Hunger Games for Legal Hackery

26:01It was an overreach to protect too many people in terms of the certified class. I think the fact that he narrowed it, one, and two, the language of the injunction tracks the language of the executive order. It's very clear that the people who are the beneficiaries of the nationwide injunction are the ones that would have been subject to the executive order entered by Donald Trump or announced by Donald Trump back in February of this year. And so I think that this federal judge was reasonably anticipating the appeal process, one. And two, your point is well taken. I do not think the Supreme Court is prepared to deal with the substantive issue of the birthright citizenship, because we need to remind everybody tuning in, there is still other litigation that is still pending on that, because the Casa case, the one that we just talked about that that had that Supreme Court opinion at the end of June, that case is still winding its way through the judicial system as well.

26:52So this was another case. This was Barbara in quotes, Barbara versus Donald Trump, president of the United States in its official capacity and other defendants.

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30:19So that is the news out of a district court in New Hampshire. Moving on to another court that might also be teeing up some issues for the Supreme Court. That is the Eighth Circuit. So the Eighth Circuit recently denied en banc review that is reviewed by all of the active judges on the Eighth Circuit in the case about whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has a private right of action. That is the question is whether the Voting Rights Act can be enforced in litigation brought by private parties like citizens and voting rights organizations, or whether instead it can only be enforced by the Department of Justice, which, as we know, not so interested in enforcing voting rights as opposed to voting wrongs right about now.

31:02You know, the Chief Judge Smith noted in dissent in the Court of Appeals case that over the past 40 years, there have been at least 182 successful Section 2 cases. Of those cases, only 15 were brought solely by the Attorney General. So not allowing private parties to enforce the Voting Rights Act, that really kills what remains of the Voting Rights Act. And this issue, you know, whether Section 2 can be enforced, is now headed to the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs are asking the Supreme Court to grant cert and review the case. And I'm sure only good things will happen from there. No? Well, what's left of the Voting Rights Act?

31:41Yeah. Honestly. I mean, we don't know what they're going to say, you know, to that question. in Louisiana versus Calais, which they put on the docket again for next term. I just feel like the chipping away is eventually going to leave absolutely nothing left on the bone. There will be no substantive meat left on the bone. And I think the primary concern is not actually, ironically, it's not the substance or the merits of it. It's the Department of Justice in and of itself. I think the decimation of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice has has turned equity on its head and equality on its head.

32:20And your point is well taken that if you do not have a Department of Justice that is seeking to protect civil rights pursuant to Section 1983 of our federal statutes, if you don't have a Department of Justice that thinks that its civil rights division actually has to protect civil rights, then this becomes a free for all. And my greatest fear is, again, what happens to what's left of the Voting Rights Act? Yeah, no, we are all going to be watching for that. So now back to some goodish legal news. And it is once again out of the district courts, which are the place to be. So we got a temporary restraining order in Planned Parenthood's challenge to the provision of the big bad bill that prohibits Medicaid recipients from being reimbursed for care that they receive at entities that provide abortions and that receive more than$800 ,000 in Medicaid funds in, you know, one fiscal year.

33:15year. So Katie, I guess let's start with that provision that is the provision in the big bad bill. Can you explain what that does? So the big bad bill has a specific provision that goes after nonprofit organizations that generated$800 ,000 or more in revenue from Medicaid payments in the 2023 fiscal year. So there are nonprofit health centers, right, that not only provide abortions, but they also provide other medical care. I think that's a big footnote here. There's a big misconception about clinics like Planned Parenthood and other healthcare centers and healthcare clinics that even though they may provide abortion services, that that's all they do.

34:04But in fact, they actually are usually centers within neighborhoods and clinics within neighborhoods that provide essential health care services from mental health services to birth control to abortion and to other things. And so basically, this big BS bill, as I like to call it, but I'll be polite because this is your show. This big BS bill, though, is an attempt by the trump administration to end run having to deal with something that frankly was already dealt with which is the hyde amendment so the hyde amendment says you cannot use federal funds for abortions right so that's already in existence but the trump administration says if we include a funding slash in the big b bill then we're gonna basically gut planned parenthood because now they won't be able to get the funding that they need.

35:01And the lawsuit that was brought essentially says, please, let's dispense with the stupidity here. We all know you're really coming after Planned Parenthood because there's really only us that generates more than$800 ,000 in income in Medicaid payments. Ha ha, we figured you out. Yeah. And so just to take that one step further, the significance of this provision, it's kind of a backdoor abortion ban because it will defund and close clinics in blue and purple states, not just red states, because if you defund Planned Parenthood, if you starve them of the funds that they would receive for providing care to Medicaid patients, that is not just going to close clinics in red states.

35:42That is going to close clinics across the country as they reallocate resources. And I think in that way, like it's similar to the targeted regulation of abortion providers legislative strategy of like regulating abortion out of existence. Because if you force the closure of a clinic, then no abortions. And that seems to be the point. So I wanted to read a statistic because I really like numbers. More than 1 million patients in 43 states receive health care services at Planned Parenthood that are covered by Medicaid. That's a lot. And that's every year. So to your point, it's not just, you know, red states.

36:22It's red states, blue states, purple states. It's 43 states out of 50 states that are going to be impacted by this. And I think it's incredibly insidious because it's not for a failure of imagination on our part, Leah, but this is some pretty creative stuff that they do. Oh, yeah. And what's incredibly disturbing is this 900-something page bill has these types of things baked in where you have to, again, extend your thought process strategically beyond just saying, well, how does this work? Like, what is this nonprofit? What is this amount? No, no, no. They are trying to get around and create basically a nationwide abortion ban because Planned Parenthood is, again, the only provider that would meet these threshold financial requirements under the BBB.

37:07Yeah. So a district judge issued a temporary restraining order, which pauses that provision of the BBB for 14 days from July 7th. And that means patients will be reimbursed for care they receive at Planned Parenthood. And Planned Parenthood will receive funds for the care other than abortions that it provides through Medicaid. And we will obviously be watching that case to see what happens from there. So after we recorded late on a Friday, I should add, in order to prevent subsequent breaking news, we got some late breaking post-recording legal news. But it's good news, so not going to complain.

37:43And gonna let you know about it. The news is this. A district judge in California issued a temporary restraining order that limits what ICE and DHS can do as part of their roving patrols in Los Angeles. This is a super important ruling in that if followed and implemented and upheld, it will reduce the amount of terrorizing that DHS is able to unleash on LA. A few quick details about the ruling. There didn't seem to be a lot of disagreement between the government and the plaintiffs about what the law actually is. That is what the law allows the government to do. So the district court actually starts out the opinion by laying out the agreement between the parties, bullet pointing the things they don't dispute.

