How Are Trump's Tariffs Are Affecting Me with Chris Hayes
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And today, later in this episode, we are going to be joined by Chris Hayes for an incredible interview about his new book, The Siren's Call, and about how tech companies are mining our brains for money. And also just a reminder that these episodes are now on YouTube in full. So you can watch the entire thing there. I am

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and how it is crashing around us for more than one reason. The administration does not seem to mind what's going on. And in fact, just a few hours before this recording, Donald Trump has now doubled down saying that if China does not rescind their tariffs by tomorrow, sorry, today, because you're hearing this on Tuesday,

He will increase the tariffs on China by another 50 percent. This is after the worst three-day performance of the stock market since October 1987. The signs over the weekend from the administration were not encouraging because Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Face the Nation on Sunday and said that markets should not expect a negotiation. I think we have that confirmed by Trump's tweet.

Or that there will be a change around the tariff policy. And now analysts at J.P. Morgan, as of Friday, raised their forecast that there will be a global recession this year from 40% to 60%. I mean, I think that's probably on the low end, especially because things have only gotten worse since then. Well, yeah.

This is happening and the administration is doubling down saying it's okay. And China's fighting back. So there's, there's a couple things with that. I am not a finance person typically, but I have had to learn. And I was like, why is Howard Lutnik? Why would he be so for the tariffs? And it turns out like he benefits from this because his business in what's is in what's called a long bond, which does well when the stock market does bad.

So there's like there's all these like hucksters out there who are trying to say that the tariffs are going to help the American people when in fact it will enrich them. Isn't this what Martha Stewart went to jail for insider trading and stuff? It is so much worse than what Martha Stewart went to jail for. Either way, I don't think honestly, like, yes, I think I think that's true. But that's like the lowest level thing that.

That has to do with any... I think that this is something Trump's been saying he wants to do since the 80s. He has wanted to put tariffs on. He believes... I think he has a misunderstanding of trade deficits and of competitive advantage and of basic economics. So he believes that this is...

He believes, for whatever reason, that this is a good idea. He has people in his ear telling him it is a good idea. However, economists will say it is not a good idea. And while I do believe that Howard Lutnick would not necessarily mind that this helps his interests, it was actually Bill Ackman who called him out for that on Twitter. Bill then walked back that statement this morning, Monday morning. But regardless...

Regardless, and this is what we were talking about maybe having Avi on the show, and this is probably what would have been helpful for him to talk about, which is that when people who have a lot of money, like billionaires and people who run hedge funds, anyone who has a lot of liquid cash, they are in a position to benefit more from volatility than they can from stability. Right.

Because when things are moving really quickly, that's when you have a lot of arbitrage that they can capture in the market. And they're able to make long bets, short bets, bets on the volatility index. That is why, not just because wealthy people can buy things cheap, that's another reason why they're able to turn volatility into profit. And that's...

That is, I think, like the story that we're seeing here. And you do have business leaders kind of panicking because what they're now seeing is that this is going to lead to lower growth because it's actually physically impossible for Donald Trump's tariff policy to work. Because even if they were trying to re-domicile manufacturing, this wouldn't be how you do it. And now how would they how are they going to re-domicile the manufacturing? How are they going to get build the factories with what materials?

How are you going to get the materials to make the things in the factories? It just doesn't make any sense. And I think that the markets understand this. And you have few business leaders who are willing to speak out because they're afraid that he's going to do to them what they did to the big law firms and to the major media networks. Right.

Well, and another thing that I was reading about is this isn't the first time that businesses have tried to play with Trump. Obviously, he was president one time before. And so the idea that a company is going to move their manufacturing entirely to the United States of America when we don't know what the next president will do or how long Trump will actually stay in power in this case is...

is none. There is none of that. There is no planning for people to move full manufacturing, put up big buildings, rehire everyone, make the cost of everything greater to satisfy Trump's whim today. Because in 2019, there were companies that moved their manufacturing, let's say, from like

China to Vietnam, which he said was a more favorable thing. If they would just move to Vietnam and out of China, then we wouldn't be competing with China the same. Vietnam's fine. All of his Trump products come from Vietnam and Bangladesh. And so those factories are now saying, hey, back in 2019, we did move from China to Vietnam. And now you put the tariff on Vietnam anyway. So we cannot trust you. We can't play with you like this.

This literally happened to my childhood friend's family. They have, and her dad actually went on CNBC the other day and talked about it because they are one of the, they have run an import export business for three generations. Very, very solid business. They moved their production to,

to Vietnam and I think somewhere else, maybe Bangladesh because of the tariffs in the first administration. And now the tariffs that they put on the entire world, A, there's nowhere to go, and B, you wipe out the entire margin. It's just not possible to do. But what's

even crazier is that treasury secretary scott besant was also saying this weekend that there is no reason for the markets to price in a recession meaning people are you know jp morgan's predicting a recession the markets are already going down more and i think they're expected to go down even more

But he says he doesn't think that there is a reason to price intercession and that he doesn't think price increases from inflation will have a big effect on consumers. However, you might understand a little bit more about why Scott Besson is so deeply out of touch when you realize that the past week when they were putting these tariffs on and deciding the policy, Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, is supposed to be in charge of fiscal policy, was not.

on Capitol Hill trying to negotiate a federal tax cut packages with Republicans in the Capitol so that wealthy people and corporations can renew their tax cuts from Trump's first term. That's the thing. There's multiple things here. It's the tariffs. It's the tax plans they're trying to get through. There's a ton of stuff in those tax plans that we're not even getting eyeballs on because there's so much chaos that people are focusing on the tariffs, obviously.

Like one of the things in the tax extension plan is if you use a credit union, Scott Besant and the Trump administration want to force them to now pay federal income taxes, which credit unions don't because they're nonprofit banks that have a mission to invest in communities and small business and the underbanked and whatnot. And the purpose of that is a law written by the big banks to try and make

community banks and credit unions less fun to work with, less valuable to work with so that they could sort of funnel push everybody to the big banks that they're invested in.

So there's just like a ton of money fuckery all around. And it feels like it's too much money fuckery. We're like, no wonder things feel like they're collapsing because it's not just like one thing. Like in 2007, 2008, it was the it was the like housing bust. Right. That was sort of focused on a certain thing. We knew what was going on with that industry. It wasn't like global worldwide chaos, crazy every single sector.

