← The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
Chris Hayes Makes His Curiosity the Antidote to Anxiety
00:55:37
Chris Hayes knows that the superpower of the human species is that we can acclimate to anything. This includes the chaos of Trump and adapting artificial intelligence into our lives.
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- [00:00]
Rachel Maddow
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Chris Hayes
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Chris Hayes
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Chris Hayes
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Chris Hayes
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- [00:35]
Chris Hayes
the app Download today. I really think this comes down to something super fundamental about us as humans. We're the only species that can live in the Amazon and the Arctic. And the reason we can do that is we can acclimate to anything. It's the superpower of our species. Put us wherever and we will acclimate. People acclimate to famine and to war. Part of our job in the discourse is to resist that normalization.
- [01:06]
Rachel Maddow
Hi everyone. This is huge. My guest this week is my other half on big nights at this network. We make up one of television's odd couples. But there is no one who captures my attention more completely when the news is rolling in. Chris Hayes also plays a role off camera as sort of an intellectual and emotional center for a lot of us on the work front. His book the Sirens Call is all about the fight, for the most part, precious commodity these days. Our attention spans critical in this moment when we're drinking from a fire hose of content and news. In his podcast, why is this Happening? Chris asks the smartest people, the experts, the questions we all want answered about the biggest issues of our time. Now he's taking his big brain and his big platform to tackle artificial intelligence, AI, a technology that is poised to transform every facet of our lives and the world. So without any further ado, this is the best people. And this is Chris Hayes. Thank you, my friend.
- [02:05]
Chris Hayes
Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
- [02:15]
Rachel Maddow
I used to always want to know what was in your thought bubble when you got plopped next to me on these sets, like, how the fuck did this happen that I'm sitting next to the Bush Cheney smokes gal?
- [02:26]
Chris Hayes
No, I mean, I think it's funny. Like, I think one of the things that's been so wild about the last 10 years of American politics is how how much all of that scrambled and also how. I think it's forced me. I don't, I. Obviously you have had a trajectory of your own. I think it's forced me to think about what is the, you know, think about like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. So, like, what is, you might think before you're in a situation where like, you don't have food that like you take food for granted. Right. And one of the things about the last 10 years of American political life is like there's sort of lower and lower in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
- [03:01]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah. It's like when we keep the Constitution.
- [03:04]
Chris Hayes
Exactly. When we keep the Constitution for that, do we have a function of democracy? And then it's like, okay, well what's, what's our feeling about a marginal tax rate? What's our feel like all these things that were sort of up higher on the pyramid. And I think we've been sort of pushed lower and lower and lower. But it's also, I think in some ways it's reconnected me with the fact that, you know, most of political life in most places across the world and even in this country's history have been pretty elemental struggles to kind of keep, to preserve the, the mechanics of democratic representation. And there are periods where you can become inured to how precious that is. And one of the gifts, in a weird way I think, of this period in its own perverse way is reminding yourself about how important that is.
- [03:56]
Rachel Maddow
What do you think we're in right now? I feel like you are on live tv, sort of able to see the moment with this hyper clear focus as it's coming in, as Rachel's setting it up and I'm sort of staring and reminding myself not to let my jaw hit the table. You can, you can really crystallize it. So, like if this ends up in a time capsule and people watch it in a hundred years. We're now at the Trump mocking small children in the Oval Office part of the second term while he undermines like a 90 minute Marco Rubio presser 90 minutes later about the war in Iran. And his approval ratings plunges further and further. So where are we?
- [04:38]
Chris Hayes
I think there's a few sort of fundamental realities right now. The first is, is low popularity. I really think that matters. I mean, when people talk a lot about Orban or they talk about Erdogan in Turkey, and I think actually Erdogan in some ways is even a more closer analog. You know, it really was a fundamental part of what they were able to do that. They were genuinely popular in the beginning as they were consolidating these sort of authoritarian regimes. It just is harder to do that from 38% approval. If he was at 60% approval country be in a lot of way more trouble. So that that fundamental political gravity matters. Adjacent to that is the fact that he doesn't care about his broad popular approval or the median voter.
- [05:26]
Rachel Maddow
Do you have a theory on why?
- [05:27]
Chris Hayes
Yes, I think there's basically, I think of it this way, there's two possibilities. One possibility is he's a lame duck and he's going to leave after the second term because he's term limited out. The other is that they're going to attempt some extra constitutional and extra legal means of staying in power. In both of those scenarios, the median voter doesn't matter that much. Right. So in either of those futures, either he leaves and it's like or I crawl down into the bunker and you
- [05:55]
Rachel Maddow
guys have to under my new ballroom.
- [05:57]
Chris Hayes
Yes, exactly. Like I think literally, actually, I do think that's actually one of the ideas in either of those scenarios. You don't really care about the median voter. And so because of that, that lack of popularity is both exacerbated by the fact that. And also I think personally he's just bored with the job. He's obviously bored. I mean you're talking about the kids. They did this very strange thing with a bunch of kids and physical fitness and he's there and like he always is. He's, you know, his eyes look down and people say he's falling asleep. He's not falling asleep. Sometimes he is, but sometimes he isn't. He's just bored out of his gourd. Very evidently could not be more bored
- [06:34]
Rachel Maddow
by the job more. Yeah.
- [06:36]
Chris Hayes
And so I think all those things are true. And then I think the final thing that's true is it remains the case that Trump and the kind of party that he has captured is committed to rule by any means necessary and will use every possible stratagem, legal, illegal, constitutional, extra constitutional, normal politics and abnormal politics to try to retain power.
- [07:04]
Rachel Maddow
When the ex Republicans that Democrats have very, very earnestly welcomed into the coalition get together, they marvel at how self examining and self critical Democrats are. And it's like an earnestness that Republicans still cannot get their brain around. Like we always sucked but we went balls to the walls. You guys have always like been more earnest and more hon honest and have been so self critical. Is that just unchangeable? Is that like in the DNA, like like, you can end up with ex Republicans as being, like, more evangelical on the Democratic side than the Democrats.
