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- [00:01]
Toray
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. When I envision the end of the world, I imagine flaming rocks hurtling down from the sky and pools of lava in the streets and the world descending into chaos. While Joy Reid is on tv, as calm as ever, delivering the news until the studio burns out. I'll be here.
- [00:56]
Joy Reid
I'm on cable.
- [00:57]
Toray
The studio is surrounded by a ring of fire. We have Miguel Almaguera outside in the flames. Miguel, how are you? Joy, I'm dying now.
- [01:05]
Joy Reid
Let's go to Ron Mott, who is not Ron Allen. You know, they're interchangeable.
- [01:11]
Toray
Joy. Joy, it's quite warm, Quite, quite warm out here. Back to you. Even if the apocalypse hasn't started yet, being a cable TV news host is. Is tough. You're consuming tons of information. You're trying to deliver it in a way that's both fair and compelling. You're constantly under pressure. You feel pressure to get the story right, pressure to broadcast live to hundreds of thousands of people, to be fast with new information, to not only be fair, but to be perceived as fair and to be compelling and get good ratings. It's a hard job to get right. And. And one of the best in the game is my friend Joy Reid. She's the host of AM Joy every Saturday and Sunday morning from 10am to 12pm on MSNBC. And she's a constant guest host for Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. So she's on the air all the time and she's always on top of every fact. And she's witty and she's fun and she's unflappable in any situation. If she seems like the kind of sister who reads the whole book and all the footnotes and then dances till late at a Brooklyn house party, it's because she is. Not only is Joy a fantastic broadcaster, she's authentic. The person you see on the air is the person you get off the air. And today she's going to talk about how she does it. This is Toray Show. I'm Toray, and each week I talk to successful people about their journey. What helped them rise, what do they know that could help us, and how did they deal with failure. I want these conversations to be valuable for you. I'm talking to Actors, rappers, business stars, painters, writers, directors, and today, a TV news star, Joy Reid. There's a lot of really interesting stuff in this conversation. Like many black people in TV news, Joy takes her position very seriously.
- [03:05]
Joy Reid
Because I do feel a deep responsibility. I have 90 year old women coming up and I have teenagers coming up and saying, I watch you on tv. And that to me is a responsibility because there just ain't that many of us.
- [03:18]
Toray
We know it's important to see black faces doing the serious job of delivering the news. And if you're one of the few black people who can get that job, you know it's a big deal and you have a lot to live up to. Joy does the news in a way that makes her audience proud to see her up there. It makes them love her, partly because she understands at a deep level the difference between being fair and being balanced.
- [03:42]
Joy Reid
Fair is saying this individual person likes to drink strychnine. It is incredibly dangerous, but this is what he likes to do. Balanced is saying, some people think strychnine will kill you, other people say it is delicious. They're not the same thing, right? I mean, it's fair to.
- [04:01]
Toray
Other people say the science is still.
- [04:03]
Joy Reid
Out, the Science on Strict 9. So I always felt like I owed fair. I do still. I owe fairness, including to the Trump side, right? I owe them fairness, but I definitely don't. I'm not in the business of false balance because balance doesn't give the audience anything. Balance is saying, here's A, here's B. You figure it out.
- [04:22]
Toray
You figure it out. We talk a lot about what makes Joy great on the air and get a lot of info about dealing with pressure on TV and what it was like for her to find out while she was on the air that her show, the Reid Report, had been canceled. That was crazy. And if you're wondering how Joy even got into TV in the first place.
- [04:42]
Joy Reid
And the way I actually got on TV was before I had the griot job in 2010, I was vacationing with my family in New York. True story. We're up in New York. I emailed her assistant and said, hey, I'm in town, would love to have lunch with Yvette. We have lunch. She said, what do you want to do? Same question you asked, what do you see yourself doing? And I said, listen, you know what? I grew up watching the McLaughlin Group and meet the Press. I would love to be on TV commenting about politics. I would love to do it in msnbc. She said, what about tomorrow? And I was like, tomorrow she said, yeah. And I said, okay. And that's the other thing. Always say yes. Right? When the opportunity arises, say yes.
- [05:12]
Toray
You've got to be aggressive, direct, and super clear about what you want if you hope to have a chance to get it. But before you even get to that point, you've got to have a good relationship in place with the person you're going to ask. Joy is expert at creating those sorts of relationships.
- [05:29]
Joy Reid
I don't like networking. I don't. I don't like the term. I feel like it sounds like using people and pretending to have a connection with them when you really don't. You just want something. But real networking is just having a relationship that later on allows that person to not mentor you, but sponsor you. A sponsor is somebody who'll make a call, right? Or give you or really help you. I think the ask comes after the relationship.
- [05:50]
Toray
That's great advice. We dig into a lot here, including what she did after her mother died just before she was about to go to Harvard, and how that forced her to grow up real fast. But we start with how Trump changed tv. The Trump era has provided extraordinary challenges for you cable news hosts, right? Because, I mean, before you had surrogates would come on and they would make their talking points and you may disagree with them, but they would make them in polite ways. They wouldn't outright lie, they wouldn't gaslight, and we could talk to them. The Trump era, it seemed like there was a consistent playbook. We want you to filibuster, want you to lie, want you to say crazy stuff. If the host says, you know, this is really important, say it's not important, it doesn't matter. And it, and it seemed like you and everybody else had to deal with them, were very much triggered, but you had to do your job just the same. So how do you keep doing the job when the person you're talking to is saying insane stuff and filibustering and, and lying and on and on and on?
- [07:12]
Joy Reid
Well, first of all, it is true that the strategy of the Trump campaign and now the Trump administration is very different from other politicians, for sure. Because what Trump is doing is he's constructing an alternate reality for his fans and for his followers in a lot of the same ways that Rush Limbaugh and other right wing radio personalities, frankly, did, and right wing media personalities and, frankly, Fox News. The job is to create, you know, we call it Earth 2 at work. That's the sort of term that we've coined for it, where what you're saying to the people who listen to you is don't believe anything but me. You know, I just had this conversation with Reza Aslan, who wrote, who's written this great new book on God, and he has an op ed in the Los Angeles Times that literally says Trumpism is a cult and that it has all the features of a cult. The leader is the only person you can trust. Nothing anyone else says is true and whatever reality the leader puts forward is reality and everything else is a lie. And in fact, the leader inverts reality and says, if you accuse me of conspiring with the Russians, the truth is you are conspiring with the Russians. Right. If you say I'm a crook, it's because you're a crook. If you say I'm lying, it's because you're lying. And Rush Limbaugh actually did that on the radio for 40 something years. So it's a right wing technique. And here's what People For People miss is that Donald Trump is a longtime consumer of that technique. You talk about the pitcher and catcher, so is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is in a lot of ways the average consumer of right wing media who is also now an expert purveyor of the exact same techniques he's been consuming probably for decades, because you can tell that he's not pretending to be this, this is who he is. So I think for me, I have the advantage over a lot of other people who do this job because I didn't come through the traditional school of journalism. I didn't even go to journalism school.
- [09:03]
Toray
Okay.
- [09:03]
Joy Reid
I actually, you know, I worked in local news for a while, but quit because I was against the Iraq war. So got out of that quick and then I went back in through talk radio. So I've been an opinion journalist, either a columnist or a talk radio person or a political operative. So I am an opinion journalist. I'm not afraid to say somebody's lying. It doesn't. There's this thing in reporters DNA that makes it really hard for them to say you're lying and makes it really hard for them to argue back to a guest. I don't have that.
- [09:30]
Toray
I think there's something particular to the liberal or progressive journalists who are extra afraid of being seen as biased. So they'll do this false equivalence thing which is supposedly gets them away from bias, but you're actually further cementing the problem.
- [09:51]
Joy Reid
Right. And I think that particularly when it comes to Hillary Clinton, who is almost a triggering figure not just for conservatives, but actually for liberals and for journalists who are perceived as liberal or don't wanna be. Right. So the attitude is, if I'm going after Trump, I'm gonna go after Hillary Clinton and Democrats twice as hard because that proves I'm not biased. I'm not particularly anti Trump, I'm anti lies, I'm anti corruption. And so if Hillary Clinton does something, I'm gonna go DEFCON 1 on that because that shows that I'm not really doing that to Donald Trump. I'm not being unfair to him and people, I think, in the media. First of all, I have found a visceral dislike for Hillary Clinton. It's not just Bernie voters. There are a lot of media people who cannot stand the Clintons. They find them corrupt, they find them dishonest. Their default is to say that what they're saying is a lie and corrupt. So it was easy to do that, to do that. Both sidesism, and I think both sidesism and false equivalency is a defense mechanism of journalists who feel like, you know, maybe we are the east coast elite, maybe we don't understand the heartland. Maybe we need to err on the side of being more generous toward conservatives than we are toward liberals to show that we're not biased.
