Off Mike | Michael Krasny | Talks at Google

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Authors at Google event. I'm pleased to have Michael Khorazny with us today as our guest, and we probably all know him as the host of KQED's forum, the station's live interview and listener call in show. Before Joining KQED in 1993, Dr. Khorazny was a host on KGO Radio, and he's been a professor of English at San Francisco State University since 1970. He holds degrees from Ohio University and the University of Wisconsin. And he's here today to speak about his new memoir, Off Mic, which chronicles his love of literature and his career as a radio host, including his encounters with people such as Stephen Jay Gould, David Rockefeller, Whoopi Goldberg, Philip Roth, among others. After his talk, Dr. Khorazny will take questions from the audience. If you do have a question, please wait for the microphone to arrive before asking it. After the event, he'll be signing books for anyone who's interested in sticking around. We've all spent hours and hours with Dr. Krasny's voice on our drives to work, and it's a great pleasure to have him with us here today in person. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Michael Krasny to Google.

Thank you, and I'm delighted to be here, and I thank you for being here. My daughter's with me, and I'm noticing there's no University of Oregon pennant up here. She's visiting us back from Duckville. Nor are the other two universities that we just mentioned that I was attending. But that's all right. You know, we've got a good representation, good diversity here. Thank you for coming out. I want to talk a little bit about my book to you and tell you what it is and maybe answer any questions you might have. I hope that some of you are overcoming what might be a little bit of shock at seeing this handsome face that you hadn't realized went with the voice that you're used to in your dashboard. And Steve Jobs once said to me, you're supposed to be in my dashboard. Krasny. You mention that name around here, okay. Actually, my memoir is published by a press nearby at Stanford University Press, and it came out on October 1st. And right after it came out, I had occasion to talk to the Northern California Independent Booksellers, and I was very privileged to have received an award from them, although the acronym kind of bothered me. It was Friend of Independent Booksellers Award, so that's a FIBS award. But I was a keynoter with John Dean whom some of you may recall from your history books, probably more from your own experiences. He was the man who said there's a cancer on the presidency to then President Nixon that led to the whole Watergate debacle. And a novelist named Alice Sebold, whom some of you may know. And I said that my memoir had come out just that week before, on October 1st, and I didn't know what to make out of the serendipity that Clarence Thomas memoir came out the same day. And John Dean, without missing a beat, shows pretty quick sense of humor, I thought said, yes, but his is fiction. Well, talking about fibbing and fiction, the book that I've written is a book about maybe not being a good enough fibber or certainly not being a good enough fiction writer, because one of the tropes that I work with is the idea of wanting to be, which I wanted to be very passionately a novelist. I was able to hold my water. I was able to put down essentially a story in a book that becomes a kind of twofer, a personal narrative and a story about my own love affair with literature and my own desire to be, I suppose, well, the author of the Great American Novel. As many of you probably know, life takes different turns. You wind up at Google. You may have wanted to be an artist, a ballerina, a musician, whatever you're using, I hope both sides of your brain. Now, I certainly am in the work that I do, I like to think, although it's probably not as technical as the work that most of you are involved in. Nevertheless, it's been exciting, sort of presenting this book and meeting the public that has been listening to me for years, like many of you, and also talking about the book, because in many ways, what I've been doing for so long is talking. And I wanted to have something that I felt was enduring in the written word. I wanted to have something that really meant a lot to me in the written word. And that's why I wrote this book. And it became a personal narrative as well as a profile of many of the people I've been privileged and fortunate enough to talk to. And in fact, what it does is it moves between literature and life, because I write about my life and the trajectory of my life, and then I give a kind of vignette about a different writer and number of writers. And then you move back between literature and life and literature and life. So it's an ambitious book, and it's a book that puts a little laundry out there, too. One of the writers I profile is Paul Oster who said, when you're writing a memoir, you're sort of going through a drawer and finding things that you didn't realize were in that drawer before. Whereas writing fiction, he says, is making the unconscious conscious. And, I don't know, I didn't have those talents in me to make the unconscious conscious enough. And I couldn't be the novelist that I wanted to be. So this book is a kind of surrogate for the novel that I wanted to write. It's also, as Ricky said, a personal narrative about an arc of moving from being what I considered, I think, appropriately to be a bad boy, as I was in high school and then going off to college. And I suspect some of you felt when you went off to college, you could, in a very archetypical American way, begin a new life or start out in a different way and remake yourself. And I wanted to make myself into a good boy. I wanted to make myself into someone who was going to be a mensch or a good person. And that was essentially also what I wanted to get down was what does it mean to try to, as Sal Bello, one of my early literary idols, said, live a good life and be a good person? A lot of it has come into focus for me in terms of community work and in terms of serving the public and being an educator. But really what I thought would be the best way and the most noble way to pursue this would be to be a novelist just lacking in talent or lacking in hearing the voices that I needed to hear or whatever it was. So this is the book that resulted. And when you write a book about yourself, like Stendahl says, it's like putting a target on yourself. Or it's a little bit like going between Scylla and Charybdis, you know, between self inflation and self laceration. And it's also presenting a more private side of yourself. I mean, those of you who know me, know me as a public figure and know me as a public personality. But I tried in this book to really, well, not so much take the lid off of my id, as someone once put it, but at least present some of those inner sides of me. What Rilke said are the devils that maybe become your angels, or you hope, become your angels. This started out as a novel, and it turned into very quickly, more a memoir. The novel material turns out to be good compost. So I've been talking about this book and trying to think of it not as a vanity project, but more as a book that really tells a story that's worth Telling as stories one hopes are worth telling, particularly one's own stories. And it's funny that I was over at University of California during their homecoming at Berkeley, and Bruce Kane, the famous political scientist, was interviewing me, and he said to the class of 68, and he said, I wish you had done with politicians what