YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Hayes

lines on the record: 77
first: 2025-01-23
most recent: 2025-01-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, and think about all the Trump-like characters who've gotten their butts kicked in elections. I mean, Mark Robinson, who's kind of a troll and says how...”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would probably be on the nightly news and people would know your name, but that would the problem with that is that there's a trade-off between that and being able to persuade people to vote for you. But what has happened is because attention has become so important, it's crowded out the other concerns such that just getting people's attention is kind of enough to wield power.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Detach from persuasion. There's kind of a trade off, and I write about this in the book, let's say you're running for local office, right? You need to get name recognition. And we're not talking about one of these big races where there's millions of dollars. Like you're running for state rep, right? And you knock on doors. People need to know your name, first of all. Maybe you raise some money and send them mailers. Now, presumably there are ways you could get everyone to know your name that would be negative. If you went canvassing naked. Or, you know, created some huge incident in a public space where you were like screaming slurs at someone.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're not describing a polarizing troll. And what Trump realized is that the methodology of polarizing troll is a more effective means of wielding power in our age than before. And that to me is the... The short version”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one there's one neat trick to quote an old internet meme, right? Like a way of getting your attention. The one neat trick I think he's used to reduce it is he will always choose negative attention over no attention. And most politicians traditionally have made the other choice. Most politicians, if you give them a choice between negative attention or no attention, they're like, I would rather have no attention. I don't want to make news because I don't want to polarize people against me because fundamentally I have to get people to like me. And when you think about someone being political or like, if you describe someone in your high school as like a politician, you're describing someone who wants to be liked by as many people as possible and as kind of a gladhander.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think Donald Trump at a very base level, born of his own personal pathologies rather than sitting around theorizing. Instinctively intuited that attention is the most valuable resource and exploited that for tremendous gain.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that one of the things I think, and I think I'd be curious to hear what you think of this because you know this better than I, I keep reminding people that in our lifetimes we have already seen the non-commercial internet defeat the commercial internet once. That the first version of the mass internet was AOL CompuServe and Prodigy. And it fell to the open web. And that open web was a much more, which was a non commercial space. It was a much more wide open place. People could, you weren't like knocking around in AOL groups. And the fact that we've recreated a commercial internet that sort of mirrors that walled garden. Not the final story. Like we could have another open internet, you know?”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know what's going on in their lives in a way that if I didn't have it, I probably wouldn't. And it's not a commercial space. No one is trying to monetize my attention in the group chat. No one is trying to sell me an ad. We're just talking to each other. This is a digital facilitation of genuine connection, which was the promise. Like that's what Facebook says they're selling you, right? So when you can get the non-commercial internet or even versions of the commercial internet, your AOL quilter example that facilitates genuine human connection, I think that's great. Like I love that. I don't want to burn everyone's phones or, you know, cut the cable that brings. The internet across the Atlantic, right?”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, dude, I'm a partisan of the internet. Like, I love the parts of, there are parts of digital culture in the internet that genuinely connect us to other people. Like, I write about in the book the group chat. I love the group chat. The group chat, and why do I love the group chat? I'm keeping in touch with people that are geographically disparate but very close to me personally.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find that it orders, it's like it gives me a deadline. It gives me a project. It orders my thinking. If I go for a walk, I'm thinking about the book and then I come back and I work on it. And that is therapeutic to me weirdly because I'm doing thinking. I am alone with my own thoughts, but it's structuring the way that I'm alone with my own thoughts in a way that for me is psychologically beneficial. And I think that's part of the work of being a human is working to be alone with our own thoughts.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blaise Pascal in the 17th century says, I've come to the conclusion that all the foibles of man stem from his inability to sit alone in his own chamber.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think one of the things I've enjoyed about the book is it's about this very contemporary phenomenon, but when you push through it, you get to something essential and enduring about being a human on the earth. And so it's like at some level, some of these problems are literally what the Buddha was wrestling with sitting under the banyan tree. Before there was anything recognizably modern in his world or media, right? The Stoics, some of the stuff we're dealing with, the Stoics thought about. So part of this is just being a human in the world. And part of being a human in the world. The unquiet mind, the unsettled self, the difficulty of sitting with your own thoughts, and the desire to put your attention on something else. And that desire, which is endemic to being a human.