On Monday, Donald Trump is going to take the oath of office for the second time. During his first administration, there was a question of how he wields policy in the government. The question of how he wields and uses and raises money. We’re used to talking about that with politicians. But there was also the separate question of how he wields and uses attention and Trump whatever else he is. He’s a master at using and wielding attention. Donald Trump has met the media moment. Conflict is attention, and attention is influence. Donald Trump is a marketing genius. He understands stagecraft. He understands the power of the visual image. In some ways, the defining feature of the last decade of public discourse has been Donald Trump as the center of attention. My friend Chris Hayes is best known as the host of MSNBC’S 8:00 PM show all in, but he just wrote a great book called The siren’s call how attention became the world’s most endangered resource. I’ve read most of the books on attention out there. This one is, I think, the best one at understanding the value of attention today, because it isn’t just endangered. It is the world’s most valuable resource, and the people who are on top of the world right now understand its value and understand how to wield it. And that’s what this conversation is about. It’s a curtain raiser on the intentional regime we’re about to enter. As always, my email at nytimes.com. Chris Hayes, welcome to the show. It’s really great to be here. So you’ve got a cable news show. You’re an attention merchant, I am. What is different about the way attention felt and worked in the early 2000, when you were starting out. When I was starting out and the way it feels and works for you now. That’s a great question. One is just there’s more competition. So much more competition. 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. Like, I love this. This thing that happened a few years ago where suits, which was a network show that had became like the most watched show on Netflix. And it’s like it never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that I might be fighting for eyeballs with someone watching Suits at every single moment that you are trying to get someone’s attention now. The totality of human content is the Library of your competition, and that is. That was not true. I think that was not true in 2000. I mean, it was definitely not true in 2000. It’s weird going in a lifetime from the problem of too little content to too much. I remember being a kid and I would read the cereal box. Absolutely I would read anything around me and there was never enough. There are all kinds of times in my life when I was caught without anything to read, and now it never happens. There’s so many. There’s so much of my life that would be better if I was caught without anything to read. But in my pocket is this portal to what is pretty close to everything ever written. Pretty close. I mean, I remember a version of the Elias Sports Bureau sports baseball compendium of stats, and I would sit I just read who the top 40 era pitchers. When I was a kid, I knew the manufacturer suggested retail price of every single car on the road by year. I could tell you not just what a Camry cost, but what a 93 Camry cost. Because you must have had some books I had the Bluebook. Yeah right. Yeah yeah. And you would in some ways. The lack of choice forced a kind of focus, and I think you and I were roughly the same cohort. I was at the front end of RSS, Google readers and blogs and this idea that you could synthesize an insane amount of information very quickly if you 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. So you’re it is hard sometimes, I think, when you’ve lived through attention and information changing as much as we have to take the long view. Yes one thing I liked about your book a lot is it takes the long view. And I would say the core argument is that what is happening to attention now is akin to what happened to human labor in the Industrial Revolution. Spin that out for me. So if you think about labor, right. Labor long predates labor as a wage commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Human beings did stuff with their effort and toil from the time that they essentially evolved. If you’re hunting, gathering, picking berries, that’s work. And labor evolved into an agrarian feudal systems and all kinds of different ways of small shopkeepers that did they did work recognizably. But what happens in the Industrial Revolution is that human effort 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. And that’s an enormous transformation in the human experience. This is a 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, and it started a while ago the same way that the Industrial Revolution actually starts earlier than we think of it at its peak. But we’re reaching a crescendo where this thing attention, which is predates it being commodified. People have always paid attention to stuff, is now this market commodity that’s extracted and sold. But go deeper. What do you mean. What makes attention price able and tradable now differently than it was before. Or is that not the ground of the analogy. Like go into the specifics of this. 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 days 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. 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. Now, I would say one is the sophistication of how minutely you could capture people’s attention. And how quickly and sophisticated you could bring it to market. So you’ve now got these nanosecond auctions that are auctioning off your eyeballs in the moment you’re loading a web page, or in the moment that Instagram Reels is going through. So that’s one change. The other is just the ubiquity. 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. Like it just wasn’t like that before. One of the things happening in this era, the reason I think people are so interested in books about attention and concern about attention is that the supply of attention is being changed and transformed by this process. It is being trained. My attention has been trained to want more than it used to want to be more despairing when it can’t get it. But also, I mean the internet, in a way, with just a much higher level of sophistication, turned into a massive experimentation for what works intentionally. It’s just this endless gain of function, bio lab for attention I like. I really think of a lot of social media as gain of function research for takes, right. Like if you tweak the take and tweak it and tweak it, at what point does it go viral. At what point does it go too viral. And it destroys your career, right. Like you could escape the lab in a way. But there’s something about not, I think, just seeing attention as a commodity, but seeing it as something that is manipulable shapeable changeable, such that our collective attention is a resource, is changing. That feels important in this. I agree, and I think when you had Graham Burnett on the show, who’s great on this and attention researcher he talks about fracking, right. And the point of the metaphor of fracking is that you need more supply. So 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. And there is something very similar happening obviously here. 