Chris Hayes on Trump and Why Attention is the “Most Endangered Resource”

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Chris Hayes, thanks so much for being here. Your recent book here, it’s called “The Sirens Call.” It is “How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” Now I mean, we have heard this age called the Digital Age, and we’ve called, you know, we heard that data is the new oil. You’re essentially arguing here that attention is the most important thing. Why?

 

CHRIS HAYES: You know, I think we all are familiar with the idea of the digital age, the information age, and the importance of information and data, which is absolutely true. Important, you know, information data are central to the forms of economic production and social life we live. But the thing about information and data is that it’s bountiful. It’s essentially infinite, and it’s cheap because of that. There might be 10 or a hundred firms that have your data. And to you, it doesn’t matter that much. It’s not gonna affect your life.

The thing that makes attention such an important resource is one, information consumes it. The more information there is in your environment, the harder it is to focus. Information consumes attention. And two, attention is bounded and finite. It can be in one place or another. So if a hundred firms have your data, that may not affect your day-to-day life, but if someone has your attention in a given moment, if you’re on a crowded subway car, or you’re at your kid’s school and someone starts screaming or a siren comes wailing down the street, or a baby cries on a plane, that takes your attention away from you. So the finitude of that resource is actually the thing that everyone is competing for. And because it is at a fundamental level, hardwired to be zero sum, that’s what gives it such intense value.

 

SREENIVASAN: So you’re saying, well, there is only so much time in the day that I have, right, and I can’t create more time. And as more things compete for that time, my attention becomes more valuable. So the more social media, the more TV channels, everything else that exists out there, that competition makes that millisecond even more lucrative.

 

HAYES: Exactly. And what’s interesting is it both has a market price outside of us. And there’s a weird thing about its value. In the aggregate when pooled over a billion users or 2 billion users like ByteDance and TikTok and Meta have, it’s the stuff of globally unprecedented fortunes. When sold off in the second that you’re loading an Instagram reel, it’s fractions of pennies. Like that second or fewer, you’re looking at its actual market price is nothing. But to you, it is the most precious thing you have. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, you, in the book, you really kind of go back into a little bit of psychology and biology. Well, and you point out that there’s different kinds of attention. I mean, there’s the kind that I voluntarily want to give. There’s the involuntary one, the social attention. Explain the differences.

 

HAYES: Yeah. The, one of the trickiest things about attention is that we do have this compulsory aspect to it. So if a siren comes down the street, if a waiter drops a glass in a restaurant, you don’t get a say over whether your attention is drawn to it. It is drawn to it pre-consciously. It is compelled involuntary attention. That faculty is very powerful ’cause that’s the evolutionary origin of hearing the predator rustling in the bushes or the sound of danger. Right? Then there’s the voluntary tension we wanna pay, aAnd there’s a kind of battle between those two things. One of the things I argue in the book is that competitive attention markets tend to drive towards compelled attention, which is blaring interruption, casino floors, Times Square, the tabloid supermarket counter. Right? When you have competitive attention spaces, they’re trying to compel you away. And then on top of that, there’s the fact that we as humans can be paid attention to, and that has a particular draw on what we pay attention to. If you hear your name at a party, it will draw your attention, even if you’re not focused on the conversation. And they could have been talking for minutes, and you’ve heard literally nothing they said before – and suddenly your name, and this is actually a finding in the experimental literature – your name and your name alone will draw you out of it the same way that a siren or a baby crying or a glass that’s shattering will.

 

SREENIVASAN: All right. Well, I’ll try to say Chris in every question now, just so you know that <laugh>, I’m talking to you.

 

HAYES: I’m focused on you.

 

SREENIVASAN: Exactly. So I wonder, you know, look, I mean this has been the purview of newspapers since they ever existed. Everyone has been trying, there’s been a town crier, right? Somebody who’d stand in the middle of the Roman square with the scroll saying, here ye hear ye, this is the news of the day. What’s so different about what’s happening to us now versus this, you know, kind of, is it the increase of the commodification? Is it just the decrease of our time that – what’s happening?

 

HAYES: It’s a great question, and I should note, yes, there’s lots of continuity in the sense that attention has always been powerful. I mean, when Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar says, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. He’s getting their attention for the purpose of a very important thing, right? Which is to persuade the crowd to back him in the wake of Caesar’s death. So yes, there is continuity. Attention has always been a powerful resource.

What’s different now is A) the ubiquity. The sort of development of the smartphone in 2007 meant that we suddenly had a portal at all times to the sum total of attention grabbing content ever created by humans anywhere on the planet over the course of history. So at all moments, there is the competition of everything ever made for your attention. That’s pretty unprecedented.

