Kai Ryssdal Is Talking to You (VIDEOS)

Kai Ryssdal is talking to you.

The handsome host of American Public Media’s “Marketplace” reports on the biggest and breaking business stories around the world and funnels it down to how it affects Average Joes and Janes.

When Ryssdal sat down with genConnect.com during the Aspen Ideas Festival, he spoke about whom he is thinking about when he’s preparing his daily program, why “Marketplace” is different from other business and economy shows, and the Millennial Generation’s views on the economy.

Click the play button below to watch, and here’s an excerpt:

[Teenagers] are intensely worried about the future of this country. They worry for America’s place in the world. They worry that our generation– the generation that exceeded the Baby Boomers but came before Generation X — is not now doing its part to work hard enough to uphold what we have built in this economy over the past 200 years. They are deeply, deeply worried about that … They are optimistic. They hope. They feel they will be able to change things and get America back on track.

So, here’s the secret about Marketplace, and you have to promise not to tell anybody. You ready? We don’t care about business. We’re a show about business in the economy, but we’re not of business in the economy. We have no MBAs. We have no Economics Ph.Ds. We have nobody with a Wall Street trading license on staff. We don’t care about business. What we use business and the economy for is to tell the stories about why all this stuff really matters. You know, when I sit down in the afternoons and I write the broadcast, I’m not thinking of the people on Wall Street, even though we know they listen, because they tell us when they don’t like what we say. We’re not writing for the regulators in Washington, even though they listen because they tell us when they don’t like what we say. I’m writing for the layman. For my 69-year-old widowed mother who still writes checks every day to go to the bank and get cash instead of using an ATM card. What we do is incredibly important because it matters so much in people’s lives, now more so than ever. But I think we would be doing our listeners a disservice– the people we built up a brand with over 20 years– if we just said, stocks were up today. Stocks were down today. Here’s why you have to buy Coca-Cola and sell Intel. That is not what Marketplace is. Marketplace is a program that uses business and the economy and money as a lens. As a way to look at these issues that are so important to this economy, so important to the people who live here. And say, that is why this matters. And hopefully that’s why people listen. Join me at genConnect.com.

We realized early on– the program’s been around for about 21 years– we realized early on that nobody really wanted to listen to a story about leading economic indicators or gross domestic product. That is not in and of itself interesting. So we decided early on two things; we were going to use that zeitgeist, that vibe of the whole program, in a very compact half an hour, to make people listen. To draw them in and to say “listen, you know what, here’s why all this stuff matters.” The other important thing about the broadcast frankly is its voice. That is my voice in my character many of the times, but also for our reporters– some of our signature names and sounds on the air– Amy Scott, Bob Moon, and Jeremy Hobson. Those guys have a listenability. We know it’s important, we know what we do isn’t all that interesting to so many people. So you know what, we need to have fun, we have to be irreverent. It’s a concept that we call “being Marketplacey”. Sometimes you got it, sometimes you don’t. And it’s not an easy thing to follow a story from Marketplace, because you have to understand why the story matters, but then you have to understand how to make people listen. And if you can’t do that, not everybody can, then you can’t be on air. It has been an incredible time– I mean you had the boom– I got the marketplace just is that dot com boom was busting– and it was important then because people were seeing so much of their wealth disappear and so much of the economy go “oh my lord. What’s happening now?” I would argue though that this is an even more important time. The last two and a half years in this economy have been life changing. Right? People have lost their pensions, they have lost their college funds, they have lost their houses, and their jobs. What we do on the broadcast I think is more relevant now than it has been in the twenty years we’ve been around because so many people understand now why and how the economy plays in their lives. It used to be easy to ignore it, you know, you would buy a hundred shares a Yahoo and let it sit there and you’d be a gazillionaire. It’s not that way anymore. People understand the risks. People understand the risks that Wall Street took with our money, the role that government had, the role that government didn’t play in regulating what was supposed to happen. All of that stuff rolls into a big ball of wax now that makes people say “I get it. I understand why this matters and I’m going to pay attention.” Join me a genConnect.com.

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Tags: American Public Media, Baby Boomer, featured, Generation Y, Kai Ryssdal, Sociology

Category: Career, Money, Videos