Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Emily Cox: Hi. This is Emily Cox. I'm an editor here at Audible, and today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Chris Hayes, journalist and host of the MSNBC show All In with Chris Hayes. He's also a podcaster and the author of a new book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Hayes: It's great to be here.
EC: Thank you. I listened to this book yesterday, really enjoyed it. It was a good distraction for me, kept me away from the TV. I took my kids sledding and I got to enjoy listening to this. I feel like that was a good mental health moment. I'm really excited to share this with our listeners. In this book, you discuss how we may think that we live in an information economy, but we're actually living in an attention economy. Can you sort of briefly dig into that difference? I loved your picnic table illustration. I thought that was really helpful.
CH: Yeah, so we all talk about the Information Age. I think it's intuitive to all of us that something happened in the economy, particularly in the 1990s, to switch from an industrial model of physical production to a digital model of information exchange and production. Tech companies and all the various people that process health claims, they're not physically moving anything the way a steel worker would, but they can make a perfectly good living, and more and more of our economy centers around that. And because more of our economy centers around that, we think of information as the key resource of the age, but that's wrong. Information is actually cheap. It's basically infinite and plentiful. It can be copied a million times. If someone has your personal data, for instance, if there are 10 firms that have it, or 100, it doesn't really make a difference in your life that much.
The finite resource of this age is attention. And the reason is that information consumes attention. The more information there is, the more it consumes your attention. And attention, unlike information, is fixed, is finite. It can be in one place or it can be in another. It's not copyable. The example I give in the book is an example I’ve actually taken from a great scholar, Lawrence Lessig. If you put a picnic table in your backyard and your neighbor copies the idea of a picnic table in his backyard, which is basically information, that doesn't really change your life at all. You both have picnic tables. But if he steals your actual picnic table, now he has it and you don't, right? And that's the way attention works. Information is like the idea of the picnic table. If other people have the information, fine. But attention is like the picnic table itself. If someone takes your attention and they have it, then it can't be in another place. And so there's a sense of choosing. There's a sense of finitude, and that boundedness, that finitude, that sense of choosing is the defining resource problem of our age.
EC: We think about this a lot at Audible, unsurprisingly, because, yeah, we can make endless copies of books, but we only have a certain share of ear. I think that that's probably what you deal with on your show too. You talk about how you're actually not just fighting the other networks, you're fighting against everything that ever was.
CH: That's right. I mean, the competition for attention is the fiercest it's ever been. Our attention is taken from us more often than it's ever been. I think anyone will attest to that. And also the competition is fiercest. So, when I host a nightly cable news show on Tuesday through Friday—and when I started, I thought of the competition of what is on linear TV at that moment—and 11, 12 years later, it's all of the content ever produced in the history of human society [laughs]. I mean, that sounds grandiose, but it's 100 percent true.
"What makes it to me insidious or dangerous, and the reason I don't think of it as a moral panic, is that this resource—attention—is the substance of life."
My daughter, she'll find these random sitcoms from the 2000s that she gets really into and binge-watches them. I didn't even know these shows existed when they were on, right? But that's something that you can watch. So, at every moment, and it's true for you folks at Audible, if I pull up my phone, what do I want to listen to during this walk, which is a thing I ask myself often. It's the entire Audible library. It's every podcast. It's every album. It's everything basically at every moment, and that competition has made these markets even more intensely extractive because they're fighting so hard to grab our attention.
EC: Right. But early in your book, you talk about historical inflection points where it seems like culture and society are on this dangerous path to bad places. The most surprising to me was there was apparently a huge moral panic about comic books in the 1950s, which I did not know about.
CH: Congressional hearings and everything.
EC: Yeah. I was a comic zombie kid. Archie, right? So, I kind of get it. But, ultimately, big changes in the media landscape haven't ended up spelling doom yet. So, you kind of set us up for this plot twist in the beginning, in that you actually do think we should be alarmed. Perhaps even more than documentaries like The Social Dilemma would have us believe. Why is this time different, and what is the sort of end-of-the-line worst-case scenario you see happening?
CH: I think that it's really good to force yourself to wrestle with the counterargument that this is a moral panic. Moral panics happened around things like comic books in the 1950s, or all these things. So there's a few things I would say. One is, in some ways, I don't think it's different in so far as I do think the critiques or the awareness that a new media form was going to transform both inner life and public life were often true. Like, TV does utterly alter the landscape of American society, American politics, American family life. It does. There are amazing things about it, and there are terrible things about it. The same is true of the printing press, which arguably inaugurates the Reformation and a transformation across the European continent. And radio as well changes the power of the president—FDR and the fireside chat.
