Can Democracy Survive the Attention Wars? with Chris Hayes

Summary

Offline with Jon Favreau: Episode Summary Title: Can Democracy Survive the Attention Wars?
Guest: Chris Hayes
Release Date: February 9, 2025

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Introduction

In this thought-provoking episode of Offline with Jon Favreau, host Jon Favreau engages in an in-depth conversation with Chris Hayes, MSNBC host and author of the insightful book, The Sirens Call. The discussion centers around the attention economy and its profound implications for democracy, societal focus, and political discourse.

The Attention Economy: Understanding the Core Issue

Chris Hayes introduces the concept of attention as the most valuable and finite resource in the current information age. He elaborates on Herb Simon's 1972 thesis, emphasizing that while information is abundant and replicable, it competes fiercely for our limited attention.

Chris Hayes [22:28]: "Information is finite and replicable... what is being competed for is the attention."

Hayes argues that this competition for attention leads to pervasive distractions, reducing our ability to focus and engage meaningfully with critical issues. This constant battle for attention fosters environments where quick, sensational content trumps thoughtful, substantive discourse.

Social Media's Role in Shaping Attention

The discussion delves into how social media platforms exacerbate the attention wars by prioritizing content that generates rapid and intense engagement, often at the expense of depth and accuracy.

Chris Hayes [29:22]: "People do create relationships online that become human, but the social attention from strangers is a synthetic adjacent form that gives you a little bit of the taste of recognition, but none of the fulfillingness of it."

Hayes distinguishes between recognition and mere attention, highlighting that while social media grants visibility, it often lacks the genuine human connection that true relationships provide. This superficial engagement can lead to feelings of isolation and mental fatigue.

The Offline Challenge: Reclaiming Focus

Jon Favreau and his co-host, Max Fisher, discuss their ongoing Offline Challenge, aimed at reducing screen time and improving focus. They introduce a new initiative inspired by Chris Hayes: The Chris Hayes Method, which involves a daily 20-minute walk without screens or headphones.

Jon Favreau [18:04]: "This week's challenge is inspired by our pal Chris Hayes. We're calling it the Chris Hayes method. A daily walk. 20 minutes. No screens, 20 minutes, no headphones."

This exercise is designed to help individuals regain control over their attention, fostering mindfulness and reducing the compulsive urge to check devices incessantly.

Public Figures and Attention Management

The conversation shifts to how prominent figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Volodymyr Zelensky navigate the attention economy. Hayes points out the contrasting ways these leaders engage with the public:

• Donald Trump utilizes provocative rhetoric to garner massive attention, often steering discourse into sensationalism.
• Elon Musk leverages his tech influence but struggles with consistent and positive engagement.
• Volodymyr Zelensky exemplifies effective attention management by maintaining moral clarity and using media strategically to support Ukraine's defense.

Chris Hayes [62:45]: "Zelensky is a fascinating figure because here's a guy whose professional life is how to get and maintain attention... to convert that attention into arms and money to support their defense."

Zelensky's approach demonstrates how attention can be harnessed for constructive purposes, unlike the divisive tactics often employed by others.

Implications for Democracy

Hayes emphasizes that the attention wars pose a significant threat to democratic processes. The propensity for misinformation, short attention spans, and the allure of sensationalism undermine informed decision-making and public discourse.

Chris Hayes [51:47]: "Donald Trump during this campaign, he would say a couple times, like, vote for me and you'll never have to vote again."

This statement underscores the manipulation of attention to foster authoritarian tendencies, where voter engagement is suppressed in favor of centralized control.

Strategies for a Healthier Attention Economy

To combat the detrimental effects of the attention wars, Hayes advocates for:

1. Regulating Tech Oligarchs: Ensuring that companies monopolizing attention do not exploit users or concentrate power excessively.
2. Encouraging Deep Focus: Promoting activities and habits that enhance concentration and reduce distractions.
3. Fostering Genuine Connections: Building real relationships that provide meaningful recognition rather than superficial attention.

Chris Hayes [68:10]: "We don't want these people that monetize our attention and exploit us to have all of the power concentrated in a few hands."

Conclusion: A Vision for the Future

The episode wraps up with a reflection on how reclaiming attention is crucial for maintaining a functional democracy. Hayes and Favreau agree that addressing the attention economy's challenges requires both individual effort and systemic reforms to ensure that attention remains a tool for positive societal engagement rather than manipulation.

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Notable Quotes

• Chris Hayes [22:28]: "Attention is the defining feature of this age."
• Jon Favreau [64:41]: "Donald Trump, during this campaign, he would say a couple times, like, vote for me and you'll never have to vote again."
• Chris Hayes [51:47]: "Trying to meditate in a strip club."
• Chris Hayes [68:10]: "We don't want these people that monetize our attention and exploit us to have all of the power concentrated in a few hands."

Key Takeaways

• Attention as a Resource: In the information age, attention is the most critical and scarce resource, shaping how information is consumed and disseminated.
• Impact on Democracy: The manipulation of attention undermines democratic processes by fostering misinformation and reducing meaningful public discourse.
• Personal Strategies: Implementing challenges like the Chris Hayes Method can help individuals regain control over their focus and mitigate the negative effects of the attention economy.
• Role of Public Figures: Leaders like Zelensky demonstrate how effective attention management can support national objectives, contrasting with more divisive approaches.
• Systemic Solutions: Addressing the attention economy requires regulatory measures and cultural shifts towards valuing deep, meaningful engagement over sensationalism.

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This episode serves as a crucial exploration of the intricate relationship between attention, technology, and democracy, offering both analytical insights and practical strategies to navigate the complexities of the attention age.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Rates will rise or fall. Inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 38,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one Cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with action. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunity. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com offline. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com offline netsuite.com offline hey, everyone, it's Chris Hayes.

[Chris Hayes]

This week on my podcast, why Is this Happening? New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer on immigration, He In Trump 2.0, the people don't realize kind of how epic the international stakes of US Immigration policy are, understandably, because they're bombarded with all of this news. And immigration policy itself is incredibly complex and it's multifaceted. You don't experience it as acutely with refugee policy, because in that case, the US Government is already controlling who gets vetted, how they get vetted, and when and how they arrive in the United States. Whereas with asylum law, you're dealing with people who very much show up at America's door needing protection. The government by law is required to extend that protection to them, but administratively, politically, it's much more challenging. That's this week on why is this Happening? Search for why is this Happening? Wherever you're listening right now, and follow in the absence of attention. And when we're conditioned to respond to attention qua attention, you get a lot of pathological seeking of negative attention. Yeah, just this kind of troll addiction. And that's not, you know, that may.

[Jon Favreau]

Sound like leave it right to the White House.

[Chris Hayes]

Well, that was the point I was gonna make. It's like, you may be like, well, that's kind of a. That's true. But like, we have watched this break the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world and produced a model of public Discourse that is now 100% the dominant model of both the most powerful man in the world who runs the most powerful military named Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world who also seems to be maybe running the country. And both of them have. Have this. This as a core part of their personalities now.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau.

[Max Fisher]

I'm Max Fisher.

[Jon Favreau]

And you just heard from today's guest, MSNBC host and author of the exceptional new book the Sirens Call, Chris Hayes. So I actually talked to Chris on this show a few years ago about a New Yorker piece he wrote that ultimately became this book.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, wow.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Which might be.

[Max Fisher]

So you're a co author.

[Jon Favreau]

So I'm a co author, basically. It might be the most offline book I've ever read.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And I know that there have been books we've talked about where you said, like, this is like an offline bible. This is it. This is the. This ties it all together.

[Max Fisher]

It's not just about technology. It's about society, it's about politics. It's how the root of all of that is so much of our digital distraction.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. And it's framed around attention as the world's most valuable and finite resource of this age, and specifically how the competition for our attention has made us as miserable as we are.

[Max Fisher]

A war for our attention, I would argue.

[Chris Hayes]

A war.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. It is a war. Anyway, highly encourage anyone listening to read it.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

Especially if you've enjoyed the conversations that Max and I have had here. Chris and I talked about so many things in the book, including how our attention economy benefits authoritarians. This is my big fear that I have articulated.

[Max Fisher]

Absolutely. I fully agree.

