Pay Attention! (w/ Chris Hayes)
Added 2025-02-18 16:30:45 +0000 UTCWe're all anxious, and none of us can pay attention. We don't read long books anymore; our kids don't read at all. When we watch TV, we scroll at the same time. And we absolutely cannot be alone with ourselves. These are the symptoms of a modern malaise that is everywhere diagnosed but rarely treated with the dire seriousness it deserves: an epochal sickness that is fundamentally changing the way we relate to each other and to our own minds. What would it take to reclaim control?
Chris Hayes — journalist, author, and host of MSNBC's All In — joins to discuss his new book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Together, Chris and the boys theorize how attention replaced information as the defining commodity of modern life. Along the way, we discuss our own struggles with social media addiction, prayer as an ancient technology for organizing attention, the evolutionary origins of attention-seeking, Donald Trump as the "public figure par excellence" of the attention age, and how to fight back against the corporate takeover of our minds. Toward the end, Chris explains how he's navigating hosting his cable show amid another bewildering Trump era, which seems designed to divide and fragment our attention.
Further Reading:
Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, (2025)
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (1952)
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking, (2022)
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, (1844)
Kyle Chayka, FIlterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, (2024)
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, (2019)
Daniel Immerwahr, "What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?" The New Yorker, Jan 20, 2025.
Comments
Chris is one of the good ones, this episode is a great listen
Gene Bailey
2025-02-26 05:54:25 +0000 UTCNo way Elon is a genius. Everyone needs to stop with this myth. He’s a very fortune psychopath.
Daniel
2025-02-25 18:18:30 +0000 UTCDespite refs to Odysseus and Marx, discussion felt oddly ahistoric. 2-3 centuries past, workers were regularly buzzed. Talk about lack of attention! Whereas jobs today require much focus. Workers don’t booze but caffeinate. Fancy that: three guys discussing boredom without reference to child-rearing and housework. Finally I note the folk belief, especially widespread among over-educated right wingers, of superior attention as a benefit of autism. Still mulling why this is so.
Kent Miller
2025-02-25 07:13:58 +0000 UTCThanks for the Scialabba rec! Reading it now
Vincent
2025-02-20 18:01:27 +0000 UTCSo much fawning over…Chris Hayes. There’s something utterly perverse that someone like him would write a book like this.
Behold 666
2025-02-20 06:14:52 +0000 UTCI feel the same way about the bath. Get my best reading and thinking done there
Kevin Price
2025-02-19 21:39:32 +0000 UTCThe purity of the heart is the will to do only one thing (get off your phone)
Kevin Price
2025-02-19 21:37:50 +0000 UTCI suppose that the adjective helps people save time when it is shape shifting constantly to stay under the radar when possible. I notice that many libertarians seem to think that they will discover some strain of capitalism that will actually work as they imagine. I liked the Ayn Rand episode where Burns mentioned how the very excesses of capitalism that disturbed most proponents delighted Rand as virtues. I suppose that is why we see it tagged so often with an adjective. I will endure anything to get rid of it.
Elizabeth Chung
2025-02-19 18:52:49 +0000 UTCChris’ anecdote about the pull of the phone, no matter how fleeting, while sitting with his child was very affecting.
Jake
2025-02-19 17:24:59 +0000 UTCThis should be 3 hours long, I need more diversion
Peter Carlen
2025-02-19 17:17:49 +0000 UTCIt is stunning how much more thoughtful Chris Hayes is compared to every other TV host
Peter Carlen
2025-02-19 17:17:35 +0000 UTCI teach ninth grade English at a low income high school and my number one anxiety about the future is the attention span of these kids who will one day be the adults. The amount of mental pacification these kids require at all times can be very frustrating
Tim Combes
2025-02-19 13:00:59 +0000 UTCSo I have resisted the phone except in its traditional role of Hello/Goodbye device. I spend too much time on the laptop true, but suddenly the phone has really aggressed with the insistance of text codes. All of this is my business, my accounts, my cards. I do not wish to swear fealty to my phone, send me an email. I am satisfied with my laptop and have no desire to use my time and my attention fooling around with the phone.
Elizabeth Chung
2025-02-19 11:41:23 +0000 UTCbeautiful
Know Your Enemy
2025-02-19 05:39:20 +0000 UTCIt’s a frustrating listen, but worthwhile bc his guest (Jake Auchincloss) is representative of a certain type of Dem lawmaker (abundance agenda-pilled, very hawkish/nat sec-oriented on FP and actually co-wrote the congressional TikTok ban, enamored with the idea of privatizing elements of the public sector for nebulous efficiency reasons, etc). What peeved me most is Auchincloss’s Hofstadter-pilled interpretation of “populism”…implying that populist political uprisings are inherently problematic for liberal democracies.
