Chris Hayes joins Katie for a thought-provoking conversation about the most valuable commodity there is: attention. As the host of MSNBC’s All In, Hayes knows how to grab it—and he's seen who else is competing for it. In his new book The Siren’s Call, he argues that attention has become the ultimate currency in a world where our brains are being rewired by the little sirens in our pockets—our smartphones. He covers it all with Katie – from how exactly we got here to the way the attention economy has radically reshaped our politics, our relationships, and the way we understand the world around us. But there’s also good news--by understanding who’s vying for our attention and how they’re doing it, we can take back control and decide where to focus our energy, rather than having it… well, captured.
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question. What's the most valuable commodity in the world today? Oil, gold, natural gas, crypto, Nope. According to author and MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, it's actually attention. Everyone wants it, and the NonStop competition to get ours is making us less productive and in some cases, downright miserable. Chris has a new book out. It's called The Sirens Call. He'll explain the title in a moment, but here's a tease. Chris says that these days, the sirens that tempted Odysseus are now living in our pockets in the form of smartphones, always trying to get our attention and make us lose focus. Chris explores how technology has changed our lives, rewired our brains, and impacted modern politics. Who's able to get our attention, even if it's negative attention seems to be winning the day. All of this has left us with less time for deep thinking and real connection, which are fundamental human needs. And I'm telling you this just as I'm fighting the urge to check the notification on my phone. So here's Chris Hayes to the rescue. Hey, Chris, it's great to be here. Nice to have you my first guest in our news studio.
This is very exciting.
We even got flowers.
They're beautiful. I love irises.
Good good, Well, welcome, and I'm really excited to talk to you about this new book you've written, called The Sirens Call. We'll talk about the title in a minute. But how did a book about attention get your attention?
I think the first place to start is my work life, which is hosting a television show, which I've been doing for over a decade, and the many hours I put into doing that, and I think this is something that you can very much relate to that. A lot of what that work is is thinking about the audience's attention, what will grab it, what will hold it. You get feedback all the time about whether you're doing a good or bad job. There were some years there in the beginning where I got some pretty bad feedback.
Really, what was the meanest thing that was said about you or to you?
Oh? Well that I mean, people said mean things. But there were periods of the show was not rating particularly well, and that just kind of everyone knows that when that's happening, you know it it's like getting a grade that you're wearing on your forehead all day. And in the craft of being a TV host, I've had to think a lot about what does get people's attention, like how do I solve for this problem? And I think the craft of that led me to start thinking very seriously about how important attention was. I mean, one of the things that strikes me is certain kind of deaths get more attention than others. If they're particularly spectacular or gruesome, they might attract attention and that might lead to all kinds of political and policy changes, whereas those that might be less visible don't attract that same level of effort or policy discussion. And so as I was thinking about this, it came to be clear to me that attention was this very powerful resource. And then there was also the part of me that is a creature of the Internet, an extremely online person since I've been twelve or thirteen or fourteen years old, who spends a lot of time online, and between the work life and that part of my life, it just became clearer and clearer to me, and particularly covering Donald Trump, that attention is kind of the defining resource of our age. It's the thing that more and more people, institutions, companies are chasing. When you have it in the aggregate, you have a very valuable thing. There's a sense in which it's being taken from us often, and that doesn't feel good. And that started me on the path of writing the book.
The title is called The Sirens Call, and it's based on the Odyssey, And I want to be honest with you, your book made me feel very stupid, Chris, But it was that your goal. How did the sirens tempt Odysseus and help us all remember? And why this particular title seems so apt.
It's an amazing portion of the Odyssey, uh, in which Odysseus has just been on the island with Circe. She's a sort of goddess witch, and she says, hey, heads up, before you leave a warning. You're going to come to these sirens and if you they're very dangerous they will warrible you to death.
And women they're not like ambulances exactly.
They're women who sing this song that is so irresistible. It will pull a ship to the rocks and you'll crash and you'll die. And she says, you'll never see home again. If you listen to them. But she gives them a plan to sort of have his cake and eat it too, because she knows this has never said explicitly he wants to hear them. So what she says is, look, stuff wax in the ears of your men, and then bind yourself to the mass to your own ship so that you can hear the sirens. But then when they try to tempt you to go towards them, your men will ignore you. And sure enough we have Odysseus bound to the mast, and he starts to hear the sirens call, and he's like gesturing frantically to his men, like go towards that, and they just ignore him, as they've been instructed to, and the wax is stuffed in their ears, and they sail safely past. And that image is a very potent one in the Western canon, and I think it represents the Freudian war between ego and ID, you know, temptation and self discipline.
