This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The last few episodes of the show have been about attention — in terms of Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump, in terms of the “big, beautiful bill.” But I also wanted to do an episode that was about attention in terms of itself: If we’re going to say attention is currency, if we’re going to say it’s power — well, what kind of currency is it? What kind of power is it? Where is it strongest? And where is it weakest?
I am a pretty loyal reader of Kyla’s Newsletter, by Kyla Scanlon, on Substack. It often feels to me like it is being sent back in time from some future economy.
And in a way, it is. Kyla is very much a member of Gen Z, and the economy she’s reporting on and theorizing about is the one that Gen Z has been churned out into — an economy that works much more digitally, where attention drives capital as opposed to capital’s driving attention.
She has emerged as a leading theorist of the economics of attention — not how they work everywhere but how they work in the part of the economy, and the part of society, that is most exposed to attentional dynamics.
Kyla is also the author of the book “In This Economy?” and you might have heard some of her different coinages, like “vibecession.” She’s a fascinating person to talk about this with.
Ezra Klein: Kyla Scanlon, welcome to the show.
Kyla Scanlon: Thanks for having me.
What is different about the economy that you live in, that you see, that you feel Gen Z is experiencing, from the way us 40- and 50-year-olds describe or understand the economy?
One of my pieces that went far was “Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress.” It was based on my research over the past year. I’ve been traveling on a quasi book tour — going to a lot of college campuses and conferences.
I’ve been talking to young people about how they experience the economy and how they think about their future. They don’t feel there’s that “path of predictable progress” that their parents or grandparents might have had.
Of course, every generation has had its own challenges. But for Gen Z, you don’t have that predictable return on a college education anymore because of things like A.I. and how expensive college has gotten. You don’t necessarily have a path toward buying a house that feels even remotely approachable. And if you think about retirement or moving through a career path, that also feels really far away.
That whole piece was: What does it look like if this path that everybody has followed has disappeared, more or less?
Let me stay on the topic of the feel of it.
What does it feel like if you can’t see your way to a house, if you’re not sure what the career paths are, not sure what A.I. will do?
If you had to describe the emotional structure of the conversations you’ve had with people, what are the dominant emotions?
I think there’s a lot of worry.
I think everybody picks up on this — there are so many think pieces about how the kids are not all right. There’s a lot of nihilism, concern, fear and anxiety. You sense that when you talk to people, because they don’t really know what to do. This path that has been instilled in you from the time that you were little — go to college, graduate and buy a house — is now out of reach. So when you can’t get that, it feels really far away.
David Brooks had this piece about the rejection generation that I think encapsulated it really well. He said: The Gen Z-ers are facing rejection after rejection. First it’s hard to get into college, and then when you graduate college it’s hard to get a job.
I think that element of always being rejected from everything — or at least feeling like you’re being rejected from everything — creates those elements of nihilism that show up in how Gen Z-ers might spend, save or invest.
Tell me about your “barbell theory” of Gen Z.
Essentially, there are two ways that people seem to be responding to the uncertainty in the economy and the lack of a path of predictable progress.
One path is tool-belt pragmatism, which is people going back to the trees, becoming a plumber or electrician — taking a path that isn’t as speculative and uncertain as getting a bunch of debt and going to college. Other people are going a memecoin gambling or sports-betting type of route.
You have these two ends of extreme risk. Both of those are responses to that path of getting a college education, getting a white collar job and going off into the sunset not really working anymore.
How much of this is a narrative — and how much of it is reality? If you look at unemployment for Gen Z or recent graduates, unemployment for new college graduates is up a bit, but it’s not 30 percent or 40 percent.
I’ve seen people debating the housing question. Were millennials, and now Gen Z-ers, really that far behind other generations on housing? And won’t all those houses get passed on anyway? Is this really a problem?
Is there a divergence in your view between the data on the economy that people in Gen Z are in and how they feel about it? Or does it match?
I still think there are some elements of a disconnect. People might be feeling a certain way because of social media, but that doesn’t always match the data.
When we look at some data points, like how much more you make with a college degree than not, that has eroded over the past couple of years. You’re graduating with a college degree that’s very expensive. You’re not making as much as you expect.
Housing is still quite expensive. Eventually, those homes will pass on. But I think the median age to buy a house now is like 54 years old. In the 1980s, I believe it was 34.
So there are some data points that support the fact that there are these elements of nihilism and perhaps reasons for feeling nihilistic that weave into how Gen Z experiences the economy. But I think it has all been exacerbated by things like social media. There are elements of narrative that might sweep beyond the data, but the data tells the story, too.
You also talk about how there’s not just one Gen Z. There are multiple. What are they?
Yes, I’m an ancient Gen Z.
I’m an elder millennial.
[Laughs.] I graduated right into the pandemic, and I’m part of the Gen Z 1.0s. Those who remember a time in college where you weren’t on Zoom. You were in the work force during the pandemic.
Then you have Gen Z 1.5. That would be where my little brother is. He was in college during the pandemic, and that shaped both his relationship with institutions and the digital world. He got a lot of education via Zoom. He relied on digital tools, as we all did during that time, to forge friendships and connections.
And then Gen Z 2.0 is the people who are in college and high school now. They’re the first part of that generation that is entirely digital. For them, digital seems to be an extension of reality.
Rachel Janfaza was the first person who came up with bucketing the Gen Zs. She had Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. I stuck a Gen Z 1.5 in the middle because I think it deserves a bit more splicing. That’s how you can think of it: the relationship with technology and the relationships to institutions.
