The Three Questions with Andy Richter - Chris Hayes

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

News Anchor and Author Chris Hayes joins Andy to discuss growing up in a diverse neighborhood, wanting to be an actor and director before becoming a reporter, and the showbiz of the news.

uh hey everybody uh this is a a fun one uh a fun episode of the three questions um because i'm talking to a real newsman uh chris hayes from msnbc is has been good enough to do this podcast and he's got to go be a news guy in like five minutes a newsman a newsman a newsman how are you i'm good andy how are you man i'm good i'm good um is that i mean what do you do you call yourself journalist do you call yourself yeah i say you know it's funny i Yeah. I say, you know, it's funny. I say when people ask me what I do, I say I'm a reporter, which is, I sort of think the way I still think about myself. Yeah.

So yeah, I say I'm a reporter or a journalist. That's how I, I still think of myself. I still do a lot of, you know, I still spend a lot of time like texting and talking to sources and trying to, you to... I think the thing that I love that I fell in love with about reporting right out of college was it seemed like this incredible hustle where you could learn professionally and people would pay you to learn as opposed to going to grad school, which was paying to learn. I was like, oh, wait, there's a way to... Rather than pay to learn, what if people paid me to learn? Right. And I feel like I've somehow managed to basically keep that going to get paid to learn.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the same thing in like the performing that I do. Take all the classes you want, but until you're actually on a stage in front of dispassionate drunks, you don't know what you're doing. You don't know the real. The rubber is not meeting the road. But you were born into a journalist-y family, right? Your dad's a reporter. No, my dad's, I mean,

I was born into a very political family, but my dad, so my dad was a Jesuit seminarian. So on his way to being a priest. Yes. In fact, had gone. So back in the day, they don't do this as much anymore, but he'd gone to a Jesuit high school, St. Ignatius, in the North Shore of Chicago. He was from the city of Chicago. the city of Chicago. And then he had immediately out of high school, like the age of 18, went and entered the seminary and sort of moved around because the Jesuits would sort of move their

cohorts around. And he was in Detroit, he was in Xavier, he was in Peru. And then he ended up- Seems shady, to be honest, moving people around like that. Yeah, maybe they were up to something I didn't realize, but he ended up in the Bronx at Fordham and his sort of small group of Jesuits got an apartment in an apartment building in the kind of South Bronx near Fordham that happened to be the apartment building that my mother had grown up in and was living in while going to Lehman College in the Bronx. And so they met as neighbors and then eventually fell in love. He left the seminary. My mom became a teacher and my dad became a community organizer. And he'd already started doing this kind of community organizing as a Jesuit. So it was a sort of natural transition, but they stayed in the Bronx. My mom taught in the Bronx and he did community organizing in the Bronx. And your mom's Italian, right?

Because that explains your crazy middle name. I know. People are always so weirdly surprised by my middle name. But it's Lofredo, which is just my mom's maiden name. Yeah, yeah. She's Italian. So she grew up right by a part of the Bronx called Arthur Avenue, which is the little Italy of the Bronx near Fort Amaso. Yeah, where all the good restaurants are.

I mean, it's amazing. It's really an incredible place. I grew up going almost every weekend. My grandfather actually had a mozzarella shop, like a deli, where he made mozzarella for years. That was what he did when my mom was growing up in Arthur Avenue. So yeah, I'm Italian on that part of the family. Yeah, yeah. And so it was obviously a politically engaged house and your mom, too.

And, you know, and I would I take it sort of liberal with it, but with a with a theological base. Yeah, right. It was it was interesting. It was a really interesting milieu because it was a very like, yes, it was very news and politics aware household. We subscribed to a bunch of magazines. We watched the news. We talked about the news. My mom's family had this tradition of like this very Italian tradition of like arguing politics at the dinner table. had this circle of friends who were all basically people doing kind of social justice oriented work in the Bronx. Um, and largely kind of Catholic inflected, I would say. Um, and it was also this period of time in which, you know, we, we were living in this very working class neighborhood in the Bronx, but you know, this was in the 1980s, late seventies, I was born in 79. Um, you know, the, the Bronx is in in very very dire straits uh yeah and and under pretty rough conditions um and these were a lot of people very committed to kind of

fighting for the neighborhoods there yeah and was i mean would you say that the neighborhood that you grew up in would could would you describe it as rough no i wouldn you describe it as rough? No, I wouldn't describe it as rough, actually. It was a fairly, no, it felt, you know, it felt pretty safe to me growing up. It was a working class outer borough neighborhood. It had been kind of this, it had been this very specific New York City, Bronx Irish Catholic, BIC, they called them. Over time, white flight and things like that, there were fewer and fewer of them. It was a much more non-white neighborhood. So it was diverse racially. It was pretty working class, but there were areas of the Bronx that had been really burned out by underinvestment, by predatory arson, basically by landlords. I mean, the whole Bronx is burning

was part of what they organizing against. And this was not that, but it was not, you know, it was not affluent. I mean, we would, you know, we would pick up my friend at the housing projects to like commute together to work like it was yeah to school so it was yeah it was but it felt stable it didn't feel in fact you know the funny thing i wrote in my second book i wrote about this the times when i felt much less safe in new york city as a kid was when i was 12 or 13 i started going down to manhattan particularly the upper east side um to go to this magnet school and that and that that school was like on the border of east harlem at a time when when you know crime was very high in the city and we just got we got

