Narrator/Announcer (2:36)

Tonight, despite the brutal cold, a massive

Katie Drummond (2:39)

crowd of anti ice protesters flooding downtown Minneapolis.

Chris Hayes (2:43)

The Department of Justice releasing its remaining documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Katie Drummond (2:47)

The US and Israel have launched strikes on Iran, targeting its leadership and escalating tensions across the Middle East. That's why I wanted to talk to Chris. We're in this moment where everything feels incessantly urgent at the same time. All of it all at once, piling on top of itself. Partially because we live in this deluge of information and opinion and of course because we are in yet another Trump news cycle. Few people are better at cutting through the noise and distilling what really matters than Chris. Here's our conversation. Chris Hayes, welcome to the big interview.

Chris Hayes (3:21)

It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of Wired. I was just telling you that you guys are doing amazing work over the last year. And I write about Wired. I'm fans of both iterations of Wired because I write about Wired in the book. I remember asking my parents for the subscription. I think it was for Christmas and getting it. And I was a die hard. Every single page, first issue through subscribers.

Katie Drummond (3:42)

And this has been. I don't want to age you this early 2000s. Is that flattering or early?

Chris Hayes (3:48)

I think it was probably 94 or 95. I don't know when it started, but

Katie Drummond (3:51)

it was around 93.

Chris Hayes (3:52)

Yeah, 93. So I think I had.

Katie Drummond (3:53)

Oh, you were a very early.

Chris Hayes (3:54)

I think I subscribed at the age of. I would have been 14.

Katie Drummond (3:56)

And not to go all in on this, although I've been thinking a lot about this sort of Wired past, present, future. I think that the very, very early Wired had a very rebellious countercultural spirit. And I would argue that today the Wired that we are running has that same spirit, but it is directed at the industry that was born of the 1993 Wired.

Chris Hayes (4:19)

Totally. And I think that's, you know, you think about who's the incumbent and who's the insurgent and the valence of that switching.

Katie Drummond (4:24)

Yes.

Chris Hayes (4:25)

Yeah. Like that Wired vibe was whole Earth electronic network. Like the original sort of like big bulletin board, kind of post hippie cybernaut kind of libertarian, but also kind of left coded, but definitely very like hopeful, utopian and also very insurgent against the powers that be.

Katie Drummond (4:45)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (4:46)

And what happened was the powers that be are the people that sat with the president at his inauguration.

Katie Drummond (4:51)

We sure did. And we sure did cover that and

Chris Hayes (4:54)

control, you know, the most powerful. And so like, yes, the insurgent vibe is now directed in a different direction.

Katie Drummond (5:02)

We're sitting down in New York, it's a Wednesday in early March, and we were just talking before we started taping that. It was just a few days ago, hard to believe, when the United States and Israel launched an all out attack on Iran, which has escalated markedly very quickly. But I would be remiss not to mention that, you know, this is the second leader this year that President Trump has ousted. The first, obviously, being Maduro in Venezuela. And it's March. So what is happening in the Middle east, right? It's terrifying, it's sad. Hundreds of people dead, including US Service members. It is also, though, yet another all consuming news cycle. It is like brain melting, mind numbing, reality warping kind of pace of news. And I'm curious because we're gonna spend a lot of time in this conversation talking about attention. How much to you, when you think about global conflict of war in the context of this era, in the context, I would say of Trump in particular, how much of it is about attention?

Chris Hayes (6:00)

Well, I do think there's. I guess the first version of the answer I would give is that there's a way in which they perform imperialism as content.

Katie Drummond (6:09)

Sure.

Chris Hayes (6:09)

You know, absolutely. And they very much like, you know, when they started, the Trump administration has undertaken a series of strikes on boats, on civilian boats. These are not military boats, they're civilian. They say drug traffickers. Although in some cases it seems like they're fishermen. In some cases it seems like maybe they're both. They're like fishermen who are paid. No, really, like they're fishermen who are paid some money to run a product somewhere. Like people who are trying to make ends meet. Our forces have killed over 100 people this way. And what's been so striking about it, other than how I think both legally and morally indefensible it is to just essentially murder people on the high seas, is that from the beginning it has been produced as content, like very Tom Clancy, the sort of unclassified. It looks like an 80s movie, which I think is exactly the kind of genre touchstone for Donald Trump.

Katie Drummond (7:02)

Yes.

Chris Hayes (7:03)

It's like right out of a Tom Clancy. So the first cut at that answer would be, yes, they perform aggression, war, imperialism, foreign policy, all as content, all as means of gaining attention, holding attention. I mean, there's the iconic shot of they've got Twitter up during the Venezuela raid.

Katie Drummond (7:21)

Oh, yes.