The pandemic is such a big player in that — whether you graduated before the pandemic or were in school during it.
Is the implicit argument here that Gen Z is going to be a very different generation because it had this shock that other generations didn’t? That the pandemic hit at a much more formative time for essentially all Gen Z-ers? And what came before them and what’s going to come after them is going to be less volatile than what they went through.
Yes, I think so. I think Gen Z is the beta tester generation. They’re the ones who asked: Is TikTok good for the brain? Can students do Zoom classes and still get an education? Is unfettered access to the internet OK? We’ll see!
We’ve tested a lot of things on Gen Z.
Smartphones and schools.
Yes, we’re learning. A lot of schools are starting to ban smartphones. But yes, I think Gen Z is the generation that hopefully will take lessons for Gen Alpha and perhaps not put them through what the Gen Z-ers have gone through from a digital and mental perspective.
How does A.I. fit into the job market that young people are both seeing and sensing?
A.I. is interesting because there are all these stories about how A.I. is going to replace entry-level jobs and companies are going to automate all this work. For instance, Salesforce said they automated about 30 to 50 percent of their work, or something like that.
If you’re a young person and you’re looking at that, you’re thinking: These jobs that I rely on to get on the bottom rung of my career ladder are going to be taken away from me. I think that creates an element of fear. Where do you even enter the work force if the entry-level jobs are supposedly all going to be done by A.I.?
This is where I think the feeling of it is important, and I feel this a bit myself.
When I talk to people who are starting out in their careers, my sense of the moment is that, for a lot of people, it feels like looking at a wave in the distance. You turn on the news, and they keep telling you there’s a tsunami warning.
And you’re like: Is that wave going to turn into a tsunami? And if so, how quickly? Do I have time to get out? Am I in a high enough area?
You really don’t know. It has become this fog between you and the stable vision of your own future.
When I started out in journalism, it wasn’t clear that I could succeed. But it was never because there might be a massive technological shock to journalism, where a computer would do my job instead of me. Obviously, things like that have happened in manufacturing with both globalization and automation.
There’s this ambient uncertainty. It feels like that moment of liquidness — fog is probably the better metaphor — is very present for people.
If you look at the money that companies are spending, that’s concerning, too. When you see Mark Zuckerberg spending billions of dollars to poach people from OpenAI — it’s like: Clearly something is happening here, and he has some sort of plan. Will that plan work? Who knows.
The metaverse didn’t work out, right?
I think it’s that fog, as you’re saying.
But the overwhelming narrative is that if you majored in computer science: You’re out of luck, man. Good luck out there. Or if you majored in the arts or you’re trying to be an artist, it’s like: Too bad — A.I. is going to do your job.
I think right now, we’re at this phase of technology where we’re trying to establish the human part of it. And we’re not doing a good job at figuring out where humans need to be in the technology equation. And instead we’re like: We’re just going to automate everything. And sorry, we don’t have a plan for people.
This really frightens me, actually. If A.I. was going to hit like Covid did and put 50 percent of the population out of work, we would do something about it. But if it moves slowly and just eats a category and a tranche of jobs at a time, we’re going to blame the people who don’t have jobs.
We’re going to say: Most people who graduated with a marketing degree got a job. So you’re just not working hard enough, you’re not smart enough or you’re not one of the good ones.
We’re so used to doing that in this economy — blaming every individual for what happens, often when it’s very sectoral and technological.
I talk to a lot of politicians about this, and they’re kind of abstractly worried about it. What do we do if A.I. — which seems totally plausible — just doubles 18- to 24-year-old unemployment in the next six years? Or triples it? What policy would we deploy for that?
And none of them have an inkling of a policy answer for it. Nothing.
I am not surprised to hear that. I don’t know if anybody has a good answer.
The common answer you’ll hear is U.B.I. — universal basic income. We’ll just set aside a thousand dollars a month for everybody, and that will be that. I don’t think that’s the right answer, either. Because to be human is to work, to have meaning and to have purpose. If we all of a sudden say: No, you don’t have meaning, and you don’t have purpose — that feels really bad.
I worry, even if we do have a policy response, about societal upheaval that could happen if, all of a sudden, we have no jobs for everybody. I think that could be really bad.
Then there’s the other side of the coin. There’s a good paper that was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research that talks about nails, as in hammer and nails. Nails were 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product like in the 1800s.
That’s a lot of G.D.P., actually.
Yes, and that just shows that technology is always shifting and changing. Nails are no longer that big of a part of our economy. We develop new parts of our economy just like we did with the internet. That’s what we have to hope for, that new jobs will be established with A.I. rather than no jobs at all.
Maybe they will — but it’s that period of disruption that’s very scary.
You mentioned U.B.I., and I’ve been around a lot of U.B.I. discourse. My wife wrote a book on giving people money a couple of years back.
My old colleague Dylan Matthews had a great line on this. He said: U.B.I. is simultaneously too much and too little of a solution for the A.I. problem. If you imagine you’re a unionized interstate truck driver and you’re making $88,000 a year. And now your job is automated by a driverless truck — which we’re pretty close to being able to do. In a far-fetched scenario where we pass a U.B.I., where we give you $22,000 a year and also give me $22,000 a year, it’s not enough of a solution for you. It didn’t replace your income or give you your dignity back. And it’s too much of a solution for me because I didn’t lose my job.
