[Music]
CHRIS HAYES: Learning stuff about the world and figuring the world out is fun.
[Music]
I grew up in the Bronx in New York City and I was raised in this pretty amazing milieu
of people that were all kind of associated with social justice work y'know lefty Catholic
social justice folks and then I went to Brown University and I studied philosophy and I
did a lot of theater, I fell in love with theater, I wrote plays and I directed plays
and so I think theater was really informative.
And I actually think theater is something that everyone should be exposed to because
so much of adult life turns out to revolve around basically how you interact with people
and how you present yourself and I think in a weird circuitous fashion, I graduated from
school and thought I was going to do theater and that didn't end up being what I did, I've
now managed to come back around to it because it is at a certain level performance what
I do.
I had been appearing on MSNBC.
I was the Washington editor of The Nation magazine and I had become a fairly regular
guest on the network in primetime and then in February of 2010, Rachel Maddow had some
engagement.
I think she was traveling or something and they needed a fill in host so they tried me
out and I filled in and did well enough that they wanted to have me keep doing it.
There was no place in the schedule for me to go.
People had the shows and the shows were successful so it was a little unclear.
I basically sat down and said, what about weekends?
What about weekend mornings?
So we talked a little bit and we sort of sketched out the basic idea that it would be 2 hours,
it would be both days, and it would be conversational.
It would be at a table.
It would be informal.
We basically got really lucky because we got to do something that we very rarely get to
do in television, which is essentially build something from scratch.
I mean it wasn't much of a blueprint.
I get to do every weekend what I would do in my normal life.
Like with the group of friends we had in Washington DC when we were living there and we'd get
dinners together which we'd always call family dinners and have drinks and argue about what
happened that week in politics.
So I now get to do what I like to do and what I had done in the past just as a person for
a living.
It's a pretty sweet gig.
The show has for cable news standards, a very young audience.
We've done incredibly well among 18-34 year olds, the youngest demographic, and our average
viewer is almost—I think it might be the lowest on the network.
And I think the reason for that is one of the things I think the show is trying to do—and
not always succeeding, but when it does succeed—is trying to channel the kind of roiling, boisterous,
tangential, crazy making, compelling, addictive, nature of Internet discourse that like it
is the TV version of watching your Twitter feed or your Facebook feed, right?
The constant simulation of the universe of social media discourse is, I think, in some
ways, the inspiration for the show.
I mean, it structures the way that I consume information so I think it's naturally mirrored
in the show and I think there's a kind of natural affinity between people that are in
the age bracket that are consuming their news through social media and the way the show
kind of channels some of those same conventions.
When I think to myself, why is anyone is anyone going to watch the show?
Like, for instance, why will anyone watch, y'know, we did 2 hours on energy, right?
And four energy wonks talking about solar.
Like why am I sitting here watching it?
Part of the reason you're watching it is, A, it has the dramatic tension and the compelling
narrative force of genuine improvisation which is genuine—the conversation isn't rigged.
It isn't pre-cooked.
It isn't rehearsed.
It's genuine in the moment and things that are genuinely happening in the moment have
the element of suspense because you don't know what will happen next.
Legitimately.
Sometimes fights break out at the table and I'm like, I never thought that you two people
would argue about that.
I can't believe that anyone is arguing about that, but that's fascinating.
What's going on here?
So that's one element of it.
And then the other element is like that we approach the show that learning stuff about
the world and figuring the world out is fun.
Like is fulfilling and entertaining an enjoyable undertaking and enterprise and I think we—that
comes across in the show.
Like, I love doing what I do and if you love doing what you're doing, you're not going
to be dour and grim, you're gonna be energetic and wise-cracky.
Hi, I'm Chris Hayes.
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