Chris Hayes Has Some Advice for Keeping Up With the News

Chris Hayes makes a living from attention: What deserves some, what doesn’t, and how to make sure the public gives their own limited span of it to the right things.

That sounds simple enough. But as I found during my conversation with Hayes, which kicks off season two of The Big Interview podcast, it’s increasingly not. In 2025, the host of MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes released The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource—a book whose central thesis argues that attention has become the defining commodity of modern life.

In keeping with that theme, Hayes himself is everywhere audiences spend time: opining on TV, hosting a podcast called Why Is This Happening?, interacting with his thousands of followers on social networks, and posting vertical videos there as well. In other words, Hayes is both adept at considering the attention economy from an intellectual perch and is participating in it as an attention merchant himself.

That’s specifically why I wanted to talk to Hayes, and talk to him right now. He has, after all, spent years studying and theorizing about attention. Given our current circumstances, it would probably behoove the rest of us to do a little of the same. I was looking for Hayes’ take on how the attention economy is increasingly shaping everything from entertainment and elections to ICE raids and world wars, and how both consumers and journalists could think about their own role in that economy as soberly and thoughtfully as possible.

When we sat down in early March, the US and Israel’s war with Iran was just getting started. Even in those early days, it had become a black hole for our attention, from relentless news alerts to President Trump’s Truth Social posts to AI-generated Department of War propaganda. We had to talk about it—along with Hayes’ views on the uneasy alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, his social media strategy, and what the left is getting wrong about AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Chris Hayes, welcome to The Big Interview.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s great to be here. I’m a big fan of WIRED. You guys are doing amazing work.

Thank you.

I write about WIRED in the book. I remember asking my parents for the subscription. I think it was for Christmas. I was like a diehard. Every single page.

I’ve been thinking a lot about WIRED past, present, and future. I think the very early WIRED had a very rebellious, countercultural spirit. And I would argue the WIRED we are running has that same spirit, but directed at the industry that was born of the 1993 WIRED.

Totally. We think about who’s the incumbent, who’s the insurgent, and the valence of that switching. That WIRED vibe was Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, like the original big bulletin board, kind of post-hippie cybernaut. Kinda libertarian, but also kind of left-coded, but definitely very hopeful utopian and also very insurgent against the powers that be. What happened was the powers that be are now the people that sat with the president at his inauguration.

They sure did. And we sure did cover that.

So the insurgent vibe is now directed in a different direction.

We’re sitting down in New York. It’s a Wednesday in early March. It’s hard to believe just a few days ago that the United States and Israel launched an all-out attack on Iran, which has escalated remarkably quickly. I would be remiss not to mention that this is the second leader this year that President Trump has ousted. The first being Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. What is happening in the Middle East is terrifying. It’s sad. Hundreds of people are dead, including US service members. It is also, though, yet another all-consuming news cycle. It is a brain-melting, mind-numbing pace of news. We’re going to spend a lot of time in this conversation talking about attention. When you think about global conflict and war in this era, how much of it is about attention?

I guess the first version of the answer I would give is that there’s a way in which they perform imperialism as content. The Trump administration has undertaken a series of strikes on boats, on civilian boats. These are not military boats. They say they’re drug traffickers, although in some cases it seems like they’re fishermen. In some cases it seems like maybe they’re both. They’re fishermen who are paid some money to run a product somewhere, people who are trying to make ends meet.

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

Yes.

So the first cut at that answer would be, yes, they perform aggression, war, imperialism, foreign policy, all as content. All as means of gaining attention.

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

It’s imperialist ambitions in a vertical video wrapper, in a social media, always-on content machine.

There’s actually an interesting and profound point to that, which is that you could make the argument that these have always been intertwined. If you look at the history of American imperialism and the Spanish-American War and the famous Hearst papers in the Yellow Press, that was both about conquest and producing content.

So I think these two things have always been twinned. The history of imperialism is also a history of propagandistic uses of it to capture and hold the attention of the masses.

But I think, yes, their version of it is a very 21st-century postmodern, vertical video doomscroll version of it.

