Social media, the attention economy and the health of American democracy with Chris Hayes

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Chris Hayes is a journalist and Emmy Award-winning anchor of MS NOW's political commentary show All In with Chris Hayes. He's also the author of, most recently, The Sirens' Call-- How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.

On this episode, recorded in front of a live audience as part of the Watson School's programming for Brown University's Commencement and Reunion Weekend, Dean John Friedman spoke with Chris about why human attention has become so endangered, the role technology and social media have played in this evolution, and what it all means for our politics and the functioning of our democracy. They also discuss how Chris feels 25 years after his graduation from Brown University about his decision to major in philosophy. It was a fascinating conversation that we think our listeners here will really enjoy, so without further ado, here are John Friedman and Chris Hayes.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Welcome to this Commencement Forum. My name is John Friedman. I'm the Dean here at the Watson School. And it's such a pleasure to have so many of you here with us this morning for our commencement forum and for a live taping of the Watson School podcast Trending Globally.

I'm thrilled to have Chris Hayes, Class of Two Thousand and One, here with us this morning. Chris is one of the nation's leading journalists and public commentators, known for bringing depth, clarity, and rigor to some of the most important political and social questions of the day. He's an Emmy Award-winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MS NOW. He's the host of the podcast Why Is This happening?

Today, we'll discuss Chris's path from Brown to journalism and public commentary, as well as some of the themes that he talks about in The Sirens' Call-- how social media, algorithmic feeds, and the modern attention economy has reshaped politics and public discourse. We'll also explore what that means for the politics of the day, for the upcoming '26 midterms, and for the '28 presidential election, as well as broader voter concerns around issues like inflation, immigration, and economic security.

These are precisely the type of issues that sit at the heart of the Watson School here at Brown and our values. How do we strengthen public discourse? How do we strengthen democratic institutions? How do we strengthen civic life in a rapidly changing world? And so, with that, Chris, welcome back to Brown. Welcome on the show.

CHRIS HAYES: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So you're back here for your 25th Reunion.

CHRIS HAYES: Yup.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: You graduated as a philosophy concentrator 25 years ago. Tell us about the path from studying Hegel and Kant to where you are today as a commentator on contemporary politics.

CHRIS HAYES: Well, I'm glad you started there because I always tell people-- I actually saw there was a statistic I saw the other day, they were graphing, I think, the unemployment rates of recent grads, which again, I think the data set is probably too small to draw grand conclusions. But philosophy majors were doing particularly well--

[LAUGHTER]

--which is counterintuitive. And I always tell people this-- that I think it's one of the best undergraduate trainings you can get. The most applicable tool and skill set that you acquire, I think, as an undergraduate isn't some specific body of knowledge because, after that, you're going to need to either go back to school or get that professionally. It's a set of critical thinking skills, and particularly writing with clarity, which I think philosophy really drills into people, which I think is an incredibly important skill set.

And then, as I was graduating, I was thinking about going to grad school for philosophy. I was thinking about doing theater. I did student theater here. I was on the board of Production Workshop along with my now-wife, Kate Shaw, who I met when I was a freshman here. We've been together for 28 years. So thank you, Brown, for the most important thing in my life. I mean, really, it's--

[APPLAUSE]

Yeah, it's an incredible thing that I'm so grateful for. And anyway, when I got out, I was thinking maybe I would go to grad school. I was doing theater, and I had this idea. I was like, well, if I go to grad school, I'm going to have to pay to go to grad school.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: That turns out not to be true if you get a PhD.

CHRIS HAYES: That's true, but I was like, what if someone-- I like learning, and I like-- I really like learning new things, and I like writing. What if someone paid me to do that? And that was my way to start doing journalism.

And I started freelancing. And it was a very different journalistic terrain back then. I moved to Chicago with Kate. I started pitching the Chicago Reader, a free weekly. I hustled. I really hustled. I pitched a lot. I was a pretty good writer and just started getting published and moved through that to become a magazine writer at lefty publications. Then I became the Washington editor of The Nation.

And then I was on C-SPAN a few times, and some booking producer for MSNBC saw me and was like, this kid seems like he can talk. And I'm an Italian American kid from the Bronx. I can talk.

[LAUGHTER]

So they started booking me on that. And so one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew I was a television broadcaster. And I have now been-- I mean, it's wild to me that that is what I do for a living. I joke to my kids, I'm like, your father talks for a living, which is honest work. [LAUGHS] But no, I've now been doing it for-- I've been hosting a television show now for 15 years.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah, more than half the time since you left Brown.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I mean, it's wild because I think I still think of myself fundamentally. And I think this is probably true for a lot of people here. Like, this crucible formation of self-conception really is often high school and college. And we identify in that way, and then we grow up, and that's still there. This is some version of the inner child. And for me, it's I still think of myself as a theater guy, philosopher, writer at heart.

