← Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pitinos of the Mind: How Silicon Valley Hacks Your Attention Span, with Chris Hayes
00:50:05
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're gonna find out what this sound is. Grab right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe Kings. When something happens like what just happened on snl, I basically was like, ah.
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B
Could have been worse.
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A
Hello and welcome to msnbc. I'm Rachel Meadow. And dads, you better hide your older bookish lesbian daughters. Cause yeah, I'm back on TV.
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B
Tonight.
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A
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 Melber. Thanks, Rachel. Joy Reid.
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B
Glad to be here.
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A
Stephanie Rule.
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B
Hey, girlfriend.
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A
And finally, Chris Hayes, AKA woke Sheldon.
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B
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 unbridgeable 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, you know, we're conditioned to only see ourselves through the eyes of people that we love or our friends, our or co workers. 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.
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A
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 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.
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B
My picks for the week, right?
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A
That's right. You have a parlay, Chris, that you're here to sell us.
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B
You got a custom parlay.
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A
You have Ben Johnson, Bears propaganda. Oh, yeah, I'm sure.
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B
Let's go. God, let's go.
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A
No, in reality, Chris Hayes, who is also, by the way, a real Chicago sports maniac, wrote a whole new book called the Siren's 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.
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B
It's the most powerful and influential resource. It's monetized to create multi billion dollar empires. What we pay Attention to, from moment to 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.
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A
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 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.
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B
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 a Internet service provider, 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, CompuServe 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.
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A
You've got mail. Yes, all of these noises are still in my head.
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B
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 in the book and part of my hope is that there's a non commercial web that can sort of reassert itself.
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A
Right? Hard to imagine at this moment.
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B
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 and the digital world more broadly. And I think that's about deeper than the technology. It's about attention.
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A
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 like 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 me, too. Yeah, right.
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B
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.
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A
But there is this feeling of being somebody who was fighting for attention on, again, an earlier, seemingly almost analog platform of television.
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B
That attention, that attentional competition is just ramped up so much. I mean, that is the sort of defining feature of all this, right? That a. That the. 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.
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A
Yes.
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B
Is the library of competition.
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A
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 Nic 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 wood block.
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B
The thing that you and I are doing right now, and the thing that maybe drove us and 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.
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A
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, tragicomically 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, thirsting actually for your attention. And now they're also desperate to keep you from a Japanese guy named Hammer King 75.
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B
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.
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A
Yes.
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B
That people have. And I'm sure you experience this.
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A
I mean, if only we had such power.
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B
I mean, it feels like you're chasing, you're always chasing, and that the audience is moving. It's, it's, it's interests and demands are moving in these kind of inscrutable fashions. They're really into this and they're really into that, and you got 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 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 interested in this thing. That's the wind. And I want to go there. And I got to figure out the technique to tackle 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 where 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.
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A
Right.
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B
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, and put it into, towards things you think are actually important and worthy.
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A
Right. The desperation of the chase, though.
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B
Do you feel that all the time?
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A
Yeah, all the time. And look, I've had a TV show canceled, Chris.
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B
Right. You're pretty close.
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A
I was gonna say we're all fighting for our lives out here.
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B
Right.
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A
And in fact, like, that same instinct is why, you know, when you, when you talk about Fox News and Dominion, it's because they were chasing the audience that we all just assumed they could direct.
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B
Exactly. And what's so wild about the emails and the texts you read in the discovery of that lawsuit, which was a electronic voting machine maker, Dominion, who sued Fox for, for, for libel, saying that they had been defamed by Fox? 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 and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. You've heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines.
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A
And this is a real issue, no.
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B
Matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory, electronic voting. 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 Capitol.
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A
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.
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B
That's a really, I think, potent illustration of how these incentives work. They're even self aware in a lot of those texts. Like it's a little like Pontius Pilate right before the crowd being like, you guys sure you don't. Yeah, yeah. All right.
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A
It's a hard business. They want Barabbas, give them Barabbas, I guess. More Barabbas. Yeah, we're getting, the ratings are saying more Barabbas.
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B
They're saying more Barabbas.
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A
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, it's the scroll on the, on the. Which every sports fan knows, by the way. But 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.