U.B.I. has always struck me as a very strange and fanciful response to A.I. It might be good for other reasons, but A.I. is not going to put everybody out of work all at once. A.I. is going to make workers more productive, which will slow down the hiring of new workers. It’s just a harder problem to solve or address.
How do you think we should address it?
I have no idea.
Even in talking to the policymakers, there hasn’t been anything floated? Is this something that we’re all just going to stare at each other until it’s here?
I think, going to some of your work on attention, you’re going to need a focusing event. And we don’t know what it will be yet. Something will happen that makes it click into place — that this is a real problem we need to deal with now. That people are actually losing their jobs now.
And it’s going to depend on how big that event is. A lot of people lost their jobs to the movement of factories to China. We didn’t really do that much for them.
No.
We just failed to respond to that, and it was very destabilizing over time in our politics.
I was talking to somebody who’s in this world, and he was a big skeptic that A.I. was going to take away jobs, even though he was a big believer in A.I. His argument to me was that there will be a lot of capital investment in data centers, and we’re going to need so many electricians.
And it struck me as very fanciful — this idea that we’re going to turn all of these comms majors into electricians really quickly.
So I just haven’t heard a solution that really makes sense. It’s weird to be hoping for more disruption rather than less. But I think we’d have a much better chance of responding to it well if the disruption is significant enough to be undeniable — than if it is slow and a lot of little pieces happening kind of all at once, but nobody can quite prove what it’s coming from.
My confidence would be higher in an almost emergency scenario of this than it is were there the accretion that I think we’re likely to get.
You’d rather have a flood than a slow drip?
I think so. What do you think would work?
I don’t know, either. That’s the hard part of it.
[Laughs.]
It’s so easy to diagnose problems. It’s much harder to come up with solutions, it turns out.
I think the physical world elements of A.I. are interesting, too. It does require a significant amount of resources. The data centers are massive, and they’re quite loud if you’re near them.
I think we’re speed-running it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a flood rather than a slow drip, just based on the amount of money that’s going into it.
One plausible scenario for what will happen is that it’s going to be during the next economic downturn, when companies need to squeeze their labor forces, that they’re going to make a big transition to A.I.
If you imagine the mixture, attentionally, of a recession, which focuses a lot of coverage and interest on the economy, and watching what companies did in past recessions, which is using this moment to make a technological jump into some higher productivity technology like A.I. — that I think becomes the scenario where this becomes a really dominant conversation.
You can imagine another category of answer to it, which are regulations about how you can and cannot use A.I. to replace people — as well as various kinds of protectionism. There was a somewhat famous interview from a couple years back between Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.
Carlson basically said: Trucking is one of the most common jobs for men in most states. I would absolutely outlaw driverless trucks.
And Shapiro said: You would?
And Carlson responds: What’s wrong with you that you wouldn’t?
I think debates like that — whether we should welcome this productivity increase or try to stop it — will become much more salient in a way that people aren’t ready for yet, because they’re so used to technology just being adopted — as opposed to debated.
Not all progress is progress. What’s also interesting about A.I. is that, yes, it’s being used to replace some jobs. But it’s also being used in ways that are spreading misinformation and capturing people.
People have sent three million messages to the A.I. chicken on Instagram.
That’s just a hell of a sentence that I don’t really understand, to be honest.
Really?
I guess there’s a chicken that’s A.I. generated on Instagram?
You can message it and talk.
Does it say “bawk, bawk”? [Laughs.]
I don’t actually know quite how it messages back, but there have been three million messages exchanged with the chicken.
And there are all sorts of A.I. slop videos on TikTok. That’s a big part of it, too — being a person you find meaning within work but you also find meaning within how you spend your leisure time. And increasingly, people spend it scrolling. Understandably, right?
I was on a plane ride yesterday for five and a half hours. The woman next to me was very nice, but she was scrolling on TikTok the entire time. You can only imagine how A.I. will accelerate the addictiveness of stuff like that, as well as the impact it will have on the labor force.
You talk about how A.I. is going to create this abundance of intelligence that will create a scarcity of truth. Tell me about that.
I think truth is really valuable. It’s the most important commodity of the present moment. And it’s something that is increasingly scarce — and once you lose it, it’s very difficult to regain it.
And I think A.I. is going to create a lot of information and noise. It’s going to become increasingly important for people to be able to sort the truth out from all that.
The A.I. does hallucinate quite a bit. If you’ve ever talked to ChatGPT, it can make things up — and if you point that out, it will correct itself. But even then, you still have to be able to source what the truth is and what that means.
That’s also the problem with social media, too. Those algorithms are designed, and the incentives are perhaps not aligned to the user — they’re aligned toward the corporation. So for anything that people can get addicted to — and there’s a monetary incentive for them to get addicted to it — it will happen.
I think there is a world where A.I. can be a source of truth — but right now I don’t think it is. People take everything it says at face value. The number of “@Grok, is that true?” that I see on X — where people are asking the A.I. to validate a tweet, rather than go and do the research themselves and work that muscle in their brain — is concerning. Because you do have to have a radar for truth. Because it’s so easy to get taken advantage of right now. There’s just so much information, there’s so much noise, and it’s just nonstop.
It’s very easy to make mistakes — and a lot of people do. And you have to be able to know what’s true and what isn’t and have your own moral and value compass.
I guess maybe here would be an optimistic version of this. A very standard story about social media is it shattered the thing we now call consensus reality.
