Offline with Jon Favreau - Chris Hayes on Why We’re All Famous Now

Episode Date: May 8, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

You are a famous person known by millions who's also very online. How has that experience changed who you are, how you think, how you interact with others? Have you thought about that? Oh, I thought about it a lot. The experience of getting the primetime show, the first four or five years of that was like really pretty psychologically difficult and messed me up pretty bad, I would say. The way that I describe it is there's an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart is working for the mafia, and they hijack a cigarette truck,

and then when they take the stolen cigarettes, they hide them all in Bart's room. And so Homer walks in, and there's thousands of cartons of cigarettes in Bart's room. He's like, Bart, are you smoking? And Bart's like, no. He's like, I'm going to make you sit here and smoke every one of these cigarettes. And the way that I think about the first few years of like real public life fame was like, oh, oh, you like people paying attention to you? Well, here's a thousand cartons of cigarettes of people paying attention to you. Do you still like it? I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. I've been dying to talk to him for this show is because of a New Yorker piece he wrote a few months ago titled, On the Internet, We're Always Famous. Chris argues that the internet's most radical change to our lives isn't who gets to speak, but what we get to hear. Which, to paraphrase Bo Burnham, is pretty much everything about everyone all of the time. Google searches and social media accounts have almost completely erased the boundary between public life and private life. And Chris also points out that even if you're not someone who's had the experience of being known, paid attention to, or commented on by strangers, the possibility of it now haunts online life, which increasingly is just life. And guess what? That possibility deeply affects how we think and how we act.

It shapes the version of ourselves we present to the world and how we interact with one another. And not necessarily in a good way. Chris writes, Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes, into the project of impressing strangers.

A project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires, but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways. I invited Chris on to talk about this article and break down the central thesis of his piece, which is the distinction between the recognition that we crave as humans and the attention that we get online. We talk about how the internet has given us warped incentives, turning normal people into politicians and some politicians into shock jocks. We also discuss why this era of mass fame isn't just bad for our democracy or our society, but for our own relationships and our own souls.

As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com, and please do rate, review, and share the show. Here's Chris Hayes. Chris Hayes, welcome to Offline. It's good to be here, offline, online with you, remotely. We were supposed to do this in person, but now we're doing offline online. COVID got me.

So you wrote a piece for The New Yorker back in September that I've been wanting to talk to you about since the first episode of this podcast. And it's not because you argue that the internet is bad. Most guests I've talked to have come to that conclusion, at least partially bad. It's sort of why you think the Internet is bad. You write the most radical change to our shared social lives isn't who gets to speak. It's what we can hear. Can you talk about what you mean by that and why you think it's an even bigger change than who gets to speak? So we are creatures like all creatures who are bound by certain

perceptual constraints of like how much information we can process. And in fact, you know, a huge part of what our systems are doing, whether at the pre-conscious or conscious level is like constraining that because the fact of the matter is there's a theoretically infinite amount of stimulus at all times present in every single moment like right now i'm looking at you there's a bookcase behind you i could like my attention could just like focus on like each individual book behind you and if it did that like my system would go haywire i wouldn't be able to like focus on you and like actually talk so we we actually have this incredibly unbelievably domestic sophisticated system that's like screening out stuff all the time yeah and the one of the big changes now is at the conscious level not the pre-conscious level right

so so at the perceptual level we're still doing that because we can't really mess with that wiring but we also have to do that at the conscious level which is like we have to focus on stuff we have to like not listen to stuff and you know, I compare it to just being in a room where like if you were at a cocktail party and like you and I are having a conversation, but literally everyone has a bullhorn. Like it just would be very hard just at a basic party, you know, where everyone actually is screaming, you, you, it's very, very hard. It's very hard to focus. And that's just like sort of at a basic level. But then it's also that humans are weird. We're all weird. We all have our weird tics. We all say stuff that's dumb and wrong all the time. And so it's just necessarily the case that like, we're just hearing a lot of that all the time in it at a level that we never have before. Like access

to publishing your inner thoughts is so distributed now and access to hearing people's inner thoughts is so distributed now in a way that's just totally unprecedented, right? In human civilization, like it's an order of magnitude different. That experience of the world, I think, is a profound, almost like epochal break in terms of how we make sense of the world, how our politics work, how our society functions. You're constantly hearing this sort of cacophony of opinions and takes and views and jokes and sometimes great stuff like things you wouldn't hear otherwise that's just overwhelming the in some ways it's sort of overwhelming the basic um gatekeeping focal faculties that we have and need to kind of like function. Well, I think it's a fascinating thesis because there are so many consequences you can point to that come from this. You were basically just talking about what it does to our sort of sense

of attention. It distracts us, but it also like deeply affects how we present ourselves to the world, how we interact with others, the way that we socialize and interact with each other. Like, I'm interested what made you sit down and write this piece? Like, when do you think the Internet became this place where we all amassed what you call basically a totalitarian ability to surveil almost anyone in the world? Like when do you, or I guess, when did you notice it? Yeah. I mean, I think it happened, I would say, you know, there, the two big developments I think are the creation, the sort of widespread distribution of smartphones, which, you know, there's several billion of them. There's more, there's more smartphones in the world than toilets, I think, which is a sort of an amazing

thing to think of. So the widespread distribution of smartphones combined with social media, right? So it really, really has really entered its own kind of period of completeness, I think, in the last few years. But I write in the piece that this basic distinction between public and private, which at least in the Western canonical tradition reaches back thousands of years, right? This idea of like there's this sphere that's private and that sphere that's public and there's a and we have enshrined it in law and custom and tradition, whatever, like and thousands of years go into creating that. We just like ripped it down in about a decade, just completely, you know, with not really a whole thought. So it's, it's incredible how much that boundary has been eviscerated. What's public and what's private. You see this all the time too, when like someone will, you know, a tweet will go viral or something

will go viral. Sometimes it's just like, you know, a dating story on TikTok. And it's like, you can respond well at some level, you put that out publicly. But the person's understanding of how public that was, was completely different than how public it became. And the other thing about it is like, I think it's not great for how we think about each other. Like, I've, there's lots of relationships a person has casually in one's life. Like your barber, like, or neighbors, or like barber or neighbors or parents at the softball team. I don't know, man. They might have some crazy-ass ideas about a lot of stuff.

