WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1621 - Chris Hayes

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

When Chris Hayes was last on the show almost ten years ago, it was a much different world. Barack Obama had just recently been in the garage and Donald Trump had just declared his candidacy for President. Making sense of that changing world is what Chris does nightly on MSNBC, but he’s also written a new book about our changing brains. Chris and Marc talk about that book, The Sirens’ Call, and our rapidly evolving relationships with attention, information, media and our phones.Click here to submit a question for an upcoming Ask Marc Anything bonus episode on The Full Maron. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey folks, I need your questions! I'm getting ready for another Ask Mark Anything bonus episode on the Full Marin, so fire away! Just click on the link in the episode description and send me a question. Then subscribe to the Full Marin so you can get every Ask Mark Anything bonus episode. Alright, let's do the show! Let's do the show! Sonic the Hedgehog 3 now streaming on Paramount Plus. I don't like being away from home for too long, but sometimes it's necessary. Like if I have to shoot a TV show or I have tour dates overseas. But if you're going away for a long trip, you can host on Airbnb and have someone else take care of all the details for you.

An Airbnb co-host can handle the listing, manage your reservations, send messages to your guests, and show up for any support your guests might need. And you'll still make some cash while you're away. Find a co-host at airbnb.ca slash host. Alright, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fuck, Nicks? What's happening? I'm Mark Maron.

This is my podcast. Welcome to it. It's been around a while. If you're new to it, that's interesting. I hope you hang out, you know, get into it. But if you're a regular, nice to have you back. Welcome. Sit down. Take a load off. Or keep doing your exercise. Or keep washing your dishes. Or keep feeding your baby. I don't know what you're doing. Driving. Are you driving? Whoo! I spent a lot of time in the car

last week. Took me a couple days to come down. Today on the show, I talked to Chris Hayes. He's the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. He was actually on the show 10 years ago in what was obviously a much different world. Obama had just been in my garage and Donald Trump had just declared his candidacy for

president. Wow. That feels like a million years ago or maybe just almost 10. So Chris has a new book out called The Sirens Call and it's about a lot of the stuff I talk about all the time. Attention, information, media, our relationships with our phones. And it's very thorough and very well researched and very well thought out and informative. And it's specific about that,

the evolving relationship with technology of any kind and how it fucks with our brains, fucks with our brains, fucks with our brains. Who are we to think? Who are we to think that we can outthink that thing in our hand? Seriously, what hubris to think we have any control other than to turn it off of that thing in our hand, that big brained motherfucker in our hand that we look at every day and

volunteer for a good brain fucking. What are you doing today? I'm gonna let my phone just discombobulate my entire brain, sense of self, hope, spiritual foundation, whatever. Just let it disassemble my brain every within seconds, milliseconds. Turn that thing on, pop it open. Boom, you've surrendered into the never-ending churn of garbage Yeah, but it knows which garbage to dump into your head. That's all other thing, right? Look, I'll be in Oklahoma City at the Tower Theatre on Thursday, March 6th Dallas I'm at the Majestic Theatre Friday, March 7th Houston at the White Oak Music Hall Saturday, March 8th and San Antonio at the Empire Theatre on Sunday, March 9th,

before I head to South by Southwest. A lot of other dates coming up, Durham, North Carolina. I'm at the Carolina Theater of Durham on Friday, March 21st. I'll be in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Knight Theater on Saturday, March 22nd. And Charleston, South Carolina. I'm at the Charleston Music Hall on Sunday, March 22nd. And Charleston, South Carolina. I'm at the Charleston Music Hall on Sunday, March 23rd.

Then I'm coming to Illinois, Michigan, Toronto, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York City for this special taping, my special taping. Go to WTFPod.com slash tour for all my dates and links to tickets. Also, hey, new cat mugs from Brian R. Jones go on sale today at noon Eastern. These are the handmade mugs you get if you're a guest on WTF. This new batch is available today starting at noon Eastern and they usually sell out pretty fast. Go to WTFmugs.co at noon Eastern today.

But a lot of times I wonder, and it sort of uh relevant to the conversation I had with Chris Hayes, you know how much of that stuff because there is the idea that the information you get when you look at your phone depending on your algorithm or what you gravitate to that there is a truth to reinforcing Whatever it is and this is how they market to you as well, however, what is your disposition? What is your psychological disposition? You know, what do you gravitate towards repeatedly?

And is it something that just accentuates or amplifies your specific state of dread, or does it reaffirm your terror? Does it make you depressed? And then I think on a deeper level, you've got to ask, is that my comfort zone? Is that my home base is being panicky, full of dread, depressed, and do I need to amplify that?

Because on some level, if you're powerless over something, then what's the point of filling your head with it? You know, you wanna keep up, but is there a way to get a breather? Yeah, and is that breather really a breather or is it just sort of like taking a little break from beating the shit out of your brain again? Yeah, and how do you do that?

You can jump around on your phone. I don't know. Like I wrestle with this stuff all the time because I'm as compulsive as the next guy about my engagement with my phone and information, but I think I'm kind of limited. I think I tend to, I don't know if my algorithm is correct. I don't know if I'm on it enough or if I'm doing it right. It shifts sometimes. Gotta be careful what you watch too long

because then you get a lot of that. I understand that. And then there are things that's like, I don't understand this at all. And then I realized that like, I think everybody's getting it. I do my share of, you know, kitty rescues and stuff. But then I like, I spent like a minute, I spent like over a minute, you know, kitty rescues and stuff. But then I spent like a minute,

I spent like over a minute, you know, just watching a drain unclog itself. And it was very satisfying, and I didn't think it was wasted time. And then all of a sudden I'm getting these, like I gotta be honest with you, I'm pretty confident at this point in my life that I could identify an abscess in a horse's

hoof. I didn't ask for that stuff. There was nothing I did that would, I think, instigate these videos of horse's hooves. But I think if I saw a guy on the side of the road and he's standing there with a horse with his foot up, I could be like, you want me to take a look at that? Yup, yeah, it's abscessed. You got one of them curly knives? Because I could probably trim this up. But I don't know how to put a shoe on because they always cut off at that point. But that's just the kind of thing, like, why is it entertaining? I don't know.

Cleaning things things cleaning metal objects rust and whatnot I I Can't answer you but I can't answer the question You know why this stuff is engaging But I do talk to Chris about it and it is just sort of like a dopamine thing whether that dopamine is going to give you a blast of dread or a blast of sort of like a dopamine thing, whether that dopamine is going to give you a blast of dread or a blast of sort of like satisfied customer.

Man, all that stuff just came out of that pipe. Man, we do the pipe riff. Chris and I do the pipe riff. I'm sure many of you have heard of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD. You might think it has something to do with being extra clean and organized, but it's a very serious condition for so many who have it. OCD can paralyze people with fear and anxiety. They can constantly have thoughts they don't want to have and all their energy is spent on making those thoughts go away. Those are just some of the things about OCD you might not realize and a lot of people don't know they have it. Feel shame

about their symptoms and suffer in silence. And not every therapist understands OCD or is qualified to treat it effectively, which can make it difficult to find the right help. But OCD is highly treatable with a specialized type of therapy called ERP, or Exposure and Response Prevention. With NoCD, you can do live virtual ERP therapy with licensed therapists who specialize in OCD. These are highly trained therapists who accept insurance and make treating your OCD more

affordable. In fact, NoCD therapy is covered by insurance for over 155 million Americans. If you relate to any of this or if you want to help a loved one who's struggling, you can learn more by booking a free 15 minute call with NoCD. Just go to NoCD.com to schedule your free call and get connected with someone who can help. That's NoCD.com. Yeah, I think I got to do that.

