Chris Hayes
Appearances
Pivot
DeepSeek Shockwaves, Nvidia's Plunge, and Target's DEI Rollback
The backlash that is brewing to this experience of contemporary life is enormous. It is indeed. It is growing by the second people do not like it. And whoever figures out how to channel that – and there's going to be a million different ways. People are going to drop out. There's going to be a kind of no phones offline movement. There's going to be people that –
Pivot
DeepSeek Shockwaves, Nvidia's Plunge, and Target's DEI Rollback
Try to build a new version of the non-commercial internet. The folks who are now trying to do that with a blue sky developed protocol. People are going to opt out. They're going to try to create niche businesses that block your phone. They're going to try new changes to lifestyles. They're going to try political movements that regulate attention, that take phones out of schools.
Pivot
DeepSeek Shockwaves, Nvidia's Plunge, and Target's DEI Rollback
There's going to be all this stuff.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
What you quickly find is that positive compliments and recognition, they just sort of wash off you. But the insults and the negativity cuts and sticks. I mean, do you not feel that way as someone who has some public profile?
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
or something like you're in the public square and it feels terrible and I don't understand why like I could just shut my computer and be gone but it does not feel that way internally yeah and I think you know I can think of days I spent in that haze you know when you come out of it you're like why did I let myself feel that way like why did I spend a whole day like why was I I could even think of moments of being distracted from my you know kids
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Because I was sitting there and feeling wounded and hurt and ruminating on a mean thing someone who I don't know said online. And I'm distracted by tensions on that instead of like my wonderful child sitting on my lap.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
That's exactly right. You know, attention is the substance of life. That is what our lives add up to. It's in every moment we are choosing to pay attention to something or we're having it compelled, but we're paying attention to something. And that's what adds up to a day and a week and a month and a year and a life. And... It's also finite.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
You know, this is one of the key points I make is that part of the value and the reason it's so valuable and the reason there is such competition for the extraction of attention is that unlike information, it's capped. It's a finite resource. It's people are figuring out how to take. one or two extra slices of the pie, not grow it.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And that's the other thing that leads to the feeling of alienation and the feeling that something has been taken away from us because of its finitude.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Yes. I mean, I started reading Marx in high school, which is a weird thing to say, but it's true. Here's the basic argument Marx makes about labor. So he's living at this time where there's this new thing called wage capitalism, wage labor. People sell their labor per hour basis.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Totally. It's interesting. Yeah. So let's think about a cobbler, right? You're in the pre-industrial age. You got your little shop. You make a shoe. And there's a few things about this process that are distinct. One is there's a telos. There's an arc to it. You start with the raw materials. Then you put them together. Then you put the sole on. Then you put the finish on.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
In the end, you have a shoe. And you own that shoe. And then you sell it in your store in exchange for money. Now, compare that experience to the wage laborer in a shoe factory who is at one position stamping soles 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. In both cases, you could say that the sort of pre-industrial cobbler and the shoe factory worker are both laboring.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But now there's this distinct thing called labor as a commodity that has a wage price and a set of institutions to take – the labor in exchange for that wage, and a set of technological and economic developments that produce a situation in which you go from being the cobbler who makes the whole shoe to being in a factory 12 hours a day stamping a soul.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And Marx talks about this as the root of alienation. You're just alienated from yourself, from your humanity. You're not doing a recognizably human thing. You're doing something that feels robotic and mechanical. But also that the value that you're creating is literally outside of you. I mean, to go back to the cobbler, when he makes the shoe, he actually owns the shoe.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
If he wanted to make the shoe and give it to his kids, he could do that. And sometimes cobblers would, right? But the factory worker doesn't have that. The factory worker is alienated from the value of the shoe. He's stamping the sole. And when it goes down the line and it gets sold off somewhere else, it's literally outside of him. It's alien to him.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
So this is the basic Marx labor theory of value, right? That you have this transformation in society, economic conditions, institutions that took a thing that was fundamentally human, effort, toil, whatever you want to call it, and transformed it into this new thing that was a commodity that could be priced and bought and traded.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Called labor. And I think basically there's something happening right now with attention that's similar. People have always paid attention to things. And that attention has always had some value. And, you know, there's people who have utilized that value for all kinds of purposes. P.T. Barnum, Mark Anthony, friends, Roman countrymen, lemon in your ears. You know, there's always been a value there.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But we've entered an age that I think is similar to the industrial age for attention where a set of institutions, technologies, and arrangements – have produced a world in which our attention is being extracted from us and commodified and sold at a price, often in millisecond auctions to advertisers.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And that extraction leads to a profound sense of alienation, similar in some ways to that sense of alienation and that alienation of labor. And yet there's one more way in which it's even more insidious, I would argue. which is that compelled involuntary aspect. So labor can be coerced forcibly. I mean, you can use a whip or a gun to make someone do something, right?
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
If you put a gun to someone's head and say, dig a ditch, you're coercing, you're forcing that labor, but they know they're doing it. If you fire a gun, your head will snap around before you know you're even doing it. And so because of this involuntary compelled aspect of our biological wiring for attention,
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
The one that I caught myself, I've caught myself doing is your child asking for screen time when they're, you know, not allowed to or it's not normally the time and giving them like a sharp no and then like going back to looking at your phone.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
this new competitive attention capitalism is working to extract it at such a deep level that it's compelling it in some way before we're even able to make a volitional choice about it. And that feeling is this profound, deep feeling of alienation. I think this alienation is so ubiquitous. I think we all feel versions of it.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And I found the concept of alienation, which I always found a little foggy in the past, very clarifying. Something that should be within us is outside of us. And that within us is my control over my own thoughts. That's the thing that should be within me. That's the nature of consciousness itself and what it means to be a free will.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And yet that is being extracted and commodified and taken outside me.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Yes, that's a good point. Yes. There's not the same sense of violation, right? Because in some ways it feels like we're consenting. I think you're right. That muddies it and also gives us a weird feeling of shame and guilt.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Well, look, here's what unites them, right? It's fundamentally these are people that understand that attention matters more than anything, even at the cost of negative attention. And this is really the key thing to understand, I think, that has really warped our public discourse.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
The thing that separates social attention from other more elevated forms of human interaction is that it's necessary but not sufficient. Someone flirting with you across the bar is social attention, pleasant kind. Someone screaming at your face because you're too close to them on the subway is also attention. And that's the weird thing about attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
It could be of either valence and everything in between. In a world that increasingly values attention over all else, what you get is you unlock the universe of negative attention and its power. Because if all that matters is attention, then negative attention is just as good as positive attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Now, most of us are conditioned to not like negative attention, but there's a certain set of people who either through a sort of So intellectual understanding, sometimes this happens, you'll read interviews with creators who are like, oh, yeah, once I started trolling, I got more views. So like part of it is the algorithms select for negative attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But part of it, I think, is just a deep brokenness in their personality. And I think this is true of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk to seek out negative attention because it's attention. And this creates a kind of troll politics writ large. And I think we're sort of watching, in some ways, the Musk era supplant the Trump era, if that makes sense.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
So most politicians, they want positive attention. And if they can't get positive attention, they want no attention. And then underneath that, negative attention, right? So it's like you want people to like you and know your name or you want to stay out of the news, right? And what Trump realizes that, no, it doesn't matter whether it's positive or negative as long as you're getting attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Musk has now taken this insight to actually having captured a platform that he purchased where he is now operationalizing this at scale. So it's like the higher synthesis of the insight of Trump. He's understood that attention is the most valuable resource. And this is true in monetary terms. I mean, look at what's happened in this. I actually get wrong in the book because I can't.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
I was writing it too early. Look what happened. He buys Twitter, okay? He buys it for $44 billion. So he gets it so he could be the main character on this. He so obsessively pursues this attention that it destroys the actual value of the entity. So lighting $25 billion on fire, right? All in this sort of broken pursuit of attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But then using this attention and using the platform, he helps elect a president who puts him essentially at the seat of power, right? that produces an enormous boon in his personal wealth because people are like, oh, now he is close to power. And it has netted him hundreds of billions of dollars in his personal value. And it's the most incredible allegory for the entire attention age.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
That's right. And, you know, one of the things I write about in the book is that when we think about the state of boredom or being bored, I think we associate it with being a child. I mean, I remember, you know, days in the summer particularly where... I was a little underscheduled. I just sort of sitting around these periods where you feel like I have nothing to do.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Here are these two guys, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who seem to recognize more than anyone that attention is the most valuable resource and that you should do whatever you can to pursue it, even if that means acting like a maniac. And it's kind of worked for both of them.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Yeah, I mean, I think, so the first thing I would say is that the cause for optimism, which I have some, is that I feel this is pretty untenable and unsustainable because I think the sense of exhaustion and alienation is so ubiquitous and profound that I don't think it can keep going that way. And actually, I think that there's unbelievable latent energy for something different than what this is.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
There are ways that attention can still be bought and sold that isn't this particular to the second algorithmic infinite scroll that we're all now trapped in. Right. So I think you are going to see flourishing of alternate means. And you see this, I mean, again, Substack, right? Like the long form newsletter, we're seeing it happen. Like Substack is growing exponentially.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Because people do want to like read long things from people that they think are interesting and not just algorithmic serving of short form video. That's a different model. It's a for profit model, but it's a different model and I think a better one and one that's less extractive and alienating for our attention. You know, vinyl records were completely supplanted by cassette tapes and then CDs.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And then starting about 10 years ago, they started growing and they've been growing every year and they've been growing at huge paces. And there's now a thriving vinyl industry. And the reason is that I think when you are streaming music, you have the twitchy short form attention extraction of music. go to the next song or maybe I want something else. When you put on a record, you commit, right?
