Rachel Maddow, Host of "The Rachel Maddow Show"

A lot of it is just the overall production day, I don't know how to work with a big staff of people. There's a lot of people involved in the production of TV, and that's a good opportunity, to leverage all that manpower and all that brain power towards the single thing that you all are working together to produce. But that's a 'big people organization project' that I'm completely mystified by.

It's a huge organism, and then you've got new facts, new stories, and you're trying to coordinate those. And you have to rely on other people to help you tell the story that you're telling. I need to be able to count on not only the people who provide me with the facts that go with the charts that I'm putting on the air, but also the people who are running the videotape and putting up the captions and labeling the people.

It's like the difference between writing your own blog... and running a publication, where you've got multiple writers, you've got information coming in from other sources, and you've committed to things in advance that you've got to get done on time. That element of it is really hard, so I've tried to simplify my life so that I can really focus on TV. So that I can figure out how to do it better.

Here's Maddow's interview with Philip Zelikow:

Has it been getting easier? You've been doing it for a few months now. It's been seven months now. No. It's not getting easier. [laughs] But it's very fun, and it's very exciting every day. I got up this morning after the Zelikow interview yesterday, and it's become huge news, the story has just gotten bigger and bigger.

I usually don't spend too much time looking at the news before I come into the office because I try to compartmentalize my life a little bit more, just so I have a little bit of sanity, a little bit of usable brain by the time I get to work. By I glanced at the headlines this morning before coming to the office and I thought, "I can't wait to do the show!"

That's great—that's what everyone dreams of... And by the way, we appreciated your show's mention of Gothamist when discussing how the Federal Reserve and Yankee Stadium look alike on the show [video]. Oh, my God, that was such a good catch.

I have to give credit to my husband who thought of it. He was thrilled to see it on your program, especially since he's been a huge fan of yours since the radio show... So I have to ask: What happened to your radio show? The radio show got simplified. The radio show is the TV show now; there's stuff I add to it, talking about the guests and stuff, but it's essentially the same content.

For a few months I was doing live original radio every day and live original TV every day, because I thought I would be able to pull that off. I might be able to pull it off some day... I'm also a very slow worker, it takes me a really long time to do anything. I'm like a little sloth, the way I get though stuff, and so I work very long, plodding days.

I'm assuming that I will get better at this and not take so long to get everything done, in which case I'll have some more time, in which case I'll write more, accept speaking engagements, or go back to doing original radio. But I'm still very connected to Air America, and I'm going on the Air America cruise with listeners, and I'm still one of their talents and one of their shows. I'm still very loyal to them as a company, I just don't go to their studios and broadcast a show every day.

You've been having a lot of fun with tea-bagging. What do you think is next for the whole trend? Are we going to have to wait for next year's Tax Day for another populist moment? [laughs] The fact that they... Well, there's always Tax Day protests. I remember when I was a kid, growing up and going to the post office with my mom to turn in tax stuff on April 15th, and there were always people there. There were lefties saying, "No money for war!" and there were people on the right saying, "You don't have to pay your taxes! I found this crazy loophole that says income tax is illegal! And I've got guns!"

This year, for the Republicans, well the conservative movement, to have adopted it, and then the Republican party deciding to piggyback on that—they literally adopted the teabag as their symbol. It was just...for weeks before the protest they were mailing teabags to the Senate. Teabags! Teabags, really? And then they started using it as a verb, and you could pay a dollar a teabag to have a teabag sent to the White House, and they talked about tea-bagging the White House... It was just a gift from God that they decided to proceed with that imagery. It was just amazing. And then to have the National Organization for Marriage adopt 2M4M as their name for their anti-gay marriage initiative?

I suppose bits of gay and pop culture are seeping into all parts of society. It's not even gay culture, it's like, personals ad culture! [laughs] It's amazing to me. I mean it's an ancient political science blessing that your political opponent shall be easy to mock, and so far it has been a blessing for the left, these guys. So I don't know what's next, but I'm looking forward to whatever it is. I don't think that the left will always have the blessed advantage of the right being so ignorant as to have cultural reference points. There will be people on the right who will learn to Google these terms before they make their websites out of them, it will happen.

They'd just need one volunteer. Yes, hire a liberal! You know, you guys? Come on, put somebody on the payroll who will check these things. I don't know what's next but I'm already looking forward to it.

Maddow discusses tea-bagging with Ana Marie Cox:

Is it harder to do the show with President Obama than it was with President Bush? Actually, it's not. I think it was sort of the common wisdom that cable would change so dramatically, and that liberals in media would have to change so dramatically after the election, but it just doesn't feel like that. I read all the same sources, I come up with five times as many stories than we can put on the show every day, and we still pick what's going to be on the show based on what is the most important thing, the story that can best be told on television, and about which we can get the best guests booked.

None of the day-to-day formula of how you get a show on the air, and how hard it is or how easy it is has changed at all. I also feel like I don't have any responsibility to any particular politician. I don't feel like I have to make things good or bad for Obama; I didn't feel like I had to make things good or bad for Bush. You take the stories when they come.

When you're plotting out how to do the day's show, how do you select what you run with for air when you have so many great ideas to choose from? It's the best part of the day, the most intellectually satisfying part of the day. What happens is the senior staffers for the show meet earlier before I'm here. They essentially anticipate what the big stories of the day are, and what they think I will want to talk about, what they think will be on the show. Sometimes that's easy to do, because we've got guests booked in advance, or because we have one obvious story to do. Obviously the [Senator] Carl Levin report [PDF] today is something that is quite clearly going to be on the show [see the segment].