How much we ever had consensus reality I think you can debate — but probably more at some other points in history than at this point in history.
And what is A.I. but an articulator of consensus reality?
When A.I. gives you this sort of middle, common-denominator vision of truth, it’s going to miss perspectives that are valuable at the margins. I think there’s a worry that A.I. is a technology of intellectual mediocrity. It sort of coheres everybody to the same set of consensus ideas. But we’ve been sitting here for so long, lamenting the destruction of that consensus reality. Maybe this world where everybody is asking ChatGPT or Grok what’s true is exactly the thing we’ve been yearning for.
Maybe? I think it has to get there.
[Laughs.] Can’t blame me for trying.
I think there’s a lot of value in optimism. What you’re talking about sounds a lot like dead internet theory — this idea that there’s an intellectual flattening of the public, where people stop coming up with new ideas or challenging themselves. There are a bunch of articles talking about how college students are having a tough time because A.I. is making things a bit too easy. It’s a little too frictionless. I think I worry about that, too — the cognitive effect it could have.
I notice it in myself: I do use A.I. But if I overuse it for research, I notice a lack of sharpening of my own tool kit.
You’ve written a lot about this world, where it seems to you that the social incentive for thinking is being diminished.
I have to be cautious of broad generalization. I make videos about the economy, right?
And newsletters.
Newsletters, and I also wrote a book.
You’re multiplatform.
[Laughs.] I spend a lot of time on social media, and the reason I make videos there is so I can understand the mechanisms.
Every day, I post a video on Instagram or TikTok. That way, I can see how people respond and get a sort of radar for how social media interprets one side of a conversation.
In terms of the social incentive for thinking, I do worry that social media has created elements of polarization — that has been very widely discussed by a lot of people. I think A.I. could exacerbate that and make it more challenging for people to go out and seek information.
There’s a lot of value in memorizing things, so that way you can pull forward that fact rather than Googling it. These arguments are also old. People said the same stuff about Google, that it was making people dumb. Perhaps it’s just that same argument rehashed.
A.I. is also bridged to this other argument you’re making — that attention is infrastructure. One of the things you write is that “traditional economic substrates are land, labor, capital — bedrock inputs to make stuff. But now, the foundational input is attention.” Walk me through that.
That’s an argument that we used to need things to raise money or move through the world. But now you can just have attention. The idea is that attention is increasingly becoming an infrastructure that people have to build upon.
So no longer is the economic foundation something like land — which is very physical labor, a person, capital or actual money. It’s attention, then narrative. The story that you tell to gain that attention is the capital that inflates the attention itself.
And then increasingly now we have speculation on top of both of those. Speculation is the operating layer. It operationalizes the attention and makes it move throughout the world because now you can attach actual dollar signs to how much attention you’re gathering.
Prediction markets would be the best example. Polymarket has a Substack, and they wrote about a man who bet on Mamdani in the mayoral race in New York. And he made $300,000 from it. What he was doing was essentially seeing where attention was going, making inverse bets off that, and seeing where the story and narrative were wrong. He was able to operationalize that attention going in the wrong direction, the stories being incorrect, through speculation via predictive markets.
I think we usually see the attentional economics and revolution as being primarily about digital media. But the way you’re describing it — and I think this is true — sounds like it’s a weird [expletive] child of digital media and the financialization of everything.
It’s the ability to endlessly bet. The venture capitalists are betting, the day traders and the crypto people. In a way, when we just give things our time, we are making a bet about what’s important.
People always talk about the attention economy, but you’re also talking about the speculative economy layered on top of that.
Yes. Influencers get money through views, and that’s the monetization of the attention economy, more or less. But now we’re able to bet on where attention goes. Influencer is a very box situation: You have a video that gets a million views, and you make your money. Blah, blah, blah.
But people can also bet on how many views your video might get. And so that creates this multidimensional aspect to the attention economy.
It creates a feedback loop, too.
I really watched Mamdani and Trump, the way the betting markets drive feedback loops — where people see something happening, and then they begin posting more on it, and then the thing begins happening more. You can also see it in the betting market. They begin posting more on it or giving more money to it, or whatever it might be.
One, it turns attention into capital, because money follows it. And two, it just makes it more real. It’s a way that something starting small can become exponential just through these feedback loops — if it’s sufficiently viral and people keep picking it up.
Where money goes, attention follows — and where attention goes, money tends to follow. So it creates a really, quite nice feedback loop — nice in terms of structure, not necessarily in terms of its effects. And it’s really interesting to watch.
It was fascinating to watch what happened with Mamdani with the prediction markets and how that moved him. I think it has always kind of been this way with prediction markets: People aren’t betting on what they think. They’re betting on what they think other people think.
They’re essentially betting on the attention economy itself and using the stories that people are telling to determine where their money should go. And then, more money follows it.
It’s crypto in a sense.
You said attention is a foundational input. That’s clearly true for a certain set of products.
Does your theory of attention as a major infrastructural input say anything about the big parts of the economy that we just don’t pay that much attention to — things that don’t have big narratives around them? Or is that just sort of not part of this theory?
There’s the physical world, and there’s the digital world.
The attention economy really applies to the digital world. There are elements of attention that can serve the physical world. If care workers need a new policy posture, the more attention they can have on things like that, the better. That’s how you get things done — having a bunch of people talking about it.
But the attention economy primarily sits within the digital world. And the physical world for now is free of it.
There’s a real thing happening here, but there’s also a very speculative, attentional thing happening here.
