Willie Geist on His ‘Sunday Sitdown Live’ and His Hope to One Day Interview Taylor Swift

Willie Geist has been a fixture at NBC for two decades, serving as a cohost of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and anchor of “Sunday Today” — tackling everything from the shootings in Orlando, Fla., and Sandy Hook, Conn., to the inauguration of President Trump and the Olympic Games.

As the son of CBS News journalist Bill Geist, he seemed destined to follow a path into broadcast news. Like his dad, Geist is one of the rare talents who can seamlessly transition between hard news and pop culture. He believes it’s because he has developed “a real, organic, bottom-up connection” to his audience, whether he’s doing a heart-wrenching interview with the family of a shooting victim or chatting with an Academy Award-winning actor.

On Feb. 2, Geist will push the envelope again when he airs the first “Sunday Sitdown Live,” which was taped in front of a raucous audience at City Winery in New York. Tickets for the event sold out in eight minutes.

Here, Geist talks about growing up in New Jersey, failing to make the basketball team at Vanderbilt University, how the news business has changed since he started, and how interviewing Taylor Swift is still on his bucket list.

WWD: Your father was a successful print and broadcast journalist so the skill obviously runs in the family. Did you ever consider another career or was this always your goal?
Willie Geist: You know, in a serious way, probably not, just watching my dad do what he did. When I was born, he was a suburban reporter at the Chicago Tribune — not for the big paper, but the suburban Trib in the suburbs. Then when I was 5, we moved to New Jersey when he got a job with The New York Times, and he wrote the About New York column. And then when I was in middle school, he got the job at “CBS Sunday Morning.” It was the only kind of job I’d ever seen up close, which was to go out and talk to people and write and tell a story. We never had a sitdown conversation where he said, “This is what you ought to do,” or “This is how you should do it” exactly. But by osmosis, watching him, I can tell he enjoyed his job. He always came home from the road with a story. He was funny and he was personable. Other people had interesting jobs, but ones that weren’t easy to understand, like Wall Street or an attorney. His was a little more colorful, and I just saw the joy he had for the work he did. And I thought, well, that seems like a good way to live, because I don’t think I saw that in every other adult.

WWD: So how did you get your start?
W.G.: I wrote for the high school paper at Ridgewood High School. Then when I got to college at Vanderbilt, I tried to walk onto the basketball team. I didn’t have a scholarship and I didn’t make the team, so the closest I could get to the games was to cover them. I joined the staff of the Vanderbilt Hustler, which is a student newspaper there, and started covering games. They sent me to basketball, baseball, whatever it was, and I started getting a byline at my freshman year in college. I had also done an internship in television the summer before my senior year in college and thought, this is cool, I like this news and culture and politics all coming together. This was also the only time my dad told me, “I just want you to know this isn’t always easy. It can be a long road. It can be a frustrating road.” He was frustrated when he was young trying to get to the places he wanted to go and thought he deserved and saw that other people were getting the jobs.

WWD: What other careers did you explore?
W.G.: I went to lunch with a friend of ours from Ridgewood who worked on Wall Street. I took the train in, went downtown, and he sort of explained his job to me. This is the summer after I graduated from college. I heard him out and wondered if I could be a big numbers guy. Then the other meeting I remember is one my mom set this up with their insurance company, Northwestern Mutual. We had a good relationship with the guy who represented them, and he’s offered to have a meeting with me. So I went and sat with him, and he was explaining the ins and outs of insurance. And I thought, “You know, you’ve made a good life and a good career for yourself. God bless you. But this ain’t for me.” So that’s a long way of saying I think probably it was always in there somewhere.

WWD: How long have you been doing the “Sunday Today” show?
W.G.: It’s coming up on nine years. We have this live event for the “Sunday Sitdown” and they created a highlight reel and I realized we’ve done 400 of these interviews. It’s been such a gift: The fact that NBC gave me an hour of “Today” show real estate and then put my name on the door and said, “Go, make of it what you can and let’s see what happens.” And so with our small team of amazing producers, we just set out to do something new and different. Here we are, nine years later, having live events, and our ratings are really good, and we’re kind of defying gravity. When it feels like a lot of broadcast is going in the wrong direction. It’s turned out to be this really fun, joyful experience.