- [11:02]
Toray
So you, Joy, why have you succeeded in the way you have? What attitudes or talents have allowed you to get to where you are?
- [11:18]
Joy Reid
That's a very broad question. And I'm really not sure. I actually think that my personality is in part due to having an adventure seeking mother. I owe a lot of it to just the way I was raised was by a very adventurous person. My mother, you know, left her country. She left British Guyana on a steamship when she was, I think in her late 20s, early 30s, went to England by herself, left her whole family behind in Georgetown, taught in England, got her a college degree there, was a teacher there, and then got on another steamship and came to the United States by herself, landed in, went to Iowa, of all places, to go to graduate school. Met my father, who was also an immigrant from Africa, from the Congo. They had my sister not married. Moved to New York, had me, then got married at some point in that, and then moved to Denver. She moved to Denver, they got divorced, she moved to Denver. So she's just been a very adventurous person. I have this theory about people who move. The connective tissue between people who succeed is not. Donald Trump thinks it's genetics. It's not. It's not something special about immigrants necessarily. It's not that, because I know that that's sometimes a question people throw At African Americans, there's a mindset of people who are willing to move, which is why the United States, right, had this jump start on Europe. Because the United States was formed by people who moved, people who got up and left. You have this dynamic and this dynamism in Chicago, for instance, that was built by black people who were in the Great migration. So people who got up and left where they were just had. There's something about the mentality of moving.
- [12:55]
Toray
What is it?
- [12:55]
Joy Reid
I think it's an adventure seeking personality. It's somebody who's willing to take risks, who's willing to risk what they have to get something they don't even know they're gonna get. It's people who are willing to give up safety and security for possibility. And so I think there is something to that personality type, whether it's in the music business, whether it's in business, whether it's on Wall street or whether it's in media.
- [13:19]
Toray
And that fuels your curiosity. You're doing that intellectually.
- [13:24]
Joy Reid
Exactly. I think if you have an adventure, seek personality, you also have a hunger for information and you're open to change. And I think being open to change means being open to change your mind. Liking to debate, being interested in debate, not being afraid of debate, not taking debate personally, which has really helped me in my job, both in talk radio and here, where I can debate a conservative for hours and never get mad. It doesn't bother me that they don't agree. So I think that my willingness to move around, physically move around the country and go to different places for opportunity that I didn't know would be there has helped me, I think my willingness to take risks on air, because look, in this business we're not supposed to show our opinions, but you know, I'm willing to risk that. And so I think my risk taking, which definitely I got from my mother, has been the biggest component. And the second would be curiosity, intellectual curiosity. Because otherwise when someone says something to you that you think innately is a lie, you won't take the risk of responding because you might be wrong. I'm willing to not only take the risk of responding, but I'm looking up in my phone and trying to google what. During the segment, during the segment I've done that on the press where I'm literally looking down trying to make sure I'm not on camera. Cuz I wanna know if what you said is bs and if it is, I wanna say it's BS before this segment is done.
- [14:37]
Toray
I mean, talk about taking risks on the air, live tv. What do you mean by that?
- [14:43]
Joy Reid
I think because in this business there is such an insecurity among journalists to not seem biased that it is considered risky to a say someone is lying. Because first of all, if someone gives you information and you don't know the answer, if you refute what they said, you could be wrong. Right. If you go after a political figure and call them corrupt and that story turns out not to be true, you could be wrong. We've just seen the reticence that journalists and that big media companies had to go after. Things like the Weinstein story. People were very, very afraid to touch that. It's a powerful person. They could sue you. People have been afraid to go after Donald Trump. They're afraid he could sue you. There's a lot of consequences that come with being forward leaning on information. But I think if you're willing to do it, the rewards of it for the audience I think are immeasurable because you're giving people actual truth. And I think the rewards for you personally can be good because it shows that you're a bit braver. Right. Than people expect journalists to be, which can be good.
- [15:42]
Toray
So you, I mean you do so much in terms of the television. There's quite often you will host two shows in a day. Cause everybody keeps taking vacation, plus you have your own show, plus you have the three kids, plus you have a husband and you've written a couple of books. What is your superpower? And I don't mean that in a flippant way, but what is the thing that is allowing you to get all this stuff done?
- [16:14]
Joy Reid
Sleep deprivation. Basically. I'm an insomniac and I mean that honestly. I don't. I have an inability to sleep on a good night. I'll get five hours.
- [16:24]
Toray
Okay.
- [16:24]
Joy Reid
There's some nights I get two and a half to three. Because I actually am an insomniac and I find that I'm most productive at night. So all my books, especially when my kids were younger and they actually needed more input from me. Yeah, I couldn't even start writing until like 10pm because everybody had to be asleep. And I needed the time to myself. And I always need like at least an hour to myself before I start writing. So I had to watch a little TV or do something else. I would like start writing at 10 and stop at like 1am So I have the ability to work late and I have the ability to work under very tight time pressure, which is really helpful. But I think my one thing, and I try to impart this superpower, if it is a superpower, to anyone else, is the ability to write. Writing will save your life, keep you employed. You will never be broke. You can always employ it. I can always write a script really fast, edit a script really fast, write a column if I need to. Writing is the thing that I actually do for a living. The rest of it is kind of ancillary to that.
- [17:20]
Toray
How much did you sleep last night?
- [17:23]
Joy Reid
So last night I went to bed early. I went to bed at midnight, but then I couldn't sleep. So I actually woke up at like 4 or 5 and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I was trying to get back to sleep. So I think I got four good hours and then maybe like an hour and a half on and off.
- [17:36]
Toray
So how does this not debilitates you?
- [17:40]
Joy Reid
It kind of does. Like, I, you know, I actually know that I'm sleep deprived and I'm not a morning person. I do a morning show, so it's very hard to get up in the mornings. I have to, like, take a lot of caffeine. So it doesn't debilitate me, I think, because I also get a lot of energy from doing what I do. I'll get a burst of energy right before I go on the air to do a show. I'll get a burst of energy just when I figure out what to write my column about and start writing it. And I. And I think I'm a little manic. So when I'm in that kind of manic phase, I can get a lot. I can be very productive. You know, I think a lot of people talk about this sort of manic depressive personality where you're the really low or really high. And I actually have that kind of personality.
- [18:16]
Toray
Really? I mean, are you hiding it? Cause, I mean, you know, when I was at msnbc, I saw you all the time throughout the day. There never seemed to be the low joy moment or the day when it's like, I leave her alone, she's feeling it right now. You always seem to be like high energy, in good spirits. Like, you never seem to be sleep deprived as far as I could see.
- [18:35]
Joy Reid
And I'm just manic.
- [18:37]
Toray
Just manic? No, depressive. Just manic.
- [18:40]
Joy Reid
Yeah, that could be good, you know, just crazy. No, I mean literally around. I'll tell you what, it's funny because you, I. You used to. You're. You were on at three and I was on at two and literally my crap, my mental crash time is about 2:00. At about 2:00 every day, I want to be asleep.
- [18:56]
Toray
Uh. Oh.
- [18:57]
Joy Reid
And so that show, what we used to do before when I had my dayside show.
- [19:01]
Toray
Yeah.
- [19:01]
Joy Reid
Is I used to turn on music. And I know you. You can relate to this. Cause you used to turn on music too, and hearing makeup. But I used to turn on music on this aisle that we sat with all these other people who were trying to work in cubicles and get up and literally dance and sing to get myself awake. Cause 2 o'clock is my crash time. And so for about an hour and a half between two and four, I really want to be asleep. So I have to really work hard to be awake. So doing that show was fun. That was a challenge.
- [19:27]
Toray
That was a challenge. So talk to me about developing your television skills. Like, how did you get to the position where you are now? You're. You're very quick, you're very comfortable, you're very personable on the air, these things. That's not the way you are when you're first on television. So how did that develop?
- [19:49]
Joy Reid
So I would say that the best training for cable news is definitely talk radio. Rachel Maddow comes from talk radio.
- [19:57]
Toray
Air America.
