Hi, everyone from New York Magazine in the Box Media Podcast Network.

This is On with Caro Swisher, and I'm Carrow Swisher.

Today, my guest is Chris Hayes, the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, host of Why Is This Happening, the Chris Hayes podcast, and author of a new book called The Sirens Call, How Attention became the World's Most Endangered Resource. As Hayes puts it, we live in an age where we're constantly overwhelmed by the compulsion to pay attention to things we don't actually care about, mostly around our smartphones.

We've been bombarded by so much information that it's hard to know what is actually important to pay attention to.

According to Hayes, that's because life is now filled with sirens, as in the sirens from the Odyssey, except now our phones are the beautiful alluring voices,

telling us to just check them all the time. But this book isn't just about how we're all addicted

to our phones and social media. It's about our crowded attention age, and as a cable news host,

whose job it is to capture our attention, that's something Hayes understands all too well.

Obviously, this is a problem I've covered for years and talked about incessantly,

and I'm interested in talking to Chris about how these tech companies have stolen our souls over and over again,

and they do it every day, and then we pay them for doing so.

And I think it has to change change and it will change going forward.

At the same time, they've never been more powerful and richer than ever. And so it's a very

dangerous time for the average citizen when they come up against these modern day supervillains,

essentially. Our expert question today comes from one of Hayes' colleagues in holding people's

attention, Rachel Maddow. She has a tough question for him and a good one, so stick around.

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