Pablo Torre Finds Out - Pitinos of the Mind: How Silicon Valley Hacks Your Attention Span, with Chris Hayes

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Ever since the invention of the written word, there have been moral panics about how new technology corrupts our brains. But now — as the richest companies in the world pour billions into an all-out war for eyeballs — something very different is happening. So we talked to the author of a new book, "The Sirens' Call," about why a satirized nerd on MSNBC is an ideal authority on how Silicon Valley is exploiting the human condition. Plus: the significance of spam, the Cocktail Party Effect, HammerKing75, a court of Infinite Jest, the piglet advantage... and a hot take from Socrates.Get Chris Hayes' book, "The Sirens' Call": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/719661/the-sirens-call-by-chris-hayes/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today, we're going to find out what this sound is. Grab. Right after this ad. You're listening to Draf Kings Network. When something happens like what just happened on SNL, I basically was like, eh, could have been worse.

Hello and welcome to MSNBC. I'm Rachel Meadow. And dads, you better hide your older, bookish lesbian daughters because, uh, yeah, I'm back on TV. Tonight for our special inauguration weekend coverage, I'm joined by our panel of MSNBC hosts, basically like the Avengers for your aunt. It's Ari Melbert. Thanks, Rachel. Joy Reed. Glad to be here. Stephanie Ruhl. Hey, girlfriend. And finally, Chris Hayes, aka Woke Sheldon. Okay, drag me, mama.

You know, one of the weird things about the experience of some modicum of fame, and I imagine that you have experienced this too, is that there is an unbridgedable gap between people's conception of you outside and the person you are in your little head. What do you think, Rachel? Oh, I'm not Rachel. I'm Chris Hayes. Huh. Usually we're, you know, we're conditioned to only see ourselves through the eyes of people that we love, our friends, our coworkers.

But to see yourself through strangers' eyes is to sometimes feel it's like unrecognizable. Like there's all these people outside you that have, they have this vision or expectations of you that is just irreconcilable with like who you think you are. All right. So the expectation that I imagine you must already have for today's episode is that our focus is going to be all possible. politics and Trump and his cabinet and legislation and executive orders, because our guest today happens to be the guy who became the youngest host of a primetime cable news show on MSNBC at age 34 back in 2013. But that expectation would be wrong. I want to set up why you're here because this is all flowing naturally into... My picks for the week, right?

That's right. You have a parlay, Chris, that you're here to sell us. You've got a custom parliance. You've Ben Johnson Bears' propaganda. Oh, yeah. I'm sure. Let's go. God.

Let's go. No. In reality, Chris Hayes, who is also, by the way, a real Chicago sports maniac, wrote a whole new book called The Sirens Call. And the focus of this book, which I found myself underlining, to truly an almost shocking degree, is the science and history and philosophy of attention. It's the most powerful and influential resource.

It's monetized to create multi-billion dollar empires. What we pay attention to from moment is what our lives are. And so we're constantly battling to kind of retain some part of it, which is really a battle to retain control over ourselves. Which now brings me back to the whole woke Sheldon thing that we started with. And also, my belief that the authority Chris wields on the specific subject of attention is, yeah, partly, but not overwhelming. overwhelmingly political.

Because even the most right-wing pundits in America would have to agree with Chris Hayes that Chris Hayes is, admittedly, a TV nerd. And this is going to be a story about what nerds have done to everyone's brains. And how that also relates to television. I was such a computer nerd that I, at the very first age when it was possible,

91-92, I was like wanted to get my own TCP IP connection. And so I had a dial-up through an internet service provider, a very boutique one that was like four nerds. And I was surfing the web on the pre-graphical version of it called Links, which was an all-text web browser. The first version of the mass internet was a commercial internet controlled by AOL, CompiServe, and Prodigy. And then AOL sort of won that battle.

It acquired Time Warner. it was the bell of the ball. It was the biggest company. There were movies. Movies about it. Like, AOL. You Got Mail. Yes.

All of these noises are still in my brain. Still in my head too. Welcome. You've got mail. So that commercial version got defeated by the non-commercial version, the open web. And the open web then got defeated by what we have now, the commercial web 2.0 social media platforms. But part of my contention of the book and part of my hope is that there's a non-commercial commercial web that can sort of reassert itself.

Right. Hard to imagine at this moment. It does feel pretty hard to imagine at this moment. It feels like an addiction, compulsion, regret and shame, bargains you make with yourself. All of the sort of tropes of addiction are there and how we now relate to our phones in the digital world more broadly. And I think that's about deeper than the technology. It's about attention.