Gene Bailey
2025-02-19 03:09:14 +0000 UTCHave only watched TV for self-admitted fiction for decades now. I've been aware of Hayes, of course, but had no take on him beyond "seems to be a good guy" and "married well." Thought his book would be, yes, an airport title, and after this, dammit, I'll be buying and reading, so impressive was this episode. (I'm already so behind on my TBR stack, and yes, you KYE boys are very much to blame for that. Curses and thanks!)
James Talley
2025-02-19 03:03:32 +0000 UTCWHOA NEW MAX LORE JUST DROPPED!!
Jenna Harmon
2025-02-19 02:53:00 +0000 UTClol why?
Know Your Enemy
2025-02-19 02:30:48 +0000 UTCSam might have an aneurism if he listens to Ezra Klein’s new pod
Gene Bailey
2025-02-19 01:07:27 +0000 UTCRe the flow state of manual work, I thought of this passage from Silas Marner: "He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of life."
Robert Mullins
2025-02-18 23:58:33 +0000 UTCI think using the word “based” would probably result in me reduced to a puddle, a la the wicked witch.
Kelley
2025-02-18 23:58:00 +0000 UTCI'm gonna try to keep an open mind heading into this ep, but, I've gotta say that I'm pretty fatigued with "_____ capitalism" formulations - surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, etc. I know there are sophisticated debates in contemporary Marxism that are a bit too elevated for me to articulate about this, but, basically, I think some of the critics of so-called "adjective capitalism" have a point. This is still capitalism, and the constant push to mint these new forms of it feels a bit fatiguing.
Joel
2025-02-18 22:19:06 +0000 UTCGreat talk again! I have never been an MSNBC watcher, but Chris definitely caught my ATTENTION. 😱 My friend who is now a Dominican priest and theology professor wrote his doctoral thesis on Aquinas’ views on emotions. He found that the idea of “boredom” is a product of the modern world itself.
Chad Bailey
2025-02-18 21:29:17 +0000 UTC24-ish minutes in, and right now i just wanna be the friend who gets to hang out with Sam and Hannah once in a while
Paul Bowman
2025-02-18 21:10:47 +0000 UTCOK, the share of my podcast subscriptions that Hayes has now hit is approaching 100%. I might be in a bubble, folks. I'm genuinely sad I missed his stop on the book tour in Boston with Lawrence Lessig. I've been thinking a lot about the information theory concept of "garbage in, garbage out." I wonder if the fact that so much of the modern media ecosystem functionally works as a misinformation engine, means that political outcomes of this system are like drinking from a poisoned well.
Keith Morse
2025-02-18 20:47:48 +0000 UTCI think the word you’re looking for is “based”
Zachary Roussie
2025-02-18 20:14:29 +0000 UTCI’m really impressed by Hayes here. I sometimes have heard him on MSNBC through YouTube clips, but I didn’t realize he was as … let’s say enlightened? On Marx/socialist rhetoric as he seems to be. Pleasantly surprised and hoping he has some influence on the “normie” news consumer.
Kelley
2025-02-18 19:58:11 +0000 UTCI listen to podcasts while I cook! Can't do any of that in the pottery studio though.
Julia
2025-02-18 19:56:24 +0000 UTCI agree so much. I also listen to podcasts and audiobooks obsessively and I took up crochet to feel more productive. Now I have more amigurumi and baby blankets than I know what to do with!
Kelley
2025-02-18 19:55:16 +0000 UTCI do my best thinking in the shower, because I know there's nothing pulling at my attention but showering itself and my thoughts. It's wild that that's the only place in my life where that's consistently true.
genrepunk
2025-02-18 19:52:38 +0000 UTCI love that Julia, and find doing "tactile" things really helps—cooking is one of those things for me. There's also the satisfaction of "look, I made something" that email jobs often don't provide. Take care (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2025-02-18 19:40:27 +0000 UTCdidnt know who cris hayes was before this ep, what a great voice. another banger ep in a long string of back to back bangers!! maybe ill finally start reading pachinko….
tippy
2025-02-18 17:49:01 +0000 UTCI started taking pottery classes a year ago. I have an extremely active inner life (as I'm sure many listeners do) and I'm always listening to a podcast/audiobook/reading/scrolling or even having arguments internally. For a few hours a week though I can just focus on doing something with my hands, it's a great detox. Currently I'm trying to listen but taking a break because there's a large industrial fire in my town and I can't stop looking for updates!
Julia
2025-02-18 17:42:22 +0000 UTCDamnit!! I’m already ADHD and OCD. Sometimes I just have to take a nap to shut my brain off for a few minutes.
erik w bjorke
2025-02-18 17:16:08 +0000 UTCthis is very exciting
Peter Carlen
2025-02-18 16:38:25 +0000 UTC