But in this case, the sirens are our digital device.
Almost literally, yes they are. It is the sound of the notification, It is the buzzing of the.
Phone, and the constant, never ending temptation.
Temptation and entreaties and seduction, the constant portal of delights that sits here pulsing on my pocket like Gollum's ring.
Right, it sounded pretty dirty.
Well, it's funny you say that, because the Sirens always have this kind of you know, uh, aspect of sexual lore. And when we think about the Internet, you know, there's this entire category that we have, even before the Internet, for things that attract our attention that we think are morally dubious, So like the words like lurid and prurient, obscene, tabloid, Right, there's this entire category of things where it's like, we know they pull out our attention, we don't think they should. And in some ways, the more competitive our attention markets get, the more they go towards that aspect.
The Sirens call, I'm a generation older than you are, and I have been keenly aware of the role that the Internet and technology has played not only in the media landscape, but really how we spend our lives. And it's almost like the frog in the slowly boiling water. I mean, I felt it, I saw it, I witnessed it. I was aware of it in a way that I felt like a lot of society was a bit asleep at the switch as this was transforming our lives. And I'm curious because I started my career before the internet burst onto the scene and your generation younger, and I'm curious how you have seen the digital world impact your career.
Well, in terms of my career, I mean, the most obvious part of it is simply that the sheer amount of things to watch has expanded most infinitely. I mean when I started, I started my primetime show in twenty thirteen. I remember we had the show creator for House of Cards on the show, Bo Willemon, and at the time, the conceit of the segment was Netflix is gonna make its own show. How about that? Ain't that a kick? Yeah, here's bau Willhemon. They're going to do an original show. So even the idea of streaming didn't exist then. And the way that we tended to think about competition, and I'm sure this was the case of the Today Show, Right is the other morning shows? What are the other cable news shows on at my hour? And that's fair enough that matters for.
And I also thought about NPR, local radio, sound newspapers. How are people getting their information? But it was a very finite sind choices.
That's exactly right, and now is it is not hyperbolic at all. It is a true statement to say that in every instant that you are trying to keep someone's attention, you are competing against every single piece of content ever generated by humans, basically anywhere in the language of the people that you're appealing to. I mean, there was, you know people. My kid, my six year old, will occasionally just start watching some discontinued sitcoms from the mid Auts because it's on Disney. I guess I'm like, I didn't even know this show existed. She's super into it, and it's cool at some level. It has a different life, right, Right, But at every instant you're competing for attention, the library you're competing with has just become so enormous.
And I think they call it the paradox of choice, to say.
Because it's paralyzing at some level, Right, what do I want to watch? I don't know.
It's so many, too many choices, yes.
And that's partly what the algorithm solves for. But the algorithm comes with its own problems, right, And then you also get in this very strange situation this is something that's really changed. It's very interesting. It used to be the case in linear cable television that, again when I started a decade ago or more, you would see in the minute by minutes of Nielsen, you would see the numbers go down during commercial break because people don't want to watch commercials and they want to switch to another network. Now that doesn't happen. The reason is because people are just like, go to their phone, right, oh, and then you come back on. They don't even switch anymore.
And it's also interesting. Now cable news will say we'll be back and they'll have a countdown.
Clock, or they'll put the commercial with the image that's now our innovation. They'll do sports ring met more like on thirty second timeouts.
They do that, right, so stand by, we're going to be here, and you can actually count down till we're back, which I think is so interesting that didn't exist when I was on television, and I.
Think it's it all speaks to the fact that there's this kind of jumpiness to our attention that is both born of some deep things about our psychologies and the way that our brains work, and also something that has been cultivated in us through the technologies. Right, the shorter and shorter your attention span is, or the more interruptions you're dealing with, The more acclimated you get to interruption, the more that you feel that things that develop slowly or move slowly or boring. Right, So there's this relationship between supply and demand, between what our desires are and what we're craving.
If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com. You know, I did a national geographic documentary series and one of them was focused on our addiction to our digital devices. And I spoke to a lot of scientists and this constant interruption, this constant jumpiness, as you say, prohibits us from being thinking deeply. It takes about twenty minutes to get in a fully concentrated state to really focus, to really activate that, you know, our deep thinking ability, and the constant interruption is precluding us from doing that, which makes you wonder, like, how are people going to think deeply if they're constantly interrupted?