Your book is not merely, guess what, we're addicted? It's actually about, I think, To be grandiose about it, it's about what it means to be human. And you articulate something about yourself, speaking of the feelings that animate us, that I wanted to read to you, because you are, in fact, the host of a television show. And you wrote in your book about yourself, quote, I have as a core constitutive feature of my personality, the desire for an audience. I want people to pay attention to me. And more than that, I want them to like me. End quote.

And, uh, me too. Yeah. Right? I think we're both here, you know, you don't end up in this position, I think, unless something really went sideways. Unless you have that. But there is this feeling of being somebody who was fighting for attention on again, an earlier seemingly almost analog platform of television. That attentional competition is just ramped up so much. I mean, that is the sort of defining feature of all of this, right?

that A, that the sheer amount of competition has expanded almost infinitely. At any given moment, you're competing for attention against all the content ever produced by humans. Yes. Is the library of competition? So we're going to get to Silicon Valley and what they found out about the human condition in a minute. But I first needed to say something about the last thing Chris told me before the break, which is that we, right now are competing for your attention against everything anyone has ever made.

Because it's true. You could very easily be listening to a Nick Cage impersonator, read The Odyssey, instead of listening to me. You could be watching a supercut entitled Top 100 Dunks of the last 25 years. Or just watching a guy in Japan that I follow on Instagram who challenges strangers to hammer a bunch of nails into a woodblock. Whoa, cool. The thing that you and I are doing right now

and the thing that maybe drove us in our personalities to do the kind of work we do has been wildly democratized as a kind of norm, a cultural norm. Like people being on social media and performing, trying to get other people's attention.

There used to be like a small group of kind of freaks and weirdos. They would like travel with the circus or they'd go out to Los Angeles to be stars. Like, that was a specific thing and even kind of frowned upon. And for this reason, I do believe that cable TV's formerly young generation of professional audience seekers found out something important a long time ago about the dynamic that pretty much everybody is grappling with right now, which is that attention has always been unbelievably slippery.

tragically slippery, in fact, even when you can get your hands on it. And so when it comes to the incentives of the mainstream media, and this part does run contrary to an online caricature of the MSM, feeding its personal ideology from on high, down to its captive audience, TV shows, in actuality, have mostly been desperate, thirsty, actually, for your attention. And now they're also desperate to keep you from a Japanese guy

named Hammer King 75. It's a really important dynamic. I think people outside the media think the media decides where to focus attention and people follow that. And from the inside, it feels like the opposite. Yes. That people have, and I'm sure you experienced this.

I mean... If only we had such power. I mean, it feels like you're chasing. You're always chasing. And that that, that's... audience is moving. Its interests and demands are moving in these kind of inscrutable fashions. They're really into this and they're really into that and you're going to run over there.

You know, the best metaphor I can come up with that I use in the book is sailing. Because I think sailing captures the fact that the wind to me is like audience attention, which is a real force that's just you can't control. But you can control where you try to take the boat. So as you get better at the craft, it's like, okay, well, the audience is interesting. in this thing, that's the wind, and I want to go there. And I got to figure out the technique to tack to get that wind, to get me to where I want to go. And that takes some development. I mean, you can just be like, well, I don't care what I want to go. I'm just going to go as fast as I can,

so I'll just go with the wind. Or you can just be like, I don't care about the wind. I'm just going to go right into it, and that won't work. Like, you won't move. Right. So the thing you try to get good at is to try to kind of synthesize those two and develop some technique and craft that allows you to use audience attention and demand and put it into towards things you think are actually important and worthy. Right, the desperation of the chase, though. Do you feel that?

All the time. Yeah. All the time. And look, I've had a TV show canceled, Chris. Right, yeah. I'm pretty close. I was going to say. We're all fighting for our lives out here.

Right. And in fact, like that same instinct is why, you know, when you talk about Fox News, and Dominion, it's because they were chasing the audience that we all just assumed they could direct. Exactly. And what's so wild about the emails and the text you read and the discovery of that lawsuit, which was a electronic voting machine maker Dominion who sued Fox for libel, saying that they had been defamed by Fox's programming, is that that period after the election 2020, the bottom kind of drops out. on the right because people are angry that Trump lost and disbelieving.

And what they start to find is that if you tell them that it was stolen, that keeps people's attention. Good evening. Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. You've heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines. And this is a real issue, no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. And there's a sort of competitive... reason to do it. And so you see those incentives pulling them towards an outright lie, a dangerous lie, a violent lie that ended up crescendoing in an attempt on the, you know, the capital.

