My first guest is a best selling author and Emmy winning host
of the Rachel Maddow Show.
Please welcome Rachel Maddow.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi, it's great to see you.
Great to see you too, Rachel.
Where are your signature glasses?
Oh, here.
But when I'm at home and sometimes
it makes me look like I'm on another planet.
Because you get the reflections from the glasses
because it's not really like professionally lit.
Can you see without them?
No, not at all.
Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, you can take them off.
That's fine.
You're beautiful either way, and it's great to see you.
Last time you were here was 2012.
Can you believe that?
Wow.
I know.
Wow, that was another planet ago.
I was going to say not much has happened since then.
[LAUGHTER]
Seriously, you must be so exhausted
after the last four years of just nonstop craziness.
You know, I feel like the whole country is exhausted.
The Earth feels exhausted.
It's trying to spit us out at this point.
[LAUGHTER]
But, yeah.
It's funny.
I was thinking the other day about how presidents--
we see them at the start of them being president,
and they look a certain way.
And then you see him at the end of their presidency,
and it looks like they've aged 1,000 years like Methuselah.
And with Trump, he looks fine.
He looks exactly like he did when he got in there.
But all of us with COVID, the Trump administration,
look like we have aged further.
[LAUGHTER]
I feel very tired.
Yeah, I was going to say not just you.
I think all of us have aged over the last four years,
and especially over the last year since everything,
you know, with COVID.
You covered the inauguration live for MSNBC.
How nervous were you to be there?
Because I mean, were you thinking
something could happen?
There were so many threats.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny.
I think because the Trump years were so hard
and so much terrible stuff happened,
I thought a lot in advance about the inauguration
of the next president.
Whether that was going to be four years after Trump started,
or eight years after Trump started.
And I had all these ideas about how--
what a relief it was going to be. and I had
pranks that I was going to play.
And I would like set aside a special like bottle of wine
that I was going to open.
So it was going to feel like a fresh start.
When it actually came to the inauguration,
I could barely get out from under my desk.
I was so terrified.
[LAUGHTER]
I was-- I really thought that I would feel differently
than I did.
I was just so agitated.
I couldn't-- I couldn't-- almost couldn't calm down ahead
of the inauguration.
After what happened on January 6th,
I just couldn't shake the feeling
that something else terrible was going to happen.
And seeing thousands of troops in the Capitol and everything,
I mean, it's an important transition for the country.
But it just felt really heavy and really scary.
Yeah.
Well, I think most of us--
all of us were holding our breath
and just wanted that day to be over, and just want to move on
and just to have a peaceful time on this planet for a while.
When you saw Bernie Sanders, did you
know that that was going to be a thing?
[LAUGHTER]
I will tell you--
I live in Western Massachusetts, which
is we kind of think of ourselves as Southern Vermont.
And I will say like seeing him on the live feed that day,
seeing him walk out there with--
I think that's like the one coat that he has.
Any time you've ever seen him outdoors,
like through the whole presidential primary,
I saw him a whole bunch of times.
Whenever it was cold, that was the coat.
And I got mittens like that.
I sort of feel like he was just representing frumpy New
Englanders in a way that felt--
I felt very seen.
[LAUGHTER]
I feel like that's--
I kind of have that coat and those mittens.
I do.
So you finally got to interview--
I mean you had interviewed Fauci before,
but Dr. Fauci was not allowed to be on your show
during the Trump administration.
Isn't that crazy?
I mean, I was an AIDS activist back in the day,
back in a previous life.
And I've known Dr. Fauci for a very long time.
When the Ebola crisis happened during the Obama
administration, I had him on then.
And when the COVID crisis started a year ago,
I asked to book him very early on.
And he said yes, and his office said yes.
And we were in the planning purposes,
and then the word came down from on high, no.
Dr. Fauci is being blocked from coming on your program.
It was really--
I mean, I don't know.
He was going on even with other people on MSNBC.
But for some reason, I was blackballed specifically
by the White House, which was very frustrating.
So I wanted to talk to Dr. Fauci about, but it was impossible.
Like a weird form of flattery.
[LAUGHTER]
Like you guys can't do anything.
Like we don't have testing.
The president says you should inject bleach.
