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.”

Of course, Hayes is aware of reports on MSNBC’s postelection ratings plunge. He suggests the drop may be cyclical, and that the audience will tune back in as the Trump administration really gets underway. At the same time, he’s learned in this job that “you really have no idea what’s happening,” he says, recalling how he prepared to hit the road for the 2020 presidential election, only to have a global pandemic curtail campaigning.

It’s not only MSNBC wrestling with how to reach—and sustain—an audience. The results of the 2024 election were widely interpreted as a rebuke of the traditional media outlets alongside the rise of Trump-friendly podcasters and influencers. I ask Hayes if he considers what the average 20-year-old is reading today. They’re “getting news,” he says, but “it’s just in this incredibly remixed and masticated way.”

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A key insight in the book is that “information is infinite,” whereas “attention is limited,” having essentially become an “endangered resource” in an era when a zillion apps are available to snuff out every second of boredom or discomfort. And regardless of the legitimate news and information that people—whether young or old—are consuming, there’s still the flood of mis- and disinformation spreading on platforms like X and YouTube. The night before our meeting, Hayes did a segment, for example, on how Trump, Musk, and other right-wing media figures were helping fuel conspiracy theories about the then raging Los Angeles wildfires.

“Part of what I think is important to wrestle with is, all of this has been true forever. Salem witch trials, pogroms, lynchings, ethnic purges,” he says. “But what’s crazy is that we’ve sort of reinvented and supercharged the village rumor.”

And the political right, Hayes acknowledges, has demonstrated “a better ability to drive sustained focus on things.” Take the New Orleans attack: If the suspect had been an immigrant who’d crossed the southern border—rather than a US citizen and military veteran—“it wouldn’t have been gone in a few days.” Similarly, he suggests that the story of Trump’s near assassination last July wouldn’t have faded as quickly had the gunman turned out to be “some liberal leftist activist.”

“So there is this power in sustaining attention and focus,” he says, “which I think they understand and they can be very good at driving.”

When reading a book on attention, one becomes acutely aware of how easy it is to get diverted from the task at hand—a buzzing phone leads to checking texts, and suddenly you’re down an internet rabbit hole. Same goes for writing a piece about a book on attention; a single Slack message leads to a series of other tasks and exchanges, and then suddenly the sun’s down. A common meditation technique is to put one’s attention on the breath, and when you get pulled away by thoughts—which you undoubtedly will—you come back, over and over. It’s a reminder of both how quickly one can get distracted and the effort required to get back to what you were doing in the first place.

I had planned on asking Hayes how he breaks from the relentless news grind and endless digital distractions, and one way became apparent as he arrived at the café in sweatpants and Air Jordans, having just come straight from a regularly scheduled Friday-morning basketball game. (He’d be back in a suit that night while interviewing Michael Cohen about Trump’s sentencing earlier that day.) Since writing the book, Hayes tells me, he’s also been trying to force himself to walk more without listening to a podcast, to be “alone with my thoughts.”

And the writing itself “was its own attentional therapy because it forced me to focus and read,” he says, adding, “I went back and I read Kierkegaard, and I read Sartre, and I read Pascal, and I read Marx, and I read Hegel, and I read stuff that I hadn’t read in years. And even just sitting, you know that feeling—hard reading you did in college—where you sit with just a page of text, like three paragraphs, and you just work through it. And I hadn’t done that in a while, and that was unbelievably crazy. But it would be very hard for me to do that as practice if it wasn’t like, you have a publisher expecting a manuscript.”

Turning back to Hayes’s day job, I ask about the challenges of covering another Trump presidency given the chaos of the first term and the radical agenda promised this time around. “Focus and modulation, those are the two challenges,” he says. “So one is how you focus attention when it’s constantly being pulled. And [two is] how you modulate your tone and your volume so that you don’t just put the dial at a 10 and leave it at 10. You put the dial at 10 and you leave it at 10, [then] 10 begins to sound like 5. And then you have no headroom to go up to 10.”

Hayes points out that “people outside media think the media has a lot more control of public attention and focus than media does, and people inside media think they have less control than they do.” He suggests that “there is some relationship between what people get habituated to pay attention to” and what they’ll consume later on, noting how, in other parts of the world, there’s more demand for international news, which likely developed because the audience became accustomed to it. “It’s like our attentional needs,” he says. “Our appetites don’t exist independent of the food we’re eating and the stuff we’re looking at.”

“If you raise a kid just on McDonald’s, they’re gonna want McDonald’s. If you cultivate a democratic polity in public on 10-second videos, they’re gonna have a hard time watching Lincoln-Douglas debates,” says Hayes, referring to the hours-long, intricately argued contests that seem unfathomable in American politics today. There has to be some end, though, to the shortening of everything. “At some point we’re gonna hit something where it literally can’t get smaller,” he says. “It’s like interest rates—they can’t be negative. You can’t make a negatively timed video. There’s some finite end to the constant compression and shrinking.”

Considering some of the book’s gloomy subject matter—at one point Hayes describes “the age we’re living through” as “akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism”—I ask about what hope, if any, he does have. He says he believes “there is this generative impulse brewing in people for a way out of this.”

“There’s a feeling of trapped dead-end-ness that I think is so ubiquitous,” he continues. “I think everyone feels it. It’s like, in the same way that I think there’s a feeling people felt at certain points of industrial development—they’re walking through sewer-filled streets, breathing crappy air, going to a factory, and obviously I’m not comparing our lives to theirs, but there was a level—and there [were] some people being like, ‘This is progress, this is progress,’ and [other] people being like, ‘This is progress? This does not feel like progress.’”

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