But in private text messages revealed in court documents filed by Dominion, Carlson called the Dominion claims shockingly reckless. Other texts showed contempt for former President Trump, including one that said, quote, I hate him passionately. And of management. That's a really, I think, potent illustration of how much. how these incentives work. They're even self-aware in a lot of those texts. Like, it's a little like Punch's Pilot, right, before the crowd being like, you guys, sure, you know, yeah, all right.

It's a hard business. They want Barabbas, giving Barabbas. I guess more Barabbas? Yeah. The ratings are saying more Barabbas. They're saying more Barabbas. They're really, the dial is turning up on Barabbas. But, but look, which is to say that all of us, again,

We feel it. It's fascinating to see how the period of the fall of 2001 is where a lot of, like, what, modern cable television, it's when it learned what it needed to optimize itself to be. It's the breaking news alerts, right? It's the scroll on the, which every sports fan knows, by the way. Of course, cable political news embraced it fully. And by the way, the other just suspect in like this murder mystery of like what happened to our attention when you go back to TV, I think PTI is in there. Oh, yeah.

PTI is so well engineered. Pardon the interruption, but I'm Mike Wilbon and welcome to opening day in this bizarre television experiment. And I'm Tony Kornheiser. And if we can have a TV show, you can have a TV show. They put the rundown on screen. Yes. Which, you know, the thing that's brilliant about putting the rundown on screen, it's like the signs in the subway that tell you how long the train is going to be.

It anticipates. I tell this to Tony and... PTI is like a gene... It's like one of the most brilliantly engineered formats. Here's how it works. We yap until the time runs out on each topic. You hear a bell. We move on.

And then the clock! And then the fucking clock. It anticipated... This was October 2001, by the way. Is that when it starts? Yeah, yeah, first episode. It anticipates the short attention span, the desire for what's next. It anticipates the infinite scroll.

Totally, you're right. Before every other show on TV. You're totally right. And one of the points I make is there's a real distinction because of the way that attention works in us biologically, biophysically, between grabbing and holding attention. So grabbing attention is much easier. And here's an illustrative example. Anyone who's listening to this podcast right now or watching it, if I see,

said, look, I'm going to ask you to go through that door, and on the other side is an auditorium with 200 people, and I want you to just get everyone's attention. Basically, everyone can do that. Go in, you scream, hey, hey, you know, whatever you do, right? You go on stage, you take a close off, whatever you had to do, right? Now, if I said to you, I want you to go in there, there's 200 people, I want you to hold their attention for an hour, go. Well, that's astronomically harder, right? Yeah. So grabbing is easy, holding is hard. Yeah. Look, the experiment that you hypothetically described is literally a thriving genre on every social media platform. It's the troll who wanders into a mall or a foreign country and just disrupts whatever the good

people of that place are doing. That's exactly right. Johnny Somali came to Korea with the obvious intention of making clickbeat videos to promote his provocative channel. However, the table seems tough turned as he is now being used to help Korean online streamers generate views. After videos of Koreans, including one streamer, assaulting Somali when viral, many Korean YouTubers are seeking out the American and the hopes of causing an altercation so they can either stream or even incite the scuffle. So what happens in competition in competitive attention markets? PTI is a great example.

What you optimize for, what the sort of process of evolutionary competition drives towards is iterative grabbing. Grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. What is TikTok? What is Instagram Reels? is X Twitter? What are all these things? They're grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. They never have to hold. That kind of the minutely engineered grab, grab, grab, grab model, what I call the slot machine model, right? Slot machines are the most effective device in a casino, and they work the same way. It's like, grab, then a little bit of suspense, then the next one, the next one. And it turns out what the slot machine programmers figured out is you can keep someone in a seat for eight hours. never telling them a story,

never having a beginning and a middle and end, never using pathos logos ethos, like now you're doing all the things that you might have been taught to do. Yeah, the hero's journey, not quite as necessary. Exactly. You don't have to come up with the hero's journey. It doesn't have to be a screenplay. If you grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, grab.