So, in some ways, we're dealing with something as profound, as epochal and shifting. In terms of what makes it to me insidious or dangerous, and the reason I don't think of it as a moral panic, is that this resource—attention—is the substance of life. What I mean by that is, our lives are what we pay attention to in every moment to every other moment. When that is taken from us, when it is used or abused or wasted, it's part of our life that is being wasted.
The point I'm trying to make here about this conundrum is more than just an empirical point. I think this is important. Jonathan Haidt wrote this incredible bestselling book called The Anxious Generation about how the ubiquity of screens is causing anxiety and depression. There are people who would cite other studies and fight about what does the literature say about these health outcomes. Independent of what the literature says about the health outcomes, I'm trying to make a deeper philosophical point, which is if you said to me, “I have a friend who's 25 and spends 13 hours a day playing video games,” you could say that's bad for his health, and maybe there's some randomized control trials that show that there are poor health outcomes. But even if there weren't, if you ask me, "Do I think he's living the good life?" I would say he's not. And this, to me, is the sort of central philosophical question at the core of the book, which is wrestling back dominion over our own minds and pointing our attention towards what we will, in the conscious sense, to reclaim a certain sense of ownership over our own lives.
EC: Right. The things you're spending the substance of your life on are your choices and not because you've been wrestled away from reality.
CH: And the title of the book, The Sirens’ Call, which is a kind of dual reference to Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus is lured by the sirens but binds himself to the mast to avoid their call, and also the sound of a siren wailing down the street in an urban streetscape. In both cases, what's key here is that the siren is compelling our attention against our will, or even independent of our will. And this is what makes attention so tricky and so different from other things. It can be compelled at a preconscious level. If you were in a room, you're in a classroom, and someone starts screaming or someone drops a glass that shatters, or someone fires a gun, your attention will fix on that independent of whether you want it to or not, before even the conscious will can exert itself. And because of that, we're vulnerable. Because of that mental faculty, we are vulnerable to having our attention extracted against our will. And that provides an opening for people that are trying to capture it for financial reward.
EC: So, you're obviously sort of, by trade, a miner and merchant of attention, so what made you want to lift up the hood and expose the inner workings of this? Was there a turning point in your life that led you to taking up this topic and writing this book?
CH: I think there's two things that led me here. One is my practice, which is that I have to keep people's attention as part of my job. I've now spent over a decade doing that job. I've done over 10,000 segments of cable news television. And in doing that, the craft of it, it's like building cabinetry or working in a kitchen. You develop craft. And in the craft, you get better at it. You start to understand ways to work more efficiently, to produce better outcomes. That practice, though, constantly forces me to think about these questions. What will keep people's attention? Why does attention flow in certain ways and against others? How do I deal with the attentional force field that exists out in the world?
And so those questions are what gave rise to the book. The craft and practice came before the theory. The book is kind of an outcome of having to think about this every day. It's like writing a book about food after you've been cooking in a kitchen for a decade. And then the other part of it is that I'm super online and have been since I was 14. I love the internet. I've come to love it much less. My own relationship to it is pretty intense and vexed. I think wrestling with that trajectory for myself about the way that I feel about the internet, that I once had such wonder and hope for and now feels the opposite of wondrous and hopeful, is part of what drove me to write the book as well.
EC: Something you don't touch on, but that I'd be interested to get your take on is the relationship between attention and grief. One of the weirdest experiences I've personally had with regards to my own attention span was after my father died, I couldn't do mental math, I couldn't read. And I'm a book person. These sort of grief symptoms, I'll call them, persisted for about a year, during which I felt so horribly scattered. Like, as if I just nailed a two-hour TikTok session. I was just wondering, do you think having our attention fractured the way it is today could be registering on some subconscious level as trauma or tragedy?
CH: That is a really fascinating point. And it's completely outside of anything I've considered. Let me sit with that for a moment. I've been very lucky that both my parents are alive, and I've never experienced the specific grief that you're saying. I've been through grief, and I actually just recently lost an aunt who I loved very much.
EC: I'm sorry.
CH: But that overwhelmingness and distraction is not something that I have a first-person access to. I do think clearly there's an intersection between trauma and distraction, and preoccupation. And adjacent to that is something that I experience, which is anxiety, which I've had anxiety most of my life. I take SSRIs for it and have for 15 years. It's been life-changing for me. The sensation of anxiety or the sensation of grief is a sensation of something inescapable compelling your attention within yourself as opposed to external to yourself. But just because it's within you doesn't make it any easier and doesn't make the experience any better—and in some ways probably is harder to wrestle because you can't outrun your own mind. You can't get away from yourself.
