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The Fight for Your Attention with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes · Question Everything

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody.
• 0:01
  Speaker 2: Zach St. Louis here, a producer of Question Everything. Once
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: in a while, we do a staff picks kind of
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: thing here at Question Everything. It's like the staff pick
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: shelf at the bookstore, just to give you a sense
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: of what some of us are listening to over here.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: And my pick to share with you today is from
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: a podcast called Talk Easy, hosted by Sam Fregoso. If
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: you've never listened to Talk Easy, it's an interview show
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: where Sam sits down with all kinds of people. It's
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: a lot of Hollywood types, actors, directors, writers. But he
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: also talks to artists, politicians, activists. And as you'll hear
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: in this episode, I'm recommending journalists. I am a regular
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: listener of this show, and to me there are two
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: things that make a talk-easy interview really stand out. The
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: first is the crazy amount of research that Sam does
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: to prepare for his interviews. Like, if his guest said
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: something in their college newspaper 25 years ago, Sam has
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: definitely read that and will probably ask them about it.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: The second is how he leans into feelings. Sam pushes
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: his guests, respectfully, to look inward. and figure out what's
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: motivating them. That's definitely on display in this episode, which
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: is an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes. Sam interviewed
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Chris not long ago about the book he recently wrote
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: called Siren's Call, which is about all the ways that
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: corporations are competing for our attention and how that's affecting
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: our lives. They wrestle with some real problems about how
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: we're getting our information and how companies are trying to
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  Speaker 2: keep us staring at our screens longer and longer. It's
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: scary and right on theme for Question Everything. What I
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: really liked about this interview is that Sam isn't just
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: asking Chris to share what he learned in reporting this book.
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: He also holds.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Chris's feet to the fire as someone who has made
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: a career off of fighting for people's attention as a
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: cable news anchor. It's interesting to hear Chris try to
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: square those two things in real time, even if I'm
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: not sure I 100% agree with him. We'll see if
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: you agree with where he lands on that. So with that,
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  Speaker 2: I leave you with this episode of Talk Easy featuring
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Chris Hayes.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fregoso.
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: Welcome to the show. Today, journalist, author, and MSNBC host,
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: Chris Hayes. For more than a decade, he's been one
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: of the sharpest political thinkers on television, bringing curiosity, conviction,
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: and a healthy dose of skepticism to his weeknight program,
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: All In, with Chris Hayes. You may remember that we
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: began the year on the show by talking to New
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Yorker writer Gia Tolentino, who talked a whole lot about
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: the destructiveness of the internet and how surveillance capitalism is
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: being sold to us as the new normal. We imagine
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: today's episode with Chris as a kind of continuation of
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: that talk with Gia, because As the first month of
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: Trump's second term has shown, nothing about this time is normal.
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  Speaker 3: Nothing about how big tech CEOs are controlling and pulling
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: the levers of power for him should go ignored. But
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  Speaker 3: the loudest question that I've been hearing amongst family and
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  Speaker 3: friends is, how do we go about paying attention to
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: all of this when what we're being asked to pay
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  Speaker 3: attention to, to witness, is so obviously toxic?
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  Speaker 1: How do we remain vigilant?
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  Speaker 3: Focused in a political climate designed to disorganize. Toni Morrison
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  Speaker 3: once said in a keynote speech that the function of
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.
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  Speaker 3: It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason
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  Speaker 3: for being. None of this is necessary, and there will
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: always be one more thing.
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  Speaker 1: The same can be.
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  Speaker 3: Said about proto-fascism, or whatever we're calling American politics at
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  Speaker 3: this moment. Distraction is a feature, not a bug, and
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  Speaker 3: its intent, Trump and Musk's intent, is to reduce our
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  Speaker 3: capacity and, more importantly, our desire to imagine something different.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: And so today, that's what we try to do with
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  Speaker 3: Chris and his new book, The Siren's Call, which explores
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  Speaker 3: how attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us,
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  Speaker 3: and from which we are increasingly alienated. We also discussed
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: the dip in ratings across many left-leaning news organizations, the
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: inner workings of his tenure at MSNBC, and why he
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  Speaker 3: believes it will take a holistic framework to wrest back
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  Speaker 3: control of our lives, our politics, and our future. With that,
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  Speaker 3: here was Chris Hayes. Chris Hayes, thank you for being here.
• 5:10
  Speaker 4: It's great to be here.
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  Speaker 1: How are you feeling?
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  Speaker 4: Hmm, how am I feeling? I think it would depend on.
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  Speaker 3: Whether I really want to know the answer or not?
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  Speaker 4: No, I just feel very divided. I do and have
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: felt for a while very divided in my answer to
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  Speaker 4: that question about how I feel about what's happening to
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  Speaker 4: the country and the world vis-a-vis American democratic and public life,
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  Speaker 4: which is something that I... worry about and spend a
• 5:31
  Speaker 4: lot of time thinking about professionally and how I'm feeling
• 5:34
  Speaker 4: about the particulars of my life, which relate to like
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: my wife and children and family and friends. I feel
• 5:41
  Speaker 4: great about that. I feel very lucky, extremely lucky to
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: be happy. And I love my kids, my wife, and
• 5:49
  Speaker 4: I love my friends.
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  Speaker 1: Those things are good.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah. So it's like, it's weird because if I were
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  Speaker 4: to just focus on that and someone said, how are
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  Speaker 4: you feeling? I'd be like, great, awesome. But I don't
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  Speaker 4: feel great and awesome because of what's happening.
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  Speaker 3: What do you mean? I'm joking.
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  Speaker 4: I took a very deep breath. I was like, how
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  Speaker 4: should I?
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  Speaker 3: What kind of show are we on? We're here in
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  Speaker 3: New York City talking just a few hours before you
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: head on over to 30 Rock to tape your nightly
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  Speaker 3: show on MSNBC. It's my understanding that you and the
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: team have your daily editorial call basically talking through what
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: you're going to cover that night in the afternoon around 1.30.
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  Speaker 3: So as you were walking the three-mile loop around Prospect
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: Park with your dog, what was on the top of
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: your mind in that meeting?
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  Speaker 4: Today, the top of the mind is the, I don't
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  Speaker 4: know if you want to call it a constitutional crisis,
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: democratic crisis, legitimacy crisis, but the.
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: I look to you to tell me what to call it.
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  Speaker 4: The truly frightening, enraging, and pretty unprecedented assault on the
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  Speaker 4: separation of powers and the constitutional order that's being undertaken
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  Speaker 4: by the current president in flagrant violation of both tradition, law, statute,
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  Speaker 4: and the constitution. And this kind of question that hangs
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  Speaker 4: over all this, that's dread inducing, which is who and
• 7:13
  Speaker 4: how are they going to be stopped from seizing more
• 7:16
  Speaker 4: and more power? That was the The theme of today's
• 7:19
  Speaker 4: meeting and the theme of tonight's show, we actually, just
• 7:22
  Speaker 4: before I came here, we did the rundown. Oh, you did? Yeah,
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  Speaker 4: we did.
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  Speaker 1: And what does that look like?
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  Speaker 4: So we have five blocks in the show, A, B, C, D,
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  Speaker 4: and E. The A block is generally the longest. It's
• 7:32
  Speaker 4: the top of the show. You tend to want that
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  Speaker 4: to be, it's the cover of the newspaper.
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  Speaker 3: And the constitutional crisis is, I assume, the A block.
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  Speaker 4: It is the A block. And the way this works
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  Speaker 4: is we'll talk it through and then I will actually,
• 7:44
  Speaker 4: once we've talked it through, once we set a rundown,
• 7:46
  Speaker 4: I will actually just kind of dictate the draft of
• 7:49
  Speaker 4: the script in that meeting, which we record and then
• 7:52
  Speaker 4: put into the script editing software. But, you know, you
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  Speaker 4: basically now have, I think, at least six federal judges
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  Speaker 4: who have said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up. What you're
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  Speaker 4: doing appears to be plausibly illegal and to plausibly be
• 8:06
  Speaker 4: causing irreparable harm. You have to stop doing it. And
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  Speaker 4: in response, you have some evidence they're explicitly ignoring those
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  Speaker 4: court orders.
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  Speaker 3: Especially from J.D.
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  Speaker 1: Vance.
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  Speaker 2: Yes.
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  Speaker 4: And then public ruminations from J.D. Vance and Musk and
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  Speaker 4: others about why they're going to just blow through the
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  Speaker 4: stop sign.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. They're not even doing like a rolling stop.
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  Speaker 4: And it's really weird, too, to watch them all radicalize
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  Speaker 4: each other on social media. Like the thing that happened
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  Speaker 4: to your cousin that you would see once a year
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  Speaker 4: at Thanksgiving or whatever, but it's happening to the most
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  Speaker 4: powerful people in the world in real time.
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  Speaker 3: It does feel like a game of poker where someone
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  Speaker 3: makes an outrageous bet and they're like, hold my beer.
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  Speaker 4: Yes.
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  Speaker 3: I'm one-upping you.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly.
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  Speaker 4: But the incentive structure in poker is that at some
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  Speaker 4: point you're going to have to show your cards.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and also it does feel like they're playing with
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  Speaker 3: our money, not theirs.
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  Speaker 4: Well said. They are playing with our money, not theirs.
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  Speaker 4: And I do think it's useful that so many courts—
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  Speaker 4: with so many judges appointed by various different presidents with
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  Speaker 4: different ideological profiles have been like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. Across political spectrum.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah. Including a fairly elderly Reagan appointed judge who on
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  Speaker 4: birthright citizenship, one of the central parts of the 14th
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  Speaker 4: Amendment was like excoriating and even asking the lawyers how
• 9:18
  Speaker 4: they could in good faith as good standing members of
• 9:20
  Speaker 4: the bar come before him and make the arguments.