[Jon Favreau]

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

[Max Fisher]

Not so great.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Am I hopeless? Maybe. Would we ever do another challenge? The answer is yes.

[Max Fisher]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Starting this week, the offline challenge returns. And this time we're going a bit bigger. All kidding aside, since last time we've done this challenge, we have seen some real improvement, you and I. Yeah. Though I've definitely backslid quite a bit.

[Max Fisher]

Especially in the Last week or two has been really tough.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. But I think that we have both learned it's impossible to do our jobs.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And even if you don't have jobs like we do, pay attention to the news.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Without ever being on your phone. So this time, instead of only trying to cut down our phone time, we are going to focus our energy specifically on our focus.

[Max Fisher]

Focus. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

For the next few weeks, we're going to be taking on a series of challenges aimed at helping us improve our focus, which is our ability to focus on an individual task like writing or reading a book or being present with loved ones. Finding the willpower to put down the phone after an hour of doom scrolling or just generally feeling in control of our minds and what we pay attention to. We're gonna get into what those challenges will look like in a moment. But first, how are you feeling about this? You had a good thought on why this is actually the perfect challenge to do in this political moment.

[Max Fisher]

So, I mean, at the most basic level, we've talked a lot about how everybody's first task for the next four years is to get yourself and the people around you through it. That you can't do anything else unless you can do that. But more broadly, I genuinely come to believe, thanks to Chris's book, thanks to a of the discussions that we've had, that Lost Focus is really at the foundation of so many of the big societal and political problems that we have talked about. And we've also talked about how building a progressive movement has to start with being able to speak to people's needs at a time when people feel alienated, they feel dispossessed, they're isolated, they, you know, everybody's doom scrolling. Everybody's surrounded by misinformation and conspiracies in ways that have led a lot of people to embrace the easy answers from the kind of mag, a cultural right of grievance, nihilism, selfishness, hyper masculinity. So when we talk about lost Focus, being at the center that like focus meaning literally just your ability to control your attention in any given moment. And those moments add up to hours, add up to days, add up to a lifetime. Like when you spend hours doom scrolling on your phone even. I don't mean specifically who. I mean anyone, you. Although it could also mean me. Even though you know you will regret that time, even though you know you will look back and think, I would have been better off if I read a news story that's lost focus when you wake up in the middle of the night and your brain starts pinwheeling because your anxiety spiraling about what's in the news that's lost focus. When you feel drained at the end of the day because you spent your commute or whatever ruminating about the news. This is something I do a lot that's lost focus.

[Jon Favreau]

Or you can listen to podcasts and during your commute where other people ruminate about the news.

[Max Fisher]

That's right. Ruminate for you. Yeah. Which is why.

[Jon Favreau]

Which I also do. Even though I'm one of the ruminators. Surreal.

[Max Fisher]

Well, this. I mean, this is this centipede of ruminating. That's. That's a beautiful thing, John. Thank you and congratulations to everyone on their commute who's imagining that now. But it is like it. You know, this week's episode is. It's a testament to the news has gotten so bad that the show that usually covers tech news now has to be a reprieve from it.

[Jon Favreau]

But like, there's also one more thing that I noticed is. But it's like a daily thing I am trying to do. Like a work thing.

[Max Fisher]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

And so I'm in. And I'm in the Slack channel. Or I need to go to the Slack channel because I. Because someone put something in there. There's a. There's a clip for me to approve for Pod Save America that someone cut right on sound. Yeah. And I'll go in there. But then I see, oh, all the other channels, there's notifications and I gotta check out that Suddenly I'm like, what did I come into the Slack for? Oh, I have to approve the clip all the time. And then I was also writing something for the show, but now I completely forgot what that this is like my whole daily existence.

[Max Fisher]

Yes. And this is. It's not even just when you're on your devices. Our synapses are just completely burned by being overloaded with dopamine. People can't read anymore. I mean, it's like literally becoming harder to read because we don't have the willpower to focus on it anymore. And then it's so easy to extrapolate out from that when you talk about people getting more addicted to their phones because of lost focus. We've talked many times about how that leads people to more misinformation and conspiracies because it kind of preys on having a more impulsive attention span. It's driving the rise in social isolation, which then in turn leads to this culture of hyper masculinity, anxiety and depression among young people. So these are all of these, like, huge problems that are really leading a lot of people, I think, to the maga. Right. And making it hard to build a progressive movement that are much bigger than lost focus. But resolving our ability to control our own focus, I think has to be the first step to fixing that. Because we can't fix any of those other things unless we can take back our own. Our own brains, really, from these tech companies that are using this incredibly sophisticated technology to take it away from us so they can sell fucking ads against it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. And even if you removed the social media component from it, which is probably the biggest part. Right.

[Max Fisher]

Totally.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, whether it's podcasts, whether it's television, whether it's just like we are. Yeah, it is so now deeply ingrained, which is why Chris calls it like the age of attention.

[Max Fisher]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

It's bigger than even the attention economy, though. That's a. That's the driver of it.

[Max Fisher]

Right, right, right.

[Jon Favreau]

But it's so ingrained in us now that even without social media, there is a focus issue for all of us.

[Max Fisher]

I find if I am, I'm trying to get much better about taking time to socialize with people and have deep connections. Like, after talking to Derek the other week, I've really been thinking about how important that is. It's hard to focus in that. Or it's harder to focus. I feel myself, you know, thinking, ah, what's going on on my phone? Or like, we've been talking for 45 minutes. It's hard to stay focused that long.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

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

[Jon Favreau]

So right before we started recording, our producer Emma, who also had this idea of focus, which was fantastic, made us sit in front of a painting, or at least a screen of a painting. We do have budgetary constraints. Is a way to measure our focus. Why did we do that and why did I do better than you?

[Max Fisher]

Why you did better than me as a. I was surprised by that one, I gotta give you. What if it turned out that actually all along you've had incredible focus and you're just choosing to put it all on bad tweets at minute?

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know, it felt like minute 100, but it was probably minute two in the painting. I suddenly had that thought to myself. I'm like, I just beat Max. What if I can't? What if I am focusing and I am choosing this life?

[Max Fisher]

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that occurred to me when I was sitting around for the hour and a half after I had to tap out because I started thinking about the bad tweets by JD Vance. Tweets you told me about as we were walking in the studio, which incredible competitive spirit.

[Jon Favreau]

Literally. Literally tweeting @JD Vance, then tweeted, then told Max about how angry I was about my tweet @jd Vince. And then we started recording.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, yeah. Told me about it right before we had to do the Focus Challenge. That's that winner's spirit that gets you there. No. So, okay, so the painting that we used is specifically from a page the New York Times set up last year where it tests how long you can look at a painting that is meant to demonstrate for you how badly your focus has been fractured. And this comes from an assignment that an art history professor named Jennifer Roberts gives her students, where she asks all of her students to look at a work of art for three hours. Now, you and I tapped out of. What was it, two minutes and four minutes.

[Jon Favreau]

Three hours.

[Max Fisher]

I know. Incredible. So the painting that I would rather. What would you rather do?

[Jon Favreau]

I'm thinking about Chris's book, and we don't talk about this, so I can tell the story, but, like, in his book talks about an experiment where you can. You can be. They put people in a room by themselves.

[Max Fisher]

And I know this. It's great.

[Jon Favreau]

And you can either stay there by yourself and do nothing, or you can give yourself a shock. You could administer yourself a small shock just to feel something, to not be with. Alone with your own stuff.

[Max Fisher]

Stimulation.

[Jon Favreau]

And people do the shock a lot.

[Max Fisher]

A lot of people lean on the.

[Jon Favreau]

Women do the shock too.

[Max Fisher]

I remember that. Yes. It's an incredible, incredibly disturbing experiment that is, like. It's shocking, but you're like, of course.

[Jon Favreau]

Of course.

[Max Fisher]

And then you start to think, would I shock myself? And, like, I would probably shock myself a little bit because I don't have a Twitter feed in front of me. Anyway, the painting they picked is the opposite of, I would say, shocking yourself. It's a painting by Whistler, Nocturne, in blue and silver. It's from 1943, which is kind of perfect because it's this impressionistic landscape of a coastline where it doesn't. It's Made up of these very subtle little details that don't have any significance until you look at it for a few minutes. It's a painting that is not rewarding unless you have the focus to spend several minutes kind of absorbing these little teeny tiny details. And the fact that it's just from the 40s, from our grandparents, lifetimes, I think, goes to show how much that focus has changed. And the fact that our brains work very differently than they do today. So we're using it as kind of a metric, but also as a way to remind ourselves that we're not good at focusing.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

Like as a species.