- [19:57]
Joy Reid
Air America. It's. It is really good training for TV for two reasons. One, because you do develop a certain fearlessness behind the microphone because you're not on camera. And so number two, you develop a certain fluidity at being a conversationalist because you don't even see the person you're talking to most of the time. You have to carry on a conversation. And number three, you get used to hearing a voice in your ear, which a lot of people don't realize is the most distracting and difficult thing for people to get used to is that voice of the people in the control room talking to you while you're talking. But in talk radio, they talk even more to you. So you get used to the sort of schizophrenic feeling of someone talking while you're talking and not answering them for some reason. It's. I can deal with it. It just. The talk radio training actually really helped me with that. And then I think the other thing that's helped me with t. Well, there's two. One is negative. One's positive. On the negative side, I had to get used to the prompter. To me, the biggest impediment to doing my job is the prompter. I hate the prompter.
- [20:55]
Toray
Really? Why?
- [20:55]
Joy Reid
I don't like reading it. It just. It's more natural to me to ad lib than to just read that freaking prompter.
- [21:01]
Toray
You're supposed to read it in a way that does not suggest you are reading.
- [21:04]
Joy Reid
Right.
- [21:05]
Toray
That you are just talking. This is quite a. This is a skill.
- [21:09]
Joy Reid
Yeah. Rachel Maddow is the best. She's extraordinary in the business at it. And you know what helps with the prompter, and I hate the prompter regardless. But what does help is you really have to be involved in writing with the prompt on that prompter. And there's varying degrees of that in the business. I mean, there are people who do a lot of it and there are people who don't do a lot of it, but I do a lot of it. I have great producers who write the segments and then I go in and I joyize it and make sure that it's, you know, we've talked about it in advance. We've really gone over what I want it to be. They've written it, they've produced it, and then I go back in and. And mess with it. I can read cold off the prompter and that's fine, but I just don't like the prompter as a thing. You know what I mean?
- [21:47]
Toray
But because you come from talk radio, you'd rather just improvise it. Do you sometimes tell them, like just blank the prompter. I'll just talk it out.
- [21:53]
Joy Reid
We. Yeah, and there's time, there's times when if we have like for instance, a breaking news situation or something new that we're adding, we just blank the prompter and just do it. Which I actually kind of prefer. But you do need. What you need the prompter for is that, you know, TV shows are a lot also about produced elements about going to this piece of video and making sure you get that piece in there. Forget things. Exactly.
- [22:14]
Toray
The statistic on the screen.
- [22:15]
Joy Reid
The statistic on the screen. And so you need great producers who can anticipate before the conversation part happens, what do you need the audience to see? And you may or may not remember all that ad libbing. You really need great producers. And I have fantastic producers. I'm very lucky. And you need them to be able to craft that segment and then jump into the conversation part, which is just freeform. But the setup is super important, especially now. I mean, we're dealing with people who think there are such things as alternative facts. So a lot of what we're doing now at my current show is trying to set up for the audience the actual truth. This is the. These are the facts. Refuting lies, you know, putting statistics out. And then we can have a conversation, including if it's with a Trump person. But before we get to them, we are going to tell you what is, you know, we can't make people believe it necessarily because people who are in that bubble don't believe anything we say. And they probably aren't watching anyway, though.
- [23:09]
Toray
They're probably not watching. You talked about fearlessness and so much of it is just being comfortable and confident. And for a lot of people, you know, the red light goes on and they get nervous and they get a little more paralyzed and they may not. They don't say the thing they really think, which limits them as a television performer. Whereas if you can say what you really think, what you would have said in the green room, you, you know, people may really resonate. You know, your words may really resonate. So how do you, joy, get to, when you first got there to get to that confidence of like, I'm gonna say what I really wanna say and nothing's gonna stop me and I'm gonna be fearless?
- [23:51]
Joy Reid
Yeah. I mean, and I think as a guest, I, I never had a problem doing that because I felt like that's what I'm here to do. You wanna know what I think? I'm gonna tell you what I think. If you don't like it, I'm sorry, you know, so as a guest, that's not a problem. As a host, when I first got the other Dayside show, and as you know, there's a lot more management on top of you and a lot more, you know, nervousness about dayside television being non ideological. And I am a very ideological person. Everybody who's, I mean, I've been writing columns, you know, for a long time. People know I'm a liberal, I've worked in Democratic politics. I've worked to try to, you know, prevent George W. Bush from getting reelected. In 2004, I worked with the Barack Obama campaign. I'm pretty openly a Democrat and a liberal. But, you know, when I was first doing tv, A, I had the prompter nerves, which was difficult to get, you know, past, B, learning to juggle all the things that television brings with it that are extra from radio, having the visual elements go up, working with all that sort of stuff. And then C, we were having all these fights. I remember having arguments with the sort of legal world about what we could say. And I'm thinking, this is. We're in the news business and we're having these back and forth arguments. For instance, when Tamir Rice was killed, I remember there being an argument about Whether or not we could say that his sister who's running to her 12 year old brother as he's just been shot and is then tackled and taken down by police, literally tackled in front of her brother, who's bleeding out in front of her about whether or not we were allowed to say she was tackled or whether we had to use some other terminology because saying she was tackled by police would be unfair to the police. And so I remember thinking this is an outrage, the idea that we would be debating the language that we use to describe a 14 year old girl or whether or not we could call the toy gun that Tamira Rice was holding a toy because there are all these restrictions, all these strictures about the language and whether it's unfair and just as a human being, as a mother that has two sons, that Tamir could have been my child, it's very difficult to maintain that, that, that emotional distance and balance. All of the people who are figuratively in your ear about what you're saying, you know what I mean? It can be difficult. It is a different, difficult balancing act to try to take yourself out of the story, to still be able to get comment from George Zimmerman's lawyer, even though objectively I'm looking at the way he, he's practicing the case and thinking a lot of what he's doing is despicable. But I still gotta talk to him, I still gotta get comment from him. So that is just called professionalism. Right? And I think a lot of people presume that as people of color, we can't exhibit the same professionalism that anyone else can do. Our job, still have our emotion. But what we are bringing to the table and what I always felt I was bringing to the table was I do know what it's like to be a mother of black sons. I do know what black teenagers are thinking right now. I actually do know what black people feel when those blue lights flash behind us and we get pulled over on the road. And I don't think it's my job to take that out of my reporting. I think it has to be in my reporting because that's the nuance that people won't get if I don't give it. The reality of media is that it is. We've substituted a system of national newspapers that were evenly spread out across the United States with television, then with three broadcast networks that also reach the entire United States states and had one fact pattern that we all shared to a diminishing newspaper industry that now is mostly on the coast, where in the Middle, they're dying. People may have one newspaper, it may just all be running AP stories. And the TV media is very coastal. So there's a sense among people in the media who also used to be cloth coat people with a high school education and who are now elite people, a lot of them from Ivy League schools. So there's this sort of insecurity among media that maybe we don't understand the country so we need to be b. This false balance comes from insecurity. I do not have that insecurity. I grew up in Colorado. I know the Midwest, okay? I grew up in country where everybody had guns in their house. I get it. I grew up in the church, okay? I do not accuse me of not understanding middle America. I do. Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details and private messages. McAfee helps stop that. Secure VPN keeps your online activity private. AI powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly. And with award winning antivirus, you get top tier hacker protection. Plus you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com, cancel anytime terms apply. Influencer. It's a word that gets tossed around a lot these days. There is a woman who went the distance, who broke ground as the first true influencer by living a remarkable life.
- [28:45]
Toray
Her name?
- [28:46]
Joy Reid
Elizabeth Taylor. I'm Katy Perry. This is the story of the original influencer. This is Elizabeth, the first Elizabeth I. The podcast, wherever you listen.
- [29:02]
Toray
We'll be back with more from Joy in a moment. But I gotta tell you a story real quick because I have hired a lot of babysitters and one of them, I don't know what happened, but I said something, just asking her to do something, and she didn't like the tone that I used. And next thing I know, we're up in our house and she's like taking off her earrings and slathering on the Vaseline and like, I'm about to fight you right now. Money. And I'm like, what is happening right now? And it just reminded me of how hard hiring can be. You're bringing somebody into your family, literal or your professional family. It is very important to find the right people. How do you do that? ZipRecruiter is one way to find people who are good and quality. They screen the folks. So you're not going to get somebody who's going to come into your business and try to kick your ass because they didn't like the way you asked them to do something. ZipRecruiter learns what you're looking for, identifies people with the right experience, and invites them to apply for your job. And 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day. You are not going to get somebody who wants to beat you up. That is the key here. The right candidates are out there. ZipRecruiter is how you find them. You guys, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free. That's right, free. Go to ZipRecruiter.com Toray that's ZipRecruiter.com Toure T O U R E ZipRecruiter.com TouRE because ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. Don't get beat up in the office. Let ZipRecruiter help you find the right people. What are you reading and how much do you have to read to feel like, okay, I know this issue. I can. Because you speak in an authoritative way, right? And Joy Reid says, this is the thing, you know, she has read the book and the footnotes and like, you know, so what do you do to prepare?