I think I still haven't gone to get evaluated for ADHD, which some people seem to think that I have. But I don do that. I think I still haven't gone to get evaluated for ADHD, which some people seem to think that I have. But I don't know, I'm mixing it up. I get things done. I can do a lot of things at once. Is that it? Am I doing it? Anyway, okay, Chris Hayes is here.

He's got this new book, which talks about some of the stuff I just talked about which talks about our sort of Codependent or obsessive relationship with the brain fuck device that we all rely on to keep us engaged with what I don't know shiny infinite garbage But the new book is called The Sirens Call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource. You can get it wherever you get books. All In with Chris Hayes airs Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.

Eastern on MSNBC and a note. We recorded this a few weeks ago before the changes to MSNBC's programming lineup so none of those came up. Okay? Okay, this is me talking to Chris Hayes, mostly about his book. This new year, why not expand your life by listening on Audible? Explore audiobooks, podcasts, and exclusive Audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you. Just open the app and tap into your well-being with advice and insight from leading influencers, experts and professionals. Whatever your focus or interest, there's a listen for it on Audible. You'll find titles on staying healthy including personal fitness, nutrition and relaxation, hear ways to improve your relationships both in your

work and your personal life or find out how to embark on a new career strategy. If you want to overhaul your financial life or hear smart talk about investing for your future, you'll find that too. Ultimately it's all about starting good habits. Making a positive change is the best resolution you can make for yourself and Audible can help. There's so much opportunity and more to imagine when you listen. Let Audible help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.ca. So look, Chris, we're in trouble.

Buddy. And I read your book like I read all these books, the ones that I do read. That's what every author wants to hear. Yeah. I read your book like I read all these books. No, no. I mean, books that to me, I want answers, and I want solutions, or I want to know what's really happening.

And usually, if you're thorough, like you are in your book, I'll know what's really happening. But the solutions, here's how far I got. I'm at page. Well, you didn't get to the solutions. I know, that's because I figured you could probably tell them to me. Okay, okay. And maybe in that way, convince me that they're possible.

Okay, yeah, I can do that. But I talk to Brendan all the time about this compulsive relationship with the phone and with technology, and I do bits about it. I've got a bit now that the premise is really that our phones are our primary emotional partners because we get everything we need from them. I've got a bit now that the premise is really that our phones are our primary emotional partners because we get everything we need from them. And you're sitting across from your human partner and they're on their phone getting what they need.

And- It's all right there. They don't need anything from you. You don't need anything from them. That's right. And I say that if you start- Parallel play. Yeah, if you start scrolling right when you wake up,

by the time I get out of bed. I've cried twice and I'm exhausted But it's true dude, I know they're it's potent it's extremely potent I know but like the way you lay it out here in terms of the biology psychology, and then you know even You you cover all the levels spirituality the impact of attention in and of itself and what it means to the human animal at a biological level. And then you sort of arc into how it's being mined, exploited, and I guess used against us to a certain degree because of neoliberal global capitalism and the disintegration or

destruction of actual community, you know, what you have in terms of community happens online and it's really nobody has founded in any sort of tradition or legacy or intellect. It's just a bunch of, you know, people who are just acting with triggers and markers of what they represent in small bits of moments. Yeah. And because of that, that that is, in a sense,

a false community, you know, all it does is serve the content thing. Yeah, I mean, the thing that, one of the things I sort of write about at length in the book and think a lot about is the strangeness of social attention. Okay. Which is both sort of necessary and not sufficient.

Yeah. So it's like attention is the necessary precondition of all actual relationships. Yeah. Like you've got to pay attention to the person that you're having a relationship with. A friend, a coworker, a lover, a family member. But what you want is more than attention. You want something deeper. Right. You want love care recognition sure

And what happens online is that the the the attention is the thing that's being scaled and monetized Yeah, so there's this like thinness this sort of it's like adjacent to the thing we want but not the thing we want right And it's being done at scale and you're and so you could kind of constantly we want, and it's being done at scale. And so you could kind of constantly get a whiff of something that feels like it's almost the thing you want, but it's never actually the thing you want. Well, I mean, Brendan and I talk about it a lot in relation to the addiction model,

which is that there is a dopamine thing that happens, there is a speed ball thing that happens, there is an up and down thing that happens. And I've lately sort of started to talk a little bit on stage about, you know, the nature of, like I'm doing this physical bit of comedy where I do an impression of a guy nodding out on Fentanyl, which is very, you know, full, full, full fold. Yeah.

And then heroin, which is like half fold. And then, and then, then I do phone, which is just hunched over like this. That's a good bit. That's a good bit. And the fact that, you know, despite the thing that I can't reconcile in terms of after reading the book is that, you know, I know when people are on their phone, I know when I'm on my phone and I know how that disconnects me from everything. Literally, like the only thing you don't get, get I mean if you want to get out of the world

You have that in your hand Yeah, but you don't necessarily get the same kind of you know full-body buzz Yeah, that you're gonna get from other drugs, but the fact is you are detached from the world But still in the way you talk about it. It's broad because when I started thinking about My own attention is like I don't do meme shit, I'm barely on Twitter, I look at the news and then I'm primarily obsessed with who's trying to contact me somehow.

And that's it, I feel like I'd like to believe that even though I'm in my phone a lot, it's not for the reasons that you're describing. Right, I mean I think people, there's different relationships people have to it. Yeah. I think that the addiction metaphor is interesting because I actually think, like to me,

I think it's, the reason it's different from booze, drugs, or cigarettes, and it's much more like food, is that it's unavoidable in the way food is. I mean, the thing about having an addictive or, you know, torture relationship with the food is that unlike other things, you can't abstain. Well, yeah, sex and food.

Yeah, you can't abstain. And attention, you can't abstain from either. You're gonna put your attention somewhere at all times. You're gonna be in your head at all times. You can't outrun it. You're going to have to live head at all times. You can't outrun it. Yeah. You're going to have to live with how you manage your attention, where it goes, how you regulate it, in the same way that you're going to have to put food in your body.

And so, I do think the addiction metaphor is useful, but it's not useful in the sense that abstaining is not an option. I mean, you can abstain from the phone. Right. But then you're going to have I mean, you can abstain from the phone, but then you're gonna have like, you still got the brain. You're gonna get real needy around the other, the people in your life. You're gonna start annoying your loved ones.

They're like, why you like this? I'm like, I'm just taking a break from my phone. And you've got to somehow match that, the amount I get out of the phone. Can you do that? You gotta please entertain me. Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, let's talk about the evolution of this attention as commodity.

Because I mean, that seems to be the arc of the book. And I think from there, we get the dangers of it. And also, the other thing that I talk about a lot is just what is it doing to our brains? I mean, ultimately you cross a point of no return with this thing where it's altered our perception entirely. It's altered our need for whatever those basic needs are not unlike drugs and that joke I just made up just then

that if you're used to getting all this stuff from this machine that is designed to blow our brains out every fucking day with more than we could ever want, when you go into the human world, or you just sit, like I'm very aware of that. If I just put out some walnuts for the squirrels and I sit there and I wait for the squirrels, it would happen very quickly with a reel.

You know, like you'd cut right to the squirrels coming. For me, I could be out there an hour. And what am I doing with that time? Well, I think that the difficulty of sitting with your own thoughts is kind of a huge part of this. And you track that historically. Yeah, I mean, that's actually, I think, an important part of this was like the demand side,

which is we want to be diverted. And that desire for diversion predates the phone. I mean, you know, I quote Blaise Pascal talking about the 17th century, you know, in some ways it's what the Buddha is talking about in 600 BC. Like the sort of commodification really starts with recognizably modern media. Benjamin Day has this New York Sun, which is the

Penny Press, where he's the first one who kind of has the idea that if you sell a newspaper at a loss, you can make money selling advertising. So he has this sort of insight about packaging attention as the thing you're selling. And then that spins out into, that basically becomes the model all the way through radio, television, and now meta, right?

