From GPS systems, to weather forecasts, to the food we consume, the U.S. government plays a role in virtually every facet of our lives. What happens behind the scenes and how do these background actions impact our lives, good and bad? Seeking the answers to those questions is the project of “The G Word,” a Netflix miniseries executive produced by former President Barack Obama and hosted by Adam Conover. Loosely based off of “The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy” by Michael Lewis, the six-part documentary explores the triumphs and failures of the government and how we might be able to change it. Conover joins WITHpod to discuss his creative process, maintaining editorial independence while working with Obama, his experiences getting rarely granted insider access of federal agencies and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey there, everybody. Just a reminder, before we get into the episode, to send us your questions, comments, thoughts on your favorite episodes, and feedback for our upcoming mailbag episode. Send those to WITHpod@gmail.com, or tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod. We should note this episode was recorded June 15th.
Adam Conover: Our lives are, in fact, held up by this invisible scaffolding, and there’s all these stories underneath that we’re going to pull out and show to the audience. That’s part of it. That’s sort of like the candy part of it. And then the vegetables part of it is that we live in a time when people have lost faith in their government, and they treat their government like they have a relationship of consumers to their government, where they want the government to provide them with services and they’re angry when they don’t receive it.
And we’ve lost sight of it as a common project that we are all engaged in as a society, and somewhat with good reason because of the way that the government has been deliberately eroded by forces working within and outside of it to reduce that fate.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes.
Do you get the sense these days that it feels like lots of things don’t work well and lots of things are broken or disrupted? And that is frustrating and a bummer. And I think it’s easy in these times to lose sight of all the things that do work or things that are running in the background. And that was something that I think the pandemic because it was such a severe disruption, it did remind us of all of the processes that function underneath our normal life.
Some of those are market processes, right? So we don’t think about the supply chain for toilet paper as a daily thing, it just sort of happens in the background. I don’t know, someone makes toilet paper, someone buys it, someone ships it, shows up in the store, you buy it, right? But it turns out that if you disrupt that supply chain, that you have shortages, right?
And there’s something similar, I think, with a lot of the stuff that government does. Government does so many things at so many different levels, that it’s just easy for it all to be invisible. I mean, to me, the ultimate example of this is traffic lights, right? Like, if a traffic light is broken, you really notice, and all of a sudden, an intersection becomes dangerous or becomes a site of a huge traffic jam.
But I live in New York City, like there’s a lot of traffic lights and 99.99% of them work, which is more than I could say for the light bulbs in my own house, for sure. Like, there are definitely more light bulbs out in my own house than there are traffic lights out, and someone is monitoring to make sure that those traffic lights work, going to replace them when they don’t, in a very timely fashion and make sure that like this very basic function of government gets done.
And that’s true, like up and down the line where government failure is just way more visible than government success. Because so often, government success is just producing the kind of framework for other people to do what they need or want to do to flourish, right? So the traffic lights working mean that you can get to work on time, or you can go pick up your kid, or wherever you’re going. If it doesn’t work, then you notice it.
And that I think is part of the reason that people think the government sucks, because they tend to just notice it when it’s not working, which again, happens a lot. Like, there’s lots of things the government screws up. There’s lots of places where government is, quote-unquote, “the problem.” But it’s only because of the invisibility of the functioning of the good parts.
Now, that key insight formed the basis for a fantastic book called “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis and we actually had him on the podcast to discuss it, where he sort of gets into the guts of what the government does, why it’s so important and how the Trump administration was like egregiously careless with those functions.
The podcast hosts, TV star, investigative comedian Adam Conover read that book and was like, “Oh, this is cool,” and has kind of through a fascinating process that involves both Barack Obama and Netflix, which we’ll get into, like, made a TV show about that basic idea. It’s called “The G Word.” It’s on Netflix, it’s out now. It’s sort of inspired loosely based on “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis, a real kind of fascinating, really entertaining, really funny investigation of like what the federal government particular does and doesn’t do, and how it does it, and why it’s so important that it does the things it does and does those things well.
I thought it’d be a fantastic opportunity to talk about both that topic and also Adam’s career trajectory, and what it’s like to work with Barack and Michelle Obama. So, Adam, welcome to the podcast.
Adam Conover: Hey, thank you so much for having me, Chris. It’s a thrill to be here. As a listener of the show, it’s a thrill to be on the show.
Chris Hayes: Oh, well, that’s great. I’m factually a listener too —
Adam Conover: Oh, my gosh.
Chris Hayes: — and I love “Adam Ruins Everything.” And let’s start with that, what was your trajectory? At some point, “Adam Ruins that Everything” was one of those cultural products that people, A, talk to me about, and B, like clips of it started floating into my awareness. You know how that happens?
Adam Conover: Ah, good, it worked.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s the Kismet of the algorithm. But people were sharing it and I was like, wow, this is really smart and really funny, and also kind of like really sort of genre defying, in a way that I find fascinating and really admire. So what were you doing before then? Like, how did you come to carve out this very cool niche that you’ve carved up?
Adam Conover: I really appreciate the kind words. I mean, the story was I was in the trenches as a comic in New York City for 10 years. I started at the very early beginning of the web video boom. I’ve been through multiple booms and busts of Internet comedy in my life. Directly preceding “Adam Ruins Everything,” I was a sketch writer at a comedy website, CollegeHumor. And my job was writing two sketches a week.
Well, actually, what happened was, I was also simultaneously doing stand-up comedy. And the question quickly becomes, when you’re doing stand-up comedy, you’re like, okay, I figured out how to make the audience laugh. How do I make them remember me? How do I give them something else, in addition to a joke, that is going to make them want to come see me again, or make them take notice?
And I’ve always been an information sponge for this kind of information. I started just sharing that in my act. And when I did, I noticed people would lean forward a little bit. They pay a little bit more attention. The first story I told was about how the diamond engagement ring is a marketing creation, but has infected our culture to such a degree, they don’t even need to advertise anymore. Everyone just buys the rings. And people are fascinated by that story, they started paying more attention to it.
Chris Hayes: That was in your stand-up act?
Adam Conover: That was in my stand-up act. I literally just did two minutes, two or three minutes about that on stage. And people would come up to me after the show and say, “Oh my God, is that true? Oh, I looked that up, that’s crazy.” And so then I wrote a sketch about that for CollegeHumor and that did well. And then I did a couple more, we came up with the title, “Adam Ruins Everything.”