- [30:55]
Joy Reid
Well, so. And I left this out of my superpower. Being a nerd is a superpower in and of itself. I love to read. Right. I do spend a lot of time reading. And so, like, for instance, we just, we did this whole Uranium One segment. I knew we were going to talk about it.
- [31:08]
Toray
It was epic.
- [31:09]
Joy Reid
I've had people walk up to me, like in airports, and random people, like teenagers, say they've only seen the clips. They've never seen my show, just that clip because it was, you know, in their social media. But for that segment, I'd seen the pattern already that when we try to talk about Russiagate, we knew we were. We keep trying to get conservatives on the show. Sometimes they do, sometimes they won't do it. We knew we had this woman, Jen Kearns, booked. We wanted to talk to her about Russiagate. But I had already seen that the rnc, which issues talking points like the DNC does. I noticed that all the surrogates on CNN and MSNBC were all doing the same thing. You ask them about Russiagate, they pivot to Uranium One or to the dossier. So I said, okay, I already know a lot about the dossier. I read through the dossier. You know, I read the actual dossier itself. I've read, you know, everything I can think of on it. But Let me deep dive a little bit into Uranium One just in case and when people don't necessarily know about me. My father was a geologist, so he came to the United States. He got his PhD from Colorado School of Mines. He was a absentee deadbeat dad. So.
- [32:12]
Toray
Okay.
- [32:13]
Joy Reid
But we developed over time a decent relationship because A, I was the least emotionally attached to him. So I was the one who could get on the phone. My sister would cry, my brother would cry, but I could get on the phone with him. I had no problem talking to him because I had no emotional attachment to him. So we would talk about, like, random things. We talked a lot about South Africa, where he went to high school and where he worked. Most of his mining career was in South Africa. So he would talk a lot about South Africa, the politics there. We would talk about the politics in his country. In the Congo, we would talk about mining. And I kind of had an interest in my, my father. The big lie he used to tell us when we were kids that he was going to send us gold bars. This was always what he would say. And he worked for this company that was a genuinely a mining company. And then he started a company that was a mining company. So I. So I actually have a little bit of an interest in mining. So I read every document there was on Uranium One. I went into a deep, deep wormhole on Uranium One the day before this segment. And I was up pretty late just reading, you know, did you know John Huntsman was the governor of Utah when they approved the American side of Uranium One? That the Uranium One Americas Company is in Wyoming and Utah. Not exactly hotbeds of liberalism. That these deals were going right through the heart of Red America, that they were all basically American mines or just mines that produce uranium not for bombs, but just for nuclear power plants. Like all that stuff was in there. And because I actually have a backdoor interest in my, in mining as because of my father and I conversations about it, I kind of had a little bit of an advantage going into it because I wasn't bored by the material. So what I'll genuinely do is I know how the business works. I've worked in politics. I was in the communications department. I know how you prepare surrogates. I know what they're doing, so I know what they're going to do. I just have to prepare for it, just have the data. Because the worst thing to be is a host that when someone lies to you, you know they're lying, but you don't have the information to respond or you don't know they're lying and you let them go.
- [34:07]
Toray
It's tricky because, you know you'll have three, four, five issues that you want to read the book about or multiple books about before you have to go in the. I mean, you know, MSNBC is studying for. Of multiple final exams every day.
- [34:24]
Joy Reid
It is. It is like taking a class. It's literally like taking a college course that never ends. Yeah, yeah. And because they lie so much on the other side, it's breathtaking. I've never seen anything like this.
- [34:35]
Toray
I mean, for me, it wasn't the lying of the other side so much as the high level of intellectualism that you, the hour before us, and Matthews, Hayes, Maddow, O'Donnell, you know, Chuck, Todd, et cetera, are bringing to bear. And I'm like, you know, just the reputation. This place is very high. So when you go on the air, you better know what you're talking about. You better have read the book if you can, or read a lot of articles. And I mean, do you feel that sort of pressure? Like, there's a lot of brilliant people around here. You better bring it.
- [35:10]
Joy Reid
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, over the last two weeks, I've had to interview four people about their books. Thank God for Audible. Not that I'm doing a commercial for them, but it. Like, I'm a pretty slow reader. Believe it. I read kind of slowly, so trying. And I want to read the book. I don't want to interview you, and I didn't read your book, so I'm trying to read the books. So when I did the Hillary Clinton interview, Audible saved me because you can put it on 1.75 speed. Yeah. So you can hear Hillary Clinton talking like this and telling her story. Like, that's literally what I did to get that book done.
- [35:38]
Toray
Really?
- [35:38]
Joy Reid
Because I feel like. I feel like it's sort of a disservice to the person if you don't read their book, you know, So I do want to read their book, read their articles they've written. It's a ton of reading. So I basically. But here, the good news for me is that if I wasn't doing tv, I'd still be reading that stuff anyway.
- [35:52]
Toray
I mean, the interviewee can tell when you've read the book and you're not doing the tell me about your book thing, but you're like, so about three quarters of the way, and you get into this issue, which is really interesting, and you could tell they just warm up so much like, oh, my God. Because they spoke to 10 other people in the last 10 days, and none of them actually read the book, but you did. Oh, my. And, right. And they open up, and it's so nice.
- [36:15]
Joy Reid
It is. And it's. It's true. It disarms people because they aren't expecting it. And when they're doing round Robbins, to your point, they know that people are just breezing through and going to the next person. But if you're genuinely interested, and that's not just with authors, I think if you take a genuine interest in the person you're interviewing, it does make the interview better. And if you're genuinely curious about what they think, it helps, too. It's just that I want the person who I'm interviewing to be genuinely honest in return. You know what I mean? Because I'm genuinely interested.
- [36:42]
Toray
So part of what you are is a great interviewer. And I want to hear from you the keys to being a good interviewer. The keys to asking a good question, I think.
- [36:55]
Joy Reid
See? And it's funny, because I don't think I'm a good interviewer. I actually am very critical of all the. I think I'm very critical. So I don't think I'm a great interviewer. I think I'm a very curious person. And I think the keys to getting through an interview and making it interesting for the audience are, number one, a genuine curiosity on the part of the interviewer about their subject, about the person they're talking to. Do you have a real interest in them? I think the second important thing is actually listen to them. It's very easy. We just talked about the people talking in your ear and the distractions and other things to be so distracted that you're not even really listening to their answer. Interviews I've been the interviewee on when you can tell when the person has not listened to anything that you said, and they're just asking the next question on the list.
- [37:36]
Toray
Right.
- [37:36]
Joy Reid
So really listening to what the person said. And then the third thing is be willing to go off your plan.
- [37:42]
Toray
Yes.
- [37:42]
Joy Reid
Right. If you had, you know, you. You know, sometimes I'll think it through and I'll put bullet points. Okay. I definitely want to ask about this, this, this, this, and this. And then around the second thing, the person will say something interesting, and rather than go to my third thing, follow that, I'm gone. Right. Chris Matthews is great at that. And people see it as Chris Matthews being dragged off into wormholes. No, it's why he's so good.
- [38:01]
Toray
He's in the moment.
- [38:02]
Joy Reid
He's in the moment. If you take him on a tangent, he's like a dog on the bone. He's not gonna let you go until you satisfy him on that point. He ain't going back to whatever the plan was. I think that's the key.
- [38:13]
Toray
Do you think your Hillary interview was successful?
- [38:16]
Joy Reid
I do. I actually felt really good about the interview and got really great feedback about it. And I think with that interview, Hillary Clinton is an interesting person in person. She's such a warm person, and it's so different from who she is on stage. And I think you talked about the people when the red light goes on. I think Hillary Clinton is a bit of a red light person that she.
- [38:37]
Toray
Gets nervous and stiff.
- [38:38]
Joy Reid
I think. I think she stiffens up in front of the camera and on stage because she's not a natural gregarious sort of big public speaker. But one on one, she is very personable. I followed her around Iowa and New Hampshire. When my show got canceled, I went back in the field as a reporter and my beat was Hillary Clinton's primary race. So I followed her to Keene, New Hampshire, and to Iowa. She would do these roundtables around a table, and she did the thing I was just talking about. Each person is talking. Politicians do the bobblehead. They're listening, they're moving, they're moving. She would actually look at the person, really listen to the person, and then really think and respond. She was very personable with them and it bored the crap out of the media people.
- [39:23]
Toray
You're making me sad like this could have been president.
- [39:26]
Joy Reid
Oh, I know it's depressing.
