WITHpod is thrilled to publish our first live WITHpod mailbag, which was hosted on Twitter Spaces. Join as Chris and producer Doni Holloway go through your questions, discuss feedback you’ve sent and share pod updates. You’re in for a special treat as Chris also serves as a podcast “board operator” for the first time!
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, we decided to do something new recently, I was hosting our first ever live mailbag on Twitter Spaces. Those of you who are longtime WITHpod listeners, though, we usually do a semi-annual mailbag where we answer your questions, respond to your feedback, share updates on the pod and more.
This one was really special, I got to say, because we tried to do this Twitter Spaces thing which was live and in the moment, and there were like a thousand of you that came, and I got to take questions like I was a drive time talk show host, as you’ll hear. Like, operate the board and go to so and so from Michigan, and get a question.
It was super fun. It was also great to co-host with WITHpod producer, Doni Holloway, and to hear from all you guys. For those who missed it, you want to hear it again. We’re excited to share it with you here on our podcast feed. And I think we’re going to definitely do this again because we had such a blast. I hope you enjoy.
I’ve been extremely delighted by the community that’s grown up around this podcast, which has been a real labor of love and passion for me and for all of us here. It’s been fantastic to be able to sort of pursue things that I’m super interested in and want to learn about, but haven’t had the opportunity to do on the show, particularly do on the show in a truncated fashion. So it’s great to have that, and it’s great to have you all.
I know a bunch of you have sent in emails and tweets as well. And we’re going to try to do something that’s never done here before, which is like open the phones, which just seems spicy and dangerous, but we’re going to try it here anyway. All right. Egberto, how are you doing?
Egberto: Yeah. Can you hear me?
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I got you, man. Oh, look at this. Look at this. This is amazing.
Egberto: Actually, it works very well, Chris. And let me just tell you that I’m calling in, I like your podcast. I like your show. And I wanted to let you know that I think it is so important the work that you’re doing and the analysis that you actually do unlike many others on other stations, et cetera. Keep up the good work. I won’t take up a whole lot of the time. I just wanted to personally tell you that you are a hell of a broadcaster and a hell of an analytical guy. So keep up the good work, sir.
Chris Hayes: Egberto, that is very kind of you. I mean, let’s be honest, that’s really the kind of feedback we’re looking for here on our WITHpod mailbag. It’s absolutely great to hear from you, Egberto.
I’m just going to go through these. Now, you guys don’t have to, I mean, as much as I like, the ritual praising of me. And it does appear that Doni Holloway is still having a hard time getting on, so we’re just doing it with you straight, you and me, the listeners. We’re opening the phone lines. It’s very exciting. So I’m just going to go in order here, just crossing my fingers that we don’t have any trolls. I’m hovering my finger over the mute button like I myself from the board up, for my own Colin radio show, which is exciting too. You’ll never know what’s going to happen.
All right. Kamau, I’m going to bring you on, adding you as a speaker. Kamau, what’s up, man?
Kamau: Hey. I wanted to ask if you thought a lot of the issues in our democracy, especially the Electoral College and the Senate, and the way demographics are going, where the country becomes much potentially, but increasingly likely under minority rule for a while, a majority-minority country in the 2040s. And then the institutions don’t really become majority-minority until the 2090s.
Yeah, I think it was a Brookings Report that showed that those institutions wouldn’t really be under majority-minority rule, and more majority Black and brown country until the 2090s. So majority of states are majority-minority. And so I heard you and David Roberts kind of talk through some of these problems. But do you think multi-member districts and modeling solutions like those at the state and local level are maybe the only route towards changing the character of the national conversation so that there’s actually things that exist at scale that are modeling the kind of multiracial democracy that he talked a lot about on the show?
Chris Hayes: That’s an awesome question, Kamau, and thank you for asking it. Yeah, I mean, I think the basic structural problem you’re pointing to, right, is the sort of divergence between the demographic makeup of the country at a national level and the sort of institutional strength at the more local level, and then the institutions like the United States Senate and the Electoral College that give land votes, right?
And if you’ve got this like polarization that’s happening around a combination of geographic density, and urbanization and race, right, which are all very much intermixed in sort of the geospatial land of the United States, that, yeah, you end up with this problem where you’ve got the possibility for essentially minority rule. We already sort of functionally have it often in the U.S. Senate, where a minority of the voters in the country control the majority of Senate seats. We have it in 2016 with Donald Trump’s election.
Your question about the importance of state power, I think, is actually super, super important. I think one of the things that you see is that even in places where you’ve got a sensible progressive power, Democratic domination states like California and New York, and Maryland or Massachusetts, right? It’s not like reactionary forces go away. It’s not like conservatism doesn’t have to be reckoned with. It’s not like the institutions are nicely responsive.
So I do think that there’s sort of two tracks, right? Like, making more responsive institutions and empowering multiracial democracy at the national level is an incredibly important project. But like modeling what responsive, multiracial democracy actually looks like, what it could confer on people at the state level is also incredibly, incredibly important.
So I think you’re right that there’s an opportunity for some really good laboratories of democracy stuff at the state level, particularly, I think, honestly, like on climate, where there’s like small stuff that can be done. Getting rid of gas stoves, for instance, just as a policy item, which is what they’re doing in Massachusetts, right? New construction, like not having gas stoves. Again, relatively small things, but things that can be modeled and put into place at the state level.