And then, at that time, CollegeHumor is looking to pitch television series. And so, we adapted it into a television show and we pitched it all around. TruTV happened to be wanting to compete with Comedy Central and wanting to make informational comedy. That was just sort of an idea they had in their heads, and so they bought it. And we also were simultaneously reposting all the clips on CollegeHumor on our YouTube channel, which is how you ended up seeing them.
So I often sort of feel that I’m like jumping from one last media sinking ship to another, that I was on Internet-based sketch comedy at the very last moment, jumped to basic cable just as that ship was sinking, have a new show premiering on Netflix just as Netflix is posting its first losses ever, right? And the entire streaming business is being reconsidered. I’m looking forward to seeing what sinking ship I can jump onto next with my career. But I’ve sort of built this thing of informational comedy. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But the thing is you have invested all your money in crypto, I mean, you should be good on that front.
Adam Conover: Yeah. I haven’t checked the markets lately, but I’m pretty sure I’m doing fine.
Chris Hayes: Well, I feel like it’s funny with comedians. Like, is it me or do stand-up comedians start doing stand-up comedy like preposterously early. I feel like everyone in stand-up comedy like knows they want to be a comic early and people like, “Oh, I started working in the clubs at 16 or 17.” Like, that’s true of like Eddie Murphy. It’s true of Chris Rock. It’s true of Pete Davidson. It’s true of Louis C. K.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, all these people just start really early. How did you start doing that?
Adam Conover: Well, some of the people you’re talking about are prodigies, right? Chris Rock was a prodigy.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: Someone like Michael Che is a prodigy. And I remember doing comedy, I was doing stand-up for two years. And Michael Che was skyrocketing. And people were like, “He’s only been doing comedy two years.” And I was like, “I’ve been doing comedy two years and I’m not on SNL. What’s going on?” So there are exceptions like that.
I started doing comedy in college. I discovered that stand-up was my main love in comedy a little bit later when I was in New York in my mid-20s. My story was I started a sketch comedy group in college, that in the very early Internet, pre YouTube, we started getting some heat. And then that was enough for us to move to New York and start trying to do comedy professionally.
But the truth is the reason people have to start early is it takes a good 5 to 10 years of doing it for free in basements before you can even make 50 bucks for doing a show. So yeah, there’s a lot of grinding out to it just to learn how to do it. It’s an unfortunate truth of the comedy labor market in America is that it requires a whole lot of free labor.
Chris Hayes: And there’s also a lot of method and craft development. I mean, there’s sort of a 10,000 hours thing happening there.
Adam Conover: Oh, a 100%.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Like “Adam Ruins Everything” and this show too, and it’s true of John Oliver who I just profoundly admire and think is great.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It was true of Colbert and true of Jon Stewart. All of that stuff, the kind of informational comedy, if you want to call it that, right, that you got to do you the comedy and —
Adam Conover: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — I don’t do that. I just do the information part of it. But that means that my audience, I think, is narrower. I think it sort of reaches less people. But I’m curious about like what did you learn about the craft in that period, that then you transfer to this kind of storytelling?
Adam Conover: That’s a really good question. I’ve never been asked that before. I mean, you learn how to write a joke. You learn how to deliver a joke. You learn how to make something that is not funny on the face of it, funny. You sort of build all of these tools very deeply into yourself so that you can just sort of use them as second nature when you’re actually doing the work.
Like what I often say in our writer’s rooms is that the comedy for us is actually the easy part. The hard part is the information. I mean, look, I admire what you do because you’re up there, breaking down very dense complex information on a daily basis, and digesting it and giving it to the audience. That is, in itself, very difficult, just finding the story and the information.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And making the argument, figuring out what the argument is, beating it out. And then once you’ve done that, you can scaffold jokes on top of it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: Now, while you’re doing it, you look for, okay, what’s the funny part of the argument? What is the funny part of the information? What is the part that’s making us laugh that’s already halfway to a joke? Once you’ve got all that laid out, you are turning it into comedy, which turns out to be a little bit more mechanical once you’ve been doing it for a decade or so.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. The mechanical part is fascinating to me because I watch a lot of stand-up and really like I’m a I’m a consumer of comedy. I really like it. And I think I find it both, I like it because I like to laugh, but also just as a presentational mode or genre, as someone who communicates for living and talks for a living, it’s interesting to me. When you talk about jokes, it’s like there’s a whole set of formal mechanisms around jokes —
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that can get you pretty far to a laugh before you get the punch.
Adam Conover: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, the pacing and the beat, and the delivery, and the audience sort of beginning to tense up in anticipation of the release they know they’re going to get. And so they’re then like almost physiologically disposed. And all of that stuff, you start to see how structural it is, I guess, for lack of a better word that’s formal, when you watch a lot of it.
Adam Conover: I think we think about it in similar ways. A lot of comedians don’t think about it in this way that you do and I do. But, yeah, like comedy is all these little moves that you make. Most of it is playing with the audience’s attention and their expectation.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: And so, yes, the thing you’ve identified where the audience laughs before they get to the punchline, because they’re sort of getting halfway there themselves is like one of my most delicious things to do as a comic, because now we’re all enjoying it together, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: That’s like a really wonderful structural move. But the thing for me is, like, I devoted decades of my life to learning how to do that piece of it. And I love that piece of it and I love focusing on it. But also my critique of comedy is a lot of it is not actually about anything.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Adam Conover: A lot of comedians don’t actually have something to say. Or the thing people make fun of comedians for saying is like, “We’re the truth tellers. We’re the philosophers of the modern day,” and then they go on to repeat the most boring common wisdom you have ever heard, right?
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Adam Conover: Like, “In the old days, we were tougher because we got bullied,” stuff like that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Adam Conover: I’m like, you can go to any street corner and find a guy saying that, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes. Correct.
Adam Conover: You’re not saying anything interesting. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, “Oh, you like and approve of the traditional gender dynamics?”
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Amazing. Wow.
Adam Conover: And look, that’s what some people want in their comedy, right? But that’s not what I do. What I really seek to do is to use comedy to find, to surface and bring to the audience, genuinely new ideas that they have not heard before. When I do informational comedy, I’m trying to like delve deep and find the really deep nuggets, like recent research, unexplored perspective. They’re actually going to be novel to them, and then make them come to life through comedy. That is, in fact, the hard part. The comedy I can sort of do. It’s muscle, whatever, fast twitch muscle fibers. It’s like built into my nervous system at this point, on a good day.
Chris Hayes: So then let’s talk about this project. First, I’m going to start with the backstory of how it came to be, which is a fun backstory.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But I got to say you really pulled it off.
