Chris Hayes Has Some Advice for Keeping Up With the News
Chris Hayes, the influential host of MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes and Why Is This Happening? podcast, operates at the very nexus of attention. His professional life revolves around discerning what warrants public focus, what doesn’t, and how to effectively guide limited human attention toward truly significant matters. This complex dynamic forms the core thesis of his 2025 book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, which posits that attention has transcended mere engagement to become the defining commodity of contemporary existence.
Hayes embodies this dual role of analyst and participant in the attention economy. He is omnipresent across various media, from television commentary to podcasting, engaging thousands of followers on social media, and producing vertical videos. This makes him a uniquely qualified voice to discuss the intricate ways the attention economy molds everything from popular entertainment and electoral politics to geopolitical conflicts and the future of artificial intelligence. His years of dedicated study and theorizing about attention offer invaluable insights into how both news consumers and journalists can navigate this landscape with thoughtful sobriety.
A recent interview, kicking off the second season of The Big Interview podcast, delved into these critical issues. Conducted in early March, the conversation took place amidst the nascent stages of a terrifying escalation in the Middle East, with the United States and Israel initiating an all-out attack on Iran. This conflict, marked by relentless news alerts, President Trump’s posts on Truth Social, and AI-generated propaganda from the Department of War, quickly became an undeniable black hole for global attention. The discussion inevitably turned to the role of attention in modern warfare, the uneasy alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., Hayes’s personal social media strategy, and what he believes the political left is misunderstanding about AI.
The interview began with a nod to WIRED’s evolving identity, with Hayes recalling his childhood enthusiasm for the magazine. Katie Drummond, the interviewer, noted how the early WIRED championed a rebellious, countercultural spirit, a mantle she argues the current iteration has reclaimed, now directing its critical gaze at the very industry born from the original 1993 WIRED manifesto. Hayes concurred, highlighting the shift where the once-insurgent tech world has become the new incumbent power structure, sitting alongside presidents at inaugurations.
Turning to the urgent matter of the escalating conflict, Drummond pressed Hayes on how much global conflict and war in this era are driven by attention. Hayes offered a two-tiered response. Firstly, he described a chilling phenomenon where imperialism is performed as "content." He cited the Trump administration’s series of strikes on civilian boats, which, regardless of the official justification (drug traffickers vs. fishermen), have been "produced as content." These actions, often visually reminiscent of an ’80s action movie, a genre touchstone for Donald Trump, serve as a means of gaining and holding public attention.
However, Hayes quickly underscored the grim reality beneath this performative layer: "But then underneath that, there’s also the fact that this is real bombs and real guns and real missiles and real people die." He pointed to the tragic loss of hundreds of Iranian civilians, emphasizing that while attentional reasons—the president’s insatiable need to be at the center of focus—drive these actions, they are simultaneously rooted in "very old-school, pure 19th century, straight-up, no-chaser imperialist ambitions." The modern twist, he summarized, is "imperialist ambitions in a vertical video wrapper, in a social media, always-on content machine." He drew parallels to the Spanish-American War and the "Yellow Press," suggesting that the intertwining of conquest and content production has a long history, but today’s version is a "21st-century postmodern, vertical video doomscroll version of it."
This brought the conversation to the media’s responsibility. Drummond referenced Hayes’s observation in The New York Times that "President Trump has a feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him," which can be "suffocating to his opponents." Hayes clarified that ignoring such a figure, who holds nuclear codes and aims to replace the constitutional order, is impossible. Instead, the strategy is to avoid "war porn" and to resist allowing Trump to dictate the terms of the narrative. He illustrated this with a case from Minnesota, where a viral right-wing video alleging fraud in daycares run by Somali immigrants led to federal agents kidnapping people and killing two Americans on camera. While Trump tried to redirect attention back to the alleged fraud, the media’s focus rightly shifted to the egregious actions of the state, thereby avoiding playing on Trump’s terms.
Hayes’s book, The Sirens’ Call, further elaborates on the commodification of attention, likening it to how labor became a commodity during early industrial capitalism. He traced this process back to the advent of commercial billboards and the "penny press" (like The New York Sun), where the core innovation was selling an audience to advertisers, necessitating metrics to measure that audience. From clickers counting passersby to newspaper circulation, the system evolved through magazines, radio, and television. The digital age, however, brought unprecedented scale: "No media companies ever had billions of users before. These attention companies do now." This is coupled with vastly more data about each viewer, enabling "microsecond auctions" for eyeballs, and algorithms that automate programming choices, creating a perpetually optimized feedback loop for capturing attention.