jacked all the time oh really just yeah just i mean yeah it was just a constant you know run your loot run your baseball cap. I'm going to take your jacket kind of thing. Um, so yeah, but I didn't, as a kid in the Bronx, I didn't feel that way. We, we had a pretty, um, it was such a strange and distinct world. I don't think I appreciated it at the time, but it was just this really interesting intersection of people from all different backgrounds. I mean, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Egyptian, Pakistani, dominican puerto rican filipino yeah egyptian pakistani um caribbean islands african-american multiple generations in the bronx sort of white ethnic um you know people were people's parents like drove buses ran delis worked as bank tellers um you know just this very kind of outer borough cross-section melting pot new york yeah world

that well and i mean i mentioned that having that as your childhood base that really informs your worldview at a you know at an early age it's kind of i think it'd be hard to come out of that being xenophobic you know or being you know close-minded about about different types of people i think it was so important and so formative for both my brother and i i mean i think about a few experiences i mean one i remember the experience of like going into people's these no one had a well that's not true a few kids actually had small kind of small houses but almost everyone lived in apartment buildings and that's that thing where you walk into an apartment building where you smell the regional cooking of of the building yeah and just like that feeling

of like curry or oxtail or right right you know korean food whatever it was and you know noticing that but then also like you know and you're a kid too so like you know you get that, but then also like, you know, and you're a kid too. So like, you know, you get that like sort of weird picky culinary thing. Oh, sure. Sure. You know, that's gross. That smell there's some, there's this foreign thing, but then also like quickly appreciating that that's just the way different, like that's the way different apartments smell. And that mine smells different. And that one smells different. People cook different things. And I eat different things when I go to this kid's house and this kid's house and his auntie makes this thing. And, and so, so there was that. And then there was also, you know, I think another thing that was really, that happened a fair amount in my upbringing. And it was a fairly, like,

it was very diverse, my elementary school, but I felt, well, I would find myself in fairly often in situations where like, I was basically the only white kid. Yeah. That would happen at like certain summer camps or like some free, my mom would find like a free program and like, there's like free tennis lessons in like the South Bronx tennis courts. It's like, you know, and I, and you know, I, I just, I remember that experience really well. And I remember being like a little discomforting or alienating, but also was really, I think, good for me. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's not like it made me, like, it's not like I have some superior enlightenment or something.

I just think that, like, it's just, I guess it's, I think it's not an experience that a lot of white people have. it's just, I guess it's, I think it's not an experience that a lot of white people have. I think that, I think that a lot of people of color will find themselves in life quite often in spaces in which they are the only one in the room. And the subjective experience of that is pretty intense. And obviously it's nowhere near as intense when it's reversed because of, you know, the way that racial hierarchy works, but just the subjective experience of noticing your own otherness in a space in which you're not the norm. And you're, is, I just, I think it's a really good, important experience. And I think it's one that I wish more people had. And I wish, you know, I mean, because I've been the only white person in, in a room full of black people maybe three times in my life,

and I'm 54 years old. Right. And that's, you know. Right. No, just that's the way, I mean, American life doesn't work to create, you know, those situations. Yeah. And I mean, I wish I had more of that, and I guess I could, you know,

I wish I had had more opportunities like that to get used to that more because I think it's important to have that perspective like you said you know which is very very catholic by the way you know the why the golden rule stuff which by the way you just have one brother i do yeah for some catholic can these people be if they've only got two kids catholic they're actually there's a real There's a real, it's a real, a real Vatican II kind of Catholicism. This is not. The pick and choose Catholicism. Yeah. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. I just think, cause I grew up, you know, the County that I grew up in

when a black family moved there, it was in a different town, but we knew that a black family moved into our County. was just you know that's just like and it's not that far we're an hour from chicago you know right it's not that far at all it just it out that whole region i mean i gotta say like that entire i moved my wife's from chicago and i moved to chicago after college and and you know new york has its own problems and i and there is a ton of segregation and you know racial disparity in the city um you know no matter what anyone says but the level of racial segregation in chicago really blew me away yeah oh yeah i was just like wait y'all have different parts of the city that you

go like and they're and they're like bisected by like enormous highways that were built. Yes. And that there are people. Yeah. And there are rumored to you can flood like it was always a rumor. Those can be flooded in case of a race war. That was one that I heard, like which I mean, of course, they're not going to be flooded. And but still everybody it was like everybody knew you know that that's like well and that was the and i will say that like again it's very hard i think it's very hard in american life for a lot of reasons having to do with both uh sort of the legacy and continued practice of white supremacy and um structural racism and racial heart care and all those things

all these sort of institutional factors. And then the policies that produce them, like creating sustainable and almost, I would say, like natural kind of multiracial spaces. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard to engineer because you're working against the grain. to engineer because you're working against the grain. And I just happened to luck out into a situation in which that was the kind of just where that was the, what I, the water I swam in as a child was just difference. Lots of difference, lots of people from lots of different places. Yeah. And I just think it was, it was good for me. And, um, and I wish, you know, I wish there were more. I wish we, one of our challenges, I think, in America in this period is to figure out how to engineer that more.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because it's hard to other people when you're sitting next to them, you know yeah and like the other thing about it too is that you know um suketta meta suketu meta who's this great um uh writer um you know wrote a book about sort of his family's journey he immigrated from from india and then he would later go on and write an incredible book about mumbai and his book you know he writes about his his building in queens which was a very similar thing right like you know russian pakistani jamaican like everyone he's like people were definitely like incredibly bigoted to each other yeah yeah he's like that doesn't it's not like that goes away like like right right people had tons of stereotypes people like it wasn't and it's not like know, there's some magical fairy dust you sprinkle on human beings.

