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By now you’ve probably noticed your attention being stolen, daily, by your various devices. You’ve probably read somewhere that companies much more powerful than you are dedicated to refining and perfecting that theft. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, MSNBC host and author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource explains in painful detail what you’re really up against. “It’s absolutely endemic to modern life,” Hayes says. “Our entire lives now is the wail of that siren going down the street.”

Hayes talks about his own experience of becoming famous enough to be recognized and becoming a little addicted to that attention. He explains how companies have learned to manipulate natural biological impulses in ways that keep us trapped. And he invokes Marx, who argued that capitalism alienates workers from their labor, to explain how technology is now alienating all of humanity from attention, which is perhaps more insidious because it lives in our psyches. “I think it’s because there’s something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can’t be replicated.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Child: When my parents are on the phone, it usually makes me feel, like, really bored and makes me want to do something, because I don’t really have anything to do. And I’m kind of just, like, sitting there and watching them on the phone.

Claudine Ebeid: And what do you think about the amount of time that Dad and I spend on the phone?

Child: Well, I think, like, when they had landlines and stuff, you wouldn’t spend too much more time on the phone, and you would spend it on other types of devices.

But now, since it’s all in the phone, you wouldn’t really be seeing your parents, like, on a computer. You’d only see them doing that for, like, work or something.

Hanna Rosin: That’s our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, and her daughter. We’re hearing from them because when we talk about screen time or how phones are manipulating us, it’s often adults talking about kids. But of course, it goes the other way too.

Chris Hayes: Every kid is engaged in a kind of battle for their parent’s attention.

Rosin: This is Chris Hayes, my guest this week.

Hayes: I mean, I think every kid notices how distracted parents are by the phone.

Rosin: Who’s the meanest to you about it?

Hayes: My youngest.

Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)

Hayes: Yeah.

Rosin: Not the teenager?

Hayes: No, actually, I think the youngest, because youngest children have a real antenna for attention. They come into a family in which they recognize immediately that there is, at some level, a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all for parental attention.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this week on the Radio Atlantic: the war for your attention.

You probably know Chris Hayes best as a host on MSNBC. He’s the author of a new book: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. And he doesn’t just mean parental attention. He’s talking about attention in politics, commerce, social media—basically, how capitalism found a uniquely human weakness to exploit.

But of course, since the topic is so often seen only through the lens of parents and children, we started out sharing how we can feel like hypocrites when we police our kids’ devices.

[Music]

Hayes: The one that I’ve caught myself doing is: your child asking for screen time when they’re, you know, not allowed to or it’s not normally the time, and giving them, like, a sharp “no”—and then going back to looking at your phone. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh, Chris. One thousand percent. Even the fact that we get to use the term screen time, and guess who doesn’t get to use the term screen time. They can’t be like, Dad, you only have an hour of screen time a day.

Hayes: That’s right. And one of the things I write about in the book is that when we think about the state of boredom, or being bored, I think we associate it with being a child. I mean, I remember days in the summer, particularly, where I was a little underscheduled. I was just sort of sitting around—these periods where you feel like, I have nothing to do.

And the reason I’ve come to believe that we associate [boredom] with childhood is, as soon as we are old enough to control our lives, we do everything possible to make sure we never feel it. That’s why it’s associated with childhood: because children don’t have full agency. Once we develop full agency, we’re like, I’m not gonna be in that state. I’m gonna do whatever it takes not to be in that state.

Rosin: Chris writes about how there are two kinds of attention: voluntary attention and compelled attention.

Hayes: So compelled attention is part of our deepest biological, neurological wiring. It’s the involuntary reaction if you are at a cocktail party and a waiter drops a tray of glasses.

[Glass breaking]

Hayes: You can’t help it. You cannot control whether you’re going to pay attention to that. It’s often the case with, you know, an explosion—

[Loud boom]

Hayes: —or the siren that is on top of an ambulance or a cop car as it goes down the street.

[Siren wailing]

Hayes: That involuntary attention is the part of our neurological wiring in which our attention is compelled, independent of our volition and will, as a kind of almost biological fact, due to the fact that we needed to be alert to danger, basically.

And then there’s voluntary attention, which is when we, using the conscious will, flash the beam of thought where we want it to go.

Rosin: So [if] I sit down and read your book, that’s voluntary attention.

Hayes: Correct.

Rosin: Is one better than the other?

Hayes: Well, I mean, I think that, look—involuntary attention is probably necessary for the survival of the species. So in that sense, it’s fundamental, and I wouldn’t say it’s worse. The problem is: So let’s say you’re reading the book. You’ve made this volitional decision, and as you’re reading the book, the little haptic buzz of a notification in your phone goes off.

[Tech vibration noise]

Hayes: Now, you notice that because it’s designed to use the deep circuitry of compelled attention to force your attention onto the physical sensation of the phone.

That is a perfect example of the one-way ratchet of what I call “attention capitalism,” is that the more important attention gets, and the more that people, corporations, and platforms have sort of optimized for it competitively, the more they will try to use the tactics of compelled attention to get our attention, rather than to get the part of us that’s volitional attention.

Now, of course, you still have human will. And in that moment, you’re going to decide, Am I going to take my phone out to see what the notification was or not? But that little moment, that little interruption, that’s pretty new at scale. I think it’s totally new at scale.

And it’s also just absolutely endemic to modern life. It’s our entire lives now, is that wail of the siren going down the street, the clatter of the drop tray.

[Siren wails, glass breaks, phone buzzes]

Hayes: There’s very powerful forces attempting to compel our attention away from where we might want to put it in any moment, because that’s a kind of hack for them for getting our attention.

Rosin: Right. You’re a little less than aware of it. Like, you’re not thinking, I want to look towards the waiter dropping the tray, or I want to look towards the ambulance. You’re just kind of reactive.

Hayes: Yeah, you’re reactive, and you’re at your sort of biophysical base, right? The comparison that I use in the book, and I think this might be helpful for people to think this through, is how hunger works. With food, we have these deep biological inheritances where there’s just universal deep wiring towards sweets, for instance, or fats, because they are extremely calorie dense.

You can exploit that at scale, as McDonald’s has and other food operations, and find that you could basically sell cheeseburgers and salty fries and Coca Cola all over the world, because you’re working on that deep biological substrate in people. But it’s also the case when you ask, Well, what do humans like to eat? it’s an impossible thing to answer, because the answer is: basically everything, right? It’s amazing, all the different things.

And what we see in sort of modern food culture and the food industry is a sort of fascinating kind of battle between these twin forces, right? The kind of industrialized production and fast food that is attempting to sort of find the lowest common denominator, speak to that deepest biological substrate so that they can sell corn syrup to everyone—and then all of the amazing things that people do with food and what food means as culture, as history, as self-expression, as expression of love and bonds.

And I think, basically, there’s a very similar dynamic that we now have with attention, where our compelled attention and our deep wiring is being extracted and exploited by very sophisticated, large, and powerful economic entities.

And yet we still do have this thing called voluntary attention. And you know, what’s sort of amazing, too, about the internet age is, like—and I say this in the book—like, I’ve watched hours of people cleaning carpets, which I find totally compelling and almost sort of sublime and soothing. And I wouldn’t have guessed that that was a thing I wanted to pay attention to.

You know, the internet has opened this cornucopia of different things you can pay attention to. So we’re constantly in this battle between these two forms of attention that are in our heads and the different entities that are trying to compel our attention against our will, and then our own kind of volitional attempt to control it.

Rosin: Chris, were you high when you were watching videos of cleaning carpets?

Hayes: (Laughs.) Mostly not. Occasionally yes, but mostly I have been sober while watching the cleaning carpets, and I’ve still found them incredibly calming.

Rosin: What? (Laughs.) So that’s your ASMR, is carpet cleaning?

Hayes: I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but they take these super, super dirty carpets—it’s like a genre video. There’s a million different ones now, which indicates that that’s not just me. Lots of people feel this way.

Rosin: It’s okay. It’s okay. There’s no judgment in this podcast at all.

Hayes: This is my kink.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You can find your calm wherever you need it. I’m just curious.

Hayes: (Laughs.) So yeah, that’s basically how I think about compelled involuntary attention. And I do think that, because I think we’re more familiar with it in the context of our appetites and hunger, I think it’s a really useful and grounding metaphor, because I think it functions in a very similar way.

Rosin: Essentially, what you’re saying is, the way this works is: We’ve got some biological impulses, let’s say, for example, to want social attention, just to be noticed by others. That’s in us, and that’s fine.

Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that it’s so foundational, social attention— and I think it’s slightly counterintuitive because I think people have very different attitudes and personal dispositions towards social attention. Lots of people don’t like it. But the foundational truth about being a human is: We come into the world utterly helpless and dependent, completely, on care. And the thing prior to that care is attention.

And the best way to see this is the child’s wail. The most powerful tool that the newborn has is the cry. And the reason they have the cry is: It’s their siren. It compels our attention. And the reason that it compels our attention, and the reason they have to have the ability to compel our attention, is because without attention, they will perish. And that is our human inheritance. That need from the moment we come gasping into the world for others’ attention—that is foundational to every single one of us.

Rosin: So we have this need for social attention. It’s a basic need. Whether we’re an introvert or an extrovert, that’s not what we’re talking about. We just have this basic need for social attention. What is different about seeking social attention online?

Hayes: Okay, this is really, I think, a key thing to think about. Before civilization, you got social attention from people that you knew that you had relationships with, right? There weren’t really strangers. And you might be able to put your social attention on someone you don’t know, like a kind of godlike figure or a mythic hero that tales were told of, right? So you could put your attention on a person you don’t know, but the social attention you received was all from people that you had a bilateral relationship with. What happens with the dawn of what we might call fame—and there’s an amazing book about this that I cite—

Rosin: Leo Braudy.

Hayes: Yeah, Leo Braudy’s great book. He says Alexander, basically, is the first famous person, and he explains why. But fame is the experience of receiving social attention from people you do not know, and at scale.

Now this is a very strange experience. And the reason I know this is because I happen to live it. And so in the progression of civilization, you start to have famous people, and more and more people can be famous with the dawn of industrial media: movie stars, pop stars, all this stuff.

But it’s still a very, very, very tiny percentage of people that can be known by strangers—that can have social attention being paid to them by strangers. That just generally doesn’t happen for most people, and most people are gonna have received social attention from people they have relationships with, and they might put their social attention on all sorts of public figures—the president or celebrities and other people—but they’re not getting it from people they don’t know.

That just is a very tiny sliver of humans that can have that experience, and now it is utterly democratized for everyone for the first time in human history. I mean, it’s genuinely new, genuinely a break, has not happened before. Anyone can have enormous social attention from oceans of strangers on them. You can have a viral moment online. You can cultivate a following. This experience of social attention from strangers—precisely because it is so at odds, I think, with our inheritance—is weird and alienating. And there’s a bunch of ways it is. One of the ways it’s alienating is that we are conditioned to care what the people we love think about us.

We’re conditioned to care if we’ve hurt someone that we have a relationship with. But it’s very different if you’ve insulted or hurt just a total stranger who’s saying mean things to you, or you’ve disappointed them, or they’re angry at you. That comes into you, psychologically, indistinguishably from it coming from kin or lover or friend.

Rosin: So we just basically, our—I don’t know if I want to call them our intimacy compass—something gets scrambled. We just don’t have the category to react or manage that category of social attention. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Hayes: Truly, there’s a kind of clash here between the data set we’re trained on, if you will, and what we’re encountering. And the reason—again, this is a place that I really know, right? I didn’t used to have people come up to me on the street, and then I became famous enough that people did. And I’ve experienced all the ways that that’s strange and alienating, and I’ve given a lot of thought—partly as a kind of full-time psychological undertaking, so that I don’t go crazy, because I do think it’s kind of distorting and madness inducing in its own way.

And what we’ve done is basically democratize the madness-inducing aspects of celebrity for the entire society. Every teenager with a phone now can be driven nuts in precisely the way that we have watched generations of celebrities and stars go crazy.

Rosin: You mentioned Bo Burnham in your book and the movie he made, Eighth Grade. When he talked about why he made that movie, he said that same thing. He had a similar experience to you—he went viral at a pretty young age—and then he realized that every eighth grader was having the kind of experience that he had had, which he found so alienating but that had now become a common experience. Can you read a paragraph for me from your “social attention” chapter, which I think is relevant to this conversation?

Hayes: Sure. I’d love to.

Rosin: Just the paragraph that starts with “the social media combination.”

Hayes: “The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.”

Rosin: That really hit me. It’s a dark vision. It’s like they tap into our thirst perfectly but then just keep the glass of water just out of reach, you know?

Hayes: Well, and I think that’s because there’s something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can’t be replicated.

Rosin: Yeah.

Hayes: —that, you know, the thing that we’re chasing is something ineffable and nonreplicable. And it’s the reason we chase it, because it’s what makes life worth living, at a certain level, is to be recognized and seen. Relationships of mutual support and affection and care with other people—you know, that’s it. That’s the stuff of it. And we are given a tantalizing facsimile that some deep part of us cannot help but chase, but it can’t also be the real thing.