"We are vulnerable to having our attention extracted against our will. And that provides an opening for people that are trying to capture it for financial reward."
I think, to bring it back around, part of why, and I write about this in the chapter on boredom, part of what has happened in the attention age is that we have tremendous demand to have our attention taken precisely because the work of sitting with our own minds can be so difficult. And that could be difficult because we are stalked by grief, or we are bedeviled by anxiety or depression or sadness or any of those human feelings. But oftentimes it is hard to be a human living inside our head, and there's something that we want outside of it to relieve us that burden.
EC: Right. Yeah. You talk about how kids are less happy. People are less happy now, or people are reporting less happiness. And I think that maybe we're mixing up our feelings a little bit.
CH: Can I ask you a question? When you talk about this experience, this year where things that you would normally enjoy putting your attention on, focusing on books or the like, was hard, what did you do instead? Was there some activity that took that place? Was it a lot of just sitting with your thoughts? How did you deal with that?
EC: Well, there was a lot of rage crying I think that happened. But walking, probably. Nature was very helpful. I don't know. There wasn't a lot to do. I mean, the things I was reading were much more commercial. You know, I consumed a lot of K-dramas. I think that actually reading subtitles was weirdly good for my brain. It focused me on something. So that's really interesting.
CH: That's interesting. That's really interesting.
EC: In your research, what was the most surprising aha lightbulb moment you had? What was the most fascinating realization you weren't expecting?
CH: There's a few. So, one was the University of Virginia study where it asked people to just be quietly in a room by themselves without anything to do, asked them how they felt about it, and almost universally they hated it. Then it gave people the opportunity to experience a negative shock, like a little bit of pain, instead of having to sit with their own thoughts. And a very high percentage of the participants did it, including, I think, 65 percent of the men, 30 percent of the women. There's one subject in the experiment who just basically continuously administered shocks to himself unendingly, like hundreds.
That was a really striking illustration of this sort of central question about the perils of our own mind, and that relates to something else that I really found fascinating to wrestle with, is how far back these questions go. So, Blaise Pascal, who's writing in the 17th century in Pensées, says, "I've come to the conclusion that all the troubles of man stem from his inability to sit quietly in his own chamber." That's an insight from the 1600s, and it feels shockingly modern. Similarly, if you go and read the Stoics and what they're saying about social attention, what it does to you to have other people talking about you or thinking about you or forming their impressions of you, and the Stoics say, "Why does that matter to you? How can it actually change you if someone has some opinion of you? What does it do to you?"
That so many of the problems we're dealing with are both a combination of a specific set of technologies and institutions that are current to now, that haven't existed before—we have not had universal access to all of the world's information in every waking second before, basically before 2007, the dawn of the iPhone. Yet they are combined with fundamental ancient and, in some ways, insoluble problems about what it means to be human. And that second aspect of it, to me, was part of the great joy of discovery of the book, was that you start with a question about a particular set of technological and economic circumstances we're experiencing now, and when you trace the line, you end up back in the core of what it means to live a good life, what it means to be a human being, what it means to nurture your soul—these sort of fundamental philosophical questions. That was a beautiful journey and revelation to go on.
EC: I love that. I love that. So, how was the experience of narrating your audiobook?
CH: Oh, I love it. It's the third audiobook I've narrated. I am a talker. I talk for a living, which is a very strange thing to do for work. I say this all the time to my kids, that I talk for a living, which they think is very funny, but it's true. Part of the thing that I love about my job, both hosting the television show and hosting the podcast, is that my twin passions when I was a young man were theater and politics, philosophy, intellectual life. And I have managed to kind of synthesize them in my adult life, where I do sort of perform. And so reading the book is a kind of performance. It's really enjoyable.
I also think one thing was very interesting in reading this book compared to the first two—the fact that I write to speak now as my default means of writing every day. I write scripts, which are different than essays because they are meant to be read and said. That kind of, for lack of a better word, “orality” has shaped my writing now, such that this book, I think, has a kind of chattier register. I'm trying to have a voice that's talking to you in the written word very explicitly and intentionally because I'm trying to keep your attention. And so it lent itself to being read quite easily, I felt.
EC: Yep. Did you find that you were making changes on the fly at all while you were narrating?
CH: Luckily, there were not many. One of the things about spoken communication as opposed to written communication is spoken communication has much more repetition. If you ever actually transcribe what people say, they repeat themselves a lot more than they do in written communication, for emphasis. There's also a lot more ellipses and self-interruption. And those are tropes that I tend to actually consciously mimic when writing monologues for the show because they create an intimacy and informality, but not when you're actually writing a book. So, that's sort of the limit of how much oral approach you want in a written text, if that makes sense.
