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When MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid was growing up she was expected to be a doctor, lawyer, or architect. Then she decided to drop out of Harvard, ditch her doctor aspirations, and re-enroll as a documentary film major. These days the biggest decision Joy makes every day is deciding what news stories to include in her show The ReidOut. Sam talks to Joy about what qualifies as “breaking news,” why she doesn’t believe undecided voters, and her new book “Medgar and Myrlie” and why it’s so important for Civil Rights love stories to be written.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Joy Reid, Samantha Bee

Samantha Bee  00:37

I would like you to know that whatever I’m about to say was certainly not written by AI unless you hate it, in which case, oh, AI is so bad. I’m kidding. I’m joking. Actually, let me just tell you that nothing I say is written by AI, and that is important to me because of something that has been clear from AI’s beginning, but has only recently begun to be acknowledged by most people using AI is bad for the planet. It is a massive drain on our energy infrastructure and uses an incredible amount of water, and I’m saving up my massive water consumption for when I become a lady of leisure who spends the afternoon and a luxurious clawfoot tub, which is why I have some serious choice words for people who can’t use their imagination to picture an animal with the body of like a frog, but the head of a horse and the tail of a lion, like we have done for millennia, and instead demand that AI conjure one up for them, a simple search like that can take as much energy as charging your phone. And recent reports speculate that within a few years, AI could use the same energy, huh, as entire nations, entire nations. What scares me the most is that we are creating this monster ourselves and seem utterly uninterested or unable to control it while we still can. New environmental issues are not the kind of innovation we were looking for. The old ones are still serving us just fine. Thanks so much for God’s sake, we have barely figured out how to save the sea turtles for our plastic straws oh.

 

Samantha Bee  03:21

This is Choice Words. I’m Samantha Bee, my guest today is the exceptionally smart Joy Ann Reid. You know her from MSNBC, is the readout, and recently she was the victim of another new technology when she herself was deep faked. We talk about how hard it is to regulate emerging tech and the election and the news industry in general, I hung on every single word of our conversation. So take a listen and make good choices.

 

Samantha Bee  03:55

Thank you so much for being here.

 

Joy Reid  03:57

Thank you for having me, Sam. It’s great to be here.

 

Samantha Bee  04:00

I feel that my listeners are going to be so jazzed to hear from you, they’re not going to believe it anyways. Okay, I want to hop into it, and I really want to talk to you about the book and everything that you’re doing. It’s a big week in the world of news, my goodness. But first my launch point, I like to start the podcast talking about is the choices that we make in life, how we got here. That’s what the show is all about. So we’ll make decisions in different ways. How do you make decisions? What does the word choice mean to you? How does that sit with you?

 

Joy Reid  04:40

That is such a profound and great question. I have never been asked this question. You know, I was I’m always impressed when an interviewer comes up with a question. I’ve never been asked. I’ve never been asked that. That’s a great question.

 

Samantha Bee  04:49

Hey, oh boy.

 

Joy Reid  04:51

So now I gotta think about it. So what does choice mean to me? I think that what choice really means is self ownership, right? Because, you know, choice is something that we have only in a limited quantity when we’re kids, because our parents kind of have custody, you know, they have literal you know, in loco parentis over us. So most of our choices are made by them, and then when you kind of go out into the world, what’s happening is you’re taking over the role that the people who raised you had, which is they made all the decisions of what you’re going to do with yourself, where you’re going to go, what you’re going to do with your time. And now you have self ownership, and without self ownership, then you might as well be a child or a pet. And so when I think about a situation that we as women face in which government is taking away choice. It doesn’t fantalize you. It turns you into a child or a pet or, you know, historically, chattel. That’s what slavery was, right? No self ownership. So to me, choice is self ownership.

 

Samantha Bee  05:59

Do you remember in your life when you first definitively started making those big decisions for yourself, where you were, like, hang on a second. I get to say two. Do you remember that moment in your life?

 

Joy Reid  06:14

I do. It was not a great moment in my life. I had, you know, you know, again, as I’m a West Indian kid. My mom was from Guyana, and West Indian kids basically have three choices in life. You can either be a doctor, a lawyer, or an architect, like, and with three of us in the family, and literally, I was going to be the doctor, my sister was going to be the lawyer, my brother was going to be the architect. Like, that’s what you do as West Indian kids. You don’t really have a lot of nurse they’ll accept as well. But I was supposed to be going to Harvard as a pre med and, you know, I wasn’t passionate about it. I was really passionate about being a writer, to the point where my mother was very supportive. You know, I was I remember one time when I was like, 11th grade, I wrote a book of poetry, I promise you this happened. I wrote it longhand. Just wrote this book of poetry, sent it to a publisher, thinking, I’m getting published, and they sent it back, like, Oh, how cute is that. No, so my mom bought me this typewriter so at least I could type my things, you know, and she was very supportive, but she still was very invested in this idea I was going to be a doctor. So I went got I got into the various colleges. I got into all as pre med. But then, shortly before I started at Harvard, my mom unfortunately passed away from cancer. It was unexpected to us. We didn’t know that she was sick, and she hid it very well. We knew there was something wrong, but she didn’t really share it with us. West Indian parents don’t share and so when she died, it completely discombobulated me, and I went ahead and went and started, you know, immediately doing something I never did, which was fail classes, because I always got A’s. I was the a student and and then I made my first big choice, which was to take a year off from school and drop my pre med major, which my family was appalled by. I mean, there were people in my family who stopped speaking to me because they thought a, that I had dropped out of Harvard and B, because I was not going to be a doctor. I’d like shamed my mother’s memory, but I made that decision for myself, and I did not go back to Harvard until I had decided what I actually wanted to do. And I went back and became a documentary film major, which, again, they were appalled by, but which now they claim to all support have supported, because now I’m on TV to hear them tell us they were always so supportive.

 

Samantha Bee  08:23

That’s right, when did they come around? When they were when did it take getting on TV for them to go? You know what? We were always there for you.