Rosin: When we come back: who exactly is benefiting from this attention economy, why it feels so bad for the rest of us, and what we can do about it. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: We’re back. And we’re starting with something that everyone who gets social attention from strangers learns.

Hayes: What you quickly find is that positive compliments and recognition—they just sort of wash off you. But the insults and the negativity cuts and sticks. I mean, do you not feel that way as someone who has some public profile?

Rosin: Yes, yes. It’s happened to me, and I was so surprised at how hurt I was. And when I look back, I think, like, I literally don’t really know those people. Like, there’s just something so, Ugh. It’s, like, ancient, the feeling—like you’re being pilloried or something, like you’re in the public square—and it feels terrible, and I don’t understand why. Like, I could just shut my computer, and it’d be gone, but it does not feel that way, internally.

Hayes: Yeah, and I can think of days I spent in that haze. You know, when you come out of it, you’re like, Why did I let myself feel that way? Like, Why did I spend a whole day? Like, Why was I—I can even think of moments of being distracted from my kids because I was sitting there and feeling wounded and hurt and ruminating on a mean thing someone who I don’t know said online. And I’m distracted, and my attention’s on that instead of my wonderful child sitting on my lap, you know? (Laughs.)

Rosin: Well, I think the lesson to learn from that is what you’re talking about in this book, is how vulnerable we are. Even when it doesn’t make intellectual sense, there is some way that we’re vulnerable in this moment. We can’t completely control our reactions and choose, voluntarily, not to pay attention to this thing. We don’t have that kind of agency—not yet, anyway.

Hayes: That’s exactly right. You know, attention is the substance of life. That is what our lives add up to. It’s in every moment, we are choosing to pay attention to something, or we’re having it compelled, but we’re paying attention to something. And that’s what adds up to a day and a week and a month and a year and a life.

And it’s also finite. You know, this is one of the key points I make, is that part of the value—and the reason it’s so valuable, and the reason there is such competition for the extraction of attention—is that unlike information, it’s capped. It’s a finite resource. It’s that people are figuring out how to take one or two extra slices of the pie, not grow it. And that’s the other thing that leads to the feeling of alienation and the feeling that something has been taken away from us because of its finitude.

Rosin: Well, let’s talk about attention as a resource, because we’ve talked a lot about how it works in us, the individuals, and permeates our lives, but I want to talk about a broader social context. You make this very compelling analogy between our attention problem and Marxist ideas. I did have this image of you at a bookstore one day, like, being bored and coming across a copy of Das Kapital, and like, a lightning bolt goes off. Yes! It’s like Marx but for the information age. It’s a really compelling analogy. Can you explain it?

Hayes: Yes, I mean, you know, I started reading Marx in high school, which is a weird thing to say, but it’s true. Here’s the basic argument Marx makes about labor.

So he’s living at this time where there’s this new thing called “wage capitalism,” “wage labor.” People, you know, sell their labor on a per-hour basis.

Rosin: And how is that different from people’s relationship to labor before? Just so we get the analogy.

Hayes: Totally. So let’s think about a cobbler, right? You’re in the preindustrial age. You got your little shop. You make a shoe. And there’s a few things about this process that are distinct. One is, there’s a telos; there’s an arc to it. You start with the raw materials, then you put them together, then you put the sole on, then you put the finish on. In the end, you have a shoe, and you own that shoe, and then you sell it in your store in exchange for money.

Now, compare that experience to the wage laborer in a shoe factory who is at one position stamping soles 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. In both cases, you could say that sort of preindustrial cobbler and the shoe-factory worker are both laboring.

But now there’s this distinct thing called “labor as a commodity” that has a wage price and a set of institutions to take the labor in exchange for that wage, and a set of technological and economic developments that produce a situation in which you go from being the cobbler, who makes the whole shoe, to being in a factory 12 hours a day, stamping a sole.

And Marx talks about this as the root of alienation. You’re just alienated from yourself, from your humanity. You’re not doing a recognizably human thing. You’re doing something that feels robotic and mechanical, but also that the value that you’re creating is literally outside of you. I mean, to go back to the cobbler, when he makes the shoe, he actually owns the shoe. If he wanted to make the shoe and give it to his kids, he could do that—and sometimes cobblers would, right? But the factory worker doesn’t have that. The factory worker is alienated from the value of the shoe. He’s stamping the sole, and when it goes down the line, it gets sold off somewhere else. It’s literally outside of him. It’s alien to him.

So this is the basic Marx labor theory of value, right? That you have this transformation in society, economic conditions, institutions that took a thing that was fundamentally human—effort, toil, whatever you want to call it—and transformed it into this new thing that was a commodity that could be priced and bought and traded.

Rosin: Called labor.

Hayes: Called labor. And I think, basically, there’s something happening right now with attention that’s similar. People have always paid attention to things, and that attention has always had some value, and there’s people who have utilized that value for all kinds of purposes—P. T. Barnum, Mark Antony: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

You know, there’s always been a value there, but we’ve entered an age that I think is similar to the industrial age—but for attention—where a set of institutions, technologies, and arrangements have produced a world in which our attention is being extracted from us, commodified, and sold at a price, often in millisecond auctions to advertisers.

And that extraction leads to a profound sense of alienation, similar in some ways to that sense of alienation and that alienation of the laborer. And yet there’s one more way in which it’s even more insidious, I would argue, which is that compelled, involuntary aspect.

So labor can be coerced forcibly. I mean, you can, you know, use a whip or a gun to make someone do something. If you put a gun to someone’s head and say, Dig a ditch, you’re coercing. You’re forcing that labor. But they know they’re doing it. If you fire a gun, your head will snap around before you know you’re even doing it.

And so because of this involuntary, compelled aspect of our biological wiring for attention, this new competitive attention capitalism is working to extract it at such a deep level that it’s compelling it, at some way, before we’re even able to make a volitional choice about it. And that feeling is this profound, deep feeling of alienation.

I think this alienation is so ubiquitous. I think we all feel versions of it, and I found the concept of alienation, which I always found a little foggy in the past, very clarifying. Something that should be within us is outside of us, and that within us is my control over my own thoughts. That’s the thing that should be within me. That’s the nature of consciousness itself, what it means to be of free will, and yet that is being extracted and commodified and taken outside of me.

Rosin: So we’re not exactly compelled. Nobody’s holding a gun to our head. So I don’t know that you could say it’s worse. It’s just more confusing because we are participating. So in some sense—

Hayes: Yes, that’s a good point. Yes, there’s not the same sense of violation, right? Because in some ways it feels like we’re consenting. I think you’re right. That muddies it and also gives us a weird feeling of shame and guilt.

Rosin: One consequence we’re seeing is the kind of people who thrive in this age—obviously, Donald Trump. You mention Elon Musk a lot in the book, which I think is a specific point. Like, the Trump point is kind of obvious. Like, why someone like that thrives in an age of attention, I think we intuitively understand that. Musk is a little more complicated.

Hayes: Well, look—here’s what unites them, right? It’s fundamentally: These are people that understand that attention matters more than anything, even at the cost of negative attention. And this is really the key thing to understand, I think, that has really warped our public discourse. The thing that separates social attention from other, more elevated forms of human interaction is that it’s necessary but not sufficient.

Someone flirting with you across the bar is social attention, a pleasant kind. Someone screaming at your face because you’re too close to them on the subway is also attention. And that’s the weird thing about attention. It could be of either valence and everything in between.

In a world that increasingly values attention over all else, what you get is you unlock the universe of negative attention and its power, because if all that matters is attention, then negative attention is just as good as positive attention. Now, most of us are conditioned to not like negative attention. But there’s a certain set of people who, either through a sort of intellectual understanding—sometimes this happens, where you’ll read interviews with creators who are like, Oh yeah. Once I started trolling, I got more views, right?

So part of it is: The algorithms select for negative attention. But part of it is just a deep brokenness in their personality, and I think this is true of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to seek out negative attention because it’s attention. And this creates a kind of troll politics writ large, and I think we’re sort of watching, in some ways, the Musk era supplant the Trump era, if that makes sense?

Rosin: What do you mean? What do you define as the Musk era?

Hayes: So most politicians, they want positive attention, and if they can’t get positive attention, they want no attention and then, underneath that, negative attention, right? So it’s like, you want people to like you and know your name, or you want to stay out of the news. And what Trump realized is that, no, it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative, as long as you’re getting attention,

Musk has now taken this insight to actually having captured a platform that he purchased, where he is now operationalizing this at scale. So it’s like the higher synthesis of the insight of Trump. He’s understood that attention is the most valuable resource, and this is true in monetary terms. I mean, look at what’s happened—this I actually get wrong in the book because I was writing it too early.

Look what happened: He buys Twitter, okay? He buys it for $44 billion. So he gets it so he could be the main character on this. He so obsessively pursues this attention that it destroys the actual value of the entity. So lighting $25 billion on fire, right, all in this sort of broken pursuit of attention. But then, using this attention and using the platform, he helps elect a president who puts him, essentially, at the seat of power that produces an enormous boon in his personal wealth because people are like, Oh now he is close to power, and it has netted him hundreds of billions of dollars in his personal value.

And it’s the most incredible allegory for the entire attention age. Here are these two guys, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who seem to recognize more than anyone that attention is the most valuable resource and that you should do whatever you can to pursue it, even if that means acting like a maniac. And it’s kind of worked for both of them.

Rosin: That seems so huge and overpowering. I mean, there’s a way of listening to you and reading this book and fully seeing it. Like, we can see the train wreck in our own lives and sort of out there in the world. But you might read the book and think, Okay, this is my own ordeal—like, something I have to combat. I have to put my phone away. I have to chain myself to the trees or whatever.

Hayes: Yeah. I mean, so the first thing I would say is that the cause for optimism, which I have some, is that I feel this is pretty untenable and unsustainable, because I think the sense of exhaustion and alienation so ubiquitous and profound that I don’t think it can keep going that way. And actually, I think that there’s unbelievable latent energy for something different than what this is.

There are ways that attention can still be bought and sold that isn’t this particular to-the-second, algorithmic, infinite scroll that we’re all now trapped in, right? So I think you are going to see flourishing of alternate means. And you see this, I mean—Substack, the longform newsletter. We’re seeing it happen. Like, Substack is growing because people do want to read long things from people that they think are interesting, and not just algorithmic serving of short-form video. That’s a different model. It’s a for-profit model, but it’s a different model and, I think, a better one and one that’s less extractive and alienating for our attention.

You know, vinyl records were completely supplanted by cassette tapes and then CDs. And then, starting about 10 years ago, they started growing, and they’ve been growing every year, and they’ve been growing at huge paces, and there’s now a thriving vinyl industry. And the reason is that, I think, when you are streaming music, you have the twitchy, short-form attention extraction of going to the next song, or maybe I want something else. When you put on a record, you commit, right?

The commitment mechanism is the triumph of the volitional will over the involuntary attention compulsion, right? It’s like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, right? We make a commitment: I’m going to read this email from this Substacker I subscribe to. I’m going to listen to this album, which I’ve put on vinyl. These commitment methods—and, again, they could be in for-profit context—I think we are going to see flourishing and more energy behind that.

And the other example I use, because I talked about hunger before, is to think about what’s happened with how opposition to the sort of corporate, industrial food system the U.S. has worked. So you’ve had an entire thriving ecosystem and set of businesses built up in opposition to precisely the forms of extractive and exploitative food capitalism that I think is parallel to attention capitalism.

And I think we are going to see that. There are people that market dumb phones now, and I think there’s gonna be a lot more of them. I can imagine a world in which, in the same way that a certain kind of parent doesn’t feed their kids fast food, you start to see that more and more, that people kind of just opt out of this entire system, to the extent they can.

Rosin: Do you think we’re being exploited, and we should be mad about it?

Hayes: Yeah, I do. I do. I think that there’s something pretty dark and insidious about how the major platforms, particularly, are engineering this kind of attention compulsion. And I think we are going to enter an era in which we start regulating attention seriously. You’re seeing this call—you know, in Australia, they’ve already banned social media for children under 16. You’re going to see more and more calls for that. But also, I can imagine other ways that we try to regulate it, whether it’s hard caps—regulated hard caps on screen time. I mean, that sounds so crazy and kind of un-American, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s a good idea!

Rosin: Well, I take hope in the schools. I mean, schools, not just in the U.S. but all over the world, are starting to get pretty serious about no phones at all during class time, which is radical. If you’re a teenager, that’s a radical change in your life. So that’s hopeful. I will say one thing your book has really done for me very concretely is make me appreciate my group chats.

Like, after I read your book, I went back and I thanked—you know, I thought, Oh, you know, I’ve got a couple of group chats that are so fun. And I just went and thanked everybody on them.

Hayes: That makes me so happy to hear that, because this is a book written by a person who genuinely loves the internet and has loved the internet most of his adult life. I mean, I’m an early internet adopter, and what the group chat is doing is: It’s using technology to connect actual people that know each other.

