MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wants your attention

Why is it so hard for us to put our phones down? And where do our minds go when we eventually do it? These are some of the questions that have long haunted MSNBC’s primetime — and OK, I’ll say it, seemingly ageless — fixture Chris Hayes.?

Hayes, like all of us, has optimistically packed three novels into a suitcase ahead of a week-long vacation only to come home defeated, having made it through half a book before succumbing to the serotonin promised by the phone laying silently on the beach towel beside us, imploring us to pick it up.?

So it seems ambitious, then, that the 46-year-old would ask us to turn our phones off long enough to consume "The Sirens Call", a 336-page long treatise on “how attention became the world’s most endangered resource.”?

All the same, it seems to be working. The book soared to the top of The New York Times bestseller list upon its release, and it stands to reason tens of thousands of people have spent many phone-free hours digesting it since.?

“I put in a lot of work in trying to make it keep people's attention,’ Hayes said, earnestly.??

Although Hayes clearly wants your attention, his employers at MSNBC may possibly prefer it if you politely look away for the moment. When we sat down to chat, Hayes and his MSNBC colleagues had endured a tumultuous week as Joy Reid boisterously departed the network amid a raft of changes to the primetime schedule, and network behemoth Rachel Maddow took a shot at her bosses on-air.?

“It's a very stressful and raw time generally,” Hayes says. “There's a lot of ambient stress, but we're doing all right. We're trying to focus on our job, and what we need to do everyday.”

Hayes, who hosts the 8pm hour on MSNBC each weeknight, has a refreshing sense of clarity when it comes to the brutal nature of the television business.?

“I've been around cable news long enough to know this is part of what comes with the territory,” he says. “Cable news shows don't last forever, but it's also really sad and upsetting and emotional when you have disruption. That's just human nature — and it's a difficult and exposed job in that respect, and it's also hard on producers and the staff that people don't see.”?

For now, Hayes feels positive about his show’s standing and the potential for his former colleagues to navigate their next step. “I feel good about where we can be over the course of this year because we do good work. I'm really committed and I think the company is committed to making sure that the staff we have find their way through this and that we can retain all the incredible talent we have and lock in for what we have to do. It's really tough every time you go through one of these (restructures)… And there's been quite a few.”

Another media moment I was eager to unpack with Hayes was a recent viral social media post that captured podcasting and sportswriting legend Bill Simmons seated in a sports arena during a break in play at a basketball game.?

Simmons was surrounded by thousands of people, and virtually every single person was staring intently at their phone — with one exception. Simmons was instead glaring at the players huddled on the court during the break, trying to detect their body language, absorb their mood and read into plays.?

The sarcastic but accurate post read: "This is what separates Bill from the plebs. Everyone in the photo is either looking at their phones or chatting. Except him. Bill "body language doctor" Simmons is diabolically locked in. That's why he has 9 houses and you don't."

Hayes learned the reporting ropes in the early 2000s when we were taught to observe — to always be watching. It strikes me that in our business, as we collapse into our phones on the subway each day, we’re not absorbing enough of what is going on around us.?

“Editors at some of the largest remaining legacy powerhouses like The New York Times are telling (staff) to get off social media and go talk to people,” Hayes said. “I think it is really important. The Times has this thing where they discourage phone interviews. If possible, do in-person interviews. If they do a phone interview, it's noted in the piece and I think there's profound wisdom in that. Get out, observe and look at the world. I had a (strong) reaction to that viral Simmons picture because I was like, ‘this is his job.’ He's there partly as a fan, but (mostly) his job is to observe, you know, and here he is doing his job.”

Hayes chatted with me recently one morning as he began to prepare for his nightly news show. Here in his own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – he walks us through his fascinating and unlikely journey and why, exactly, he craves your attention.?

The current president is the ultimate culmination of the book's thesis. This is not a meme or a joke. I've never seen anything like it. And the reason is because Musk and Trump have control over attention in their own way. They both have a kind of deep, broken, desperate psychological need for it. They both have a kind of means of dominating it.

There’s an analogy to human appetites and culinary predilections. If you want to sell food at scale across the globe to billions of people, you're gonna drive towards the lowest common biological denominator, which is sugar, salt and fat. McDonald's and Coca-Cola are sold everywhere for a reason, right? Literally an evolutionary inheritance. But also if you ask, well, what do people like to eat, it's crazy what people like to eat and one doesn't displace the other. The fact is the rise of fast food doesn't mean that sushi didn't, somewhat improbably, become an enormous mass American hit.?

I think it's really encouraging that all sorts of weird things have had success on YouTube. Part of the point I'm trying to make is that the structure of these attention markets really matter. Podcasts have become so dominant because they work off an open platform and protocol which can syndicate a podcast to any feed anywhere. It's not contained in some algorithmic attention market. I like the fact that the internet allows human creativity to be aggregated and find new connections in all sorts of wonderful ways. That's a distinct thing from the specific forms of attentional capitalism that are designed to maximize eyeballs and attention hours and extract it for value.