And this is a I mean, this is a problem for anyone that wants to think deeply. I mean for me writing the book. One of the great things about writing the book is that, like Odysseus binding himself to the mast, I signed a contract to deliver a book and I had to do it, and that forced me to focus, and it forced me to create. When I'm writing, I need two hours. Two hours is the block for me of a writing session, because there's some there's some time to sort of move through that first twenty minutes of focus. There's some time inside that zone of focus where your attention has really locked in, and there's some time sort of coming back out of it and figuring out ways to train our own attention away from a craving for constant interruption.
Did you keep your phone out of the room.
I've come up with a whole bunch of weird things that I've done through the years. I would have the phone in the room, but I wouldn't look at it. I would set a timer, though, So the way I do a writing session is for twenty five minute blocks of writing with a five minute break where I can check the phone or I can check the internet. And that kind of gets me, it's like not too much interruption, but it's structured enough.
But if you can see your phone, do you know that very act of being able to change it. Yeah, yes, actually prevents you from focusing.
The key thing too. And this is something that I think we see a lot is and I actually think younger people are better. This is actually proactively managing interruption so you can select your phone so it doesn't do any notifications, which is one thing.
Like MYNC can also make it black and white, which makes it less appealing.
Yes, And I think we're going to see more and more people opting in these directions. There's people selling dumb phones that have been starting to be very successful. There's people selling pouches. There's all kinds of ways that people are in their own way, attempting to sort of solve this problem. The problem fundamentally is I want to think deeply. I want to regain some willful discretion and control over where I flash my spotlight of thought. I don't want it yank hither and yeah on. And I want to regain some comfort of being alone with my own thoughts. That to me is the profound human question at the core of this.
I thought it was interesting that you write about boredom and that this is that we're afraid of boredom. And I've written and done a lot of stuff about this as well, about busyness being kind of a badge of honor in our culture. But I don't think it's not wanting to be bored. I think it's not having the opportunity to be bored, because we always have something that will allow us to divert our attention if we land and we're driving. And I've often told my friends is sometimes I go to a new city, I'm so busy looking at my phone, i don't even notice where I am, or the buildings or the sites, or the sounds or the scenes of a new place. And I get to my hotel and I'm like, where am I?
Where am I at?
And why am I here? As Admiral Stockdale said, but you know, it's just such an attention suck. So I almost feel like it's not that we're afraid to be bored. We just there aren't moments of boredom that present themselves.
I think it's both, but I think those relate to each other. I mean I think that I mean, I'll speak for myself that I am afraid of being bored. I mean, I remember being bored in childhood. Remember like reading the back of a cereal box, right, you know, over and over because it's the thing there and you want your You're craving something to put your attention on. And I think part of the reason we associate boredom with childhood is because.
We didn't have phones.
We didn't have phones. But the other thing is, as soon as you get old enough, you just cut it out of your life.
I remember telling my mom I'm bored in the summer, and she said, read a book.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean kids complaining about boredom. I mean the thing that I've caught myself doing, which is very funny. As your kid comes up to you and they're like, I'm bored, and you say, I don't have to tell you, man, like can I screen time? No, go read a book something else. And then as soon as you say that, you go back to your phone. Right, You're like, you got to figure it out, that's true. It's like, oh what am I doing here? And sometimes they'll call you out on it. Right. So I think that you know that feeling if you go into a coffee shop, you left your phone in the car and you start that like you have the instinct you're like, ah, I gotta sit with my thoughts for four minutes. I think that the less that we have that the more the scarier it seems to be without it. And we kind of thoughtlessly run on this treadmill of the constant input because that's what we get habituated and comfortable with. And I think the work of sitting alone with our own thoughts which is which is work that stems all the way back to the Buddha sitting underneath the Banyan tree, and Pascal writing in the seventeenth century and his Christian apologetics about penses and careker guard, and you know, spiritual traditions like that's the stuff of being a human, is that you got to sit with your own mind. And sometimes the mind can be a scary place, a feral beast.
But it also can be a very fertile place because your hipocampus is the part of your brain that's responsible for creative thinking, and it can only ignite when you're not distracted. And that's why you have so many good ideas or these epiphanies in the shower. The shower, yes, and so that's an argument for daydreaming, for just thinking, for not having constantly, you know, all these things around you to distract you. So you know, along with this idea of deep concentration, it does make you think how much of our creative selves, our deep thinking selves, are being sacrificed in our current culture.