 

Joy Reid  08:31

I was, like, kind of the almost black sheep in the family for having given up my pre med. You know, a lot of my family are doctors, and they were very upset. And, yeah, it was when I got my first show, the read report, and suddenly I’m having cousins who, you know, literally had not spoken to me, saying, Oh, my cousin, I’m so proud of you. And suddenly it was like a whole different vibe once I was on the TV.

 

Samantha Bee  08:55

That must have been an agonizing decision for you. I mean, years of thought, years of careful consideration.

 

Joy Reid  09:05

Yeah, and also just, really, you know, the, you know, I always was a just natural writer. I didn’t have to really think much about, you know, English class and history class. I was always a history buff, but, you know, I actually had to study, you know, for science and stuff. It wasn’t my natural inclination, and I didn’t have real love for it, so I put a lot of work into making sure that I got high enough AP scores on the science APs and on the math APS to become a pre med in the first place. So it was a big deal to change majors, not at Harvard. Like they don’t care what they literally, when you get there, you realize that what they consider the privilege of the Harvard degree is congratulations, you got in. Like the rich kids didn’t even go to class because they knew that all they needed was the name, and they had no interest in even going. Like, we would meet some of the really, really rich kids, like, around the end of class, like, when we were done and we were getting our grades, suddenly we’re, like, That guy’s in our class. Oh, that’s right, he’s like, a Roosevelt or something. He didn’t have to come, you know, and so, but. You know, their whole thing was, you got into Harvard. This is what, this is the currency. It’s not your major. So you can change majors. They don’t, they don’t care. But definitely outside of that world, people care.

 

Samantha Bee  10:11

Well, that is a very big joy, and change the entire trajectory of your life.

 

Joy Reid  10:16

I know I would have been Dr joy. I mean, I probably would have made it fun for myself. I would have just made it fun, because, like, I like fun, but, yeah, I wouldn’t have been happy at it.

 

Samantha Bee  10:25

You might not have. You would have been a really good doctor. I’m just saying, like, I You made the right choice, obviously, but you would have been very good at it. Are you good at do you love making big decisions like that? Because in the career that you’re in. You’re making decisions all the time too. Like to speak about things, to write about things. Do you do you love that? Do you embrace that? Or do you sometimes sit back and think, okay, I really wish I didn’t have to just make this big move right now. I just want it to be, can’t things be easy for one time?

 

Joy Reid  10:58

I mean, I think that about the country. I think, can things be normal? Like, can’t we just have like, a Mitt Romney style, a person that’s on one of the tickets? But no, I actually, the only problem now that I have with making these kind of choices is, we’ll do this, you know, 11 o’clock show call, and then, especially on a Monday, when I’ve accumulated like, 40 topics that I would like to do. The hardest choice now is, you know, narrowing it down to five blocks of television and figuring out, like, four or five topics, because we could literally be on TV for three hours with how many things I would actually like to talk about. And so that is the hardest choice every day, is, what do we narrow down the horrors of that we need to cover? And is there anything not horrible we can include? Those are the hardest.

 

Samantha Bee  11:40

Can we insert? Is there one moment of joy? Is there one thing that’s like that we can insert just to end the show on a positive note?

 

Joy Reid  11:48

We end the show every week with who won the week, and it’s that’s why we do it, because we’re like, we have to cover so many bad things all week. And I actually carried who won the week over from my weekend show. And joy, that was one of the things we kept because we just were like, we need something positive every week.

 

Samantha Bee  12:03

That’s very relatable to me, because we used to have to, when I had a show, we were always seeking just like, just like, one thing to hold, one thing to keep you going, because it can, I mean, how do you actually wrestle with that? Because there is, how do you ingest everything that you ingest, but then just keep it going.

 

Joy Reid  12:23

It’s difficult, um, you know, and it there are times when it’s been more difficult than others. You know, I was on the Black Lives Matter beat for years, and I have three, you know, black children. I have two sons and a daughter that are, you know, our kids are young or older. They’re older now they’re 29, 27 and going to be 25 but they were going through their teenage years, you know, when I started at thegrio, they were seventh, ninth and 11th grade, and so that was very difficult to separate it, because then you’re getting questions at home that are very personal. Because everything that’s happening to a Trayvon Martin, my kids recognize that it could happen to them, you know, and I remember our middle child, Jamar, at one point, he’s the actor of the three. Of course, we didn’t put the West Indian. We didn’t put the West Indian thing on our kids. I have artists and one little business guy, but he asked to write something for the grio. And he had a little nepotism advantage. I let him write something because he was so upset. So upset. I mean, Trayvon was literally his age, right? And so he, you know, so I have traumatized kids at home while I’m covering, you know, the death beat, and I did that for years, and it was not easy confronting, you know, grieving mom after grieving mom and grieving dads. And then also, you know, systems that just didn’t care police systems that were lying about them. You know, Tommy rice might have been the hardest because he was 12, and, you know, the police were sort of portraying him as a man and not a little boy, and just trying to give context to the world about these kids. That was really the hardest. That was harder than covering Trump, to be honest, because it was more personal.

 

Samantha Bee  14:30

Well, people, be right back after this.

 

Samantha Bee  16:10

To narrow down all the all the stories for an evening’s show. What are the markers that you look for? How do you know what to pare away? Or, do you is it like a game of Tetris in a way that you’re just kind of putting the little building blocks here, and you’re like, we could shift this brick to another day. Or how does it look? What’s your office look like? I think is what I’m saying. Notes everywhere.

