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.