Why are we so reluctant to sit with our own thoughts? Because when we do, and we are left to our own devices, we turn dark. We sometimes even start to think about things like mortality. I think it's exacerbated by the technologies we have, but I think it does go back much deeper. In the 17th century, Pascal identified the part of the human condition that is to be alone with our own thoughts and confront who we are. That is, the most profound truth about ourselves, which is that we will only be here for a short finite period of time. To sit with our own minds can be really uncomfortable. I think it's a habit and practice thing. The less time we spend alone with our own thoughts, the scarier it becomes to be alone with them. And because we have so much opportunity to flee from our own thoughts, we don't get very much practice.

I did a lot of theater in high school. Then in college, I did a ton more theater and when I graduated, I was just thinking about grad school. But then I started to think, if I go to grad school, I have to pay someone to learn and write about what I'm learning. But… If I were to become a journalist, someone would pay me to learn and write about what I'm learning and that might be a nifty way to make a living. So I started writing and trying to freelance right after college, and I didn't have any grand idea other than I liked learning about things. I knew I wanted to keep learning after college and it would be cool to get paid to do it. I was eventually able to start making enough from reporting to pay my half of the rent.

As my writing took off, I still applied for a bunch of theater jobs. If I had gotten a job at the Goodman Theater at that age or had been able to become an assistant artistic director or something like that, I probably would have just done it. But the journalism thing clicked first. There's definitely the rush of your first byline. It feels really cool to see your words in print and I stuck with it.?

Appearing on TV was the climax of a bunch of sort of happy accidents for me and a lot of luck. My wife got a clerkship for John Paul Stevens in Washington, D.C., so we moved there together right after we got married. At around the same time, The Nation’s longtime DC editor David Corn left and there was an opening. I got it. Then this really great PR person named Ben Waskita, God bless him, at The Nation, was pitching me to get on TV. He booked me on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and I took that clip and sent it to the people at MSNBC. They tried me out and I think the thing that gave me a little bit of an advantage was I had been in performance theater since I was 12 or 13. I was comfortable doing that, and I think that probably helped a lot. Talking on TV is a weird skill. Everyone can talk, but not everyone can talk on TV. And so I think I had a kind of knack for it.?

Transitioning to storytelling on TV compared to daily news articles and feature writing was pretty hard. The weekend show I had on MSNBC was so discursive, but the attentional imperatives of prime time were different and really difficult. Thinking of things visually first, for instance, there was a lot that made it much harder. It took a while to develop the toolset that would make me effective at it. A lot of it's just like craft and rhetoric. Rhetoric is keeping people, you know, spellbound, listening to you and persuading them by the way you talk, and that's really what I do for a living. Part of that is the journalism part, which is getting the facts right, arranging the facts in a way that is interesting. And then there's the rhetoric part. That’s the difference maker in some ways: how you talk to people, how you structure the way you talk to them, how you present arguments and facts.?

When I landed the primetime show, I was basically immersed in the job full time from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. Just, like, completely in fight or flight mode every waking minute for about four or five years. My wife would say ‘you look like you're being hunted.’ Which was kind of my vibe, like a literal deep somatic system, going on adrenaline. Basically all the time.?

Writing this book tested my own attention span. I'm a pretty disciplined person and I've been that way for a long time. So I'm really disciplined about my work and my time. I have three kids in school: 13, 10 and 7. I have a wife who I completely adore and am obsessed with. She also works her butt off and has multiple gigs. We are lucky to have the ability to have a lot of help. My parents live in town, we have an incredible au pair, we have babysitters. We're totally lucky and privileged to have that.?

Over the course of my time writing books, I developed a two-hour method. It’s kind of like the Pomodoro method, so 25 minutes on, five minutes off. I think of a writing session as four half-hour quarters. Each quarter is 25 minutes total focus, no phone, no internet: Either researching, reading texts or writing. And then you can get up and make coffee for five minutes and check your phone, go back, do that. If you do one of those a day, five or six days a week, you can do about 1,500 words a week, which is 6,000 a month. Over the course of 18 months, you get a draft.?

I don’t listen to critics from the other side of politics. It doesn't affect the show. It really doesn't. I truly don't care what they say and I don't even really pay much attention to it. Like, I know where they're coming from about us already.?

The job has been harder because (the news cycle) has been designed to overwhelm our attention and ability to focus. So it's been hard to parry that. But it's very invigorating in a weird sense, in that I feel very committed to the mission of what we do and it feels important to do it right. So in that sense it's motivating, like deeply motivating. It’s kind of like a very difficult basketball workout where you know the coach is just gonna run you. After it, it’s not like I would say it's pleasant or enjoyable, but it's rewarding. And it's a good, honest effort and it’s doing something. So that's how I feel about this work, which is very difficult right now and very hard to do well. But it’s also important to do it well, and to do it both precisely and passionately. Even if those two things can sometimes bring a little bit of tension.

Wanting attention myself is a part of me that has been very present from when I was a kid. I was always a bit of a show-off. And I don't love it about myself. Doing this book tour, I've actually over the course of it thought, ‘oh, this is too much.’ And I've been happy to feel that because it feels like some kind of maturity or well-adjustedness. So, you know, I would love for people to ignore me for a little. Even saying that, to me, feels a little like I've reached some growth in my middle age about how I feel in relation to this pursuit of attention.