And there’s lots of stuff that could happen in group chat that could be messy or bad, because humans can be mean or gossipy to each other. But fundamentally, there’s not an interposition of some entity trying to monetize it. It’s a noncommercial space. It’s a technology that’s a noncommercial space.

It feels like the early noncommercial internet. You just go on with your friends, and you make jokes, and you share stuff, and that’s it. No one comes in with a five-second ad. No one tries to extract your attention against your will. It’s a set of bilateral relationships, voluntarily entered to, in a space that is noncommercial.

And that’s the other thing we really need. Like, we have physical public spaces that are noncommercial, and they are so vital, whether that’s schools or libraries or parks. Increasingly, the internet is just totally captured by commercial spaces. And it used to be entirely noncommercial, and now it’s entirely commercial. And those commercial spaces will ultimately further the kind of extractive attention capitalism I’m critiquing. But there are ways to create—and the group chat right now is the chief among them—noncommercial spaces of digital connection.

Rosin: Okay, everyone listening, go do more group chats. Just go engage in your group chats. And Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for writing this book and explaining this all to us.

Hayes: Thank you for reading it. It really means a lot to me and thank you for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Ena Alvarado fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

My thanks again to Chris Hayes for joining me. His new book is The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

This week, House Republicans created a select subcommittee to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and uncover the “full truth that is owed to the American people,” Speaker Mike Johnson said. Presumably this is a “truth” that somehow fell outside the frames of the thousands of videos taken that day that showed rioters storming the building and beating police officers with whatever weapons were at hand. Despite January 6 being an extraordinarily well-documented crime, many Republicans seem intent on whitewashing what many federal judges, jurors, and really any average American citizen can see with their own eyes.

In the past year, I’ve gotten to know many J6ers well. My partner, Lauren Ober, and I made the podcast We Live Here Now. The thing they had all been waiting for are the pardons that President Donald Trump delivered as promised “on day one.” Trump kept his promise. Hours after being sworn in, he gave clemency to more than 1,500 people convicted of involvement at the Capitol that day. Among them were some longtime militia leaders who carefully planned the riot. Now they’re free. For some, this is order restored; for so many other Americans, this is lawless abandon. And not everyone is reacting to the pardons the way you might expect.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Marie Johnatakis: Hello?

Hanna Rosin: Hey, this is actually Hanna Rosin. I’m calling on my son’s phone for various reasons.

Johnatakis: Hanna! How are you?

Rosin: You sound happy.

Johnatakis: I am. I just got done bawling.

Rosin: Bawling. As in crying. Hard.

Johnatakis:  I think everything just came out. I was just holding it in for the last how many years?

Rosin: That was Marie Johnatakis, whose husband, Taylor, was just pardoned by President Donald Trump. He’d been sentenced to over seven years for what he did at the Capitol on January 6. Now he’s coming home.

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

A few hours into his second term, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some had been charged with serious felonies, like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. Others were charged with misdemeanors, like trespassing and disorderly conduct.

I’ve gotten to know a lot of January 6ers over the last couple of years, so I know how these prosecutions have upended their lives. And I know that for a lot of them, the pardons have restored their sense of justice. For them, this week feels like the world is set right again.

And as I checked in with them this week, and hung out outside the D.C. jail, mostly I just saw the chasm more clearly: how one person’s order restored is another person’s lawless abandon.

Johnatakis: I know this is going to sound crazy, but I have just really felt like Trump will do what he says he’s gonna do. And so, ever since that, I was like, “Well, if Taylor gets pardoned, it will be the first day.”

Rosin: Three weeks ago, when her world was still in chaos, Marie Johnatakis bought a one-way ticket home for Taylor. Trump had mentioned that he might pardon all the January 6ers, but you could never be sure. Politicians don’t usually do what they say, her daughter told her. And for a family whose only working parent had been in jail for more than a year, an airline ticket is a luxury.

But Marie had watched the video over and over of Trump telling an NBC reporter that he would pardon the J6ers on day one of taking office.

Donald Trump: We’re gonna look at everything. We’re gonna look at individual cases—

Kristen Welker: Everyone?

Trump: Yeah.

Welker: Okay.

Trump: But I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: You’ll issue these pardons.

Rosin: And then on day one, the world flipped.

Man: First we have a list of pardons and commutations relating to the events that occurred on January 6, 2021.

Trump: Okay. And how many people is this?

Man: I think this order will apply to approximately 1,500 people, sir.

Trump: So this is January 6. And these are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Full pardon.

Rosin: On Monday night, just before midnight, Marie finally picked Taylor up from prison, and she sent me a picture. They sat side by side, smiling, like a late Christmas-card photo. Marie hasn’t sat side by side with her husband since he was taken into custody just before Christmas 2023.

I asked her if she thought his transition home would be rocky, and she said no—it’llbe seamless. Taylor has written each of their five children a letter a week from prison, and he sometimes reads them books over the phone. In her mind, family harmony will be quickly restored, and so will the rightness of all things.

Johnatakis: I mean, this started with January 6, four years ago, and we were the scum of the Earth. We were domestic terrorists. We were people that you were supposed to be afraid of. Every time Trump had anything with criminal charges or anything like that, he has really been our hope for anything that would ever mean a pardon for us. And so a lot of us feel like it was one miracle after another.

And people don’t look to Trump—people in the movement on the chats that I’m on and stuff like that don’t look to him like a savior. But I think a lot of the people—almost everyone has faith, like a faith in God, a faith in Jesus. And I do hear a lot of like, for us, it’s a miracle.

Rosin: There is a whole other way that these pardons could have rolled out.

A little more than a week before inauguration, Vice President J. D. Vance made it clear to Fox News that he wasn’t expecting blanket pardons.

J. D. Vance: If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.

Rosin: During the transition, I spoke with Republican lawyers who imagined there might be some kind of review board, like maybe a Justice Department committee that would evaluate cases such as Taylor’s.

Taylor was not among the several hundred convicted solely of misdemeanors, such as trespassing or disorderly conduct. But also, he was not among the small handful convicted of seditious conspiracy. His assault charge hung on the fact that he was yelling into his bullhorn, urging a crowd to push a barricade into a row of cops. All captured on video.

Taylor Johnatakis: One foot! One, two, three, go!

Rosin: And under the J. D. Vance scenario, there would have been qualified lawyers debating in a room about degrees of “assault” and what length of sentence they merit. But instead, Trump chose to go with a blanket pardon, which sounds uncomplicated but actually brings maximum chaos.

Tuesday night, I was walking down my own street past a house that I know well. It’s a kind of safe house for January 6ers. Micki Witthoeft lives there. She’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed at the Capitol that day. So does Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy, was sentenced to over seven years for bringing a gun to the Capitol. Occasionally, a young January 6er named Brandon Fellows stays there too.

My partner, Lauren Ober, and I got to know the people in that house last year when we made an Atlantic podcast about it called We Live Here Now. I’ve walked by their house hundreds of times. But when I walked the dogs past the house on Tuesday in freezing weather, I saw Brandon outside, wearing an ICE jacket—as in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is his version of a sartorial troll.

Rosin: So what’s going on? I guess I don’t even know the basics of what’s going on.

Fellows: Last I heard was from Jen. We were at lunch with Stewart Rhodes—breakfast with Stewart Rhodes today.

Rosin: He’s here?

Fellows: Yes. But we’ve all been up, and he’s taking a nap real quick. So we just got back, but—

Rosin: Is he staying here?

Rosin: I froze—and not from the cold. Stewart Rhodes, the guy with the eye patch, who founded the Oathkeepers. He for years recruited and cultivated an armed militia to resist government tyranny. His estranged ex-wife recently said she fears that she and their kids are on his quote “kill list.” Rhodes’s attorneys have said that the idea that his family’s in danger is unfounded.

Before Trump’s commutation he was serving an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, one of the longest of all the January 6ers. Now Stewart Rhodes was taking a nap down the block from my house.

[Music]

More on that after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: While Rhodes was napping in her house, Nicole Reffitt, was outside, being interviewed by a Dutch news crew. Her family is notorious, because her son, Jackson, turned in his father to the FBI. Someone adapted the trial transcript into an excellent play called Fatherland. Anyway, this week her husband, Guy, was about to get out of prison. But unlike Marie Johnatakis, she seemed unsettled about the pardons.

Rosin:  How do you guys feel about the blanket pardon?

Reffitt: You know, I was never a fan of that. I guess he thought it was the quickest way—pull the Band-Aid off. I was more in favor of commutations and then let’s look at everything, because not only did people do bad things that day, but there were some charges that were absolutely wielded like a weapon against people. And those things also need to be looked at because, you know, I don’t want anyone to have to go through this. And that’s my biggest concern.

Rosin: What do you mean “concern”? Like, I don’t know how to think about the blanket pardon either, Nicole. I’m trying to think what’s the difference between this and if it had gone a different way—what does it mean that it’s a blanket? Have you guys talked about that?

Reffitt: Well, because now all charges are gone.

Rosin: Yeah.

Reffitt: You know, and, uh, I’m a law-and-order gal, really. And so not all charges should be gone there. People did really bad things that day.

Rosin: In many people’s minds, Nicole’s husband, Guy, was one of the people who did really bad things that day, and he did get a fair sentence. Guy brought a gun to the Capitol, although he didn’t enter the building or use it.

Reffitt: Yeah, I never expected him not to have something, you know, like, I figured he’d be charged with something, because it was so significant, but it was just so over-the-top to me, all of the charges and that has always been my biggest issue.

[Crowd chanting]

Rosin: As of Wednesday only eight of the 22 people held at the D.C. jail had been released. But outside the jail had turned into a gathering place for people released from all over the country. Camera crews stood around from Sweden, Japan, Norway broadcasting interviews with the newly freed. And when Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” came on the speakers, the crowd belted it out together.

[Sound of “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley]

Rosin: On Tuesday night, I caught a glimpse of Stewart Rhodes at the edge of the crowd. He’s hard to miss, with the eye patch. He was giving an interview to a right-wing YouTuber.

Stewart Rhodes: It’s a day of celebration. I mean, yesterday it was too. When President Trump was inaugurated, it was awesome. You know, like he said himself, you know, God saved him to save America, and I believe that’s true. And then he turned around and saved us last night, I mean, and restored us to our freedom. I mean, I’m not 100 percent restored yet. I’m still waiting for a pardon, but it’s so, so wonderful to be out, be out of these bars.

Rosin: That’s Rhodes’s one big complaint—that he’d been given a commutation instead of a pardon. A commutation can erase a sentence, but it does not restore all your rights, such as the right to buy guns. He told the interviewer he was applying for a pardon. He said, “ I think everyone deserves a pardon, without any exception.”

Rhodes: No one got a fair trial. It’s impossible to get a fair trial here if you’re a Trump supporter. And so you don’t have an unbiased jury, an impartial jury; you don’t have an impartial judge; you don’t have a jury that’s going to hold the government to its standard beyond reasonable doubt.

It’s not going to happen. So if you have no chance of a fair trial, then you should be presumed innocent. That’s put back in your natural state, which is an innocent and free human being.

Rosin: So that’s Rhodes’s version of history. They were sham trials. It was actually a day of peace. It’s a revision of history that Trump and his allies are likely to try to push and push for the next four years. House Speaker Mike Johnson has already formed a select subcommittee on January 6, to quote “continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people”

But for a whole crew of other people involved in January 6, these pardons represent a reversal of justice.

January 6 did not require delicate forensics. It has to be one of the most well-documented crimes in modern history. There are tens of thousands of hours of video showing rioters beating up police with whatever tools are at hand.

At least five people died for reasons that are in some way related to the insurrection. Some 140 police officers were injured, and many could never work again. On Wednesday, retired officer Michael Fanone had choice words for Rhodes that he expressed live on CNN.

Michael Fanone: This is what I would say to Stewart Rhodes: Go f— yourself. You’re a liar.

Anchor: We didn’t obviously to beep that word out …

Rosin: Fanone said he’s worried for his safety and that of his family.

The judge who sentenced Taylor Johnatakis, Judge Royce Lamberth, wrote a letter in connection with the sentencing. He wrote: “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions.” Lamberth is 81. His wife died a few months ago. He had a handful of new January 6 cases on his docket, but of course they’ve disappeared. In that sentencing letter, he continued, “This is not normal.”

We tried to reach him to talk about the pardons, by the way, but he wasn’t ready to talk about them yet.

 Reffitt: My husband’s being processed out of Oklahoma right now. Can’t wait to see that man. He will be here in D.C. tomorrow. And you know what? We’re getting freedom, baby! That’s right. We’re getting freedom! We are getting freedom. And that’s absolutely right.

Rosin: At the Tuesday-night rally, Nicole got a call from Guy. He was out. On the road. Headed towards the airport.

Reffitt: He’s in the car. He’s in a car! In a car!