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
The commitment mechanism is the triumph of the volitional will over the involuntary attention compulsion, right? It's like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, right? We make a commitment. I'm going to read this email from this sub stacker I subscribe to. I'm going to listen to this album, which I've put on vinyl. These commitment methods, and again, they can be in for-profit contexts, right?
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
I think we are going to see flourishing and more energy behind that. And the other example I use, because I talked about hunger before, is to think about what's happened with how opposition to the sort of corporate industrial food system the U.S. has worked. So you've had the entire thriving ecosystem and set of businesses built up in opposition to
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
to precisely the forms of extractive and exploitative food capitalism that I think is parallel to attention capitalism. And I think we are going to see that. There are people that market dumb phones now, and I think there's going to be a lot more of them.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And the reason I've come to believe that we associate with childhood is as soon as we are old enough to control our lives, we do everything possible to make sure we never feel it. That's why it's associated with childhood, because because children don't have full agency. Once we develop full agency, we're like, I'm not going to be in that state.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
I can imagine a world in which in the same way that like a certain kind of parent doesn't feed their kids, you know, fast food, you start to see that more and more. The people kind of just opt out of this entire system to the extent they can.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Yeah, I do. I do. I think that there's something pretty dark and insidious about how the major platforms particularly are engineering this kind of attention compulsion. And I think we are going to enter an era in which we start regulating attention. Seriously. You're seeing this call, you know, in Australia, they've already banned social media for children under 16.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
You're going to see more and more calls for that. But also I can imagine other ways that we try to regulate it, whether it's hard caps. regulated hard caps on screen time. I mean, that sounds so crazy and kind of un-American, but I don't know. Maybe that's a good idea.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
That makes me so happy to hear that because this is a book written by a person who genuinely loves the Internet and has loved the Internet most of his adult life. I mean, I'm an early Internet adopter. And what the group chat is doing is it's using technology to connect actual people that know each other. And there's lots of stuff that could happen in group chat that could be.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
messy or bad because humans can be mean or gossipy to each other. But fundamentally, there's not an interposition of some entity trying to monetize it. It's a non-commercial space. It's a technology that's a non-commercial space. It feels like the early non-commercial internet. You just go on with your friends and you make jokes and you share stuff. And that's it.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
No one comes in with a five second ad. No one tries to extract your attention against your will. It's a set of bilateral relationships voluntarily entered to in a space that is non-commercial. And that's the other thing we really need. Like we have physical public spaces that are non-commercial and they are so vital, whether that's schools or libraries or parks.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Increasingly, the internet is just totally captured by commercial spaces. And it used to be entirely non-commercial and now it's entirely commercial. And those commercial spaces will ultimately further the kind of extractive attention capitalism I'm critiquing. But there are ways to create, and the group chat right now is the chief among them, non-commercial spaces of digital connection.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
I'm going to do whatever it takes not to be in that state.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Thank you for reading it. It really means a lot to me, and thank you for having me.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
So compelled attention is part of our deepest biological neurological wiring. It's the involuntary reaction if you are at a cocktail party and a waiter drops a tray of glasses. You can't help it. You cannot control whether you're going to pay attention to that. It's often the case with an explosion or the siren that is on top of an ambulance or a cop car as it goes down the street.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
That involuntary attention is the part of our neurological wiring in which our attention is compelled independent of our volition and will as a kind of almost biological fact due to the fact that we needed to be alert to danger, basically. And then there's voluntary attention, which is when we, using the conscious will, flash the beam of thought where we want it to go.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Well, I mean, I think that, look, involuntary attention, I think, is probably necessary for the survival of species. So in that sense, it's fundamental. And I wouldn't say it's worse. The problem is, so let's say you're reading the book. You've made this volitional decision. And as you're reading the book, the little haptic buzz of a notification in your phone goes off.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Now, you notice that because it's designed to use the deep circuitry of compelled attention to force your attention onto the physical sensation of the phone.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
That is a perfect example of the one-way ratchet of what I call attention capitalism, is that the more important attention gets and the more that people, corporations and platforms have sort of optimized for it competitively, the more they will try to use the tactics of compelled attention to get our attention. rather than to get the part of us that's volitional attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Now, of course, you still have human will, and in that moment, you're going to decide, am I going to take my phone out to see what the notification was or not? But that little moment, that little interruption... That's pretty new at scale. I think it's totally new at scale. And it's also just absolutely endemic to modern life.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
It's our entire lives now is that wail of the siren going down the street, the clatter of the drop tray. There's very powerful forces attempting to compel our attention away from where we might want to put it in any moment because that's a kind of hack for them for getting our attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Yeah, you're reactive and you're in the you're at your sort of biophysical base. Right. You're the comparison that I use in the book. And I think this might be helpful for people to think this through is how hunger works. So with food, we have these deep biological inheritances where there's just universal deep wiring towards sweets, for instance, or fats because they are extremely calorie dense.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
You can exploit that at scale as McDonald's has and other food operations. And find that you could basically sell cheeseburgers and salty fries and Coca-Cola all over the world because you're working on that deep biological substrate in people. But it's also the case when you ask, well, what do humans like to eat?
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
It's an impossible thing to answer because the answer is basically everything, right? It's amazing all the different things. And what we see in sort of modern food culture and the food industry is a sort of fascinating kind of battle between these twin forces, right? The kind of...
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
industrialized production and fast food that is attempting to sort of find the lowest common denominator, speak to that deepest biological substrate so that they can sell corn syrup to everyone. And then all of the amazing things that people do with food and what food means as culture, as history, as self-expression, as expression of love and bonds.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And I think basically there's a very similar dynamic that we now have with attention. where our compelled attention and our deep wiring is being extracted and exploited by very sophisticated, large and powerful economic entities. And yet we still do have this thing called voluntary attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And, you know, what's sort of amazing too about the internet age is like, and I say this in the book, like I've watched hours of people cleaning carpets, which I find totally compelling and almost sort of sublime and soothing. And I wouldn't have guessed that that was a thing I wanted to pay attention to. Like,
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
You know, the Internet has opened this cornucopia of different things you can pay attention to. So we're constantly in this battle between these two forms of attention that are in our heads and the different entities that are trying to compel our attention against our will and then our own kind of volitional attempt to control it.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Mostly not, occasionally yes, but mostly I have been sober while watching the cleaning carpets and I've still found them incredibly common.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
That is. That's the – I don't know if you've seen these, but they, like, they take these super, super dirty carpets. It's like a genre video. There's a million different ones now, which indicates that that's not just me. Lots of people feel this way.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
So, yeah, that's basically – That's how I think about compelled involuntary attention. And I do think that because I think we're more familiar with it in the context of our appetites and hungers, I think it's a really useful and grounding metaphor because I think it functions in a very similar way.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that it's so foundational, social attention, and I think it's slightly counterintuitive because I think people have very different attitudes and personal dispositions towards social attention. Lots of people don't like it. But the foundational truth about being a human is we come into the world utterly helpless and dependent completely on care.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Every kid is engaged in a kind of battle for their parents' attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And the thing prior to that care is attention. Right. And the best way to see this is the child's wail. The most powerful tool that the newborn has is the cry. And the reason they have the cry is it's their siren. It compels our attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And the reason that it compels our attention and the reason they have to have the ability to compel our attention is because without attention, they will perish. And that is our human inheritance. That need from the moment we come gasping into the world for others' attention, that is foundational to every single one of us.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Okay. This is really, I think, a key thing to think about. So before civilization, you got social attention from people that you knew that you had relationships with. There weren't really strangers. And you might be able to put your social attention on someone you don't know, like a kind of godlike figure or a mythic hero that tales were told of.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
I mean, I think every kid notices how distracted parents are by the phone.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
So you can put your attention on a person you don't know. But the social attention you received was all from people that you had a relationship, a bilateral relationship with. What happens with the dawn of what we might call fame, and there's an amazing book about this that I – Leo Braude. Yeah, Leo Braude's great book. He says Alexander basically is the first famous person, and he explains why.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But fame is the experience of receiving social attention from people you do not know and at scale. Now, this is a very strange experience. And the reason I know this is because I happen to live it. And so in the sort of progression of civilization, you start to have famous people. And more and more people can be famous with the dawn of industrial media, movie stars, pop stars, all this stuff.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But it's still a very, very, very tiny percentage of people that can be known by strangers, that can have social attention being paid to them by strangers. That just generally doesn't happen for most people. And most people –
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
are going to have received social attention from people they have relationships, and they might put their social attention on all sorts of public figures, the president or celebrities or other people, but they're not getting it from people they don't know. It just is a very tiny sliver of humans that can have that experience.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And now it is utterly democratized for everyone for the first time in human history. I mean, it's genuinely new, genuinely a break, has not happened before. Anyone can have... enormous social attention from oceans of strangers on them. You can have a viral moment online. You can cultivate a following.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
This experience of social attention from strangers, precisely because it is so at odds, I think, with our inheritance, is weird and alienating. And there's a bunch of ways it is. One of the ways it's alienating is that... We are conditioned to care what the people we love think about us. We're conditioned to care if we've hurt someone that we have a relationship with.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
No, actually, I think the youngest because youngest children have a real antenna for attention, right? They come into a family in which they recognize immediately that there is at some level a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all for parental attention.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
But it's very different if you've insulted or hurt someone, just a total stranger who's saying mean things to you or you've disappointed them or they're angry at you. That comes into you psychologically indistinguishably. From it coming from kin or lover or friend.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Truly. There's a kind of clash here between the data set we're trained on, if you will. Right. And what we're encountering. And the reason, again, this is a place that I really know, right? I... didn't used to have people come up to me on the street, and then I became famous enough that people did.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And I've experienced all the ways that that's strange and alienating, and I've given a lot of thought, partly as a kind of full-time psychological undertaking so that I don't go crazy, because I do think it's kind of distorting and madness-inducing in its own way. And what we've done is basically democratized the madness-inducing aspects of celebrity for the entire society.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
for every teenager with a phone, now can be driven nuts in precisely the way that we have watched generations of celebrities and stars go crazy.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes, into the project of impressing strangers.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
A project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires, but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
Well, and I think that's because... there's something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can't be replicated. Like that, you know, the thing that we're chasing is something ineffable and non replicable.
