Are You Not Entertained? Host Chris Hayes (The Sirens’ Call) on the Attention Age

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For more than a decade, Chris Hayes has been one of our most incisive political thinkers. He joins us this week in New York City, hours before taping his hit MSNBC show, All In with Chris Hayes, to discuss his new book, The Sirens’ Call.

At the top, we unpack America’s Constitutional crises (5:30), the editorial inner workings of “All In” (7:00), and how attention became our most endangered resource (12:00). Then, Hayes talks through the challenges of maintaining viewership in the era of cord cutting (14:00), the diversity of his primetime audience (25:00), and how he balances the performative elements of the job with his authentic self (44:00).

On the back-half, Hayes describes the challenges of reaching a wider audience in our increasingly partisan political landscape (50:00), his tenure on television (55:00), his formative years writing at The Chicago Reader (1:05:00), and a short story from Albert Camus that keeps him on course (1:10:00).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Lemonada
0:02.0	Lemonada
0:04.0	This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam for Goso. Welcome to the show.
0:56.8	Today, journalist, author, and MSNBC host, Chris Hayes. For more than a decade, he's been one of the sharpest political thinkers on television, bringing curiosity, conviction, and a healthy dose of skepticism to his weeknight program all in with Chris Hayes.
1:03.0	You may remember that we began the year on the show by talking to New Yorker writer Gia Tolentino, who talked a whole lot about the destructiveness of the internet and how surveillance capitalism
1:09.2	is being sold to us as the new normal.
1:13.1	We imagine today's episode with Chris as a kind of continuation of that talk with Gia,
1:19.3	because as the first month of Trump's second term has shown, nothing about this time is normal,
1:26.2	nothing about how big tech CEOs are controlling and pulling the levers of power for him should go ignored.
1:33.3	But the loudest question that I've been hearing amongst family and friends is, how do we go about paying attention to all of this when what we're being asked to pay attention to, to witness, is so
1:46.4	obviously toxic. How do we remain focused in a political climate designed to disorganize?
1:53.5	Tony Morrison once said in a keynote speech that the function of racism is distraction.
1:59.3	It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over
2:03.1	and over again your reason for being. None of this is necessary, and there will always be one more
2:10.9	thing. The same can be said about proto-fascism, or whatever we're calling American politics
2:17.1	at this moment.
2:18.7	Distraction is a feature, not a bug, and its intent, Trump and Musk's intent, is to reduce our
2:26.9	capacity and, more importantly, our desire to imagine something different. And so today,
2:33.9	that's what we try to do with Chris and his new book, The Sirens Call,
2:37.9	which explores how attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us,
2:43.5	and from which we are increasingly alienated.
2:46.9	We also discussed the dip in ratings across many left-leaning news organizations, the inner workings of his tenure at MSNBC, and why he believes it will take a holistic framework to rest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
	...

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