Brian Lehrer Comes to Here's the Thing

needs to be on us, guys. As I mentioned, and when Brian got the Peabody Award for Broadcast Excellence for his daily public affair show on w n y C, the jury put its finger on exactly what he represents real engagement, respectful dialogue and getting to the truth. Brian Lara on w n YC and Governor Culomos joins us now to talk about a few things. The grassroots group Make the Road released an anti Amazon statement. Do you think that's just petty politics? First two is Make the Road, Brian,

do you want to characterize it? No? I don't know who they are you don't know at this point, as active as they have been in New York politics for this long. You don't know who make the road is? Should you know? Who make the road is? The very thing that makes Brian so good at his job makes him a tricky subject. It's not about him, which is exactly what New Yorkers have craved for over a generation.

We are in our thirtieth year. This is the world has not ended, but nor has it improved all that month. How's the show changed? Well, the show changes depending on the state of the world. When we started in September, it was this incredibly optimistic moment. The fall of communism was taking place right at that moment. We started in

late September nine. By six weeks into our run, the Berlin Wall had fallen and New York City had elected its first black mayor, and there was all this optimism at the local level and at the national and international level. Freedom was breaking out around the world, Democracy was breaking out. What a heady time. Well, let's jump ahead, oh thirty years. Optimism is just not in right now. But also you nine, you say, interesting, how New York contradicts the national trend.

Maybe George the first becomes president in Dinkins becomes mayor in eighty nine, and so in New York. Sometimes not always, but sometimes interesting how they go contrary to the national trend. That right right, There are parallels too, though. Um. You know, when I think about the ninety nineties, it was the Clinton era and the Juliania in aberration in New York that a Republican in order candidate would be elected mayor. But New York is thriving in many ways. The economy

is growing, crime is going down. Um. At the same time, the economy is growing and crime is going down nationally, and the Democrats are saying, look, we have a liberal in the White House and everything's getting better. And the Republicans are saying, look we have a conservative in city

Hall and everything's getting better. So sometimes it's just the larger trends of history and whoever wants to latch onto it politically, you know, you're so measured, you're so careful, like what pisces you off without naming names and getting you know, stepping outside your role. Is Brian Larris sitting there in the bathroom with a bob of vaka in his hand, throwing a plate of haggandahs at the TV.

There's plenty that pisces me off, and you can probably hear it on the show by the way I frame a question or by a monologue that I'll do introducing a segment. But at the same time, I want to invite everybody in. So sometimes people have said to me, oh, your show is the opposite of Rush Limbaugh. And it's not because he's conservative and on liberal. It's because he makes no secret about the show is about what he thinks.

There's a joke I've heard him tell that this show isn't about what you think, it's about what I think. And he says it in this kind of jokey, pompous way, and it's a joke, but it's also true. And that's the commercial radio formula. This isn't just about Rush Limbaugh. For me, I have opinions. I sometimes state my opinions, or I sometimes frame questions in a leading way that suggests an opinion. But the show is not about what

I think. So if I'm expressing a point of view, which I'm allowed to do on the show, you know, I'm not a robot, and nobody wants me to be a robot. But If I do express an opinion, it's in the context of Okay, this is what I think. Now, everybody else who agrees or disagrees, come on in and let's have a meaningful conversation about it. That's how it's different from Rush Limbo or you can pick any liberal

or conservative or opinionated host. Now, when you mentioned Limbo and the reporter asked you, I think it was in two thousands of sixteen you were talking to the observer. He asked, you know why left wing radio had failed? I think you said to him, but that failure was a mystery to you. It's still a mystery to me. There are plenty of liberal or progressive people in the country, though there are a smaller percentage than there are conservatives,

by you know the surveys over the years. Um. But the way you're asking the question, UM, feels like you think you know the answer. So sometimes when people say they think they know the answer to that, it's sort of a corporate conspiracy. There's no company because it's not in the interest of corporate America to put liberal media out there. Um, Is that where you're going with it? No? No,