And, and like, it's not like those differences went unnoted. And it's not like kids didn't say messed up stuff about. And it's not like people weren't known as like Johnny the Greek, you know, you know what I mean? Here comes Bill the Swede, you know. I remember some dude saying i remember it was it was it was like a puerto rican friend of mine saying something about a dominican kid that was like so racist it's just like my heart went my throat but it's like but and not to not to say like any of that's okay because it's not and kids should not do that and adults shouldn't do that but the proximity of the friction of the other relationships that are happening alongside that is very different than than that stuff happening

from afar or right online or representations you know then sitting in kansas and thinking you know what a dominican person is that's right and I think again because and I just don't want that it's important I think not to idealize like Metsa's book has a great riff on this because he's like very real about it yeah um but but I do think that like yeah living with difference living alongside difference and and being comfortable with it and and learning to kind of celebrate and when not to celebrate, accommodate, you know? That's really, it's a really important life skill. Yeah, and it's like, you know, you say it would be nice. I say more than be nice.

It's absolutely necessary. Like we got to start doing that, you know? And like, we got to start doing it yesterday. It's literally, it's the central story of American politics at this moment. I mean, it's the central story of American politics at this moment. I mean, it is the central story of American politics as moment is a kind of divide in the country between people who are broadly comfortable with that and people

who absolutely reject it. And the people who were in that first coalition broadly comfortable, these people are not like some, like they're not like enlightened. A lot of them, like totally fairly reactionary politics. It's it's not you know and then when you try to integrate their schools they show up the school board meeting and lose their mind so it's like yeah yeah i don't want to you know i'm not throwing a halo on anyone but in a broad aggregate sense the the basic accommodation to that in the general aggregate sense of we're going to be a country of difference and multiracial democracy or we're going to be a country in which we're losing our country.

Like that's the central dividing line. Right, right. Now, when you were growing up, I mean, you grew up in this kind of, you know, very activated family. Did you always have in mind that you would be doing something with you know politics current events you know civic issues i think i i don't know when i first started to say i mean i think you know when i was seven or eight i wanted to be a professional basketball player sure of course of course um i think yeah i think i started to feel that way um early 12 13 you know i remember early, 12, 13. You know, I remember like reading my dad's New York review of books. Yeah.

That's, man, what a jock. Yeah. So I remember that and I remember thinking like, that's kind of what I want to be. I want to be the kind of person who either is writing a review of the book or has written a book that is being reviewed and then has a caricature drawn of them by David Levine. So I had that. And then the other thing that happened, I would say in college is I started doing theater and that really like blew my mind and altered my aspirations. I think, you know, for a lot of my teenage years, I really wanted to be an actor or an actor or a director or a playwright or some combination of them. And that, that aspiration continued through college and even after college.

I think if, if things had shaken out differently, that might've been what I ended up doing. And of course you had your famous classmates.'t you didn't you direct lynn manuel miranda in his first i mean this a lot has been made of this yeah yeah i directed lynn and i lynn and i met when he was 12 when i was 13 he was in seventh grade i was in eighth grade we were cast together in a student written play called swingline 457 at which a dinner party where an unruly guest accidentally chucks a stapler out the window which killed someone on the sidewalk below and um that's pretty good for it oh yeah this guy rob sosan he was written by rob sosan and rob sosan still works as a writer today and was like a brilliant playwright at the age of 17.

yeah yeah um he wrote he wrote a book he wrote a play also called neon girly city i still remember to this day that centers on two like 19 year olds in vegas uh hiring a sex worker and being with her on the night that reagan was elected uh in 1980 like watching the returns come in which was also just like incredibly profound yeah yeah again this is a 17 year old play like right i know and such disparate things to glob together you know yeah so so um so lynn and i were in this play together and we we formed this very tight bond because we both would commute on this express bus uptown he would get off at the stop and in one at 207th and i go up to the bronx um and so then we just became extremely close and we worked on a million

things together and then by senior year he wrote his first musical, which I directed. So yeah, we, we were, we were super close, but there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of amazing, there are a lot of amazing people at that school and a lot of amazing, you know, theater that we were able to make. I mean, a lot of it terrible. I mean, I'm sure if I went back and saw it, I would absolutely think it was. But still you're doing it. I mean, that was was the most that was the most important it sounds like fertile like just like oh my god this place was surrounded by so many creative people and people continue to

this day you know it was so creatively fertile i think one of the things i mean it was an amazing place in many ways i've written about it in both my books because it was so formative for me but um you know one of the things i think that made it really incredible was you've got this school it's on 94th and park in the upper east side and you've got a school that's a five borough schools people come from all five boroughs they test across the city so for a whole bunch of kids it's like home is a far way away so there's just this like people are just hanging out around the school afterwards like making theater or going to the newspaper. Cause you're not, no one's going to run home.