Radio Atlantic
The War for Your Attention
And it's the reason we chase it because it's, it's what makes life worth living at a certain level is to be recognized and seen in relationships of mutual support and affection and care with other people. You know, that's it. That's the stuff of it. And it's, We are given a tantalizing facsimile that some deep part of us cannot help but chase, but it can't also be the real thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
That's a good observation. And I mean, look, I go back to the secret video about the rest vote that the I forget the organization did. Yeah, I'll shut them out in the show notes. But like, he gave away the game all right there. I mean, like the guy, I guess you got to hand it to him. Do you have to hand it to ISIS? I guess you got to hand it to rest vote.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Like he was like, I've spent the last four years basically writing all these executive orders that we've seen in the last week. Like it's essentially what he said, like they were prepared. They knew where the weak spots and the soft spots were, where they could challenge the courts. In some cases, they don't really care if there's a weak spot or soft spot.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
But it has been just an organized and regimented effort to tear down anything in the government that they don't think serves them, which is basically everything.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
They like attention and control. You know, they like to be lavished, praised, praised to be lavished on them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
In exactly the manner which they wish for it to be lavished on them. Okay. Yeah. You have some interesting insights about things that I dealt with in therapy, about the difference between attention and recognition. So we're going to do deep thinking, but unfortunately we have to do news too. There was some news last night, the Office of Management and Budget.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
That kind of backs me into the book. So we'll do the politics part of the book first, and then we'll kind of end with the phones and the social element of it, because... You know, you talk about how we're in the attention age and the way that Trump has leveraged that, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And the way that, in some ways, the Democrats, I think particularly at the presidential level, have not quite figured out how to leverage it in the same way. And just in this specific example first, you know, my colleague Sam Stein, your pal, wrote this this morning.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
He writes, the two parties running at different speeds, Senate Democrats are holding a press conference today to condemn the pardoning of January Sixers. That was a week ago. unclear if there is anything today to go after the OMB power play to take over all federal grant money. And like, there is something to that, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Like you could imagine this being a moment where a either a single democratic figure or, you know, sort of a democratic organization or some, you know, leader on the hill, like seized this moment to grab a bunch of attention for themselves. And That hasn't really happened.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You know, you can shout out random people, Chris Murray's been out there, AOC's been talking, but like, that hasn't really happened anywhere kind of near the scale of how like Trump would have done it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
This seems where all the problems are going to be coming from in the next administration. Yeah. Put out a memo ending all grant making. They put a stop work order on all grants. This includes USAID and others. Among potentially the things affected by this is the program that helps women, infants, and children that need food, the WIC program. Thoughts?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Even back to me, I'm laughing, but just to be honest, this is how quickly things have moved in eight years. I was running communications for Jeb Bush eight years ago. We cared if we got fact-checked. If we got a negative fact-check, we cared. Jeb cared. The campaign cared. We did not want to be fact-checked. That seems so, in some ways, kind of nice and earnest and cute, but also absurd.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Right. We want to have a modicum of integrity, like within the bounds of campaign discourse.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You get DeSantis. That was exactly what was in my head before you said it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
For comm staff, it's scary for her to do an Instagram live, but it's also no risk, no reward. There is an authentic way to get attention. It doesn't have to be. You don't have to be a total sociopath. It does help to be a shameless sociopath. That is Trump's superpower. But I hate to pick on Gretchen Whitmer, but it just it happened yesterday and I was watching her. on CBS this morning.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And my buddy Peter Hamby at Puck wrote about this. And he writes, this interview wasn't bad or embarrassing. It was just rote, cautious, and forgettable. I want to play one clip from it just to give people an example of what we're talking about.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I mean, that's nice. That's all nice. That's fine. That's fine. But Donald Trump is like tearing apart the government right now. And you are plausibly supposed to be one of the people running against him in 2028. Like he is shutting down all grants for any organization. He's firing people. That's a night of the long knives. And you're like, you know, we got to find some common ground right now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I wanted to beat you to the punch.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I do think, though, that presidential races and governors races, we kind of like lump all this stuff together. I told the president is just totally different. Yeah, it's a different in 1992. It was so, you know, I said this about Jebo. He's like. He was very much like his father, like his father in 1992 was in a good shape to run a presidential race. It was a very different world. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And I don't think H.W. Bush would have been president if he was running in 2016. It would have been like Mitt Romney probably would have been that sort of race. Right. It's just it's a different time. And you can be Tony Evers and be a good governor of Wisconsin who is cautious and whatever. But like the type of attention on a presidential race, Roy Cooper. Yeah, Roy Cooper.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
People don't talk about their governors, right? You're on the local... Really, governor's races are not all that different from 1992. They're a little different, but not all that different. Presidential races now are all consuming. They're like celebrity figures. You're talking about them on the Nelk Boys and on Sports Fog. And fitness influencers. Everybody's talking about them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You know what I mean? It's different.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I was like, I'm not sure this works for him.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Right. It's NBA versus high school basketball. You can improve on the margins in the NBA if you have good bounce passes and dribbling and fundamentals. But at the end of the day, you need top-level talent to sway. The other thing, I'm just curious your take on this. I think that the Democrats are missing on the attention thing that maybe is not related to sociopathy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
So I'm trying to kind of encourage good behavior. There's a little unpredictability. Yeah. Like you can get attention right now by being unpredictable. And that, I kind of know what every Democrat's going to say before they even sit down.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Yeah, and you're an interviewer, right? So you know this. Like you could probably do the interviews in your sleep half the time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Man, we are really... Yeah. Well, it's because it's obvious. It's maybe a problem if two white pod boys think it's so much the same. Maybe the Dems should zag away from everything that we're suggesting right now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
But you talk about the book is how and you compare it to in cable news, right? Like you got to grab people's attention and then hold it. Yeah. Right. And like being unpredictable is kind of part of holding attention. I mean, I just I hear from people anecdotally. I hear from listeners like you have a politician on and sometimes like I fast forward halfway. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Because I know what they're going to say. You know what I mean? And so it's kind of my job to try to make it unpredictable. But like they could participate in that a little bit, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
All right, let's talk about the sociocultural part of the book. I guess, what is just the broad thesis about putting the politics aside about how we are kind of managing our attention in this, you know, in the box of screams age?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Like that's the goal here. I was going back even further than that. I was thinking like spoil system.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
So there's kind of two sides of this that you get into. Like one is how we manage attention. you know, in this age dealing with like all of the different attention stimuli and, you know, how, you know, how we channel our attention for good. And then the flip side of the coin, which is the democratization of getting attention. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And so let's just like talk about the first part first a little bit and like whether, you know, I think you had one line in there that your, the book was an attempt to find some peace on this front. Did you find any for people?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You wrote this Elon thing. I'd write this down. He wrote in 2022 that, where is it? Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks. Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization. He wrote that in 2022. How'd that go?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And who was that that has the power of the purse? Is that the Trump family organization? That's Barron.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
On kind of the receiving of attention side of this, I was intrigued by the point about babies, right? That we get attention immediately, that in other animals, like, you know, babies don't need attention quite as much, you know? Have you ever watched, by the way, have you ever watched like a litter of pigs nursing? I don't think I have. You watch a lot of weird shit. I did notice in the book.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You also were like, I've once watched carpet being cleaned for hours.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You watch it while you do other stuff? Or is it just you and your mind looking at carpet cleaning videos?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
So then this leads to the more grown-up problems, which is the thing that really resonated with me, which was an attention-recognition paradox. Yeah. And you write about how a lot of the people that are ruining our society right now have been unable to navigate the attention-recognition paradox, but I think it's something that all of us deal with. So talk about that a little bit.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