I mean I wasn't. I don't think I had an answer. Uh, my thinking has always been that I've always felt and this is a pejorative, this is a judgment at the very least that the conservatives need their media predigested more than liberals do. I don't want to judge all conservatives are all Fox News viewers or the majority of them by saying conservatives need their opinions predigested for them, but I will say that it's been a problem for the

Democrats relative to the Republicans in the political space. Where Republicans do digest very simply what there for? You know, wherefore family values, a strong enforcements, and free economy. Democrats struggle with it. Chuck Schumer wrote a book a number of years ago that I don't know the title of it, but one of his main themes was Democrats have to learn to say what therefore in seven words? And that

was hen fifteen years ago. And I don't think Chuck Schumer himself has figured out how to do that yet. And the Democrats as a party have not figured out how to do that yet. For whatever reason, they think more in terms of complexity and um, so it sometimes does not accrue to their benefit. Earlier, in your career. You had a TV show for ten years. I had a weekly public fairs TV show on the old w n y C TV when that existed, that was Channel thirty one. That's part of the history of w n

y C. When it was owned by the city. There was the radio station and there was the television station. And when Rudy Giuliani became mayor and decided he was going to get the city out of the broadcast business because that wasn't a function for city government. Fair enough, but it was a threat to public broadcasting in New York City. Um, w n y C is not where on the radio dial public radio stations usually are. There's a nonprofit public radio zone below FM, and we have

got this technically commercial frequency of point nine. So Giuliani considered selling all of w n y C into the commercial sector, and ultimately there were a lot of people who really valued w n y C Radio w n y C TV maybe not so much who ever heard of it, even though they were doing some good things, And that was sort of the deal that was struck. The city sole channel thirty one for I think two fifty million dollars, and that helped make it okay to

let public radio sort of retain our license. But anyway, that was the l w N y C TV. Did you enjoy that? I do enjoy television, but they're really different. On television, you have to look at the camera, and you know, radio is sort of an open book test. People say, oh, you seem to know so much about the topics that you're talking about. Well, I have notes there in front of me for everything, and I refer to things, and you can cheat and you can look down and you don't have to make eye context. So

that makes radio a little bit easier. But television is fun. It's nice to be seen, it's nice to be able to play with visuals. You know, they're very different media. What I liked about it was you can read the person's expressions in their faces and you and there's something to be said about that in an interview, how do

they behave? The other thing about live radio as opposed to podcasts, people are constantly coming and going, so you have to reset right, this conversation has to make sense if you tune in at ten o'clock or if you tune in at ten oh eight. We have to constantly be thinking, okay, if this person tuned in to this half hour segment seventeen minutes through. We wanted to be able to make sense for them, but at the same time be able to progress for the people who have

been there since the big inning. It's just sort of a whole other layer of presentational awareness that you don't have on television and they don't have on podcasts. That's one of the interesting thing about podcasts having come in and become such a dominant form in the world. A podcast is like a private space. You go into the podcast, you know you've chosen to subscribe and download, and you

can start it and stop it. Um And in a way it's even more intimate than live radio because it's really just you and the podcast talking right in your ear. I think it also a podcast there's something about portion control. You know. Thank God for my producer, because you know, I would argue, I'd say, let's do the podcast like an hour and a half, and then they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. Podcasts are like the right size. I've been told that one popular podcast, I'm not going to call them out

because I may have the story wrong. UM figured out exactly what the average length of a commute is in New York City and set their podcast for that length, So that's targeted. But look at old news Radio ten ten wins. You give us twenty two minutes, we'll give you the world. You know why, because the average length of listening is no more than twenty two minutes. They

go through the whole cycle and they start over. So if we wanted to do the most commercial show we could possibly do in my format, we would take the lead story of the day and do it three times an hour and three times the next hour. For the two hour show, twenty minutes discussions about the one thing

that people most want to talk about. Because for us to the average length of listening is probably about twenty minutes per person per listening day, even though for many people your shows on later in their day, they're out the door by then. I when I'm not working, I wake up, I take a shower, I have breakfast whatever with my kids. But ten o'clock is right and when I might maybe I'm going to shave and comb my hair.