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, watching a movie while staring at another screen. 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 shifting. You talk in the book about attention now being the most valuable commodity, the most important commodity, the commodity that so many of the great modern businesses, among other things, are built on Google and Meta. And I still think we’re realizing it was undervalued, or maybe that its most important value isn’t selling it off to advertisers. So I’ve been thinking a lot about Elon Musk who emerges in your book as a slightly pathetic figure. Trying to. Yes the book was written before. I think he kind of got a second chapter. Yeah trying to figure fill this howling void he has for attention. Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter $44 billion. It is not a business, as he has said himself, worth $44 billion. On the other hand, the amount of attention that he is capable of controlling and amassing and manipulating through Twitter cannot be traded directly for $44 billion, but is clearly worth, I think, more than $44 billion multiples of it. So how do you think about this translation that we’re seeing happen right now between attention as a financial commodity and attention is having more worth, frankly, than the money it would fetch on the open market. That’s a great point. Yes I think he backed into the 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 and New York tabloid world. He figured something out that has been obviously tremendously valuable in dollar terms. One of the really important ironies here, which I think does map onto labor, is that the aggregate of attention lots of attention or the collective public attention is wildly valuable, right. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a great example of this. The president of Ukraine he understands that attention on Ukraine’s plight is essentially the engine for securing the weaponry and resources his country needs to defend itself. And yet, even though the aggregate of attention is very valuable in market terms, each one of our individual attention to second a second is like pennies, fractions. Yeah, not even pennies. Not even pennies, fractions of pennies. And that was exactly what it was like with labor. 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. And I think we have the same thing with attention, where it’s like it’s really valuable, pooled and aggregated the most valuable. Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless. It’s pennies. And then subjectively, to us, it’s all we have. I think attention is now to politics, what people think money is to politics, I totally agree. Certainly at the high levels, right. There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money, controls them with attention. And I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world, but that’s actually not what matters about him right now. It’s just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that’s a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made and Democrats haven’t. Democrats are still thinking about money as the fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics. I really like this theory. I think you’re totally right to identify that. They kind of. It’s a sliding scale between the two, which is to say, political politics that have the least attention. Money matters the most. So in a state rep race, Yes. Money really matters. State rep race, partly because no one’s paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been money can buy their attention. Money can buy their attention. So like can 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. 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. But largely attention and then persuasion. I’m running for president. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s why you should vote for me. Now, you can do that at billions of dollars worth. And everything is just like drops of rain in a river. 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 that in some ways it’s kind of a sucker’s game to try to pop in and be like, I got an ad, hey, hey, do you like tax cuts. Do you like, what do you like. Like all that’s just going to whiz past people that the 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. I think this is right. I think there’s another distinction between Democrats and Republicans here, which is that I think Democrats still believe that the type of attention you get is the most important thing. If your choice is between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention. And at least the Trump side of the Republican Party believes the volume, the sum total of attention is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention. Not only fine, maybe great. Because there’s so much attention, energy and conflict. And so you’d really see this Kamala Harris. And once he became part of the ticket, Tim Walz and behind them, Joe Biden before the changeover, they were just terrified of an interview going badly. Yes Trump and Vance. And I mean, they were all over the place, including in places very hostile to them. Yeah and Vance had a ton of interviews that went badly. Yeah, but they were everywhere. Yeah, because they cared about the volume of attention and were completely fine with the energy that negative attention could unlock. I think this is the key insight, the key transformational insight of Donald Trump to politics. So 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. What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this war of all against all, actually just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it. And one way reliably to get people’s attention is negative attention. 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. They were in a competitive, intentional marketplace in local places. Shock jocks said outrageous things. They weren’t trying to get someone to vote for them. They just wanted you to know that they were on the running the morning zoo. I don’t know how to insert into the discourse a strong enough point that Joe Rogan is much better than Howard Stern was. Yes, it’s true. Like, nobody quite wants to admit this, because now Howard Stern has become this lovable uncle who for liberals, who has Hillary Clinton on his show. And I think Kamala Harris went on his show, but I think Rogan is the inheritor of Stern, basically. And Rogan has become much more right wing in the past couple of years. But compared to what. Stern was Rogan is just smarter and preferable. I think that’s probably true, but what I find. Crazy is that the shock jock model has now become a successful model in politics. O.K, but now I think we need to have a moment of caution because there’s a tendency right now because Donald Trump won the popular vote by like 1.5 percentage points, which is a terrible win in the annals of American politics. And yet there’s just like no doubt that Trump and his broad cultural side have won some kind of cultural and intentional victory that is much bigger in its feeling than the actual electoral victory they want. So some of these things both feel like I’m not sure this works as well in politics, but in terms of changing the culture his win has changed the culture immediately, in a way that I would not have foreseen and does not reflect. Like if you just told somebody the election results, I don’t think they would feel the vibe shift. So I agree with that. And I want to take those in two parts of. Because I think the politics is actually worth taking a second with. Mark Robinson ran for governor of North Carolina. He was already elected as statewide as a Lieutenant Governor, said lots of outrageous things all the time. 