- [39:27]
Toray
Somebody who doesn't care about anybody but himself. What did you do to make Hillary feel comfortable?
- [39:35]
Joy Reid
So this is interesting. So we did the interview. We went to her. First of all, we didn't have her come to the studio, which I think was an advantage. We. Because her sk. Because of her schedule, we had to go to chat. Boa. She was in a restaurant where she and Bill eat all the time, near her house. So she was comfortable in the place that she was in, which was helpful. She was doing other interviews later on, but. So we went to her, had her in a place where she was comfortable. When she got there, I talked to her about some things we had in common, some people we knew in common, sort of, you know, disarmed her a little bit with, you know, I'm not here to attack you. I'm, you know, I generally, you know, as just a human being. Let's connect for a few minutes and then by the Time we sat down, we'd actually, we had a bit of a camaraderie. I've met her before but haven't had that long conversations with her. But we actually took some time before the interview to talk and I think that helped.
- [40:20]
Toray
I wonder how you wordsmith the questions in your head because sometimes a slight difference in the wording can lead to a big difference in where the interviewee goes with it. And one thing I noticed that you do very well is you are not afraid to ask short questions. Some, especially on tv. Some people think they have to talk a long time and sort of give you the intellectual direction that they want the answer to go in. And you're not afraid. It's just like a three word or a two word question just like ping right back at you. What about this?
- [40:55]
Joy Reid
I think those, I honestly wish people would ask Donald Trump more short, declarative, fact based questions. I think they're the most powerful tool in journalism because otherwise, to your point, you're kind of suggesting the answer in the question or making a statement with a question mark on it, which gives people so many ways out. So many ways out. It's easy to wriggle out of a complicated question. It's very hard to wriggle out of a short, simple question.
- [41:22]
Toray
And a short direct question can be wriggled. Really important.
- [41:26]
Joy Reid
Yeah, it can be very impactful. I would love to hear somebody ask Donald Trump what is in the Republican health care bill, what is in the tax bill.
- [41:35]
Toray
He could not answer that question. I have also, though, I have found personally that I can get a lot out of making a statement. And that gives you the space. Yeah, it gives you a broad space rather than a question which narrows where I want you to go. But if I give you a statement and you can blue sky it now you are telling me what you want to talk about.
- [41:58]
Joy Reid
Exactly. And the whole point of the interview, A, you're a substitute for the audience who, if they were there, what would they ask?
- [42:04]
Toray
Right.
- [42:04]
Joy Reid
That's one thing. B, you're trying to give the audience new information about somebody they probably already kind of know. So something novel and interesting that they didn't know. And C, you're trying to get a moment out of that person that they didn't expect because everyone prepares well, most people prepare for the interview. So you want to give them a moment they didn't prepare for. I think it's kind of important to do that.
- [42:24]
Toray
People who want to be in TV or people who are just starting to get into TV and rising what do they need to know they want to get to the big time like Joy Reid? What do they need to know? What do they need to be doing to prepare to move up?
- [42:38]
Joy Reid
I would say, number one, polish up your writing skills. I cannot tell you even working in local news, the state of writing is in this country is very poor. Having been an editor and dealt with writers, if you want to be good at television, radio, Internet, whatever it is, be a very good writer. That's the key. I would say. The second thing is be very. Is increase your curiosity level, meaning read some things that don't comport with your views. I spend a lot of time reading conservative media. You know, I used to like what, what sources I read redstate.com Eric Erickson. Yep, I'll read Hot Air. I can sometimes read the Federalist. It's a little much. It's a Fox. A little bit much for me that I don't do because I don't think that Fox News is actually providing me anything more than from my side, sort of a peek into Earth 2, into what they're saying. I can just get clips of that online. I don't have to subject myself to it.
- [43:36]
Toray
You listen to Ben Shapiro.
- [43:38]
Joy Reid
I cannot. I don't. Yeah.
- [43:39]
Toray
What about Limbaugh?
- [43:41]
Joy Reid
I used to, you know, when I got into talk radio, I used to listen to Glenn Beck almost every day and Rush Limbaugh almost every day. Because at the time my goal was to get good at talk radio.
- [43:51]
Toray
Yeah.
- [43:51]
Joy Reid
And they were the best in the business.
- [43:53]
Toray
I mean, Rush Limbaugh, his ideas are insane, but as a performer, it's extraordinary, brilliant.
- [43:58]
Joy Reid
And I think Lynn Beck is even better, to be honest with you, in.
- [44:01]
Toray
That in terms of performance, performing. I mean, I found few people, left or right, who could compare to Rush as a performer. And to think about him doing three hours with no notes daily. I was no guests, no co host. As a performer, he's extraordinary.
- [44:18]
Joy Reid
And you know who else is, is Reverend Al Sharpton. Reverend Al does three to four hours. I think it's a four hour show every day on the radio with no script. And he's a pastor, so he has an advantage. But people who can think on their feet and talk, it is a skill. It's absolutely a skill. And I think talk radio is brilliant at developing that skill because it's also a skill with no accoutrements. There's nothing but you and the mic.
- [44:43]
Toray
You talk about Earth 2, which is where the conservatives live or where they want their audience to live. And I wonder if you would Consider this sort of Earth 3 in that they are always talking about an imagined liberal position, right. Which is far more delicate and simplistic and lacking nuance than we like. You know, so if there's a shooting and they, like liberals, will say, we want to take away all the guns, here's how we should respond to that. I'm like, nobody on our side is making that point. But there's this constant description. And the left does not tend to talk in this way. The left will characterize the right's position accurately or not discuss it at all. But the constant right conversation is the left will say this, and then there will be a mischaracterization, a gross mischaracterization of left. And then they argue against the straw man.
- [45:37]
Joy Reid
Yeah, Earth 2 and Earth 3 have an argument.
- [45:40]
Toray
Right?
- [45:40]
Joy Reid
Right.
- [45:40]
Toray
So. Right. So they're creating Earth3 so that they can beat up on Earth. Is that like.
- [45:44]
Joy Reid
I think that's absolutely true. One of the best examples of that is this horrific shooting in Texas. You get the Republican politicians all do the rote thing where they say, thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. We send our thoughts and prayers. People like me criticize them and say, you're saying thoughts and prayers. First of all, these people were praying. They were in church when they were slaughtered, including a dozen children. And secondly, you are a politician whose job is not to think and pray. It is to pass legislation. So the thing you could do is to do something to try to stop it. And number three, faith without works is dead, says the Bible. Right? And so when we criticize them, then I get the Washington examiner and other conservative publications coming after me and other people who made that criticism and saying, we attacked prayer. Liberals attack prayer. That's what they get out of our critique of their thoughts and prayers gambit. The idea that anybody said prayer is bad, that we attacked Christians or prayer is ridiculous. I'm a Christian. I grew up in church. I used to teach Sunday school. You cannot essentially remove me from Christianity because I believe faith without works is dead. You've basically taken Christianity and put it on earth, too, and said the only real Christianity is right wing Christianity, white conservative Christianity. What about black evangelicals? What about evangelicals who believe in uplifting the poor? What about conservative Catholics who are in the field with migrant workers? The way the Catholic Church in my community when I was growing up was as conservative as they were were. They were out there with immigrants picking, you know, vegetables in the fields to show their solidarity with immigrants. So the idea that these people are not Christian, right That liberal Christians are somehow excised from Christianity and only gun loving, Trump loving right wingers can be Christian. And if you criticize their positions, you are attacking prayer itself. It's a way to get their tribe to hate us, to distrust us, and to not listen to anything we have to say.
- [47:38]
Toray
See, and the hate is important. The right wants to be combative and wants to hate the left in a way that is different. The left is not trying to hate the right. Is that. Am I right?
- [47:52]
Joy Reid
I think, you know, I think there are people who, if they're very honest with themselves after this last election, do hate the right in a way, okay, because of the way that for a lot of liberals, they have twisted and distorted the country.
- [48:05]
Toray
But that's not.
- [48:06]
Joy Reid
But it isn't hating.
- [48:07]
Toray
It's not a guiding force of lefty politics the way I feel like it is a guiding force in the right.
- [48:15]
Joy Reid
And I think that it's not. There's no purpose on the left. There isn't the. There is a sort of a nihilistic trend among the conservatism, quite frankly, and Republican friends of mine have said this. It's made them question being in the party. That there is this sense that there's an apocalyptic war between them and us and that they must win by completely crushing the left. That there is no accommodationalist principle as there is on the left, which is how can we come to some accommodation and live in the same country with you, with them? There is this sense that we need to. We need to get rid of you. We need you to have. We need you to be crushed and destroyed, and we need to see it happening. There's this, this thing, negative empathy that a lot of people ascribe to Donald Trump, that not only does he have no empathy, but he actually derives pleasure from the suffering of other people. That.