But the deeper question of state level democracy remains a really vital one, which we’re going to get a huge court case this fall about as well. And that’s where it’s, in some ways, a little bit scarier, just because of what the court has been sort of leaning towards.
All right. I am going to go to Maxwell Bruno Lewis, whose bio says here regional field director for the AFL-CIO in, I think, Michigan. Add as a speaker. God, this is so fun. Now, this is all I want to do. I’ll host a cable news show.
Maxwell Bruno Lewis: Thanks for having us on. My question is, I’ll keep it short and quick. It’s a little more politics based, with the Iowa caucus being kind of the wild show that it was in the most recent Democratic primary.
Chris Hayes: That was very euphemistic.
Maxwell Bruno Lewis: Yeah. I was wondering, with the potential mix up of new states being a higher priority in the list, what do you think; A, should be priorities in picking the new states to be the early primaries; and B, what do you think is most likely the route that’s going to go? And thanks so much, Chris. I love the show. This is really cool. I’m from Michigan, so this is my plug that it should be Michigan.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I actually think Michigan is a great place because, first of all, I think there’s widespread consensus, right, that a state that is really not particularly demographically diverse. We need a state that’s much more demographically diverse in Iowa, and particularly the one-two punch of Iowa and then New Hampshire. Also, the fact that, as you said, Maxwell, politely that it was a cluster, I think doesn’t help at all. So we’ve also got that, meaning I think there’s going to be change.
I think Michigan is great. And the reason I think Michigan is great is it’s got a whole bunch of things going for. One, it’s got a demographic breakdown that is somewhat similar to the nation at large. I think it’s like the state itself is about somewhere around 12% African American, if I’m not mistaken, which is right around the national number. It’s got both urban and rural areas, itself is a swing state, which I think is also really good.
Because if you’re going to have a primary and you want to be like organizing and getting voter registration lists, and you’re going to be mining the terrain somewhere, like might as well do it in a state that is going to be a contested state. And Michigan is a very contested state. And an important one, it’s also a strong labor state, which is great, obviously, as you know, Maxwell, as I think a labor guy yourself.
So I think there’s also a pretty good argument for Illinois, which for basically similar reasons, it’s got big rural downstate areas. It’s got a huge metropolis. It’s got the kinds of suburbs that have been traditionally were bastions of republicanism, have been sort of trending towards the Democrats, particularly in the Trump era. So there’s a lot of stuff there.
It also got a very large immigrant population in the state of Illinois, both first generation, multiple generation, a very huge and organized and vibrant Latino community. It’s particularly Mexican American and Chicano in Illinois, but not just that. So I think there’s good arguments for both of those states. People make arguments for all kinds of states.
The one thing that I would say about Illinois that makes it a little more difficult, and something that Iowa and New Hampshire have going for them, is they are relatively cheap media markets, which is a thing to keep in mind. Because part of the idea of having this primary broken up in this sort of state fashion is that you can basically allow candidates to be competitive, that don’t have enormous bank accounts because they’re not trying to run, A, a national primary which would be very, very difficult. And B, in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, relatively small markets, relatively cheap medium markets, you can do a lot of retail politicking.
So preserving some of that, I think, does make some sense. I do think there’s some logic to that. And I think that that’s something that Illinois’ downside is the Chicago media market is one of the most expensive.
All right. Here’s what I’m going to do. Doni, are you on? Will you talk to me for a second?
Doni Holloway: Hey, Chris, I’m here.
Chris Hayes: We got him.
Doni Holloway: I’m glad to be here.
Chris Hayes: Doni, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to take a few more of these because I’m having so much fun.
Doni Holloway: Yeah, this is fun. This is something new.
Chris Hayes: I’m pretending I’m a drive time radio host here. By the way, can I just note, I’m going to go with Brandon next. Brandon is actually also from Michigan. So I’m going to take Brandon next. I will note that every speaker request has been a man so far. It’s just like an amazing natural experiment here. So if there are non-man identifying folks that would want to ask a question, it’d be great too. Brandon Snyder, putting you and you are now connecting. All right. You’re now on the air. You got to unmute yourself.
Brandon Snyder: All right, very good. So thanks, Chris, for this. I appreciate the question. I appreciate the back-to-back Michigan questions. So I’m a fan of yours. One quick story, I went to London three years ago with your brother and a bunch of Working Families Party folks for a thing, and now you pop up on my Facebook as a person I should know. So very weird. So glad to meet you.
Chris Hayes: You went with the great Luke Hayes. I remember he took that trip.
Brandon Snyder: Yes. So I’m very, very glad to be connected on this. My question is short, though. So I talk to a bunch of funders, labor folks, other folks, and the mist in the air is that we’re going to lose and we’re going to lose badly. And that is not good. So what does that mean for both our country and even for our states over these next two years? Like, if we’re going to lose badly this fall, or the mist in the air is that we’re going to lose badly for this year, then that sets us up for 2024. What does that mean?
Chris Hayes: Well, I mean, first of all, it’s great to e-meet you, Brandon. He was referencing my brother, Luke Hayes, a WITHpod guest actually. Oh, man, this is so fun. I feel this godlike power, just managing the board here. Yeah, I mean, look, it doesn’t look good. I mean, I would say that I don’t think losing badly is in the cards, or as predetermined or overdetermined as I thought it was like six months ago.