So for Brian Larra's research, people figure out how long does it take the average man to shave and style his hair? That's how long like a segment should be. And one of the nicest things anybody can say to me is you made me late for work. You have maybe laid for work. Believe it now. Um, when the TV show ends without your choice, could you have gone on you wanted to change? Yeah, I would have gone

on at that time if if I could have. You were doing a radio show years ago, and I guess in the beginning of your careers, as in Albany Music Program. And I read that in the seventies you said I think I'll just open the phone lines. That true, Well, it was a little more complicated than that. Um. When I was coming up, my real goal was to be an FM rock DJ. They were some of my role models. Dennis Elsis be Dennis ELS's, Vin Scalca, Pete for a tell.

And these people, this is when I was a teenager, were more than what we think of as DJs spin in the hits. They were kind of radio artists. They were playing an eclectic mix of music that you could play on the radio in those days on the FM rock stations when they were new. Musically speaking, yes, it was rooted in rock, but they played jazz, they played folk,

they played bluegrass. I remember sitting on the beach one summer during college, listening to the old ny WFM, and there was I think a Rolling Stone song and the next thing that came on was Miles Davis during an electric track from his album Bitches Brew, and it blew my mind and I was like, what is this? And I've never heard anything like that before, and I was like, I want more of this. Yeah. I said to people, I said, I wanna have my own show, and they said,

what do you want to do with it? I want to do anything. I want to play old Cheech and Chong clips and then I'm gonna go from like uh Emerson Lake in Palmer to Rosemary Clooney like who Cares? So there was that part of the art to it.

There was also the spoken word part of the art to it because these DJs or hosts were telling stories, they were sometimes reading poetry very much made an impression on me as a teenager that Roscoe, that particular DJ on the old ny WFM would sometimes read poetry, as I recall, and they would do political monologues, they would do social commentary in between playing rock records, and of course they would talking about music and in the context of the times, and I was like, I want to

do that. Well. In college I did a lot of that on the camp's radio station at Albany State. I also did news. And after college I got my dream job. There was an FM rock station in Albany that was just starting out and they were hiring DJs, and I got um a job like that, and they said it's a six day a week job, so, okay, you have your after show. No no, no, I have graduate. They said, it's six day a week job, so you have your Monday through Friday show and you have to come in

and pick a weekend shift. And because I was also interested in news and talk in the world, I said, well, can I come in late Sunday night and open the phones? And to my shock, they said yes, and the reasons they've been doing that before. No, but in those days you needed public affairs credit with the f c C, with feral government. Even if you're a music station that's

all gone now you don't need it. I probably would never have been able to break into this business under you know, contemporary rules, But at that time, even a music station needed some news and some public affairs. And they must have been like, oh, this kid wants to open the phones for midnight three on Sunday night. What have we got to lose? And we get to check

the box that we have our public affairs credit. Well, what happened was, over time I realized that I was putting much more mental energy and really time into preparing my three hour a week middle of the night talk show than my five hour a day, five day a week music show. And I realized this is really who I am. Was that an unconscious wish fulfillment for you? It was conscious wish fulfillment. By then. It was just because I was curious, and I like the idea of connection,

and I like the idea of talking to strangers. But then after a while I realized this is actually a form of journalism, and I feel woefully underqualified to do this, and I went back to school. I actually quit that job and went to grad school for journalism so I could try to do it more seriously. Now, when you see I like to talk to strangers and that curiosity you have, is there anything in your childhood that signaled that. Did you grow up with your parents? Were you sitting

with your dad by the radio? What was the home life like in terms of media. Um. The home life was very average American in terms of media. Uh, you know, we watched definitely candid camera. I mean my parents were, you know, pretty cultured. They would I mean, considering that they grew up poor in the South Bronx. Um. He was an electrical engineer and then a home inspector, and

my mother was an elementary school teacher. Um. And you grew up in the city, grew up in the city, grew up in Queens And they also though took us to theater. They took us to a lot of UM summer stock which was the way we could afford seeing Broadway plays. And they had Broadway cast albums that had classical music. At home. Um, and we watched you know, regular television. Media was was average. But for some reason I got curious about talking to people not like me.