You can add that up to eight hours of sitting in a seat. Everybody is learning what it's like to be a frustrated television producer, trying to grab and hold attention, finding that, okay, the latter is really hard, the former can be hacked, so to speak. Yep. And so what I want to bring it around to is just this idea that, in a sense, this problem, this panic around attention being scarce and attention being commodified, our way of life being disrupted,

it is a thing that people have worried about with pretty much every medium that has ever been invented to date. Like, I didn't appreciate that writing. At the birth of the written word, according to Socrates, was something that, quote, in his mind, would implant forgetfulness in their souls. Writing was video games to Socrates. Writing was video games to Socrates. Look, this is a really tricky part of this discussion because you have to not fall prey to presentism and understand that each new technology has come, with a set of concerns, sometimes a set of what look in retrospect,

like silly panics. But the flip side of that, and what I'm trying to say here, is that Socrates identifying that writing would transform human communication thinking was 100% correct. In fact, good take by Socrates. Socrates with a good take,

a hot and good take. Same with magazines in the mass media or radio or television. Like television produced a lot of panic about its results, but it absolutely transformed both family life, public life, all these things. So what I think we're dealing with here in this sort of attention age is a genuine transformation. It is along a curve of modernity that harkens back to the kinds of things that Thoreau was decrying when he went and lived on Walden Pond or Blaise Pascal back in the 1600s. You know, there are technologies at each moment that are moving us up this kind of curve of modernity. But at each step along the curve, there is something being transformed.

And I think we've reached a point along the curve where there's almost a kind of break, a kind of difference in kind. Money is an enormous differentiator here. I mean, look, the whole notion of iterating, but specifically the biggest companies in the world, using all of their resources to experiment on us perpetually such that they figure out how to use us to make them money. That feels like a new development as a matter of magnitude. Absolutely. In terms of magnitude, in terms of ubiquity, in terms of the scale that it's happening on, both globally and within our own lives, I mean, the hours and hours we're spending on it. And the fact that the engineering has gotten so good.

I mean, you know, Mr. Beast is a great example of someone that is an individual who just kind of iterated until he kind of figured out. Oh, I read his manifesto that got leaked at some point. Yeah, it's fascinating because he's thought deeply about this. He's like a master of the craft. He reverse engineered the engineering. Every minute, one of these 20 contestants will be eliminated and lose half a million dollars. Start the timer. You add on top of that, the fact that truly, like, the largest companies in our country

are devoted to this practice. Yes. 161, six of the ten largest U.S. companies were oil companies. And now you go to Forbes, and it's Microsoft and Apple and Google slash alphabet. It's meta slash Facebook. It's Amazon. And information is what their business is. Data is what their business is.

It's not quite the same as oil. Right. How do you explain the key difference there? What all those companies are, even more. their information companies is their attention companies. Amazon's a great example. What Amazon is able to pull off the logistical level is genuinely insane. But in terms of the point of sale, why does Amazon have the power they do? Fundamentally, they're an attention company. And an illustration of that is, let's say you want something. The other day I bought for my pickup game, like reversible black and white

jerseys so we can like, right? I thought you're going to say, I bought a shooting sleeve. Oh, no. My son was really into a shooting sleeve for a while. It's like, I can't shoot around. soon as sleep. So I got these reversible jerseys, which of course I order on Amazon. And how often if you have the experience where you're ordering a product, the brand name of which is like RJ-947-T, the only reason that that product captures you, that you're purchasing it, is because the expensive attentional real estate of the top of the Amazon search is what they occupy. So what Amazon is really doing, the value they have is that you go to them and you put your focus, on what is on the top of that search.

And then you can buy things from Amazon from brands you've never heard of before and we'll never hear from again that are even like, no idea where they're made, how they're made, they're just that it's there at the top of the Amazon algorithm. And so fundamentally, similarly to what Google is doing in some ways in Facebook, they are really monetizing attention.

It also speaks to like the fundamental quality of this resource, right? which is information in theory is everywhere. Replicable. It is infinite. But attention, like the unit of measurement for attention seems to be units of our time. That's exactly what it is. And there is this very famous line by the genius economist political scientist, Herb Simon, who writes this essay about decision-making for organizations in a complex world.

where he says, you know, information consumes attention. This is really the most fundamental insight to understand about the age we live in because we think about it the information age, but the information isn't actually the stuff that's valuable. Information is infinite, it's copyable and replicable. Your data, for instance, your data is valuable, but it doesn't make a difference to Pablo

if the data is with 10 firms or 100. And quite frankly, I don't even know. I don't even know. No. No, no way. Why is that data valuable? The data is valuable because information about what you will pay attention to. That's what they're trying to. They want to sell the data to get your eyes, right? It's a means to that end. The thing that's finite, the resource that can only be in one place at one time, here or there, is attention. And so if you think about this line from Simon, who saw this very early in 1970s, information consumes attention, you then realize that the more information there is, the more valuable. the resource that gets consumed is, and what that resource is, is our attention. This all then leads to the logical question, which is, okay, if it's not quite the same

as television and magazines and radio and video games and the written word and all of that, if it's not like comic books, what is this? What's it most like? So there's two metaphors I use, two comparison points I use in the book for what this is most like.