And this is global worldwide chaos, every single sector. The other difference with 2008 is that that was when the concept of too big to fail came up, where a problem could be truly systemic.

And this is a you know, because the way that the underlying loans were made, it's like they were overvalued. So that was a this is a totally different thing. This is self inflicted. This is not this is this is a reaction to a policy, not to the bad moves of an industry. There are two things with his China issues that I want to point out from like my food and agriculture and chef life and the way that we dealt with it the first time.

One, the number one export that we do to China is soybeans, which may not sound like a big deal to many people until you realize that a great majority of our farmland was forced to switch from consumable crops and corn to soybeans to produce an export that would benefit the United States overall economy. And there's a lot of farm subsidies. When you plant soybeans...

You burn that territory. You can't switch over. So even if the farmers are now – if China is now saying, hey, we're not going to buy American soybeans because of the tariffs. We're going to buy them from Brazil who has been upping their soybean prices.

production to serve China, we will lose so much money, not just in the export of the soybeans from the farmers that are growing them now, but from the amount of time that it would take to turn a soybean field into any other crop. That is catastrophic. And the other thing is, in 2013, China basically bought all of American pork production.

They bought Smithfield, which was like the last remaining American pork production facility, like legacy company. And it was very controversial because now China owned all of pork production. And what they're saying is they are going to pull back entirely on the pork that they're buying. Now, the problem in particular with pork farming is that you can't just like cut pigs loose. They destroy everything around them. And the price of pork is already on a razor thin margin.

where if this commodity, if we lose 50% of our pork exports because China won't buy from us anymore,

We will have 54% more pork in this country and we can't sell it. People already... There's been so many advertising campaigns trying to get people to buy pork and it never really works quite the way that it should. And to flood the market with commodity pork hurts farms, hurts farm workers, will make it less safe for meat processing plants and makes it entirely impossible for us to do away with or reduce the herd because you can't just kill that many pigs and you can't also let them go. So it's like...

not just an economic failure, but an actual like truly scorched earth problem for America's heartland and where a lot of our farmers are producing right now. Well, this is what happens when you have people of low or low to zero expertise and who refuse to acknowledge the reality of things such as that tariffs are a tax on consumers. This is a fact. Yep. Money does not trickle down.

When you refuse to acknowledge those things, this is where you end up. And it's really embarrassing that all of these business leaders thought, "Oh, he's going to be good for business because he's going to get rid of all the regulations. They're going to make government more efficient." It's like, "God, do I have a bridge to sell you because you're fucking stupid." They really believe this.

And they were so excited about the economy. It was going to soar. The market went up when he got elected. And now all these companies are pausing their IPOs. Klarna and StubHub just paused their IPOs. Equity in the private markets is totally going to dry up for tech investments, for really all types of investments. It's just...

I don't understand why you would do this to American business when he clearly does not even seem to actually understand economics and trade deficits. And what I actually think it is, is because this is a man who had an idea in search of a justification. And no one really seems to agree with him except one guy.

Peter Navarro. Oh, God. Trump has always felt like he got the short end of the stick. He didn't get the respect he deserves. And now that he's in a position of power, I believe that he is enjoying the fact that these big businesses that maybe wouldn't bank with him. Right. Remember, there were times when people wouldn't bank with him or that he couldn't buy real estate in Russia. Right. Or that he couldn't control are now at his mercy. And he's enjoying watching them fail because this is, again, a short term, chaotic, psychopathic thinker, in my opinion.

Yes. Well, it gets at what I think what's kind of underlying all this is what Senator Chris Murphy said, which is that this is not about trade. This is about a using using the economy as a tool to dismantle democracy and to increase corruption by getting companies to basically tell the administration that we are going to be loyal to you if you give us tariff exemptions so that they can literally survive.

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It's not just Trump. It's also the people he surrounds himself with. And this is... Sammy's going to explain it, but...

This is just another example of like it's the layers go deep on the dysfunction and the psychopathy over there. So Peter Navarro, what's he doing? Who is he? Peter Navarro has written some books about economics, about tariff policy specifically. And since 2001, he has been using an expert named Ron Vara.

to justify the tariff policy, this protectionist tariff policy that Trump has instituted. I mean, first, you know, do you know why it's Ron Vara? Do you get why? No. The letters? No. They spell Navarro. That's sick and crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And he cited a fake expert that's himself.

Because it's the only way he could justify this policy. Okay. So this is what happens. So, I mean, can't you just be a normal person and make up a fake name? Like you do your stripper name, which is like the name of your first pet in your childhood home street or like whatever. Or like how Trump uses John Barron to call in and hype himself up. Remember, there was all those stories about from the 90s, he would call into radio shows. John Miller, John Barron. Yep. And say, Donald Trump's an amazing businessman. Oh, I know this story. This is John Barron. Yeah. Not only that, but after...

After Trump won this election, Ron Vara, quote unquote, wrote a fake memo from a fake email address that circulated all around Washington, D.C. in support of tariffs. And now they're in place. The only person who is in who is in favor of them is my boyfriend from Canada, Ron Vara.

George Glass. He's real. He's real. Oh, my God. Okay. But it gets worse because not only did a fake person invent this fake ideology for this policy. Yeah. The way they actually calculated the tariffs, the percentages that you remember he came out with that big poster board. Right. A conservative think tank found that they use chat GPT.

to calculate that and what they did was not calculate a trade deficit they made up their own formula that no no serious economist no economist has ever used to calculate a trade deficit they also only counted goods not services so it didn't even like account for our entire GDP and then they made the numbers four times higher than they were supposed to be

from their fake chat GPT formula. This is nuts. This is the end of critical thinking. And that's why he kept saying they were going to be reciprocal tariffs, which I think made sense to a lot of the MAGA people. They were like, oh, well, if they charge us 15%, then we should charge them 15% because again, these people do not understand the economics. That's called propaganda.

