other thing is like, you know, you read biographies of like Einstein

and he's just like taking two hour walks in Princeton every day. I said that- Just thinking stuff, just thinking it up. And it's like, that's how thoughts happen. My resolution, my New Year's resolution for last year was to go on a 20-minute walk every day with no ear, nothing.

Yeah. No headphones, no nothing, and didn't do it like once. Maybe I did it once. And then I was like, okay, I'm not going to look at the phone and I'll just listen to a podcast. And I feel like that was enough. Right. But it's not.

Well, and that's partly because of this acclamation. It can be unwired. Like I actually do the 20 minutes. I really am religious about 20 minutes without, with only my thoughts every day at some point, which is like my one little news you can use. Part of this book is like, do that. Just find a way to do 20 minutes every day.

And that can be your commute where you like just drive and don't listen to something. Yeah. But you let your thoughts marinate or it's, I do it it on a walk because I live close to a park, I take my dog. But that reacclimating to that condition. And to go back to your original point

about the sort of generational cohort, like we are the generation, the last generation that like read the cereal box. Which I heard you talking about that with Ezra and I was like, oh my god. It was like the first time I had remembered doing that, but I used to do it all the time. Of course, it's like, what copy is there in my visual field?

And there would be little things on the back, because that was, and so I think that also, because we experienced that sort of dearth to overload experience that we're keyed into it. We've talked a lot on this show about how social media gives us the illusion of connection with other people. You described this dynamic, and I thought, in a really smart way, which is that humans seek recognition,

but what we get from social media is attention. Can you talk about the difference between recognition and attention and why social media tends to. Can you talk about the difference between recognition and attention and why social media tends to give us the latter and not the former? So social attention is a strange thing. Like we need social attention to survive from the moment that we're born.

But it's attention in so many spheres, it's a theme of the book is necessary, but not sufficient. It's like you want something more than social attention from other people. You want love, consideration, care, friendship, camaraderie, all these things. And fundamentally as humans, what we seek is recognition, which is to be seen as human by another human. That is what we want. You can't get that from social media because the person who's noticing you, you fundamentally can't get that from social media because the person who's noticing you, you fundamentally can't see them as human

and they can't really see you as human unless there's an actual relationship. People do create relationships online that become human, but the sort of social attention from strangers is this like synthetic adjacent form that gives you a little bit of the taste of recognition, but none of this, like the fulfillingness of it. So you sort of snack on it, right?

There's like a reciprocity that you're looking for. Right, reciprocity is what relationships are made of. That's the weird thing about taking the covalent bond of relationships that are formed through mutual social attention and right separating them into different vectors of like I pay attention to you you pay attention to me and then distributing them at scale such that now none of those things are synced up or matched. It is funny because a while back now I changed my Twitter settings so that I only saw notifications and comments and

everything from people that I follow. That's an enormously important change. Right? And so, but now I look at it and it's very funny because I'm like, you know, scrolling and I'm looking, there's not much there. And then I see some people that I know, because I follow them, who just like like a tweet. And I'm like, oh, it's nice that they liked the tweet.

But that's all that's all I got. It's nothing. There's no there's no conversation. There's no nothing like you start feeling and then you go back to the tweet, but that's all I get. It's nothing, there's no conversation, there's no nothing, and you start feeling, and then you go, and then I'm like, now I'm gonna go back to the tweet and see if there's any angry comments. Yes, yes.

Because maybe I'm gonna, the angry comment is something, even though it's not, like what the fuck, that's crazy. That's the sick part. Yeah, that's the sick part. If you can't, where it's like, if you can't get anything else, you'll take attention. And the other thing that's important about social attention as a kind of feature of this sort of framework is

the weird thing about social attention is it has no valence, positive or negative. Like someone screaming in your face on the subway is social attention. Someone like flirting with you across the bar is also social attention. They're both attention, like one is far more pleasurable than the other,

but in the absence of attention, and when we're conditioned to respond to attention qua attention, you get a lot conditioned to respond to attention qua attention, you get a lot of pathological seeking of negative attention. Just this kind of troll addiction. And that's not, you know, that may sound like- Leads right to the White House. Well, that was the point I was gonna make.