you did with writers, Michael, because there's so much about writers in here. But actually, when you read through this book, of course, you do meet so many figures, because I've been interviewing figures in your world as well as. I mean, in business and technology as well as in the arts and culture and education and politicians as well. So there's a story to be told here in terms of just many of the people that I've been fortunate enough to meet. By the way, speaking of meeting people, going out on this book signing tour has been nothing short of a revelation because you meet people, like I said, who have been listening to you for years and who remember things that you had forgotten and all that, or are oblivious to. But recently I had one of those sobering experiences. It's a good example of inflation followed by deflation. I had a woman walk up to me and say. She said to me, Dr. Krasny, I've been waiting for over 30 years to say this to you. You were my professor at San Francisco State, and you changed my life. You actually inspired me to be an educator, and I have you to thank for that. And I said, that makes me feel wonderful. That's so good to hear. Thank you. I said, where do you teach? She said, I've been retired for five years now. So, you know, you have the inflation initially and the deflation. And this is also, you know, this is also a story about many of the stories that you don't hear on mic. There are stories that go on off mic and behind the scenes and impressions and anecdotes and all of that that happen off mic. One of the classic examples that I like to use is when I was in commercial broadcasting, and this is also a book that tries to make the difference viable between commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting. They are two sides of the moon, and they are very different. And I can tell that story because I worked for ABC as a talk show host for a number of years and then saw things moving more toward heat and away from light, more for a desire to get people to bang their dashboards and get excited and be tabloidized or whatever you want to call it. More sensationalism and demagoguery, frankly. Although there are many people who remain in commercial Talk radio, who are very good, enlightening and fine people, to be sure, in terms of what they're giving the public. But I saw the movement more and more toward the extreme right. Rush Limbaugh became sort of the gold standard. And there were those talk show hosts who felt that they had to out. Limbaugh, Limbaugh. And a lot of the move was more toward entertainment than it was toward what I felt identified with, which was more community service and education. So I found the right niche for myself, clearly. But I had to tell that story as well. Off mic story. For example, when I was in commercial radio, Doris Lessing just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And I had Doris Lessing on when I was at KGO because she had written a book on Zimbabwe, actually Rhodesia, which was Zimbabwe before Zimbabwe, and she had grown up in Rhodesia. And Somalia had just broken out. And I thought this would be good. We talk about Africa, we talk about the kinds of experiences she wrote about in her memoir. And that same week, I had on Jessica Mitford, the famous journalistic doyen who wrote about the American way of death, about the funeral industry, and the program director who in many ways epitomized to me both the Peter Principle and the Dilbert principle, who is now a very high executive with abc, took me aside and he said, kraz, because that's what he called me. He said, kraz. Gotta stop putting these old broads on the air. Doris Lessing and Jessica Mitford, mind you, old broads. So I knew I kind of crossed a Rubicon at that time. But there's another story I like to tell because it epitomizes a different side of talk radio, at least commercial talk radio. That happened off air. I had on a guy named Kenneth Adelman, and some of you may remember the name. He was an ambassador of rank and he was chief nuclear negotiator in SALT II and other nuclear negotiations for both President Reagan and President Bush Sr. And we're on the air, and it was a simulcast. It was on both radio and television. And suddenly a news announcement came on a news flash that President Bush Sr. Had selected as his running mate Senator Daniel Quayle J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana. Some of you may not remember Dan Quayle, but he wasn't exactly known for being a sparkling intellect or wit. In fact, he was the man who made himself famous by misspelling the word potato and put an E on the end of potato to a classroom. Always a good example. And I heard this, and I said to Adelman, because I knew Adelman Ambassador Adelman. I said, you know, Vice President Quayle, he doesn't seem like he's got a lot of gray matter and he's the running mate. In fact, to this day, and I don't mean this in any insulting way, to this day, Dan Qualle and W sometimes fuse in my mind. They really do remind me of one another to be political. But they're both. When you absorb a lot of information like I do, you learn irrelevant and unimportant facts. Like the fact that they were both in the same fraternity dic, different schools, but they both had a kind of frat boy quality about them. And I said, this seems like a strange selection. Dan Quill, I mean, it may be good regionally because he's from the Midwest, he's a Hoosier. At which point Edelman said, you know, he's gotten a bad reputation for a guy that's very smart. He understands all of this nuclear technology and nuclear sophisticated weaponry. He's really much more bright than, much brighter than the media makes him appear to be. And we went off the air and I hope I'm not going to offend anybody with this story again. It's an off mic story, went off the air and I said, I'm sorry, Ambassador, you know, but your guy just seems like a dim bulb to me. Whereupon he said, fuck you. Just like that. And me being a somewhat slightly aggressive fellow at heart, and certainly in those days, even more aggressive than I am now that I'm long in the tooth, I said, fuck you. Then we went back on the air and, you know, we were talking and things went back to normal. So this is a kind of sense of what we mean by off mic stories or what I mean in here. I also felt, you know, I have so many gay friends who've come out of the closet, I felt, maybe it's time for you, Krasny, to come out of the closet a little bit as a neurotic. So I did that in this book as well. But I try to trace a lot of these stories going all the way back to when I began in my radio career, which was at a station in San Rafael called ktim. Doesn't exist anymore. It used to be freeform radio. And the kinds of things that happened at KTIM were things that could happen really no place else, particularly in this day and age. For example, being on the air and having a guy named Doug Wendt who did a reggae show. Say, Mike, I want you to meet the king of reggae. This is Bob Marley. Okay? Those things don't happen nowadays. Especially when Bob Marley at the time was really not the legend that he's become. Or sitting in a studio interviewing Jerry Garcia, and suddenly in the middle of the interview, having him take out a spoon, a little gold spoon, and start putting coke up one of his nostrils. These are the kinds of things that happen at ktim. It was even before the Internet. So all the Deadheads knew by some underground communication that I was on the air with Garcia and they were all outside. And I got a little panicky knowing that all these young people were outside. I thought maybe they'd bring the