Chris Hayes (7:21)

Seeing who's tweeting about it wild. But then underneath that, there's also the fact that this is. There are real bombs and real guns and real missiles and real people die. And there's real children numbering maybe as much as 150, 180 or dead in Iran because our missiles or Israel's missiles still not, not clear killed them in a strike. They're doing it for attentional reasons. Right. Because the President likes to keep everybody's attention. He has to be at the center of attention. He has to be doing all the time. He has to have you thinking about him. And also they have very old school, I mean, pure 19th century, straight up, no chaser, imperialist out ambitions.

Katie Drummond (7:57)

Yeah. So it's sort of, it's imperialist ambitions in a vertical video wrapper. You know, social media always on content machine.

Chris Hayes (8:07)

And I think there's actually kind of an interesting and profound point to that, which is that you could make the argument that these have always been intertwined. And if you look at the history of American imperialism in the Spanish American War and the famous Hearst papers in the yellow press, that was as much about. That was both about conquest and producing content. I mean, quite famously, and in some ways is sort of the dawn of the American newspaper era. So I think these two things have always been twinned. Sort of history of imperialism is also a history about kind of the propagandistic uses of it to capture and hold the attention of the masses. But I think, yes, their version of it is a very kind of 21st century, postmodern, vertical video scroll, doom scroll version of it.

Katie Drummond (8:55)

Right, right. On tech steroids, you wrote in a piece for the New York Times, unrelated to Iran, I should say, quote, president Trump has a feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him. You called it suffocating to his opponents. When you think about your role, our role as media, we're both journalists to not be the foot soldiers helping to fuel that dynamic. When you go tape an episode of your show, let's say tonight, what decisions do you make about how to approach, let's say, what's happening in the Middle east to avoid sort of playing into that hand, to avoid playing into that imperialism on social media steroids.

Chris Hayes (9:34)

Well, the thing we can't do is ignore him or what he's doing. Right. So like the US Actually is at war with that.

Katie Drummond (9:41)

There are real human lives.

Chris Hayes (9:43)

The latest account is 1000 plus Iranian civilians. Not to mention we don't know how many combatants or members of the regime. You can decide whether political figures in a regime count as civilians or not.

Katie Drummond (9:54)

Human lives are human lives.

Chris Hayes (9:55)

Human lives are human lives. So in that sense, it's like he's the President of the United States. He has the nuclear codes. He's now launched multiple forms of extraterritorial killing, let's call it.

Katie Drummond (10:08)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (10:09)

So the way that I think we do it is to try to a not do war porn. There is a subtle but unmistakable ideological substrate to certain forms of depictions of war. Try to avoid that. Also, don't let him set the terms of things, which is like, we're not gonna play huge chunks of whatever his nonsense is, except to sort of set them up to show why they're lacking. But, like, there's no really avoiding it, I guess, is what I would say. In the end, Donald Trump having being the President of the United States, which is the most powerful nation on earth, having access to nuclear codes and also the full force of the American military, and also attempting to replace the constitutional order with essentially a presidentialist personalist dictatorship, is the top story of our time. And I cover that story every night. And the question is, on whose terms do you give attention and what you give attention to? So here's a great example. They made an amazing miscalculation in Minnesota. There was this viral right wing video that was alleging to uncover fraud in Minnesota daycares run by either Somali immigrants or Somali Americans. Now, there actually was. There has been this huge fraud network there. It's been prosecuted and investigated, in fact, by the U.S. attorney's Office and by the very prosecutors who would later resign because they didn't like what the Trump administration was doing. Trump administration saw this and they were like, we want to bring more attention to this. We're sending Bevino and CBP and ICE there. What ended up happening was that they kidnapped people and they killed two Americans in broad daylight. On camera. Yeah. And that was where all the attention went. And you could see there was this Trump backpedaling where he was furiously posting on Truth Social, like, you should be talking about the fraud. It's like, you just killed two people. We saw you all. Then you called them, you slandered them, called them domestic terrorists. You're kidnapping people's neighbors, you're tear gassing high school students. This is marauding.

Katie Drummond (12:15)

And we can all see it. It's everywhere.

Chris Hayes (12:16)

And so that was a great example to me of like, right, you're not like, were we paying attention to Donald Trump? Yes. At some level. Was it on his terms? No. Right. I mean, I think that's basically the question we Ask ourselves now, your book

Katie Drummond (12:27)

Sirens Call is out in paperback now. It's a great book.

Chris Hayes (12:30)

Thanks.

Katie Drummond (12:30)

And it's all about this. It's about attention. And you argue that attention has become a commodity in the same way that labor was made a commodity in the early years of industrial capitalism. I'm curious about when you start the clock on that process, right? Like, when did the process of commodifying attention really start? How do you track that through history?