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B
Oh yeah, PTI is. 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. And if we can have a TV show. You can have a TV show. They put the rundown on screen.
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A
Yes.
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B
Which, you know, the thing that's brilliant about putting the rundown on screen. It's like. It's like the signs in the subway that tell you how long the train is going to be.
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A
It anticipate. I tell this to Tony is like.
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B
A gen. Like, 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.
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A
On clock. It anticipated.
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B
Yeah.
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A
In this was October 2001, by the way. PTI debut.
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B
Is that when it starts?
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A
Yeah, first episode. It anticipates the short attention span, the desire for what's next. It anticipates the. The. The infinite scroll.
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B
Totally. You're right.
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A
It is for every other show on tv.
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B
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. Here's an illustrative example. Anyone who's listening to this podcast right now or watching it, If I said, look, I'm gonna 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 your clothes 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.
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A
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.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And just disrupts whatever the good people of that place are doing.
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B
That's exactly right.
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A
Johnny Somali came to Korea with the obvious intention of making clickbait videos to promote his provocative channel. However, the table seems to have turned as he is now being used to help Korean online streamers generate views after videos of Koreans, including one streamer assaulting Somali, went viral. Many Korean YouTubers are seeking out the American in the hopes of causing an altercation location so they can either stream or even incite the scuffle.
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B
So what happens in attention, in competitive attention markets? PTI is a great example. What you optimize for what the. The sort of process of evolutionary competition drives towards is iterative grabbing. Grab, grab, grab, grab. What is TikTok. What is Instagram reels? What is X, Twitter? What are all these things? They're grab, grab, grab, grab. They never have to hold that kind of. The minutely engineered grab, grab, grab model, what I call the slot machine model. Right. Slot machines are the most effective device in a casino. And they're. 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 never doing all the things that you might have been taught to do.
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A
Yeah. The hero's journey. Not quite as necessary.
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B
Exactly. You don't have to come up with a hero's journey. It doesn't have to be a screenplay. If you grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. You can add that up to eight hours of sitting in a seat.
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A
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. 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.
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B
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 a hundred percent correct, in fact.
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A
Good take by Socrates.
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B
Good Socrates with a good take, A hot, 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 hearkens back to the kinds of things that Thoreau was, you Know, 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, we've reached a point along the curve where there's almost a kind of break, a kind of difference in kind.
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A
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, a new development as a matter of magnitude.
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B
Absolutely. In terms of magnitude, in terms of ubiquity, in terms of, you know, the, 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, 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.
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A
Out, oh, I read his manifesto that got leaked at some point.
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B
It's because fascinating because he, he's thought deeply about this. He's like a master of the craft.
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A
He reverse engineered the engineering.
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B
Every minute, One of these 20 contestants.
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A
Will be eliminated and lose half a million dollars.
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B
Start the timer.
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A
When you add on top of that, the fact that truly, like the largest companies in our country are devoted to this practice.
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B
Yes.
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A
1961, six of the ten largest US 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.
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B
Right.
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A
How do you explain the key difference there?
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B
What, what all those companies are, even more than their information companies, is their attention companies. Amazon's a great example. What Amazon is able to pull off at a 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.
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A
I thought you're gonna say I bought a shooting sleeve.
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B
Oh, no. My son was really into a shooting sleeve for a while. It's like, I can't shoot without my shooting sleeve. So I got these reversible jerseys, which of course I order on Amazon. And how often have you had the experience where you're ordering a product, the brand name of which is like RJ947T? 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 will never hear from again, that are even like you. 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.
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A
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.
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B
That's exactly what it is. And there's a. 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.
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A
Or 100, and quite frankly, you don't even know, I don't even know.
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B
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 the 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.
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A
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?
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B
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 have, what you do with your effort and commodifying it and selling it on a market was alienating. This is Marx's whole theory.
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A
I was going to say this is the part that the right will clip out is just Chris Hayes doing a whole long Karl Marx.
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B
Yes, there's a long, there's a long reading of Marx. 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.
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A
But we're being alienated from the, that used to give our life meaning.
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B
Exactly. Like this thing is taken from us and sold out of us. It's extracted. The other comparison to what's happening to attention, I think is what's happened to around hunger and the way our food appetites work. 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, 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.