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 1 or two Republican State at national level. It didn’t work for him. Like there was a lot of attention. Mark Kari Lake courted negative attention, lost two successive statewide races. Doug Mastriano. I could go down the list. So there’s something really JD Vance underperformed in Ohio in his Senate considerably. Considerably so there is something happening where it’s not a great. 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. 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 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, 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 percent 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. You can frame this as a strategy. And clearly people who are not temperamentally suited to the strategy Vance and Rubio and others have tried it on with varying degrees of fit at different times. But I think it’s better to frame it in a way as a temperament. I mean, you write in the book, compliments roll off your back, criticism stays with you for days, but it’s not true for everybody. There’s a certain personality type that is O.K. with that negative charge. It is O.K being hated by many to be loved by some. A lot of people would not have been willing to absorb the personal polarization Musk has decided to absorb to become as significant as he is. Trump is very similar. I think most people would take the trait of being thought fairly well of by a larger number of people, even if not thought that much of by them. Yeah, in general, rather than absolutely hated by half the country to be quite loved by the other half in order to really dominate the attentional sphere. And I think that’s something in people. And I guess what I’m asking you is does politics now. And attention select for a kind of attentional sociopath I think it does. I mean, I think it does select for a potential sociopath. I would push back a little bit in this respect though I’m not 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 or CNN. Yes, that’s true. He’s a guy who actually seeks out stuff to make him angry. Yes, but I guess what I’m trying to say is I think it bothers him. And Musk too. I just like I don’t. I guess I just don’t buy that they don’t, that it rolls off their back. I mean, they’re kind of obsessed with it also. So that fixation is manifest differently. It at least doesn’t turn them back. It doesn’t turn. They don’t recede from the idea that they’re zen like. Like, well, people are just going to hate me. Like, that’s not what’s going on there psychologically. Fair enough. So Yes, I do. I worry actually that it now selects for a kind of sociopathic disposition. Or, or just a very, broken and compulsive one because I don’t just speaking for myself, I have the show off demon in myself and I’ve from the time I was very young, I wanted people to pay attention to me. I don’t love that part of me. I don’t that’s like the best part of me. I think that my relationship to it is a little fraught and intentionally, intentionally managed. And I don’t think that I would be a better person if I let that beast run loose, 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 most competitive attentional regimes select for the parts of people that are in the aggregate and over time, 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 days New York Sun. He was the first New York newspaper to have a court reporter who went to the court and said wrote down what he heard. Tabloid coverage of crime 100 percent has an 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 most reactionary selves. And then the negativity bias of a competitive attentional markets also means it’s really hard for incumbents. We’ve been, I think, talking about attention mostly in terms of social media here. And I want to talk about another way that attention is in the way we think about stories like changed in this period, which is reality television, which is the other side of this that Trump comes out of. I mean, I understand Trump is made by Twitter that time, cable news at that time, and reality television. Joe Rogan, weirdly, also comes out of reality television. But one thing that has felt true to me about Trump’s second term much more than the first, is it feels like reality television. It is all these secondary characters with their own subplots and their own arcs. And what’s going to happen with Pete Hegseth. And over here is RFK jr. and Musk. Trump is playing much more than he did in the first. In the first term, Trump was the only character of the Trump administration. Now he’s playing a role that feels to me much more like the host. Like sometimes he comes out and somebody actually is voted off the island. It’s like, well, Matt Gaetz is gone now, or so and so is gone. People get fired or he settles like the big plot of that week. He’s going to side with Musk and Ramaswamy on h-1b visas or he comes in to announce a new plot like Greenland, right. He’s not the only one. We’re running a new competition. Yeah he’s not the only figure. He’s the. Yeah the host, the decider. There’s something there. Compared to other administrations, even compared to his first, this one is feeling programmed in a very different way. I mean, you’re somebody obviously has to follow the plots and report on them night after night. And in the eternal purgatory that you are in, there are worse fates. Does that resonate for you. It does resonate. I mean yeah, 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 conflict is what keeps attention. And those people like attention, not all of them, but the ones they pick, right. You pick people on reality shows who like attention and are willing to absorb negative attention to be the star. Exactly right. And you don’t pick people who are just shy and go along to get along. Because what does that get you. So that model, I think, explains a lot about the personalities that are selected for in contexts of intense attentional competition. In terms of the programming, I totally agree, although I do think it’s totally like instinctual for him. Like I don’t think it’s that plotted out. But I do think fundamentally, he thinks that you need to keep the he needs the attention at all times, and he just has an intuitive sense of that. The Greenland thing is a perfect example, and there’s been 1,000 of them in the first Trump administration. There’ll be 1,000 more, which is like, what do you do with it. 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 is it a good idea. No it’s not. Should we debate it. Should we talk about. I don’t but we’re all just now inside the attentional vortex of the Greenland conversation. And he’s done that again and again and again. But it’s a way in which his sense of it seems to have changed. It was a well remarked on and reported dynamic of the appointments in the first term. Yeah that he had a casting orientation to them, but it visual. He wanted people who looked like a Secretary of State, a general, a Federal Reserve chair. So you got people like Rex Tillerson and Jay Powell in Trump won. He is building characters and selecting people who are good at going on podcasts, for instance, or being on TV in Trump to. 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 all of the biases that come with that. Like if you’re looking for a general central casting, you’re looking for a white man. 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 who does he see up on the TV. I think there’s that. But, I mean, it’s a different story, right. I mean, Pete Hegseth is a different kind of character. I mean, he’s an underdog in the thing. Then Jim Mattis for sure. Then, Jim. He’s that it’s more the a soldier who’s going to take over and disrupt the thing. Look, I’m not saying it’s all planned out. I’m just saying that there has been a way this feels different. 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 maybe doesn’t want to spend as much time doing everything. Kind of if someone says in this season we’re going to let you. Like last season of the show, you had really long shooting days. This season, we’re going to front some other characters. So like, we can cut your shooting days in half. I think there’s a little bit of that happening now. I want to ask about the Democrats in relationship to this. And I guess one way to do it is that since the election, I mean, any room with six Democrats is a post-mortem now, whether formally or informally. Personally my favorite. I’d like to keep this going for years as we can. There are parts of the postmortem that are divisive in the party, right. Did they move too far left or actually, did they moderate too much. And what about Gaza and the one that every room of this I’m in. Everybody agrees on is and it’s always said the same way is that Democrats have a media problem. Yeah I’m curious what you think that means. 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 any debate or argument on either side. Like, empirically, he gave fewer interviews. He gave fewer press conferences. I mean, compare go watch Barack Obama be president and/or George W Bush or all these people. Did Joe Biden. 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. So you got to start with that. Would that have would it have worked. I don’t know. I believe Joe Biden, at 67, wins reelection, that he can tell a story about his own record, that if you want my counterfactual on this, basically what I think I kind of agree with that. And I’ll say I kind of agree with that because this is a rising with all the fury I felt about it all year, going back a year, I talked to people, I will say, because of the way this conversation happened at the absolute highest level of the Biden administration. And one thing that they were not shy about saying when I was making these arguments before I even made them publicly about can this guy really run again, is I would hear something look, Joe Biden can perform the presidency, but he can’t perform. The presidency was a wake up put to me. And they still thought it was O.K to run him again. You got to do both. Which shows an unbelievable devaluing at the highest levels of Democratic politics of attention. So, O.K, so that they thought it was O.K. They could just make this argument like, this guy can’t perform it. But I mean, that’s entertainment. This is a presidency. It’s not about who’s the best celebrity or who can go on Jimmy Kimmel. But of course, it partly is. So that’s the first layer, right. But that connects the next layer, which is the obsession with what is called the mainstream media. The legacy media, all of which is like understands is understandable, but is increasingly a conversation that a relatively small part of the country is part of. And they’re still laser focused on that. And again, I get that and they’re laser focused on it in terms of not making news. I think about this phrase all the time, 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. Something that has been on my mind. Is it, in a way, the fact that I keep hearing Democrats call this a media problem, rather than say, an attention problem, reflects exactly the problem, the issue that I think there’s still an intuition. I mean, the media as a linguistic construct sounds like an institutional thing that people control. Like one way you might solve your media problem is Chris Hayes decides who goes on the Chris Hayes all in show on weeknights on MSNBC. And you get him to book you and/or a Joe Rogan of the left, a Joe Rogan of the left. That’s my favorite phrase to come out of the election. I think it reflects Democrats still thinking that media is something that broadcasters and gatekeepers control, and the way to win it over is to win them over as opposed to something that you attract. Media is something you get booked on. Attention is something you attract. Liberal Joe Rogan discourse actually drives me like insane. Like I want to throw myself off of a bridge. You can’t build Joe Rogan if you’re a political person. You’re trying to back it out as a because the whole point of what is meaningful about him, to the extent he’s meaningful, and I’m not sure I’m using him a little bit as a stand in for a whole world of culture that I think Democrats have kind of abandoned. What’s meaningful about him is fundamentally, he’s not for people interested in politics Democrats are obsessed with how New York Times’ exactly words. It’s headlines about Donald Trump. But Democrats win. People who read New York Times’ headlines about Donald Trump, they lose people who don’t read politics at all. And you can’t win them by being more and more political and be like, we’re going to create a Joe Rogan, but with perfect politics who likes everything Democrats do. Like the whole point is that you have to go and compete in nonpolitical spaces, and you also have to get attention. You 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 using celebrities like, wait, well, these are attentional magnets. They’re avatars. But increasingly it just doesn’t work that way anymore. I do think a little bit I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m not sure I think what I’m about to say is right, but I think a bit that the media attention cut I’m making was actually there in who the two sides treated as celebrities because Democrats treated as celebrities. Celebrities like Beyonce and Taylor Swift and there was this kind of mocking like, well look, they’ve got Kid Rock over there at the RNC. But the actual celebrities that Republicans were relying on were U of C influencers and random podcasters. And I do think there was a way in which this election, in a background fashion, was testing this question of, well, actually, who are the celebrities today or at least in a persuasive level, who are the celebrities. Because there are these very buttoned up celebrities where you would get one post from Taylor Swift, or maybe Bad Bunny came in at the end. And I’m not saying that stuff didn’t help Democrats a bit. And again, you can overstate how much any of it mattered. But I do think there was a way of not seeing that in this world. Like there are a bunch of people who are not named celebrities by the media, but they are influencers of massive power now because they’re just like they’re good at competing and getting attention and building direct relationships with their audience. 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 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. And that’s really true, I think with attention entrepreneurship, which is not just to 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. It’s a really good show. I have listened to intermittently for years, particularly I used to more than I do now. I’ve listened to Rogan podcasts where he does 2.5 hours with an astrophysicist, and they’re totally fascinating. I mean, part of the problem, too, as I think this through, there is an asymmetry about risk. And I’m trying to figure out how it just is the case that a gaffe for a Democratic politician is going to stick out more and stick more. Partly, I think, as a self-reinforcing cycle, which is that if you do less media, then the gaffes stick more. And partly because, well, 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. O.K you’re at you’re at a restaurant with your kids and the kid over there. 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. 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 JD Vance and Donald Trump, are those other kids at the table. I don’t care what they do. They’re not my kids. And I. I truly believe this is true. This could get me in trouble. I don’t care. I do. I do think there’s something to it, but I think there’s one more link in the chain, which is that the issue is that the people who vote for Democrats are like to them, the mainstream media is influencers. exactly. And I mean, it isn’t the case. Or rather, it is the case that there are things Republicans can do in the media that are problems for them in certain ways, not being anti-immigrant enough. Yeah right. Or say Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. They have their own gaffes. They have their own gaffes. They’re just different. And they’re because the mainstream media for them is in the role of enemy for the mainstream media. Be mad at them. Doesn’t matter. Like that’s already the storyline. So I was running these numbers because I can write a column about this, but I don’t think I am now. So I’ll say it to you instead, which is that by 2000, Fox News is fairly it is a big enough force that one can take it seriously. Conservative talk radio is mature and is a big deal. So look at the 7 elections since 2000. Presidential elections. Republicans win the popular vote in two. Yep, in the seven before they win it in four. Yep now we know that Fox News persuades people to go right. And we know that Fox News is watched by people. And yet we also know that Republicans are performing worse, as Fox News and right wing media have become more powerful. And I always think the reason for that is that Fox News has made Republicans weirder. Oh, Yes. And, detached them from the center. I don’t think Donald Trump is electorally optimal himself. And so there’s this weird way where you’ve got to be very careful with this idea of I want this propaganda machine because the first person the propaganda machine is going to convince is you. That’s exactly right. And we see this in race after race after race. I mean, this has really been one of the 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. And this happens in all kinds of races. I mean, even races that they win, that are way closer than they should be. So part of what’s happening is this malformation of the public. This of different publics of parties, of different audiences 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. I mean, there’s been all this post 2024 talk, some of it by me, about the problem of the groups on the Democratic side and the way they pull Democrats not just left, but into a distance from the median voter they convinced Democrats of things about the public that are not true. The group that is saying we represent Black voters, we represent Hispanic voters does not. I think conservative media is like that, but much more powerful for the right. It is, given the right a very malformed view of the public. Oh, I agree with that. And enforces that view in a vicious way. I think this is one place I think this is really true is on trans issues. I think people are deconflicted 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, I mean, obsessed with this issue and with the lives and bodies of these fellow Americans of ours as the propaganda machine and the attentional, the attention merchants on the right are finding. And again, they’re covering that because it rates to be clear like there’s a feedback loop here. They’re not just like telling people to care about this. There’s a small group of people that do really care about it, but I think it has been distorting for them. And I there’s all kinds of races where they have closed with this message. Well, I think that this issue is somewhere where as you say, people are deconflicted. So if you can split the electorate or make the electorate think about the part where they side with the right sports teams. That’s probably their best issue. But the issue I think that and I’ve said this a bunch that one reason I mean just even just politically I think Democrats should be thoughtful about not veering too far, is it. What’s about to come is cruelty. And people don’t like cruelty. Yeah And most people don’t like most people don’t like cruelty. Some people like cruelty. But when I think of the damage Twitter x did to Democrats, it came from 2020, not from 2024. It was his time when Democrats actually dominated Twitter and used it to do a lot of in-group policing and persuade themselves of a lot of electorally ruinous or unpopular ideas that then Republicans weaponized. In 2024 the fact that Republicans now have x and I guess truthsocial and it’s run by Musk and Trump, it’s not obvious to me that it’s a net benefit. It’s a net benefit. 