Chris Hayes (12:49)

You know, it probably starts with two technologies. Commercial billboards and the penny press. The New York Sun, Benjamin Day's New York Sun. So that's like, you know, it's 19th century, basically, early to mid, depending on how sophisticated it gets. In both of those technologies, you. The idea was that you were selling an audience and you had to come up with metrics that you could measure that audience and then sell that audience to advertisers. So early technology and billboards, there would be people who would stand by the corner, the billboard was on with clickers, and they would go like this and they'd say, we get 600 people an hour, if you're talking about Times Square or something, or we get 25 people an hour, whatever it is. And then you can go to your advertiser and say, this is how many people are going to see it. The penny press, you know, the big innovation there is that you sell the paper for less than it costs to make the paper. You lose money on every paper, but then you sell the advertising, right? And so that's the initial process. It gets. There are multiple iterations. Magazines come in, and then you get radio and then you get television, and then you get social media and the Internet. What has happened though, is the global scale that you can sell it at is new, right? So no media company's ever had billions of users before like these Attention companies do now, the amount of data you have about your viewer is orders of magnitude more the microsecond auctions that you could run in each second about how you're going to serve that viewer. So you now have this sort of auction for eyeballs happening in nanoseconds, you know, constantly. And the thing about the algorithm is you don't have to have people making programming choices. You know, it's just. There's just a ton of stuff up. You just see what people start to look and then they. You serve them that over and over. So, you know, the old model, which was, well, what are we putting on the front page of our penny press, you know, the New York sun or what Are we putting the APM time slot on NBC or.

Katie Drummond (14:52)

Right. What content will get you to spend eight or nine hours on TikTok is basically the calculus now. It's. And it's one.

Chris Hayes (14:58)

They don't have to make the choice.

Katie Drummond (14:59)

People aren't making it exact.

Chris Hayes (15:01)

And that, and that is actually a huge difference.

Katie Drummond (15:04)

I'm curious. Very much so. In the book, you, you acknowledge your own sort of role in this economy, right? You're an attention merchant yourself. You're a TV anchor, you're also on social media, right. You, you film clips for your Instagram account for Ms. Now, how do you navigate your own role in that sort of algorithmic attention landscape? Like, how do you. I think part of it is sort of how do you grapple with it as a human being and then how do you think about it strategically?

Chris Hayes (15:35)

I think there's a few different ways depending on the platform or the medium. I mean, I think with my television show I have a sense of where attention is flowing and that's an imperative for me. I mean, I say in the book it's necessary but never sufficient. Like if no one watches my show, then I haven't done my job.

Katie Drummond (15:53)

No, you haven't.

Chris Hayes (15:54)

So I have. The first level is that I have to get people's attention and then the second level is I have to do something worthwhile with it. And sometimes those are intention because sometimes the best thing to get someone's attention is not that worthwhile. To me, on a week when we just went to war, that has not been really a problem. This is one of those weeks where I'm not real tortured about it. The audience's attention is flowing towards the fact we just started a war with Iran. I think that's the most important story. I'm not like internally.

Katie Drummond (16:22)

No, sure. And they come to you because you can help them cut through and understand what's going on.

Chris Hayes (16:27)

There was the period where the plane went missing and I was on air for that. And that was a three month story. And at a certain point it's like, yes, it's an interesting story, it's certainly a newsworthy story. It's tragic.

Katie Drummond (16:38)

But the plane is still gone.

Chris Hayes (16:40)

The plane's still gone and the audience still wants you to talk about it. I mean, that was really a difficult thing. It really did like the signal and the noise was just keep giving us a plane. I still feel the pressures every day. And on my podcast I feel the same way too. I just do what I'm interested in, the podcast and I let the chips Fall where they may. Social media is interesting. We've been doing more and more vertical video because everyone does.

Katie Drummond (17:01)

Everyone does.

Chris Hayes (17:03)

I think it's such a weird slot machine effect. Like, I did this thing the other day about there's a pretty little notice set of tariff votes in the House that Donald Trump lost that were House votes to overturn some of the tariffs, including the Canadian ones. It actually happened before the Supreme Court struck him down. So I did a little thing about like, this is kind of interesting, like he's lost Republican votes on this. It blew up.

Katie Drummond (17:26)

Oh, there you go.

Chris Hayes (17:28)

And sometimes you're like, this one's gonna blow up. And then it doesn't. You're like, well, what did I do wrong? And it's unclear to me, I guess if I put more time into this, if this. My whole life was like playing the slot machine. Remember, I get better at playing the slot machine. And obviously there are people like Mr. Beast and I think people are sure.

Katie Drummond (17:43)

Who are very good at it.

Chris Hayes (17:44)

Yeah. But.

Katie Drummond (17:45)

Well, and I think that's sort of one of the challenges as journalists or sort of purveyors in my view of accurate and newsworthy information is you are competing now not with a couple of other cable news shows, you're competing with Mr. Beast and with cooking videos and I mean, with everything, every piece of content, every single thing in that feed, every

Chris Hayes (18:05)

piece of content is at every moment pitted against every other piece of content ever created.