 

Joy Reid  18:00

Oh, oh, it Yeah, if I zoomed out so that my desk is behind me, and, if you zoomed in, you would just see piles and piles of paper, a lot of indictments that I’m reading, a lot of indictments. But what happens is, we have a team that is half in DC and half in New York. And interestingly enough, we actually launched the show during the pandemic we I got the hour in 2020 so we launched it virtually. So a lot of us had never met, and this is the core of the old hardball team. So my executive producer, Tina and I have known each other since, like 2012 because I used to be the midnight hardball sidekick. I was Chris Matthews, like official traveling sidekick, whatever midnight hardball would travel. So I knew Tina. I’ve known her for a long time. She was one of my first friends inside of MSNBC so and Robert, who’s my senior producer, I knew him, and I knew a couple people because I brought them over from my weekend show. But other than like five people on the team, the other like 14 people I had never actually met for over a year.

 

Samantha Bee  19:02

Wow.

 

Joy Reid  19:03

I know. So we never met in person. We only met on like, zooms and on screen, you know, on the screen. So what we end up, what we did then, what we do now, is we have this meeting, this 11 o’clock meeting that’s kind of like our therapy meeting, where we all say, here’s what I care about. This is this, these are the stories I think are important. We all throw that out there, and then our job, as you know, Tina Robert and myself, then get on a call, and we’re like, all these great ideas were all so good, we have to then pare that down to five or sometimes four blocks of TV. And that’s really hard, because then we have to say, you know, a lot of us agree on the most important things. But sometimes we come out of that meeting with like, eight really good topics, and something can’t make it, you know, and so it’s hard that’s that is the hardest choice we do every day, is how to pare down all the great ideas and get everyone’s ideas into the show.

 

Samantha Bee  19:55

It does drive me crazy that everything feels like breaking news or everything is characterized as breaking. News Now, because we have this kind of manic approach as even as news viewers now, or it feels like it’s being pushed on us. How do you respond to that? How do you feel about that?

 

Joy Reid  20:14

Breaking news is like an active shooter, if that’s happening during the show, that’s absolutely breaking news, or like, the results of an election will break in to our program to say an election that we’ve been covering has been decided. That’s breaking news. So I think using it in a more limited way is more effective and more impactful, so that when it happens, you know that we mean it right. So I agree. I think it’s something that I wish the industry would use, like, a lot less and a lot more sparingly.

 

Samantha Bee  20:44

Yes, well, I I appreciate that about you and your show I, and I do want to talk about how much I appreciate how you cut through those very common both side isms that are that are such a big part of watching the news now, or it feels like it’s like the media feels it’s their responsibility to call out both sides, but it is hard to speak honestly when you’re on TV every night and you have to answer to advertisers to some extent. Do you do you get a lot of pushback, like, how do you handle pushing back against I just, I feel like pushing back against advertisers is one of the things that people don’t talk about enough, because it’s very difficult.

 

Joy Reid  21:32

Well, the good thing for me is that I have no idea who advertises in the show. I have no connection to it. And, you know, it airs, I actually have never even, actually, I’ve seen the read. I know it exists, but I’ve never actually watched it, because I just am watching it while it’s happening, right? So I generally don’t know who’s advertising in it, so I don’t think about them, which is great.

 

Samantha Bee  21:50

And you know, when no one calls upon you, they don’t go like, Hey, you can’t say that about you can’t say that about Taco Bell. You know, I don’t talk about them, but you know what I mean?

 

Joy Reid  22:00

Yeah, no, thank God, no. That is a good thing that we do not have to worry about, thankfully. But, I mean, I think on the both sides ism thing. I think that is an issue in the media in general. I think it’s a problem in that. I think what happened to the media over time, and I actually do a lecture about this. I used to teach a race, gender and Media course at Syracuse University, and then I taught one at Howard University, similar topic. And I do a lecture for my students, and I’ve done it at talks as well about this kind of false neutrality and both sides ism that has emerged in the media. And I won’t do the whole talk for you now, but it it partly has to do with, you know, like a lot of things in our country, with the race, because there was a time when even the New York Times would cover lynchings as if the person who was being lynched did it, and they would just presume that, and because they were that what neutrality was, which actually kind of emerged after World War One, was it existed in a time when the media wasn’t diverse at all. You didn’t have women, you didn’t have people of color. It was just a very specific type of person that was always the journalist. They didn’t even understand that. They all came at things from the exact same point of view as each other. They weren’t giving you multiple points of view. They were giving you the unit point of view, the one point of view that white American, affluent men had. And you had a lot of pushback against that from from Black Journalists, from people like Ida B Wells, who demanded that lynching specifically be covered as a crime against the lynched person, and that, presuming the lynched person did, it was bias, and that you can’t say you’re unbiased because you’re covering matter of factly that a 15 year old boy was forced in Texas, in Florida, to jump off of a bridge to his death, what with his father standing there because the white man who lynched him and the gang that was with him believed that he was going to rape a white girl because he sent her like a sweet note. That’s a real story, but it was covered in a way that was so awful, or the way that, you know, the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa was covered as if this was a perfectly normal thing. And so you had journalists who demanded that things change, and things did change. By the time you got to the civil rights movement, the media was covering the Civil Rights Movement as a victim and a villain. And there were conservatives at that time, segregationists who decided that meant the media was biased. It was biased against conservatives. It was biased against white people. And the person who came along and said, well, I have a solution for that is Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, who said, we can fix that. We’ll create a media that is quote, unquote, fair to conservatives. And you had someone else who did that, whose name was Rush Limbaugh, who said, I’ve got a great business plan. I’ll create a media that is quote, unquote fair to white conservatives. And so it’s twisted the meaning of neutrality to pull it to the right. And so I think what a lot in the mainstream media have done reflect. Massively to sort of resist the image of being biased against conservatives and against white conservatives, is to pull toward them, right? He said, I mean, as a way of seeming, as a way of saying, no, no, no, we’re not biased. So we’re going to cover if Trump committed a crime. We will entertain the idea that maybe Biden committed a crime. So we’re being fair. And I think it’s a lack of it’s an insecurity on among the media writ large that is making them do that, but that isn’t informing people. You know, it’s not helpful. Because, you know, the example I used to give in my talk was, let’s say that you had two people, one of whom says strychnine is poisonous, and the other who says it’s delicious, you could say, on the one hand, some people think it’s poisonous, and on the other people think it’s delicious, but a lot of people are going to die of drinking strict diet if you do.