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. What I mean. Like, and I think that. So I think there’s sometimes there’s trade offs between that, honestly. And I think that’s true for Democrats too. Like sometimes there are trade offs trade offs 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 trade offs go in both directions. 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. And so there’s real tangible results to all of this that transcend politics. And I well, to me, that’s one of the ways, though, that this might not play out well for the right. Yes that for instance, a good possible example of this is that if the embrace of crypto culture leads to unwise levels of I wouldn’t call it deregulation, but because these things aren’t regulated really now, but structures of regulation that are shadowy, so you have huge amounts of risk pooling in weird places. You might have contagion in the financial sector because my Annie Lowery, my wife, wrote a great piece about this in the Atlantic. You might have contagion, the financial sector, because financial firms begin reconstructing themselves as blockchain assets in order to go into later regulation. And then you have something that somebody doesn’t understand or the regulators don’t understand blow up. And now you’re blamed for it in the way that Bush and the Republicans were in 08. There’s no guarantee that happens. It might not. 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 the center left, which still broadly concerns what we would call the mainstream media, legacy media, institutional media, that there’s just more of this reality checking happening there. I mean, there’s a big fight about is inflation happening or is it not. And then it was clear that inflation was happening. It was very high. And you didn’t get, there were people who were talking about whether the inflation was the cause of the American Rescue Plan or whether it was really politically salient. But you didn’t get a bunch of inflation truthers saying that the books were cooked or they were wrong, or inflation was high, and that core fact suffused the coverage of all the people in that media ecosystem and sphere. But I think if you saw 9 percent inflation under Donald Trump, I think you would have had a kind of similar, reaction to the election, the 2020 election, which is like it’s not happening. I think there’s just a mechanism of denial, a mechanism of like sheer cleaving off from reality in that attentional ecosystem that is distinct. So the political scientist Henry Farrell had this good piece on a Substack, an essay about he was saying, we misunderstand the problem of social media. And he had this analogy to porn, and he says that the way he’s working off somebody else’s argument about porn, but he says internet porn is tuned not towards people who watch it, but people who buy it. What internet porn is trying to do is not get you to consume it for free, but to pay 9.95 a month or whatever. And the people who will do that have more extreme tastes. And so you have this ecosystem of pornography that is tilted to be more extreme because it’s trying to get this actual conversion, but it then creates this mass sense among the porn watching public that tastes are more extreme, that everybody else is into things that are more extreme. It arguably changes people’s tastes because you just get used to things. And in that way, pornography malformed the public. And his argument is that social media is doing the same thing. It is making everybody think that everybody else’s tastes politically are more extreme than they are that everybody else is obsessed with a UK gang rape scandal from more than 10 years ago. The effect is not just what it does to the public, but the way it warps practically the understanding of politicians and media figures who are looking at social media as if it is the public. And his key point here was, which I think is just the bedrock to 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. Because, as he writes in the piece, a lot of this discourse is about individuals like this, a bunch of individuals hold these wrong beliefs. But democracy is something we do together. It’s not a bunch of aggregated individual choices. And I think this argument is completely correct. And partly it’s because we’re also being constantly pulled towards things that are the most potentially salient, which is just a distinct category from at a bedrock from what we think is important. I cannot stress this enough. Attention is not a moral faculty. There’s a Lippmann writing in 19 teens that I quote in the book. It’s during Versailles. 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, in the same way that 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 and it’s pretty funny because it’s bang on. And the point is that we all understand we have a category of words, going back to porn titillating, prurient, lurid. Did that obscene, obscene that describe the category of things that we think that we both draw our attention, but are morally dubious. And what happens in the collective malformation around attention as the most signature value. It’s the only thing that matters in this competitive landscape is a kind of moral degradation, 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. O.K, so I think this actually brings up a good like very counter to this conversation question, which is maybe the optimal strategy if your vision, your sense of the public, your politics, maybe your own moral faculties are so warped by competing for this volume of attention is to not play. So in 2020, Joe Biden is the least online and the least intentionally sophisticated or even interested of any of the Democrats running for president. And I don’t think that is unrelated to him winning, to why he won in 2020, certainly won in the primary and possibly even won in the general because he had lots of problems as a candidate. He was, I think, too old to be running effectively even then, or at least very much on the edge. And he was diminished from what he once was, but his sense of the electorate had not been driven. Malformed malformed. That’s a great point. And so he didn’t get on board with a bunch of dumb things other people were getting on board with. That’s a great point. We’re kind of implying that the right strategy here is an embrace in the way some kind of alternative but still embrace like what we’re seeing from Trump and Musk. Maybe it’s the opposite. And think about this for candidates. I mean, after Bush won in 2004, when there was a version of the discourse we’re going through now, the idea is like what. We need a Black guy with a foreign sounding name who is a former professor and community organizer. Constitutional law professor. Like, that was ludicrous. Like, what we need is like a guy you can have a beer with who also has a ranch. And, that’s what we need. And it was like, no, we needed something totally different. Two things. One, I think it is important again, to distinguish between what is this doing to people more broadly, and what is it doing to political professionals. Yes And I think it’s extremely dangerous for political professionals to read social media as representative of the public. 