I think there’s lots of reasons to think the Dobbs decision was a major turning point. I do think that the primacy of bodily autonomy for women and pregnant folks in states like, for instance, Michigan and Pennsylvania are two great examples, where in Pennsylvania, it’s just very starkly on the ballot. There’s Republican State House control in both houses. There’s currently a Democratic governor. If a Democratic governor replaces him, he will veto the inevitable abortion ban that crosses his desk. If it’s Doug Mastriano who’s like, essentially, a Christian nationalist and extreme anti-abortion zealot, he will sign it into law.
Like, the stakes of that are stakes that didn’t exist six months ago when we were sort of looking down the barrel of all this. So I do think there are some changes. I do think it’s a very weird political time. I do think there’s a case that Democrats can make, to outperform the sort of general approval of the Biden administration and Biden himself, which is low. But obviously, the stakes are enormously high. Like, I don’t want to get too doomer here.
But like Kari Lake, a possible Arizona governor, and Doug Mastriano, as governors in 2024 is like inviting a constitutional crisis, essentially. I mean, these are people that are loudly and proudly pro-coup, who cannot be trusted to respect the democratic legitimacy of their own voters in their own state in 2024, and as such, would certainly invite a real constitutional crisis.
So the stakes are existential. They can’t really get any bigger. Not to mention like the climate stakes, the stakes for building slowly the project of American social democracy, which feels currently very stalled. So yeah, it’s not great.
All right. I’m going to take one more call then I’m going to go to Doni who has collated a bunch of questions from WITHpod listeners in the actual mailbag. This one is going to be Cheryl Roberts.
Cheryl Roberts: Hello. How are you?
Chris Hayes: I’m great.
Cheryl Roberts: Good. Thank you. I’m Cheryl and I’m from St. Louis, Missouri. Missouri, the home of the McCloskey’s, Eric Greitens, Josh Hawley, and the trigger for the abortion rights being taken away. Thank God for Claire McCaskill, or else we would just be drowning here. What I’d like to ask was a question that’s a little bit off-topic, I guess, but still on, and that is, there seem to be no rules in place and no attempt to put rules in place to build guardrails, if you will, around things that we think are important.
I’m a human resource professional. You don’t go work in a company without having all these things, like non-harassment. You cannot compete code of confidence, ethics. All these kinds of things are in place in every major corporation, and you wouldn’t think of hiring an executive or a CEO if those things weren’t in place. And so to find out that our country literally has no rules, and it’s all the little boy networking, “I know he’s going to be a good guy.” And now, we know that and there doesn’t seem to be a rush to fix that is perplexing to me. And I don’t understand why that’s not high in the news that nobody is doing anything about trying to fix the things that we found to be the problems.
Chris Hayes: So that’s a really great question. I’m going to mute you for a second. That’s Cheryl Roberts who asked that question. So yeah, I think it’s a great point. So there’s two ways to think about this, right? The Democratic frailty was born of forces that were personal and political, right? The movement around Donald Trump the sort of buffed him as a personal figure, the authoritarian inclinations of the people that supported him which I think he cultivated an urge on, and then a bunch of sort of institutional weaknesses in American democracy, and then some like really kludgy actual legal stuff.
So to talk about the third thing, which is like to your point about the guardrails, like I’ve said this before, I think, on the podcast that like if you have a contractor come to your house, you have someone to go do work, and they open up the wall and they’re like, “Oh, my God, Jesus, Lord, what the hell? Who was the guy who did this?” Like, that’s the experience, I think, we all had a little bit in 2020, with the lateral mechanics behind the wall, like behind the drywall, right, of American life.
The mechanics of electing a president which turns out to be this like preposterously complex subject to attack system, which is a combination of the U.S. Constitution Article II, the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which again was passed because the first real contested presidential election, almost through the country, no constitutional crisis. Because the system the founder setup was so acutely terrible, it almost blew the whole country up essentially immediately in the election of 1800, so then the Twelfth Amendment.
And then another really, really, really contested bad election, which is 1876, between Hayes and Tilden, in which Tilden gets more popular votes. He manages to become the president through a compromise that struck in Congress. And in the wake of that, they passed what’s called the Electoral Count Act. When you take together Article II, the Twelfth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Electoral Count Act, you have a jerry-rigged Rube Goldbergian mechanism that is subject to the predations of aspiring autocrat, authoritarian demagogue like Donald Trump, and we saw it play out. And so you’re correct, we should correct those things.
First of all, I think what we should do is the person who gets the most votes nationally is the president of United States. It’s a one-line amendment. The president shall be the person receiving the most votes when all votes in all states are counted. Boom. So simple. The way that you run every, “Oh, where should we go to dinner? Everybody, raise your hands.” Right? The way that like every vote that happens everywhere, all the time happens, right?
So that would be the obvious thing to do. That would involve, we think, well, amending the Constitution or getting states to do it. And because that’s difficult, there’s talk now about fixing some of the particulars of the Electoral Count Act. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin have a sort of small set of technocratic patches that have been endorsed by election law professors I respect like Rick Hasen. That might actually get done this year. So Cheryl, to your point about like putting in the guardrails, there is a little bit progress on that.
Okay. I hope I still have your attention, which is what I live and die by. And Doni Holloway is here, and I think we’re going to shift from the live caller aspect of this, although, God, I can tell that I’m already addicted to this. We’re going to go from the live caller aspect to some mailbag questions, with introducing, I think, for the first time to listeners, Doni Holloway.