It's like an hour and 15 back to, you know, Woodside or whatever. Um, and that I think was part of the, the incredible creative fertile atmosphere. Like here we are in the city. It's six o'clock at night.

We're like, we're in the theater. We've been here for hours you know and we're a bunch of kids left to our own devices very much so it was unbelievably laissez-faire yeah i mean i think arguably too much because i think a malpractice of some kind i think well no i think what ended up happening was that there's a little bit of sink or swim where it was a very what you mean it was a difficult and competitive environment and i think certain kids and i think particularly kids that are coming from um

poorer neighborhoods and and more and more difficult circumstances yeah yeah um were not given the support that they needed to thrive there because it was just kind of like all right and i think that you know in retrospect that's um, that was a real failure. Uh, but yeah. But for those of us who did, you know, swim, uh, it, it was magical. Yeah. You know, we were like little adults. I mean, we were, you know, I thought I was, I was 14 and like, I could just go anywhere in the city. I could walk across the park. I could take the subway to my friend's house. I could take the crosstown bus. I could hang a light and put a Leeko and focus it and I could figure out a soundboard.

And, but you know, it was just, you know, I felt like king of the world. I just feel like there's every, we can do anything. Yeah, yeah. Can't you tell my loves are growing and so what it's interesting to me that then theater when you say that theater changed your worldview did that just kind of give you the notion that broadcast journalism would be in your future i mean because ever in a million bazillion years i thought oh really never never so when when you decided to start being reported, did you put aside the desire to?

Yeah, basically that's what happened. Yeah. So it was, I got out of college, um, and moved to Chicago with my then partner, now wife, Kate. Um, you know, she and I started dating our freshman year. We've been together ever since. So, um, that's nice. 23 years or something like that um bless you

both yeah it is nice it's really it's been an incredible blessing in my life and um very special um it's it's very i think it's a very unique thing to form your life with someone you know i mean when i look back it's like we were we were kind of kids when we met each other yes um and we've kind of co-formed each other um in lots of really beautiful ways and like grown together um so we moved to chicago and i was sort of simultaneously pursuing these two tracks i was freelancing as a journalist trying to teach myself how to be a reporter yeah and then i was working with a theater company where I was trying to hustle and direct, assistant direct, read scripts. Not so much an actor? I was less interested.

I hit a certain point where in college I acted and I was around these profoundly talented performers. John Krasinski was a friend of mine in college. Oh, wow. Oh, that's right. He went to Brown. Yeah, I knew that. Yeah. John Krasinski was a friend of mine in college. Oh, wow. Oh, that's right. He went to Brown. Yeah. I knew that. Yeah.

In fact, I cast him in something that was sort of, I think it was really intense and wonderful experience. We did an adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which I had gotten obsessed with. And then I turned to a show of monologues. And then later when we left college, John bought the rice to an actually made a movie out of it.

Oh, wow. That grew out of that experience that we had working on it together. And so, but I, I, I found myself, I liked acting a lot and I love the rush of being on stage. Obviously, but I just felt like I was like fine at it, but not amazing at it. And I felt like, and it's crowded out there. And there's, but not amazing at it. And I felt like, man, it's crowded out there. And there's people who are amazing at this, who are amazing and beautiful and can sing.

And I'm fine. I'm fine. But it's just not. So I wanted to focus more on writing plays and directing. And maybe I think my dream would be to be an artistic director, likeustace, who's a runs the public and had taught at Brown. And I was basically working these twin tracks. And what ended up happening was that I just started being, being able to make a living writing sooner.

Yeah. Yeah. To the point where it was like, oh, okay, well, this is, this is now segwaying into like a real perfect,

like I can be a writer. Yeah. And do children come along at any point in here to sort of like force your hand one way or the other? No. I wrote for a while, and then we moved to Washington, D.C. because Kate got a clerkship for John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. And we still did not have children. Then she worked in the Obama White House. And then by that point – at that point, she was a lawyer. She was an established lawyer Then she worked in the Obama White House. And then by that point, you know, she was at that point, she was a lawyer. She was an established lawyer. She worked in the White House. I had started writing for the nation, the Washington Bureau of the Nation, and started appearing on MSNBC as just like a common talking head, essentially.

Yeah, yeah. And so we didn't, we didn't, she didn't get pregnant with her first child since until we were like 32, 2011, when she was finishing up the Obama House. Oh, okay. So we had a good, you know, we had 10 years basically of, we had a solid decade of being together, 20-year-olds together, both kind of hustling without that added responsibility. Yeah. My ex-wife and I were married for seven years before we had our first child. And we always referred to the time before our children as when we were single. Yeah. Meaning that like when we as a couple. Right.

