This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Monday, Donald Trump is going to take the oath of office for the second time. During his first administration, there were questions around how he would instrumentalize policy in the government, how he would raise money. We’re used to talking about that with politicians.
But there was also the separate question — of how Trump wields and uses attention.
He’s a master at it. And I’d say he has a disciple, an ally, in Elon Musk. Musk is probably the most attentionally rich person in the world alongside Donald Trump, and Musk’s attentional riches might be more important now than his financial riches.
And so if you’re going to think about politics predictively, you have to scrutinize how attention is being spent, amassed and controlled. And that’s what this conversation is about. It’s a curtain raiser on the attentional regime we’re about to enter.
My friend Chris Hayes is best known as the host of MSNBC’s 8 p.m. show, “All In With Chris Hayes.” But he just wrote a great book called “The Sirens’ 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 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.
If there is going to be a successful opposition to them, that opposition is going to need to understand its value and understand how to wield it. And right now, it doesn’t.
Ezra Klein: Chris Hayes, welcome to the show.
Chris Hayes: Really great to be here.
So you’ve got a cable news show. You’re an attention merchant. What is different about the way attention felt and worked in the early 2000s 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 there’s so much more competition. The notion now is that at every single moment when you are competing for someone’s attention, you are competing against literally every piece of content ever produced.
I love this thing that happened a few years ago where “Suits,” which was a network show, had become the most-watched show on Netflix. It never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that 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 totality of human content is the library of your competition. And that was 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. I would read anything around me. There are all kinds of times in my life when I was caught without anything to read. And now it never happens. In my pocket is this portal to what is pretty close to everything ever written.
I remember a version of the Elias Sports Bureau’s sports baseball compendium of stats, and I would just read the Top 40 earned run average pitchers in 1983. [Laughs.]
When I was a kid, I knew the manufacturer’s 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.
In some ways the lack of choice forced a kind of focus. I think you and I — we’re roughly the same cohort. I was sort of at the front end of Really Simple Syndication, Google Reader and blogs. And this idea that you could synthesize an insane amount of information very quickly if you curated it and created processes to feed it into you. And those processes have gotten much harder, and they’ve been totally overwhelmed.
It is hard sometimes, when you’ve lived through attention and information changing as much as we have, to take the long view. One thing I liked about your book a lot is that 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.
Labor long predates 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. If you’re hunting, gathering, picking berries — that’s work. And labor evolved into agrarian feudal systems and all kinds of different systems.
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 — 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 started earlier than we think. But we’re reaching a crescendo where attention is now this market commodity that’s extracted and sold.
What do you mean by: “It’s a market commodity that’s extracted and sold”? What makes attention priceable and tradable now differently than it was before? Or is that not the ground of the analogy?
So there’s a prehistory here. From the birth of what we would call recognizably modern media — the penny press and magazines and particularly Benjamin Day’s New York Sun — there’s the idea that you charge people a penny for a newspaper. And 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 different now, I would say. One is the sophistication of how minutely you could capture people’s attention and how quickly and sophisticatedly you could bring it to market.
You’ve now got these nanosecond auctions that are selling off your eyeballs — in the moment you’re loading a webpage or in the moment that Instagram Reels are 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. 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, so concerned 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, the internet, with a much higher level of sophistication, turned into a massive experimentation for what works attentionally. It’s just this endless gain-of-function biolab for attention. I really think of a lot of social media as gain-of-function research for takes.
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?
But there’s something about not just seeing attention as a commodity but seeing it as something that is manipulable, shapeable, changeable — such that our collective attention as a resource is changing — that feels important in this.
I agree. And when you had D. Graham Burnett on the show, who’s great on this and an attention researcher, he talks about fracking. And the point of the metaphor of fracking is that you need more supply. 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.
There is something very similar happening, obviously, here. The expanded supply eating into your sleep hours — that’s more supply. Looking at two or three things at once — which would have seemed totally antisocial and borderline deranged two or three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. The qualitative or subjective experience of what attention is, 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. Like Google and Meta.
I still think we’re realizing attention 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 fill this howling void he has for attention.
Yes, the book was written before I think he got a second chapter.
Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter at $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 dollars. But it’s clearly worth more than $44 billion dollars.
So how do you think about this translation that we’re seeing happen right now between attention as a financial commodity and attention as having more worth, frankly, than the money it would fetch on the open market?
