Created by Chris Hayes live with consideration: what some people deserve and what they don’t, and how to make society devote its restricted time to the right things.
It sounds uncomplicated enough. But as I discovered in my conversation with Hayes as we begin season two Great interview podcast, increasingly this is not the case. In 2025, MS Now’s host Anything with Chris Hayes released The siren call: How attention became the world’s most endangered resource— a book whose main thesis is that attention has become the most critical commodity of newfangled life.
In keeping with this theme, Hayes himself is everywhere viewers spend time: speaking on television, hosting a podcast called Why is this happening?interacting with thousands of their 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 perspective and participates in it as an attention trader.
That’s why I wanted to talk to Hayes, and now. After all, he spent years studying and theorizing about attention. Given our current situation, it would probably behoove the rest of us to do a little of the same. I was looking for Hayes on how the attention economy is increasingly shaping everything from entertainment and choices to ICE raids and world wars, and how both consumers and journalists can think about their roles in this economy as soberly and thoughtfully as possible.
When we sat down in early March, the United States and Israel’s war on Iran was just beginning. Even in the early days, it was a shadowy spot for our attention, from constant news alerts to President Trump’s Truth Social social media posts to AI-generated War Department propaganda. We had to talk about it — along with Hayes’ views on the uneasy alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, 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, hello Great interview.
CHRIS HAYES: It’s great to be here. I’m a huge WIRED fan. You are doing an amazing job.
Thank you.
I write about WIRED in the book. I remember asking my parents for a subscription. I think it was for Christmas. I was like a die-hard. Every page.
I’ve been thinking a lot about WIRED’s past, present and future. I think very early WIRED had a very rebellious, countercultural spirit. I would argue that the WIRED we run has the same spirit, but is aimed at the industry that was born out of WIRED in 1993.
Entirely. We think about who is the incumbent and who is the insurgent and the significance of this change. This WIRED vibe was reminiscent of Whole Earth’ Lectronic Link, like the original gigantic bulletin board, a sort of post-hippie cybernaut. In some ways a libertarian, but also in some ways left-wing, but definitely a hopeful utopian, and also very rebellious against the current government. What has happened is that the current government is held by the people who sat with the president at his inauguration.
Certainly yes. And we certainly discussed it.
So the insurgent atmosphere is now directed in a different direction.
We are based in Modern York. It’s a Wednesday in early March. It’s solid to believe that just a few days ago, the United States and Israel launched an all-out attack on Iran, which escalated extremely quickly. It would be remiss not to mention that this is the second leader ousted by President Trump this year. The first was Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. What is happening in the Middle East is terrifying. That’s depressed. Hundreds of people are dead, including US soldiers. But it is also another all-consuming news cycle. It’s the melting, mind-numbing pace of the 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?