So one is labor. labor is something that predates labor as a wage commodity, meaning human beings have always done stuff. They've always toiled. They've always worked in some sense. But a very specific set of legal, technological, economic institutions arose in the Industrial Revolution to take labor as a wage commodity that had a price per hour, right, that you had a relationship with an employer for. And that experience of taking something that in some senses is all you. you have, what you do with your effort, and commodifying it and selling it on a market was alienating. This is Marx's whole theory of labor.

I was going to say, this is the part that the right will clip out. It's just Chris Hayes. Doing a whole long marks. Yes. There's a long reading of Marx. Yes. There's a long reading of Marxist. Although, as I say in the book, like, I'm not a Marxist.

And what I think is interesting is you don't have to be to appreciate what he's saying. But we're being alienated from the shit that used to give our life meaning. Exactly. Like this thing is taken from us and sold out of us. It's extracted. The other comparison to what's having new attention, I think, is what's happened to around hunger and the way our food appetites were. We've got this biological inheritance. You need food to live.

We seek out certain calorie-rich foods like sweets, sugars, because they pack a lot of calories, fats. And if you unleash the genius of iterative capitalism, on the problem of what will people eat, it will get to Coca-Cola pretty quickly, and then it will sell Coca-Cola all over the world. Similarly, the slot machine and the TikTok algorithm are the version of that for our brains, right? We've got this biological inheritance.

We need to pay attention to the sound of rustling in the bushes because there's a predator there. That's hardwired into us, but then that can be used for all sorts of means by companies that want to extract it. But at the same time, in the same way with food, alongside that physical inheritance, we have all of the beauty and bounty

that is human appetites. People eat all sorts of things you can't even list them. And food has such meaning in families and in cultures. It's connected to history, to tradition, to identity. If you ask, if an alien said,

well, what do people like to eat and you had to explain it, you couldn't list all of it. Yeah, you'd watch a TikTok and be like, I think they like to eat expired military rations. You know, That guy?

Oh, I know that guy. But like, I'm working with that guy, too. Just FYI. Right now, as we speak. The rye in this is awesome. Amazing. And so it's the same thing with attention. Well, what do people like to pay attention to?

Well, you know, people will watch, you know, Wagner's Ring Cycle for eight hours. They'll watch carpet cleaning videos. They'll watch the new Bob Dylan biopic. I mean, you couldn't possibly cover the bounty of human attentional appetite. But the biological inheritance, right? It's hardware and it's software.

Exactly. So the part about what it means to be human and why this is not just grandiose gas bagging is because when you look at what a human baby is like, they are so comically helpless in a way that actually is distinct and worthy of our inspection. A pig lid.

So much better a prospect. Yeah. Like we can't walk. I mean, foals are walking almost right away. most mammals are way more developed than the human infant is. And this has to do with the way that the birth canal and walking on two legs and our big brains all kind of came together in this evolutionary process where basically to make it all work, you got to give birth to the baby before it's really fully formed. And that means that the human infant needs attention right away. And they have this way of getting it, which is the cry.

Because it speaks to the wiring of you must. attend to the most important sound in the world, which is your kid crying. But that need for attention, that core need, it starts at the beginning and it just keeps going. And it's our central inheritance socially. So that's the other aspect of attention that makes it so potent. It's not just that we put our attention on things. It's that people put their attention on us. And in fact, it is the necessary precondition for life from the moment that we come into this world is that someone somewhere is attending to us

because if not we perish and that's the life or death stakes for the infant. And there are psychology studies, experiments in the realm of just scientists trying to just suss out how profound our need for social attention is. The cocktail party effect is just one of my favorite things.

So basically, the cocktail party effect is we have this amazing ability to drown out other sounds and stimuli when we're focused on something. So one of the ways you test this is you give people headphones and they have two ears and each ear is a distinct track

and you give them a task. So in one, it will be like numbers and you'll say something like, count how many times they say the number two or add up all the numbers. And because our focus is so incredible, you will just totally shut out the other ear. But one of the things they've found is that the one piece of stimulus that will wrench your attention back against your will while you're focused is your own name. And we've all experienced it 100% in a cocktail party. We all know what this is like.