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 the self that doesn’t want to eat the third cookie, and the self that does eat the third cookie. There are different publics too. In that same way within the public. There’s a public that feels very compassionate towards immigrants. It feels proud of America being a nation of immigrants. And there’s a public that is feels like they’re being ripped off and invaded. And sometimes those are the same people. Often they’re the same people. But Ferrell’s whole point is that these publics are formed collectively. So I think it’s important the political professionals don’t make this simple representational mistake, which I agree with you, has led to a lot of poor choices, people on this social media platform are screaming to me about this means there’s some constituency behind them. And yet, as the line between reality and online breaks down, the Vanguard of people screaming really do have cultural significance. That’s true. But here’s one of my big theories, and we’ll in four or eight years if I’m right, I think we are ready or very near ready. And I see it in the States and counties banning phones in schools. And just like the discourse for true backlash. And yes, I think that the next really successful Democrat, although it could be a Republican, is going to be oppositional to it in the way that when Barack Obama ran in 08. And I really think people forget this part of his appeal, he ran against cable news, against 24 hour news cycles, against political consultants. People didn’t like the structure and feeling of political attention then, and I don’t think there was anywhere near the level of disgust and concern and feeling that we were being corroded in our souls that there is now. And I think that at some point you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling, that they are going to run not against Facebook as a or meta as a big company that needs to be broken up, but all of it. They’re going to run against all of it. That society and modernity and politics, shouldn’t feel like this. And some of that will be banning phones in schools, right. It’ll have a dimension that is policy, but some of it is going to be just absolutely like radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves. I mean, your book has a lot of this in it. I think that political space is weirdly open, but it seems very clear to me Somebody’s going to grab it. I could not agree more. Even not even before we get to politics. Thoreau for president, but not Thoreau. I really think this is important. It’s not somebody. Well, you can’t drop out for President. It’s not. You can’t somebody who is withdrawing and wants to live on a lake. There are people like that. It’s more like John Hite. Yeah right. It’s more like what he is channeling. I mean, but channeled into politics, which is an actual anger at it. A it is not supposed to feel this way. And I don’t think it’s just going to be like, we’re going to get rid of TikTok, but it is going to be something about this culture and society has fallen. I think it’s a keen insight. I agree, and what I thought about is like sometimes you’ll read historical dispatches from peak industrial London and people are just being like, this is the most disgusting place that has ever been put on God’s Earth. It’s just sewage and coal ash in the sky. Satanic Mills, just satanic Mills, just the sheer stench. And just like, what have we done. How far from God we have fallen in this. And they were right. Like, it’s genuinely it was genuinely disgusting. And it did reach a point with all of these things, particularly the worst depredations of the Industrial Revolution, where people had enough and they’re having enough was represented in a million different political tendencies, cultural movements, manifestations, and we are at that. I mean, it is in the course of writing this book. I mean, literally from the conceptualization of this book for an essay that I wrote, 2022 to this book coming out now, we’ve already moved a tremendous amount. I mean, when I first started telling people about this book, I’m like. Attention and now it’s like, right. And I’ve been obsessed with this for. Well, you have for sure. Yes, Yes. And I think you and I are predisposed to be obsessed with it, because the universe in which we operate is like we’re constantly trying to 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’s an wellspring, an untapped wellspring 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 and the way it feels to be inside the collective’s mind. Yes, even I know a good number of Trump supporters and they may like him, but they don’t not how he feels, but how all this feels. No, no one likes it. Nobody likes it. No one likes that. That is there. It’s the thing that Obama was very good at working with. That is there in its modern version, I think, to derive energy from. Before any of that happens, though, he’s going to be president again. You’ve probably heard and I’m just I’m just hearing this now. How do you think I’m sure you’re thinking about this. How has your coverage of Trump in 2025 and his White House, knowing everything we know about the way attention works under his presidency, going to be different than it was in 2017? 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 five eventually, and then you can’t turn it up past 10. 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. It’s 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 it wouldn’t be a Democratic president’s choice. But that’s not to say that no one should raise any concerns. I just mean in terms of coverage, let me ask you something about the negativity bias and the incentives that sets up. Obviously, the future of the Republican Party is not highly determined by what MSNBC hosts say about different Trump appointees. But there is something about a world where Marco Rubio gets no coverage for being a who knows what kind of Secretary of State he’ll be, but plausibly, Yes, a more normal, thoughtful Marco Rubio, as a politician, works hard and tries to think about ideas. He’s also genuinely qualified for the job. Compared to a Pete Hegseth or a RFK jr. or Tulsi Gabbard. In this world where we say that there is value to attention and we give all this attentional resource to the worst people, making them more valuable to Trump and squeezing out the. That’s interesting. Is there actually like a bad incentive system being set up by that. Like, I’ve never known what to do with this thought, which I’ve had for a long time, because on the one hand, you can’t just ignore the terrible things happening in government. That’s a dereliction of what we’re here to do. And on the other hand, if you believe that just giving things attention is to give them energy and energy to only cover the terrible things happening in government is to not empower like the Doug Burgum’s and Marco Rubio’s in the future. Like there feels some tension here that the media is never known what to do with. I think that’s interesting. I mean, I think that I don’t know. 