[Jon Favreau]

And we're going to. We're going to come back to that painting at some point, right?

[Max Fisher]

Yeah. I think the idea is that every week we're going to come back to it. So that's like.

[Jon Favreau]

So we hit three hours.

[Max Fisher]

I mean, listen, I would love to get to three hours. It's kind of like our focus is a muscle and our brains. And this painting test is seeing how much our attention can bench press. Every week it's arm day for arm.

[Jon Favreau]

Day for our brains.

[Max Fisher]

For our brains. For our attentions. Yeah. Which not because it's important to look at paintings, but because having that focus is better for leading an actualized life.

[Jon Favreau]

So in addition to the painting, we're also gonna be tracking our sleep. Why sleep and how have you been sleeping?

[Max Fisher]

So it's not great. Great. Since the election, the last couple of weeks especially, I've been down to like four or five hours a night because I'm doom spiraling. Everything that erodes your focus also erodes your sleep. So it's a very useful benchmark. And then at the same time, better or worse sleep also leads to better or worse focus. It's just at the foundation of a lot of your brain being able to do the things that you want it to do and having control and having like the hormones that you have in your brain are more like. It's more adrenaline if you've slept less. So it's harder for you to focus. So if we can improve sleep, we'll probably improve everything else.

[Jon Favreau]

That's cool.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

It's a just a different, like explains a lot biochemically. Yeah, right. Exactly. Because you're on that fight or flight when you haven't slept as much. So I. Last week I said I was clocking like four or five hours. We have been tracking our sleep on apps. I believe you have an app on your phone.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

What do you have? What do you.

[Jon Favreau]

What em and I were talking about this before because she did it too. But, like, I found that you just using the app gave me worse sleep because I. First of all, it was hard to believe that the app. Sleep score. Sleepcore. We have sleep score.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And you put it on the. Like, on the nightstand next to bed, and somehow it, like, knows when you're doing deep sleep, less deep sleep. So the whole night I was like, is this really going to work? And so I just kept being like, anyway, my score was a 79.

[Max Fisher]

Okay. Out of 100. That's great.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. But I logged, like. What was it? Hold on. Sorry.

[Max Fisher]

And it. And what? It's scoring five hours of sleep, but it's deep sleep. It's the quality of your sleep.

[Jon Favreau]

Sleep duration. 5 hours and 50 minutes.

[Max Fisher]

Really? Oh, man. That's not great. You're supposed to get eight.

[Jon Favreau]

You are supposed to get eight. Yeah, I did not.

[Max Fisher]

So I have been. So I got a Fitbit, because I don't. Sorry to be snooty, don't bring my phone into the bedroom. So I wear a Fitbit to bed now to track my sleep. And I had the exact same experience with you where this is device that's supposed to help you track your sleep so you can get better at sleeping. And instead, I have been having stress dreams about the Fitbit sleep score not being high enough. I literally had a nightmare that woke me up the other day where I was looking at the Fitbit sleep score and was watching the number go down, and it stressed me out so much that I woke up and lost sleep.

[Jon Favreau]

So sounds like it's working already.

[Max Fisher]

I am averaging 67 out of a hundred, and I've been getting about six and a half hours, but I'm aiming, aiming for eight.

[Jon Favreau]

If I get to seven, I'd be thrilled.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, I don't have kids, so it's. I'm coming from a position of luxury.

[Jon Favreau]

It's not even. I can't even blame them. Last night, they were actually both angels. Last night, I just couldn't sleep.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah. Well, it's something that I think I'm also gonna be watching for myself is how long does it take me to fall asleep? Which is partly a focus thing, because you're brain spiraling. And when I wake up, am I awake? Am I awake for three minutes, or am I awake for two hours?

[Jon Favreau]

Yep, that's. That's my biggest issue. The other thing we're gonna do is track our phone pickup because it's.

[Max Fisher]

It's a measure of how many times we are involuntarily reaching for our phone.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. And so last week My average was 276 times per day I picked up my phone.

[Max Fisher]

I will say that at least four of those have been during this recording. So I can see why those numbers are what they are. I'm at 88, which is still a wild number, is still so much. So I don't want people to think 88 is low because it is not. It's just that 200, what was it? 276.

[Jon Favreau]

76. Woof. See if I can get that thing down, huh? All right. So what are we doing this week? Walk us through the challenge.

[Max Fisher]

This week's challenge is inspired by our pal Chris Hayes. We're calling it the Chris Hayes method. A daily walk. 20 minutes. No screens, 20 minutes, no headphones. That's it. It's 20 minutes. Just you, yourself, your thoughts, your brain, nothing to distract you. And just try to redevelop those muscles to be able to because there's not going to be anything distracting you. Can you control what you're thinking about and not say do. I'm going to do the first few times, which is just doom spiral about the news and like actually kind of try to direct my own thoughts in the absence of all of that stimulus.

[Jon Favreau]

And this is once a day.

[Max Fisher]

We're doing this once a day. 20 minutes.

[Jon Favreau]

Woo. Okay.

[Max Fisher]

It's going to be great.

[Jon Favreau]

All right, all right. In a minute you'll hear my conversation with Chris Hayes on the war for our attention. But before we jump to that, just quick housekeeping. There's a ton of rage bait in the news right now meant to distract oh and overwhelm us. Today we'd like to focus on something positive, the work being done to fight back and what you can do to help. This month, Vote Save America is making donations as part of their anxiety relief program to black led organizations and candidates of color, helping us gain ground at the state and local level, like Kimberly Pope Adams, who's running for a Virginia state House seat this year. Prime opportunity to expand the Democrats one seat majority. You can set up a recurring donation at any amount that feels right for you and Vote Save America will use it to build Progressive Power in 2025 and beyond. Go to VoteSave America.com donate to donate now paid for by votes Save America. Votesafeamerica.com not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Up next, Chris Hayes Offline is brought to you by Armor Colostrum. Everyone's looking for ways to be healthier and stave off winter illnesses give your immunity and gut health their best chance with Armor Colostrum Discover the transformational health benefits of Amra Colostrum that have earned tens of thousands of five star reviews. Probiotics and other supplements are touted as a gut health solution, but most products on the market are dead before they even reach your gut. Armor Colostrum naturally fortifies your entire gut wall system and optimizes your whole body microbiome, which helps guard against irritants that can trigger digestive issues and compromise your immune system. Research has shown that Colostrum helps to enhance nutrient absorption. Armor Colostrum can help stabilize blood sugar levels, modulate hormones and ignite your metabolism. This enhanced nutrient absorption has been a closely guarded secret of elite athletes. Colostrum has been shown to promote lean muscle building and fuel cellular repair regeneration to fuel better performance and faster recovery. The bioactives in Armor Colostrum have also been shown to aid in reactivating hair follicle stem cells and activating collagen production, promoting hair growth and enhancing skin radiance. We've worked out a special offer for my audience. Receive 15% off your first order. Go to tryarmor.com offline or enter offline to get 15% off your first order. That's T R Y-A R M R A.com offline auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it.

[Chris Hayes]

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[Emma Ilic]

Get a quote today.

[Chris Hayes]

Restrictions apply.

[Jon Favreau]

Chris Hayes welcome to Offline.

[Chris Hayes]

It's great to be here in person, irl in person, offline and irl.

[Jon Favreau]

Perfect. Perfect for this conversation. I love this book.

[Chris Hayes]

Oh that's. Thanks.

[Jon Favreau]

Siren's Call. It's so good. Thanks brother. I thought I would like it and I liked it even more. That's great to hear and it's great to be talking about attention here on the third week of Trump, the sequel, which we can get to feels pretty relevant, I know. So I emailed you this, but I think the argument you make is the skeleton key to understanding, I don't know, the last few decades of what's happened to our politics, our culture, our minds. The reason I think it's important is because your analysis of living in the age of attention goes deeper than the problems we talk about on the show that we have with phones, with screen time, with social media. And your view is that the critique of the attention economy actually doesn't go far enough. And you write my Contention is the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource, our attention, is also the very thing that makes us human. Just to give people who might not know what that means a quick explanation. Why is attention the most important resource right now? And why is it the very thing that makes us human?