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 borne of his personality and his upbringing in the New York tabloid world, he figured out something 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 — like lots of attention or the collective public attention — is wildly valuable.
Volodymyr Zelensky is a great example of this. The president of Ukraine 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, our individual attention, second to second, is 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 almost nothing in the market.
And I think we have the same thing with attention, where it’s really valuable, pooled and aggregated. Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless, is 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. Certainly at the high levels.
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 — he controls them with attention.
I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world. But it’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 a 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 there are a few things: One, I think you’re totally right to identify that it’s sort of a sliding scale between the two. Which is to say: For politics that get the least attention, money matters the most.
So in a state representative race, money really matters — partly because no one is paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been gutted. Money can buy their attention. You could put out glossy mailers. There’s a lot you could do. 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 of advertising, and everything is just like drops of rain in a river because there is so much competition for attention.
What Trump and Musk figured out 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? What do you like?
All that is just going to whiz past people. 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 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 that the volume, the sum total of attention, is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention: not only fine — maybe great, right? Because there’s so much attentional energy and conflict.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and before them, Joe Biden — before the changeover, they were just terrified of an interview going badly. And Trump and Vance — they were all over the place, including in places very hostile to them.
Vance had a ton of interviews that went badly.
But they were everywhere. 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 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 Antony says before he proceeds to attempt to persuade them.
What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this sort of war of all against all, that just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it.
And one way reliably to get people’s attention is negative attention — if you insult people, act outrageously. There was a commercial model for this — which is the shock jocks of the 1980s and ’90s that we grew up with. 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. They just wanted you to know that they were running the morning zoo.
I don’t know how to insert into the discourse a strong enough point: Joe Rogan is much better than Howard Stern was.
Yes, it’s true.
Nobody quite wants to admit this, because now Howard Stern has become this lovable uncle for liberals who has Hillary Clinton on his show. And I think Kamala Harris went on his show.
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 with what Stern was, Rogan is just smarter and preferable.
[Laughs.] I think that’s probably true. And I also think that the general shock jock model has now become a successful model in politics.
OK, but now I think we need to have a moment of caution. Donald Trump won the popular vote by like 1.5 percentage points, which is a terrible win. And yet there’s just no doubt Trump has won some kind of cultural and attentional victory that is much bigger in its feeling than the actual electoral victory they won.
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. It does not reflect, if you just told somebody the election results — I don’t think they feel the vibe shift.
I agree with that. And I want to 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. He 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-one or -two Republican state at national level. It didn’t work for Robinson.
Kari Lake courted negative attention — and lost two successive statewide races. Doug Mastriano — I could go down the list. So there’s something really fascinating —
JD Vance underperformed in Ohio, considerably.
There is something happening where it is 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.
In terms of influence, I think negative attention is incredibly effective. You can just call it 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 involves 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 — like Vance and Marco 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. You write in the book, something that feels quite human: 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 OK with that negative charge. 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 rather be well-regarded but somewhat forgettable to a large group of people — rather than absolutely hated by half the country in order to be quite loved by the other half. And I think that’s something in people.
What I’m asking is: Does politics now select for a kind of attentional sociopath?
I think it does select for a potential 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 —
But he’s sitting there watching MSNBC and getting mad at it, or CNN. 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 guess I just don’t buy that it rolls off their back. They’re kind of obsessed with it, also. So that fixation is manifest differently. But the idea that they’re sort of Zen-like: Well, you know, people are just going to hate.
That’s not what’s going on psychologically. I worry, actually, that politics now selects for a kind of sociopathic disposition. Or just a very broken and compulsive one.
I have the show-off demon in myself and 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 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 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, and also in the collective public sphere.
Let me say that the thing that I think is the deepest problem here: 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 goes back to The New York Sun. This was the first New York newspaper to have a court reporter who went to the court and 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 generally lead people toward their most reactionary selves. And then the negativity bias of competitive attentional markets also means it’s really hard for incumbents.
Think about 1964 — Lyndon B. Johnson, huge landslide victory. Think about ’72 — Richard Nixon, incumbent landslide victory; ’84 —Reagan, incumbent landslide victory; ’96 — not landslide, but Clinton basically cruises to re-election. It is inconceivable to me in our current media environment for a large majority of our electorate to be like: Let’s keep it going — this is good. Status quo — ramp it up.