Adam Conover: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Again, this is something I’ve thought about. I’ve thought about like if I wanted to do docs series, if I was going to host something, what would it be about? It’s way easier to go from like some idea to a thing that actually works, that people want to watch. But talk about the origin of “The G Word,” like how did it come about.
Adam Conover: Sure. It’s a funny story. I mean, I had read Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk” in 2018, around when it came out. I thought it was an incredible book. And there were a bunch of stories in it about how the federal government works that really, I was like, “My god, I would love to do these on television someday.”
The story of how the National Weather Service underpins our entire society in these ways. Planes could not take off if not for the National Weather Service. Much less, you wouldn’t be able to get a single forecast on a nightly news, and how the private weather company AccuWeather is undermining the National Weather Service and trying to turn it into a private entity. What a hell of a story. This is a story that I would do on “Adam Ruins Everything.” Unfortunately, “Adam Ruins Everything” has come to an end because the AT&T-Time Warner merger killed our show as it did many other projects. We were cancelled soon after that merger.
And so, I was looking for new television shows to pitch around the time I read this book. About nine months after I read it, I get a call from my manager and he says, “Hey, so I don’t know if you’d be interested in this. Barack and Michelle Obama’s company have optioned this book, ‘The Fifth Risk.’ They would like to make a TV show about it, but they don’t have an idea. That’s all that they know.” They want to know if you want to come in and pitch on it.” And I said, “Well, yes, indeed I would because I love that book and I have a good idea for it.”
So we went in and pitched it to Higher Ground first, then into Netflix, and they bought it. And it was a long road getting the show coming out because COVID happened in the middle of our writing process, and set us back a lot. But those are the broad strokes.
Chris Hayes: So I think this is probably of interest to like a very small set of people. But I am one of those people and it’s my podcast so I’ll ask you, what was the pitch?
Adam Conover: Those are the best questions.
Chris Hayes: Like, what was the pitch? Yeah. I don’t do the pitch for me. But it’s just a show that’s a fiction, a drama show, and I’ve never done that before. I found that process fascinating because it was new and I’ve never done it before. But what was the pitch? I mean, you’re already halfway there, right? They’ve optioned the book. They want something on it. But it’s like, we’re going to do what? Like, go around and talk to people in the government and make jokes? Like, you got to have something more refined than that.
Adam Conover: Yeah. I mean, it’s about, first of all, the incredible stories that are lurking just beneath the surface of our daily lives, right? That our lives are, in fact, held up by this invisible scaffolding, and there’s all these stories underneath that we’re going to pull out and show to the audience. That’s part of it. That’s sort of like the candy part of it. And then the vegetables part of it is that we live in a time when people have lost faith in their government, and they treat their government like… they have a relationship of consumers to their government, where they want the government to provide them with services and they’re angry when they don’t receive it and we’ve lost sight of it as a common project that we are all engaged in as a society. And somewhat with good reason because of the way that the government has been deliberately eroded by forces working within and outside of it, to reduce that faith. And so, we positioned the show as somewhat of a tonic to that, to try to illuminate for people all the incredible things that the government does, that affect our lives, both good and bad. Very important that we are as critical as much as we are complimentary about government ineffectiveness and inaction, and just ways in which it is harmful and deadly.
But then also, yeah, the piece where we go meet the on-the-ground workers who make the government function, not the heads of the departments who you see on the Sunday shows, but the people who work for the government day to day. So a big part of the pitch, I like to give a flashbulb moment. We are going to go to a meat processing facility and see the USDA workers who are standing there on the line every single day, touching the meat with their hands.
Chris Hayes: Picking up the like, “Ah.”
Adam Conover: Picking up the meat.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: Looking at it. And those workers have a big red button, they can stop the line at any moment. But if they do, every one in the plants could be mad at them because the people, they work right next to the people who work for the company, right? What an interesting position to be in. That’s a working class job that still has an important mission behind it.
And we’re going to meet the folks who, this is the part that sold Netflix, I think, literally fly planes through hurricanes in order to figure out where the hurricane is going so we can protect everybody’s lives in Florida or Louisiana. That was an essential part of our pitch. So now, look, at the end of the day, if I had gone into pitch this idea to Netflix and I didn’t have Barack Obama who, by the way, Netflix is already into for like $100 million, right? They have a giant a deal with it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I know. Yeah, they got a big deal. Yeah.
Adam Conover: So when Barack Obama says, “Hey, the show I want to make is this show.” And they’re like, “Well, we’ve already given you a bunch of money. Like, it’s kind of hard for us to say no now.” If I had gone in without all of that, would this show have gotten made in today’s capitalist media ecosystem? I have a hard time thinking it would be as easy to sell. But all those things together that helped make it happen.
Chris Hayes: Barack Obama appears in it.
Adam Conover: Yes, he does. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Had you met him before that?
Adam Conover: No, never. I mean, we did not speak with him until we had started working on the show.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about the USDA example, which is a great one and people should watch it. This is almost a cliche, right, which is that like people don’t really want to know what goes on the inside of a meatpacking plant for a whole bunch of reasons.
Adam Conover: Yeah. You don’t want to know how the sausage is made, right?
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Like, obviously, this has been the sort of like very early and profound example of what the government should regulate, the dangers of unregulated markets. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” which was a sort of investigative look at how meatpacking was functioning in an unregulated marketplace, the fact that every piece of meat you buy says USDA, whatever on it. You seemed a little traumatized by it actually.
Adam Conover: Yeah. Yeah, I mean —
Chris Hayes: Which I think would be as well. But tell us just how that came about, and walk us through what you learned there.
Adam Conover: So one of the very first things we knew we want to do on the show, like I said it was in our pitch, was to go into a meat plant. We also knew that it would be incredibly difficult. I mean, they have not allowed cameras in these facilities for decades, ever since PETA started sneaking in and filming this footage and releasing it as part of their own activism. And we were working on it for three years, and it was the last thing that we shot. So there was a moment where we had every other piece of the show in the can and we were like, “Oh” —
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow.
Adam Conover: — except for the very first most important field piece in the entire show.
Chris Hayes: The first sentence of our pitch.
Adam Conover: Yeah. Absolutely. And the other last thing to shoot was the hurricane plane segment because we had to wait for a hurricane and we had to have just the right window that the Air Force could bring us up. But we did finally get access with the help of our wonderful field producing team, and it was a really intense environment.