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  Speaker 3: In the first month of Trump's second term in office,
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  Speaker 3: he's been following the Steve Bannon playbook to a T,
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  Speaker 3: which is basically what Bannon calls the flooding the zone
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  Speaker 3: with a kind of muzzle velocity. Basically, if you're always
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  Speaker 3: consumed by the next outrage, you can't examine the one
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  Speaker 3: in front of you.
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  Speaker 1: And it's true.
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  Speaker 3: Right off the bat, he's revoked birthright citizenship, frozen federal spending,
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  Speaker 3: shut down AIDS and HIV relief, shut down DEI programs
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: and threatened to deport people based on their political views.
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  Speaker 3: And that is an abbreviated. short list. As someone who
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  Speaker 3: has just published this book about attention, how are you
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  Speaker 3: processing this opening act of his? Are you prioritizing survival
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: over synthesis? Are you just trying to hold on for
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: spring training and the Cubs come back?
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Where are you at? It's funny.
• 10:15
  Speaker 4: On my Cubs group text the other day, someone was like,
• 10:18
  Speaker 4: pitchers and catchers. And it was like, I'm just looking
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  Speaker 4: for some sunshine here. Look, what you are seeing is
• 10:24
  Speaker 4: a kind of form of attentional dominance and weaponized distraction, right?
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  Speaker 4: And there's a weird symmetry between these two experiences. The
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  Speaker 4: experience I write in the book, which is the sort
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  Speaker 4: of notion of constantly being subject to these kind of
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  Speaker 4: siren calls through these platforms and forms of kind of
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  Speaker 4: attentional capitalism that are constantly trying to beckon us, call
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  Speaker 4: to what is our faculty for involuntary attention, like the
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  Speaker 4: wail of a siren going down the street or the
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  Speaker 4: song of the siren in the Odyssey or the clattering
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  Speaker 4: of dishes in a waiter dropping at a restaurant, the
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: buzzing of the phone, like that sense of kind of
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  Speaker 4: Distraction and constant battle for dominion over your own focus
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  Speaker 4: is now being matched in the political sphere of discourse.
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  Speaker 4: There's like this strange symmetry between those two experiences.
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  Speaker 3: Tell us more about what you mean by that, the symmetry.
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  Speaker 4: The symmetry is that the central tension and conflict I
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  Speaker 4: identify in the book and in the opening moments particularly
• 11:26
  Speaker 4: is a conflict between a faculty for attention that can
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  Speaker 4: operate independent of our will. And be drawn to things
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  Speaker 4: even before we get to weigh in on whether we
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  Speaker 4: want to pay attention to them. If a car honks
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  Speaker 4: at you in the middle of the street, a dog barks,
• 11:41
  Speaker 4: a baby cries in the airplane. And then what we
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  Speaker 4: voluntarily want to pay attention to. And living in a
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  Speaker 4: world in which a bunch of very sophisticated companies have
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  Speaker 4: engineered very sophisticated means to call on our compelled attention,
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  Speaker 4: to compel it and extract it and monetize it. And
• 11:58
  Speaker 4: often it feels like they're doing that against our will
• 12:01
  Speaker 4: and this battle for our will. That's happening in the
• 12:03
  Speaker 4: sphere of like the life we live normally. And then
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: that's also happening in the sphere of politics where Musk
• 12:10
  Speaker 4: and Trump particularly, and Musk, who's the kind of Venn diagram, right?
• 12:14
  Speaker 4: He bought one of these platforms to do this. And
• 12:16
  Speaker 4: he's also kind of running the country, are basically trying
• 12:20
  Speaker 4: to do the same thing, this sort of constant sense
• 12:23
  Speaker 4: of interruption to capture your attention, right?
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: And you're someone who walks around with an Apple Watch.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: I do.
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  Speaker 3: Does it help or hurt you?
• 12:31
  Speaker 4: You mean from the distraction? I don't have any notifications
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  Speaker 4: on it, which I think is key. So never.
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  Speaker 3: Because just looking at it right now is giving me anxiety.
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  Speaker 1: I do.
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  Speaker 4: I am a no notification person, which I think is
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: pretty key.
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  Speaker 1: Because.
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  Speaker 4: To me, the notification system is the ultimate example of
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  Speaker 4: what I'm saying here. The haptic feedback of Apple Watch
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: or your phone, the buzz, engineers hardwiring in a feature
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  Speaker 4: to the device that literally compels your attention. You can't
• 13:01
  Speaker 4: not notice when something buzzes in your pocket. And that's
• 13:04
  Speaker 4: on purpose.
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  Speaker 3: You know, we began this year on the show talking
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: to Gia Tolentino about the corrosiveness of the internet, just
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: how bad it feels online. move through the world with
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: these devices. And I think your book gets to the
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  Speaker 3: heart of it in ways I haven't read in other
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: books about attention.
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  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: But people sounding the alarm about emerging technologies is nothing new.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: The advent of the printing press was criticized. It was
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: believed that only handwritten word on parchment would last more
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: than 200 years. When the post office was invented, there
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: were concerns it would make letter writing too quick and casual.
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: there were worries and concerns about the danger of comic books,
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: that comic books are turning children into addicted hijack zombies,
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: which sounds remarkably similar to how we describe kids in
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: the social media age. Do you believe the internet, especially
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: social media, is more like comic books, which proved to
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: be just fine, or more like cigarettes, which have proved
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: to not be so fine?
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  Speaker 4: I think it's probably more like cigarettes, but I think
• 14:11
  Speaker 4: it's deeper than that because cigarettes are really bad for
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: your health, but they don't fundamentally alter your interior life.
• 14:21
  Speaker 4: They don't take from you something that's sort of fundamentally yours.
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: You don't think addiction alters your interior life?
• 14:28
  Speaker 4: I think it does. But I think one of the
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: things that's weird about cigarettes is that it's not, I mean,
• 14:32
  Speaker 4: nicotine is kind of mind altering, but it's not really
• 14:35
  Speaker 4: mind altering. And one of the problems about nicotine and
• 14:39
  Speaker 4: its insidiousness and particularly tobacco addiction is that you can
• 14:43
  Speaker 4: be fully functional and do it, not hit rock bottom.
• 14:46
  Speaker 4: And then you get, you know, get lung cancer, whatever age.
• 14:49
  Speaker 4: So one of the points I make in the book
• 14:51
  Speaker 4: is it's really important to try to be rigorous about,
• 14:53
  Speaker 4: because I cite the comics example in the book, right? Like,
• 14:56
  Speaker 4: are we going through a moral panic or is this
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: thing really dangerous? And my answer is like, no, it
• 15:02
  Speaker 4: probably is a little more like the printing press.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: Say more.
• 15:06
  Speaker 4: Well, the printing press truly was a seismically disruptive technology.
• 15:11
  Speaker 4: And for people who are like, This is bad. I
• 15:14
  Speaker 4: don't think in the aggregate the printing press was bad.
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: But the people who identified that an apocryphal change had
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: happened were right. The religious wars that are essentially kicked
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: off by the combination of the printing press and the
• 15:26
  Speaker 4: Reformation do kill millions of people, do completely break apart
• 15:31
  Speaker 4: old orders, for instance, the dominance of the Catholic Church,
• 15:33
  Speaker 4: like et cetera, et cetera. And so I think that
• 15:37
  Speaker 4: the level of change we're dealing with here is something
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: more like that than comic books or cigarettes.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: It does sound like in the book, on the whole,
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: that you think most of these analogies fall short when
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: you try to relate them to smartphones. And this book
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: is an attempt, as you write, to, quote, find peace
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: in an era defined by the sirens called the smartphone,
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: the 24-7 slot machine blinking at us. What about these
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: devices make them mostly immune to historical comparison?
• 16:07
  Speaker 4: It's a great question. So one is the ubiquity. We've
• 16:10
  Speaker 4: had portable media before in the forms of books, magazines,
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: and the Walkman.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: I miss the Walkman.
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: Walkman's an amazing device. Someone I went to middle and
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: high school with sent me a picture of myself in
• 16:23
  Speaker 4: eighth grade with a Walkman, like my little Sony Walkman in.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: What were you listening to?
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: Almost certainly in that age, one of the Beatles cassette
• 16:29
  Speaker 4: tapes that I had that I was like obsessive, completest about.
• 16:32
  Speaker 4: I knew every single Beatles song and Beatles lyric at
• 16:35
  Speaker 4: a certain point in my life.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: There is a Beatles quiz at the end of this interview. Okay, perfect.
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: Well, I'll lock in.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Abby Road or White Album?
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: Oh, Abby Road for sure.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: We've had portable media before, but we have never had
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: the ubiquity of a attention absorption device at all seconds
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: that we have it. We've never had the global scale
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: of the companies. So no one's ever had a billion
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: users before, ever. Like the largest corporations, the largest networks,
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: they were just not operating at the scale. They were
• 17:07
  Speaker 4: not operating with the individuated sophistication of machine learning that
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: is very different than the gatekeeping of programming where a
• 17:16
  Speaker 4: bunch of humans decide to green light things or not.
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: The algorithmic machine learning algorithms, which really are the first
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: consumer facing mass use of what we now call AI
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: machine learning. No one's ever green lighting anything or making decision.
• 17:29
  Speaker 4: It all just gets uploaded and then you run the
• 17:32
  Speaker 4: experiment on the people.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: There's no curation.