They're all doing that same thing. But meta or bite dance or Snapchat, whoever is just doing it at a scale and a ubiquity and a level of sophistication that's just in a completely different realm. But the basis of that is, and throughout the book it seems, and maybe I'm being naive, is that you want attention to sell things. So the economy of attention is really just holding the audience to sell the things. Yeah, that's, well, or you want it for political ends

or other ends, but in a commercial sense, it's to sell the thing. Right, to sell the things. And then like, but what I don't get is like, I don't feel like, you know, that I avoid all those ads and even the ones- You don't buy the stuff. Not really.

So, but they still have my attention I know well the weird thing about it is one of those strange things that I track in the book is that from the very beginning of The idea of selling attention to advertisers. Yeah, there has been this fascinating debate of like does it work? Right. Yeah, and how does it work? Yeah of like, does it work? Right. Yeah. And how does it work? Yeah. And are you actually getting sales from the attention you're garnering? And you would think that, you would think that

that would be a solved problem now. Right. Right? That like, okay, back in the radio days, how could you really trace it? But now you really know. And it's still hilariously opaque how unclear it is about how effective the

The throughput from attention to sales and yeah Well, I mean I was at the movies last night and they have an ad at the beginning one of those sort of Like you can have your ad here like on this screen before the movie and it's clearly someone's big acting job Right, you know to do that, but I'm like, this is fucking ridiculous. I mean, who is this even for? I think that everything in the book and all the history and philosophy of it all really has more to say about how is it changing our brains?

And what are we adapting to? And can we come back from that? And in terms of whether it's propaganda or it's advertising, I mean, the truth is is that it is somehow enabled fairly shallow people to engage in a cultural discourse that's way above their heads, but it doesn't matter. Because there's a point in the book where you basically say that the language of debate

and the language of democracy and what needs to really be talked about in a fairly deep sense is impossible and it's boring. Yeah, it's like meditating in a strip club. Right. So, but where does that leave us? Well, I mean, I think you're seeing where it leaves us right now, which is that the government, basically the government, the most powerful government on earth has been literally taken over by trolls.

Yeah, right. Will Stancil's a sort of writer that, I was just reading this as I was coming over here and I think that's one way of, and I write about this in the book, that like the weird thing about attention is that it can be negative. That get courting negative attention is a kind of like shortcut hack to getting attention.

If you don't care about, you know. Right. It being negative. Right. What that means is that you don't get debate. You don't get discourse. You just get this sort of reaction and trolling. Yeah.

And now you really genuinely have a literal sense in which Musk, whose brain has been rotted out by online. When you talk about what it's doing in our brains, you can watch Elon Musk lose his mind. The need for attention is so fundamentally ego driven. So when a guy has that much power and craves that much attention and has that much of a platform, we're all operating in reaction to him literally now on a global level.

Yeah, I mean he is the, he's the, it's the, the, it's the Frankenstein's monster, it's the Oppenheimer moment of the attention age. Yeah, right now. Right now, like it's all like everything you're talking about, like the drug-like addiction, the way it's rewiring a brain has all now converged in the two most powerful people in the country who are in tandem.

Well, like Trump's an old school huckster attention getter. He innately knows how to hold and maintain and capture attention. And needs it desperately. That's the other thing about him that makes him effective is that you can't fake the level of pathology that drives how much he needs it.

Yeah, with both of them. Yeah, no, exactly. But Musk is now the sort of 2.0 iteration. You're totally right. Old school medicine man, Huxter, tabloid, P.T. Barnum, Trump, TV, fundamentally a TV guy. The 2.0 iteration is Musk, whose brain has been rotted out by Twitter,

who bought Twitter for $44 billion so he could be the main character. Who's now locked in this like, totally pathological relationship to online response. Okay. Who's now locked in this like, totally pathological relationship to online response. But, and the issue, the problem with the troll is essentially that, you know, they thrive more on negative attention than they do on positive attention.

Yes. And that throws a switch in the brains of the angry and simple, you know, to thrive on that as well and double down on even the most heinous of ideas and Like I on a day-to-day basis. I really don't know You and I I think have this or maybe it's a fading belief that people are inherently human and decent Yeah, but but I think that in in relationship to information technology

that in relationship to information technology, that the human brain is pretty fragile and probably not as deep as we thought. And as a machine can be turned a certain way and it becomes irretrievable. Yeah, I mean, I think that that is true. But I also, what I get, part of what I think is, we went through a bout of this exact discourse in the wake of World War II.

Around what? Fascism and Nazism. Well, right. And how was it possible? I mean, that same switch got thrown. Yeah, okay. But it hasn't been reaffirmed on a daily basis a thousand times a day. But I think there's a really interesting question there because a lot of, there was a certain

discourse that comes out of World War II that does, I think, look at what we think of as mass media and mass propaganda as a huge part of producing fascism. And I think that was probably right. I think we're getting our own age's version of it that's particular to the kind of wiring that basically social media is doing. But also, in light of that and in light of the moment we're having now now that everybody is so

Distracted and the information is so fragmented and people can take the information they want that you know and that lack of tolerance and Sort of enforced lack of empathy, you know creates a you know an audience of monsters and these are primarily, you know lonely angry people with grievances that are- Men, men particularly, young men. Grievances that are beyond their immediate understanding and they're satisfied through this doubling down

on hateful bullshit is that in terms of a civilization, where you have a large part of the population able to dismiss the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people potentially, and also the firing of tens of thousands of people as just being par for the course, or even if they're not even paying attention to that. How do you get that collective empathy back? I know you don't necessarily have answers

and we're getting away from the question, but maybe. No, I mean, look, I don't, I think we need to, I don't have some straightforward way to cut through. I do think that like, I think basically the current attention marketplace is fundamentally reactionary. It stacks the deck towards reactionary ways of thinking and being and reacting. Because that keeps people engaged.

Because it's, yes, because the threat, you know, the threat and the hack of negative attention. Yeah. But I also think it's also not the full story and that there are ways for forms of positive attention and solidarity and empathy to flow across those platforms as well. And we've seen them and we've seen people,

we've seen, you know, mobilization of mass movements around the world. We saw the George Floyd protests, like, you know, mobilization of mass movements around the world. We saw the George Floyd protests. Like, you know, the door does swing both ways, even if it's sort of hinged in one direction. Right. But you can, like, I guess I want to push back on the idea that we're in a terminal state. Okay.

Well, I mean, you sort of have to if you want to hold on to hope. You seem to think we are well I mean, I don't I don't really know because Leo Mike's my my experience with humans You know has always been like well if you if you get one-on-one with somebody you can probably you know find some connection there And at least assess, you know the vulnerabilities of somebody you're talking to instinctively if you have that capacity. But once the dehumanization takes place.

And you get them in a crowd. Yeah, well that too, but even now I'm seeing on an individual level, if the dehumanization element is deep enough and they've really separated their ability to register that because they're operating at this heightened state of what I, sort of the only analogy I have is like when you do morning radio and you're in that zone, that amplified zone of continuing to talk and follow through with whatever you think is the trajectory.

It's all morning radio now. That's actually a pretty good, I say that, that's like the shock jock model. It's the shock jock. That's actually a pretty good. Yeah. I say that. That's like the shock jock model. Yeah. It's the shock jock model. Well, I mean, but people are talking like that. Yes. No, I mean, the shock jock model is now like the model of discourse.

Yes. Like shock jocks, which used to be this like very niche thing. Right. That had one little small particular set of attentional incentives. Yes. Is now the dominant form of discourse. But I don't, I go, like that's one step away from, you know, laughing over a mass grave, right?