[Chris Hayes]

Great. So why it's the most important resource, I think has to do with the structure of American economy and society and what we call the information age. We all sort of intuitively grasp it's conventional wisdom that like we had an industrial economy and now we have an information economy. And we used to move atoms around through manufacturing, now we move bits around, right? So I think we all get that. The key insight, I think is that information is not actually the valuable resource of the information age. Information is finite and replicable. There's maybe 100 firms that have my data and information, or maybe a thousand, but it doesn't really matter to me personally. So information isn't the key scarce resource. In 1972, Herb Simon, a brilliant political theorist and economist, wrote this, gave this lecture called Designing Decision Making for Organizations in an Information Rich World. And his key insight is that information actually consumes something. And what information consumes is attention. And this key insight, which is a 50 year old insight, is really to me the kind of skeletons key. Because once you think, okay, information is really important to this economy, there's more information than ever. That information is competing for something scarce and consuming something scarce, which is attention. All of a sudden it's like, oh right, it's actually the attention age. It's the information is key, but the, the thing that we have to, that is being competed for is the attention. And the way that I describe in the book, I, I use a metaphor that Lawrence Lessig used in a book about intellectual property where if your neighbor steals your idea of having a picnic table in your backyard and puts his own picnic table in his backyard, doesn't really affect your life, like, but if he steals your picnic table, now you've got a real problem. Yeah, information is like the idea of the picnic table. Attention is the picnic table. If some, if your attention is taken, it can't be copied, it can't be replicated. If someone takes it, they have it and you don't. So that's the key sort of insight of like why it's so important now and then. The part of what it makes us human is our consciousness is the ability to direct the beam of thought where we want it to go. That's attention. That faculty is the faculty that defines us as conscious human creatures. And if people are taking it from us, we've lost dominion over our own mind.

[Jon Favreau]

And it's what makes us unique as social animals.

[Chris Hayes]

Absolutely right.

[Jon Favreau]

No, I thought that was. I thought that's so interesting about information and attention because we are also a generation that has now known what it was like before the information age, growing up that way, and now are very much in it.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

And it made me realize, like. Yeah, when we first, you know, when there was. When there is the Internet and we went online, there was like, all this information. It was great. It's like, now I'm gonna be able to know everything. And now there's so much information that we've all experienced the challenge of figuring out, okay, what information do I need? When do I need it? How much do I need?

[Chris Hayes]

And even that. Like, we're basically the same cohort. And I think that our cohort experience is kind of key to some of these insights precisely because of what we went through. And the sort of experience, this sort of feeling of adventure that was the early Internet, which is like the feeling you have where you land somewhere new that you're visiting as a traveler, and, like, you get out of the hotel and you're like, okay, yeah, what are we gonna go do? Like, that's how the Internet felt. And now the feeling is like the feeling of car sickness and stuck in traffic.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Chris Hayes]

It's like the complete opposite sensation. Feeling of, like, vertigo. Woozy, kind of like not quite in your right body. And it's just a. It's. It is a 180 from that thrilling feeling of adventure.

[Jon Favreau]

No, I mean, I'm sure you feel this as well, but as I prepare for every pod Save America, I feel like if I just keep reading the news and read everything there is on the Internet about the news that we're gonna talk about on the show, I will be prepared.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And that's insane.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

So, like, I've transitioned from. I'm like, all right, I read the stuff that I need to know, and now I need to just. Just think about how I feel about.

[Chris Hayes]

The news that I read and that taking space. I mean, this is something I write about in the book. And this idea of being comfortable just sitting with your own thoughts and how that's an old problem for humans. It's part of the human condition. It's part of what the Buddha is wrestling with in 600 BCE. Pascal writes about it in the 17th century. This is not just intention age problem, but it's A human problem, but it's one so exacerbated by the attention age where we acclimate to conditions, where we have endless diversion, a bounty of diversion before us. And the more diversion you have, the more diversion you need. And it's never enough. And so when it's taken away, everyone has had the feeling of, you double park the car, you put the hazards on, you go in to get a cup of coffee. You're like four people deep in a line. You pat your pocket, your phone's not there, and it's like, oh, my God, I'm screwed. I'm screwed. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Well, I'm just gonna be here waiting on this line with my own goddamn thoughts.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, I can't. I can't.

[Chris Hayes]

And it's like that flare of panic. But the other thing is, like, you know, you read biographies of, like, Einstein, and he's just, like, taking two hour walks in Princeton every day. I said that thinking stuff, just thinking it up. And it's like, that's how thoughts happen.

[Jon Favreau]

My resolution, my New Year's resolution for last year was to go on a. A 20 minute walk every day with no nothing.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

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

[Chris Hayes]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

But it's not.

[Chris Hayes]

Well, and that's partly because of this acclimation. It can be unwired. Like, I actually do the 20 minutes. I really am religious about 20 minutes without. With only my thoughts every day at some point. Which is like, my one little news you can use. Part of this book is like, do that. Just find a way to do 20 minutes every day. And that can be your commute, where you just drive and don't listen to something.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

And you let your thoughts marinate. Or it's. I do it as on a walk because I, you know, live close to a park. I take my dog. But it, you know, that re. Acclimating to that condition. And to go back to your original point about the sort of generational cohort, like, we are the generation. The last generation that, like, read the cereal box.

[Jon Favreau]

Which I heard you. I heard you talking about that with Ezra. And I was like, oh, my God. It was like the first time I had remembered doing that. But I used to do it all the time.

[Chris Hayes]

It's like, what copy is there in my visual field? And they would do. There would be little things, you know, there'd be little things on the back because that was. And so I think that also because we experience that sort of dearth to, you know, overload experience, that we're keyed into it.

[Jon Favreau]

We've talked a lot on this show about how social media gives us the illusion of connection with other people. You described this dynamic, and I thought a really smart way, which is that humans seek recognition, but what we get from social media is attention. Can you talk about the difference between recognition and attention and why social media tends to give us the latter and not the former?

[Chris Hayes]

So social attention is a strange thing. Like we need social attention to survive from the moment that were born. But it's it. Attention in so many spheres, it's a theme of the book, is necessary but not sufficient. It's like you want something more than social attention from other people. You want love, consideration, care, friendship, camaraderie, all these things. And fundamentally, as humans, what we seek is recognition, which is to be seen as human by another human. That is, that is what we want. You can't get that from social media because the person who's noticing you, you fundamentally can't see them as human. And they can't really see you as human unless there's an actual relationship. People do create relationships online that become human. But the sort of social attention from strangers is this like synthetic adjacent form that gives you a little bit of the taste of recognition, but none of this like the fulfillingness of it. So you sort of snack on it, right?

[Jon Favreau]

It's like a reciprocity that. Yes, you, you. You're looking for. And it is.

[Chris Hayes]

Reciprocity is what relationships are made of. That's the weird thing about taking the covalent bond of relationships that are formed through mutual social attention and. Right. Separating them into different vectors of like, I pay attention to you, you pay attention to me. And then distributing them at scale such that now none of those things are synced up or matched.

[Jon Favreau]

It is funny because a while back now I changed my Twitter settings so that I only saw notifications and comments and everything from people that I follow.

[Chris Hayes]

That, that. That's an enormously important change.

[Jon Favreau]

Right. And so, but now I look at it and it's very funny because I'm like, you know, scrolling and I look and there's not much there. And then I see some people that I know cause I follow them who'll just like, like a tweet and I'm like, oh, it's nice that they liked the tweet. But that's all. That's all I get. It's nothing. There's no conversation. There's no nothing. And like, you start feeling. And then you go. And I'm like, now I'm gonna go back to the tweet and see if there's any angry comments.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes, yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Because maybe I'm gonna. The angry comment is something even though it's not.

[Chris Hayes]

That's like, what the fuck?

[Jon Favreau]

That's crazy.

[Chris Hayes]

That's the sick part.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, that's the sick. If you can't.

