All right, welcome listeners to episode 110 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast

co-hosts, and I'm here, as always, with my great friend Sam O'Uther Bell. Hey, Sam.

Hey, Matt. I'm excited, as always, to introduce this episode. It's one that is a little different

in some ways. We take a step back from politics, day-to-day politics, and talk to our friend Chris Hayes about his new

book, which is titled The Sirens Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered

Resource. It came out just at the end of January, and this was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was

really good. For listeners who are waiting patiently for our big Elon Musk episode, that's still coming. We're taking a momentary break from that trajectory to talk to Chris about this book. And listeners can probably glean from the title what this book is about. It is about the attention economy, about the algorithmic feed,

about the effect of these, you know, massively profitable Silicon Valley, mostly platforms

that are monopolizing our attention and manipulating us to pay attention to them instead of

something else we might want to pay attention to. And it's about kind of like this misapprehension

that's out there that the defining feature of the information economy is the value of information

itself. But what Chris really zeroes in on is that, you know, there's too much information for

anybody to pay attention to it all the time. What becomes value, what is actually scarce, is our

human ability to pay attention to one thing or another at any given time. And so that is what

these apps, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, what they are competing over is our attention, which we

only have a finite sum to spend in a given day,

in a given hour, in a given minute. And the effects of that competition on our collective life,

on our individual psychology, on our capacity to talk to each other, to pay attention to

things that really matter in our lives. That is what this book

is about. And I thought it was a very, very effective analysis and rallying cry for taking this

problem seriously and coming up with collective solutions. Yes. I say this at the start of the

conversation, but don't judge this book by its cover.

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