 

Samantha Bee  25:49

It is so delicious. I mean, just if you’re if anyone’s curious, I mean, just relish. You know, we talk about these media silos that exist now and that they were legitimately created by individual people who we can look back in history and go, Oh, you built it. You stood outside and built like a psychological silo. Do you feel like you move the needle? Do you feel like there’s a way to penetrate those silos? Ever, is that ever going to be possible for us? I don’t know how.

 

Joy Reid  26:27

I don’t know. I think it is because so two places I’ll look for hope for that. The first is juries. If you think about it, there have been now two, really three, jury trials of the former president in New York and both the defense and the prosecution, let’s just say in this last trial, this last felony trial, they had an equal opportunity to choose jurors and to decline jurors as they wish, that they constructed that jury the defense and the prosecution together, and so what you wound up with in the current jury is a jury that had some people who seemed so compelling and so pro Trump that their team was in advance saying we can think of at least one juror who seemed to be on our side, like they felt a kinship with at least one of those jurors, so they felt pretty good about that. But in the end, when this jury was stripped of their ideology. There were some of them who got their news from truth social right. There were people who read everything from CNN to MSNBC to Fox. So they were getting their own personal information sources. They were very diverse. There were they were racially diverse. They came from different fields. There was a speech therapist, but also a finance guy. Like there were all kinds of people, men and women, but when they got the same set of facts, they were able to come to a pretty quick unanimous decision just based on the facts, not based on their ideology. The same thing happened in the E Jero trial, where one of the people on that jury declared themselves to be a fan of Donald Trump, but still said when I heard these facts, I had to come to this conclusion. So I think juries, not always, but a good percentage of the time, give you hope that if you just present people with information that’s free of the silo and the kind of the weight that like getting that info from your favorite conservative host or your favorite liberal host, when you take that off the table and it’s just a straight presentation, people will come to the same conclusion, and then the other one, I will say, is just look at the number of very conservative Republicans that talk to you Just on MSNBC. Michael Steele was the Republican National Committee chairman. He is a conservative. He is a right winger. I would even say he’s a friend of mine. We are so different that people sometimes are surprised when I talk about what good friends we are.

 

Samantha Bee  28:53

Right, right, right.

 

Joy Reid  28:54

And we were always friends. We’ve been friends. I have plenty of Republican friends. And there’s, there are certain facts that even as ideologically different as we are, and how different we are on all kinds of topics. We agree on certain things about democracy. We agree on certain things about the right to vote. And so I think there are some commonalities that are bigger and broader than people think.

 

Samantha Bee  29:18

You know, it’s not your job to make me feel better today. It’s truly not, but actually, that was they did. So thank you for that.

 

Joy Reid  29:28

I honestly, Sam, I do I really think that there is a, like, it’s like, a frothy layer of cray, cray in the country.

 

Samantha Bee  29:38

Oh, it is thick, and.

 

Joy Reid  29:40

It’s thick, but it’s frothy, but it’s at the top, so you see it, and it’s the thing that makes you think, this is the beverage, you know? But sometimes the thing under the layer is the beverage. We still don’t know what that beverage is going to be like. We just know what the frothy layer looks like, like. The great example, the former President goes to Detroit. And this is again, where I think the media does not do itself. A lot of good is you get all these headlines, including out of Detroit saying, Donald Trump visits black church to court black voters. But here’s the problem with that narrative. A when you turn the camera around and look at the room, not too many black voters. Second thing is, the journalists who did the best work were the ones who went up to people and said, hey, where are you from? Almost none of them said, I’m from Detroit, let alone from this church. So now you have a different story. That may be what looks like a it looks like one thing, you know, but to paraphrase the wire, it’s another. So the question is, are we willing to do the journalism to go up to people and ask the questions that would get you the real story?

 

Samantha Bee  30:49

Do you hold? I mean, because you’re talking about your bipartisan friendships, which is great, and people don’t really believe that that is possible, but it is possible. Do you ever are there grudges that you do hold, I mean, there, because there are, you know, Republicans now who are anti Trump, who were very much on board, who, you know, set the conditions. They helped to get us where we are. So it’s fine after the fact, to be like, Actually, I didn’t think that that was a good idea. I went along with it because I had to, like, do you hold that in your heart, or are you able to just move through it very quickly?

 

Joy Reid  31:25

It depends, I think, on how there are people who I know, who went into that world, who I’ve really have had to, like, reevaluate my my opinions on them aren’t because they went in knowing what they were going into and did it anyway, like, I think that’s shameful. And then there are people who are just partisans, and so they did what partisans will do. And I kind of get it, because that’s their partisans, and they, you know, they’re with their team, and so I don’t necessarily love that as a thing for them. I don’t necessarily have the deepest respect for it, but I get it, you know, I used to be in politics. I came out of news for a while and worked as a, you know, a democratic operative, including on the Obama campaign, on the Florida Obama campaign. So I get it, you know, sometimes you do things for the party. In this case, it’s getting harder and harder with time to understand why somebody would be still, if you if they’ve stated certain values and principles, to still promote that and still to still promote this person as a viable option, I don’t get it, you know, I know Nicole Wallace too well to do that. She was a partisan. She was at me, but on a much higher level, she worked for a president. She was a partisan. She and I were on opposite sides of the 2004 campaign when I was working on that. In that world, I would have very low level. She had a very high level. And so if she can come to the conclusion, as a lifelong Republican, that there’s something wrong here, I don’t see why anyone equally intelligent to her can’t. So I think, yes, there’s a point at which I say, I get it, but I can’t, like, affirm that as a positive thing.

 

Samantha Bee  33:05

I guess, on the same on the same track. What do you what? Honestly, what do you make of undecided voters? Like, literally, how I.