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 has been is on a brainstorming notepad of mine, and I’ve thought about a million versions of it. The phrase is the opposite of doom, and I think about this a lot because I think that we live in a doom obsessed time 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. There’s different ages where all sorts of different people are planning their utopias 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 contemporary version of utopia. Maybe in some version, the 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. And it relates to this question about the individual coverage decisions which are absolutely affected by negativity bias. Like 100 percent And conflict too. Like there’s a fight over exdeath 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. But the reason I bring all this up is because I sometimes think about it just in terms of 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 30 years ago, it just was inconceivable that we would cure HIV/AIDS. And it was it’s amazing 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 to do good things and to solve problems. All right. I have a lot of thoughts on this. One is that I mean, you and I both know there have been a million efforts in journalism to do solutions based journalism. Yes right. Good news, good news journalism. And they don’t work in part. Not that they don’t work at all. No but it’s and this is as you make the point of at the beginning of this conversation and often in your book, attention is a business. So when they don’t work for you, your cable news show gets replaced, with somebody who will do doom. On the other hand, one of the things I really believe about the podcasting world, one thing that makes me very hopeful about it is these podcasts have built huge, unbelievably huge audiences not being primarily about doom. Agreed right. They don’t actually have a big negativity bias. They’re very hopeful. They’re futuristic. The obvious thing to say is the opposite of doom is hope. But I think the opposite of doom is curiosity, at least in this respect. I don’t think it’s utopia. I think it’s something about curiosity, interest, beauty. There is this way that doom is a doom is a belief that we know how things are going to go. Comforting in its own way because of that. Comforting in its own way because of that. And mystery feels to me like an opposite of doom, and that there’s a dimension here where I think what has gone wrong in a lot of this journalism is it feels hokey and cliché, and it has it is actually too much the opposite of doom. When the problem is like want to be on another dimension entirely. Like if the only question is things go, good things go bad, things go bad is more attention grabbing. If the question is things go bad or are there UFOs. Things go bad. Or like this novelist speaks unbelievably beautiful because I see it the ratings of this show, right. I can get very high downloads for Trump episodes and very high over time downloads for a novelist who describes a world in a really beautiful way. I don’t think the opposite of doom is hope or good things or utopia. I think for attention, it’s curiosity. It’s curiosity, it’s interest. Interesting It’s like oh, have you ever thought about it this way or isn’t that weird. I want to make a point that I’m afraid is boringly technical after what you just said, which I am chewing on. I also think the back, the technological infrastructure of podcast matters tremendously. You’ve talked about that line from I forget who wrote wherever you get your podcasts is a radical statement that the fact that podcasts have built audiences largely outside of algorithmic feeds have built them through an open protocol called RSS, that technical backbone actually matters for precisely what you’re talking about. Part of the reason podcasts have flourished two or three hour podcast 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. And I think it’s actually really hopeful, because I think one of the things to remember here, and 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. AOL was the Belle of the ball and 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 a non-commercial open internet that rewarded curiosity, that rewarded people connecting about obscure topics. It rewarded hobbyism. It rewarded obsessive, small little corners of knowledge. It’s already been the case once that an 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. So that to me is really hopeful, though, because it’s like it’s we have divided cells, 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. I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question what are three books you would recommend to the audience. 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 Yes way. Yes totally Yes. And an explicit way. Also the first essay, which is just about the different versions of 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 Another book that has been mentioned on your podcast a lot and relevant, which is again, I feel like I’m citing canonical texts here, and it’s important for me to do because I want to be clear, as we all are as authors lots of people have been thinking about this very well and very hard, but Jenny Odell’s how to do nothing is a fantastic book. It’s strange and distinct and is much more, I would say like spiritually omnivorous than the book that I’ve written, more interior in its focus to about how you do this work with yourself and with other people as a kind of collective, radical undertaking. Yeah, the form of that book is also the function, because I feel like so much of what books about attention are about is how it homogenizes all of us. In that book, I love that book so much. It is a completely distinct product, a completely distinct mind no other human being would write that book. 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 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 percent of the way there by just like hearing the author on a podcast or reading a review, you got to actually read the book. And then my final is a work of fiction of short stories by an author named Tony tulathimutte called rejection. And it is the bleakest, not safe for work friends, 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 and basically a day and it has stuck with me. And I really recommend it highly. One of the most intense reading experiences there is. There is a 10 to 12 page granular description of a sexual fantasy in this book that is, that your full body will be basically 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 and it’s I’ve never read anything like it. Chris Hayes, your book is great. I recommend it to everybody. Thank you, Thank you. Pop pop pop pop. Pop pop pop pop.