It's like, you may be like, well, that's kind of, yeah, it's true, but like we have watched this break the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world and produced a model of public discourse that is now 100% the dominant model of both the most powerful man in the world who runs the most powerful military named Donald Trump

and the richest man in the world, who also seems to be maybe running the country. And both of them have this as a core part of their personalities now which and I want to talk about this later but like which is basically the perfect logical conclusion of the attention age these two at the time like you could absolutely like and I was I did a final read of the book back in you know because books have a long lead time. And I did my final read, it must have been maybe back in the summer, like we were sort of locking the book. And I was like, there's a lot of Musk in this book.

Is there too much Musk? And it was because he was such the perfect figure of this. There's this guy where like all of these pathologies and deformative, they've clearly kind of broken his brain. They've changed his behavior. He bought this thing for $44 billion so he could be the main character on it. Yep.

And then I was like, no, actually he is pretty central. And now it's like, I didn't even get to write about everything that came after the manuscript was locked. I mean, he is a genius whose brain has been rotted by the very platform that he purchased. Yes, exactly. Which is just one of the many stories. Exactly correct.

So here's a problem I've encountered. There's people like you and I who spend way too much of our lives online, but at least recognize the damage it's doing to us. Then there's people who spend way too much of their lives online, but they deeply believe still that it's a good thing. It makes them feel happy, connected,

important part of the world. Is that true? Well, I think about the intense, intense reaction to the TikTok ban briefly going into effect. Yes. Because TikTok decided to. And I wonder, I'm like, I have to check myself

because I'm like, are we missing something? Are we just like old guys, like out on our lawn, yelling at the kids? And if we're not missing anything, like what, is it, is it hard to recognize this if you're so addicted to the algorithms? And I think TikTok is probably the worst example of this. Yeah. I mean, I think it's the most powerful for sure. I think that's the most kind of weaponized version in the least reciprocal. Yeah, so then there's this very weird thing that happens on TikTok,

which I think is like an incredibly unhealthy thing of like taking the comment and posting it and responding to it. Which is a very, very perverse and dysfunctional version of discourse. Very. It's even worse than Twitter dunking somehow, yet it is of course like a main trope.

My feeling about this is, I guess the following. One is there is a little bit of a baby in a bathwater issue here, which is I love the internet. I've always loved the internet. And I love lots of stuff on TikTok because when the internet is at its best, what it is doing is aggregating and curating and leading you to discover the sheer talent brilliance of people,

people being funny and smart and clever and people who don't have comedy writing jobs, but are working in a liquor store and people who are not professional dancers, but can really dance and people, you know, there is so much talent creativity out there that one of the incredible things about the internet is to run through the gatekeepers that create sort of formal systems in which people are able to utilize their talents

and instead kind of distribute it. When that is happening, that's great. Like I love that. And honestly, earlier TikTok was a lot like that. And then as it got more, as it sort of grew, the same thing happened to it that happens in all these competitive attentional markets, which is driving towards conflict,

driving towards like clips of old office shows. Like, like, like. And it's incredibly individualized. Like, I find, and sort of the way that I came to TikTok is friends in the group chat, which you write about in the book, like sending a funny TikTok around. Because like.

And you're like, oh, that's cool. All that cool stuff that you're talking about that's done on the internet, it's meant to be enjoyed with other people and talked about with other people. Right, which is why sharing is so key. This episode is out on the day of the Super Bowl, right? Which is maybe the last monocultural.

The last thing we got. Or the biggest in one of the last monocultural events. And Trump's there, and Taylor Swift. And so you've got sports fans, sports fans, political thing, a music, like it's all there. It's all happening at the Superbowl. But I do think, and we've talked about this for a while on the show, that like we are losing the monoculture is not just a like nostalgic, oh well.

Like I think it's, there's something deeply problematic about that in just having a functioning society. Yeah, I do. And it's funny because again, this is one of those places, you know, you gotta keep testing yourself. Am I the old guy? Get off my all on. So like, just to close that thought in,

like I think there's a baby in bath water thing. I understand why people like certain aspects of TikTok and these platforms. It's the specific structural mechanisms by which they monetize attention, as opposed to the technological ability to do this thing that is the problem. You know what I mean? Because you could have the latter.