All right, good.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Oh, my God. Do you feel that? I feel it in a big way. No, this is what I literally had to do. I was doing therapy about because I was like – You write at length in the book about famous people reading their comments. And you admitted to the fact that you once searched Chris, not once, but at one time in your life before you dealt with us, you had searched Chris Hayes. It was like name searching.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Read mean people attack you. And it was like, why is this? Why do I care? Why is this happening? you know, something that people who are successful, like, shouldn't they feel fulfilled?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And one of the things that I was, you know, shout out to my therapist was like, that is related to this attention recognition paradox is like, I was getting attention, but I did not necessarily feel good about what I was providing to the world. if that makes sense, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And that, like, you can resolve this somewhat, and you still have the human nature of wanting to be liked, but, like, you can resolve it somewhat if you do the internal work to feel good about yourself and you build up relationships with people that value what you're actually doing and that that is... much healthier than the low calorie, you know, retweet attention.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And obviously it's, it's not quite as, you know, like the barriers are, are not walls here that you kind of can flow back and forth a little bit between. And I do all the time. Yeah. But, but there was something to that for sure. And I definitely, it resonated for sure.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Yes. And then it's particularly exacerbated in my case when I was putting out things that I actually didn't think were good for the world. So that's the other side of the same spectrum. That's where it gets even uglier. All right. Last thing, in case Donald Trump shuts down MSNBC, which he's threatening to do, the free speech president, and you have to become a pop psychologist full time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Do you have any other pop psychology advice for not for minor celebrities, but for humans out there trying to navigate the attention age?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
just me and me just it is watching cleaning carpets while i have my own thoughts does that count or no nothing no no nothing zero yeah no no not even carpet cleaning videos all right boy that's gonna be tough but uh i'll do my best uh chris hayes thanks he also has a podcast i don't know if i mentioned in the beginning why is this happening it's mostly great It's like mostly great.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
But that's what their contention is. And I think they'll probably have some friendly courts as to that effect. And we've seen some of this. It's interesting.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Like seven out of 10. I'm like, these are awesome. Mostly great. Thank you. And then like two or three, they're like, that's fine. Yeah. Which is pretty, I think that's a pretty good podcast rate. If I was doing seven out of 10 great podcasts, I'd feel really good about it. Why is this happening?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
If people haven't listened to it and the, uh, the book again, the sirens call how attention became the world's most endangered resource. Thanks. Help me. We'll see you on your show. You bet. Up next, Alex Cantrowitz. All right, we are back. He's host of the Big Technology podcast, and he writes Big Technology on Substack. I'm a subscriber. And he formerly covered Silicon Valley for BuzzFeed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
It's Alex Kantrowitz. What's up, man? Hey, Tim. Great to see you. Good to see you, too. Yeah, I texted you yesterday because... I'm not like as deep in the tech world as I used to be, you know, I'm monitoring your newsletter when I can, but there's other news I've got to pay attention to. Unfortunately, I don't know if you've noticed a lot happening in Washington.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And so the deep seek thing really kind of blindsided me. It was this new AI application. I guess you're going to explain it in a second. I guess the Chinese hedge fund pushed out, but it had massive market implications. It's going to have massive, I think, geopolitical implications. So I was like, I got to get smart on this and understand what's happening. So I was hoping you could educate me.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
That seems a lot cheaper. Way cheaper. The question is, is that like, how is that possible? And I saw there's a lot of, you know, conversation I saw online and you can immediately get into conspiracy land, right? Which is like, are the Chinese, are they lying about this? Like, was it actually that much more expensive? Or, you know, were they using like chips, like American chips, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
It's like, what, like, what is at this point, like the consensus on like how and why they managed to create a model that's so much cheaper?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
But first, I get to turn the mic around on somebody you might know, you might have heard of it that he wrote about in his book that he's, he's kind of a big deal. He's kind of a minor celebrity that gets noticed in the airports. Now, his name is Chris Hayes. He's on MSNBC. And he's got a new book out the sirens call how attention became the world's most endangered resource. How you doing, man?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Have you played with it? So like the DeepSeek, is it just ChatGPT?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
It's horrible. It's like if you wanted to name something that was in a thriller movie about a computer that takes over the universe, it feels like it's all aimed at that. It's all these sci-fi nerds naming this shit.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Holy shit. So like, yeah, so this gets to the kind of CCP of it all. Like, you know, I guess it's hard for me to ask you to, you know, divine the motivations of the people that are behind this new technology, but like... That does seem strange, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I guess like the natural concerns that would pop up for people in the political or national security space is, oh, man, like people are going to start using this model. You know, the same kind of data concerns that people have about TikTok might be relevant here. The same concerns about Twitter. Who knows how they can jigger the algorithm in various ways that might be pernicious.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
But if it's open source and people can build on it off of their platform, then a lot of those security and other related concerns don't seem to be as stark. But then you kind of wonder, well, shouldn't the CCP have some feelings about that?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Yeah, it's interesting. I guess maybe I should have had your wife on for this question, but it's always kind of the inverse of the other conservative, like big legal win actually during the Biden years, which was the Chevron case, right? Which was like essentially like they were arguing that the agencies didn't have carte blanche to interpret ambiguous laws, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Why didn't they do it? Why weren't they able to do it? There is a little bit of, you know, you got to kind of laugh a little bit at our masters of the universe who, you know, spent the last week suckling up to Donald Trump in a reality TV show and going to inaugural balls and talking to him about how we need the government to be supportive of these AI endeavors.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You have this big announcement that Sam Altman put out about all the money that we're going to be investing in this. And then like two days after that, a Chinese hedge fund is like, well, actually, we've already lapped you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Like they didn't want the EPA going rogue and doing things that they didn't, that weren't specifically prescribed by Congress. But they're saying that the EPA can stop doing things that were specifically prescribed by Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
All right. Yeah, we'll see about that. I saw Andreessen, you know, tweeted yesterday, this is a Sputnik moment. And, you know, as you mentioned, the big tech stocks had a pretty rough day yesterday. Like, what is the sense of, you know, among your sources, people you talk to in that world? Is there like panic? Are they excited about, you know, the opportunity? I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
What's the vibe check in Silicon Valley?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Though maybe it should have been a little bit of a... I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
That's not a popular word. No therapy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
The definitions of masculinity among these fellows are pretty interesting, though. I don't know. Mark Zuckerberg's new haircut isn't as bad as some people think, I don't think. Some of the crypto folks, even some of my listeners who are pro-crypto, aren't really loving my anti-crypto pivot of late. But... I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I was looking at the Coinbase traffic over the weekend, and it was like 20% of the trades were on that coin that's named after the co-founder's cat. I'm blanking on the name right now. About 5% were on the Trump coin, which is a totally worthless scam and a rug pull being run by the President of the United States. We've got a bunch of people around him.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
now who i think are motivated to ensure that the government is not staffed with people who are going to investigate this sort of thing given what happened with ftx i just i don't know i mean obviously people are going to make money on this in the short term um you know not regulating crypto and we're having kind of a crypto moment but uh there's some red sirens blaring for me i don't know what do you what you think about that
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
No. Yeah, I don't know. Some of the folks that's pro-crypto folks were mad at my Coinbase attack. They're like, well, yeah, it was just one day. It was just one weekend day. And hey, there are other businesses that have platforms that have things on them that aren't valuable. I was like, really?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Are there other businesses where like a third to two thirds of the traffic on a given day there are basically scams and Ponzi schemes with no value?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
That takes us to the other news item that I wanted to cover. The acting attorney general moved on Monday to fire several Justice Department officials who worked on the federal criminal investigations into Donald Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I don't understand. I guess maybe there's some of this. Again, you're more in this world than me. Why aren't big advocates for Bitcoin more mad at Trump? I would imagine a world like, again, back to Andreessen, somebody that does think that there will be really powerful, amazing use cases for this. There's a credibility destroyer.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
To have the incoming now president of the United States launch something that is a completely worthless, obvious scam. Right. I mean, wouldn't they want something like a structure, a superstructure that is going to make things more credible?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Why be mad when you're getting rich?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Well, good thing there are no morality tales or no kind of historical lessons about the issues that might be associated with just ignoring fundamental problems as you get wealthier and wealthier. That never comes back to bite you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
All right, last thing. This is all just kind of developing, so I don't think you're going to have any deep reporting on this or anything, but just I'm interested on your kind of top line thought. there's been a pause put on all grants and research. We just talked about that with Chris Hayes for a little bit from the feds.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, again, the acting attorney general wrote that he did not believe they, quote, could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda. because of their significant role in prosecuting the president. Is that the job of career Justice Department officials, to faithfully implement the president's agenda?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And like the first thing people start talking about with relation to that is like medical research and a lot of stuff that there are a lot of folks who are sympathetic to that. Maybe not particularly folks in the Trump coalition, but there is also a lot of grant making that supports the, the tech world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And, you know, I know that David Sachs might not like to admit that, but there is a lot of federal funding that's kind of underlying a lot of this research. I do wonder what your thoughts are on that. Like, if there's a pause on that, whether there'll be any backlash or pushback within the tech world or anything that those folks might be concerned about.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