And one of the things that was really amazing about writing this last book was how much philosophy I got to do. And it felt-- in fact, there was even a few things that I took in classes here that I went back to in writing this book.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: One of the themes of the book is that, more so than ever, there's this race to capture people's attention and to monetize it.

CHRIS HAYES: Yup.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Tell us, how is that shaping the public discourse? How does that shape the way you think about coming at your job every day and producing a television show as part of this media ecosystem?

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I mean, the fundamental thesis of the book is that attention is the signature resource of our age. And it's not-- I mean, I think there's a sense that we have postindustrial life-- digital life, particularly-- that the most important resources aren't necessarily physical ones like oil or commodities, but it's information or data.

And I think the information and data idea actually gets it completely wrong because information is essentially replicable, and it's infinite, and it's copyable. The thing that's finite-- the value derives from scarcity. The thing that's finite is your attention.

And it's not just the thing that's finite is your attention. It's that information consumes attention. It's this great insight of Herbert Simon, the political scientist/economist in the Nineteen Seventies. So the more information there is, the more asks there are on your attention. I mean, everyone can think about their inbox, right?

And so, in a situation in which there's essentially infinite information, finite attention, that attention becomes the valuable resource. And so people are fighting for it. It also becomes incredibly lucrative and monetizable.

It's monetizable in a very strange way. I compare it in the book to what Marx says about wage labor. The weird thing, the paradox of the value of your attention is that each little individual discrete part of it that's sold to some TikTok Shop that's trying to sell you tank top T-shirts, in my case. I don't know why. They really want me to buy tank tops. It's just--

[LAUGHTER]

Each little individual slice of your attention that's monetized there is very, very cheap, right? But when aggregated together, makes the most powerful, profitable company in the world. Like, Google is fundamentally an attention company, and it's basically the most profitable company that's ever existed in the history of global capitalism, quite literally, from aggregating those slices of attention.

So each individual little bit of attention doesn't cost that much. It's pennies. Aggregated together, it's trillions of dollars. But for you, it's all you have. And so we're in this very weird situation where the most important commodity is here, is essentially indistinguishable from our own sovereignty over ourselves, is indistinguishable from consciousness-- the will to direct the beam of thought where we want it to go. And that's what's being taken from us.

And in terms of how it connects to politics, I think that it is not an accident that this attentional golem that is Donald Trump--

[LAUGHTER]

--has risen to power at exactly the moment that attention is the most important resource.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So I want to get to politics in a second, but let's stay on the attention economy for a moment. So for me, it's socks. I'm a runner, and for some reason, I always get ads for socks.

CHRIS HAYES: You've got-- for people that are listening in this podcast, he has nice ones on right now.

[LAUGHTER]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I appreciate that. So let's-- I think there's something more that we need, though, because there's a different way that this could have played out, which is that, to take us back to the age of linear television, when you and I were growing up, there were shows that being funded by advertisements.

CHRIS HAYES: Yup.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: By and large, you would be watching advertisements that are completely irrelevant to whatever you'd be doing. And part of what the information age has afforded these companies is the opportunity to actually try to target these things in ways. And you could have imagined that this would work out by saying, wow, isn't it great that I'm trying to figure out something and actually they're giving me information that I can use? Now, I think we all have the sense that it hasn't quite worked out that way.

CHRIS HAYES: Yes. [CHUCKLES]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Why hasn't it worked out that way?

CHRIS HAYES: It's a great point, right? So obviously, these attention markets have existed for a long time. I mean, most people, I think, identify it rightly as the birth of the penny press is the first time that you really get the kind of-- that the product itself is either free or sold at a loss and the thing you're selling is the audience attention to advertisers. This is Benjamin Day of The New York Sun's big-- he creates the penny press, and the penny press is really the first place that we get it.

And then radio and TV-- broadcast, cable-- all these things use basically similar models. You're not necessarily paying for the product. You're paying a little for the product. But the thing that the producer is selling to their audience is the audience attention. That's how advertising-backed media works.

And I think you're totally right that, in the broadcast era, these were broad publics being constituted because there was not a way that you could individuate. And that's the nature of broadcast. I mean, the stat I always love is that-- the comedian Tiny Tim. Remember him? He got married on The Tonight Show, and I think 75 million people watched it. The Super Bowl barely gets that these days, right?