 

Joy Reid  33:23

I tend to think and look just again. This is the camp. This is the campaign person in me. I take off my shirt for a minute, go back to my campaign. Most of the time in campaigns, what we call undecided voters are people who do not vote, right? You know what I mean? Yeah, if you can’t decide, this is like you can either have an orange or you can have a red brick, which would you like to eat today? If you can’t decide you’re really not eating, you’re probably not hungry. And I’m at a certain point, I think we have to stop chasing these undecided voters, because in the campaign world, the closer. I mean, yes, there are some undecided people. I don’t in this case, this year, it is really stark here. I don’t know how you couldn’t make up your mind. So if you, the closer you get to an election, the more likely it is that that undecided voter is just not going to vote.

 

Samantha Bee  34:12

Having covered so many presidential campaigns, like from my comedy perspective, even still, I would, every time there was another election, I would meet with undecided voters and just be, I just kind of yell at them, but I because I think it’s actually very kind to say an orange and a red brick. One of them is so obviously a greasy paper plate left over from a pizza slice that was eaten with a knife and fork. You know, yeah.

 

Joy Reid  34:42

They also like attention. Say, I mean, let’s they do. They love the attention. Because what happens is they get Vaughn Hillyard to come up to them, and they feel so important there’s a camera in front of them, and someone’s gonna ask them, or somebody from The Daily Show, or from they’re gonna get, they’re gonna get your our attention. And so I. Think sometimes undecided voters, they’re not undecided. They just like, right?

 

Samantha Bee  35:04

Yeah, they’re just saying, so are you, are you telling me right now that everyone’s just saying it about RFK Jr, please God, no one.

 

Joy Reid  35:11

Is different. So RFK, if you tell me, RFK Jr is a different thing. These are people who were really, really, generally with him, really, who are upset about the pandemic response, and they really don’t like vaccines, and they really don’t like they really got red pilled specifically by that. And so I’ve never met anyone that is for him, that that’s not their issue. It’s their specifically voters on that. Because he doesn’t have other things. He’s just an anti Vaxxer. He doesn’t have like, other issues that he’s promoting and some of the other things that he’s promoting, I don’t think anybody really believes him, right? Like he’s trying to make himself sound like he’s like the reparations guy. Come on, man, you accused a black man of a murder you know your cousin, like, you know your cousin did it. And you wrote a whole book saying this black guy did it. I don’t think black people are gonna be down with you. You said the black guy killed somebody your cousin killed. So the blacks aren’t with you, man, if they are, it’s because they don’t like the fact they don’t like the VAX. You know, that’s the only and so this is why Trump has started to disparage him. Because if that’s where you are, you would have been with Trump right there. There just isn’t a lot of overlap between Kennedy and Biden voters. I don’t believe a poll that says he’s a threat in any way, or threat equally to Biden and Trump.

 

Samantha Bee  36:28

I hope you’re right, because I don’t I don’t love a I don’t love a spoiler, and I don’t want a spoiler in the race who has a pet emu and an ex. You know, the other day, I was like, you know the other day, I was like, you know that brain worm starved to death. There isn’t much going on up there. That thing is so hungry. Let it out.

 

Joy Reid  36:49

Free the worm.

 

Samantha Bee  36:50

Free it, please put it brain worm. Oh my gosh, do you are there trends or things that you’re seeing in our coverage of the presidential election this time around, that you just go, if we could just change that one thing, like, is there a big, big ticket item that you would change in an ideal world?

 

Joy Reid  37:14

If you could, I, I would really love in the one and this is not just in this political campaign world, but in general, but really it’s more intense and more important now is, and here’s the thing that’s so interesting, is that I feel like comedy, television comedy, is doing a better job at it sometimes than we are in the mainstream media is having full conversations with these voters. I love mos i am a huge fan of it. It’s my favorite thing I could watch MOS all day, because I think it’s so interesting to hear people answer questions. But I think you have to do more follow up. If someone says something that is just factually, just completely wrong, I think you need to explore that more, not necessarily correct them, but you need to, like, explore it more. Like, why do you think that? Like, I would love to hear somewhat longer interviews with man on the street, where you’re trying to get to the bottom of why people think some of the erroneous things they think. But I think a lot of times, and this was true. I used to work in local news. It was even more true in local news is there is this sort of I need to go out and get this sound bite, and so once I’ve got it, I’ve got it right, but once you’ve got the sound bite, isn’t there a next layer? You know, I think we need to hear more from regular people, what they think, but not just what they think, why they think it. That was, that’s the one thing I would change.

 

Samantha Bee  38:33

Are you saying that it’s not enough to just once a year go to a donut shop in Iowa and be like, I think I’ve got my finger on the pulse. Get me out of here.

 

Joy Reid  38:42

It’s like, that same deli The New York Times is. It’s like, they have their favorite Deli. They just go in there and ask the same people. And, you know, it’s interesting. I did, I got a chance to do this being during 2016 right? And so during the primaries, MSNBC sent me to Staten Island. This is true story. So me, and clearly I was the only black in the Staten Island Deli. So I’m walking around me and my camera crew, and I’m just going up to people. Now, some people just gave me dirty looks. It didn’t talk to me, but the people who did talk to me was very interesting. I had some instant conversations. There was one guy. I went up to him and his friend. It was two guys. One guy had a handlebar mustache. He looked really angry. The other guy seemed somewhat friendly. So I started up a conversation with them, and they both were, they were people who liked Donald Trump, right? And the stereotype of Staten Island is that it is a majority Republican borough, but that is not true. It’s actually a majority. It’s a super majority democratic borough. It’s just less democratic than like the 92% democratic Bronx or 90% democratic Brooklyn, but it’s like 78% Democrat. These are conservative Democrats, not Republicans. So every time I would ask them, Who do you like in the primary, they would almost all, they almost all said, Trump. My next question was, what political party are you in? They’d say Democrat. All of them, the two guys who were sitting at the table, they were the only like mixed marriage in the room, right? The one who said he liked Trump was a Republican. I was like, okay, the one who was the handlebar mustache guy was a Democrat, and he said, I’m a Democrat. And I said, do you know that you cannot vote for Donald Trump in the Democratic primary, because as a Democrat, you can’t vote for him in the primary. And he got really angry, and he’s like, I’m an American. I serve my country in Vietnam, and I can vote for anyone I want to. And I said, yeah, but not in the Democratic primary.