They don't understand economics at all. But in addition to that, now we're realizing that that wasn't even that would have even been the simple mistake. This is like a way wackier formula they came up with. And that's why the poorest country in Africa now has like a 37 percent tariff on it, because Donald Trump can't understand why the poorest country in Africa doesn't buy as much from us as we buy from them. And what is the export of the poorest country in Africa?

diamonds. We don't have diamonds in the United States like that. So we have to import them from Africa. And there's no balance. There's nothing that this tiny little area in Africa needs from us that would be on par with the value of diamonds, especially at the rate of which diamonds are purchased in the United States. So they import like 7 million from us and we import like, I don't know, 200 billion from them or whatever it was. It was like astronomical difference. But it has to do with the quality of the product.

And this is the problem where you're seeing a lot of folks come on TikTok now that are small business owners, make all their products in America. And they say, my product is 100% created, designed and made in America. There was a jewelry designer from Manhattan that was talking about it. She's like, but the loops that I use, those aren't that that product doesn't come from here. The diamonds, the gemstones, you cannot get that product from here. Most diamonds are cut in India because that's where the best.

diamond cutters are. We can't just like, even if we were to make lab diamonds in the United States, we would still not have the talent or the infrastructure or the machinery to cut them the way that we have it globally set up right now. So even though my product is entirely American made, all American made products rely on some form of global trade to create them. Packaging. Think about what the supplies...

are needed to get the raw materials for the products that you make in America. Like, I don't think people realize how much it's, this is intertwined and this is just going to screw us. But if, you know, if you don't, if you don't really pay attention to reality and facts and math,

you end up in a place like where we are now. And for that reason, we're going to play a game called Delulu Derivatives. Girl math walked, so Republican math could sprint. We're going to ad lib whether something is girl math or maga math. Ooh, okay. Let's see. Here we go. If you pay with cash, it's free. Girl math or maga math? That sounds like girl math to me. It could also be maga math. I don't think that... I think it's more like if you pay with cash...

No one knows it's illegal. That's true. That's MAGA math. That's MAGA math. Okay. We're going to go with girl math on that one though, I think. If you decide you spend too much money, tell Amex that you won't be paying the balance because Congress didn't vote to raise your debt ceiling. Is that girl math or MAGA math? Oh God. I am going to say that that is girl math. You know, that's what I do every month. Once I have regrets. Excuse me, Senator Schumer won't bring it to the floor. Yeah.

Financial decisions are best decided by chat GPT. I think that.

that is Magamath because they literally did it. They literally did do it. It's gotta be Magamath. What's the problem with thinking for yourself? Is that, I mean, I guess that's part of an authoritarian regime. They don't want you to think for yourself. So they're leaning so hard on AI and chat GPT that things that just straight up don't make sense. They're like, but the chat GPT said it as if that's some sort of like law. Well, there's no person who's going to come up with this

Right. This idea because it doesn't make any sense. There's no economist. You have to make one up. That's why we got Ron Vara. Ron Vara and the chat GPT. If you cancel on plans made when you were feeling extroverted, you just made money. OK, as a person who does this.

Yes, that is girl math. And also I would add a caveat here that if you do attend the plan, but you only go for the first half of the plan, like let's say you bought tickets to a Broadway show and you only go to the first act and then you go home, you have also gotten the full value of your money because you have decided that you've had enough entertainment for that day. And that is how I do math. That could be V math. Once I've had enough fun at something, I'm going to go to the next show.

That's it. I don't need to stay for the whole thing. I am with you. The one thing that would make this Republican math, if you cancel on plans you made to spend on infrastructure while the Democrats were in office, you just made money. Yeah. I think that's how MAGA would do that saying. Yes. It's like how I made money when I canceled my hotel for the inauguration because I thought it was going to be Kamala and then it wasn't. And I took that money and spent it on therapy.

That sounds like making money to me. Yes, it was a good, it was a reinvestment. I moved assets around, you know, as we do. The next one is how much could a banana cost? $10? $10.

Yes, maybe. That's MAGA math because that's how much a banana is going to cost soon. And they're willing to spend it. We don't get bananas here. No, they're willing to spend it too. So many MAGA influencers right now are like, it's going to be fine. I'd rather spend the money now and support Trump and be American. It's a patriot tax. I'm like,

OK, brother, was it a Patriot tax when Biden was in office? No, certainly not. That's what I'm saying. The mental gymnastics we're going to go through this week with these people is going to be outrageous because if Trump does somehow get convinced into like pulling back on tariffs that they've as of today, as the economy is crashing, they're saying are a good thing for them to have to wheel it back around and say it's a bad thing. I mean, this week's going to be a weird, really exhausting week. He can't.

wheel it back. I mean, he can, but the reason that it doesn't make sense is because the tariffs are supposed to be bringing in revenue. But if you renegotiate it, then where's the revenue? It doesn't, the whole thing has no logic, but this next, but this next question does. Okay. This next saying, is it Republican math or girl math? Yeah. That's a write-off. That's gay math. That's,

I think it's everyone. I think it's both. I think, you know what I always wonder? Influencers who are like, I just have to make a quick video while I'm in Paris so that I can make this trip a write-off. I'm like, you know that's not how it works, right? Like, that definitely does not work. No.

If you cancel on the IRS agents you just hired to redeem tax money, you just made money. That's the Republican math. I am so worried about paying taxes next week. We usually pay really early and quarterly for the business and whatnot. And I've held out to the last minute just to see what they do to the IRS before I pay taxes because I'm just freaked.

Oh, boy. Next week. Seven days. Eight days. Seven days. We'll see what happens. You know, might be like when the pandemic came and I was like, the IRS can't pay rent if I don't have money. And you can't you can't kick me out of here. So I will just have to owe you next time. Spending more for free shipping saves you money. That is girl math.

It has to be. That is girl math. Correct. Right. And the next one. It depends how much more you're spending to get the free shipping. Well.

Well, we'll see how free shipping and prime goes, too, because one of the things that Trump's tax plan wants to close is that diminutive thing where if you are getting something for less than $800 or $600 from another country, then you don't have to pay a certain tax on it. And he's like wanting to cut that off, which would like truly screw Amazon. And so might be Republican math in the end. Oh, boy. Yeah. All right. Next one.

When you buy luxury goods abroad with a good exchange rate, you are saving money. That's my math. That's Sammy math. I thought so. I don't know how to do that. I know they give you the paper, you know, that you're supposed to fill out for like the duty free or whatever. I never do it. I never do it.

