Six months later, he was making barely enough to cover rent, but the first time he heard a live segment he’d written, he says, “I had chills.” Back at KQED, he arrived at his interview in suit and tie heads swiveled, but he joined the pack of 19-year-old interns unself-consciously. But it was worth it in pursuit of what he says is his life’s passion. “ It’s … agonizing,” he says, nitpicking his “styling,” “pacing”-everything. _To torture_him, play back old tapes from his very first days on-air.
Though he hasn’t flown in more than 20 years, he jokes about quitting his job to tool around in a puddle jumper.
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After four, he’s back in the van.īreakfast is yogurt, and since he doesn’t like “to go on the air with a full stomach,” he skips lunch, popping almonds instead. Arriving at Marketplace by 7:15 A.M., he goes straight into editorial news meetings, tapes interviews from 8 to noon, then writes and plans the show-it mixes major business headlines with quirkier feature stories on the economy-until hitting the air at 2. And today, when he climbs into his 12-year-old Honda minivan with 180,350 miles on it, rumbling the 13 miles into downtown Los Angeles to work, he misses the blue drop-top. He recalls his mother spending time with him after school each day, sanding off Scandinavia. Raised in Europe as a child-first England for five years, then Denmark for three-he struggled with English upon returning to the States. The maintenance of his ballyhooed haircut-it has been described as a white man’s hi-top fade-involves a visit to Martha at the HairMasters in La Crescenta every six weeks, as well as a fortifying varnish with something in the John Paul Mitchell product family. Here, the interrogator became interrogatee: we pressed Ryssdal on the man behind the voice. In the 15 years since, he’s gone from cutting together tape as a 34-year-old KQED intern to charming President Obama (who was impressed with his service record), grilling Nancy Pelosi and Donald Rumsfeld alike, and going bearish on Larry Summers’s Fed-chair potential-all tonic to the show’s five million weekly listeners.
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Shelving paperbacks for $7.25 an hour at a local Borders, Ryssdal happened to crack a volume containing listings for radio-journalism internships. wife got into business school, taking them from Beijing to Menlo Park. A former hotshot naval aviator and Pentagon hand turned Chinese-speaking foreign-service officer, Ryssdal hit a record-scratch moment when his fellow F.S.O. But the veteran host of the award-winning Marketplace, radio’s marquee financial-news program, came to FM in a roundabout, third-career kind of way. To hear the mellifluous musings of Kai Ryssdal, star of public radio, is to think, This is a guy born for the airwaves.
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