Yeah, we’re going there. In one of our mailbag episodes, Chris Hayes joked about doing an hourlong meditation on mortality. Surprisingly, more than a few of you spoke up in favor of the idea, and one of our #WITHpod listeners suggested checking out a book called “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” by philosopher Martin Hägglund. In his book, Hägglund takes on some of the most fundamental questions we face if, in fact, this one life is all we have. Say there’s no afterlife - what doe...
Nov 05, 2019•51 min
Y'all - this is a good one. Trust us. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you reflect, it'll inspire...it might even give you that special WITHpod brand of existential crisis. Our second stop of the fall tour brought Chris Hayes to the stunning Theatre at the Ace Hotel with screenwriter and director Adam Mckay along with debut novelist Omar El Akkad. The question at hand - how can we use art and pop culture to properly convey the urgency of the climate crisis? How can storytelling break through the...
Oct 29, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Over the past few months communication coming in and out of Kashmir, the highly contested land between India and Pakistan, has been increasingly difficult. The Indian government lead by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken steps to blackout the region in to order to once and for all place Kashmir under Indian control. The move has been roundly condemned by international groups, and serves as another dire warning of ostensibly liberal democracies engaging in authoritarian and illiberal behavior...
Oct 22, 2019•55 min
CHICAGO! We have a date, we have guests, and we have a SPECIAL PRESALE CODE! Join us Tuesday, November 12th at the House of Blues Chicago with special guests Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi. Presale starts Friday, October 18 at 10am ct and goes until Sunday, October 20 at 10pm ct. Presale code -- withpod Remaining tickets will be released Monday October 21st at 10am central.
Oct 18, 2019•5 min
Listen for details on how to win tickets to our Los Angeles live show! Salman Rushdie is a most singular figure. He’s authored 19 books, accrued countless awards, and spent about a decade in hiding after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death. Needless to say, Chris Hayes jumped at the chance to have a conversation with Salman Rushdie about his life and the ways his particular experiences shape his worldview. In one hour, they manage to cover the political climate in India and the ...
Oct 15, 2019•1 hr 3 min
You’ve likely heard of redlining - the practice of systematizing discrimination based on where you live. You’ve probably even heard us talk about the ways its legacy continues to impact the upward mobility of communities of color. But do you know what happened next? In the wake of urban uprisings in the late 1960s, politicians pushed to end redlining, to lift people up out of poverty and improve their lives by making homeownership attainable. But that’s not what happened. Instead, bad policy and...
Oct 08, 2019•54 min
What is conservatism in the era of Trump? During the 2016 primaries, Senator Ted Cruz argued that he alone was the true conservative candidate, consistently attacking Donald Trump as a big government liberal. So what does Sen. Cruz make of the conservatives that rejected him and went on to put Trump in the White House? At The 2019 Texas Tribune Festival, Chris Hayes and Sen. Cruz sat down in The Paramount Theatre in the first stop of the #WITHpod fall tour to talk about all things conservatism. ...
Oct 01, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Get your tickets today! Listen for details on how to get EXCLUSIVE presale access to tickets for our WITHpod Live event in Los Angeles happening Monday, October 21st with special guests Adam Mckay and Omar El Akkad. Presale is from 10am-10pm pacific time TODAY, September 26th - you can access the website here. Regular sale starts Friday, September 27th at 10am pacific time. And don't forget to come see us in Austin this SATURDAY September 28th at the Texas Tribune Festival for our live WITHpod w...
Sep 26, 2019•4 min
Andrew Marantz spent three years embedded in some of the ugliest corners of the Internet. His goal: find out how trolls and alt-right propagandists were able to so effectively turn social media platforms into a vehicle for taking their fringe opinions into the mainstream. Unable to talk to the gate keepers of the Internet, Marantz went to the gate crashers. What he found is a clear guide to a sort of underground information economy that has a reach every bit as far as the mainstream media. This ...
Sep 24, 2019•56 min
What was it like to be in the room for some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration? Samantha Power started as an outsider, a war correspondent who became a voice of moral witness about the failings of the American government. That voice earned her a job in the cabinet of President Barack Obama, helping shape the foreign policy she was once a harsh critic of. Both as a member of the National Security Council, and later as Ambassador to the UN, she had the c...