cops or something. I went to a public service announcement. I said, Mr. Garcia, you can't do that in here. And he said, oh, you can't. Okay. You know, he put his cocaine paraphernalia away and we went on with the program off Mike's Story. So a lot of these stories seem to blend themselves into narratives and stories that seem worth telling, including, you know, some of the war stories that every talk show host has. And some of those stories, I think, are pretty enlivening and will both amuse and amaze, I hope. In fact, what I thought I'd do is read a passage about my first interview, which was one of those difficult interviews that probably in some ways should have set me against the career that I set myself upon. But it was with Gore Vidal. Most of you know the name Gore Vidal still good. The actor Peter Coyote, another name that I know many of you recognize, said to me when he found out I was writing this book, he said, just don't write to get even or to settle scores. And I wanted to say that as a little bit of a preface before I read the interview with the Dow, because it might sound like I'm getting even or settling scores, but that's not the case. This is pretty much repertorial the way it happened, and let me read it. My first interview, a baptism of fire, happened by Fluke in 1976. The audiovisual head at San Francisco State University asked me if I might be interested in interviewing Gore Vidal on the campus's new, at the time, Intra Campus television network. I jumped at what seemed like a serendipitous opportunity. It was an interview that would cast me as a nervous, deferential neophyte, and Vidal as sour, condescending, inebriated and mean. Heading into the interview, I was sure, both of us being literary types with left wing politics, that we would become fast friends. I wanted to do a professional job and ask good thoughtful, intelligent questions. I read as much as I could on Vidal and re read early works of his like Myra Breckinridge and the City and the Pillar, as well as his newest novel. At the time, Kalki more impressed by Vidal's essays than his fiction, I still felt certain that the two of us would have much to talk about and would get on well. When we met briefly before going to the television studio set to begin the interview, Vidal seemed world weary, as if afflicted with terminal weltschmerz. But more important, he smelled of liquor and his voice was thick with booze. I noticed a copy next to him of James Atlas biography of Delmore Schwartz. I asked what he thought of the book, hoping to indicate a bit of literary conversation before we went on the set. What did he think about Schwartz, a gifted Jewish writer and lifetime friend of Sal Bellow, the prototype for Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift? Vidal's response shocked me and felt like a blow. Schwartz thought he was better than we Goyem, Vidal replied acidly. Then he added offhandedly, the Jews really think they run New York. Was Vidal baiting me, sensing my Jewishness and trying to gore me with it? How could one with such radical sympathy sound like such a rank bloody anti Semite? He must not have meant what he said. How could he? Well, I did know a few Jews who acted like they thought they ran New York, and I shunted Vidal's remarks aside, I was on my maiden voyage. I had a job to do. Now the amazing thing about the interview is that once we were on the air, Vidal was on in a way that took me as much by surprise as his prior world weariness, condescension, and antisemitism. The lights and cameras rolled and he was a different man. He sounded sober and was all performer. I gave him a short but flattering introduction that I had memorized, mentioning that I was an English professor and that Vidal's real name was Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. He quickly ripped into me for bringing up what he archly called my Christian name, adding that unlike our born again president, Jimmy Carter, he, Vidal, was a born again atheist. In the first part of our interview, Vidal made me squirm by derogating English professors as a pack of pedants who wanted nothing more than to write reams of useless criticism that no one but other English professors would ever want to read. We were all a bunch of dryastists who longed to create something as obscure as endless annotations of Finnegan's wake. Before the interview I felt I needed to defend my tribe now. It was my profession. Vidal was animated and electrified, palpably alive as he proceeded to skewer his favorite targets, the New York Times, Republicans, corporations, Reagan, Nixon, President Jimmy Carter. Some of it was clever stuff, refined in caustic humor that I might have enjoyed were it not for the anti Semitic cracks and the invective against English profs. I was trying to hang on during the interview to keep the dialogue flowing without losing my temper or cool without being cowed by the realization that I was conversing with the larger than life literary Gore Vidal. As the interview moved into politics and I asked Vidal about his social concerns, another self emerged. Vidal was suddenly benign, casting himself in the role of munificent socialist. When the interview ended and the cameras were off, he once again became world weary, cold and aloof, the man I had met before the interview as sterile as I'd found his apocalyptic novel Khalki. There was not, I felt anything particularly distinguished about my performance that afternoon, though I knew that I was pretty professional anyway. How is one supposed to measure performance in something as difficult a judge as interviewing? It was, however, quite a performance on Vidal's part, and it was the sort of interview that might have turned someone else away from interviewing, especially since he lit out without so much as a thank you or nice talking to you. But other things later converged that drew me to interviewing and set me on a path, trying to meld life into art. As I read and interpreted and taught and wrote about writers, I went on to talk and talk and talk with writers until I had interviewed more writers perhaps than anyone ever has or will or should. I was on the road, my own road to literary Damascus. Now the follow up off Mike's Story is fast forward 20 years. After that, we booked the Dalan Forum on KQED. And I thought, how am I going to approach this interview? And it was a kind of an inner test, because I thought, I'm going to approach it professionally and I won't say anything until we're off the air about this first incident that I had with him, encounter that I had with him. But I will when we're off the air. So when he came in, I simply mentioned him. We had an interview about 20 years ago on television. I said it in just kind of a flat tone of voice. I said, oh, okay. And we went on the air and I introduced him and he said, michael, it's such a pleasure to be with you once again. When we were back on television, I remember our first encounter on television. He went on like that. Anyway, when the interview was over, I said, Mr. Dowell, you know, I said, we had this first encounter. Let me tell you a little bit about what actually happened. And of course, his response was, that's not how I remember it. And I said, in this case, I trust my own memory. And what you have to do when you write a book like this is trust your memory. And memory is not always trustworthy. Memory can lead you astray. In fact, recently I had occasion to talk about memory on stage at the Herbst Theater with Isabel Allende, who is a friend and who was kind enough to interview me about the book. And I thought I'd. Any of you know his work? His work? Many of