I don't know if they do or not. We have a really lovely time talking about our kids and who's fielding ground balls well. I don't need to know their terrible views about things if they have them i'm not if you're listening uh fellow parents i don't think you have terrible views i i just think that like it's just a perfect example like there's an entire universe of relationships that in some ways are dependent on a little bit of that public private division like you are a certain way in a certain context with a person that creates like casual social bonds yep like if you see them if you have that conversation you go home on facebook and they're like you know well tell brandon no vaccine for me and it's like oh well okay

now i have to not talk but it's also like i don't want to feel that way about that. But like, again, like, I think I honestly like, and this is me talking with like, you know, from my Irish Catholic upbringing, like sometimes a little repression is good. Like sometimes a little like not everyone sharing everything is good for the social lubricant. Like we can have small talk and just kind of be a little everyone not knowing everyone. And I don't even just mean that about politics. I mean everything, right? Those sort of divisions, those tiers of sociality, those tiers of public versus private persona have been stripped down and replaced with like the totalitarian panopticon of like constant surveillance, which is that everything is constantly in the public domain. Yeah. And I don't think we really understand how different it was before. Like now when you,

when you meet someone, when you're about to meet someone, you Google them all the time and you know a whole bunch of shit about that person that you never would have known in, in the old world. We're interesting because of, because of the age we are, that we sort of straddle both of these worlds, right? Like at some point, there's going to be generations who don't ever remember this. And then probably our parents' generation still don't quite understand it, but we've sort of been on the border of this. But knowing a ton about every single person that you meet, and then after meeting them, knowing even more is just going to change fundamentally the way that we interact

with one another. And you make a really interesting point. You argue that the era of mass fame is upon us, but you point out that even though the experience of fame and being known by strangers is still foreign to most people, the possibility of mass fame now haunts online life, which you accurately point out is increasingly just life. How do you think the possibility that you might suddenly become known by millions of strangers shapes the version of ourselves that we present to the world? That's a great question. I mean, let me just take a step back and say that. So part of part of the point of the essay and part

of the thing that I was I've been wrestling with. So one of the things is hard. And I think you've been thinking this through because I've listened to to this, this podcast, like you don't want to be old man yells at cloud and you don't want to be like kids these days. And you don't want to like, it used to be like this and now it's like this and I don't like the way it is. And there's also this question of like, well, what's new and what's not right. So like, what, what are we dealing with? And that was actually one of the starting places for this essay. I was like, okay, what is actually new here? You know,

there's this street car photo of everyone like commuting and they've all got their heads buried in the newspaper, you know? And it's like, someone made a joke about like, Oh, look at these kids on their iPhones. Like it's like, right.

Certain things here. The thing, one of the things, I think there's a bunch of things that are genuinely new. One of the things is this relationship of being known by strangers. So one of the arguments I'm making in the essay is that's actually like a really rarefied human experience in the experience of being known by strangers, the king, you know, some sort of royalty, some pirate of infamy. And then when you get to the industrial age, that category gets bigger. People like Darwin was famous in his time, as was Dickens

and Tolstoy and actors at the time. Like there's, there's real fame that happens, right? It's just never been mass distributed the way it is now. That you could be known and seen and responded to by a stranger at the scale that happens now has never existed in human society before. That experience, and part of the reason I'm writing about it is like, I kind of know a little bit about that because I have a very weird job that puts me in the public eye. And I know a little bit about how psychologically unmooring being known by strangers is because, because human relationships develop, evolve, and are created in the, in the context of mutuality.

When you take the mutuality away, you've got something very weird so all my relationships that i develop over the course of my development as a human being are relationships where i know the person they know me or relationships that are one directional you know the person they don't know you right so you might have idols you look up to you might have famous people you you know you have heroes right right? But the other way around, that's totally absent from your human development. That's now everywhere all the time. That is a weird, distinct form of human relationship. It does weird things to you psychologically. And to circle back around to your point, it makes you think of the projection

and performance of yourself in a totally different way. Because you are now thinking about how strangers view you. And thinking about strangers view you and what they will say about you, how they will judge you, outside the context of mutual relationships, means you start to emphasize certain things that are ripped from the life world of human love, affection, solidarity, and camaraderie. Yeah. I mean, you talk a lot about how mass fame means we're constantly trying to impress other people. I think that's where you're getting at there. Doesn't it also mean that we're constantly trying to avoid embarrassing ourselves like that's what i think about for all the people who do not yet know mass fame who might be like yeah well i'm not famous so

this doesn't really apply to me right but like the knowledge that at any moment something you do in your private life may suddenly become public no matter who you are or what job you have, like that has really got to fuck with people's heads and their sense of self and how they behave just going through their lives. Right. Right. And I make the point, right.