One thing about A.I. as a technology is that the leading figures of it are big influencers on social media. Sam Altman is probably the most masterful of the C.E.O.s, alongside Elon Musk, at driving attention wherever they want it to go. But the A.I. world is extremely dominant on social media platforms. A.I. is a technology, but it’s also a very compelling story line — in a way that very few other technologies have been.
So how do you think that plays into this?
Yes. I mean the entire S&P 500 is a bet on if the A.I. will make it.
There’s a lot of money making really big bets, and there’s a strong incentive for them to keep attention on it and to hype it up as much as possible.
I remember this one interview that Sam Altman did where he talks about how A.I. is going to require a reordering of the social contract. To go back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, when you hear something like that, you’re wondering: What does that mean for you in the time, however long, you have left on Earth?
The A.I. universe does a great job at keeping attention on them. That’s actually one very useful part about the image and video generation. You’re able to direct a lot of eyeballs toward your A.I. model and then also use it in a workplace. Hype is very valuable.
There’s a company called Cluely that raised $15 million from a16z. They’re interesting, and they have a lot of really engaging videos. They were able to raise a bunch of money off the back of those videos, for what was essentially an A.I. note taker.
They were able to capture attention and the $15 million. Because in this world where ChatGPT, OpenAI and Anthropic are so far ahead, the companies that will win are those who can differentiate. And the way that you differentiate is through attention. And then you get the speculation.
What do they do to capture attention?
Those videos.
Roy Lee, who is a C.E.O., drew an [expletive] on the whiteboard.
They have this line that’s like: “Cheat on everything,” right?
Yes. “Cheat on everything” is very inflammatory within itself. They mastered attention. They got two newsletters out of me and plenty of think pieces out of other people, as well. And it was just based on these videos.
Jake Paul, the boxer — and he was a big YouTuber — he was one of the first Gen Z influencers. He got very popular through stunts in virality.
You see startups now copying this Jake Paul playbook of being loud and in your face. In a world where it’s difficult to differentiate A.I. products —because it’s all essentially the same technology underneath — you have to be able to draw eyeballs. And that’s where you get the speculative capital from venture capital.
Do you know the book “Seeing Like a State” by James C. Scott — the idea that the state has to make things legible to itself?
The algorithm has to make things legible to itself. So those of us following along in life, through the algorithm — we’ll see the things that are legible to the algorithm. Cluely is very legible because they have this high engagement strategy.
On the other hand, $15 million from a16z — it’s nothing. On the list of A.I. investments, it’s pennies. Most of these companies are making or raising a ton of money. Many of them are in stealth mode because they don’t want other people copying them.
There’s a lot happening that is less attentionally salient. But because it’s not visible to the algorithm, we can’t discuss it.
True.
The economics of attention needs to be able to distinguish when attention is also misleading you. What do you think about that?
It’s something I’ve thought a lot about because I do make videos on social media. I can fall into the trap of thinking that’s the entire universe. Most people who use social media can fall into that trap. But there are a lot of companies outside of the attentional universe that are creating very real things.
I think what has been really interesting about the Trump presidency is that he’s expedited the value of attention. For him, attention is the value creation — it’s not the path to value creation. And in doing that, he has established a kind of playbook in politics that others are starting to follow.
There will always be pockets that exist outside of the attention economy. But more and more, things are falling within the purview, including politics.
You have this line on Trump: “ Trump is the first human-algorithm hybrid president — governing via Truth Social truths, bond market reactions and direct market signals. A feedback loop in a suit.”
Tell me about that.
He uses Truth Social as his policy platform. We got an announcement about a bombing of Iran via Truth Social.
He’s able to use this platform that he owns as a way to spread messages and get his point of view out there to move markets that are quite responsive to him. To give his opinions on Elon Musk, to give his opinions on the “big, beautiful bill” and tariffs.
He uses Truth Social as an extension of the presidency in a way that we’ve never really seen a president do. We’ve never had a president who tweets so much — or “truths” so much, I suppose. [Laughs.]
I refuse to use these stupid bespoke verbs.
You had another line that I thought was very perceptive. You said: Typically, events create narratives. But during the Trump presidency, narratives create events.
Talk me through that.
I think it’s all kayfabe to a certain extent.
What is “kayfabe”?
It’s theatrics — “The show must go on” type of thing in W.W.E.
There’s this great essay by Roland Barthes that I always talk about called “The World of Wrestling.” He talks about how they’re always in character and doing stunts and performances. And it’s just always a show.
Elements of politics increasingly resemble wrestling — this theatrical pursuit of justice and truth. You can align it with the way wrestling always has a heel — there’s always a bad guy to defeat. Once you’ve defeated the bad guy, you did a great job and it’s on to the next opponent.
Which is kind of how Trump moves throughout his presidency. He got bored of the war, essentially.
I think this is one of those really interesting things — we get a spectacle, and then we just move on, because the policy never had a strategy.
So did we destroy Iran’s nuclear program? It felt like there was a three- or four-day news cycle here: We bombed Iran. Then there was an intelligence leak that we only set it back by a few months. Then the Trump administration yelled about the leak. And then we just moved on to debating the “big, beautiful bill.”
It’s not that past policy efforts didn’t create spectacles — they did. But the spectacles were yoked to some kind of strategy and end goal.
The tariffs have had this feeling, too. What is our tariff policy at this point and what is it trying to achieve? Does anybody actually know? Could anybody give me an account of our global tariffs and where they think they’re going to be in 30, 60 or 90 days?