I think there's an enormous loss of that creative impulse because that time is so often interrupted. And one of the things I've said to people, you know the extent, there's some like what do I do take away? The most concrete for me is spend twenty minutes every day alone with your thoughts. And for me, that's a walk where I'm not listening to a podcast or not why I'm just walking, And sometimes that can be longer you start to push it out. I'll do an hour walk the loop of the park with my dog. And it is amazing how pleasurable that state is when you get into it, of daydreaming, of letting your thoughts kind of wander, of letting creative thoughts bubble up, and how rare it has become to have.
It, and therapeutic it is I think for your overall health. I think it was Jennifer Aniston. I can't remember a great philosopher named Jennifer Aniston said you shouldn't you shouldn't have your phone, and I have found this to be the case for me. It is also an enormous time suck. You know, I can spend an extra hour in bed reading stuff. Now it's worthwhile stuff. It's articles from very you know, respective publications or The Atlantic or The New Yorker or The Times or a whole host of really smart people writing great things, and I feel enriched. But you know, if I didn't have that phone, I wouldn't grab it and spend sometimes an hour and a half reading. So you have to kind of figure out how you're going to spend your time.
Well and think about the imperatives on the other side of this. Right, So, if like the people that want to capture your attention, which is a wide array of entities and particularly the platforms that are some of the most powerful and profitable companies in America, right at a certain point, they have to start, like you need growth. And for a while, when for instance, the smartphone was introduced, there was this growth. Every year more and more people got up, but then it levels off and then you look to international markets and that levels off too, and then a certain point, well you need to find more growth. And what is it. Well, there's a fixed amount of people with a fixed amount of waking hours. Well you can start to eat into sleep. Well, there's a fixed amount of adults with a fixed amount of waking hours. Well you can start going for children. There's you can only watch one thing at a time. Well, maybe get people to start watching two or three things at a time. Right, So there's all these places the growth imperative starts to push against these limits, like sleeping in fact, a really upsetting thing that has happened to me, And I doubt this has ever happened to you. I don't know if you're like, have ever had a TikTok habit?
Instagram reels, cooking videos? That's my vice?
Okay, that's your vice. TikTok has something in the algorithm where if you look too long at it, a person pops up to be like, hey, buddy, like you you've kind of been looking for a long time, maybe take a break. It's like your drug dealer cutting you off. It's super upsetting.
No, that's awesome that they do. It works against their business model.
Yes, and I wonder the origin of this person who comes in. But hitting that point on a TikTok jack is an upsetting moment. It's like one point thirty in the morning and you're like, the device is telling you to log off.
You must be full of shame when that happened.
The Chinese government is like, buddy, your brain is cooked, please put it down.
I'm curious when you said your show wasn't doing well, it made you think about how to capture people's attention. And was that fighting with what you thought people needed to know and hear and more importantly understand, versus how they would stick with you and watch your whole show or more minutes than they normally would. And what kind of Fostian deal did you have to make?
That is the central conundrum. I mean, as I write in the book, attention is not a moral faculty. There's a great line from Walter Lippman when he's writing about this in the twenties. He's writing about the aftermath of World War One and the Treaty of Versaillese. He says, the American public has a great deal of interest in the outcome of these negotiations. But they're not interested in it, Like it's going to matter a ton to the US, but like no one really cares. And this is the central conundrum of being a journalist. I think, in this environment, in any environment, honestly, but in that.
Particularly, it's like on steroids.
Now. It's this balance. You know, you have these twin imperatives. I have to keep people's attention and hold it, and I have to deliver information and a set of stories about the world that are true and I think important and urgent to the project of self governance. Sometimes those are in competition. Sometimes they line up, you know. The California wildfires are a great example where they both compel your attention the visuals and the drama of the tragedy, and also it's a really important story. So sometimes you get them both right. Sadly, Sadly, sometimes you're fighting these twin imperatives. And part of the craft that you develop over time, that I've tried to develop is getting better and better at figuring out how to tell stories and move the audience from point A to point B through your ability, through your skills to get to talk about the things you think are important and still bring people along that's hard. It's really hard. I mean it's the it's really hard, and I don't I've gotten better at it, but I still fail at it all the time.
And plus people don't necessarily want to stick around to connect A B and C. Right, So I think its those people who watch your show probably do.