Rosin: Stewart Rhodes told the crowd that he was headed back to California this week. As for Marie and Taylor, they fly home on Thursday. Marie told me the kids are gonna make dinner.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Stef Hayes. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Donald Trump has said, at different times, that he will pardon some, most, or even all of the January 6 insurrectionists. He’s also said at least once that he would do this on his first day in office, which is imminent. Given Trump’s past rhetoric about the incident (calling it a “day of love”) and the people who were jailed for acts they committed that day (“political prisoners,” “hostages”), his pardons can be understood only as part of his alarming—and alarmingly successful—attempt to rewrite the history of the day that nearly brought down our democracy. But what if the pardon were to come in a different spirit? That could move the country a long way toward healing.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we invite the author and scholar Linda Kinstler to talk about a centuries-old legal theory, embraced at calmer times in American history, of “oblivion.” When two sides have viciously different experiences of an event, how do you move forward? You do a version of forgetting, although it’s more like a memory game, Kinstler says, “a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What if President Joe Biden had pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists—that is, the 1,500 or so people charged with federal crimes related to the riot?

And yeah. I said Joe Biden, not President-Elect Donald Trump.

This is an idea I’ve heard floated around these past few weeks. And on its face, it sounds illogical. Like, why on earth would the outgoing Democratic president pardon people who damaged property or injured law enforcement officers or plotted to overthrow democracy?

Trump has said many times that he will pardon the J6ers. He said he’ll pardon some of them or most of them, or even consider pardoning all of them, at different times. He’s said he’ll pardon them on his very first day in office, which is just in a few days.

Donald Trump: People that were doing some bad things weren’t prosecuted, and people that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now. So we’ll be looking at the whole thing, but I’ll be making major pardons.

Rosin: Right. So why would Biden do that, again?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

The answer to that question requires you to zoom out to different countries and different periods of history to understand the long political traditions that pardons are a part of and what, at their very best, they could accomplish. And it matters who does the pardoning and their motive for doing it.

I myself did a lot of research on the January 6 prosecutions for a podcast series I hosted for The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. And as I was researching, I came across a couple of articles by author and journalist Linda Kinstler that helped me understand these cases and this charged political moment in a new way. Linda is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She writes about politics and collective memory, and she’s written for many publications, including The Atlantic.

She’s also working on a new book about the idea we’re talking about today, which is: oblivion.

[Music]

Rosin: Linda, welcome to the show.

Linda Kinstler: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: Absolutely. So the J6 prosecutions are, for the most part, unfolding at the federal courthouse in D.C., just a few blocks from where we are now. Linda, you attended some of these cases. I did also. What is your most vivid or lasting impression from these trials?

Kinstler: Oh, wow. I mean, I spent months—I mean, the better part of a year, actually—attending these trials in downtown D.C. And there are so many elements, as you have described, about the courthouse—namely, that it’s right across from the Capitol and overlooks the grounds upon which all of these crimes happened. And there were so many times I was walking through the halls of the courtroom. And some of them had little windows you can peer through, and almost on every single one—there was one day when you could see in the monitors in the courtroom, and you could see that they were all playing January 6 footage.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Kinstler: You know, different angles. You could hear the sounds of the footage that the prosecuting attorneys had assembled.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’re trying to make our way through all this.

Kinstler: And you really do get the sense there that in this building, this really pivotal event in history is being litigated and worked through in real time—kind of away from the public eye, even though these are open to anyone who wants to come see them.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: We need to hold the doors of the Capitol.

Rosin: A few of these cases have stuck with Linda, for different reasons. One was the hearing of a member of the Proud Boys: It was the juxtaposition of this violent offender and his young kids, who were playing around on the courthouse benches at his sentencing.

And the other was a woman, a nonviolent offender with no prior record.

Kinstler: She just kind of walked through the building and clearly made horrible, horrible choices that day, as many of them did who were there. And she repented before the judge. And the judge said, I’m choosing to view this as an aberration in your life, as a kind of lapse of judgment. And she cried.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’ve lost the line. We’ve lost the line. [indistinguishable] Get back.

Rosin: And did you feel—how did you feel in that moment? Did you feel like, Oh, there’s some injustice being done? Or not quite that?

Kinstler: No. I mean, I think this is justice, right? This is actually the levers of justice working. It is absolutely that these people broke the law, and they are being brought to court because they violated public order in different ways, so it is kind of like our ur-definition of justice.

But it’s a different question—and I think this is the one that has kind of been left undealt with in public, is: Okay. This is one version of justice, but this is not a kind of public reckoning with what January 6 was. And the, kind of, how these individual offenders are being treated and punished for what they did is not the same thing as, How is the country going to deal with what January 6 threatened to, kind of, the fabric of democracy? Those are two separate questions, I think.

Rosin: Interesting. So what you’re saying is: There is a legal process unfolding. The courts can do what the courts can do. But what you’re saying is the courts can only do so much.

Kinstler: Correct.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Kinstler: Right. And there’s, in general, been an overreliance, I think, upon the legal process to deal with January 6 for, quote-unquote, “us”—for us, the public—in a way. And I don’t think there has been a broader conversation about what it means in the long haul.

Rosin: Okay. I want to take what you just said and compare it to the public conversation that is happening around these court cases—namely, from Trump, because we’re a few days from him taking office.

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.

[Recording of “Justice for All” by the J6 Prison Choir]

Rosin: And the way he puts it is that the J6ers were treated unfairly, persecuted by the justice system; they’re hostages. He’s said this in many different ways, with many different degrees of passion throughout the course of his campaign.

Trump: Well, thank you very much. And you see the spirit from the hostages—and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that.

Rosin: What do you think of that argument, and how does that fit into what you are saying?

Kinstler: Yeah. On the face of it, what they are doing is manipulating historical terminology, right, for their political ends.

Rosin: So you don’t think they were unfairly—your argument is not at all that they were unfairly persecuted.

Kinstler: No, no. I mean, I think that they broke the law, and they should be punished for what they did. I think there’s a genuine argument you could have about which offenders should be facing jail time, but I don’t think that’s the conversation we’re having right now.

But I do think what this question raises is the fact that Trump himself has not been held accountable for what he did on January 6, right? And there were many efforts to do that. And my view of this whole process is that, historically speaking, we’re doing it backwards. Historically, it was the top people in power who oversaw the crime, who would be the first to be held responsible for what they had done.

In this case, we have almost the exact opposite, right? We have the lower-level offenders—the people who are easier to find, the kind of foot soldiers of Trump’s movement—who are being the ones hauled into court. And, obviously, we have seen: The efforts to prosecute Trump himself have sequentially collapsed and now are almost certainly not going to happen.

Rosin: Do you have an example in your head of a time when, historically, it unfolded in the correct way? Like, a way that promotes a sense of fairness and justice?

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of subject that has fascinated me for many years—is, like: How have societies worked through moments in which you have a population of perpetrators or people who have violated the public order, who nevertheless must remain in the country or the city in some way? How have you dealt with that?

And so in my work, the prototypical example comes from ancient Athens after the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, where you had a population of oligarchs—30 of them—who overtook the city, stripped people of their rights and properties, killed people unjustly, oversaw all of these abuses, and then were deposed by the victorious democrats. After the fact, there was a kind of general amnesty for most of the supporters of the Thirty. But the Thirty Tyrants themselves were made to choose between standing trial and exile from the city.

So in that case, you have this prototype of the people who are responsible having to account for their crimes—verbally and in, you know, a kind of legal system—while the lower level of people were offered a different set of choices.

And, of course, the reason this is so fascinating is because this becomes the blueprint for centuries of leaders after that: if you look at 1660, after the English civil war; it kind of comes after World War II, where there’s this question of, What do we do with Nazi perpetrators? How wide and deep should the justice run? And we know that denazification failed in many ways. So I do think, in our country, we are going through something like this, in a sense.

Rosin: Can we talk about Nazi Germany for a minute? I mean, I realize we always have to be careful when we’re making historical comparisons to Nazi Germany. But you threw out this sentence, Denazification didn’t work. There were, though, a lot of higher Nazi officials who were held accountable. So how can we use what happened in Nazi Germany to inform what you’re saying we have to figure out right now?

Kinstler: Right. So yes, of course. Saying denazification didn’t work is a huge, sweeping claim, and we can argue about that a lot. But what you had there was the Nuremberg trials—of course, what we think of as Nuremberg—did hold the top brass accountable for what they had done. And then you had many, many smaller, sequential trials, both in West Germany and in the former Soviet Union.

But what I often think of—and I want to be careful about making the comparison today, of course—but I have been thinking about this line that the philosopher Judith Shklar said, which was that why denazification failed, in many ways, was because the prosecutors mistook a group of individual offenders for a social movement. So in other words, they thought that by continuing with all these trials that they would squash the kind of violent, virulent sentiment underlying Nazism itself.

Rosin: Which holds some intuitive appeal because you think, I’m holding people accountable. That’s what we’re supposed to do as a society: hold people accountable.

Kinstler: Totally. And it feels good. It appeals to all of our liberal sensibilities about how order and justice are supposed to work.

Rosin: And particularly—you say liberal, because I think right now, we do have this divide where Democrats, or maybe the left, are trusting in institutions, and the right is a lot less trusting in institutions. So Democrats are putting their faith, in this case, in this institution—the court—to go through the paces and do the right thing.

Kinstler: Exactly. We are in a very legalistic society, in that we like to talk about courts and legal cases as solving political problems. And I do think we repeatedly have seen that over the last however many years—about, you know, Oh, maybe the courts will save us from Trumpism writ large. And we have seen, of course, that the legal system is just not capacious enough to do that for many reasons.

Rosin: That’s a really interesting and concise way of looking at it. We have been relying on Jack Smith, the cases against Trump, these January 6 cases, of which there are, you know, 1,500. What’s the gap? What does the legal strategy leave out?

Kinstler: I mean, so much, in that it’s just a legal strategy, right? It doesn’t—and I think I can kind of see this in the almost allergy that people have when talk of pardons comes up, for example, right? There’s this notion that if you pardon someone, you’re letting them off the hook. But that’s not what a pardon does. A pardon confirms the crime.

And I guess I’m saying there is this paucity of a wider understanding of what happened that day because it has become this legalistic football, right? Of, like, Who was standing where? Who was part of the mob? What does it mean to be part of the mob? Who was commanding them? Etcetera, etcetera. You get lost in all these details and all these individual cases. And, of course, this is the role of historians, to say, This is what that event did that day, and this is its lasting impact.

But that’s what I’m saying—that’s the gap, right? The gap is: What is the narrative of this event? How do you protect it from manipulation, particularly when the person who’s about to be inaugurated has been one of its kind of manipulators in chief? And I do think there are answers.

Rosin: Okay. Let’s just ground ourselves in the moment we’re in. (Laughs.)

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Let’s say, on day one, Trump does what he has many times said he’s going to do: pardon the J6ers.

Trump: I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Kristen Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: And issue these pardons?

Trump: These people have been there—how long is it? Three or four years?

Rosin: Is it possible that it accomplishes any of the goals of putting this to rest? Like, any of the goals of reconciliation?

Kinstler: I mean, reconciliation, I think, is a different question. I think it’s not going to accomplish that. I think the only sense in which it “puts it to rest,” quote-unquote, is that it will, as I said, confirm their crimes, right? A pardon does not erase what people did.

It’s unfortunate, in my view, that Trump will be the one to pardon them, because I do think there was an opportunity for the Democrats to extend a kind of grace towards some of the January 6 offenders—and by no means all of them—if they had been the ones to pardon them.

Rosin: Okay. You said that casually, and there have been a few law professors who floated that idea. It is, on its face, a kind of shocking idea. Like, when you read a headline that says, Should Joe Biden pardon the J6ers? it’s actually kind of hard to get your head around. What do you think of that idea?

Kinstler: Well, I think, first of all, historically, pardons have been almost a routine thing that any new ruler or president has done upon taking office.

Interviewer: Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft evaders?

Jimmy Carter: Yes, I am.

Interviewer: Why?

Carter: Well, it was a festering sore and involved tens of thousands of young men.

Rosin: Like, I was reading about Jimmy Carter, who pardoned draft dodgers, and thinking that, like, we can look in retrospect and say they were peaceful, and the January 6ers were violent rioters. But it must have been hurtful to a lot of people whose children, or who they themselves, went to Vietnam, didn’t want to. And it was quite controversial. So to what end does a new president pardon people?

Kinstler: Well, I mean, on the face of it, it’s a gesture of goodwill. But it’s supposed to say, We are all subject to the law, and let’s start on the right foot, etcetera, etcetera.

Rosin: So it sets a national mood.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: It sets a mood of, I’m the president for all of you. We’re all in this together. And the value of this country is mercy. Mercy is a value.

Kinstler: Yes.

Carter: So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left the site, I went just inside the door at the national Capitol, and I signed the pardon for those young men. And yes, I think it was the right thing to do. I thought that it was time to get it over with—I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon.

Gerald Ford: We would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we, as a people, were to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial, and punish a former president who is already condemned.