I could tell you and you totally should do it. Yeah, I didn't. It's very easy. I'll tell you. Thank you. We'll work on that later. I will give you the instructions if you're buying anything in Italy. Responsible financial planning will happen when the time is right. It's just not right now. That's magamath for sure. That's 100% magamath. Listen. Responsible planning. Women are responsible. Yeah. No.

Oh my God, what a mess. It's going to be crazy. And what's nuts is we're recording this on Monday in the middle of the day. You'll hear this on Tuesday. And then tomorrow, which is Wednesday from when you're hearing this, we could be in a whole nother situation where the tariffs are even worse and where the outlooks are even more bad. I did a video on TikTok talking about what it was like the last time because I had just like graduated and got my first big girl job during the 2007-2008 recession. And like the thing I remember most is going from having clients, I was an event planner, to having clients

At Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, who were coming in spending crazy money in the restaurant all the time, to those same people asking me if I was hiring for cater waiters or bartenders because they just got laid off and there was no work. And so I don't know how this one's going to go compared to that one. But I remember being 24 and clients that were in their 40s that were super wealthy people were –

like in a different it was it was a extremely humbling experience for everybody it was terrible yeah and it looks like that might be the direction we're going in if we continue with this bag of math and with that we're gonna kick it to our interview with chris hayes who has a bunch more information for you after the break um thanks for sticking with us watch us on youtube youtube could be a part of making us the fastest growing podcast in the news category on youtube and we will see you soon

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Today, I am joined by Chris Hayes, anchor of MSNBC's All In and author of the New York Times bestseller a few times over at this point, The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.

Welcome, Chris. It's good to be here. Thank you so much for coming on. I have followed your book tour, read your book, devoured it in a second, then passed it on to my husband. And he was in extreme agreement with me that it is very important. And then we went back to be on our phones. So I don't know. I don't know what to tell you.

But just, you know, I followed, you know, you've been on so many shows at this point. And, you know, just for the sake of this audience, which I feel like probably does have a little bit of a sense of what your book is about. And I want to get into, you know, the real meat of the convo rather than kind of summarizing. So will you just give us like a quick pitch explanation of the book?

about as long as our attention spans. Well, that's hard because that's like a few seconds. You're wasting time. Basically, the book argues that attention is the most important resource of our age, that it's the most valuable commodity that we can pursue.

And that because it's so vital to us that it's really the substance of life, there's this crazy alienation existing in a world in which your attention is this valuable commodity being extracted by external forces. But to you, it's the most important thing you have.

And living in that constant pull is the kind of background noise, the experience of what it is to sort of be alive at this moment. Right. And so this revolution, this new phase of technology is really existential because it's extracting kind of the last thing we have, our very humanity.

so that's exactly right what i've been what really has stuck with me about the book and you know if anyone has it has it read it i highly recommend just for the actual you know the actual insights within it are incredibly deep and worthwhile at the very least just try it on blinkist i've never used it but i hear it's good for non-fiction one thing that has kind of sunk in for me and i keep just returning back to this is like oh this was the downfall the smartphones in the pockets

That was it. That was the ballgame. You know, the money in politics, you know, Citizens United and the smartphones in the pockets. And I think that that was like a Rubicon that we didn't realize we were crossing. Totally. But just was like the final push of the boulder down the hill. Yeah. And it's interesting to put those two things together, actually, because I don't quite put them together in the book. But it's a really profound insight because, you know, as I'm speaking to you now, we're seeing Elon Musk, you

you know, spending, you know, tens of millions of dollars on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which he says is like the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. And he's running million dollar lotteries that seem to be like facially illegal. But here you've got this guy. I mean, Musk is sort of the perfect sort of place where all this converges. Here's this guy who's the richest man in the world.

who clearly has had his brain completely destroyed by the experience of being online 24 hours a day, which he is like, you can go and look at the timeline of his Twitter feed. This is someone who CEO of five companies or something, CEO of five companies. But like the thing that he really is spending the most time on is his posts and his responses and his retweets.

And you can see how this kind of warping has all coalesced around this one person who's as powerful as any private citizen in the world and who's playing out moment by moment the insane dysfunction in extremists.

That all of us have some little part of in the era in which we have this attention machine just stalking us in our pocket. Yeah. And it's like the it's almost like this, this, this machine. I'm like looking at my phone. I'm like, want to grab it is is like this device. And I don't want to like call it the devil, but it's, you know, it's it's basically like trained to suck your soul out. And and it didn't have to be.

The thing is, it didn't have to be. If we weren't living in this extreme hyper-capitalist society where extracting every piece of profit and this need for growth for growth's sake at all costs, I think that that's where the problem really comes to roost because there is nothing that these platforms can sell. Just a question. Do you ever use the app Path? No.

maybe like 10 years ago. Okay. So it wasn't very popular and it did go out of business. I've been like having a daydream about maybe like somehow recovering it because I think it's kind of like an amazing, uh, it was amazing. It was like,

The idea was, and it was around when like Facebook was popular and Instagram was popular. You could only be friends with 150 people. And you were heard about this and you were like kind of isolated to your 150 people, which I think is scientifically like the number of relationships we have the capacity for. Right. And you used it like how people used to use Facebook, where you put up an event or a photo or a message or something like that. And I think that that was kind of like where we should have stopped.

Well, it's funny you say that because one of the things that we're seeing, like people, sometimes they read the book and they're like, we're screwed and we're in this sort of dead end. And one of the things I always say is, hey, if you look at the daily active users of a lot of these sites, they're declining. And part of the reason is like people don't like it. And there's only so much you can like sell people a product they don't like. They don't like they don't like the feeling of the alienation.

And one of the things that Adam Masseri at Meta said when he was talking about like threads and Instagram, he was product head of product at Instagram. He said, like, we're seeing everything move to messages and group chats. And what I think that is, to your point about path, it's like recreating like there are ways of being online that don't feel as sort of relentlessly alienating.

as the specific way that the platforms make us feel. And like a lot of times group chats, like they can be, they can take a lot of your attention. Sometimes they can be drama on them and there's all gossip, whatever, but at least that's recognizably human. And,

And no one's trying to monetize the interaction. And you're interacting with people you have actual relationships with. Like this is the key thing. So like in the group chat, there's something that to me like is a reminder that technology can take many forms. The way that we interact with it and the way that it takes our attention towards things we find useful and productive or towards things that feel like wastes.

can depend on the financial incentives of a given model, right? So it's like when I'm group chatting with my friends, I don't feel like it's a waste. Like we're cracking each other up. I'm finding about their kids little league game. Like that's fun. That's good. It's still the technology and it's still the phone, but it's a space that's non-commercial fundamentally that really separates it from what a lot of the rest of online life feels like.