We’ve been, I think, talking about attention mostly in terms of social media here. I want to talk about another way: that attention and the way we think about stories changed in this period. Which is reality television — which is the other side of this that Trump comes out of.
One thing that has felt true to me about Trump’s second term, much more than the first, is that it feels like reality television. It is all these secondary characters with their own subplots and their own arcs: What’s going to happen with Pete Hegseth? And over here is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Musk.
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 has gone. People get fired, or he settles 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. He’s not the only figure — he’s the host, the decider. Compared with other administrations, even compared with his first, this one is feeling programmed in a very different way.
You’re somebody who obviously has to follow the plots and report on them night after night in the eternal purgatory that you are in —
There are worse fates.
Does that resonate for you?
It does resonate. If you’ve ever talked to people in reality television, they have selected for people with very flawed personalities, borderline personality disorder, narcissism. Because that produces conflict and conflict produces drama, and 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, who are willing to absorb negative attention to be the star.
Exactly right. And you don’t pick people who are sort of shy and go along to get along. Because what does that get you? So that model I think explains a lot about the personalities who are selected for in the context of intense attentional competition.
In terms of the programming, I totally agree — although I do think it’s instinctual for him. I don’t think it’s that plotted out. But I do think fundamentally he thinks that he needs the attention at all times. And he just has an intuitive sense of that. And Greenland is a perfect example.
There were a thousand of them in the first Trump administration. There will be a thousand more. What do you do with it? Is it attention-getting to be like: The incoming president wants to take over Greenland? Yes, 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 it? I don’t know. 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 his sense of it seems to have changed. It was a well-remarked on and reported dynamic of the appointments in the first term that he had a casting orientation to him. But it was 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 Jerome Powell in Trump 1.0. He is building characters and selecting people who are good at going on podcasts, for instance — or being on TV in Trump 2.0.
Yes, he is selecting for people who will keep attention and communicate, for sure. I still think there’s a certain amount of a casting look to it. With — we should note — all of the biases that come with that. Like, if you’re looking for a general on central casting, you’re looking for a white man.
But you’re not looking for Pete Hegseth. I mean, Pete Hegseth is a different kind of character —
Than James Mattis, for sure.
Hegseth is an underdog. I’m just saying that there has been a way this feels different.
I also think the man is the oldest man ever to be elected president of the United States. And he maybe doesn’t want to spend as much time doing everything. Kind of like if someone says: Last season of the show, you had really long shooting days. This season, we’re gonna front some other characters so we can cut your shooting days in half.
I want to ask about the Democrats in relation to this. Since the election, any room with six Democrats is a postmortem now. And there are parts of the postmortem that are divisive in the party: Did they move too far left? Or actually did they moderate too much? And what about Gaza?
But everyone I talk to seems to agree on one thing: Democrats have a media problem. I’m curious what you think that means.
Well, I think there are two components to that. One I think you cannot avoid is that whatever you think about Joe Biden’s ability 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.
I just don’t think there’s any debate or argument on either side. Empirically, he gave fewer interviews, he gave fewer press conferences. It just was the case — I think largely due to his age — that he was not capable of focusing and occupying the attentional space at the center of the presidency. So you’ve got to start with that.
I believe Joe Biden would have won a second term if he had run for re-election at, say, age 67 instead of age 82 — that he could have told a compelling story about his own presidential record.
I think I kind of agree with that.
Going back a year, I talked to people at the absolute highest level of the Biden administration, and I would hear something like: Look, Joe Biden can perform the presidency, but he can’t “perform” the presidency.
And they still thought it was OK to run him!
Yes — you’ve got to do both!
Which shows an unbelievable devaluing at the highest levels of Democratic politics of attention. Like: This guy can’t “perform” it. But, you know, 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.
That connects to the next layer, which is the obsession with what’s called the mainstream media, the legacy media. All of which is understandable. But it’s increasingly a conversation that a relatively small part of the country is a part of, and they’re still laser focused on 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 in their communication is to “not make news.” And Donald Trump’s goal is always to “make news.”
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.
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.
Or a Joe Rogan of the left.
Or 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. Media is something you get booked on. Attention is something you attract.
Liberal Joe Rogan discourse actually drives me insane. Like, I want to throw myself off a bridge. You can’t build Joe Rogan if you’re a political person, because the whole point of what is meaningful about him is fundamentally that he’s not for people interested in politics.
Yes.