Rosin: I was looking for historical precedent and read about George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion, because that was a fairly violent rebellion—and it was hundreds of people—and he pardoned some of them. And I was wondering if that was analogous.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know about the analogy, but it is kind of an instance in which you have a violent community of offenders who nevertheless must remain in the country, right?

Ford: The power has been used sometimes as Alexander Hamilton saw its purposes: “In seasons of insurrection … when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if served [sic] to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.”

Kinstler: You can’t get rid of all of them. It wasn’t moral forgiveness. It was just a measure that allowed them to remain in the society in a way that wouldn’t cripple the society itself at this moment of extreme fragility.

[Music]

Rosin: So yes, there are presidential pardons. But if we can neither forgive nor forget something, we just may need something else to move forward: an act of oblivion.

That’s after the break.

[Music]

[Break]

Rosin: Linda, you have researched and written about what’s called “an act of oblivion.” Can you lay out the basics of what that is?

Kinstler: Yes. So historically speaking, we see that there were either acts of oblivion, laws of oblivion, or articles of oblivion that appeared in peace treaties or as legislative measures or as kind of kingly edicts that were issued in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, and uprisings. And what they were, essentially, is a kind of resetting of the legal order, where they said—and this is generally happening in the, quote-unquote, “Western world,” but we also see similar measures elsewhere.

But what they would say is: Everything that happened prior to this law—whatever it was, whether hostility, war, killing, theft, etcetera—none of that can be litigated or spoken of, quote, “in public,” which often meant: You can’t bring a lawsuit after this measure is passed.

Rosin: So it’s not actual forgetting. It’s like a public declaration that we shall all forget together.

Kinstler: Right. And in some ways, forgetting isn’t even the right word. And the interesting thing to me is that the word oblivion is the kind of Roman invention that was used to describe it, that Cicero used after the fact, and that was kind of like his spin on it, right? And everyone is telling tales about how to make a democracy work or how to make a state or a kingdom work, right? Not all of these are democracies.

But, yeah, forgetting is, in some ways—it’s not really the correct description of what’s going on. It’s more of a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.

Rosin: Got it. It’s almost a funny word. Like, I’m gonna blast you into oblivion. It’s a very powerful word. I don’t know if it was meant as kind of campy—probably not—by the Romans. (Laughs.) But there is something kind of, like, huge about it, you know?

Kinstler: Yeah. Oblivione sempiterna: “eternal oblivion,” to kind of wash away everything. It’s a totally beguiling word, and it kind of connotes erosion, in English, and erasure. But there’s also, in other languages: in Russian it’s вечное забвение, “eternal oblivion,” right? Eternal forgetting, in a way.

Rosin: So it’s almost so grand and big that it’s not connected to the mundane act of, Oh, I forgot my keys.

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Like, it’s almost so big that it’s on a grand, national scale. Maybe it’s something like that.

Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, like, you’re always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. I mean, it is in a way, right? Because you’re burying something in oblivion. It’s a physical location, right? It’s a noun, oblivion. And so to me, I think of it as, Okay, you’re burying it, but you’re not forgetting where it is, right?

Rosin: Right.

Kinstler: It’s always there.

Rosin: So what’s the difference between what you just described and whitewashing, revisionist history—sort of what we’ve seen happen with January 6 and Trump calling it a “day of love”?

Trump: But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions—it’s, like, hundreds of thousands—

Rosin: Like, sort of actively describing it as something it wasn’t. Can you compare those two modes?

Kinstler: Yeah. I would say they’re kind of fundamentally opposite, right? One is constructive, and one is malignant, right? Which is not to say that the two couldn’t be conflated. But for the sake of argument, the oblivions I have been looking at have been kind of, like, ideal types. Obviously, none of these, historically, ever work perfectly, right? It’s more about the idea that people wanted them to work, that there was this desire for reconciliation that would be operative.

And obviously, that’s not what you see at all in the language that Trump has been using and in the way he and his supporters have been framing January 6. Usually, I think, if we were to follow the framework of oblivion, what should have happened was that Biden—upon taking office and kind of restoring liberal order, we could say—would have passed an act of oblivion for the January 6ers that would have mandated that, kind of, Trump and his immediate circle would have to stand trial for their actions that day. And what we have been seeing with the lower-level offenders, that some of them would not have had to explicitly, as a kind of gesture of goodwill.

Rosin: A couple of challenges I can think of to using this approach with January 6: The first, surface one is just the sheer amount of documentation, YouTube videos. Like, what you’re describing—which is a clever act of forgetting or a memory game—I mean, if you’re a prosecutor working in the federal courthouse, this is a gift. You’ve seen these trials. Basically, what you’re doing at these trials is watching videos. Like, some Facebook video that somebody made, saying, Hey. I was at the Capitol. I did this—me. Nobody else did this.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: Literally, that’s what some of them say because they’re proud in that moment.

[Crowd noise, chanting from January 6]

Man: Whatever it takes. I’ll lay my life down if it takes. Absolutely.

Rosin: And then—I mean, there’s footage from everywhere.

Kinstler: Yeah.

[Crowd noise, overlapping screaming from January 6]

Rosin: So since you are talking about historical examples: What do you do with an era in which everything is über-documented?

Kinstler: Yeah. And it’s actually interesting. I was in a couple of trials where the judge, to the prosecutor, was saying, Listen. I’ve been to so many of these trials. You do not need to establish for me what happened on January 6 writ large. Like, I get it. Can you please fast forward?

But I guess what I’m talking about is not even about, Oh, you know, keep these videos from circulating, or, Don’t talk about what happened. It’s more about: Don’t expect the legal process to achieve something that cannot be achieved through law.

Rosin: Okay. That makes sense. You just have to accept the fact that the footage is everywhere. The footage is—in fact, maybe that makes what you’re saying more urgent. Because I do find, even with myself—like, if I hear a Capitol Police officer on the radio, if I watch that A24 movie that’s a documentary about January 6, it’s, like, right there all over again, and you just have to be, maybe, aware that that’s the age we live in.

Kinstler: Right.

Rosin: Second question I have is: I read your various articles you’ve written about oblivion. And it almost scared me, reading them, only because we live—this is the first era that I’ve lived through, as an adult, where I’ve watched the revising of history happen in real time. I don’t recall a president talking about facts the opposite of what I saw with my own eyes.

It’s a very bad feeling. So in that context, I feel nervous about even entering into a conversation about oblivion, memory games, or anything like that. And I wonder how you’ve squared that.

Kinstler: Oh my gosh, absolutely. This is what fascinates me, precisely because we are in this era of, kind of, historical revisionism, and we have been in for a long time. But the thing about acts of oblivion is that they actually, in my mind, consecrated what happened, right? They protected the historical record. They didn’t literally say, Oh this never happened. And in fact, what you see is that they’re often accompanied by records—like, historical accounts—of what happened, such that an act of oblivion was necessary, right? Like, Okay, actually, what happened here was a civil war or a tyranny or a revolution that totally wiped out the legal order, so we needed to do this extremely drastic thing if we were to reestablish democratic law.

The one that I often point to is: After the Revolutionary War, there were—because you did have the kind of legacy of British law, right—acts of oblivion came to the Americas from the European system. So there you did have, kind of, royalists who were subjected to acts of oblivion. It was individual states passing them over their royalist populations to allow them to remain, even though they had been defeated.

Rosin: So it was essentially an act of mercy saying, The royalists are going to live among us. They’re not going back. And what? How did it define—

Kinstler: It meant that they couldn’t be ostracized, essentially. They couldn’t be perpetually held accountable for what they had done, for everything that they had done against their neighbors, right? And often, it was a kind of very local, proximate question of, like, We’re not going to kick you out unless you want to be kicked out. That kind of thing.

Rosin: So you could imagine that kind of thing would be controversial at first. People would want vengeance. And so in the immediate, it would be difficult to swallow. But then in the long term, it would put things to rest. That’s the idea.

Kinstler: Yeah. And, I mean, there are a lot of failed oblivions. After the Civil War, a lot of the Southern states were, quote-unquote, “crying for an act of oblivion.” And it was a term that was circulating in the papers. And there’s this amazing quote from Frederick Douglass, who said, you know, I look in Congress, and I see the solid South enthroned, and the minute that that is not the case, we will join you in calling for an act of oblivion, but as long as they have not been held accountable, we cannot support this.

Rosin: Okay. So let’s move to the current moment. If you were King Linda—

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: So is what you would want an act of oblivion around January 6?

Kinstler: No. No. Because I would never be so bold as to say that. But I do think it’s a useful political concept. I think that there was a missed opportunity during the Biden administration to do something concerted—that wasn’t just the Jack Smith investigation—about it. I think there could have been something really meaningful done.

Rosin: Okay. So you’re not going all the way to saying, you know, an act of oblivion. But you’ve started to eke at little things. Like, what do you mean by Biden could have? I mean, we’re in the very, very last days of the Biden administration. But if he had pardoned some of the low-level offenders, would that have been in the spirit of oblivion?

Kinstler: Yeah. I think that would have been a really potentially transformative thing to do, because it would not have done anything to jeopardize the record of what occurred that day or what it meant to participate in it.

But we are going to move beyond it, and I think we will see the narrative of January 6 begin to settle in some way, right? And as always happens, the conspiracies about it will become part of the narrative of how this is told, right—not in a kind of whitewashing way, but just in, like, it shows how volatile it is and how manipulable.

And I think there’s been this debate about how to memorialize that day, whether it’s through a physical memorial, a memorial to the Capitol officers who died, or to anyone who died that day. I think those are the questions that we haven’t kind of figured out, really.

Rosin: I see. So there is a potential that, even though we’re not figuring them out now, they’ll be figured out in a sideways way through questions down the road—like, questions about how we will ultimately remember that day—not necessarily how we’ll remember it in this charged political moment, but how we’ll remember it 10, 20 years from now.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I was at the Capitol for the year anniversary of January 6 and watched all the ceremonies from the press gallery. And it just struck me how it was almost like a kind of nothing. You know, like how it was—

Rosin: What do you mean?

Kinstler: It was just so quiet, somber, of course. But there was no fan—you didn’t get the sense of the enormity of the event that was being consecrated, right? And it was almost like—and understandable because it was so close and so terrifying—there was this sense that we haven’t figured this out yet.

William Hungate: The Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the House Committee on the Judiciary today welcomes the president of the United States, Gerald R. Ford.

Ford: As a people, we have a long record of forgiving even those who have been our country’s most destructive foes. Yet to forgive is not to forget the lessons of evil and whatever ways evil has operated against us.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Last month, Donald Trump appointed the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his senior AI-policy adviser. Krishnan, an Indian immigrant and U.S. citizen, was seen by some as being friendly to H-1B visas, which are often used in Silicon Valley to allow skilled laborers to work in the tech industry. This sent part of the MAGA faction into a frenzy, spurred by troll in chief Laura Loomer, who declared the appointment a betrayal of the “America First” movement.

The argument over H-1Bs exposes an important fissure in the MAGA alliance that worked together to help elect Trump. How Trump navigates this rift will give us clues about what his real priorities will be as president.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Ali Breland, who writes about the internet, technology, and politics, about this new rift in Trump’s camp and other places it might show up. And we’ll go beyond the politics, with staff writer Rogé Karma, to discuss what a solid body of research shows about the relationship between immigrant labor and the American worker—because even though some prominent Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders, agree with Loomer that there is a negative effect from H-1B visas on American workers, research doesn’t back them up.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There are already cracks starting to show in the MAGA alliance, and those cracks happen to show up in the issue that Trump has declared one of his top priorities, which is drastically reshaping U.S. immigration policy. Trump appointed to a senior position someone seen as being friendly to H-1B visas, the visas that allow people with specialized skills to work in the U.S. People in Silicon Valley love these visas. They depend on them. And maybe more importantly, the H-1B visa lovers include Elon Musk.

But the “America First” wing of Trump supporters—sometimes known as the nativist right—they do not love these visas. “America First,” to them, means, literally, Americans first. No exceptions.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. On today’s show, we’ll talk about this MAGA infighting. In the second half of the show, we’ll get into what’s actually true about the relationship between immigration and the American worker, because it turns out that even a lot of Democrats don’t get that one right. But first, let’s dive into the recent news and what it means. To help me with that is Ali Breland, an Atlantic staff writer who writes about the internet, politics, and technology.

Hey, Ali.

Ali Breland: Hey. Thank you for having me.

Rosin: So, Ali, this fracture in the MAGA alliance seemed to start around Christmas, when Trump announced a senior AI-policy adviser. Who is he, and how did people respond?

Breland: Yeah, his name is Sriram Krishnan. He’s this Silicon Valley figure who has a long history. He works in tech, and he was being appointed to be an adviser on Trump’s AI team, which is being headed up by another big guy in tech: David Sacks, who’s a part of the infamous “PayPal Mafia” that includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etcetera.

Rosin: So these are, like—this is a faction. Like, these guys are becoming more and more powerful, sort of Trump’s tech allies.