Doni Holloway: Hi, Chris. Thanks so much. It is so fun to be here. I think we’re going to definitely have to do more of these live mailbag. We’re having so much fun with this. We got a lot of questions as we did a call to action in our recent episodes, where we asked for listener feedback and listener questions. We got a lot from all around the country, all around the world.
This one that I want to get into comes from Tom. I thought it was really interesting and really speaks to the tagline of the show, the things that keeps Chris up late at night. By the way, they really are the things that keeps Chris up late at night. Tom asks, what’s keeping you up at night the most these days?
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, I’m working on to writing significant and substantial writing projects that are difficult, and I’m thinking about them all the time. So in a narrow sense, it’s that, which is the book that I’m writing, which is public. It’s a book about attention. And the TV show that I’m working on, which is quasi-public. I think for people who listen, I mentioned it before. So at a literal sense, I’ve been spending time on that.
But in a more existential sense, I mean, there’s two things. It’s the climate crisis and the democratic crisis, and I think those are the twin perils. I mean, the threat to the planet which is acute and terrifying. And the fact that I think American democracy is kind of like a patient in the hospital, like just off the ICU and recovering a little bit, and not that really like touch and go, like is there still pulse days, it looked like. But still stalked by deep illness and in need of great care and healing.
And so I think there’s a lot of worst case outcomes that are possibilities, maybe not the most likely outcomes, but their possibilities are on the table. And in terms of what the future of American democracy looks like, and the future of the habitability of our climate, those are the two things that really keep me up the most.
Doni Holloway: Wow. That’s very interesting. Now, you talked a lot about the climate crisis and democracy and the fight for our democracy. That really goes into the next question that we got. And this one comes from Aaron. Aaron is a longtime WITHpod listener. I’ve got to say he’s a super fan. He always tweets us and is in our mailbox a lot.
Aaron actually asked this question the last time that we did the mailbag, but got in touch again. He mentioned that he asked you what gives you hope in this dark time. We’ve gotten more dark times than ever. He’s curious about whether your answer has changed in light of the rogue Supreme Court, creeping authoritarianism and fascism from the right, and really the failure to pass any and all climate legislation.
Chris Hayes: Well, yeah, I mean, I think depending on what happens, it could be harder or easier to feel hope. I mean, a guy that I really like who’s got a Substack, John Ganz is his name, who goes by I think Lionel Trilling, which is a funny, dumb, Twitter smart inside joke. He has a Substack where he just wrote about Richard Rorty, the great American pragmatic philosopher. His big kind of degree he ever wrote is kind of a political manifesto called Achieving Our Country.
And I basically subscribe to Rorty’s view, which is like democracy is a kind of uplifting, civic communal practice. And I’ve said this on the show before, I’m not a person of particular faith, although I wouldn’t describe myself as like a hardcore atheist. I don’t know really where I fall. But I do know that I think human life is beautiful and short, and that diminishing suffering and increasing joy are sort of our mission to collectively do together.
And that the practice of democratic politics is the practice by which one practice, by which we do that, not the only one. But the most promising human technology that’s ever been invented for vouchsafing a basic platform to achieve human flourishing is the collective self-governance enterprise, that is democracy. And that in the pursuit of that practice, there is something beautiful, communal, uplifting, whose process itself sort of produces some kind of almost spiritual reward. Collective human striving itself is noble. And so I take hope and joy in that always.
I mean, in some ways, it’s a little bit of a cop-out because it’s like, well, you can strive and fail. But that’s as close as I have to kind of faith, sort of civic faith. And that’s kind of what I return to time and time again. The other thing is that like on the weekend, I take Twitter off my phone, and I don’t really read the news during the weekend. I try to stay away from it and just be present with my wife, Kate. We quite talk about a lot, and my three kids, and my friends and just be present in those relationships which I find a good antidote sometimes to the to the news.
We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Doni Holloway: I didn’t know that you don’t look at the news that much over the weekend. That’s fascinating. That’s a hot take. We got another question from Andy. And Chris, I know you focus a lot on climate change. It’s a passion point for you. Andy says that he’s seen people who study and report on climate on both ends of the optimism spectrum, making it quite difficult to know really what to believe, regardless models suggesting millions of species on track for extinction. Within decades, it really enrages him. He says, re the U.S. political urgency, so your thoughts on that, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. This is a really good question from Andy and one that I struggle with, which is like, okay, not the debate over. There’s no debate about is climate change happening and is it bad that it’s happening? There’s no debate.
There is real debate and a real band of uncertainty of how bad it will get and where are we in the sort of best to worst case, even with the best case being bad, right? We established that, and that’s a real interesting debate. That is the subject of tremendous contentiousness among incredibly passionate people, passionate, righteous and informed people, people who are experts in various ways, because this is open to a ton of uncertainty.
Part of the uncertainty is like what we do and how quickly we do it. Part of the uncertainty is like climate logical effects are incredibly uncertain. It’s literally the most complex system that exists on the planet, the climate. And so there’s all kinds of unintended consequences, tail risks, feedback mechanisms.
The most obvious example of this is that ice, for instance, is white and reflective. Water is dark and less reflective of heat. So when ice melts as temperatures rise, then the ice goes into the water and there’s less reflective surface. And when there’s less reflective surface, then you get more heat. When you get more heat, more ice melts. When more ice melts, you have less reflective surface, on and on.