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: There's no curation. And then the most important and biggest
• 17:38
  Speaker 4: thing that makes it historically distinct is the ability of
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: this form of attentional capture to utilize our weakness for
• 17:46
  Speaker 4: social attention and to specifically talk to us and name
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: us as individuals in a way that no media before
• 17:55
  Speaker 4: was really able to do.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: What do you mean by that?
• 17:58
  Speaker 4: The simple tag mention in social media. You tag someone.
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: You get a little notification. That person is talking to you.
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: The TV, the radio couldn't do that. They could try
• 18:07
  Speaker 4: to speak to you as some generalized consumer. The Uncle
• 18:11
  Speaker 4: Sam poster reaches out into the space in front of
• 18:13
  Speaker 4: him to point to you. But to actually be like, no, you, Chris,
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: you are bad or you are good or check this out.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: That sounded like a fundraising text.
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: The fundraising text is the perfect example of this.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Sam, we have a problem. Sam, we're really disappointed. Exactly.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: Just hearing someone else be disappointed in me. As if
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: I'm not already disappointed in myself.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: All the time.
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: That specific form of address, which has been scaled.
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: But proven to be effective at capturing attention.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: Totally.
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: Totally.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 18:48
  Speaker 4: And in fact, I write in the book, there's this
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: thing called the cocktail party effect, which is.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: Yes, I love this.
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: Explain this to people.
• 18:53
  Speaker 4: If you're at a cocktail party and you're talking, right,
• 18:55
  Speaker 4: and you're. You've got your voluntary attention going, which I'm
• 18:58
  Speaker 4: focusing on you. We're having a conversation.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: Your few drinks in.
• 19:01
  Speaker 4: Your few drinks in. And you actually have to do
• 19:03
  Speaker 4: focusing because in that environment, there's lots of stimulus and
• 19:05
  Speaker 4: other conversations around you, which your brain is actively suppressing.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: People talking.
• 19:09
  Speaker 4: So that you can focus.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: The one thing that will pull your attention out, and
• 19:14
  Speaker 4: this is true in experimental settings, but also anecdotally, I
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: think we relate to, is someone saying your name in
• 19:19
  Speaker 4: another conversation. And all of a sudden, it's like record scratch,
• 19:21
  Speaker 4: like the beam of focus goes over there.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: And that means- What?
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: That we have a kind of active stenographer in our head?
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 19:30
  Speaker 4: That is always- Searching for our name.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: It's command effing for our name.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: Which is wild.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: That's insane.
• 19:37
  Speaker 4: At a processing level, the fact that we're able to
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: do that and we can't do with other stimulus is
• 19:41
  Speaker 4: so mind blowing.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: What do you think that says about us?
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: It says about us that core to us in almost
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: a biological and neurological way is this third aspect of attention,
• 19:52
  Speaker 4: not just voluntary attention and involuntary attention, but social attention,
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: which is, and this is one of the things that
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: makes attention so explosively powerful, being paid attention to, not
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: just what we pay attention to, but attention being paid
• 20:06
  Speaker 4: to us. And attention being paid to us is a
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: necessary precondition for human survival because we can't do anything
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: for ourselves when we're born. And it's also the foundation
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: for all human relationships. And so it's sort of constitutive
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: of us. And one of the strange things about this
• 20:21
  Speaker 4: technology is it takes it, it separates it out from
• 20:25
  Speaker 4: the normal context of bilateral relationships. It makes it unidirectional.
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: You pay attention to a person or they can pay
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: attention to you. And it deploys it at a scale
• 20:34
  Speaker 4: heretofore unimaginable for all but a tiny, tiny sliver of people.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: You have a great line in the book. We have
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound,
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: the swirling lights of a 24-7 casino blinking at us,
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: all part of a system minutely engineered to take our
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions, anything
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd,
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: like trying to meditate in a strip club.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Which actually I've heard you have tried to do a
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: few times.
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: It's a real go-to move of mine.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: You guys get off work at what, 9.30? Yeah.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: You head down there?
• 21:12
  Speaker 4: And then just try to meditate.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Right. Your wife's calling you, three kids.
• 21:16
  Speaker 4: Sorry, I'm meditating.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Your wife may listen to this.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: Kate, very sorry.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Just blame it on me.
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: That's not Chris. In the book, you describe this attention
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: capitalism as running parallel to what industrial capitalism did to workers' bodies.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: How do you connect the dots here? Is this about
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: the commodification of our time? I'm curious because the analogy
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: to me reads as a little tenuous, but I want
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: to understand it more.
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's a question of like how much
• 21:51
  Speaker 4: this is an analog and how much I'm saying they're
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: actually the same, which I think I'm a little unclear
• 21:55
  Speaker 4: on even in my own mind. But basically the parallel
• 21:58
  Speaker 4: is this. I think A, There's this notion that this economist,
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: Carl Poliani, talks about called a fictitious commodity, which is
• 22:06
  Speaker 4: there are commodities that are market goods that are extracted
• 22:09
  Speaker 4: from the earth, rubber, oil, copper, and then they're regularized, right?
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: So it's like you have a barrel of oil, light, sweet, crude.
• 22:17
  Speaker 4: It has these features and every barrel is interchangeable with
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: every other barrel. And that interchangeability, which converts it to commodity,
• 22:24
  Speaker 4: means that you can do all sorts of stuff with that.
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: You can sell it at scale. You can bet against it.
• 22:28
  Speaker 4: You can His point is that there are certain things,
• 22:31
  Speaker 4: and two examples he gives is labor and land, that
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: he calls fictitious commodities, where these things fit very strangely
• 22:41
  Speaker 4: with commodification, partly in the case of labor because the
• 22:44
  Speaker 4: thing that's being commodified is the sum total of our
• 22:47
  Speaker 4: human effort and toil. Karl Marx says the commodification of
• 22:51
  Speaker 4: labor is this sort of process of alienation, whereby this
• 22:56
  Speaker 4: thing internal to us that we kind of own and
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: have dominion over gets taken from us and put out
• 23:00
  Speaker 4: into the world and poured into products that we then
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: no longer own, that we are literally alienated from. Here's
• 23:07
  Speaker 4: how I think this connects to attention. I think this
• 23:09
  Speaker 4: is the neatest way to understand it. There's a weird
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: triangle of value that Marx identifies with labor that goes
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: like this. And it's a paradox he's trying to solve for.
• 23:19
  Speaker 4: During the Industrial Revolution, the sum total aggregate value of
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: all the labor of the workers is enormous. And not
• 23:26
  Speaker 4: only is it enormous, it's the necessary precondition for industrial capitalism.
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: You take away the workers, there's no factories, there's no objects.
• 23:34
  Speaker 4: In fact, that's the logic of a strike, right? So
• 23:37
  Speaker 4: some total aggregate value is huge, but the individual slice
• 23:40
  Speaker 4: that each worker has of it is a pittance. And
• 23:43
  Speaker 4: not just a pittance, like you can barely survive on it, right?
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: And it's hard to weaponize it.
• 23:48
  Speaker 4: And it's hard to weaponize it. And yet... In the aggregate,
• 23:51
  Speaker 4: it's very valuable. Individually, it's not very valuable. But to you,
• 23:55
  Speaker 4: it is the most valuable thing. It's all you have.
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: If you're spending 60 hours a week in a sweatshop,
• 24:02
  Speaker 4: your life is being taken from you. That exact same
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: triangle exists with attention. In the aggregate, when you pool
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: it over a billion users, attention is wildly valuable and
• 24:14
  Speaker 4: the foundation for the most profitable and largest corporations. In
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: the individual moment that you're looking at an Instagram reel
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: and there is an auction happening in the background in
• 24:23
  Speaker 4: nanoseconds to bid off your eyeballs to an advertiser, it's
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: like fractions of a penny. It's basically nothing. But to you,
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: your focus and your attention is the most valuable thing
• 24:35
  Speaker 4: you have in any given moment. And if it's being
• 24:37
  Speaker 4: taken from you, that something's being taken from you that
• 24:40
  Speaker 4: matters and is very, very dear to you.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: We'll be right back with writer, reporter, MSNBC host, Chris Hayes.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: I want to talk.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: About how attention... capitalism governs your life, especially within the
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: confines of your show. And to do that, I thought
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: you could read a section from the book here.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 25:27
  Speaker 4: A cable news show is powered by attention. It has
• 25:30
  Speaker 4: no internal combustion engine to make it go. Yes, you
• 25:33
  Speaker 4: can cover whatever you desire night after night, but if
• 25:36
  Speaker 4: no one watches it, the show will be canceled. This
• 25:38
  Speaker 4: is what almost happened to me. After a lot of
• 25:40
  Speaker 4: trial and error, I now view audience attention as something
• 25:43
  Speaker 4: like the wind that powers a sailboat It's a real
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: phenomenon independent of the boat, and you can successfully sail
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: only if you harness it. You don't turn the boat
• 25:53
  Speaker 4: into the wind, but you also don't simply allow the
• 25:55
  Speaker 4: wind to set your course. You figure out where you
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: want to go. In the case of my show, what
• 26:01
  Speaker 4: I think is most important for people to know, you
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: identify which way the wind is blowing, and then using
• 26:06
  Speaker 4: your skills and the tools of the boat, you tack
• 26:09
  Speaker 4: back and forth to manage to arrive at your destination
• 26:12
  Speaker 4: using that wind power. This experience gives me a certain
• 26:15
  Speaker 4: perspective on how attention functions, I think. Every waking moment
• 26:20
  Speaker 4: of my life revolves around answering the question of how
• 26:22
  Speaker 4: we capture attention. And it just so happens that constant
• 26:25
  Speaker 4: pursuit of others' attention is no longer just for professionals
• 26:28
  Speaker 4: like myself. Indeed, it has been democratized to include every
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: teen with a phone.