- [07:45]
Chris Hayes
Yes. Okay. You. You're pointing towards something that I've been working out in my head, and I haven't quite concretized. I think personality type has a lot to do with the way our politics function. And there's some evidence. There's a fair amount of evidence. And one of the main metrics I've been thinking about this and. And this happened a lot with COVID is you can think of a. Access of what we might call conscientiousness or less charitably, neuroticism. Right. And I think that, like, the personality of the modern sort of progressive liberal left is highly conscientious and also highly neurotic. And again, it's a fine line between those two because, like, conscientiousness is awesome. Right, Right. Like, hey, wait, that thing you said actually is a little insulting to that person over there. Is a. Is a cool instinct.
- [08:31]
Rachel Maddow
Right, Right.
- [08:32]
Chris Hayes
It's also the case of, like, it can become. You can't. We can't say anything. We can't agree about anything. We're constantly questioning ourselves. And I think this is kind of the core of the engine in the sort of inner sanctum of what drives the kind of collective discourse around Democratic politics, Democratic Party progressive politics is this constant battle between what's conscientious and what's neurotic.
- [08:57]
Rachel Maddow
But, like, I have strategists on who, like, I don't even remember or. And I'm not mad at them anymore about the campaign. And they're like, no, one of the things we did wrong. And I'm like, what. Why are you still. Why are you still Platform. Like, like, everyone, 70% of the country is down on Trump. Like, we're all over it. Like, 70% of the country wishes you won. Move on and figure out how to win next. Like, there is such a. And I guess the contrast is, you know, it's still better than what we've got, but it makes me nervous about 28.
- [09:31]
Chris Hayes
It's a really interesting question. I mean, I think there's an adjacent question that. That prompts, which is, is it necessary to have some comprehensive diagnosis? I mean, I think about 2012. So if we go back and we think of the Republicans. Right. So 2012, Romney loses. You know, there's the. The famous sort of postmortem. And the postmortem, which Lindsey Graham gets behind and Marco Rubio gets behind is that we have to get right with Hispanic Voters. The way we get right with Hispanic voters is comprehensive immigration reform. Senate passes it, Boehner kills it in the House. Rubio's for it, Rubio's for it. And the Trump finds his way, I think via Steve Bannon, via his own sort of weird kind of feral instinct to an alternate theory of the case, which is we need to get white working class voters and we need to juice that turnout and that support and that, that, that proves to be enough to kind of pull the Inside Straight in 2016. The lesson for me of that is that like, you can't just reverse engineer what happened last time, right? So you need new ideas, you need creativity, you need innovation. And so I think that's one of the things I worry about. There is this real instinct to kind of go back what went wrong, correct for it. And one of the things you're seeing
- [10:49]
Rachel Maddow
right now, which is super healthy. It's super.
- [10:51]
Chris Hayes
Exactly.
- [10:51]
Rachel Maddow
We get back to like, it should be the way you win, but, but I, I, my only hang up is like, it isn't right now. No, like it, like how do you take like the party doing all the right things and losing two out of three elections against Trump and get them to be a little naughtier?
- [11:08]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, that's interesting. Or even just less scared of their own shadow, you know, I mean, that, that I think, because I think that's
- [11:15]
Rachel Maddow
what the confidence is smelling. Right? Yes, confidence, right.
- [11:18]
Chris Hayes
And I think, look, there are places where I think you see that for sure. And I think part of down to a lot of it comes down to talent and who the candidates are. But I think you're right, you're identifying something very true and correct. And I think it's been a psychological profile and feature of the discourse in the sort of broad center left, particularly progressive circle since I was in my early 20s. I mean, notoriously like factionalism and sort of purity tests and all this stuff. But yes, the other fundamental thing I think you're putting your finger on is a sense that every conservative and Republican has from very young, that the country is with us and we are the true representative of America. And the sense that so many Democrats have that they aren't and worried that they aren't and which isn't even true, which is not true. I mean, that, that, I mean, that's the thing about right now, right? I mean, particularly right now. Like people don't, you know, the Iran war being a perfect example. Like people don't like it. Nobody, no, no one likes it. And people like, don't like it. Who are. Have my politics, people who don't have my politics, people who are religious, people who are secular. And I think the only way out is through. And what I mean by that is ultimately it's all in the doing and it's not the theorizing. So like you gotta go out and do. And I think you're seeing different candidates from the Democratic Party in very different ways, like John Ossoff, James Talarico and Graham Platner are, you know, three different white men around the same age with extremely different approaches in very different states and massively talented and all very mass talented, all three of them. And I don't know, you know, who's gonna be successful projecting a kind of confidence that is not the kind of hand wringing thing. Right. Like they all, they all, all three of them, again, very different folks, different backgrounds. They, they project. They seem like they to their core think they're talking for the majority.
- [13:13]
Rachel Maddow
I bet. Add mom dummy to that list.
- [13:15]
Chris Hayes
Absolutely.
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Rachel Maddow
Like I said this to Adam Kinzinger who was on this week, and I said, you know, because they won't do it for themselves, I'll do it for them. The Democrats have the bigger tent. They should be throwing big tent parties for themselves, patting themselves on the back. They're on the right side of every single issue. If you ask the public, I'll throw them a party if they won't throw one for themselves. But that should just.
- [13:34]
Chris Hayes
Yes, confidence.
- [13:35]
Rachel Maddow
Not just confidence, but all the things that people said they didn't do, they have done. They have the better media ecosystem. They have comedians saying, what the fuck? Why are all these comedians? They're winning the party, they're winning the communications. They're making fools out of their own sort of stooges in state media. I mean, you've got Megyn Kelly attacking Fox News in a way that I don't think you and I even ever would. I mean, you've got the Democrats to sort of taking all the notes and acting on them. But, but I guess your point maybe answers it. They, they now need to deliver. Is that the feeling?
- [14:08]
Chris Hayes
Yeah. And I think you're right though, that there is like this weird vestigial place that people go to, to, to keep talking about the. You know what I mean? It's like, what's 2026 like? A lot. And you know, there's this great line, you know, the, the former UK ministers during World War II about the, what the hardest part of governing was. And he says, events, my dear boy, events. Yeah, it's like, you know, as you remember, you know, there were articles being written in the summer of 2000 about when Jim Jeffords, the Republican senator, moves from Republicans to Democrats about like, is the Bush lost his way and then, you know, what happened? 9, 11. Yeah, it's like there were articles being written after Donald Trump beat impeachment in the Senate in January, late January, February 2020, about how like Trump's back and he's on the rise. And then Covid happened. Like, none of this is static.