Right, on tech steroids. You wrote in a piece for The New York Times, unrelated to Iran, “President Trump has a feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him.” You called it suffocating to his opponents. When you think about your role, our role as media, what decisions do you make about how to approach, let’s say, what’s happening in the Middle East to avoid playing into that?

Well, the thing we can’t do is ignore him or what he’s doing. So the US actually is at war with Iran.

There are real human lives.

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

Human lives are human lives.

Yeah, so in that sense, it’s like he’s the president of the United States. He has the nuclear codes. He’s now launched multiple forms of extraterritorial killing, let’s call it. So the way that I think we do it is to try to not do war porn. There is a subtle but unmistakable ideological substrate to certain forms of depictions of war. Also don’t let him set the terms of things, which means we’re not gonna play huge chunks of whatever his nonsense is. Except to set them up to show why they’re lacking.

But there’s no avoiding it. Donald Trump, being the president of the United States, which is the most powerful nation on earth, having access to nuclear codes and also the full force of the American military, and also attempting to replace the constitutional order with essentially a presidentialist personalist dictatorship, is the top story of our time. I cover that story every night. The question is: On whose terms do you give attention and what do you give attention to?

Here’s a great example. They made an amazing miscalculation in Minnesota. There was this viral right-wing video that was alleging to uncover fraud in Minnesota day cares run by either Somali immigrants or Somali Americans. Now, there actually has been this huge fraud network there. It’s been prosecuted and investigated by the US Attorney’s Office and by the very prosecutors who would later resign because they didn’t like what the Trump administration was doing.

The Trump administration saw this, and they were like, “We want to bring more attention to this. We’re sending [Gregory] Bovino and CBP and ICE there.” What ended up happening was that they kidnapped people and they killed two Americans in broad daylight on camera.

Yeah.

And that was where all the attention went. You could see Trump backpedaling where he was furiously posting on Truth Social, like you should be talking about the fraud. It’s like, you just killed two people. Then you called them domestic terrorists. You’re kidnapping people’s neighbors, you’re tear-gassing high school students.

That was a great example to me of, were we paying attention to Donald Trump? Yes, at some level. Was it on his terms? No. That’s basically the question we ask ourselves.

Your book, The Sirens’ Call, is out in paperback now. It’s a great book; it’s about attention. And you argue that attention has become a commodity in the same way that labor was made a commodity in the early years of industrial capitalism. I’m curious about when you start the clock on that process. When did the process of commodifying attention really start? How do you track that through history?

You know, it probably starts with two technologies: commercial billboards and the penny press, the New York Sun. The idea was that you were selling an audience, and you had to come up with metrics that you could use to measure that audience and then sell that audience to advertisers.

With early technology and billboards, there would be people who would stand by the corner the billboard was on with clickers. They’d say, “We get 600 people an hour,” if you’re talking about Times Square or something, and then you can go to your advertiser and say “this is how many people are gonna see it.” With the penny press, the big innovation was that you sell the paper for less than it costs to make the paper. You lose money on every paper. But then you sell the advertising.

There are multiple iterations. Magazines, and then you get radio, and then you get television, and then you get social media and the internet. What has happened, though, is the global scale that you can sell it at is new, right? No media companies ever had billions of users before. These attention companies do now. The amount of data you have about your viewer is orders of magnitude more. Microsecond auctions that you could run in each second about how you’re going to serve that viewer. So you now have this sort of auction for eyeballs happening in nanoseconds. And the thing about the algorithm is you don’t have to have people making programming choices.

In the book you acknowledge your own role in this economy. You’re an attention merchant yourself. You’re a TV anchor. You’re also on social media. You film clips for your Instagram account, for MS Now. How do you navigate your own role in that algorithmic attention landscape?

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

I have to get people’s attention, and then I have to do something worthwhile with it. Because sometimes the best thing to get someone’s attention is not that worthwhile to me. In a week when we just went to war, that has not been really a problem. This is one of those weeks where I’m not really tortured about it. The audience’s attention is flowing toward the fact we just started war with Iran. I think that’s the most important story.

On my podcast, I feel the same way. I just do what I’m interested in on the podcast, and I let the chips fall where they may. Social media’s interesting. We’ve been doing more and more vertical video because everyone does. It’s such a weird slot-machine effect. I did this thing the other day about a House vote on tariffs, including the Canadian ones. It actually happened before the Supreme Court struck them down. So I did a little thing like, “This is kind of interesting. Trump has lost Republican votes on this.” It blew up.