Katie Drummond (18:11)

Yeah. So in many ways that tariff video doing well is like a. A little miracle. Yes, it's a miracle on the Internet.

Chris Hayes (18:18)

Right. But then I was like, I was really like feeling myself about it and I was like, oh, it's awesome. And then my next phone, I was

Katie Drummond (18:24)

like, yeah, but the thing is you essentially have to participate. Right. You know what I mean? Like, you can't opt out of shooting host to camera vertical video anymore.

Chris Hayes (18:34)

I mean. Right. You can. Well, but not if you are trying to.

Katie Drummond (18:39)

Are you trying to reach a mass audience with news about tariffs?

Chris Hayes (18:42)

Yeah, I mean, this is the problem. Vertical video ends up being a kind of terminal point in the development of attentional technologies just because it is. It's very difficult to compete with.

Katie Drummond (18:53)

I want to ask you a little bit about the midterms because we are getting to be at that season. You wrote in that piece for the New York Times. I mentioned you argued that the Democrats main problem isn't their message. You're reflecting on the Harris campaign. You said her core problem was her inability to get people to hear her message. It wasn't the message itself. So basically an attention deficit, which I would argue still a problem for the Democrats heading into the midterms. I'm curious about your view there and sort of your view on the Democrats ability to galvanize an electorate online in the way Trump and the GOP were going into the 2024 election. Sort of. Has anything meaningfully changed there?

Chris Hayes (19:35)

Yeah, so the reason that I said that, I just think it's important. One of the most important pieces of data that we had from 2024 is that amongst voters who said they paid a lot of attention to the news, Harris won by five or six points. And as you moved further down, like, sometimes to literally never, Trump's margin increased.

Katie Drummond (19:57)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (19:59)

And I say this for two reasons. One is a lot of people like to blame the media for Trump's victory. And it's like, well, the people that consume the most journalism and news media were the most Harris inclined. So it complicates that story quite a bit. The thing that comes after that is for a very long period of time, basically, I would say from the 1980s until recently, there was a very straightforward kind of theory of attention in campaigns, which was you raised money and then you spent it on TV ads.

Katie Drummond (20:27)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (20:27)

One of the points I was making there is, like, that's clearly broken down. You can't just say, we're gonna raise a lot of money and then we're gonna run a lot of ads on what, the local news. Who's gonna reach who? Exactly.

Katie Drummond (20:36)

Right, right, right.

Chris Hayes (20:37)

Some of the voters you need, you know, But a lot of voters that you need are not there. So you need to have a theory of, like, how do you reach the people that don't consume media? Which is like, we used to call, like, earned media.

Katie Drummond (20:50)

Oh, yes. Earned media.

Chris Hayes (20:50)

Right. Earned media is like, you're interviewing me, and then there's paid media, which is like, you're running ads on tv.

Katie Drummond (20:56)

Chris did not pay for this interview.

Chris Hayes (20:57)

I did not pay for this interview. So it's like, if they're not gonna see your earned media, because they don't consume that and they're not gonna pay me, like, you gotta come up with some theory.

Katie Drummond (21:06)

Do the Democrats have a theory?

Chris Hayes (21:08)

Well, I think they've gotten better at it. I mean, I think that the idea that Donald Trump kind of went everywhere in 2024 and talked to all kinds of different podcasters and made all sorts of content, including him, like, that truck and serving McDonald's.

Katie Drummond (21:20)

Oh, yeah, dude. Sorry, none of this is actually funny, but.

Chris Hayes (21:24)

No, I mean, it was absurd. Absurd and kind of comical and actually pretty effective. The kind of thing that like, clearly reverberated out through the world past people that consume the news, past paid advertising. Jaron Mondani obviously was like a huge innovator in this, you know, did an incredible, incredible job. The vertical videos. Now, it may be the case, like Roy Cooper in North Carolina is incredibly well known. He just won the nomination to be the Democratic nominee. He's gonna go against Michael Watley, the Republican nominee for that senate seat. Roy Cooper's super well known. He's been elected statewide, I wanna say three or four times. He was the governor for two terms also. He's gonna raise a ton of money. And it may be the case for Roy Cooper. He can just. He's got a theory. He's gonna raise money and run ads.

Katie Drummond (22:08)

Roy Cooper.

Chris Hayes (22:08)

And people know who Roy Cooper is. Yeah, but like James Talarico.

Katie Drummond (22:11)

I was gonna ask you about James Talarico.

Chris Hayes (22:13)

Yeah, yeah. So he's, you know, he's state Rep. Jasmine Crockett. He defeated Jasmine Crockett in that. In that contested Democratic primary in Texas. Now, Jasmine Crockett obviously has a theory of attention, which is.

Katie Drummond (22:23)

Well, I was going to say, I sort of. I think that that is interesting to me because I feel like they both have theories of attention. They're just very different.