Or at a party. If you are talking to someone and someone somewhere else says your name, all of a sudden, your attention goes to it. And that's because of the potency of that social attention. It's almost hardwired into us. Right. And in some ways, when you think about the engineering of social media platforms with, like, tagging this person, mentions replies, they have hardwired into the architecture of social media,

the cocktail party effect. Yes. Letting you know when someone in the room is talking about you. They know. our weakness, you can go back to William James, I think, right? It's the principles of psychology. His definition for what attention is, it turns out through this lens limited. What he says is, quote, my experience is what I agreed to attend to. And what these experiments are showing is that it's not quite consensual. No. And in fact, James takes up the question of attention precisely

because he is concerned with the deeper philosophical question of free will. Do, Do we have it? Can we control our own minds? Do we have free will? Right. And that is why the assault on our attention feels like such a deep assault on our being. Because the extent to which we can control where our mind goes is the extent to which we have free will in our independent consciousnesses. If the attention is being pulled by other people constantly, in a very real intangible second to second sense, we feel like we're out of control, that we're not actually directing our own lives.

There is a stat, just to bring it to the media side of this, too. It was this 2014 stat that chart beat had found, which is that 50, this is, it's just... And by the way, that's 10 years old. So, like, it's worse now. It would be by hypothesis. 100% worse now. Right.

It was that 55% of people who land on a page last less than 15 seconds. It's good to know that we're all just, we're all a real thing. Rick Petino of the mind. We're all in and out of there. Get that shot up. Get it up.

But from that to Blaze Pascal, right? This whole thing of like, why can't we sit with something? Why can't we sit alone with nothing? The book ends up being animated by that question. Blaise Pascal writing in 17th century about all the troubles a man stem from his inability to sit alone in his own chamber. It sounds very modern, extremely contemporary, right? We still have that issue, that all of the weird ways we feel,

the forms of alienation we feel now are both distinct to our age, but they share something with the experience of being a human in modernity or whatever particular social arrangement you're plopped into. And there's something to me that's very comforting about that. You know, that we've been trying to figure this out for centuries? Yeah, that the problems I'm talking about at one level are exacerbated and specifically created through a certain set of historical conditions, but are fundamentally related to something that's deep and inescapable about being alive. So what's comforting is that there is a commonality to the human experience throughout the millennia.

What's less comforting is that Blaise Pascal's take is that what's really unifying us is our fear of death. Yeah. That we're all just kind of milling around trying to avoid the unbelievably obvious reality that we're going to fucking die. Right. The thing that haunts us

and the reason that it's so hard to be alone with your own thoughts is essentially that. That if you're alone with your own thoughts, inevitably where the mind will go to is the ultimate reality of the impermanence of life. And I think there's, I don't know about you. I 100% feel that.

Yes. I mean, a huge part of my life is just focusing on things so that I never think about that fact. I realized recently that I like being busy. And I was like, oh, this is kind of like a virtue. And then I realize I'm really not getting to the core issue, which is that I'm trying to remain busy so as to not have to confront what actually makes me uncomfortable. And I do think at root, what I'm uncomfortable with is the people I love and also just me. vaporizing and then meaning ultimately nothing. Yeah, and I think that's when I talk about

the thing that is animating all this is something essential to human experience. But I also find something really beautiful about that. I don't have a spiritual practice, but what I do find comfort in is actually just sitting with the magnitude of the inescapability of what we might call the human condition. And we're all kind of wrestling with that.

And that's the preciousness of being alive and that there's something just incredibly sublime and beautiful about that. And that when you can take the time to focus on that, when I can look at my daughter's breathing as she's asleep and focus on that and just say to myself, like, this is the greatest gift, this moment that I'm here with her watching her sleep and watching her breathe. that itself is the antidote, you know. I feel that so acutely, except you left out the part where immediately after that thought, I go back to watching a rug cleaning video. This was stored behind somebody's shed for quite some time. But the philosopher Blaise Pascal also observed something else

that I think you should wrestle with here. He observed back in the 17th century that there is a curse that befalls the king. The king being a figure possessing unique and unparalleled access to diversion, to infinite entertainment in his court. But the king's curse was that whenever he was not being panoramically distracted in his royal court, he found life uniquely intolerable.