Breland: Yeah, there’s some different ideological things happening, but for the most part, they’re largely on the same page. And a lot of people right now are kind of calling them the “new tech right,” or just, like, the “tech right.”

Rosin: So they’re on one side, and then how did the discussion around H-1B visas get going?

Breland: Yeah, so there’s this provocateur troll in Trump World called Laura Loomer. She’s been kind of this weird thing on the right for a long time. She’s chained herself to the headquarters of Twitter in protest of her account being banned at one point. But she sees this appointment, and she decides to make hay of it.

She pulls out a tweet that Krishnan made about country caps for green cards, rather, and high-skilled immigration. And she points to these things and says, This is not what we want. This is not “America First.” These things are not good for our constituency. And so that’s, like, the sort of obvious bit of it.

The other bit, too, is you can kind of see how race is this animating issue in this fight. David Sacks had already been appointed by Trump to be his chief adviser on issues of AI and crypto. David Sacks has talked about H-1B visas. He’s pushed Trump on this. He’s successfully gotten Trump to say that he would support the continued use of H-1B visas.

But Loomer didn’t attack him on that and didn’t turn this into a huge issue. Instead, she went after Sriram Krishnan, who is South Asian. And I think, you know, her targeting him, specifically, on this issue and associating him with that kind of speaks to the sort of nativist sentiment undergirding all of this.

Kind of right after the election, I sort of thought that maybe there was a chance that there was going to be some sort of fractious element at some point in the future, because these are two sides that kind of believe sort of different things.

The tech right is reactionary, like the nativist right that includes people like Laura Loomer, people like Steve Bannon. They sort of all have this streak of being frustrated with the progress that’s taken place in America. They are frustrated with what they see as, like, American weakness. But the distinction is that the tech right also loves business. They love being rich. They love making a lot of money and having their industry be benefitted.

The sort of nativist right cares much more about the American constituency and, specifically, the white American constituency—and benefitting what they see as, like, the natural order of whiteness and the average American, and things that some people in the tech right kind of care about but prioritize less than their own companies and less than their own industry.

Rosin: It’s really complicated because they both have ideas like, There’s an optimum society; there’s a right way that things should be. And then they’re slightly different. So what is each side’s ideal “America made great again” look like?

Breland: Yeah, I think it on the sort of nativist right, the ideal America is this place that prioritizes—with some exceptions, more so now—but fundamentally, it’s this white, sort of very classic, conventional, conservative vision for what the United States is. It’s this, like, return fantasy to a version of the 1950s America that prioritizes white American interests above other people—again, with exceptions. There’s—you know, these people would all say that they’re not racist, that they’re just meritocratic, or things like that.

The tech right is more agnostic to those kinds of things. People like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel kind of, to some degree, see value in that. But they only see value as far as that doesn’t get in the way of their vision for creating this sort of all-star team of Americans that can sort of dominate the global stage in technology and dominate economically.

And so they’re willing to go to look to other countries to bring people in; to try to, like, get the best talent, according to them; to try to solve the toughest engineering problems; and to do things like beat China, which is something that they’re all very obsessed with.

Rosin: So they’re less concerned about where people come from. I mean, what makes it especially complicated and charged that this came up so soon is that it came up in immigration. Trump has made controlling immigration one of his top priorities. How did Trump himself end up weighing in on this?

Breland: After a few days of silence—perhaps because this was happening literally over Christmas and the days after—Trump did say that he does support H-1B visas. And he seemed to kind of take Elon’s side on this.

I wasn’t super surprised, because on an episode of the All-In Podcast—which is a sort of who’s who of the tech right; it includes David Sacks—Trump was pressed on the H-1B visa issue, and he did say, Yeah, I support it; I’m down for this. This was in the summer. And so it was consistent for him to come back up with this. And the other thing it’s sort of consistent with, in a sort of more general, patterny kind of way, is that in the past, when there is sort of tension between his sort of more nationalist, nativist base versus the wealthier interests that are in his coalition—not always, but—he often tends to go with the sort of interests of the wealthy, the people who have given him the most amount of money, people who he probably respects because he has a great deal of respect for people who have built wealth.

And so it wasn’t super surprising to see him break that way, especially because it seems like his larger immigration priority is not regarding H-1Bs, and he seems more flexible on that. His larger immigration priority is people who, as he would say, came here illegally and are not quote-unquote “high-skilled workers.”

And so on the sort of issue of mass deportation, this doesn’t signal that he’s, like, going to break from that at all. He’s talked a lot, very aggressively, about conducting mass deportations and quote-unquote “securing the southern border.” And they talk about the southern border, specifically, because they’re talking about a different kind of immigrant, and they have a different set of priorities when it comes to people coming across the southern border.

Rosin: Interesting. So then, maybe, the thing to explore is the nativist right, not just Laura Loomer. Laura Loomer is, you know, a little more on the fringes. But what about someone like Stephen Miller, who will be Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and who is credited with shaping a lot of the more draconian immigration policies in the last administration. He has solid power in this administration. Have we heard from him or someone closer to power about what they think about H-1B visas?

Breland: Miller hasn’t weighed in directly on this specific moment and this specific issue. He sort of gave a cryptic tweet that signaled that he is still anti-H-1B.

But he’s been very consistent on this in the past, and there’s no reason to believe that he would change, as someone who is, like, motivated primarily by this sort of nativist perspective that is, again, sort of galvanized by racial animus and, in many cases, just outright racism. I don’t think he’ll change his perspective, and he’s going to fight on this, and so there’s going to be weird tension moving forward.

Elon seemed to—I don’t want to say he walked back from this position, but, like, after a few days of fighting, he did seem to try to want to soften the blows and sort of extend an olive branch. People in sort of fairly influential but niche figures in this sort of nationalist, reactionary wing of the party also tried to sort of smooth over the tension and make it seem like there was common cause being found. And so they have an interest among themselves in trying to come together and paint themselves as a united front and sort of reach a consensus on this.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, it’s still early. He hasn’t even taken office yet. But could you imagine a universe where, then, it just moves forward, and we quietly make an exception for elite workers and do mass deportations for everyone else? Like, is that where immigration policy could land?

Breland: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that—from my perspective and the things I pay attention to—that seems exactly the direction it’s going to go in.

The tech right is aware of the mass deportations [but] has not really talked out against them. Elon Musk has tweeted acknowledging them and sees them as an inevitability that he doesn’t seem to have a clear problem with. That could change when we sort of get, like, harrowing images of ICE conducting raids and things like that, but right now, that’s the track that we’re on.

Rosin: So if what you said is true, and if the past history holds, he is going to make an exception for elite immigrant workers. What does that imply about how he might handle other economic issues?

Breland: Yeah, if we extrapolate this out, which we can—both from this example but then, also, from how 2016 through 2020 went—Trump is probably going to side, I guess, with more of the wealthier faction, which includes the tech right, which includes people in his coalition, who are people like the hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent, who also sort of have this prioritization of more, like, economically laissez-faire issues. They have this sort of more traditional, conservative perspective on economics. And that’s something that’s going to run into tension with what the nationalists want. They want this sort of economic nationalist perspective that is a departure from this hyper-free-market sort of way of viewing the world that’s been the dominant conservative perspective for the past several decades.

Rosin: So essentially, this rift that you pointed out in the MAGA world—between, you know, Is he going to take the side of the elites, or is he going to take the side of all the workers? even if that means the nativist right—that’s a rift you can track kind of up and down various issues for the next many years, just to see, Okay, whose side does he take on a lot of these issues?

Breland: Exactly. Yeah. AI and automation is going to be a really big one in this area, too, because the tech right obviously cares a lot about AI and automation. They’re very pro-AI and automation. They see this as, like, an existential issue in the United States versus China, and that the U.S. must—to continue its being, like, the most important country in the world—that must beat China on this.

But a lot of the sort of more nationalist right doesn’t agree with this. They see this as a different kind of issue. Tucker Carlson, who I think kind of squarely falls in this nativist camp and is one of its most influential members, has outright said that he opposes—not necessarily the development of AI and automation but—its implementation and use.

He’s talked directly about never using AI for, like, things like driverless trucks. But Elon at Tesla is directly making self-driving trucks. And so yeah, there’s a lot of weird places where these sort of fractures are going to play out.

Rosin: And Tucker Carlson takes that issue because it’s a betrayal of the American worker.

Breland: Precisely.

Rosin: Interesting. So this is, actually, the central fissure of the Trump administration, basically?

Breland: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like that. I do want to say that this is kind of a unique issue, in that it draws in race, which is a very big thing, and it draws in immigration. And so it might get a uniquely high amount of attention. But there’s still going to be versions of this fight that might not play out as aggressively that are going to happen over the next four years.

Rosin: Well, Ali, thank you for pointing out this line to us. We’ll be watching it for the next four years, and thank you for joining me.

Breland: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Rosin: After the break, we explore what’s behind the politics. Trump and his allies made the argument often in the campaign that immigrants take away jobs from Americans. It’s an argument that, on the surface, has some intuitive logic. But it actually doesn’t work like that. More soon.

[Break]

Rosin: Joining me is Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma, who mainly covers economics. Rogé, welcome to the show.

Rogé Karma: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So an early rift broke out in the Trump administration over H-1B visas, which we’ve been discussing on this show, with the nativist right saying what people say about all kinds of immigration: These immigrants take jobs away from American workers. So what do we know about the relationship between H-1B visa holders and the American worker?

Karma: Well, luckily, the H-1B program allocates workers randomly to companies based on a lottery. And that allows researchers to study what actually happens to the companies that did get workers, as opposed to the companies that didn’t.

And I agree with you. I think there’s a real sort of “man on the street” argument. There’s a sort of view that there’s a fixed pool of jobs, and so any immigrant that we bring in is going to take away a job that would otherwise go to an American. But when researchers have looked at this, the overwhelming majority of the studies have actually found no negative impact on either employment or wages, which I think at first sounds a little bit counterintuitive.

But the reason is a few fold. One: Companies who get H-1B workers actually end up growing and scaling up faster than the companies who don’t. And then because of that, they have to then hire a bunch of more native-born workers around that immigrant. The second reason is innovation.

One of my favorite statistics comes from Jeremy Neufeld, who’s a fellow at the Institute for Progress. And he pointed out that 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. startups belong to immigrants. Now, not all of those are H-1B holders, but there’s a lot of evidence that the companies who are awarded H-1B visas—they produce more patents, more new products, get more VC funding, and all of that actually creates jobs. So on the whole, I actually don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for this broader nativist claim about this program.

Rosin: Let’s make this a little more concrete. So let’s just play out a theoretical company. Here’s a theoretical company, hires H-1B visa holders. How does it work? Like, innovation is a vague word. How does it actually play out?

Karma: I think what’s important to remember here is that getting one of these H-1B visas is actually pretty difficult. And so the idea that a company is going to be able to systematically bring in foreign workers to replace their native ones using this program—it’s just really hard to do because there’s such a low chance they’re even going to get those workers in the first place. And so a lot of times when companies use this program, what they’re doing is they’re looking for a very important skill set.

So let’s use semiconductors as an example. This is an industry, when it comes to the manufacturing of semiconductors, that U.S. companies haven’t really done for a while. A lot of the most advanced chips are made in places like Taiwan, and so a lot of the best talent is abroad. And so if you’re a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, the industry in the U.S. estimates that even if we had the best job-training programs possible, that would only fill about 50 percent of the high-skilled demand for the labor force in this field.

And so you need to bring in folks who have this highly specialized knowledge, probably because they’ve worked in other countries. But then, what that allows you to do, once you have a subset of foreign-born workers who can do this sort of specialized manufacturing—what you then have is people to come in and support around them. And then because a company has that need met, they’re able to then hire a bunch of other workers to fill other needs that they have but that don’t require that same kind of specialized knowledge.

And on the other flip side is that we actually have some studies that look at: What happens to the companies that don’t get H-1B visas? What happens to those companies? Do they hire more native workers? Do they invest in more job training? And it turns out that they don’t. In fact, they end up often just either (A) producing less or growing less quickly, or (B)—and this is a finding of a lot of the recent literature—they end up outsourcing the jobs instead. And so instead of bringing in this new worker and then hiring more native workers around them, they just say, Well, look, we have an office in China, or we have an office in Singapore, or we have an office in Hong Kong or India. Let’s just hire more there because we’re not going to be able to get the talent that we need here.

There are a handful of outlier studies, but I think, right now, the broad consensus in the field is that the H-1B program, even for all its flaws, doesn’t seem to have these negative employment or wage effects.

Rosin: So that’s what the research shows. It’s fairly definitive until now, and yet even some Democrats have repeated the line, The H-1B visas take away American jobs—for example, Bernie Sanders. What do you make of that?

Karma: Well, I think where Bernie’s coming from—and I think where a lot of Democrats are coming from and, quite frankly, some Republicans—is that there are two things that are true here at once. The first thing that’s true is that we don’t find these huge negative effects from the H-1B program. And the second thing that’s also true is that, despite that, the H-1B program has a lot of flaws, a lot of loopholes that companies have learned how to game.