Chris Hayes (22:29)

They are very different. But they both, but they both had a sense of how do I. How do I become known? How do I make sure that people whose votes I'm going to want or need know even who I am? My point is that you better have a theory of this, right? Like, that's based on who you are. That cannot be. What you cannot do is you cannot default to what had been the paint by numbers approach for literally decades. I'm gonna raise a bunch of money and I'm gonna run a bunch of local TV ads. That is not going. To.

Kathy Werzer (23:07)

As a listener of Uncanny Valley, we know you want to stay on top of today's biggest stories in tech. And if you're curious about how tech and innovation are changing the healthcare landscape, check out Mayo Clinic's chart topping podcast, Tomorrow's Cure. Back for a brand new season, host and award winning journalist Kathy Werzer dives into the breakthroughs, challenges and human stories shaping the future of medicine. From advances in AI and cancer research to the rise of chronic disease and autoimmune disorders. Not sure where to start. We Recommend the season four premiere where dermatologist Dr. Saranya Wiles and biomedical engineer Dr. Adam Feinberg explore how 3D bioprinting is revolutionizing medical research and accelerating breakthroughs in healthcare. Whether you're a healthcare professional, patient, or simply curious about what's ahead, tomorrow's Cure invites you to imagine what healthcare could look like and shows you the future is already here. Find tomorrow's cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo-o o dot com. That's o-o o dot com.

Alex Barker (24:39)

Porn is everywhere. Millions stream it every day. Yet nobody seems to know who really controls the business. I'm Alex Barker. I'm a journalist at the Financial Times. Years ago, my fellow reporter Patricia Nielsen and I started digging into the porn industry to find out how the money flows. And in our new audiobook, the Kink, the Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment, you'll hear our investigation into the power and influence that drives the most taboo corners of the Internet. Find the Kink Machine, the Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment at Pushkin FM Audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks.

Katie Drummond (25:29)

I want to ask you about where politics and technology sort of collide and come together. We talked a little bit about this at the top, but, you know, when I got to Wired, it was very obvious to me and I think to the team here that covering politics more closely was not an optional decision. Right. It was an imperative. There was no space between Silicon Valley leaders and the government. Particularly true after Trump took office. You've been a political journalist for a very long time. You spent your career, I think, observing and documenting how power shifts in government. How have you sort of seen that merging of power between those two spheres, between sort of the Silicon Valley elite, the tech industry, and politics and politicians?

Chris Hayes (26:12)

I thought the inauguration was such a shocking.

Katie Drummond (26:16)

Was that shocking to you when you saw them all sitting there? I'm genuinely curious. Yeah.

Chris Hayes (26:20)

Yeah. I mean, the fact that the support wasn't shocking, but the. We're all gonna stand up here with him and, you know, because there are downsides to those calculations and usually they're thinking about those downsides. I think a few things happened. I think as the Industry matured from an insurgent industry to an incumbent one. Its politics got more right wing. Yeah, this is not a very surprising trajectory.

Katie Drummond (26:46)

It does happen.

Chris Hayes (26:47)

It's like, yes, sometimes if you interview someone who's 23 trying to break into something and then you interview them when they're 63 and they make six figures or seven figures, they have some different politics for sure. And so I think part of it is that. I think part of it is they absolutely all cook their brains on the Internet and Twitter and with each other. I mean, I think they just like

Katie Drummond (27:13)

spun each other up.

Chris Hayes (27:13)

I think they like just pickled their brains in a brine of reaction.

Warby Parker Narrator (27:18)

Huh.

Chris Hayes (27:19)

I really do. I just think they're in like the same way that people talk about. People talk about this all the time. They talk about. And this is a very common, documented almost trope, which is relatives who were lost to Fox News. Oh, of course. You know, people that just, you know, they used to have a certain set of views. Maybe they're kind of right leaning and Republican and they just started watching Fox all the time and it almost did something at like a chemical level. They're just angrier and more irascible. And I just think there's a kind of right online version of that that happened to the tech elite. And then I think there's just the political economy of it. They are the most powerful and profitable corporations in the world. And then of course, the big part of it is the AI bet. Right. So that's like the final component. I think they were kind of cooking their brains. They were personally getting radicalized and kind of. I think there's a lot of like backlash reaction politics. I think they're mad at their woke workers. I'm putting that in air quotes. They were a mature industry that wanted to cozy up to power in the government. And then they had this technology that they think is the kind of make or break technology. And their relationship to the state is existential.

Katie Drummond (28:32)

That's all so interesting. I mean, I think I'm always curious to hear different people and sort of smart people who look at this in different ways about whether they see what has happened as more ideological that these sort of tech elites, tech leaders, like genuinely move to the right and this is legitimately how they feel, that this is the right way to run a country, the right way to run a business, the right way to work with government, or whether it is simply like they are biting their tongues and holding on for four years and presenting the president with tchotchkes in the Oval Office when they need to because they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders. They have a huge base of employees that they need to support and pay and uphold. And that is just sort of this fundamental like, I hate this guy, but I have a business imperative.