You could. And we've had, you know, email is messed up for a lot of reasons and it's spam, but it's an open protocol. You can send email to anyone and there's lots of reasons emails are great technology, right? In terms of the monoculture, that's another place where it's interesting because if you go back and you look at the media criticism in particularly around the 30s and the rise of fascism, right? They've got the opposite problem of hyper individuation. They've got the mob and masses, right? So it's

like when you have these small channels that everyone hears, if the wrong people take them over and start the radio broadcast that the entire nation listens to with propaganda, that's really scary. Well, and you write about this, this is sort of like Orwell versus Huxley, the Neil Postman that it's about, which is like mass communication is a problem or just everyone not paying attention. Yes, Postman's insight is that the, he's writing this in 84, the dystopia described by Orwell in 1984, which is information controlled by a single entity is not the dystopia described by Orwell in 1984, which is information controlled by a single entity is not the dystopia we got.

Instead it's brave new world of Aldous Huxley where there's just endless pleasures and delights and distraction and no one actually pays any attention to important things. Yeah, and now there's that, and there was that in the TV age, but now there's that, but it's like all of us in our own individual, algorithmic drip for each of us, right own individual, you know, algorithmic drip.

Exactly. For each of us, right? And so we're not even connecting. And all of us, and all of us, you know, people spending more time alone, which is a key part of this. And then the, you know, the fusing of offline and online life is a huge part of this.

Like, I remember this sort of slogan we used to use back in the day of like, Twitter's not real life. And one of the things I think it was really clear in this last election is that like, you really can't distinguish real life and not real life. If you're in a public place and you look around, ordinary people, what are they doing? in real life, they're looking at their phone. What is on the phone? The stuff on the internet or what's the, you know, that's where they're getting information. That's how they're learning about the world.

Yeah. Uh, I could spend an entire episode talking with you about how the attention age shapes the decisions people in media like us make about what to talk about, what to cover. I want to zero in on a point that you make that I think a lot of people who aren't in media understandably don't get, which is that the process of directing people's attention

isn't just a one-way street. And the audience has a say in what we cover because if what we cover doesn't capture their attention, they will simply direct their attention somewhere else. And I think a lot of folks think, well, this is, it's about ratings and money and all the financial model is, does depend on that. But even if money wasn't part of it,

if I'm saying something and you're not paying attention, what does it matter that I'm saying? It's funny when some people will be like a critique of like, well, you're just trying to get ratings. It's like, yes, a lot. Yes, I'm trying to get a lot of people to pay attention to what I'm saying, which is another way of saying that. Because I think it's what I'm saying, you know, could make a difference in some way. I would like as many people as possible to hear what I'm saying. That is true. Like guilty

as charge. And I think that that feeling, you know, when you're inside media, you always feel like you're chasing. You're chasing the horse. And people outside media see us as riding the horse. Yes. Leading it. And how do you balance that? Like on a typical day when you're trying to figure out

what's in the show, how do you balance the need to direct people's attention, but also follow where the audience is? Sometimes it's, you know, today, like sometimes it's as sort of crude as a few blocks of following and a few blocks of leading. You know? And look, sometimes you're in a situation

where the place where there's attentional energy around is really important. Like the Musk thing is both a great story, not great in like, it's, you know, it's bad. Interesting story. But I mean like it's sort of narrative components. There's this character, the world's richest man is like infiltrating the payment systems of the Treasury Department. And also is really important.

So that's, those are kind of the easiest days, right? When it's right in the middle of the Treasury Department. And also is really important. So those are kind of the easiest days, right? It's right in the middle of the Venn diagram. But then we're also going to do something on the acting US attorney in DC, Ed Martin, who has really flown on the radar. That fucking guy. But yes, but people should be directing their attention to. And then there's certain ways where you, through the monologue, you start in one place where you're trying to sort of capture people

on what they're paying attention to, and then you kind of move them from that place somewhere else, and then you end up on a guest on a thing that's under the radar and not getting a lot of attention, but you started. Yep. You know, that's a real, that's a classic Rachel Maddow trick. Um, and she sort of does it better than anyone, but... But I've learned how

to do it pretty well myself so there's different ways you but you what you can't do is just ignore no where attention is flowing no but it is it's funny and you I mean you see it here I'm sure you guys say you have a podcast as well so you know this but when we when we started like the data for podcasting is like notoriously thin. It's like a- It's not great for TV too. It's gotten better, but it's still largely a black box.

But at the beginning, we were checking out how many, first of all, we didn't even know how many downloads we were getting when we were over at the Ringer. And then now, and then we started this and we're like, oh, we check it once in a while, but it's an ad model and it wasn't completely dependent, so we would just not pay attention to it and we would just, oh, we check it once in a while, but it's an ad model and it wasn't completely dependent, so we would just not pay attention to it and we would just say whatever we wanted.