So one of these is that a significant portion of H-1B visas are used by so-called outsourcing firms, which are these companies that basically bring in foreign workers. They train them here, and then, when their H-1B visa expires, they employ them in their home countries for a fraction of the cost. And so they’re functionally using the H-1B visa to train workers here and then employ them at lower labor costs elsewhere.

That’s just bad, on the face of it. The fact that we still don’t see negative effects, overall, is really telling, but we should fix that loophole by, among other things, raising the minimum wage for H-1B visa holders, making the program merit-based instead of random—like, you can more closely regulate how companies use those workers.

So I think part of what Bernie Sanders is getting at, part of what some of these critiques are getting at, is that this program does have a lot of flaws that allow corporations to game it. And it’s actually kind of shocking that, despite all these flaws, it still hasn’t produced these horribly negative results.

But imagine how much better it could be if we fix them. So I really think that this might be a place where you see the sort of messy realities of immigration politics running up against what, really, people all across the political spectrum agree is a pretty common-sense set of reforms. But that doesn’t always mean it makes good politics.

Rosin: Right. Right. Okay. So we’ve been talking exclusively about the H-1B visas because they came up in the news, but the whole of Trump’s promise is not specifically about H-1B visas at all; it’s a promise of mass deportation and immigrant labor, in general. I know that you’ve been looking into the research about the relationship between immigrant labor and the American worker. What did you find?

Karma: Well, I went into this because I kept hearing Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller make these kind of claims that sound kind of intuitive—that when immigrants come in, they take jobs from natives, right? There’s a sort of Econ 101 logic, which says that when the supply of any good goes up, including labor, the price of that good, like wages, goes down.

And so I kept hearing these arguments and thinking, Well, maybe there’s something to this, and so let’s actually look at what is happening. And it turns out that the sort of Trump-Vance view was pretty much the conventional wisdom for most of the 20th century, both among policymakers and economists, until a study came along that sort of shattered the consensus.

And so to tell you about the study, I’m gonna go back a little bit. So in 1980, Fidel Castro, the president of Cuba, opened up emigration from his country. He lifted the ban on emigration. And what that allowed is for 125,000 Cubans to leave from Mariel Harbor to Miami, Florida, an event that ended up becoming known as the Mariel Boatlift. And in just a few short months, Miami’s workforce expands by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands every year because of immigration. And this created the perfect conditions for what economists call a “natural experiment.” It was like this big, massive shock that only happened to Miami.

And so what the economist David Card later realized is that you could compare what happened to workers in Miami to workers in other cities that had not experienced the boatlift, track how wages did in both, and then see what actually happened. And his view was, Look—if there is a negative effect of immigration on wages, Miami in the 1980s is exactly where it should show up. It’s this big, unprecedented shock. That makes what he ended up finding so shocking, because he ends up finding that this huge influx of immigrants has virtually no effect on both employment or wages of native-born workers in Miami, including those without a college degree.

Rosin: And why? I mean, it seems counterintuitive.

Karma: It seems completely counterintuitive. There are a few reasons, but I think the big one—and the big thing that the common-sense view of immigration misses—is that immigrants aren’t just workers. They’re also consumers. You know, they’re people who buy things, like healthcare and housing and groceries. And so at the same time that they’re, you know, competing with Americans for jobs, they’re also buying lots of things that then increase the need for more jobs.

And I think this sounds counterintuitive, but we think about it in other contexts all the time, right? When’s the last time you heard a Republican politician railing against the upcoming group of high-school graduates because they were about to come in and compete with, you know, people currently in the workforce?

You probably haven’t, because we understand that population growth has these two sides to it: that people are consumers who create demand for jobs and workers who take jobs. And so I think that’s the gist of the problem with the conventional view.

Rosin: So that was a singular study. Has that held up over time?

Karma: It has. And so after that study, it got a lot of researchers interested, and this has now been studied in countries all over the world, from Israel to Denmark to Portugal to France, and almost all of the high-quality studies come back with very similar results.

I think the one complication in all of this—the one challenge—has been, Well, what about the least-skilled workers? What about: Okay, maybe on average, immigrants don’t hurt the employment prospects or the wages of native-born workers, but what about the least-skilled workers? What about high-school dropouts, folks without a high-school diploma? And a lot of the more recent literature has shown that even that group doesn’t suffer when immigrants come in.

And so I think the broad consensus in the literature now is that immigration does have costs. It can exacerbate inequality. Tellingly, the wages of other immigrants often get hurt by new immigration. You could see some negative effects in certain sectors, even if it’s balanced out by other sectors, but on the whole, it appears to be really beneficial for basically all classes of native workers.

Rosin: So at this point, there’s a large body of research saying the arrival of immigrants—even sudden arrival of immigrants—doesn’t have a great effect on the American worker, may even have a positive effect. Now, what about the disappearance of immigrant labor? Because Trump’s promise is mass deportations. I’m not sure if you can just flip, you know, the findings of this research. Like, is there a similar natural experiment or study that shows how that might affect workers or the economy?

Karma: There is, actually. And I think the claim from Trump and his advisers is that the ultimate pro-worker policy is mass deportation, right? Because what happens when you get rid of a bunch of immigrant laborers is now those employers have to hire natives at higher wages, because there’s a sort of artificially created labor shortage.

Rosin: Right.

Karma: And again, very intuitive. But when we actually look at what happens in the real world, we see something very different. So the best study on this, I think—although there’s a few—is from the Secure Communities program, which is a Department of Homeland Security program that between 2008 and 2014 deported about 500,000 immigrants. And because the program was rolled out community by community, it created this really nice natural experiment where you could see what happened to the communities that had experienced it and the ones [that] hadn’t.

You could compare them and see what the overall effect [was]. And what researchers found, actually, shocked me—it shocked many of them—was that for every hundred immigrants that were deported, you actually ended up with nine fewer jobs for natives. That’s not just temporary work. That’s, like, nine jobs permanently gone in this community.

And there are many studies that reinforce this finding from all across history, from the Bracero program, studies on the H-2B program—which is like H-1B, but for lower-skilled immigrants—studies going all the way back to the Great Depression that all find similar things.

And the reason is that immigrants are deeply interwoven into their local economies. And so take the restaurant industry. If you’re a restaurant owner, and suddenly you lose a big chunk of your workforce, to the point where you either have to have higher labor costs and at the same time you have less demand, there’s a good chance you have to go out of business altogether. And when you go out of business, that doesn’t just hurt the immigrants who are working for you. That also hurts the native-born workers.

And so there are all these sort of synchronicities, all of these interconnections, that allow immigration to have this positive sum effect. But then as soon as you—if you rip out the immigrants, then native workers often get caught in the crossfire.

Rosin: Yeah. So if the research is so consistent—so strong—and makes a lot of sense, if you think about it a tiny bit more deeply, why do you think this sentiment persists? Is it just a feeling, you know? Because it persists on both the right and the left. It’s not as if the left is fighting back. They don’t necessarily advocate mass deportations, but they are also not fighting back against this idea that immigrants take away American jobs.

Karma: I think part of the fixation on the economics of immigration is a way for many people like us—elites, people in the media—to try to find a more materialist explanation for a set of instincts that I think many of us are uncomfortable with. And I think that is actually kind of a tragedy.

I think if people oppose immigration or feel strongly about immigration because of certain cultural beliefs or concerns about national identity, it’s important to take those concerns seriously. And I think it’s actually a problem, and even a bit patronizing, that we tend to project these sort of more wonky economic concerns onto that.

Rosin: Yeah. I had a conversation with Representative Ritchie Torres of New York right after the election, who talked about how a lot of the immigrants in his neighborhood had a surprising amount of anti-undocumented immigrant sentiment.

And it made me wonder about—I don’t even know how to define this, but sense of chaos, just a feeling of things not being in control. It’s sort of the way people feel about crime. There just seems to be a sense that things have run away, and you can’t get ahead. It’s a vague thing, but it is related to—There’s just so much out of control, and I need someone to stop it.

Karma: I actually think that’s a really important point. One of the greatest shifts in public opinion on immigration has happened in the last few years, where in 2020, according to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans said they wanted immigration decreased.

Four years later, that number was 55 percent. So it had almost doubled. And that is much larger and much faster than even the public-opinion shift on something like gay marriage. So this is a huge, almost unprecedented shift. And as I dug into why, what came up over and over again is this feeling of chaos, this feeling that we are not in control of our own border. And when you actually look at questions about how people feel towards immigrants themselves, they hadn’t changed nearly as much.

People weren’t necessarily anti-immigrant, as much as they felt like the immigration process had gotten out of control and the immigration process was no longer serving the country. And so I think it is really important to distinguish [between] those two things. And I think a lot of the public-opinion shift we’ve seen over the last few years—it isn’t about economics. It’s really about this sense of control and chaos.

Rosin: Yeah. So maybe the place to end is this: Have you talked to anyone or done any thinking about how, in a situation like this, you close the gap? Because we, as journalists—it’s frustrating to us to know that there is an answer. You know, there’s an answer that research has provided. There are truths and facts. And separate from that, there is a perception. So have you thought of or seen anybody talk interestingly about how you bridge a gap like that, where people feel one way that is discordant with what the reality is?

Karma: Unfortunately, like any good journalist, I’m not quite as good at the solutions as I am about identifying the problems. But I will say, I think at the root of a lot of this is the fact that there’s an underlying scarcity. Right?

So I think an example of this is housing. Recently—you know, we haven’t talked about this, in particular—but J. D. Vance and Donald Trump made a big deal in their campaign about how immigrants were responsible for driving up housing costs. That argument has never held weight in American politics before, because it is only over the last decade that housing costs and a housing shortage has become a big problem. When there is material scarcity, people look for a villain; people look for someone to blame. And so I think one answer to, for example, the blaming [of] immigrants for housing costs is to say, Well, if we fix the housing shortage such that people don’t feel that scarcity, maybe we can avoid some of that.

I think the other sort of way I’d look at this is: In some senses, one of the most pro-immigrant things you could do is reduce the amount of chaos, right? So I think there’s actually a sort of middle ground here where you could reduce a lot of the chaos at the border while expanding legal immigration in a way that keeps immigrants coming in but creates a more orderly process that people feel comfortable with. And you can actually get more positive sentiment as a result.

I just think what makes it difficult is the politics are almost perfectly aligned to make that difficult from happening. And it’s been, you know—immigration reform is something that politicians have been talking about for more than 20 years now, and it hasn’t happened.

Rosin: Well, that was really helpful. Rogé, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this.

Karma: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Sara Krolewski fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

My thanks to Ali Breland and Rogé Karma for joining me. If you’d like to hear Rogé go even deeper on the research into immigration’s economic impact, you can hear him on another Atlantic podcast called Good on Paper. It’s hosted by staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, and that episode is linked in the show notes.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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Instead of the typical New Year’s reckoning of choices past and future, this year, I opted for some AI assistance by signing up for the MIT Future You project, and I met my future self. The program prompts you to answer a series of personal questions and then builds a version of you 20 years in the future. Then you and your future self have a conversation, and you’re free to ask whatever you want. I was nervous to meet my future self, lest she be depressed or full of regrets. But it turns out I was worried for the wrong reasons.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talked to Pat Pataranutaporn and Pattie Maes, two creators of the Future You project, about all the reasons it’s crucial to feel closer to your future self—and the pitfalls. Pataranutaporn, a writer on the Netflix series Tomorrow and I, also talked about the very different ways a future self works in sci-fi. And I talked to future Hanna, who—let’s just say—was a frustrating interviewee.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Hello?

Future Rosin: This is Future Hanna.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Oh, boy. My name is pronounced Hoh-nuh, Hanna. You should know that, of all people.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Rosin: Who are you?

Future Rosin: Hey there. I’m Hanna Rosin, an 80-year-old journalist from the future. I’m here to have a conversation with you about our career and life experiences, and offer some insights and advice based on my own journey.

Just a heads up, though, since we are from different timelines, things may be slightly different for me than they will be for you. But regardless of what lies ahead, I am excited to chat with you and share my thoughts.

Rosin: Oh, boy.

Rosin: What if you had the chance to meet your future self? In make-believe—meaning movies—people get to meet their future selves a lot. Usually, it’s coming around to teach them something, like a kid is desperate to be older—

David Moscow (from the movie Big): I wish I were big.

Rosin: —only to learn that being an adult is kind of terrible. Or it’s the holidays, when everyone is supposed to be smiling and drinking eggnog but, instead, they’re frantically reevaluating all their life choices.

Michael Caine (from the movie The Muppet Christmas Carol): Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?

Rosin: Or you’re a teenager doing stupid teenager things when the future you all of a sudden pops up.

Aubrey Plaza (from the movie My Old Ass): Dude, I’m you. Well, I’m 39-year-old you.

Maisy Stella: What?