Here's a certain way to look at my progression in media. By getting so much out of those DJs who are also radio artists. When I was a teenager and feeling like I was learning a lot about the world by sitting in my bedroom and hearing these people who were more connected to things in the outside world, I was like, I want to do this someday and connect with kids like me. Also, then as I got older, I thought, I want to do this and connect to people not

like me. When I realized that that was a revelation that helped motivate me to want to open up the phones, that helped motivate me to get into journalism. There was, you know, maybe a social consciousness and that realizing that I was growing up in a fairly comfortable We certainly weren't rich, but I never had a worry where my next meal was coming from kind of middle class home.

And I was realizing there was a lot going on in the world that wasn't like me, and there was a lot going on that would broaden my perspective on things, and I was curious. I wanted to learn more about the world, and that got me interested in talking to strangers. When you took phone calls back then in the beginning, what kind of people were calling you on a Sunday

between twelve three am. Well, it was a combination of Oh, I would say, you know, rock music, stoners who were up in the middle of the night and had an outlet because I was inviting them to call in. Also older people that was interesting to me, because they were certainly not the music audience for that FM rock station. But there were real talk radio listeners who tended to be older people who maybe were retired or insomnia. Then

they wanted some company, absolutely right. Um. Sometimes some of those folks would try to call me off the air later and just sort of strike up a friend ship. And that was one of my early lessons in how radio is companionship. Brian Larr the City's companion for more than thirty years. Another wonderful fixture of New York media is Philip Galanas. He's a novelist and attorney who writes the legendary Social Cues Advice column in the Sunday New

York Times. But advice wasn't the Gray Ladies original idea. First they wanted me to do a column, you know, one of those you'd know everything about me and my boyfriend and my dog. And it was because supposed to be about my life, the life of you know, a metropolitan gentleman philippin New York going around to the movies and what I saw at the theater, and I thought people will be so fucking like it's like I can see that. For three weeks to hear what advice New

Yorkers are really looking for. Download my full interview with Philip galanas at Here's the Thing dot org. More. Brian Larrer coming up. This is Alec Baldwin. Here's Brian larr on what he calls the paradox of modern New York. The city is cleaner, it is safer. We don't want to go back to the nineties seventies where you couldn't

walk down the street and there was a fiscal crisis. Uh, you know, the city and states finances have been in fairly good shape in recent years, and obviously crime is down, but at the same time, homelessness is at record levels. All of these spectacular contradictions, and hopefully there's a policy way out of those things. But I think kind of that's the state of New York to meet. New York is dirtier than it's ever been. The homeless thing is a problem again. The housing thing is a problem again.

The subways a mess. Also, this construction thing they upperstamp every building. There's scaffolding and obstructive driving. If you could wave a wand and solve off the top of your head two or three problems right now and this is a fantasy in the city. What would you address, Well, at large, it would be affordability. The real estate industry holds incredible power in this city and this state. And look at Mayor du Blasio, who I would say, as

trying to do something about inequality in the city. If he could wave a wand and say you can only build affordable housing for the next eight years in New York City and actually get affordable housing built, he would do it. But there's enough power by the industry that if they don't get a certain amount of hearn on their investment, they're just gonna blow it off. And it takes a certain investment to bring the return that can makes it worth it for developers, big risk to put

their money up um. But the city owns land as well. What prevents the city from not taking land they own and designing properties there that could be affordable. Well, there was a lot of that in the nineties when Ed Coach was mayored. There was so much more abandoned space. At that time it was a lot easier to do. Now there isn't as much, though there certainly are advocates who say the city should be taking still more of land that they own and turn it into affordable housing. Um,

