Hi, how are you? Cheers, Willie.
Look at your studio, I am so jealous.
Really?
Oh my gosh.
I also wanna congratulate you
on another season of the show.
Thank God, I'm so relieved, Willie.
I mean, People don't realize how hard it is.
How hard it is to start something, anything.
To start something during a pandemic
without the plan that you had sketched out for a year,
all of a sudden, it's totally different.
Yep.
And to succeed the way you've succeeded
is a huge tribute to you and your crew, so congrats.
Thank you, it's all about the crew.
(crew cheer)
It's a big deal. We're all we've had.
And so it's a testament to us.
And I am saying this to the man who truly knows
what making a show is all about.
And you just celebrated,
I see all your family and friends
celebrating your fifth anniversary of "Sunday TODAY."
Thank you, yeah.
Yeah, like you, we started it five years ago
not quite knowing where it was heading.
Was doing something a little bit different
within "the TODAY Show" family.
and, you know, we tinkered with it along the way,
the same way you have probably.
And I think we finally landed on something
that might stick around for awhile.
It's interesting when you are so kind of gut convinced
that something's gonna work and it just doesn't.
Totally, totally.
When I started that show.
So my other job, I was on "The TODAY Show" at the time,
hosting the third hour, and "Morning Joe" on MSNBC.
So I had these two jobs.
And my plan was, what if I smashed those two shows together
and make some combination of that.
And it was a little too much of the conversation off the top
at the beginning, where the audience needed to actually know
what was going on in the world
and not launch into the conversation
the way we do on "Morning Joe."
So that was part of the learning.
So we walked that back a little bit.
We still have our conversations, of course,
but by and large, it's, here's the news,
and then we make the turn
to it being kind of a magazine show.
Well, we're gonna do thank you
for doing the "Art of the Interview"
which is a digital series I do to pick the minds of...
people that I admire,
especially in the journalistic sense, curious people,
people who have figured out how to have an art
in the interview itself.
What is something that is advice,
I'm asking for myself here.
(Willie laughs)
What is advice to asking that surprising question
that might catch off guard, might be a bit pushy
but really is gonna ultimately bring insight
into that person we're not getting otherwise.
I think it starts with trust.
And I think you're really good at that actually,
which is that you are open yourself.
You're willing to share,
which you've been on our show twice, by the way.
I'm so lucky. And it's a short list.
It's you, Dolly, Ina Garten.
There's like four people and you're in that group.
What company, my goodness.
But you, I know if I can build trust with you
and you know that number one, I'm well-researched,
that I'm not interested in whatever the gotcha question is
from the gossip magazine, that's just not what I do.
If you can start a conversation,
and frankly on our show, we have time.
I sit with somebody, as you know, for 45 minutes or an hour.
So even if I don't know the person, I'm building a rapport.
So once you have that trust,
you might not even have to ask the question.
They might just start sharing something with you
or talking about,
you know, I don't like to zero in on pain in someone's life
but if I feel like we've got enough of a relationship
in the interview that they're willing to go there,
then I will, or a lot of times, as I say,
it will just come out because we've built that rapport
over the course of the interview.
I definitely am someone who is willing to go there myself.
And I would like to welcome anyone else to go there with me.
And what you just said made me think of your signature piece
in your show, the highs and the lows.
And I was wondering if I could turn that question on to you.
Yeah, I would love that.
And why don't we start with the lows
so we can end on the highs.
Oh, okay, all right.
I guess professionally, as I think about it,
it's interesting, we've been celebrating
five years of the show
and it's all been sort of the glossy interviews
and all the great people we've talked to.
But the lows are, as I said, it's still a news show.
So a lot of times you'll wake up on a Sunday morning,
unfortunately, and something terrible has happened
the night before.
And so in our first year of the show, it's June of 2016,
We're only two months into it.
And it was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
And I was on the air that morning
I think for seven and a half hours alone, no commercials,
just talking and trying to get everybody up to speed
and interviewing people.
And I'll never forget the moment
when the police first came out to the microphones
and we're trying to assess what exactly had happened.
And he said, "We have 50 casualties."
and I'll never forget saying to my producer off-mic,
"Did he say 50?
Did he mean five?
Did he say 15?"
Which is bad enough.
"Did he say 50?"
And they said, "Yeah, he said 50."
And then over the course of that morning,
I'm interviewing people who've just lived through
the worst thing you could ever live through.
I can't sort of express to people enough,
what type of person
with an empathic heart, a curious mind
and someone who is, again, incredibly well versed
in the ways of the world, the current news,
and humanity in general,
to be able to go on the air for seven hours,
hear these stories, tell these stories.
I think you can really feel the authenticity of someone.
I agree.
All I've done for my whole career is just be myself,
just totally be myself.
I mean, you can't play TV or try to be the anchorman
or what would Walter Cronkite do right now?
You just have to be you.
Okay, the highs, well, let's end on the highs
before we go to commercial break.
Well, for me, it's the people you don't hear from a lot,
when we land an interview with someone like that.
So Al Pacino was one of them last year.
I mean, look at this picture
where I am cruising around Beverly Hills
in a drop top Cadillac Eldorado with Al Pacino.
And that is an out of body experience.
Yeah, no, that's a moment.
I sat down with him,
he doesn't do a lot of interviews, as I said,
for about an hour.
We talked through his career.
And he said he was turning 80,
and he felt like it was time and he was ready to talk.
And then he just agreed to everything.
Yeah, we can do an hour,
and then we'll go for a drive around Beverly Hills.
And all these people are yelling at him
and he's having the time of his life.
And I thought, what life is this, you know?
How did I end up in this car with Al Pacino riding shotgun.
Homework, curiosity, and being a good person, you know?
I mean, if you use the ladder of other people,
It just won't be there.
And if you use the ladder of yourself, you will build slowly
but there's a strong foundation there.
(upbeat bright music)