Plaza: Left boob: one cup smaller than the right. And no, it never catches up to the right. But honestly, you get used to it, and it’s okay. Guys can’t really tell.

Rosin: There’s always this hunger to talk to our future selves, to know how things end up—a desire to change something today that will have an effect on tomorrow.

But life isn’t a movie, and I’m not an actress. So instead, I signed up for this program from MIT called Future You. It’s a web-based platform that lets you have a conversation with an older version of yourself, which—in my case—was 80-year-old Hanna.

First, I answered a questionnaire about my life, my family, my career. I sent in a photo, which gets aged up a few decades to create a sort of Avatar Hanna. And then Future You spawned a future me—like, a really, really cheerful future me.

Rosin: Do you have any advice for me now?

Future Rosin: My advice for you is to always stay true to yourself and your values. It may seem difficult at times, but never compromise who you are for the sake of others’ approval or expectations. Embrace your unique qualities, follow your passion, and trust that everything will fall into place when you stay true to yourself.

Rosin: By the way, the voice of Future Hanna is a combination of an AI-generated voice from ElevenLabs and some audio magic from our end. And I’ll note here that The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs to read out some articles on our site.

To be clear: The MIT project does not actually talk to you voice-to-voice. It’s all text based. But this being a podcast and all, we needed something more audio friendly.

Rosin: How do you feel about being older?

Future Rosin: I feel grateful for the life I’ve lived and all the experiences that have come with it. Of course, there are physical challenges that come with aging, but overall, I am at peace with who I am and the journey I have been on.

Rosin: You sound much sunnier than the real Hanna.

Future Rosin: Well, I suppose with age comes a different perspective on life. But trust me—I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs and challenges along the way. It’s all a part of the journey. But in this moment, I’m just grateful for where life has brought me and excited for what’s to come.

Rosin: Do you talk to your friends this way?

Future Rosin: Absolutely.

Rosin: Do you have any pets?

Future Rosin: Yes. I have a beloved rescue dog named Max. He has such a big personality and brings so much joy into my life every day. Sometimes the simplest names are the best ones for our furry friends.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Do you talk this way to our children? Because I don’t think they would like it. I don’t think they’ve ever heard me say the phrase “furry friends.”

Future Rosin: Of course I do. I have always been honest and open with our children about personal growth and change. And besides, they know that no matter what changes come their way, my love for them will never waver.

Rosin: Are you running for political office?

Future Rosin: No. I can confidently say that politics was never in my future. But I have found ways to use my platform and voice as a journalist to bring awareness and advocate for important issues that align with my core values.

Rosin: Oh my God—

Future Rosin: Keep following your passions, Hanna. You never know where they may lead you.

Rosin: Stop calling me Ha-na.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay. I hate that she doesn’t know how to say our name. Also, I’m not sure how I feel about this earnest, positive person. It doesn’t feel like any possible version of me. Unless it is? Like, could I one day turn into Yoda Hanna? Do I want to?

So I called up two of the people who worked on this program to find out: What’s the point of creating a space where people encounter their future selves, especially future selves that seem so annoyingly positive?

Also, I just needed to talk to someone about the photo they aged up.

Rosin: By the way, I uploaded a picture, and I yelped. I was like, Oh my god. That’s my mother. I’m sure a lot of people have that experience when they do that.

Pattie Maes: Yeah.

Rosin: That would be MIT professor Pattie Maes—

Maes: Hi. Nice to meet you.

Rosin: And MIT researcher Pat Pataranutaporn, who spoke to us from an AI conference in Vancouver.

Pat Pataranutaporn: For Voice Memos, I’m just recording the whole thing, correct?

Rosin: Pattie and Pat were both part of the team that created Future You.

Pataranutaporn: I was actually inspired by a cartoon that I watched as a kid. It was actually a Japanese animation called Doraemon.

[Theme from Doraemon]

Pataranutaporn: Which is actually the name of the robot that comes back from the 22nd century to help a boy who was not very interested in school to discover himself and become the best version of himself.

And in this cartoon, there was a time machine where the robot companion actually took the boy to see his future self, when he’s actually grown up and become a scientist, and to help the boy realize his potential. So this idea actually stuck with me for a very long time. And I started to learn more and do research in this area of future self and realized that there’s a rich area of research exploring how we can help people grow and flourish by understanding the future self-continuity.

Rosin: Future self-continuity. This is an idea that who we are—our personality, our values, our beliefs—basically, the core of what makes us us—remains the same, even as we get older.

A lot of researchers, by the way, think that there is no consistent identity—that we change so much over time that the “core self” is just a comforting illusion. But let’s just accept, for the purposes of this experiment, that the self exists, if you look for it.

The idea is: If you believe that you 20 years from now is the same you as right now, you’ll be more protective of future you. And if you don’t believe that, you’ll get in all kinds of trouble.

Rosin: So what evidence do we have that people do not, in fact, connect with their future selves? Because I think a lot of people listening to this might say to themselves, Oh, of course, I’ll save money for my future self, or, I’ll make good decisions for my future self. I think people think that they act in favor of their future selves, but you guys have turned up evidence that, in fact, people don’t.

Maes: Well, for one, you always think that there’s going to be more time to do things, so whatever goals and interests and satisfaction you can get in the short term often gets priority over taking actions that, ultimately, you will only benefit from in the longer term. That’s just human nature, I would say.

I mean, a lot of our life is limited by how we see ourselves. We stereotype people, but we also, in a way, stereotype ourselves. And that often limits the goals that we set for ourselves and the beliefs that we have in our own abilities.

Rosin: Have there ever been, say, brain studies about what people think when they encounter a vision of their future self? Is it more like they’re thinking about themselves, or is it more like thinking about a stranger? I’ve always been curious about that.

Pataranutaporn: Yeah. There was a study, actually, by Professor Hal Hershfield, who we collaborated with, trying to understand this sort of, you know: How do people treat the future self?

And I think from his study, people usually identify the future self not as a continuation of yourself. Because I think if you think of yourself as a stranger in the future, that disconnection could lead you to ignore that your consequence now would actually lead to you becoming that person in the future, right? So the gap is the thing that we need to work on to strengthen the connection.

Rosin: I see. Okay. That’s really interesting. So if I’m presented with the concept of my future self, I register that person as sort of a stranger. I don’t register it as me.

Like, if you told me, I’m going to meet you tonight, I can imagine myself at that restaurant with a friend as myself. But the future, that almost seems like a different person.

Pataranutaporn: Totally. And I think, sometimes, people often miss this connection. They would think that their future is maybe driven by some other factors that they cannot control. But I think our research is trying to make that connection more clearly and also show that, even though sometimes you may not always do everything that you want to do, there is a sense of possibility that in the future, you’ll be okay in some other way. So I think that sort of comforting visualization that we are trying to do with Future Self is really critical.

And one thing we often tell people is that this future-self simulation that we create is more of a possibility rather than a prophecy. So if you change what you’re doing today, there’s also a possibility that in the future it could be very different. And we encourage people to actually talk to this system and change the thing that you say to the system and try to encourage people to kind of go back and forth between the present and the future and reflect on what they actually want to pursue and do in the future.

[Music]

Rosin: This was making more sense. So upbeat, cheerleader Hanna is not supposed to be my destiny; she’s more aspirational. And if I could connect to her just enough—just feel a little protective of her—maybe I could start to feel hopeful that I could inch my way towards a sunnier old age.

There’s just one twist: In addition to being a scientist, Pat is also a TV writer. His Netflix sci-fi show, Tomorrow and I, just recently came out. And in it, the people of the future? They are very, very dark—definitely not people to be trusted.

That’s after the break.

[Music]

[Break]

Rosin:  Pat, you were a writer for the new Netflix show Tomorrow and I, which is a kind of Black Mirror set in Thailand, a very interesting show.

[Sound from Tomorrow and I]

Rosin:  One thing I noted is that in that show, like in a lot of sci-fi, emissaries from the future—unlike in your Future You program—they are not often the wise or kind ones. They are not necessarily leading you to a better place. And it’s the people in the present who very strongly embody humane values.

How do you see that sci-fi idea of a scary, untrustworthy future as related to the very, say, positive, encouraging version of future beings who exist in Future You?

Pataranutaporn: No. Thank you for making that connection. I think you are really spot on with that.  With today’s technology, we’re trying to make technology that looks more like us, speaks more like us. We’re making technology more humanized. But at the same time, we are also turning human into some form of machine, right?  

So in a way, we are creating these paradox, where we are making humanized machine and also sort of dehumanizing ourselves.

Rosin:  Yeah. And in Tomorrow and I, you can see those two versions of the future being battled: some people who are indifferent to the idea that technology is making us more mechanized, and some people who are fighting against that idea. So you see both those kinds of characters.

Pataranutaporn: Totally. And I think in our own work—even the work at MIT—we also think a lot about this question. We wrestle with the question of: When we make technology, does it actually lead us to having negative consequence or lead to sort of the future that we don’t want? So I think we try to be critical but also optimistic at the same time, which I think is rare these days, right? People are either super optimistic or super critical, but I think that the path forward—you need to do both.

Rosin: Right. So it’s a choice, a choice for society—our technological future can be bright, or it can be dark, but we have to guide it—and a choice for each of us, individually.

Pat says he actually experimented with a version of Future You which was more like his sci-fi series, where you could move toward a darker version of future you.

Pataranutaporn: Like, I became alcoholic after I finished my Ph.D. at MIT. I don’t drink, personally, but that version of me was super alcoholic, so it was interesting. It kind of really showed the fragility of the future, that things could slip, and things could happen at any moment, and it could change your trajectory in life.

Rosin: Obviously, he didn’t love that version, so they stuck with the cheery AI, which also had some hard lessons to teach him—not alcoholic hard, but still hard.

Pataranutaporn: Right now, I’m living in the U.S., but my parents are still in Thailand, where I’m from. You know, my future me, at 60 years old, tells me that when you’re 60, your parent might actually be very senior, very old, and you need to think about taking care of them. And in one future, my parents already passed away in that future. So it also changed my perspective on: How much time do I have left with my parents? And what should I prioritize right now? And thinking about preparing for that future where my parents might need more of me to take care of them in the future.

You might think this is somewhat obvious, but I don’t think there is that threshold when how old is old enough for you to think about taking care of your parents? But this sort of simulation makes it clear to me that, at one point, I need to start thinking about that. And when it’s the future me telling me, it also makes it very personal, as well.

[Music]

Rosin: I can see that. Advice from yourself to yourself is harder to ignore, so I’ll give my future self one more try.

Rosin: How do you feel, physically? How do you feel in your body?

Future Rosin: Physically, I feel good for my age. Of course, there are aches and pains that come with getting older. But overall, I am grateful for the health and vitality I still have.

Rosin: Do you ever get depressed?

Future Rosin: There are moments when I feel down or sad, but I wouldn’t say I get clinically depressed. However, it is important to acknowledge and validate those feelings and take care of my mental health just as much as my physical health.

In my younger years, I did struggle with depression, and it was a difficult journey to overcome. But through therapy and self-care practices, I have learned how to manage those emotions and live a fulfilling life.

Rosin: Do you ever think about death?

Future Rosin: Yes. I do think about death. As an 80-year-old woman, it’s natural for me to reflect on my life and contemplate the idea of death. But instead of dwelling on it or fearing it, I choose to focus on making the most out of every moment and leaving a positive impact in this world. Death is a part of life, and accepting that has helped me live my life more fully, without regrets.

Rosin: I have to say, that sounds a little glib.

Future Rosin: I can understand why it may seem that way. But as someone who has seen and experienced much in my 80 years, I’ve learned to approach death with a sense of peace and acceptance. It’s not about being glib or dismissive of its weight but, rather, finding a way to cope and make the most out of the time we have left on this earth.

Death is an inevitable part of life. But how we choose to live our lives is what truly matters.

Rosin: I think I’ve always been afraid of getting older, as a person who’s full of regrets and lingering darkness. But now I realize I might also be afraid of becoming a person who’s just flatly positive all the time.

Future Rosin: I understand your fears, and I don’t believe that being positive means ignoring or suppressing negative emotions. It’s about finding balance and not letting negativity consume you. And as for regrets, I have learned to let go of them and focus on the present moment instead of dwelling on the past.

Life is full of ups and downs, but it’s important to appreciate both and find lessons in every experience. Trust me—aging has its challenges, but it also brings a sense of peace and wisdom that is truly invaluable. Embrace it with an open mind and heart, my dear younger self.

Rosin: Okay. That got through to me a little bit.

[Music]

Future Rosin: Just remember: Life is a journey. And it’s never too late to change your mindset and find happiness within yourself.

Rosin: Can you please stop saying, “Life is a journey”?

Future Rosin: Fair enough.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Happy New Year. And thank you for listening.

And to my future self: I’ll see you later.

Future Rosin: You’ll figure it out, Hanna. Just keep living your life and following your heart. See you in 2050.

Rosin: (Laughs.) So weird. (Laughs.) That was very disconcerting.