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Chris Hayes makes A Living of Attention: What some deserve, what some don’t, and how to make sure the public gives its limited scope to the right things.
This seems simple enough. But as I found out during my conversation with Hayes, which kicks off Season 2 of… The big interview PodcastIncreasingly, this is no longer the case. In 2025, MS Now’s host All with Chris Hayes Released Siren Call: How Concern Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource– A book whose central thesis is that attention has become the defining commodity of modern life.
In keeping with that theme, Hayes himself is present everywhere audiences spend their time: editorializing on television, hosting a podcast called Why is this happening?He interacts with thousands of his followers on social media, and posts vertical videos there as well. In other words, Hayes is skilled at looking at the attention economy from an intellectual perspective and participates in it as an attention merchant.
That’s exactly why I wanted to talk to Hayes and talk to him now. He has, after all, spent years studying and theorizing about attention. And given our current circumstances, perhaps the rest of us should do a little of the same. I was looking for Hayes’ take on how the attention economy increasingly shapes everything from entertainment and elections to ICE raids and world wars, and how consumers and journalists alike can think about their role in that economy as soberly and thoughtfully as possible.
When we sat down in early March, the US-Israel war with Iran had just begun. Even in those early days, it became a black hole of our attention, from incessant news alerts to President Trump’s social truth posts to the War Department’s AI-generated propaganda. We had to talk about it — along with Hayes’s views on the uneasy alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., his social media strategy, and what the left gets wrong about artificial intelligence.
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 are doing a great job.
Thank you.
I write about WIRED in the book. I remember asking my parents to sign up. I think it was for Christmas. I was like a militant. Every single page.
I’ve been thinking a lot about WIRED’s past, present, and future. I think early WIRED had a rebellious, counter-cultural spirit. I would argue that the WIRED we run has the same spirit, but it is directed at the industry that was born out of it. 1993 Wired.
completely. We think about who is the incumbent, who is the insurgent, and the valence of that switch. That was a WIRED vibe The whole earth “electronic link”.like the original Big Billboard, a kind of post-hippie cyberpunk. A kind of liberalism, but also a kind of leftism, but certainly a very hopeful utopianism and also very rebellious against the powers that be. What happened is that the powers that be now are the people who sat with the president at his inauguration.
They certainly did. and We definitely got that covered.
So the atmosphere of rebellion is now directed in a different direction.
We’re sitting in New York. It’s a Wednesday in early March. It is hard to believe that just a few days ago the United States and Israel launched a comprehensive attack on Iran, which escalated with remarkable speed. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is the second leader President Trump has ousted this year. The first is Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. What is happening in the Middle East is terrifying. It’s sad. Hundreds of people died, including American service members. However, it’s also another all-consuming news cycle. It is the dizzying, mind-numbing pace of news. We’re going to spend a lot of time in this conversation talking about caring. When you think about global conflict and war in this era, how much does it matter?