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: There's a lot to unpack there, but I want to
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: narrow the focus first on audience attention and how you
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: go about Capturing it, because leading up to the election,
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: I had to look this over last night, your show
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: received somewhere around 1.4 million viewers a night. But by
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: the time mid-November rolled around, post-election, that number was almost
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: consistently halved, around 700,000. And it's since made some marginal
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: gains in 2025. But it is still well shy of
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: that pre-election number. The same cannot be said about your
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: competition on the right in Fox News, which has seen
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: a huge uptick since November. What do you think this
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: withdrawal amongst Democrats is telling us about this political moment?
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: And is it in any way changing how you are
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: thinking about your job?
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: There's a few things. I mean, one, I would just
• 27:29
  Speaker 4: say that my understanding is in the last, literally the
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: last two weeks, we've seen those numbers go way up,
• 27:36
  Speaker 4: like way past marginal. So 80 or 80 percent over
• 27:41
  Speaker 4: the last, the previous two weeks. So there's people coming
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: back quite a bit. The phenomenon that you're identifying is
• 27:48
  Speaker 4: a real one. Fox experienced it in 2020 after Trump lost.
• 27:53
  Speaker 4: And in fact, one of the things that we learned
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: from the Dominion lawsuit and what I write about with
• 27:57
  Speaker 4: some length in the book is that they were freaked
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: out and desperate to keep the audience's attention in an
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: atmosphere in which people were demoralized and didn't want to
• 28:05
  Speaker 4: pay attention to political news. And one of the things
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: they tried to do was basically play up The story
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: of election fraud, the false story of election fraud, which
• 28:15
  Speaker 4: led them to this lawsuit and then a settlement. I
• 28:19
  Speaker 4: think what I would say there to go back to
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: the metaphor I started with is, you know, and I've
• 28:24
  Speaker 4: read accounts of life at sea in the 17th and
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: 18th century. There are times where boats just sit on
• 28:30
  Speaker 4: a dead calm sea. There's nothing the sailor can do.
• 28:34
  Speaker 4: There's no technology in the boat.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: No matter how skilled they are.
• 28:37
  Speaker 4: Doesn't matter how skilled they are. And if you don't
• 28:41
  Speaker 4: accept that that's part of what happens and the wind
• 28:44
  Speaker 4: is going to come back, you can't be a sailor.
• 28:47
  Speaker 4: And if you start being like, well, the boat is broken.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 28:50
  Speaker 4: We got to change. What if we start ripping– I
• 28:52
  Speaker 4: mean the boat is too heavy. That's why it's not moving.
• 28:54
  Speaker 4: What if we start ripping up some of the floorboards?
• 28:57
  Speaker 4: You're going to court disaster. I have been doing.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: This now for– 20-something years.
• 29:03
  Speaker 4: I've been a journalist for 20-something years. I've been a
• 29:05
  Speaker 4: television host for 13 or 14 years.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: 14 years.
• 29:08
  Speaker 4: At this point, I understand that like sometimes the wind's
• 29:11
  Speaker 4: not going to blow.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: And how do you feel about that?
• 29:13
  Speaker 4: I truly have gotten to a place, I think, through
• 29:16
  Speaker 4: sheer experience and reps.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: Equanimity?
• 29:19
  Speaker 4: Where I have total equanimity about it. I just know
• 29:22
  Speaker 4: that I can't control that. When something is happening, when
• 29:25
  Speaker 4: the numbers you're talking about, like that level of attention.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Right, get halved.
• 29:29
  Speaker 4: It's nothing you're doing.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Right. And you don't feel bad about that?
• 29:32
  Speaker 4: No, I don't.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: And you don't panic?
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: I don't panic.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: The team doesn't panic? No.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: No one at the office is panicked.
• 29:40
  Speaker 4: I can't speak for other people.
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: The people near you that you work with.
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: I think no one likes it when that happens.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 29:48
  Speaker 4: Because it doesn't feel good. But no, I don't think
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: there's panic. And I know for myself, you know, one
• 29:53
  Speaker 4: of the things for me is I stopped looking at
• 29:55
  Speaker 4: ratings in 2020 during COVID. And I haven't looked back.
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: I will hear from other people and stuff about what's
• 30:03
  Speaker 4: going on. I know, for instance, the numbers you cited
• 30:06
  Speaker 4: are roughly in line with what happened.
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: I don't hear about it until I go on a
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: podcast with Sam Fragoso.
• 30:11
  Speaker 4: Yes, then I hear. But a hard-fought piece of wisdom
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: I've achieved is understanding what I can and can't control.
• 30:18
  Speaker 4: And more than that, to go back to that Fox
• 30:20
  Speaker 4: example or the idea of deciding you need to start
• 30:24
  Speaker 4: throwing things off the boat because it's too heavy, it
• 30:26
  Speaker 4: won't move. If you start to panic and if you
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: start to try to control things you can't control, you'll
• 30:31
  Speaker 4: start doing bad stuff.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: I would really love to see your version of panicking.
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: Is it just like more interviews with Wallace Shawn on
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: your show?
• 30:40
  Speaker 4: Wow, that is an amazing deep cut.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: It's a great interview.
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: I love that interview.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: The editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has said
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: that public distrust of The New Yorker, The New York Times,
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal are at record levels.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: Our ratings are a misery. The same could be said
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: and applied to MSNBC.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Why is that?
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: Why are people so distrustful of journalists and institutions that
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: seemingly operate in good faith with clear, rigorous editorial standards,
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: as I know you and David do? Why doesn't that read?
• 31:18
  Speaker 4: I think we're in a little bit of a different
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: category than those others you mentioned in a way that
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: I think is somewhat helpful because I think there's a
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: distinct ideological profile that we have that I think is
• 31:29
  Speaker 4: pretty transparent and means that, you know, you can go
• 31:33
  Speaker 4: back to the 1950s and 60s, you go back to
• 31:35
  Speaker 4: the 20s and there's like the Nation Magazine and the
• 31:37
  Speaker 4: National Review and the idea of like opinion journalism or
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: point of view journalism is as old as the country.
• 31:45
  Speaker 4: I think in terms of the categories and how people
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: feel about the media and distrust, we're in a little
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: bit of a different situation because of that. That said...
• 31:53
  Speaker 4: One of the things that I don't think people really
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: understand is that over the process of literally probably 40
• 32:00
  Speaker 4: or 50 years, everyone right of center started dropping out
• 32:06
  Speaker 4: of non-conservative media as consumers, as subscribers, as viewers, to
• 32:13
  Speaker 4: the point where all media that isn't Fox, Newsmax, et cetera,
• 32:20
  Speaker 4: is competing for basically half of the country that is
• 32:25
  Speaker 4: the center left. And sometimes people are like, well, what
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: did they do to lose that trust? I don't think
• 32:32
  Speaker 4: they did much to lose the trust.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: Did they do much to retain it?
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: I think there was a war on the mainstream media
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: and the idea of the media from the right that
• 32:43
  Speaker 4: starts in basically the 50s and 60s and was waged
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: for many years and was successful. It's not like, look,
• 32:49
  Speaker 4: if we were having this moment of like, distrust against
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: the media after the Iraq War, that would be one thing.
• 32:56
  Speaker 4: But we're not having it after the Iraq War. And
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: there was a moment of reckoning after the Iraq War.
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: But again, the partisan valence of how that kind of
• 33:03
  Speaker 4: distrust shook out isn't predicted by getting the war wrong.
• 33:08
  Speaker 4: I think there's tons of stuff the quote media has
• 33:10
  Speaker 4: gotten wrong, although that term is like so amorphous as
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: to be useless. But mostly, I think what's happened is
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: a reactionary project to attack independent sources of authority, science,
• 33:24
  Speaker 4: the academy, journalism, which are all independent sources of authority.
• 33:29
  Speaker 4: Rush Limbaugh once referred to government, science, the academy, and
• 33:33
  Speaker 4: journalism as the four corners of deceit. And I think
• 33:37
  Speaker 4: it's been a successful reactionary project to cut people off
• 33:41
  Speaker 4: from trust in independent sources of authority so as to
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: epistemically dominate people.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: It has been successful.
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: It just won.
• 33:49
  Speaker 4: Wildly successful.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: And I'm pressing you on this not because I don't
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: like what you do. Right. I've obviously spent an inordinate
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: amount of time with your work for a decade now.
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: Is there something in the approach, the editorial considerations that
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: make it less appealing to a wider audience? And do
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: you see anything in the way that left-leaning media fails
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: to connect to a larger audience the way the Democratic
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: Party also failed this past election? Are the two tied
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: at all to you?
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: I think they might be, although they're such different– or
• 34:22
  Speaker 4: they should be different projects.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: I don't disagree. They should be different projects. Yeah.
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: But they are not different projects on Newsmax and Fox News.
• 34:29
  Speaker 4: Correct. I mean those are more explicitly and flatly partisan outlets.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: They're in harmony.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: So I guess I would take this in a few steps.
• 34:36
  Speaker 4: One is– It's really challenging to communicate to people at
• 34:41
  Speaker 4: the scales we're talking about. Like, what's something that a
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: million people want to listen to? What's something that 10
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: million want to listen to? Or what's something that's 75
• 34:51
  Speaker 4: or 80 million? Like, these are wildly different scales. So
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: when you're talking about a presidential campaign, you're talking about
• 34:58
  Speaker 4: the biggest scale possible. It's 150 million voters here or there,
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: you know, more or less. We're talking to, like you said,
• 35:06
  Speaker 4: maybe one and a half million.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: And a half. Right.