Democrats are obsessed with how The New York Times exactly words its 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 Joe Rogan but with perfect politics, who likes everything Democrats do. The whole point is that you have to go and compete in nonpolitical spaces.
And you also have to get the attention of people at the periphery of politics. 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. The idea of Beyoncé — the idea of using celebrities is that these are attentional magnets.
I think the media and/or attention cut I’m making was actually therein who the two sides treated as celebrities.
Because Democrats treated as celebrities Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. And there was a kind of mocking: Look — they’ve got Kid Rock over there at the Republican National Convention. But the actual celebrities that Republicans were relying on were Ultimate Fighting Championship influencers and random podcasters.
And I do think there was a way in which this election, in a background fashion, was testing this question: Who are the celebrities today? Or at least at a persuasive level: Who are the celebrities?
Because there were these very buttoned-up celebrities — 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 is a way of not seeing that, in this world, 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 good at competing and getting attention and building direct relationships with our audience.
Steve Jobs had this saying: It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want. And I do think there’s a little bit of Democratic obsession with numbers and market research: What are the numbers saying? And part of this is just innovation and improvisation and trying new stuff that hasn’t been tried before, as opposed to backing up what you think the expectation is.
And that’s really true, I think, with attention entrepreneurship. It’s not just: What does best in the algorithm? And not just: Look at the data. But to try new things.
I don’t love Joe Rogan’s politics, but Rogan’s a really good podcast host. It’s a really good show. I have listened intermittently for years. I used to more than I do now. I’ve listened to Rogan’s podcast where he does two-and-a-half hours with an astrophysicist, and they’re totally fascinating.
Part of the problem, too, as I think this through, is there is an asymmetry about risk. A gaffe for a Democratic politician is going to stick out more. It’s partly as a self-enforcing cycle. Which is: I’ll do this take, and then you can cut it out.
We’re definitely not cutting it out now.
OK, you’re at a restaurant with your kids. And the kid over there at another table, same age, just acting 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 — they’re not my kid.
I feel like that’s how the mainstream media basically treats the Democratic Party. And 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 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.
I truly believe this is true. This can get me in trouble. I don’t care.
I do think there’s something to it, but I think there’s one more link in the chain. It is the case that there are things Republicans can do in the media that are problems for them. Like, in certain ways, not be anti-immigrant enough. Or saying Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.
They have their own gaffes.
They have their own gaffes. They’re just different. And because the mainstream media for them is in the role of enemy, for the mainstream media to be mad at them doesn’t matter — that’s already the story line.
So I was going to write a column about this. But I don’t think I am now, so I’ll say it to you instead. Which is, by 2000, Fox News is a big enough force that one could take it seriously. Conservative talk radio is mature and is a big deal.
Look at the seven presidential elections since 2000. Republicans win the popular vote in two. In the seven before, they win in four.
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 become more powerful.
And I always think the reason for that is that Fox News has made Republicans weirder 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. This has really been one of the stories of the MAGA era: 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.
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. Because the group that’s saying, “We represent Black voters” or “We represent Hispanic voters” actually does not. And I think conservative media is like that — but much more powerful for the right. It has given the right a very malformed view of the public.
Oh, I agree with that. 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: The public writ large is nowhere near as 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.
And they’re covering that because it rates, and there is a small group of people who do really care about it. But I think it has been distorting for them. And there are all kinds of races where they have closed with this message.
Well, I think that on this issue, as you say, people are conflicted. So if you can make the electorate think about the part where they side with the right — like sports teams.
I think that’s probably their best message.
But one reason, even just politically, I think Democrats should be thoughtful about not veering too far is that what’s about to come is cruelty. And people don’t like cruelty.
Well, most people don’t like cruelty.
Most people don’t like cruelty.
Some people like cruelty.
When I think of the damage Twitter/X did to Democrats — it came from 2020 not 2024. That was a 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 Truth Social, and it’s run by Musk and Trump — it’s not obvious to me that it’s a net benefit.
Yeah, I would agree with 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.
And I think that’s true for Democrats, too. Sometimes there are trade-offs between ideas moving public opinion or normalizing things that seem outré or radical and may cost a few candidates elections.
The other thing is there are consequences here that are more than political. Tens of thousands of people died who shouldn’t have died during the pandemic because they didn’t get vaccinated. So there are real tangible results to all of this that transcend politics.