[Chris Hayes]

Where it's like, if you can't get anything else, you'll take attention. And the other thing that's important about social attention as a kind of feature of this sort of framework is the weird thing about social attention is it has no valence, positive or negative.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, right.

[Chris Hayes]

Someone screaming in your face on the subway is social attention. Someone like, flirting with you across the bar is also social attention. They're both attention. Like, one is far more pleasurable than the other. But in the absence of attention, and when we're conditioned to respond to attention qua attention, you get a lot of pathological seeking of negative attention. Yeah, just this kind of troll addiction. And that's not. You know, that may sound like lead.

[Jon Favreau]

To the White House.

[Chris Hayes]

Well, that was the point I was going to make. It's like, you may be like, well, that's kind of a. That's true. But like, we have watched this break the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world and produced a model of public discourse that is now 100% the dominant model of both the most powerful man in the world who runs the most powerful military named Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world who also seems to be maybe running the country. And both of them have. Have this. This as a core part of their personalities now, which.

[Jon Favreau]

And I want to talk about this later, but like, which is basically the perfect logical conclusion of the attention age with these two at the top when.

[Chris Hayes]

You couldn't absolute, like. And I was. I did a final read of the book back in. You know. Cause books have a long lead time. And I did my final read. It must have been maybe back in the summer. Like, we were sort of locking the book. And I was like, there's a lot of musk in this book. Is there too much musk? And it was because he was such the perfect figure of this. There's this guy where, like all of these pathologies and deformative, they've clearly kind of broken his brain. They've changed his behavior. He bought this thing for $44 billion, so he could be the main character on it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep.

[Chris Hayes]

And. And. And then I was like, no, actually, he is pretty central. And now it's like, I didn't even get to write about everything that came after the manuscript was launched.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, he is a. He is a genius whose brain has been rotted by the very platform that he purchased.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is just one of the many stories.

[Chris Hayes]

Exactly.

[Jon Favreau]

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

[Chris Hayes]

Is that true?

[Jon Favreau]

I think. Well, I think about the intense, intense reaction to the TikTok ban briefly going into effect.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Because TikTok decided to. And I wonder. I'm like. I have to check myself, because I'm like, are we missing something? Are we just, like, old guys, like, out on our lawn yelling at the kids? And if we're not missing anything, like, what is it? Is it hard to recognize this if you're so addicted to the algorithms? And I think TikTok's probably the worst example of this.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah. I mean, I think it's the most powerful, for sure. I think that's the most kind of weaponized version of it in the least reciprocal. Yes. Although, then there's this very weird thing that happens on TikTok, which I think is, like, an incredibly unhealthy thing of, like, taking the comment and posting it and responding to it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Chris Hayes]

Which is a very, very perverse and dysfunctional version of discourse.

[Jon Favreau]

Very.

[Chris Hayes]

It's even worse than Twitter dunking somehow. And yet is. It is, of course, like, a main trope. My feeling about this is, I guess the following one is there is a little bit of a baby in a bathwater issue here, which is. I love the Internet. I've always loved the Internet, and I love lots of stuff on TikTok, because when the Internet is at its best, what it is doing is aggregating and curating and leading you to discover the sheer talent, brilliance of people. People being funny and smart and clever, and people who don't have comedy writing jobs but are working in a liquor store, and people who are not professional dancers but can really dance. And, you know, there is so much talent, creativity out there that one of the incredible things about the Internet is to run through the gatekeepers that create sort of formal systems in which people are able to utilize their talents and instead kind of distribute it. When that is happening. That's great. Like, I love that. And Honestly, I. Earlier, TikTok was a lot like that. And then as it got more. As it sort of grew it. The same thing happened to it that happens in all these competitive attentional markets, which is driving towards conflict, driving towards, like, clips of old office shows. Like. Like, like.

[Jon Favreau]

And it's incredibly individualized. Like, yes. I find. And sort of the way that I came to TikTok is friends in. In the group chat which you write about in the book, like, sending a funny TikTok around because, like.

[Chris Hayes]

And you're like, oh, that's cool.

[Jon Favreau]

All that cool stuff that you're talking about that's done on the Internet, it's meant to be enjoyed with other people and talked about with other.

[Chris Hayes]

Which is why sharing is so.

[Jon Favreau]

Right. I mean, this episode is out on the day of the Super Bowl. Right. Which is maybe the last monocultural.

[Chris Hayes]

The last thing we got or the biggest. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And one of the last monocultural events. And, you know, Trump's there and Taylor Swift, and it's like. And so you got like, sports fans, sports fans, political thing, a music thing. Like, it's all there. It's all happening at the Super Bowl. But I do think, and we've talked about this for a while on the show, that, like, we are losing the monoculture is not just a, like, nostalgic. Oh, well, like, I think it's. There's something deeply problematic about that in just having a functioning society.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, I do. And it's funny because, again, this is one of those places, you know, you got to keep testing yourself. Am I the old guy? Get off my. All on. So, like, just to close that thought. And, like, I think there's a baby in bathwater thing. I understand why people like certain aspects of TikTok and these platforms. It's the specific structural mechanisms by which they monetize attention.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

As opposed to the technological ability to do this thing that is the problem. You know what I mean?

[Jon Favreau]

Like, because you could have the latter.

[Chris Hayes]

You could, like. And we've had, you know, email is messed up for a lot of reasons, and it's, you know, spam, but it's an open protocol that, like, it's not like you can send email to anyone. And there's lots of reasons. Email is a great technology. Right. In terms of the monoculture. That's another place where it's interesting, because if you go back and you look at the media criticism in particularly around the 30s and the rise of fascism, Right. They've got the opposite problem of hyper individuation. They've got the mob and masses. Right. So it's like when you have these small channels that everyone hears if the wrong people take them over and start the radio broadcast that the entire nation listens to with propaganda. That's really scary.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, you. And you write about that. This is sort of like Orwell versus Huxley.

[Chris Hayes]

Huxley.

[Jon Favreau]

Postman. That Neil Postman writes about. Yeah. Which is like mass communication as a problem or just everyone not paying attention.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes, that. Yeah. Postman's insight is that the. He's writing this in 84. The dystopia described by Orwell in 1984, which is information controlled by a single entity, is not the dystopia we got. Instead, it's Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, where there's just endless pleasures and delights and distraction and no one actually pays any attention to important things.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. And now there's that. And there was that in the TV age, but now there's that. But it's like all of us in our own individual, you know, algorithmic drip.

[Chris Hayes]

Exactly.

[Jon Favreau]

For each of us. Right. And so we're not even connecting.

[Chris Hayes]

And all of us. And all of us, you know, people spending more time alone, which is a key part of this. And then the, you know, the fusing of offline and online life is a huge part of this. Like, I remember this sort of slogan we used to use back in the day of, like, Twitter's not real life. And one of the things, I think it was really clear in this last election is that, like, you really can't distinguish.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

Real life and not real life. If, you know, if you're on a. If you're in a public place and you look around, ordinary people, the, you know, what are they doing, you know, in real life? They're looking at their phone. What is on the phone, the stuff on the Internet. What's the. You know, that's where they're getting information. That's how they're learning about the world.

[Jon Favreau]

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

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

And the audience has a say in what we cover.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Because if what we cover doesn't capture their attention, they will simply direct their attention somewhere else. And I think a lot of folks think, well, this is. It's about ratings and money and all the financial model does depend on that. But even if money wasn't part of it, if I'm saying something and you're not paying attention, what does it matter that I'm saying it's funny when some.

[Chris Hayes]

People would be like a critique of like, well, you're just trying to get ratings. It's like, yes, a lot. Yes. I'm trying to get a lot of people to pay attention to what I'm saying.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is another way of saying, I think it's what I'm saying, you know, could make a difference in some way.

[Chris Hayes]

I would like as many people as possible to hear what I'm saying. That is true. Like guilty as charged. And I think that that feeling, you know, when you're inside media, you always feel like you're chasing, you're chasing the horse. And people outside media see us as riding the horse. Yes, leading it.

[Jon Favreau]

And how do you balance that? Like on a typical day when you're trying to figure out what's in the show, how do you balance the need to direct people's attention but also, you know, follow where the audience is?