I mean, first of all, it’s a factory. It’s a working factory. We went to a Cargill beef processing facility in Schuyler, Nebraska. And it’s a working factory. There’s hundreds of people working there. It’s cinder block walls. It’s loud. It is sort of all consuming. And then when we actually entered the floor where the meat is inspected, it was one of the most intense places I’ve ever been. It’s like there’s humidity in the air from what is being done there, right? The smell is overpowering. The sound is overpowering. It’s almost the kind of sound design that would be in a movie about a sort of horrifying factory. It’s sort of like these pneumatic sounds of gush.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And it was utterly overwhelming. And this is a facility where the cows come in, and they are slaughtered, and they are butchered, and the packaged meat goes out the other end. Everything is happening in this one facility. And we show you most of that. We don’t show you the moment at which the cows were slaughtered because we didn’t feel that it was appropriate to do so. But we certainly paint the picture and you can imagine what’s happening in the middle, right?
And we have this conversation with the veterinarians who work there, with the inspectors who work on the line. And they explained that, yeah, they look at every single piece of meat to make sure that it’s not diseased, and they make sure that the cows are not diseased on the way in. And I had a really difficult conversation, interesting conversation with one of the veterinarians who said he used to be a small animal vet. He was a literal, “My dog is sick. Let me bring my dog to the vet,” he was that kind of vet.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: Now, he works for USDA. And how does he feel about the fact that he’s now a part of a system that kills animals and abuses animals on a massive scale? And he said, “Well, I do love the animals. But I do think it’s important that someone be here to make sure that this system isn’t as bad as it could be.” And you can see on the tape, I kind of go, “Yeah, okay, I agree with that.” I still have my qualms.
And we go on, by the way, to have a lot of criticism of the USDA, and its coziness with big agriculture and prioritization of the needs of farmers or the needs of eaters. There’s various proposal out to reduce the number of inspectors on the line, which is something that the industry is pushing for, but isn’t in the public interest. We give what I hope is a very well rounded view of this very difficult complex system. But we also point out if it weren’t for the government’s intervention here, it would be much, much worse.
And sort of part of the theme there is to paint the picture for the audience that, look, because of diseased meat back in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, people were dying at a huge rate of infected meat. We said we’re going to send inspectors from the government, on the line. They have to be there for the plant to operate every single day. That’s a massive intervention by today’s standards. We did it, it worked. We no longer die at enormous rates.
Now, the system could be better. It could always be improved that and we need to guard against it being rolled back. But look at what we did. So imagine if we were to do that again in all these different areas. We’re trying to raise our belief in what the government can do again.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I thought it was interesting. your interviews with the folks. Like, it’s also just fascinating, like the colocation of it all, right?
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s not like you’re the building inspector, and you get in your car or get on the subway, and you show up in the building, and then you inspect it and you go back to your office.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, that’s your workplace. That’s where you are all the time, which just in a social institution, psychological level is really intense.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Particularly compounded by the intensity of that atmosphere, which really is like, “Whew.”
Adam Conover: Yeah. I mean, look, one of the things that gave me the idea for this piece, just to shout this guy out. There’s a wonderful, immersive journalist named Ted Conover. We are not related, just so you know, or maybe very distantly. He does a wonderful form of journalism where he immerses himself in a particular profession and then writes about them.
So he worked as a prison guard at Sing Sing for three years and he wrote an incredible book called “Newjack” about that. So he wrote a piece for Harper’s a number of years ago called “The Way of All Flesh” in which he worked as one of these workers. He just described the experience of being a meat inspector, but sharing a break room with everybody else, or sharing a workplace, and knowing that when you have to hit that stop button, that (beep) up everybody else’s day, people in your same community who you care about.
And that wasn’t something that we were able to get into in the show, but it’s like a wild part of that job. That, yeah, I mean, these are folks, they live in the same town. This is a town where everybody at the town works at this plant.
Chris Hayes: It’s amazing how company town does.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, one of the things that happened during COVID, right, was like we had these outbreaks and you would see these like population density maps, and there’ll be these little population dense pinpricks in Nebraska.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: What’s that? It’s like, “Oh, right. That’s the meatpacking plant.”
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s completely rural, and then there’s like 5,000 people in this small place that are making this meatpacking plant run.
Adam Conover: Yeah. And one of the stories from early in the pandemic was there were huge early outbreaks in some of those meat factories and a lot of them were USDA workers. A lot of USDA workers got COVID and died very early because they were classified as essential workers. And this is a cold environment where people are clustered together. It was just like a recipe —
Chris Hayes: Yelling too, you know.
Adam Conover: Yeah, exactly, yelling over the machinery. It’s an incredibly dangerous place to work. And it’s one of those jobs where before you take a bite of your burrito, like, say a prayer of thanks to the inspectors there —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Adam Conover: — like looking at the meat that you just taste.
Chris Hayes: All right. Let’s talk about the National Weather Service —
Adam Conover: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which is another part of the show and the hurricane part of it. But more broadly, like, suddenly, I finally bought an Apple Watch. I don’t know, I was like holding out, and then I was like, “You know, whatever.” Anyway, I have an Apple Watch. And I don’t think people realize it, like when you get the little like, “Oh, here’s what the forecast is.” Like, it’s all basically coming from them.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like all of it, like everything you know about the weather, essentially, is downstream of the government.
Adam Conover: Yes, it quite literally is. I mean, we have a little fun on the show and make fun of like local weather people, right, many of whom are accomplished meteorologists.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s a funny bit.
Adam Conover: Yeah. And by the way, we rankled a couple of television meteorologists who are like, “Hey, we’re not just stuffed shirts. We actually know something about the weather,” which many of them do, but many are just reading a forecast, right? Let’s be honest. There’s a lot of folks who are weathercasters rather than meteorologists.
They are certainly not running a network of hundreds of weather observation posts, staffed by thousands of meteorologists, satellites across the country. They’re getting all of that data from the National Weather Service, which provides it to everyone for free. You can go to weather.gov and you can see the exact same weather products that your local meteorologist gets, if you’re a weather geek. And countless businesses are built on the back of this public service. And not just businesses, it’s people at sea, right, air traffic controllers.
The reason it’s provided by the federal government is it’s a public good that only the government can provide. We simply cannot rely on a single private business to do this. And that’s where all of the data is coming from. But as we talked about on the show, private weather businesses like AccuWeather that have built their businesses on that data, AccuWeather, in particular, has started to see the National Weather Service as competition. And for the past decades, they have been working to undermine the National Weather Service.