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: We're in the first group and Joe Rogan's in the
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: second group.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 35:10
  Speaker 4: So it's just like these are different– these are totally
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: different scales. But it also means you're going to communicate
• 35:15
  Speaker 4: differently and also your messaging is going to be different.
• 35:18
  Speaker 4: Like what would be good for my show? I wouldn't
• 35:21
  Speaker 4: necessarily say here's my A block and give it to
• 35:24
  Speaker 4: a Democratic presidential candidate and be like this is the
• 35:27
  Speaker 4: way to reach the median voter. They're different audiences. The
• 35:31
  Speaker 4: same way I wouldn't like take my nation columns and
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: like walk into Barack Obama's White House and be like
• 35:36
  Speaker 4: this is the way– To keep Iowa in play in
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: the 2012 election. What I will say here, which I
• 35:42
  Speaker 4: think is important, a few things. One is I've occasionally
• 35:45
  Speaker 4: gotten to meet with like our audience research people. Our
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: audience is way more ideologically diverse than you would guess.
• 35:51
  Speaker 4: Like truly huge chunks describing themselves as independent or moderate
• 35:57
  Speaker 4: or conservative. It's a big audience with diverse views. I
• 36:00
  Speaker 4: know this because I run into people all the time.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: Who I know their politics differently. who are like mention
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: something they saw on my show or watch my show.
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: People who are friends, family members, who I've heard of
• 36:13
  Speaker 4: for years and I know they are not my politics
• 36:16
  Speaker 4: and I meet them and they're viewers. And I always
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: love that. Because it's like, oh, wow, did you, you
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: see that commentary I did last night as you're like
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: eagerly shaking my hand?
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: But to me that tracks because the show and your
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: podcast and this book is driven by, I think, a
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: natural curiosity. I wonder, though, like if form is related
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: to function here, which is you started doing TV back
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: in 2011 and you and your staff had this mantra.
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: I think it was called the content should be simmer,
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: not boil. Do you still believe that approach is effective
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: in reaching people? Like, can you make a meal simmering?
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: Maybe not unless you're having soup every day.
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: Simmer, not boil was a phrase that we used for
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: the level of kind of political, ideological tension or conflict
• 37:06
  Speaker 4: we wanted at the table. So in the context of
• 37:09
  Speaker 4: a format, you know, form is function, like the format
• 37:12
  Speaker 4: of a panel show where there's me and four guests,
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: you always wanted there to be like a little, like simmer,
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: not boil means you don't want people shouting at each
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: other because I hate watching people shout and I hate
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: watching people interrupt each other.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: You also- Is that true at the dinner table as well?
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: That's true everywhere. My mom tells a story of me
• 37:27
  Speaker 4: watching Siskel and Ebert as a kid while my parents
• 37:30
  Speaker 4: having on and just being like, Why are they arguing
• 37:33
  Speaker 4: all the time?
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she said, quote, he gave it two thumbs down.
• 37:39
  Speaker 4: I thought your research is so thorough. I thought you
• 37:41
  Speaker 4: were actually going to bust out a quote from my
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: mom about me watching Siskel and Ebert because I'm like, Jesus,
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: I don't know. Maybe I said that at some point.
• 37:47
  Speaker 4: You seem to have read everything. No, Simranat Boya was
• 37:50
  Speaker 4: sort of the place that we wanted that conversation at
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: the table to live, which is not everyone just agreeing
• 37:55
  Speaker 4: with each other and not people yelling at each other.
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: But like a frisson of tension and disagreement that was
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: still managed.
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: You compared it once to Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: Did I? Mm-hmm.
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: That scene when he's like– What do you mean?
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: I'm funny?
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: You think I'm funny?
• 38:11
  Speaker 4: You think I'm funny? So I wanted– we wanted that
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: on that show. But again, that format of that show
• 38:16
  Speaker 4: was a two-hour show. It was a panel show. It's
• 38:19
  Speaker 4: just a very different thing to do one hour with
• 38:22
  Speaker 4: fewer blocks, shorter– longer commercial breaks, all that stuff. Mm-hmm.
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: And to get back to your sort of original question,
• 38:28
  Speaker 4: which I think is a really important one and one
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: that I take very seriously, like I think there are
• 38:32
  Speaker 4: a bunch of structural reasons that a lot of people
• 38:34
  Speaker 4: are never going to listen to a thing I say
• 38:36
  Speaker 4: and aren't going to trust me. But I really do
• 38:40
  Speaker 4: try to engage in good faith and I really do
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: believe in rhetoric and persuasion, meaning I do try to
• 38:49
  Speaker 4: make arguments to people, to give reasons and cite those
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: reasons in support of my views and try to persuade
• 38:56
  Speaker 4: people to agree to the things that I want them
• 38:59
  Speaker 4: to agree to because I think are important and see
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: my way of things. There's a limited audience for that
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: because of these structural factors and probably my own shortcomings,
• 39:08
  Speaker 4: but it is a project I'm engaged in.
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: What do you think are your shortcomings?
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: Well, I think that my shortcomings are probably I'm maybe
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: not the best instrument for a lot of people. I'm
• 39:20
  Speaker 4: from New York City. I'm from the Bronx. I have
• 39:22
  Speaker 4: the education I have. I have the social milieu I have.
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: I'm now like a dad in Park Slope. And all
• 39:28
  Speaker 4: of those identity signifiers, cultural signifiers, class signifiers, they come
• 39:35
  Speaker 4: with so much weight these days because of how polarized
• 39:38
  Speaker 4: we are along these lines that I think there's probably
• 39:42
  Speaker 4: people that are just like put me in some mental
• 39:44
  Speaker 4: category about– Who I am and what I believe. And
• 39:48
  Speaker 4: sometimes you see people say that about you that so
• 39:52
  Speaker 4: profoundly misrepresent you that you realize just– and it actually
• 39:57
  Speaker 4: gets you thinking like, oh, are there people on the
• 39:59
  Speaker 4: right that I have that view about that I also
• 40:02
  Speaker 4: actually don't know anything about?
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: I think it goes both ways.
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: I think it does, yeah.
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: I think we do ourselves and other people a great
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: disservice when we think it's just the right.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: It's just, oh, those people on the right.
• 40:14
  Speaker 4: Oh, totally, yes.
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: Those assumptions we make. based on aesthetics, education.
• 40:20
  Speaker 4: Or another really important thing, social media voice. There are
• 40:24
  Speaker 4: people I know who I love as people who sound
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: like utter psychopaths on social media.
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: Some of my closest friends, I would never befriend with them.
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: If that was what they were.
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: If the version they are online was the version they
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: are at a bar.
• 40:38
  Speaker 4: A great example of that in public life is J.D. Vance. J.D.
• 40:41
  Speaker 4: Vance on social media sounds nuts and nasty. When you
• 40:45
  Speaker 4: saw him in the debate with Tim Walz, it was like, oh,
• 40:50
  Speaker 4: I just suddenly got this image of this guy who
• 40:53
  Speaker 4: is able to kind of code switch, who's able to
• 40:55
  Speaker 4: talk about things in a way that sounds reasonable. He
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: just was like, I was like, right. There's such a
• 41:01
  Speaker 4: difference in his persona and profile. The one person I
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: think this is not true of is Elon Musk, who
• 41:06
  Speaker 4: I think is probably the same both.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: When MSNBC launched All In with Chris Hayes, I heard
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: that you would tell your guests before they went on air, that, quote,
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: the most important principle of the show is that we
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: are not on television. What that means is no talking points,
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: no sound bites, no point scoring. Twelve years into making
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: All In, has that guiding philosophy changed? Are you thinking
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: about it differently in an era of attention capitalism where
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: content creation has been democratized?
• 41:39
  Speaker 4: So that spiel started on Up, which was a panel
• 41:43
  Speaker 4: show with longer time blocks and conversation. I gave this
• 41:46
  Speaker 4: whole thing that was like, don't talk like you're on TV.
• 41:49
  Speaker 4: And I will be totally honest that one of the
• 41:51
  Speaker 4: things I've learned over the time in primetime TV is like,
• 41:54
  Speaker 4: people talk the way they talk on TV for a reason.
• 41:57
  Speaker 4: And the biggest reason for that has to do with timing.
• 42:01
  Speaker 4: And this is actually something, this is a real bedrock
• 42:04
  Speaker 4: form equals function or form determines content. And Chomsky actually
• 42:09
  Speaker 4: makes this point in Manufacturing Consent.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: We're getting dangerously close to a math class I can't take.
• 42:15
  Speaker 4: Well, here's what he says in Manufacturing Consent. He says
• 42:18
  Speaker 4: the imperative in TV of concision requires people to basically
• 42:23
  Speaker 4: utter either simpler ideas or ideas that require less explanation.
• 42:28
  Speaker 4: And the concision of TV is a real thing, particularly
• 42:32
  Speaker 4: compared to the form that you and I are in
• 42:33
  Speaker 4: right now. People don't realize how long they speak for
• 42:37
  Speaker 4: and how quickly TV goes by. And that pace issue,
• 42:43
  Speaker 4: which is a formal constraint, can be really hard to
• 42:46
  Speaker 4: negotiate unless people have some reps speaking on TV in
• 42:50
  Speaker 4: what we call sound bites because the time goes by
• 42:53
  Speaker 4: really fast. And so I think I have come around
• 42:58
  Speaker 4: to like, I want people who are on up. I
• 43:02
  Speaker 4: was like, I don't care if you're good on talking
• 43:04
  Speaker 4: on TV. I just want you to be good at talking.