[Chris Hayes]

Sometimes it's, you know, today, like, sometimes it's as. Is as sort of crude as a few blocks of following and a few blocks of leading, you know, and look, sometimes you're in a situation where the place where there's attentional energy around is really important. Like the Musk thing is both a great story. I'm not great in, like, it's, you.

[Jon Favreau]

Know, it's not an interesting story, but.

[Chris Hayes]

I mean, like, it's sort of narrative components. There's this character, the world's richest man is like infiltrating the payment systems of the Treasury Department and also is really important. So that's. Those are kind of the easiest days. Right when it's right in the middle of the Venn diagram. But then we're also gonna do something on the acting U.S. attorney in D.C. ed Martin, who has really flown on the radar.

[Jon Favreau]

But fucking guy.

[Chris Hayes]

But yes, but, but, but people should be directing their attention to. So, so, you know, there's. And then there's certain ways where you, through the monologue, you start in one place where you're Trying to sort of capture people on what they're paying attention to, and then you kind of move them from that place somewhere else, and then you end up on a guest on a thing that's under the radar and not getting a lot of attention. But you started.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep.

[Chris Hayes]

You know, that's a. I mean, that's a real. That's a classic Rachel Maddow trick. And she sort of does it better than anyone. But. But. But I've learned how to do it pretty well myself, so there's different ways. But you. What you can't do is just ignore.

[Jon Favreau]

No.

[Chris Hayes]

Where attention is flowing.

[Jon Favreau]

No, but it is. It's funny. And you.

[Chris Hayes]

I mean, you see it in your.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm sure you guys say you have a podcast as well, so you know this. But when we. When we started, like, the data for podcasting is, like, notoriously thin. Right? It's like a.

[Chris Hayes]

It's not great for tv.

[Jon Favreau]

It's gotten better, but it's, like, still largely a black box. But at the beginning, we were like, you know, we were checking out how many. First of all, we didn't even know how many downloads we were getting when we were over at the ringer. And then now. And then we started this, and we're like, oh, we check it once in a while. But, you know, it's an ad model, and it wasn't, like, completely dependent, so we would just, like, not pay attention to it, and we just say whatever we wanted. And then the show grew and it was great. And then you get to a point where you're like, okay, here's how many downloads we have each show, and should we listen? And there's financial issues and the ads and all that kind of stuff. And then. But. But what I've realized, too, is if you try to completely shape the content with the thought in mind that you have to, like, get more downloads, it doesn't work.

[Chris Hayes]

It's a failure.

[Jon Favreau]

No, it doesn't work. It's not even like, it's bad. It just doesn't work.

[Chris Hayes]

That is really an important point, too. You can't reverse engineer things off of the data. I mean, some people maybe can. I can't. And what I've done is I think I've just developed a sense that's like a craft sense or almost like a surfer in the wave sense, where it's like, I just know it at some point in my. You know, I just know where you.

[Jon Favreau]

Have a feel for it.

[Chris Hayes]

I have a feel for where the energy is, but I'm.

[Jon Favreau]

I. Because you're on the devices, just looking at all the news all the time.

[Chris Hayes]

I have this magical feel. It's called reading the Internet all day long. It's a mystical quality.

[Jon Favreau]

No.

[Chris Hayes]

And you know, and I, I, I feel the same way. Like, I stopped, I stopped looking at ratings in 2020 during COVID and I've never looked at them since. And I have no idea.

[Jon Favreau]

Wow.

[Chris Hayes]

It's been five years. I have no idea. And it's, I think, so much better for the show.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

And, and all. And ironically, probably the ratings.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

I've been thinking about this a lot since the election. How do you think about ways to reach people beyond the people that all of us are already talking to? And we've all, we're all on the team, we've decided, you know, like, we, we're thinking a lot alike, especially about politics. And I mean, it's a little, I still have my, you know, Democratic strategist organizer hat on. But I wonder for you as you're thinking like, okay, we gotta reach more people, does that. How do you think about that on a day to day basis? Or is that the conversation you want to be having?

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, I mean, I guess there's two ways to understand the we, like, in a specific sense of me as Chris Hayes who has a podcast and a television show, or like people with my politics or like, yeah, the Democratic Party, which is not really my, like, Democratic Party has to do its own thing. I'm not, you know, that I'm not structurally part of it. You know, I think different platforms or different forms of media matter. Like we launched the podcast. Why is this happening? In part, and I see it at book signings where there is a different group of people that listen to the podcast and watch show. Yeah, probably that's an age thing of, of younger people listen to podcasts and watch less cable news. So that's part of it. Watching Jamelle Bouie, like blow up on TikTok has been a delight, you know, because it's like, and even people. He has some funny things where people are like, who's this TikTok guy? And it's like, I'm the columnist in the New York Times. It's like one of the five most important writing jobs in the English language, maybe probably. Like, and it's just so funny because it's like, right. That's a different audience. So part of what I'm trying to say is there are structural boundaries around who listens to what kind of media or consumes what kind of media that you cannot unilaterally overcome. Yeah, like I can't get 25 year olds en masse to watch linear cable news.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Chris Hayes]

I can't do it. I could, I could make amazing content and it's just not going to happen because of the structural impediments. So part of that also is like putting our clips out on Instagram reels and putting it out on TikTok and doing that sort of thing. Thing. The other thing I would say is one of the things I really like about the podcast is we don't just talk about politics, we talk about a lot of different things. I think that's really important when people talk about this Joe Rogan the left idea.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

You know, talk about other stuff and your worldview and values can inform that, but it's not right. Let's talk about the special election, Nebraska.

[Jon Favreau]

That'S coming up all the time.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah. So I, I think that's part of it, too. But, but to your point, let me just say one more thing. One, the, the research data we have shows that there's actually more heterogeneous viewership of our show than you would guess. Like, people who describe themselves as conservatives watch our show.

[Jon Favreau]

We get, we get that. We get. People come on up to us and be like, oh, I listen to you guys and Ben Shapiro. I'm like, what?

[Chris Hayes]

I got this guy in my neighborhood who's like, like the world's biggest Steve Bannon fan who's just always saying, like, I love your show. He's like, you and Bannon. I'm like, all right, man, whatever floats your boat. But, but I think that this idea, the real, the political question here is a Democratic Party getting caught in audience capture. And that's really what we're getting at, right? Which is saying things that the people that are your most fervent supporters want to hear from you, but are in tension with the messages that will reverberate in the outer part of the concentric circle where elections are won and lost, particularly presidential elections in a universe in which low propensity voters are drifting away from you. And that is a real conundrum.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, to me, that's the biggest conundrum.

[Chris Hayes]

That's the biggest conundrum.

[Jon Favreau]

One of the reasons I just loved your book so much is you articulated the problem that I have been worried about for a long time, even before the results of the election, which is I have thought for a while that the, the central political challenge of our time is living in a society where, as you say, attention's the most valuable resource. And I worry that that is basically incompatible with living in a functioning democracy at this point. Because I think that like, like nearly every incentive that you write about advantages, authoritarian movements, right? Like our tendency to pay attention to the most lurid stories, crime, threat, particularly threat scandals, tendency of lies to grab more attention than truth, public debate and discord discourse has become nearly impossible. I think you write that it's like trying to meditate in a strip club.

[Chris Hayes]

That's the line.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep, it's perfect. And here's the big one. Donald Trump, during this campaign, he would say a couple times, like, vote for me and you'll never have to vote again. And you know, and we all scream, look, he's telling us there won't be elections again. But I think part of what he was saying there and part of why it was appealing to people is if you vote for me, I will take care of everything and you won't have to pay attention to the boring shit anymore. And to all this like messy and we're and Democrat, we're like pay attention to this important thing. And it's hard and it's messy and you might be disappointed sometime, but just your precious attention, which you don't have much of, we want you to direct it to this boring endeavor because, and you know it's gonna help people and you wanna help people, but I don't know, this other guy, he's telling you you can go back to just having fun and watching TikTok and I'll take care of it all. And like I don't know how to get, but I don't know how to get beyond that.