maybe only over the course of the next year or two until they lose this battle internally with Stephen Miller and Russ Vogt and the Bannon wing. But that will be something for us to monitor. Man, thank you so much for your reporting on this, educating me, and hopefully we can do this again soon.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
For folks that want more on the tech world, again, Alex Cantworth's podcast, Big Technology, a sub-stack, Big Technology. We'll be back tomorrow, as always, with another edition of the Bulldog Podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
That seems like a change in their scope. That's a change.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
They gave it a bonus unit.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
I'm great, man. How are you? I'm doing well. You're dealing with the gaze of strangers.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Yeah, the prime example of this is, have you paid attention to the show to the gentleman that's been put in place as the acting district attorney for D.C.? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Nice guy. Eagle Ed. Eagle Ed Martin. Yep. I mean, this is, again, it's hard to keep track of all these people that are being hired. Like, this is a preposterous choice to be the district attorney.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Yeah, he's like a stop-the-steal guy who represented a bunch of Jan 6 folks. Yeah, and was like, before that was like Phyllis Schlafly's butt boy. I mean, he was not, this is not like... Well, that's your... That's your characterization. Yeah, it was. It was mine. I wasn't putting it onto you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
But like, this is not, you know, this is not somebody that like has a bunch of experience, you know, prosecuting or is, you know, a constitutional expert. You know, you have people such as that, like you can say what you want about Neil Gorsuch, you know, he might not like his politics, but like he's thought seriously about the constitution and the laws. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And the prosecutors. This is why it's true about the Hegseth thing, but I think it's interesting. You would presume, we don't know, among these dozen of prosecutors that have been removed are people that Like did a good job prosecuting criminals and like moved up through, you know, the government. Dude, these are people that their resumes are like, they're all like public.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Right. So, you know, again, you would think that if you did genuinely care. about holding criminals to account in law and order, then you could at least have gone through the resume pile of these people and said, okay, well, we'll keep a couple of you. All right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
The very first night we were together on the night Donald Trump, the great and good American people bestowed upon him a second presidency. You were coming off the set. I was going on for the late night shift. I don't know why I agreed to that. And we were chatting for a second. Is that election night? Election night, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's right. I did see you in the handoff. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And I was very... The only thing I was thinking about is don't be on one of those YouTube reels. Yeah. That was my only obligation that night. It was challenging. But during our brief handoff exchange, I was like, what do you think?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
you just said on the set and we just followed up on it, that like the interesting thing about this, there's a lot of bad, but like the interesting thing is like at that moment, like we didn't really know, right? Like might he just like have decided that he got his get out of jail free card.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
He, he won, he's just going to golf and like the government will just do whatever it does and he won't really care. You know what I mean? And like, he'll just like want to hang out with rich people and, and want people to just call him sir and stuff. Or like, The other side of the spectrum is start immediately moving to create an urban estate here in America.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a doubleheader. I called in Alex Kantrowitz, a tech reporter, to try to educate me on what in the hell is going on with DeepSeek, the Chinese AI advancement that Mark Andreessen called a Sputnik moment for the country. So I wanted to figure out what the hell's going on with that. So he'll be up in segment two.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And it could be anywhere in between those things. I'm wondering now, two and a half months later, where you assess our trajectory is on that spectrum.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Right. Okay, good. Well, between you and JBL, JBL's newsletter yesterday was talking about how we shouldn't limit our imaginations that we might be on a path towards Putinism. I'm summarizing it. It was very long, but it was kind of talking about how Putin wasn't Putin in 1998. And like, you didn't really know. I mean, I thought that was a little much even for me.
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
And I've got about the darkest sunglasses on that you could have. I don't know. I guess my one caveat to that is like, In some ways, it's just horrifying, right? Like you have the four richest people in the world, essentially, like hanging out around Donald Trump. Unlike the other hand, wouldn't I rather that than like Corey Lewandowski?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
You know, and might there be some sort of check, like the fact that these like noxious people that we're about to get into next, the Mark and Dreesons of the world and the Zucks, like isn't the fact that they're calling him like a little bit of a check or no for you?
The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Yeah. I don't have it in front of me, but there was some statement. It just kind of got lost in the shelf a little bit, but there was like a sentence in there that was like any man that's pretending to be a woman doesn't have the whatever integrity. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think this is the key transformational insight of Donald Trump to politics. Generally in politics, you want to get people's attention for the project of persuading them. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, Mark Anthony says, before he proceeds to attempt to persuade them, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this sort of war of all against all, that actually just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it. And one way reliably to get people's attention is negative attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, if you insult people, act outrageously, I mean, this is literally, there was a commercial model for this, which is shock jocks of the 1980s and 90s that we grew up with, right? Like, they were in a competitive attentional marketplace in local places. Shock jocks said outrageous things. They weren't trying to get someone to vote for them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They just wanted you to know that they were running the morning zoo.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think that's probably true. And I also think that the general shock jock model has now become a successful model in politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So I agree with that. And I want to sort of take those in two parts because I think the politics is actually worth taking a second with. Mark Robinson ran for governor of North Carolina. He was already elected statewide as a lieutenant governor. Said lots of outrageous things all the time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
He was discovered to be, almost certainly, I think he denies it, but it seems to me pretty plausible, a commenter on the Nude Africa site where he said all sorts of wildly offensive things, including, I am a black Nazi. Robinson lost that race in North Carolina, a state Trump carried. It's probably like a plus one or two Republican state at national level. It didn't work for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, Carrie Lake courted negative attention, lost two successive statewide races. Doug Mastriano. I could go down the list. So there's something really fascinating— underperformed in Ohio and his Senate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So there is something happening where it has not proven to be a replicable strategy. That the old logic that we were just talking about the Democrats having and being outdated still does hold in a lot of races. That said, in terms of influence, I think negative attention is incredibly effective.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think you're seeing this shock jock, you can call it shock jock, you can just call it trolling politics. I mean, it is trolling politics. The idea of trolling and the reason that trolling exists is is it's easier to get negative attention than positive attention. It creates a conundrum for the other side, which is, do you ignore them while they say horrible stuff?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Or do you engage them and give them what they want? And I think this kind of trolling politics, which was really Donald Trump's insight... is the most transformational part of politics now. And you're 100% correct. The media management around Democrats is so much risk aversion. If the choice is negative attention or no attention, we take no attention every time. And that is the wrong choice.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, I think it does select for attentional sociopath. I would push back a little bit in this respect, though. I don't know how much of the negative feedback gets to Donald Trump and Musk. Like, I do think they have probably created... But he's sitting there watching MSNBC and getting mad at it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes, but I guess what I'm trying to say is, like, I think it bothers him and Musk, too. Like, I guess I just don't buy that it rolls off their back. I mean, they're kind of obsessed with it also. Mm-hmm. So that fixation is manifest differently. It at least doesn't turn them back, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They don't recede from the... But the idea that they're sort of zen-like, like, well, you know, people are just going to hate me. Like, that's not what's going on psychologically. Fair enough. So, yes, I do. I worry, actually, that it now selects for a kind of sociopathic disposition. Or just a very, like, broken and compulsive one. Because, like, I know just speaking for myself, like,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You know, I have the show-off demon in myself, and I've, from the time I was very young, wanted people to pay attention to me. I don't love that part of me. I don't think that's, like, the best part of me. I think that my relationship to it is a little fraught and intentionally managed. And I don't think that, like, I would be a better person if I let that beast run loose.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I worry that the incentives are to basically do that, both for everyone individually, in politics and culture everywhere, and also in the kind of collective public sphere. Let me say the thing that I think is the deepest problem here. I think fundamentally...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
the most competitive attentional regimes select for the parts of people that are, in the aggregate and over time, kind of the most reactionary. That's the deeper problem I worry about. Tabloid coverage of crime. Tabloid coverage from crime, which literally goes back to Benjamin Day's New York Sun. He was the first New York newspaper to have a court reporter who went to the court and said...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