It’s part of the reason that the biggest temperature changes we’ve seen in the early years of climate change have been at the poles. So there’s all kinds of uncertainty. I don’t know where I come down because I don’t feel an expert and I can ping back and forth. I guess to come back to sort of my previous answer, which is about the kind of like practice of faith, I tend to try to just focus myself on the more optimistic stuff because I don’t really know what to do with the scale of the doom or the long-tail stuff.
Like, I just don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to activate it off, and how should I live my life in the face of that? So not for like rigorous intellectual reason, but more for like psychological reason. Sorry, I say too much and I get a lot of feedback on that, and I apologize. I’m catching myself doing it.
For that reason, I tend to try to focus on the more optimistic scenarios, because I guess I feel it’s a little bit of Plato’s noble lie, that if you focus on an optimistic scenario in which things could get better and we can avoid the worst case outcomes, which I believe actually. You are also engendering the conditions by which you might bring such an eventuality about. Bertolt Brecht once said that art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. So I feel a little bit that way about how I think about climate. It’s less important to me to accurately reflect like what the future and the risks are, and more important to produce the conditions by which we may collectively act to make the worst outcomes least likely.
Doni Holloway: I love that. Focusing on having optimism is so important when the outlook can look pretty bleak, something that we talk about a lot. And we actually republished the episode this year, Chris, remember telling the climate story one, a lot of urgency from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, citing that time is running out to reverse damage to the planet.
Now, also, one of our favorite things about working with the podcast is really the wide variety of episodes that we get to do. We started off this year with our first crossover episode, with the All In with Chris Hayes show airing at 8:00 p.m. on MSNBC. Talked with Bart Gellman, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Sherrilyn Ifill, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and walked through really this pivotal moment in our nation’s history and how we can move forward immense distrust, uncertainty and dwindling morale.
Other topics that we had, Jamie Raskin, that was a really moving conversation. Revisited our conversation with Dr. Izzy Lowell, who runs Queer Med. So as a lot of potential for more rights to be taken away from marginalized communities, had her on to talk about her private clinic that specializes in providing accessible health care to trans patients, ranging from kids to adults. And talked with NBA legend Dirk Nowitzki, got an insider’s perspective —
Chris Hayes: I love that one.
Doni Holloway: Really, Chris was fanboying over that one. So it was —
Chris Hayes: Wait. Can I tell a story about that? Because I think this is a fun story. Dirk Nowitzki, that interview came about because there’s no biography Dirk Nowitzki being published by the publisher Norton, who published my second book which is called “A Colony in a Nation.” And I think the editor, I’m not sure, Tom Mayer, who’s my editor at Norton, was a great guy, brilliant editor.
He was like, “We got this Dirk book coming out. I think Dirk is going to like come to press from our office.” He’s like, “Would you want to have him in the podcast?” I was like, “Absolutely.” So I was super psyched to have it. And he was sitting there in the Norton office doing it because when you do these sort of book PR tours, you’ll often just like be in an office and they’ll just move you through a bunch of different interviews.
And Tom tells me afterwards that, after we finished the podcast, Dirk takes off his headphones, he’s like, “That guy is a basketball fanatic.” I was so shocked. I was so touched by Dirk’s endorsement on my level of basketball fanaticism.
Doni Holloway: That’s so true, Chris. I know you play basketball. You try to play it a few times a week. And that episode was really fun. I remember when we were getting the setup, we had to actually keep adjusting the camera so much because he’s so tall.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. He was out of frame.
Doni Holloway: Exactly. So yeah, this next question that we got really plays into a wide variety of episodes. This question comes from Matt. And he says, “Which episodes in the last year have most changed the way you think about a particular topic?”
Chris Hayes: Well, that Izzy Lowell episode really sticks with me. I don’t even know, that wasn’t in the last year, right, Doni?
Doni Holloway: Yeah. So we republished that one this year.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Doni Holloway: We actually spoke with her earlier this year.
Chris Hayes: The Izzy Lowell, who just does trans health care for youth in the South. I just found like every time that that debate over trans rights comes up, I just found that conversation so grounding because I feel like that debate, to the extent there’s a debate there, I think often it’s in bad faith. I do think there are some people who, in good faith, have certain concerns. But by and large, I just feel like that conversation I keep coming back to.
The other one, the Connie Walker conversation has really haunted me too. She’s the one that did the —
Doni Holloway: The one on “Stolen,” the residential schools.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, “Surviving St. Michael’s.” Yeah. So that really stuck with me because that to me is when, in some ways, I think the podcast is just at its best. I didn’t do a lot in that podcast. I didn’t have a lot to say about it. I just learned a lot about something that I kind of knew about, but didn’t know enough about. And the podcast itself that you heard, I would definitely check that out because it’s really worth it and it’s really an incredible piece of journalism. So yeah, those are two that really stick out to me.
Doni Holloway: Totally. We got a lot of responses on that “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s” episode. We got a lot of responses in our inbox. Now, Chris, you have to consume a lot of information, whether it’s for All In, which is in some ways, complimentary to the podcast. We get to go more in depth with a guest on WITHpod.
This next question comes from Jase. And he says, “Chris, what is a typical day like for you in terms of information consumption? And what’s your basic strategy there? You seem to be really excellent at this. And as someone who isn’t in the business of being on top of the news, rather as Cal Newport says, looking to be more underneath it, curious whether you have any general advice.”
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think I’ve gotten good at it in the same way that a carpenter would get good at building cabinets, or a waiter gets good at balancing Martini drinks on a tray. Like, partly, it’s just a function of craft. Like, I have to do it and I’ve gotten techniques.