Right. It's this, it's this field of extraction that you have, you find yourself sort of forced to be in. And I think we're seeing it a lot with, you know, doctors and therapists and people who don't make content, who don't have to make content, but now they're like creators. They have to figure out how to advertise online and they're fighting the algorithm, which is like essentially a VIG for any small, like any business. Like it's, it's basically just, it is

It is a big, it's well said. It absolutely is. And it's, it really is just, uh, like you can't fight it cause you need it. But at the same time, it also does something not just to the viewer, but the influencer. So I've been like the person who's creating their image online, it is so deeply dysfunctional. And I say this as someone who has had my whole career on the internet and

I often say I was born in the perfect year. I was born in 1989 like Taylor Swift. Because

because of that, I was raised not on, like I had normal life. Like I had to talk to people with looking them in the eye and I had technology, but it was like, you go in the computer room and you like there, you had to fight your family for who's going to be online because of the dial up. And you went into a chat room and you went like into a website and there was a divide

And generally speaking, there was like a real separate online life. And when I came out of college was actually when I got a smartphone and that's when most of the world was switching to smartphones. So having a business that's basically online, you see that an online

More so, you know, like I'm not a really a forward facing influencer or really wasn't for most of that time. But I watched how people they become this this this facsimile online. Yes. And it's it's hard to watch.

That and just like there's there's so many monetization schemes that I think people aren't aware of. Like the Manosphere has a monetization scheme behind it. There are people who are paid to make the Manosphere go viral and creators are incentivized on TikTok to be more controversial or to make typos or to like say things that are not true. So people will engage and correct them. And while this seems maybe harmless, if one person's doing it, it's actually really toxic when someone

You have like foreign interference and things like that being fought on these platforms as well.

It's toxic in a bunch of different directions. I mean, at first, it's toxic to the people doing it, I think, right? And I mean, this is actually an old insight, right? Like, we all understand that fame drives people crazy, right? This is like, you know, this is a trope. It's a cliche. Like, the star that burned too bright, the rock star who hits this insane amount of sort of global fame at 20 and just can't deal with it. And there's a profound reason for that, right? Which is that...

Social attention is really key to who we are. In fact, attention from other people is the necessary precondition for us to survive as newborns. We have this technology to get people to pay attention to us, which is the newborn's cry. We can't survive without it. We're helpless. And

But all the social attention we get in our lives is from people that we have relationships with, whether they're friends or family or lovers or bosses or coworkers. When you start getting social attention from strangers, there's this crazy wiring thing that happens. You have trained on having social attention from people that you care about.

When you start getting it from strangers, it feels like people you care about, even though it doesn't matter at some level. And then keying in on them starts to drive people nuts. And we like we know this, right? The pathos I write about in this book, the pathos of death of a salesman, right? Is it Willie Loman? Can't get people to pay attention to him. Yeah. And yet what the sort of Ponzi scheme of online life has made Willie Loman's of us all.

So you have this like this crazy sort of like obsessive seeking of social attention as the kind of pyramid hierarchy of success. And then you have all those.

Those incentives you're talking about, right, like conflict, like the things that sort of grab us, those aren't the things that we necessarily value the most as individuals or civically and socially. So you've got this total misalignment problem at scale that is increasingly the way that everyone gets their information about the world. This is the thing. Like when you ask people under 40, you're

how do you know about the world? The answer is online. Like I get it. Like I just, I'm, I'm looking through online and then I, maybe I find out that the Martians built the pyramids and also that like, you know,

Joe Biden fell down the steps or like or vaccines don't work like whatever it is. I will say I'm the only person I know who watches MSNBC. But I'm like, really, that is you're not going to get the same things that you will get from TikTok versus watching cable news versus watching versus reading news articles.

Like even, even passive, I do a lot of passive watching of cable news, but if I really want to focus on something, I'm going to read an article and try to absorb the details. Like I think there was something you wrote about reading how it's like actually reading in codes in your brain and a different way than videos. And yeah.

I'm very grateful that I am someone who likes to read because I feel like I haven't lost like my access to thinking in a way. Yes. I mean, reading, reading is a superior technology for the efficient transmission of information for sure. Just in terms of like,

how much you get from a certain amount of time. It also, we have pretty good data that it encodes better, like for memory, for comprehension. And we're now moving because it's not like text is not as intentionally salient as video. And again, I work in television. So like no shade here. Like I get it. Like we use images too. We're moving to this kind of post literate internet. I mean, that's really like the internet. That's another thing where you're talking about this generational change that you and I like we're 10 years apart. I was born in 1979, but again,

We came up in an Internet that was very text heavy just because of the constraints on bandwidth. Now you have a video driven Internet and like it is increasingly getting post literate. Like, oh, yeah, it's just like people don't read. And that's not great for civic health either. Well, that's what I want to talk about next, which is teenagers mostly. And a few things. So you have the parasocial relationships.

with people they know, you know, with influencers, you have the sort of relational bullying, relational aggression that you get between men, between young kids as teenagers, like at scale. Um, I don't know if you watch the show adolescence, that was quite an eyeopening show. And then you have like the fact that they get their, their, uh,

from the comment section. So that creates quite a ripe situation for bot campaigns and maybe any sort of motivated actor could be like a celebrity's PR team to flood comment sections or encouraging brigading, things that people aren't even aware of necessarily or conscious of.