Sometimes you’re like, this one’s gonna blow up. And then it doesn’t, and you’re like, well, what did I do wrong? It’s unclear to me. I guess if I put more time into this, and my whole life was like playing the slot machine, I might get better at playing the slot machine.

I think that’s one of the challenges as journalists or purveyors of accurate and newsworthy information: You are competing now, not with a couple of other cable news shows. You’re competing with MrBeast and with cooking videos—I mean, with everything.

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

In many ways, that tariff video doing well is like a little miracle.

I was really feeling myself about it, and I was like, oh, this is awesome. Then my next one I was like …

But the thing is, you essentially have to participate. You know what I mean? Like you can’t opt out of shooting a vertical video anymore.

I mean, you can, but not if you are trying to …

… trying to reach people, a mass audience, with news about tariffs.

This is the problem. Vertical video ends up being a kind of terminal point in the development of attentional technologies.

I want to ask you about the midterms. You wrote in that piece for the New York Times that the Democrats’ main problem isn’t their message. Looking at the Harris campaign, you said her core problem was her inability to get people to hear her message. So basically an attention deficit, which I would argue is still a problem for the Democrats, heading into the midterms. I’m curious about your view, and your view on the Democrats’ ability to galvanize an electorate online.

One of the most important pieces of data that we have from 2024 is that amongst voters who said they paid a lot attention to the news, Harris won by five or six points. As you moved further down, sometimes to literally never, Trump’s margin increased.

I say this for two reasons. One is that a lot of people like to blame the media for Trump’s victory. [But] the people that consume the most journalism and news were the most Harris-inclined. So that complicates that story quite a bit.

For a very long period of time, from the 1980s until recently, there was a very straightforward theory of attention and campaigns, which was you raised money and then you spent it on TV ads. That’s clearly broken down. You can’t just say, “We’re gonna raise a lot of money, and then we’re gonna run a lot of ads on the local news.”

Some of the voters you need are there, but a lot of voters that you need are not there. So you need to have a theory of how you reach the people that don’t consume media, which we used to call earned media. Earned media is like you’re interviewing me. Then there’s paid media, which is like you’re running ads on TV.

Chris did not pay for this interview.

I did not pay for this interview. If they’re not gonna see your earned media because they don’t consume that, and they’re not going to see your paid media, what are they going to see? You gotta come up with some theory.

Do the Democrats have a theory?

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

Oh yeah. [Laughs.]

Dude.

None of this is actually funny, but …

No, it was just …

Absurd.

Absurd and kind of comical. And actually pretty effective. The kind of thing that clearly reverberated out through the world, past people that consume the news, past paid advertising.

Zohran Mamdani obviously was a huge innovator in this.

He did an incredible job.

Yeah, the vertical videos. Now it may be the case that Roy Cooper in North Carolina is incredibly well-known. He just won the nomination to be the Democratic nominee. He’s gonna go against Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee, for that Senate seat.

Roy Cooper’s super well-known. He’s been elected statewide, I want to say three or four times. He was the governor for two terms. Also, he’s gonna raise a ton of money. And it may be the case for Roy Cooper that he’s got a theory; he’s gonna raise money and run ads. But like James Talarico …

I was gonna ask you about James Talarico.

He’s a state rep. He defeated Jasmine Crockett in that contested Democratic primary in Texas. Now, Jasmine Crockett obviously has a theory of attention …

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

But they both had a sense of how do I become known? How do I make sure that people whose votes I’m gonna want or need know even who I am? My point is that you better have a theory of this.

What you cannot do is you cannot default to what had been the paint-by-numbers approach for literally decades.

When I got to WIRED, it was very obvious to me, and I think to the team here, that covering politics more closely was not an optional decision. It was an imperative. There was no space between Silicon Valley leaders and the government, particularly true after Trump took office.

You’ve been a political journalist for a very long time. You spent your career observing and documenting how power shifts in government. How have you seen that merging of power between those two spheres, between the Silicon Valley elite, the tech industry, and politics and politicians?