At some level. I think we have the audience segmentation, which can be bad in certain ways, can also self select for people that are you know, at this point. One of the things that I like about my job and the relationship I have visa visa sort of these attentional questions, is I'm not just popping into a feed into someone's algorithm. We feed to try to grab their attention for a few seconds. They've never seen me. Right, by and large, there's a relationship that has been built up with the viewer. And that relationship is actually important because what the relationship means is that, in the same way that my relationship to the New Yorker is such that I have a relationship with the publication. And so if it lands in my house and I pick it up, and I go through the table contents and there's a profile of the conductor of the Bavarian orchestra, and I'm like, I'm not that interested in it, but okay, I'll see what you got because I know. And then I'm like, oh wow, this is this guy's fascinating right that that little friction you might feel is overcome by the pre existing relationship that you have. There's some of that in the relationship I have the audience right that they that they're willing to trust me to guide them, such that if we're starting to do something that left to your own devices, maybe you wouldn't find that interesting. You sick with it?
I mean trust we could. You should write your next book on trust.
I actually have thought about precisely that.
Because funnily enough, that is the big another huge crisis in our culture.
And they're related. I think trust requires depth of connection and the building of a relationship over time, and I think often the attentional atmosphere we exist in cuts against that. You can argue on the other side that actually people do have trust relationships that have grown very deep. There are people that trust Alex Jones to tell them the truth, and there are people that you know, don't trust me, right, But I think one of the central elements in our current condition is just that we're becoming a more and more low trust society, and it's very hard to run a low trust democracy.
What are we going to do? I don't know, Dude, I've never been called dude. I like it.
I mean, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of peril. You know, it's a moment or great peril. I do think I do have a very central belief in people, and in the American people. I do think collective publics can manifest both really awful tendencies and truly noble ones. I think some of the stuff you've seen in Los Angeles in the aftermath of wildfires is completely incredible. It is amazing how much people will self organize and act cooperatively and selflessly with urgency in those moments. I'm just seeing so many people and we're all just one degree removed, I think, from that disaster in many respects, and just seeing so many beautiful stories of mutual aid, cooperation. And I do think like our politics and our media environments and our cultures can cultivate different impulses collectively in US, and I think we've been going through a period with some of our worst impulses are being cultivated. But I also don't think that means that like those impulses are the true ones and the other ones are false. I think it's a question of our situation.
You're more optimistic than I am, because I think that it doesn't fit the business model to try to come together and to spotlight our better angels. It is more beneficial to antagonize and enrage and divide.
And I think this goes back to something that's like deep and inescapable about our evolutionary wiring, which is attention as a faculty has negativity bias. And there's an obvious reason for that. You know, if you're sitting there and there's like a pretty flower here, and there's a predator over there, that's going to get your attention to the predator. The pretty flower you may or may not linger on. And so so.
We're hardwired to basically be attracted to danger or negativity reactivity.
Threat. Yeah, particularly threat, I mean threat is really the ultimate. I mean, the sound of a gunshot is going to get your attention in a crowded street. And so that negativity bias, when you put it in the context of these enormous competitive second to second competitive attention markets you are going to trend towards negativity.
Well, let's talk about that, because I know you believe that Donald Trump has been able to marshal this attention dilemma or you know, take advantage of the so called attention economy in a much more effective way. And can you explain how he's able to do that?
I think there's basically one simple trick he's figured out. Most politicians only want attention if it's positive attention. Most people are like that. I'm like that. I don't want people to pay attention to me and be mad at me, or mean, I don't ask you with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you. And most politicians, for perfectly rational reasons, also want that because they see their job as to be popular and liked and to win majorities and to persuade people. Trump's big insight, which is born of something deep in.
Him, well he you know it comes down to all press is good press.
Right, It's exactly that. Basically, negative attention, particularly if attention is all that matters. Negative attention is almost as good as plausitive attention, maybe as good. The old pt Bartum quote, right, as long as you spell my name correctly, ma'am. When she a reporter says she's writing a negative piece, he goes, go with me, just spell the name correctly. All press is good press. And I think there's two levels at which he's been able to marshal this that are important. One is has to do with the fact that attention is more important than ever and so fractured that just getting it itself has a value, not as even just a means to another end. But I also think it's a hard thing to fake personally, and by that I mean other politicians have tried to do what Trump does, which is to be outrageous and polarizing, and it hasn't worked for them the same way.
When you look at Carrie Lake, she's the perfect example.