[LAUGHTER]

There was just not a ton-- there was far less competition. The cost to create content was higher. Now we have this almost fractal level of individuation. And I think there's a bunch of things about that that can be good and bad. I mean, I think there's a lot of critiques of the broadcast era, particularly critiques on diversity. Like, whose stories get told when there's only four or five of them? One of the things the internet did was break that apart. And I was part of the first blog revolution.

But this hyperindividuation means that it is very, very hard to constitute shared publics. One of the problems to solve for both in politics now, and I think even for me as a journalist, is, where are people getting their information? Literally, how does anyone know things about the world?

I used to have a sense of that. It was like there was the evening news. There was the network news. There were big national newspapers. There were local newspapers. And then there was a period where there were a bunch of online publications and you could see what's trending.

But in the era of the algorithmic vertical video feed, I don't know where anyone's getting anything. And also, two people might have the same app open, getting totally different things. So we're increasingly hyperindividuated. And also, in the collective sense, in the sense that a public might get constituted for democratic mobilization, it's harder and harder to constitute that public.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: One of the things that I found so interesting about the way that this has played out-- and I think this is especially true in the last 10, 15 years as social media has risen-- is the extent to which these algorithms are able to really grab people's attention in ways that they might not even realize. And that's not only shaped the information that people are getting. I see this with students all the time. It shapes their perception of how politics works.

I often get questions that say, oh, you worked in the government. Did you just scream at each other when you would get in rooms with people from the opposite party? I said, no, these are actually quite thoughtful and dedicated public servants. And fine, we would disagree about whatever, but we'd figure out a way to work it out. How do you see this new form of fractalized, captured attention shaping the way that people engage themselves with politics, when they think of scream at each other over whatever issue as the primary mode of engagement?

CHRIS HAYES: So I think if we-- let's go back to Benjamin Day and the penny press. So one of the things that happens is that Benjamin Day and the penny press and the New York Sun figures out quickly that the way to get people's attention is the category of things that we have-- we have a word for this category of things which is alternately lurid or prurient.

So he's the first one that sends a reporter down to the criminal court to just record everything that's happening. It's like, this woman murdered her cheating husband, and there's blood spattered everywhere. And these would be the tawdry stories.

All of this has a kind of political valence that I don't think is left-right but I would broadly call low-trust and populist. And that's because the attentional faculty of interruption-- which is like the siren, literally, on the street or a gunshot in a room-- is the attentional faculty of threat of the safety drive.

And so what you get is, in these competitive attentional environments-- like the ones we have, the algorithmic ones, where you're running this evolutionary experiment at all times of what will people look at-- it does select for conspiracism, sort of like, there's some nefarious group out to get you. I'm going to tell you something that they won't tell you. And I do think it creates this essentially fundamentally trust-destroying arc.

And I think one of the big, big questions-- the big conundrums-- across the political spectrum for the functioning of American democracy is it's very hard to run a low-trust democracy. This is the experiment America is engaged in in Twenty Twenty-Six -- is, how long can we go running a low-trust democracy?

And by low trust, there's all sorts of empirical measures. There's different outfits that poll both how people feel about their institutions but also interpersonal trust. We ask people in different countries, can most people be trusted most of the time? Would you leave your bag on a chair or in a restaurant and go to the-- things like that.

And the US is very, very low. Other developed democracies are much higher. It's like us and Russia, often in similar situations. I don't think it's fully causal that the attention, environment, and economy that we have is the causal mechanism for that, but I think it is grossly exacerbating it.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And I think a lot of the policy changes, a lot of the social changes we've seen over the last generation-- where there have been communities that have been hollowed out. There's been rising inequality. We have seen, in some of these communities, lower levels of upward mobility--

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: --which leads to a lot of the similar phenomena-- zero-sum thinking, a lack of trust in establishments. I think it's the combination of these two things.

CHRIS HAYES: Totally. That's the material substrate, yes.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: People are in a media environment that emphasizes these lack of trust of things, but also, I think many people feel like they have a lot to lack trust in.

CHRIS HAYES: Yes, and that some sort of compact has been broken and is not there anymore. I mean, the other thing that I would say that I think is important is, much of this book emanates from my experience of trying to do this every day because the biggest thing I have to do-- the number one thing I have to do-- before I do anything else for my job is get people's attention and hold it. And if I don't do that, I don't have a job anymore--

[LAUGHTER]

--which, at times, when I was not doing a very good job of it, was communicated quite directly to me.

[LAUGHTER]

It's like, that's-- you know. But I am someone who comes from a tradition-- an ethos of journalism-- where that's not the only thing. It's a means to an end. So the means is, I want to grab people's attention, and then I want to inform them. I want to give them the tools that are necessary for democratic self-governance and a flourishing society. But if you don't care about the second part and you create market institutions that don't care about the second part, then you're just competing based on attention that it doesn't matter whether you're telling the truth. Like, what?