WWD: The live “Sunday Sitdown” that you’re doing. Is that a one-and-done or will you do others?
W.G.: We did it at City Winery and we didn’t really have a sense if it would be something people would be into. I went on the “Today” show with Nate Bargatze and we announced it, and it sold out in like eight minutes. And we said: “OK, I guess we can pull this off.” The next time, the place needs to be bigger because apparently there’s a big waiting list. So the idea and the goal would be to do more of them, because I feel a real, organic, bottom-up connection to our audience. The “Sunday Mug Shots” is an example: It was not some marketing idea that we had where we sent mugs to people and they take a picture. We noticed a few years ago, people taking a picture with this big yellow mug that, honestly, I didn’t even know we had on the website. People were taking them to all sorts of exotic places. And I said, “Well, why don’t we just put these on the air at the end?” I think we do seven every week. A couple weeks ago, we had one from every continent: somebody hiked to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, and you know how little you get to take with you. Then there was this couple in North Carolina flying in their biplane, like that Snoopy open plane, and the pilot and the passenger both have the mug out up in the air. Who’s at the controls? It’s become almost a competitive thing because they know you can’t just send it from the kitchen table anymore. But the point is I feel this connection to our audience, and I feel like they do too. It’s Sunday morning, it’s slower. You’re in your pajamas, you’re not racing out to work or school, and you can kind of settle in.

WWD: Back to the “Sunday Sitdown.” Who are some of the favorite interviews you’ve done over the years?
W.G.: Growing up in New Jersey and listening to “Livin’ on a Prayer,” I never thought I’d be in a room with Jon Bon Jovi. And then to interview Billy Joel, who in many ways has been the soundtrack to our lives, and talk through the genesis of “Piano Man,” or Billy Crystal, a guy I’ve looked up to and thought was funny and great for all these years. When you grow up, these famous people live on a different planet and there’s no way you would ever interact with them. They exist on a different plane. And then when you come into their orbit, and you sit down with them, and you realize, oh, that’s just a human being who struggled to get where he or she is, and is still grappling with staying relevant. It’s such a treat to be able to get that connection with them. The other one, I would say, is Larry David. He was kind enough to invite me to be on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” last year, which was incredible, so he reciprocated and came on my show. I’m always grateful to the very first interview, which was Leslie Odom Jr., who played Aaron Burr in Hamilton. That was in 2016 in the spring, at the height of “Hamilton,” and we were trying to get a show off the ground. He took a chance and said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” So I’m always grateful he would do that.

WWD: Who was your most challenging interview?
W.G.: A very talented musician named Machine Gun Kelly. This was a couple of years ago. He came into the room and was upset about the way a show had gone the night before. So he was in a mood, which is fine. We sat down, and usually we have a nice banter and get to know each other, but he was giving one-word answers or not saying anything, to the point where I said: “This isn’t good for him. Let’s give him a break if he needs it.” That upset him because I wasn’t letting him just be himself, I guess. But there’s a happy ending to the story. We hashed it out. There was a 10- or 15-minute period where we were going at it a little bit, in a respectful way, and then we came through that and his demeanor totally changed, and we talked for another hour and had a wonderful conversation. Some guests are tougher nuts to crack than others, but I’m up for it. And we always have 45 minutes or an hour. So if the first 10 or 15 minutes are not going great, I have that time to earn the trust of the person I’m talking to, and generally, we end in a good place.

WWD: Is there anybody on your bucket list?
W.G.: Taylor Swift, she hasn’t done it yet. We’ve been working on it since Day One and her team is wonderful, and they’re always very polite when they say no. I grew up around New York as a hip-hop fan, so Jay-Z has always been a very interesting one to me, and by the way, if Beyoncé wants to join, we’ll take them separately or together. Then there’s a funny one because he’s perfect for our show — Will Ferrell — but we finally got him and he’ll be on in a couple of weeks. Over nine years, we’ve had everybody on: Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and George Clooney. There’s a never-ending supply of interesting people.