And as Michael Lewis writes about in that book, Barry Myers, the head of AccuWeather advocated to get himself appointed to be the head of NOAA. He was not appointed, but he has been on National Weather Service boards. He was able to block them from developing their own app. And so, I do this comparison a lot. If you look at NASA, go to nasa.gov, you will see the most beautiful website you’ve ever seen, right? Because NASA gets a marketing budget, because NASA historically was partially a public relations exercise, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And so the government has given NASA enough money in order to tell its story. The National Weather Service has been prevented from telling its story to the public. You go to National Weather Service, go to weather.gov, you’ll see a lot of wonderful data. You won’t see a slick website that’s going to appeal to weather geeks, like the Weather Channel has, right? And I think that’s a failure because the Weather Service is incredible. Like, as soon as you learn about it, you can’t help but geek out over how cool it is. And that has left an opening for bad actors to try to pervert the system for their profit rather than the public good, because we don’t know enough to protect it.
Chris Hayes: So how did you get into the hurricane? Again, this is a logistical question. But just from a field production standpoint, that seems a heavy lift.
Adam Conover: It was about two years of work to go up in a hurricane plane. And here’s the thing, just to give you a little context, every single time that there is a hurricane approaching the Atlantic coast or the South coast, there are multiple teams of U.S. government workers flying planes through that hurricane. They take off, they fly directly to the center of the hurricane, then they make a cloverleaf pattern. They go back through it four or five times. Then they land. Another plane takes off and does the same thing continuously, basically, throughout hurricane season.
And the reason they do this is that getting direct measurement of the hurricane is the only way you can figure out where the hurricane is, what the wind speeds are, et cetera. You can learn some amount through satellite and radar. They literally try to get a fix of the center point of the hurricane, and they do that by measuring the wind speeds. And there’s a navigator a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. Okay, we found the center. And then that’s how they update the hurricane’s motion, and that’s how they know when it’s going to hit the coast.
Chris Hayes: Right. So just so everyone knows, again, to hammer this point home, every time there’s a hurricane approaching, every single map you see, every single display, all of the coverage of it on my network, on the weather, on every network, all of it, 100% is because of those flights identifying that data. That is the way that we know where it is.
Adam Conover: Yeah. And they’ve been doing it since the ‘40s, right, or somewhere around there. Nobody else is doing them. So those flights are done by two agencies, by NOAA, which is a civilian agency, but they have this NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps where they’re uniformed, and they’re like specific pilots. It’s a very cool agency. And then the Air Force does it as well.
And we, at first, tried to go with NOAA, but they had extremely strict COVID restrictions because they have so few pilots. It’s like a very, very elite sort of small group that they couldn’t afford any risk of infection. So we ended up going with the Air Force. And it was a matter of “Hey, here’s hurricane season. Here’s when we hope we’re going to be flying a mission. And we hope that we’ll have seats available for you.” And you have 48 hours’ notice that you’re going to have to fly down to one of these airports to get on one of the planes.
So we did it once. We flew out of Florida. We went up and it turns out the hurricane didn’t form. We like went out with them on a mission, but the mission was just flying around the Atlantic into a thing that was not quite yet hurricane for like eight hours. We got very nauseated. It was pretty good footage.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: But for the show, we were like, “We need to fly through an actual hurricane. We need to do it again.” And so we then had to ask them, “Please let us know about the next hurricane.” And they said, “Okay.” A couple of weeks later, they’re like, “All right, we got another one.” We’re flying out of St. Croix, which is one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, flew down there with no notice, put a team together.
Our incredible producing team really like killed themselves getting us there. And flew up again and went through Hurricane Sam, which is a hurricane that in 2021, it never made landfall, but it was a named hurricane that sort of went up to the northeast through Atlantic. It was an incredible experience, really nauseating, very uncomfortable. Imagine a cargo plane, but it’s just outfitted with scientific equipment.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: So there’s no seats. There’s like jump seats you strap yourself into, but you’re not seated. There’s no bottled water, right? You have to bring your own food. You’re sort of walking around. There’s trip hazards everywhere. It’s more like being on a boat than being on a plane. And it’s constantly shaking, there’s enormous turbulence. But then, as you see on the show, there’s this moment where you break through the eye of the hurricane.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And it’s astonishing. I mean, suddenly, you’ve been in clouds for hours. You’ve been in gray-out conditions. Suddenly, the sun is shining down from the sky. The ocean is below you. You can see all the way from the top to the bottom. And then ahead of you, a mile ahead of you, you see this mile-high wall of clouds that is just towering in front of you. And it was mind-blowing. It’s like going to the moon or something, or going to the Marianas Trench. It’s like one of the most powerful physical forces, natural forces on Earth. And these guys fly into this everyday. It was unbelievable.
Chris Hayes: Talk a little bit about the GPS as well, because that was something. The weather Service I knew about because of the Michael Lewis book. I did not realize the degree to which GPS is somewhat similar in terms of being a fully government run and back to backbone, that everything else operates off of.
Adam Conover: Yeah, I mean, I was in the same boat. When we started the show, I had read Michael Lewis’s book. I knew about the National Weather Service a bit. My dad is a marine biologist. I’ve heard of the National Weather Service in my life, right. But I asked my staff, “Hey, what else does the government do that most people aren’t aware of?”
And one of my researchers, a man named Sam Rodman brought in the story, “Okay, did you know that the government invented and currently runs the entire GPS network for the entire world?” Literally go anywhere in the world and use any GPS device, whether that’s a Garmin or an Apple Watch, or a cell phone, or a car with GPS, every single one of them is using U.S. government satellites for free, that are a public service for the entire world.
And I was like, “How did I not know this? Like, how is this a story that we have failed to tell?” Like, we all believe that, I don’t know, Google, Garmin, TomTom, one of these companies did it. It’s the U.S. government that did it all along, and it took them like 50 years of research to do It’s an unbelievable story.
Chris Hayes: Right. I always thought it was one of those like DARPA stories of it had been developed through government research. And then at some point, it’s sort of been handed off, or someone else was running it. But I didn’t realize like, “And also, that’s for the whole world.”
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That was the other thing that blew my mind.
Adam Conover: Yeah. Well, my understanding is that the reason that works is because the satellites are just constantly transmitting, right? It’s not like a cellphone tower where you send data to them, and they send it back to you. They’re just sort of going, “Here I am, here I am, here I am, here I am, here I am all the time.” And so it’s like a lighthouse, right? If you have a GPS device, you can access that signal at any time.
