Lemonada Media

Attention Seeker or Attention Giver? (With Chris Hayes)

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MSNBC’s Chris Hayes joins Sam and drops the most intimate choice yet—the decision to kiss his now-wife for the first time! Chris talks about how he is perhaps *too* decisive,  what the right level of fame is, how his life improved when he stopped reading his mentions and Donald Trump’s pathological and genuine need for attention. They talk about Chris’ new book The Sirens’ Call and why they agree Trump might actually be funny.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Chris Hayes, Samantha Bee, Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Samantha Bee  02:04

We are barely awake into the second Trump term, and yet I feel like I have whiplash from trying to follow the news Whack a Mole he has plunged us into. If you’re trying to follow the White House happenings, your neck and eyes probably heard as much as mine do, as our attention is consistently demanded wherever we’re not currently looking like we’re watching 10 simultaneous tennis matches. Why does it feel so much harder to stay on top of what’s happening? Oh, right, because that’s the whole point, which is why I have some serious choice words for the barrage of shit. I mean, sorry, presidential executive orders, no. I mean, shit, no. I mean, I don’t know what is the difference that has just been lobbed at us, purposefully trying to dilute our attention. Which terrible thing will we pay attention to as if, as soon as it happens, some other terrible thing follows it? It is impossible. Our attention is a finite resource. Trump and his advisors know that, which is why he signed a record breaking 26 executive orders on Inauguration Day, ranging from designating an invasion across the southern border to revoking the security clearance of former advisor John Bolton, I want to implore you to stay vigilant and never stop paying attention to call their bluff and show that nothing will go unnoticed. But I don’t know if I believe that to be true anymore. We mere mortals have our limits.

 

Samantha Bee  03:58

This is Choice Words, I’m Samantha beep. My guest today is the host of MSNBC. All in with Chris Hayes. Chris Hayes, Chris’s new book is the sirens call, and it argues that our attention is our greatest natural resource. Donald Trump knows that, so take a listen, pay attention and make good choices. Oh, my God, thanks so much for being here. So okay, we’re going to talk extensively about your book. The sirens call, but first, because the show is called choice words, we do have to talk about choices, so I am going to start talking you do? I do well, this is the place for you. This is the play. This is the spot. Um, okay, so are you good at making them? Are you good at are you like, a decision? Are you a decisive decision maker? Are you like […]

 

Chris Hayes  04:54

I am, yeah, I think.

 

Samantha Bee  04:56

You are?

 

Chris Hayes  04:56

Yeah,  I am not indecisive. I am definitely. I am decisive. I think probably I’m if I have a flaw on this, it’s too decisive. A real personal weakness of mine is impatience,  I get very impatient with long deliberative processes,  which is not a great that’s not a great quality. So the thing that I have going for me is that I’m decisive. I am the opposite of indecisive,the the flaw there is that sometimes I’m like, hey, let’s just […]

 

Samantha Bee  05:26

Make a call.

 

Chris Hayes  05:27

Let’s do it. Let’s make a call. And that can be bad. You know, sometimes long, deliberative processes are important. Okay, well, does.

 

Samantha Bee  05:35

Okay, that mean that you’re going to get frustrated with, like, my lengthy question asking where I’m just, like, mulling as I go?

 

Chris Hayes  05:41

No, I’m not a jerk.

 

Samantha Bee  05:45

No. I know that. We know each other a little bit world.

 

Chris Hayes  05:49

Yeah, that’s right.

 

Samantha Bee  05:50

Like, if you look back on the kind of the spectrum of your life, is there something that you is there? It’s a big decision that you made, like, abruptly, let’s say, let’s say you chose a path quickly that you really changed kind of the trajectory of any of everything that just like was the stone in the pond that rippled and changed it all. And you were like, oh.

 

Chris Hayes  06:12

I mean, this is a little bit intimate to say, but.

 

Samantha Bee  06:16

I like it even more now.

 

Chris Hayes  06:19

When I was 19 years old. My freshman year of college, I was hanging out at a in a dorm room with my now wife, who I was friends with and also had a pretty intense crush on, and the most decisive like move I’ve ever made in my life is that she got up to go into the hallway where the bathroom was, and I was just like, I’m just gonna go follow her and maybe try to kiss her. And walked into the hallway and literally, very politely, like, tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around, and then I started, then we started kissing. And that was that’s by far the most important choice I’ve made in my life that’s huge, the choice to do I remember having the thought of like, because I was not my this is out of character for me, okay? And I remember having the thought sitting there and being like, all right, trying to go do this.

 

Samantha Bee  07:17

And it didn’t happen that she turned and then you kissed her teeth or something like that.

 

Chris Hayes  07:22

It was lovely. I won’t go I won’t go any further on it. But I was choosing between succumbing to fear, anxiety and inertia, or choosing to do something decisive, and I’m glad I made that choice.

 

Samantha Bee  07:36

She’s very emotionally vulnerable right now. She has to pee so badly. Now’s my chance. I know she has to go blushing.

 

Chris Hayes  07:45

I can’t believe I told that story on it your podcast.

 

Samantha Bee  07:48

You’ve been with your wife a really long time.

 

Chris Hayes  07:51

Yeah, we’ve been together for 20, almost 27 years. So we’ve been together. We’re one of those couples. I’ve been we’ve been together longer than we were not. We’ve not been together like our more of our life is spent with each other than was spent separate. That’s, you know.

 

Samantha Bee  08:06

Oh, my God, I think that my husband and I just crossed over into that, it’s never even thought of that.