There’s something about the way things rise and fall now that genuinely feels different. Even after the big story line has played out, the moment is gone — even if the policy has not been decided or the goal has not been reached. The decay rate has really accelerated.
It feels that way, and I think it creates so much fatigue in people who are paying attention. I think a big part of that is the attention economy.
Trump gets it. He gets how people work, how people consume information. And he knows that in order to keep people engaged you have to keep the story line moving along. The guy is literally a reality-TV star. So I think he understands that better than any president we’ve ever had.
There are valuable parts to that playbook. There’s value in using social media as a tool to spread a message and to capture people’s attention — and then sending them somewhere else rather than just dragging them to the next story line.
But I’m curious — earlier you mentioned that past policies have had some sort of spectacle — have you ever seen anything quite like what we’re seeing now?
No, but it’s hard for me to describe the difference.
The Obamacare fight was like a year, but it was driving to an outcome. There’s a way in which the Trump administration feels like they lose interest before the outcome is reached.
What you just said a minute ago was that Trump gets this better than anybody alive. He gets how to engage you.
Let me try this on you. I do believe it. Everybody always says — everybody, pundits: He’s trying to distract you. The Trump administration is trying to distract you. Muzzle velocity. They’re flooding the zone.
But Trump isn’t trying to distract you. Trump is himself distracted. He doesn’t understand this better than anybody else does — he embodies it.
You said earlier he’s a feedback loop in a suit. I don’t even think it’s that. He’s just very distractible. Listen to him talk. The way his mind works — he often can’t follow the thing he is talking about for more than a couple of sentences before he wanders down another path.
In the first term, somebody who worked for him told me that to try to brief Donald Trump on policy is like chasing squirrels around a garden. They just keep running in different directions.
There’s a sense sometimes that Donald Trump is conceptually in control of events, that he’s got some plan. But I don’t think it’s that at all. I think that he starts things and then loses interest.
In cases where another part of the administration or government is trying to drive something to its conclusion, it keeps going. Congress has a process to try to decide if this bill is going to pass or not pass. Stephen Miller is very focused on his hatred of immigrants — and he’s going to keep using the machinery of government to prosecute that as long as he can.
But Trump just sort of phases in and out of how much he cares about things. Like, what happened to DOGE? That was a big project. Elon Musk was running it. It very much could have continued at that level of aggression after Musk left. A lot of people thought it would.
But we actually don’t hear nearly as much about government reform, waste, fraud and abuse as we did a couple months ago. Trump has moved on, the rest of the administration has, too, and nobody actually owns the thing to drive it.
I think the difficulty with Trump is that he really is like the algorithm — he lives for the moment. It’s all about the current thing. And when the current thing moves on, so does he.
That’s a good point. It sort of refutes the idea that he’s not doing it on purpose — it’s just how he is.
Part of it might be that perhaps I have a hope that some elements of it are on purpose, because then at least it feels like there’s more control. Otherwise, it just feels like a fun house going on in the government because obviously things have very lasting impacts.
Your point about how he is the algorithm — there’s an element of instant gratification in him. He couldn’t fix the war, so he was like: Nevermind.
But now what’s going to happen to Iran? Are they going to continue to develop these weapons? And what does that mean?
There are all of these real answers that we still have to seek. Because everyone does get yanked around in terms of trying to follow what’s happening next, it does create a very distracted, overwhelmed and fatigued public. And then you have things like the “big, beautiful bill” that a bunch of Americans haven’t even heard about.
Imagine Trump as a golem summoned by the attention economy. We are being governed by the human embodiment of the Twitter algorithm. I actually believe this.
So then it creates this interesting question. Because on one hand, Trump is completely dominant over events. But on the other hand, he’s not that successful and remains unpopular.
We’re going to see what happens with the “big, beautiful bill.” His ability to actually drive things all the way to the outcomes he wants is often weak. And now it looks like Republicans are headed for a pretty bad midterm. Senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, just announced he’s not running for re-election.
Because Trump threatened to primary him.
Because Trump threatened to primary him. That’s exactly what I mean. Trump got mad at Thom Tillis for like a second because he wasn’t going to support the level of Medicaid cuts in his bill, threatened to primary him and put at risk a North Carolina Senate seat — which could become the deciding line between Democrats recapturing the Senate or not.
That’s not a person acting out of anything more than a momentary incentive. That’s a person who’s not thinking forward into his own future.
The whole Trump experience in a way is: What would it be like to really live in the algorithm? What does the algorithm miss? What can’t it see?
Attention and its opposite are simultaneously more salient than they ever were before.
Totally. Trump is very focused on, I guess, since he’s a squirrel, the next nut. I think that gets into the digital economy aspect of things.
And then the physical world kind of falls apart because we get science and solar cuts. All these things that have real-world consequences. But since they’re not part of the algorithm or aesthetically pleasing, they get ignored and forgotten about.
I think that’s the biggest consequence of the Trump presidency — that he seems to forget that the physical world needs investment just as much as his digital presence.
Give me your theory of friction.
Basically the idea of friction is that there is value in things being a tiny bit difficult.
When we use digital tools, there really isn’t a lot of friction. For instance, dating apps make dating very easy. DoorDash makes things coming to your house very easy. You can have this frictionless existence.
You also have an algorithm that’s designed around you, serving up anything within your echo chamber. You never really have to think outside of what you’re already thinking unless you choose to.