And it's like, you know, the thing that always sticks in my mind, and I haven't really figured out how to integrate it into a comedy piece, is all those pictures that were taken at public lynchings in the South, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, it looks like a fucking date night. It's a party. And there's just people, and it's like, how close are we to that in terms of the othering

of a very broad group of people, which is the woke, the liberal, the Democrat, the satanic, whatever it is, that how close are we to that party? I mean, I think one way I think about it is that, you know, how close is it? Are we to that party? I mean, I think one way I think about it is Musk has this thing where he's like, you are the media, right, he keeps saying this. And the way I think about it is that, yeah, we had that version of the media.

It was called the village rumor. Salem witch trials, lynch mobs. Like that's what you are the media means. Like what has happened is the most vicious parts of the village rumor have now been reinvented at scale. So I think it does connect back to exactly that phenomenon. Now, the reason that I say reinvented is because the ability of masses of people to aggregate

towards cruelty, violence, mayhem, murder is not dependent on the technology. Like, no, it's happened many times. Many times, you know, but you don't. Religion, nationalism. You don't need Facebook for pogroms, you don't need Twitter for the Salem Wish trials, like, you know, but I think you're right that like,

this sort of, the heightened state of attentional wiring and reactivity is pushing people towards something really, really dark. And again, we saw, like there was a concrete example of this in Myanmar where, you know, in Burma where, where the government used Facebook as a vector for ethnic pogroms. Yeah.

I mean, literally got on the platform. These people are raping your women, these people are dogs, these people need to be exterminated, and it led to mass killing. 10,000 people. And it was culturally insulated and in a national sense, small enough to make action happen. It did, and in fact, one thing that everyone

sort of lost sight of is when Zuck came out to go on Rogan and then announced that like, we're not woke anymore and we're getting rid of our, you know, we're getting rid of our- DEI and- We're getting rid of that, but we're also getting rid of content moderation. We're getting rid of these fact-checking.

That the reason that stuff all started was because like, they were culpable in a literal pogrom. Like they were used for the darkest shit that humans do. Yeah. Facebook was. Yes. And then they had, there was all that, it was a big story. Yeah.

Human rights groups were documenting this. They then had to come out of them and be like, well, Jesus Christ, we've built a machinery that can in certain hands can be the machinery of ethnic cleansing. We need to do some things with it. And then 10, 12 years later, it's like, fuck it. Screw it. But that speaks to the thesis is that the attention,

the commodity of attention, even in something that's evolving as a fascist state is the premium. It is because we live in an age where information is infinite, plentiful, replicable. You keep saying infinite. I like that because it seems infinite until you get the same real choice. It is weird when that happens, isn't it?

So I already saw this one. I thought this wasn't supposed to happen. I think the reason that is is because if you spend your time on it, even if you spend a lot of time on it, if it's limited and you're not doing a lot of the picking, is that you're really getting like, because I was just thinking about this after reading some of the book today is that for some reason I started getting these reels of guys cleaning the hooves of horses, trimming horses.

Why is that everywhere? It's because you're not spending the type of time on it that gives it a definable algorithm for you. I think if you're relatively passive about your engagement, there are these ones that run through, and also they speak to this base, this thing you talked about in terms of the basis, you know, type of information.

Yeah. And I think that is what that is. Yeah. Because it's firing some deep circuitry. Yeah, yeah. But like, you know, if you're in a political loop or you're in the food loop that you got in that you talk about on the book, I mean,

I don't even get those anymore. I don't even know why. For a year, for a while, I was just getting like food, cooking reels where I'm like, what country is this? You know, what is that? Oh, the street food reels? Whatever. I love the street food reels. Yeah, what country is this? You know, what? The street food reels, whatever.

The street food reels. Yeah, yeah. I love those. They're great even if you're like, I don't know if I would eat that. It looks a little dirty in there, but. Yeah. But I think that when you started talking

about the basis form of this engagement, you know, I watched a large pipe unclog itself for a minute and a half. The entire video was just the opening of a pipe with sludge. And then it shoots out. Yeah. Yeah. Those are great. Those are so satisfying. They're satisfying on the most base level, like literally the biological level. Right. But not based in the terms of like, this is wrong or stupid, but it is kind of. Right. But the point that you're making here is that, right, because what is happening is

competitive attention markets algorithmically engineered are going to drive towards the base in the sense of the closest to our biological affinity. If you're not playing the game where we can figure out who you are, watch this pipe shit for And you're like this is good this is good good. This is pure this might be this might be poetry This might be art. It's really tapped into something. It's funny too because like at some level

I say this that yeah, you that you're someone who's experienced, you've been in entertainment and comedy and all these things. So there's all these gatekeepers where people have to give green light to things and you pitch stuff. And the funny thing about the algorithm is no one has to pitch anything. So you couldn't have gone to Hollywood and be like, I've got a show where we just saw show pipe shitting. For a minute at a time. In a minute at a time. That would have worked. I think you could have probably put it on TV and it would be like, I've got a show where we just saw show pipe shitting. For a minute at a time. In a minute at a time.

That would have worked. I think you could have probably put it on TV and it would have like America's Funniest Home Videos, it probably would have slayed. No one had the idea and no one would have green lit it. It just turns out that. Well, there was an approach to advertising that that could fit perfectly and you could do that for a minute. If you put that as a commercial on TV, just that pipe for a minute and then at the end said you commercial, you know, on TV, just that pipe for a minute,

and then at the end said, you know, you know, medical insurance, something more specific, just like a laxative. Right? I mean, that would be the most effective thing. Because that has to be the primal thing it's tapping into. Yes, the satisfaction of evacuation. Yeah, yeah. On a biological sense. But but that base, but the point being that that baseness thing it's tapping into is the satisfaction of evacuation on a biological sense. But that base, but the point being that that baseness, which in this sense doesn't carry with it the moral sense of baseness, right?

Which is like pogrom ethnic cleansing is adjacent in the wiring. Isn't that interesting? Right? Like that's the thing like. Shitting and killing. Well, I think these deep, yeah, deep essential aspects, and I think the killing part of it or the demagoguery part is that the attentional circuitry we have fundamentally is about threat.

Okay, right. You talk about that in the book. But the predator in the bushes. The, like, you know, if you were walking across a street and you're lost in your phone, and the car honks the horn before it hits you, when it honks the horn, you pay what I call in the book, what is called in literature, involuntary attention.

You don't get to volitionally weigh in about whether you're going to pay attention to that horn, luckily, because that's the thing that saves your life in that moment. Right, but if you live in a big city, it could go either way. Also true. There's that attentional... You might look up and then back to your real of the pipe. That's right. I gotta finish this pipe or evacuation before I get hit by this car. Exactly, or it's evolved enough to know that the distance seems, you know, relatively far away and maybe I can watch something unfold, but I don't think I'm going to.

But I think that what's evolved, and I guess the transition from an ad selling attention holding model, and Brendan and I have talked about this, from an ad selling attention holding model. And Brendan and I have talked about this and I've had guests that spoke to this, the Bobby Althoff episode. That these people that know how to mine the attention and work within the structure of attention getting technology have also found that, you know,

that offers them, this is the whole economy in terms of attention it seems to me, is that you get people that use you know, that offers them this is the whole economy in terms of attention, it seems to me, is that you get people that use the technology, hold the attention, and then, you know, figure out their business within that. That's exactly right. And that and whose goal, they are not like, there's a weird inversion of attention as means or attention as end. Yeah. So it's like, if you were an artist or a writer, you had something to say. Yeah.

The thing you had to say was the end. And then you want to get attention as the means towards getting that out. Yeah. Or, or doing your artwork or making a living. Increasingly, the ending of itself is attention. Yeah. How to get it.

Yeah. And then when you get it, then you'll figure out like how do you monetize it? Right, who's gonna give me the money? Mr. Beast is a great example of this. He's like, he's genuinely a savant. Yeah. And he's been very straightforward on this.