Chris Hayes (29:20)

Yeah. And I think there's different individuals on different side of that. I mean, I think.

Katie Drummond (29:24)

Sure, yeah. They're also not all the same person.

Chris Hayes (29:26)

I think Bezos has gotten very right wing in his personal politics. I mean, I don't think he was ever a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. Obviously Musk has got, you know, Elon B. Elon.

Katie Drummond (29:36)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Hayes (29:36)

Terminal brainworms. But like Tim Cook, I don't know. You know, I think that's an example.

Katie Drummond (29:43)

He looks deeply uncomfortable, but he won't

Chris Hayes (29:45)

give him the bauble.

Katie Drummond (29:46)

Yes.

Chris Hayes (29:47)

You know, Sergey Burn and Larry Page's don't be evil model for Google. But again, like that was, you know, it looks ridiculous now, but I think it was a genuinely felt at the time. And I also think they thought, you know, again, this sort of the trajectory of how this happens. When Google was created, it was the perfect example of like genuinely building a better mousetrap. I was searching the Internet at the time. All the searches were bad.

Katie Drummond (30:14)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (30:15)

Google came along and it was so much better. And it was better in a way that transformed the usability of the Internet. And I think they thought, well, this is a. We're providing a good service and we're gonna sell advertising and like a pretty ethical business. Which, like. Yeah, yeah, this works pretty well. You sell it out, you know, and then slowly over time. Right.

Katie Drummond (30:37)

Yeah. Things escalated from there.

Chris Hayes (30:39)

Things changed.

Katie Drummond (30:40)

And here we are. I mean, when you think about looking at the next. I mean, we've got three more years of this administration and you think about the level of proximity, of collaboration, of, I'll say, collusion. You don't have to. But the sort of very close relationships that we see between someone like Sam Altman and the administration. Does that scare you?

Chris Hayes (31:04)

Yeah. I honestly was chilled to my core when there was, you know, there's a meeting between the head of Anthropic and the head of the Pentagon in which they can't come to terms on. Basically it's the terms of service agreement of implementing Anthropics Claude model in Pentagon situations. And then the Pentagon throws this temper tantrum. That sounds completely deranged.

Katie Drummond (31:32)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (31:32)

Like Bond villain kind of thing. And we're going to try to cut them off from all that. There are supply chain risk. You can Sell Nvidia chips to the Chinese government.

Katie Drummond (31:42)

Yes, but got.

Chris Hayes (31:44)

But you can't use Clau. I mean, come on.

Katie Drummond (31:46)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (31:47)

And then for Sam Altman opposed this thing being like, hey, we've swooped in and we've made a deal. Look, these companies, particularly those two, which are the two that are startups, right? OpenAI and Anthropic, they're not the legacy incumbents that have their own AI models like Gemini or whatever, they're on a treadmill. They got to run fast and they got to raise money and their revenues are increasing a lot, but their costs are increasing arguably faster. There's a sort of sense of desperation and I think the combination of people with a very powerful technology who are banking on making a world changing fortune, but also have a kind of like ghosts and Pac man financial burden trailing behind them is to the tune of

Katie Drummond (32:39)

many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many billions of dollars.

Chris Hayes (32:42)

Yes.

Katie Drummond (32:43)

That's a shocking amount.

Chris Hayes (32:44)

That is not. I would not say that that is the best setup for like ethical and responsible decision making or decision making that takes into account the stakeholders involved. And I think that's incredibly terrifying.

Katie Drummond (32:56)

It is really scary. It's scary. And I want to ask you a little bit more about how you're thinking about AI. I think you've called yourself a lame centrist. I would say I probably fall into a similar camp, at least in the

Chris Hayes (33:07)

context on the AI debate.

Katie Drummond (33:08)

On the debate, sorry, yes. But the conversation around it, you know, very polarized. Um, you've got the doomers, you've got the boomers. Very sort of overly simplified arguments, I would say. In general, I think we spend too much time like ping ponging between those two extreme views and maybe not enough time talking about the, the practical implications or like the potential future scenarios that we really should be taking seriously. You posted on Blue sky that the left needs to, quote, start thinking seriously about the AI hype being true. Tell me more about that.

Chris Hayes (33:43)

You know, the thing that I'm most worried about is the job replacement issue. All of these jobs that people have right now, from coders to first year law associates to the administrators who work at large health insurance companies, you know, the world in which those are automated in a relatively short period of time is gonna cause some pretty profound dislocation.

Katie Drummond (34:06)

And do you. Is your general sense that not enough people, maybe people on the left are taking that seriously? That there's like a head in the sand kind of feel.

Chris Hayes (34:13)

I think there's an idea that if you take that seriously, you're ceding to their own propaganda about how useful their product is. I think there's a huge question about how quickly this is all gonna happen.

