Jenna Bush Hager Compares Hoda Kotb’s Dating History to Ludacris Song

Jenna Bush Hager could only think of one thing while Hoda Kotb opened up about her dating history on the Today show.

“Did you have a lot of relationships in your 20s?” Bush Hager, 43, asked her cohost, 60, on the Wednesday, December 4, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna, noting that her relationship with husband Henry Hager was the most prominent one of her 20s.

Kotb noted that she “moved from city to city when I was in local news,” so she would “date someone in the city” where she was at a given time. In reaction, Bush Hager joked that Kotb’s romantic past reminded her of the song “Area Codes” by Ludacris.

“Ludacris is singing in my head ‘cause you moved from city to city and you had somebody in a different area code,” she stated. In the 2001 track, Ludacris, 47, sings, “I’ve got hoes in different area codes.”

The comparison caused Kotb and the show’s off-camera crew to burst into laughter. “Well, you meet people, and then, you get another job, so you have to leave,” Kotb retorted.

“So, you had men all over the country?” Bush Hager quipped, prompting more on-set laughs. “You gotta go back and listen to that song ‘Area Codes.’”

Bush Hager shares three kids — Mila, 11, Poppy, 9, and Hal, 5 — with Hager, 46 whom she wed in 2008. Kotb, meanwhile, was previously married to Burzis Kanga from 2005 to 2008 and moved on with Joel Schiffman, with whom she adopted daughters Haley, 7, and Hope, 5. The ex-fiancés announced their split after eight years together in 2022.

In the years since Kotb and Schiffman’s breakup, Bush Hager has acted as her cohost’s wingwoman, attempting to set her up with stars such as Kevin Costner and Lenny Kravitz on the NBC morning show. While the celebrity connections weren’t a success, Kotb went on several dates with a mystery man Bush Hager picked out for her earlier this year.

“I think it was just the kind of fun of talking about something that wasn’t kids and wasn’t work,” Kotb shared during a May episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, noting that she and the man were planning to go on a third date. “It was just life, and I missed that. And he’s really handsome.”

However, Kotb revealed in August that she decided to put a pause on her romance with the mystery man after their third outing. “I did kind of decide in that space — because this person who’s a lovely human being has a lot of … things that are being worked out — that I think I’m looking for more … simplicity,” she explained on an episode of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” podcast.

She went on to tell host Jamie Kern Lima: “This has been tabled beautifully, like, nothing funky, all good. He’s very cute, by the way, extremely handsome. I’ll show you a picture after, but [things are] tabled for now.”