WWD: You touch on hard news and cultural issues, which do you like better?
W.G.: What I like about the Sunday show is that it’s both. And I love my job on “Morning Joe” because we get to be on the front lines at 6 a.m. for whatever is happening that day. We get kind of the first cut at everything and set the tone for the day. I’ve done that for 17 years. But what I love about Sundays is it’s a little bit of a breather. Obviously it’s the “Today” show: We give you the news at the top, everything you need to know when you wake up. And then we make the turn and remind you, not in some Pollyannaish way, but in an uplifting way, there are a lot of good people in the world doing really impressive and decent things. Our “Sunday Spotlight,” our “Life Well Lived,” all those areas where we can remind people of what this country is, what it has been, what it still is, despite all the noise you hear on your phone all day. I think it’s a nice time to feel a little bit soothed on a Sunday morning.

WWD: You famously covered the Orlando nightclub shooting for seven straight hours. How do you keep your emotions in check and still report the news?
W.G.: I think on those days, you just go into a zone where it’s: what’s next? We go to a reporter to bring you up to speed, then you get an eyewitness, and then a police official, then somebody who worked at the Pulse nightclub, whatever that is. I think we had no commercials for those seven-and-a-half hours. I think I ran to the bathroom once in that time. It’s a long time, and the emotional part is real, but I’m really good at a little bit of disassociation. I was up at Sandy Hook for a few hours and standing outside the firehouse where the parents were being informed whether their child was alive or dead. That’s as bad as it gets. You’re talking about 6-year-olds in their light-up sneakers. We recently covered the inauguration and Jimmy Carter’s funeral and those are day-to-day, but the ones that are toughest are the ones where people’s lives were shattered in an instance. That’s a school shooting or a fire in California or a tornado in Oklahoma or the hurricanes in Florida. I remember going to Oklahoma years ago for a tornado, and a woman said, “Do you see where that foundation is? I was sitting there watching TV 12 hours ago.” Those are the hardest ones.

WWD: How has the news business changed since you’ve gotten into it?
W.G.: Immensely. Even just in the last few years, the way people are getting their information has changed completely. The siloed media means that everyone has a different version of the story. So let’s say you’re a supporter of Donald Trump listening to his inaugural address, it makes complete sense to you, because that’s the story of America in decline that you’ve heard from him at rallies or on the TV network you watch, or on the website you read, or from the people you follow on TikTok or Instagram. If you’re not a supporter of Donald Trump, it sounds like he’s speaking a foreign language. That’s a tough thing to bridge: How do we agree on a shared set of facts when we’re being told all these different versions of the same story?

I think in Trump’s case, that’s worked to his benefit, to create a narrative about the country in decline so he can ride in and save America from itself. The fact that I have two teenagers and, if we didn’t have cable in our house, because my wife and I watch it, we wouldn’t have cable. In other words, they’re not flipping on the news every night, or, I hate to say, “Morning Joe” in the morning. They’re reaching for their phones and whatever. We’ve encouraged them to go to trusted sources: The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NBC, CNN, if they hear something that sounds wild, crazy, outlandish, double check it before you believe it or amplify it. This generation, and it’s not teenagers, just doesn’t have any relationship with the media world where the news comes on at night, the paper comes out in the morning. I’m not saying it was great when it was that way because the messaging was controlled by so few people, but now it’s controlled by so many people. It’s so disparate that it becomes difficult to know what the truth is and who to trust.

WWD: Is it hard for you to do both soft and hard news?
W.G.: At this point, viewers are savvy enough or they trust you enough to accept that you can do both. Especially on “Morning Joe,” there’s such a wide range of what we’re talking about — Trump’s first day in office, the college football game, and on a lighter day some other pop culture thing. Our audience knows that we’re fluent in all of those things, and they allow for it. And I think the same is true on “Sunday Today”: here’s the news, hopefully I deliver that with credibility and the truth. And then they enjoy just sitting back a little more and relaxing. I love the balance, and I think for the audience, they hopefully trust me enough to let me live in all those different worlds.

WWD: Does your father ever critique your work?
W.G.: I think I’ve been doing this long enough, he doesn’t. But his style, which was conversational and had a sense of humor to it, has probably guided me in many ways. When I was starting out, I went from being a producer to on-air literally overnight, and I was kind of feeling my way, he would send me notes and tell me, that was a good conversation, but that’s going back 15 or 20 years. In recent years, we’ve settled into a good place where he says, “Glenn Close was great. You and Larry David were hilarious” — just a supportive dad.

