Can You Pay Attention, Please?
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When I sat down with Chris Hayes, I asked him to pretend that we were at a cocktail party and that I was talking his ear off. I just like won't shut up about, I guess, we'll save my child. You're giving me a decent amount of your focused attention. What kind of attention is that?

That is voluntary attention where I'm using my sort of conscious mind to exert my powers of focus on you. And particularly in those sorts of environments, there's a lot of distractions. You actually have to work pretty hard to kind of block those out if you're in a, you know, if you're at a concert or a baseball game or a cocktail party where there's like a lot of stimulus around you.

You may know Chris from his MSNBC show, All In. But he also just wrote a book, The Siren's Call, which is all about attention and how, in the age of smartphones and social media, attention became, quote, the most endangered resource in the world.

So let's keep going with our party. All of a sudden, someone on the other side of the room drops a huge tray of drinks, and our attention swivels over there. That's involuntary attention or compelled attention. And the reason that's so important is it's kind of the whole kernel of both the faculty we have and the problem.

When the tray drops and it makes this enormous noise, your head whips around and you notice it before you even get a chance to consciously weigh in. Then the party gets going again. Chris and I keep talking until someone near us, someone engaged in their own conversation, happens to say his name, barely even audibly. But Chris's brain hears it immediately. And to me, it's an example of the...

particular acuteness of what I call in the book social attention.

I mean, first of all, just as a feat of processing, it's kind of crazy that this works because I'm focusing on you and the cocktail party. I'm listening to what you say. I'm actively screening everything out. But then it turns out that like some part of my brain is actually scanning all the other conversations for my name. And then when it comes up... So you're not just vain. This is a subconscious process. And so when it comes up, it sort of...

it's like, oh, we want to process this and it punctures our attention. And that's because as I posit in the book, I think this is a sort of elemental aspect of attention as well, which is we can pay attention to things, but ultimately we need people to pay attention to us. We need it from the moment that we come into the world as a newborn, we're dependent on it. And it ends up being another sort of key faculty that is so electric and

an explosive in its power that if it gets in the wrong hands, it can be pretty destructive. Destructive to our thinking, our relationships, our children, maybe even to democracy. Today on the show, a conversation with Chris about the fight for all of our attention. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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Professor Jonathan Haidt wrote a best-selling book just last year warning about the effects of smartphones on our kids. In the past, people worried about television, radio, even magazines. Socrates himself feared that the written word would start to erode our memories and cognition.

But what Chris zeroes in on is social attention. That part of your brain that hears your own name over the din of the cocktail party. The part of you that checks your likes and mentions and is drawn to what an algorithm tailors just for you. And online, that feels akin to human interaction. But Chris says it's not.

Social attention is necessary but not sufficient. It's a kind of predicate for the things we want from relationships. But social attention we experience for all of our formative years in the context of some kind of mutual relationship or us putting it on some distant person, like if you're a teenager and you're mooning over a pop star. What we never experience is the unilateral incoming social attention from people we don't know.

So that means checking your mentions or what? Yeah, or just anyone on the internet naming you or talking about you that you don't know, unless you're like a child star. And we basically understand that fame drives people nuts. Famously, healthily developed child stars. Yes, exactly. The paragon of... And the reason that we understand this is because we've seen it. And also, we understand there's something unnatural and unhealthy about

this unilateral relationship of social attention. Okay, so this makes me think obviously of social media, but there's also this thing where I just kept thinking about like 4chan and 8chan and the kind of feedback loop that happens in social internet channels, even when you do not know someone, that you get, what, validation from that social attention? Yeah, there's some deep part of you lighting up

And the thing that I argue in the book is that it's like adjacent to an elemental human desire, which is a desire for recognition, to be seen as human by other humans. This is a driving animating desire.