Like he started producing the content he did as a byproduct of studying the algorithm. Right. And what, how it worked, and what was the best thumbnail, and what kinds of content did well on YouTube. And he's, I mean, he's brilliant at it. But that's an, in this day and age, that's entrepreneurial incentive.

Yeah, it's an entrepreneurial incentive, and I don't like, I don't begrudge it at all, but it is a, it's an inversion of like, I like to make this thing, and then I put it out there, and then it- I hope people like it. I hope people like like, I like to make this thing. And then I put it out there and then it. I hope people like it. I hope people like it as opposed to, what do people like, what works in the?

And now you've got the craziest thing about this is, the sort of terminal point of this, because attention is a resource, if you get it, then you can figure out how to monetize it, right? The meme coin is the ultimate embodiment of this, where people are purely monetizing attention via creating a crypto coin that doesn't hold any inherent value,

that doesn't do anything, that only gets purchased because enough people know who you are such that you could sell it at a scale that you could make money off it. And also you talk about it being a fictional commodity. Yes. Explain that to me. It's a great term from Carl Poliani as a political economic theorist of the 19th, 20th century.

And his idea is like, we have commodities, like oil's a commodity or rubber, right? His idea of a fictitious commodity is something that the market treats as a commodity, but wasn't produced for the market. So land is an example, like land just exists and then like you turn it into this commodity. Labor, which is the thing inside us that is our sum total of effort and toil. an example, like land just exists and then like you turn it into this commodity, labor,

which is the thing inside us that is our sum total of effort and toil. And I say in the book that attention is also a fictitious commodity in that attention exists independent of the market, but it's internal to us, but it gets extracted from us and priced and traded the way a commodity does. So it's like a fictitious commodity. So on a small level, that would be listeners or viewers. Yeah, listeners, viewers, or advertisers. And that's how you sell, like, we've got this many, here's our rate sheet,

relative to how many people pay attention. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. And what's weird about that, in the same way that I think, the experience of the commodification of labor that Marx identifies is alienating. Yeah, oh, that's a big part.

It's alienating because there's this weird thing that happens in the Industrial Revolution with labor where the total aggregate value of labor is extraordinary, right? And not just extraordinary, it's necessary for the whole Industrial Revolution to happen. Like there's no workers, you can't do extraordinary, right? It's, and not just extraordinary, it's necessary for the whole industrial revolution to happen. Like there's no workers, you can't do it, right? So all the labor put together is super valuable.

And in fact, the value upon which everything depends. Your individual slice of the value, when you go to the sweatshop for 60 hours a day, is nothing, it's a pittance. And yet to you, that's all you got. It's the most important thing. Right. And the same thing is happening with attention.

Attention pooled together in the aggregate makes multi-billion dollar corporations. It moves markets, it moves governments. Right. Your individual slice when there's an auction going off in the background algorithmically of like that next reel is like literally fractions of a penny.

Yeah. And yet to you, your attention is all you have. That's right. If someone takes it, if it's not being, if it's not put in the place you want it to be, something's been kind of taken from you. Right, but this new generation of entrepreneurs and content creators have figured out that, that with that, they can make a fortune if they figure out the trick. If you aggregate enough of it.

Yeah, because what you're saying is that as a laborer, you know, you're part of the whole is minuscule and not appreciated and gets you relatively nothing. But it seems like the alienation that people are operating in as content creators or as people that play this troll game. There's a little bit of the possibility of winning the lottery.

There wasn't for the worker. A little bit, but the delusional part of it is that it's a lot. That in the sense that you talk about delivering a tweet that runs the world, that goes around the world, even if it's for a day or two, that incentive on a personal ego level will get you in. And then if you figure out how to chase that,

you could get a job in the State Department. I think. Like, if you get good at that. Maybe DOD, you know, possibly. Of course. Yeah. So here, let me ask you this question. Cause I think what's interesting is that you have, you're someone whose career has moved

through a bunch of different modalities and moments in time in attention markets. Like standup comedy, morning radio, sort of frontier of podcasting. And, and one of the contentions I have is that comedy, morning radio, sort of frontier of podcasting. And, and one of the contentions I have is that there are better and worse models that do better and worse things to us and to the incentives of people making stuff. Yeah.

That matter a lot. Like that, that, that the structure of markets in some ways matter. So like the current structure I think is really bad. And what are you talking about specifically? Well, I think the sort of algorithmic feed, right? Whereas the sort of, I do think the like subscription model is actually, it's a way of monetizing attention for sure. But I also think it's like, has a bunch of better incentives.

Well, that's right. If you deal with a curated platform, like the difference between doing it for me now, and let me speak to something first, is that unfortunately and fortunately, I've never thought in terms of market. I don't think in terms of money, in the sense that I'm happy that I have enough money

to eat wherever I want. I don't buy a lot of things. So part of the equation that is like, how do I make a lot of money, is just fundamentally not who I am. Right, no, but you're an example of what I'm saying, which is that like, you've been doing stuff because you wanna do it,

and then find an audience for it. Well, yeah, I mean, I want the attention, but the sad thing about me, is despite whatever Brendan knows as my producer and business partner, in terms of how we're doing, I never really ask him for specifics because I don't wanna hear it

because sadly I can be sated with too good emails. Yeah, that's good. Well, yeah, kinda, but you do get hungry for that attention but it's still a very personal and very primitive attention seeking thing for me is that I need to know that it's having an impact somehow. And I think by virtue of who I am on that level, the way I speak to you or anybody else

resonates as something authentic, and that resonates with the type of people you're talking about who want to make choices around what they are taking in in relation to what they think is important, creatively, emotionally, and all that other stuff. And the idea of what you're saying, that for me, you like to do a Netflix special

versus an HBO special, I know that HBO is a curated shop, that they're gonna have one great show on, and their homepage is gonna really showcase all the other stuff they're doing, because it's finite. And then you have a shot at getting the type of people that would be moved or interested in what you're doing.

Whereas, I can't even get past the fucking menu on Netflix. Like I spend more time flipping through options than I do watching anything. It's true. But is that part of their model? Look, we've got to look at what we have. I do think they have a quantity model, for sure. But in terms of what I feel now is a futility

in the face of this tsunami of garbage and how it's turned a lot of human brains inside out in terms of their capacity to appreciate anything or process anything on a deeper level. Like this idea that people kept saying, it's like this attention span deficit that you've got to figure out, you can only do this amount of time

because that's the amount of time that people will pay attention. I still push against that. Maybe I'm naive or dumb, but I'm like, no, no, people can pay attention for two hours. They can though. I mean, that's one of the weird dichotomies of the age, right, is that, and this is part of what I'm trying

to get at with sort of different model questions. Is that, Maro was saying this last night, it was a pretty funny point where he said, you know, everything's either 10 seconds or like three hours. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's like, it's a 10 second video or a three hour podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. And what, what I think that speaks to is that because we have these different attentional circuitry, we've got the kind of predator in the woods, car honking its horn, casino compelled attention. And then we do have all of the tastes and appetites of human beings, which is like people watch the ring cycle over eight hours to watch opera

and they read War and Peace and they listen to three hour podcasts. And like, so those two things are next to each other. It's the same way like our biological appetites work where it's like, if you want to sell food at scale, you can sell Coca-Cola, French fries, and burgers anywhere. But if you ask what do people like to eat, it's everything. So those two things are next to each other always.

Different kind of market models or institutions can coexist. Yeah. Or incentivize one or the other. Yeah, okay. So I get that. So in speaking of it in market terms, what we, the difference in time is interesting, and you're kind of attributing that to the different attentional, you know, drives we have.

