Chris Hayes on How Attention Became Modern Life’s Most Dangerous Commodity
Chris Hayes’ entire career revolves around one critical, increasingly scarce resource: attention. His work boils down to three core questions: What deserves our focus, what doesn’t, and how can we steer the public’s limited attention spans toward the things that matter most.
That sounds straightforward on paper. But as I learned during our conversation, which launches the second season of The Big Interview podcast, nothing about attention is simple anymore. In 2025, Hayes, host of MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes, published The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, a book that argues attention has become the defining commodity of modern life.
True to the book’s theme, Hayes meets audiences where they already are: he opines on nightly cable news, hosts his own long-running podcast Why Is This Happening?, engages with hundreds of thousands of followers across social media, and churns out vertical short-form video for those platforms. In short, Hayes is both a leading intellectual critic of the attention economy and one of its most prominent working attention merchants.
That’s exactly why I wanted to talk to him, right now. He’s spent years studying and theorizing attention, and in an era where the attention economy shapes everything from elections to entertainment to war, the rest of us could stand to think more deeply about it too. I wanted his take on how both audiences and journalists can navigate this system soberly and intentionally.
When we sat down in New York in early March, the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran had just begun. Even in those first days, the conflict had already become a black hole for public attention: endless news alerts, constant Truth Social posts from Donald Trump, AI-generated war propaganda from the U.S. government. We talked about that, plus the uneasy alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, Hayes’ own social media strategy, and where the left is getting AI wrong.
Before we dive in, a quick note: season 2 of The Big Interview is now available on YouTube in addition to all major audio podcast platforms. 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 huge fan of WIRED—you guys do amazing work.
DRUMMOND: Thank you. I actually write about WIRED in my book? Wait no, wait—you wrote about WIRED in your book, right?
HAYES: Oh yeah, I wrote about WIRED in The Sirens’ Call. I remember begging my parents for a subscription for Christmas when I was a kid. I was a diehard, read every single page.
DRUMMOND: We’ve been thinking a lot about WIRED’s past, present, and future. Early WIRED had this really rebellious, countercultural energy. I’d argue the WIRED we run today has that same spirit—just directed at the industry that the 1993 original WIRED helped birth.
HAYES: Totally. It’s all about who the incumbent is, who the insurgent is, and how those roles flip. Original WIRED vibe was Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the old big bulletin boards, post-hippie cybernauts. A little libertarian, a little left-leaning, definitely utopian, definitely insurgent against the existing powers that be. Now those powers that be are the same people sitting next to the president at his inauguration.
DRUMMOND: They sure are. And we’ve covered that shift extensively. So the insurgent energy is pointed in a new direction now.
We’re sitting here in New York on a Wednesday in early March. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago, the U.S. and Israel launched a full-scale attack on Iran, and it’s escalated so fast. This is the second leader Trump has ousted this year, after Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. What’s happening in the Middle East is terrifying, it’s tragic—hundreds of people are dead, including U.S. service members. But it’s also just another all-consuming news cycle, this brain-melting, mind-numbing pace of updates. We’re here to talk about attention today: when you think about global conflict and war in this era, how much of it is about attention?
HAYES: The first version of my answer is that they perform imperialism as content. The Trump administration has done all these strikes on civilian boats out on the high seas—they say they’re after drug traffickers, but sometimes they’re just fishermen. Sometimes they’re a little of both: guys just trying to get by, taking a little extra cash to move product somewhere.
Our forces have killed over a hundred people this way. What’s so striking about this, beyond how legally and morally indefensible it is to just murder people in international waters, is that it was produced as content from day one. It’s very Tom Clancy, it looks like an 80s action movie—which is basically Donald Trump’s favorite genre, right?
DRUMMOND: Yeah, exactly.
HAYES: So that’s the first cut: yes, they perform aggression, war, imperialism, all of foreign policy, as content. It’s all just a way to grab attention.
But underneath that, this is still real bombs, real guns, real missiles, real people dying. We think as many as 150, 180 children are dead in Iran from our missiles or Israel’s—we still don’t even have an exact count. They’re doing this for attentional reasons: the president has to be the center of everyone’s world, he has to have all of us thinking about him 24/7. But they also have these pure, old-school, 19th-century, no-apologies imperialist ambitions. It’s just those ambitions wrapped in a vertical video wrapper, inside an always-on social media content machine.
There’s actually a deeper point here: this has always been intertwined. Go back to the Spanish-American War, Hearst and the yellow press—it was both about conquest and about producing content to sell papers. Imperialism has always been twinned with propaganda to capture and hold the public’s attention. That part isn’t new. What is new is that this is a 21st-century, postmodern, doomscroll vertical video version of it.
DRUMMOND: Right, on tech steroids. You wrote in a New York Times piece (unrelated to Iran) that “President Trump has a feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him,” and that it’s suffocating for his opponents. When you think about your role, our role as media, what choices do you make to avoid playing into that when covering something like the Iran war?
HAYES: The one thing we can’t do is ignore him or what he’s doing. The U.S. is actually at war with Iran. There are real human lives on the line. The latest count is over a thousand Iranian civilians dead, not to mention combatants and regime members—whatever you think about how to classify them, a human life is a human life.
Trump is the president of the United States, he has nuclear codes, he’s launched multiple extraterritorial killing campaigns. So what we try to do is avoid war porn. There’s a subtle but clear ideological bias to how some outlets cover war that just glorifies it. We also refuse to let him set the terms of the conversation—that means we don’t just play huge chunks of his nonsense, except to break down why it’s wrong.
But there’s no avoiding the story: Donald Trump, as president of the most powerful country on Earth with access to nuclear codes and the full U.S. military, who is trying to replace our constitutional order with a personalist presidential dictatorship, is the biggest story of our time. I cover it every night. The question is never whether you give it attention—it’s on whose terms you give attention, and what you focus on.
I’ll give you a perfect example. They made a huge miscalculation in Minnesota. There was a viral right-wing video claiming to uncover fraud in Minnesota day cares run by Somali immigrants and Somali Americans. Turns out there actually was a big fraud network there, it had already been prosecuted and investigated by U.S. attorneys—prosecutors who later resigned over the Trump administration’s policies.
The Trump administration saw this and decided they wanted to crank up the attention: they sent Gregory Bovino, CBP, and ICE in. What ended up happening? They kidnapped people, they killed two Americans in broad daylight, on camera.
DRUMMOND: Yeah.
HAYES: That’s where all the attention ended up going. You could see Trump backpedaling, furiously posting on Truth Social yelling that everyone should be talking about the fraud. It’s like—you just killed two people. You labeled them domestic terrorists, you kidnapped neighbors, you tear-gassed high school kids. To me, that’s the test: we pay attention to what Trump is doing, but not on his terms. That’s the question we ask ourselves every day.
DRUMMOND: Your book The Sirens’ Call is out in paperback now, it’s all about attention. You argue that attention has become a commodity in the same way labor was commodified in early industrial capitalism. When did this process of turning attention into a commodity really start? How do you trace that through history?
HAYES: It really starts with two technologies: commercial billboards and the penny press, like the New York Sun. The core idea was that you’re selling an audience to advertisers, and you need metrics to measure how big that audience is to set a price.
Early on, for billboards, guys would stand on the corner with clickers counting how many people walked by. They’d tell an advertiser “we get 600 people an hour here in Times Square” and charge accordingly. For the penny press, the big innovation was selling the paper for less than it cost to make—you lose money on every copy, but you make it back selling advertising.
It’s evolved over and over: magazines, radio, television, then the internet and social media. What’s new now is the global scale—no media company ever had billions of users before these big attention companies do now. The amount of data they have on every viewer is orders of magnitude bigger than anything we’ve ever had. You have microsecond auctions for eyeballs happening every nanosecond, and algorithms make all the programming choices instead of people. It’s a whole new system.
DRUMMOND: You acknowledge your own role in this economy in the book—you’re an attention merchant yourself: TV anchor, social media creator, you film clips for MS Now and Instagram. How do you navigate your own role in this algorithmic attention landscape?
HAYES: It’s different for every platform. For my nightly TV show, I know where attention is flowing, and getting attention is a necessity, but it’s never enough on its own. If no one watches my show, I haven’t done my job. But once I have people’s attention, I have to do something worthwhile with it. A lot of the things that grab attention the fastest aren’t worth anyone’s time, to me. This week, with the war starting, that hasn’t been a problem—everyone’s attention is already on the war, which is the most important story anyway, so I don’t have to twist myself into knots chasing clicks.
My podcast is the same way: I just do what I’m interested in, and let the chips fall where they may. Social media is interesting. We’ve been making more and more vertical video because everyone does it now—it’s this weird slot machine effect. The other day I did a 60-second clip about a House vote on tariffs, including the new Canadian tariffs, this was before the Supreme Court struck them down. I just said “it’s interesting that Trump lost Republican votes on this” and it blew up.
Sometimes you think a clip is gonna go viral and it does nothing, and you have no idea why. If I spent my whole life playing this slot machine, I’d probably get better at it, but that’s not what I’m here for.
One of the biggest challenges for journalists who actually care about accurate, newsworthy information is that we’re not just competing with a handful of other cable news shows anymore. We’re competing with MrBeast, we’re competing with cooking videos, we’re competing with literally every other piece of content ever made, all at the same time. So when a clip about tariffs goes viral? That’s a little miracle.
DRUMMOND: But the thing is, you basically have to participate, right? You can’t really opt out of making vertical video if you want to reach a mass audience.
HAYES: Exactly. You can opt out, but not if you want to actually get your reporting in front of people. That’s the problem. Vertical video is sort of the end point of the entire evolution of attentional technology.
DRUMMOND: I want to ask about the upcoming midterms. You wrote in that New York Times piece that the Democrats’ main problem isn’t their message—looking at Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, you said her core problem was that she couldn’t get people to even hear her message. That’s basically an attention deficit, and it still feels like a problem for Democrats heading into the midterms. What do you think about their ability to galvanize voters online right now?
HAYES: One of the most telling data points from 2024 is that among voters who said they paid a lot of attention to the news, Harris won by five or six points. The less attention people paid to news, the bigger Trump’s margin got, all the way down to people who never followed news at all.
That tells you a lot. A lot of people blame the media for Trump’s win, but the people who consume the most news are the most likely to vote for Democrats—that complicates that narrative a lot.
For decades, from the 80s until recently, campaign strategy around attention was super simple: raise money, spend it on TV ads. That model is broken now. You can’t just raise a ton of money and run ads on local news and expect to win. Some of the voters you need are still there, but a lot aren’t. So you need a whole new theory of how to reach people who don’t consume traditional news, which used to be called earned media. Earned media is this interview we’re doing right now, paid media is buying TV ads. I didn’t pay for this interview, for the record.
If your target voters aren’t seeing your earned media because they don’t follow traditional news, and they aren’t seeing your paid media either, what are they going to see? You have to have an answer to that. Do the Democrats have an answer? They’re getting better. Trump had it figured out in 2024: he went on every podcast, made all kinds of content, even that whole thing where he drove a truck and handed out McDonald’s. It was absurd, but it worked—it spread way beyond people who follow the news, way beyond paid advertising.
Zohran Mamdani was a huge innovator with this too, with all his vertical videos. The point is, you can’t just default to the same paint-by-numbers strategy that worked for decades. You have to have a theory of attention now, or you’re gonna lose.
DRUMMOND: When I got to WIRED, it was obvious that covering the merger of power between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government wasn’t optional—it was an imperative. That’s been especially true since Trump took office. You’ve covered politics for decades, you’ve watched power shift in Washington. How have you seen that merging of power between tech elites and politics evolve?
HAYES: The 2025 inauguration was such a shocking moment. All those tech CEOs sitting front row with Trump. Was that shocking to you?
DRUMMOND: I’m genuinely curious—was it shocking to you?
HAYES: Yeah, it was. I knew they supported him, but the open, proud display of being in his inner circle? That hit different. A few things happened here. As tech went from an insurgent upstart industry to the incumbent power, its politics got way more right-wing. That’s not a surprising trajectory—if you interview a 23-year-old trying to break into an industry, then interview that same person when they’re 63 making eight or nine figures a year, their politics are gonna change.
A lot of them also just cooked their brains hanging out on Twitter and the internet with each other, pickled in reactionary brine. They got mad about “woke” employees, they got radicalized. Then there’s the political economy of it: they’re the most powerful, most profitable corporations in the world, and AI is their biggest bet ever. Their relationship to the state is existential for their bottom line.
DRUMMOND: People debate whether this is ideological or just business: do tech elites actually believe the right-wing politics they’re supporting, or are they just holding their nose for four years because it’s good for business?
HAYES: It’s different for different people. They’re not all a monolith. Jeff Bezos is genuinely very right-wing in his personal politics, he never was a liberal. Elon Musk has terminal brain worms, full stop. Tim Cook? He looks deeply uncomfortable the whole time, but won’t say anything.
When you see how close people like Sam Altman are to this administration, how much they collaborate, does that scare me? Yeah. I was chilled to the bone when Anthropic couldn’t reach a terms-of-service agreement with the Pentagon for using Claude for military work, and the Pentagon threw this deranged Bond villain-level temper tantrum, claiming they were a supply chain risk and threatening to cut them off. They sell Nvidia chips to China, but Claude is too dangerous? Come on. Then Altman jumped in and cut a deal right away.
OpenAI and Anthropic are startups, right? They’re not legacy incumbents with their own established models like Google’s Gemini. They’re on a treadmill, they have to keep running fast, they need to raise billions, their costs are growing faster than their revenue. They’re desperate—they have this incredibly powerful technology, they’re chasing a world-changing fortune, and they have billions in debt breathing down their necks. That is not a good setup for ethical, responsible decision-making that accounts for everyone who’ll be affected by this. It’s incredibly terrifying.
DRUMMOND: I want to ask more about AI. You’ve called yourself a “lame centrist” on AI, and I fall into that same camp. The debate is so polarized: you have doomers on one side, fanboys on the other, way too much time spent bouncing between those two extremes and not enough talking about the actual practical implications we need to plan for. You posted on Bluesky that the left needs to “start thinking seriously about the