I thought the inauguration was such a shocking moment.

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

Yeah, it was. The support wasn’t shocking, but the we’re all gonna stand up here with him and … yeah. You know, there are downsides to those calculations, and usually they’re thinking about those downsides.

I think a few things happened. I think as the industry matured from an insurgent industry to incumbent one, its politics got more right-wing. This is not a very surprising trajectory.

Sometimes if you interview someone who’s 23 trying to break into something, and then you interview them when they’re 63 and they make six figures or seven figures, they have some different politics. So I think part of it is that they absolutely all cooked their brains on the internet and Twitter and with each other. They just pickled their brains in a brine of reaction.

Then I think there’s just a political economy of it. They are the most powerful and profitable corporations in the world. Then of course, the big part of it is the AI bet.

So that’s the final component. I think they were kind of cooking their brains. They were personally getting radicalized, and I think there’s a lot of backlash reaction politics. I think they were mad at their “woke” workers. They were a mature industry that wanted to cozy up to power in the government. And then they had this technology that they think is make-or-break technology, and their relationship to the state is existential.

I’m always curious to hear from different, smart people about whether they see what has happened as more ideological. That these tech elites, tech leaders, genuinely moved to the right, and this is legitimately how they feel—that this is the right way to run a country, the right way to run a business, the right way to work with the government—or whether it is simply like they are biting their tongues and holding on for four years. They have a huge base of employees they need to support and pay and uphold. And that this is just sort of I hate this guy, but I have a business imperative.

I think there’s different individuals on different sides of that.

Sure. They’re also not all the same person.

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

But like Tim Cook, I don’t know, you know?

He looks deeply uncomfortable, but he won’t say anything about it. We’ve got three more years of this administration, and when you think about that level of proximity, of collaboration, of, I’ll say collusion—these very close relationships with someone like Sam Altman and the administration—does that scare you?

Yeah. I honestly was chilled to my core when there was a meeting between the head of Anthropic and the head of the Pentagon and they couldn’t come to terms on basically a terms-of-service agreement for implementing Anthropic’s Claude model in Pentagon situations. Then the Pentagon throws a temper tantrum that sounds completely deranged, like a Bond villain kind of thing. We’re gonna try to cut them off … they’re a supply chain risk …

You can sell Nvidia chips to the Chinese government, but you can’t use Claude. I mean, come on.

Then for Sam Altman to post and say, “Hey, we’ve swooped in, and we’ve made a deal.” Look, these companies, particularly those two, OpenAI and Anthropic, they’re startups, right? They’re not the legacy incumbents that have their own AI models like Gemini or whatever. They’re on a treadmill, they gotta run fast. They gotta raise money. Their revenues are increasing a lot, but their costs are increasing arguably faster. There’s a sense of desperation. It’s people with very powerful technology who are banking on making a world-changing fortune. But they also have Pac-Man ghosts of financial burden trailing behind them.

Yes, to the tune of like many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many billions of dollars.

I would not say that that is the best setup for ethical and responsible decision-making or decision-making that takes into account the stakeholders involved. I think that’s incredibly terrifying.

It is really scary. I want to ask you more about how you’re thinking about AI. I think you’ve called yourself a lame centrist. I would say I probably fall into a similar camp.

You’re saying, on the AI debate?

On the debate, yes. Not when it comes to what OpenAI should or should not be doing business with the Department of War.

Yes, right.

The conversation around it is very polarized. You’ve got the doomers, you’ve got the boomers. A lot of very overly simplified arguments. I would say, in general, we spend too much time ping-ponging between those two extreme views and maybe not enough time talking about the practical implications or the potential future scenarios that we really should be taking seriously. You posted on Bluesky that the left needs to “start thinking seriously about the AI hype being true.” Tell me more about that.

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

Is your general sense that not enough people, maybe people on the left, are taking that seriously?

I think there’s an idea that if you take that seriously, you’re ceding to their own propaganda about how useful their product is. I think there’s a huge question about how quickly this is all gonna happen. I can see it. I use several different LLMs for different things and mess around with them.

I was going to ask about your personal use cases.