Acknowledging his own role as an "attention merchant," Hayes shared his approach to navigating this landscape. For his TV show, he considers where attention is naturally flowing, seeing it as "necessary but never sufficient." His goal is to capture attention, then use it for something worthwhile, particularly when major events like war naturally command public focus. For his podcast, he simply pursues his interests. Social media, however, presents a more enigmatic challenge. He noted the "weird slot-machine effect" of vertical videos, where a seemingly mundane post about House votes on tariffs could "blow up," while others he expects to go viral fall flat. He underscored the dilemma for journalists: competing not just with other news outlets, but with "MrBeast and with cooking videos—I mean, with everything." The pervasive nature of the attention economy means participation, even through vertical videos, is almost a necessity for reaching a mass audience.
The conversation then shifted to domestic politics, specifically the Democrats’ struggle with attention. Hayes reiterated his point from The New York Times that the Democrats’ core problem isn’t their message, but their "inability to get people to hear her message," citing Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. Data showed Harris winning among voters who paid close attention to the news, but Trump’s margin growing significantly among those who paid less or no attention. This, Hayes argued, complicates the narrative of blaming media for Trump’s success and highlights the breakdown of traditional campaign models reliant on TV ads. Democrats now need "a theory of how you reach the people that don’t consume media," moving beyond traditional "earned media" (interviews) and "paid media" (ads). He pointed to figures like Zohran Mamdani, who excelled with vertical videos, and the contrasting "theories of attention" employed by candidates like James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett in Texas primaries. The imperative for any modern campaign, Hayes concluded, is to have a clear theory for how to become known and capture attention, rather than defaulting to outdated methods.
Drummond then raised WIRED’s strategic decision to cover politics more closely, acknowledging the inseparable link between Silicon Valley and government, particularly since Trump took office. Hayes recounted the "shocking moment" of tech elites sitting alongside Trump at his inauguration. He posited several reasons for this merging of power: the tech industry’s maturation from insurgent to incumbent, leading to a more right-wing political leaning; a collective "pickling of brains in a brine of reaction" through online echo chambers; and the pure political economy of the world’s most powerful corporations seeking to cozy up to government. The final, critical component, he stressed, is the "AI bet," making their relationship to the state "existential."
Hayes differentiated between individuals, noting figures like Jeff Bezos becoming "very right-wing" and Elon Musk’s "terminal brain worms," while others like Tim Cook appear "deeply uncomfortable" but constrained by business imperatives. He expressed profound alarm at the "proximity, of collaboration, of… collusion" between figures like Sam Altman and the administration, citing a chilling incident where the head of Anthropic and the Pentagon failed to agree on terms for implementing AI, only for Altman to "swoop in" with a deal. He described these AI startups as being on a financial "treadmill," with revenues increasing but costs potentially faster, driven by a "sense of desperation" to make "world-changing fortunes" while facing "Pac-Man ghosts of financial burden." This, he warned, is "not the best setup for ethical and responsible decision-making."
Regarding AI itself, Hayes, who self-identifies as a "lame centrist" in the polarized AI debate, argued that "the left needs to start thinking seriously about the AI hype being true." His primary concern is the "job replacement issue," where numerous current jobs—from coders to legal associates and administrators—could be automated in a relatively short period, leading to "profound dislocation." He suggested a reluctance on the left to acknowledge this, fearing it validates "propaganda" from tech elites. Hayes, who uses various LLMs for research (like NotebookLM for navigating uploaded sources without hallucinations), noted AI is "manifestly getting better" and "is not gonna start to touch jobs people do also seems insane."
To address this, Hayes advocated for serious regulation of AI and "first-principles thinking" about societal structure. If jobs are automated, what should people be doing? What should be guaranteed in a wealthy society? He also championed "small acts of resistance," like grassroots efforts fighting data centers. While not the solution, such actions operationalize the sentiment against a technology driving up electricity consumption, increasing local prices, and intentionally shifting national income from labor to capital.
The interview concluded with a lighthearted "Control, Alt, Delete" game. Hayes’s choices offered a revealing glimpse into his tech philosophy:
- Control: AI. He stated he would trust himself more than many involved in AI development to figure out "a humane method."
- Alt (Alter): Internet search. He lamented the declining quality of Google Search, overwhelmed by ads and AI boxes, no longer surfacing relevant information effectively.
- Delete: Cell phone calls. Hayes called cell technology "the highest level of failure that we tolerate from any technology in our lives," citing patchy service and dropped calls as unacceptable in any other consumer product. He then offered a highly specific and well-researched point about "sidetone" – the ability to hear one’s own voice through the receiver, present in landlines but absent in cell phones. This absence, he explained, prevents proper volume calibration, makes conversations less intimate, and is why people often shout on their phones. He proposed bringing sidetone back or effectively deleting current cell vocal technology to start over.
Chris Hayes’s insights underscore the urgency of understanding and engaging with the complex forces of the attention economy and emerging technologies. His advice points towards a critical awareness, ethical engagement, and proactive thinking to navigate a future increasingly shaped by these powerful, often unseen, dynamics.