Yeah, yeah. But ultimately, the core of why people do it is still feeding something reactive, usually, that will support their point of view or make them feel smarter. And I, but I think the point I'm trying to make is that the sort of philosophical and moral discourse necessary to keep community human

is lost in most of this. Yeah, I mean, I think that's because one side of that is winning out over the other. The quick, the- Yeah, yeah, the base, the sort of, the kind of fast food version in the analogy, right? Sure, sure. But I also think like, so here's an example of that.

The place I find hope. Yeah. Podcasts exist in their current form based off an open platform called really simple syndication, RSS, which is the technical means by which you can achieve the same sentence wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah.

Yeah. That openness of that platform has mattered profoundly and tremendously to the growth of what it is. Yeah. That's a place where there's a technical of that platform has mattered profoundly and tremendously to the growth of what it is. That's a place where there's a technical infrastructure that's actually underpinning an entire genre that does, I think, often allow people to think deeply,

listen to deep conversations, spend 15 hours on the revolutions podcast about the history of the French Revolution. Oh yeah, I guess what, that's sort of a radio motto. I think in my mind, I was just thinking about the visual thing. Cause I still do, we're audio only, we're old school. You are. And-

No, the video thing is, I mean, the idea that we are moving towards, this is something that's happening right now, the kind of death of text. Yeah. Like we're moving towards a kind of post-literate age where everything is visual. I saw this data the other day because talking about how it rewires our brain.

There's this thing in, there's this thing known as the Flynn effect, which is that as societies get wealthier, the average IQ increases, cumulative. Which to me speaks to the fact that like you isn't measuring anything in eight, it's measuring a set of circumstances. Anyway, this has been basically a lockstep rule. There's some evidence coming in that like Americans are declining cognitively in their IQ, that we're like reversing the Flynn effect. And I think it's like, I think we're literally getting stupider, like I think that the attentional

circuitry is being rewired around like short form video, not longer logical processing. The crack element. Yeah, and it's actually doing something to us like actually in our aggregate cognitive abilities. Making us dumber. Like literally, not in a like, idiocracy jokey way, but in a like actual

Okay, so that's interesting. Testable way. Well, that's disconcerting, but I guess what was sticking in my mind about the idea of RSS and actual sort of thorough long form conversations about whatever or journalistic investigations is that does the satisfaction of engaging with that necessarily mean that you are an active part

of a community that is proactive? I think there's some other side effect to this where you're like, well, it's the same thing about, you know, progressive causes and the kind of falling out of the democratic ideas that, you know, what is the level of engagement other than listening to the thing? Yeah. I don't think necessarily, yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to say like these sorts of models produce community building, although in some places they can. Well, yeah, I think that like, you know, indivisible, you know, there are certain things that promote civic or civil action. But I think a lot of people find satisfaction. It's just like the hashtag thing. It's like, you know, I was part of that hashtag.

Like, okay. So, but like, you know, I'm guilty of it myself, but I understand that a lot of this discourse is still available, but it's not guiding culture in any way. And it's sort of like, my grandmother years ago when we were in Vegas, my family used to meet my grandparents from Jersey, they go to Vegas for something once a year, so we go from Albuquerque to Vegas, and I must have been in high school and I remember asking my grandmother,

you know, does she like Vegas? And she said, well, it was nicer when the boys ran things. And I think it just meant there was a type of hospitality when there were fewer hotels and the mob was involved, where you would show up, and they'd be like, hey, welcome back right right right So but there is a sense of like the the the cultural focus of three networks with one PBS Where at least even if it wasn't you know completely on the level information?

Everybody was still getting roughly the same information and there was there was like part of what I say, what I say in the book is that, like, one way of defining culture is what people pay attention to together. Yeah. Like, that's one way you could define what culture is. That's right. And that is undermined by your observation in the book

that nobody is watching the same thing ever. Yeah. Because of algorithmic. Even in the same home. You know, I mean, this sort of, I talk about the book. One of the things that was fun was to research the origins of the Walkman. Yeah, oh, that was great, yeah.

Which, when you think about it, it's like, I don't think anyone, when they're thinking of like, great innovations in technology is like the Walkman. Actually, the Walkman, what the Walkman did was- The great isolator. Exactly, and what's fascinating about it is, it gets created by Sony, and they're worried that people will think it's anti-social.

At the last minute, they add a second headphone jack to the original Walkman. So they could be like, plug in with your friends. Right. You know, like you're not, but people thought it was a scourge at the time. They were like, there's all this stuff, the writing at the time of like, you're listening

to music by yourself, like just alone. And it's, that is now the default of how people walk through the world, you know, and, and, and the, the Walkman and the phone have created the ability of this hyper individuation. Yeah. What, what, you know, you have five people in your household, each of those five are watching something

different that is grabbing their attention and there's sort of good things about that for the culture, which is that you break out of the, the handcuffs of like middle brow. Yeah. If you have to program for all five of those people in the household to watch the same thing. Yes.

There's one thing you got to do. Yeah. But if you can give each of those five a different thing, there's different things. And there's good and bad about that. But the fundamental aggregate thing is that we, massness or mass culture or paying attention together is basically falling apart.

Right, until somebody with the thrust of a effective autocrat is able to take all the attention. That's the one thing, right. effective autocrat is able to take all the attention. That's the one thing, right. But I think, you know, in terms of the three networks sort of thing, once the idea was posited that, you know, that information, and this came out of the 60s too, which anything that came out of the 60s, you know,

ideologically or in terms of personal values is exactly what's being erased now. And that's been an agenda for decades. But ultimately, once all information becomes dubious and there is no bar of barometer for truth on any level or fact, you know, then you have this mess. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and I think that the fact that,

one of the things I write about that I think is a sort of important concept to think of is like attentional regimes. Yeah. And that all human communication, all cooperative work depends on some attentional regime. Like if you're in a meeting, there's an agenda.

Yeah. Yeah. Your first day of, of pre-K or a nursery school, there's some attentional regime the teacher introduces like raise your hand, right? All that stuff in a classroom, in a meeting, in a conversation where we're alternating turn-taking and looking at each other.

Attentional regimes are necessary to regulate attention at any moment towards any collective productive enterprise among humans. And that's true of a democratic society. You need some attention regimes. In the U S Capitol on the floor, there's like very sophisticated rules about floor time in committees there are the, the, the, the, the large scale attentional

regimes that might regulate the flow of attention for democratic deliberation have totally broken down. Right. Okay. Completely. And, and so even these vestigial ones like the Sunday shows, which there's all sorts of critiques off of the Sunday shows, but like public affair

programming as a specific attentional regime that the networks did in a trade basically with the FCC to be like, here we're serving the public interest. That had some sort of, there was an attentional regime there for the purpose of public debate. All of that, it's all gone. It's all gone and whatever of it exists is being watched by 80 year olds.

Yeah. Because they only, right. By the way. Well, they're the only- God bless them, by the way. Well, they're, like you said, when you were born and when I was born, that's how they were wired. So now, no one's wired like that. They're wired by this other thing. They're wired by this other thing.

And you came into your adolescence in that world. You were there as a teenager when the internet happened. I was already in my twenties or whatever. And I still don't see it the same way as somebody who had to adapt to it as with that childish, an undeveloped adolescent. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you know, whatever that did to your brain or whatever it does to these newer generations of that's how that's their original engagement with social discourse. I mean, how are they capable of even framing anything?

Yeah. I don't know. I don't need, and also this, the idea of there being no, you know, whatever we used to be thought of as journalism in fact, is now so easily within bubbles, sort of, all you gotta do is go like, I don't know, did you do your own research on that? Because I think, and then, you know,

there's a whole world for them to go into of very efficient and self-aware propagandists to distract them from anything. The very nature of these platforms is structurally authoritarian. Yeah. And I didn't really understand that until it's actually being hijacked

by actual authoritarians. Yeah. That, you know, whatever Musk is or whatever kind of clown these guys are, you know, with the intellectuals who have been trying to. Structurally authoritarian, yeah. Yeah, right.