38:23The opening paragraph says, quote, the federal government agrees roving patrols without reasonable suspicion violate the Fourth Amendment and denying access to lawyers violates the Fifth Amendment, end quote. The dispute, in other words, is about the facts, i.e. whether DHS is detaining people without reasonable suspicion and then denying them access to lawyers. And the district court concluded plaintiffs submitted enough to substantiate their request about what is happening and to get a TRO. The district court wrote, quote, What the federal government would have this court believe in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case is that none of this is actually happening, end quote.

39:01You would think that this would be the kind of ruling that would or should hold up on appeal in the event the government tries to appeal a TRO, which ordinarily isn't appealable, but appellate courts let you appeal temporary restraining orders that are functionally the equivalent of injunctions. Anyways, as Justice Jackson's scorcher of a dissent in the Union of Federal Workers case indicated, the Supreme Court is not above second-guessing district courts on the facts, even when the fact-finding process is on the up-and-up and even when the facts seem to line up as the district court found them to be.

39:30Still, the temporary restraining order is great and welcome news, and this is what it actually prevents DHS from doing. ICE, DHS, Border Patrol, they can't stop and question people solely based on their race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or having an accent, being at a specific place, like being outside of Home Depot, where day laborers might gather, or doing specific work, such as landscaping. Side note for our listeners, an old Supreme Court decision, Brignoni Ponce from 1975, had actually permitted some racial profiling in the enforcement of immigration laws, but at the border and functional equivalents.

40:06Elsewhere, like LA, the government has to identify specific articulable facts in order to justify stopping and questioning people. On the basis for the government's arrests in this case, the court remarked, quote, defendants, that is the government, do not explain why fleeing upon seeing unidentified masked men with guns exiting from tinted cars without license plates raises suspicion, end quote. When ICE doesn't identify themselves, there are consequences. The temporary restraining order that the judge issued also directs the government to immediately provide people who are detained in the basement of federal buildings with access to lawyers and confidential legal calls.

40:43So great news, L.A., about this order. And again, in a sane, functioning legal system, this should be the kind of order on which a district court gets a lot of deference, the kind of order that stands. The Trump administration, as I was saying, did not argue that these kinds of stops were legal. They just claimed, in spite of all the evidence, that it wasn't actually happening. And we usually let district courts resolve facts in reasonable ways, but we will see whether the administration gets the Supreme Court on speed dial for this one. And speaking of the Supreme Court, back to the original recording.

41:16So auditions continue apace for the role of America's Next Top SCOTUS justice. And among the auditions is, of course, the one being done by Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, who issued a concurrence to his own opinion in a death penalty case. Hey, it worked for Neil Gorsuch. Anyways. He doesn't have enough to do, my bro. It's like we saw you in your very lengthy majority opinion that you drafted. We needed you in a concurrence. What the hell? He's going to do extra credit. So this case is actually back from April, but we haven't had a chance to cover it yet. And the case involves some individuals who were sentenced to death in Louisiana, and they had tried to challenge Louisiana's lethal injection protocol.

41:56And one death row inmate sought to reopen the case to challenge the state's new nitrogen hypoxia protocol. So the case is about the interpretation of federal rule of civil procedure 60, which governs motions to reopen and not content to rest there. Judge Ho filed a concurrence to his own majority opinion in a case about federal rule of civil procedure 60 and motions to reopen. And what did he say about in this case on civil procedure involving the death penalty? He wanted to stake out his position about how the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad district courts are doing too much to control Donald Trump's unlawful actions.

42:30Like he literally just goes off on the proceedings in Trump versus JGG, the Alien Enemies Act case. And I just got to respect the hustle. I don't know. Well, I mean, it was the best part of his concurrence is a lying down and spitting up in the air moments of him saying, quote, it is often said that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, but that's wrong. Well, what do you do, buddy, for a living? Because last I checked, that's what we do. So he then goes on to say - He prostrates himself in front of the president. That's what he does. We're not an active branch. We're a passive branch.

43:14And under the constitution of our founders, the judiciary is the least powerful branch. I mean, bro, like maybe you need to find a new job because this is your job as a judge. Last I checked as a member of the judiciary. But that type of self-flagellation. Yes. Woo. Like, really? Like, he needs therapy? Yes. But what's horrific is, to your point, this guy is shortlisted all the time for SCOTUS. Yeah. All the time. And I'm like, should be happy. Fellow Asian American maybe being considered for a big role. Not so happy. That is James Ho. Just going to put that out there. And he is not the only Fifth Circuit judge trying to put his name in the hat because Judge Andy Oldham also got on this shtick, and he filed a lengthy dissent to the Fifth Circuit's decision to reaffirm that federal law is indeed supreme and that Chief Justice Marshall got the whole federal supremacy thing right in McCullough v.

44:10Maryland. So the Fifth Circuit concluded that Texas's SB4, which basically allows the state to countermand federal immigration law, is preempted by federal law. And Judge Oldham filed a lengthy dissent. What to make of this dissent? So it cites White House press releases, including one called Promises Made, Promises Kept. It cites Fox News several times, at least five. And it cites anti-immigrant talking points from executive orders. Katie, who do you think has the edge here? Judge Ho or Judge Oldham? Oh, listen, I think Ho wins the gold medal. But I think that I think Oldham saying I respectfully but emphatically dissent.

44:53Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, that's going to change my mind now because you emphatically dissented. He spent a lot of time on his love for Texas. Yes. Like Texas this, Texas that. I wonder if he consulted Ken Paxton and his wife. I mean, it was a love song to Texas. Yes. It was wild. It was a love song to Trump immigration policy. Well, yeah. And it's like, you know, they're standing in the way of Trump. Oh, Marga. Like the whole thing read like a Project 2025 Trump campaign for illegal immigration enforcement. Yeah. It's what it is. But to your point, it's who's going to outdo the other when it comes to the beauty pageant.

45:39Tyra, where are you? We need you, Tyra. Send up the bat signal to figure this one out, to send somebody home. Yeah. Okay. So this is what's coming from the guys already on the federal bench. We also have some news about the guys who may yet still be on the federal bench, specifically one Emile Bovee, nominated to the Third Circuit. So Senator Durbin released a trove of communications and documents provided by the whistleblower, Mr. Arez Ruveni, who alleged that the regime plotted to defy court orders and that they, you know, plotted to smear Kilmara Brugo Garcia as they resisted efforts to return him.