[LAUGHTER]
Like you have all these crazy--
like the one thing that you can do
is make sure that Dr. Fauci doesn't
go on Rachel Maddow Show.
Why are you even working on that?
Why do you even know who I am?
How can this be the one thing you're
incredibly efficient at when we need you to be doing so much?
[LAUGHTER]
The only thing that we're good at
was keeping him away from me.
That's fantastic.
The one thing he was efficient at.
I am-- I want to ask how Susan is.
Because your partner was very sick with COVID.
I got COVID, and it's so weird.
It's like a crap shoot.
You just don't know how it's going to affect you.
I had an easy time of it, and yet Susan
was really, really sick, right?
Yes, she got really sick.
And it was absolutely terrifying.
I actually haven't gotten it.
I've been negative the whole time.
We were able to-- we got her tested really
soon after she got exposed.
Thank God we had access to testing and could do that.
And then we separated.
But, I mean, that was a mixed blessing.
One, I didn't get it, which is amazing.
But on the other hand, she was really suffering
and I was trying to take care of her
from afar without being able to physically be with her.
And so she's on her own, getting sicker and sicker,
and we're monitoring her as close as we can.
And basically, I just Facetimed with her 24 hours a day
for the whole time that she was super sick.
But it was really, really scary.
It really-- I feel like I'll never be the same again
having been through that scare.
I have a--
I'm lucky I have the world's greatest relationship.
And I am totally in love, and she is the most important thing
in my life.
And to feel like she was--
her life was on the line, I don't--
I will never--
I will never be the same person.
It was so scary.
I can imagine.
I can imagine-- you said-- you mentioned
that you really, at one point, thought
she was not going to make it.
And you all have been together over 21 years.
And like you said, you have that relationship
where she's your everything.
And I can imagine.
How is she now?
Thank you for asking.
She's good.
Although like a lot of people who
have had considerable symptoms with their COVID,
there's a long tail for these symptoms.
And so even though she's a couple of months out of it
now--
I mean, technically she's recovered virologically,
but she still has a lot of the symptoms that kind of just
recur in an unpredictable way.
The fatigue, and the headaches, and body aches, and the brain
fog, it just kind of comes back and won't
let her-- won't let her go.
Her take on it is that she's not getting better every day,
but she is getting better every week.
Meaning even though she's got these recurring symptoms,
they're a little bit less every week when they come back.
But it's a long time.
Actually when I-- when Joe Biden became president,
so I was allowed to interview Dr. Fauci again.
Which is crazy.
One of the things he told me is that one of the things he's
personally working on is what they call a long COVID,
is the long tail of symptoms.
Even for people who didn't have severe symptoms,
sometimes people find themselves months
later still out of breath, or still having that brain fog,
or the other problems.
Yeah, I just heard today that there's something
that a nurse said that you can recover from it and be fine.
Or even if you didn't have it that bad when
you were sick and then months later,
you have paralysis in your legs, or things
are all of a sudden happening months later.
Have you heard of that?
Yeah.
Well, I mean that's sort of what they're trying
to get their hands around.
The thing that surprised me that Dr. Fauci told me
in the interview was that it's a very large proportion of people
who get it and recover from it who nevertheless
have some kind of ongoing symptom,
whether it's something really severe
or it's something that's more of a nuisance.
It doesn't seem like the body lets
it go even after you are testing negative,
and you've technically cleared it,
and you're no longer contagious.
And so that's why they're studying it at the NIH.
Is that they're trying to do meta-analysis
of all the different places they're
studying it all over the world, but also
to do big American surveys.
I mean, we've had so many millions of Americans infected.
There's a lot of people who have been through it.
And I think that the studies of that
are going to get more intense as time goes by, and good.
Because we want to know what the long term effects of this
are going to be for everybody who's recovered from it.
Well, I'm going to use the excuse that I
had COVID that I had brain fog.
I think that I'm going to say that's a recurring.
That's what I'm going to do.
We have to take a break, Rachel.
We'll be back more with Rachel after this.
Hi, I'm Andy.
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so you can see more awesome videos.
Like videos of me getting scared or saying embarrassing things
like ball peen hammer.
And also some videos of Ellen and other celebrities
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[SCREAMS]