[Chris Hayes]

I think all that's right, that the trends are in the wrong direction. But I also think that talent and innovation matter a lot. And there are ways to do this in pro social. I mean, the deck is stacked surely in favor of essentially reactionary forms of attention capture.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Chris Hayes]

In the same way, like we see this and we've seen this, competitive attention markets, what do they select for? Right? Casinos, Times Square, the tabloid space of a supermarket, which is a very competitive little market for your eyeball attention. Right. It's lurid, it's often false. The lead of evening news is often like if it bleeds or leads like. What's that? Well, threat, danger, right? Competitive attention market. So those all have reactionary entailments. But the other thing is like being a really good public communicator, wanting to dominate attention matters a lot, which a lot of Democrats do not want to do. Does Dick Durbin want everyone talking about Dick Durbin all The time. Dick Durbin does not want everyone talking about Dick Durbin all the time.

[Jon Favreau]

You know what? He's mission accomplished. Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

And that's not shade on Dick Durbin.

[Jon Favreau]

No.

[Chris Hayes]

In fact, to be honest, people that don't want people talking about them all.

[Jon Favreau]

The time are probably normal, more normal.

[Chris Hayes]

Normal and decent people who want to do their work. So you need people that want the attention, that understand it's important to get it, and then you need people to try lots of different things to get it that might be weird or wacky or not what other people have done before. Yeah, but part of the gene, you know, part of the genius of the algorithm is that it can find stuff that no one would have given a green light to that people like.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

And that's kind of the job in politics. I mean, Barack Obama is a pretty good example of this.

[Jon Favreau]

I know, but I, I've said this to former Obama colleagues many times in the last couple years, which is. I wonder if he would win today.

[Chris Hayes]

I do, too. But I think a version of him can. Like, I. I don't know if this.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, if that. If he can't, then, then I don't know who.

[Chris Hayes]

Right. But it's also, it's also, we're talking about, you know, we're talking about two and a half points in the swing states, so, you know, can you get that margin? But, yeah, I mean, I think you need people that are going to try stuff. That is the really important.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

Part of this.

[Jon Favreau]

I. Well, it's funny, I was listening to you and Ezra talk about this, and, you know, and I've heard this before, which is, you know, Republicans understand that it's not the. It's not the type of attention you receive, it's the quantity of attention. And they're very good at getting negative attention. Donald Trump's very good at getting negative attention. Elon Musk is getting. Is very good at getting negative attention. But like, like, I think even if there were Democrats who mastered getting the amount of attention that Musk and Trump do, or. And if some of it was negative, like, that doesn't work for our project, which is a Democratic project, where we're trying to tell everyone, like, you know, democracy requires patience and hard work and grace and empathy and all these. Everything, we're like, we are working against everything. So when we try to get attention, even on the Democratic side, some of the people who get the most attention are the people who seem Trump like. Yes, in some ways.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes. Although I think there's different ways to do that. But yes, I mean, it pushes against the project. I think of the kind of pressing the buttons that light up lizard brain. That is, that is the, the sort of stock in trade. But I also think that you can, you know, there was a certain kind of virality to Barack Obama that was rooted in his unique abilities as a public communicator that, but then kind of took on a kind of like viral aspect of their own. And I, I, it's funny that like, that was the critique of him. Like he's a big celebrity in the can ad now.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Now it's like. Yeah, that's why he won. Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

He was a big celebrity.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

Maybe try to run someone that everyone wants to be around and wants like thinks is cool. That's an interesting idea. And, but, but part of that was him, like, he had a unique set of skills. Has a unique set of skills. Part of it, of course, was his staff, obviously, probably 70 to 80%. And then part of it was just the kind of like weird vagaries of the viral up updraft that happened. And I guess part of what I'm saying is like, you got to try stuff and hope you kind of hit that lottery.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

You know, and you don't know what that's going to be ahead of time. Even though the deck is stacked and the game is kind of rigged. You know, Trump didn't know all this stuff was going to work.

[Jon Favreau]

No, he very much backed into most of this.

[Chris Hayes]

He backed into it and a lot of it, you know, stuff did work. But, you know, if, if he had, if his polling had plummeted and he'd been abandoned after that first John McCain comment.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. That would be it.

[Chris Hayes]

The world would, yeah, exactly. Like the world would have just gone on a different track. I don't know what would have happened. But.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

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

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

Rear guard actions to defend institutions, defend the bureaucracy.

[Jon Favreau]

And, and, and it's, I don't think it's a coincidence that most of them come off as the most boring.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah. Politics and defend the status quo. And that's not to say like right now it's important to defend institutions and bureaucracy, but also like a lot of institutions don't work well. A lot of things that bureaucracy are broken. Like if you talk to People who are up close to the bureaucracy, they can give you. I know people in the bureaucracy who are both, at one hand, terrified and appalled by what Musk and Trump are doing and also can give you two hours about everything that's broken in their specific part of their bureaucracy. And so this, this sort of small c. Conservatism, this kind of dependence on precedent, there's a lot of this kind of, like, retracted in thinking in progressive Democratic Party circles that I think is really a problem.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it's interesting because I always, you know, like, aoc, I think, is one of the best communicators in the party. And she, you know, her politics are a little to the left of mine. Not much, but, you know, if everyone. Every time I'm like, oh, she's one of the most talented communicators in the party, but it's like, well, look at her poll numbers. Like, she's so polarizing and, you know, she's got one of the higher speed, you know.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Negatives or anyone. So I'm like, okay, well, but she's interesting. She can break through. She's communicating. And then as you get closer to the center, it's hard to think of a. A politician or a leader here or anywhere who can capture attention but is like a center left.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Very electable figure.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And I don't know, like, we can go back and critique criticized Kamala Harris's campaign or Joe Biden or all of them, but, like, we keep running into this.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah. I mean, I think. Yeah, it's. It's hard to. It is hard to come up with that. I also think, like, okay, well then just try stuff. Like, go be the centrist aoc. I don't know. Fetterman, is he kind of doing that in his own weird way?

[Jon Favreau]

I guess Pete, in a way.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Pete was a.

[Chris Hayes]

And Pete likes to. And the thing about him is that he likes attention and he likes to go talk to people and he likes to be on stuff, and that's an important part of it. But yeah, like, I don't know if the AOC model is the right one, but she is out there.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Emma Ilic]

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[Jon Favreau]

You mentioned Zelensky as like an example of a good attention merchant. I had a why do you think that works?

[Chris Hayes]

It's so funny. The original draft of this book had a 5,000 word prologue that was about the Ukraine war. And Zelensky and I cut it because it sort of felt like a weird place to start. But I think he's a fascinating figure because here's a guy whose professional life is how to get and maintain attention. Because he was a comedian.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Chris Hayes]

Then he wrote and starred in a show that is a attention age parable in which a substitute teacher in a high school goes on a rant about corruption in Ukraine while a student surreptitiously records him on a video. It gets uploaded and goes viral.

[Jon Favreau]

I forgot that that was.

[Chris Hayes]

Thus launch teacher into an unlikely campaign for president, which he wins. He. Then that show is the biggest show in Ukraine by far. It's watched by like a third to a half of the country. He then trademarks the name of the party in the show as his own party and runs for president, having written a show about a viral dude running for president successfully and destroys the competition. Then finds himself immediately, after a few sort of stumbling years as a wartime president, like, literally, like ducking Russian bombs, and understands immediately that the single most important thing for the survival of his nation is to grab the attention of the world so as to convert that attention into arms and money to support their defense.

[Jon Favreau]

And I was, I. I've been thinking about him since I read that in your book, and I do. Like, there's sort of a moral clarity in his rhetoric. Like, I was trying to think of how he spoke and why he got so much attention. Part of it is just the circumstances he found himself in. But he was very good about, like, he, you know, he. He wasn't trying to embellish things. He wasn't trying to do, like, push all the buttons you push when you're trying to go for the lizard brain stuff.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

It was just moral clarity. Putin is a. Is a murderous tyrant. And here are my people and here are their stories, and I'm gonna walk among them. Like, it was just. The story was good.

[Chris Hayes]

The story's good. But also the appetite to talk to people and communicate constantly.

[Jon Favreau]

That's true.

[Chris Hayes]

This is a big thing.

[Jon Favreau]

He was everywhere. He still is everywhere.

