This is Entrepreneurship in Society.
It is a course that is offered through the University of
Wisconsin School of Human Ecology.
I'm Jeanan Yasiri Moe. As we begin today, I'd like to
extend thanks to our partners in helping produce this class, the
College of Engineering for their technical support, the UW Office
of Corporate Relations for their support, and the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation which has provided financial support for
this course over eight semesters.
Additionally, we'd like to thank our media partners, Wisconsin
Public Television, and their University Place crew for taping
today's lecture. It's my special privilege to be
able to introduce to you a special guest today, Michael
Feldman, host of the wildly popular national radio program
"Whad'Ya Know?" Michael was born and raised in
Milwaukee, graduating from the UW in 1970.
While teaching at an alternative high school here in Madison, he
volunteered his services at a local public radio station,
WORT, back in 1977 and soon landed his own Friday night
call-in show called "Thanks For Calling."
That experience eventually led him to Chicago's WGN radio to
host their afternoon drive slot, and in 1985 Michael returned to
the Wisconsin Public Radio network to host "Whad'Ya Know?"
a weekly talk show. Today, "Whad'Ya Know?"
is produced by Wisconsin Public Radio and broadcast across the
US to 200 public radio stations and broadcast on Sirius and XM
satellite radio. The show is streamed, podcast
archived, and available on demand through various sources.
I knew that Michael's story was an interesting one and one that
really does speak to entrepreneurial thinking:
innovation, risk-taking, as well as great wealth creation,
especially for those in his audience.
So it is my pleasure to introduce and to welcome, as our
last speaker this semester, Michael Feldman.
[APPLAUSE] >> Ah, geez.
Well, thank you. Well, some of that is true.
I don't know about the innovation, to tell you the
truth. I do a public radio show so
you've never heard it. I would say probably your
grandmother might like me. Your grandfather probably
doesn't. That's just sort of the way it
splits, public radio. Some of you might be familiar
with me. We've been on long enough now
where we actually raised children in the show from birth
to about age 25 or so. So you could be one of those
kids that was raised on "Whad'Ya Know?"
but it doesn't look that way just from the reaction I'm
getting. Anyway, I am Michael Feldman.
The show is called "Whad'Ya Know?" that I do.
I used to be high school teacher, but it drove me to seek
other forms of vocation. I don't know if any of you are
in education, but you might find that same thing happens to you.
So I taught here at Shabazz High School in Madison, which is the
alternative high school, so-called because the kids went,
like, every other time. Actually, my first radio show I
had a show at a greasy spoon called Dolly's Fine Foods on
Williamson Street. It was right across from the
Crystal Corner bar, which you may already know.
If you don't, you probably will. And I'd do a show there from
6:00 to 9:00 in the morning each week day, and then I'd go and
teach at Shabazz, and that worked out pretty good
for a while. But after while I left that, and
I got a job, actually, on Wisconsin Public Radio which it
turns out the guy who runs Wisconsin Public Radio, ran at
the time, heard my show from the greasy spoon and said this could
work on public radio, and I pretty much proved that it
couldn't. But I did several shows there.
Then I got the call to go down to the big time in Chicago at
WGN, which I found out actually stands for Who Goes Next in
terms of personnel. And I lasted there the worst
part of a year, actually, I like to call it.
They teamed with a co-host, and I had actually never worked with
anybody before. For me radio is me.
You have a microphone and due to certain dysfunctions that I
have, kind of a nervous disorder that I have, I can free
associate and just keep talking about nothing.
It worked very well in teaching high school, as you can imagine.
[LAUGHTER] So I can do that
endlessly, but working with someone else, they interrupt you
flow. And they teamed with this woman
who had been a traffic copter reporter.
So she had a very loud voice because she had to be heard
above the props of the helicopter.
So I would go off on one tangent and she would just chop it down.
It was horrible. That's why I never work with
anyone. I shouldn't really be in a
relationship with anyone. [LAUGHTER]
I shouldn't really deal with anyone outside of
myself and just stay in a bubble, and I'm okay in the
bubble. Eventually, it got so bad,
actually, we had to do the engineering for the other
person, we'd switch off the pots and all that, the levels and
stuff, and she kept potting me down and her up, and I would pot
her down and me up. And finally they super glued the
controls on the control board, WGN, World's Greatest Newspaper
station. And they super glued them, and
she was so loud on show that I was doing that I actually
pounded on it with my fist until they bled trying to move her pot
down so I couldn't hear that in my ears.