 

Samantha Bee  40:40

Not always.

 

Joy Reid  40:43

But I gave him some information he needs, because, you know what, he was going to show up to vote, thinking he was going to get to vote for Donald Trump and all of these people who liked Donald, this was a signal right of something that was happening, because these people to a person other than this guy and one other guy who was In there were Democrats, but they were conservative white Democrats, and so I think we by not like digging in, we’ll miss little things like that. And then even just to confirm it, when I did one of my phone ins to do my hit, I had all this information that I’d gotten by walking around and getting all this data. And then I had them go to Steve Kornacki our numbers, And I asked them what percentage of the voting population in Staten Island as Democrats, and he confirmed it was like 78% and I guess maybe, since I worked in campaigns, I’m more sensitive to it, but we’ve got to, like, dig that one layer deeper. Sometimes you just need the one other layer to really understand what’s going on with voters.

 

Samantha Bee  41:39

Do you think that you would have been as interested in going into news and television news, if, if social media, or the internet in general, had been as big a deal when you were starting out.

 

Joy Reid  41:54

We would have, I mean, look, I wouldn’t have hated, I would have hated to be a nerdy junior high school student social media. I thank God it didn’t exist when I was in high school, I think so, because I find it fascinating, just as almost an anthropological thing, I got interested in news, becoming obsessed with a story that had nothing to do with me. The Iran hostage crisis was, you know, 9000 miles away from the United States, from, you know, from Denver, Colorado. It had nothing to do with me, and I just got interested in it, just because I thought it was interesting. So I think I would have still found the same things interesting. And I find the world interesting. I find history fascinating. And what I love about social media is there’s so much information there, and it’s just a free marketplace of information. You just have to know what’s information and what’s bullshit. And I think the reason you read books and the reason you do you do more than just get it all from social media is social media is the frothy layer, right? You actually need the you need the drink. And the drink is like books and actually reading, you know, real history and things like that. So I feel like, as long as I was still as informed as I feel like I am, and I’m not, you know, the most informed in the world, but I feel like I’m pretty informed. Pretty informed, and I would still be fascinated with it, even if social media had existed before.

 

Samantha Bee  43:07

So I’m hearing from you that it’s okay that my frothy layer is just a thick ribbon of kitten videos and a sloth gently trailing his toenails in a lake, as long as I get to the meaty stuff at some point.

 

Samantha Bee  43:25

At some point, if you get to the beverage, it’s all fine, whatever your floppy layer is. And look, there’s nothing wrong with this […]

 

Samantha Bee  46:33

Or they’re adorable, whatever you need to get through the day. We’ll be right back after this.

 

Samantha Bee  46:42

Can I just ask you this Deep fake? Okay, so you were deep faked last year. I find that so ominous. We did a big piece about it years and years ago. It is a wild world, having had a deep fake perpetrated on you, which I imagine was, I mean, can you even just like would just walk me through the feeling of when you discovered it. I mean, what a violation.

 

Joy Reid  47:25

It was so bizarre, because it was a family member who texted to the family group chat, to my cousin, group chat, please, can you get me some of these gummies? And I’m thinking to myself, I don’t even do weed. What are you talking about? Like weeds. What do you mean? What gummies? And I said, What gummies? Because I’m like, gummies. She’s like, you know, the weight loss gummies. I saw your commercial, and I’m like, what commercial? They’re like, you know, when Anderson Cooper interviewed you about the weight loss gummies, you look great. I want to lose weight. Can’t you? Please send me these, you know, give me the hookup. And I was like, I’ve never I’ve seen Anderson Cooper on the street one time. It’s the only time we almost met. He doesn’t know me. I don’t know him. We work for rival networks. Why would he interview me? And I do not know what you’re talking about. And they were like, let me find it. You absolutely sat down with him for an interview. I’m like, I would remember this. And we’re going back and forth in the family group chat, and my cousin is insisting, my cousin, my blood cousin, is insisting that I did this interview with emson Cooper, so she sends me the video, and I was horrified. It’s like a mash up. It’s like fake hands holding the product. It’s him and me, my voice, it’s my voice, but it sounds almost robotic, and it’s this fake interview. And so it’s such a violation. I, you know, I reached out to the network to be like, hey, FYI, you know, let me let y’all know what’s going on, and spoke to one of the sort of, you know, in House lawyers. I’m like, is there anything I can do? Can we do a cease and desist? Is there any way to stop this? And another good friend of mine who’s a really fantastic lawyer out in LA, I texted him, I’m like, Hey, is there anything we can do, and to stop these people from, you know, because they, because then I got, you know, I do a Google alert on myself, just to see what horrible things are being said about me, right? Because their networks I’ve already gotten for punishment, I just want to know. And so the Google Alert starts filling up with all these various people writing about me, promoting a weight loss drug. And I’m like, this is horrible. What if this harms people? What if someone takes it and then they want to sue because it didn’t work. Like I like, I have to stop this. And it turns out there’s what I discovered through all of this happening, is Sam, there’s almost nothing you can do if you get deep faked you have almost no recourse. And that is terrifying. And we are now in a world where this could be used for political campaigns, they can do anything to you an actor. My sister was an actress. They can use your image to make porn. How would you stop them?

 

Samantha Bee  49:51

Are there having been, having having been on the receiving end of a deep fake? Are there specific guardrails? That you have thought to put forth that obviously no one’s listening to. Like, do you have it? But I guess guardrails on AI would be nice as a start, but it doesn’t feel like we’re really cruising in that direction.