Katie Drummond (34:24)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (34:25)

But I also just like I can see it. I mean I use several different LLMs for different things and I was gonna

Katie Drummond (34:32)

ask you a little bit about like your personal use cases.

Chris Hayes (34:33)

I have been using them more because I think I wanna understand what they do.

Katie Drummond (34:37)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (34:38)

For instance, like Notebook LLM where you can upload sources and then you can use it to navigate from those sources is extremely useful so that you're not getting hallucinations and it's also citing back to something. So if I say like oh what date did this thing happen? This obscure historical detail that only you. That won't be Googleable, A because Google no longer really works, but B because it's embedded in a PDF of a scholarly article I've uploaded to you. So there's lots of useful ways of using it to me when you're bounding sources, particularly for research purposes. But it's just manifestly getting better. Like obviously, I mean just like this idea that it's not is insane.

Katie Drummond (35:17)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (35:18)

And the idea that it's not going to start to touch jobs people do is also seems insane.

Katie Drummond (35:23)

Yeah. I mean I have a few friends who are very senior level software engineers who until very recently maybe December, thought this was just so ridiculous. Yes. They were like our CEOs won't stop talking about it. They're insufferable. I this will never. This is just a ridiculous toy. It's the new Metaverse, it's the latest tech fad. And then I think it was the Claude code release that all of a sudden they are writing book proposals. They're trying to use AI to launch businesses. They're trying to figure out what's my next thing because I'm in my 50s and I want to work another 10 or 15 years. I need to work and I don't think I'm going to have a job in a few years. And that for me just sitting and having a drink with them and listening to them talk about that was pretty jarring actually.

Chris Hayes (36:10)

Yeah. And I think again, you know, part of the problem is I think that we should have some clarity about the business case proposition of this technology is exactly this like the reason that they think they can sell this to people. I mean think about how much money revenue that is for you. Right. If you can sell that. And also it's a savings for them. And the only problem is that someone's out of a job. Right. That's the business case. So, like, part of the problem is if you start to talk about that, it does feel like you're seeding.

Katie Drummond (36:40)

Well, I was about to say, when you get that reaction from the left, it's like, but I don't like this, and I don't want this to be the case. It cannot be the case that all of these elites and oligarchs in Silicon Valley are telling me that I'm not going to have a job. I don't accept that. And so what would it look like to you, for quote unquote, the left to start. To have to start to take that more seriously? How does that manifest?

Chris Hayes (37:09)

I mean, I think you got to start thinking about, like, job protections, like, do. Like, how do we want to deal with that?

Katie Drummond (37:16)

You mean like meaningful regulation?

Chris Hayes (37:18)

Yeah, meaningful regulation.

Katie Drummond (37:19)

I mean.

Chris Hayes (37:20)

Well, first of all, I'm laughing a

Katie Drummond (37:21)

little bit because first of all, we

Chris Hayes (37:22)

should be regulating AI And I don't know how. I think the idea that it's like, terrifying, totally unregulated, is insane. So partly that's going back to real blue sky thinking, to be thinking in a broad sense of like, well, if all these jobs were automatable, like, if you didn't need people to do all these things, what do we want people doing? What does society do? Like, we're just locked into, like, where are the good jobs going to be?

Katie Drummond (37:52)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (37:52)

And work has changed over time and productivity has increased. And the big thing is like, well, what do you want? What should a person have a shot at? What should they be guaranteed? What should they have a shot at in a wealthy society like ours? And how do we order the society fairly to do that? And that's like real first principle stuff. But I do think in some ways this calls for some real first principles thinking.

Katie Drummond (38:17)

And I don't know that I want Donald Trump to be the person making those calls. No. The timing is very unfortunate.

Chris Hayes (38:24)

No. And I think the same in Gracie is not going to make those calls because he's just going to let the AI companies run rampant and do whatever they want?

Katie Drummond (38:30)

Sure.

Chris Hayes (38:31)

But I also think that small acts of resistance, I think people at the grassroots level fighting data centers, is that the solution? No. But is it a way to operationalize the sentiment, which is like, wait a second, you're telling me this is going to replace all of us? This thing, it's driving up local electricity prices. It's intentionally being created as a technology that will move the distribution of national income from labor to capital. You want to build one in my town, no, that's a totally good, legitimate, actionable way to start.

Katie Drummond (39:06)

A small act of resistance in the context of data centers is a bit of a hopeful place for us to end.

Chris Hayes (39:19)

If there was a big red button that would just demolish the Internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is

TurboTax Narrator (39:30)

rewiring your week and your world.

Katie Drummond (39:33)

This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

Chris Hayes (39:36)

It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the Internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Katie Drummond (39:58)

I want to play a very quick game that we invented. It's called Control, Alt, Delete. So I want to know, what piece of technology would you love to control? What piece would you love to alt? So alter or change? And what would you love to delete? And people have been very generous in their interpretations of that question. Someone tried to control the weather, and I didn't have the heart to tell them that that is not technology.

