-Our first guest tonight is a best-selling author,
the Emmy-winning host of MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes,"
and the host of the weekly podcast
"Why Is This Happening?" Please welcome back to the show
our friend Chris Hayes, everybody.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Welcome back, my friend. -We're so close now.
The last time I was here, I was over there
so COVID couldn't get you.
-Before we had an audience, we went over there,
and we had very firm words with COVID ahead of time.
We were like, "Don't get between us."
-"Don't you dare." -"Don't you dare."
We talked about this recently, not on-camera,
but we just had the eighth anniversary of our show.
You just had the ninth anniversary of your show.
And it does feel like it's been a hundred years, right?
-[ Laughs ] Yeah.
I mean, I think -- I think
Trump into plague into war has been,
like, a really intense run, I would say.
-Right, because I do think there's this --
you know, at every turn,
when maybe people have framed it
as "We're finally going back to normal,"
something incredibly abnormal
and with potentially even higher stakes happens.
-Yeah, and I think, like -- I can't tell --
I think about this a lot. I can't tell if it's
just that I'm aging,
and the longer your life goes, the more opportunity you have
to watch once-in-a-century things happen.
-Yeah. -Or we've been through
a particularly insane period.
But I remember, like, when I was younger,
I was, like, a playwright or I'd watch TV shows
and there would be too much stuff happening
and some, you know, tragedy from above,
and I'd be like, "Aw, that's not realistic."
And now everything I'm watching,
I'm like, "Yeah, that totally could happen.
Like, there's no plot twist, there's no, like, you know,
deus ex machina tragedy I'm not like,
"Yeah, that makes sense." -That's true.
-That would definitely happen. -You're right.
We're basically living in a Shonda Rhimes show.
-Yes! Just one thing after another.
-Where you're like, "How did they come up with that?"
-I mean, I even had the, like -- I mean, the timing --
and again, like, you know, the war,
the principal victims of the war are the people of Ukraine,
and that will then cascade out through the rest of the world
in brutal, brutal ways.
But I do remember having a thought of, like,
"Alright, well, this omicron wave --
get over that wave, and then, you know, maybe,
just maybe [Knocks desk]
things maybe chill out a little bit."
It's like, absolutely not. -Absolutely not,
and the other thing, you've covered conflicts before,
but this does seem to have moved faster
than anything that we've certainly dealt with
in the times that we've been on television.
-It has moved faster.
There's a real waking-nightmare quality to it,
partly because it's so terrible for everyone
and no one wants it but one person.
-Yeah. -And you're just watching this.
We were watching it in the run-up,
being like, "Don't do this, do not do this,
don't do this.
This will be awful for everyone."
And you know, it's bad for --
obviously, it's bad for Ukrainians.
It's going to be bad for Egyptian bread buyers.
It's going to be bad for Russian oligarchs
whose yachts are seized. It's going to be bad
for average Russians who are going to have
their pensions devalued by 50% to 80%.
It's going to be bad for NATO and the West
as they see gas prices going -- It's bad, bad, bad in every way,
and you're just watching this entire thing,
thinking, like, "Don't do it."
And this one person is the only one that wants it,
and that's the person that matters right now.
-It is shocking to think that one person has that --
their hand on a lever that sort of contains
that much power behind it. -It's shocking and terrifying.
-One of the things that is different about this,
and none of us think that you should just blindly touch --
sorry -- blindly trust the intelligence agencies.
But, you know, obviously, it's been a bad history,
in recent years, of the American intelligence agency
getting things right, but they really got this right.
And it seems like Biden took this information
and he shared it with our allies and, almost to the week,
got it right that Putin was going to
actually go through with this. -I described it
as the Iraq War in reverse, in terms of
the public presentation of American intelligence.
I mean, you even had Antony Blinken,
who was sitting at the same seat in the U.S. -- in the U.N. --
where Colin Powell gave his famous speech,
explicitly referencing it, saying, "I'm not here
to start a war; I'm here to stop one."
They took a very high-leverage strategy, which was to be
very granular about the intelligence.
And a lot of the world didn't want to believe it
because a lot of the world thought this was a bad idea
and didn't want it to happen. When it did happen
almost precisely the way the U.S. intelligence apparatus
and the Biden administration said,
I do think it produced a lot of credibility
they have now leveraged
to sort of get this coalition together.
-It is both -- Again, it goes back
to what you were saying. I think the idea
that there's this coalition is
something we can all be happy about.
And it does seem like a strong -- again, early days --
strong coalition. But it doesn't really matter
when you talk about isolating someone like Vladimir Putin.
It seems like he's perfectly fine, living in isolation.
-I mean, the question now is -- and then what question,
what possible off-ramp there can be,
what possible level of pain for the Russian government,
for Vladimir Putin personally,
for the Russian people, for oligarchs.
What would produce a decision
that this was not worth the price?
And right now -- I mean, he's been very explicit.
He said the other day something like --
the effect of, "Nothing will ever make me back off
from the notion that these are one people."
-Right. -It does not sound
like a person who is ready to get on an off-ramp.
-A lot of arguments are made that certainly --
I don't think they're good-faith arguments,
but people say about me,
"Why are you so obsessed with Donald Trump?
Why are you still talking about him?"
I imagine you get the same sort of thing.