 

Joy Reid  50:15

No. I mean, the best you can do, and this isn’t even a full remedy, is, like, now when I post videos, even if it’s a video of a segment of my show, I never post it without adding something to it to make it custom, so that there’s words on it right. It’s better to post it with like a big headline at the top or something. That makes it harder to just take that video and just suck it into something else. I mean, people can still crop it and do it, but they have to go through I’m going to make them work harder. If you’re going to steal or a clip from the readout, it’s going to have, like, captions under it and a big headline at the top, and it’s going to be where you’re just not going to get the clean video, if I can help it, but they can still do it. I mean, sadly, the technology has outrun the law, and it’s one of those things where the tech is so far ahead of, you know, the average 70 year old members. No, no offense that we love, I love all persons. I have no problem with the elders, but they don’t have a grasp on it enough to even do anything legislatively. And I don’t know what you can do, if anything.

 

Samantha Bee  51:18

What are you talking about? Chuck Grassley is dreamboat he is grappling. He is at the vanguard making technology safer all of us.

 

Joy Reid  51:36

Oh, gotta adjust cat video, I need it right now. I need two kittens.

 

Samantha Bee  51:46

I need someone to be wearing a sweatshirt with two kittens in the hoodie and a baby bottle. More and more insane as the news gets worse. Okay, I really it’s hard for me to imagine being so steeped in the news every night, and then also finding time to do your own personal writing. Okay, you just wrote Medgar and Merley. How in the world did you find time to do that, in addition to everything else that you’re doing, and also, why did you feel like you needed to write it now.

 

Joy Reid  52:24

You know, the whole project took about two years to get done, between the research and the interviews and then just trying to figure out how to make it into a book. I didn’t actually initially come up with the idea, but I got the spark to do it in 2018 when I interviewed ms Murley for my old show for am Joy. I was just in LA, and I had interviewed her before, just remotely, and this was my first chance to interview her in person. So I was very excited. And she and Maxine Waters came on, and they were my little panel. And after the interview, she presents me with this New York Times piece about me and asked me to sign it. I nearly fainted on the floor, because I’m just like, I’m such a Stan of her. I just respect her so much. She’s like, an icon. And I’m like, you want my autograph. I want your autograph. And so, chatting and and I just, we just started talking, and she brought up Medgar. I don’t remember how it came up. I guess we’re all talking about our, you know, relationships. And we’re talking about, you know, we talked about Miss Maxi, you know, representing water’s relationship and everything. But when Merley Evers Williams talked about Medgar Evers, she spoke about him like that was her high school boyfriend, and she just fell in love with him yesterday, it was so intense her love for him, right? And I said to her, Miss Merley, it’s been 60 years. He’s been dead for 60 years. You still seem like you’re madly in love with this man. And she said Medgar Evers was the love of my life, and it was that stayed with me for literally two years, and once my my editor and my publisher were having me put pushing me to come up with another, with another book for Harper Collins and I Peter, my publisher has done all my books with me, except one. And so he’s just my guy. I go back and there, he’s like, What book would you like to write now? And so we went out with my my agent, Suzanne, and the three of us are out at lunch, and he’s they’re like, what do you want to write? And I was trying to think of what I would enjoy writing, right? Because I had written a Trump book. It did well, but I didn’t want to, like, go in that mind again. I want to do something different and nothing political. I’m like, what do I want to do that’s different, that’s not like, necessarily a politics book, right? And I thought about that love story, and I said, you know, what has anyone ever written a civil rights love story? Because I think I have one. And I pitched it to them. I didn’t even write a pitch. I just pitched it to them at lunch. And they were like, we love it, do it. So then it took a good two years. And then, of course, the pandemic hit, and it was very difficult to get it done. And then I got this show.

 

Samantha Bee  54:50

Then you’re launching a new show, and so it all kind of got discombobulated.

 

Joy Reid  54:55

And I ended up, you know, doing the interviews and spending a lot of time with her. And then once i. Had all of these interviews and all these interviews with other people. We went on her block where they lived, and we just congealed all this great information. And then I got, like, profound writer’s block, partly because I was just so busy and things were so crazy, I put my podcast on hold, and I was just like, I have to figure out how to write this book, right? And what my favorite writer of all times is James Baldwin. I love James Baldwin. I’m like, obsessed with him. And I said, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna I’m gonna get on a plane. And I went to Paris, and I said, I’m gonna go. And I had never really vacationed without Jason, my husband. We’ve been married, like, 30 years, and I’ve always, we always vacation together. This is the first time I had vacation by myself. I went for two weeks. I checked into this beautiful Airbnb, which I call my apartment. I don’t know why these other people think they live their apartment now my apartment, and I moved in there with my limited French, and I just lived there for two weeks, and I went on. The first thing I did was go on this James Baldwin tour. So I went to where he ate. I went, I went and saw his apartment where he lives, and I just got steeped in the James Baldwin Enos. And I managed to write seven chapters in Paris, what literally in two weeks, and I was just, it was just coming out as I was listening to, like, my old jazz, my 40s jazz, um playlist. And just like getting in the vibe, and I was able to write the book that way, so I got a lot of it done there, and then came back, was able to work the rest of the book into my schedule. So it was hard, but I did it thanks to James Baldwin.

 

Samantha Bee  56:17

Thank you, James Baldwin, thank you for everything. It is so striking how young they were, how young they were, how many of the civil rights heroes were so young. It feels very important to remember that young people have always been at the heart of progress.

 

Joy Reid  56:39

Absolutely, and the thing is, I mean, we just went through the anniversary of the discovery of Goodman Schwerner and Cheney’s bodies. You know, when they were killed in Mississippi, Nikki Schwerner was 24 Cheney and Goodman were 22.

 

Samantha Bee  56:57

Oh, they were kids.