you know her work. Many of you know I was back out of a doll. I thought I'd give you a little sample of the kind of vignettes I do here by reading the passage about Isabel, because it's funny and I think you'll enjoy it. And she's local, so. Isabel Allende once said to me on air during the Clinton impeachment, this is on air, mind you, that the world had never witnessed a more expensive blowjob. She also talked openly about another time. She also talked openly another time about having a dream of biting into a tortilla. Wrapped around Antonio Banderas. She is still the heretical, fallen away Catholic girl who delights in body talk and sensuality and what I oxymoronically like to call, in her case, female virility. The only sins of the seven that really interest or entice her, she once told me, are gluttony and lust. When she came to the United States, the immigration officer insisted that she was not white, as she had written on the forms. He, a Latino, insisted she was an Other. So she showed him her breasts and asked him if they didn't look white to him. Allende is making one of her periodic guest appearances on my radio program. My brother Victor is in the studio because he has wanted for quite some time to meet her. She is herself not unlike a house full of spirits, full of warmth and charm and hearty laughter and love of good conversation. She relishes malattention and sometimes acts like a schoolgirl around her husband Willie, a California lawyer whom she adores. Her father left her when she was a child, and she grew up knowing she was much smarter than her brothers. She resented that they had so much more opportunity. She left her husband and the church, and she left Chile after the coup against her uncle, whom a surprising number of people still think was her father and whom the TV talk show host Tom Snyder once confused with Pinochet. She felt since childhood like a misfit and then grew up to love feeling like a dissident, finding other women and a magazine and change as ways to channel her anger, discovering both feminism and journalism, the best outlets for the immense anger she felt. Had she not found ways to channel her anger, she assures me she would be a total bitch. Had she stayed in Chile, she is certain she would have been arrested for hiding people or trying to smuggle out information or trying to get people into embassies. She spent 13 years in Venezuela, then met Willie and settled in Northern California. She has sold tens of millions of books, including Paola, the heart wrenching portrait of her daughter who died, the book for which she wanted no money. Fans swarmed to see her in Europe and South America. She has a grandmother who occasionally will slap her grandchildren and whose own grandmother was supposed to have moved a bowl of sugar by telekinesis. She hates nationalism and swears that a good prayer, the Lord's Prayer, can always catch a taxicab. Memory, Allende tells me, is like smoke. Imagination and memory are the same process, and language is like blood. Separation made her a writer once she left Chile. She always had an accent. She wouldn't be a writer of fiction today without having left everything behind. So these are the kind of portraits I try to give of a number of writers. And there are some of your probably favorite writers in here, because we cover. That's not the Royal we. I cover a broad gamut. I'm used to using the Royal Week as I work with producers. No producers in this book, it's just mine. And so I write about a lot of off mic type things, including things like anger. And certainly those of you who have listened to me over the years know that I keep my calm Persona on the air. But as my daughter can attest, I do have a temper. And temper sometimes serves me well because I've been angry ever since the 60s, really. And I write about the 60s. You know, they say if you remember the 60s, you didn't really live through them. But that isn't always axiomatic. I did. And I write about them, and I write about them with some nostalgia, but also the recognition. There was a time of great feelings of idealism, anger at social injustice, anger at social inequality. And there's also personal anger. And I write about that in here as well. And I write about, for example, the kind of anger that just comes up in you when you feel. Well, part of it may be my street background, but just recently I was driving along, some guy cuts me off like a Pavlov dog. I honk on the horn, you know, just a quick reaction because he cut me off pretty quickly, whereupon he turns around and gives me the finger. And I had, you know, old guy that I am, I had to restrain myself because I wanted to go after him. You know, you have to. You get that feeling in your blood. It's like D.H. lawrence says, you want to speak with the blood. And it's not only men who feel this way. I know. It's women as well. Self restraint. It's always there on the air. But on the air, off the air, sometimes, you know, the impulses are there and the feelings are there. The visceral sense is there. And I tried to write about that and I thought it was important to write about. So there's a lot in this book. It's a wide canvas, and it's a book that I hope will be enlightening because I think what I've been trying to do ever since I moved into public radio, maybe what I've been trying to do throughout my whole career in broadcasting and as an educator, a professor, is to try to bring light, sometimes heat as well. But most of the time, at least the attempt is to bring light. And one more off mic story will serve here that happened at KQED that many people remember and bring up. Well, actually, it's funny because people remember those moments, like the Gene Simmons interview that Terry Gross did some of, you know, right. Those moments where things went awry and they went off track. And just recently I had Alan Keys on who is a candidate for president. Conservative, moralizing Christian, and very strong against abortion and very strong against homosexuality, even though his daughter has come out as a lesbian. He was talking about Cheney's daughter. And how could Cheney put up with that evil? And then his daughter came out, you know, kind of like that sort of story. But Keys was on, and some of you may have heard that broadcast, and he was holding forth and we weren't having a dialogue. And as his interlocutor, as his interviewer, I felt like there was really no dialogue going on. And so, you know, some of my aggressiveness came out and I said, let's have a civil conversation here. Because he said, wait till I finish. And a lot of people responded to that very favorable, said, you know, Michael, you kept your cool, Michael, you showed grace under pressure, all those kinds of things. The truth of the matter is that's my job. That's professionally what I'm supposed to do. I can't let my emotions come out, and I don't let them come out, even though sometimes, you know, I've had those moments on the air where my voice is broken and where I've had an emotional moment, to be sure. But I can tell you of one where the anger was just rising, and that's the story. It was with Lynn Chaney, actually, some people will tell me at book signings, you know, I almost had to. I had to stop the car. I had to drive off the road because it became a battle with her. And I won't go into the particulars of it. What I was really going to tell you about was Betty Friedan, the great feminist, was on the air with me once, and what happened was she had just published an autobiography, and she had talked about her husband abusing her. And I brought that up in a delicate way, of course. And then I brought up