Nobody anywhere was more than that. miserable than the king, missing his infinite jest, to which Chris Hayes now observes in his book here in the 21st century. We're all the king now. Yeah, it's a real monkey paw situation. Absolutely. Like, if only I had, I mean, when you think about the drudgery of like feudal life in the 1600s, right, as Pascal's writing this, that most people, I think, who are listening this podcast have been liberated from. We're not, you know, we're not feudal peasants. But we will take you if you are still in a feudal society somewhere, just like and subscribe. Oh yeah, like and subscribe. Absolutely. Smash that, smash that like and subscribe button in between your

wheat harvesting. You're packing your salted meat for the winter. That's right. As you put your salty stone into a broth and then drink it, just know that we're interested. Yeah, so I think that that King's paradox, Pascal put his finger on it 400 years ago, but it's what all of us live with now. And that feeling we all have, which is, the more diversion you have, the more you need it, the moment that you are away from the diversion, you suddenly feel panicked, claustrophobic, trapped, that feeling that the king has, we all now feel. Raw dogging is a thing because of this. Exactly.

When I'm watching Erling Holland, the Man City star post about how, guess what I did. Did he raw dog a flight? For seven hours and I was very proud of it. And I'm like... I mean, that is genuinely impressive. Although don't you always feel with the flight raw dogging videos that you just can't trust that that's true? I agree.

I agree. We need flight raw dogging verification. We need some kind of... I want the Snyder cut of your raw dogging. Which reminds me of this Russian philosopher that you quote, as many segues go. I don't have pronounced his last name, but Alexander... Koyev. What Koyev says, and he bases this on Hegel, is that the fundamental he...

human desire that makes us human is desire of recognition. We want to be seen as human as people by other humans. It's a real fine print scenario. Exactly, right? Because- Children's fable of like, well, the good news is that you will get adoration. The bad news is you don't give a fuck about anybody who gives it to you. Exactly. And that is exactly what the internet offers, right? That, yes, you can have all these people paying you attention it feels very close to recognition. It's firing something in you, but it's actually not quite recognition.

Part of the reason it can't be recognition. Koyev explains this in another context is that you don't actually see them as human. The necessary mutuality isn't there. So all of this influx, strangers' attention on you, whether it's someone smashing that like and subscribe button, which, of course, you should do. Always.

Always. Or they're replying to you on a social media site or whatever they're doing. It's a simulacrum of recognition. It's a synthetic form of it. It's Fugazi recognition. It's Fugazi recognition that feels close enough to leave you almost nourished, but kind of wanting more, but never actually kind of making you feel sated. Right.

And that nearness of it, the fact that attention is right next to recognition, and we can mistake one for the other, that is the trap of social media. It's a trap of all kinds of people up to including the man who just took the oath of office. Yes. Donald Trump. It's an incredible sales pitch that Mark Zuckerberg,

to bring him into this too, that he always makes. I want to connect the world while also making the world feel somehow more disconnected. I want to give you all the food you can eat while also leaving you feeling starved. But the amazing thing about this Zuckerberg connection point is that when you go back to the original technology of Facebook, the point of the Facebook, the physical analog version and then Facebook, was to take the mutuality of connection

and separate it into two constitutive parts, gazing at and being gazed upon. It's precisely that separation that produces the strangeness of social media, right? But the separation of those two takes what is relationships, the stuff of human connection, and turns it into, mere attention. I'm the guy who was number 199 to join Facebook.

Really? Which means that I made zero money. Right. And was just complicit enough to make it a problem. And I was like, yeah, I'll join Mark's side. He was the year ahead of me. Priscilla Chan, his wife, lived in my freshman dorm. Oh, wow.

So she sent an email, hey, sign up for Mark's website. Cool, I did. Never anticipating what would come later, which was truly an avalanche of people who worked on the product, it seems like, telling everyone. everybody, these whistleblowers, you probably shouldn't use the product. It is crazy how many people inside that world have their misgivings about it. And not just because of whatever Zuckerberg's politics are at this given moment. Again, on this level of the biology of human attention and the way that their technology exploits it.

Sean Parker, founder of Napster, one of these people. He says, quote, God only knows what it does to children's brain. end quote. A former Facebook employee in the New York Times in 2018. Quote, I am convinced that the devil lives in our phones

and is wreaking havoc on our children. End quote. And then you have the dude who invented the infinite scroll. Oh, I love that quote. Yes. He sounds like Frippenheimer, Chris.

