In the legal world, there are principles of conflict of interest, and there's also a question of an appearance of impropriety.

I would have wished the president had not gone down that road because at the very minimum, there's an appearance that I would rather he not have not have opened the door to.

I got to tell you, Donald Trump says things frequently that I wish he wouldn't say.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, today we're doing something new and different, which is exciting.

It's exciting. If you are listening to this, you probably have read who today's guest is. That's in the title of the show.

And you're probably thinking, I really would like to listen to a little Ted Cruz on my commute.

So you are in luck because that is what we are delivering today.

More seriously, this is the first of this fall's live with pod tour. We're doing four different dates.

This is the first one where I do a live podcast, one-on-one conversation in front of an audience.

The next one is coming up in October and tickets to that are available, but going very quickly.

That's going to be Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel Monday, October 21st at 730.

If you go to ticketmaster.com search Chris Hayes, you can find tickets to that.

I'm going to be talking to the amazing Adam McKay, who is the genius behind everything from Anchorman to Vice to the Big Short.

And an incredible sci-fi author Omar El-Akkad wrote an incredible book, American War, about a future civil war that happens under conditions of climate change.

So that's the next one that's happening. It's going to be very different than this one, which you're about to listen to, which is a conversation with the Ted Cruz.

And I've seen people say to me, like, why did you do a conversation with Ted Cruz?

And I feel like about it is, he is an interesting guy. He is a United States senator. We don't really agree on anything.

We have spoken to people across all different kinds of ideologies and political valences and backgrounds and forms of expertise.

We've done freshman Democratic members of Congress. I don't think that with Pod is a podcast that I would turn into a weekly talk with a Republican senator.

But I also thought, like, this will be interesting to try to see. Basically, I went into a thing like, here's a very obviously a very smart guy, who to me is a sort of fascinating figure in these times for this reason.

What conservatism is in the era of Trump is incredibly up for grabs.

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