I mean, I use Twitter and I use it in a very specific way, which is as a means of aggregating an enormous amount of information quite quickly. And the key is to find good trusted people, but on any topic on Earth, you can find 20 people to follow, who really know what they’re talking about. And this is the key, you have to really find people who really know what they’re talking about, who are actual subject matter experts, who think about this and are not cloud chasers, and are not like performative grifters.
But like there’s a guy out there who his entire life’s work has been an analysis of the tank capabilities of the Russian army. Like, that’s what he studies. And then Russian invades Ukraine. And suddenly, like, one of the most important questions in the news is like, well, how capable is the Russian tank column? How good is the Russian army at performing this particular maneuver? And it’s like, well, there’s this guy who has been sitting on this knowledge.
And again, this is one of the things that remains amazing to me about the Internet, not just Twitter, but just generally Internet is like the aggregated knowledge of all of humanity is at your fingertips. And if you can find ways to marshal that in your favor, you can learn a tremendous amount in a really, really short amount of time, and not achieve like expertise by any means. And I try to really stay humble about what I do and don’t know. There are certain things I knew I’d find a fair amount. And there’s a lot of things that I just try to be curious about.
But you can become like conversant in things, at least just like get the parameters of like where is the room, where are the walls, what does the terrain look like, very quickly. And so I use Twitter for that. I consume a lot of Twitter. We have a Slack channel that we do. I do a lot of podcast listening. I listen to books on tape, or not on tape, that’s a funny anachronism, on my phone when I go for walks. And I’m also doing a fair amount of reading for my book.
I try to break up the day. I have very specific windows of time in which I’m doing specific things, which helps me concentrate a little bit, although my attention is pulled all over the place like everyone else’s. And I wish it was better. Kate got the most incredible, superhuman attention and focus that I just like. I’m so both impressed by and jealous of. But I manage.
So yeah, I mean, I think creating a schedule where I have these windows, where I’m focusing on things, focusing on the editorial meeting and the rundown, focusing on the segment stuff. Like, last night, I was working after the show. There was work that was like a little less brain-intensive than some of my other work. And the kids were in bed and I could work from 9:00 to 11:00, and drink a glass or two of wine and do it. So like that was that work there.
There’s work that is intensely creative, that needs to happen, like generative writing work that needs to happen like first thing in the morning with like three or four cups of coffee. So if I attack and segment my day so that I’m using different parts of my brain at different times, I can squeeze a lot out of myself in a day.
More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Doni Holloway: You mentioned segmenting your day. And this next question really is similar to the previous one. So Lou says, “Hey, longtime listener and reader, loved your two books.” First time emailer says, “I really loved your episodes with Heather McGhee and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones.” One question that he has is, “You seem like a prolific reader. How do you digest all those books and retain the knowledge as best as possible?”
Chris Hayes: That’s a great question. I’m glad that you like Heather McGhee, who I should give a shout out to, has a new podcast called “The Sum of Us,” which has the same name of her book, which has premiered I think today.
Look, as long as I have been reading, I have two genuine skills. One of which is like completely valueless, and one of them is valuable. The valueless skill which I have is that I’m great at navigating. I have an incredible sense of direction. And I often lament the fact that we live in the era of GPS because if it was like the 1600s, this would be a very, very valuable skill. And I am very proud of my sense of direction. It might be the best skill I have. But it’s completely rendered obsolete by the world of ubiquitous GPS and smartphones.
The other skill that I have, the other only genuine skill I have is consuming and retaining information. And I’ve just always kind of had it since I was young. I feel like I just remember a lot of what I read. It’s funny, whatever part of my brain retains information doesn’t function when it reads fiction. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any novel I’ve read more than a year ago. I can’t quote passages. I can’t remember the names of characters. I can’t remember plots. There are people who are the opposite, who know every detail of every piece of fiction they’ve ever read.
And then I think partly too, to go back to this craft question, like it’s funny, I was watching an amazing moment in a podcast, where the podcast host asks NBA players, who’s the first person to bust your ass? Meaning like, what was the first time in the NBA that someone just like dropped a ton of points on you and made you look like a clown on defense? And Steph Curry relayed a story, which was Kobe dropping a few moves on him, and that guy named Brandon Jennings who put up 55 points on him when he was playing on Milwaukee Bucks.
It’s this amazing thing, Steph Curry is talking about it’s his first year in the league or second year in the league, so it’s like 10 or 11 years ago, and he is describing Kobe Bryant moves. He’s literally like Kobe faked over his left shoulder, and then he spun around, “I beat on the fake and then he hit this jumper.” And they’re syncing it with game tape. Now, keep in mind, this is just one play. I mean, Steph Curry had literally thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of plays in his career, but just complete photographic memory for this play.
LeBron James, same thing, like there’s this amazing viral clip that you should definitely go check out. Maybe we’ll post it on the WITHpod, or Doni’s Twitter feed or mine, where LeBron James was asked like what happened on the stretch of that game in which LeBron James like recites exactly the last like eight possessions of the game, like exactly, right, like from memory. And then he ends and he puts his hands up, and everyone applauds.