And then the show grew and it was great. And then you get to a point where you're like, okay, here's how many downloads we have each show and should we listen and there's financial issues and the ads and all that kind of stuff. But what I've realized too is if you try to completely shape the content with the thought in mind that you have to like get more downloads. It doesn't work. It's not even like it's bad. It just doesn't work.

That is really an important point too. You can't reverse engineer things off of the data. I mean, some people maybe can, I can't. And what I've done is I think I've just developed a sense that's like a craft sense or almost like a like a surfer in the wave sense where it's like I just know it at some point in my you know I just know where the energy is. I have a feel for where the energy is. Because you're on the devices just looking at all the news all the time. I have this magical feel. It's called reading the internet all day long. It's a mystical quality. And I feel the same way, like I stopped,

I stopped looking at ratings in 2020 during COVID and I've never looked at them since and I have no idea. Oh, that's good. Five years, I have no idea. And it's, I think so much better for the show. Yeah. And ironically, probably the ratings. Offline is brought to you by Mosh. The older you get, the more you may find yourself wanting to be more intentional about the way you live, eat, and take care of your body. Mosh, which you may have

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We've decided, you know, like we were thinking a lot alike, especially about politics. And I mean, it's a little I still have my, you know, Democratic strategist organizer hat on, but I wonder for you as you're thinking like, okay, we gotta reach more people. Does that, how do you think about that on a day-to-day basis? Or is that the conversation you wanna be having? Yeah, I mean, I guess there's two ways to understand the we,

like in a specific sense of me as Chris Hayes, who has a podcast and a television show, or like people with my politics or like the Democratic Party which is not really my... Democratic Party has to do its own thing. I'm not structurally part of it. You know I think different platforms or different forms of media matter like we launched the podcast Why Is This Happening in part and I see it at book signings where there is a different

group of people that listen to podcasts and watch show. Probably it's an age thing of younger people listen to podcasts and watch less cable news. So that's part of it. Watching Jamel Bowie like blow up on TikTok has been a delight, you know? Cause it's like, and even people, he has some funny things where people are like,

who's this TikTok guy? And it's like, I'm a columnist in New York Times. It's like, it's the, like one of the five most important writing jobs in the English language, maybe, probably. Like, and it's just so funny because it's like, right, that's a different audience. So part of what I'm trying to say is there are structural boundaries around

who listens to what kind of media or consumes what kind of media that you cannot unilaterally overcome. Like I can't get 25 year olds en masse to watch linear cable news. Can't do it. I could make amazing content and it's just not gonna happen because of the structural impediments. So part of that

also is like putting our clips out on Instagram Reels and putting it out on TikTok and doing that sort of thing. The other thing I would say is one of the things I really like about the podcast is we don't just talk about politics. We talk about a lot of different things. I think that's really important when people talk about this Joe Rogan on the left idea. Yeah You know talk about other stuff and your worldview and values can inform that but it's not Right. Let's talk about the special election, Nebraska. That's coming off all the time. Yeah Yeah, so I think that's part of it too. But but to your point, let me just say one more thing

One the the research data we have shows that there's actually more heterogeneous viewership of our show than you would guess. Like people who describe themselves as conservatives watch our show. We get that. We get people come on up to us and be like, oh, I was listening to you guys and Ben Shapiro. I'm like, what?

I got this guy in my neighborhood who's like the world's biggest Steve Bannon fan who's just always saying, like, I love your show. He's like, you and Bannon. I'm like, all right, man. Yeah, that works. Whatever floats your boat. But I think that this idea, the political question here is a Democratic party getting caught in audience capture.

And that's really what we're getting at, right? Which is saying things that the people that are your most fervent supporters want to hear from you, but are in tension with the messages that will reverberate in the outer part of the concentric circle where elections are won and lost, particularly presidential elections in a universe in which low propensity voters are drifting away from you. And that is a real conundrum. I mean, to me, that's the biggest conundrum. It's the biggest conundrum. One of the reasons I just loved your book so much is

you articulated the problem that I have been worried about for a long time even before the results of the election which is I have thought for a while that the central political challenge of our time is living in a society where as you say attention is the most valuable resource and I worry that that is basically incompatible with living in a functioning democracy at this point. Yes, that's the worry.