Attention is like right next to it. And so it tastes enough like it to keep you going for it without ever delivering the thing you want. And what you're describing is, I mean, first of all, it's now become the dominant mode of public discourse and politics to incredibly destructive ends. But that courting obsessively of attention is you're looking to get a thing out of the interaction. The interaction can't ultimately give you but feels close enough to the thing that you want that you keep going for it.

Can you tell me the story of this experiment that was done at UVA? Because I think it's illustrative of that. So they basically had people sit alone in a room with their thoughts for periods of time when they're sort of setting the control 10, 15 minutes. And then they asked people, you know, did you like it? Did you not like it? And people uniformly are like, I hated that experiment.

And then they run the experiment and they give people the option of giving themselves just a little shock. They can shock themselves. It's an unpleasant feeling. It's not like a pleasant shock, but that's the one thing they can do to interrupt being alone with their own thoughts. And like half the people take the shock.

Interestingly, like two thirds of the men do and about one third of the women. There's one dude who shocks himself like one hundred and sixty two times, meaning he's in there just obsessively administering the shock to himself.

And that is that guy, whatever is happening to that guy, that is what the internet selects for. And it's now like those are the most powerful people running the world is really how I feel. So think for a second about that experiment and the device that might be in your hand. If you're sitting in the dark, refreshing a feed, maybe ignoring your spouse, choosing novelty over human interaction, maybe.

How different are you? You pull your thumb down for more and more content. It's called the infinite scroll. And it was a conscious design choice. The infinite scroll means you never have to stop. So there's the frictionlessness of the infinite scroll, which I think is hugely important. I also posit that it feels like a slot machine.

For non-accidental reasons, the slot machine is probably the single most successful pure attention monetizing technology ever derived. People can spend eight hours there with these little five second bursts. So there's the infinite scroll. There's the machine learning. This is a really key thing. The machine learning algorithm, first of all, it's useful to think of the fact that

What we now call AI is really first deployed truly at scale in a customer facing way on what we call the algorithm. Like what the social media algorithm is doing is just machine learning at scale. It's one of the first. It's taking a lot of data. It's taking a lot of data and it's learning what it's learning off of that data independently. And so it's figuring things out about attention. I mean, there's all sorts of weird genres happening.

Horse hoofs being cleaned out, pipes being unclogged, carpets being cleaned that turn out to get people's attention quite reliably that the algorithm just figured out. But no executive would have ever greenlit. And this is actually a really big difference in in in this technology. They never have to figure out Netflix, even with its algorithm, still has executives saying yay or nay. Right. TikTok doesn't. They never have to figure out what's going to work or not.

Everything just gets thrown against the wall and the machine learning figures it out. Well, that's why it's so valuable. It's why it's so valuable. I mean, there's cool aspects of that because you discover stuff that you wouldn't maybe have otherwise thought would work. But that engineering aspect. And then there is the social component, like the hard wiring of the mentions, the fact that notifications are weaponized. You know, the best example of this, which, you know, I don't have my phone ever allowed to do this, but.

The haptic feedback of a phone, a buzz in the phone, is the ultimate example of involuntary attention. It's like the glass falling in the cocktail party example. Like, you will feel that go off in your pocket. You don't really get a say if you do or not. You engineer all that together and you have the most sophisticated machine for keeping people's attention that ever existed. And it's borne out in the numbers, you know. You've thought about your own culpability in this. Like, where have you landed?

I mean, the way that I think about it is I have to keep people's attention and that's necessary for anything else I want to do.

And sometimes we're using the hacks and tricks of loud voices and bombarding people with visual stimulus. And then there's also the stuff that you were doing at the beginning of this that we've learned to do. You and I are sort of practitioners of a similar cohort, like storytelling and leads and narrative arc and conflict and all the stuff that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and across many traditions of storytelling. Yeah.

