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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. This next conversation is one I've been looking forward to for a long time. She's a colleague, mentor, and sister-friend, and like me, she's a southern girl. Her Emmy award-winning career started down in Texas.

Tamron Hall: This land belongs to Tai, he plays fourth earlier today, did very well. He's only 12 years old but as you mentioned, a lot of hard work goes into getting the sheet to look as good as this one does here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Today, you'll find her at home in Harlem or on the New York set of her popular daytime talk show.

Male Speaker: Today on Tamron Hall, how your name impacts your life, especially when you share it with someone famous.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, you all, it's Tamron Hall.

Tamron Hall: Welcome, welcome to the show. Today's show is going to be so fun. We're actually talking--

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joining me now is Tamron Hall, executive producer and Emmy award-winning host of the Tamron Hall Show. She's also host of the new Court TV series, Someone They Knew. Tamron, welcome to The Takeaway.

Tamron Hall: Oh, thank you for the warm welcome MHP, so good to be on with you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to start, before we get into all of the substantive, amazing things you're up to, I really want to start because I feel like sometimes we don't do this enough publicly by just saying thank you. There are not a lot of folks in this business who are as genuinely, authentically supportive, honest, funny, joyful, and who I would call straight-up sister friends. I just want to say thank you for always being that.

Tamron Hall: You know what, that means the world to me. You know how much I respect and admire you professionally but deeply personally, and the integrity which you glide through life. You are in the spirit of so many women that I grew up with, from my own personal folks in my family to the women I respected, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, all of these women that influenced, I hope, my career in many ways, you are in the spirit of those individuals, Sonia Sanchez, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

There's something about from the moment I met you, those three names came to mind, as well as my mother, my aunts. You're just that rich kind of woman that I celebrate and I'm honored to even know.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, to be even mentioned in the same breath as Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni, I'm going to take that little piece, I'm going to edit that out, and I'm just going to play that on a loop. [chuckes] Can we talk about your mom for just a second? Because you posted a picture of your mother on the Gram.

Tamron Hall: My mother's thirst trap photo. I said, "Why are you out here thirst trapping at 72 years old?"

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Listen, actual life goals to be your mother. Wow.

Tamron Hall: It was so funny. My mother was a single mom at age 19, and every birthday that I have, she called me exactly at the moment that her father, my grandfather, drove her to the hospital to have me. She goes, "Melissa," detail by detail. "I started to feel this way and I told your Papa that I was feeling like this." It is so funny to see her now as a 72-year-old, I always had the youngest mom of all of my friends. I had the mom who would get out and play volleyball or whatever with me because I was an only child for eight years. I said to her the other day, "I knew you when you were a baby." She said, "I knew you when you were a baby, too."

It's amazing how alive she is and how resilient she is and how beautiful if I can say she is. It was awesome to celebrate her birthday and trust me, she's seen all of the comments, [unintelligible 00:04:01] has seen them all. [chuckles]

Melissa Harris-Perry: You are a mom and in certain ways still a new mom. Maybe isn't brand new baby. It's walk and talking little person baby but, boy, you were doing a lot of things all at the same time. How's that work-life balance going?

Tamron Hall: Oh, as you know, there is no balance to it. It is surreal. It is amazing. It is hard. It's also obviously joyful and rewarding. I just got off the Zoom call with him. I usually call right after the show. We are live three days out of the week so I call him right after and he's now used to talking with mommy on Zoom. As you know, I'm looking at this human being and I can't believe I'm responsible for guiding him. I also can't believe at the same time how much he brings just a smile to my face. That's the selfish part of it, what they bring to us. It's so awesome.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk about this live talk show. I appreciate the kind words you said to me but as I'm thinking about, like, what is every single thing that Tamron Hall can do, and what I've seen you do literally in any one given day, the range of like morning show America's sweetheart kind of work, and then in the afternoon, you flip the switch and be like, "Let me ask you the hardest possible questions of a political reporter journalist," and then don't let there be a hurricane because you'd be out there with the rain slicker and reporting on what's going on by evening. In this role, you get to set so much of the agenda.

You're in season three, talk to me about what this role has been like and what else you want to do with it.

Tamron Hall: It's been so rewarding. I want to do more. Today's show, for example, we based it on ways that we can help other people. For example, one of the guests lives in Barcelona, Spain, 19 years old, like the rest of us watching the horrors of the assault and the massacre of Ukraine and its people. He decided to protest for the first time aged 19. Okay, that wasn't enough. He then threw his ability to code. In fact, he just won a Webby Award in 2020 for coding work that he did with tracking COVID-19.

He used his experience as someone in the coding world, which, obviously, I do not understand any of what he did, but he connected people who had been displaced from their homes who were fleeing for their lives with homes that were welcoming them in. That was just one of the most beautiful things, and I sat there thinking, "Of course, we all feel so helpless watching what's happening and we're wondering why can't the world do more," and that can weigh on anyone's soul, all of our souls right now. He took that and turned it into action with the exuberance and fearlessness of a 19-year-old.