EC: Yep. That is super interesting, especially sitting here as an English major audiobook nerd. I love this topic and how we write differently when we're meaning to speak it. I have to say, the book, I would highly recommend people listen to it over reading it if they had to pick one format, because it sounds like you. It sounds like your show. It sounds very much like the familiar, if people are fans and they know your work.
So, I understand from a few things you referenced in the book that you probably wrote this over the summer. It was certainly pre-election.
CH: Yeah, the manuscript was locked down. The final revisions happened a few months before the election.
EC: Does any of the substance of the book feel different to you given the current political reality? Would you have done anything differently?
CH: No. And in fact, I mean, honestly, I've been shocked by the uncanny degree to which events have coalesced. The book is about attention domination both in public and private life. It's about the tech platforms that have extracted this. And it's about figures in public life, like Donald Trump, who dominate attention. And every part of that has now converged into the same place.
Elon Musk is a sort of central character in the book. There was a period when I was doing an early revision of the draft where I was like, "There's a lot of Musk here. Is it weird there's so much Musk?” I was debating how central he was. I was debating, “Is he just strange and peculiar in his relationship to attention or is he representative of something larger?” And it clearly is the case that he represented something larger. The one thing I think I got that I didn't quite get right is that Musk is a figure in the book who burns all this money on X because he's so obsessed with attention. But I think, subsequently, it's shown that his ability to capture attention can then be monetized and turned into power whose dollar value exceeds by an order of magnitude whatever money he spent on that.
EC: Right. But you make the point as well that it doesn't matter if he actually makes the money back. He's paid for something he thinks is valuable to him, right?
CH: Yes. That's the thing about Musk, is that he did this for very particular and personal reasons, which is I think he, like Donald Trump, I don't think you can fake the level of compulsion and pathology needed to act towards attention the way that both Trump and Musk do. I think they are authentically pursuing something deep within them. You cannot pretend to feel the way that they feel about attention. You can't force yourself to operate in that. It has to be cellular, as it is for both of them. So in that way, they are authentic, both of them. They're doing this out of a deep human need that's their core human need.
But because they both share this same deep human need, they've also both backed into the key insight about the power of attention in our age, the power it gives you when you have it. I don't think they got to that through theorizing. I think they got to it through some fundamental human need. But because of how intense and acute that need is, they have managed to acquire and wield it and understand its power.
EC: Right. And you talk about how Trump, specifically, has managed to wield negative attention successfully, which most people haven't managed to do. And certainly his emulators haven't been as successful. I still don't totally understand why, what that is.
CH: It's a little bit of a magic trick, right? The basic framework I talk about in the book is that one of the strange things about attention, about social attention particularly, which is attention we pay to people and they pay to us, is that unlike other forms of human relationships and interaction—care, love, loyalty—it has no veillance. It has no content, social attention. So, someone lovingly tending to you while you're sick is attending to you, and someone screaming at you on the subway is also attending to you. They are, in both senses, social attention. And because of this weird quirk of attention, which is that it registers even if it's negative—most people don't like negative attention, but if you're comfortable with it, you can get a lot of attention if you're fine with it being negative. This is sort of the foundational insight that Trump has and also the kind of foundational insight of all of trolling that dominates the internet and now dominates our politics, which is, if all that matters is attention, if that's the most powerful resource, negative attention is actually easier to get than positive attention.
"We don't want our attention taken this way. We don't want this feeling. There has to be another way. And part of that is finding noncommercial means of interaction."
So, screaming at people on the subway, you can get their negative attention, or in a public place. That's essentially trivial. It would be harder to give a beautiful speech that everyone was like [claps], “Awesome,” right? So, if attention is the most powerful resource, and negative attention is a surefire way to get it and you're comfortable with that, then that's a trick. That's a hack. And Trump and Musk, I think, both have that.
Now, the point that you make, that I say in the book, is that there's limits to that because getting negative attention doesn't necessarily help you get elected or persuade people. Most politicians, if given the choice between zero attention or negative attention, they’d rather have zero attention. Like, “I don't want you to know who I am to think poorly of me. I need your vote. I want you to think well of me. I want you to listen to my ideas. I want to persuade you.” Trump has pulled off this trick in a way that others have attempted to emulate and hasn't worked for them. A very funny thing about this era is Trump is a much more successful politician than most of the Trump-esque figures who have attempted to pull off the same trick. There's a certain alchemy there that I think goes back to what I said, which is you could kind of only pull it off if some deep part of you is genuinely comfortable with the negative attention in a way that is not suited for most people.