That like the idea of the totalitarian state was that it, it created incentives on behavior, right? Like, so even if you weren't being spied upon, you knew you would be. And so it would change the way you acted. And like, right? Like, so even if you weren't being spied upon, you knew you would be, and so it would change the way you acted. And like, there's a,

I think there's a corollary here about if everything is happening in public. Now, the thing that makes all this so complicated, right, is that it's voluntary. I mean, it is and it isn't, right? It's sort of compelled now, I think in the generation below us by social norms, it's compelled by extremely sophisticated engineering

that has produced a world in which, us by social norms. It's compelled by extremely sophisticated engineering that, you know, has produced a world in which, you know, there's a sort of addictive quality of the thing. But yeah, I think it does change behavior. And even for the people that are listening to this and thinking like, well, I don't, no one knows me. It's like, you've interacted with a stranger online most likely. Right. And even that is weird. Again, in the context of human history, like, and again, this is really generational. I think that, you know, the younger you are, the more native you are to the environment of constant social media life world, the more that like, it's just what the performance of self is. And again, that's not new to, it's just the scale, right? Because like when you're 16, you're performing yourself all the time laboriously. I mean, you know, it's just like,

what do I wear and who am I? Am I this kind of person? I'm that kind of person. You're thinking about that all the time. And some of that never goes away. I mean, we're humans and we think about all this stuff all the time. But again, the scale and the kind of input you can receive.

And again, yes, that specter of like virality or that specter of blowing up or something or what that would mean just looms over all of it. My theory of this is that it's making people who are not in politics and people who don't even pay attention that much to politics act like politicians or public figures, right? Because you want to both capture the attention that a politician does, and you want to be respected like many politicians do, but you also are not really allowed to think out loud, make mistakes out loud, grapple with difficult questions out loud in public anymore because if you say something

dumb, that could be it for you. And I think there's a few things about that. So interesting. So one of them is like, I've been seeing people, you know, I've been seeing people with like the Elon Musk talking about like, you know, sometimes you'll see people talk about something like that, like this dumb ass, you know, and like, yeah, Elon Musk's tweets don't make him seem particularly bright, I have to say. But it's also like, if you ever zoom into like, I mean, like, I don't know what Albert Einstein's tweets would have been like, or Darwin's, or like, God knows, Tolstoy was a complete weirdo.

Like, people are weird. They're weird. And they can be utter, I mean, Mozart. Can you imagine Mozart's Twitter feed? Like, that guy was was loony tunes. Like people can be brilliant geniuses in one arena and completely either monstrous or, or ridiculous or superstitious in another domain. And we now get to see like all of that about a person in sort of a fascinating way.

No, I, I, I always thought that because like i i had met elon musk a few times before he was really big on twitter and i would always tell people the guy is fucking weird he's one of the weirdest people i've ever met they're like yeah but he's a genius he's amazing well and then he started tweeting a lot and it's like yeah see now everyone gets to see that and you didn't even have to meet him right because we hear everyone's thoughts all the time it's also the fact that like so wait to go back to this politician idea this is i think this is interesting and worth pressing on because i think there's something a little complicated happening and i sort of agree and sort of disagree let me just put my cards on the table which is

like i'm working on a book about attention um i and and i'm in the grips of of wrestling with this stuff and i think that sometimes when you have a thesis you're working on it makes you a little monomaniacal where like you want to fit everything into that framework so i'm probably guilty of that a little bit but on the on the politician thing what's interesting right is that in some ways it's a little bit the opposite and here's what i mean the notion that you had when you someone likes you say he's like a politician or he's very political. Generally, what you mean by that is he doesn't he or she is essentially negative attention seeking. Donald Trump. Right. Or Elon Musk now. Right.

And negative attention seeking is the opposite of like being like a politician, but there's something about the ping of endorphin. Basically, my thesis is that someone paying attention to you is kind of the lowest rung on the ladder of human social need. So like on the bottom is attention. And then above that is recognition. And then above that is love. And like love is rarefied and you're only really going to be truly loved by people you have mutual relationships with. Recognition is something that you can receive from people that don't know you. Like they really, they see see you attention is the lowest

attention can be positive or negative there's all kinds of ways to get attention i think we like attention and the structure of the networks incentivize attention which also in a weird way incentivizes a whole form of performance that's actually the opposite of a politician it's like negative attention seeking so that's another really weird part a politician. It's like negative attention seeking. So that's another really weird part of that because in other parts of life, that is really rare. In the context of like mutual IRL interactions, you sometimes meet people

who are kind of like performative assholes and they're like, they're a pain in the ass. It's not that common a trait, but it's really common online. You mentioned recognition, and a big part of your piece actually sort of focuses on the distinction between attention and recognition. Could you talk about that a little more here? Because like, what is the difference of being recognized by another person and getting recognition from them than just getting attention, which is lower on the ladder? was a wealthy Russian family, fled the Bolshevik resolution. He goes to France. He's a Parisian

scholar. He then goes on to be a bureaucrat who's like one of the foundational bureaucrats in creating what would become the EU. At that point, it's the European common market. Really interesting guy. Gave a very famous series of lectures about Hegel's phenomenology of spirit in Paris that was attended by some of the most formidable and influential thinkers of the 20th century. In fact, Koyev's theory was very influential on Francis Fukuyama's book about the end of history, just to put note. He's reading Hegel, and Hegel's talking about what it means to be human. And Hegel's got this whole master-slave dynamic, which Koyev builds on. And he talks about the really interesting paradox and what he calls

a master-slave relationship, right? So there's the master who stands over the slave and can tell the slave to do whatever he wants to do. The master seeks recognition because seeking recognition is what we want as humans. And what recognition is, is to be seen as human by another human. It's a condition of mutuality. You see me as a human, and I know you see me as a human because you're another human. And what Koyev says about the master-slave dynamic is that the paradox, in some ways the tragedy of the master-slave dynamic, is the slave is not seen as human by the master. And so the master cannot get recognition from the slave. He's trapped without recognition because he doesn't understand the full humanity of the

slave. He doesn't actually see the slave as human. He can't be satisfied by the slave recognizing him. And I think there's like a profound thing about that. What he goes on to argue is that the core of being human in some ways is the seeking of recognition, that we grow towards recognition the way a plant grows towards the light. That what recognition is, is again, being seen as fully human by another human. Now, again, that's lower than like being loved or all these things, but it's higher than attention. Attention is just the eyes on you. Attention can be positive or negative. Recognition is deeper, right? Like I fully internalize your humanness in front of me, before me. It seems like recognition also has to do with a level of empathy for the other person, right?