Because I think that nearly every incentive that you write about advantages authoritarian movements, right? Our tendency to pay attention to the most lurid stories, crime. Threat particularly. Threat, scandals, tendency of lies to grab more attention than truth. Public debate and discourse has become nearly impossible. You write that it's like trying to meditate in a strip club.

That's the line. It's perfect. And here's the big one. Donald Trump, during this campaign, he would say a couple of times like, in a strip club. That's the line. It's perfect. And here's the big one. Donald Trump, during this campaign, he would say a couple of times like, vote for me and you'll never have to vote again. And you know, when we all scream,

look, he's telling us there won't be elections again. But I think part of what he was saying there, and part of why it was appealing to people is, if you vote for me, I will take care of everything and you won't have to pay attention to the boring shit anymore. Yeah, that's exactly right. And all this like mess.

And we're, and Democrat, we're like, pay attention to this important thing and it's hard and it's messy and you might be disappointed sometime, but just your precious attention, which you don't have much of, we want you to direct it to this boring endeavor because, and you know it's going to help people and you want to help people, but don't know this other guy he's telling you you can go back to just having fun and watching tik-tok and I'll take care of it all and like I don't know how to get I don't know how to get beyond that I think I think all that's right that the trends are in the wrong direction but I also think that you know talent and innovation matter a lot and there are ways to do this in pro-social.

I mean, the deck is stacked surely in favor of essentially reactionary forms of attention capital. In the same way, like we've seen this competitive attention markets, what do they select for, right? Casinos, Times Square, the tabloid space of a supermarket, which is a very competitive little market for your eyeball attention, right? It's lurid, it's often false.

The lead of evening news is often like, if it bleeds or leads, like, what's that? Well, threat, danger, right? Competitive attention market. So those all have reactionary entailments. But the other thing is like, being a really good public communicator wanting to dominate attention matters a lot. Yeah. Which a lot of Democrats do not want to do. Does Dick Durbin want everyone talking about Dick Durbin all the time? Dick Durbin does not want

everyone talking about Dick Durbin all the time. You know what? He's mission accomplished. Yeah and that's not shade on Dick Durbin. In fact, to be honest, people that don't want people talking about them all the time are Mission accomplished. Yeah, and I'm not that's not shade on Dick Durbin. No, in fact, in fact to be honest People that don't want people talking about them all the time Probably normal more normal and decent people who like want to do their work like So you need people that want the attention that understand it's important to get it and then you need people to try lots of different things To get it that might be

Weird or wacky or not what other people have done before. But part of the genius of the algorithm is that it can find stuff that no one would have given a green light to that people like. And that's kind of the job in politics. I mean, Barack Obama is a pretty good example of this. I know, but I've said this to former Obama colleagues many times in the last couple of years, which is I wonder if he would win today. I do too, but I think a version of him can, like I, I don't know if the,

I mean, if he can't then, then I don't know who can. Right. But I still think like some of- It's also, we're talking about, you about, we're talking about two and a half points in the swing state. So, can you get that margin? But yeah, I mean, I think you need people that are gonna try stuff.

That is the really important part of this. Well, it's funny, I was listening to you and Ezra talk about this. And I've heard this before, which is, you know, Republicans understand that it's not the, it's not the type of attention you receive. It's the quantity of attention and they're very good at getting negative attention. Donald Trump's very good at getting negative attention. Elon Musk is getting, is very good at getting the negative attention. But like, I think even if there were Democrats who mastered

getting the amount of attention that Musk and Trump do, and if some of it was negative, that doesn't work for our project, which is a Democratic project where we're trying to tell everyone, democracy requires patience and hard work and grace and empathy and all these, everything. We are working against everything. So when we try to get attention, even on the democratic side, some of the people who get the most attention

are the people who seem Trump-like in some ways. Yes, although I think there's different ways to do that. But yes, I mean, it pushes against the project, I think, of the kind of pressing the buttons that light up the lizard brain. That is the sort of stock and trade. But I also think that you can, you know, there was a certain kind of virality to Barack Obama

that was rooted in his unique abilities as a public communicator, but then kind of took on a kind of like viral aspect of their own. And it's funny that like that was the critique of him. Like he's a big celebrity in the McCain ad. Now, yeah, now it's like, yeah, that's why he won. Yeah, he was a big celebrity.