What I what I've come down on is I think of what I do and what we do is having like the Federal Reserve, a dual mandate. There's two things we have to do that are in direct tension with each other, which is what makes the job hard.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to keep prices low and keep employment high. And those are sometimes you got to do one that pushes you towards one direction and it directly affects the other. We have to keep people's attention and give them important information that is the that are the tools they will use for self-governance and a flourishing life. And those two things are often intention, in fact, often directly intention. And the reason it's hard to be a central banker is you

At a certain level, you can't like computerize the judgments necessary to try to figure that out. And it's the same, I think, in journalism. You have to use. But your show could go off the air if people don't watch it. Totally. Yes. I mean, I have and I have to keep it on. Well, if I want to keep doing it, I have to keep it on the air, which requires a certain level of attention. But the other thing that I think is important is in both your case and mine and a lot of other cases is.

The attention is a means towards some end. I am not just on air to keep people's attention. That's not the project I'm engaged in. And if I were, I might make different choices. What does what is different about the machine learning algorithm over at ByteDance or Instagram is that it does purely do it for the purpose of attention. There is no other purpose it's driving towards. Nothing. Zero. And I do think that makes a huge difference. And that's not to say that

There are people doing amazing work in every genre. There's brilliant things I've learned off of TikTok and Instagram and all these platforms from creators doing really cool stuff, smart stuff, truthful stuff, historical analysis. But in the aggregate, there is no other value or purpose that is driving what's being done there, which I think is different than what we do, what you do, what, you know, journalists do.

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This book was written before the second Trump presidency. But I mean, I feel like I could walk out of the studio right now and there'll be like five things that happened while we were having this conversation. So is he a symptom of our attention problem or is he a cause of it? He is. He is both. But fundamentally, he got to where he was because his weird skills and pathologies perfectly matched the moment. Like he's just like a crashing tray of drinks.

He is a crashing tray of drinks. That's well put. He is he is a machinery. He understands he has a deep desire. If you go back to the cocktail party, someone who just needs everyone in the room to be looking at them and will do whatever it takes for that to happen. Even if it means that everyone in the room ends up hating him or half the people in the room end up hating him or slightly more than half or slightly less than half. As in the last election, he has a very strange relationship to attention.

He pursues it pathologically with a kind of feral genius. And most people, the vast majority of people don't have that relationship to attention. Even people like myself who really do like attention and have structured my life around it. I don't like negative attention. I don't like being loathed and hated. And I don't have an obsessive desire to constantly keep poking and prodding people. And...

And so he is the perfect, he turns out to have the perfect set of skills and psychology that match the moment in a way that I have, that I think also has itself become a cause. But so how, how does one then differentiate where your attention should go in the next 3.8 years? Because like, how do you know if every executive order is a cry for attention or if it's something that's going to hobble,

fundamental part of government? That is a very important and good question to which I have no simple, straightforward answer. We're going to try to apply our judgments. I think there's one illustrative example in the first two weeks. And people can get wrapped around the axle of like, what is he? He's distracting from X or Y. But it was interesting to me that he got Dr. Phil and a bunch of people to embed with ICE and

on these deportation rates. He clearly wants headlines out of that. He fired all the inspectors general at like Friday at 11 p.m. That's an interesting indicator about at least where they're calculating they want attention and don't want it. But I don't know the answer to your question ultimately. I've talked around it, what to pay attention to, what not to. They are doing a lot of things differently

that are genuinely destructive and important that people should pay attention to. But they're also trying to overwhelm our faculties for doing that. You would hardly be the first person raising alarm about our attention spans or where we are now. I mean, previous Surgeon General did this. You spend a decent amount of time in this book devoting attention to the classic moral panic. You talk about how the Senate had hearings about the danger of comic books.