Like she had two winnable in that state. The first one she nearirely lost, the second one she lost by more. She has tried to do it. She's also like a former broadcaster.
Yeah, she's talent TV news anchor and Arizona who ran for office twice lost and now she's had the Voice of America.
Yes, but she's been rewarded for her But.
You're right, but why couldn't she do the same thing. Is he's a singularly talented individual in being able to do what he does. Do you see anyone who comes close.
The only one now is Elon Musk, who I think is doing the same thing. And I think the reason that Elon Musk is doing is similar to Trump. It's not that he's bought the platform and he's the world's wealthiest man, although that helps. It's just at some deep psychological level, their relationship to negative attention is is different than yours or mind. And I just think it's not fakeable, you know what I'm saying. I could try. I could take this book and study it. I could go run for office and try to be mayor of New York City and be like, you know what, I've learned this lesson. I'm going to be the polarizing shock jock of mayoral candidates who gets negative attention because I've written this book and it'll be my manual. It wouldn't work. I just wouldn't at some deep level. Wouldn't work because I don't want people to be mad at me, not like me. It would bum me out too much, and I could try to force myself to fake it. But I think that like it selects for some deep psychological attributes.
Right, And I think of Alex Jones, I think he's probably close to agreed Donald Trump in his ability to get attention.
Kanye is another one.
Yeah, and in a negative way. You call this trolling politics. Yeah, what do you mean by that? Exactly?
Trolling is a term that goes back to almost the earliest moments of the Internet, when there were message boards in the nineteen seventies. These are mostly academics and computer scientists talking as message boards, and basically the insight of trolling is that it's easier to get negative attention the positive attention, like if you walk up to someone, if you walk into a subway, can't start screaming at people like you will get their attention, probably not going to like you very much. And that same insight started to manifest itself on social networks and bulletin boards and where people were interacting, certain people had to zeal for getting attention. They figured out the quickest way is just like, be a kind of obnoxious jerk, and people will pay attention to you, often to fight with you. And now that conflict itself draws more attention, so then you're you're constantly getting it and then you're creating a dilemma for people that know you're trying to get a rise out of them, but they don't want to let it go. This form of Internet behavior called trolling, which sort of goes back to trawling for fish, right, you put a lure and you drag it, and the fish gets distracted and goes after it has now become a huge part of our politics. So trolling politics that you see. Marjorie Tailer Green is a great exams. She's like a classic troll, right, She just constantly courts negative attention. But she's one of four hundred and thirty five members of Congress, and I know her name, and you know our name, and probably some of the listeners know her name more than they know hundreds of others of members of Congress who do not court that negative attention. So she has been successful in that respect, and that is increasingly the model for modern politics, particularly I think on the right Republican Party, because it stems from Trump's you know insights.
Well, let's talk about the Democrats because they seem to be a very different kettle of fish in terms of how they interact with the media publicly, the kind of attention they get and you say, it's because they are very risk averse. Yeah, they don't want negative attention. They don't and what's wrong with that?
You know, it's a totally natural in some ways. What's interesting about this is, at the same time Trump has been very successful. If you look at other Racesublicans have lost a ton of winnable races by nominating candidates who courted too much negative attention. The voters are like, I don't like that person. I mean, we just had a race in North Carolina, which is a great example. Lieutenant governor there Mark Robinson lost by thirteen points. Now, he's kind of an outrageous guy, kind of a troll, says all sorts of controversial things.
He's the one that was on Nude Africa, yeah, and also Africa, right, and likes watching. I mean, got caught on all these weird porn sites. Isn't that the same guy?
Yes, he was on a he had a user name that he denies was him on a porn message board called Nude Africa, where he declared himself a black Nazi. Right.
He had all sorts of other strange predilections that we don't necessarily have to go into.
Some strange predilections that he confessed to on Nude Africa. But even before that, he said things in public all the time some people need killing, for instance, that were very controversial and he did not do well. Like Josh Stein, who's now the governor North Carolina, ran a low attention I'm a likable dude race and at works. So the Democrats instinct to avoid negative attention has worked for them in some places. It's it's won them races at the lower level. At the top of American politics, I think what we've learned attention is so important that if you're constantly making the choice to avoid the possibility of negative attention, even if it means people are paying no attention to you, you are making a poor trade. And that's something that national Democrats keep doing, and I think they are suffering for us.
So what are you saying. If you had to advise them, you would say, get out there. More so, even if you say something stupid, you have to get out there. But what if the stupid comment is the thing that everybody focuses on, how do you get get part of the solution.