We're just our, you know, our own unit and there wasn't all this extra. Sometimes think about like, you know, sometimes you get these flashbacks to those days like a saturday morning you know when you're 26 and like you wake up with your partner like 11 and they're like i should go get some bagels and yeah no so-and-so's hanging out at whatever for brunt like just right knocking around yeah yeah like having to figure out what you're gonna do with your day as opposed to having having these little creatures that say like here's what we're doing yes i have an agenda now why uh did you ever consider using your sort of civic mindedness your your you know interest in in what's happening and policy into onto an you know like actually sort of being involved in making policy or kind of being more on the side of what your wife was doing? Well, I think I used to think

about running for office a fair amount. Um, so I did think about that and I thought, I used to think, well, running for office would be kind of a natural merging of these different interests, you know, like the, you know, I'm a, I'm a pretty natural extrovert. interests you know like the you know i'm a pretty natural extrovert um i like talking yeah uh and and you're good at it i mean i you know i was a friend of i was just with friends of mine from high school some of my oldest friends and someone was joking me he's like and you figure out a way to talk for a living. I'm like, yeah,

talk for a living. But you actually see, I do the same thing, but I don't have to know anything. You got to actually know shit. Well, I don't know. I mean,

I think, yeah, I think that I, I thought for a while about running for office. But then I think partly I didn't, I didn't know the right sort of, I didn't go to law school. I thought about it for office um but then i think partly i didn't i didn't know the right sort of i didn't go to law school i thought about it for a little bit and then kate went it felt a little weird to also go like you know we were sort of doing yeah different things and she was like incredible at it and loved it immediately and um so i thought about doing that and i i i've never quite i there's some some part of it always some seems

attractive to me um but that was as far as it went i didn't i didn't really think about i really liked i think i what ended up happening is that i started getting further and further along as a writer yeah and i had this very rare life where I didn't have anyone really telling me what to do. I had editors and I had people, I had to produce a work product, but no one told me how to structure my day. I didn't really clock in. I wasn't going to meetings. And I just really loved that freedom. I was just kind of free and i had to work a lot i worked my butt off but i was just producing my work product every day yeah and the thought of like going into some organization to be an intern in the policy shop of the mayor or something yeah it just felt

like i would be giving up too much freedom to do it and so i just stayed with what i was doing because i don't know i was like it felt when I started making a salary as a writer, a staff writer, it just felt like I'd hit the jackpot. It's like, yeah, I call people up or I show up and I ask them what's going on. Then I take notes. Then I go and I kind of try to figure it out and write it up. And then I publish it under my byline. There's a direct deposit check that shows up every two weeks. That's my life and my job. This is as good as it gets. Why don't I do something else?

Yeah, it's a minimal amount of bullshit, which is a very, very serious concern. Hugely. Some people's careers are 80% bullshit. I mean, dude, I've been in meetings. careers are 80% bullshit. I mean, dude, I've been in meetings. I mean, I, even now today, like, you know, to this day, it's like, I have a very crystal clear work product. Like everyone knows what my work product is every day. And I've always loved that. I've loved that about, I love that about writing. Like the article publishes or it doesn't like you, like my, my work product is transparent. Yeah yeah and it's the same thing now

you yeah like you could think it's bad or it's good or somewhere in between yeah but you can't ask like what exactly did you do today yeah and or and yeah right and i mean and what's what else is what else is going on behind the scenes it's like no this is it this is the product yeah i didn't have like 90 meetings where we didn't decide anything yeah like i mean that's one of the things you know my current job is incredibly you know demanding and punishing in many ways although again let's be clear i'm not like you know i'm not a hospice nurse and i'm not mining coal you're not a longshoreman yes i am unbelievably privileged to do what I do. But, you know, it has its own, you know, it's a pretty punishing schedule to produce every day and to start from zero and to make an hour long show every day.

Everybody's day is the same, you know, the same length. And it becomes your life and it becomes your day. And unless you're some kind of like ridiculous, performative Pollyanna, you start to bitch about stuff because you know yeah we're all satisfaction is an engine you know so it's to me it's um but the one thing i like about it is there's still a real minimum i'm 42 i've made it to 42 20 years basically in the working world and like i'm not having a lot of meetings where we just like someone shows a deck and then we talk around each other and we don't make any decisions because like there's a show we got to make a show like yeah every meeting produces decisions those decisions are then executed and then every day no matter how anyone's feeling or what has gone on, at 8 p.m. on the dot, a green light comes up on the camera and beams us out to millions of homes across the country live.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, you can't be precious about it. No, you cannot. And you can't miss a deadline, and you can't rewrite something 40 times and you can't say uh this isn't good enough like right you got to ship the product yeah and also i imagine that that sort of minimizes competition among colleagues too i would think too that where it's not like or or does it yeah i mean i don't competition doesn't even enter into the picture in some ways because i find the i find the effort to make the thing so totalizing

yeah like there's there's very little space yeah you know to be even aware of what people will say sometimes it's like oh like what do you and you know what do you and lawrence talk about are you and it's like we just spend every second from the time we wake up like making a show every yeah it's like there's not a lot of water cooler i mean even before covid like it's not a lot like futzing around and like you know you're just you get up you start reading the news and you just walk through the process of the meetings to make the show that night yeah and that and that well and also that kind of autonomy and sort of direct line between your efforts and its result. Like, holy shit, are you absolutely wrong for politics now?