Maybe try to run someone that everyone wants to be around and wants, like thinks is cool. That's an interesting idea. But part of that was him, like he had a unique set of skills, has a unique set of skills. Part of it, of course, was his staff. Probably 70 to 80 percent. And then part of it was just the kind of like weird vagaries of the viral updraft that happened and I Guess part of what I'm saying is like you got to try something and hope you kind of hit that lottery Yeah, you know and you don't know what that's gonna be ahead of time

Even though the the deck is stacked and the game is kind of rigged You know, I Trump didn't know all this stuff was gonna work kind of rigged. You know, Trump didn't know all this stuff was going to work. No, he very much backed into most of it. He backed into it and a lot of it, you know, stuff did work, but you know, if his polling had plummeted and he'd been abandoned after that first John McCain comment, yeah, that would be it. The world would, yeah, exactly. Like the world would have just gone on a different track. I don't know what would have happened, but yeah, so part be it. The world would, yeah, exactly. Like the world would have just gone on a different track. I don't know what would have happened, but.

Yeah. So part of it is just, you need, you know, that you need to try stuff. That, that, that I think is the one lesson here. And I think there is a real problem of you see this across everything of the center left in this country being hidebound and small C conservative.

Yeah. Rear guard actions to defend institutions, defend the bureaucracy. And I don't think it's a coincidence that most of them come off as the most boring. Yeah. And defend the status quo. And that's not to say like right now

it's important to defend institutions and bureaucracy, but also like a lot of institutions don't work well, a lot of things in the bureaucracy are broken. Like if you talk to people who are up close to the bureaucracy, they can give you, I know people in the bureaucracy who are both at one hand terrified and appalled by what Musk and Trump are doing and also can give you two hours about everything that's broken in their specific part of their bureaucracy. And so this sort of small c conservatism, this kind of dependence on precedent, there's a in their specific part of their bureaucracy. And so this sort of small C conservatism, this kind of dependence on precedent, there's a lot of this kind of like retracted in thinking

in progressive democratic party circles that I think is really a problem. Well, it's interesting, cause I always, you know, like AOC I think is one of the best communicators in the party and she, you know, her politics are a little to the left of mine, not much. But, you know, if everyone, every time I'm like, oh, she's one of the most talented communicators in the party, but like, well, look at her poll numbers, like she's so polarizing.

And, you know, she's got one of the highest, you know, negatives or anyone. So I'm like, OK, well, but she's interesting. She can break through, she's communicating. And then as you get closer to the center, it's hard to think of a, a, a politician or a leader here or anywhere who can capture attention, but is like a center left, very electable figure. And I don't know, like we can go back and criticize Kamala Harris's campaign

or Joe Biden or all of them, but like we keep running into this. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, it's hard to, it is hard to come up with that. I also think like, okay, well then just try stuff. Like go be the centrist AOC. I don't know, Fetterman is kind of doing that

in his own weird way. I guess Pete in a way. Yeah, yeah. Pete was a, yeah. And Pete likes to, and the thing about him is that he likes attention, he likes to go talk to people, and he likes to be on stuff, and that's an important part of it.

But yeah, like, I don't know if the AOC model's the right one, but she is out there. Yeah, and she's breaking through. ["The Daily Show Theme"] Offline is brought to you by Haya. Typical children's vitamins are basically candy in disguise, filled with 2 teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals, and other gummy additives growing kids should never eat.

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and Zelensky. And I cut it because it sort of felt like a weird place to start. But I think he's a fascinating figure because here's a guy whose professional life is how to get and maintain attention because he was a comedian. Yes. Then he wrote and starred in a show that is a attention age parable

in which a substitute teacher in a high school goes on a rant about corruption in Ukraine while a student surreptitiously records them on a video, it gets uploaded and goes viral. I forgot that that was a good thing. Thus launching the teacher into an unlikely campaign for president, which he wins. He then, that show is the biggest show in Ukraine by far.