And other countries now, China and Russia are starting to develop their own GPS network. So they don’t love relying on a U.S. government public service in their own countries. But like, the entire concept for GPS, the implementation of it, and then the development of the chips of the tiny GPS receivers was all led by the government. And so, yes, there’s many other examples like DARPA. DARPA funded the initial research that led to the development of the computer mouse and the Internet, and all these things. But ultimately, they’re public-private partnerships, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: But the GPS is a public-public partnership. It’s just a public service that we are running. And we go to the room where the GPS services run from, where 10 folks who now work for the Space Force.
Chris Hayes: 10 people?
Adam Conover: 10 people. It used to be the Air Force. Now, it’s under the Space Force.
Chris Hayes: They’re called guardians, 10 guardians.
Adam Conover: Space Force guardians. And by the way, I had as much fun making it for the Space Force as anybody. When you go actually meet them, you’re like, “Okay, I like you guys.” You know what I mean?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. No. Totally, no, I got no beef with the people in the Space Force. My beef was with the bizarre and ludicrous trajectory of a man-child becoming president and focusing on making his 7-year-old dreams come true.
Adam Conover: Absolutely. But that was long in the works, and everyone I talked to there said —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: I asked a couple of people, I was like, “Is there a good organizational reason for making a distinction between the Air Force and the Space Force?” And everyone I spoke to was like, “Oh, yes. Yes, for such and such a reason, it’s a very good idea.” So like, whatever, I’m not going to argue with those people.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: In any case, there’s 10 people in a room making sure these satellites stay on course, making sure the signal is clear, and basically taking customer service requests from like companies that rely on the GPS service, and military folks who are using it. And if the U.S. government wasn’t doing that, the entire system would go down and everyone’s GPS devices would stop working in an instant. And that is like a true piece of like essential scaffolding in modern life. And GPS is one of the most, by the way, transformative innovations of the modern age. Like, it’s up there with the Internet.
Chris Hayes: Absolutely.
Adam Conover: How much does a GPS receiver cost? Like, probably a nickel at this point. And you can put it in any single device, it can tell you where you are anywhere on the planet like within a fraction of a meter. Like, what the hell, what could be bigger than that?
Chris Hayes: It still feels like magic to me, honestly.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I’m old enough that I remember printing out directions
Adam Conover: Yeah. No, I did, too. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And driving, and it still feels like magic to me. I mean, I guess the question is like, what is the theory behind when government works and when it doesn’t? Like, why is it good at some things and bad at others? What are places where it provides services really smoothly and other places where it doesn’t do that? I’m curious how your ideas about that, at a broader theoretical level, develop through this process.
Adam Conover: Absolutely. I mean, so one of the things that make concluding the show very difficult is that you really can’t come up with a single theory of government, once you are looking at it on the level we are, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: This show is anti-cynicism, but it’s not uncritical, right? Like, we go through every single one of the positive stories I just told you. We tell a negative story about the National Weather Service is incredible. FEMA is a structural embarrassment that results in the deaths of thousands of Americans every hurricane season.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: The USDA has been in bed with the agriculture industry and with ruinous effects on our health. DARPA, which helped create the GPS system, is responsible for the deaths of countless civilians because they invented Agent Orange, you know?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: So half of our show is dedicated to those examples.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Your show’s position is GPS, good; Agent Orange, bad. That’s your hot take?
Adam Conover: It’s a little bit more complex. I mean, yes, but except that, look, we have GPS. And DARPA is a military research agency. It’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. All these things were invented. GPS was invented to help target missiles. Like that’s what it’s for, and then figured out, “Oh, we can open this up to civilian use and that’s going to be great.” But a persistent pattern in our government is that we invest in research that helps us kill people, literally.
That’s why we know the structure of the atom is because the U.S. government wanted to build a giant bomb. And we have decades of high energy physics as a result of that decision, that also led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And so we have to grapple with that duality. And so a question that we asked at the end of that episode, which is called “The Future,” why do we always imagine a future where we have bigger blast of weapons, where we’re killing each other in more efficient ways? Why is that what the government’s research power is put towards rather than just saying, “Hey, how can we fix housing,” right, with better research, et cetera?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: Why don’t we invest resources there? We’re trying to give a more complicated view than this good, this bad, or government good, government bad. What we do identify are that there are services that the government provides that cannot be provided any other way, such as true public goods. True public goods can only be provided by an entity that serves at the pleasure of the public, and that whose incentives come from public support or lack of public support. That’s one thing that government does.
We also talked in our money episode, about how the government is in charge of how much money there is, right? And so, fundamentally, when you have a crisis like the COVID-19 shutdown, or any other similarly sized economic crisis, only the government can step in. It’s literally the only organization that do it. Like, Goldman Sachs can’t do it. Like, only the government can do it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: And only the government can make sure that those who don’t have power, those who don’t have resources are adequately cared for. That’s another piece of the public, only the government can ensure that. We talked about, for instance, in medical research, that the NIH, the National Institutes of Health is responsible for most of our greatest medical research advancements. And they research things that nobody else will. For instance, they’re on the verge of curing sickle cell disease, which is a disease that predominately affects African Americans. And Pfizer is not working on that because there’s no money in it, only the National Institutes of Health could.
And so, we make the case that these are needs that only the government can provide. Now, the government is still (beep) up at providing them a lot of the time. For instance, the government creates all of this money, right, out of thin air and injects it into the economy to make sure the economy doesn’t grind to a halt, and people are able to pay their bills. But that money didn’t end up in the hands of the people who needed the most.
I mean, you’ve seen the show, but I interviewed these two women who run a daycare, who received a total of $6,000 in government aid. And their daycare, which is a truly essential service working for underserved folks in South L.A., their daycare had to close. My production company which just makes television shows received more PPP loans than that. That’s a failure of the government to make sure that they got what they needed. Why did we get more? Because that’s the way the world. We have a fancier accountant at the bigger bank, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: So we have more, so we get more. That, unfortunately, is how capitalism works in the absence of government intervention. The government’s job is to say, “No, no, no. We’re going to change that dynamic and we’re going to make sure that those who need, the public that needs these services gets them.” It doesn’t always succeed at that, and there are many forces arrayed to stop it from doing that.
And that’s why we have to be eternally vigilant to make sure that we are always pulling the government back towards what it’s supposed to be doing. We need to be pulling it towards National Weather Service and fixing FEMA. The FDIC is a wonderful example of a service that serves everybody, including those most financially vulnerable, and we need to be holding up those models and moving away from the ones that fail us.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What was it like? You’ve interviewed Barack Obama. I don’t know how active here Michelle were on the project. But that seems like it has its own gravity around that.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I’m just curious how you approach to navigate it.