Go back to how we felt at 19, how many protests and things we got involved with and now we're older, like, "Okay, wait a minute, what time is that? Okay, do I have to show up?" Right?

Melissa Harris-Perry: If it's after 7:00, I'm not going to make that protest.

Tamron Hall: First off, I got to get a nap in. [chuckles] Can I send in a representative? He, at 19, rushed into this. Then, we had a family. They have three children, two of them have a rare genetic disease that will require organ transplants. They live in California, Antioch, California. They created a database on Facebook of people who have this similar rare disease. As it turns out, they met a man 7,000 miles away in Nepal. He and his wife now live with this family in California because the treatment that's needed doesn't exist or is not available in Nepal. They opened their doors to this stranger. Now in their home, two children and an adult that they did not know are all being cared for.

We call them acts of kindness. This is act of greatness. Going to your point about the show, yes, we cook and we have our fashion and we have fun but all of it represents a part of my journey. I hope it all leads to people feeling inspired to do more and to feel good, even in the most darkest and most difficult of times.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk a little bit more about that. It's a challenge we face even here on The Takeaway when we're putting together an hour show, and especially in times that are difficult or dark or where there's one big story that seems to be dominating like Ukraine, but we also want to have some joy, we want to tell some of the stories that make us feel good and that remind us that even in those dark times, there's humanity, there's life, there's love, there's babies being born.

Tamron Hall: It's a balance because there's a beautiful gospel song, Ain't No Need to Worry about What Tomorrow is going to Bring. It'll be All Over in The Morning. What we know is nothing lasts forever, the joy or the pain of life, and even in this crisis that the world is watching, and it seems to be never-ending, and we don't know when the end will come to this latest crisis, we know that there will be something else. I think part of balancing this for our own mental health and that of our children is to believe that things can and will get better and be able to talk about those in the midst of sadness.

Reverend Barber, as you know, William Barber, he gave a great sermon once at an event, National CARES, with Susan L. Taylor, it was a mentoring program, and he talked about people believing these are the worst of times, that this is the worst that we've ever seen. I think about this remark that he made often and he said, "Think about all of the things that we conquered and overcome in our society. We look at what's happening in Ukraine but we also know what happened during the Holocaust and how yes, there was appeasement and people turned away and did not want to get involved but eventually, the universe, the world was compelled to do something, and to stop what was happening, and to end it."

I believe that that's just a part of the cycle of life and he talks about with great pain that has existed since man has walked, since woman has walked, we have had to balance it. I've covered, as you talked about, natural disasters and being there while people's homes literally floated away with everything they ever worked for, and see those same people smile or laugh about something, and you think, "Wait a minute, you lost everything, how in the world are you smiling?" That's resilience. Isn't that what it is?

We have a responsibility, I feel, to reflect that. We have a responsibility to get back on air in the middle of a pandemic, for my show, for your show, to be a bellwether for those listening, and for those watching to know that it does not last forever. We are all watching the difficult days, but we have to believe, to your point, as life leaves, life enters. I think that's the balance, and I know that's a very heady thing to explain as I do at a daytime talk show cooking, but guess what, everybody's got to cook, you got to eat if you're so fortunate to have food. I've had people ask me more about a cooking segment than an interview I did with Michelle Obama. "Was that really good?"

"Were those pancakes really good, Tamron Hall?" I'm like, "Yes," because sometimes it is the easy that we can connect to that makes us know that it will be all right in the morning and that's why this show in the layers of it-- I just quoted Reverend Barber but this is going to be a strange quote. Shrek the movie, I'm sure you know very well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, Shrek, layers like an onion.

Tamron Hall: The layers like an onion. He's like, "Like a parfait?" "No, like an onion," and that's life. It's layers so that we can sit down if you invited me to lunch or dinner, and we've been together at my home in Harlem, and we sat there and talked. We will talk about politics, we will talk about parenthood, we'll talk about what it was like when we were single, the vacation. Life is layered. If we only sat and talked about one thing, you'd say, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to go to Tamaron's anymore. We don't ever laugh," or, "I don't want to have Melissa on, all we have to talk about is one thing," but when you layer that relationship, it's deep, and it's real and that's what we try to do on this talk show.

Is that it's a layered conversation and some days it will be hard and some days it will be enlightening. Some days it will be inspirational, but it will be layers of a conversation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, a daily talk show, parenting, that seems like enough, but no, not for you. You've also got this new Court TV Show, talk to me about this.

Tamron Hall: It's called Someone They Knew. I did Deadline Crime, another crime show, for six seasons for Investigation Discovery, and in that series, we covered cases around the country. I've been a journalist for 30 years and really my origin story, superhero, is when I was a reporter, general cyber reporter in Bryan College Station in Dallas, Forth. I covered mostly crime. Crime and natural disaster. Once you become an anchor, you're more behind the desk and you're tossing to the person who is at that scene. I really missed being in the trenches and talking firsthand with people about their journey.