That I can see you as human. I can stand in your shoes. I can understand what you're going through, where you're coming from, because I can see sort of the common threads between us that make us both human. And with attention, you don't necessarily go past that barrier of really understanding the other person or empathizing with the other person. You just experience the other person. That's right. And you experience them as an input or, you know, or something that is, you know, that is, again, paying attention. It's pinging your attentional endorphins. But I think the thing that's really interesting about

recognition is it can be deeper, it can be more shallow. Like, I've had moments on the subway of deep recognition that are fleeting. You know, that I don't actually know the story of the person that I'm recognizing or is recognizing me, but even just a human mode of, like, a person gives up the seat for my kid, you know, because we're traveling with my three kids on the subway and we've got two wedged in and the, you know, there's something about that interaction where there's recognition, you know, it's not just that they're paying attention to me. It's like, oh, I see you as a human with this need and I'm going to respond to it. And that's a good feeling. Um, and I think the, you know, in, in the same way that, you know, the way that addiction works

is every drug we could become addicted to or get high from, we are, we can get addicted to or get high from because we have endogenous cell receptors that are the same structure as the drug. Right? So that's the way it works. The drug comes in and it like is like the same Lego block as the little things floating around our brains and it fits into that receptor and it lights up the brain. Online attention is like the drug version of what our endogenous receptors for recognition are. So like the thing we have that lights up the brain in the right way within us in a natural sense is recognition. And that's what we seek. And there's a synthetic version of it that the internet provides that is attention that sort of lights up the same receptors,

but can't produce the same spiritual fulfillment. And I mean, spiritual in the broader way, and then creates that sort of pattern of pleasure seeking addiction that, you know, you see in, you know, classic chemical in, you know, classic chemical addiction. I mean, we've talked a lot on this show about all the ways the internet is breaking our brains. You seem to be saying that it's, it's like breaking our souls, which is even more depressing. Yeah, no, my, my focus is much less on the, on it.

I almost say nothing about our cognitive. I mean, I said at the beginning a little about the information informational processing but i think it's doing much something much more profound about who we are as people and how we interact and how we think about other fellow humans and yeah i think it i think it is doing something pretty profound there now again it can do the opposite i mean i i have to say i, I have become partly, I tell myself that this is for work, which it is. I'm writing this book about attention. I've become a big TikTok enjoyer. Now, I love, TikTok to me is like, I'm sure there's lots of corners of it that are terrible, but the corner of TikTok I have is pretty delightful. It's a lot of people making

sandwiches and then cutting them open and showing them to the camera, which is just I can watch that forever. It's people restoring very old pieces of machinery or equipment, which look terrible. And then after two minutes look bright, spinning new after they spent like clearly like 150 hours where like the the actual thing they restored maybe cost 1099. So it's a hilarious undertaking. All that said, like, one of the things I like about TikTok now, and I used to like about Twitter and I think has happened less, is that you would have these moments of someone just making an incredibly funny joke out of nowhere or an incredibly keen observation where, you know, humans are unbelievably magically talented and talent, wit, musical genius, voice, it's all distributed across the population that in no way correlates to like race, class, affluence, privilege, like people's ability to be funny. Like all that stuff like is not constrained and not predetermined or ordered by all the social hierarchies that we impose on humans. Right. And the internet at its best can explode that in such a wonderful way. And when it explodes it in a wonderful way, there is a moment of recognition, at least you're, you know, I think you can feel like you can laugh at a joke. They may not be feeling the recognition, but you see like a real human consciousness behind it. Well, I mean, wasn't that the original hope of the Internet?

Right. Yes. That it could like that somehow if all of us are connected, that it could sort of dissolve lines of class and race and geography and help us bring us close together. So then what happened? And then I not just what happened, but then I start to wonder, you know, there's all the, usually the tech geniuses make this argument that it's not, it's not the structure of these social platforms. It's just us. It's human nature.

This is what happens. There are good parts when we come together and connect, and there are bad parts when we come together and connect. And the bad parts are because we're human and we have failings and we're not perfect. Right. And so what is it about the structure of the internet that has done, that has made this worse and made the good parts that you're talking about so much rare? Yeah, I don't think I have an answer to that yet.

I think what I would say is that to your point, right? I think that there's the two extreme versions of this are the tech people say it's just humans. And if you put a lot of humans together you get good stuff and bad stuff like you get flash mobs and ethnic killing you know it just depends like what how it how it works out um the the the opposite end of the argument is that it's the algorithm you know we, we hear this a lot, right? Or it's the financial incentives that are selecting for certain kinds of human interaction. I think there's a lot to both of those.