Adam Conover: I’m really glad that you asked. Yeah, my biggest concern about taking on the project was this is a show about the United States government. Barack Obama is an executive producer of the show, right? Is there a conflict at the center of the show? But I looked at it much the same way as I did when I was on TruTV advertising supported television, and I was making television that is advertising supported. I mean, I’m criticizing advertising.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: So it was a matter of carving out a creative space on the show that would allow us to do an investigation with integrity that was not going to be seen or was actually going to be a mouthpiece for Obama’s political views. So one of the ways that we approached it was I made it very clear to them at the beginning that we needed editorial independence and that we needed to follow the stories that came out of our research room, and that it had to be my perspective, not his.
And as a result, they granted us that and stuck to it, although we did have to remind them on occasion, “Hey, remember, this is the agreement that we’re making, et cetera. We’re not going to take that note. Thank you,” but et cetera. And as a result, we did a lot of segments that Barack Obama would not himself have done on the show. We talked about the incredible increase in drone strikes under his administration. We talked about the concession that the Affordable Care Act made to the sort of neoliberal need to compromise with the market rather than actually put in place a muscular government solution, that sort of thing. So we did those.
But then the other thing I knew we needed to do was to let the audience know that this is the conditions under which the show is being made. So if we were just to make the show, and then people would see on the credits, “Hold on a second. The executive producer is Barack Obama. Something shady is going on here.” So instead, we did an opening scene in which I and him are transparent about it, openly discussed the conditions under which the show is being made, whether or not I say, “People are going to think this is pro government propaganda.” And he says, “Okay, well, leave me out of it. You go do whatever the hell you want. Your funeral, go have fun.”
Chris Hayes: Right. Which really worked and was a good idea, by the way.
Adam Conover: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: That’s my note.
Adam Conover: I appreciate it.
Chris Hayes: You get a lot of note from me.
Adam Conover: Look, I’m very happy to hear it because I spent two years sweating over that sequence, right, and making sure that it was doing what we wanted it to do. But then as we worked on the show, over the course of it, we were writing the show during the protests after George Floyd’s murder, right. And we were sitting there, I started thinking, “Hold on a second, I’ve spent my career raising awareness of issues like this. How the hell do we go about changing the government, right?”
I’m complaining about FEMA. I’m complaining about criminal justice, right? What the hell do we do about it? And decided we throw out an entire script and said, “We need to do an entire finale that answers that question or attempts to answer that question.” And I realized one of the best ways to do that would be to, frankly, confront Barack Obama about it because his election, for me, I was in my 20s in 2008. It was a big part of my own political awakening. I was not particularly engaged before his election.
Chris Hayes: Sure.
Adam Conover: And it was all right, we’re going to see change. This is what we’re voting for. And I am one of those voters who eight years later was like, “I didn’t quite see the change I wanted to. I’m not sure I feel optimistic about the direction of the country right now.” And I read his book. For example, there’s the degree to which his own account of why he made the decisions that he made at the time that he made them, doesn’t match the rhetoric that he ran on, especially in that first election, right?
And I wanted to, if only for myself, have that conversation with him, right? And say, “Well, your election was the greatest movement for political change. I have seen it in my lifetime on a national level. And yet, we didn’t see the change that we expected. And so how do we grapple with that? And what do we do about it? And where do we go from here?” And I’m really happy that he was able to have that conversation with me.
He’s an incredible speaker, and you’ve heard him speak for your entire life. And you can almost imagine, if you were to ask him any question, what his answer would be? You’ve heard him say the same things over and over again.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Conover: And I was like, I need to get him off of that rut a little bit. I need to give him a shove.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Conover: And I need to get to a different place. And in a very short period of time, we talked for an hour, but the interview was seven minutes edited.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: And I’m happy that I think we were able to do that and sort of get to a little bit more of a complicated, interesting spot and have a real conversation. I definitely annoyed him a little bit, just part of my goal, and was able to have a real conversation about this stuff. And that ends up being the kickoff moment to our exploration of criminal justice reform, why it’s stalled in America, and if we want to make a difference in it, how we can actually do that, which ends up being organizing politically on a local level rather than on a national one. It ends up being our big call to action at the end.
Chris Hayes: What is your vibe right now of things? Like, I feel I am really finding myself battling dark, pessimistic thoughts. I’m a person who generally both has a combination of I have generally anxiety, but I’m pretty optimistic and pretty upbeat person. I’m pretty happy person. I’m not a particularly tortured in person. And so, it’s been a tough to read.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I’m just curious, like having made this, now having launched it out into the world, and I found it like there was this piece in The New York Times the other day you might have seen which is about Houston and homelessness, where they just went through how the city had basically found homes for about 25,000 folks who had been homeless and how they’ve gone about doing it, and how it worked. Is it perfect? No. There are problems.
And it was one of these things where it’s just like I needed to read that at that time because I was caught in this, like it’s very hard to fix things. Nothing can improve. And I found your show that way too. Like, I think it’s a good time to release this out into the world. But I wonder where your head is at about these things.
Adam Conover: I mean that final episode is where my head is at. It was me trying to grapple with these questions about mass incarceration, criminal justice reform. Two issues that are really important to me. And it often feels so one step forward, two steps back when we’re tackling them. But the more involved I get in local politics here in Los Angeles, honestly, the more optimistic that I become, because the truth is that, yeah, the national situation is incredibly bleak. The political fundamentals are incredibly bad, in all kinds of countless ways that you talk about every week, we don’t need to get into on the show.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Conover: But the fact is, there’s a huge potential for change to be made locally. And one of things we talked about on the show is if you care about criminal justice reform, then your local city or county district attorney is by far the most important job, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And that is a job that you can organize to flip, if you are interested in that seat; or if homelessness is your issue, that’s something that you can build around. And so the reason we made that is that’s what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years.
In 2020, I basically tapped out of the national election because I was really disheartened by it. I followed it, obviously. But instead, I organized and campaigned for a local city council candidate for the council district I live in CD 4, for a woman named Nithya Rahman, who was running on a platform of not just “Hey, I want to change our district, but like, I want to literally inform the citizens of what a city council person does and what is possible, and just like prove that this is something worth caring about.”