So to go back to Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day ran an entire series-- that was the most successful newspaper series of his time-- on what life on the moon was like--

[LAUGHTER]

--and invented a guy who had a telescope that could see the moon. And it was, you do long stories about the bat people that live there. And this newspaper was so successful that other newspapers started writing stories about it as well. And at a certain point, it's like it was obviously all made up, but they'd made their money and gone on.

And so there's this mercenary set of incentives when you have both institutional ethos and traditions and norms and also a standing set of credibility, where people know who I am. And if I get something wrong, or come back and watch me correct it, or they're going to be like, wait, he got that wrong.

In the iterative world of the hit-and-run feed, there's none of that incentive. Like, if something goes viral on a lie, you might not even real-- like, who is this per-- You just told me a thing. And then maybe the algorithm will give it to you again. So you've taken away all this other-- it's like pure Hobbesian war of all against all for attention, without any of the other ethos and norms.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And so let's now move the conversation into politics. It's clear that Donald Trump has been the most successful purveyor of this style of politics.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And whether he figured it out 12 years ago or just lucked into that, I don't know. But it is--

CHRIS HAYES: I would say a creature of New York City tabloids, which is actually incredibly important.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: That was his training. That was his minor leagues. That's where he got his reps.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. One, I think, key difference between politics and the pure algorithmic feed is that there is some form of feedback loop, right?

CHRIS HAYES: Mm-hmm.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So we are now about three months into a war with Iran, and you can pull out whatever attentional tricks you want on a daily basis in order to redirect attention or pitch what's going on in a current light. But at the end of the day, consumers are still driving past gas stations with prices that are $1.50 higher than they're used to. How do you see these two forces interacting in the current political space?

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I mean, I think it speaks to what the point that you were making before about the low-trust environment being born of both and, like actual structural conditions of the American economy and whether people are experiencing upward mobility-- whether they're feeling like they can achieve a middle-class life and have this American Dream promise and feeling like they can't-- and also the attentional environment. And I think it's true in politics too.

So there's material conditions, and there's the attentional atmosphere. And those two things are always playing off each other. Obviously, the material conditions-- I mean, they've-- I saw a poll yesterday that the president's approval rating was 31%, which is below freezing, and you don't get a lot of those.

So I think there's a combination. I think there's some exhaustion with the attentional tricks that he used and, I think, has used. And I think those also wear over time, and I don't think he's particularly innovated. He's doing the same thing over and over.

But also, the material conditions are the material conditions, right? Inflation is going up gas, prices are high-- all of the core economic anxiety that people expressed very clearly to pollsters in the Twenty Twenty-Four election about costs, which itself is interesting because, also, I will say, is refracted through the attention environment. We shouldn't just be like, oh, that's pure material conditions. Like, people's concern about the economy is purely material. It is not. It is incredibly mediated. So we should be clear about that.

That said, all of those complaints-- and even agony, I would say-- has gone not only unaddressed but made worse. I mean, usually, presidents don't control the price level, but he's done two things that explicitly monocausally have caused price shocks-- tariffs of goods and a war in Iran that's locked up 20% of the global oil flow.

The reason I bring that up is to-- you're talking about this sort of feedback mechanism, this sort of, there's a public, and then they like and don't like things, and then politicians respond to that. And I guess what I would say is, yes, gravity exists, and it's still functioning. It's never not mediated. We're seeing it function now, and I guess I wish it had functioned a little earlier because I think this was all predictable.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah, and I feel like, even within the space of real-world consequences of policy, there's a range of the speed or salience with which that feedback happens, right?

CHRIS HAYES: Totally.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So we're talking about gas prices, prices at the grocery store-- super salient to people. The stock market makes the expected future cash flows of large corporations extremely salient to people in a way that the expected future research output of America's universities is not, in a way that the value of a society that is governed by rule of law is not.

CHRIS HAYES: Or the lives of people in the Global South--

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: --of whom there are literally tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands that will be lost because of decisions made.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: What I found to be the most interesting political debates, not just in the Twenty Twenty-Four election but in Twenty Twenty-- it resurfaced during the government shutdown in fall of Twenty Twenty-Five -- was, how much do Democrats make this about democracy, rule of law? Which, I'd say, maybe a majority of the party felt was really the key thing.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Like, yes, he's doing this. Yes, he's doing that. But at its root, it's about democracy and the rule of law, with the fact that it just didn't seem like that was something that people were able to pay attention to or respond to, and whether this was about the intentional environment or what median voters, as opposed to what median Democrats cared about.