• 43:06
  Speaker 4: I still feel that way about the podcast, but on
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: my primetime show, people kind of have to be good
• 43:11
  Speaker 4: at talking on TV.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: Have you gotten better? Talking on TV?
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: Yes, much.
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: Okay. Because, you know, like before journalism, theater was your
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: first true love. At Hunter College High School, you acted
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: in plays, you wrote plays, you even directed a play
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: starring your classmate, Lin-Manuel Miranda. And in many ways, your
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: theater dreams kind of came to fruition with the show
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: of yours. You perform four nights a week in front
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: of a crowd that you can't see. How do you
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: balance delivering facts and On a show that necessitates a
• 43:45
  Speaker 3: kind of performative fiction.
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: Well, I would say it's performative but not performative fiction.
• 43:50
  Speaker 4: In fact, the key thing is to– the hardest thing
• 43:54
  Speaker 4: to be on TV is yourself and it's also the
• 43:57
  Speaker 4: most important thing and the thing that takes the most
• 44:00
  Speaker 4: practice and reps to be. If you go back and
• 44:03
  Speaker 4: you look at early David Letterman, he is way tenser,
• 44:09
  Speaker 4: way jumpier and way less himself than– Letterman 20 years later.
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: We're talking about like Weatherman and Indiana Letterman?
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: No, I mean early, early Letterman, late show. And I
• 44:21
  Speaker 4: think that one of the things I've gotten better at
• 44:23
  Speaker 4: is the irony of television performance, which is a little
• 44:26
  Speaker 4: different than theater, is you want to be biophysically in
• 44:33
  Speaker 4: the calmest non-fight or flight place. And because like your
• 44:38
  Speaker 4: resting heart rate is something you can't really control except
• 44:41
  Speaker 4: through practice— It takes a lot of time on camera
• 44:46
  Speaker 4: to get there, but you get better the more relaxed
• 44:49
  Speaker 4: you are, the more yourself and the more comfortable you are.
• 44:54
  Speaker 4: So it is a kind of performance. So it very
• 44:57
  Speaker 4: much is performance insofar as we're using the tools of rhetoric.
• 45:01
  Speaker 4: I'm punching certain words. I'm doing certain things with my
• 45:04
  Speaker 4: body and my voice. Like I am performing intentionally, but
• 45:08
  Speaker 4: fundamentally I'm performing myself. And if it weren't that, it
• 45:12
  Speaker 4: would not work.
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: Are you performing now?
• 45:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I think all, at
• 45:17
  Speaker 4: some level of distraction, all talking is performing. But one
• 45:21
  Speaker 4: of the things that I would say, and I think
• 45:24
  Speaker 4: anyone that knows me would tell you this, and people
• 45:27
  Speaker 4: have said this to me, they're like, at the bar,
• 45:30
  Speaker 4: talking about what's going on is basically exactly what I sound.
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: Like on the show. Probably a little more profanity at
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: the bar.
• 45:36
  Speaker 4: There's more profanity at the bar, for sure.
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: Which you're welcome to put out here.
• 45:39
  Speaker 4: We can use here.
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: Winding our way back to the book, As an attention merchant,
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: I read this book and I thought, like, is this
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: book an act of atonement, self-justification, or a roadmap to
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: do this job differently?
• 45:54
  Speaker 4: That's really interesting. I mean, I think it's some atonement
• 45:56
  Speaker 4: and it's some self-justification. But I also think, like, fundamentally,
• 46:01
  Speaker 4: I'm proud of what I do and believe in what
• 46:03
  Speaker 4: I would do. And I wouldn't do it if I didn't.
• 46:05
  Speaker 4: My dad is an amazing guy and he was a
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: community organizer for years. And he once said this thing
• 46:10
  Speaker 4: to me that I always think about because I think
• 46:12
  Speaker 4: he's He's both a really righteous and virtuous person, spiritual person,
• 46:17
  Speaker 4: and spent his whole life doing really good work. But
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: he said this thing to me of like, there's no
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: such thing as purity in this life, but there is
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: such thing as integrity, which I think about all the time.
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: You're going to be making compromises in the world where
• 46:33
  Speaker 4: you have to deal with two competing imperatives that are
• 46:37
  Speaker 4: in tension with each other. Your fidelity to your journalistic
• 46:41
  Speaker 4: vision or what you think is most important and where
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: the attention flow is. Politicians have to face this, all
• 46:47
  Speaker 4: kinds of people, lawyers, right now, civil servants in the
• 46:50
  Speaker 4: federal government who may be getting told to do things
• 46:52
  Speaker 4: they think are flatly illegal. You can't escape those. All
• 46:56
  Speaker 4: you can do is like act with integrity and good
• 46:58
  Speaker 4: faith and honesty. And so I think I've actually weirdly,
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: through the process of writing this book and doing the show,
• 47:05
  Speaker 4: I feel as good about the work as I ever have,
• 47:09
  Speaker 4: partly because I think I have wrestled some of these
• 47:12
  Speaker 4: things to the ground, I think I've developed a sense
• 47:15
  Speaker 4: of judgment and sense of self and confidence in myself
• 47:18
  Speaker 4: where I don't feel, I don't quite feel as lost
• 47:21
  Speaker 4: and I don't quite feel as panicked. And that I
• 47:24
  Speaker 4: think makes me better at doing what I'm doing, both
• 47:27
  Speaker 4: in the sense, interestingly enough, of that intentional imperative and
• 47:31
  Speaker 4: also in doing the best journalism I can do.
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: When did that change?
• 47:36
  Speaker 4: I think COVID was a little bit of a It's
• 47:41
  Speaker 4: a slow process over time. I felt really lost the
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: first four years for a bunch of reasons.
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: Which were?
• 47:52
  Speaker 4: The adjustment to the new format, the dealing with ratings
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: that were not great, different imperatives from people I worked
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: for who had ideas for why it wasn't working.
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: You said on Longform in 2014, making the show was
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: like playing a first-person shooter. There's another quote where you said,
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: the flip side is that the unrelenting... Metronomic regularity can
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: wear on you after a while. Yeah. Another quote was,
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: it felt like I was in a cage with a
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: wild animal.
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: My wife always told me I looked hunted. She's like,
• 48:22
  Speaker 4: you got that hunted look in your eyes. Yeah, I
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: just had like a real, I had a solid three
• 48:30
  Speaker 4: or four years there where I felt basically constant fight
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: or flight somatic engagement. adrenaline system pumping. We also had
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: just given birth, I had young children not getting a
• 48:43
  Speaker 4: lot of sleep in the new world of being a parent,
• 48:46
  Speaker 4: which is its own sort of dislocating event about who
• 48:51
  Speaker 4: you are and what you are and what your schedule is.
• 48:53
  Speaker 4: And so the combination of those two, I think I
• 48:55
  Speaker 4: just was like a little, just kind of out of
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: body experience of just a lot of stress response, almost
• 49:03
  Speaker 4: constant From the moment I woke up in the morning
• 49:06
  Speaker 4: to going to bed, just like the faucet all the
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: way open on the stress response. And over time, that
• 49:14
  Speaker 4: just started to trickle and then got kind of shut off.
• 49:17
  Speaker 4: And now I don't feel it at all.
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: I feel like.
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: That image of the faucet being turned off is what
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: you're working towards in this book when it comes to
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: social media and the internet and our attention. And, you know,
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: this book is in a long line of books in
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: the past decade about attention.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: And there's a review of your book in The New Yorker.
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: Did you read that?
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: I did, yep.
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: There's a part in it where the critic didn't, I think,
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: didn't totally track the argument or didn't believe the argument
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: was relevant. And he wrote, a large part of the
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: knowledge class problem is that cultural creators, especially those in
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: legacy media, fear that smartphones will lure their audiences away.
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: In this, they don't seem vastly different from the 18th
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: century priests decrying novels for turning women away from prayful obedience?
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: Is the ostensible crisis of attention at bottom a crisis
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: of authority? Is people aren't paying attention just a dressed
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: up version of people aren't paying attention to me? Ours
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: attention deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis. What
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: did you make of that when you read it and
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: when you heard it now?
• 50:41
  Speaker 4: I think he's wrong. I understand the point. I mean,
• 50:44
  Speaker 4: I think the historical evidence he marshals, basically the thrust
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: of that review is this is kind of a moral
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: panic and not just a moral panic, but it's motivated
• 50:53
  Speaker 4: by the fact that a set of gatekeepers can no
• 50:55
  Speaker 4: longer kind of control either public discourse. And there is
• 51:00
  Speaker 4: something to that. But I also think, A, I just
• 51:04
  Speaker 4: think it's so... There's a little bit of look out
• 51:07
  Speaker 4: the window and tell me if it's raining or not
• 51:09
  Speaker 4: feeling to this. Like, does this all feel good to you?
• 51:13
  Speaker 4: I don't think it does. I think most people feel
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: it doesn't. And I think they're right and I think
• 51:16
  Speaker 4: I'm right. The gatekeeper question I think is actually really
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: interesting but more complicated.
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: More complicated than you explored.
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: Well, more complicated in this sense. I do think part
• 51:27
  Speaker 4: of this, at least in the context of public discourse,
• 51:30
  Speaker 4: is about a kind of ethos around news and journalism
• 51:33
  Speaker 4: that's being destroyed.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 51:34
  Speaker 4: And I think that ethos is actually a really useful
• 51:37
  Speaker 4: and important one. And I think the notion that Elon
• 51:40
  Speaker 4: Musk says, you are the media. And he's right in
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: the same way that like the residents of Salem were
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: the media during the witch trials. Like, yes, congratulations. You
• 51:51
  Speaker 4: have reinvented the village rumor at scale.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: Great.