46:17You know, recall that Riveny alleged that Emile Bove, a nominee to the Third Circuit, had said the administration planned to say, quote, fuck you to the courts in the event the courts prevented expulsions to El Salvador before they were carried out. Most self-hating judges, you know, between him and Judge Ho. But anyways, you know, the allegations more generally describe Bove's machinations to defy court orders. And so now he's provided he's turned over to Congress, you know, these text messages, phone records and emails with his colleagues, you know, at various federal departments. I guess, Katie, I'll just start by asking like high level thoughts on this recent document dump.

46:53Bro has receipts. Raveni is impressive. I mean, he's like he's like every law professor's dream, right? It's like save all your notes, write everything down. I mean, he's the king of no spoliation of evidence. I am like, wait, there's more. It's like, do you want the Ginsu knives, too? I thought there was plenty before the first time Emil Bovey went and testified. and the fact that there's more stuff that we're getting to see. And the crazy thing is I have to ask, like, how did he keep these things? Because you know he got walked out of that place. You know when he got dismissed, DJ was like, email cut off.

47:28We're going to escort you out. But he kept all of this stuff because he knew, all kidding aside, Leah, Arez Ravini knew that this was going to come back to bite somebody and it wasn't going to be him. He's like, I am not going to be with a hole in the bag. But what's startling to me is how it is a direct refutation of Emile Bove's credibility. And it's crazy because, I mean, I did a video on my YouTube channel about this. And I said, if Bovey makes it to the Third Circuit and he doesn't agree with one of his fellow brethren on the bench, is he going to turn to that judge and say, fuck you? Like, I'm serious.

47:59Like, how is that going to work for him? I know. But this is alarming, alarming that his, as in Bovey's DNA and fingerprints, are on Kilmar Abrego Garcia's fate. And the fact that he knew and he was directing other official agencies to disregard judicial orders is, of course, part and parcel for this administration, but is a huge red flag. But I fear, Leah, I fear it's still not going to be enough. Yeah. So just to highlight the evidence that substantiates Riveni's allegations of Beauvais saying, fuck you. So there are texts in which, you know, he and other people are saying this doesn't end with anything but a nationwide injunction and a decision point on fuck you.

48:40And guess it's time to find out time on the fuck you, right? Like they are referencing the comment. So it seems to have been a thing. And, you know, this is not just an indictment of Emile Beauvais, although, of course, like that is in some ways like the most relevant given that he is nominated to the Third Circuit. You know, there are text messages during the hearing with Judge Boesberg in which Rouvenet seems to make clear that the lawyer, right, arguing in front of Boesberg lied. Like there's one text message that says, oh, shit, that was just not true in reference to, you know, his co-counseling saying.

49:17I think it was Drew Ensign. Yeah, exactly. In reference to Drew Ensign saying he doesn't know whether there are plans to actually bring about the AEA removals, you know. And then, you know, someone else said, it's a question if Drew, that is Ensign, the lawyer arguing, gets out without a sanction. Like, when you are wondering in real time, if you're going to get out without sanctions, something has gone wrong. Well, and also one of the things that actually is removed from the Reveni credibility issue is the fact that Arez Reveni's boss actually emailed and said that the Office of the Director of the Attorney General, you know, obviously the Deputy Attorney General, which, you know, basically said it was Emil Bove was instructing those federal agencies that it was totally okay for them to deport these detainees, disembark, deplane them in El Salvador.

50:07And that was a direct, direct contravention to what Judge Boesberg did. I, Leah, am upset that they got the administrative stay on the appellate court level, which would have which which stopped effectively stopped Judge Boesberg's contempt inquiry. Because I know for a fact that Judge Boesberg would have done some damage to Emile Bove. And so, as I say, timing is everything. Yeah. So Katie's referring to the decision by the D.C. Circuit to pause Boesberg's order or decision finding probable cause for criminal contempt. And he would have proceeded further. Like this evidence could have come out earlier.

50:46He might have made findings that Emile Beauvais did indeed direct other federal officials to defy the court order. He might have made findings that Emile Beauvais said, fuck you to the courts, but he wasn't allowed to actually consider the facts because the D.C. Circuit stopped that in its tracks. More middle fingers to the district courts. Exactly. One bright spot of this document dump is that friends of the pod turned up in the oddest of places. So after Riveni texted, quote, guess we are going to say fuck you to the court. Super. His colleague responded, well, Pamela Jo Bondi is not you. And I love that they're listening to the pod so they know, say her name.

51:28It's Pamela Jo Bondi. It's not just Pamela Bondi. Pamela Jo. Exactly. PJB. So this is how the Republican Party selects its judicial nominees through something like a Hunger Games for Legal Hackery. But it's not the only way to select political officials. We know that crooked listeners and Vote Save America volunteers have been inspired to run for office for a variety of reasons. So we thought, what happens when we ask folks in our network to run? Vote Save America is running a first-of-its-kind pilot program to recruit our audiences, you, in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas, to run for office.

52:03That means candidates for school boards, city council, county commissioner, town clerks, that's like election protection, state legislature, and more. This is how you build power. So if you want to learn more, you can sign up at votesaveamerica.com slash run. Okay, so this is probably about all we have time for, for this particular episode. Katie, we always are ending these, I don't know, surveys of the fuster cluck around us with things we've recommended, things we've read, seen, watched and liked over the last week. So I wanted to put that question to you before we say our goodbyes. So, I mean, I probably should say something a little bit more uplifting, but I am paying particularly close attention to the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp.

52:54It is literally less than 40-something minutes away from where I live here in Florida. And there have been a couple of lawsuits that have now been filed, one from an environmental impact standpoint that I have covered on my substack, and then one that was just filed yesterday by a group of state representatives that were denied access to conduct state statute, torily authorized, unannounced visits, because there's going to be an imminent dog and pony show tomorrow or over the next couple of days where there will be a scheduled visit. And by all accounts, the detainees are saying that the conditions are abysmal at Alligator Alcatraz.

53:29So I am keeping a very close eye on that. And I invite other people to look at the cases and consider the litigation because it is a very interesting collision between the federal government and the state. And frankly, anything involving Ron DeSantis and his political demise makes me very happy. And if you want to, again, follow along with that litigation, you can follow Katie at her YouTube channel, Katie Fang News, or at her sub stack at Katie Fang. So my recommendations from this last week would be as follows. So V.E. Schwab's Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is this totally unexpected, surprising work of fiction that I didn't see coming.