- [14:58]
Rachel Maddow
So one of the things you get
- [14:59]
Chris Hayes
is you get this like, well, the last election we have was this and this happened. And the podcasters we should have got on the podcast, it's like, like I grab.
- [15:07]
Rachel Maddow
No Democrats show up on the. Like lots of stuff has happened, right?
- [15:10]
Chris Hayes
Like lots of things have happened. You do talk about what's happening. So. And I think again, some people think, well then you're just coasting on thermostatic public opinion and backlash, whatever. But it's like also like, no, you're responding to events. I mean, this is something I think that's so important is you have to be responsive to where the public's at and what people are feeling. And right now the country thinks we're on the wrong track, doesn't like Donald Trump, don't like the way things are going, things are too expensive. They don't like the war and they think Trump is corrupt. These are all like big 60%, 65% majority findings. So just go with that. Right?
- [15:48]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah. I mean, do you spend any mental energy trying to figure out chicken and egg with these big stories like, is the Epstein betrayal the keyhole through which they believe the rest of what the pro democracy had to say about the economy and the corruption? Or do you think it's just all crashing down on people? What is your theory on how.
- [16:09]
Chris Hayes
That's a great question. So here's what I think. I think that one, I think useful category to think about is sort of low trust, high trust, Right. Do people trust other people and trust in institutions? And one of the things about the US is we are a very low trust democracy. In fact, we're the lowest trust country of pure nations. Right. So there's all sorts of measurements of trust. Do you think most people can be trusted? Most of the time is a question gets asked across all the countries. Do you trust the government? Do you trust big business? These things. We're very low trust. In fact, it's like us in Russia. But the reason I think it's relevant is a. I think the information environment has exacerbated that. Right. The way the algorithmic feed works, it feeds on that and it benefits the out of power party because it's like, don't trust them. They're important establishment. So Donald Trump had that as a tailwind when he was running against. And I think one of the things you saw with Epstein was that dynamic flip around and then it was a headwind.
- [17:07]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:08]
Chris Hayes
Right. So it's like. And you saw with Diane Bongino, it's like he's out, he's a podcaster being like why I wanted to release it, and then he's in the FBI, totally uncomfortable. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's one fundamental dynamic here. The reason I think Epstein was so crucial is that it kind of flipped. That sense of who's in power and who's out of power. Who's the they. Right. That they. That we've all heard. They don't want you to know this. They are keeping the deep state. The deep state, whoever it is. Right. That sense of the they, I think flipped at a certain point, particularly with a certain kind of low trust voter that was very weakly bound to either party. And if you think of it as like an electron weekly, like circling a nucleus, that it sort of bound to Trump in 2024 and then it's bound back off him. And I think in many ways Epstein was the story that made that chemical reaction happen. And now I think it's pretty hardened. Right. Because now it's like these people look like insiders and liars. So I think you're right to identify that as like a key moment. But I think in some ways, and I think this is actually a real challenge for Democrats if and when they retake power. Is that like, it's very hard to run a low trust democracy.
- [18:24]
Rachel Maddow
You've almost got to go all sunshine. Like, you've almost got to have like, like Florida had sunshine laws that requ. I mean, they were like, it was forever ago because I'm ancient. But like reporters could be anywhere where two politicians were in the same room. So if I work for Jobish, if he was golfing with someone, the press was allowed to go. Like, you almost have to modernize sunshine laws.
- [18:43]
Chris Hayes
That's interesting.
- [18:43]
Rachel Maddow
And put like a puppy cam on the head of every politician.
- [18:46]
Chris Hayes
Like, you live stream the White House
- [18:48]
Rachel Maddow
or live stream, you've got to throw the doors open in a radical way.
- [18:51]
Chris Hayes
Yes. And I think that is one to go back to this question about like, you know, learning from the past, while not being obsessed with it and trapped in it. I do think one of the big lessons of 2024 is like, say yes, talk to the press, talk to everyone. Like, the default should be a posture of, yes, I'll do press conferences. I'll go on this show, I'll talk to that person. I'll talk to that person. I'll talk to that person who doesn't like me. I'll go on that show where the host has said some awful things before. I don't care. I'm still going to talk to his audience. I think changing that default has been pretty key, and I do think that's been happening.
- [19:28]
Rachel Maddow
Who do you think does it best? You don't name one. But, like, who do you like? Because I read your comments about this. Some of what benefits Trump isn't that he crushes a single one of these performances. It's that there are so many that were like, what you call it. Post gaff politics.
- [19:44]
Chris Hayes
Yes. Post gaff politics, yes. I think Mandani has done this very well. I think the campaign that Platner has run in Maine is pretty instructive. Again, take out what you think of him as a, you know, whether he'd be a good senator or not, or he's kind of been everywhere. And part of that, too, has to do with the difference between the. And I'd love to hear you talk about this, the assessment you're making about cost benefit when you're the incumbent and you're the challenger. Right, Right. So it's like, I think a lot of the Democratic establishment still worries about the gaffe, and they worry about, I'm going to do this interview and then this thing's going to get spun up and it's going to be the Howard Dean scream all over again.
- [20:20]
Rachel Maddow
And it's like, like, that could never happen again.
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Chris Hayes
It's never. Nothing lasts long enough.
- [20:24]
Rachel Maddow
But I worry that Democratic voters would still hold someone accountable for a scream. I think that there is still this thing, and I see it in try, like, like trying to book my own show where people are like, oh, no, he doesn't want to do too much. Why not? What? Like, the more you do, the more you do. And that's. That's all that I think there is.
- [20:40]
Chris Hayes
And also the other thing is that, like, Democratic politics is a sustained act of communication between people trying and arguing, like, sustained argument. You know, it is the nonviolent means by which we resolve the conflict endemic to human affairs.
- [20:55]
Rachel Maddow
Right.
- [20:56]
Chris Hayes
That's what we got.
- [20:57]
Rachel Maddow
That's all we got.
- [20:57]
Chris Hayes
And the way you do it is talking, right? It's like talking or something else. So we talk.
- [21:02]
Rachel Maddow
Right.