do they need the state's permission to do that? Is it time for the city to be given back more of their authorities? Do you believe? In my opinion, yes, because Wi Doly need people from and I am still living rentally. It shouldn't be up to them to say what we do here. It shouldn't be up to us to say what they do in Rensselaer, which by the way,

is pronounced rents. Sorry, it's like Nevada, Nevada. If you work in media, you say Nevada all the time, except when the primaries and caucuses are upon us in the presidential cycle, and then we go back saying Nevada. Well, it's Rensler. One of our guests said the word collegio and supposed to collegio. I was like, yes, that's another except collegial is right. I think collegial is right now. Um, the Great Brian Larra wakes up in the morning and

plugs into media. How how does your morning media feed begin?

My morning media feed begins with Morning Edition, And I'm listening to what we're doing locally from our spectacular newsroom, which is the jewel of w n y C as far as I'm concerned when real news organizations are going out of business left and right, especially for local news, w n y C in the nonprofit space has wound up being able to grow the newsroom to dozens of people, and we have a bigger reporting staff actually going out and digging and doing investigations than some of the old

commercial news operations, either in broadcast or in newspapers. On the way in, I'm reading from various news sources, The Times in the Atlantic and Slade and National Review in the Wall Street general mix of you know, liberal and conservative and other and sources that cover different kinds of stories. I'll usually consume a little cable TV audio on an app on the way in, you know, give a little listen to what CNN and MSNBC and Fox are doing

on their morning shows. That's my consumption in the morning, and it's going to vary from day to day to day because to some degree I'm following the thread of the topics that I know we're going to be talking about that day, and that might lead me to any kind of news source. Sometimes my entry point to the media in the morning is Twitter, just to see as

a news aggregator. I use Twitter as a news aggregator because we at the Brian Laire Show follow a whole bunch of journalists and news organizations, and I can see from that, what of the zillion news stories that I could find on all the news apps people are actually talking about Now, I couldn't think of what the beachhad would be for the Trump question. But whoever the Democrats put forth, what do you think that person needs to do to beat Trump in what would the Democratic parton

need to do to make that happen? I think there's a fine line that that person has to walk. I think there's a real tension within the Democratic Party over the argument that it needs to be someone like Joe Biden who can appeal to those quote unquote Obama Trump voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio, etcetera, who Biden could bring back who maybe some of the others couldn't. On the other hand, so much of the Democratic victory in the House of Representatives in the mid terms last year came

because of huge turnouts by younger voters. You know, every election cycle they say, oh, the youth vote is going to rise up, and it's going to be different, and often it doesn't happen. It kind of happened last year. Um, and to what degree it happens in remains to be seen. So there are those two different competing visions of what kind of candidate. There's also something that Trump does that I'm not sure that Democrats, any Democrats, have figured out

how to navigate. Yet. People ask is Trump a baby? Is he crazy? Or is he a political genius? And I tend to fall on the political genius answer, meaning all this provocation that he does is not from lack of discipline. It's because it's something that he has honed. It's the Steve Bannon theory too. You know. Bannon says, if somebody on the right does something kind of outrageous on purpose, it's in part to draw an overreaction from

the left. Right. When Trump went out there and said about John McCain, oh I prefer people who weren't captured. Oh my god, this is gonna be the end of the campaign. Well obviously it wasn't. When he said about Megan Kelly after she asked him a tough question and a Fox News debate, she's bleeding from the wherever people are. But he was actually tapping into something that some people wanted. And these things that a lot of people think are a bug with respect to Trump aren't a bug their feature.