I mean, I do think the fact that maximizing for attention, which is what at a business level, all these frameworks have to do, like that is going to have negative consequences because attention, again, attention is not recognition. Attention is not human connection. Attention is a very different thing. It's colorblind. Meaning if, if the full texture of human emotional life is in color, like attention is just black and white, like you're paying attention to a bad tweet and the algorithm is like,

Ooh, ah, it's working. It's working. It's like, Whoa, someone said something horrible and monstrous. It's like, it's working. We're doing it. It's like, wait a second. That's not, no, that's not good. So, so I do think, I think there's something a little self-serving about the tech people's like it's human beings at the, on the other hand, I do think there's an oversimplified kind of like the villainous tech people got together and created'm one of them, like who are on message boards and use net groups before all of this was monetized, all of it was selected for like can recognize that sort of both sides of that argument,

which is that like there was a lot of bad human behavior in those forums all the time, but also they were better than what we have now. So like, it's both the case that like trolls are as old as the internet, that the history of trolling is really fascinating in terms of how it developed and how content moderation problems are as old as the internet. Like people posting porn and comments or saying nasty things, doxing, like all this stuff is as old as the internet, basically. More or less. Patrolling, you know,

anti-social behavior was an early collective problem of the open internet. The solutions to were, some of which were good, some of which were not good. All of that existed, but it was still better than the monetized version we have now. Now, the way it wasn't better, though, was that it was a tiny, tiny little subgroup of people. And that subgroup of people was extremely demographically unrepresentative, not the sort of wide cross-section of humanity. So again, like now I'm flipping back, toggling to the other argument against myself, right? So like,

maybe you can say, well, the ability to patrol social boundaries in that part of the internet was produced by the relative homogeneity of people who are online when you put the entire world online all of that stuff falls apart and this is what you get and if you like the old internet it's only because you kind of like being in like the essentially online version of like the yale club where like you know if only certain people yeah only certain yeah if like t richardson the third had won too many martinis someone could politely ask him to leave you know like so there's like a little bit of there's a little bit of that uh argument as well but i do think there's a complex interplay between the monetization that's happening the way that the monetization selects for attention as the ultimate outcome,

and the fact that humans, humans enter into conflict with each other when they interact in mass. That is like... Has always happened forever. That is like a human, there's a rule of human interaction. And I don't mean violent conflict.

I just mean like friction. Right. I mean, you just said that you are at least telling yourself that you are studying this for work and writing this book for work. I'm interested in how you think it shapes politics, because obviously, you know, changes like this that shape our own individual behavior ladder up to shape the politics that we have. And it's always struck me that a fundamental requirement of democracy and a healthy democracy is the ability to recognize each other and to sort of get to that level of recognition and not just attention. And if we are not able to reach that level of recognition with one another, how can we have a democracy that actually holds together? Yeah, I think that part of it is really dangerous.

I mean, Michelle Goldberg had this line that I think about all the time. She's like, I don't know, like maybe 20 years ago, people were sending out Christmas cards, their entire family holding guns. But if so, I didn't know about it. And that was probably for the best. It's a good point. Like, yeah, yeah.'t know about it. And that was probably for the best. Just a good point. Like, yeah. Yeah.

If people did that with their circles, I guess. Fine. Like, I didn't have to know about it. It didn't make me. I didn't have to be like, why is your five year old, you know? So I think there's, yes, this sort of dehumanization. I think particularly when the dehumanization gets run through this, again, the machine that incentivizes attention over recognition, it exacerbates the issue. There's a lot of ways I think it's affected our politics.

I do think it's the case that it has, to make the argument again for it, right? You can hear more people. What you can hear if you're a staffer for a U.S. senator is way, way, way larger than what it was 20 years ago. And I think there's an argument that that's probably for the better, right? Because, like, what could you hear? Well, the local, you knew the local reporters, you know, the Washington reporters, and then like the big donors and the, you know, there's a pretty constrained group of people you were hearing from. Maybe the phone calls, you'd tally that. Now it's like, and I do think that that's had some positive effects. expression representation, the fact that people who did not have a way of being heard before can be heard now does actually have tangible effects. And in fact, you see people decrying this, right?

Like, there's this whole counter narrative that's emerged about how like, it's the sort of relatively unrepresentative avant-garde of Twitter that drives democratic policymaking and politics in a way that's like fundamentally dangerous. I don't think that's true, but I think there's like an interesting debate happening there that is along the axis of a real thing that's happening, if you know what I mean. Like there's something that has changed in how, in what feedback mechanisms produce political, particularly at the staffer level. Who are you worried about hearing from? And I think that's changed.

And whether that's been good or bad, I think, is an interesting debate. The other thing I think is really weird. I think of this as the way that intention is incentivized. So J.D. Vance is an interesting example to me. And I did this riff on my show. So after Alec Baldwin, after Alec Baldwin very horrifyingly, accidentally, as far as we can tell, I think there's no reason to think it wasn't, shot and killed the cinematographer on a film he was working on. It's a big story. It was just, you know, profoundly upsetting in every direction. I mean, there's just like one of those stories that this is awful what an awful human tragedy and um jd vance is running for senator in ohio now again i say this all the time not to be the dead horse ohio is not mississippi and it's not wyoming donald trump won ohio by eight points like brock obama won it twice again i don't think it joe biden's you know the democratic nominee is going to win it in 2024 it's a tough but it's not like it's not alabama it's not alabama it's not like these look it's

like not a 60 it's 65 35 state okay jd vance is running to be the representative for all the people in hiale and his response to this human tragedy was at jack on twitter you gotta get let trump back on i gotta see what he says about baldwin and i actually did a monologue on this on my show i'm like what a deranged anti-social thing to say like any human being with decency again across lines of class race religion like i think just anyone is like, oh, what a terrible tragedy. When I was growing up, the kind of person who would say that would be the shock jock. And the shock jock would say that because the shock jock was in a very competitive attention market where there were three or four different shock jocks who were jostling for morning drive time attention. And their whole shtick was to get attention so like that that would be a very