CHRIS HAYES: I think there's also an--

JOHN FRIEDMAN: It's been an interesting back-and-forth.

CHRIS HAYES: --education-level question, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's an opportunity now to tie those two stories together, which is that corrupt, autocratic regimes tend not to have amazing economic performance.

[LAUGHTER]

And this isn't an accident, right? There's, obviously, an enormous literature on this, and you can look at it in other countries. In fact, one of the classic things they get is high inflation rates because they bully the central bank. And I think we're going to get our own version of that pretty soon.

Look, I think different people play different roles in the discourse. One of the things I hate about the discourse is that everyone plays pundit. And there are some people whose job is to get elected or get people elected, and there's other people whose job is just to talk about what's happening, and inform the public. And they don't necessarily have to be the same thing. [LAUGHS]

So if I were hired to consult a democratic campaign, I would be like, yeah, you should be laser-focused on affordability tied to corruption, which is about, in a sublimated way, rule of law. It is the case that your prices are going up because he doesn't care, because he's too busy stealing money from you. [CHUCKLES] And that is a function of someone that wants to destroy the whole system we have. I would not lead with, like, American democracy is at risk. I don't think the median voter processes that in the way that's the most powerful.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So let's now think about the Twenty Twenty-Six election, the Twenty Twenty-Eight election. There's a really interesting debate within the Democratic Party, I think, on what's the right path to regaining a more stable majority and whether that's in a presidential vote or in the Senate-- slightly different dynamics in the details. But that debate-- and actually, I'm going to draw on another philosophy concentrator in college, Matt Yglesias, as just an example of the types of great things that come from philosophy concentrators.

He and many others have argued that the real barrier between the Democratic Party and broader success isn't so much about communication, but fundamentally, it's about the actual positions on issues. And in particular, what they would argue is that there's a set of, let's call them, purple-state voters, and whether it's on some issues of economic populism, on issues of culture, there needs to be more moderation, as a summary.

But then that stands in contrast to many others who, I think, are coming much more from an intentional perspective that say, no, no, no, that's actually not what we need. What we need is just more effective messaging. We need to sound less like wonky nerds. And we need to really connect with people's fears about what's going on--

CHRIS HAYES: And lean into populism, I would say.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: --and lean into populism. Where do you see this going?

CHRIS HAYES: So I think my short version of this is that I think the strong versions of both arguments are wrong, and the weak versions are both right. So let me quickly-- so the strong version of the popularist argument is that there's some set of public preferences that are fairly clear and fixed and you should just reverse engineer your positions around them to maximize your vote share. And I think that's obviously nonsense. [CHUCKLES]

One of the things that some people were saying in the beginning of the Trump term was, like, don't talk about immigration. It's the strongest issue. And if you raise the salience of immigration, then that will hurt you. It's not a crazy thought, but I think the Gettysburg for this administration will be seen as Minnesota. I think that's when they lost the country, and I think it's because people raised the salience of immigration and did things that led them to doing horrifically unpopular things, including killing two Americans on video.

So I think the strong version of popularism, which is like there's some fixed set of public preferences that you match, is nonsense. The weak version is like, hey, don't go out of your way to adopt unpopular positions. It's like, yes, very clearly true.

And I say this to people who are arguing on the other side because I'm going to turn around and argue the other way. But I say this to people on the left, who their strong version of the argument is that public opinion doesn't exist-- people don't have actual politics, and it's all just messaging.

And I'm like, look, you're hired right now to advise James Talarico to win his Senate race in Texas. And there's a group of activists that are calling for him to say that he will get rid of ICE and CBP and vote to do that as a senator. And there's a group that's saying he should call for a pause on deportations. Which of those two positions would you tell him to take?

It's like, obviously, you would not tell him to call for the abolition of CBP and ICE in the State of Texas, where CBP particularly gives a lot of people jobs, particularly along the border. That would be crazy. So obviously, everyone intuits that there are some positions that are too far left, however you want to code them, and that, in cross-pressured populaces, you should go to the center.

The weak version of the left thing-- which I think is true-- is that I think they have identified the fact that what's more important than the specific mapping of moderation onto some issue sphere you get from polling is a sense of heterodoxy and independence, of moderation affectively. So Graham Platner is a kind of interesting thing that's going on in Maine, where his coding is a little mixed up. And this was true of Bernie Sanders for years. I mean, Bernie Sanders ended up getting more coded as a--

JOHN FRIEDMAN: He was quite conservative on many cultural issues.

CHRIS HAYES: Guns--

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Started guns--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah, he's really changed on that.

CHRIS HAYES: So I think they're both right in their weak version and wrong in their strong version, and I think that-- the other thing I would say is, this is a real example of how you need experimentation. Like, you got to run the experiment. None of this can be reverse engineered.