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Appetite in hunger than it is drugs because drugs are other substances can be abstained from and they can be cordoned off and they don't sort of dominate our lives in a sort of ubiquitous fashion for all of us the way that that food does”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pervasiveness and the fact that everyone has to put their attention somewhere and everyone's got to eat. This is actually the thing that makes food and food addiction and disordered eating so difficult. People that have substance problems, whether it's tobacco or it's alcohol or it's drugs, one possibility is abstinence, right? People that have disorder relationships with food don't have that option. You are going to have to eat and you're going to have to live with it and it's going to be everywhere and it's ubiquitous and it's unavoidable and it's woven into your biology every moment. So that's attention to me is much more like.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why did I stay up so late scrolling? I didn't want to do that, but I did it. Why did I go out drinking? And now here I am. I have a hangover the next morning. Like, those are all similar. The real key difference, though, is drugs and alcohol are not the dominant markets in America. They're not like to me the better. Metaphor is food. The reason that food is a better metaphor is that”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's similar. I think the relationship to it is similar, and there's a few ways that it's similar. But I think the reason the drug metaphor is insufficient. So I think our personal experience of it is similar to our experience of drugs or people that are in any substance abuse disorder substance use disorder situation, which is you kind of hate yourself for it, but there's a compulsion to keep using it. You need bigger and bigger payloads, right, to get the same effect. And that feeling of like hangover and guilt and shame after a long jag on the internet is very similar.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I mean? If you think about it. Right. But it's important, I think, to actually map that out because the information is the means to the ultimate end. The reason the information is useful to them is to get my attention, which is to try to get an ad in front of me that is more targeted towards me, that's more socially indexed on me. But the ultimate end, the ultimate thing that matters is that attention.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I just want to say something about that, about data and information, because I think there's two things they're taking from us. They're taking data and information, they're also taking our attention. And to me, the attention is the more valuable resource, not in market terms necessarily, but in the sense that it doesn't really matter to me. It doesn't affect my life if 10 firms have my data or 100 or 1,000 do. Like, I don't really know. It's out there somewhere. Everyone's using it. They're trading it. What does matter to me is whether they have my attention. Because either I have it on the things I want or they have it on the things they want. And so it's the finitude of attention that is so key here. It's the zero sumness that is the source of its value and the reason it's so contested.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, for some people, I think it is, but for me, it's not making me clinically depressed. I can decide that this is a weird and alienating way to go through life independent of that as the empirical outcome. And I think one of the things you've seen in some of the reaction to the hate book is like this question about like, well, what does the literature say?”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is this a way that we want to live? Is kind of the question that the book is asking, which is a little independent of like, well, no, it's not making me clinically depressed.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, a pretty good summary of it, right? Like, I think one of the things I think that's interesting about, and I think the hate book is really provocative and very persuasive That I think we tend to focus, and you see this in the social dilemma on Netflix, we tend to focus the fear on teenagers, but it's all of us. And I also think it's actually really important to make this distinction There's an empirical question about what the literature says to the degree we can measure it, about what this is doing to diagnosable pathologies like addiction, depression, anxiety, things like that, right? But then there's a deeper philosophical question, which is is this the way we want to live?”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we like, I mean, I think it's a complicated version of like, right? Like in the same way that. We seek it out, but I do think there's a generalized, and I think this is also crescendoed in the last two years, even in the course of writing the book. A generalized sense of disgust. I mean, really, people feel disgusted by it at this point.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were very online. I'm very online. And we all live in this world. And it just became clearer and clearer to me that this thing, attention, is the most valuable resource of our age. It's the defining resource of our age. And it is also the substance of life. It is our life will be in the end, moment to moment, what we have paid attention to, what we have ignored. There is something profound at a philosophical level about the thing that is most essential to us, the substance of our lives, being extracted from us often in a field in a way that feels against our will.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, although that's a great Great example because that's that speaks to the kind of vagaries of it, right? Like, I can't control what I can't control. What I try to do is do the best version I can of holding attention, but in some ways it's often outside your control. And the difficulty of that it's a really hard thing to do has made me think deeply for over a decade on this question. And then when I'm not doing that, I'm online.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few reasons. One is that my experience doing the television show means that the craft and technique that I have been working on for over a decade now, 13 years hosting a cable news show, is about attention. It's about grabbing people's attention and holding it.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mark Andreessen created graphical user interfaces for the web. I mean, I was really got on the internet early and was pretty hardcore and it has been pretty formative for my life”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I, you know, when I was 13 years old, I convinced my parents, 13 or 14 convinced my parents I didn't want to muck around with AOL or CompiServe. I wanted my own ISP and I got on the internet and I started browsing the web on links, the text browser, before.”
2025-01-23 · On with Kara Swisher · From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT