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 ever