BIG INTV: Chris Hayes on Urgency and Attention

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1:18

From Wired. This is the big interview and we're in Season two. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Every week on Tuesdays, I'll be right here bringing you in depth conversations with influential figures in tech, culture, politics, business, science and beyond. Together we'll get to know interesting people and tackle the biggest subjects on the planet right now, all through a Wired lens. Lately there's been a lot of talk from powerful and influential men, especially on X, who aren't happy with me and what Wired's doing right now. I'd like to have some of them on the show this season, but for a palate cleanser, we're gonna start with another powerful man and fellow journalist who isn't mad. At least not at me.

1:59

Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes.

2:40

For many TV viewers in the US Chris Hayes has become a familiar face and voice in the evening news cycle. For over a decade, he's hosted all in with Chris Hayes, the evening news show msnbc. Nowadays known as Ms. Now, the show covers the latest news and if you hadn't noticed, there's been no shortage of that this year. Tonight, despite the brutal cold, a massive crowd of anti ice protesters flooding downtown Minneapolis.

2:42

The Department of Justice releasing its remaining documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

3:09

The US and Israel have launched strikes on Iran, targeting its leadership and escalating tensions across the Middle East. That's why I wanted to talk to Crew Press. We're in this moment where everything feels incessantly urgent at the same time, all of it all at once, piling on top of itself. Partially because we live in this deluge of information and opinion, and of course, because we are in yet another Trump news cycle. Few people are better at cutting through the noise and distilling what really matters than Chris. Here's our conversation. Chris Hayes, welcome to the big interview.

3:13

It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of Wired. I was just telling you that you guys are doing amazing work over the last year. And I write about Wired. I'm fans of both iterations of Wired because I write about Wired in the book. I remember asking my parents for the subscription, I think it was for Christmas and getting it. And I was like a die hard, every single page, first issue through subscribers.

3:47

And this has been, I don't want to age you this early 2000s. Is that flattering or early?

4:09

I think it was probably 94 or 95. I don't know when it started, but

4:14

it was around 93.

4:17

Yeah, 93. So I think I had a very early. I think I subscribed at the age of. I would have been 14.

4:18

And not to go all in on this, although I've been thinking a lot about this sort of Wired past, present, future. I think that the very, very early Wired had a very like rebellious countercultural spirit. And I would argue that today the Wired that we are running has that same spirit, but it is directed at the industry that was born of the 1993 Wired.

4:22

Totally. And I think that's, you know, you think about who's the incumbent and who's the insurgent and the valence of that switching. That Wired vibe was whole Earth Electronic Network, like the original sort of Big Bolton board kind of post hippie cybernaut kind of libertarian, but also kind of left coded, but definitely very like hopeful, utopian and also very insurgent against the powers that be.

4:45

Yeah.

5:11

And what happened was the powers that be are the people that sat with the president at his inauguration.

5:12

They sure did. And we sure did cover that and

5:17

control, you know, the most powerful. And so like, yes, the insurgent vibe is now directed in a different direction.

5:20

We're sitting down in New York, it's a Wednesday in early March. And we were just talking before we started taping that. It was just a few days ago, hard to believe, when the United States and Israel launched an all out attack on Iran, which has escalated markedly very quickly. But I would be remiss not to mention that, you know, this is the second leader this year that President Trump has ousted. The first obviously, being Maduro in Venezuela. And it's March. So what is happening in the Middle East? Right. It's terrifying, it's sad. Hundreds of people dead, including US Service members. It is also though, yet another all consuming news cycle. It is like brain melting, mind numbing, reality warping kind of pace of news. And I'm curious because we're going to spend a lot of time in this conversation talking about attention. How much to you, when you think about global conflict of war in the context of this era, in the context, I would say of Trump in particular, how much of it is about attention?

5:28

Well, I do think there is. I guess the first version of the answer I would give is that there is a way in which they perform imperialism as content.

6:26

Sure.

6:35

And they very much like when they started. The Trump administration has undertaken a series of strikes on boats, on civilian boats. These are not military boats, they're civilian. They say drug traffickers. Although in some cases it seems like they're fishermen. In some cases it seems like maybe they're both. They're like fishermen who are paid. No, really, like they're fishermen who are paid some money to run a product somewhere. Like people who are trying to make ends meet.

6:35

Yeah.

7:02

Our forces have killed over a hundred people this way. And what's been so striking about it, other than how I think both legally and morally indefensible it is to just essentially murder people on the high seas, Is that from the beginning it has been produced as content, like very Tom Clancy, the sort of unclassified. It looks like an 80s movie, which I think is exactly the kind of genre touchstone for Donald Trump.

7:04

Yes.

7:28

It's like right out of a Tom Clancy. So the first cut at that answer would be yes, they Perform aggression, war, imperialism, foreign policy, all as content, all as means of gaining attention, holding attention. I mean, there's the iconic shot of they've got Twitter up during the Venezuela raid.

7:29

Oh, yes.

7:47

Seeing who's tweeting about it.

7:47

Wild.

7:48

But then underneath that, there's also the fact that this is real bombs and real guns and real missiles and real people die. And there's real children numbering maybe as much as 150, 180 or dead in Iran because our missiles or Israel's missiles, still not clear killed them in a strike. They're doing it for attentional reasons. Right. Because the President likes to keep everybody's attention. He has to be at the center of attention. He has to be doing all the time. He has to have you thinking about him. And also they have very old school, I mean, pure 19th century, straight up, no chaser, imperialist ambitions.

7:49

Yeah. So it's sort of. It's imperialist ambitions in a vertical video rapper in a social media, always on content machine.

8:22

And I think there's actually kind of an interesting and profound point to that, which is that you could make the argument that these have always been intertwined. And if you look at the history of American imperialism in the Spanish American War and the famous Hearst papers in the yellow press, that was as much about. That was both about conquest and producing content. I mean, quite famously, and in some ways is sort of the dawn of the American newspaper era. So I think these two things have always been twinned. The sort of history of imperialism is also a history about kind of the propagandistic uses of it to capture and hold the attention of the masses. But I think, yes, their version of it is a very kind of 21st century, postmodern, vertical video scroll, doom scroll version of it.

8:33

Right, right. On tech steroids. You wrote in a piece for the New York Times, unrelated to Iran, I should say, quote, president Trump has a feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him. You called it suffocating to his opponents. When you think about your role, our role as media, we're both journalists to not be the foot soldiers helping to fuel that dynamic. When you go tape an episode of your show, let's say tonight, what decisions do you make about how to approach, let's say, what's happening in the Middle east to avoid sort of playing into that hand, to avoid playing into that imperialism on social media steroids?

9:21

Well, the thing we can't do is ignore him or what he's doing. Right. So, like we, the US Actually is

10:00

at war with Iran, there are real human lives.

10:07

The latest account is a thousand plus Iranian civilians. Not to mention, we don't know how many combatants or members of the regime. You can decide whether political figures in a regime count as civilians or not.

10:09

Human lives are human lives.

10:20

Human lives are human lives. So in that sense, it's like he's the President of the United States. He has the nuclear codes. He's now launched multiple forms of extraterritorial killing, let's call it.

10:21

Yeah.

10:34

So the way that I think we do it is to try to a not do war porn. There is a subtle but unmistakable ideological substrate to certain forms of depictions of war. Try to avoid that. Also, don't let him set the terms of things, which is like, we're not going to play huge chunks of whatever his nonsense is, except to sort of set them up to show why they're lacking. But, like, there's no really avoiding it, I guess, is what I would say. In the end, Donald Trump having, being the President, United States, which is the most powerful nation on earth, having access to nuclear codes and also the full force of the American military, and also attempting to replace the constitutional order with essentially a presidentialist personalist dictatorship, is the top story of our time. And I cover that story every night. And the question is, on whose terms do you give attention and what you give attention to? So here's a great example. They made an amazing miscalculation in Minnesota. There was this viral right wing video that was alleging to uncover fraud in Minnesota daycares run by either Somali immigrants or Somali Americans. Now there actually was. There has been this huge fraud network there. It's been prosecuted and investigated, in fact, by the U.S. attorney's Office and by the very prosecutors who would later resign because they didn't like what the Trump administration was doing. Trump administration saw this and they were like, we want to bring more attention to this. We're sending Bevino and CBP and ICE there. What ended up happening was that they kidnapped people and they killed two Americans in broad daylight on camera. Yeah. And that was where all the attention went. And you could see there was this Trump backpedaling where he was furiously posting on Truth Social, like, you should be talking about the fraud. It's like you just killed two people. We saw you all. Then you called them, you slandered them, called them domestic terrorists. You're kidnapping people's neighbors. You're tear gassing high school students.

10:35

This is marauding. And we can all see it. It's everywhere.

12:39

So that was a great example to Me of like. Right. You're not like, were we paying attention to Donald Trump? Yes. At some level. Was it on his terms? No. Right. I mean, I think that's basically the question we ask ourselves now.

12:42

Your book Sirens Call is out in paperback now. It's a great book.

12:52

Thanks.

12:56

And it's all about this. It's about attention. And you argue that attention has become a commodity in the same way that labor was made a commodity in the early years of industrial capitalism. I'm curious about when you start the clock on that process, right? Like, when did the process of commodifying attention really start? How do you track that through history?

12:56

It probably starts with two technologies. Commercial billboards and the penny press. The New York Sun, Benjamin Day's New York Sun. So that's like it's 19th century, basically, early to mid, depending on how sophisticated it gets in both of those technologies. The idea was that you were selling an audience and you had to come up with metrics that you could measure that audience and then sell that audience to advertisers. So early technology and billboards, there would be people who would stand by the corner, the billboard was on with clickers, and they would go like this, and they'd say, we get 600 people an hour, if you're talking about Times Square or something, or we get 25 people an hour, whatever it is. And then you can go to your advertiser and say, this is how many people are going to see it. The penny press, the big innovation there is that you sell the paper for less than it costs to make the paper. You lose money on every paper, but then you sell the advertising.

13:15

Right?

14:10

And so that's the initial process. It gets. There are multiple iterations. Magazines come in, and then you get radio, and then you get television, and then you get social media and the Internet. What has happened, though, is the global scale that you can sell it at is new. Right. So no media companies ever had billions of users before like these attention companies do now. The amount of data you have about your viewer is orders of magnitude more the microsecond auctions that you could run in each second about how you're going to serve that viewer. So you now have this sort of auction for eyeballs happening in nanoseconds, constantly. And the thing about the algorithm is you don't have to have people making programming choices. You know, it's just. There's just a ton of stuff up. You just see what people start to look and then you serve them that over and over. So, you know the old model, which was, well, what are we putting on the front page of our penny press, you know, the New York sun or what are we putting the APM time slot on NBC or.

14:10

Right. What content will get you to spend eight or nine hours on TikTok is basically the calculus now. And it's one that they don't have

15:18

to make the choice.

15:25

People aren't making it. Exactly.

15:25

And that is actually a huge difference.

15:27

I'm curious. Very much so. In the book you acknowledge your own sort of role in this economy, Right. You're an attention merchant yourself. You're a TV anchor. You're also on social media, right. You film clips for your Instagram account for Ms. Now, how do you navigate your own role in that sort of algorithmic attention landscape? Like how do you. I think part of it is sort of how do you grapple with it as a human being and then how do you think about it strategically?

15:30

I think there's a few different ways depending on the platform or the medium. I mean, I think with my television show I have a sense of where attention is flowing and that's an imperative for me. I mean, I say in the book it's necessary but never sufficient. If no one watches my show, then I haven't done my job.

16:01

No, you have not.

16:19

The first level is that I have to get people's attention and then the second level is I have to do something worthwhile with it. And sometimes those are intention because sometimes the best thing to get someone's attention is not that worthwhile. To me on a week when we just went to war, that has not been really a problem. This is one of those weeks where I'm not real tortured about it. The audience's attention is flowing towards the fact we just started a war with Iran. I think that's the most important story. I'm not like internally.

16:21

No, sure. And they come to you because you can help them cut through and understand what's going on.

16:48

There was the period where the plane went missing and I was on air for that. And that was a three month story. And at a certain point it's like, yes, it's an interesting story, it's certainly a newsworthy story. It's tragic.

16:53

But the plane is still gone.

17:04

The plane's still gone and the audience still wants you to talk about it. I mean, that was really a difficult thing. It really did like the signal and the noise was keep giving us a plane. I still feel the pressures every day. And on my podcast I feel the same way too. I just do what I'm interested in the podcast and I let the chips fall where they may. Social media is interesting. We've been doing more and more vertical video because everyone does.

17:06

Everyone does.

17:27

I think it's such a weird slot machine effect. I did this thing the other day about there's a pretty little notice set of tariff votes in the House that Donald Trump lost that were House votes to overturn some of the tariffs, including the Canadian ones. It actually happened before the Supreme Court struck him down. So I did a little thing about like, this is kind of interesting, like he's lost Republican votes on this. It blew up.

17:29

Oh, there you go.

17:52

And sometimes you're like, this one's gonna blow up. And then it doesn't. You're like, well, what did I do wrong? And it's unclear to me, I guess if I put more time into this, if this is. My whole life was like playing the slot machine. Remember, I get better at playing the slot machine. And obviously there are people like Mr. Beast and we're very good at it. Yeah. But.

17:53

Well, and I think that's sort of one of the challenges as journalists or sort of purveyors in my view of. Of accurate and newsworthy information is you are competing now not with a couple of other cable news shows, you're competing with Mr. Beast and with cooking videos and I mean with everything, every piece of content, every single thing in that feed, every

18:11

piece of content is at every moment pitted against every other piece of content ever created.

18:31

Yeah. So in many ways that tariff video doing well is like a. A little miracle. Yes, it's a miracle of the Internet.

18:37

Right. But then I was like, I was really like feeling myself about it and I was like, oh, it's awesome. And then my next one, I was

18:44

like, yeah, but the thing is you. You essentially have to participate. Right. You know, you know what I mean? Like, you can't opt out of shooting host to camera vertical video anymore.

18:50

I mean. Right. You can. Well, but not if you are trying to.

19:00

Are you trying to reach, Reach. Reach a mass audience with news about tariffs?

19:05

Y. And this is the problem. Vertical video ends up being a kind of terminal point in the development of attentional technologies. Just because it is. It's very difficult to compete with.

19:08

I wanna ask you a little bit about the midterms because we are getting to be at that season. You wrote in that piece for the New York Times. I mentioned you argued that the Democrats main problem isn't their message. You're reflecting on the Harris campaign. You said her core Problem was her inability to get people to hear her message. It wasn't the message itself. So basically an attention deficit, which I would argue still a problem for the Democrats heading into the midterms. I'm curious about your view there and sort of your view on the Democrats ability to galvanize an electorate online in the way Trump and the GOP were going into the 2024 election. Sort of. Has anything meaningfully changed there?

19:19

Yeah. So the reason that I said that, I just think it's important. One of the most important pieces of data that we had from 2024 is that amongst voters who said they paid a lot of attention to the news, Harris won by five or six points. And as you moved further down, like sometimes to literally never, Trump's margin increased.

20:01

Yeah.

20:23

So, and I say this for two reasons. One is a lot of people like to blame the media for Trump's victory. And it's like, well, the people that consume the most, like journalism and news media were the most Harris inclined. So it doesn't. It complicates that story quite a bit. The thing that comes after that is for a very long period of time, basically, I would say from the 1980s until recently, there was a very straightforward kind of theory of attention in campaigns, which was you raised money and then you spent it on TV ads. Yeah. One of the points I was making there is like, that's clearly broken down. You can't just say we're raise a lot of money and then we're going to run a lot of ads on what, the local news. Who's going to reach who? Exactly.

20:24

Right, right, right.

21:02

Some of the voters you need, you know, but a lot of voters that you need are not there. So you need to have a theory of, like, how do you reach the people that don't consume media? Which is like, we used to call, like, earned media.

21:03

Oh, yes. Earned media.

21:16

Like earned media is like, you're interviewing me and then there's paid media, which is like, you're running ads on tv.

21:17

Chris did not pay for this interview.

21:22

I did not pay for this interview. So it's like, if they're not gonna see your earned media because they don't consume that and they're not gonna say, you've paid me. Like, you gotta come up with some theory.

21:23

Do the Democrats have a theory?

21:32

Well, I think they've gotten better at it. I mean, I think that the idea that Donald Trump kind of went everywhere in 2024 and talked to all kinds of different podcasters and made all sorts of Content, including him, like, driving around that truck and serving McDonald's.

21:34

Oh, yeah, dude. Sorry. None of this is actually funny, but.

21:46

No, I mean, it was absurd. Absurd and kind of comical and actually pretty effective. The kind of thing that, like, clearly reverberated out through the world past people that consume the news, past paid advertising. Jaron Mandani obviously was like a huge innovator in this who did an incredible job. The vertical videos. Now, it may be the case, like Roy Cooper in North Carolina is incredibly well known. He just won the nomination to be the Democratic nominee. He's gonna go against Michael Watley, the Republican nominee for that senate seat. Roy Cooper's super well known. He's been elected statewide, I wanna say three or four times. He was the governor for two terms also. He's gonna raise a ton of money. And it may be the case for Roy Cooper. He can just. He's got a theory. He's gonna raise money to run ads.

21:50

Roy Cooper.

22:34

And people know who Roy Cooper is. Yeah, but like James Talarico.

22:34

I was gonna ask you about James Talarico.

22:37

Yeah, yeah, so he's a. You know, he's State Rep. Jasmine Crockett. He defeated Jasmine Crockett in that. In that contested Democratic primary in Texas. Now, Jasmine Crockett obviously has a theory of attention, which is.

22:39

Well, I was gonna say, I sort of. I think that that is interesting to me because I feel like they both have theories of attention. They're just very different.

22:49

They are very different. But they both. But they both had a sense of how do I become known? How do I make sure that people whose votes I'm gonna want or need know even who I am. My point is that you better have a theory of this. Yeah, right. Like that's based on who you are. That cannot be. What you cannot do is you cannot default to what had been the paint by numbers approach for literally decades. I'm gonna raise a bunch of money and I'm gonna run a bunch of local TV ads. That is not going to work.

22:55

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24:36

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25:07

I want to ask you about where politics and technology sort of collide and come together. We talked a little bit about this at the top, but, you know, when I got to Wired, it was very obvious to me and I think to the team here that covering politics more closely was not an optional decision. Right. It was an imperative. There was no space between Silicon Valley leaders and the government. Particularly true after Trump took office. You've been a political journalist for a very long time. You spent your career, I think, observing and documenting how power shifts in government. How have you sort of seen that merging of power between those two spheres, between sort of the Silicon Valley elite, the tech industry, and politics and politicians.

25:42

I thought the inauguration was such a shocking moment.

26:25

Was that shocking to you when you saw them all sitting there? I'm genuinely curious.

26:29

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the fact that the support wasn't shocking, but the we're all gonna stand up here with him and, you know, because there are downsides to those calculations and usually they're thinking about those downsides. I think a few things happened. I think as the industry matured from an insurgent industry to an incumbent one, its politics got more right wing. This is not a very surprising trajectory.

26:32

It does happen.

26:59

It's like, yes, sometimes if you interview someone who's 23, trying to break into something and then you interview them when they're 63 and they make six figures or seven figures, like they have some different politics.

27:00

For sure. Yeah.

27:11

And so I think part of it is that. I think part of it is they absolutely all cook their brains on the Internet and Twitter and with each other. I mean, I think they just like

27:13

spun each other up.

27:25

I think they like just pickled their brains in a brine of reaction.

27:26

Huh.

27:31

I really do. I just think they're in like the same way that people talk about. People talk about this all the time. They talk about. And this is a very common, documented almost trope, which is relatives who were lost to Fox News. Oh, of course. You know, people that just, you know, they used to have a certain set of views. Maybe they're kind of right leaning and a Republican and they just started watching Fox all the time and it almost did something at like a chemical level. They're just angrier and more irascible. And I just think there's a kind of right online version of that that happened to the tech elite. And then I think there's just the political economy of it. They are the most powerful and profitable corporations in the world. And then of course, the big part of it is the AI bet. Right? So that's like the final component. I think they were kind of cooking their brains. They were personally getting radicalized and kind of. I think there's a lot of like backlash reaction politics. I think they're mad at their woke workers. I'm putting that in air quotes. They were a mature industry that wanted to cozy up to power in the government and then they had this technology that they think is the kind of make or break technology and their relationship to the state is existential.

27:31

That's also interesting. I mean, I think I'm always curious to hear different people and sort of smart people who look at this in different ways about whether they see what has happened as more ideological, that these sort of tech elites, tech leaders, like genuinely move to the right and this is, this is legitimately how they feel, that this is the right way to run a country, the right way to run a business, the right way to work with government, or whether it is simply like they are biting their tongues and holding on for four years and presenting the president with tchotchkes in the Oval Office when they need to because they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders. They have a huge base of employees that they need to support and pay and uphold. And that, that is just sort of this fundamental like, I hate this guy, but I have a business imperative.

28:44

Yeah. And I think there's different individuals on different side of that. I mean, I think.

29:33

Sure, yeah. They're all the same person.

29:37

I think Bezos has gotten very right wing in his personal politics. I mean, I don't think he was ever a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. Obviously Musk has got, you know, Elon B. Elon.

29:39

Yeah, yeah.

29:48

Terminal brain worms. But like Tim Cook, I don't know. You know, I think that's an example.

29:49

He looks deeply uncomfortable, but he won't see anything. Yes.

29:55

You know, Sergey Burn, Larry Page's don't be evil model for Google. But again, like that was, you know, it looks ridiculous now, but I think it was a genuinely felt at the time. And I also think they thought, you know, again, this sort of the trajectory of how this happens. When Google was created, it was the perfect example of like genuinely building a better mousetrap. I was searching the Internet at the time. All the searches were bad.

30:00

Yeah.

30:27

Google came along and it was so much better. And it was better in a way that transformed the usability of the Internet. And I think they thought, well, this is a. We're providing a good service and we're going to sell advertising and like a pretty ethical business, which, like. Yeah, yeah, this works pretty well. You sell it out, you know, and then slowly over time. Right.

30:28

Yeah, things escalated from there.

30:50

Things changed.

30:52

Here we are. I mean, when you think about looking at the next. I mean, we've got three more years of this administration and you think about the level of proximity, of collaboration, of, I'll say, collusion. You don't have to. But the sort of very close relationships that we see between someone like Sam Altman and the administration. Does that scare you?

30:53

Yeah. I honestly was chilled to my core when there was, you know, there's a meeting between the head of Anthropic and the head of the Pentagon in which they can't come to terms on, basically it's a terms of service agreement of implementing Anthropic's Claude model in Pentagon situations. And then the Pentagon throws this temper tantrum that sounds completely deranged, like Bond villain kind of thing. And we're gonna try to cut them off from all that. There are supply chain risk, you can sell Nvidia chips to the Chinese government.

31:17

Yes, but God can.

31:55

But you can't use cloth. I mean, come on. And then for Sam Altman, opposing being like, hey, we've swooped in and we've made a deal. Look, these companies, particularly those two, which are the two that are startups, right, OpenAI and Anthropic, they're not the legacy incumbents that have their own AI models like Gemini or whatever, they're on a treadmill. They got to run fast and they got to raise money and their revenues are increasing a lot, but their costs are increasing arguably faster. There's a sort of sense of desperation and I think the combination of people with a very powerful technology who are banking on making a world changing fortune, but also have a kind of like ghosts in Pac man, like financial burden trailing behind them is to the tune

31:57

of like many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many billions of dollars.

32:51

Yes. That's a shocking amount. That is not. I would not say that that is the best setup for like ethical and responsible decision making or decision making that takes into account the stakeholders involved. And I think that's incredibly terrifying.

32:55

It is really scary. It's scary. And I want to ask you a little bit more about how you're thinking about AI. I think you've called yourself a lame centrist. I would say I probably fall into a similar camp, at least in the

33:08

context on the AI debate.

33:19

On the debate, sorry, but the conversation around it, you know, very polarized. You've got the doomers, you've got the boomers. Very sort of overly simplified arguments, I would say. In general, I think we spend too much time like ping ponging between those two extreme views and maybe not enough time talking about the, the practical implications or like the potential future scenarios that we really should be taking seriously. You posted on Blue sky that the left needs to, quote, start thinking seriously about the AI hype being true. Tell me more about that.

33:21

You know, the thing that I'm most worried about is the job replacement issue. All of these jobs that people have right now, from coders to first year law associates to the administrators who work at large health insurance companies, you know, the world in which those are automated in a relatively short period of time is going to cost some pretty profound dislocation.

33:56

And do you. Is your general sense that not enough people, maybe people on the left are taking that seriously, that there's like a head in the sand kind of?

34:18

I think there's an idea that if you take that seriously, you're ceding to their own propaganda about how useful their product is. I think there's a huge question about how quickly this is all gonna happen.

34:26

Yeah.

34:37

But I also just like I can see it. I mean I use several different LLMs for different things and I was gonna

34:37

ask you a little bit about like your personal use cases.

34:44

I have been using them more because I think I wanna understand what they do. For instance, like Notebook LLM where you can upload sources and then you can use it to navigate from those sources is extremely useful so that you're not getting hallucinations and it's also citing back to something. So if I say like oh what date did this thing happen? This obscure historical detail that only you. That won't be Googleable A because Google no longer really works but B because it's embedded in a PDF of a scholarly article I've uploaded to you. So there's lots of useful ways of using it to me when you're bounding sources, particularly for research purposes. But it's just manifestly getting better. Like obviously it's just like this idea that it's not. Is insane.

34:46

Ye.

35:30

The idea that it's not going to start to touch jobs people do also seems insane.

35:31

Yeah, I mean I have a few friends who are very senior level software engineers who until very recently, maybe December, thought this was just so ridiculous. They were like our CEOs won't stop talking about it. They're insufferable. This is just a ridiculous toy. It's the new Metaverse, it's the latest tech fad. And then I think it was the Claude code release that all of a sudden they are writing book proposals. They are plan, they are, they're trying to use AI to like launch businesses. Like they're trying to figure out like what's my next thing because I'm in my 50s and I want to work another 10 or 15 years. I need to work and I don't think I'm going to have a job in a few years. And that for me just sitting and having a drink with them and listening to them talk about that was pretty jarring actually.

35:36

Yeah. And I think again, you know, part of the problem is I think that we should have some clarity about the business case proposition of this technology is exactly this like the reason that they think they can sell this to people. I mean think about how much money revenue that is for you. Right. If you could sell that. And also it's a savings for them. And the only problem is that someone's out of a job. Right. That's the business case. So, like, part of the problem is if you start to talk about that, it does feel like you're ceding.

36:23

Well, I was about to say, when you get that reaction from the left, it's like, but I don't like this, and I don't want this to be the case. It cannot be the case that all of these elites and oligarchs in Silicon Valley are telling me that I'm not gonna have a job. I don't accept that. And so what would it look like to you, for quote unquote, the left to start to have to start to take that more seriously? How does that manifest?

36:53

I mean, I think you gotta start thinking about, like, job protections, like, do. Like, how do we want to deal with that?

37:21

You mean like meaningful regulation?

37:29

Yeah, meaningful regulation.

37:31

I mean, first of all, I'm laughing a little bit because first of all,

37:32

we should be regulating AI. And I don't know how. I think the idea that it's, like, terrifying, totally unregulated, is insane. So partly that's going back to reality Blue sky thinking, to be thinking in a broad sense of like, well, if all these jobs were automatable, like, if you didn't need people to do all these things, what do we want people doing? What does society do? Like, we're just locked into, like, where are the good jobs going to be?

37:35

Yeah.

38:04

And, you know, work has changed over time and productivity has increased. And the big thing is like, well, what do you want? What should a person have a shot at? What should they be guaranteed? What should they have a shot at in a wealthy society like ours? And how do we order the society fairly to do that? And that's like real first principle stuff. But I do think in some ways this calls for some real first principles thinking.

38:05

And I don't know that I want Donald Trump to be the person making those calls. No. The timing is very unfortunate.

38:30

No. And I think the saving Gracie is not going to make those calls because he's just going to let the AI companies run rampant and do whatever they want?

38:37

Sure.

38:43

But I also think that small acts of resistance, I think people at the grassroots level fighting data centers, is that the solution? No. But is it a way to operationalize the sentiment, which is like, wait a second, you're telling me this is going to replace all of us? This thing, it's driving up local electricity prices. It's intentionally being created as a technology that will move the distribution of national income from labor to capital. You want to build one in my town? No, that's a totally good, legitimate, actionable way to start.

38:43

A small act of resistance in the context of data centers is a bit of a hopeful place for us to end.

39:19

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39:36

there was a big red button that would just demolish the Internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is the Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

41:21

This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

41:34

It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the Internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:37

I want to play a very quick game that we invented. It's called Control Alt Delete. So I want to know what piece of technology would you love to control? What piece would you love to alt? So alter or change? And what would you love to delete? And people have been very generous in their interpretations of that question. Someone tried to control the weather and I didn't have the heart to tell them that that is not technology.

41:59

I mean, I guess I want to control AI.

42:27

Yes.

42:29

Well, because, you know, I guess I trust myself maybe more than Sam Altman.

42:30

Arguably I would trust you more than most of the people involved in AI. So that sounds good to me.

42:35

I mean, yeah, I guess if I could control it, I'd figure out a humane method. I'll be the one.

42:40

It's Chris Hayes.

42:46

I'm the one.

42:46

He's in alt.

42:47

Alt I've got. Which is. I would love to alter Internet search so that it works again.

42:50

Yeah. What's your beef there? What's going on with your searches?

42:58

I just think it's gotten so bad.

43:01

It's not great.

43:03

I think the quality of the product of the. Of just Google search particularly there's other ones that people, you know, suggest that I've, I've used as well. But essentially it's all, you know, it's been displaced now by AI partly because search got so bad.

43:05

Yeah.

43:20

And so, but I. It's nice to search things and be able to find them and that's become more and more difficult.

43:21

Do you just get that big like AI box?

43:27

Well, first you get your phone and

43:29

you have to X out of it

43:30

and then you also get the big box. But you also get overwhelmed by ads and you also just. The search does not surface things that you're looking for as well as it used to. Here's my delete.

43:31

Okay.

43:40

I just, I want to get rid of cell phone calls and replace them with landline quality calls. I find cell phone, cell talking on the Cell technology is the highest level of failure that we tolerate from any technology in our lives.

43:41

Just in terms of like the service being patchy.

44:00

If your oven just shut off as often as a call dropped or you couldn't hear someone or your alarm didn't go off as many times or your computer just didn't turn on as many times as you can't hear someone or a call drops, it's insane.

44:02

We would be in the streets.

44:18

No one would tolerate it.

44:21

No.

44:22

And it's the reason people text all the time and don't talk. And the other thing that I hate about cell phone calls, you know, FaceTime audio can fix this. WhatsApp audio a little bit is that they don't have what's called side tone.

44:22

What is that?

44:38

Okay, when you are in junior high, I think we're roughly same cohort when you were in 12 or 13 or 14 and you would go home after school and talk on the phone for hours. Oh, yeah, you would be. When you were talking on that phone, that landline, you would be hearing your own voice through the receiver in what's called side tone. Because the way that a landline works is in the same way that when you have cans on, you're doing a podcast and you're getting your own voice in your ears.

44:39

Yep. Okay.

45:05

A landline does that. And it is such a better, more pleasurable way to talk to someone because you can calibrate your own volume. Cell phones don't have side tone, which is why people shout when they're on phones, why people sound weird, why you sound weird, why you can't actually have good and intimate conversations on cell phones. It's why people always want to put their headphones in even though the headphone doesn't even give you sidetone. So this is my big. I guess that's an alt because I like to bring sidetone into cell, but I basically just want to delete cell vocal technology and start over.

45:06

That is so specific and so like, well studied. I really applaud that. I love that one. Chris Hayes, thank you so much. This is fabulous. The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope content. This episode was produced by Kate Osborne and Adriana Tapia. It was mixed by Pran Bandy, who was also our New York studio engineer. It was fact checked by Matt Giles. Kate Osborne is our executive producer and I'm of course your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director. Thanks for listening.

45:38

This week on the Political Scene from the New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

46:26

Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only Pre World War II, but really it's a pretty pre 20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

46:32

Join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the Political Scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

46:50

From prx.

47:04