No one thought that the solution to the Democrats' problems after Kerry's loss was a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, who was a University of Chicago law professor and ex-community organizer who had been against the Iraq war. But you know what? Stuff changed. And there's that old line of the British foreign minister. It's like the hardest thing about public service, and he says, "Events, my dear boy, events."

[LAUGHTER]

That's the thing that's missing from the entire discourse all the time, is yeah, stuff changes. Issue spaces change. Things are happening in the world. You have to be responsive to them.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So let's open it now up to questions from the audience. Before I take the first question, I will remind you that a question is a short statement that ends with a question.

[LAUGHTER]

Please, sir.

AUDIENCE 1: Thank you. Thank you, Chris. You talked about trust in institutions is going down. One of the institutions is mainstream media, right?

CHRIS HAYES: Mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE 1: I mean, you would agree that trust in mainstream media has gone down. So I'd like your views on why that is happening and why, if you look at people like Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly, their viewers significantly surpass those of nightly shows. So where does this take us? Is that a response to the lack of trust in mainstream media?

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, great question about lack of trust in mainstream media. A few things. One is, I would just say, on your last point about their viewers, I think sometimes there's a little bit of apples and oranges that's happening in the counting here. So it depends, but between a million and 2 million people will watch my show on a night, right? And what that means is that Nielsen's taking this statistical sample every minute across the network, which means every minute averages 1 and 1/2 million people watching.

That's very different than a video that got a 1 and 1/2 million views. It doesn't mean like people watch to the end. Certainly doesn't mean they watch to the end of 25 minutes. So there's a little bit of padding that happens sometimes where it's like, oh, digital media is so much bigger than the, quote, "mainstream media." It's not actually clear empirically. That's true, first of all.

Second of all, I would say, you're right. Absolutely, it's a fact. In our measurements of people's trust in mainstream media, it's declined. It's also the fact that, in some ways, it's as competitive as it's ever been for attention. And in that, there is a market incentive for distrust because the whole point is, it's the same way that any contractor that's ever come to your house to fix something, is like, the last guy who did this was terrible.

[LAUGHTER]

Right? Everyone has had this experience-- I don't know who put the sink in-- always, without fail. No one ever comes in and is like, they did a great job. There's nothing for me to do.

[LAUGHTER]

It's just the same market phenomenon in media. Why are you watching Tucker Carlson? Because these people are lying to you. They put your sink in wrong. I'm here to fix it. The more competitive those intentional markets get, the more that the branding, marketing advantage is in "distrust those other people."

And also, to the point that John's been making, there's been a set of colossal screwups by the, quote, "mainstream media." I mean, the iconic one of my age was the Iraq war, right? So I think all of those things fit together.

The last thing I'll say on this, though, is, this is a real issue. Everyone in the media world right now increasingly is audience-captured. And one of the things I always say when I watch someone who's in business for themselves-- and this is a little bit of a fine point, but I'm going to make it.

I am a laborer. I get paid a wage by my bosses. My job is to put on a good show. But I don't own the company. I'm going to get my wage, which I contract with them for either way. If I were Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, that's my company. I own it. I'm a capitalist. And the value of that enterprise is exactly what my bottom line is.

The world in which we break everyone up into their own owner-operators means that your bottom line, whether you pay your mortgage and feed your kids, is increasingly dependent on how much audience you get. The incentives for audience capture are even stronger, and those incentives are also part of telling the people the story about how they can't trust anyone else.

AUDIENCE 2: Hi, Chris.

CHRIS HAYES: Hey.

AUDIENCE 2: After the Twenty Twenty-Four election, and I was listening to everyone comment on what went wrong--

CHRIS HAYES: I don't think anything went wrong.

AUDIENCE 2: No.

CHRIS HAYES: I think it went pretty well.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE 2: I didn't hear people talk about the completely polluted information system. And I was surprised because, to me, as I watched through the years of Biden, I just watched it get more and more polluted. And I just felt like, by that point, it wasn't possible for Democrats to penetrate it. And to me, that was-- people talk about messaging, but whatever their message was, it wasn't going to get through. And I just wondered why you think people didn't really address that more.

CHRIS HAYES: So I think it's a great question. One, I think, to the degree it's addressed, it's a little like the weather that you can't control if you're running a campaign. So it's like, if there's some exogenous conditions under which the campaign is being run and you can't control those conditions, you gotta do the best you can. It's like you tell your kid at a basketball tournament, you gotta just ignore the ref and play basketball, right? So I think, a little bit in terms of operational advice, that's the reason.