 

Chris Hayes  08:11

You know, it is an interesting milestone to consider, because when you think about what forms you as a person,Obviously, your childhood is distinct, and nothing can ever replace the formativeness of your childhood. I mean, 19 is about as young. You know, I have one pair of friends. They started dating freshman year of high school because we went to high school together, and they’re still together. So they’re they, yeah, that’s really they real, literal children.

 

Samantha Bee  08:38

Literal children. I always use that metric. You know what? I’m gonna I’m gonna use it in relationships now, because I never thought of that before, but my husband and I use that in terms of fame, where, like, usually, when you cross over and you’ve been famous for longer that you weren’t then you weren’t famous, that’s an interesting you’re kind of a ruined person, and you should just put yourself to pass.

 

Chris Hayes  08:59

Oh, that’s a really got real dark, real fast, like, well, I’ve got some years left on that before I have to, in the words of Sam B, put myself out to pasture.

 

Samantha Bee  09:08

You’re totally fine.

 

Chris Hayes  09:10

Do you think? Wait, I want to stay on this my experience of fame, which is totally relative, and I have, like, some, but not a ton, which I’m super happy for.

 

Samantha Bee  09:20

You have a good amount. You have a very,  good.

 

Chris Hayes  09:22

It’s a manageable amount. I can, like, go to the grocery store, I can go, I take the subway every day. Can have a healthy life, yeah, yeah. My experience of it was, it was the hardest in the early part, and then I worked really hard to kind of acclimate to it, and it feels like I had, it’s more manageable now, whereas what you’re saying is, the longer you go, the worse it is.

 

Samantha Bee  09:40

Well, it’s more that the longer, no, it’s not that the worse it is. It’s the worse you become as a person. No, but boy, possible your life. Well, it’s just, I’m talking about, like, kind of that, like, bigger, like, again.

 

Chris Hayes  09:56

Like movie star famous.

 

Samantha Bee  09:57

Like movie star famous, where you can’t, you’re inhibited. From living your life, you get into a world where you sort of stop doing stuff for yourself because it actually is too hard to go grocery shopping. People stop you all the time. Totally. That contracts your world so much that you then become kind of it. It not doesn’t have to everybody. Some people can do it. It’s kind of rare.

 

Chris Hayes  10:20

No, but I think that that I totally if you’re in a category where you cannot ride the subway, go grocery shopping, take a walk around your neighborhood, I think that would be totally psychologically debilitating, and stunting.

 

Samantha Bee  10:35

Crippling.

 

Chris Hayes  10:36

And almost unavoidably. So like, even if you were trying really hard and very intentional about it and aware about it. I think that that lack of normal social feedback would be pretty tough.

 

Samantha Bee  10:47

And the feedback of, like, not really having someone in your life who truly says no to you, yeah, you really need, like, a just a little bit of friction. I

 

Chris Hayes  10:57

Sometimes when people say no to me, or sometimes when people like disagree with me. I have that. I have the twin impulse of, like, What are you saying? No, but then I have the secondary super ego being, like, No, that’s good. Like, yes, but they’re, they’re, but they’re both there.

 

Samantha Bee  11:12

Yeah, they have to exist. And I do think that, like, you know, living on the East Coast is very helpful. Friction is everywhere, people don’t care out in the world, like, even if you don’t have someone equipped in your life to be like, this is a very bad idea. And here are the 10 reasons why. And we all agree that you’re wrong, yeah, even if you don’t have that, the world will Yes, accommodate you. People will yell at you on the streets, yes, and on the subway, yeah, no problem. We need to talk about the the world at large. And I think actually, your book is dropping it literally the perfect time. Yeah, weirdly. I mean, weirdly, you couldn’t have picked a better time to launch a book about the attention economy. So your new book. It’s called the sirens call it’s about one of the most precious resources that we have our attention. This has to be just like a creative car like this has to be something that you think about all the time, given your job, given the world that you live in, why did you decide to write this book, and why did you decide to write it now?

 

Chris Hayes  12:21

I’ve been hosting a television show now for in some form or other, for, like, almost 14 years. The THE NIGHTLY SHOW for for a dozen and the experience of that day to day is thinking a lot about attention, yes, where the public’s attention is, why attention seems to flock to some subjects and away from others, how personally to grab people’s attention and keep it, which is the foundational part of my job that I have to do, or that I’m not doing my job like everything comes after that, but the first thing I have to do is hold people’s attention. And over a decade of thinking of that day in, day out at a kind of tactile craft level, started to produce a bunch of more theoretical thoughts about this and questions that I was constantly encountering. And then the other part of it is living in the world, being a person who’s extremely online and has been since he’s 14 years old, and also negotiating the difficulty of exerting dominion over my own mind that I think all of us are experiencing. So all of that kind of came together, and my experience of social media, my experience of social media as a person who’s sort of famous, but also my awareness that that experience was being democratized, right, right. Like the weirdness of strangers insulting you or being mad at you was a thing that very few people used to experience and is now essentially democratized for everyone.  All of that started to push me towards thinking deeply about this. And then I wrote an essay for The New Yorker in 2022 and I really liked working on that, and I felt like forcing myself to think about it and to read about it, was making some progress for me. And so then I want to read a book.

 

Samantha Bee  14:10

Right? I mean, it is your literal job to, like, harvest people’s attention.

 

Chris Hayes  14:13

Yeah.

 

Samantha Bee  14:14

And I do think, do you.

 

Chris Hayes  14:15

Well, you, you too. I mean.

 

Samantha Bee  14:17

Oh yeah,  me less so now. I mean, much less so now, because not on television. But never say never say. I mean, okay, like, I’m paraphrasing something that you wrote in the book, but I did you just, kind of, you just really said it like on TV, your single goal is maintaining people’s attention, but now the experience of that is democratized. Every teenager with a phone, literally, anyone who’s on social media is experiencing like feedback, a lot of it, and the need for more feedback and likes and like all of the it’s very it’s degrading our human experience. Yes, would you agree with that?

 

Chris Hayes  15:01

I think it’s Miss shaping or malforming our human experience in ways, part of the way. The reason that I say it’s, it’s the sort of most endangered resource, it’s also the defining resource of our age, is that there has been this shift in our social, social status and desirability. I think about my grandfather, who has since past guy I loved very stoic old school. He was a naval pilot and then a commercial pilot, and conservative Catholic, like he just grew up in a time where seeking others attention was low brow. I mean, if you go back to think about performers right in, like the medieval times or in Shakespeare plays, they’re kind of like they’re trashy, like it’s trashy, it’s like trashy and low status to want people’s attention, traveling salesman, The Music Man, like all of that is like we have because partly social media and because resource is so important, We’ve done a 180 in the social desirability of getting other people’s attention, that is what people want to do. It’s what everyone is trying to do. Achieving it confers status on you, right? And it’s always been the case that, like, there were stars and there were people that moved to Los Angeles to, like, be stars, but that was always a was a small, weird, distinct, little group of weirdos, right? And now it is basically everyone all the time that we have an environment where, because we want to be paid attention to, in some deep part of our beings, from the moment we come crying into this world, we need other people’s attention, right? That that has now been kind of democratized and weaponized and become the coin of the realm for everyone.

 

Samantha Bee  16:46

There’s more choice words in just a moment.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  18:30

I know you have kids. Are they little? They’re pretty young.

 

Chris Hayes  19:16

I got three school aged children. I have, okay, 13, 10, and 7.

 

Samantha Bee  19:20

And seven, so I constantly, I mine are a little older, 14, 1619, and I constantly think about the attention span of my children and how I have, like, neglected the cultivation of their attention span, vis a vis my own limited attention span, yes, and my own. Like, it’s just like fragile, just like an eggshell thin ability to focus on anything. It really looms over us. We are really living in like it’s a narcissist world, and we are, we are all just living in it.

 

Chris Hayes  19:54

Yeah, and I think that’s partly the potency of taking this thing that’s so dear to. US, which is social attention is the foundation upon which all relationships are built. Right? Like, if you’re in a relationship with someone, you pay them social attention. They pay you social attention. That reciprocity is what produces the foundation of the relationship, right? Whatever relationship is, parent, child, lovers, friends, co workers, we’ve taken this, it’s evolutionary, and this thing that we’ve taken away the mutuality that comes with this in all normal relationships, right? In all normal relationships, you’re not having someone pay attention to you if you don’t know them, right? But that experience of strangers paying attention to you. You paying attention to strangers. That second one was the experience of, you know, having some movie star you thought about, or some politician. But now these unilateral relationships of social attention are everywhere. Yes, because social media makes them possible, and they’re they produce in us a whole bunch of weird psychological effects, because we have not developed to have those relationships that the relationships we’ve developed to have are mutual ones. That’s all we have.

 

Samantha Bee  21:11

Yes, there are so many parasocial relationships too, between so you are delivering, you have deliverables that you are delivering to people who like you, but they a lot of people in your realm, in the realm of people you don’t know who you’re speaking to, think they know you and feel entitled to say stuff about your life.

 

Chris Hayes  21:35

Right? And the thing that we’ve known forever, right? This goes back to our time, and it links up with what we were saying, that being in this conversation is that, like fame does drive people fame does drive people kind of crazy, and the part of the reason fame drives people crazy is you’re just not psychologically prepared to deal with the influx of feedback from strangers, and that experience, that particular experience, is now democratized for every team with a phone. Everyone can have that experience. People have it all the time. People go viral and they have people screaming at them, or you just have a post and or an Instagram picture, and then some stranger DMS you like, whatever experience it is, that little weird experience that we’ve watched make people go mad forever is now an experience that everyone can have.

 

Samantha Bee  22:18

Everyone can have, and I think it’s a little better, and it’s not good for anyone. It’s not even good to come at that as a fully formed adult person it’s very difficult. I’m sure it was difficult for you. I know it was difficult for me. When you start when people start giving you terrible feedback that you hold on to forever, it’s tough. It’s really tough when you’re a whole person, let alone just in a very formative stage of life where you’re just seeking approval, trying to figure out who you are. I remember the first terrible comments I ever got on, like a chat board. I’m sure you do too.  Do you hold that stuff?

 

Chris Hayes  22:58

Yeah, I do. I mean, I think it’s much worse for women to state a very, very obvious point. It’s bad for all of us, but it’s worse for women. It’s also worse for women of color. And I mean, I do get off relatively easy just because I’m just so likable. I think part of it.

 

Samantha Bee  23:18

Well.

 

Chris Hayes  23:18

I think that’s it.

 

Samantha Bee  23:19

I mean, the fashions, it’s the every it’s the whole picture.

 

Chris Hayes  23:28

Presumably, I’m just very unthreatening to people. No, I definitely remember. I mean, I had, I actually had this really crystal, clear memory when my show first launched. People have talked about parasocial relationships. People have intense parasocial relationships with parasocial relationships with hosts. And as you know, and particularly because I host a nightly cable news show, it’s a very habituated viewing experience people watch every night. It’s part of their routine. It’s something I really cherish about it, like I love having that relationship with people, but when you’re the new person, there’s a lot of you’re not my real dad energy coming from coming from the audience, yes, and it’s pretty tough to read that, and I remember being pretty shaken by it, and having dinner with one of my best friends and one of my oldest friends, and I was talking about this. He’s like, will you do me a favor? I’m like, sure. He’s like, just don’t read your mentions. Like, literally, just don’t read them.  He’s like, promise me for a week you’re just not going to read them, right? And I was like, I guess I could just not read them. He’s like, just don’t read them. And I stopped, and it massively improved my life. Like, why? Why should I let all this feedback from strangers, this social attention from strange strangers into my head, it’s not it’s not normal. It’s not good.

 

Samantha Bee  24:46

It’s not good. It doesn’t help you do your job.

 

Chris Hayes  24:48

No, it doesn’t help you do your job.

 

Samantha Bee  24:49

Doesn’t help you do your job. I mean, Tina Fey talks about that, and you reference her in your book.

 

Chris Hayes  24:53

Oh, I love that’s one of my favorite things ever, when she got up at the Golden Globes, I think, and she won an award. I think, I think it was for 30 rock and she, like, started shouting out troll negative commenters on the LA Times award season message board who had been like criticizing her cash. It was like, suck it, suck it. You could really suck it. She said.

 

Samantha Bee  25:19

Well, I do remember, because I when I first, my first real television job was on The Daily Show, and that was joining, similar to what you experienced joining a beloved cast of characters. And I think there’s, there is a real there is like a different energy, because you use your own name, you are you. You’re a TV version of you, but you’re still you. And I was definitely like a character version of myself at first, but was still my name, still me. And I can literally remember a commenter named Hanzo Hattori, telling me, you remember the commenter, I’ll never forget as long as I live, because Hanzo Hattori is kind of like in my imagination anyway, telling me it’s that I should go walk in front of a bus. And I was like, what?

 

Chris Hayes  26:11

Well, that’s not very nice, Sam.

 

Samantha Bee  26:12

What? And just like this Canadian woman who’s like, this is big chance. And then I go on the story, like, literally walk, step off the sidewalk in front of a bus, and I was like, oh, I think life might be changing. I don’t think this is a good idea for me. Yeah. Like, I agree with you that it is different for women, but it isn’t less for men. It’s just a different it has a different energy, but, yeah, it’s a different stream, like the fire hose is the same. It’s the same quantity of feedback. It’s just, like, slightly different, for one.

 

Chris Hayes  26:51

It’s different and it’s less toxically focused on your appearance, I would say, is, I think, the biggest, the biggest difference.

 

Samantha Bee  26:59

Sure, Chris Hayes, you’re not my dad.

 

Chris Hayes  27:03

Yeah, you’re not my real dad.

 

Samantha Bee  27:03

You’re my realtor. I don’t have to listen to you.

 

Chris Hayes  27:07

Exactly a lot of that.

 

Samantha Bee  27:09

Okay, did you you finished this book before? Oh, I started to sweat just even saying the next sentence before Trump won the election. Do you want to write an Epilog to the book now, or is this just sirens call part two?

 

Chris Hayes  27:23

Well, I mean, unfortunately, I think the main dynamics identified in the book have been born out, born out past my wildest imagination. I mean, I write about him as the sort of apotheosis of the attention age, the single person in American public life who’s understood at a deep, feral, intuitive level that attention the most important resource, and whatever you have to do to accrue it is worthwhile, and has dominated the national attention and wielded that for power. Elon Musk is now basically doing the same thing watching the inauguration, where it’s Donald Trump, who’s this sort of singular attention hound, and then Elon Musk, and then all the people that run the companies that are harvesting and extracting our attention, like next to him was like a little on the nose.

 

Samantha Bee  28:18

It does feel like with those guys, though, especially with Trump. I mean, he really is, as you say, The Apotheosis, like, it’s just pure, it, it’s like, in his DNA.

 

Chris Hayes  28:18

Yeah, it’s, it’s cellular, it’s,yes, it and partly, that’s why he’s so successful at it, because it’s not theorized he’s not doing it because he sat down with 20, you know, a handful of consultants, and they read him a PowerPoint, and they said this, it’s, it’s purely at the level of instinct, yeah.

 

Samantha Bee  28:44

So it’s a very authentic.

 

Chris Hayes  28:46

It is authentic. That’s when people say Trump is authentic. That’s what they mean, because he not authentic in like, what he says, or when he performs, being a garbage man or a McDonald’s drive through person like that’s obviously inauthentic, but what they are identifying is his keening, overwhelming, I would say, pathological need for attention is genuinely authentic, and he genuinely pursues it, and that’s the authenticity people are identifying.

 

Samantha Bee  29:18

This is such an interesting topic of conversation, especially when it comes to today’s politics, because it seems like it would appear that attention overrides everything else. Attention overrides money. Attention overrides all credibility. It is like the driving force, because attention confers influence. Anyways, it’s just attention, and brand awareness

 

Chris Hayes  29:46

Yep, it has cannibalized other aspects. I mean, particularly in public discourse. I think it because it’s so powerful, it kind of cannibalizes like persuasion or argumentation, or like Donald Trump is not good at making arguments like. Like public life used to select for people that were very good at persuading, Trump is not good at persuading really.

 

Samantha Bee  30:08

Hold on a second. Are you resistant to the weave? What are you saying right now?

 

Chris Hayes  30:12

The weave, he’s not particularly good at persuading, but he’s just good at attention, and that ends up mattering more and the sort of sheer bulk of it can override other aspects. But also, yes, like in in the products, we buy the triumph of the brand over the product, which is something that Naomi Klein identifies, no logo, you know, 30 years ago. So that’s everywhere in our in our lives now too, where the key is to grab people’s attention, and the thing you sell them afterwards is is more of a secondary thought, partly because industrial production has become so commoditized and so globalized. You know, half the time you’re buying stuff from Amazon, you don’t even know who’s making it.

 

Samantha Bee  30:56

Half the time.

 

Chris Hayes  30:58

Nine tenths of the time it’s like, oh, I need a tea kettle. And it’s like, well, here’s the tea kettle that’s at the top of the of the screen, right? So the thing you’re purchasing is you’re purchasing it because the attentional space where you put your eyes in focus is where that product is going to live. Yeah, that’s the reason you’re buying it. You’re not buying it because you’re like, that’s a great Tea Kettle.

 

Samantha Bee  31:20

That has everything I want.

 

Chris Hayes  31:22

You know nothing about it. You know like, and that’s, and that’s increasingly how you make consumer decisions as well.

 

Samantha Bee  31:27

Right, you can be Kamala Harris. You go run out there, you can raise over a billion dollars, but you there is no price for attention. Attention is priceless. You can’t put a money value on it, yeah?

 

Chris Hayes  31:43

And there is a trade between these things, right? So like, yeah, it is the fact that you can take money and you can purchase attention through advertising, which is what the Harris campaign did. But I think one of the lessons of that campaign was just the limitations of that. And I don’t again, I think they ran a very good campaign, and that’s not just my subjective assessment. You know, the one of the most important bits of data to come out of that campaign that everyone needs to understand is she lost by much narrow margins in the swing states than the non swing states, right? And the reason that’s important is the swing states were where they were running the campaign. The campaign narrowed the gap like the campaign was a net positive. They ran a better campaign than Donald Trump is did in the overall environment. That was what boosted him to victory, and that environment was born of Joe Biden being old, and it was born of high inflation, but it was also born of the attentional saturation, of Donald Trump.

 

Samantha Bee  32:42

And Joe Biden not being out there, communicating the opposite. I mean, the opposite being hidden away.

 

Chris Hayes  32:48

Totally failing to occupy the bully pulpit.

 

Samantha Bee  32:51

Totally and again.

 

Chris Hayes  32:52

That’s just people will get mad at that. It’s just empirically true that he gave fewer speeches, fewer press conferences, fewer interviews, than previous presidents that just, we can count these things, and he just did way less well.

 

Samantha Bee  33:09

I mean, not even it was negligible, really. There’s more choice words in just a moment.

 

Samantha Bee  33:21

Yeah, so, okay, I think that the GOP seems to understand that negative attention can function just as well as positive attention, like in a brand awareness way, it doesn’t always work, yeah, but it often works. You talk about people in the book who try to mimic Trump. I think of Carrie Lake Blake masters, how they all lost. Why do you think it works for him and not for them? Because it’s so authentic.

 

Chris Hayes  35:14

Yeah. I mean, this is one of the great mysteries of the age, right, which is Trump pulls this off, but almost none of the Trump like candidates can pull it off. So people that do what he does, which is sort of trolling politics, they don’t. They run far behind Trump. They, they, if they win races like Marjorie, Taylor green, it’s in totally safe seats where they win primaries, Yeah, but you’re not seeing them. These kinds of candidates win close elections. So there’s some price you’re paying, which goes back to the insight that I think Democrats and the Democratic professional political class has is, yeah, it’s not a great strategy to court a lot of negative attention, because then people won’t like you. That’s true for these other folks, and not for Trump.

 

Samantha Bee  35:56

I do think there’s an extra ingredient. I do have a theory. Let’s see.

 

Chris Hayes  36:00

Hit me.

 

Samantha Bee  36:00

If it holds I think that the extra sauce that Trump has is that people find him funny.

 

Chris Hayes  36:08

Yes, I think the humor, the humor and the authenticity, I think it is a that it’s not he’s not doing a bit. He is being that way because that’s who he is, as opposed to Ron DeSantis trying to be a troll, and he is genuinely funny and has comedic sensibility, that Leavens everything so that it’s not just this, like off putting dourness of DeSantis, who is a completely humorless, like genuinely a humorless guy.

 

Samantha Bee  36:36

Genuinely humorless.

 

Chris Hayes  36:38

Trump, is very funny. There’s there’s a weird ironic distance. I remember back in 2016 he goes before, as early as in Iowa, and he goes before some farmer event. He’s got some ethanol announcement that he’s like reading off a sheet, sure. And he goes like, he’s like reading, and he’s like, my administration will support ethanol. And then he sort of interrupts. He goes, that’s what you people like, right? That’s what you like. And it was just, you mean it as a joke. It was so funny because it was like, the most flatly transactional. He wasn’t pretending to care about ethanol. No, he was just like, you someone, you’re into this. Someone told me, you weird farmers like ethanol. So is that good enough for you, basically. And I think that weird, like this weird ironic detachment, this strange comedic sensibility, real is enormously distinguishing for him, although. But here’s the thing, Trump is generally genuinely charismatic in the sense of, like the ancient Greek concept of charisma. Musk is not, Musk is not funny, and he’s not, no, he’s not. Oh no, he’s not charismatic. He’s not funny. He’s a vortex charisma, and yet he seems to be pulling it off too well.

 

Samantha Bee  37:58

First of all, I want to say that I thought it was so funny one Trump called DeSantis meatball Ron. That’s, I still call him meatball Ron. It didn’t really take but I loved it. And that was, like, probably the only compliment I’m ever gonna pay Donald Trump. You’re right. Like Elon Musk does not have he does not have Riz.

 

Chris Hayes  38:15

He has no whatsoever. He is riskless.

 

Samantha Bee  38:18

But he’s so wealthy, and I do think that that is that yes, really another kind of key that unlocks the consciousness of the American people. There’s something so aspirational here.

 

Chris Hayes  38:31

Yes, I think that’s right too.  It puts you in a different category. It makes people more they’re more willing to focus on you, yes, because they want to be they want to give you their attention because they think that you’re worthy of it because you’re rich.

 

Samantha Bee  38:46

You’re they’re magic. They it’s like people think that the magic is going to rub off if they just kind of sidle up to it, adjacent to money, adjacent to money. And bad opinions, the worst opinions. I do think that I’ve heard you talk about this, and I think it’s, it is really very interesting point that I think, you know Democrats, obviously, everybody’s in outer space right now, but there is, like a feeling, and you could certainly see it in the in the Harris campaign, that they still sort of believe that the quality of the attention matters, versus the GOP, who seem to understand that it really is more about quantity than quality, the magnitude, the magnitude, just like, again, the fire hose of attention.

 

Chris Hayes  39:35

Yes, go everywhere, talk to everyone, have be constantly on people’s minds, that that’s the most important thing. And you know, you’ll take some hits. That’ll part of it too, is this is, there’s a there’s a self fulfilling nature to this. So let’s say you do one interview, a sit down interview, and you say something false or mis phrased or controversial, yeah. And then there. There’s a whole news cycle about that. And you don’t do another interview for three months, there’s gonna be a bunch of stories about that. But if you do an interview the next day and then the next day, or you do two more that night, like it tends to wash out the negativity. Yes, another big thing we’re seeing this now with the first, you know, several days the Trump administration, in 70 or whatever executive orders and memoranda he signed, this sort of overwhelming the ability to focus.

 

Samantha Bee  40:28

It dilutes, like, the bigoted and stupid things that you say, Yeah, and you could just say 10,000 things.

 

Chris Hayes  40:34

Exactly, and even, even if it’s on the other side, and you’re not Donald Trump, and you’re not saying, like, genuinely vile stuff, if you’re saying things that, for whatever reason, as a Democratic politician, or a gaffe or controversial or people are hounding you about, like, if you just say some more stuff, it just pushes it down the queue. You know, it does. It, and that’s, that’s another thing that you you, you put yourself in a position for people to focus on your gaffes, if you don’t talk that much or focus on things you said that are controversial, whatever. Whereas, if you’re talking all the time, it just is harder to do that. If you’re doing stuff all the time, it’s harder to do that. That’s the other thing, like, if everything is finely crafted, and you put it out into the world, and then, you know, just to defend this line, this way of thinking that I think a lot of Democrats have, which is both conflict first, I will say this too, that I know a lot of people that work in democratic politics, they think it’s actually really important to choose your words carefully, to be precise, to not say untrue things, to be rigorous like that. I don’t want to denigrate that as like you dummies aren’t out of touch, because I do think those are important and good values.

 

Samantha Bee  41:40

Those are great values. Are they do they hold? Do they still hold?

 

Chris Hayes  41:45

Are they adaptive for?

 

Samantha Bee  41:46

Are they adaptive? Yeah, for the age that we live in. Like, I’m not sure that. Sorry, not to I mean, I know that, like, rigor is important. Rigor is important to you. Rigor is important to me, yeah. But is it.

 

Chris Hayes  42:01

We live in unrigorous times.

 

Samantha Bee  42:02

We live in the most unrig times. And I don’t know that Democrats in general right now have the temperament to like for this world.

 

Chris Hayes  42:13

This temperamental question is so important too, and we keep kind of circling it, and because when we talk about Trump, it is so deeply temperamental. When we talk about politicians who tried it and didn’t work, it’s not temperamental. In the case of like Ron DeSantis, it’s almost impossible to condition yourself to not care about negative attention or pretend you don’t care if you do right? And this is a key part of this and what this age selects for and the kinds of personalities it selects for.

 

Samantha Bee  42:40

Because sociopaths.

 

Chris Hayes  42:41

Well, that is one way of putting it. I mean, honestly, that’s really because, you know, someone sat me down and said, the way to make your show more successful, or is to just say really offensive stuff all the time, and we have the data that shows it, I’d be like, I don’t want to do that first of all, because that’s not true to who I am. It’s not what I want to do with my public with my public platform. But also, like, I don’t want people to be mad. Like, even if you told me, like, we’re gonna give you a raise and it’s gonna increase ratings, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want that. At the deepest level of my person, I don’t want it. And you can’t pretend to be different about that than you are.

 

Samantha Bee  43:19

And if you do pretend, then you will absorb those bad ideas and opinions.

 

Chris Hayes  43:25

And if you do pretend, you get the worst of both worlds. You get you get the DeSantis campaign right, which is, you’re obviously inauthentic, you’re sort of trollish in a bad way. It just doesn’t work. And I think that’s a real conundrum, because you could tell Democrats go out there and court negative attention, it’s like, well, I don’t want to do that.

