Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and author who studies AI’s effects on work and education. He frames AI as a co-intelligence and explains where agentic systems are already reshaping software, business workflows, and household tasks. He walks through diffusion patterns, risks around rapid capability gains, and how organizations and education may need to be reorganized.

Derek Thompson, Atlantic writer and author of Abundance, offers sharp takes on AI and its societal ripples. He explores why AI scares us differently than past tech. He weighs models of automation—permanent displacement versus augmentation. He probes rapid advances, where AI actually helps, and who might end up holding power and profit.

A new AI miniseries is introduced that probes what artificial intelligence actually is and why it matters. Conversations will examine rapid adoption, commercialization pressures, and risks to paid labor. The series promises diverse expert perspectives on power, profit, and progress in an AI-driven future.

Molly Crabapple, artist and author of the NYT bestseller Here Where We Live Is Our Country, recounts her seven-year dive into the Jewish Bund. She explores archival research, Yiddish culture, and the Bund’s vision of building socialist life where Jews already lived. Brief, vivid stories cover interwar organizing, resistance in Warsaw, and debates with Zionism.

Zohran Mamdani, NYC mayor and progressive former state assembly member, talks big-city solutions with a practical bent. He explains pothole politics and connecting services to trust. He outlines plans for city-run grocery stores, universal childcare, housing preservation, and worker protections. He discusses public safety trends, immigration responses, and taxing the wealthy to fund public goods.

Ben McKenzie, actor-turned-director and author who made the documentary Everyone is Lying to You for Money, digs into how crypto became a vector for scams. He traces pump-and-dumps, rug pulls, stablecoins and political money. He also explores cultlike communities, real-world harms like addiction and crime, and why regulation matters.

Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and veteran Latin America reporter who wrote a biography of Che Guevara, joins to unpack the Cuba crisis. He traces the impact of fuel cutoffs, historical ties to the Soviet Union and Venezuela, shifts between Obama and Trump policy, and the real risks of U.S. pressure and potential intervention.

Antonia Juhasz, investigative journalist and energy specialist focused on oil and geopolitics. She discusses the risk of a global oil supply shock from the U.S.-Iran conflict. She frames fossil fuels as weapons of war, explains market panic versus physical supply, and traces how industry and politics shape price pain and policy.

Tamika Tremaglio, former NBPA executive director and current sports consultant, breaks down the WNBA's landmark labor deal. She discusses rapid valuation growth in women’s sports, why live sports hold premium value, the impact of NIL and mismatched rookie pay, the need for gross-revenue sharing and transparency, negotiation dynamics and public pressure, and mental health and gambling risks facing players.

Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who studies airpower and coercion, discusses air strikes, the seductive illusion of precision bombing, and the risks of escalation. He covers leadership decapitation, why air campaigns change politics not regimes, the pivotal escalation risk of ground troops, and the catastrophic consequences of state collapse.