some other things in her book that had to do with the visiveness and sort of feuds that she had with other feminists, Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and later on, Susan Faludi. And a caller called in and said, michael, you make it seem like the feminists are divisive. Now, I wasn't honest doing that. I was trying to talk about material that was in the book and have her respond to it, like, again, a good journalist, I hope, would do. And curiously enough, she said, that caller's right. I'm sick of you goddamn people in the media. And I said, Ms. Friedan, I take umbrage to that. I don't like you lumping me with whomever you're talking about. And she said, all right, then, this interview is over. And to took her headphones and threw them down on the table and proceeded to walk out. And I looked at the clock, about 20 minutes left in the hour. And I'm thinking, you know, tap dancing. No, I mean, these thoughts go through your mind very quickly, like quick synapses. I said, Ms. Friedan, and I was really angry. I said, Ms. Friedanz, please. And suddenly my voice changed, and I realized it was my professional voice. And I said, please come here and sit down. We've had civil conversations before. We can continue this in a civil way. There's no reason for us to be adversaries. There's no enmity here. You're not in the enemy camp. I almost said it eventually, like I was talking to a kid or something. And she, to her Credit came and sat down. But my first impulse was an angry one. And I've tried to quell that and keep that in check, even try to keep it in check. I write about this also in the book when Leroy Jones Amiri Baraka was on, and I asked him about an incident that had allegedly taken place at the University of Wisconsin when I was working on my PhD there. And the story was that he came into a room and was insistent that all of the black people sit in the front rows and the white people sit behind them. People complied with this. That was the Times. And then during the Q and A, some young woman said, what can I do to help the cause of the racial divide to heal? And Baraka, as some of you know now, he's a Marxist, but then he was a black militant and very angry about separatism and the absolute insistence on separatism and hate white people. He said to her, you can die a slow, horrible death. And I said to him, this is a story I heard from a number of sources. I want to find out from you again, just a journalist asking the questions, did this really occur? Are you having trouble hearing me? Oh, sorry. I said, did this really occur? Did this actually occur? And he said, it happened. I own it. I said it. But it's obvious to me that you are in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now. I'm a guy with a lefty pedigree. I'm not so left anymore. You know, when Henry I. Miller, the Hoover scholar, did a review and a very laudatory review I'm very proud of in the San Francisco Chronicle of my book, and I didn't think a Hoover guy would be reviewing my book, especially with such laudatory remarks. He kind of shifted the focus of what my politics are by saying Krasny may turn out to be an apostate to many of his NPR listeners because he says in his book, I've become more conservative as I've had more to conserve. I was talking in general about social things much more than political things. But guess what? I'm not an ideologue anymore. I'm very much more moderate and more in some ways of a centrist moderate on some issues, lefty on some issues, more conservative on others. And the truth of the matter is that I don't let my politics drip out or seep out that much when I'm on the air because I don't think it serves you, the listeners. If I'm talking to someone and I find their ideas complete anathema to me. It doesn't matter. I want them to air those ideas because in the marketplace of ideas, they ought to be aired. They need to be aired. And if you are opposed to their ideas, you need to know how they think. At least. That's always been my governing ideology, but I certainly had a strong leftist propensity when I was younger because I was protesting against the Vietnam War and out there protesting in favor of civil rights. So here is a guy saying you're a member of the Central Intelligence Agency or to be called other kinds of names. Eventually, if you work in the kind of line of work that I do, you'll be called almost anything. I can do a program, and I can be right down the center, say, on the Middle east, and you can almost put a stopwatch with equal amount of time to the Israeli and the Palestinian, the Palestinian and the Israeli. And I understand both sides and I sympathize with both sides, and I think it comes through often in my questioning, but I'm also sometimes pretty tough in my questioning. I can go off the air after that. Navigation that's, I think, consummately fair in my own mind at least, and certainly in the minds of my producers and so forth. And there will be all these emails and all these messages on the voicemail saying, you're a Palestinian stooge, you're a Zionist puppet. I mean, almost equal. Same thing when I'm talking about, say, India and Pakistan doing his show on Kashmir or doing, you know, I mean, anything that's volatile like that. People often hear what they want to hear. So you have to be inured in many ways. You almost sometimes have to be an armadillo to this sort of thing and not take it personally. And certainly, you know, I've had my share of criticism, as anybody who is out in the public gets. But I try and certainly make every effort to keep the composure and calm that I feel is within me when I'm on the air, because there's too much in commercial radio now that has to do with, as I said, the kind of creating of heat and creating of controversies for the sake of controversy. And I think our culture in many ways is divided now in that way. And it's one of the theses in my book. It's divided between a culture of rant and excoriation. I call it the sort of thing you see on talking heads on TV where they're yelling at each other and a more genteel and more civil approach, which is what we try to do in npr. Publishers Weekly did a review of my book, they said, krasny canonizes public radio, okay, so be it. And if I'm trying to canonize what we do in public radio, it's because Dan Shore, when he left CBS and went into public radio, said, I found my way into the promised land. And I feel somewhat that way as well. Those of you who listen to NPR on a regular basis or pri, listen to the public broadcasting stations, know that we take what we do in a journalistic sense and in a dissemination of information sense very seriously indeed, and try to present multiple points of view and try to present many different sides and dimensions of whatever the issue is, whether it's a news issue or whether it's something that even touches upon controversy. But we also try to bring education because the original mission of public broadcasting was education. Funny thing about original missions. You know, when we think about television and how great it was in terms of what it could open up in terms of civic and citizen responsibility, we think of the Internet. You know, when it first opened up, it was the same kind of idealism. One can hope, and maybe this is a pitch and a little bit of a sermonette or a homily on my part, that those kinds of ideals are still very much out there. I like to think that they are in public broadcasting. And I thank you so much for your attention, and I'd be glad to field any questions that you have about the whole world that I work in or anything that I've presented here this afternoon.