You know what I mean? I mean, I think, yes, I think that's right. I think it's probably spoiled me for that. My younger brother is a school teacher in Illinois, and he ran for Congress after because he took a group of students to see what was going to be Hillary Clinton's inauguration. And then, you know, they had to see Trump's inauguration. And he said, like, you know, they were sophomores in high school, I think, just kids crying because of the vibe. just kids crying because of the vibe and then he said then that the 180 the next day of of the the women's march uh or the you know that yep uh he said that it just inspired him and he ran for office actually in lauren on lauren underwood's district she oh that's right when yeah yeah and uh i just just a little glimpse into that and I had a hunch this is the way it is, but all you do is ask for money.

Yeah. Like when you think like somebody, that's what kills me about people that the chicanery that goes on to keep people in office in a, you know, a congressional seat in Indiana or something is they, their life is asking for money. They dial for dollars. Yeah. When's the yeah when's the when's the fun happen yeah and you also yeah you have to get so disciplined about that and you have

to um at some part of you has to it's really my i did a podcast with my brother about this actually because he's a campaign you know he's a political organizer yeah campaign manager and i one of my i have a podcast called why is this happening and of them, I just interviewed him about like, okay, like, what's it like to run for office? Like, walk me through the steps. Like I, we, you know, day one, like, what do we do? Like, he just, it's the whole hour is just him just being like, well, first you get the signatures. And then, and he talks about that, you know, the benchmarks, the lists, how you get the list and the, and the, and the crazy psychological cat and mouse back and forth game between the finance director and the candidate who never wants to do it and has to be like induced and hectored and chased around.

And like, it's like you can get some dinner if you do two hours of call time or let you do something fun. Like, and the whole thing is just a real, real bummer. Yeah. Yeah. No, it does not sound fun at all. And just because I'm a political loudmouth on Twitter, people are like, you should run for office. And I'm like, no fucking way. It's like, make my life one long PTA meeting? No, thank you.

You know. Thank you. Can't you tell my loves are growing? Well, now, how do you transition from writer to on-camera personality? Who's the first one that's like, son, you got to get on TV? Well, I got on, you know, we had this great PR person at The Nation named Ben Wiskita, who still does PR, and he was, you you know doing what PR people at print magazines do was hustle you on the TV I went on to C-SPAN Washington Journal

to talk about an article I wrote like on a Sunday morning at like you know 8 a.m. with the Colin show yeah yeah I'll never forget someone called in someone called in apropos of literally nothing in the article to suggest that maybe the solution to our garbage problem was to throw the garbage in volcanoes

yes and baba buoy to you too i was just like yeah um that's that's pretty far outside my air of expertise um but um actually that clip is still on youtube that's honestly that's i mean it's not far off from from you know shooting a nuclear missile at a hurricane exactly no that was the first i think i told that story literally to my staff the day that story came out um and then from there i think some producers at msnbc saw that clip and then invited me to be on the uh i was on oberman in fact the first time i was on oberman was when the first night that rachel matto hosted guest hosted for oberman and then you know i think basically what happened is um the thing i would say i would be curious what you think about this since

this is what you do for a living too. Like there's a few different ways to think about like the ability to talk on television. So basically the way I think about it is some people are real naturals at it. Yeah. Like some people we have on and I'm like, well, and I think I was, I was a natural at it. Like I, I just, I talk a lot. I like to talk. I was natural at it. The second thing I'll say is like, basically. You also, if I may say you talk in a very writerly way.

Huh? That's interesting. You do. You talk in a very writerly way and, and like a much more sort of intricately constructed sentences than most people exchange ideas with. Oh, well, I appreciate that. I never thought of it quite in those terms, but I think that there's a certain fluidity that was natural to me. And so I think they, you know, I have this experience too. We'll try someone out and sometimes it's like,

they were fine. And sometimes it's like, oof, that was terrible. And sometimes it's like, whoa, book that person again. So I think that was part of it. The second thing I would say is basically anyone can get good at it. It is not neurosurgery and with enough practice, you know, and you see this sometimes with athletes who are assigned to be TV commentators because of their, who they are. And in the beginning, it's like, oh my God, because they're just like,

don't have a natural affinity, but you know what? A year later, they're perfectly good. They're fine. Yeah. And the reason is basically, you know, aside from the question of like, you know, human disability or whatever, but anyone can talk like, yeah, anyone could communicate. We all do in different ways. So, and then there's like the third step, which is like mastery. Yeah.

And there's just a really interesting learning curve it's this is true for teleprompter too where you know some people are good at it naturally some people are struggle with naturally anyone can get pretty good and then being masterful at it is extremely hard yeah yeah yeah and i think i think the master the the masterful level is a, you can do it or you can't like either got it in you or you can't. I think I totally agree. That's what I mean. Like that last 20% like that, that you could get anyone to the 80%. That's yeah.