Well, to me, that’s one of the ways that this might not play out well for the right. A good possible example of this is that if the embrace of crypto culture leads to unwise levels of — I don’t want to call it deregulation, because these things aren’t really regulated now — structures of regulation that are shadowy. So you have huge amounts of risk pooling in weird places.
Annie Lowrey, my wife, wrote a great piece about this in The Atlantic. You might have contagion in the financial sector because financial firms begin reconstructing themselves as blockchain assets in order to go into lighter regulation.
And then you have something blow up that somebody doesn’t understand or the regulators don’t understand. And now you’re blamed for it in the way that Bush and Republicans were in 2008. There’s no guarantee that happens. It might not.
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.
There was a big fight about: Is inflation happening, or is it not? And then it was clear that inflation was happening, was very high. And 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. 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 similar reaction to the 2020 election. Which is: It’s not happening. I think there’s just a mechanism of denial, a mechanism of cleaving off from reality in that attentional ecosystem that is distinct.
So the political scientist Henry Farrell had this good piece on his Substack. He was saying we misunderstand the problem of social media, and he had this analogy to porn. He’s working off somebody else’s argument about porn, but he says that the internet porn is tuned not toward 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. It arguably changes people’s tastes because you just get used to things. And in that way, pornography malforms 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 United Kingdom gang-rape scandal from more than 10 years ago.
And the effect is not just what it does to the public, but the way it warps particularly the understanding of politicians and media figures who are looking at social media as if it is the public.
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.
Because as he writes in the piece, a lot of this discourse is about individuals. 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 toward things that are the most attentionally salient, which is just a distinct category from what we think is important.
I cannot stress this enough. Attention is not a moral faculty. There’s a Walter Lippmann writing that I quote in the book. It’s during Versailles, and he says something about how the American people have a great deal of interest in what happens at Versailles, but they’re not interested in it. 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. And Lippmann is like: What we’re interested in is the gowns of the queen, basically.
And it’s pretty funny because it’s bang on.
We have a category of words, going back to porn, like “titillating,” “prurient,” “lurid” —
“Obscene.”
“Obscene” — that describe the category of things that we know draw our attention but are morally dubious.
And what happens in the sort of collective malformation around attention as the most signature value, as the only thing that matters in this competitive landscape, is a kind of moral degradation. Because it’s pulling us toward things that we know at some level aren’t that important or morally defensible — but do get our attention.
OK, so I think this actually brings up a good, 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 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 attentionally sophisticated or even interested of any of the Democrats running for president. And I don’t think that is unrelated to why he won in 2020 — certainly why he 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 mad, malformed. And so he didn’t get on board with a bunch of dumb things other people are getting on board with.
After Bush won in 2004, when there was a version of the discourse we’re going through now, the idea was: You know what we need? A Black guy with a foreign-sounding name who is a former professor and community organizer. That was ludicrous. Like: What we need is a guy you can have a beer with who also has a ranch. 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? 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 who wants to read a novel and the self who scrolls Instagram. There’s the self who doesn’t want to eat that third cookie and the self who does eat that third cookie.
There are different publics, too, in that same way. Within the public, there’s a public that feels very compassionate toward immigrants, that 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.
But Farrell’s whole point is that these publics are formed collectively. So I think it’s important 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.
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 know 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 — for true backlash.
And 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 as 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. They are going to run not against Facebook or Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up. 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. It’ll have a dimension that is policy. But some of it is going to be absolutely 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 is going to grab it.
I could not agree more. Thoreau for President.
But not Thoreau. I really think this is important. It’s not somebody who is withdrawing and wants to live on a lake. It’s more like Jonathan Haidt. It’s more like what he is channeling — but channeled into politics — which is an actual anger at it. I don’t think it’s just going to be like a “We’re going to get rid of tech” talk. But it is going to be something about how this culture and society has fallen.
I think it’s a keen insight. I agree. Sometimes you read historical dispatches from peak industrial London, and people are 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 —
Satanic mills.
Satanic mills. Just the sheer stench and just like: What have we done? How far from God we have fallen?
And they were right! It was 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 having enough was represented in a million different political tendencies, cultural movements, manifestations.
We are at that point. In the course of writing this book, I mean, literally from the conceptualization of this book for an essay that I wrote in 2022 to this book coming out now, we’ve already moved a tremendous amount. When I first started telling people about this book, they were like: Huh, attention. Huh. And now it’s like: Right!
I’ve been obsessed with this for years.