you know, wrote down what he heard, right? Tabloid coverage of crime 100% has a ideological valence that is conservative, reactionary. So I think generally competitive attention markets select for negativity. They select for all kinds of things that are generally lead people towards their sort of most reactionary selves.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And then the negativity bias of competitive attentional markets also means it's really hard for incumbents. Think about 64, right? LBJ, huge landslide victory. Think about 72, Nixon, incumbent victory.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's a great question. One is just there's more competition, so much more competition. I mean, the notion now that at every single moment when you are competing for someone's attention, you are competing against literally every piece of content ever produced.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This week we're running a new competition.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There are worse fates. Does that resonate for you? It does resonate. I mean, you know, if you've ever talked to people in reality television, like they selected for people with... very flawed personalities, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, because that produced conflict, and conflict produced drama, and drama is, you know, conflict is what keeps attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And those people like attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Exactly right. And you don't pick people who are just sort of like shy and go along to get along, right? Because what does that get you? So that model, I think, explains a lot about the personalities that are selected for in context of intense attentional competition. In terms of the programming, I totally agree, although I do think it's totally, like, instinctual for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, I don't think it's that plotted out, but I do think fundamentally he thinks he needs the attention at all times. And he just has an intuitive sense of that. And... The Greenland thing is a perfect example. And there's been a thousand of them in the first Trump administration. There'll be a thousand more, which is like, what do you do with it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, is it attention getting to be like the incoming president wants to take over Greenland? Like, yeah, it is. Is he serious? I don't know. Is it a good idea? No, it's not. Should we debate it? Should we talk about? I don't know. But we're all just now inside the attentional vortex, right? Of the Greenland conversation. And he's done that again and again and again.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, I love this thing that happened a few years ago where like Suits, which was a network show that became like the most watched show on Netflix. And it's like, it never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that like, I might be fighting for eyeballs with someone watching Suits. But at every single moment that you are trying to get someone's attention now,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes. I mean, that latter point, I think he is selecting for people that will keep attention and communicate for sure. I mean, I still think there's a certain amount of casting look to it with all of, we should note, like all of the... biases that come with that, right? Like, if you're looking for a general on central casting, you're looking for a white man, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Which is part of, I think... Yeah, but you're not looking for Pete Hegseth. I guess, although I also think there's a certain amount of, like, who does he see up on the TV?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Oh, definitely. I mean, I also think, I think there's also an Occam's Razor Well, I don't know. I also think the man is the oldest man ever to be elected to be president of the United States and, like, maybe doesn't want to spend as much time doing everything and kind of, you know, if someone says, last season of the show, you had really long shooting days.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This season, we're going to front some other characters so, like, we can cut your shooting days in half. Like, I think there's a little bit of that happening now.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I'd like to keep this going for years, and we can.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Well, I think there's two components to that. One, I think you cannot avoid is that whatever you think about Joe Biden's abilities to be president in the sense of doing the job day to day, he was very clearly, and I think irrefutably, incapable of occupying the bully pulpit. Like, I just don't think there's...
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
any debate or argument on either side like empirically he gave fewer interviews he gave fewer press conferences he he i mean compare go watch barack obama be president and or george w bush or all these people did joe button like it just was the case that i think largely due to his age he was not capable of focusing and occupying the attentional space at the center of the presidency
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So you got to start with that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's basically what I think. I kind of agree with that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The totality of human content is the library of your competition. And that was definitely not true in 2000.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Of course it partly is. So that's the first layer, right? But that connects to the next layer, which is the obsession with what is called the mainstream media, the legacy media, all of which is like understandable, but is increasingly a conversation that like a relatively small part of the country is part of. And they're still laser focused on that. And again, I get that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And they're laser focused on it in terms of not making news. Like, I think about this phrase all the time, like not making news as opposed to making news. Making news means getting people's attention. Not making news means not getting people's attention. And the goal of a lot of Democrats always in their communication is to not make news. And Donald Trump's goal is always to make news.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's my favorite phrase to come out of the election.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
If you're trying to back it out as a retrofit.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And you also have to get the attention of people at the periphery of politics. I mean, how do you get messages to people at the outer periphery? And part of the answer is, You need to draw a lot of attention generally. And it's not like they didn't know this. I mean, the idea of Beyonce, the idea of like using celebrities like, wait, well, these are these are attentional magnets.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They're sort of avatars. But increasingly, it just doesn't work that way anymore.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Steve Jobs had this saying that it's not the customer's job to know what they want. And I do think there's a little bit of, like, democratic, like, obsession with numbers and market research that's like, well, what do the numbers say? And part of this is just innovation and improvisation and trying new stuff that hasn't been tried before as opposed to backing out what you think the expectation is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that's really true, I think, with attention entrepreneurship, which is not just to, like, look what does best in the algorithm and not just look at the data, but to try new things. Like, I don't love Joe Rogan's politics, but I... Rogan's a really good podcast host. It's a really good show. I have listened intermittently for years, particularly I used to more than I do now.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You know, I've listened to a Rogan podcast where he does two and a half hours with an astrophysicist. And they're totally fascinating. I mean, part of the problem, too, as I sort of think this through, right... There is an asymmetry about risk. It just is the case that, like, a gaffe for a Democratic politician is going to kind of stick out more and stick more.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Partly, I think, as a self-enforcing cycle, which is that if you do less media, then the gaffes stick more. And partly because I'll do this take and then you can cut it out. I mean, we're definitely not cutting it out now. Well, this take has nothing to do with attention, but here's my take. Let's see. You're at a restaurant with your kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And the kid over there at the other table is just same age, just acting like crazy, watching a screen, doesn't have their napkin, making a mess. And your kid says, well, they don't have to do it. And I'm like, I don't care about them. It's not my kid. I feel like that's how the mainstream media basically treats the Democratic Party. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think that's partly it's partly the flip side of a correct conservative critique, which is that the vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are products of a cultural milieu that is generally center left and Democratic voting. But it means that they hold Democrats to higher standards. And like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are those other kids at the table.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I don't care what they do. They're not my kids. And I truly believe this is true. This can get me in trouble.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Pretty close. I mean, I remember a version of the Elias Sports Bureau's, like, sports baseball compendium of stats. And I just read, you know, the top 40 ERA pictures.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And we see this in race after race after race. I mean, this has really been one of these stories of the MAGA era. is bad Republican candidates at all levels losing winnable races that they probably should have won because they were adhering to the exact same attentional incentives that produced Donald Trump up at the top. So part of what's happening is this malformation of the public, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This malformation of different publics, of parties, of different audiences, right? is producing real pathologies that are in many cases, again, with among Republican candidates rejected by the people who are outside of that particular audience sphere that is being formed by that kind of propaganda.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One place I think this is really true is on trans issues. I think people are conflicted on questions of policy around this. But I think one thing that is pretty clear both from electoral results and from polling is that The public writ large is nowhere near as obsessed.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, obsessed with this issue and with the lives and bodies of these fellow Americans of ours as the propaganda machine and the attention merchants on the right are finding. And again, they're covering that because it rates. And to be clear, like there's a feedback loop here. They're not just like telling people to care about this. There is a small group of people that do really care about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But I think it has been distorting for them. And I think there's all kinds of races where they have like closed with this message.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I had, like, the blue book. Blue book, right, yeah. Yeah, and you would... In some ways, right, the lack of choice forced a kind of focus. I think you and I, you know, we're roughly the same cohort. I was at the sort of front end of, like, RSS Google readers and blogs and this idea that you could synthesize an insane amount of information...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think that it's pretty clear to me that Musk's takeover has produced a kind of vibe shift and cultural influence for reactionary ideas that I think broadly benefits the right writ large, even if it sends a few Republican candidates over the cliff. Yeah. So I think there's sometimes there's tradeoffs between that, honestly. And I think that's probably true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's true for Democrats, too. Like sometimes there are tradeoffs between ideas moving public opinion in one direction or another or normalizing things that seem ultra or radical that may cost a few candidates elections. And I think that those tradeoffs go in both directions.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The other thing is like there's consequences here that are more than political, like literally tens of thousands of people die that shouldn't have died during the pandemic because they didn't get vaccinated. Yeah. So, there's, like, real tangible results to all of this that...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But that's the kind of thing where— That's the risk you're running. I'm biased here, and people listening to this who don't share my politics are free to write this off or not. But I think the center-left, which still broadly consumes what we would call the mainstream media, legacy media, institutional media, that there's just more of this— reality checking happening there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, you know, there's a big fight about like, is inflation happening or is it not? And then it was clear that inflation was happening. It was very high. And there are people who were talking about whether the inflation was the cause of the American rescue plan or whether it was really politically salient.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But you didn't get a bunch of inflation truthers saying that the books were cooked or they were wrong or like inflation was high. And that was that core fact suffused the coverage of all the people in that media ecosystem and sphere.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But I think if you saw 9% inflation under Donald Trump, I think you would have had a kind of similar, you know, reaction to the election, which is like, it's not happening. I think there's just a mechanism of denial, a mechanism of like sheer sort of cleaving off from reality in that attentional ecosystem that is staked.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