Part of the solution is to go say something next day too. There is a real problem. If you do fewer interviews, a gaff something you say is going to be magnified if you're doing interviews all the time. Jadvancyd interviews a ton. He said a ton of stuff that attracted negative attention. It was washed out by the next day. I think politicians should write their own social media posts. I think they should go on Instagram Live. I think they should go on podcasts. I think they should talk to people. I think they should not be afraid of saying stuff. I think if you say something wrong, just say something else next, or say I should have phrased that differently. But again, even that is dicey because part of the key to excelling in this area is never apologized, never look back, just keep saying stuff. But I think generally the idea of being authentic, speaking to people and speaking a lot. Here's one thing I think is really important. I think people have gotten more forgiving about gaffs. Gaffs partly because everyone's saying stuff publicly all the time through social media, and more and more people have the first person experience of saying something that you wish you could take back or didn't quite get across what you wanted to say right, And I think that's part of what we've seen happen where things that used to be disqualifying we would say that would be an enormous scandal don't mean anything anymore. And I think it's partly because everyone's generating content. Everyone's had the experience of like saying something someone took out of context, and so people are much more forgiving. And I think that means you should just talk more, like go communicate to people.
Do you think that that is what hurt Kamala Harris, that she was a there were questions about her authenticity and she was so risk averse when it came to doing interviews for quite a while during the campaign.
I think it was a contributing factor. I mean, I think I think the data bear out that she actually ran quite a good campaign. And it's notable to me that the gap between her and Trump was the narrowest in the swing states, which is where they were actually campaigning, and much wider in the states where they didn't campaign, which speaks to the fact that it was actually a pretty effective campaign and she was a pretty effective candidate. The environment was pretty tough. You see this in New Jersey and New York and California, where the swings were much bigger than the swings that happened in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. That said, I think it was a enormous tactical mistake to approach the media and communications with that kind of risk aversion and not talk to people more and more in a more free, willing fashion.
How are you going to cover Trump this go round differently, Chris, because that's something that I've been wrestling with same. You know, people say they don't want to know, but my job is to tell them what's happening. And if it's fact based reporting, then to pro MAGA people it seems biased. And it's a real conundrum and sometimes you just have to say, to hell with it. I'm just going to do the best I can. But it's tricky, it's really hard.
I don't think i've it's still an unsolved problem even these ten years in. I've got a few guiding principles that I've been thinking about, some of which I've thought of before, some of which have become a sharper focus this time around. The first is modulation is key. If you turn the volume on your stereo up to ten and you leave it there, it starts to sound like five, right, and then you can't ever turn it up past ten, So you have to modulate. And that was really important the first term. It's important here not everything is of equal urgency or danger. Right.
That's what a lot of people are writing about that it can't be a five alarm flyer every time he does something that you have to be much more selective about the things you shine your spotlight on. I think that's part of their strategy, is to flood the zone with so many things overwhelm, right, you don't quite know what to really dive deeply into.
So that relates to the second principle, which I think is focus is power, and that falls out of a lot of the things I'm writing about in the book, and that be intentional and volitional about your focus. So like tonight I'm going to do we're doing the pardons again for the second day in a row. Now, could have just he did a lot of other stuff in the last twenty four hours that could pull us off the pardons, But I'm doing the pardons again because I think these partons are really important, an abomination truly, and I want to stick with it, so focus is power. The third thing, it's very tempting, not just around Trump and the media, to start with the story and work backwards to the facts. And by that I mean when he signs in an executive order, it plays some narrative role like Donald Trump is going to do X, and I think it's really important to start with the facts and work to the story. And what I mean by that is to actually read the executive order, understand what it means, talk to subject matter experts in that area of law. Is this actually going to tangibly affect people? Is this essentially a press release? Understanding what's happening as the first thing to build your foundation on. It sounds obvious, but it's because things happen so fast, and because he does so much. You can get trapped in covering him because the actions play some narrative role, but you don't actually have a handle of what's being done. And that to me is really important, like always always drill down the details.
Will you report on things that you think are positive?
Oh? Sure?
I mean, can you think of anything thing that would fall into that category?