- [21:02]
Chris Hayes
And I mean, that's, you know, that's human history, Right, Right. So you gotta be willing to talk, you know, and I really, I mean, I'm biased. You're biased. We're talkers, right? So it's like I think that the thing that I do is the most important, but I do think it's important.
- [21:16]
Rachel Maddow
Well, I mean, it is the way, I mean, and you've written the book like, it's the way people consume about who they're going to pick. It is content that you only create content and people only consume content that's fresh or viral. And you only do that if you're. If you're everywhere.
- [21:30]
Chris Hayes
Absolutely. And I think there's this real control question too. And I think this is a thing that gets to consultant culture, staff culture, even political culture. In some ways, you want to control as much as you can control. And there's a certain formula to. Let's say you're recruiting a swing seat House candidate, right? It's like good resume and bio. Do a bunch of like very set piece earned media where like you, I am outside this hospital that's gonna go under because of Medicaid cuts. Right. Take a few questions and then raise a ton of money and buy a bunch of ads. I mean, that's been the formula for decades. And the advantage of that is that you can control everything. You control the ad. Right. But the problem is increasingly, as the landscape changes, the people you need to reach aren't going to see the ads. They're not watching like local TV news.
- [22:26]
Rachel Maddow
But what Democrats would say to you is, how do we lose all the swing states over the Trump trans ad? I'm for whatever that ad was.
- [22:33]
Chris Hayes
She's for whatever it was they them. I'm for you.
- [22:36]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah, I'm for you.
- [22:37]
Chris Hayes
Here's. I think there's a strong rebuttal of this. Two things. One, in the states where the swing states where both sides are running ads and campaigning, Harris's margin was narrower than in the other states. So look what happened. Look at Trump's over performance that happened in New York state where no ads ran. Right. So if you want to test the hypothesis, zero money. The structural conditions were driving support towards Trump and the, the Harris campaign actually
- [23:05]
Rachel Maddow
blended it, clawed it back. We'll take a quick break here while. And we're back much more with my friend and colleague, the host of the why is this Happening podcast And all in with Chris Hayes. My colleague, Chris Hayes. Stay with us.
- [23:32]
Chris Hayes
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- [23:39]
Chris Hayes
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- [25:20]
Rachel Maddow
I have this argument with campaigns all the time. They're like you say the ads don't because I worked on campaigns and I'm very skeptical of paid media.
- [25:28]
Chris Hayes
The second thing I would say also, which I think is a really important thing to realize, is if you break up voters by how much news they consume, okay, so in the center of this bullseye are the most the people who consume the most news who say who self reported a lot of news. Kamala Harris wins them like plus four or five. Then like some news is like maybe plus one or even almost no news is Trump plus seven. I'm again I'm doing this off the top of my head, but roughly and zero news is like Trump +15. Right? So it wasn't like the people most tuned in the campaign and the swing states and the people most Tuned in were those were the most Harris disposed voters. It's that outer circle. And you gotta have a theory of how to talk to those people.
- [26:19]
Rachel Maddow
I think this gets into the attention economy that you wrote about and that you talk about. I just read something, I think in the Atlantic that for all the time and energy we spend on our podcasts, a majority of people consume all podcasts and clips.
- [26:31]
Chris Hayes
It's all clips. It's all clips.
- [26:33]
Rachel Maddow
That's incredible.
- [26:34]
Chris Hayes
I mean, it's all clips. And I mean, look, there's something we could get into what this is doing to everyone's brains and their attention spans and their ability to concentrate and listen. I think there's also a question of does everything need to be tv, right? Oh yeah, I like tv, you like tv, we make tv. But also listening is nice, reading is nice.
- [26:54]
Rachel Maddow
And should we have to do our makeup for our podcasts?
- [26:56]
Chris Hayes
Well, that's. And, and the idea that everything now is TV is insane.
- [26:59]
Rachel Maddow
Insane.
- [27:00]
Chris Hayes
I mean, short form video, right, is the kind of default means of communicating and that has profound implications. The other thing that's crazy about that too, which you know, is worth thinking about, is we talk about the algorithm like the oracle adelphi, like with like the, the proper noun. And it's like that algorithm is determining something in some opaque way that is communicated to us as a neutral arbiter of virality or popularity. But it's not like, why does that algorithm do what it's doing? I get served stuff all the time in my algorithm where it's like, I like to work out and I like weightlifting, I like watching weightlifting videos. And it's like, do you also want to see this like super right wing anti feminist content from like gross misogynistic dudes? And I'm like, no, I don't.
- [27:48]
Rachel Maddow
But it's the same thing. Like they're making guesses, right, about what you might. What else you might like.
- [27:54]
Chris Hayes
It's also not. The other thing about it is it's not like it's that sophisticated, right?
- [27:58]
Rachel Maddow
You know that, right?
- [27:59]
Chris Hayes
So you looked at a bunch of weightlifting. You like these shoes.
- [28:02]
Rachel Maddow
You might like, dress you like a lot of sports.
- [28:04]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, exactly, right? It's like, oh, wow, the algorithm, it's like not that incredible. But I do think that, you know, the role that plays it is a weird black hole at the center of our politics, the algorithm. Because if you go back to what you were just saying before, which is true, that most of the podcasts now are being consumed as clips, it's like, well, where do they see the clips? Well, they see the clips on Instagram or TikTok. TikTok. Where they're fed into an algorithm. What does the algorithm show them? Well, I don't know. Yeah, and I've had this experience too. You know this slot machine we're now making, we're doing short term form video, which again is good and we should. And that's again to, to take my own medicine, right? About like you gotta meet people where they are. I'm sure you've had this experience. You know, you make three videos and you put them out and like one gets 30,000 views and one gets 90,000 views and one gets 2 million views, right? And it's like, was the one with 2 million views so much better than the others? I don't know. I mean you try to kind of retroactively engineer for the next one and then sometimes you'll try and iterate, you'll be like, well, I'm going to do another one on that topic.
- [29:12]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's like chasing the, it's like chasing the highly rated block. You can't do that either, right? Because like what works on one day, no, may not work the next day.
- [29:21]
Chris Hayes
And that brings back to where we started, right, about how you approach politics, which is you want to be informed by the data. You don't want to just be like, I don't look at polling, I don't look at the numbers. You want to be informed by the data.