very quickly if you kind of curated it and you created processes to feed it into you. And those processes have gotten much harder and they've been totally overwhelmed by the evolution such that I now have a very hard time even figuring out what the funnel I'm trying to construct is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And his key point here, which I think is just the bedrock for this analysis and so often left behind and so important, is that we're talking about collective understanding and collective publics as complicated organisms that are greater than the sum of their parts.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Because as he writes in the piece, like a lot of this discourse is about individuals, like a bunch of individuals hold these wrong beliefs, right? But democracy is something we do together. It's not a bunch of aggregated individual choices. And I think this argument is completely correct.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And partly it's because we're also being constantly pulled towards things that are the most intentionally salient, which is just a distinct category from like at a bedrock from what we think is important. I cannot stress this enough. Attention is not a moral faculty. There's a Lipman writing in 19-teens that I quote in the book. It's during Versailles.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And he says, the American people have a great deal of interests in what happens at Versailles, but they're not interested in it. He's like, he's like in the same way that like a child has a real interest in his father's business. He's going to inherit, but he's not interested in it. He's like, what we're interested in is like the gowns of the queen basically. Yeah.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And you know, it's pretty funny cause it's bang on. And the point is that we all understand we have a category of words that going back to porn, like titillating, prurient, lurid. Obscene. Obscene, that describe the category of things that we think that we both know draw our attention but are morally dubious.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And what happens in the sort of collective malformation around attention as the most signature value, the only thing that matters in this competitive landscape, is a kind of moral degradation, right? Because it's pulling us towards things that we know at some level aren't that important or morally defensible, but do get our attention.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
when there was a version of the discourse we're going through now. The idea is like, you know what we need? a black guy with a foreign-sounding name who is a former professor and community organizer. Constitutional law professor, yes. That was ludicrous. Like, what we need is, like, a guy you can have a beer with who also has a ranch. And, like, that's what we need.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And it was like, no, we needed something totally different. Two things. One, I think it is important, again, to distinguish between, like, what is this doing to people more broadly and what is it doing to political professionals? Yes. You know? And I think it's extremely dangerous for political professionals to read social media as representative of the public. Right.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I also think you shouldn't just ignore it as online or Twitter is not real life because increasingly there is no distinction between the two. But there are different selves that we have. There's a self that wants to read a novel and the self that scrolls Instagram. There's, you know, the self that doesn't want to eat that third cookie and the self that does eat the third cookie.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There are different publics, too, in that same way. Within the public, there's... a public that feels very compassionate towards immigrants, feels proud of America being a nation of immigrants, and there's a public that feels like they're being ripped off and invaded. And sometimes they're the same people. Often they're the same people.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But Farrell's whole point is that these publics are formed collectively. So I think it's important, A, that political professionals don't make this simple representational mistake, which I agree with you, has led to a lot of poor choices. Like, people on this social media platform are screaming to me about this means there's some constituency behind them.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And yet, as the line between reality and online breaks down, the vanguard of people screaming really do have cultural significance.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So if you think about labor, right, labor long predates labor. labor as a wage commodity in the industrial revolution, right? Human beings did stuff with their effort and toil from the time that they essentially evolved, right? Like if you're hunting, gathering, picking berries, that's work.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I could not agree more. Even before we get to politics, you know, Thoreau for president. But not Thoreau. I really think this is important, right?
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think it's a keen insight. I agree. And what I thought about is like sometimes you'll read historical dispatches from like peak industrial London. Yeah. And people are just being like, this is the most disgusting place that has ever been put on God's earth. Like, it's just sewage and coal ash in the sky.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Just satanic mills. Just the sheer stench. And just like, what have we done? How far from God we have fallen in this shit? And they were right. Like, it's... Genuinely, it was genuinely disgusting. And, you know, it did reach a point with all of these things, particularly the worst depredations of the Industrial Revolution, where people had enough.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And they, you know, having enough represented in a million different political tendencies, cultural movements, manifestations. And in the course of writing this book, I mean, literally from the conceptualization of this book for an essay that I wrote, you know, 2022 to this book coming out now, We've already moved a tremendous amount.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, when I first started telling people about this book, we're like, huh, attention, huh. And now it's like, right.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes. And I think you and I are pretty disposed to be obsessed with it because the universe in which we operate is like, We're constantly trying to sort of screen information, get the good information, protect our attention, try to think in a way that's productive. But I just think the ubiquity of this, I mean, yes, I think there is an wellspring, an untapped wellspring. Yeah.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And labor evolved into an agrarian feudal systems and all kinds of different ways of small shopkeepers that did work recognizably. But what happens in the industrial revolution is that that human effort is
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
For a total rebellion against the way it feels to be inside your mind at this particular moment with this particular form of attention capitalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The one thing that I tried really hard in the first term, which I thought was important, and I think I mostly succeeded at, but certainly not always, was modulation. That to me is a central question of modulation. If you turn the dial on the stereo to 10 and leave it there, it will sound like 5 eventually. And then you can't turn it up past 10.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And this was something I was intentional about the first time, but I think even more intentional now. And I think you see some of this, like literally no one's saying anything about Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Fine. That's fine. Yeah. That's a perfectly, that's fine. I mean, wouldn't be my choice, but I don't get to choose and wouldn't be a Democratic president's choice.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that's not to say that, like, no one should raise any concerns.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
gets embedded in a set of institutions, legal institutions, market institutions, that commodify it so that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
He's also genuinely qualified for the job.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, I think that I don't have a worked out theory for how to deal with that, but I think it's a good point. I have a broader thing I've been thinking about a lot. This phrase that is like on a brainstorming notepad of mine and I've thought about a million versions of it. The phrase is the opposite of doom.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think about this a lot because I think that we live in a doom-obsessed time, doom-scrolling. We do not live in an age in which we have a conception of the opposite of doom. We do not live in an age where we have a lot of conceptualizations of utopias. You know, there's different ages where all sorts of different people are planning their utopias.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Spiritual leaders, architects, political leaders, this is it. This is what it's going to look like when we figure it all out. No one does that anymore. I mean, literally no one does that. Like, I can't think of a modern...
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
contemporary version of utopia maybe in some version the sort of trump i'll fix everything personalist is the closest we get personalist vision of fixing everything and the reason i think about this is i think it's probably really important to us in our collective public and individually to put our attention towards a vision of what we think something great would be
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And it relates to this question about the individual coverage decisions, which are absolutely affected by negativity bias, like 100%. And conflict, too. Like, there's a fight over Exeth, as there should be, and there's not a fight over Rubio, and the conflict drives the news. I mean, that's as old as news.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But the reason I bring all this up is because I sometimes think about it just in terms of like putting attention on things that have worked as opposed to things that haven't worked. So not so much about individuals or members of the cabinet. But like I was thinking about this the other day, like 30 years ago, it just was inconceivable we would cure HIV AIDS. It's amazing how...