But then also you use the example of cigarettes. And so I wonder, like, where, how do we know if we're talking about comic books or cigarettes here? That's really the question. I think there's another dimension to this, too. So cigarettes are harmful in a way that is measurable and empirical. And I think there's people that make a strong case, Jonathan Haidt's book, but other people that something similar is happening with cigarettes.

the attention technologies were embedded in. But I also think there's a deeper philosophical question of are we living the good life? Do we feel self-possession and dominion over our own minds or do we feel alienated from them? And these philosophical questions are old questions. They appear in all kinds of different technological contexts. But I do think that our technological context exacerbates them. And I think that there's a reason people still read Walden Pond by Thoreau and don't react to it by being like,

Well, you thought it was you thought it was a lot of stimulus then got a lot worse and we're fine because he's getting at something profound and essential that is in some ways, I think, kind of maybe the consistent experience of up each along each inch of the curve of modernity, which is this sort of feeling of overwhelmed and accelerating.

So there's this one part of the book that I would like you to engage with. I'm going to just read part two. This is probably the most common complaint of our age, the inability to focus, the shrinking attention span, and the sense of constant distraction. We flee from any moment of time in which our minds might be empty, but in doing so, find the reward we seek to be absorbed, to have our attention fully occupied, harder and harder to find.

Have you, in this long process of writing this book, thinking about it, now doing interviews about it, have you found ways to do that, to be fully absorbed? I've gotten better at it. I make sure I spend 20, at least 20 minutes every day alone with my own thoughts, which means no podcast, no stimulus, just me and my brain, usually while walking my dog. And I think re...

regrowing that muscle that I think is atrophied for a lot of us is pretty important. I had a long conversation about your book with my husband, who's a theater director, who does not work in the frenetic world that you and I do. And he directed this play that is eight hours long, right? It is a complete staging of The Great Gatsby. It's very long. And when they first started doing it, they did not think that people would sit down for eight hours.

And so they started doing chunks over a course of days. The idea was that someone might come and they would see part one and then they'd see part two, blah, blah, blah, blah. But after years, literal years of experimentation, he realized that there was an appetite among quite a broad swath of people to come and sit for eight frigging hours. And yeah, you go out for dinner in the middle and experience this full thing, which tells me that there is an appetite to turn away from

And like, how do we cultivate that? How do you cultivate that in yourself, in your children? You have three children at like a variety of ages. How do we find that? More theater. I mean, sure. Great. That, you know, takes for my family. Take them to the ring cycle every weekend. I think there's a straightforward way, which is that if you force, if you sort of slowly ratchet up the attention that you have to give to things, you get better at it, like anything, like

It's like, you know, weightlifting. But I also think that your husband's insight here is so important and something I write about in the book that there's two aspects to this. Like, yes, we're trapped in this kind of algorithmic cage that's driving us towards a post-literate society of five-second videos as the key form of social discourse.

But people also listen to three and four hour podcasts. People still do. Joe Rogan. I mean, not my cup of tea, but people love that stuff. They love it. And they and on obscure topics and people buy and read books still. There is we kind of have two aspects to our attentional appetites. I mean, one is the kind of lowest common denominator biophysical wiring of compelled attention and

I compared the book, which is also almost a cliche of like Coca-Cola French fries, right? Because you've got a biological inheritance to appetites. If you want to sell food to a billion people, that's a way you can sell food to a billion people. But if you want to sell food to 40 people a night or 80 people a night, or you want to get people to come to a play that's 200 seats or 150, people have wild appetites. You know, human beings eat everything under the sun. You could never even begin to describe it.

And that's true for our attention, too. And that's beautiful. Like, that is the hopeful part of this. Different technologies, institutions, cultural arrangements, market structures can cultivate one or the other. And just because one is being cultivated right now through the algorithms and through the platforms and through the sort of discourse doesn't mean the other ones died. It just needs to be cultivated. Chris Hayes, thank you so much for coming on. It's great to talk to you. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

Chris Hayes is the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, the podcast Why Is That Happening, and the author of The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Elena Schwartz.

TBD is part of the larger Whatnext family. And if you like what you heard, the best way to support us, help us pay the bills and keep the lights on is to join Slate Plus. You get all of your Slate podcasts like this one ad free, plus no paywall on the Slate site. All right. I am Lizzie O'Leary. Thank you so much for listening.