But the last, the last 20%, I think there's some combination of discipline technique and then just like natural talent yeah that that comes together it's like the difference between actors and movie stars like there are just movie stars that just and when you meet them it's just like oh yeah that's person that has is magnetic yeah just has magnets that draw your eyes to them and they're just you know you want to see him just talk and move around well i think this is true of you and conan and i think it's true of it's definitely you know it's true of um i think it's true of you know a bunch of people but but the the hardest thing to be to me the hardest thing about television the the master of this the the two people i think about all the time who are kind of like at the top of this are are op Oprah and Letterman, particularly late stage Letterman and, and, and Oprah now, which is like your body is processing adrenaline

and fight or flight stuff in all kinds of ways that you can consciously control a little bit by focusing on breath, but is largely subconscious and people that achieve a certain level of mastery and this is true of you and conan too like get to a level where all of that chemical stuff basically isn't happening yeah and your breath and your your your your sympathetic nervous system is functioning as if you were talking to a person yeah and that stuff is deep below your conscious mind and it makes a huge difference when you're listening to a person you may not be able to sort of consciously realize the difference between a person who's operating at that level but or who's not yeah but when you're in the presence particularly in broadcast of

someone like that martha stewart's another example yeah where it's just like holy crap like you're just like and and getting to that level is extremely difficult yeah uh just as a quick anecdote i was a guest on a uh short-lived will arnett uh sitcom in which margo martindale played his mother and at the it And it's very common on a multi-camera sitcom that all the cast gets into the makeup room, as usually the star is getting made up, and you do a run-through. And everybody just does a top-speed level

of all the recited lines. Margo Martindale was sitting on a chair and saying her lines at triple speed i it was still was like you just felt killing like yeah just everything she said was like i i didn't even like i forgot my lines because i was just watching her and it's a fucking sitcom it's not you know it's just the the those people are incredible now i do want to ask because you went from being you know socially aware young guy in a very socially aware family in a in a diverse background writer start getting on tv now you have a tv show i do and you got to get ratings and you got it you know

there is an aspect of your show that's show business because it's it's on television true yeah it's funny how do you how do you handle that like well it's a great question the answer well the answer is that when my i first had a morning weekend show that was very successful. That was successful, I think, partly because it was massively format breaking, but also there was no ratings competition really at the time. So it was able to first. Then I went to primetime April 1st, 2013. And basically the show immediately tanked ratings wise. And it absolutely destroyed my psyche yeah um it it was it was the

most difficult psychological period of my life which again nothing like having a country reject you yeah i mean again world's smallest violin, right? Right, right. And you know what? You know what I would, this is honest to God. I listened. One of the key things that got me through that period was Conan's Marin interviews. Oh, wow. Because he talks about that experience. Yeah.

In them. And I just found it so comforting and also relatable um of just that feeling of like yeah i'm being rejected and i'm i'm failing i'm failing publicly and there was something also about the fact that he came through it that made me feel like I'm not going to be consigned to like the dustbin of history yeah um and I think ultimately what I would say about ratings is that I've used this metaphor before but I think that I think when you get a tv show you think that you're getting the keys to a sports car and you're just going to go and drive where you want. And what you realize is that you just got a sailboat and you can't just, it has no power under its own. It only goes somewhere because the wind and the wind

is audience attention. And if you can't find where the audience attention is blowing and then channel the audience attention and tack around the audience attention to move the show and the boat where you want it to go, you can't be successful. Now, there are some people who don't care where the boat goes. Yeah. And so one thing to do is just chase audience attention. Yeah. And there are ways to do that that are successful. In my case, I really care where the boat goes. Yeah.

But I can't make it go there by myself. And I sure as hell cannot steer into the wind. I can't say, hey, America, here's a thing you're not paying any attention to. Yeah. And I'm going to make you pay attention. Yep. I could pick my spots and sometimes do that. Yeah. And you do, I've, I've seen it before. Yeah. And I, I'm now, again, I'm a, I've, I've, I'm a sufficiently, I'm a sufficiently accomplished, you know, sailor now that I can do that. But that was all very difficult learning. And, you know, we spent the first two or three years where the broader context was that interest in political news had fallen off a cliff.

Barack Obama won a second term. That story was kind of over. You know, I mean, it wasn't over. He was still the president, but it was like. I know what you mean. A certain narrative tension had left the story yeah yeah and in the absence of that narrative tension what you saw across all political media was you know stuff just fell off the table yeah and so that was the context we were in and it was brutal and we were you know

we were not rating very well we I was constantly having stories written about how I was going to get cancelled and they were trying they were talking to this person or that person just totally mess in my head it's absolutely brutal and are their executives throwing all kinds of unhelpful suggestions at you of course

yes yes yes yes you're getting noted to death and it's not even like it's like you want them to, you know, go away, but it's also like, it's not really working. It's like, you know, and it was, it was, I'm still, I'm still genuinely like psychically scarred from that period. Yeah. Like for real. It really, but we came through it. We sort of, I think, I honestly think to be honest,

the only reason I survived that period, two reasons. One is we kind of became a to-do list item that never got crossed off. Yeah. You know, those things that are in your to-do list that like you look up, you're like, holy shit, that's been been there five years like yeah it's like there was always some post-it somewhere like replace chris hayes at pm i know i i yeah i've been there it never quite got yeah it never got executed and then i think the other thing honestly was that we were always i think myself and our staff my executive producer dennis horgan

who deserves a huge amount of credit i think for our survival were everyone knew how hard we were working how much we wanted it to work and how generally like decent we were as colleagues to work with. Like people did not have it out for us. Right. They weren't like, Oh, that asshole. Right.