Chris Hayes (40:25)

I mean, I guess I want to control AI.

Katie Drummond (40:28)

Yes.

Chris Hayes (40:28)

Well, because, you know, I guess I trust myself maybe more than Sam Altman.

Katie Drummond (40:33)

Arguably, I would trust you more than most of the people involved in a. That sounds good to me.

Chris Hayes (40:39)

I mean, yeah, I guess if I could control it, I'd figure out a humane method. I'll be the one.

Katie Drummond (40:44)

It's Chris Hayes.

Chris Hayes (40:45)

I'm the one.

Katie Drummond (40:45)

He's in

Chris Hayes (40:48)

Alt. I've got. Which is. I would love to alter Internet search so that it works again.

Katie Drummond (40:57)

Yeah. What's your beef there? What's going on with your searches?

Chris Hayes (41:00)

I just think it's gotten so bad.

Katie Drummond (41:01)

It's not great.

Chris Hayes (41:02)

It was, I think the quality of the product of just Google search, particularly. There's other ones that people will, you know, suggest that I've used as well. But essentially it's all, you know, it's been displaced now by AI, partly because search got so bad.

Katie Drummond (41:18)

Yeah.

Chris Hayes (41:19)

And so. But I. It's nice to search things and be able to find them, and that's become more and more difficult.

Katie Drummond (41:25)

Do you just get that big, like, AI box? Well, first you get to X out

Chris Hayes (41:29)

of it, and then you also get the big box. But you also get overwhelmed by ads and you also just. The search does not surface things that you're looking for as well as it used to. Here's my delete.

Katie Drummond (41:38)

Okay.

Chris Hayes (41:40)

I just. I want to get rid of cell phone calls and replace them with landline quality calls. I find cell phone, cell. Talking on the cell technology is the highest level of failure that we tolerate from any technology in our lives.

Katie Drummond (41:58)

Just in terms of, like, the service being patchy.

Chris Hayes (42:00)

If your oven just shut off as often as a call dropped, or you couldn't hear someone, or your alarm didn't go off as many times, or your computer just didn't turn on as many times as you can't hear someone or a call drops. It's insane.

Katie Drummond (42:17)

We would be in the streets.

Chris Hayes (42:19)

No one would tolerate it.

Katie Drummond (42:20)

No.

Chris Hayes (42:21)

And it's the reason people text all the time and don't talk. And the other thing that I hate about cell phone calls, you know, FaceTime audio can fix this. WhatsApp audio a little bit, is that they don't have what's called side tone.

Katie Drummond (42:37)

What is that?

Chris Hayes (42:37)

Okay. When you. When you are in junior high, you're. I think we're roughly same cohort when you were in 12 or 13 or 14 and you would go home after school and talk on the phone for hours. Oh, yeah, you would be. When you were talking on that phone, that landline, you would be hearing your own voice through the receiver in what's called side tone. Because the way that a landline works is in the same way that when you have cans on, you're doing a podcast and you're getting your own voice in your ears.

Katie Drummond (43:03)

Yep. Okay.

Chris Hayes (43:04)

A landline does that. And it is such a better, more pleasurable way to talk to someone because you can calibrate your own volume. Cell phones don't have side tone, which is why people shout when they're on phones, why people sound weird, why you sound weird, why you can't actually have good and intimate conversations on cell phones. It's why people always want to put their headphones in, even though the headphone doesn't even give you sidetone. So this is my big. I guess that's an alt because I like to bring sidetone into cell, but I basically just want to delete cell vocal technology and start over.

Katie Drummond (43:37)

That is so specific and so, like, well studied. I really applaud that. I love that one. Chris Hayes, thank you so much. This is fabulous.

Chris Hayes (43:44)

Thanks.

Katie Drummond (43:50)

The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope Content. This episode was produced by Kate Osborne and Adriana Tapia. It was mixed by Pran Bandy, who is also our New York studio engineer. It was fact checked by Matt Giles. Kate Osborne is our executive producer and I'm, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director. Thanks for listening.

Narrator/Announcer (44:25)

Now more than ever. Technology is a dominating force in our lives. Then there's the threat of AI everywhere. And yet, tech can be inspiring and help level playing fields. I mean, a YouTuber with a self funded debut movie just dominated the box office.

Chris Hayes (44:43)

I thought, hey, if you interview me, it'd be good for your publication. And that's not ego. I just have a lot of followers. But it's that stigma. It's like YouTubers, they're not real.

Narrator/Announcer (44:54)

Join me Lizzie O', Leary, the host of what Next TBD, Slate's podcast focused on technology, power and the future. Follow what Next TBD now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Katie Drummond (45:11)

From prx.