- [49:07]
Toray
So is that schadenfreude or no?
- [49:09]
Joy Reid
No, I think. No, that's sort of schadenfreude, but it's like I call it. I think it's negative empathy. That might not be the right term for it.
- [49:15]
Toray
So how do you define negative empathy?
- [49:17]
Joy Reid
Negative empathy means not only do you not sympathize with someone's suffering, but you actually derive pleasure from their suffering. That the only way that Donald Trump can really feel joy is to see other people suffer. There's a sense in which. In which conservatism has adopted negative empathy as a principle. Remember when the search for a Republican to run against Barack Obama was which Republican would punch him the hardest? You had people like Chris Christie and others demonstrating how nasty could they be to Obama, how harsh could they be, how angry could they be? And they kept escalating their rhetoric to prove to the base that they could hurt him. It wasn't just a matter of defeating him in an election. They wanted him harmed. They wanted him labeled not an American. They wanted him stripped of his presidency, his citizenship, everything. And they need to see the left crushed. There's a part of the right that just wants to see liberals suffer, and that's why they like Donald Trump. They don't even care about Donald Trump. They just want to see him make us suffer. That is a transfer of a negative empathy into an entire political class.
- [50:24]
Toray
That is a problem, to say the least. You know, one of the things that we, when you're hosting, want the least is to be shocked when you're on the air. And one of the greatest moments for me of your career, during the primary, you were in for Chris Hayes and you had. Was it Marco Gutierrez? Was it. Oh, my goodness, is that his name?
- [50:50]
Joy Reid
Yes.
- [50:52]
Toray
A Mexican American who was a Trump surrogate who had. I mean, and this is not an off the cuff remark, this was a law. My people are a very dominant people and if they are not stopped, you're going to have a taco truck on every corner. And I'm not even doing justice because the thought was like three times longer than that. And I know that you were like, what I'm sure, like the Scooby Doo. Like, like what happened in your mind? Like, like when he's saying this, when these words are coming into your ear and you're like, what, what is going through your mind? And what do you. As. Not just as a political person, but as a host.
- [51:34]
Joy Reid
Yeah.
- [51:34]
Toray
Who has to decide, do I personally attack this? Do I say, this is not worthy of discussion? Shut him up. Go to the next guest to cleanse the audience from hearing this horrific stuff. Did you realize, like, we're gonna be talking about that? Cuz you came back, did another segment on it the next night, I think the night after that, like, did you realize, like, oh, he just dropped a nuclear bomb?
- [51:54]
Joy Reid
Oh, totally. That was one. I think it was my first sort of viral moment on tv. And I'm sitting across from Adriano Espaillat, who is the congressman from New York, from Harlem. And the look on his face had to have been the same look on mine. We were both dumbstruck. And I am almost never speechless. I was actually speechless. That was one of the first times on TV when I literally was struck dumb.
- [52:14]
Toray
And you really didn't know what to say?
- [52:15]
Joy Reid
No, I had no. I had no idea what to say. And it was. It was one of the few moments in TV where I did. I genuinely did not have a response. I didn't know what to say. What can you say to that? He himself. And, you know, I ran into him at the debate that the candidates did at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. He walks up to the rope line where we're all. I mean, or the rope that's keeping us in our little pen. And he said, joy, remember me? Couldn't believe it. He wanted to take pictures with me.
- [52:45]
Toray
But what was great about you in that moment, you did not make him look or feel stupid. He made himself look small. But you. So that you didn't. You didn't personally crush him. You didn't say, that's idiotic, so that he could come back and say, let's take a picture, shake hands. I mean, he said what he wanted to say. You let the guest take it apart. Right. But you didn't clown him, which you could have and.
- [53:14]
Joy Reid
Exactly. And I had, you know, I had a Latino guest in front of me. Espailant is. I believe he's Dominican. And, you know, I let him handle that. But at the same time, I, you know, I genuinely think also just another sort of aspect of growing up in a house where we loved politics and we love to debate politics. When he was around. My father was a Reaganite right winger. My mother was a liberal Carter person. Wow. I know. They. I don't know how they ever even made children together. They just completely did not get along. I don't even get the whole thing. I don't get it.
- [53:43]
Toray
I wonder what was going on in 1980. Like, and they're clashing. Were they arguing?
- [53:47]
Joy Reid
Like, I just remember when Reagan won, my sister, my brother and I all burst out into tears, crying. And my father was like, ha, ha, Reagan won. He loved Ronald Reagan. But he also called me the night that Barack Obama won. He was the first person to get through on my phone. I was doing a radio broadcast. Obama's declared the winner. I pick up my phone. It's a sat phone number. Same sat phone number he's had his whole life. My whole life. And it's my father weeping. He was so proud of Obama becoming president because of his African heritage. And he would have. I don't know what, he's dead now, but he would despise Donald Trump because he was like a Reagan Republican.
- [54:25]
Toray
Well, Reagan would Not get through the Republican primary at this point.
- [54:28]
Joy Reid
He'd be a rhino.
- [54:28]
Toray
Not, not in tone, not in his taxes. I know all that. All right, so let's deal with something difficult. Cuz I can hear the other side going like, well, you're not going to keep it real. And both of us have experienced this that like, you know, being at MSNBC is not just doing the job. You're doing the job sort of like in a sense of in combat. Like the other side is trying to ruin your reputation so that your word does not matter anymore. And they have both found stories about both of us and Melissa and the Rev that have.
- [55:05]
Joy Reid
What do we all have in common?
- [55:06]
Toray
I wouldn't embarrass, that have embarrassed us. And I don't want to talk about that. In particular, I want to talk about how you deal with the attack on us and the attempt to destroy our reputation as if we are elected officials who. There's oppo research and we're trying to pull you down and how do you deal with that?
- [55:30]
Joy Reid
Yeah, and it's interesting. And it escalates during the elections. You know, during the election I had. Not only that, we had, you know, the National Review of all places, trying to attack every black host on MSNBC and get us fired. The thing is that the right has reacted to real stories of scandal among their ranks that have cost members of their ranks their jobs with essentially a coordinated campaign to get any prominent liberal voice on television or in print fired. You notice that with cnn, they swiftly fired three journalists who got just a story wrong. We all get stories wrong. There is a coordinated campaign. It used to be. It used to be small. It was twitchy, which is this little silly thing that Michelle Malkin created that would essentially send swarms of Twitter some real, some coordinated against you if any story you wrote displeased them. So the Twitchies would come at you. And I used to get them filling up my Twitter timeline. I would have to basically let my Twitter timeline know, Listen, I'm cleansing the thread. Get out for 24 hours and let them have it.
- [56:36]
Toray
Yeah, you'd have to leave Twitter for a couple hours because you can't even see because Twitchy Team is just filling.
- [56:40]
Joy Reid
Up your inbox, filling up your inbox. And then Twitchy team kind of receded during the campaign. It was Pepe. It was the people with the Pepe the Frog and Nazi sign signatures in there or Nazi paraphernalia and their signatures. They all had little Pepe's with the little Hitler mustache. They were vile and racist. Incredibly vicious. And they would. That would fill up my timeline, I have to say. Well, cleansing the threat again. Spraying it with Raid. Let's let the Pepes have it. They get tired after a while. And a lot of them are bots, right? In a normal period like now when there's no election, those have gone away. And then you get individual right wing attackers who come after you and you get these campaigns to find something about you. So I kind of live constantly knowing that people on the right are digging for information they think could get me fired or listening for something I say on the air to try to get me fired. I know that's what's happening. It's taxing. It's sort of mentally taxing a little bit. But what I try to do is treat it the same way I used to treat my hate mail. Because when I used to have a blog, which was called the Read Report, I used to get the most insane hate mail from the right. I mean insane. Some from the far left too, by the way. And I would actually post it, I would actually correct the spelling and put it on my blog. So I sort of had fun with it and I sort of treat it as absurd. And I have to kind of treat this as absurd too, otherwise you couldn't do your job.
- [57:58]
Toray
One thing I always want to talk to folks about is failure and rebounding from failure. And so much of success is about how you pick yourself up from a difficult moment. So what is perhaps the most instructive, helpful failure that you have gone through that you learned from that helped propel you upwards after you rebounded from it?
- [58:24]
Joy Reid
Oh, wow. I can think of tons of those. One that I will say is the failure of my first TV show, the 2pm Show. The 2pm Show. I kind of now feel like getting that show getting canceled is one of the best things that ever, ever happened to me.