[Chris Hayes]

He did Letterman in a Metro station. I just saw him do an interview with Lex Friedman, the podcaster. And Friedman speaks fluent Russian. And they have this fascinating fraud exchange at the beginning where Friedman's speaking to him in Russian. And, of course, Zelensky is from the Russian speaking part of Ukraine and actually grew up speaking Russian as his, like, household language, but was explaining to Friedman, while he won't use Russian now because of what it means at a Moment when, when people speaking that mother tongue are killing his people. And it was this incredibly intense exchange. And this is something that I think there really is a, like Zelensky talks to everyone. He does a lot of trying to get attention. Lopez Obrador in Mexico, who was the only incumbent basically to buck the trend of incumbents around the world getting their butts kicked and passed off the presidency to his hand chosen successor, Claudia Schaumbaum, who won by 30 points, was doing like three hours a day of. He gave away a watch on his last press conference to some kid, Narendra Modi, who's got 65% approval rating and is a reactionary and I think sort of aspiring autocrat, but he's doing like all sorts of crazy stunts where he's on TV all the time.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, well, Trump, Trump, Trump has been.

[Chris Hayes]

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

[Jon Favreau]

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

[Chris Hayes]

Yes. And you have to. The other thing that you have to. Which is key, and this is about AOC and it's true about Pete. You have to, deep in the deepest part of yourselves, enjoy doing it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Chris Hayes]

If you are not enjoying doing it, it's not going to work. Like you, you gotta love it. You gotta be like, love being out there, love tussling with the press, love talking to people. And you know, Joe Biden, for most of his career that was true of Joe Biden.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, like, I actually think that was some of the charm that led him, you know, to the heights that.

[Chris Hayes]

And I think that I, I think a 65 year old version of him might have had had a very different experience of incumbency this time around. And even, you know, running what do.

[Jon Favreau]

You think the political movement to sort of take back our attention collectively sounds like. I know, I know you guys were talking about, like there's a space for a candidate that, that runs against all this. And it's not just, not just the phones, though. That's part of it. But what is it? What does the vision for that kind of country sound like?

[Chris Hayes]

It's really interesting. I mean, I think it's regulating. Going after the tech oligarchs is the, the kind of pressure point here.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

We don't want these people that monetize our attention and exploit us to have all of the power concentrated in a few hands. And they're that, you know, taking them.

[Jon Favreau]

On and they are like sapping something from us that makes us alive, which is, I mean, I thought about that cyber. Do you hear Steve Bannon talk to Ross, do that, that podcast? And it was interesting hearing the, the split between him and Musk, which is not just, you know, over immigration or anything like that, but he's, he's, his thought is basically Musk is a transhumanist and they all want.

[Chris Hayes]

He hates the tech dudes.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Cause he, but the reason why is he thinks like spiritually.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

They are stealing something from all of us and they all want us to just the robots to take over and put the chips in our brain and send us to Mars and whatever else. And like that that's, you know, what makes us human is, you know, being together. And Steve Bannon, so I'm putting a nicer shine on what he said, but it did make me think that there is an opening that is cross ideological for people being like, enough of this.

[Chris Hayes]

And I also think Musk represents that right now. And I, I, you know, so again, polling is not, you know, it is what it is. But, but, you know, to the extent we can measure how the American public feels about this guy, it's plummeting. It's like truly falling off a cliff. And part of the thing that he doesn't have is he is not Donald Trump. He is not charismatic in the same way. He is not funny in the same way. No, he is like, he is like a vortex of negative charisma. I mean, he's just like the, just the, the unfunniest dork that ever lived.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is why he's not on TV all the time.

[Chris Hayes]

That's the other thing is he can't. Trump could go out there and he can kind of defend himself and he can lie and he can change direction. He can. Musk is just There's a million stories being run about Musk, and Musk is on his platform, which is where he sort of communicates, but it's just not the same of him being able to redirect. He's trying to on the platform he owns, but I just.

[Jon Favreau]

But all he can do is meme.

[Chris Hayes]

I think people are like, I don't like this. What? And I have found this out in the wild. I don't know if you have too, but the Musk thing is absolutely getting through to normies that people didn't follow political news. And the initial visceral reaction is like, I don't know, he's in the payment.

[Jon Favreau]

No one.

[Chris Hayes]

His 19 year old can control Social Security payments. I don't know about that.

[Jon Favreau]

But also, like, it is the difference between Trump and Musk because you, you meet people who've met Trump and they're saying, you know what, he's actually, he's a gregarious guy and he's charming and stuff like that. And people who meet Elon Musk, they'll say, yeah, he's a genius. Everyone will say, he's fucking weird.

[Chris Hayes]

Weird dude. Weird dude.

[Jon Favreau]

No one's like, oh, he's so wonderful and generous to the staff. No one says that.

[Chris Hayes]

Weird dude.

[Jon Favreau]

So it's great coincidence that you're here this week because Max Fisher and I, Max, my co host here, we did an offline challenge last year where we tried to, we tried a bunch of things to reduce our screen time with mixed results, at least for me. This week we're starting another offline challenge that serendipitously has to do with reclaiming our attention. This is about trying to increase our focus.

[Chris Hayes]

I love this.

[Jon Favreau]

And so we're gonna do a different challenge over the next couple weeks. Any ideas or advice for the listeners? Besides the walk, which is a good one.

[Chris Hayes]

The walk is a good one. I also think the, I mean, again, these are like this, these are sort of dumb and obvious points, but like, the physical, physical location of the phone matters a lot. Yeah, it just does. Where do you, like, have a place to plug it in? That's far from where you hang out in the house. It just, you know, these little friction points. You know, there's these studies, I remember reading this back in college in some class about like public plazas and if the stairs were like, you know, over some amount, you know, three inches, and if they were over inch, like, no one went up to the plaza. Just like a little bit of friction. So physic. That kind of physical Friction does really work.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

For.

[Jon Favreau]

For where, you know, how are you finding. Because I found this difficult even in. It's sort of getting used to the Trump era again. Like, I remember this from the first term. It feels worse. This term is like, it's worse, you know, for our jobs. And a lot of people listening pay attention to the news and, you know, they want their phones and their screens for that. But like, how do you. Have you found any ways to consume the news that are not just like fire hose?

[Chris Hayes]

No. Like smoking three packs a day.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay, cool.

[Chris Hayes]

I'm just like those, like lighting one off the. Off the. Off the one I got in my mouth.

[Jon Favreau]

Are you still reading, like, the physical copy of the paper?

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, I do read the physical paper in the morning, which I do. Really. The great thing about that is it just directs your attention to things that are not going viral online.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Chris Hayes]

Which is a really key thing. Yeah. Because, you know, the physical paper is an. Is a attention directing technology in which people make editorial decisions about where they think your attention should go and is not subject to the whims of Cher's virality algorithms. And that is really, really useful. You also just read better when you're reading. Reading on paper. I do. I think it's weird. People have a lot of animus against the New York Times right now, and I sort of understand it, and some of it I think is pretty profoundly misplaced. But I do think a physical subscription in the newspaper is a great idea. Yeah, it really is. And I got a thing about papers piling up and it makes me feel neurotic and claustrophobic. But.

[Jon Favreau]

But it is good. The editorial attention, direction, I think is something that we're missing.

[Chris Hayes]

I've read more. I have read more articles about the warrant. The New York Times has been covering the war in Ukraine with tremendous amount of resources and sustained focus. And it. Those stories never take off online.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Chris Hayes]

No one shares them, talks about them. And I've been reading their coverage and it's really good coverage. I feel like I have actually a way better understanding, which.

[Jon Favreau]

But I remember thinking about this when the war first started. I was like, Putin, he just wants to wait everyone out because he knows absolutely that in the age of attention, it's going to go away.

[Chris Hayes]

It's like a log in a fireman. It burns up fast. And then you got to come up with ways to throw more logs on there.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. It's a fantastic book. Seriously, everyone read it. I've been recommending it to everyone. If you listen to the show then you absolutely should read it. Yes, yes.

[Chris Hayes]

You are like right in the audience.

[Jon Favreau]

All the characters, offline characters are in there. So you should definitely read it. Chris, thanks for coming by.

[Chris Hayes]

It was great man. Thanks.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Ilic. Frank Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Seville. Delon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer and Adrian Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

[Emma Ilic]

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[Jon Favreau]

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