shock jock thing like the morning after this happened the shock jock being like oh i'd love to see what trump says about him like you know and they they do a whole riff about ball when they make a lot of like disgusting jokes because of the fact that in a weird way the intentional incentives of like drive time morning radio have now come to dominate all of culture and politics you're selecting for shock jock attributes in your politicians and this is a new and weird thing like it used to be the case to go back to your point about like people acting like politicians it used to be the case that a politician's response to that would be like, if asked about it, like what a terrible tragedy. That's it. All I got to say. Also, you're trying to make people like you. So the thing to do is to say a thing that's like broadly agreeable to the

mass of people, which is like, what a human tragedy. You're not a shock jock. And I think this weird inversion that's happened where like the shock jock politician which i think is produced by the intentional incentives is really weird and obviously trump is the ultimate example of this he is 100 of shock jock like even his acts like everything about him is like a new york city drive time radio host that has really changed things i think think, in politics. It has. But as I listen to you say that, like, the reason that these incentives are there is because to some extent they work on a lot of people. Right. And Trump gets this.

Like, Trump knows that the spectacle of Trump is interesting to people who may not even be hardcore Trump supporters and believe his politics. And it does seem incredibly dangerous that, I mean, like, you know, Trump always says this about the media, like, you guys will miss me. And a lot of people say, you know, with, I think, a lot of good reason that there are like financial incentives for the media to keep covering Trump. But there there's also it's like the watching a car crash thing just like slowing down by as you go by a car crash yeah uh phenomenon where you you're right like it's it's it's gross what jd van says but then if trump was back on twitter and did say something everyone would want to look at what trump said about that

and that's horrible i'm just like can we not i don I don't care. I don't care what this guy says. And yet, you know. You're looking. You're scrolling and you're looking. But again, to come back to the car crash, because I think that's useful, right? So to bring it back around to that, like, why do we look at the car crash? Well, let's say, and this is why i think and again i'm talking my book here right this is like me thinking through this in a way so let's say you're walking down the street okay

you're lost in a daydream uh you're you're thinking about a thing you have to do at work uh your perceptual system's hunting in the background and it's taking in the information it needs to like for you to walk it's almost doing it the background. And it's taking in the information it needs for you to walk. It's almost doing it. It's almost like sleepwalking. That thing where you drive to a place. Happens in LA all the time particularly. And you get there and you're like.

I don't remember a single second of that drive. I took three left turns and I couldn't tell you which ones. It just happened. An amazing miracle of how the human perceptual system works. And all of a sudden. A car runs a red light and slams into a stop sign right by you. A few feet away from you, right? All of your attention is suddenly on that.

And that's not volitional, okay? You can't control whether you pay attention to that or not. That is from the deepest parts of you. This is a thing that makes attention different than other parts of us, which is that it can be compelled involuntarily. So labor is another thing that is ours, the product of our thought and effort and toil. And it could be coerced from us, whether through in the plantation system of chattel slavery or through you got to work to eat. But it can't be taken at the involuntary level. You actually have to do it.

Attention can be taken at the involuntary level. Right. That aspect of it, attention can be taken at the involuntary level. Right. That aspect of it, that dimension of it. So when you talk about the car crash, there's a reason we talk about the car crash. Because when you look over the car crash, now at that point you're sort of doing it voluntarily. But the reason the car crash is doing that and the reason that we have rubbernecking on the road is because you've got a whole set of very complex and sophisticated psychological and cognitive processes that are looking out for things that will kill you. Yes.

So, I mean, you know, there is that, but that's on the like survival level, right? And this is all sort of involuntary. You talk about. No, but my point is there's a connection between the two right like i think that those processes can be played with at the at a much higher level around things like threat death sex like that you know when you go back to what was the earliest successful mass media in the tabloid penny press it was all crime death right but you mentioned in mentioned in the piece that George Saunders' essay, The Braindead Megaphone, which I thought was the perfect sort of analogy for, and you mentioned, you connected to Trump, but also sort of how politics is today. Can you talk about The Braindead

Megaphone a little bit? Well, Saunders has this great essay he wrote in this essay collection where he talks about, and it's actually, it's a critique of cable news in the run-up to the Iraq war. The cocktail party sort of metaphor I use, which is in reference to him, right, is a sort of adjustment to his thought experiment. He talks about being at a cocktail party. And all of a sudden it's like, everything about the texture of the room changes. And they're like, these cheese cubes are good. And everyone's like, okay. Now everyone, he says, is interacting in reference to what the person, the megaphone says. And he, by the way, he does this riff. I can't reconstruct from memory. That's like a monologue of the person with the brain-dead megaphone. He says, what if one person has a megaphone? And then what if they're not particularly bright they're just like sort of loud obnoxious and kind of and and his monologue is like

almost verbatim what a trump monologue would be and this is 15 years before trump runs for office and his point is that once that enters the room like everything revolves around it. Nothing can, no conversation can now happen independent of the brain dead megaphone. And I think it's, it does capture something profound about the Trump effect. And right now the Elon Musk effect, like when you get someone at, at the megaphone sort of barking things that everyone then is interacting in reference to. Yeah, we actually talked about this on yesterday's Positive America. Lovett brought up the point that all of these Republican primaries now, there is zero policy discussions in the Republican primaries, that it's all about getting attention, negative

attention, whether you're J.D. Vance or Josh Mandel or Dr. Oz or whoever these characters may be, that like the incentives are all aligned, at least on the Republican side, towards negative attention. Then I think back to 2020 and I'm like, well, Joe Biden did win the nomination and then the presidency on our side. And he did. He he's not brain dead megaphone guy. No, he was the opposite. And in fact, I think that like that's again, like there's if you go back to the original point I was making about the shock jock, there's a reason politicians didn't used to talk like that.