54:08Highly recommend if you really want some escapist distraction. Also loved Gilbert King's Bone Valley. I got an advanced reader copy of that. It's coming out this fall. He's, of course, the author of Devil in the Grove. And it's just this book, Bone Valley, is just terrific. Finally, I got to see Cowboy Carter, and it gave me life. I'm so jealous. Oh, my goodness. Just everything. So, Katie, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you breaking down all of this legal news for our listeners. Thank you for the hospitality. and just huge fan of all of yours and especially of your book, Leah.

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57:33the pod subscriber. A limited number of discounted tickets are still available. Get them before they run out. See you at CricketCon.

57:48We are delighted to be joined today by one of our favorite collaborators, Chris Hayes, whose fantastic new book The Sirens Call is so good that we'd want to discuss it even if Kate wasn't married to him and even if he wasn't our trusted roadie. Chris, welcome back to the podcast.

58:03Chris Hayes:Thank you. That means a lot, Leah. That sounded so genuine, Chris. No, I meant to be here. He's a sincere guy. I was sincere. I meant it genuinely. It doesn't mean a lot. All right. Okay. So let's get right into it, Chris. The Sirens Call's central premise is that attention has become a commodified resource that is extracted and exploited in what you call the attention age. And you analogize it to the way that labor became commodified and was extracted and exploited during the industrial era. So we've seen this before, only now we're seeing it with attention. In your own words, you say, what you're arguing here is that the scale of transformation we're experiencing is far more vast and far more intimate than even the most avid critics have understood because this process of attentional resource extraction produces a wide array of negative consequences.

58:55So I am someone who is always seeing my attention divided. What are the negative consequences of attention being a scarce resource?

59:05Chris Hayes:I think the most profound at a kind of like soul level is a sense and a feeling of alienation. And that term is the one that Marx uses to describe the way that industrial era laborers felt about their labor, right? that people have always worked, they've always toiled, but the difference between, say, being a cobbler or shoemaker who makes a shoe and pours yourself into the process of making a shoe and at the end of the process has a shoe to sell, that's a very different experience than being on an assembly line stamping soles into shoes 10 hours a day. and in some ways the transformation from one to the other was the experience of a thing that should be internal to you the sum of your total effort and toil being extracted outside of you so that you're alienated from it and i think when we think about attention it's kind of inseparable from the very heart of what it is to be a conscious human being i mean william james takes up this question in the 19th century precisely because he rightly, I think, understands attention as inseparable from consciousness and free will, right?

1:00:17Chris Hayes:The ability to put your mind's focus where you want to put it is kind of what makes us human, right? I mean, you know, a sea slug in a lab will just stimulus response, stimulus response. But the ability to exert dominion over our own minds is very much at the core of what it is to be human. When that faculty, which is the ability to exert that dominion starts to degrade, starts to be taken from us, then I think we suffer something at the most profound level of ourselves. Like what we are as humans gets taken from us. And I think endemic to the inner life of almost everyone in the attention age is this feeling of alienation.

1:00:58So can you say more about the dehumanizing aspect of the attention age, like kind of concrete examples maybe about how this manifests?

1:01:05Chris Hayes:Well, one of the things I think that's happening is that like everyone's literally getting dumber. And I actually this is a sort of interesting thing like the metrics by which we measure people's cognitive capacity intelligence are rightly the subject of tremendous amounts of controversy, imprecise and, you know, in all these different ways. But one of the things we've sort of been seeing across the globe is like a decline across every country in scores on sort of some of these basic aptitude tests and cognitive tests about people's literacy. And I think that the thing that's necessary to like process and think is the ability to sustain attention.

1:01:48Chris Hayes:And when you start to take that away, then you really start to strike a deep blow at people's ability to kind of do cognitive work. And I, you know, I think all three of you are teachers and professors and you're all three of you are like extremely, extremely top tier law schools where you're getting the people whose faculties are the most intact, who sort of run through this gauntlet to get to that. Well, you are. I mean, to get to that. I'm not sure they would take that as a compliment, the people whose faculties are most intact. I mean, I think it's probably true. And I still think it probably manifests in your classrooms all the time and with students.

1:02:25Chris Hayes:And I think, you know, this idea that we're now going to have this new wave of AI that creates, that sort of institutionalizes all the shortcuts away from cognitive effort is also like particularly dispiriting in this sense. But I also think it has it also has really tactile consequences for the media and information environment we live in. So, you know, one implication of this is that in competitive attention environments, you tend towards the sort of lowest common denominator of compelled attention. So like, what does Times Square look like? And why does Times Square look the way it looks? Well, Times Square is a place where people's attention is being fought over in a very competitive marketplace.

1:03:05Chris Hayes:And so you get bright lights and interruptions, the same of a casino floor, right? Increasingly, all competitive attention markets look like that, and they work against other forms of communication or media that look different. Can I ask about that? I mean, is it now that it's not just that you can walk into Times Square and you're being assailed by all of these different things that are competing for your attention. Now you can walk with your phone, and your phone is like – I'm thinking about that article that came out, I guess, a few months ago about how college students can't read a book. Like they're just not trained to sustain attention long enough to be able to finish a lengthy reading assignment.

1:03:43And so it's sort of revamped the entire structure of curricula, even in higher education. Are we making ourselves dumber with smartphones and other technology?

1:03:55Chris Hayes:I think we almost certainly are. And I think that, you know, the experience of Times Square or the experience of the casino floor, like is increasingly the experience of inner life. And to be clear here, we're talking about six, seven, eight hours a day, depending like what who's doing the measuring. Like this idea that I think 10 years ago, more and more, you can make this distinction between IRL, like get offline, go touch grass. And, you know, the internet, like the internet was one sphere, IRL was another sphere. And those spheres kind of contacted each other throughout the day. Now it's like there's no distinction really between the two.

1:04:34Chris Hayes:It's one seamless lived reality. And that seamless lived reality is most of our waking time or a sizable portion for some most, some half, some slightly less than half is spent in a competitive attention market whose job is to extract our attention whether we want it to or not. And then to sell that attention to some third party. and that is going to have profound effects on what we can do with the sort of miracle and gift that our attention is. Yeah. So will you say a little bit more about that, Chris, the kind of the way that our entire social and political and economic order has been restructured around attention?

1:05:13And I think, you know, you make this really profound point in the book about the difference between getting and keeping attention. So can you walk through that? Yeah.