This dovetailed at a time that my family happened to be dealing with something unimaginable in our own lives, which was the unsolved murder of my sister. That show started around that time. I did six seasons of that show. When I got pregnant with Moses, I remember tracking, doing some audio work on an episode and I was reading about the murder of a mother and I said, "I can't do this anymore. I'm 30 weeks pregnant, can my baby hear this? How does that energy impact this child?" I needed to take a break to launch the show, but also in full disclosure to you, I could not do those types of stories and keep a healthy mind, and I felt keep a healthy pregnancy, so I stopped.

Now the talk show is in its third season, and I was approached to do this very unique area of crime, which is Someone They Knew. So often in a big city, I live in New York, people think crime is somebody jumping out of an alley or an incident on the subway, but in fact, we know that many, many crimes, particularly where women are the victims, I believe it's around one in four or two in four, half of the crimes involve someone they knew. This was very interesting to me. What does greed, jealousy, envy do to someone? How can you be in the room celebrating with someone and then murder them? It sounds frightening, and it should, but it is very real and it's a very unique type of crime.

I felt this is interesting, there's something here. This is not glam crime. This is not me just on telling a bad thing about someone way, way over there, this has really happened to humanity. What is a person willing to do?

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you point that out, and that we can't live looking at every person in our lives as our potential source of destruction, so what does it mean to even try to live through and with other people knowing that violence is usually not someone jumping out from behind a bush somewhere, it is most likely to happen as a result of someone you know?

Tamron Hall: Especially with women. Especially when there is, in some cases, a romantic relationship but we cover many, many different cases with this particular series. As I said, the commonality is someone they knew and I always preface that by saying, no, do not be afraid of your loved one but it's almost like remember that movie Sleeping With the Enemy? It's almost that effect when all watched that movie with Julia Roberts, and you start to look over like, "Wait a minute."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right. [laughs]

Tamron Hall: Like, "Hey, wait, what'd you say to me?" There's a level of could that happen to me, could that happen to someone I know, and what drives someone to change through no fault of the victim but what causes the perpetrator to change from an ally to an enemy? I think it's a very fascinating type, as I said, of crime, but from a perspective of a journalist. It's a very interesting storyline.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you're thinking of yourself in a leadership role, particularly as a Black woman, what are some of your rules or ideas or philosophies of leadership that you use in those spaces?

Tamron Hall: That's been evolving, I have to say, even with this talk show. Well, my first rule was always be on time because they expect me to be late because I'm a woman and I'm Black. That's the first rule. I'm always the first going, "Hey, how are you doing? How are you doing?" You will not catch me slipping that way but because we all deserve to be able to be late but we know these are the things that set the stage the minute you walk in. It's involving. When I started the show, I'll be honest with you, I gave my phone number to the entire staff, like, "If you need me, call me, I'm here, let's do it." Then, I go to this leadership training class and I say, and it's like, "No. No, there are lines."

I thought because in my mind I fantasize about this communal energy of everybody hanging out but that's not reality. To be a leader doesn't mean you can't be accessible because I am obviously accessible to my team but there are relationships that have to grow and we get to that point. I was going in hot. I'm like, "Hi-five, everybody," like, "No, no, they have to get to know you as you need to get to know them." I had to also learn the unique role of a woman in a leadership position of that, and I'll say this, and I say this with all kindness, but I'm not your mom. So often, as women leaders, we are held to a different standard than men.

They don't go in thinking that the male executive is their father figure but we fall into a maternal role for some, and also for many, it's shocking, even in 2022, to have a leader that's a woman and that's a Black woman.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As a final question because I know that my students and other young people are going to say, "But why didn't you ask her for advice?" This is a question in part on behalf of so many of the young people I have an opportunity to see and meet. What is the advice that you would give to young journalists and maybe, particularly young women, queer folk, non-binary folk, people of color, who are starting out in this business now?

Tamron Hall: Oh, man, there's so many things that I would offer and say, and I hope to be able to be with you in a classroom one day, and we can answer many more questions. The first I would say is I could tell them my exact path, and you could say your exact path, and they could follow brick by brick, stone by stone, and it would turn out different, so don't become obsessed with someone else's path, "But this is what she did," or, "This is what Tammy--" No, no, no, your path is your path and I mean that. I mean it because it will work out the way it's meant for you.

I would also say be prepared for the things that people love about you for at some point for it to become a factor which they may not understand you. What I mean by that is, you're outspoken, you're honest, and you're a truth-teller. That's what you are known for, Melissa, in your great career in television. Then, it becomes intimidating. Wait a minute. She's too much of a truth-teller. Wait a minute. Is she talking about me? Is she telling the truth about me? That very thing they love about you becomes a source of intimidation because you are on to a path of greatness. You are seeking excellence and you're seeking greatness, but know at some point, it becomes intimidating, but don't change.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That is irresistibly good advice. Tamron Hall, thank you, author, host, journalist, mom, and really absolutely extraordinary, extraordinary fashionista. Thank you for joining us.

Tamron Hall: Thank you.

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