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A
Yeah, you'd watch a TikTok and be like, I think they like to eat expired military rations. You know that guy that is.
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B
Oh, I know that guy.
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A
But like, I'm working with that guy too.
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B
Just right now, as we speak.
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A
The rye in this is awesome.
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B
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.
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A
But the biological inheritance. Right, it's hardware and it's software.
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B
Exactly.
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A
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 piglet. So much better a prospect than us. Like, we can't walk.
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B
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 gotta 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.
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A
Yes. Which is the cry, because it speaks to the wiring. Yeah. 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.
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B
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.
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A
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.
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B
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 find 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 this 100%. That's the part in a cocktail party.
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A
We all know what this is like.
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B
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.
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A
Right.
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B
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.
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A
Yes.
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B
Letting you know when someone in the room is talking about you.
- [31:47]
A
They know our weakness. They know. You can go back to William James, I think. Right. It's the principles of psychology. Yep. His definition for what attention is, it's, it turns out through this lens, limited. What he says is, quote, my experience is what I agree to attend to. And what these experiments are showing is that it's not quite consensual.
- [32:11]
B
No. And in fact, James takes up the question of attention precisely because he, 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? 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 and 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, we're out of control, that we're not actually directing our own lives.
- [32:54]
A
There is a stat just to bring it to the media side of this too. It was this 2014 stat, that chart Pete had found, which is that 50. This is, it's.
- [33:03]
B
And by the way, that's 10 years old. So like it's worse, 100% worse now, right?
- [33:10]
A
It was that 55% of people who land on a page last less than 15 seconds. It just like. It's good to know that we're all just. We're all a Rick Patino of the mind. We're all. We're all in and out of.
- [33:24]
B
Get that shot up, get it up.
- [33:27]
A
But from. From that to Blaise Pascal. Right. This whole thing of like, why can't we sit with something? Why can't we sit alone with nothing?
- [33:37]
B
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. 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, like that we've been.
- [34:18]
A
Trying to figure this out for centuries. Yeah.
- [34:20]
B
That the problems. The problems I'm talking about at one level are exacerbated and specifically created through a certain set of historical conditions, but. But are fundamentally related to something that's deep and inescapable about being alive.
- [34:39]
A
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.
- [34:54]
B
Yeah.
- [34:54]
A
That we're all just kind of milling around trying to avoid the unbelievably obvious reality that we're going to die.
- [35:01]
B
Right. The thing that haunts us and the reason that it's so hard to be alone with your own thoughts is. Is essentially that. That if you're alone with your own thoughts, inevitably where the mind will go to.
- [35:11]
A
Right.
- [35:11]
B
Is the ultimate reality of the impermanence of life. And I think there's def. 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.
- [35:27]
A
I realized recently that I like being busy, and I was like, oh, this is kind of like a virtue. And then I realized 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.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah. And I think that's. 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, 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 that itself is the antidote.
- [36:48]
A
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.
- [36:59]
B
This was stored behind somebody's shed for quite some time.
- [37:06]
A
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 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.
- [38:00]
B
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.
- [38:14]
A
Peasants, but we will take you if you are still in a feudal society somewhere. Just like and subscribe.
- [38:18]
B
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.
- [38:29]
A
That's right. As you put your salty stone into a broth and then drink it, just know that, like, we're interested.
- [38:36]
B
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.
- [38:58]
A
All now feel raw dogging is a thing because of 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 was very proud of it.
- [39:11]
B
And I'm like, 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?
- [39:19]
A
I agree, I agree.
- [39:20]
B
We need some raw. We need flight raw dogging verification. We, we need some kind of.
- [39:26]
A
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 pronounce his last name, but Alexander Kojev.
- [39:39]
B
What Kojev says, and he bases this on Hegel, is that the fundamental human desire that makes us human is desire of recognition. We want to be seen as human, as people by other humans.
- [39:51]
A
It's a real fine print scenario.
- [39:53]
B
Exactly right.
- [39:54]
A
Because children's fable of like, well, the good news is that you will get adoration. The bad news is you won't give a about anybody who gives it to you.