1:05:22Chris Hayes:So we have these sort of two faculties for attention. One's voluntary and one's involuntary. And the involuntary one is the root of what attention is, because if you're walking across the street, scrolling through your phone, and a car honks because it's about to hit you, the whole point, the thing that attention has to do from an evolutionary perspective is to wrench you away from the phone towards the thing that's about to put you in danger, right? So the reason we have this faculty is so that we can recognize danger. It is and is so that we can be interrupted in some deep sense. So involuntary attention, which is, you know, the whale of a siren down the street, the crying of a baby on a flight, the honk of the horn of the car, or a waiter dropping a tray of glasses.

1:06:09Chris Hayes:That's one form of attention. The other form of attention is voluntary, right? Which is you're deciding right now as you're listening to this podcast that you want to listen to this podcast and you're putting your focus on it right now. The issue is that if you're in competitive attention markets, it's much easier to grab someone's attention than to hold it. So think about it this way. Almost any person, if there was a room, let's say an auditorium of a thousand people, and you said, look, your job is to go in there and get on that stage and just get everyone's attention. Like anyone can do that.

1:06:39Chris Hayes:It's sort of trivially easy. Like where anyone who's ever raised their glass and hit the fork against it to be like, hey, everyone toast time, right? Like you can get attention very easily. But if you said, okay, your assignment is to go into that theater of a thousand people and hold their attention for an hour. Well, that's a much, much more difficult proposition because it's easier to grab than to hold. What it means is competitive attention markets tend to drive towards iterative grabbing of attention. I call this in the book, the slot machine model, right? Someone, you know, people legendarily will sit at slot machines for six, eight, 10 or 12 hours.

1:07:14Chris Hayes:They're not being told the story, right? There's no narrative arc. They're not spellbound by their attention being held. Instead, the slot machine is taking three second bites of interruption and repeated interruption. This sense of selecting in competitive attention markets for iterative interruption, you know, that is what the infinite scroll of the internet now has become. I mean, I don't even think it's an accident that it's actual interface is like a slot machine. Like, I mean, you're it's scrolling in front of you. You're sort of like awaiting the dopamine hit of the cherries, which is like the funny video or some, you know, something that's that's provocative or interesting or titillating or whatever it is.

1:07:53Chris Hayes:And so you you have this selection effect because it's speaking to some deep part of our wiring. Right. And the comparison I use in the book is the same way that we have certain evolutionary inheritances when it comes to our appetites that are exploited by companies like Coca-Cola or McDonald's, which can sell their product anywhere in the world. In any context, you can get people to drink sugary water because there's a deep part of us that reacts to that. There's something similar happening with attention and what happens to attention capitalism when it's deployed at scale. And remember, the scale we're talking about here, you know, Meta's got 2 billion users, right?

1:08:31Chris Hayes:Like ByteDance has something in that universe, billions of users. I mean, this is on a scale that almost no corporation has ever been selling a product at. So Chris, in the book, you make the point that no one wants mere attention. In fact, you say, quote, we want recognition and attention is a poor substitute. How do we distinguish between what is mere attention and what is recognition, which from your telling seems deeper and more substantive and meaningful? Yeah, I think this is one of the most central points of conflict and despair in the social media world that we've constructed, which is not only can we pay attention to people, but people can pay attention to us, that social attention.

1:09:19Chris Hayes:And in some ways, that social attention is, you know, from the moment we come into the world, we need it. I mean, a newborn baby is helpless and it will die without attention. It has to be attended to. and that attention is the thing that brings care you know that in fact newborn babies have this trick right they can cry and it's not an accident that like that cry is very very hard to ignore if you're ever around a newborn whaling uh because that is the means by which it attracts attention and that attention is necessary for its survival so we are creatures that are social creatures and we need social attention to live from the first moments of life.

1:09:58Chris Hayes:And what that means is that the platforms have kind of weaponized this against us by engineering social attention into the very foundations of the platform, right? When someone tags you, responds to you, right? Your mentions, your notifications, right? All of that is sending this bit of information, someone's paying attention to you. There's experiments that show in a setting where like a cocktail party, where you're focused on the conversation in front of you, someone says your name across the room, it leaps into your consciousness. Because that that social attention is such a profound part of who we are that it's even wired into our perceptual apparatus.

1:10:38Chris Hayes:The difference between that and recognition is that I think the thing we want as humans is to be seen as humans by other humans. Like, the weird thing about attention is that it's mere. It's necessary, but never sufficient. So like what you want in a relationship, in a friendship, in a collaboration with colleagues, in a romantic relationship, right? In a friendship, you want care, reciprocity. You want to be seen as human by another human. You want all these things that are profound and deep about recognition. Attention is the merest level of it, but it's necessary to get the other stuff. And so what we're being fed online is the merest thing that is easy to kind of mistake for the deeper thing.

1:11:19Chris Hayes:It's like a sort of like synthetic version of something, right? Like a synthetic drug that replicates endogenous chemicals in our body. And that mismatch between like what we're getting and what we actually crave, I think describes a lot of people's extremely compulsive behavior online, particularly as regards social attention. Okay, let me maybe pivot for a minute. So I obviously know the book super well. So I'm just like asking you to talk through some of my favorite parts of the book and kind of insights in the book. But I really like the parts of the book. Now, it's not a book that's about Donald Trump.

1:11:52And you spend most of the book not talking about Donald Trump, but then you have to. And so he is in some ways like this kind of product of and paradigmatic exemplar of the kind of attention age figure. And you talk a bit about Elon Musk as well in the book. So can you just talk through the way you discuss those two really important players in the book? And then maybe let us know, has your thinking about either of them changed, right? So you finished writing the book a year plus ago. I'm trying to remember the exact timeline. But obviously, there have been a lot of developments involving both Trump, who has become president again, and Musk, who has, you know, bought Twitter.

1:12:29I think he was purchasing Twitter and newly running it as you were kind of putting the galleys of the book to bed. So any and all of that.

1:12:37Chris Hayes:So I think in Trump's case, this is someone who recognized very early on how powerful attention is. Also, one of the things that distinguishes attention from other forms of human relations is that it can be positive or negative. Like there's no such thing as really like negative care or negative love, negative reciprocity. Like the things that we think of as positive aspects of human relationships are positive, but attention can be negative or positive. I mean, someone can be screaming at you on the subway or they can be flirting with you. And like, those are both forms of attention. Donald Trump is such a, I think, just profoundly broken person at such a deep and fair level that he doesn't really distinguish between them where he wants attention so badly that he's willing to take negative attention in ways that are truly kind of pathological and unnatural for most people who don't like negative attention.