And what I realized about that is like that’s partly natural ability, but it’s also partly craft. Like, this is their craft. They have to do this. And so, for me, like my craft is I have to retain information, and so I’ve gotten better at it over practice. And then that’s combined, I think, with a kind of natural aptitude. I don’t have good tips for it because I think, for me, it has just been a product of a natural aptitude, a genuine enjoyment of curiosity, and just so much practice, that that’s just what I have. Like, I have technique, I can give you techniques for writing. I can tell you about broadcast technique, which I’ve tried to develop over time. But this is just something that feels much more natural.
Doni Holloway: I’ve got to say if there was a superpower, it would be being able to retain information like that. And one of the things, I travel a lot, I get to meet a lot of people who are WITHpod listeners. And they’re just fascinated by the podcast and the approach, and often say like you’re a supercomputer. The information is just there. It’s like you’re a walking encyclopedia.
One question that we got from, again, our legacy listener. His name is David and he says, “Reflecting on your 20 years of reporting, what changes have you observed in how you approach a story in the context of social media, ubiquity, hyperpartisanship, and in checking your own personal biases?
Chris Hayes: That’s a great question. That’s really, really good question. So one, I would say I’ve always been careful, but I’ve probably gotten more and more careful over time. Just like it is easy to mess up. The more information that’s out there, the more bad information that’s out there, and the easier it is to fall for bad information. And so I have my defenses up and my antenna up a lot.
As you learn to be a reporter, you learn to be skeptical. You learn to have your defenses antenna up. There’s an old thing that old newspaper reporters would say, editors would say, if your mother says she loves you, check it out. Meaning, like check it out, run into the ground, like report it out, right? Like, don’t just trust your mother, she says she loves you. So that instinct I think has always been there.
But in the world of just all of this information pinging around, some of it fake, or some of it have unlikely provenance. I mean, just like I’ve gotten much more cautious and guard-up about what information I take seriously or not, what I consume and what I don’t, who I listen to and who I don’t. So that has really, I think, changed over time. There’s been a kind of necessary adjustment to like, for lack of a better phrase, epistemic environment that we find ourselves in.
And I got to say, like, it’s bewildering and difficult for me as a professional. I mean, I think it’s really, really brutal on just casual news consumers, even non-casual news consumers for the same reasons. So that’s been a big change.
The other big change I would say is that there just used to be more reporters and less take-mongers. And now, there’s fewer reporters and more take-mongers. I’m a professional take-monger. I sell my wares. I sell my takes like a like my fish or my cheese. There’s warmongers, hatemongers, cheesemongers, fishmongers. I think those are the other mongers.
Doni Holloway: We had a fishmonger on the show.
Chris Hayes: We did have a fishmonger on the show. So I think the structural factors of the means by which reporting in journalism is produced has undercut. There just used to be a lot more like local news reporters, and it’s really noticeable how few they are. And you could be a reporter reporting on the local politics and conflict, as a career. And it’s just become harder and harder for that. And I think that’s been a huge change in the 20 years that I’ve been recording.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. Totally, it has been becoming harder and harder, especially as the media landscape evolves. This next question. I really, really love it. It’s from WITHpod super fan. I got to say she’s always responding to our post, and sends messages and DMS and everything. Her name is Aretha.
She says, “Dear WITHpod, I hope this message finds you well and enjoying the summer. Every WITHpod is full of goodness. But hearing Chris in conversation with Elie Mystal was an extra special treat. Americans don’t question the framing of certain ideas nearly enough, and Mystal helps us do that. I appreciated his insisting, for example, that quote, ‘The people who kidnapped and enslaved my ancestors created rights and freedoms, while brutalizing my ancestors,’ end quote. How legitimate can a multiracial democracy be, if we keep using their conceptions of rights and freedoms?”
But Chris also set up Mystal perfectly to make a point that especially resonates for her. She said, he called listener’s attention to the fact that countless legal and political maneuvers in the United States have been aimed at putting Black people, quote, “in their place.” And in that way, he acknowledged something she calls know-your-place aggression. She’s argued that this aggression answers the achievements of anyone who isn’t the archetypal citizen, a cisgender, straight white man, and Americans need to get clear about how proactive we need to be on every front.
Racism isn’t taking any breaks, but neither is sexism, heterosexism, Islamophobia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks for a great podcast. She mentioned she’ll keep listening. So her question there is very interesting.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right. Rather, basically, is the U.S. constitutional project redeemable? Look, the person that I think is the best authority on this is Frederick Douglass, whose answer was kind of yes and no. I mean, Douglass is such a fascinating figure for this reason. And we’ve had David Blight on WITHpod, I think, before Doni joined years ago, who wrote this Pulitzer Prize winning masterful biography of Douglas.
If you read “What to the Slave is Fourth of July?” which is probably the most brilliant piece of philosophy and rhetoric on precisely this question, he basically both hit parts of it. It’s a great speech. The first part says like, “Hey, guys, you guys are celebrating today and congrats for you.” It’s kind of like you guys have put together a pretty cool thing for yourselves and then I understand why you’re justly proud. You’re kind of patting yourself on the back. And it is true, you did throw off this tyranny. You did create this, quote-unquote, ‘democracy’ like pretty impressive stuff, but and also.”
That text, to me, I think is pretty foundational how I think about the question. I mean, Douglass himself actually thought it was redeemable in the end. I mean, it was redeemable through the liberation of slaves and then the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments that are an attempt to create multiracial democracy that is then rolled back and stymied by white supremacy and terrorism.