 

Samantha Bee  43:44

You can’t do that. It’s very hard to do constitutionally. So I’m not sure how. I’m just not sure how this shakes out in the modern era. Plus Democratic voters, honestly, are a bit more fickle. There’s a little less brand loyalty, a lot less brand like, actually, there’s no brand loyalty, yeah, to speak of. Okay, well, so when you’re guiding your show by way of example, how are you selecting what to pay attention to, what to give your attention to? Like, I’m thinking of the example of the Greenland story, which obviously is pretty unserious. We’re not buying green land.

 

Chris Hayes  44:28

You might try to do something about it, but, yeah, try. But the Greenland story is a great example, because it was a real conundrum that we talked about. We did one segment on it, and I largely didn’t do a ton on it, because it seemed to me, the real world implications were fairly remote, and it seemed like a stunt. Right now, I’m a little concerned that they’re really serious about it, and what that would mean if they are. But you know, in the first few days, this this focus question, and. You know, I think I say in the book that in a distracted age, focus is power, right? And focus is a real hard to come by. And we’ve been trying to figure out, like, what do we want to focus on, right, and not be pulled in a million directions. But it’s genuinely hard because, again, you know, there’s certain things he’s doing that are both distracting and also bad substantively that deserve coverage.And so that’s, it’s not like, you know, there’s bunch of Eos he signed that are totally vile that I haven’t even gotten a chance to cover.

 

Samantha Bee  45:33

And he might not, because there’s going to be a whole bunch more, which is really flooding the zone. So focusing, like, I mean, talk about, like, lack of choice forces focus. So how are you limiting the choices? Like, I don’t know how you make those editorial decisions on a day to day basis. When, like, how late in the day are you making editorial because, yeah, the world changes.

 

Chris Hayes  45:57

We do a 130 meeting, okay, but one thing that we’ve been kind of trying to operationalize the first few days is to do a 130 meeting, but also to keep a block, one block in the show that’s kind of open, we have an idea that we have these guests that can talk about a few different things we can do this topic, which we’ll pencil in for now, and then we’ll reassess at five, you know to keep some some now, if something big happens, we’ll throw out the rundown. We’ve done that a million times. Yeah, that’s just part of doing cable news, but that’s one way we’ve been trying to hedge a little bit with the kind of flow of the day’s events.

 

Samantha Bee  46:37

You two have to have a kind of, yeah. Need a little buffer in there for the whiplash of this administration. Did it bring back? It was kind of haunting, no.

 

Chris Hayes  46:46

It doesn’t feel good, it’s not good.

 

Samantha Bee  46:48

It’s not good for quality of life.

 

Chris Hayes  46:51

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been working very hard to just literally do the Serenity Prayer, like, the things I can control and the wisdom to know the difference. All I can do is control what we put on the show and try to do a good job of that, right? And I can’t control anything else. I really can’t. I can’t control if people like my book. I can’t control if people buy it. I can’t control, I cannot unilaterally control if he does terrible things as much as I would like to or as much as I sometimes the job can make you feel like you do you can, and that if you’re not stopping terrible things, you’re failing, which is a feeling I feel a lot. I just have to remind myself that that’s an illusion, a delusion, that I cannot unilaterally, you know, control what happens in the world.

 

Samantha Bee  47:38

I love the Serenity Prayer.

 

Chris Hayes  47:40

It’s profound. It’s a real insight. It’s a true insight.

 

Samantha Bee  47:45

It’s a real one. I say it to myself all the time, yeah, because I’m like, no, it’s Yeah, serenity, please. I think you know, you talk about how there’s such inaction on climate change, because it doesn’t hold our attention. It holds it so briefly. I mean, it’s kind of holding it with the LA fires, not that much. And I actually think that there’s a small chance that people are turning off the podcast. They hear the words climate change, and they go, what do about these very real issues so present in our lives that people do not find to be interesting enough or perhaps too large to focus on.

 

Chris Hayes  48:31

Climate is a great example. I mean, I do think that the fires are so unbelievably intentionally salient, aside from being.

 

Samantha Bee  48:39

Oh my god.

 

Chris Hayes  48:40

Totally tragic and horrible, and also, you know, fascinating in their own weird way, right? I mean, from just a the dynamics of how these fires work and why they spread the way they did, and how difficult it is to control them, I think that really is an opportunity to talk about the climate in ways that people, people will be interested in, and we’ve done that on the show. I think it’s weird that more haven’t, the root problem with climate change itself is that it is quite literally an invisible process. It has zero attentionally salient features in the daily accrual of carbon in the atmosphere. We can’t carbon. We can’t smell it. It’s not even like air pollution. In fact, air pollution smog. Part of the reason that you got the Clean Air Act, part of the reason you’ve seen real people see it exactly. Real political pressure against the Chinese party, Communist Party in China, is like people can feel it in their lungs and they can see it. Yeah, you can’t feel the carbon in your lungs. You can’t see the carbon. You can’t smell the carbon. It is obviously having tons of visible effects, hurricanes, South Florida, flooding, right? Wildfire so that you can do but the actual thing that’s happening is actually invisible and possible to sense. And I do think that actually has a huge effect on how compelling it is.

 

Samantha Bee  50:00

Do you what would you what do you think your early life would have been like had smartphones and social media existed to the extent that it exists?

 

Chris Hayes  50:10

Oh, that’s a really interesting question. I don’t know my I came from one of those households that was pretty intensely regulated on the TV front, we got, we didn’t get much television. It was pretty restricted. There were lots of things we couldn’t watch.

 

Samantha Bee  50:25

Oh, give me an example. What were you not allowed to watch?