- [29:32]
Rachel Maddow
Right.
- [29:33]
Chris Hayes
But fundamentally you cannot back out a calculation, reverse engineer, chase a thing where you just construct from the data. You have to have a vision and have some ideas and try stuff and, and see what works. But you can't just depend on, you
- [29:53]
Rachel Maddow
know, so how do you do that for your TV show? Like going from the high tech to the algorithm to like the probably the lowest tech thing we both do, which is program our TV shows based on what we've read and consumed in the news.
- [30:04]
Chris Hayes
I mean, honestly, I think in a weird way, I think we all have a sense of like, what are the big stories? You know, sometimes I ask myself if I'm like staying too closely in the main center, like the big stories. I mean, we, you know, it's an ABM show, we do, you know, we do the big stories of the day. Sometimes I'm like, should I be doing things that are more bespoke or more underappreciated? But then in some ways, like the big stories are so big most days,
- [30:35]
Rachel Maddow
like there's a lot of broadcasters like, and like the medium is also like a broad story feels too broad. I mean, I don't know. I also feel sort of like everyone can get the news on their phone. So my duty. Right. Is to sort of do some curation. And so what is the thing that impacts the most people or hurts the most people?
- [30:52]
Chris Hayes
Totally. And I think also we're living in a world where those big stories are big and kind of omnipresent. It's, you know, I've been.
- [31:00]
Rachel Maddow
They're also so bad.
- [31:01]
Chris Hayes
They're so bad. And I've also. They're so bad. But there's also, is this sense I have of there's bad stories that have sunk below the visibility line where I'm like, corruption.
- [31:12]
Rachel Maddow
Like, I, Especially when you, when you watch the results out of Hungary, like, corruption is so universally loathed. Right. It's like making a fool out of you. Out of you. And especially if you're one of the Trump supporters who thought he was going to make your life better. The corruption really rubs him the wrong way. I struggle to find a lot of good investigative journalism about the corruption. I know the New York Times just want to pull it serve for some, that's crypto reporting. But those stories obviously take forever and there's zero television element.
- [31:42]
Chris Hayes
That's a big part of it. That's a big part of it.
- [31:44]
Rachel Maddow
To give the corruption coverage it deserves. It is a story I am doing the worst on.
- [31:49]
Chris Hayes
I have had the same struggle with precisely that story. There was interesting polling I saw the other day that showed the percentage of people who say he's corrupt has really dramatically gone up, including in every sub demographic, including Republican voters, including white Evangel colts, et cetera. So it is getting out there.
- [32:03]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah, because he's doing it all on camera. So, I mean, me and my crypto fund, and here's my coin, here's my
- [32:10]
Chris Hayes
son showing up on Fox News to talk about his drone company. Just got a Pentagon contract.
- [32:15]
Rachel Maddow
Correct. Like they're not even hiding about. Right, Right.
- [32:19]
Chris Hayes
So, yeah, I've struggled with that. Some of the other stories, one of them, which we've done a fair amount of, but like, we are still killing civilians on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean. We've killed maybe 170 now. It is. People pointed out a few days ago when Marco Rubio, out of context, was talking about the Iranians firing at civilian boats, it's like, well, that's actually what we're doing. So that's one story that we've covered, but also feels a Little like has unfortunately been routinized. The other story that I've really struggled with is one of those things that we all covered when it happened. But the single most consequential thing from a sheer like, tally of lives, like human life that this administration had done is Trump, Musk and Rubio killing off usaid. And there's a new study in the out of Harvard that estimates that the total cost of that's going to be 600,000 people dying. It's like an unfathomable. That number doesn't. You can't get your head around it. And again, it's like that happened and the sort of long tail of that is still playing out. And again, I have been struggling with how to cover that because I would say on the other side of it though, is to the point that you were saying before about how bad the things that are happening. I guess what I feel like is there are kind of high definition abuses and then there's like more remote abuses. And if it's the case that we're covering the high definition abuses, I'm okay with that as long as they're abuse. You know what I mean? Like if they're, they're real important.
- [33:54]
Rachel Maddow
What is your sense of how the press is doing that covers Trump?
- [34:01]
Chris Hayes
I think it's hard because I think there has been such dislocation of the press, you know, Right.
- [34:09]
Rachel Maddow
Like, what does that even mean? Right. Like who's, I mean, there used to
- [34:11]
Chris Hayes
be, you know, I think you saw this from being in Tom's White house, you know, 20 years ago. I saw it from my perch sort of coming up as part of a crop of sort of blogosphere online writers that were kind of outside of the old establishment of what used to be called the Gang of 500, like the Washington press corps. That world is just so much more tenuous now and sort of stripped down of its power. I think there's been a ton of amazing reporting happening. I think the rise of this network has really transformed what news cycles are, frankly. I think people have a lot of frustration with the coverage of Trump because fundamentally there's this kind of genre constraint around this sense of normalization, you know, and it drives people insane when the headline is the President says whatever totally insane thing he said, like every headline
- [35:13]
Rachel Maddow
should be, Trump undermines Secretary of State and national security advisor 80 minutes after he addresses press for two hours.
- [35:22]
Chris Hayes
Or, you know, I think about this word, I think about all this all the time. We have debates about this. My staff, the word claims such an Interesting word. Such a loaded, fraught word. Think about when someone says something and someone claims something. Now, at some level, those are the same. You're communicating the same. Trump says. Iranians ready to sign memo of understanding. Trump claims. Right. Claims. Now, both are defensible even in the world of sort of AP mainstream journalism, but they have incredibly different senses. And there's a lot of Trump says that should be Trump claims.
- [36:02]
Rachel Maddow
Right.
- [36:03]
Chris Hayes
Like, basically everything he says should be Trump claims. Yeah, Trump claims that. Blah, blah, blah, Claims that.
- [36:09]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah.
- [36:10]
Chris Hayes
Because claims is like, I don't know.
- [36:12]
Rachel Maddow
Right, right. It's like one step down from says,
- [36:15]
Chris Hayes
it's a step down from sez.
- [36:16]
Rachel Maddow
But I mean, I also think we need a different word for like. I've been covering the overnight posts because I consume a lot of sports, live sports and sports news. And if any athlete in baseball or basketball or football just had the posting, practices and times of the president United States, it would be a huge sports story.