Yeah. That there's a context that you have to honor. And, you know, and, but then you realize that you know It's of control. It's controlled. It's controlled So and now that it's not open right? It's not it's not like RSS. It's not like email even right now There are open platforms. The internet is capable of producing. That's right forms. It's capable of producing open protocols It's capable of producing contact and communication between people in essentially a neutral civic space. Right, but it's not as exciting.

Well, it doesn't optimize for attention. Right, okay, that's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but like, for instance, one, an example of that, and one I write about the book is like the group chat. Like no one controls the group chat. You know, you're doing it, you know, you're doing it on an Android phone or an Apple phone,

whatever, but no one is monetizing the attention in your group chat. Like the group chat is an example of actual human communication happening over a digital medium in which the imperatives of the digital medium to maximize attention are not the thing that's driving it. Right, it's the human interaction.

And it's possible to do that. That's the thing is that there are different models of the technology that are not essentially the totalitarian of platforms. Yeah, no, I get that. And also, I also understand, it took me a while to come around to understanding the intent of this pushback understanding the intent of you know this pushback against you know woke platform you know mob rule right that you know unfortunately it became

sidelined and that the example was you know liberal thinking around trans and gender issues was that when Chappelle said that Twitter's not real, it took me a long time to really assess that, that what we're talking about in terms of attention and its relationship to actual life is limited. I mean, it's a thought thing. Well, it's limited, but it's also increasingly what life, I mean, that's the thing is like, That is limited. Yeah. I mean, it's a thought thing. Well, it's limited, but it's also increasingly what life is. I mean, that's the thing is like,

That is life. It's not real in the sense that whatever's getting a- Visceral. Yes, right. Right. Like whatever's getting a reaction online isn't representative of like how everyone thinks. Right. But it's also real in that what's happening there

has actual real world effects as we are seeing. That's right. You know, right now, like the sort of insane self-radicalization that Musk has undertaken and his interaction with the trolls is like producing effects in the world. Yeah, king of the trolls. Yeah, horrible effects.

Horrible effects. And unfortunately, the infrastructure of democracy that you talked about is a little plotting in its ability to respond to it, because those models of deliberation are ancient in relation to- And they're slower. Yeah. So, well, ultimately,

I guess some of the issues were answered, but what is the solution that you talk about that I haven't read yet? Well, there are technological solutions insofar as we had a commercial internet that was the first mass internet. It was AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. And AOL is gonna be the biggest media company

for the next hundred years. Remember? Time Warner, the whole thing. Well, yeah, I remember being on AOL is gonna be the biggest media company for the next 100 years. Remember? Time Warner, the whole thing. Well, yeah, I remember being on AOL. I remember the homepage on 9-11. When I opened the homepage up and I saw One Tower, I'm like, what is, it's not April Fool's Day. And it took me an hour to be like, what the fuck,

and look out my window in Queens. But I remember when that was it. Yeah, and so, and people thought that was gonna be it. And what happened was that version of a commercial internet with these platforms was defeated by an open internet. The open worldwide web. All of the things, email, you know, an open protocol, use net newsgroups, the fact that you could,

anyone could put up a webpage. It didn't have to be on Facebook. It was just your webpage. Yeah. The, the reason that I think that's so important is that the ability to create an open version of what we have now didn't go anywhere.

RSS is a great example. Yeah. We can create and people should be spending time and money creating signals and nonprofit messaging service, creating open non-commercial platforms. Right. And I think that that is going, and the reason I think that's going to happen, not just can

happen, is that if you look at daily active users across the platform, they're all declining. The amount of- Really? Yes. People are tired. Yeah. Yeah.

Because there's only so much you can strip mind in people's brains. Yeah. And there's only so much you can strip mine in people's brains. Yeah. And there is a sense in which this moment to me feels like a terminal moment for this version. Because people genuinely don't like it. They may be addicted to it. Right.

They may be spending lots of time on it. Right. But there's this index called regretted minutes that some companies have started to take. Oh God, they classify everything. Or they- Regretted minutes, and it's like, there's a lot of regretted minutes. Yeah.

You ask people, like, are you glad you spent your time on this or you regret it? And the regretted minutes are really high. The weird thing is I don't regret watching the pipe. No, the pipe's great. We did 30 minutes on the pipe today. I think it's an important foundation of what really we're talking about. We're mostly talking about the pipe.

Yeah. No, so I think that there is this terminal sense. I think that we're going to have to start regulating the platforms and regulating attention. And you're starting to see that with in schools, pursuant to the Jonathan Haidt book about getting phones out of schools and classrooms. I talked to a school administrator the other day who said that this is really interesting. At the school that she runs, they started offering

a voluntary program to the high school students where you can give your phone in the morning and get it back at the end of the day. And that's working? And there are more and more kids opting in. It's not mandatory, it's voluntary. And there's more and more kids opting in. So I think we've sort of hit this point of there's no more further that you can push the spring down. And that this is not like our

fate in the long term. Well yeah, but then we just have to stop them from you know, banning the books and putting the Ten Commandments in the classroom. Well that's, I mean there's a political, I'm talking specifically about this attentional thing. Then there's the political question. And I do think actually that there was a really useful clarifying moment that just happened that I think is actually gonna have profound political consequences.

Donald Trump on stage at inauguration with all of the people that run these attention companies where it's like the guy who's sort of dominated attention to get himself elected and the people that make their billions off our attention altogether in one tableau. Yeah. Like that is a clarifying moment of what

needs to be toppled. Right. Right. Like what, what, and I think that people are going to start opting out. I think you're going to see a huge growth in like phone free, phone free spaces. People are going to start buying dumb phones. It phone, phones are going to start opting out, I think you're gonna see a huge growth in like phone free spaces. People are gonna start buying dumb phones.

Phones are going to start being like cigarettes in spaces. You're gonna stop, there's gonna be phone cubbies in every restaurant and every coffee shop. There's gonna be like, people are going to start rejecting the ubiquity and rejecting. And then I think the fundamental thing is that they need to be, we need to regulate attention. We need to think about how you regulate it in this political climate, you know, just the you know, I I get a little

You know cringy when you even say regulate and I'm for it. You're a little buddy But but there is this moment where you like I don't know that word is I know you have to think of a different word I know But I think I think it's gonna happen and I think, because I think that the backlash that is brewing, I could just, I'm telling you, the backlash that is brewing is enormous. Well, that's what, cause people don't acknowledge that and then sometimes on stage you have to do it.

You know, this popular vote was 75 million to 77.5 million. Yes. So that means like, but unfortunately, you know, coming from where I come from as one of the 75 is that there is something innately threatening to the idea that you're possibly surrounded by the 77.5 and they're gonna be a problem. Yeah, and I mean, the thing I always tell people about this,

about the 77, you know, whatever it is, whatever, 75, it's like if you were in a room with 100 people and there's 51 on one side of the room and 49 on the other and two people cross over, you're not like, the room's unrecognizable. That's right. It's just same room. But it's the same room.

It's the same, like, that's what we're talking about. That's what happened. Like, people reacted like we were, this was Goldwater in 64 or McGovern in 72 or Mondale in 84. Like it was like, it wasn't. Yeah, but because of these attention, because of the technology we're talking about

and because of the size of the megaphone and proliferation of messaging. Yes, exactly. There's a dominance, an atmospheric dominance that totally does not match that numerical reality. But because our brains are wired this way now, they're frightened. And there's many people that-

Well, they're also frightened because they're trying to dismantle American democracy. That's right. Brick by brick. That's right. Day by day. Well, I guess the word frightened is not what I wanna, is not the right idea.

They feel powerless. Yeah, right. And it's relentless. The information that's coming in, that is maintaining that sense of powerlessness. People gotta get off the mat. That's the most important thing. Yeah.