Whereas in the physical world, there’s a lot of friction. If anybody has flown over the summer, it might have been a challenging experience. We don’t have enough air traffic controllers, and we don’t have enough people doing maintenance on the plane.
It’s just little things that feel like they should be simpler and running smoother. And they’re not, because they’re not part of the digital universe, which gets so much money and investment.
It’s this idea that there’s a bunch of friction in the physical world, and perhaps not enough in the digital world.
Do you think those things are connected? That there’s so much friction now in the real world, in actually building and accomplishing things, that it has created this flight to the digital world? That people are overinvested in the digital world because we’ve done such a bad job managing friction in the real world?
Yes. It’s just easier to be online. You don’t have to reckon with stuff. You can create this curated experience. My boyfriend talks about it all the time: You can present this perfect appearance. And people write about this, too. Your Instagram page is a collection of your best moments ever. So you can kind of have this life that isn’t your life. Whereas in the physical world, you might just be dealing with headache after headache: How do I pay this bill? How do I make rent this month? How to make sure I’m still succeeding in my job. All of those things.
For you there’s a connection between friction and meaning — or frictionlessness and meaninglessness.
How do you draw that?
I think the idea is that when things are a little too easy, it’s tough to find meaning in it. The way I think it might be best to visualize it is from “WALL-E.” If you’re able to lay back, watch a screen in your little chair and have smoothies delivered to you — it’s tough to find meaning within that kind of WALL-E lifestyle because everything is just a bit too simple.
The good parts of life often come through the hardest struggles, and I think that is where people do find a lot of meaning. That’s what all the greats write about: the struggle and the path.
Keep pushing the rock up the hill, more or less. That’s how I think about it — but I don’t have data to back that up.
You do have literary analysis, which I’ve enjoyed. You have a great piece on “The Screwtape Letters.”
Best book.
Why don’t you describe what that book is for people who have not heard of it.
It’s one of my favorite books in the whole world. Have you read it?
I have not read it.
You should really read it. It’s one of my recommendations over here.
It’s this demon called Screwtape. And he’s writing these letters to his demon nephew, Wormwood.
It’s all about how you demonize this human. Wormwood has a human within his care. His whole thing is to bring him into hell and away from God.
And the way that you demonize someone — you’d think you’d want them to go kill somebody, right? That’s how you would think of it. But it’s really just keeping that person stagnant.
All of Screwtape’s letters to Wormwood are about keeping him from feeling anything. Keep him in one place, don’t let him fall in love or get passionate. Just keep him base line and bored. Don’t let him do his prayers. Let him forget all meaning and purpose within his life. That’s when he will come to us, the demons.
And toward the end, Screwtape gets mad at Wormwood, and they eat each other, essentially.
Spoiler. [Laughs.]
It’s a good metaphor for how badness moves through the world.
Badness does usually end up eating other forms of badness. Not to call Trump and Musk demons, but they’re fighting now. Trump is threatening to deport Musk. People who are trying to find the bad parts of people are always going to find them. They eventually turn on each other.
Did you listen to my colleague Ross Douthat’s podcast with Peter Thiel?
I have seen clips. I have not listened to the whole thing yet.
This is largely Thiel’s view of the Antichrist. His theory is we’ll be lulled into the Antichrist’s one-world government by the environmentalists promising peace and safety.
There’s something very strange about that, especially since he’s out there funding Palantir and surveillance technologies. To me, those seem like the kind of tools that would create a one-world, dangerous government.
But from “The Screwtape Letters,” if you’re going to imagine that the worst thing for society is stagnation, that the true path away from godliness is a kind of decadence — there’s a connection between those two theories.
Yes. The way that C.S. Lewis is writing “Screwtape,” or at least the way that I interpreted it, was that if you do have people who are numb to the world around them, it becomes difficult for them to push back, if there is a Palantir takeover or something like that.
There’s also this sense that there’s some type of corrosive meaninglessness in the society we’re building — in the absence of certain kinds of struggles and social structures. And I’m not sure we know how to pull those things apart.
When you said at the beginning of the conversation that the thing you hear a lot is nihilism from young people. And the way A.I. feels to me is: It pushes nihilism.
There’s this sense that: If this can do all my work for me, then what am I exactly?
I don’t think any of us know how to put this on a chart, but it certainly feels to me like people are acting from a sense of its truth.
It’s one of those things that you can feel when you talk to people. There’s this element of fear and worry.
One thing about the U.S. is we don’t really have a social safety net. And so if you do fall because of A.I., how do you climb your way back up?
People are trying to find truth and meaning while having this technology that’s incredibly hypnotic. And it will get more so hypnotic with things like A.I. — which also might take your job.
It’s a bunch of forces all at once that is perhaps too much for humans. We really haven’t evolved that much since we were hunter-gatherers.
In this hotel I stayed in New York, they had all these headlines on the wall from The New York Times.
Great paper.
[Laughs.] The headlines were about people looking for Amelia Earhart and basically everything between 1912 to now. I was looking at that, and they were just the saddest headlines ever. And I was like: I feel like I see all those headlines in just one day now. And that’s a lot for the human brain to process, considering we haven’t really kept up evolutionarily.
You often make the argument that everything feels like crypto now. That feels relevant somehow here. Crypto has this quality of so much energy, hustle, money and attention — all circling a kind of nothing at the core.