I have been using them more because I want to understand what they do. Like, NotebookLM, where you can upload sources and then you can use it to navigate from those sources, is extremely useful, so you’re not getting hallucinations and it’s also citing back to something. So if I say, “What date did this thing happen?” about the obscure historical detail that won’t be googleable —A, because Google no longer really works, but B, because it’s embedded in a PDF of a scholarly article I’ve uploaded—that’s useful. Particularly for research purposes. [AI] is just manifestly getting better. This idea that it’s not is insane. The idea that it’s not gonna start to touch jobs people do also seems insane.

I have a few friends who are very senior-level software engineers who, until very recently, maybe December, thought this was just so ridiculous. They were like, “Our CEOs won’t stop talking about it. They’re insufferable. This is just a ridiculous toy. It’s the new metaverse.” After the Claude Code release, they’re trying to figure out what their next thing is, because they’re in their fifties and want to work another 10 or 15 years. Just sitting and having a drink with them and listening to them talk about that was pretty jarring, actually.

I mean, think about how much money, revenue that is for [AI companies], right? If you can sell that, and also it’s a savings for [companies]. The only problem is that someone’s out of a job. That’s the business case. Part of the problem is if you start to talk about that, it does feel like you’re ceding …

Well, when you get that reaction from the left, it’s like, “but I don’t like this. I don’t want this to be the case. It cannot be the case that all of these elites and oligarchs in Silicon Valley are telling me that I’m not gonna have a job. I don’t accept that.” So what would it look like to you for quote-unquote “the left” to start to take that more seriously?

I think you gotta start thinking about job protections. How do we want to deal with that?

First of all, we should be regulating AI. The idea that it’s unregulated is insane. Partly that is going back to real blue-sky thinking: if all these jobs were automatable, if you didn’t need people to do all these things, what do we want people to be doing? What does society do?

What should a person have a shot at? What should they be guaranteed? What should they have a shot at in a wealthy society like ours? How do we order society fairly to do that? That’s real first-principle stuff. But I do think in some ways this calls for some real first-principles thinking.

I don’t know that I want Donald Trump to be the person making those calls. So the timing is very unfortunate.

I think the saving grace is that he’s not going to make those calls, ’cause he’s just gonna let the AI companies run rampant and do whatever they want.

Sure.

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

A small act of resistance is a hopeful place for us to end. But before we do, I want to play a very quick game we invented. It’s called Control, Alt, Delete. I want to know what piece of technology you would love to control, what piece you would love to alt, so alter or change, and what piece you’d love to delete. People have been very generous in their interpretations of that question. Someone tried to control the weather, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that is not technology.

I mean, I guess I want to control AI. Because I guess if I trust myself maybe more than Sam Altman …

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

I mean, yeah, I guess if I could control it, I’d figure out a humane method with that.

It’s Chris Hayes.

Alt. I would love to alter internet search so that it works again.

What’s your beef there? What’s going on with your searches?

I just think that it’s gotten so bad. The quality of the product of Google Search, particularly. There’s other ones that people suggest that I’ve used as well, but essentially it’s been displaced now by AI. It’s nice to search things and be able to find them, but that’s becoming more and more difficult. You get the big AI box, but you also get overwhelmed by ads, and search does not surface things that you’re looking for as well as it used to.

Here’s my delete.

OK.

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

Just in terms of the service being patchy?

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

We would be in the streets.

No one would tolerate it.

No.

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

What is that?

OK. When you were in junior high—I think we’re roughly in the same cohort—and you would go home after school and talk on the phone for hours, you would be hearing your own voice through the receiver in what’s called side tone. In the same way that when you have cans on when you’re doing a podcast, you’re getting your own voice in your ears. A landline does that, and it is such a better, more pleasurable way to talk to someone because you can calibrate your own volume. Cell phones don’t have a side tone, which is why people shout when they’re on phones.

Huh!

That’s why people sound weird, why you sound weird, why you can’t actually have good and intimate conversations on cell phones. It’s why people always want to put their headphones in, even though the headphone doesn’t give you a side tone. I guess that’s an alt, because I’d like to bring side tones into cell phones, but I basically just want to delete cell vocal technology and start over.

That is so specific and so well-studied. I really applaud that. I love that one. Thank you, Chris Hayes.

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