And she mobilized a huge number of people in Los Angeles. And she ended up winning. She’s beaten entrenched incumbent opponents who had the support of everybody in the political establishment. And she won by knocking on doors, and by inspiring people, and by being honest and truthful about what she wanted to do.
And now, two years later, there’s a whole crop of new people who are running in Los Angeles. And I’ll be honest, we just had our primary election here as so many others. And honestly, I was, at first, really worried about that election. On that election night, I was really down about it because Chesa Boudin was recalled in San Francisco. And here’s the problem, every time we elect one of these progressive prosecutors who wants to not throw 16-year-olds in prison for life, for having an ounce of weed in their pocket, right, the entire society mobilizes against them and say, “Oh, they’re abetting crime and they’re doing XYZ.”
And we don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty of like Chesa Boudin could have done XYZ better, or Larry Krasner could have done XYZ better in Philadelphia. The point is we need these changes to be made, and the counter organizing against them is immense. And so that made me kind of disheartened. But the longer it’s been since that election day in L.A. and in California, the better the news has gotten because there’s progressive DAs in other counties in California who are doing quite well. We have one counter example, but the wave has not yet crested.
And we just had new ballots come in because they’re coming in over the course of many weeks here in L.A. We just had new ballots come in and it’s looking like a progressive sweep in Los Angeles. Like, literally, a woman named Eunisses Hernandez who was running in CD 1 here who, because there’s only two candidates, she’s not going to run off. So the primary is like do or die. That’s the whole election. And she just pulled out ahead, impossibly. Like, it was honestly a very, very long shot.
She pulled out ahead. Hugo Soto- Martinez is running in CD 13 is ahead. The progressive candidate for city attorney is ahead. Karen Bass has pulled against ahead of Caruso. I was incredibly worried about Caruso’s candidacy because —
Chris Hayes: Yes. I was seeing your posts about it.
Adam Conover: Yeah. I mean, it looked like, hey, this guy is running on law and order. He’s running as the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. This could really work, and it hasn’t. And that has made me really positive, where I had a moment where I was like, “Wait, is knocking on doors, is mobilizing people, is being full-throated about progressive policies that work actually going to make a difference, or is it going to be overrun by the tough-on-crime backlash?”
Chris Hayes: Backlash. Yeah.
Adam Conover: The same thing that killed the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War protests in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And so far here in L.A., we have seen that, no, the appetite for change, for progressive change is continuing and it’s really working. And here’s what I try to tell people, it’s extremely easy to feel pessimistic when you are sitting at home scrolling on Twitter, or no offense, watching MSNBC, right?
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Adam Conover: Because you are in a situation where you are powerless. But when you start organizing locally, if you find something you can show up to, if you start participating in your union, if you find a local branch of your local party to show up to, right, like find a committee to join, and you start meeting people on that committee, and you start being one of the people who shows up every week or even every month. And they say, “Oh, Chris is there every week. Hey, Chris, I know you care about this. I like what you have to say, do you want to help me organize this thing we got next week? Do you want to go knock on some doors? Do you want to do a fundraiser?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: And you’re like, “Okay, yes, I do want to do that.” Pretty soon you’re going to be too busy to be pessimistic, because you’ll have too much (beep) to do. And that’s the position I found myself in. I’m on like the board of my union now. I’m like putting together fundraisers, doing all these things.
And on the one hand, on my darkest moment, I’m like, maybe this represents a retreat for people who think that I do. Instead of working nationally, we have to work locally. We’re going to let the U.S. get balkanized.
Chris Hayes: No, I don’t.
Adam Conover: But on the other hand, this is all I can do.
Chris Hayes: I tell people the exact same thing. And I think like, ultimately, that’s what democracy is. Like, you start with like speed bump on the road and on your block because the cars are going too fast, or, whatever it is, you elect people. They represent you. You want certain things. You want certain priorities. You want certain values embedded. You want tangible material things. I 100% agree with that. I tell people things, very similar things, particularly when I meet viewers of ours who are caught on that kind of paralysis.
Adam Conover: And the way, by the way, that the right-wing has advanced its objectives is the same way. I mean, on national issues, guns, the thing that people misunderstand about the NRA is it’s not that they have billions of dollars, they do donate a lot of money. Sure, it helps.
Chris Hayes: No, that’s not what it is.
Adam Conover: They are organized. They’re an affinity group that is like a church, for the people who care. And they can tell people, “Hey, show up.” They don’t even tell people to show up, but people want to show up because they are embedded in it. And that simply does not exist for gun control, or for any of these other issues. And like, we need to build those systems. We need the politicians respond to organization more than anything else. Because if they know that people are going to show up, if they try something, then they’re going to have to respond to that.
Chris Hayes: So you’re doing a comedy tour now?
Adam Conover: I am. Thank you so much. Oh, my God, Chris, music to my ears that you would bring that up. Yes, I’m doing a stand-up comedy tour, my first tour after the pandemic.
Chris Hayes: Adam, we got to move some product here, okay? We’re not (inaudible) around.
Adam Conover: Nothing is more important to me than talking about this. Yeah. Right after this recording, I’m headed to Phoenix. I’m going to Boston, Arlington/D.C., New York, Nashville, going all across the country to different clubs. I got a brand new hour of stand-up comedy. I’m writing about attention deficit disorder, and the attention economy and all of those issues and some very personal stuff and —
Chris Hayes: That’s awesome.
Adam Conover: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I’m writing a book about that.
Adam Conover: About the attention economy?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Adam Conover: Amazing.
Chris Hayes: I just sold a book called “The Sirens Call,” about life and the attention age, and it’s all about attention. So come back, come see me in New York. Adam Conover is the TV host, stand-up comedian, creator and host of “The G Word” on Netflix that’s out now. It’s based on “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis who we’ve had on the podcast. Executive producers of “The G Word” include, as you just heard, Barack and Michelle Obama. He’s also the creator and host of “Adam Ruins Everything,” which now streams on HBO Max. He got a great podcast called “Factually.” And this was an absolute delight, Adam. Thank you for your work, and thanks for coming on the program.
Adam Conover: Thank you so much. Can I plug where people can get the tickets to the shows?
Chris Hayes: Please do.
Adam Conover: Adamconover.net/tourdates or just adamconover.net, you can find tickets to all my upcoming shows. Please come see me. I’d love to see you. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. This was an absolute blast.
Chris Hayes: Awesome. Once again, my great thanks to Adam Conover. We reached out to AccuWeather for comment on their relationship with the National Weather Service, something that he mentioned in the episode, for clarity on their mission. We did not hear back as of this recording.
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Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.