Second, the social aspect. Movies can’t actually talk to you. TV shows can’t talk to you. But the internet and platforms can. You can see what your mentions and your tags are. They are working off of the individualized form of social attention that grabs your name in that cocktail party at scale, engineered to make you pay attention. That’s also new.

And third is the fact that because of the overwhelming amount of information and the primacy of it to our economic, social, institutional, and political lives, there’s just more scarcity, as I said at the beginning. So the competition is fiercer and it’s being extracted and monetized at a global scale it never was before. There has never been anyone talking to 2 billion people the way that Meta and ByteDance are.

 

SREENIVASAN: What you point out in the book is really that, I mean, I see so many parallels to the sort of ultra-processed food industry and how we seem to be so much more addicted to sugar. But how do you try to get something like attention back?

 

HAYES: You know, I’m glad that you point to the food analogy or precedent ’cause I actually think it’s the closest one here. In the same way that, you know, we have certain biological inheritances. We like salt, fat and sugar. If you unleash large global capitalism on that problem, it will give you Coca-Cola and fries. And you could sell that anywhere in the world. Right? But the other thing about human beings is their tastes are almost too diverse to characterize. They’ll eat a million different things because of how impossibly complicated humans are in terms of culture and cuisine and history. Right? And the same is true of attention. We do have these two cells. There’s the cells that’s compelled by the casino floor and Times Square, and then there’s the parts of people that go to eight hour operas, and will watch four hour podcasts and we’ll read –

I mean, it’s amazing. There’s people, people read books, they buy and read books. And it’s, what an amazing thing in this day and age, people buy the – hundreds of thousands of millions will do this. And so the question is how do we cultivate market structures, government regulation, social and civic life to cultivate the diversity of our attention as opposed to the flattening? And the food example is really good. We have seen a revolution over the last 30, 40 years and what, in the way food markets work, the rise of organic food and farm to table and farmers’ markets and the moving away from the ultra-processed casseroles and jello salads of the late 1970s and 1980s, which are now almost a kind of punchline, right? We really have seen through all kinds of different means, cultural, social, regulatory, legal, organizing and activism, a revolution in how we relate to food. And I think we’re at that point in attention as well.

 

SREENIVASAN: So how do you build an attention market that might have similar outcomes?

 

HAYES: It’s a great question. So I think how markets are structured really matters. Whether your attention’s being monetized or not. Like group chats are a great example of a part of the digital life I really like. They allow me to stay connected to people that I don’t live near who I’ve known for a long time. I like when my attention is on them ’cause I’m talking to my friends. Crucially, no one is monetizing my attention in the group chat

 

SREENIVASAN: Yet.

 

HAYES: Yet. Right. And this is sort of a key thing, right? The difference between spaces that are fundamentally non-commercial and spaces that are commercial. There are versions of digital life in the internet that don’t have to be commercial. In fact, we had an open web, you know, before we were dominated by the web 2.0 platforms in which open protocols – podcasts are a great example, which everyone loves – the phrase, wherever you get your podcasts, speaks to the fact that podcasts exist on an open internet architecture where they are not commercially bound by a platform attempting to monetize your attention. And they’ve given rise to this incredible flourishing. So rebuilding this, the infrastructure of the internet around non commercially enclosed platforms attempting to monetize attention. And then I think there’s real questions about the law and regulation and getting serious about regulating how attention is extracted from us, and who it’s extracted from.

 

SREENIVASAN: So what happens to the, our kind of ecosystem and our landscape? I mean, you are a person who has been on a platform, cable news, for at least 10 years, right? How does a program like yours, a network like ours, stay relevant?

 

HAYES: It’s a really good question. I think, you know, one of the truths of the attention age is that it’s easier to grab attention than hold attention. And that’s a universal truth. You can ask any person that you meet to walk into a room of 500 people and get them to, and ask them and say, you could use any tool you need to get everyone’s attention, they could probably do it. But if you told ’em to give a talk for an hour that held their attention for an hour, well that’s a lot harder, right?

One of the things we try to do is balance our attentional imperatives, which are absolutely there, and you’re right about cable news, with another set of values. Like, the way to think about attention is as a means towards an end. And the end that we’re trying to get to is educate people, enlighten them, give ’em the tools for self-governance and civic flourishing. The attention is a means to do that. What happens in competitive attention markets is that attention is just the means, the end in and of itself. That’s the thing that’s being sold. And I think having places where people have other imperatives is really important in whatever genre they’re working in. There are people who do awesome stuff on TikTok and amazing podcast and great stuff on short form video and on YouTube. Like, these are, there are people doing amazing work in all those places, and the reason they’re doing amazing work is because they have something they’re trying to do other than just getting people’s attention.