1:13:26Chris Hayes:But I think via this deep, instinctual aspect of his personality, he made the discovery that attention is basically the most important resource. And if you collect it to yourself, you collect tremendous amounts of power. I think Elon Musk didn't start out with the same brokenness of Donald Trump, but he got it somehow, I think by being online too much. Like, I literally think Twitter broke him profoundly. And he became addicted to attention in a way that was totally compulsive and pathological, but also led him to the same insight that I think Trump had, which is about the power of attention and even negative attention.

1:14:06Chris Hayes:that if you collect enough attention, and even if it's negative, you aggregate power yourself. I do think that his arc is really interesting to study in contrast to Trump, because I think Trump has natural charisma, which I think, you know, aids him in a way that Elon Musk is like the opposite of charisma. He's like the least charismatic human being I've ever encountered. He's like a negative void of charisma. He's just... Have you met Sam Alito? you're right actually alito is in a very similar category um and so i i think that they have the same insight and some of the same pathologies but ultimately like trump has like a natural a natural talent for for getting attention in a way that elon musk doesn't his is born purely of the kind of pathologies and addictions of of his very like very obviously and like documented addiction to social media, which he posts on all hours of the day and night.

1:15:03I feel like you are a channeling bane. You merely adopted the dark. I was born and molded by it as you were talking. Okay. So I wanted to ask, you've talked both in interviews about the book, but also the book itself about how part of your job was kind of staying on top of rapidly developing news and how that kind of forced you into this world of attention and the attention economy. And I guess I wanted to ask for your advice, because I feel like a lot of what people are being asked to do right now is to stay tuned into politics, right, and engage in public information and public education. And these situations can be quite rapidly developing, like as a vote is unfolding, and people are all of a sudden calling on you to call certain representatives and whatnot.

1:15:49So how do you balance the competing demands of this rapidly evolving political hellscape in which we all need to be tuned into and participating in and informing ourselves and others about with the reality that, of course, in order to form deeper engagement and engage in deeper thinking, you need to check out of that at some points and toggle back and forth between the two.

1:16:12Chris Hayes:Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, I would say my first answer is just like, if you listen to strict scrutiny, why is this happening? Watch all in and then make some time to read Lawless and the Sirens Call. Like you're that's you're basically that's a good comprehensive set of information sources. No. And Kate's New York Times op eds. Yes. I mean, obviously, when Kate pops up in the New York Times, you got to read that, too. But no, I think that fundamentally, it's a great question. I mean, I tell people this, which is kind of an admission against interest, which is that, like, you don't really need to follow the news all day, every day.

1:16:46Chris Hayes:I think, you know, one thing I think about is like, there's a kind of a natural logic to the idea of morning news radio or like the morning paper, or you read the paper later that day when you get home, there used to be, you know, back in the day, it'd be morning papers and evening papers, morning paper. And the evening news is another combo you could do, right? Like, I do think that setting time aside where you actually pay attention to the news and try to digest it at in some way that is more than just the kind of barrage does make kind of sense um and i do think the constant plugged in can can have kind of diminishing returns after a certain point even though obviously you know from the perspective of my like employer like it's better if you will watch our network all day um which you know which I get, but I do think that like, yeah, I do think there can be diminishing returns.

1:17:43Chris Hayes:And I do think setting time aside, I mean, one little thing I write about in the book, which I do think is interesting, is reading the physical paper is so much better than reading it online or reading it mediated through social media. I saw this really funny thing the other day where like the Sunday shows all did rounds of interviews where there was a lot of questions about Zora Mamdani. and some Democrats said some pretty bad stuff about him and that got clipped and it went viral. And I saw people like, why are Democrats paying it? Like they're about to pass this terrible bill and why are Democrats only talking about Zora Mondani?

1:18:17Chris Hayes:It's like, if you go back to the interviews, like there were tons of exchanges about the bill. The thing that got people's attention was the controversy about Mondani, which then got clipped. But the actual original source of the interview was not just about Zora Mondani. In fact, it spent a lot of time on the bill. And one thing that happens is when you get information in news totally mediated by social media, you can lose that context very, very easily, which is why I think that like doing things like reading the newspaper or like, you know, listening to strict scrutiny, you know, all the way through, even about cases that are not like the big cases is actually just a really useful way to get information.

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1:22:06It's undisputed that President Trump, Elon Musk are major figures in the attention age. But on strict scrutiny, I think we are of the view that the Supreme Court is also a major player in the age of information. So yes or no, do you agree with us? The right answer is obviously yes. And then I will ask you to elaborate. How exactly is the court a player in this ecosystem? Is the court more susceptible to public pressure because attention is more fluid and performative than it's ever been? How does all of this impact the world that we occupy and our views of the court?

1:22:45Chris Hayes:So I agree with you that it's as important as the other institutions and in some senses more so. But I also think it has the most interesting relationship to attention. I think they generally don't want a ton of attention. I mean, there are definitely divas among them in that sense. But I think institutionally, one of the things that you find in TV is that it can be hard to do stories about the court because you have nothing to show. Like there's so many times I've done a court segment. When I look up at my return monitor, it's the first when they sit for their, when they pose their term portrait.

1:23:21Chris Hayes:There's a still photo and then there's B-roll. And we're just re-racking the B-roll over and over as I talk about the case because it's like there's no images. There's a reason they don't let cameras in the courtroom. There's an admirable part of that and a devious part. The admirable part, I think, is that I think there's genuine concern about the court as an institution being pulled into the same set of attentional incentives that the rest of the branches are, right? Controversy raises money, for instance. And so you get like real, you know, nutty figures who are trying to raise money and say wildly outlandish things because it will, you know, they can win a primary or get eyeballs that way.

1:23:59Chris Hayes:So I think there's a sort of wise fear of being pulled into that maw. But there's also something devious, which is that they don't want really attention because attention also is related to like democratic accountability. And they don't really want democratic accountability. Part of that is by design, but I think part of that's their desire at this moment. I do think it would transform fundamentally the court in really fascinating ways if we had video of oral arguments, if you could watch them live. It's interesting to think through what the implications of that might be. I do think it's really interesting the sort of experiment that we had with, you know, starting with COVID where we got live oral arguments and got to listen to them.

1:24:44Chris Hayes:You know, we've been able to sort of stream them on on MSNBC where they show the pictures of the faces when the person's talking. But it's not the same, obviously. And I think that's a very it's an it's a really intentional relationship to attention on the court. Can I ask one quick follow up to that? Yeah. You know, so obviously we are kind of doing our part to try to draw attention to the court. I'm curious whether there are strategies to the extent that you're right. And I think you are the majority would prefer to have less attention focused on what it is doing. like this kind of three Democratic appointee block is going to be in dissent for a long time.