I think the more idealistic dreams of what it could do have faded. It’s pretty clearly a vehicle for speculation.
There’s a way in which I think a lot of things are developing a little bit of that quality. Even politics sometimes develops that quality. There’s this kind of nihilism people can sense in it that I think is really depressing.
Same with the economy. If you feel you’ve put in all this work into your education and your learning, and now the deal you’ve been promised isn’t really there. We’re inventing a computer program that can write your essays and do your learning — and produce the kinds of things we are asking you to produce better than you can. You’re still running really fast, still trying to get grades and trying to achieve something. But what is at the core of that? It becomes a little bit less obvious.
I think hollowness is something people sense really well and is very dangerous.
I used to work in crypto and was once very excited about it: This thing is going to be cool, and we’ll have alternatives. It’s increasingly become a speculative asset. There’s that element of hollowness in it.
I know a lot of people who used to work in crypto, and they’re working on very cool projects. There’s a lot of optimism sometimes.
You do see a lot of people in this space asking: What’s behind the curtain?
I think that sort of speculative hollowness, as you’ve pointed out, that does show up in how people are trying to navigate their lives. Because it’s like: What is next? What does this mean? I think part of it is the broken-ladder problem: So you graduate from college — do you get a job?
Twenty-three percent of Harvard M.B.A.s were unemployed three months after graduation. Those are the cream of the crop, right? If they can’t find jobs, then it might be tough for you. You see all this data and you’re wondering what it means for you with housing and career progression. Because people are taking longer to retire.
I think all of those points can create that feeling of hollowness: What is it all for?
I have this sense that we are undergoing a kind of correction — where interest and attention are moving back into things that are more difficult and more real.
I would not have thought I would publish a book on zoning reform and the policies under which we can build transmission lines, and it would become a big national best-seller and throw off endless discourse. We’re talking the day after Gavin Newsom signed a bill really changing the California Environmental Quality Act.
There’s so much energy around even just a conversation about how we do things in the real world. It was pent up. It’s not my book that did this, it’s that people wanted there to be attention on this, and the book was a focusing event.
Even with my work with abundance, I’ve noticed that if you only follow the discourse on X, it would look like people just screaming at each other. That’s a very polarized discourse with aggressive defenders and critics.
Whereas then in the world, as I watch it actually filter through, I find moderates picking up parts of it. I find leftists like Zohran Mamdani picking up parts of it and Gavin Newsom doing parts. Everything is more complex than the simulacra.
Somehow you need to fuse the dynamics of the attention economy and the real economy with the dynamics of performative politics and real politics. The next Democratic or maybe even non-Democratic president will be better at managing both performative policymaking and spectacle — which obviously Joe Biden was not even in the game on — with strategies to actually try to get things done — which he was better on.
Attention has become more like capital, and you need to know how to raise it. But just like with capital, to succeed in the long run you also need to know how to spend it. I think right now there’s a lot more sophistication in the raising of attention than the spending of attention. And that’s going to be societal learning we will all go through it together — and not painlessly.
I wonder if pretty impressive things can’t lie on the other side of it — if we could get some politicians and business leaders who understand both sides of it.
The thing I’ll say about OpenAI and Sam Altman, which is also true for Elon Musk, is that they’re both very good with attention. But OpenAI keeps releasing impressive products. Elon Musk is very good with attention. But SpaceX keeps doing impressive things in space.
There is this way in which the future belongs not to the influencers but to the influencers who can deliver. It’s maybe not enough to deliver without being an influencer, but it’s also not enough to be an influencer without being able to deliver. I think that’s my optimistic take.
I think attention is a precursor to power rather than a byproduct now. As you’re saying: The more attention that you can raise — narrative is a form of capital, memetic storytelling is really useful — you can build all of that around yourself, and then it makes getting into power a bit easier.
The way that I think about it is there’s extractive speculation, and then there’s strategic speculation. Extractive would be like Trump kind of dragging people from one thing to the next, or Cluely’s marketing campaign dragging people along. They end up somewhere and wonder: Where am I?
Strategic would be something like your book, which got a lot of attention and discourse, reaching Gavin Newsom. That was a really good use of the attention economy. I don’t think it was intentional on your part, but it was incredible — the amount of discourse. And now you’ve changed policy. Which is the ultimate goal.
I don’t want to take too much credit for this. It was, hopefully, helpful. But —
He said directly: Shout-out to Ezra.
Fair — but a lot of people have been working on this for a long time before me.
As you’re saying: There has to be an end goal. You can still use the framework of the attention economy to get people to that end goal. That’s what has to happen.
The bones are still important, and I think they’re not going away for a bit. The question will be: Where do they go from here? And you have to be able to send them somewhere.
And then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I really like C.S. Lewis, and so I’d recommend “The Screwtape Letters.”
I’d also recommend “A Grief Observed,” which is also by him. It’s a really nice read on grief.
Grief can feel very lonely when you’re going through it. If you’ve ever gone through a loss, it’s just devastating. You feel like you’re the only person who has kind of experienced something so big and heavy. People are telling you it’s going to be fine. And you’re thinking: It’s not. He just writes in a way that makes you realize you’re not alone.
My last book recommendation is “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” by Richard Bach. It’s about a sea gull that’s told: You’re never going to be able to fly that far and do all this.
He just takes it upon himself to fly. I won’t ruin the ending, but it’s this really nice read on the power of people taking a chance, but also what happens when we forget why we took that chance in the first place.
Kyla Scanlon, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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