Hi, Dr. Krasny. First, I'm sure you hear this a lot, but I just want to say thank you. I'm a huge fan, and you're just a fantastic. You and your show are great source for both local and national and international issues. But getting to this issue about the divide, I kind of get that sense, too, which is that it seems like public discourse has become more entertainment and less information, or as you say, more heat and less light. And TV is especially bad. I mean, the saddest thing is that probably Jon Stewart is where the most interesting, informative political discourse happens. And that's a comedy show.

Right.

So how do we change that? How do we get things to swing back the other direction? Because it seems like we're sort of sliding down into this mudslinging and the type. You know, your show is such a notable exception to that. But how do we broaden that back out?

Well, you've asked the $64,000 question. There has been a real coarsening of the culture, and I think polls have shown that most college Students get their news from Jon Stewart or Jay Leno and David Letterman, which is sobering in itself, although I like Jon Stewart and I like some of the things that he does very much. Well, one certain dictum that I have is, yeah, keep listening to public broadcasting. But aside from that, you know, you do have a lot of possibilities on the Internet. You really do. And what's going out there in the blogosphere is pretty exciting in many ways. And there's the thing that concerns me about it, is there's a lot of flaming that goes on, too. I don't understand the phenomenon. I once talked about it with Stuart Brand, the head of the. And founder of the Whole Earth catalog. And I said, how do you explain this whole phenomenon? People on the Internet flaming in ways that they never would face to face. There's a lot of cruelty on the Internet because I see some of it going on, you know, from the start of the chat rooms. In fact, it seemed to be both liberating in one sense, which was positive, and in another sense, kind of making people uninhibited in a way which could loosen atavistic parts of their psyche, or whatever you want to call it. But I think that the Internet does at least provide some real possibilities for civil discourse. What can we do about television, though, is a whole other can of worms. I mean, the networks and Fox and now cable have been leading us pretty much off to the direction that you're talking about, and that's the direction of sensationalism, and that's the direction of controversy for the sake of controversy, or a lot of sexuality and a lot of tabloid stuff. And my daughter can attest to the fact she has some of these reality shows on sometime. And I thought, what are they doing? What are they showing here? It's all about hooking up and getting people to be violent with one another, because it's all pretty much orchestrated and they're calling it, or they got producers names and writers names. What are they doing? They're called reality shows, right? What happens to people when they put a camera in front of you? And now we're getting more of them because of this writer's strike. I like to think that some of you at the stage of your life that you're at and the kind of educations that you have and the serious thinking that many of you have and critical thinking that you're capable of, can really be beacons. You know, I'm talking to mostly younger generation here, and I talk about this with my students. I think the sense is if the culture and the coarsening of the culture bothers you, you have two choices. You can either retreat from it. Just listen to, say, NPR all the time and KQED all the time, or just watch public television and the cable channels like the Animal Planet and the things that, you know, give you a higher level or higher quality of education. Or you can take the other option and try to do something about it. And what that means, I think is an individual choice. Look, one of the things that I proselytize about, and I'm not much of a proselytizer, I'm not much of a missionary, but one of the things that I believe in devoutly is citizenship, good citizenship, informed citizenship. It's one of the things that my whole career has been about. If you're informed citizens and if you can spread your own sense of an informed citizenship and your own commitment to franchise that you have as a voter to the high minded quality of what you may indeed bring once you become more informed and once you become more enlightened. And I don't mean that in any kind of, you know, elite way or anything of the sort. I think it's something that can disseminate on its own and have its own form of dissemination. Where's the onus? It's on all of us. Sorry.

I'm not sure what your heritage is, but I'm of Czech descent and krasny means beautiful.

I know.

So every, every time I hear you, I think that you're doing beautiful things.

But the name is Russian and it means red in Russian, which was a problem, you know, during, during the Cold War. It was a bit of a problem, yeah. But I prefer the check meaning, actually.

Likewise. So I'm curious in the book off the mic, if you address or talk about your research methods or how you stay on top of everything. Because it seems like when you're commenting or interviewing authors and their latest 500 page book comes out, you've read it or have a point of view or something along those lines. So can you give us a little insight into, you know, your appetite for research or how you go about doing that?

That's a good phrase. I like that appetite for research because I do a lot of preparation. I think it's apparent. I wish sometimes I could be like Larry King, just come in and say, so tell me about this. You know, the boilerplate line is that's why he makes the salary, he does. I say that's why he's rich and famous, because he never reads the book. And you know, My, I guess my signature is reading the book. Always reading the book or coming in, certainly prepared. I was a boy Scout, even though I was a bad boy. I was a boy scout too and taught us to be prepared. There is just a sense of hunger and wanting to know and wanting to get as much knowledge as I can. What you hear on the air, as far as preparation, I mean, only maybe about 10 or 15% of it goes out on the air. But I need to be over prepared, probably because I'm neurotic and anal retentive, but also I need to be over prepared because of a sense of duty. Does that sound a little bit corny or maudlin? I hope not. But you know, I have a duty to you, the listeners, and responsibility to you and to my own sense of professionalism. So it means that I'm like a black hole. I just absorb as much as I can and I'm always absorbing information. I'm always staying up with the news anyway. But if I have a book to read, I'll read that book and I'll make sure that the time is calibrated. I don't have probably a life like many of you have. You know, a lot of recreation, a lot of gardening, maybe cooking, you know, things that take time in life. I'm very bookish and my, you know, time is often spent preparing to perform and then doing the performance based on often what the preparation is. It's very assiduous preparation and very careful preparation. And what my producers do is provide a lot of that for me. They give me a lot of homework and I take it home and I study it just the way you would when you're, you know, ready to take a test or something like that. But I have to, if I'm going to read a novel of 500 pages, you know, I have to time myself and calibrate my time. So I'm reading all the time. I'm reading seven days a week. It's like having a shop with an open sign and it's open seven days and certainly in the evenings as well. And that's kind of the long and short about it. I mean, I pretty much point out that if anything, I'm over prepared when I write about it in the book. Which, by the way is Off Mic, off the Mic I like too. But Off Mic is the title. There was a sense of should it be called On Mic or Off Mic? And, well, I think it's the right title, but it's a subtitle, it's subtitled A Memoir. Of talk radio and literary life. I should mention one other thing that's sort of. I was talking about Larry King being, you know, rich and famous. And those of us who work in public radio and are dedicated to that, not being rich and famous and joking about it. But, you know, I'm also on Sirius, I'm on itunes and you can ipod and download me now my program. And we went on Sirius a number of years ago, in fact, when Howard Stern signed a five year contract with Sirius. This is non terrestrial radio, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, comes off of Uzbekistan off a satellite up there. When Howard Stern went and signed a contract with Sirius, it was reported that the contract was $500 million for five years. And I said to my producers, I said, you know, we've been on serious for five years and we haven't seen a check yet, you know, but there's kind of the divide a little bit between. It gets back to your point, though, unfortunately, if you can bring the common denominator down and you can sensationalize and you bring in the large numbers. There was a guy at kgo, he used to be a program director. He used to say to me, think of it as a party and you want to get as many people as you can to come to the party. That's what your job is, you know. And after a while you begin to think, how can you do that? Well, what we've had or what we've got set up is a kind of competition between being more extreme and going more vulgar or going more low key, low class, I should say, and sensational, and getting people to yell at each other and scream at each other? What is this serving? I mean, what is it? Is it serving a higher level of discourse? Is it serving civility in terms of teaching young people to be well mannered? Is it serving the sense of citizenship that I was talking about? I don't think so. I really don't think so. And it's not to take a slam necessarily at all, the commercial fare that's out there, because some of it is actually pretty good. I mean, I admire many of the people who work in commercial broadcasting in capacities that I do. I think Tim Russert, for example, is a pretty talented guy. I thought Ted Koppel was. Well, he's with NPR now. But anyway, you get the picture of what I'm saying. I think think. Thank you for that question. Hi, Michael, thank you for taking my call. I can't take emails, so I'll take your call. Once upon a Time I, too, wanted to be an artist, yet I found myself here working at Google, not in an artistic capacity, I might add, but it seems like you've made that voyage as well. And I'd like to hear a little bit about how you've made peace with that.