To your point, I couldn't agree more, and I'm going to give you two statistics that I think are actually really important for everyone to think about when they think about what went wrong in Twenty Twenty-Four. So here they are.

Number one, the swing towards Trump in non-swing states was more than in the swing states. What does that mean? In the States, they were running campaigns, and both sides were spending money on ads and doing events. Harris did better than the states they didn't. Like, the swing to Trump in New York and California were way more than the swing in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which is to say, that leads one to the hypothesis-- that the campaign itself, as a campaign, did pretty well; that the conditions were driving the swing.

The other thing to think about is, if you segment the populace by how much they pay attention to news in the exit polling, the most news-focused voters were Harris plus 4.5. And then some news was tied. Very little news was Trump plus 5. And then no news at all-- "I don't consume any news--" was Trump plus 15.

And I think there's two things going on. I don't want to be too quick to say that's just an information environment. That's also, I think, a class reading of how exposed people are to inflation. So there's confounding variables there. You can't just say, well, it's just about reading the news. There's a third variable lurking there, which is that there's class correlation between how much news people are consuming and how exposed they are to inflation and rising prices and how much they're struggling.

But those two stats, to me, suggest that, ultimately, the worst thing in that campaign were the conditions. And it doesn't mean that they were insurmountable because you still have to-- again, if you're running that campaign, you can't control inflation, right? So then you have to figure out what you do.

One thing you have to do is you have to break with the incumbent president who people view as responsible for the inflation-- 100% have to. I know this from people that tested messaging. The worst testing messaging of all the Harris clips were when she said there was nothing that she would do differently than Biden. Just absolute killer, right? So I think, yes.

But I also think the information environment-- and we're seeing this now. This goes back to what we were saying. Here's an interesting thing to think about. Reagan runs for re-election in '84-- very popular. Clinton runs for re-election in '96-- popular. He's got an approval rating above water. He wins fairly easily. Bush runs for re-election sort of on the bubble. Obama is slightly above water.

I don't know if the information environment makes it possible for an incumbent to be popular at the national level right now. Like, it may just be that people are like, this sucks. Let's try the other one. This sucks, too. Let's try the other one. This still sucks. Let's try the other one. It feels a little like that is the place we're in.

AUDIENCE 3: Great. So you've been answering this just now, but I wonder if you could elaborate on your thoughts about the relationship between messaging by a political leader-- a charismatic one, let's say-- or an effective journalist and segments of public opinion. Like, what's driving what? And how much room is there for an elite to be moving people in a direction? And if that's the case, how can you incentivize them to be more constructive and less divisive?

CHRIS HAYES: Oh, that's interesting. Right, so the interplay between public opinion and elite signaling. And yeah, I mean, I think it's always good to keep these things as a constituted, mediated, collective enterprise. There is no just, like, the public thinks. But it's also not the case that, if there's enough elite signaling, you can get everyone to support a 300% increase in the gas tax. Not going to work. [LAUGHS] So it's like there's limitations in both directions.

I think that the incentives for elite signaling are pretty bad right now, partly because they are about chasing attention. And then, in political situations, they are about winning primaries. I mean, we're going to have so few competitive House seats this time. There's 15, which is a historic low. Now, we might get a lot more because if the president keeps doing what he's doing, he might be at 25% by the time Election Day comes, and Lord knows what happens then. But the system we have increasingly, where the primary is the thing that you're worried about, means that you're just messaging to a very small group of people.

I had this thought. We call her-- Illinois 9 had a competitive primary, which is Jan Schakowsky's district. She's retiring. This is a liberal district in Evanston and Skokie, in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and there were three competitive people. It was an open field of eight people.

And I got off-air that night where the guy who'd been the mayor of Evanston, Daniel Biss, won with 25,000 votes, and the next high was 21,000, and then 19,000. And I was just thinking to myself, one of the people, Kat Abughazaleh, who's running was 26 years old, and she got 21,000 votes. If she got 5,000 more votes, she would have been the nominee, and then she would be the member of Congress from that seat for the next 40, 50 years.

Think about how crazy that is. Think about the fact that if you win, if you can get 27,000 votes in a primary into a safe red or blue seat, then you're just there forever. I'm not sure that's a great set of incentives for this signaling responsiveness.

And on the media side, it's all the same audience capture things I was telling him. Like, increasingly, you're trying to keep your audience with you, and solely that, as opposed to driving some other set of values.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I will say that Congress has been attempting to fix this problem by making working in Congress extremely unpleasant--

CHRIS HAYES: Yes.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: --that many incumbents of both parties have decided this is not--

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: But please.

AUDIENCE 4: Hi. Everybody keeps coming back to this similar question, but I'll just ask you to give another take on it.