And it's like you kind of can't parse between real and fake. And now kids can't read books, everyone's saying. So what is happening? Like, how are people going to have reason? Like, how do you get back literacy? Are there any societies that have gone gotten less literate? All this data is a little contested and a little unclear. So I don't want to say that, like, it's definitive, but we've got.

pretty decent evidence of like declines in both domestic and global literacy in the last 10 or 15 years since the smartphone. Now, is that the cause? We don't know. And there's a bunch of, again, debates about this right in the research, but it does seem like people are getting dumber. Like this, this really does seem to be an actual, like a genuine to the extent we can measure these things, the extent we can measure people's literacy, their cognitive capacity. Again, all this stuff is contested. I don't want to say this is like,

Absolutely the bedrock truth. We don't know yet. Yeah, but there's some indications. It's not less like book smart, though. Like, yes, that's also happening. But it's not like people. My issue is not that people like no less facts because you can just Google them. I kind of get why people have less facts at the tip of their tongue. Totally. But but when you.

The things that people will believe. Yes, that's it. The reasoning, the ability. Yes. Reasoning, sort of skeptical understanding of information. And again, I think million in condoms to Gaza, that would be like 500 million condoms. Like, like,

Elon Musk tweets this and then he's like, oh, how could I have gotten that? Oh, just oops. No, you're an idiot. How are you like? Yeah, you're smart. Yeah. Do the math for four seconds. And I think in other areas of life, we have what I call in the book attentional regimes and

And that are either formal or informal means of regulating attention for some project we have. So like in a conversation like you and I are having, the basic thing is turn taking. Like this happens in all conversations. It happens on dates unless they're really bad dates. Right. Like this is like this is like and in kindergarten or preschool, what's the first thing a kid learns? They learn an attention regime. How do you hold? Do you raise your hand if you have to go to the bathroom, if you're answering the teacher, if we all.

Clap three times. And that means what we have now and those attention regimes scale all the way up to the United States Senate. They scale up to how we run meetings. Right. What we have now is a public discourse in which our attention regimes have don't exist. And to the extent they exist, they exist for one end, which is to maximize at scale the monetization of the extraction of attention. And that is going to sit.

in real tension with an intentional regime of informing a populace for self-governance, right? So, like, we have these two things side by side. So your point of, like, people not being able to tell, like...

what's news, what's information, what's lies, what's myth? It's because it's all together in the same attentional space. It's not like you're walking into a place where it's like, now we're doing Sunday public affairs debate shows. And now we're like looking at a get ready with me. It's all in the same place, right? So like they're all competing with each other. Which is sometimes quite morbid when you,

what is juxtaposed like oh my god thousands of people dying in an earthquake and then you have here's my bronzer and it's kind of creepy when you like think about it like that and you know that's why we need path back

And I, I, one thing I wonder, and I keep, I keep coming back to this. I don't know why it's like, do you think that people who grew up pre algorithm and pre internet who know how to read and, you know, can have a conversation? Do you think that we are going to be in an advantage or at a disadvantage? Because those, you know, if the norm, if this is like a rare skill, right.

To be and even to be able to like disagree when you're in conversation. I think that's kind of where we all fell apart is that we're all you have to be with the people you agree with and otherwise, you know, fuck off. Yeah. So I just wonder, like, is that, you know, is it going to be like someone who can write in cursive or is it going to be like...

Oh, you're good. You're smarter because you can do this. I mean, look, my fundamental idea, my fundamental feeling is that being able to reason is going to be an important skill for anyone at any time. Are you sure? I mean, but I say that with, like, it really depends on how things go with LLMs and with AI and, like, how much they... Like...

You know, I've known people who can do math really fast in their head, and that's not really that useful a skill in the modern world. I am someone who has I always joke about this with my wife. Like, I have a really, really, really good sense of direction. And if I lived in a time when we didn't have GPS, it would be like really valuable. Like, I really am able to navigate very well, but it doesn't matter now. It's just like a fun one day. If we, you know, end up in some sort of no off.

the grid situation. Actually, it's going to be quite useful as well. I imagine the ability to reason. I don't know. Physical strength also going to be quite important as well. So PayPal lets you pay all your pals like your graduation gifters. Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the beanbag chair? Aren't we getting a mini fridge? Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before we buy. Oh, yes. That's smart. Glad we can agree on something.

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Yeah, I mean, so a lot of it depends on like, where does, what does the tech do? And what does it do to us? And what's sort of left? And I do think like there's a weird convergence happening now with AI and the sort of attention capitalism I write in the book with this kind of like,

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is spam, the problem of spam and how if you understand the problem of spam properly, it's actually the problem of pollution in the attention age. Right. What it is, is it's it's the smokestacks of the attention age. Right. So in the industrial age, it's like you had an industrial process and then you had this pollution. You just like throw it out there.

Because it doesn't cost you anything to put it in the air, but you're getting value from the process you're making, right? And the same thing with spam, right? It doesn't cost you anyone to waste someone's time, waste their attention, right? Because you can monetize the end product, but it costs us something for our attention to be wasted, right? And we've seen this happen with email, which has grown less and less useful. And it's why Slack has emerged, right? Slack and Discord, these other features. There's a great piece in 404, it's a great publication, about just like,

The fact that like people are just using AI to like brute force spam social media now, like like just, you know, just like, yeah, just brute force slop.

And then the question becomes, well, what if you combine these things, right? If you're using this to sort of spam this kind of form of attention capitalism, maybe the whole thing just kind of collapses a little bit, right? Like maybe it just in the end, we are in a kind of dead end for it. And there's something on the other side of it that is fundamentally more human. And I really think like that's kind of a beautiful vision to sort of hold to and think about.

Yeah. Like I think about that too. Like if everything is in your feed is just shit, then something real and human and artistic stands out. At least I appreciate that. But then again, I can still read. So I don't really know if I stand for everybody. So it's like, it's just very, uh,

You know, it's hard to see, you know, I mean, I guess you can kind of see around corners and a little bit in some sense, but also who knows what X factors I'm always thinking about, like, what would be the X factor that will throw this off? The other thing I'll say, though, I mean, one of the things, you know, there is look,

The generative ability of humans is amazing and sort of beautiful and sublime. And like, there's a lot of look, there's tons of stuff, you know, for all like, you know, here's a great example, like Lex Friedman podcast, which is like he and I do not have the same politics at all. I find his worldview weird. It's not mine, but like.

There's lots of really long, I listened to a five hour thing with AI engineers that was like genuinely in the weeds and super sophisticated. I learned a lot from. There's a lot of people doing a lot of cool stuff, right?

On these platforms, the question is, how do you create the incentives that allow like different kinds of ways of creating and being human together to flourish and that don't sort of overdetermine and drive everything towards the slop? And I think that's a that's an interesting question because it it allows for agency and it also allows for the fact that like both regulation and policy and tech choices can create

like, can create something that we actually do like that does make people flourish.

Yeah, well, I think that kind of comes down to like who's going to be owning and accountable for these platforms and will there be any form of regulation, which I think, again, brings you back to the money because who's writing the potential regulations? And how do we know if these regulations are good? Like the regulations can ultimately end up shaping things in a way that is more harmful because... Oh, yes.

The way that it kind of creates an imbalance between bigger and smaller players. So what do you make of the fact that you have these tech oligarchs who are so close to the administration and they will be there while America is transitioning into a more AI based world?

I mean, it's a real worry. And I think that one of the things you saw with those guys at the inauguration, who in some ways are kind of the kings of attention capitalism, that they're sort of the winners that have created this attention. You know, they're extracting the gains from the attention age.

One of the things I think you've seen is they all think that AI is going to be kind of a winner take all thing like they they understand this competition as a winner take all. I don't know if they're right about that, actually. And I think actually they may just be wrong. It may just be that a you know, Bezos has a line about AI that I think is actually pretty interesting where he says it's like a layer like electricity.

Which I think is a useful way to think about it. Like there was a time when like you didn't have electricity and everything, and then you had electricity and basically everything. And that changed the way the world worked to the extent that some version of intelligence is in things that way.

If you extend that metaphor, the thing that's interesting about the metaphor is that electricity is actually not a winner take all. It's like it's a utility. It's that's it's not like a it's not a sort of sexy, lucrative area of capitalism. And that's through a lot of regulation and work and stuff. But I wonder how much they're just wrong about their bet about what is on the other side financially. I think I think it's possible they're chasing something that's not there. I think you're right.

And that belief that it would be winner take all seems like it is biased by their own ideology and the people around. Totally. And because, you know, Amazon was the first mover in Internet commerce in a way or one of the first movers. Google was really one of the first movers and built the best search.

Apple was the first mover in the personal computer revolution and the smartphone. Like so. And they've and they've created monopoly rents out of it, like Microsoft and the Windows operating system. And so they all think in these terms, right, that like who's going to win the jackpot at the end where you get the whole monopoly rent?

from being the one AI. And I'm just not quite sure they're right about that. - Well, I think what might ultimately come back to bite them in the ass before they're able to actually achieve that is that the fact that, you know, the oligarchy kills innovation.

So the fact that they have no real incentive to innovate the way that Steve jobs did when he was trying to make this revolutionary product that essentially we're still using 15 years later, like it's not that different of a product at all. And that is what changed everyone's life, like his invention. And it's like, they, he, he was a hungry innovator and, you know, as well as what was it? Johnny Ives, I believe. And that,

is not something that you can create when you're just the copycat, you know, the copycat social media guy or you're just trying to do it to like get control and so you can put your tweets to the top of the algorithm and like

You see what happened with Google after they just had sucked all the profit they possibly could. Then they make their search shit and you can't find anything. So my feeling is like, if that's what's going to happen from being at the top, you're not going to get to the tippy top if you can't actually be the best. This is, I mean, what you're saying right now, I think is, you know, we have these sort of two weird forces in our digital lives, right? There's the kind of

This feeling of this sort of alienated dead end of attention capitalism and this race for AI. And in both cases, this like, yeah, this sort of oligarch mindset

oligarchic structure. Now, of course, there's like Anthropic and there's OpenAI and these are like essentially startups sort of opening a kind of kind of isn't. But the thing that happened with DeepSeek in China really is interesting, right? Like that's like that is much they were a hedge fund first. They got into this from a kind of sideline and they did shock the world. And now you've got like multiple Chinese companies, you know, producing models and coming up with sort of new ways to kind of like hack to the front of the line.

And it does sort of like shake the whole foundation of, again, this idea that like one of the big, one of the things that I think these big oligarchs liked was the idea that the capital expenditure of,

And the amount of compute you needed was so big that it wouldn't let new players in and that it was a fight between them because of the because of this high bar to entry. And what was so wild about that deep seek moment was like, oh, maybe that's not right. Right. Like maybe that we're wrong about these barriers to entry. And maybe to your point, maybe.

There's space for innovation from players that we don't already know. That was so satisfying to me, not because I'm like, oh, I want Chinese companies to defeat American companies like that. It's so irrelevant to me from that perspective. Right. But I like the underdog. I like the idea that they wouldn't set. They wouldn't allow them to use their chips. So they're like, all right, well, we're going to make our own.

own thing and we're going to make anyone be able to see the code. And to me, there's something like very American about that. And it's almost like not communistic. Think about what there's a lot more like economic planning in the United States. Not I wouldn't say more than China, but there is economic planning. It's just looks a little nicer. And we also currently have an administration and a president who like

and basically state managed economics like for the wealthy and is going to like do like the most insane industrial policy via tariffs that we've sort of ever seen. So like we, you know, we're who knows what our actual structure of innovation looks like. We're, we're killing off the seed corn, you know, of scientific, basic scientific research of like,

like foreign students coming here, like all the things that power American innovation right now are genuinely being attacked like relentlessly day after day in a way that's almost shocking and baffling. Like it doesn't actually make any sense in any direction. But but but the future of American innovation in that sense, I think, is like really, really up in the air. Well, well, I think when something doesn't make sense in the way that this doesn't,

It kind of reminds me of, you know, the Russia hoax and Trump at Helsinki. It's like when it doesn't make sense in the way that we would have thought about it, typically, maybe the intentions of the person who seems to not making sense are different than what we would ascribe to the president. That's what I keep thinking about. I'm like, OK, well, I don't.

We're assuming that his intentions are for the economy to be better because he used to tweet about the stock market. But I don't think his intentions are the same as they always were. I think this is more about like exploiting, taking private. And he wants to control the tech companies. Control. Yes. Combination of surveillance, capitalism and propaganda. And of course, you have to control that. That's that.

fascism 101. Hello. Yes. I mean, I think you're right that like the way to understand the only way it makes sense is control. Right. So so if you if you think of it through the framework of control, you know, then fascism

Things like innovation you don't love because you can't control innovation. Right. And like like science, science is fundamentally a kind of the, you know, happens fundamentally. Exactly. It happens in an open society in which there's open exchange of ideas. You can't control that. Like, yes, if you view it through this framework of control, then you can kind of get a clearer read on this, even though it just seems to me so so complicated.

dead clear. I mean, there's certain questions in policy where it's like, well, there's this trade-off and there's arguments on both sides. Going back to school during COVID was one of them. There's real questions. There's trade-offs on both sides. Should we just absolutely take a crowbar to the kneecap of American cancer research? It's like,

doesn't have real trade-offs. It's like, no, obviously we shouldn't. And yet that's exactly what we're doing. It's about a lot of things. I also think science suggests empiricism suggests a fact. And if you're trying to assail facts with one side of your mouth, you can't then be like, well, the facts over here are, you know, it's either you're not. I mean, one way to think about this, right, is to look at

independent sources of authority as targets of the wrath, right? So like, what are the independent sources of authority that like, it's like science, academia, the media, institutions of civil society, museums, libraries, like all of these things that are in our society, in an open society, an open liberal democratic society are sources of authority and that contest with the government, right? The regime's source of authority. Our, our,

are being targeted, right? They're all competitors. And I mean, really, it's it sounds like completely Orwellian and dystopian when you say it, but it's like they're 100 percent going. I mean, the EO the other day, like tasked J.D. Vance with being the ideological patrolman of the zoo, like to like

shake the world of animals, Chris. Yeah, exactly. It's like it really does have this kind of weird. Yeah, this sort of very totalitarian ethos to it. Well, I think another piece of that is, you know, you look at what academia puts out, you look at what the you know, the Department of Health and Human Services puts out when they put out papers. They're long. They require context. They

They rely on standing on years and decades, even a precedent. And, you know, when you look at vaccines and infectious disease research, like,

You have to actually have knowledge and doesn't fit in a tweet and it doesn't fit in the attention span of a degraded populace that can only pay attention to one thing. I mean, and college is inaccessible and you're an elite if you go and, you know, can't trust you because you have this sign. You have a doctor in front of your name. So we trust R.K. Jr. This is I mean, this is where we come back around to where we started with the, you know, the sort of

point of the book, right? Which is that like attention is the most valuable resource when you have an entire sort of superstructure built around its extraction and the sort of growth model of capitalism where the extraction has to happen uber all this, right? Like for like always and bigger than your sort of

creating the conditions in which like whatever's the most intentionally salient as like algorithmically determined second to second um is going to be what people increasingly are exposed to and that is not going to be like a lot of the stuff that we associate with an open society like the rigors of science the rigors of you know uh literature and discourse and like

you know, the vaccine question is really one of those places where I think we've seen it in its most deadly form, which is that the, the kind of anti-vax fervor does have this kind of like attentional salience that like vaccines work doesn't. And,

And I think that like that has helped them algorithmically. And I think it's actually like created the kind of monstrosity that we have right now where we have, you know, four or 500 cases of measles. It's the biggest outbreak we've had in a while. We've had two deaths from it, which hasn't happened since 2014. And the basic full retreat from the federal government's health infrastructure from vaccines is,

in order to basically play to this sort of pathological disordered form of thinking that is celebrated and elevated by the attention capitalism that we have. Yeah, I mean, it's a shame that you guys weren't reporting zero cases of measles every day, that there were no measles, because maybe people would have appreciated it. That's a great, right? That's exactly, I mean, that line, you know, there's a line we have in newsrooms, which is like,

you know, there's the, if it bleeds, it leads. Right. And that's, that's like way before anyone had an algorithm, right. That's just the local news or we don't cover the planes that land is one of them. Right. Like, and also true, like, and what that, what that speaks to is that like, there's a negativity bias to attention, partly because our attentional faculty is a preservation one, right? Like the predator in the bushes is the thing that we're attuned to for evolutionary reasons. You know, the, the sound of gunshots or, or, or something, a

a loud car crash, right? A hunk of a horn. And so when you have, again, this has been a thing that bedevils the media always, right? But when you have it algorithmically driven at scale, where, again,

There's no other ethos guiding it. Right. This is the key thing. Like that's the thing that I can wrestle with in my cable news show, because there's other things I want to do other than simply grab people's attention. There's an actual like professional ethic that I'm pursuing and I can balance.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Like I can balance those interests. Right. But if you take away the professional ethic and all you're doing in these platforms is driving towards those essential incentives, then there's nothing to balance it. And that's really kind of where we are with like where people are getting their information now in the information environment where there's no other ethos on the other side to balance the attentional incentives.

And no sort of offline life. There's no going leaving the computer room. There's no leaving the smartphone room. There's no IRL. I mean, there's you know what I mean? Like, there's no like the lack of IRL, I think, is its own sort of anti-democracy culture factor. Yeah.

And it's like, maybe if we didn't have the phones, you'd go IRL more. I mean, one of the things I think, A, I think the combination of this sort of attention capitalism and COVID created something pretty profound in that respect, although I think we're coming out of it. And one of the things I think that's been awesome about seeing, like, some of the protests and, like, the Tesla takedown stuff is, like, people being around each other physically in real life. And, like, that, I really think this is one of the antidotes to this is, like, being with people physically.

You know, we all the metrics we have of how much people socialize, how is going down, how much time they're spending alone is going up. Like how like parties like there's some pretty good data showing that like parties are on the decline, like nightclubs and raves and things like that are actually on the decline, like all sorts of ways that people get together with each other seem to be.

over time. And I think one of the solutions to all this is like rejuvenating all that. Look, throw a party, save democracy. That's going to be my new path. I'm going to fund parties and that's all we do. Exactly.

Thank you so much, Chris. This has been so enlightening. Everyone check out the book. It is even more enlightening than this conversation. And I imagine that you, like I, I'm very hopeful for a swing of the pendulum back to an age of reason, because after this, where do you go from here? I totally agree. Gotta go to extreme logic. I don't know what else we're gonna do. All right. Thank you so much. This was great. Thanks. I had a great time. Awesome. And until next week, this has been American Fever Dream.

Betches.