This week, Inside the Hive welcomes special guest Jon Batiste, leader of the Stay Human Band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Hot off his Golden Globe win for his work on the score of Pixar’s Soul, Batiste's latest album, We Are, represents a vivid turn from straight jazz into a joyful, danceable pop and neo-soul. It's also a bold declaration of conscience: catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter movement of last summer, when he rallied protestors with an ad hoc street band, Batiste wanted to deliver a personal statement on his own experience as a Black man in America. “We have to hold ourselves accountable to the things that we profess to believe,” he says. Batiste collaborated with 200 musicians, producers, and friends, including Quincy Jones, Mavis Staples, and even author Zadie Smith, with whom he held regular singing sessions over Zoom at the height of the pandemic. Here he recounts his own musical evolution, from Louisiana, where he grew up in a storied musical family, to New York, where he studied jazz piano at Juilliard and later developed what he’s come to call “social music,” a sound that draws on, in addition to New Orleans jazz, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Wu Tang Clan and even Bjork to find a common humanity in a time of division.

On this week's episode, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox extoll the virtues of having time to talk about actual issues--confirmation processes, the minimum wage, Potato Heads. Plus: what the future could look like for the Republican party and a very special superfan email that will make your week.

In this double feature episode of Inside the Hive, cohosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox interview rising Democratic star Joe Neguse, Congressman from Colorado, about last week’s impeachment trial of Donald Trump and what was and was not achieved after Republicans refused to convict. Neguse takes us behind the scenes with the impeachment managers, including the controversial decision not to call witnesses before a final vote, and considers what lessons Democrats should draw from it. That's followed by Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who talks to Hagan about the state of emergency in Texas and the intransigence of his former rival for Senate, Ted Cruz. O’Rourke lays into Cruz, who flew to Cancún during statewide blackouts: "I don't know how much we were expecting from him to begin with,” he says. “That guy wants nothing to do with government, or at least our form of it.” Whether voters, suffering from food shortages following a freak snow storm, will make the GOP pay—and create an opening for O’Rourke to run for Texas governor in 2022—remains to be seen. But O’Rourke finds optimism for the country in new leaders like Neguse, who he calls “an all-time American hero.”

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, NBC News's Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins talk about the roots of the disinformation that gets planted online, fed on social networks and tech platforms, and spread all the way to Washington.

This week, Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, joins Inside the Hive to talk about his campaign to steer the GOP away from Donald Trump, the QAnon conspiracy cult, and the insurrection of January 6. In advance of an impeachment trial in the Senate, Kinzinger has allied himself with Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney and voted to remove Trump ally and QAnon adherent Marjorie Taylor Greene from her congressional committees. But he acknowledges a tough battle ahead, not least the struggle to bring Trump’s base out of the “fog” of disinformation, comparing the current crossroads to the morning after a Friday-night “bender”: “The easy answer is to drink a Bloody Mary and just feel a little better and start up again,” he says. “Or you can take a look at what you did and…bear the pain a little bit.” The congressman recently started a PAC to support “country first” Republicans and predicts that sanity will prevail and Trump’s support will deteriorate within six months. “[Trump] doesn't have Twitter, he's not blinding people,” he observes. “And I think folks are gonna wake up … and say, ‘The party of Trump is not the party that's going to be in the majority of the future.’”

Nick Bilton stops by Inside the Hive to talk about his upcoming HBO documentary, Fake Famous, about a social media experiment that explores the influencer economy, but not before discussing all the ways in which people are trying to get COVID-19 vaccines, and how Joe Biden’s administration is trying to correct course.

This week, Inside the Hive co-host Joe Hagan talks to New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow about his provocative new book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, which proposes a reverse migration of young Black people from northern cities to the South to try replicating what Stacy Abrams achieved in Georgia in the 2020 presidential and congressional races. Post-Civil Rights empowerment for Black populations has failed to materialize, argues Blow, with racism as pernicious, if not more so, in the “liberal” north as the south. The only way for Blacks to claim true power, he says, is through self determination—creating large Black population centers in places like Atlanta and turning the political tide in their direction. Blow paints a searing portrait of fair-weather liberals whose BLM protests last summer he likens to "a social justice Coachella” that ultimately failed to deliver policy changes. “Somehow Black people are supposed to pat white people on the back and say, ‘You're getting there, I'll keep waiting?’” he says, calling Dr. King's dream of white and Black children joining hands a naive vision. "I have three children in this world,” Blow says. “The idea that they can still be fighting some form of the thing that I'm fighting today, when I am gone from this earth, is insane to me.”