 

Chris Hayes  50:29

Like, real anti violence regime at my house, like, I couldn’t watch World Wrestling Federation. I couldn’t watch wrestling. We, I couldn’t play with GI Joes. We couldn’t have I couldn’t have guns, and I watched a lot of public television. So I would imagine there’d be some version of a regime like that. That would have been pretty restrictive. I think it’s probably pretty good for me. I don’t think we’re as restrictive with our kids, although maybe that’s a generational change.

 

Samantha Bee  51:02

Right, there is a sense, like, as a modern parent, that you’re like, Well, I’m kind of hobbling my children by like, how, what is the limitation of restriction, like.

 

Chris Hayes  51:13

It’s also there’s a million more decisions to make of like, when they get what device and what they can do in it, and what they can watch on it. And can they chat with friends? And can they chat with friends in group chats, or can they chat with Snapchat? And is there a difference in group chat and Snapchat? And like, how do I feel about that, all these, these minute distinctions and boundary drawing that you have to do?

 

Samantha Bee  51:32

And also, what I think people, what is not discussed enough is that we gave them free rein for a year and a half when they were not in school to do all of their learning and socializing online, they it was complete. It was their only connection to the outside world and to learning for so long, and it’s actually kind of difficult to now say one’s bad for you now.

 

Chris Hayes  51:56

Yeah, I mean, there’s something so perverse about I remember sitting there my son was in first grade on Zoom school and having a really hard time. I was like, this is literally software designed for adults to have meetings. Yes. Like, yes, that’s what this software is for. We are using software designed for grown people.

 

Samantha Bee  52:19

Yes, to do who don’t want to be there.

 

Chris Hayes  52:22

Who don’t want to be there, to have meanings like, no wonder it’s not working for a first reader, learning.

 

Samantha Bee  52:28

Oh god. Zoom school.

 

Chris Hayes  52:31

Zoom school.

 

Samantha Bee  52:32

Oh boy, what are you doing? What do you do when your kids are bored? Are you like? Are you are you good? Are you like? Play with these acorns and read.

 

Chris Hayes  52:40

There’s a lot of like, there is go read, there is go play. My oldest is has so much school work that she has any free time to be bored, so she’s working all the time, and she’s hanging out, she’s  really thriving. She worked, she does a lot of homework. She hangs out in real life, a lot of friends. She also does this thing, which, like, I don’t want to be this sort of Doomsayer about technology, like, one of the things she does, which I think is great, is that she great, is that she will FaceTime her friends while she does homework, yeah. And I think that’s awesome. Like, that’s a great use of technology. Like, my, my blessings entirely. Like, you sit there, you’re sort of socializing. You’re kind of doing work. It’s, I think that’s good. Is it a little distracted, sure. But fundamentally, that’s like, actual human connection happening there.

 

Samantha Bee  53:21

It’s still a group. It’s still in a group, but actually a little easier.

 

Chris Hayes  53:26

Yeah, so the my middle child is obsessed with basketball, which I also view as a blessing, and I think because we’re like, all parents in this weird screen thing, like he wants to go play basketball all the time. And we’re like, sure, yeah, let’s go. I’ll take a lie, because it’s not, it’s not a screen, and it’s out with other people. It’s, it’s physical. The youngest is still in an age where she’ll play with, you know, she’s playing with Legos, playing with dolls. But yeah, I think that you know that the thing of telling kids like, go amuse yourself is pretty important. Go be bored. Go read a book.

 

Samantha Bee  54:05

Yeah, when we were children, we played with rocks.

 

Chris Hayes  54:07

Yeah, like, exactly.

 

Samantha Bee  54:10

I watched squid game part two, like Season Two with my kids, and they were like, Oh, my God, what is this rocks game? I’m like, Guys, mommy played with rocks. That’s how bored I was. That’s what it was like to grow up in the 1970s everyone was like, once you go play in a gravel driveway, are there cars? Probably, this was a delightful conversation.

 

Chris Hayes  54:36

Oh, thank you. I really enjoyed it, too.

 

Samantha Bee  54:38

Thank you so much for your book. I mean, it is dropping into our lives when it is time for us to really reflect on this. Who we give our attention?

 

Chris Hayes  54:47

I really hope people get something out of it, and it feels generative and social that people have their own ideas. Maybe they disagree with parts of it. Maybe there’s things they want to tell other people about it, or, like, have a book group and talk about like, I do think you. The social aspect of this is really key, and I hope people can can use it that way.

 

Samantha Bee  55:06

I was trying to remind my kids when Snapchat or sorry, when, what was it that went off the Tiktok. Tiktok went away. My kids celebrated. They were like, we don’t have to serve this God anymore, and then.

 

Chris Hayes  55:20

I know a lot of people who felt that way.

 

Samantha Bee  55:22

Then it came back, and they were like, well, here we go again, and I was like, you have the choice to not use it. They’re like, not if everybody else is using it. But it was very satisfying for me to remove X from my phone. I felt like, you know what? Oh, yeah, we don’t need to carry water for these people if we don’t want to. We don’t need to. All right, awesome. Thank you so much again. That was Chris Hayes, and I had no choice but to look up one thing we were lamenting that no one seems to pay attention when we start talking about climate change because it’s a problem that can’t be seen, which made me wonder, how long have we even been talking about climate change? Well, the first mention of it is largely credited to Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896 oh, my god. Everybody ignored him, too. We’ve had so much time to deal with this anyway. Thanks for joining us. I am Samantha B and see you next week for some more choice words. Thank you for listening to Choice Words, which was created by and is hosted by me. The show is produced by […], with editing and additional producing by Josh Richmond. We are distributed by Lemonada Media, and you can find me @realsambee on X,and Instagram. Follow Choice Words wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.

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