Chris Hayes on Why Donald Trump and Elon Musk Thrive in the Attention Age

Chris Hayes was starting his third week hosting a new prime-time MSNBC show, All In, when tragedy struck in Boston. The deadly marathon bombing, and subsequent manhunt, he recalls, became a TV “spectacle” that dominated the news for about a month. Yet at the start of this month, he says, “a guy with an ISIS flag killed 14 people” in a New Year’s truck attack in New Orleans and the story quickly faded.

“It’s wild to compare Boston to that,” says Hayes. One troubling caveat, he notes, is that people have “become acculturated with mass acts of violence, like school shootings,” thus raising the bar for what stories command and keep the public’s attention. Still, he says, there’s this “feeling that nothing sticks,” which pertains to Donald Trump, who both drives and benefits from today’s hyperspeed news cycle.

When I meet up with Hayes for breakfast in Park Slope, Brooklyn, there are still 10 days before Trump will return to the White House and, once again, dominate media coverage by flooding the zone with executive orders and pronouncements. But the 47th president—as well as Elon Musk—is an unavoidable topic of conversation over coffee and eggs that morning given the subject of Hayes’s latest book: attention.

“These are two people who understand at an almost cellular level how important attention is, I think, partly because of their own weird, broken personalities,” he says. They’ve “figured out this core truth,” he adds, “that attention is the most valuable resource of our time and that you should do anything you can to get it.”

While Hayes confronts our screen-addled present in his upcoming release, The Sirens’ Call, he begins a few thousand years back with the “Odyssey,” recalling the scene in which Odysseus had to be tied to a ship’s mast to prevent him from being drawn to an enticing song being sung by sirens, mythical creatures known for luring sailors to their demise. “The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will,” Hayes writes. “And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life.”

Throughout the book, Hayes bats around big ideas from philosophers (Plato, Pascal, Marx), media theorists like the late Neil Postman—whose seminal 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, feels especially prescient at the start of another reality-show presidency—and some deep thinkers from the early days of the internet. Hayes charts how the Information Age has morphed into the Attention Age, an epoch dominated by the likes of Amazon and Apple and in which attention “is now commodified and can be traded, bought, and sold in sophisticated, instantaneous algorithmic auctions that price a second of our eyes’ focus.”

Yet Hayes gets personal too, reflecting on attempting to rein in his kids’ screen time—as well as his own—and revealing aspects of his professional life because, as he tells me, his “whole job” is “to keep people’s attention.” That experience as a cable news host “developed the ideas that ended up in the book to be theorized,” he says, adding, “The book is sort of the end product of all the thinking that I do every day, constantly, about this craft, and about how do we keep people’s attention and how do I end a monologue and what goes in what order.” And the process of writing the book, he says, has made him consider making changes on air. “I would like to do more radical experimentation, and I think that there’s appetite for that,” Hayes says. “That’s like a New Year’s resolution.”

It should come as no surprise that Hayes’s network bosses are also thinking a lot about what’s keeping people’s attention. The previous night’s ratings—or “the numbers,” as they’re referred to inside 30 Rock—are closely scrutinized when shared around 4:15 p.m. “It’s like getting a grade every single day,” he writes, “but a grade that you wear on your forehead as you walk around school.” What is surprising, though, is that Hayes hasn’t been checking his own ratings since 2020.

“During COVID, I just completely checked out,” he says. “And I’ll tell you the reason why: I was starting to get stressed about them at some point. And then I was like, It’s a pandemic, dude. We have a role to play in the civic—and literal physical—health of the nation. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. And me worrying about it doesn’t help me. So I’m just gonna try to do my job as best as I can. And I stuck with that for five years.”