Well, you have for sure. Yes. And I think you and I are predisposed to be obsessed with it because in the universe in which we operate we are constantly trying to screen information, get the good information, protect our attention, try to think in a way that’s productive.
Yes, I think there is 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.
Knowing everything we know about the way attention works under a Trump presidency, how is your coverage of Trump and his White House going to be different in 2025 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. 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 about now.
And I think you see some of this. No one is saying anything about Marco Rubio as secretary of state. Fine. That’s fine. I mean, wouldn’t be my choice, but I don’t need to choose. Wouldn’t be a Democratic president’s choice. And that’s not to say that no one should raise any concerns.
Let me ask you something about the negativity bias and the incentives it 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 a more normal, thoughtful one. Marco Rubio is a politician who works hard and tries to think about ideas.
He’s genuinely qualified for the job.
Yes. Compared to a Pete Hegseth or an R.F.K. 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 — is there actually a bad incentive system being set up by that?
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 giving things attention is to give them energy, to only cover the terrible things happening in government is to not empower the Doug Burgums and Marco Rubios in the future.
There feels like some tension here that the media has never known what to do with.
I think that’s interesting. 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 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. 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 are different ages where all sorts of different people are planning their utopias: spiritual leaders, architects, political leaders. No one does that anymore. I mean literally no one does that.
I can’t think of a modern, contemporary version of utopia. Maybe some version of the sort of Trump “I’ll fix it” personalist is the closest we get — a 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 toward 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. There’s a fight over Hegseth — as there should be — and there’s not a fight over Rubio, and the conflict drives the news. 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 on things that haven’t worked. So not so much about individuals or members of the cabinet. But I was thinking about this the other day: Thirty years ago, it just was inconceivable we would cure H.I.V./AIDS.
And 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. Who 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.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. One is that you and I both know that there have been a million efforts in journalism to do solutions-based journalism. Good news journalism. And as you make the point often in your book, attention is a business. So when they don’t work, 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 unbelievably huge audiences not being primarily about doom.
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 belief that we know how things are going to go.
It’s comforting in its own way because of that.
I see it in the ratings of this show. I can get very high downloads for Trump episodes and very high, particularly over time, downloads for a novelist who describes the world in a really beautiful way. I don’t think the opposite of doom is hope or good things or utopia. I think for this, for attention, it’s curiosity. It’s interest. 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’m still chewing on.
I also think the technological infrastructure of podcasts matters tremendously. That line — I forget who wrote it — being able to say, “‘Wherever you get your podcasts’ is a radical statement.”
The fact that podcasts have built audiences largely outside of algorithmic feeds, have built them through an open protocol called R.S.S. That technical backbone actually matters for precisely what you’re talking about.
Part of the reason podcasts have flourished — two-, three-hour podcasts, podcasts with novelists about obscure topics, long solo monologues about history — is because they’re not embedded in the same technical attentional marketplace. I think that really matters a lot, and I think it’s actually really hopeful.
I think one of the things to remember here — this is really an important point that everyone has wiped 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 bell 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 an open internet that rewarded curiosity. That rewarded people connecting about obscure topics. It rewarded hobbyism. It rewarded obsessive small little corners of knowledge.
It has 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 we have divided selves. 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 G.O.A.T.
The G.O.A.T. in this discourse. I think it still totally holds up.
Somewhat predicts Donald Trump in an explicit way.
Yes. Totally, yes, in an explicit way. Also, the first essay, which is just about the sort of different versions of the dystopian future between “1984” which is information constraint, and “Brave New World,” which is overflow of entertainment and information, and about how we ended up in “Brave New World.”
Another book that has been mentioned on your podcast a lot, and 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: Lots of people have been thinking about this very long 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, spiritually omnivorous than the book that I’ve written, more sort of interior in its focus 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. And that book is a completely distinct product of a completely distinct mind. Like 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. 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 hearing the author on a podcast or reading a review. You have to actually read the book.
And then my final is a work of fiction. It’s by an author named Tony Tulathimutte. It’s a book of short stories called “Rejection.”
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 in basically a day, and it just stuck with me, and I really recommend it highly.
One of the most intense reading experiences.
There is a 10 to 12 page granular description of a sexual fantasy in this book that basically you will hit a point of physical paralysis as you read it — 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.
Chris Hayes, your book is great. I recommend it to everybody. Thank you.
Thank you
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
The post Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly. appeared first on New York Times.