You've ending up in a different place.

So far from where you originally aspired to be. Well, writing a book helped, I can tell you that, because I was able to move through that whole trajectory and see my own self revealed or multiple selves. One of the things I worried about with this book was I was writing too much about myself. In fact, one of the reviewers, who was very laudatory, said krasny writes an awful lot about himself. And I thought, well, this is a memoir. But anyway, I think I've come to peace with that because I've realized what my abilities are, and that's a difficult thing to do. I mean, there are still people who think if I could have, or would have, or had the opportunity or whatever. And it's not to say that there's still possibly not a novel in me. In fact, there's some people who think, having written this book now, I can write a novel, sort of like releasing some. But I don't think so. I don't think in me. And I think I'm able to recognize, well, very simply, what I'm good at. And you come to a point in life where you do and you accept it. It's not necessarily resignation. In fact, what it ought to be and what it is for me, quite honestly, is a feeling of being fortunate, because there are all too many people who find work that gives them no satisfaction or no pleasure. In fact, talk to a lot of people, and they hate their jobs. I've been so fortunate and blessed that I have two things that I like, because I love being a classroom teacher and scholar and living the academic life. But I also love working in public broadcasting because it's always being in the world of education in some fashion, always learning. And if you're learning things on your job and they're things that delight you or that please you, then you're ahead of the game, way ahead of the game. And if you're making a good living and you're earning as well, then you're also way ahead of the game. Especially I did a program this morning with Mike Mandel, who, some of you might have heard it, who is the economist for Business Week. And, you know, in this time of subprime mortgages and the economy seeming like it's going south and wondering if the dollar is going to hold up against the euro or the yuan, the yuan or the yuan, as most people pronounce it. You have to ask yourself, you know, are we going to be as well off? Are things going to slide? If you've got a good job and it's a job that you like, you really are ahead of the game. Can you still nurture that side of yourself, though, that wants to be the artist? Of course you can and you should. And it may find another outlet. It may not even find the outlet that you thought you were destined to succeed in or to accomplish. I mean, there are a lot of ways to be creative, and I think many of you find them. And then suddenly. I know, for example, a woman named Lillian Rubin who was on my radio program. Some of you might have heard her. She's a famous psychologist and sociologist and has written scads of books and just wrote a book about getting older. A very touching book. In fact, I noticed that Amazon has. If you buy Krasnyy's book and you can get Lillian Rubin's book and get them at a reduced price, they get these things because they, you know, they see that she was on my program and they do it with Oliver Sacks because he was on recently. I didn't know they did this. It was very interesting because following Amazon lately. Anyway, the fact of the matter is Lillian was a therapist and a writer and she was yearning to do something creative. And Suddenly in her 70s, she started to paint. She thought she was going to be, when she was a young girl, a vocalist and a singer. And that was her dream. And then she found out that she could paint as a septuagenarian, you know, a woman in her 70s, suddenly she's painting and guess what? She's doing good work. She's had a couple of shows and she feels a sense of purpose, which of course, and it's a creative purpose. And in fact, the other career that she had built her life on has suddenly receded. She's not doing therapy anymore because she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to leave the studio. She's too into her painting, too passionate about it. What a wonderful story that is, isn't it? I never think that your dreams are in the dust, I guess, is the lesson from all that. Sorry, do you have something?

Hi, Michael. Hi. I've also wanted to thank you because I've been a listener since you've been on kqed and I listened before to your predecessor and you even outdid him, and I thought he was pretty good to start with. So I really appreciate that.

Thank you.

I wanted to ask you, and I might be mistaken about this, but it seems to me like several years ago you might have auditioned to be host of Talk of the Nation. And I remember thinking at that time that, you know, the Bay Area's loss might be the country's gain if you were host of that show. But I also was wondering whether you could do the same sorts of things on that show that you do on your current show. I just wanted to to know if that was true, if you had thought about hosting that show and whether you think you could do the kind of in depth, really informed interviews that you do on your current show.