You can't just sit there, sit by and let this happen. Yeah. Like really, gotta get off the mat. They're gonna... Well then you gotta turn off the pipe. Well... You... Somebody's gotta...

Stop looking at pipes. Get off the mat and focus on a tangible thing you could do every day. I mean, literally, it really does help to call your elected representative. You should call your senator and tell them under no circumstances should they vote for Cash Patel to run the FBI. You should connect with other people through Move On or Indivisible or local community groups. And if there are protests being planned, you should do those.

And you have to outnumber the people that are calling saying like, we know where you live. There's a guy watching your kid right now. Yeah, no, I know. I mean, it's grim. I think there's actually, to that point, there's some real evidence that like physical fear of security is like a non-trivial factor in all of this. Yeah. Well, that's, that is a building block of effective fascism.

Yes. Yeah. And I... He also just let, you know, he just did a jailbreak where like the most violent hardened people have been let out onto the streets. And they're waiting for orders. Yeah.

I, all right. Well, we were almost on a hopeful. We had a nice hopeful place. We were so close. I was trying to get us there. Yeah, well, that's my nature. I know, I know. Unfortunately.

That's what's kept me at mid-level for as long as I've been. It's like, yeah, he's good. But then it got weird and dark. And he left us hanging. Well, it was a very good book, very thorough, and definitely had an impact on me. I'm glad, I'm glad you liked it.

I did. Because not unlike you, that when you are actually out in the real world with a head full of this stuff that has rewired our brain, it can be kind of a threatening place. Yeah. I mean, how often do you think about your security? Do you feel like you're a target?

I don't really think about it a lot. That's good. I just, I think, I think I put it in the category of like getting hit by a car. Uh-huh. Like, you know, you could definitely get, I know people who have been in bad car accidents, I know, I've lost people in car accidents. But you don't indulge in getting hit by a car on purpose. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

It still falls under the umbrella of just being hit by a car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much hate do you get? I don't get that much hate really. But does that, you know, there's a- I honestly think, I think being, I genuinely believe this,

I think being a straight white man makes a big difference. Oh yeah, I think being, I genuinely believe this, I think being a straight white man, it makes a big difference. Oh yeah, but I mean, but how does that play into the memoir portion of this book you wrote in terms of your own need for attention because of your job, when you don't get hate is part of you like, how come I don't get as much hate as Rachel?

No, no, no, I mean, I really try to screen out all that stranger feedback. Oh, you do? I do, yeah. You just don't engage with it? Yeah, I really, I don't read my mentions. I don't like, I really try to just screen out stranger feedback. Because you feel like you're too sensitive to it

if you did let it in, that it would start to buckle you somehow? Oh yeah, because there were periods where I did. Yeah, yeah. And it got, there were dark periods where I was sort of obsessing over it. Yeah. It was like, I needed like one of those cones for the dog.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, try to like bite the wound. Yeah. Lick the wound. Yeah. And so I just don't let that in. Yeah, I try not to, but because it does, but the weird thing about it is like the comb

for the dog element is that, that the sort of, and I think you talk about it in the book, that you can look at all these great comments. And they just like wash right over you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the one like you fucking. You almost like don't believe them. Yeah, well that's a fun to, that's-

Like the positive ones you're like. But that's a character issue. They're blowing smoke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fundamental, that's- Like the positive ones you're like- But that's a character issue. They're blowing smoke or, you know, but then when someone says something mean, you're like, ah, that's the reality. That's right. That's the truth. If a troll figures out your vulnerability, which they're very good at,

if they reaffirm your darker sense of self. But there is a deep way in which like, holding your power means like, you like finding the switch within yourself to turn off such that they have no power over how you feel about yourself. Right, or pretend at least. Oh, good.

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I really did find that. Like I don't, I try to do good work. I spend all of my time with my like, my wife, kids and like really good friends and family. That's it. You know, that's good. And I leave the show every day. Some days I feel like that show was really good.

Some days I'm like, eh. Yeah. Or that one segment, I wish we'd done this. Right. But then I get to come in the next day and do it. Right. And so it's like. And because of the nature of this information economy,

like the day before is forgotten immediately. Completely, never existed. Unless somebody clips something. I literally will turn to someone and be like, what did we do yesterday? Oh, I know. What did we lead with yesterday? Well, what is that?

Because I think that sense of disrupted time and memory is directly proportionate to this attention economy. Yes, and in fact, one of the things that I, I don't write about this in the book, but I've actually been thinking about it now and thinking about maybe writing something on it is the relationship between attention and memory.

Yeah. We all know intuitively that moments of maximum focus are moments that you remember. Yeah. You know, if it's an incredible moment of, you know, love and ecstasy, or if it's a moment of fear. You think about if you are in a car accident,

you remember these moment by moment. And we also know that if you're in a distracted fog, you don't remember things. And so I think that there's this relationship, and I think this is a thing that really benefits Trump is the public stays in the state of distracted fog and then never remembers anything he does. But it's, but, but there's an element of trauma in that. Yeah, there's also, yes. I mean, I think there's also the, there's the, there's COVID and trauma,

which I think also is a huge part of the memory story. But like I was thinking about this today with the, you know, he's, he, he, he announced this big war on Canada and Mexico, right? And he's going to do the tariffs because they're ripping us off and we've never been, we've never, we lose, we can never make good deals. The current level of Canadian and Mexican tariffs are set by a trilateral agreement that was negotiated and signed by Donald Trump the first time.

It was a whole big deal. He ripped up NAFTA and he made the US MCA. It's his deal. No, not a, I, not, less than 1% of Americans could tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. Is that, that was a whole big story.

But that is his. It's completely gone. No one remembers it. But that's his instinctual ability to gain this fucking attention economy. Yes, exactly. Exactly. He knows it doesn't matter.

Yeah. All he needs is. I'm gonna rip up the shitty deal. It's like, it's your shitty deal. Exactly. He knows it doesn't matter. Yeah. All he needs is- I'm going to rip up this shitty deal. It's like, it's your shitty deal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if he did that every time he made a deal- I know.

Well, it was great talking to you, man. Good seeing you. Good book. Thanks. You too. There you go. It's a good read. It's good stuff.

Provocative, informative, and you can order it on your phone. It's available wherever you get books. The Sirens Call. Hang out for a minute, folks. Hey people, check out the new Audible original podcast that's anything but typical. The Unusual Suspects with Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell This unlikely duo is speaking with some of the world's most influential figures to hear their unexpected success stories Hear guests like Jimmy Kimmel WNBA legend Sue Bird Maryland Governor Wes Moore. Dr. Dre and others listen to the unusual suspects with Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell on Audible now. Go to audible.ca slash unusual suspects.

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Yura Borisov, he played the guy, the thug? Yeah. Oh my God. That moment where you can see, there's a moment there where they're dynamic is this guy is one of the guys that's basically holding her hostage and she's just like kind of lashing out

and just being crazed and angry and you just see the moment that guy falls in love with her and there's nothing he can do. And when he's holding her and he's being careful not to hurt her because he's so taken with her, and like that performance was so subtle and so enjoyable. That whole thing, that whole last act of that movie

really got to me. We've got that episode plus another Oscar bonus episode with Brendan and Chris tomorrow. Full Marin listeners get bonus episodes twice a week, every week. Go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFPod.com and click on WTF Plus. And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by Acast. Here's some guitar, which I like.

It's got a good vibe to it, but I think I was dragging a little bit. For some reason, I couldn't hear my quick track on my air pods I got a reload the quick track app, but I like the guitar sound And it sounds like a lot of other things that I've recorded here, but that's okay because it doesn't fucking matter Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr So So So I'm gonna be a good boy. I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a good boy. So So Boomer lives, monkey and Lafonda, cat angels everywhere.