Right. Because alienating a ton of people was the literal opposite of what of what they wanted to do when running for office, which was to get as many people as possible to like them. I mean, Barack Obama, very likable guy, like really likable. I met him when he was a state senator and he had a real talent for that, served him well in his political career of like not going out of his way to alienate people. So, and then some of those incentives, I think still pertain.

Like, I mean, I think there are universes in which like Vance can't run. I don't think, I think Vance will have problems running that version of himself in the general. You are a famous person known by millions. Who's also very online. How has that experience changed who you are, how you think, how you interact with others? Have you thought about that? Oh, I thought about it a lot. As, yes, a lot of thinking about it, a lot of therapy. I mean, I'm not even kidding.

I think that my first three or four years of it, the experience of it was, well, I think the earliest period when I first started appearing on television as a guest was kind of like fun in a kind of pure way. And I've always been a performer. I did acting in high school and in college. I did a lot of theater. I've always liked performing. And so I was, I think, disposed towards it, acclimated towards it. I think I've always had like an attention thing. I've wanted people to pay attention to me, which is not universal at all.

Lots of people are the total opposite. But I was already in that category. Then I had the experience of getting the primetime show. And the first four or five years of that was like really pretty psychologically difficult um and messed me up pretty bad i would say like i think that you know the the way that i describe it is there's an episode of the simpsons in which bart is working for the mafia and they hijack a cigarette truck and then when they take the stolen cigarettes they hide them all in bart's room and so homer walks in and there's like thousands of cartons of cigarettes in bart's

room he's like bart are you smoking and bart's like no he's like i'm gonna make you sit here and smoke every one of these cigarettes which is like an old-timey way that you would like cure a kid of or a teenager who wanted to smoke and the way that I think about the first few years of like real public life fame was like, oh, oh, you like people paying attention to you? Well, here's a thousand cartons of cigarettes of people paying attention to you. Do you still like it? And, and so what had to happen was, and I think the reason that I wrote that essay and the reason that I have spent so much time about it was at both an emotional and psychological level, but also an intellectual level, I had to sort of go back and reconstruct in myself. Why does it matter what a stranger thinks about me? What does that do to me as a person? Why do I care?

How should I orient? What are the things I value? What are the relationships I value in my life? Like, how do I? To me, the really difficult thing is because I think people go in the opposite direction. Like, there's definitely a Kanye temptation of like, F the hater. Like there's definitely a, there's a Kanye temptation of like, F the hater. Like, I don't care. I don't care what anyone thinks about me. It's like, well, caring what other people think about you is kind of the foundation of civilization. So you don't

want to go that far of like, I don't care what anyone thinks about me, but you can't care too much. And you have to sort of figure out how you manage that, how you manage those psychological inputs. Yeah. I mean, there's also a utilitarian case for why people like you and I care about what people think of us. We're both doing jobs where we're trying to persuade other human beings. We have certain beliefs that we're trying to pass on to other people that we have strong beliefs about politics and opinions. And if everyone stopped paying attention to us or caring about us, or if we said things that pissed a lot of people off, then the people that we're trying to reach may not listen to us. It was so much easier in some ways, I thought about like, and maybe this is because I like,

I come from an academic background, and I love like being in college so much. but when I was writing speeches for Obama, like you could sort of think out loud during the speech draft, right? Like what is the argument we're making in this speech? How do we get it just right? How do we get the nuance right? How do we say, oh, this is mistaken. This is too harsh. This isn't harsh enough. Right. And you go back and forth and then you finally have the draft. Now it's sort of like, it's always, you're always playing with live ammo. You're just talking, right? You prepare, right? I prepare for the pod,

all that kind of stuff. But your tweets, everything else, it's just out there. And there's very, there's less room for error in sort of groping for an answer, a conclusion. You just kind of have to keep going.

And it's a little bit more of a high wire act. It is a little more of a high wire act i think it also like it weirdly incentivizes certainty you know or the performance of certainty in a way totally um which i think is is is bad but i mean i think what you're the argument you're making is right but like just being a thousand percent real talk honest here like that's the intellectual or like utilitarian way wasn't the reason that it was like messing with my like chest yeah no the thing that the thing i'm feeling in my sternum and in my viscera and in my like that stuff is like that's deep stuff yeah that's like it's like oh it's like why do i why am i walking around today feeling like i just went through a

breakup or like a person that like i love isn't talking to me it's like i why am I walking around today feeling like I just went through a breakup? Or like a person that I love isn't talking to me. It's like, I got into a fight on Twitter. Or someone said a mean thing about my show. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's take a step back here. Why is that producing the visceral physiological response in you of intense relational emotional drama like this is why i try not to fight on twitter anymore emily always says this to me she's like i can tell when you're sitting there looking at your phone she's like and your jaw is clenched

she's like and your jaw is going and there's times when you're just not paying attention because you're reading the news and then there's times when I know that you're pissed off in a Twitter fight. I can tell from your face the difference between those two modes. I mean, how often do you and Kate think about what growing up in an era of mass fame and mass surveillance will do to your kids? Because I have an almost two-year-old and now think about this constantly with Charlie. I think about it all the time. I mean, I think about it at two levels, right? So I think about the social media level

and I think about it like, you know, it's sort of a bummer to have famous parents. Like, you know, the funny thing here is that like Kate's dad was a very, extremely well-known Chicago political reporter and like, you know, really loomed large in Chicago. I remember. Yeah, yeah yes of course um he was a you know covered barack obama early and was around all the time his name is andy shaw he's a great really truly truly like incredible top-notch political reporter like it's like they don't make