The first term I can like George W. Bush and pepfar which was the AIDS funding that the federal government promulgated under George W. Bush and led to literally millions of people getting AIDS drugs and saving their lives. Operation Warp Speed was by far the greatest thing that Trump administration did. That was the program where they essentially guaranteed federal purchase of a COVID vaccine, thereby incentivizing rapid research and deployment and helping get a vaccine to market in an incredibly fast period of time that saved hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of lives. Like Operation Warps Feed was great, If he does something like Operation Warp Speed again, I'll be like, that's great.
What about his condemnation of the vaccine now.
It's deeply sick. One of the most dispiriting realities we find ourselves in, particularly as we're watching bird flu percolate, is that we're in a worse position to deal with the pandemic now than we were before COVID, largely due to the insidiousness with which opposition of vaccination vaccines. More broadly, vaccine skepticism has captured one of the two political coalitionions, and Donald Trump has been part of that. He tried to fight it. In the beginning, there's these really interesting moments in his public appearances where he'd talk about the vaccine, people would boo, right, But in the end, he'll always choose the mob. He'll always choose the crowd. And so now he's basically positioned himself as anti vax even though the greatest achievement of his presidency the first time around was a vaccine development.
Before we go, I want to ask you about some of these cabinet selections. What about OURFK Junior.
Our f K Junior is more more responsible for the mass turning away from vaccination than almost any other public figure, and that has had consequences that add up to tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths that shouldn't have happened. The fact that he petitioned the FDA to rescind its approval of the COVID vaccines, as that very same vaccine, which is the crowning achievement of the first Trump presidency, the best thing Donald Trump did, and the fact that it's saved globally in its first year, according to our best estimates, around twenty five million lives. It is despicable to me that this individual will be put in charge of the nation's health system. I know, I don't want to end not real modulated on those you know, fine, Doug Bergham an Interior Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. I mean, there's a whole bunch where like, sure, go to town. Do you get to Doug Bergham? Great? Cool?
You know, like leez Elden is EPA.
Fine. Make Lee's Elden your EPA guy. Good for you, you know, make the you know, make the fracking dude the head of department Energy. Okay, that's your you know, fine.
You do you do you before we go, I don't want to end on such a down note. And in fact, you talk about the fact that we live in a doom obsessed time, which I think is completely accurate, and you think a lot about the concept of the opposite of doom, and gosh, I don't know, most people I know are feeling pretty down these days and dispirited. And whether it's my twenty nine year old daughter or people I've known since college, not all of them, by the way, but many of them. So what is the antidote for a doom obsessed culture? And how can people see light at the end of what the many view as a very dark tunnel.
I think one the most important antidotes community to be in fellowship with people, to be in relationships with people, talking to people, sharing things with people. Isolation is bad and pushes us towards doom. I think allowing ourselves the space to think about the world we want what that would look like if we weren't in the world we are in now is an exercise that we don't do anymore of what we should do more of magic, wond blank slate. You're the king of the world. What do you want the world to look like? What do you want things to be like?
I think it's also focusing on controlling things that you can control. Like you were saying earlier, Chris, you can't really impact the macrocosmic reasons that ratings are and it's really not because of anything you're doing. But conversely, I think we can do positive things and it may not change the bigger picture, but it'll change our lives absolutely.
And focusing on things you can control and things you can do is the other part of this as well. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. And the last thing I'll say, and I think this is actually really important. I find for myself reading history so useful and encouraging. People have faced unbelievable odds and done incredible things in the face of those odds time and time and time and time again. There's lots of tragedies throughout history, obviously, but there's also just incredible stories of endurance and persistence and overcoming and going back to the those stories and understanding how fraught things looked at certain times and how little we know about what the future will bring. That actually I find really really comforting.
What's the most important thing you learned writing this?
I think the most important thing I learned is that whatever our technological circumstances and the particulars of this historical moment, that there are certain features of the human experience that endure. And there's something truly sublime about the fact that we are linked in a chain with all the other humans that came before us, wrestling with their own minds, trying to find solace and comfort and answer big questions about the world, and that there's something really beautiful about the continuity of that. That you can read ancient texts that speak to some of the things that we think are very modern and very contemporary, and that we're all linked together going back thousands and thousands of years. I find that really profound and it's really stuck with me.
The book is called The Sirens Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered resource, And I think my takeaway is that we have a choice. You know, people may be trying to get our attention, they may be trying to figure that out, but ultimately it's up to us, and we have free will, and whether the Democrats figure it out or Donald Trump keeps doing what he's doing, we have the power to decide where our attention goes. I agree, Chris, this was fun.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you, Thank you, Thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio. And Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,