1:25:19And I have kind of occasionally wondered whether they need to be playing a different game vis-a-vis the public's attention. And I'm not sure if you agree with that or have sort of thoughts about what that might look like.

1:25:30Chris Hayes:That's a really interesting question. And I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but I also think you're probably right. I mean, one of the things I've been thinking about in the political sphere is that there's sort of different rules for like incumbents and challengers about attention. You know, you see this sort of reflected in political conventional wisdom, for instance, that the, you know, the person leading the polls wants to do fewer debates and the person behind the polls wants to do more debates, right? If you extend that logic, right, to the 6-3 court, it's like they're the challenger, they're the ones behind the polls, they should want more attention.

1:26:02Chris Hayes:And I think that's right. And I think it's interesting to think about how they might go about doing that. You know, again, one of the things we've learned is that all these are just norms, you know? I mean, there's no one, you know, the Supreme Court doesn't have a boss, which is why you can like violate, you know, federal gift reporting requirements and all basic common sense ethics and, you know, take trips that you don't disclose and things like that. you could just give interviews about cases like the day that they happen you could have a media availability who says come on strict scrutiny we repeat the invitation yeah like i mean and i think that obviously like even as i say that i'm like myself i'm a little aghast at it but well but here's the thing the republican justices sometimes appear on fox to promote their books as do other republican appointees they also appear on podcasts or they like appear at you know i mean it is it It is very funny to me, like where these rules are and aren't like what you can do and say and what you can say and do in books.

1:27:06Chris Hayes:And all of it is this kind of like none of it's written down, but there are sort of unwritten rules. And you can like give this almost sort of like comically petty bitchy speech in Notre Dame, you know, if you're a Supreme Court justice. But like you would be crazy to go on like my show, The Night of Casa, if you were Ketanji Brown Jackson and be like, this sucks. But like, why not? Right. I mean, and why are they why are they different? I mean, in some ways. Right. I mean, and now you can argue as I sort of say this out loud and argue myself. I mean, you can argue that if he had to do all over again, maybe Alito didn't would take back the Notre Dame speech.

1:27:43Chris Hayes:Right. Like, was it did it redound to his benefit to like give this sort of petty speech where you're like calling out specific Atlantic writers and also saying, like, how dare you accuse of us of, you know, deciding these shadow docket emergency questions on SB8 because we. you know, want to get rid of abortion before you actually go ahead and do exactly that. So like, I don't know, did it rebound, we're down to his benefit. But I do think there's a really interesting question about, you know, I think you guys are so your sort of fundamental insight here, right, is that there's a mismatch between the amount of the attention the court gets in its power.

1:28:19Chris Hayes:And part of the project of what I see you guys is doing is like shrinking that distance, right, to bring attention to it, because that's a kind of necessary first step in like a healthier court, broader democratic, like small d democratic accountability. And so I do think it's interesting to think about that in broader terms as like how that can be wielded with this 6-3 minority. It's really interesting question. So maybe shifting from problem to solution and to the thing the Supreme Court is supposed to be doing, which is law, what legal or constitutional concepts do you think we might need to revisit in order to effectively deal with the growing wave of attention-based manipulation?

1:28:59Maybe there's some possibility of using antitrust to focus on attention monopolies, or your book talks about the First Amendment being a potential barrier to effective regulation. So can you elaborate on possible legal concepts that we might have to rethink as we are thinking about how to address this?

1:29:15Chris Hayes:Well, I think what's interesting is that a lot of attempts to deal with regulating attention run up against the fact you're regulating speech. And that's a real thorny issue. I did think that the court allowing the, um, well, this is funny, the court allowing the TikTok ban to go into effect, um, which it then we've all decided talk about no law, just vibes. Like we've all just decided the law doesn't apply, including all of the members of Congress of both parties and both chambers that voted for this law and everyone, which was a lift and they pass this law and now everyone has just unilaterally decided doesn't matter it's so insane that this has happened but i digress but when the court allowed the ban to go into effect um their finding which was unanimous which is that like this kind of i mean obviously it was partly on national security grounds which i always get a little like worried about and kind of gets my back up a little but But the idea that platform, total platform regulation, right, independent of content, doesn't do enough.

1:30:17Chris Hayes:Like there are speech interests, but largely spares the speech interest in such a way that that's a useful avenue for regulation. Like, for instance, I mean, this would obviously get challenged, but like it would be interesting for the law to regulate how many hours a day people could look at the platforms. like that that to me doesn't like is there a speech issue there it's not clear to me there is right like we're not saying like you could you could watch all of the worst stuff you want for those six hours we're just saying that there's actually and then you know age age restrictions are the other question and again on age restrictions there are live issues i think even before the court before the appellate courts on the speech implications of those and i think i part ways with some progressive folks on this question.

1:31:04Chris Hayes:I'm much more in favor of age regulation on this stuff than I think a lot of, you know, than the line that comes from, say, the ACLU and others. But just as Alito is just going to say that parents have a fundamental right to raise their children in the manner of their choosing, and they can watch Bible TikTok as long as they want. Yes, exactly. Yes, I think that's right. I think if you like if you challenge it on a religious grounds. Like my kid has to watch Bible TikTok all day. Can I throw one more thing in that I've heard you talk about is like space, not just age. Kind of like the fact that once upon a time smoking in restaurants was like extremely normal and natural.

1:31:39And we have obviously basically banned that. Like limitations on public phone use. Now, I don't know if you're talking about that as social norms or law, but I've also heard you talk about it in kind of an interesting way.

1:31:51Chris Hayes:Yeah, I think of that more as a social norm that's enforced, although if you extend out the analogy with smoking, obviously that was that was both first. It was both right. Like first it was restaurants being like, we're not going to have smoking. And then it was, you know, then it was law. I do think that before you get to the law, the social norm, you know, there's all this focus on schools and classrooms, understandably. But I also think that like the focus on kids ends up being this a little bit of this displacement of our own anxieties and also on to subjects with less autonomy than us. so there's this kind of thing of like we should take their phones away it's like the consensus view of like they should not be in front of the phones all day it's like well what about us and i do think that there's you know because they have their whole lives ahead of them we're on the b side of life chris like there's no hope for us wow come on i saw a very funny joke about this about someone like on their you know the old cliche about no one on their deathbed as like i wished i worked harder and i saw some joke about like being on your deathbed and being like I wish I could have scrolled more.