- [36:37]
Chris Hayes
Oh, my God. Like, a huge.
- [36:38]
Rachel Maddow
Like, if any basketball player, if the
- [36:40]
Chris Hayes
day before LeBron was going to compete in some big game and it's like, wait, we have the timestamps. You're up at. You're up.
- [36:47]
Rachel Maddow
That would be the story. Right. And if any. And I. And I consume far less entertainment press, but, like, I. It's sometimes in my feed. Right. But if any actor at the top of their game, like, he's president, he's at the top of our politics, we're posting all night. It would be a story in the entertainment press. Like, they would have to cover it. And the political press rarely covers overnight screeds. I do.
- [37:11]
Chris Hayes
This connects with actually something. I have a theory that one of the best things for Trump and one of the things that allowed him to win in 2024, was getting kicked off Twitter and going to Truth Social.
- [37:22]
Rachel Maddow
Maybe because we didn't see it.
- [37:24]
Chris Hayes
You don't see it. So it's like someone having a, like, psychotic episode where they scream into a pillow and then they, like, come back to you.
- [37:33]
Rachel Maddow
True socialist pac.
- [37:35]
Chris Hayes
It is. It's like. And it's like. And because. No, Literally, no. The only reason people are Find it.
- [37:41]
Rachel Maddow
I just read this. I don't know how to find it.
- [37:43]
Chris Hayes
No, we all read it based on the repost. Whatever. Whatever account we follow that reposts.
- [37:47]
Rachel Maddow
Correct.
- [37:48]
Chris Hayes
But I think that, like, when it was on Twitter, particularly when I was on Twitter during peak Twitter pre, when we were all there, when everyone's there, it was so. It was like being in a subway car with a person who's having a breakdown night. But then we all move to a different subway car
- [38:06]
Rachel Maddow
in there.
- [38:07]
Chris Hayes
And I think it sort of. I think it helps him. I really do think it helps because it's, it's like. And you're totally right that if that was more present if it were. I mean, again, if anyone in your life, I mean, forget about, you know, first there's your athletes or celebrities, but like if a co worker, if your boss, if you're, if you're all night. I mean, I wouldn't, I mean it would be. No one would.
- [38:30]
Rachel Maddow
I would call Rachel and be like. You call him. I call mom and be like.
- [38:36]
Chris Hayes
But for any person in your life,
- [38:38]
Rachel Maddow
I mean, like, we talk about algorithms and I want to ask you about AI and your. In your series, but like, are our brains already broken and that the commander in chief, the guy with his fingers on the codes, posts all night and it's barely news?
- [38:49]
Chris Hayes
I really think this comes down to something super fundamental about us as humans. We're the only species that can live in the Amazon and the Arctic. And the reason we can do that is we can acclimate to anything. It's the superpower of our species. Put us wherever and we will acclimate people. Acclimate to famine and to war people. I mean, I've watched videos of a guy working out in a half bombed out gym in Gaza with the machines and the dust, like literally it's like caved in. There's rebar showing and he's like on the machine, machine pulling. That fundamentally is the issue. It's like he's just done it enough that we've acclimated this adaptive feature. And it's adaptive feature for all of us. And I think you're right that like part of our job in the discourse is to resist that normalization. But the pull towards that normalization is powerful. You know, it's just a powerful part of our collective again, like our w. At the deepest level of our wiring. It's partly what produces us and our ability to function.
- [40:01]
Rachel Maddow
Much more of my conversation with Chris Hayes right after the break. We'll be right back.
- [40:15]
Chris Hayes
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- [42:20]
Rachel Maddow
So the AI piece is this thing that I think I have two ways of coping with AI. One is what is artificial intelligence, right? Like, I'll just stay and wonder as long as I can. Like, what is this newfangled thing? And the other is denial, right? Like, I'm already using it because it's everywhere. Like, how do you span that in what you've like, tackled and what you're trying to present?
- [42:41]
Chris Hayes
So part of the reason we did this series on the podcast the AI Endgame was precisely because I was feeling myself in a kind of defensive crouch about it, where it stresses me out. It gives me the bad feeling. I don't. It's like something's breathing down my neck. I want to like, close the door and pretend it's not there.
- [43:00]
Rachel Maddow
Like one more thing for us to be scared. I can't do it.
- [43:04]
Chris Hayes
Exactly.
- [43:05]
Rachel Maddow
I'm like freaked out about my. I still drink water out of a plastic bottle and like, don't. I can't do AI. Like, I'm gonna let someone else worry about that, Let Chris Hayes worry about that.
- [43:13]
Chris Hayes
So that's exactly where I was. And I think one of the things that was really wonderful about doing the series is I think curiosity can sometimes be the antidote to anxiety.
- [43:23]
Rachel Maddow
Totally.
- [43:23]
Chris Hayes
You know, it's like, wait a second, let me. Let me find out some stuff. And one of the things that I think I came to is I think I've arrived at the point where this is a big deal and a big technology, but fundamentally, it's what you might call a normal technology. What I mean by that is the car is a normal technology. It completely transformed every aspect of our society, our world, like our health. Yeah, Everything. Right. So. And it has had enormous negative consequences, Enormous positive consequences. Like, you know, the smartphone and the Internet, the personal computer, the steam engine, the railroad. Like, these are all, again, normal technologies. Transformative, enormous consequences. But fundamentally, there were human beings who were heartbroken or grieving a loss of a loved one before and after the automobile. And we're going to be human beings before and after AI having human experiences. So that, like, that to me, helped lower the temperature. But once you start. Once I started engaging with it in normal technology, once I started thinking about, like, well, how did the car changed the world and how did the personal computer, and what would it be like to go through that again? And what were things that we'd like to go back in time and kind of figure out at the time around the car or burning coal that we wish we did back when it started. That was my way into kind of starting to feel some agency restored to me as opposed to, like, I'm sitting here waiting for them to drop the bomb on me, which is the way that I think that a lot. Right. Doesn't it?
- [45:00]
Rachel Maddow
One of our colleagues is walking around the other day, you know, stunning before, but, you know, mid hair and makeup, and walked by. I said, what's wrong? She said, I'm so scared about AI. And I'm like, wait, what did I miss?
- [45:12]
Chris Hayes
What did it do exactly?