- [58:40]
Toray
How long did that was it nine months, 10 months?
- [58:42]
Joy Reid
We had it for 11 months. We got canceled one month before our one year anniversary. And it was at the time, heart wrenching. It was, you know, I felt terrible for my team. I felt like I'd let everybody down. It was depressing. Kind of the way it happened was kind of crazy because the timing of it. I was on the air and didn't, you know, really realize it was happening.
- [59:01]
Toray
You said you got a message while you were in the chair. On Twitter, Was it at 2:40?
- [59:06]
Joy Reid
It was at like 2:40. People were tweeting, oh, my God, I can't believe your show's been Canceled. You know, I'm always on my phone. I'm always on Twitter.
- [59:12]
Toray
Just to be clear, in the break. In the break, you're checking Twitter.
- [59:15]
Joy Reid
I'm checking Twitter during the break, and I'm seeing that my show is canceled. People are like, I can't believe your show's been canceled. And I'm like, what?
- [59:20]
Toray
What are you talking about?
- [59:21]
Joy Reid
Then an intern comes running on the set saying, give me your phone. And I'm thinking, I must have been fired. Cause, you know, normally when they take your phone, this is my work phone. So normally I'm thinking when they take your phone, that means you're being escorted out of the building. I'm like, oh, my God, I've just been fired. So the person, she's demanding my phone. And I'm like, why?
- [59:38]
Toray
First of all, you're an intern, so you don't demand shit.
- [59:40]
Joy Reid
You can't demand my phone. And I'm like, I'm not giving you my phone. Give me your phone. So the whole thought at the time, I think, okay, I guess I've been fired because I've already seen it. And I'm thinking, it's canceled and I'm fired. So after.
- [59:54]
Toray
Before you go to after, how do you do the last segment or two?
- [59:58]
Joy Reid
Yeah, I literally. Just. Because I do have performance adrenaline. So I'm one of those people who, if I can't find my keys, I'm literally, like, batty. But I could handle a crisis. Like, if there was, like, a tornado that went through this building right now, I'd be the best person in a crisis. Because I can be calm and collected in a crisis, and I can manage myself and other people in a crazy crisis situation. It's like, mundane things that drive me crazy. Like, I can't find my car. You know what I mean? Like, stuff like that. But so in this situation, I was able to do my performance thing. I could get back on the air, smile, do my segments. I'll deal with this at the end. And I do have a compartmentalizable mind, so I can compartmentalize it and say, I'm gonna deal with that right now. I'm gonna finish this show. Cause I don't wanna embarrass myself on tv. I don't wanna show that I'm shaken. I'm not gonna let them see me sweat. Got through it, and then we had to deal with it. But getting that show canceled, it was, in my mind, a failure. And it was horrifying in a way. But then I was faced with sort of A choice, right. Of what to do. I could either be really pissed off and, you know, I've walked away from news before. I'm a very acquitted job person. I'm a walk away from a job person. I'll just go do something else. And I quit TV before I quit tv. I quit NBC before I quit, because I was against the Iraq war and went and did politics. And I was just, I'm done. So it's not like I'm averse to moving on. I am. And we talked about people who move. I'm a person who will move. So I could have said, you know what? I'm done with this business. It's too harsh. I don't like it. Or when presented with the option of going back out and being a reporter, which I am not a trained reporter, but I am a journalist, I was like, I'm going to own that and I'm going to really throw myself into it. And I feel like one of the most productive periods in my career was that next year, I mean, I covered the Selma anniversary. I covered the Clinton campaign. I covered the Clinton vs. Sanders fight in South Carolina. I went all over the country. I went to, I think, 10 states in 10 months. I saw the country. I went to Mississippi and covered an apparent lynching. I went to Alabama. I went to places I never would have gone in this country and talked to people I never would have talked to. I covered the South Carolina taking down the Confederate flag. I was in the chamber when they took the vote that took that flag down. I saw the real story of how a black woman politician and a white man got together and created the strategy to do that, even though the governor, Nikki Haley, took credit for it. I saw the real story and could write the real story. So it's like, I think the thing I learned from it is that you take those moments of shock and sort of failure and feeling like a failure, and you have to take those. You have to make them productive and find a way. My godmother has this saying. She's my Jamaican godmother, says disappointment works for good. And it's true. It actually turns out that that saying is true.
- [62:49]
Toray
In that same vein, perhaps maybe one of the most difficult moments of your life, you get into Harvard about a month to go before you're going to Harvard as an undergraduate and your mom passes away.
- [63:03]
Joy Reid
Yeah.
- [63:05]
Toray
How did you deal with that? What did you do?
- [63:07]
Joy Reid
Well, yeah, I didn't deal with that very well. So that was the opposite. I was 17 when I was going to Harvard. I Was very close to my mother. We were like buddies. We were very, very close. And she had had cancer when she was in her 40s, but we didn't really know it because West Indian moms don't necessarily tell you things. We just knew she had gone to the hospital. Hospital. She'd had this surgery. I knew she had this scar in her breast area, but she wouldn't use breast cancer. And she never talked about it. So when it came back, like, you know, at what we thought she was 47 because she also used to lie about her age by 10 years because she could pull it off because she looked good. So we thought she was 47 years old. We're thinking, this is a young person, she can't die of cancer. And she didn't tell us really what was happening until the very. Toward the end, but she didn't. We didn't think it was going to be fatal. We just thought, she's gonna go to the hospital and she's gonna come home. I'm 17. My sister was 18 and a half, almost 19, and was in at Brown. She was in college and my brother was 12. So I was already, you know, working every day, taking care of my brother while she was in the hospital cooking dinner and doing all the stuff that she would normally do. And then, you know, she died. And it was such a shock. And I was supposed to be a pre med. On top of that, I was going to Harvard as a pre med. She had been very instrumental in me even applying. I applied to all the IVs, but I got in. When I got into Harvard, my mother said, if you get into Harvard, you gotta go. I mean, you don't say no to that. So I was committed to go. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to leave my brother. You know, he was a baby, he was a kid. I didn't want to leave him and I just didn't want to go anymore. And I didn't want to be a doctor for sure. I didn't believe in medicine anymore. I had no faith in it. I didn't have any interest in it anymore. My family, you know, West Indian family, we have a lot of doctors in the family. They wanted me to do it, but I didn't want to do it. So I reluctantly went. Some church members of our. Members of our church took me to school and I was just depressed. I was miserable.
- [64:55]
Toray
When they like physically dragged you there.
- [64:59]
Joy Reid
More or less, yeah. We flew out together with me and two members of my church and they stayed for A couple of days. And then my aunt from Brooklyn, who was gonna basically take possession of us. My aunt in Brooklyn, which is where we went for holidays, et cetera. My brother stayed behind in Denver with some other family friends because he just didn't want to leave his school. It was just too much to rip him out of his school and send him to New York. So we were bouncing back and forward. He was bouncing back and forth between Denver during the school year and my aunt in Brooklyn during the holidays. And so was I from. And so was my sister. We were all, you know, sort of convening at my aunt's during holidays. And that first year that I was in college, I, for the very first time, failed classes. I had never gotten even a D. I think I had one C my whole life in typing. I never could figure out how to type, but I did figure out a type eventually. But anyway, so I was getting bad grades. I was failing school. I got an academic. I got on academic probation. I wasn't really making friends. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I would just pretty much lay on the floor in my dorm room and cry. I was just miserable. I would try to go out and go to parties and just. What? My heart wasn't in it. So I ended up taking a year off. I went to New York. I lived in New York. I lived with my aunt for a while, but then, you know, we had to go to church like, four or five times a week. And I couldn't deal with that. I was a Methodist. I was like, we don't go to church four or five times a week. You know, we just don't do that. So I moved out. I had my own apartment in. In Fort Greene, around the corner from Spike Lee. And I just sort of. That year that I took off saved me for sure because it reconnected me to my sort of adventurous spirit. I was living on my own. I got a job. I was working in Columbia Pictures as a temp, basically down the street from Trump Tower, and saw how tacky it was firsthand. I hated that place. It was horrible. I went in there one time for lunch, was like, this is Trump Tower. This is horrible. Tacky. Everything is gold. Gold fountain, gold stairs, gold walls. Awful. But that year, I actually first of all figured out what I wanted to do that I wanted, that I did. I finally made the clean break with pre med, which my family was very upset about. They thought I dropped out of Harvard, so a lot of my family wouldn't even speak to me. They were so angry. I had to be on my own. I had to take care of myself. I had to pay bills, pay rent, send money to my brother. You know, I was basically an adult at 18, living by myself. And it made me grow up and get my shit together. And it was. In the end, I think it helped form. Form me into who I am today. But it was a hell of a way to have to do it.