EC: That is fascinating. So, you call attention a fictitious commodity. That's something I wanted to ask you about because that brought to mind that idea that there's lots of culturally important things that are fiction, like money and countries—those things that only exist because we agree collectively they are real. Is there a possibility of devaluing attention, agreeing collectively that it's not a commodity to be bought and sold, that could save us from this mess?
CH: That's a great question. I think that we can create noncommercial relationships of attention. That, to me, is the key, which is to decommodify it. The term fictitious commodity comes from the great economist Karl Polanyi. His point is basically this: that we have all sorts of commodities in life, which are things that are extracted from the earth and then standardized so that every barrel of oil is like every other barrel of oil, right? And they can be bought and sold. The category of fictitious commodity, in his telling, are things that exist outside of market production but then get pulled into this market formula. So, land is an example. He uses money as another, and labor. Those are the three that he talks about. It's weird for labor to be a commodity at a certain level, like, inside you with the sum of your toil and effort. But the process of the Industrial Revolution and industrial capitalism is to standardize labor along wages, and every hour you work is equal to every other hour you work. But there's something fundamentally alienating about that, as Marx identifies and as I say in the book.
I think there's something similar happening with attention. It doesn't feel like it should be a market commodity, and yet, it is. It's both internal to us and then also taken out into the world. I think part of what you're feeling brew right now, which I think in the course of writing this book and even in the last several months, this rebellion against this is just growing in its power. You could feel it like a spring being pushed down, pushed down, and down, and down. And it's going to pop up, which is we don't want our attention taken this way. We don't want this feeling. There has to be another way. And part of that is finding noncommercial means of interaction.
Part of what was great about the internet that I sort of long for in my old man nostalgia is a noncommercial internet where people connected because they wanted to connect, and it's not like that was not fraught. There were trolls. There were fights. There were message-board arguments. Conflict is endemic to human affairs, wherever you are. You could be sitting around a campfire.You could be in a space module. You could be under any technological regime. You're going to have conflict. We can't get rid of that. What is distinct here is this feeling of alienation and extraction, and the rebellion that's growing against it, which is the feeling of alienation, which is profitable for some people, the extraction that's profitable for a very small number of firms and people that is being taken from us, and the value is being transferred to them. We need to reclaim noncommercial ways of managing our attention.
EC: Is there anything that we can do on a personal level? I loved the vision you painted of vinyl records and Whole Foods, farmers markets. These are visions of how we might take something that became ultraprocessed and commoditized and tried to wrestle it back a little bit. But those also feel like big cultural shifts or business shifts. Is there something we can do as individuals?
CH: I mean, as individuals, I think the one thing I say is make sure that every day you take at least 20 minutes with just your thoughts. That can be the commute. That can be the walk. And expand that. At the individual level, I think get comfortable with just being with your own thoughts. Take your attention inward for a little bit. Doesn't have to be the actual practice of meditation, although that obviously is the most salient, long, psychological and spiritual tradition here.
Then there's all the kinds of things that a million people have talked about, which is phones at the dinner table and managing those screens and attention, doing things together as a family where you are talking to each other and not off in each other's world. But again, there's limits to that. Part of the reason I sketch out these cultural, social, political, even legal avenues is we need to re-create noncommercial spaces on the internet. Open protocols, like Signal, which is a nonprofit, and the group chat which is noncommercial, and Blue Sky, which is trying to create this protocol that all these different people can use so you're not just being monetized and you have control, and we're moving away from an algorithmic feed that is preying on our slot-machine weakness.
I think we're probably going to need regulation both in terms of antitrust and also in how we regulate attention markets, children, the amount of hours we spend on it, how those platforms can operate. But also, a real turn against it as social practice and a social activism. I think we're going to see more and more of that.
EC: Something just popped into my head when you were talking about how you need to take a few minutes with your own thoughts. I've started to realize that people in my life often refer to ideas they have as “shower thoughts,” things that came to them in the shower. And I think that may be one of the only times when you're not—
CH: The last place.
EC: Yeah. Is that the last place where [laughs]—
CH: It's the last place. It is the last place, right? And I think that's part of, again, creativity grows from that emptiness. You need space. For me, it's a walk every day. That's really just central to my mental health but also my creative well-being. I have to be doing that.
EC: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. I really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed your book, and I can't wait for everyone to listen to it.
CH: Thanks so much. I really, really enjoyed it.
EC: Listeners, you can get The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes on Audible now.