 

Joy Reid  56:58

You know, but they had both been civil rights activists for like, five years each, you know. Cheney, the one Mississippian young black man had started as a 15 year old NAACP volunteer in high school that was tutored and came into the movement because of Medgar Evers, right, you know. And so Medgar factors into so many of these stories because he was the biggest booster of young activists. He just believed in them. And most of the activists that he was training and bringing into the movement were between 15 and 19 years old. They were young, you know, John Lewis was only 22 when he took those blows on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. So we’re talking about people like Dr King and Medgar. They were the older ones. And they were like, 30, you know, and so we’re talking about a movement. And the reason for that is pretty obvious in some ways, if you think about it, that you know adults, people you know my age, you’re you’re a young you’re young lady, but me, my age, I’ll say that.

 

Samantha Bee  57:54

That’s kind.

 

Joy Reid  57:56

But you know, grown folks had mortgages and jobs that they could lose if you join the movement, if you join the NAACP, you could get your mortgage, be called. You could they could you could be fired from your job just for joining the NAACP, and specifically in Mississippi. So people were terrified if they’d managed to form a middle class life, and that mostly meant teachers, World War Two veterans. They there weren’t that many other jobs you could do as a black, quote, unquote, middle class person, they were afraid to lose it all, and you could get lynched for it. Whereas young people had this bravado and a lack of fear of death that enabled them and also the lack of responsibilities, no financial responsibilities, no kids. And so they were the ones who were free to act, and they had the courage to act. And so they’re the ones who really form the core of the movement.

 

Samantha Bee  58:44

That is why we seek such youthful vigor in our presidential candidates. Because those two spunky lads.

 

Joy Reid  58:56

Those spunky lads, are in the prime of their lives.

 

Samantha Bee  58:59

Okay, yes, okay, you so many people come to you for the news. Who do you go to?

 

Joy Reid  59:05

It’s interesting. I am both a I’m both an MSNBC staffer and an MSNBC consumer. I really do watch MSNBC, especially my prime time friends. You know, I love Rachel. You know, that’s my that’s my homegirl. I love her. I love Nicole. I love Chris Hayes and Alex Wagner and all of those. And, you know, Stephanie rule, that’s my that’s my crazy bestie. She’s so She’s so silly and fun. So I actually do and Lawrence, of course, you cannot leave out Lauren. I mean, I actually love MSNBC primetime. I’ve been a viewer of it since I was, you know, you know, when I wasn’t in politics and when I wasn’t at this level of news. So I do love what we do here. I do there are people on CNN that I really respect, like Jim Acosta, um, there, you know, there’s some brilliant, I mean, Manu Raju, I covet so much. If he ever, if his contract ever came up, I would call Rashida the president MSNBC and just demand that she hire him immediately. I’m obsessed with him. I think he’s brilliant. You know, we have some great journalists. We have Vaughn Hillyard. We have. Great people, but I tend to consume a lot, like every so often. I even pop over to Fox and check out what they’re doing. You know, I kind of consume a big, very large diet of news. I’ll read the New York Times, Washington Post, but I also love to read regional so I’ll read the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun Sentinel. I’ll get the Boston Globe, and sometimes I’ll even check out the Boston times. I want to know. I feel like the best way to be informed is to consume a very wide variety of things. So I spend most of my mornings absorbing as much as I can grab from as many news sources that I can grab. I don’t have a specific go to I kind of go to everything, and then I kind of distill it in my brain and figure out what seems to make sense.

 

Samantha Bee  1:00:37

I like to do that too. I like to wake up in the morning and just go what’s going on in the Tampa Bay Times.

 

Joy Reid  1:00:41

The Tampa Bay Times. It’s great paper. The sad thing is, these papers used to be better, but they’re all getting eaten up by conglomerates, and so sometimes what you’ll find is that the exact same stories are in the Tampa Bay Times and The Miami Herald, because they’re just using the same wire stories. It’s sad, but these papers are not what they used to be. To be honest with you, I think they’re they’re losing funding. They’re losing, they’re losing their heft over time.

 

Samantha Bee  1:01:08

And into their independence.

 

Joy Reid  1:01:10

And their independence, and they’re getting bought by hedge funds. And as hedge funds buy them up the ball. You know, the paper here in Baltimore was recently bought up by a hedge fund, and it does change the coverage. The Wall Street Journal used to be a different paper. It’s a different paper.

 

Samantha Bee  1:01:21

Under those hedge funds have our best interests at heart. It’s just settle down economics, real, just really big hearted. Well, I thank you so much for talking to me today. This was just a just a total pleasure. I’m such a huge fan of yours, so glad you didn’t go to medical school. I’m not saying that you might not, though, because you still, you’re writing books, you’re doing it all. You could do it. It could still happen.

 

Joy Reid  1:01:48

Well, I don’t have the time and fortune that I would rather spend on my retirement, but I’m a huge fan, and thank you for having me on it. You know, I love having these conversations, because I do think it’s what we’re all thinking about, right? It’s like, What in the world is happening.

 

Samantha Bee  1:02:03

What in the world, what in the world? Well, Godspeed, this week.

 

Joy Reid  1:02:07

Thank you.

 

Samantha Bee  1:02:07

Godspeed.

 

Samantha Bee  1:02:15

That was Joy Reid and I had no choice but to look up one thing. She said that Staten Island actually has more Democratic voters than Republican voters, which I found quite hard to believe. But she is right. I mean, you know, like, of course, she is 39.72% of registered Staten Island voters are Democrats and only 31.46% are registered Republicans. That was crazy. All right, thanks for joining us. I’m Samantha Bee, see you next week for some more Choice Words.

 

CREDITS  1:03:03

Thank you for listening to choice words, which was created by and is hosted by me. The show is produced by Baron Reinstein, with editing and additional producing by Josh Richmond. We’re distributed by Lemonada Media, and you can find me @realSamb on x and Instagram. Follow Choice Words wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.