 

SREENIVASAN: So should we collectively as a society be trying to moderate this in some way? Because it seems like most of the people that run the social media platforms are all too happy to go to Capitol Hill, and it’s tell the senator should their face please regulate us knowing that nothing’s really gonna happen. Or even if something happens, it’s gonna be so late and so long that technology and usage patterns have changed. And I’m still gonna make a few billion in between.

 

HAYES: I mean, they will say, please regulate us, but they’ll, but then if you try to do things like put on age caps, they fight it <laugh>. Yeah. So that’s –

 

SREENIVASAN: They lobby against it. Yeah.

 

HAYES: Yeah. So, yes, they want to choose their own regulators and regulation, but I think that – I think that you need both regulation and alternatives. Like, I like the idea of regulating attention in some way, whether that’s essentially like a hard limit on screen time, like a statutory limit. That sounds, people are like, that sounds utterly insane, and the most paternalistic thing. And it’s like people thought that about maximum hours at a certain point.

 

That’s what the Lochner decision, the famous Supreme Court decision’s all about is like, if New York says you can only work 55 hours a week, is that paternalism or are they protecting something essential about you? And does the Constitution knock that law down? I think it’s worth thinking about that for attention. But I also think that you can’t do that unless you are also nurturing alternatives that are like open platform civic alternatives, right? Because there are ways that we could communicate with each other. There are, you know, there’s – video does not have to exist inside YouTube. You know, know there are ways <laugh>, there are ways to have, you know, open platforms in which people can do things. And I think, again, to come back to podcasts, it’s so striking to me that that has emerged as this kind of dominant form when it’s the one that relies on the open platform. And I do think there’s a connection to it. I think there’s a connection between creativity and the openness of a platform.

 

SREENIVASAN: You’re rolling this book out at the beginning of the second Trump administration. And I wonder, you know, having watched the election and the entire political runup to it so closely over the past decade, what did you learn from this election and perhaps on what Donald Trump did well that the Democrats should learn from, if they wanna have a chance at running against you know, him or I guess the party with anybody else?

 

HAYES: Yeah, I mean, there’s a chapter in the book about public attention, attention in the public sphere, and it, I talk quite a bit about Trump. And what I say is he’s got one kind of simple trick and insight into attention, which is simply that in the attention age, when attention is more valuable than ever getting it, and the quantity of it is more important than whether it’s positive or negative. He is almost more than any politician I’ve seen willing to get negative attention, controversy, rage protests if he’s getting attention. He’s – the first moment when he said, John McCain, I like people that weren’t captured. And that was a very attention getting statement. That has been the MO, and most politicians don’t like that trade. Most politicians are like, if you, if the option is I go out there and I get attention that’s negative, or I get no attention, I take the latter. I don’t wanna make news, I’m gonna keep my head down. And I think what he’s shown, which is very optimized for the attention age, and I think Elon Musk as well, is that attention domination in politics is incredibly important. It might be more important than fine grade messaging. It might be more important than advertising. And that you have to be willing to take downside risks to get it. And maybe you’re gonna, people are gonna, you know, maybe you take some of that risk on, but as PT Barnum said, as long as you spell my name right.

 

SREENIVASAN: I mean, how much of that is him in a singular way? Because there have been politicians even in the Republican party who tried to take that route and –

HAYES: It didn’t work.

SREENIVASAN: No. You know, so how much of it like, okay, well Donald Trump was exceptional in somehow threading this needle versus you know, if you’re writing a playbook for the Democrats in three years, what do you tell ’em?

 

HAYES: It’s such an important point ’cause It’s really true that there have been so many, essentially knock off Republican candidates who have lost eminently winnable races being outrageous and polarizing and obnoxious and having the high negatives and losing races they should have won. Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake and Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz. And you know, on and on and on. There’s been a whole bunch of ’em. In fact, it’s one of the stories of the Trump era is that Trump manages to pull it off and Trump-like candidates do much worse than just kind of normy Republicans. So you’re right that there’s a real trade off there. One of the things though I think is important is that presidential politics are just different than anything else. And that’s the place where the attentional imperatives are at their most competitive and at their most important. And I think also Trump is able to pull it off because of something particular and genuine and authentic to who he is, which is that at the core of his being, he needs that attention and he isn’t faking it. And that’s another part of his appeal, I think. It selects for a certain kind of personality, a personality like you’re seeing in Elon Musk as well, who I think is pulling off the same trick.

 

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” Author and host of podcasts and TV shows and attention grabber everywhere, Chris Hayes, thanks so much for joining us.

HAYES: I really appreciate it. Thank you.