- [67:30]
Toray
That informed you that you had to be an adult right away.
- [67:37]
Joy Reid
I had to be independent, completely independent. And, you know, I had been working since I was 15 because I always wanted my own money. And when I was kid, I had my little Coke bottle glasses and I really wanted contact lenses, but my mother couldn't afford it. So I got this job at this place called the Curiosity Shop, which was the preschool that my church operated. So they hired me because I was a member of the church, even though I was only 15. Hope I'm not outing them as committing any crime. And so that's how I afforded to get my contact lenses. So I always worked. I was like. I had a hustle spirit even as a kid. I wanted my own money. I'd babysit, I wanted a car. So my mom bought me this Buick Apollo 79. Buick Apollo. But she said I had to put the gas in it myself. So I had to work. So I already knew how to work. I had a work ethic. But being on my own by myself was hard in New York. But back then, New York was different. You know, New York had this vibe. Brooklyn was pre gentrified Brooklyn. So it was like, cool Brooklyn.
- [68:26]
Toray
Yeah, it was rougher, though.
- [68:27]
Joy Reid
But it was rough. I lived on Washington park, which was right across from the park. One side was DeKalb Avenue, which was. Spike Lee was. The other side was the projects.
- [68:37]
Toray
Well, Spike lived. His office was on DeKalb, but he lived on Washington Park. Right by Willoughby.
- [68:44]
Joy Reid
Exactly. So I was right there on Washington Park. The. You know, I kind of. This is probably a terrible story to tell and admit to, but it's funny because, you know, Washington Avenue is the big avenue, and Washington park is this little street nobody ever knew. And back then, Domino's used to say, 30 minutes or you get it free.
- [68:58]
Toray
Right.
- [68:59]
Joy Reid
I was broke. And it used to be the best strategy because they could never find my apartment. I would say the real address, Washington park, they would always go to Washington Avenue, and they'd be the part. The pizza would be cold, but it would be free. That was a strategy. Say, I learned Strategy. It was like every time they would go to the wrong place and I would tell them the real place. It's not like I was making it up. I was telling the right place that pizza was cold but free, honey. I stick it in the oven. It's good.
- [69:21]
Toray
You are hysterical.
- [69:23]
Joy Reid
Pizza and ramen. That was my diet.
- [69:25]
Toray
So what's the goal for Joy Reid? Where do you want to go? What is the, like, five years from now? Where do you want to be?
- [69:32]
Joy Reid
I really want to write books. I love writing books. I want to write. I'm trying to come up with another one now. I want to be somebody that is a. A very successful author of books. I'd like to still be teaching. I've started teaching this year, and I love it at Syracuse University, the Newhouse School. I don't go up there to Syracuse. They bring the kids come. They shouldn't call them kids. They come to New York City first semester, they're cheering, they're cheering. And I teach.
- [70:02]
Toray
They could be yours.
- [70:03]
Joy Reid
That's true. They're young enough, kid in college.
- [70:05]
Toray
You could be yours. Wait, what is your. What do you teach?
- [70:08]
Joy Reid
I teach race gender in media, which is interesting because the classes are mostly white students that are taking these race gender media classes.
- [70:14]
Toray
So you're blowing their minds.
- [70:15]
Joy Reid
And I. I do a module on whiteness, which is always my favorite class.
- [70:20]
Toray
And what are you teaching in the module on whiteness?
- [70:22]
Joy Reid
That essentially I say to them, and I do this in a lot of talks, too. White America never talks about whiteness. They don't talk about being white. They don't confront the fact that they have a race to. And that they have and that there are things that flow from that. And so that class is like the first time a lot of these students ever we talk about being white. And so this last time, I brought in Whitney Dow from the Whiteness Project, who played. He does these interviews all over the country where he asks people questions about being white, and they're super uncomfortable, but they answer. And so I love that class because it is the first time people. And they. They start it very quiet, but after a while, they really get into it and they finally confront, you know what? Identity politics is our. We have identity politics, too. Everybody does.
- [71:02]
Toray
Everybody does. For a lot of white people, I feel like they think discussing race is racism, or at least it is tap dancing right near the line and let's just not go there.
- [71:13]
Joy Reid
Exactly. And I think there's. It's incredible for a country that was literally founded on explicit white supremacy that assigned Extra special citizenship to landed white men explicitly in the contra in the the Constitution and said, if you are not a white male landowner, you're a lesser citizen. And we're going to spell that out. If you're black, you're three quarters of a person. If you're women, you're just not in the document, you can't vote. And that it took and that we've had so much sort of work around whiteness for the first 150, 200 years. And then all of a sudden after the 1960s, it became a taboo to talk about whiteness. When I wrote my first book, I spent a lot of time watching old TV newsreels from the 50s and NBC or whoever would go down to Mississippi and they would go up to a white person on the street, they would use the N word openly firstly on TV and say black people like sitting in the back of the bus. We think segregation is great. They would talk about being white, I'm white. And you know, and all of a sudden that, that stopped happening. It's weird.
- [72:12]
Toray
Why?
- [72:13]
Joy Reid
It's weird to me because I think white America took from the changes in civil rights, voting rights, that are positive changes. They added to that this idea that political correctness means we can't talk about being white anymore. We can talk about being Irish, we can talk about being Italian, we can talk about that, but that whiteness itself is a taboo subject. And so we just don't talk about it. So they lost the sense that being white meant anything. So they don't believe you when you say there's privilege attached to being white. A lot of white people just don't believe you. They're like, no, it isn't.
- [72:44]
Toray
So you finished Harvard, you became a TV star and a mom. Do you think like, you know, I wish mom could see me?
- [72:56]
Joy Reid
Oh, totally, yeah. And my mother was such a political junkie, you know, she would be so proud. She would be, she would. First of all, my mother would have been over the moon about Obama. She would have been absolutely just hysterically giddy about Obama. She was very, a big Democrat. She came here in 60. She loved JFK, she loved Jimmy Carter. You know, she was a die hard Democrat. You know, she had us out there rooting for Dukakis even, you know, like.
- [73:22]
Toray
Hey, I worked for Dukakis.
- [73:23]
Joy Reid
Hey.
- [73:24]
Toray
I mean, but I mean, you know, black woman, immigrant. I mean, that is the backbone of the party.
- [73:28]
Joy Reid
It is the backbone of the party.
- [73:29]
Toray
When you talk about love and Carter, Dukakis and Obama, she would have been proud to Watch you?
- [73:37]
Joy Reid
Definitely. Definitely. I used to sit up with my mother when I was starting in the sixth grade when abc, when Nightline started, it was countdown. It was a countdown of the hostage.
- [73:47]
Toray
Crisis, of the Iraq hostage crisis, the.
- [73:48]
Joy Reid
Iran hostage crisis, Right? And so I got obsessed with the Middle east based on that. And I said, you know, mom, can I stay up and watch this? And she was like, you know, you can go to bed. It's 11:30. I was like, please, guys, just watch it. She was like, okay, fine. I ended up watching it with her every night my entire. From 6th grade till she passed away. It was like our thing, and I was the only one that wanted to do it. So it was like a special kind of bond that we had. So she loved politics, and she. We used to watch the Sunday shows together. We used to watch, you know, and I used to say, I would love to be on the McLaughlin Group. And she'd be like, you'd be great on there. I think she would be thrilled that I was. That I'm doing this thing, even though she had the West Indian be a doctor gene and was really excited that I was gonna go and be a doctor, which I was just, it's not gonna happen. But I think she would have been actually happier with this outcome.
- [74:35]
Toray
I'm sure Joy's mom would be super proud. Pride is what Joy makes so many of us feel. We're proud for her success and proud that she's in the position to be delivering and contextualizing the news. She makes sure her audience respects her, but she's also good enough to make them love her. And when people want to see you succeed, when they get invested in your success and see your victories as victories for them, well, then you're unstoppable. Thanks to Joy for the time and thanks to you for listening to Torre's show. Much appreciated. I hope this conversation was valuable for you. Check out Joy on MSNBC every Saturday and Sunday morning. If you want to talk to me more about this episode. I'm on Twitter Ore and on Instagram orayshow. Please stop by and say hi. And if you like the show, please subscribe, rate and review and tell a friend. Help me spread the word about the show. Toray show was written by me, Torre, and produced by Chris Colbert and Matt Ford, with help from Shelby Royston and In association with Cadence 13 Studios, we're beaming to you from the amazing borough of Brooklyn, baddest place in the world. And we will be back next Wednesday with more knowledge from successful folks, because the man ain't shut us down yet.