That duality between the promise of what popular constitutionalism could be and the promise of a genuine, equitable, multiracial democracy in which people from all different backgrounds, creeds, colors, gender experiences, people they love, religious confessional traditions, can all find human dignity and equality before the law and engage in sort of the collective struggle of self-determination through democratic representation. Like, that’s still deeply aspirational.
There’s a question about whether it is or isn’t embedded in the original document, right? Like, can that be salvaged from the slave-owning founders or not? But in some ways, I thought that’s a Jamal Green question. Jamal Green who was just on the podcast talking about this, I thought his answer to that which is like, “We’re in dialogue with each other.” Like, in some ways, it’s kind of like what the founders thought. Like, I think sometimes we, on the left, end up taking a little bit of their originalism pill about what the founders thought.
Like, it doesn’t matter what the founders thought. Like, what matters is the bonds we have to each other. It’s what binds us together now, what our shared moral principles are, what our shared civic creed is, what we believe in and how the institutions we embody bring those beliefs into practice. That Madison wouldn’t have liked pronouns in bios.
Like, it’s just a ridiculous way to think about anything. And I’m not saying that the question is ridiculous, I think it’s a great question. I just think that we should not allow ourselves to be too founder-driven either.
The tensions that were inherent there that are there from the beginning, that are identified by some of the people who signed the document around at that time, including free Black Americans at that time who recognized it at the time of the nation’s founding and revolution, including white abolitionist and manumissionist at the time who recognized it, including slave owners who recognized it, including the enslaved people who recognized it, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and others. That paradox is still unresolved, but we don’t have to be tied to one side of it. What we have to do is try to like make the place better that we have.
Doni Holloway: Totally. And when we think about historical events, and the Supreme Court, that was something that Jamal Green definitely talked about, and how this is really such as the conservative Supreme Court and really is the most conservative one since the New Deal era. You also mentioned the Pulitzer Prize person who we had on the podcast. We’ve had a lot of great authors on the podcast, some of whom who won or were Pulitzer Prize finalists this year. Remember the one with New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliot?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Doni Holloway: She won for her book, “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.” We discussed that on the podcast. Another really good one was with New Yorker contributing writer Anand Gopal, he was a finalist for his feature reporting “The Other Afghan Women.” Remember that one?
hris Hayes: That piece, by the way, I think I said this on Twitter, I think that piece “The Other Afghan Women” might be as a sheer feat of reporting, the single most incredible piece of reporting I’ve ever read. It’s an unbelievable piece of reportage in journalism, and I would urge everyone to read it.
Doni Holloway: Totally. It really includes his on-the-ground reporting there in Afghanistan. So like you said, talked about that on that WITHpod episode. And then we had New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci. She was a finalist. So congratulations again to her for being a finalist on her numerous columns on the pandemic and American culture. You talked about that with her on the program.
So another question that we got is, what’s it like hosting a podcast from home? That’s from a lot of people. This is a little bit of a wildcard one. But what is it like hosting a podcast from home?
Chris Hayes: It’s great. I mean, look, I think there’s a reason that it’s been so hard to come back in the office. There’s a lot of things that are really nice about work from home. And podcasting technology has come a long way. I mean, most people are not podcasting in professional studios. We can achieve a pretty good level of audio quality with a MixPre and a pretty good mic and a laptop. It’s just about what we got. We’re not doing anything super fancy here.
Right now, I’m speaking to you through my phone headphones, which are like my most prized possession, which are my Jabra Evolve headphones which have a little bar that come over. So I look like a telemarketer when I’m walking around my neighborhood on the call. But it’s super awesome. I love it. The work from home episode hasn’t come out yet, right?
Doni Holloway: No. That one hasn’t come out, but that’s a really good one.
Chris Hayes: We just did a conversation with Helen Peterson, who co-wrote a book about sort of remote work and working from home. We just had a conversation with her. She’s got a Substack as well, where she writes about this, about like what’s sort of the future of the office, the reinvention of work, the pandemic and work from home, and what it’s done. A really fascinating conversation that I had a lot of thoughts about because I think it’s an experience that many of us have been having.
Doni Holloway: Totally. Yeah, that’s something that’s top of mind for a lot of people. I’m in 30 Rock right now. Well, Chris, we could go through these questions. I mean, I think we could probably go for another hour or so. We got so many questions, but we really want you to keep them coming. You can tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, or you can email us at WITHpod@gmail.com. We also are on TikTok now, so that’s super exciting. So keep your comments and questions, feedback coming in.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I’m practicing my dance along to the Nicki Minaj song that has a super beat to the background, which is everywhere. That would truly be the cringiest thing in history. So don’t worry, that’s a joke. But, yeah, TikTok, wow, what a world. I probably got about two hours of material just on TikTok. Maybe we should do a TikTok combo.
But anyway, leave your comments. Smash that Follow button. Leave your comments below. Now, leave your comments. If you listen to this and you liked it, then we should do it again. I like the live caller, me manning the switchboard part of it. So I think we should completely do that again. So maybe we’ll make this a more regular thing. But yeah, this is awesome. Thank you, everybody.
Doni Holloway: Thank you. “Why Is This Happening?” we should say, is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by me, Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and features music by Eddie Cooper. Be sure to, as we said, follow us on TikTok, searching for WITHpod, and email us at WITHpod@gmail.com. You can see more of our work, including links to some of the things we mentioned in this Twitter Spaces combo by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Chris Hayes: Doni Holloway, nailing the tag, everybody. All right, we’ll be back soon.
Doni Holloway: Thank you.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.