Sep 17, 2019•1 hr 2 min
How do you know when it’s time to ask for help? For former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, the moment came just as his political star was rising. October of 2018, in the final stages of what looked like a successful mayoral bid, and while part of conversations about potential 2020 contenders, Kander stepped back. “After 11 years of trying to outrun depression and PTSD symptoms, I have finally concluded that it’s faster than me,” he wrote. “That I have to stop running, turn around, and ...
Sep 10, 2019•57 min
The Trump administration wants to legalize transgender discrimination in the workplace. This week’s conversation breaks down how we reached this point. From the ways our social system constructs and uses gender, to the law and its limitations, to the political struggles within the LGBTQ community, Chase Strangio discusses many of the complex factors at play in the fight for transgender rights. A lawyer at the ACLU and a trans man himself, Strangio has been at the epicenter of the extremely high ...
Sep 03, 2019•1 hr 4 min
Why is it so expensive to go to college? Going to a four-year university and getting a bachelor’s degree is considered the most direct path to the middle class. At the same time, families in the middle class are forced to take extreme and desperate measures to pay for soaring school fees. It’s a broken system that’s taken its toll – we now have more college debt in this country than auto loan or credit card debt. So why is the barrier into the middle class so inaccessible? Caitlin Zaloom, author...
Aug 27, 2019•55 min
What does it mean to apply for asylum? This is the story of one man, Luis Mancheno, and the events that unfolded in his home country of Ecuador that led him to seek refuge in the United States. His journey is heartbreaking and harrowing and powerful – and best heard in his own words. RELATED: “Refugee, Immigrant and Citizen” (The New York Times, 2017) Follow Luis Mancheno here
Aug 20, 2019•57 min
Law professor Katie Porter never considered running for office. She worked under then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and had Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a professor and mentor, but the idea of holding office herself was never even on the drawing board. That all changed election night 2016. Two years later Katie Porter flips California’s 45th district, delivering a Democratic victory that helped fuel the blue wave of 2018. Now the freshman Congresswoman is known for her signature ability ...
Aug 13, 2019•49 min
Migration is central to the human experience. For as long as we’ve been around, people have been moving from one place to another. Though it’s never been easier to get from point A to point B, the inequality between those places could be as great as they’ve ever been. We’re now on the front edge of a climate crisis, launching the greatest period of human migration that will ever have happened on the planet. The backdrop of this great migration, however, is a political landscape marred by virulen...
Aug 06, 2019•59 min
Last week the Governor of Puerto Rico resigned after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in two weeks of sustained protest. Leaked inappropriate texts between Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and his inner circle provided the spark, but corruption and deeper frustrations on the U.S territory kindled the fury of citizens into mass mobilization. This week journalist Julio Ricardo Varela explains the political history and dynamics of Puerto Rico and what pushed people to take to the streets an...
Jul 30, 2019•55 min
Gov. Jay Inslee is running a presidential campaign unlike any other. The Washington governor is basing his run on the fundamental organizing premise that the climate crisis is more important than anything else. It’s a unique strategy that comes at a time when more and more people are recognizing the urgency of the climate crisis. But while climate is moving up on the list of issues voters care about, Gov. Inslee is making the case that it’s not just ‘an issue – it’s ‘the issue’. RELATED READING ...
Jul 23, 2019•1 hr 3 min
How do you build a movement? How do you connect people across race and religion and identity in order to create a united coalition? This is the work of Rev. Dr. William Barber II, one of the best and most important political voices in America right now. He has dedicated his life to the fight against systemic racism and poverty, and is known for his ability to organize diverse coalitions around every manner of social justice issues. He’s an incredible figure in movement building politics, particu...
Jul 16, 2019•54 min
Let’s talk about socialism. There’s a marked generational divide in the way people think about that word, what it means, and what it conjures. For those who were adults during the Cold War, socialism evokes something very different than those who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, there’s a growing part of the left that’s trying to make a case for socialism, inciting a definitional dispute about what it means and what it’s capable of. Bhaskar Sunkara is at the center of the poli...
