MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Joy Reid are all coming to Philly

Three of MSNBC’s most recognizable hosts — Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Joy Reid — will be taking time out of their hectic cable news schedules to head to Philadelphia over the next few days.

Hayes, who has hosted All In on MSNBC for a decade, is headed to the Fillmore on Monday for a live taping of his podcast, Why Is This Happening? Joining him on stage will be two guests — author Naomi Klein and Reid, the host of MSNBC’s The ReidOut.

“I’ve never had a chance to just sit down and interview her for all these years,” Hayes said of Reid. The show is scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m. Monday.

Hayes began hosting the podcast in 2018 as a way to go deeper into topics that can be hard to examine in 15-minute blocks on television. It also allows Hayes to relay information from experts who might not be comfortable on television or speaking in smaller sound bites.

“We’ll have someone who is an academic. Or we talked to a heath-care provider who provides health care for trans youth in the South. She was amazing, but it took her a little while to warm up,” Hayes said. “On TV, if it takes someone a little while to warm up, you’re screwed.”

Recently, Hayes cut down to hosting All In four nights a week, with former White House press secretary Jen Psaki taking over hosting duties for Monday’s show. That’s allowed him to remain energized and spend more time on other projects, including his podcast, writing a new book, and working on script development deal for a yet-to-be-announced TV show.

Philadelphia is the third stop on a four-city tour Hayes launched in Austin, Texas, last month. Hayes has connections to Philadelphia — his wife, Kate A. Shaw, was a visiting professor at Penn last semester, allowing him to spend a lot of time around town.

One question Hayes is asked wherever he goes is the difference between MSNBC and Fox News. Beyond the obvious ideological leanings — Fox News opinion hosts are conservative, while their counterparts at MSNBC are liberal — Hayes has stopped trying to explain the differences and just references Fox News’ recent settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over election lies broadcast in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

“At the core of it is the fact that in order to keep their viewers inside their tent, they were willing to systematically lie to them and put people on their air who they knew were saying completely untrue — and dangerously untrue — things,” Hayes said. “It isn’t just this ideological project — it’s a business project that is fundamentally rooted in a disregard for the facts.”

Maddow, who has been with MSNBC 15 years, will join Princeton Professor Julian E. Zelizer at the Free Library of Philadelphia Sunday afternoon to discuss her new book, PREQUEL: An American Fight Against Fascism. The book, which stems from research she did for her recent podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, tells the true story of World War II-era lawmakers who plotted to overthrow the government by spreading lies and misinformation across the country.

“Just as I like to dive into the backstory and deep origins of any particular news event, I also find it helpful to know if we’ve previously contended with something like what we’re seeing in today’s news,” Maddow said in a statement. “Even though I find it disturbing and a little scary that, in our own time, some sizable chunk of Americans seem ready to jettison real elections and instead embrace rule by force, it’s somehow heartening to me to know that this isn’t a brand new challenge — another sizable chunk of Americans felt essentially the same way in the lead-up to World War II.”

Tickets for the event are sold out, but the Free Library is selling tickets for a live simulcast of the conversation.

Ultra was the first podcast to win the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism, and a feature film produced by Steven Spielberg is in the works, though there hasn’t been much news on the project in recent months.

Like Hayes, Maddow has reduced the number of days she hosts her MSNBC show to make room for other projects. During the summer, Maddow released a limited podcast series, Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News, which took current headlines and compared to them similar events in American history.