It's watched by like a third to a half of the country. He then trademarks the name of the party in the show as his own party and runs for president. Having written a show about a viral dude running for president successfully and destroys the competition, then finds himself immediately after a few sort of stumbling years as a wartime president, like literally like ducking Russian bombs, and understands immediately that the single most important thing for the survival of his nation is to grab the attention of the world, so as to convert that attention into arms and money to support their defense. And I was, I've been thinking about him since I read that in your book,

and I do, like, there's sort of a moral clarity in his rhetoric. Like, I was trying to think of how he spoke and why he got so much attention. Part of it is just the circumstances he found himself in. But he was very good about, like, he, you know, he wasn't trying to embellish things. He wasn't trying to do, like, push all the buttons you push

when you're trying to go for the lizard brain stuff. Yes. It was just moral clarity. Putin is a murderous tyrant and here are my people and here are their stories and I'm gonna walk among them. Like it was just, the story was good. The story was good, but also the appetite to talk to people and communicate constantly.

That's true. This is a big part of it. He was everywhere. He still is everywhere, yeah. He did Letterman in a metro station. I just saw him do an interview with Lex Freeman, the podcaster, and Freeman speaks fluent Russian, and they have this fascinating fraud exchange

at the beginning where Freeman's speaking to him in Russian, and of course, Zelensky is from the Russian speaking part of Ukraine and actually grew up speaking Russian as his household language, but was explaining to Freeman while he won't use Russian now, because of what it means at a moment when people speaking that mother tongue are killing his people.

And it was this incredibly intense exchange. And this is something that I think there really is a, like Zelensky talks to everyone, he does a lot of trying to get attention. Lopez Obrador in Mexico, who was the only incumbent, basically, to buck the trend of incumbents around the world getting their butts kicked and passed off the presidency

to his hand-chosen successor, Claudio Schaumbaum, who won by 30 points, was doing like three hours a day. Yeah. He gave away a watch on his last press conference to some kid, Narendra Modi, who's got 65% approval rating and is a reactionary and I think sort of aspiring autocrat, but he's doing like all sorts of crazy stunts where he's on TV all the time. Like Trump has been on TV all day every day.

And I just like, I'm like that part of it, I don't think has an ideological valence. I really don't. Yes, there's something a little kind of, there is something a little Codillo-esque about the, I'm going to do three hour press conferences every day. But you could do that as a liberal. You could. You could just do that as a liberal. You could be like, today we're doing this big thing and I'm going to take questions

and I'm going to make news. This gonna like, and I'm gonna make news. This is where the Zelensky comparison is interesting too. I do think you have to like humor on our side helps, right? That you can be funny, entertaining because you've gotta be entertaining and hold the audience's attention without just being an asshole the whole time. Because again, that cuts against the actual project.

And you have to, the other thing that you have to, which is key and this is about AOC, and it's true about Pete, you have to deep in the deepest part of yourselves, enjoy doing it. If you are not enjoying doing it, it's not gonna work. Like you gotta love it. You gotta be like love being out there,

love tussling with the press, love talking to people. And Joe Biden, for most of his career, that was true of Joe Biden. You know, like I- I actually think that was some of the charm that led him, you know, to the heights that- Yeah, and I think that, I think a 65 year old version of him

might've had a very different experience of incumbency this time around and even, you know, run it. What do you think the political movement to sort of take back our attention collectively sounds like? I know you guys are talking about like, there's a space for a candidate that runs against all this. And it's not just the phones, though that's part of it.

But what is the vision for that kind of country sound like? It's really interesting. I mean, I think it's regulating, going after the tackle oligarchs is the kind of pressure point here. We don't want these people that monetize our attention and exploit us to have all of the power concentrated in a few hands

and they're that, you know, taking them on. And they are like sapping something from us that makes us alive, which is, I mean, I thought about that. Cyber barons. Do you hear Steve Bannon talk to Ross Duthat, that podcast? And it was interesting hearing the split between him and Musk, which is not just, you not just over immigration or anything like that,

but his thought is basically, Musk is a transhumanist, and they all wanna- Oh, he hates the tech dudes, he hates them. Yeah, but the reason why is he thinks spiritually, they are stealing something from all of us, and they all want us to just, the robots to take over and put the chips in our brain and send us to Mars and whatever else, and that's what makes us human is, you know,

being together and Steve Bannon. So I'm putting a nicer shine on what he said. But it did make me think that there is an opening that is cross ideological for people being like, enough of this shit. And I also think Musk represents that right now. And I, you know, again, polling is not, you know, it is what it is. But, you know, to the extent we can measure how the American public feels about this guy, it's plummeting. It's like truly falling off a cliff. And part of the thing that he doesn't have is he is not Donald Trump. He is not charismatic in the same way. He is not funny in the same way. He is like, he is like a vortex of negative charisma.