They meet ahead of me, because it's time to get started on booking, to try to get people on the show. And that happens before I'm even here. Then I arrive, and by noon I'm reading. I do this very un-ecofriendly thing, which is that I print out all the stories that I'm potentially interested in talking about on the show that day. I get down on the floor with all my paper, and I make this big grid which is very embarrassing, but this is how I've been doing it since my very first job in radio.

Then I come up with a list of all the things I think we could possibly do, so the senior producers have got their anticipatory rundown of everything they think we could do, and then I've got my list, and we sit down and hash it out, we factor in important stories, what points we think could break over the rest of the day, who got booked, what else we know is happening on the network, if some [other story] is blowing up, you know, we do factor that in.

It's a very hard discussion, and we try to go fast, because time is of the essence at that point, but we work it out, and it's very satisfying. That's the thing that, I think, if I ever had to give up this job, that's the thing that I know I would miss.

The behind-the-scenes newsroom discussions about what makes the news are always what fascinates me. It's the best part of the job. It's the most satisfying thing, and it's the thing that you don't get if you're just a guest on somebody else's show. It's the thing you only get if you host, if you have creative and editorial freedom, which is the whole gig, it's the whole reason that this is a great job.

It's non-stop pace... On the flip side, are you up in Massachusetts [where she, her girlfriend Susan Mikula and their dog have a home] every weekend or do you get to alternate? Pretty much every weekend. There are sometimes unavoidable things that I know I have to do, which means I have to do other things on weekends, but ninety percent of the time I'm in Massachusetts. I'm pretty protective of that time, because I work really long days, and I work really hard. I don't have any other life other than work in New York at all. I eat and work and that's it.

So on the weekends, for me to be able to not work, literally to just not be working on a book, not to be working on a speech, not to be working on anything except on cleaning out the basement, and just to be able to walk the dog, to get into a different environment. It's important, and knowing that's coming on the weekend makes me not resent working long hours during the week.

That's a healthy outlook. I'm always looking for that work/life balance. Well, it makes me understand why rich people get country homes. I didn't do it that way, that was my house, that was where I lived, and then I got this job in New York, and I thought, "Oh man, I gotta get an apartment in the city." Our apartment in the city is like 275 square feet; it's really small. We essentially treat it like a hotel room, so we've been in the same place since we moved here in 2004.

It's got tiny little closets and I keep one season's worth of clothes there. And then we've got this giant dog. But he likes coming to the city, he likes going to the dog run, he's never here for all that long at a time. I've probably spent a total of two weekends in our New York apartment since we've moved here five years ago.

Do you take the subways? Yeah, I take the subway, and I walk, and I take cabs. When I worked at Air America, it was a nice easy walk, I live in the West Village, and Air America's at 20th street, so that was really easy. And now, I can still walk it, and I sometimes do, but now I need 45 minutes to an hour in which I don't need to be reading or talking to someone on the phone, and I often feel like I don't have that time. So I don't walk as much as I want to anymore, I just take the D train.

I know you work really long hours, but do you ever visit those Prohibition-era cocktail bars? Oh never, I'm a teetotaler. [Laughs] Yes, as frequently as possible. I leave work, my show ends at 10, so I leave my desk, I leave the building anywhere between 10:30 and 12:30, and to the extent that I see anybody, like tonight, I have a sort of meeting with my producers to talk about a meeting that I had with nuclear weapons experts at Harvard a few weeks ago, and we're going to go to a bar, after the show, even though that's like work. Then tomorrow, one of the NBC correspondents who's just back from a place that I really want to learn more about, since we're going to be talking about it on the show, as far as what his beat has been, I'm going to take him out to a bar, too. So to the extent that I do anything outside of my office, I always try to do it at a nice drinking establishment.

What's your favorite cocktail these days? Or do you mix it up? It's all about mixing it up. It's like asking what's your favorite song. You do sometimes have a moment where for a week you're obsessed with a song, and that happens to me with cocktails sometimes, but right now I'd say that I'm more interested in Scotch than I have been in the past.

Here's Maddow teaching Jimmy Fallon about the finer points of cocktail creation:

Scotch is used in very few cocktails, but when it is used, it can be very effective. So I'm very interested in trying to figure out what's beyond the Blood and Sand in terms of Scotch in cocktails. My favorite Scotch cocktail is one of the rare hot boozy drinks that I like, which is called a Whiskey Skin, and we're entering into the part of the year when you don't want hot drinks anymore, and I don't particularly like the Blood and Sand, so I'm trying to come up with a good warm-weather scotch cocktail. That's my current project. And when I say "coming up with" I don't mean inventing one, I mean finding a classic one that works for me.

One more question for you, and this comes from our publisher. He wants to know what he can do to become your new gay boyfriend? I think you have that effect on a lot of men [Video]. [Laughs] How could he be my gay boyfriend? I don't know. I've never experienced the application process, I haven't started to work on it.

I guess if he can come up with a good pre-Prohibition Scotch cocktail appropriate for warm weather that is not a Blood and Sand—and that doesn't have anything creepy in it—then I'd consider it, I guess. I guess? Is that the wrong thing to say? Yeah, I guess. It's a very rigorous application process, there's a whole team of human resources people who would have to be involved.

That's very good! We'll have to have a contest for you! Oh my God, I'd die and go to heaven.

We'll do our best to make it happen!

Hear that? If you have an idea for a "pre-Prohibition scotch cocktail appropriate for warm weather that is not a Blood-and-Sand"—"and doesn't have anything creepy in it"—let us know and we'll arrange a tasting for Rachel Maddow. E-mail us at tips(at)gothamist(dot)com .

And if you can't get enough of her, Maddow will be speaking at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday night—more details here.