- [40:02]
B
Exactly. That's. 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. Kojev explains this in another context, is that you don't actually see them as human. The necessary mutuality isn't there?
- [40:32]
A
Yep.
- [40:33]
B
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 and. Or they're replying to you on a social media site or whatever they're doing. It's a. It's a simulacrum of recognition. It's a synthetic form of it.
- [40:54]
A
It's something gazi recognition.
- [40:56]
B
It's fugazi recognition that close enough to leave you almost nourished, but kind of wanting more, but never actually kind of making you feel sated. 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.
- [41:21]
A
Yes.
- [41:21]
B
Donald Trump.
- [41:22]
A
It's an incredible. 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.
- [41:37]
B
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.
- [42:26]
A
I'm the guy who was number 199 to join Facebook.
- [42:29]
B
Really?
- [42:29]
A
Which means that I made zero money.
- [42:31]
B
Right.
- [42:32]
A
And was just complicit enough to make it a problem. I'm just like, yeah. Were you guys the same class? He was a year ahead of me. Priscilla Chan. Yeah. His wife lived in my freshman dorm.
- [42:41]
B
Oh, wow.
- [42:41]
A
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 everybody, these whistleblowers, you probably shouldn't use the product.
- [42:58]
B
It is crazy how many people inside that world have their misgivings about it and not just because of, you know, whatever Zuckerberg's politics are.
- [43:07]
A
No, I just, again, on this level, on this level of the, of the biology of, of human attention and the way that their technology exploits it. Sean Parker.
- [43:17]
B
Yep.
- [43:18]
A
Founder of Napster, one of these people, he says, quote, God only knows what it does to children's brains. 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.
- [43:37]
B
I love that quote.
- [43:38]
A
Yes. He sounds like Oppenheimer. Chris.
- [43:40]
B
Yeah. Yes.
- [43:41]
A
It's. It's all about the combined total of 200,000 more human lifetimes just absorbed, taken by people scrolling infinitely.
- [43:52]
B
And this, this point, which I should shout out Johann Hari, whose book on attention is very good. And who, who, who surfaces, quote, this point, you're probably old enough to remember when webpages ended, you would get to the end of a webpage, you'd get.
- [44:08]
A
To the animated gif Counter.
- [44:09]
B
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 that infinite scroll is the, the way that we pass our lives.
- [44:26]
A
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.
- [44:41]
B
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 reductio ad absurdum.
- [44:51]
A
Yeah.
- [44:52]
B
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?
- [45:03]
A
We 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.
- [45:13]
B
Yeah, spam. Spam to me is really important and an important thing to understand in 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, of, of the attention age. And you could 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 text, like the, 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, 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.
- [46:18]
A
Right. They waste our time for their benefit.
- [46:20]
B
Exactly.
- [46:21]
A
Is the quote. And that's like. Yep, that nailed it. Look, the whole thing that we are going to live in this Orwellian age. Neil Postman, who wrote the seminal text Amusing Ourselves to Death.
- [46:31]
B
Yep.
- [46:32]
A
He's the guy, I think, who saw this with a disturbing clarity.
- [46:35]
B
Yep. That he's writing in 1984 on two dystopian visions from two writers of a generation before Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell's contention was that the truth would.
- [46:47]
A
Be concealed from us.
- [46:49]
B
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's 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.
- [47:16]
A
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 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.
- [47:48]
B
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 want. I like, I don't want a frontier, 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.
- [48:16]
A
Yes. Literally go on a walk.
- [48:18]
B
Yeah. Without your headphones.
- [48:20]
A
Without your headphones, yeah. Do you think this technology is so addictive that the pendulum will not crash back in the other way?
- [48:26]
B
I feel the backlash brewing unlike anything I've ever felt in my life. And 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. 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.
- [49:04]
A
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.
- [49:18]
B
I think it's probably a bad idea.
- [49:21]
A
Chris Hayes, noted sports dad.
- [49:24]
B
Noted sports dad. Sports fan. Pablo Torre, fan. I gotta say, I love the show.
- [49:28]
A
Thank you for your compliments and for liking and subscribing.
- [49:31]
B
I like and I subscribe.
- [49:32]
A
Thanks, dude. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time, Sam.