Yeah, yes. It's all about the combined total of 200,000 more human lifetimes just absorbed, taken by people scrolling infinitely. And this point, which I should shout out Johann Hari, whose book on attention is very good

and who, who surfaced this quote. This point, you're probably old enough to remember when web pages ended. Mm-hmm. You would get to the end of a web page. You'd get to the animated gift counter. Yeah, and exactly. And then you go to the next page.

Or like, and his design innovation was simply to take that away so that you could scroll infinitely and you would hit no resistance. And that is now that infinite scroll is the way that we pass our lives. Right. And now that all these platforms are full of bots, right? Again, 2018, Adobe study found that nearly 30% of all web traffic

showed strong non-human signals, which is obviously worse now. I mean, the fact that Meta announced that they were creating AI avatar bots to populate their social network to me was like this amazing reduct you out of absurdum. Yeah. Like, is the problem with the internet, there's not enough people on it? Has anyone ever thought for a second that we need fake people to interact with on the internet? You need fake people sending us fake email. And by the way, the rate at which 50 to 90% of the daily email traffic in the entire world is spam?

Yeah. Spam, spam to me is really important and an important thing to understand the context of the attention age, because if you go back to that Herb Simon Insight, which is information, consumes attention. Spam is the pollution of the attention age. And you can think about spam in this narrow sense of the emails you don't want. But actually, if you think of the broad sense, which is people attempting to abuse your attention for their own profit, it costs them very little to waste your attention by showing up in your inbox. It costs you something. Like, for instance, inboxes become unusable unless they're constantly managed, right?

phones with texts. Like the totality of pollution, of spam, of people cheaply attempting to acquire your attention because if they acquire it, it'll be monetizable for them. And it costs you something to yourself, but costs very little financially. That is one of the sort of endemic problems of the time. It's in a way that's similar to the way that air pollution in the industrial revolution was the, you know, endemic problem. Right.

They waste our time for their benefit. Exactly. Is the quote. And that's like, yeah, that nailed it. Look, the whole thing that we're going to live in this Orwellian age, Neil Postman who wrote the seminal texts, using ourselves to death. Yep.

He's the guy, I think, who saw this with a disturbing clarity. Yep. And he's writing in 1984 on two dystopian visions from two writers of a generation before. Orwell's 1984, and Aldous Huxey's Brave New World. Orwell's contention was that the truth would be concealed. from us, totalitarian restriction of information such that all you saw was propaganda. Huxley's vision was a proliferation of boundless delights and hedonistic pleasures and entertainment

and distraction that meant that no one even wanted to read or think seriously about anything else. And the contention of Postman is that Huxley is the one who nails it, right? That's the actual dystopia. He's writing this in response to TV, but also this true prophetic insight. Yeah. So look, just in terms of what we do in our own lives near the end here, right? We're bad at dealing with boredom. We are being exploited and abused by all these platforms that are promising one thing and giving us, again, the illusion of it.

There are legal consequences that could be possible. Age limits, just outright bans, all of that stuff. But in terms of a more practical solution, you write about your constitutional, your daily constitutional. And I do the same thing. I just can't recommend it enough. Going on a walk. Go on a walk. Spend 20 minutes with just your thoughts every day.

That's my one big takeaway. And sometimes I allow myself to be interrupted. I don't want a front here, you know. It's a little like writing a recovery memoir when you're still drinking. It's like I don't want to pretend that I'm not as, you know, pulled in every direction as I think we all find ourselves.

But that is one thing I do every day, take a walk, and spend 20 minutes. That is one concrete place to start. Yes, literally, go on a walk. Yeah, without your headphones. Without your headphones. Do you think this technology is so addictive that the pendulum will not crash back in the other way? I feel the backlash brewing unlike anything I've ever felt in my life.

I agree. In the course of the year or two of writing the book, it feels to me like a spring is being pushed and pushed and pushed and crammed. And now with this turn where the sort of troll-in-chief, the president and the co-troll in chief, the co-president Elon Musk, dominating public discourse with a row of billionaires who control the attentional platforms all coalesced in this tight package of power

only is going to focus the backlash more intensely and give it more energy. Yeah, I said this wasn't really going to be a politically focused episode, but it does feel like at the end here we should probably just say aloud, the people we've just been talking about who ruined our brains,

maybe we shouldn't let them run the government. I think it's probably a bad idea. Chris Hayes, noted sports dad. Noted sports dad, sports fan, Pablo Torre fan. I got to say, I love a show. Thank you for your compliments and for liking and subscribing. I like and I subscribe. This has been Pablo Torre finds out.

A Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.