CHRIS HAYES: Am I doing a bad job answering it?

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE 4: You're doing great.

CHRIS HAYES: OK. Thank you. Thank you.

AUDIENCE 4: You're doing great. [LAUGHS] To what extent is it true that the rule of law and democratic institutions are the best exit strategy for the predicament that we're in? And if it is true, how do you persuade people to believe it? And if it's not true, how do we get there?

CHRIS HAYES: OK.

CHRIS HAYES: Well, that's a great and profound question, and I'm going to give you 30 seconds and figure it out.

[LAUGHTER]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Let me add something. So one of the first rich democracies in the world to experience this kind of phenomenon was Italy, when Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister, kind of on and off again over 15 years or so. And there's a political economist at Chicago named Luigi Zingales, who's written very powerfully about this experience, in some cases literally as, like, here is the manual for what worked there, what worked here.

And what he wants to take from this experience is exactly-- rail on all you want about how institutions are being ruined. That won't work. Treat them like a normal politician and just point out that he's bad at making the economy work and producing employment and all of the humdrum stuff of normal life. And that turned out to be successful.

CHRIS HAYES: Right, but I think there's two questions here because there's a messaging question about what's the best way to communicate to voters to take the power away from a person who is attempting to destroy the constitutional order-- which, by the way, he 100% is. No one should have any, any, any doubt at this point that the goal is to bring an end to what we recognize will be called the American constitutional order. That is the point. That is the goal. That is what he's trying to do. It would not be surprising if they try to Jan. 6 the midterms at all. Like, I don't think you set up $1.8 billion to pay off the people that you've pardoned for violent insurrection accidentally. I think these are-- it's genuinely happening. They're going for it.

Now, the question of, Does communicating about that help you win the median voter? I agree was in [INAUDIBLE], and I agree. Like, talk about people's material conditions. But what I heard in your question is a second thing, which is, substantively, what do we rebuild afterwards?

AUDIENCE: Well, that's it, and also, are democratic institutions the best way to rebuild the material conditions that people want?

CHRIS HAYES: Right. I mean, well, that's-- god, I mean--

[LAUGHTER]

JOHN FRIEDMAN: We're going to need another hour for that.

CHRIS HAYES: Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think I used to-- it's funny you say that. I mean, I think I used to have higher faith that that question was obviously yes. I still do because I believe in democracy as an item of secular faith. Like, I just can't think of a moral order that can replace it, just based on my first principles about human sovereignty and what we owe to each other as people and how we best make decisions about the short and precious time we're on Earth together. So I don't have a better argument than that.

I do think that-- I do think the Chinese model is an actual competitive threat in a sense of, like, it's a shockingly high-functioning nondemocratic society. You know what I mean? It is, and I think it's not morally defensible to run a society that way. There's also a lot of things that Chinese propaganda papers over. They just had a coal mine that killed 90 people today. There's a little bit of-- we're constantly getting, like, look at their cool cars, and everyone here is happy. And it's like, OK, OK, take it down a notch.

But yeah, I think there's a real question about democracy's ability to deliver for ordinary people, and I think, in some ways, that's the existential question that comes back to this messaging question, which is that you have to-- we're seeing the rise of popularist movements. We're seeing democratic backsliding across the world. And you do need to create the conditions in which democratic, free, liberal societies, in the small l sense, produce material gains that make people invested in its survival.

AUDIENCE 4: Thanks.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I also think that there's a difference between trying to rebuild through democratic institutions and trying to rebuild through the same set of often quite ossified, particular bureaucratic approaches in a way that-- maybe the analogy is not perfect, but it is actually a real, live fact in the world that cities are often more dynamic and richer and faster-growing 10, 15 years after there's an earthquake--

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, right.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: --because it loosens up the constraints in a way that you can no longer be in a "defend the status quo versus new stuff" anymore. It's now about this new thing versus that new thing. You must be forward-looking in it.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, and I think that's true about the constitutional order--

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: --which is that you need big, bold reimagining of it. And you basically need something-- post-Watergate is one analog, and post-Civil War is another. Those are two places where there was a real--

JOHN FRIEDMAN: New Deal, Depression.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, reimagining of what-- and what I think you can't do, if there is a democratic president ever again, is to go back in and be like, here's my AG. We're going back to DOJ-- we're just going to reconstitute the order that happened before. The order is dead, has to be reimagined and rebuilt, like after an earthquake.

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JOHN FRIEDMAN: Let me thank all of you for coming today. Chris, thank you so much.

CHRIS HAYES: Thank you. Appreciate it.

[APPLAUSE]

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Juliana Merullo. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, with additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that, too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word-- trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back soon with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

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