- [45:14]
Rachel Maddow
Did it backdrop, like, what happened? Like, what? That's how I felt. I'm like, I'm just like, waiting for the bomb to drop that with her curlers in. She's like, I'm so upset about it. And I literally got my phone and, like, you can't Google AI. It's too smart for that. So I'm like, what did it do?
- [45:29]
Chris Hayes
Did AI do a thing? Claude, did AI do a thing?
- [45:33]
Rachel Maddow
But, like, what is, like, the AI for dummies. Like, what can. What can. Well, how do you start? Like, how did you start?
- [45:40]
Chris Hayes
Okay, I think if you build up from the idea of let's start with just predictive text, right? You give a computer a lot of your emails and it's. It's iteratively. You train it so that it can start to recognize that when you say, like, sorry, I can't, the last two words are make it pattern recognition, right? And it turns out there's a way to represent the connection between those words in a big matrix such that probabilistically, right. When you run it again, it's like, sorry, I can't make it. Okay. That core insight that a lot of the talking and reasoning we do is probabilistically related to each other is the insight this whole thing grows out of. You get more and more sophisticated, more and more variables and more and more data into a model, and you train it more and more. The connections it can start to make get more and more elaborate and complex.
- [46:37]
Rachel Maddow
Like remorse. It can start to communicate remorse. Like, sorry, I can't make it. I'm tied up, but I feel terrible because I know this is the fourth time I'm canceling it.
- [46:45]
Chris Hayes
Exactly, right? So, yes, from sorry, I can't make
- [46:48]
Rachel Maddow
it to that, a message I type often, right?
- [46:50]
Chris Hayes
Right, exactly. From that small thing to that bigger thing to a lot more sophisticated and complicated things. Basically, in this remarkable way, with enough data and enough training and sophisticated enough relationships between variables, a whole bunch of behaviors emerge that don't work the way that we work internally, but are effectively able to, through a kind of different process, to ape a lot of what we can do.
- [47:22]
Rachel Maddow
Now, you and Derek, though, put your finger on the part that I think scares me, which is that there is a human sort of atop the technology, or a few humans, or a handful of humans, or, you know, very small numbers, and no one is able to ensure that they have benevolent interests.
- [47:41]
Chris Hayes
I am not anti billionaire. I am fearful of a world where billionaires amass so much wealth that they can easily pay for power. That is what I'm most afraid of. Not just a world where billionaires control artificial intelligence, which itself might be dystopian, but a world where billionaires, by virtue of their AI wealth, are able to control everything else because they can buy political power. That is scary to me.
- [48:15]
Rachel Maddow
What do we do about that?
- [48:16]
Chris Hayes
The metaphor that many people use inside and outside Silicon Valley and inside outside AI is imagine the nuclear arms race in a bunch of private companies, not Los Alamos, no state with Oppenheimer state actors, where it's like, everyone's vetted. We're doing this for the state. It's like there's a company in New York trying to build a bomb, and then there's one down in Austin, Texas, and then there's another competitor and they're racing against each other. And then also there's a bunch of
- [48:42]
Rachel Maddow
Chinese companies and there's one in Moscow and there's one. Right.
- [48:44]
Chris Hayes
And maybe, maybe these are good people, maybe they're not. That's the way it feels right now. And I think one of the things that's just inevitable and people inside Silicon Valley say this is that there's gotta be some federal regulation. There's all kinds of profound implications of the technology, cybersecurity to war, fighting to privacy. Right. That there has to be some democratic interface. Now, that's dangerous and scary in its own way. Like, do I want Donald Trump personally thumbs up and thumbs downing which models come out? No. But one of the things, I think it's interesting when you think about how the modern state has evolved to deal with areas of really difficult technical expertise is like, we have these institutions that got created. I'll give you two of them, the central bank and the fda. Like, we don't want up or down floor votes on whether a new drug should come to market.
- [49:41]
Rachel Maddow
Right.
- [49:42]
Chris Hayes
We democratically created a technical body that has a process to regulate the safety and efficacy of new drugs. We also don't want up or down floor votes on, like, interest rates. We have done this for various other problems before. It's a muscle we haven't exercised in a while. But I think it's going to be something we're going to have to exercise that muscle again.
- [50:03]
Rachel Maddow
Is there any movement toward creating that? Is the industry so resistant to it?
- [50:08]
Chris Hayes
Our CNBC colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin had a, I think someone from Palantir on the other day where he said, what do you think about the idea of an FDA for AI? And he's like, the FDA has killed millions of people. Right. So I think that's the posture of a lot of people. Yes, there, there are people thinking about this for sure. Like, it, it is again, it's slow and it's behind where the technology is. But there are lots of smart people thinking about what a regulatory and governing regime would look like. Like, that wouldn't be Donald Trump vetoing things. It wouldn't be an up or down vote at every model. And it also wouldn't be this sort of laissez faire Let me ask you
- [50:43]
Rachel Maddow
a low tech question. Do you empower it yourself? Does someone let it in and that's where its power is, to know your history and to know. Or is its power external, like fine tuned on a vast sample of humans? Like can it. How could it be manipulated by bad actors?
- [50:57]
Chris Hayes
Oh, I mean there's a million ways to manipulate it for bad actors. First of all, the companies are gonna have so much access to information about
- [51:03]
Rachel Maddow
you, everything that we do, because you're talking to it all the time, right?
- [51:07]
Chris Hayes
So I even the other day Anthropics Claude had a new feature where they say there's this new feature called memory. Do you want to turn it on? And I said sure, yeah. And then it said, and it gave me a readout.
- [51:17]
Rachel Maddow
Here's where it access.
- [51:19]
Chris Hayes
Well, it just gave me a readout based on my interactions. But what it said to me was, you're the host of the APM show on Ms. Now and you have written these books and this is your next book project and you just went to Japan with your wife and your three kids and they're this age and all of that just came from. I'm talking to you and you're learning stuff about me. And then I had this moment of like. And then what it can do with that is also sort of fascinating. It's a much more sophisticated thing it can do with it than like algorithmic ads. Think about a bad actor who wants to put their finger on the scale of an election, right? I mean increasingly where do people go for information? You know, for an earlier generation it was Google. You know, young people today go to OpenAI, they go to ChatGPT or Claude or Grok, right? Now imagine the person who's in the wiring of those models who wants to put a finger on the lever for the Republican candidates. So who's running in my local election? Well, this person who's got this issue and this person who sounds pretty good. Yeah, yeah, that's the answer you get. You don't know that the model was messing with the wiring. Right?