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: But actually having a set of people that attempt to
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: marshal attention for some other end that is civically minded.
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: with a professional ethos, which is what journalism and the
• 52:06
  Speaker 4: news is about, is an incredibly important thing in democratic self-governance.
• 52:11
  Speaker 4: So this idea of like, you're like the priest that
• 52:14
  Speaker 4: doesn't like the novel, I think just actually misses the
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: centrality of journalism to modern democracy. I also think there's
• 52:23
  Speaker 4: weirdly an academic consensus, like there really is this academic,
• 52:26
  Speaker 4: non-academic divide on this issue. It genuinely is the case
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: that there is across many fields, a kind of academic
• 52:32
  Speaker 4: consensus that It can't be that some new technology is
• 52:36
  Speaker 4: actually changing things that much.
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: Why do you think that is?
• 52:40
  Speaker 4: Well, first of all, the author of that piece, who's
• 52:42
  Speaker 4: an incredible writer and wrote a really great book called
• 52:46
  Speaker 4: How to Hide an Empire, is a historian. And in
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: the same way that I think he views me as
• 52:52
  Speaker 4: being predisposed by my profession to be a gatekeeper and
• 52:56
  Speaker 4: not like the people, I think historians tend to be
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: pretty predisposed to say, ever was it thus?
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: No.
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: Like, that's also overdetermined. If me as an attention merchant
• 53:06
  Speaker 4: is overdetermined, like, being a historian is sort of overdetermined
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: in the same way.
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: He did bring up the priests. Yes.
• 53:11
  Speaker 4: So, like, I think partly it's that. It's interesting, too. Like,
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: it was really interesting. I don't know if you tracked this,
• 53:16
  Speaker 4: but when the Jonathan Haidt book came out, The Anxious
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: Generation came out, there was this enormous backlash against it
• 53:22
  Speaker 4: from academics who study online life that really accused him
• 53:27
  Speaker 4: of engaging in moral panic. And some of their arguments...
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: I thought had some merit or were interesting, but by
• 53:34
  Speaker 4: and large, there has been a kind of academic fashion
• 53:38
  Speaker 4: of late to sort of jettison an older framework that
• 53:42
  Speaker 4: viewed the actual forms of media as causally salient in
• 53:47
  Speaker 4: favor of a kind of audience-centered version in which it's
• 53:51
  Speaker 4: all about the audience and not really the formal mechanisms
• 53:54
  Speaker 4: of the media.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: After the break, more from Chris Hayes. As we get
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: to the other side of this moment and this book,
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: how are you thinking about what we do with our
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: attention and how we better use it?
• 54:38
  Speaker 4: It's a great question. You know, one of the things
• 54:40
  Speaker 4: I keep this mantra we've said on air on the
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: show and we say in the meeting all the time
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: is focus is power, focus is power. And trying to focus.
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: Stay on stories. Don't just pick them up and drop them.
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: which happens so much in our news environment, and I
• 54:57
  Speaker 4: do myself, fully copping to. In the same way that
• 55:02
  Speaker 4: you can tell yourself you're not going to scroll and
• 55:04
  Speaker 4: then you do, I have the same issue with trying
• 55:07
  Speaker 4: to produce the show.
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: You've only checked your Apple Watch a couple times. Yeah.
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: That's true.
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: Which I'm grateful for.
• 55:14
  Speaker 4: So focus is power, which means trying to be willful
• 55:18
  Speaker 4: and intentional about where we shine the flashlight of our attention.
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: That's really important. I think... People incorporating that intentionality into
• 55:26
  Speaker 4: their lives, like one of the things I say is
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: that you should spend 20 minutes a day with your
• 55:30
  Speaker 4: own thoughts every day. No phone, no podcast, no nothing.
• 55:33
  Speaker 4: Like you and your brain, it's on the commute, it's
• 55:35
  Speaker 4: on the drive, it's on the subway ride, it's walking
• 55:37
  Speaker 4: your dog, it's the walk back from dropping your kid off,
• 55:39
  Speaker 4: whatever it is. You go to the drugstore and you
• 55:42
  Speaker 4: don't put the podcast on in the car. I think
• 55:46
  Speaker 4: re-acclimating our brain to being alone with itself is really important.
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: And then I think people should– Not allow the intentional
• 55:56
  Speaker 4: weaponized distraction to render them impotent and paralyzed.
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: Not even.
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: If it feels like the news is too much, just
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: pick a thing that you really care about. Maybe it's
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: NIH funding. Maybe it's USAID. Maybe it's abortion. Whatever it is.
• 56:18
  Speaker 4: And like talk to other people about it. See if
• 56:21
  Speaker 4: there's a group in your area. Move on into visible
• 56:23
  Speaker 4: other groups that you can sign up for. Call your
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: members of Congress to tell them that you're really concerned
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: about this. And just focus on that and do a
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: few small things as opposed to thinking that you have
• 56:36
  Speaker 4: to do everything and pay attention to everything.
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: Tell me about the models of consumption that you think will, quote,
• 56:43
  Speaker 3: seek to evade or upend the endless attention commodification we're
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: living through. What large-scale responses— do you see in the
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: spirit of markets for natural food that began in the
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: 1970s that you think could come about now?
• 56:58
  Speaker 4: So I think they're going to not be large scale.
• 57:00
  Speaker 4: I think they're going to start small scale. So we're
• 57:02
  Speaker 4: seeing this already being done in schools. We're seeing it
• 57:05
  Speaker 4: in day camps for kids. I think the next step
• 57:07
  Speaker 4: is for adults. So I think one of the things
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: we're going to start to see is people just putting
• 57:11
  Speaker 4: phone cubbies in public spaces, coffee shops, restaurants, stores, like
• 57:16
  Speaker 4: different places where it's just like, oh yeah, we're just,
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: it's not a phone space. This is not a phone space.
• 57:22
  Speaker 4: You just throw it there and get on your way out.
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, like some stand-up shows.
• 57:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. And we've seen it at stand-up shows. There's
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: other places. There's certain elite restaurants don't let you bring
• 57:32
  Speaker 4: your phone in. So I think that just behaviorally, that's
• 57:36
  Speaker 4: one thing you're going to start to see. The other
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: thing I think you're going to start to see is
• 57:40
  Speaker 4: a veer towards paper and dumb phones. I think people
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: are going to start producing technology that is more stripped
• 57:46
  Speaker 4: down that people buy. I think that print is going
• 57:51
  Speaker 4: to make a comeback. I know that sounds crazy, but
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: I really think it's going to start to happen in
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: the same way vinyl did. It's going to take a
• 57:57
  Speaker 4: little while. And that means print magazines. That means hopefully
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: print newspapers, print books, which are actually doing quite well
• 58:05
  Speaker 4: and were not killed off by e-readers. The other big
• 58:09
  Speaker 4: thing I think you're going to start to see is
• 58:11
  Speaker 4: people coming together to experiment with forms of digital life
• 58:14
  Speaker 4: that are not that Get the great stuff about the
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: internet without the ceaseless attention monetization, which is open protocols,
• 58:23
  Speaker 4: open spaces of internet life, forms of platforms that are
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: not controlled by four or five dominant entities that try
• 58:30
  Speaker 4: to relentlessly maximize your eyeballs. All that's possible. You can
• 58:36
  Speaker 4: build open social networks. You can build open protocols. RSS,
• 58:39
  Speaker 4: which is what podcasts operate on, is an open protocol,
• 58:41
  Speaker 4: and thank God it is. So rebuilding or building a new,
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: a kind of civic and open internet. And then I
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: think there's going to be like real political movement behind
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: breaking up and regulating.
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: You think there'll be laws?
• 58:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah. Regulating attention the way we regulate labor hours. I
• 58:56
  Speaker 4: think people hear that and they're like, that's insane. Obviously
• 58:59
  Speaker 4: we can never do that in America, but we thought
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: that about labor hours too.
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: Well, tell me how you think it would work.
• 59:03
  Speaker 4: Well, I think you could just, you could have hard
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: caps on screen time. You could have caps per hour
• 59:08
  Speaker 4: on the app. One way that if you want to
• 59:10
  Speaker 4: avoid hard caps, I thought this was really an interesting idea, Lawrence.
• 59:12
  Speaker 4: Like Lessig said, was like you can just put an
• 59:15
  Speaker 4: accelerating tax on– each minute over a certain amount for
• 59:19
  Speaker 4: the company to pay. Where it's like at a certain point,
• 59:21
  Speaker 4: you're doing something that is taking away from the collective
• 59:25
  Speaker 4: that you then have to pay for. If you have
• 59:27
  Speaker 4: users who are doing this many hours, like you then
• 59:30
  Speaker 4: have something to pay. And I thought that was sort
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: of an interesting way because then that's not a hard cap.
• 59:35
  Speaker 4: It would just like change the incentive structure. The other
• 59:38
  Speaker 4: thing that you could do is you can force these
• 59:39
  Speaker 4: companies to A, be transparent about their algorithms, which they're
• 59:42
  Speaker 4: not now. you can, one of the things that'd be
• 59:44
  Speaker 4: really important in the AI era is transparency about whether
• 59:47
  Speaker 4: you're talking to humans or bots, which is going to
• 59:51
  Speaker 4: be an enormous issue because if you take the weaponization
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: of social attention and you put it in the hands
• 59:57
  Speaker 4: of extremely intelligent LLMs, there's an entire universe of things
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 4: that can be preyed upon your, like that individuation we
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 4: talked about before by things purporting to be human. So
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 4: I think that's really important that we have like total
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 4: transparency on that. And then I think you can also
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 4: just break the companies up or also force the opening
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 4: up of our social graphs, which is to say, have
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 4: some version of your social graph who you're linked to
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 4: that is yours and you can transport from platform to platform.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: You mentioned labor, which I think is a comp you're using.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: In the beginning of the eight-hour workday, they said eight
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: for what we will. That phrase, what we will, is
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: such a good one and a poetic one. Uncommonly poetic
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: for something that's like government issued. Where do you land
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: with that? I don't know what we will in this moment.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: It doesn't feel like we will a whole lot.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 4: That I think is precisely the question. I think if
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 4: you had to identify the source of the argument I'm
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 4: making in the book and what I think is the
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 4: source of our alienation is that In those eight hours
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 4: or whatever amount of time that we have for what
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 4: we will, we feel that we are not doing what
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 4: we will, but rather is willed upon us. And part
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 4: of the project here is reclaiming dominion over our own minds,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 4: over our own attention, to put it towards what we will,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 4: the things that we love, the people we love, the
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 4: people we want to be with, the hobbies or interests
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 4: we want to pursue, and not to have it taken
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 4: from us.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: How have you thought about what you or how you
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: want to spend your time? I.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 4: Really like being a parent. I really like spending time
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 4: with my kids. I love spending time with my wife.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 4: I absolutely love spending time with my friends. I've got
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 4: an amazing crew of friends. Some of them I've known
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 4: since I was 12. We've been together for 30 years.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: I noticed reading about basketball trade rumors is not on there,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: which I think it should be.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 4: Is that how you like to spend your time?
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 4: My brother is like a big basket. My brother's the
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 4: kind of guy that like sends you A trade machine trade.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: That's what Bill Simmons is like.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Who says no?
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: Who says no? Everyone because it will never happen.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 4: Well, except in the case of Luca Freydi.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: I'm so, so glad. We really covered meditating in a
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: strip club.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: We covered everything.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: Which actually is probably why Luca got traded from Dallas.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 4: I don't know, man.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: Breaking news.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: Don't you feel like it's a little bit of weird
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 4: character assassination happening against him that's like through, like no
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 4: one's ever coming out and saying things, but then there's
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 4: this weird by implication that he must have been doing
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 4: something so terrible.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: 100%.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: And as much as I want to end this podcast
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: talking about Luca and the.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 4: The second apron in the Supermax contract.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: This is actually.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: Such my wheelhouse. I'm getting sweaty just thinking about this.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: I do want to go.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: Back to something a little more pertinent to this conversation,
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: which is how you've spent your time. Your first story
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: was in the Chicago Reader. You started writing for them
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: in the early 2000s. You were in Chicago. And there's
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: a story you wrote early on that was called Trapped.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: It was a domestic abuse case. And I believe at
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: the time your wife was a domestic abuse counselor. And
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: you wrote this piece. And in the aftermath of it,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: this woman who was in prison received clemency. There was
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: A clear, quick resolution. You wrote something. Something happened. And
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: I imagine some part of you went.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: Is this how it's going to be? Yeah, totally.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: So walk me through this moment. Like the story comes out.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: It's winter.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: You're south on Clark Avenue. You travel south by train
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: until you hit a bookstore that you know the van
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: will stop and deliver the reader at. Take me back
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: to that morning when you pick it up.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 4: I think what ended up happening, that my first story,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 4: I took the bus down to a bookstore on the
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 4: north side, from the far north side. I think with
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: the Joy Brown story, that was her name, and she'd
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: been convicted of assaulting her abusive partner by pouring hot
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 4: grease on him. She said it was both an accident
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 4: and that he had sexually assaulted her. She was trying
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 4: to get him to leave after she sexually assaulted her.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 4: He denied that. With that cover story, I went all
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 4: the way down because I was so anxious to see it.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 4: I actually remember this. I went all the way down
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 4: to the Reader headquarters offices, which was the first place
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 4: that got them because I was unwilling to wait for
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: my first cover story for it to creep up in
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 4: the van up to the north side. So I went
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 4: down to, I want to say it was on East
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 4: Illinois Avenue in the loop. There's a Thai restaurant on
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 4: the first floor called Star of Siam, I want to say.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 4: And I went into the lobby and And.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: It was there.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: And I remember, I think I brought a camera with
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 4: me to take a picture. I was so.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: Excited about it. How did it feel?
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 4: It felt incredible. It was months of work. I talked
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 4: to so many people.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: I visited.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 4: And Kate and I worked on it together. And then
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 4: she ended up sort of backing off of it and
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 4: taking her name off of it because she had this job.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 4: And it was going to be complicated to publish it.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 4: And at that point, George Ryan was the governor. He
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: had done this incredible thing where he had given clemency
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 4: to everyone on death row in Illinois. And then I
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 4: think it was, I forget how long after that cover story,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 4: but it was in his last day or two, probably
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 4: his last weekend on the job that we got word
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 4: that he had given her clemency.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: Your reasons for writing that story, the hours and days
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: and weeks it took to make that story, are those
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: the same reasons you have for the job you do today?
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 4: They are remarkably preserved. One, it was cool to see
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 4: my name in print and be on the cover. And
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 4: there's some part of me that likes to have my
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 4: own TV show.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: The theater kid. Theater kid. Exactly.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 4: Two, the work itself was incredibly rewarding. The actual, I
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 4: love the reporting and the writing and the revision and
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 4: being told by an editor, like, you can't use that
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 4: quote anonymously. If you want to use that, you got
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 4: to go back to that guy and get it on
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 4: the record. And how is the piece going to be structured?
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 4: And is it too long? And all of the work itself,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 4: like incredibly rewarding. And then three, to try to make
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 4: the world a better place and have some positive impact
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: in the world. And the thing about that story was
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 4: that was the most immediate cause and effect I've ever
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 4: had with any piece of journalism. And it hasn't ever
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: happened as directly since.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: It really is like the first time you go into
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: a casino and play blackjack.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 4: And winning like an insane amount of money.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: And you leave with your friends going like, I think
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: this is great.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: Is this how it is? Exactly.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: But those three reasons, like there's some part of like,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: you know, liking my name in print, liking showing off.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 4: Some part of the actual process of the work itself
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 4: is incredibly intellectually stimulating and rewarding. And some part of
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 4: wanting it to have some positive effect in the world.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 4: And it's those three things then and it's those three
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 4: things now.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: The third thing you said is the last thing I
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: want to talk about in my last question. Because the
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: work you make is fundamentally offering people a way to
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: process an era that feels ungovernable, often indecipherable, confusing, scary, vexing,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: whatever adjective you want. And I get the sense that
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: every day you wake up with a mission of seeking
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: and producing clarity. And focusing attention in a certain way.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: But I got to say, like, as optimistic as you've
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: been in this conversation, there are many more people listening
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: to this right now that don't really know how they
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: can keep going. And not just like, am I tuning
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: in to all in or if I'm listening to talk easy,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: but like, how can I even keep up with this?
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 3: How can I ingest something that feels so toxic?
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: And I wonder if the last thing we could hold
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: together is your father's favorite short story, which is The
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 4: The Myth of Sisyphus is an essay by Camus that
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 4: sort of is the purest distillation of his moral philosophy.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 4: It's the same ideas that appear in, for instance, Plague,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 4: a novel he wrote, which is a kind of willful
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 4: humanism in the face of the absurdity and uncaringness of
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 4: the universe. And he talks about the Greek mythic figure Sisyphus,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 4: who is condemned by the gods to roll a rock
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: up a hill, only to have it roll back down
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 4: over and over and over. And Camus basically says, that's
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 4: what we're doing here on earth. He doesn't believe there's
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 4: a benign God. He doesn't believe there's a heaven we're
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 4: going to. He's an atheist and a secularist. But he
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 4: basically finds meaning in the struggle of the work. And
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 4: the last line of the essay, after he sort of describes...
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 4: the means by which one can wrench meaning from an
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 4: unfeeling and absurd universe with no God, that that's our
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 4: project in life. The last line is, one imagines Sisyphus happy.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: And my dad really loves that essay. I really love
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 4: that essay. And The reason I really love it is
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 4: because it captures whatever source of unflappability I have, which
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 4: is like, we're here, we're here once. We set our
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 4: will to do things that we think are good and
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 4: righteous and joyful with other people we love. And that
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 4: there's something sublime and meaningful and transcendent in that. And
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 4: That's kind of all we can control. We can't control
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 4: the circumstances, whether the rock's going to roll back down
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 4: the hill. We can just control whether we're going to
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 4: push it up or not.
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: Well, I think you're due to push the boulder up
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 3: the hill in about two and a half hours. So
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 3: thank you for the time and for this conversation.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: It meant a whole lot to me.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 4: I can't tell you. I so enjoyed this conversation. Thanks
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 4: for hosting me.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: I'll see you tonight. Zach St.
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: Louis here again from Question Everything. Thanks to Sam Fregoso
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: and the Talk Easy team for letting us share this
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: interview with you. Next week on our show.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 4: I'm not dumb.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 3: Thank you. I may be 90-some years old, but I
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: know what's going on. And what's going on is illegal
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: as hell.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: A 98-year-old newspaper publisher fights off the police as they
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 2: raid her house and office.
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: Don't you touch any of that stuff. Ma'am. You asshole.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 4: Brian will be back with that story next Thursday.