him like that anymore like he like what he was able to do the sort of he would do three or four minutes store like he was just like he owned this beat and was like a true real reporter in this incredible way but he was he had this enormous like if you go out to a restaurant in the nishan chicago like everyone in the room looks like he he he is he was very famous in chicago and so kate grew up with that so that's the other weird layer to that yeah um and so there's that level um and then there's the the social media level and then there's the like what are we passing on the other really interesting thing is like i sometimes think to myself like my parents like my dad is like a kind of midwestern irish catholic who is a community organizer who is very it was a jesuit

seminarian like he's not he's, he does not have what I, I'm stealing this term from a friend and podcast host I listened to named Luke Burbank, who I think the term came from his ex-wife who referred to it as the show-off demon, which I think is a great that he had the show-off demon. And I love that term. I think about it all the time. Like my dad does not have the show-off demon. My mom doesn't really, although she's, she's from the Bronx and and and has um she's got opinions she's from this italian american bronx family but like neither of them have the show off demon really and i wonder sometimes like where did i get it from and am i passing it on to my

kids am i are my kids gonna get this inheritance whether through upbringing or genetics whatever to have the show off demon to want strangers to pay attention to them like part of me hopes not i mean mostly i hope not um so i think about it at like those two levels right there's the like what is it to be a young social media native person in america and then also like what does it mean to have a parents that are sort of in public life yeah no i mean emily and i both have the show off demon so that's what that's what makes me worried for charlie and that's why i always think i'm like you know if nothing else i just want him to be kind empathetic like figure out how to have that recognition of others like as as you start to like try to mold them from a

young age i feel like that's like my overriding goal like if i could just get him to be a kind selfless person then we'll be okay because i do worry that the not just his his his parents but just the incentive structure that we've been talking about on social media on in the internet is just totally in the other direction now yeah and i think there's two levels right there's like the the core level when you're producing a kid producing a kid when you're raising a child like kindness empathy being able to like truly listen to other people and to mentally model what their states are i mean you know that's it i'm sure you know you have a two-year-old so it's it you're very

early in this but i have three kids ten eight and four and like it's a lot of like well how do you think your sister felt when you said that how do you like a lot, right? Like, oh, I don't want to do that. I'm like, well, the whole family is getting up and helping to clean up right now. So if you don't feel that way, like look around you. Look at how everyone is contributing. Like it's a lot of like think outside yourself. Think outside yourself. Think outside yourself.

How do other people respond? How do other people think? What are other, like a lot of teaching everything. But the other skill, the skill that to me is so important. And I think I developed later in life. And it's partly the product of therapy is like, you're feeling a lot of things all the time. And being able to just take one step up the ladder of abstraction, sit there inside your own body and mind and look down at what's happening in it and why that feeling is in your chest or what that is in your cheeks name the feeling

that you're feeling right now oh that's anger huh why are you angry and then figure out what's going on there that to me is like so important yeah in the social media world too because you watch people lose it lose it in public because they and i sympathize but it's like they are losing it because they cannot in the moment take the second to walk up one step of abstraction be like why am i tweeting these things at the stranger why am i doing this i've deemed like i need to step away and it's like so that ability i'm not saying like i'm amazing at it because lord knows i can lose it too but that is the ability to me that's and that's a more developed one that's a hard one to teach up certainly a two-year-old even a six or seven-year-old i mean that's something that

comes i think with like full adult sort of self-actualization a little bit but that is a really key thing to me that is and again i say this coming out of the like those first few years of the show that were brutal on me psychologically working very hard to get to that level to to be able to walk one level up that's that to me is really like really important 40 years old still working on it i mean yeah i mean as someone who like internalizes all those things until the point where it actually like affects my physical health right yes yes i can tell you that i'm still working on it um last two questions i'm asking all our guests uh what were you doing the last time you realized

you needed to put your phone down and what's your favorite way to unplug um need to put my phone down was was probably this literally this morning getting my daughter ready for school my youngest daughter ready for school it's like there's something about the morning that's tough because it's like particularly like the work you and i are speaking the i don't know if you don't want to time date this or not but we're speaking the morning after a draft opinion overturning roe v wade leaked yes you know there's that that feeling in my head of you and I are speaking the, I don't know if you don't want to time date this or not, but we're speaking the morning after a draft opinion, overturning Roe v. Wade leaked. Yes.

You know, there's that, that feeling in my head of a, just the, Oh my God. But then also like, I got to do a show tonight. That's going to be about this.

So I need to be, who are we booking? What are we? So there's like that, that, that clock is ticking in the back of my head. We're counting down until 8 PM. But it's also like I had this morning with my kids.

And so that was, you know, the last time it's like like a few hours ago. In terms of unplugging, like, I have found, you know, family hikes are great for unplugging. I've been cooking a lot more recently. I make pasta with my kids, and that has become this really cool tradition. Kate's an incredible cook and baker, and she makes bread. Again, these are both like sort of a little pre-pandemic, but really got sort of flowered in the pandemic. And now we kept doing them.

But I find that just the tactile nature and like making fresh pasta for a bunch of people takes a really long time. So it's like a few hours of just focus. And we put on Italian music in the background. And so that's been really, really great. Also, chopping wood. Wow. I really like chopping wood as sort of a Zen thing and sort of chopping up trees and doing that kind of thing. But it's a struggle all the time.

I mean, you know, again, I'm not like any sort of model for anyone in my online habits. No, the best answers tend to be things where you really do have to use both hands to do the activity so that you can't even have one hand holding the phone. Chopping wood, making bread,

that kind of stuff. Chris Hayes, thank you so much for joining Offline. Really appreciate it. This was great. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineer the show. Thank you. team Elijah Cohn, Narm Elkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes

as videos every week.