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that's an enormous transformation in the human experience, total transformation in all social relations, political relations, economic relations, and also, crucially, the subjective experience of being alive in the world. I think something similar is happening with attention.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
that we essentially have. And we've done it through the labor and work of people across all sectors of society over the course of decades that took a thing that just felt horrible and intractable and made it so much better. And there's just so much less attention on those stories. And I think it is making it harder and harder for us to conceptualize that it is possible even.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
to do good things and to solve problems.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And it started a while ago, the same way that the Industrial Revolution actually starts sort of earlier than we think of it at its peak. But we're reaching a crescendo where this thing, attention, which predates it being commodified, people have always paid attention to stuff, is now this market commodity that's extracted and sold.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I want to make a point that I'm afraid is like boringly technical after what you just said, which I am chewing on. I also think the technological infrastructure of podcasts matters tremendously. That line from, I forget who wrote, wherever you get your podcasts, it's a radical statement.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That the fact that podcasts have built audiences largely outside of algorithmic feeds, have built them through an open protocol called RSS, right? that that technical backbone actually matters for precisely what you're talking about.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Part of the reason podcasts have flourished, two, three-hour podcasts, podcasts with novelists about obscure topics, long solo monologues about history, I mean, all sorts of stuff, is because they're not embedded in the same technical attentional marketplace. And I think that really matters a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think it's actually really hopeful because I think one of the things to remember here, this is really an important point, Everyone has wiped this from their memory, but the first version of the mass internet was an entirely commercially engineered mass internet with Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. AOL emerged as the winner. AOL acquired Time Warner.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
AOL was the bell of the ball in this huge company, and it was a walled garden, and you dialed up, and you were in this little world that was curated by these large commercial entities. And that was destroyed, partly, ironically, because of Marc Andreessen's development of a graphical user interface, to open internet. That rewarded curiosity. That rewarded people connecting about obscure topics.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It rewarded hobbyism. It rewarded obsessive small little corners of knowledge. It's already been the case once that open internet animated by curiosity defeated a closed commercial internet. It doesn't have to be the case that the version of the commercial internet we have now is still the same one. That to me is really hopeful, though, you know, because it's like we have divided selves.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
We have divided desires. There's different parts of us that want different things and different market setups, technical setups, institutional setups can cultivate different parts of those selves. It's not like we lose one part or another. The other part is still there. It's a question about the systems around us drawing forth those different parts of us or not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So first I'll start with a classic, which is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. The goat. The goat. In this discourse, I think it still totally holds up. The first chapter, which is... Somewhat predicts Donald Trump. Yes, totally. In an explicit way. Yes. Totally, yes. In an explicit way.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Also, you know, the first essay, which is just about different versions of the dystopian future between 1984, which is Information Constraint, and Brave New World, which is overflow of entertainment and information about how we ended up in the Brave New World. Great.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Another book that has been mentioned on your podcast a lot and relevant, which is, again, I feel like I'm sort of citing canonical texts here. And it's important for me to do because I want to be clear, as we all are as authors, you You know, lots of people have been thinking about this very well and very hard. But Jenny O'Dell's How to Do Nothing is a fantastic book.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It's strange and distinct and is much more, I would say, like, spiritually omnivorous than the book that I've written. More sort of interior in its focus, too, about how you do this work with yourself and And with other people as a kind of like collective radical undertaking.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
No other human being would write that book. There's no comp for that book. It is its own thing. And it's also a book that... I love books like that. I love books like that, too. And I also think it's a rare thing to write a nonfiction book where you can't get 85% of the way there by just, like, hearing the author on a podcast or reading a review. Like, you got to actually read the book.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And then my final is a work of fiction. It's by an author named Tony Tula-Tamudi. It's a book of short stories called Rejection. And it is... The bleakest.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Not safe for work. It is the bleakest and one of the most unremittingly punishing pictures of the hell that we've built for ourselves. And yet, I say this, that doesn't sound like a book you want to read. I absolutely tore through it. I read the whole thing in basically a day and it just stuck with me and I really recommend it highly. One of the most intense reading experiences.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There is a 10 to 12 page granular description of a sexual fantasy in this book. That your full body will basically, you will like hit a point of physical paralysis as you read this, but also can't stop reading and also are so amused. It's so funny and it's so dark. I've never read anything like it.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So there's a prehistory here, which is that from the birth of what we would call recognizably modern media, and the penny press and magazines are probably the first place that you would call it that, particularly Benjamin Day's New York Sun, which has the idea that you charge people a penny for a newspaper, you lose money on each newspaper, but you sell the advertising, right?
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So the thing you're selling is the audience. Modern media has had this model for a long time, and basically it's all been selling attention. Billboards, newspapers, magazines, radios, TV. There's a few things that make it a difference in kind now, I would say.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One is the sophistication of how minutely you could capture people's attention and how quickly and sophisticatedly you could bring it to market. So you've now got these nanosecond auctions that are auctioning off your eyeballs and in the moment you're loading a webpage or in the moment that Instagram Reels is going through. So that's one change. The other is just the ubiquity.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The TV can't travel with you. Magazines can, but eventually you read everything in the New Yorker and that's it. The birth of the smartphone produces a ubiquity of attention to be captured and sold that just represents a kind of break.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I agree. And I think, you know, when you had Graham Burnett on the show, who's great on this and attention researcher, you know, he talks about fracking, right? And the point of the metaphor fracking, right, is that you need more supply. So, you know, there used to be a certain category of oil you could get, and then market demand said you had to go get more of it, and they figured out a way.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And there is something very similar happening, obviously, here, right? The expanded supply. So, like, eating into your sleep hours, that's more supply. Getting children, that's more supply. Looking at two or three things at once, which would have seemed totally, like, antisocial and borderline deranged. Two or three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like if someone did that 10 years ago, you would have been like, what are you? It would be so weird. The qualitative or subjective experience of what attention is, is shifting.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes, the book was written before I think he kind of got a second chapter.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's a great point. Yes, I think he backed into the purchase of Twitter based on a kind of howling personal void. But in the same way that Donald Trump backed into the same insight born of his personality and his – upbringing in New York tabloid world, he figured something out that has been obviously tremendously valuable in dollar terms.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One of the really important ironies here, which I think does map onto labor, is that the aggregate of attention, like lots of attention or the collective public attention is wildly valuable. Right. Volodymyr Zelensky is a great example of this. Right.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The president Ukraine, like he understands that attention on Ukraine's plight is essentially the engine for securing the weaponry and resources his country needs to defend itself.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And yet, even though the aggregate of attention is very valuable in market terms, each one of our individual attention, the second a second is like pennies, fractions, not even pennies, not even pennies, fractions of pennies. And that was exactly what it was like with labor.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
when Marxists would say labor is a source of all value, they were right in the aggregate, take away all the workers and the industrial revolution doesn't happen. But to the individual worker in the sweatshop, the little slice of labor that you're producing is both everything you have as a person and worth nothing in the market, almost nothing.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think we have the same thing with attention where it's like, it's really valuable pooled and aggregated, like the most valuable, but Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless, is pennies. And then subjectively to us, it's all we have.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I really like this theory. I think you're totally right to identify that they kind of – it's sort of a sliding scale between the two, which is to say –
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
politics that had the least attention money matters the most right so in a state rep race yes right money really matters state rep race partly because no one's paying attention to who the state rep is local media has been got in can buy their attention money can buy their opinion so you're like you could put out glossy mailers you could there's a lot you can do that the further up you go from that to senate to president the more attention there is already the less the money counts and you saw this with the harris campaign
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They raised a ton of money and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people's attention, whether that's through advertising or door knocking. Right. But largely attention and then persuasion. Right. I'm running for president. Here's what I want to do. Here's why you should vote for me.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Now you can do that at billions of dollars worth and everything is just like drops of rain in a river. Right. Because there is so much competition for attention. And so what they figured out, I think, was that they being Harris or they being Trump, they being Trump and I think Musk, is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere.
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Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That in some ways it's kind of a sucker's game to try to like pop in and be like, I got an ad. Hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? You're like, what do you like? Like all that's just going to whiz past people. that the sort of attentional atmosphere, that's where the fight is. And that's what Musk's Twitter purchase ended up being an enormous, almost like Archimedean lever on the electorate.
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Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
January 6th. Right. And it was it was laying the groundwork for an assault on the institutions of democracy. He's not spending four or five minutes of a speech listing, you know, pretty painful way all of this supposed fraud, which is obviously nonsense. To not do anything with it. Yeah, they're coming for it. He was telling you the two big takeaways. The headlines were trade war coming.
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Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
Social Security, they're coming. They are coming. They are coming. They are coming. Like yelling out Omar's coming. They are coming.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
It's really hard. It's really painful to do. I was mad at his staff on his behalf for him putting him in that situation.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
Right. So it's like exactly. So why is he listing? Why is he listing?
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
I just like to say I think the Old Testament has something to say about whether circumcision is woke. I just want to say for the record, this idea of like, well, how ridiculous is this? Well, that's actually pretty long tradition.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
The other thing here is just generally, like, in terms of the focus of the speech, one of the things that's emerging in early polling here, just as a sort of barometer, is that People he won this election because people were frustrated with the economy. Like that is where the marginal voter was. This was a very culture war speech. This was a very DeSantis speech.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
DeSantis like lost that primary for a reason. There's a reason he's the governor of Florida and not like doesn't have higher office. And what people want is like, what are you doing about the economy? And that was ridiculous. relatively limited.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
I laughed at that lie because I was like, buddy, do you know how much soy you're talking about? It's so much soy. He has no idea.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
Chris, just this point about the sort of the problem of focus, which has been the problem that everyone's dealing with. We're all dealing with it every day. The Democrats, that Social Security. I mean, what a tell that was. He's talking about Social Security in identical terms to the way he talked about voting in the run up to January 6th. It's the exact same story.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special coverage of Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress
It's identical. It's the dead voters in Pennsylvania. It's the same thing. Yes. And the logic applies in the same way. What did that lead up to him doing?