Jul 09, 2019•58 min
There’s been a heated national debate over what to call some of the migrant detention centers along the southern border. Are these facilities deserving of the label "concentration camps"? Andrea Pitzer has a uniquely deep perspective on this, having written a global history of concentration camps titled “One Long Night”. This conversation details the lineage of concentration camps, from the late 1800s in Cuba to the death camps of WWII to their most modern iterations we are witnessing ...
Jul 02, 2019•58 min
After two years of a Donald Trump presidency, voters turned out in the 2018 midterms to deliver Democrats the House by a historic margin. That freshman class has its fair share of rabble-rousers who are using their platforms to shake up Congress from the left of the party. But those members of Congress aren’t the ones who won Democrats the majority – for that, you have to look at the candidates who flipped district after district on election night. That includes Rep. Max Rose (D-NY 11th), an exc...
Jun 25, 2019•1 hr 2 min
Got impeachment on the mind? If you do, odds are there are two recent examples of the impeachment process you might be drawing from – Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But what do you know about the first ever presidential impeachment? There is no better time to revisit the case of Andrew Johnson, the white supremacist President whose impeachment reveals a wild truth about the history of this country. Brenda Wineapple spent the last six years uncovering the details of an erratic and power hungry P...
Jun 18, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Liberalism is the ordering principal of American government, and yet liberalism is embattled. After the end of the Cold War, it was widely believed that liberal democracy would spread inexorably, but instead new challenges to liberalism have emerged. Across the world, authoritarian governments flourish and some countries have begun to backslide away from liberalism. Even here at home, liberalism’s critics on the left and right have found renewed strength. This week Adam Gopnik, author of the new...
Jun 11, 2019•55 min
“Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” In July of 2013, Alicia Garza wrote these words in reaction to a jury’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. That post turned into a hashtag which became the rallying cry for one of the most recognizable social movements of this generation. While it can feel like the nation’s current racial discourse is trending downward, the last four or five years has seen an ostensible rapid expansion of social justice ...
Jun 04, 2019•1 hr 1 min
We just celebrated our one year #WITHpod anniversary! What!? To mark the occasion, we put together a second mailbag episode with producer Tiffany Champion to answer your questions and reflect on the year. Find out who Chris said was his favorite guest, why he loves #WITHpod listeners so much, and what he hopes to do in our second year. Thanks for listening! EPISODES MENTIONED: School Segregation in 2018 with Nikole Hannah-Jones (July 31, 2018) The Rule of Law in the Era of Trump with Kate Shaw (...
May 28, 2019•41 min
An era of paranoia, the pull of radical politics, the way in which an entire society can fall under the sway of a fever, and how that fever eventually breaks. These themes made up one of the darkest periods of modern American History: The era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. This week historian and journalist David Maraniss discusses his new book “A Good American Family”, that excavates the story of his own leftist parents as they lived and raised a family during the Red Scare. Maraniss reconst...
May 21, 2019•49 min
On the final day of Passover this year, a gunman walked into a synagogue outside of San Diego, killing one and injuring three more. Exactly six months earlier, a man entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, shouted anti-Semitic slurs and opened fire, killing 11 of those gathered. These acts of violence are part of a marked rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes unfolding across the nation in recent years. Historian Deborah Lipstadt examines these most recent manifestations of anti-Semitism an...
May 14, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Should you be worried about the federal deficit? While campaigning, President Trump followed in the footsteps of his conservative predecessors by fear-mongering about the ballooning deficit but when he got to the White House that concern seemed to disappear when it came to his tax cuts for the rich and increased government spending. In fact, there’s a pattern to the Republicans’ selective concern about increasing the deficit, and it all depends on who holds the power. When you look at the behavi...
May 07, 2019•55 min
What is the most devastating impact Donald Trump has had on the highest office? His lies and rhetoric and bigotry have all had a poisonous effect on our national discourse. But when it comes to his destruction of norms, those are only the ones most visible to the public. What about the destruction of norms going on behind the scenes, disrupting the most critical work necessary for running the federal government? Michael Lewis, the prolific author of "The Big Short", "Moneyball&quo...
Apr 30, 2019•49 min