I mean, he's just like the unfunniest dork that ever lived. Which is why he's not on TV all the time. That's the other thing is he can't, Trump could go out there and he can kind of defend himself and he can lie and he can change direction. Musk is just, there's a million stories being run about Musk and Musk is on his platform, which is where he sort of communicates,

but it's just not the same of him being able to redirect. He's trying to on the platform he owns, but I just- But all he can do is meme. I think people are like, I don't like this dude. What? And I have found this out in the wild. I don't know if you have too, but the Musk thing is absolutely getting through to normies

that people that don't follow political news. And the initial visceral reaction is like, but the Musk thing is absolutely getting through to normies that people that don't follow political news and the initial visceral reaction is like, I don't know, he's in the payment. No one who is 19 year old can control social security payments. I don't know about that. But also like it is the difference between Trump and Musk

because you meet people who've met Trump and they say, you know what, he's actually, he's a gregarious guy and he's charming and stuff like that. And people who meet Elon Musk and they say, you know what, he's actually, he's a gregarious guy and he's charming and stuff like that. And people who meet Elon Musk, they'll say, yeah, he's a genius. Everyone will say, he's fucking weird. No one's like, oh, he's so wonderful and generous to the staff. No one says that. So it's great coincidence that you're here this week because Max Fisher and I, Max, my co-host

here, we did an offline challenge last year where we tried a bunch of things to reduce our screen time with mixed results, at least for me. This week we're starting another offline challenge that serendipitously has to do with reclaiming our attention. This is about trying to increase our focus. I love this. And so we're going to do a different challenge over the next couple of weeks. Any ideas or advice for the listeners

besides the walk, which is a good one? The walk is a good one. I also think the, I mean, again, these are like, this is sort of dumb and obvious points, but like the physical location of the phone matters a lot. It just does. Where do you like have a place to plug it in that's far from where you hang out in the house.

It just, you know, these little friction points, you know, there's these studies, I remember reading this back in college in some class about like public plazas. And if the stairs were like, you know, over some amount, you know, three inches, and if they were over a inch, like no one went up to the plaza.

Just like a little bit of friction. So that kind of physical friction does really work for where, you know. How are you finding, cause I found this difficulty even, and it's sort of getting used to the Trump era again. Like I remember this from the first term, it feels worse this term.

It's like, you know, for our jobs and a lot of people listening pay attention to the news and you know, they want their phones and their screens for that. But like, how do you, have you found any ways to consume the news that are not just like fire hose? No, like smoking three packs a day. Okay, cool, cool, cool.

That's not just like, I'm just like those like lighting one off the one I got in my mouth. Are you still reading like the physical copy of the paper? Yeah, I do read the physical paper in the morning, which I do really. The great thing about that is it just directs your attention to things that are not going viral online. Yes. Which is a really key thing.

Yeah. Because, you know, the physical paper is an attention directing technology in which people make editorial decisions about where they think your attention should go and is not subject to the whims of shares virality algorithms And that that is really really useful. You also just read better when you're reading. Yeah, you know reading on paper I do I think it's where people have a lot of animus against New York Times right now and I sort of understand it in Son of it I think is pretty profoundly misplaced But I do think I do think a physical subscription in the newspaper is a great idea.

It really is. And I got a thing about papers piling up and it makes me feel neurotic and claustrophobic. But- But it is good. The editorial attention direction, I think is something that we're missing. I've read more articles about the war.

The New York Times has been covering the war in Ukraine with tremendous amount of resources and sustained focus and it those stories never take off online. Yeah. No one shares them, talks about them and I've been reading their coverage and it's really good coverage. I feel like I have actually a way better

understanding. Which but I remember thinking about this when the war first started. I was like Putin he just wants way better understanding which but I remember thinking about this when the war first started I was like Putin he just wants to wait everyone out because he knows absolutely that in the age of attention It's gonna go away. It's like a log in a fire, man It burns up fast and then you got to come up with ways to throw more logs on there. Yeah, it's a fantastic book Seriously, everyone read it. I've been recommending it to everyone If you listen to the show, then you absolutely should read it.

Yes, yes, you are like right in the audience. All the characters, offline characters are in there. So you should definitely read it. Chris, thanks for coming by. It was great, man. Thanks. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Siglund. Delon Villanueva

produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeleine Herringer, and Adrian Hill for production support, our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.