1:32:53Chris Hayes:If I had to do over again, I would have scrolled more. But no, I think that creating adult norms around this that are similar to what we say about the classroom. I found myself recently in some context of adult conferences, and it's just crazy for people to be sitting with their phones out. And I do think that something I do think will happen, and I'm wondering how much AI actually speeds this up is that I would love for us to arrive because it is a collective action problem that like certain public places, certain public environments are just phone free, whether that means you just don't take them out as like a matter of practice or there's actually some cubby system or yonder bags or whatever it is that you just, you check them.

1:33:36Chris Hayes:And that's just like, and so when you're at a restaurant, like people don't have their phones out. Like that's just like - We saw how well that worked in White Lotus. Yeah. We haven't watched the last few years. Oh, sorry. Oh, of course you haven't. Of course. I know, I know. This is how it starts. This is the root of all of it. No, this summer we're going to. We're catching up slowly but surely. But yes, I do think that like, and then it is interesting to think about what legal implications of that might be. Like I said before, I'm increasingly believe, even in the months since the book was put to bed and come out, that like a lot of the problems here may be so exacerbated by AI and become so bad so quickly that the whole thing kind of blows up a little bit.

1:34:20Chris Hayes:We'll see. All right. So I think we have to leave it there. Before we let you go, though, we have recently started ending episodes by identifying a couple of things that we read or watched or did in the last, say, week and want to share with our listeners. So do you want us to go first? Do you want to go first, Chris? I'll go first for something that will, by the time your listeners hear this might be a little dated, but is fresh to me, which is one of the things I thought was really interesting about Zoran Mandani's campaign for mayor was the way that he sort of used social media and particularly like direct to voter communication, sort of not relying on intermediaries, but going direct to voters with these short form videos.

1:34:58Chris Hayes:And after he won, there was a round of takes in the amongst the take mongers like myself, people slinging various takes back and forth about what it meant, which was the kind of classic mediated political discussion. And I thought it was really interesting that he put out his own take on his own win today in a long video where he did the thing that all of us as pundits do, which is like, look in the crosstabs of like the precinct level data and who won this and how did you win? And he's like, here's my take on having just done it on how I won and made some really interesting and good points. But both the content was interesting, but also this idea of the politicians sort of reasserting authorship over their own story, I thought was really interesting because the post-election take circle is such a tradition.

1:35:49I agree. That was great. And actually, I'm going to go next and also mention something Mamdani content related, which is a conversation that you, Chris, had with Ezra Klein and his podcast just after the election that kind of takes this lens of attention in the attention age and brings it to bear on Mamdani. campaign and win. And it was a great conversation. So really recommend that. And then I just have just started. So I don't really have a full assessment of the book. But I started reading Rutger Bregman's Moral Ambition, which is much more like how to self-help than I realized. It is really just like a how to kind of reconceptualize your relationship to ambition and to focus on literally just prioritizing making the world a better place every day with the choices you make.

1:36:29But I really like it so far. So that's my other recommendation. So I am going to do a read and a watch. I rewatched Dirty Dancing, which I love. I remember watching it at summer music camp at FSU. I was the first cheer viola. And it was amazing. And I think every time I come back to it, I'm always surprised to recall that there's a huge abortion storyline. Yes. It does. It's not really like baby doesn't have an abortion. If I'm ruining it for you, that's a real problem. You should have been watching it a long time ago. But the whole plot is animated by this question of an illegal abortion that happens and then sort of propels the plot forward.

1:37:14So I love going back and watching things I haven't seen in a while. And I'm always nostalgic. I read this week, a fantastic book by a law professor named Andrea Freeman. The book is called Ruin Their Crops on the Ground, the Politics of Food in the United States from the Trail of Tears to American School Lunch. And it is a James Beard Award winner. I didn't even know James Beard. I was just about to say. She got to meet Patma, Lakshmi. I love that. I love that for her. Andrea is probably the most important legal scholar working on questions of food justice in the country right now. And this book really is a tour de force.

1:37:54She had another book a few years back called Skimmed, which is about the way in which the pet milk company marketed infant formula to the black community during the 1950s. I mean, she's done amazing work on this and related it in really interesting ways to both our history of enslavement and racism and segregation, but also to our current moment of deep, deep income inequality. Chris, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Chris Hayes is the author of The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. And if you only know him as our roadie or the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC or the Why Is This Happening podcast, now you know he's also a brilliant thinker and author.

1:38:39Chris, thank you again for joining us today.

1:38:41Chris Hayes:Oh, it was such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. And before we go, a few housekeeping notes. So the media might have moved on from Trump's reign of terror in Los Angeles, but we definitely have not. If you want to join us in spreading the word that we're not OK with what the Trump administration and ICE are doing, pick up some merch from the Crooked Store. The Friend of Immigrants Tea sends a message that you're standing up for your neighbors. And the Don't Poke the Bear California flag tea is perfect for those of us who love the state and the immigrants who make it amazing. You can find both at crooked.com slash store.

1:39:09Also, as you know, Republicans in Congress just passed one of the cruelest and least popular pieces of legislation in history. It's going to kick millions of people off their health care so that the rich can get even richer. Many House Republicans who voted in favor of this bill won by slim margins and are facing tough reelections next year. We can hold them accountable by voting them out and taking back the House. And that's why Vote Save America set up a Take Back the House fund to support must-win House races. To get more information, head to votesaveamerica.com slash house. This was paid for by Vote Save America.

1:39:38You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

1:39:48Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production, hosted and executive produced by Leah Lippman, Melissa Murray, and me, Kate Shaw. Produced and edited by Melody Rowell. Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer. Jordan Thomas is our intern. Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Music by Eddie Cooper. Production support from Katie Long and Adrian Hill. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. And thanks to our digital team, Ben Hethcote, Joe Matoski, and Johanna Case. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. subscribe to Strict Scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes find us at youtube.com slash at Strict Scrutiny podcast if you haven't already be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode and if you want to help other people find the show please rate and review us it really helps

1:40:44Hey, it's John. Last year, 2 ,500 people joined us at Crooked Con for conversations with some of the smartest organizers, least annoying politicians, and most interesting voices in politics about how to fix this mess. We're doing it again November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. with even more podcast panels and workshops. Plus, there will be drinks, which we'll need after the midterms, no matter which way they go. Get your tickets at CrookedCon.com, where we'll also announce the lineup. If you're a Friends of the Pod subscriber, a limited number of discounted tickets are still available.

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