Right. I mean, some people had it out for us because they wanted to take over the slot. Yes. And that's just normal. That's just, you know, normal Machiavellian.

Yeah. That's just like, yeah, that's life. You know, that's just, that's what it is. But I think the fact that it was clear to everyone that we were, that no one was working harder at it or trying to figure it out more than we were.

Yeah. That combined with time. And then honestly, the context just changed, you know? And then all of a sudden the show became quite successful. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think a huge part of that was luck, a combination of luck context. And I think I also, we talk about that, that learning curve was there was some, some level of performative comfort that I achieved.

Yeah. That probably helped. Yeah. No, it takes a while to learn how to be on tv you know yes lauren lauren michaels who whatever you want to say about him is an amazing font of aphorisms and one of his is uh the longer you're on tv the longer you're on tv absolutely and it is true it's just you get on there and nobody longer you're on TV. Absolutely. And it is true. It's just you get on there and nobody goes. It's like you say, they don't go to the trouble of taking you off

because, well, he's already there and they're doing all right. Okay, whatever. Leave him there. And also because you get A, you get better and people get TV functions, particularly TV personality relationships.

They're operating. I mean, I have a whole riff on TV, particularly TV personality relationships, they're operating. I mean, I have a whole riff on this that I'll spare you. But like the short version is that we evolved as hunter gatherers on the Savannah in which we produced extremely powerful facial recognition as a means of telling who our kin are. Yes, yes. Not killing each other and and that basically like that like the one of the oldest pieces of our brain circuitry is functioning when we see a person particularly night in night out it's like oh that's kin like they'll share food with me i'll share food with them you know yeah? And that's a powerful thing. That's a tough thing to break. Yeah.

Yeah. Biological imprinting. Yes. The secret to TV success. Well, I got to get you out of here because you got a show to do. So just to kind of wrap up, you know, this is, in this podcast, we like to kind of have people say like, you know, you started out, you know your life is is a very successful interesting life of adjusted expectations and and i wonder like what has that taught you and i mean and what it what from that arc do you like do you feel like sharing when because people always ask

when you're when you're doing good they say, how do you do it? They always want advice. I mean, honestly, the honest answer is an enormous amount of privilege and luck. That's the truth. true yeah yeah um i think the other two things i would say are i think that it has borne me pretty intense rewards to be a person who is generally an affable and polite kind person yeah um it's not to say i don't get angry i don't you know whatever yeah i think generally like on the how is he an asshole spectrum um i'm i'm not really yeah

and i think that's really because there's a lot of people who are absolutely like absolutely and also that's the way that's the way the wind blows when you're on tv and and you get surrounded by people that want to make things happen for you if you don't work against it you will become a dick yeah yes no oh my god it's like yeah television success is like a someone running an experiment to see if they can turn you into a psychopath yeah yeah it's like yeah here let's just like have a lots of strangers have opinions about you yes and make you simultaneously feel like omnipotent and desperately needy. And garbage. Yeah.

What if we combine unceasing neediness with enormous ego and just pump them into your brain? What will happen? And the answer is you'll become a psychopath. Yeah, you become a lunatic. So I think that not being a psycho. And then the last thing I would say is that I will say this about, I think like, you know, to quote Shakespeare, like to thine own self be true. Yeah.

I didn't, I never, it was hard at times and I felt really pulled at times, but I never gave up on who I am. I, you know, I, I am who I am. I believe in what I believe in. I say what I say. I think I've gotten better at like, you know, certain broadcasting technique things, but I never, I never was like, well, whatever. What do you want me to be? Yeah.

And I'm so happy that I didn't because it felt tempting to do that at times. Yeah. And I don't, I've never, I've never felt that people do that. I mean, it's a different, it's a different side of television, but I've never felt that people that I've never encountered a person that did that, who said, let me be who you want me to be ever ends up. It's exactly right. Yes. They always end up in absolute fucking misery.

Absolute misery. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And there are some people who get successful that way. It's not that that's like that. That is a way that that's what I mean. It can work.

Yeah. It can absolutely work. Absolutely. It takes a psychic toll for sure. Yeah. But you basically have just given yourself yeah i i call it the commodification of the self yeah like you take the deepest part of you and whether you know whether you know it or not you're giving it to somebody to be printed on t-shirts yep and that fucks you up you know so don't do that kids don't do that, kids. Don't do that, kids. All right.

Well, Chris, thank you so much. This was a really, really incredible conversation. Thank you for having me. Oh, thank you. Sure. I was happy to, and I was excited that you said yes. So go give him hell tonight. I will. All right.

Thanks, Chris. And thank all of you for listening to this episode of The Three Questions. And we'll be back next week. Big, big love for you. The Three Questions with Andy Richter is a Team Coco and Earwolf production. It is produced by Lane Gerbig, engineered by Marina Pice, and talent produced by Galitza Hayek. The associate producer is Jen Samples, supervising producer Aaron Blair, and executive producers Adam Sachs and Jeff Ross at Team Coco,

and Colin Anderson and Cody Fisher at Earwolf. Make sure to rate and review the three questions that Andy Richter on Apple Podcasts. Can't you tell my love's a-growing? This has been a Team Coco production in association with Earwolf.