WWD: What about your sister, Libby Geist Wildes? She’s pretty accomplished, too.
W.G.: She’s a documentary filmmaker, so she does something completely different than I do. I think our family is good about appreciating what everyone does as separate and different from each other, and there’s not a lot of critique of each other’s work. And frankly, with her, there’s not much to critique. She does unbelievable work. She won an Academy Award for “OJ, Made in America,” she did “The Last Dance,” the Michael Jordan documentary. She has “Super/Man” out right now, the Christopher Reeve story. She’s incredibly prolific and talented, and so I’m just proud of her.

WWD: A couple of personal questions now. You played both football and basketball in high school. Which one did you like better?
W.G.: That’s hard. I think basketball was my game from a young age, because I was tall. I’m 6-3, and I was 6-3 probably by sophomore year in high school. Even in fifth grade, I was the tall kid. So I always loved basketball. But football…we won a state championship in 1991, which I’m sure you’re aware, and that was the real glory days/Bruce Springsteen stuff in New Jersey. We still get together, joke and reminisce and have fun remembering that time. So football was very, very special.

WWD: Do you still play today? How do you stay in shape?
W.G.: My son and daughter both play basketball in high school, so I don’t play competitively, but I definitely shoot around with them in the driveway. That’s not much of a workout so I’ve become, only in recent years, a runner. I decided during COVID I was going to run the New York City Marathon, so I started training for that. I still have pictures somewhere I sent my wife having just finished 2 miles, because it was such an achievement. Because of COVID, they canceled 2020, but I said, “Well, I can’t not do it.” So I kept training and ran the 2021 marathon. I’ve kept that up — certainly not at that distance, but I understand why people run. It’s meditative, it’s quiet. I don’t love running on a treadmill because you don’t go anywhere. But outside, you have stimulus, it opens your mind up. I also like to take long walks in the woods with my dog.

WWD: What about hockey? That runs in your blood, too.
W.G.: My great-grandfather is in the Hockey Hall of Fame, which is amazing. He played for the Detroit Red Wings in the ‘30s, won two Stanley Cups, was captain of the team. But I can barely skate. I think again, it was the height thing. By the fourth grade, I was so tall they said, you’ve got to go to basketball tryouts. There are hockey players in our family, I’m just not one of them. I have huge respect for people who can skate while holding a stick and controlling a puck and getting hit by other people because I can barely stand up on my little rented figure skates on vacation.

WWD: You’ve written three books already. Is there a fourth in your future?
W.G.: It’s been a long time. I think the last one came out 10 years ago. I’ve been cooking up an idea for another one that will have elements of humor to it, but be more of a novel, a mystery, that might bring in elements of media, crime and culture and politics. It’s still very loose. I need to tie all those strings together on my bulletin board before I figure out how they all connect. But I definitely have thought about it. I really enjoyed writing the other ones. The most recent one I wrote with my dad: “Good Talk, Dad,” and it was a great back and forth between the two of us, chapter to chapter about the father-son talks. We never had them until now.

WWD: Of course we have to talk fashion. Who dresses you?
W.G.: I dress myself. In the news business, we don’t have racks of clothes waiting for us when we arrive at 5 a.m. I got a great tip from Al Roker a long time ago. When I started on the “Today” show full-time in 2012, I was cohosting an hour with Al Roker and Natalie Morales and Tamron Hall. I was going to Barneys and buying these expensive suits and I didn’t really have the budget for it, but I kind of thought I needed to do it. Then Al told me: “J.Crew makes great suits, and here’s a list of places where you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars, because I know that’s probably a stretch.” And he was right. So ever since then, I’ve taken that to heart, and you can find reasonably priced suits. J.Crew is a good one. If I have people advise me, it would be my wife, and then my daughter, who’s 17 and takes pride in being my stylist. It helps to have cool, honest women in your house who are not afraid to tell you that’s not good enough: go back to your room and try again.

WWD: OK, so what’s left to do in your career, what haven’t you had a chance to do yet?
W.G.: I would love to get into production of scripted TV. I’ve been in this news world, which I’ve loved and been so grateful for, for so long. But I think there’s another next chapter which is not even related to the news: writing, producing TV shows, movies, whatever and living in that world a little bit. There will come a day, as my wife points out, when getting up at 4 a.m. isn’t going to work. I’ll do it as long as I possibly can, but it’d be nice to have a place to be whenever this wonderful road in the news ends.