-We do. -He is deeply connected
to not just the news today, but I also think the future.
Right now, if I had money to bet --
I don't 'cause it's all in rubles.
I blew it. [ Laughter ]
I don't want to talk about it. I had an investor.
-I told you not to make that trade.
You texted me. -I'm already regretting it.
But, you know, I believe he will, in all likelihood,
be the Republican nominee.
-Yeah, that's the problem, right?
I mean, if he's not the most likely nominee for President
in 2024, and an even-odds chance
of being the president again, then, yeah, screw him,
forget about him.
But he is the leader of the Republican Party.
He was a once-in-history -- He led, essentially,
a once-in-history attempt at American democracy.
Never really happened before.
I mean, Fort Sumter, you know, the secession.
So he is the most acute threat to American democracy around,
and probably in the nation's recent memory
and perhaps since the Civil War.
And he's still in power.
So he's still -- I mean, the question
about the perseverance of American democracy
is one of the major stories of our time,
if not the major story. And he is the --
You know, he is the villain in that story.
You can't not talk about it.
-We were also talking backstage how deeply disappointing it is,
in a time where anyone would love to have a distraction,
that Major League Baseball -- we're both baseball fans --
is currently in a lockout. You grew up in New York,
but your dad raised you a Cubs fan.
-Yep. -Because he was from Chicago.
You threw out a first pitch.
How did your first pitch at Wrigley go?
-It went very well. -Really?
-Yes. -Alright.
I said that in a way that I'm already regretting.
[ Laughter ]
Now, slow down, here.
-Well, let me say, it was not a strike,
but it was not -- it was a ball near the zone.
-Gotcha. -Okay?
-Like, the umpire would have had to make a call?
-Yeah, right. I wasn't bouncing it up there.
-Yeah. -I got advice --
I ran into Bill Murray in a restaurant,
the summer before I threw out the first pitch.
-Fantastic. -Amazing.
Definitely struck up a little conversation.
He had thrown out a first pitch.
And the last words he said to me were, "Aim high."
'Cause you don't want to bounce that thing.
You'd rather sail it than bounce it.
So I aimed high, and, yeah, it was super fun.
Have you done the first pitch?
-I did the first pitch at Fenway Park.
-Oh. -Yeah.
I wish I'd run into Bill Murray. [ Laughter ]
-Wait, did you, like, 50 cent it?
-No, it was perfectly fine. I had Billy Miller,
who played for both the Cubs and the Red Sox --
he actually did me a solid.
He went out and caught it.
So I actually had an active player on the roster,
catching it. And he did me a real solid.
He kind of had to do this.
He went and got it before it bounced.
-Okay. -But it required --
-And then he framed it up? -Oh, he brought it up.
The other thing people -- they should also tell you is,
like, almost no one is paying attention.
Like, when you think about every baseball game
you've gone to in your life, they do it
like an hour and a half before the first pitch.
-Correct. -No one is there.
-Right. -There's always like two guys
who are just there to make you feel bad.
-Yeah. -Yeah, they, like,
show up early just to, like, heckle.
-You basically just want to stay off a YouTube bloopers reel.
-That's it. -That's it.
You don't want to be on the 50 cent compilation.
-Right, that's true. There's no YouTube compilation
of, like, "The Best Celebrity First Pitches."
-None. -They're like, "Chris Hayes!"
Wham! [ Laughter ]
-Look at that breaking slider.
-I was lucky enough to do --
You have a great podcast, "Why Is This Happening?"
You're doing a special series that I was lucky enough
to be a guest on, a four-parter. -Yeah, it's super fun.
It's called "The Future Of." And again, I found myself --
and maybe other people feel this way --
it is very hard to conceive of futures that are not dystopian.
-Yeah. -You know, like, you go back
and you look at the Columbian Exposition
in the 1890s or, you know, "Metropolis"
or even "Star Trek" -- right? -- these visions of
like, "We're going to space," or
"We're solving humanity's problems."
And "The Jetsons," even, at a cartoon level.
Like, there's no equivalent to that now.
All we think about the future is like "Blade Runner"
or, you know, "The Road."
-I'd give anything for "Blade Runner."
-That would be a huge improvement.
-Oh, my God, if we could get "Blade Runner"?
If my kids could grow up in a "Blade Runner" world,
based on how things are going, I'd be so happy.
-I guess that's a best-case scenario at this point.
So, yeah, we're just doing this series
and sort of looking at the future of different things
and thinking about how -- I think particularly
because we're coming out of this two-year period
in which everything changed, I'm really obsessed
with, like, what stays and what goes.
You know, your shirts, for instance --
those are staying. -They're staying for now.
-We're carrying that forward.
You know, the audience is back.
-The audience is back. -We like having them back.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-So there's some good. -Pandering.
Pandering also. -Yeah, pandering is back.
-Pandering is back. So, yeah, we've got
some cool folks talking about everything
from the future of energy to the future of friendship
to the future of entertainment with you.
-Alright, well, hey, thank you so much
for being here. You guys, that's Chris Hayes.
-Great to be here. -"All In With Chris Hayes"
airs weekdays at 8:00 p.m. on MSNBC.
New episodes of "Why Is This Happening?"
are released on Tuesdays
and available wherever you get your podcasts.