- [52:30]
Rachel Maddow
Well, the other thing as like a campaign person is the vast majority of consumers would view it as a neutral source, which is sort of the burden of so much politics. Even an endorsement comes from a loaded person, a partisan figure. The vast majority of consumers view AI as neutral on the sidelines.
- [52:48]
Chris Hayes
The other thing on top of this is as the models get more sophisticated and there's more, what we call emergent behavior, the people running the models don't actually understand why they're doing what they're doing, I mean, this line that the New Yorker writer Gideon Lewis Krauss, you know, put in a piece that stuck with me is we had the steam engine before you had the laws of thermodynamics, which is to say the steam engine was built and working before we understood the physics of why it works.
- [53:13]
Rachel Maddow
Right.
- [53:14]
Chris Hayes
So that's a little bit of where we are right now with the models. Yeah, the model's doing stuff. The theory of why the model's doing that stuff.
- [53:21]
Rachel Maddow
We're still working on it.
- [53:22]
Chris Hayes
We're still working on it.
- [53:23]
Rachel Maddow
Let me play a clip. We'll talk about it on the other side. I think what they're doing is actually something that's extremely interesting and powerful, but very different from what children are doing when they're learning. What they're doing is taking all of the material that human beings have already learned. Right. The reason why they're so effective is because they're taking everything that human beings have said and thought and put out on the net and understood, and then they use these statistical methods to try to organize and summarize and agglomerate that information. So it's not that they're going out into the world and figuring out things that are new, the way that two year olds are doing. What they're doing is taking all of the things that human beings have thought and learned and had ideas about and then finding statistical patterns in that information. So that was Allison Gopnik. And you have kids. I have kids. I mean, some of the mistakes I think people can make in thinking about AI is it is not functioning the way our kids brains function.
- [54:26]
Chris Hayes
This is what's so fascinating, right to the point where we're just talking about, like, frontier AI models are producing all this remarkable behavior. It's not because it's being built the way that a human brain is. It's a different thing. Now, we'll probably learn some things about how our brain works from this, but. But Alison Gopnik, who's a fascinating, brilliant cognitive scientist, psychologist, philosopher, across all these different areas, one of the things that she is identifying is the embodied human child is the most potent intelligence that exists on the world. The amount that you're learning in the amount of time bootstrapping in your environment puts everything else to shame, including brilliant adults and frontier AI models. But the question then becomes like, will we learn things about how we operate by having this other form of intelligence? Will we change the way those models work to get more like us? Will they become more embodied? Which is A whole other question. There's lots of data that you're getting as a little kid when you're sticking things in your mouth and crawling around.
- [55:38]
Rachel Maddow
I'm in it, right?
- [55:39]
Chris Hayes
The model is just reading the Internet, you know, like, it doesn't have that experiential learning in the same way. And so, so one of the things to get back to why I found this podcast series so interesting is one of the ways I dealt with COVID and that anxiety was to think about the fact that there were all these intellectual questions this pandemic presented. How do supply chains work? How do communicable diseases work? Everything. There are so many fascinating questions that this technology prompts that I actually think can be the source of some inspiration, because it brings us back in some ways to what we find beautiful and thrilling about being human.
- [56:16]
Rachel Maddow
What's fascinating to me and what I learned from sitting next to you is that I think this moment in covering this moment is like this pressure cooker. And when the pressure bears down on humans, right, we do all different things. You go to, like, intellectual curiosity. I go to, like, whose hand can I hold in my despair, right? And like, I, I, I do, like, I go home and I sometimes laugh that, like, sitting next to me are you and Rachel, right, Who, like, your intellectual journeys, like, would never have taken you through any, any of the things that, that I', of, like your monologue the night after the Iran war started, like, makes me cry talking about it. At the end of the day, the curiosity comes from, like, deep, deep care for the humans and just talk about, like, what's inside of you. What is your driver like? What is your why?
- [57:06]
Chris Hayes
You know, I, I come from my, my parents are really remarkable people and, and extremely compassionate, humane people who definitely raised me and my brother with a sense that you need to care about other folks and think about what makes the world better. I think that's the animating drive for both of us. My wife is the same way. That's her animating drive. It's the drive that you want to pass on to your kids. And I think in the best, what I would call secular humanist tradition, what drives me is that I think it's a miracle that we get to be these things. It's totally improbable and totally beautiful and totally transcendent that we're here, that we have the ability to reduce suffering and increase kindness, and that in the time that we're here, that's what we're put here to do. That's really the animating drive. Like I really believe in that. And it's not quite a religious faith, but it's adjacent to it because it is faith. It's not because of anything I can deduce from a spreadsheet or anything I've read. It's just there as the principle of what I think a meaningful good life is. And so that's my project, is to live a good and meaningful life. And what living a meaningful and good life is is to make things better.
- [58:34]
Rachel Maddow
I love being your colleague. I love sitting next to you. I love being on calls with you when you say the thing that everyone's thinking but no one says. And I love covering this moment with you. I feel like I won this lottery ticket that I get to sit there.
- [58:49]
Chris Hayes
I love. I love this podcast, by the way. No, it's been great.
- [58:52]
Rachel Maddow
Well, you are like the podcast pioneer,
- [58:54]
Chris Hayes
so thank you for wonderful and it's such a great pleasure to get this time together.
- [58:58]
Rachel Maddow
Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to the Best People. All episodes of the podcast are also available on YouTube if you visit msnow. The Best People to Watch the Best People is produced by Vicki Vergelina. Our intern is Colette Holcomb with additional production support from Ayan Chatterjee and Rana Shahbazi. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Hazik Bin Ahmad. For Red, Katie Lau is our Senior Manager of Audio production. Pat Berkey is the Senior Executive Producer of Deadline White House. Brad Gold is the Executive Producer of Content strategy, Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of audio and Madeline Herringer is Senior VP in charge of audio, Digital and long form. Search for the best People wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to follow the series.
- [59:58]
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Rachel Maddow
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