And the Democrats haven't figured out how to play that yet because so often they get lured into tis tisking a Trump and saying, oh my god, this is outrageous and we're headed toward a asis sexist, authoritarian country more than before. And it may be true, but at the same time, it doesn't necessarily win the election. So obviously

they have to talk about policy. They avoided impeachment and investigations and stuff on the stump in and they talked about healthcare and other kitchen table issues and that helped a lot. And I think they let the undertow of objection to Trump's sensibilities, which everybody knows how they feel about already one way or another, play itself out as a factor. So they probably have to do that. On the other hand, and we have this problem in the

media too. You know why is there so much Trump coverage. It's because there's a tension between not getting sucked in every time he throws out a little bit of bait and ignoring things that are so outrageous that they shouldn't be ignored. There's no right answer, there's only attention. And so in political terms, for Democrats, they have to figure out how to walk that line. And that's one of the things that's going to determine if somebody can be

Trump in. I think that the way to be Trump is you just have to point your finger right at his skull, if to hit your finger like an inch from his temple, and say this guy said this, and this guy and just don't back off from the indictment of his behavior when you say, is he a genius? Trump has a talent for something. But I think it would be so easy to be Trump in. There's a way. You just have to find those pressure points and just drive them in saying because I think he has nuts.

The argument against your way of running against Trump, though, is that everybody already knows how they feel about Trump. So if you're taking dead rhetorical aim at him and not letting him off the hook, it could just repolarize everybody into the positions that they're already in, and his supporters will get, you know, pumped up from that, and his opponents will get pumped up from that, But it

doesn't change anything. No matter what happens. Have you noticed this, No matter what happens with respect to the Russian investigation or policies, whatever it is, Trump's popularity remains in a very narrow range. Right. It's like never goes below, never goes above. Bill Clinton, for example, when he was going through impeachment and everything, people say, oh, it made him more popular, which it did, but his popularity ratings were so changeable, he would be way down, he would be

way up. We're in a different kind of moment now where people already are frozen in terms of what they think about Trump. So I'm not sure that making Trump the issue beats Trump because everybody just stays with it. But I think that I respect what you're saying, but I think that overly simplifies what I'm referring to, which is you have to have people that can excite their side of the aisle and galvanized their side of the aisle with their ideas and their rhetoric, which includes the

indictment of Trump. The way that Trump excites, You've gotta get in there, you gotta get dirty with Trump. Somebody once said, a liberal is a person who won't take his own side and an argument. Now. My last quick question is Brian Lair runs out the door. It's a sunny day in Manhattan. He's got the time doing something. Guy that was the host of a music show. What's your pleasures? Is it? The opera? Is it? The symphony? Is a jazz clubs? Is it? What does Brian Lair

do in New York to have some fun? It is, first of all, going running on those streets of New York. I love to run. I don't run long distances, but I try to run about three miles every day. Uh, it's my zen. Once upon a time I did a lot of yoga and meditation. Now I run. I once had a conversation with Peter Segal on the host of Wait Wait, Don't tell me who's really a runner. I'm

not really a runner. He's really a runner. And he was making a big case about not running with headphones so you could be very present, and so it was zen for him in that respect. I find for me, if I just go running with nothing, I'm still thinking about work and I'm still thinking about the world. So I like to go into my music and run and I'm escaping. So I do that. UM Theater art museums, jazz clubs, restaurants. What does Brian Lair like to eat?

Ethnic foods or a thing you crave. One of the ethnic foods I like is Ethiopian food because you can eat it with your hands that have that wonderful and jeribread and you can get vegetables or you can get meat and then you just take that bread and you scoop it up. And I love Ethiopian food. I'm gonna end with this, which is we paint this picture Brian there on the subway with the New York Time, reading the Times on his way to work. He goes running to zen out in the streets of New York, and

he loves Ethiopian food. You really are the ultimate New Yorker, Brian There. There is no ultimate New Yorker, but thank you. Alc Bolo Ultimate new Yorker. Brian Larr broadcasts his ultimate New York talk show, The Brian Larr Show, every weekday at ten am on w n y C. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the Thing, testing one to three, testing one toy. I'm sorry, that's me here here we go, So maybe I'm deaf. Literally so I need to have it very loud. Okay, you dry allergies?

Are we do? What do we do? What's that bring it in? And bringing the bringing His Majesty's I hear you use this, um. But how can I be second on this and be talking about saying maybe that's the way I could teach you how to eat a ricola while you give out the news. That's right,