Boy, that's a good question. And I write about it in the book. I did audition for Talk of THE NATION with a number of other people when Ray Suarez left and went on to the Lara NewsHour. And I found that I wasn't all that crazy about the idea of living in Washington, though my wife works for a Washington, D.C. law firm. And we talked about it as a possibility of moving there. And it seemed to me the logical thing to do, to move up to a national arena, to have a national talk program. And it seemed logical in a way, like an assemblyman thinks if he's really dedicated to public service, gee, I could do a lot more as a congressman. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? When you think about it, however, I wouldn't have been able to do what I do here in Northern California now on the Internet and Sirius and so forth, because Talk of the Nation and a lot of respect for npr. But Talk of the NATION is very controlled by the newsroom and is answerable to the newsroom and responsible to the newsroom. And many of the ideas and topics that you hear on Talk of the Nation come out of that newsroom sort of production. I was on the air, in fact, on Talk of the Nation, and I was talking about the radiation of meat we had two sides on. And it was a good debate, actually. And all of a sudden, my headphones, I hear somebody in my headphones say, why don't you ask this and why don't you ask that? I said, where is this coming from? Well, it's coming from the newsroom the newsroom was monitoring, and the reporter who had this as her beat was there to instruct me in how to ask the questions. I don't like that. And moreover, what happened with Talk of the NATION was it's a very simple story. I tried to modify it in my telling of it in the book because I didn't want to fall into any even semblance of sour grapes or sounding sour grape. What happened was Juan Williams tried out as the host of Talk of the Nation. As soon as I heard that Juan Williams tried out, I thought there's a lock on the job. Why? Well, because Juan Williams had a Pulitzer Prize. He was a Washington insider. He was a had a column for the Washington Post for many years. He's African American. His name is Juan. You know, he's got a lot of bases covered. And moreover, he's a pretty smart guy and a very capable guy. I've had him on forum a number of times. The one thing that Juan wasn't, though, and when I listened to him, I realized this was a great talk show host or even a good talk show host or even maybe a better than satisfactory talk show host. There's a certain kind of it's not meant to be self serving. There's a certain kind of skill set that goes with running a talk program, and Juan just didn't have it. In fact, there were many other people who auditioned Korva Coleman, one of the international reporters, a few others who really, I thought had it and could have done the show well, but I really didn't think that Wanda. But I thought he said going to get the job, it wasn't being prescient. It was just, you know, understanding how Washington works and how those things tend to wash out, so to speak. And indeed he did. And then things sort of went south. They lost carriage in New York and some other things happened and they moved Juan up to being a commentator. There was a lot of controversy because Juan was on Fox News also. They thought should a guy doing Talk OF THE Nation who's supposed to be a fair minded interlocutor, be doing of all things, Fox? The other problem was that he seemed to be, even for npr, a bit too controversial in the sense that, well, for example, recently some of you know, he interviewed President Bush and there was a strong feeling that he was too kind and too softballish and almost too ingratiating to President Bush. So there was a lot of this sort of feeling that Juan Williams wasn't the right person for that job, but he's now doing political commentary. And I just heard him, in fact, earlier today talking about Oprah in Iowa. And he's where he should be. He's a fine political commentator, just like he's a fine writer. He did the best biography extant of Thurgood Marshall, definitive biography of Thurgood Marshall, the former Supreme Court justice. So that's the TALK OF THE NATION story in a nutshell. And you know what? Just like, not being a writer, I'm glad where I am. I'm okay with where I am. I really am. Ricky, what are we. You're the timekeeper here.

Hi.

Hi.

Thanks for coming today.

Thank you.

I am wondering if there is any sort of review or editing that happens between your program in the morning and the time it goes on to, like itunes, for example. I'm asking this because some mornings my friends or co workers will come in and be discussing a certain quote or a certain call, and then I'll download the podcast and although it's an hour long, that call won't be in there. And this is namely the episode that I'm most like directly referencing is the one about homelessness and soma. And so I'm wondering if either you remember that and having something cut from it or if there is any sort of editing between.

No, that show wasn't cut, as far as I know, on the ipod or itunes, broadcast, download. In fact, to tell you the truth, we don't edit. We don't edit on the air. We're live. You know, sometimes I wish, plenty of times I wish that we could have edited. And Terry Gross, for example, is edited. And on the Media with Brooke Gladstone is edited. But Forum is not edited. The calls are live, no trapeze, no net underneath, nothing like that. And as far as I know, that's the case with sometimes people hear things and then they relate them or they hear things on TALK of THE NATION or another show that they think is on forum. It could have been that kind of confusion. But we don't edit.

Now we have time for perhaps one more question.

Hi, Dr. Krasny. Thank you for coming.

I just wanted to know, since you've been interviewing so many people throughout the years, is there anyone that you haven't.

Interviewed yet and you'd love the chance to interview? And who would that be and why? Well, three names come to mind in the following order. Number one is W. And yes, I would hold his feet to the fire. And yes, I would be aggressive with him, but I would also be civil and courteous and just would love to have the opportunity to interview him. I was envious of Juan Kissinger for even more reasons that come out of my own experience as a Vietnam War protestor. I did interview Robert McNamara, was secretary of defense during Vietnam. And again, that was a test of my own mettle in terms of keeping my composure and not showing my anger and all that. But I would like to see if I could be that professional with both W and Kissinger. The other person I'd love to interview that I never interviewed is a writer because I am a literary guy. And I've interviewed most of the writers I've always wanted to over the course of the years. But not Toni Morrison, whom I'm a great admirer of and who I teach and have taught for many years. Thanks. Thank you. Well, thank you all. Thank you all so much. And I guess I have the luxury of signing any books, which I'll be glad to do. Any of you who would like a book. That's how it's run here, Ricky.

We have books for approximately the people in the two front rows.

Say it again. I'm sorry.

Thank you for coming, Michael.

All I heard was the first front rows, and they're clapping very vigorously. But I didn't hear what else you said. I'm sorry.

We have books for the people in the two front rows.

That's it. Okay. I'll be glad to sign them for you, if that's whatever this program is. Thank you again.