So that's my history in commercial radio.
Oh, and one weekend at WMAD in the cornfields there in Sun
Prairie which didn't work out either because I didn't know you
couldn't play what you wanted to.
I'd never been on commercial radio before.
On WORT we played pretty much whatever we wanted to and some
pretty obscure things and a lot of strange music.
But on commercial radio you don't do that.
There's actually a play list, I was told by the program director
the next morning. So I had an overnight in the
cornfield there, and it was very strange to begin with because
would call in and say my sister just had a newborn baby, could
you play Hells Bells by AC/DC for her.
Sure, okay, whatever, commercial radio, do that.
So I played that but it's very bizarre because, literally,
you're in a cornfield at WMAD, if it still exists.
Does it? Probably does.
It's called something else maybe.
And so you have a window there, and all you see are corn, stalks
of corn in the dark. This is the overnight show, and
it's very scary. And so that lasted two weekends,
and that was the end of commercial radio for me.
But public radio is a good thing because you can stay on it as
long as possible because no one notices you're there.
I have flown under the radar for, like, 25 years just on this
show alone. And people don't even realize
that I'm still here so it's perfect.
You really couldn't ask for anything better.
I don't know if any of you are thinking about careers in radio.
Anyone here radio oriented? TV?
No. Comm arts?
What's your thing? >> Comm arts, TV and film.
TV and film? Okay, cool.
I will say that, in terms of preparation for a career in comm
arts, radio, TV, or what have you, I never took a course in
it. And I'm not bragging about that.
It just never occurred to me. I never really thought I was
going to do that. I took English because I could
speak it and write it. So that's cool.
So I had an advantage, I thought, taking English courses,
and I liked reading. And then I graduated and I
figured I didn't see any ads for English majors wanted.
So it was a question of what am I going to do for a living.
You may run into this shortly. So I thought I could always
teach. Those we can, do; those who
can't, teach. The old saying.
And so I took a year of education here at the
university, teacher education, and there was an internship that
open up in Kenosha at Tremper High School down in Kenosha.
It was opened because the kid who had gone there to intern
from Madison, these were the days, had shown up at the
welcome dance at the country club wearing sandals.
And they sent him home. They sent him packing because
this is not going to work in Kenosha.
So I took his opening. During my job interview they
asked me, would you ever consider sitting in the yoga
posture on your desk while teaching a class?
And I said it never occurred to me.
Which, of course, I did for the following three or four years.
It was just those days. The war at home was going on in
Madison, and in Kenosha some other sort of war was going on,
the war against the factory. My students in Kenosha,
universally, all they wanted was not to work in the factory.
It was American Motors at that time.
And they were great kids and everything, but they wanted to
get out of Kenosha. That was their one consideration
not the war or politics or anything else.
But when I came down there, my first day when I saw the campus,
there was smoke rising from Tremper High School.
As I came down highway 50 and I see that smoke was rising.
And I thought, my god, the war at home has reached Kenosha.
And it turned out it was senior bratwurst day.
That was my first indication that Madison is different from
maybe some other places you'll run into.
So take that for what it's worth.
As far as being an entrepreneur, can you be something that you
can't actually say? [LAUGHTER]
I've been practicing, entrepreneur.
I don't think I would be anything that is French, to
begin with. That's a French word.
I don't think there's a French word for me.
Unless it's je ne sais quoi. So entre-manure I thought of.
That was possibly me. I'm more of a contra-preneur or
something. I never have made wealth because
I got the list things, take risks, think innovatively, and
create wealth. Now, just looking at wealth, I
have made some money, but I've never created wealth because
wealth, to me, is bigger than money or making a decent living.
It's like creating wealth, something really big.
I'm not sure what it is, to tell you the truth, but like creating
wealth stream, a stream of wealth that other people can dip
into. You know, wealth.
Producing wealth, making wealth available.
That, I don't do that. I don't know what that would be.
Taking risks. I'm not a type A.
Well, it depends what that stands for, I guess.
I occasionally take risks but usually not intentionally.
So there's that. I think, for me at this point in
my life, getting up in the morning is a risk I take.
[LAUGHTER] I do it slowly.
Well, you're not there yet. I won't even tell you want's
going to happen. You don't want to know, believe
me. You wake up each morning sort of
surprised that you're still here.
That's different. So that's taking a risk, I'd
say, to get out of bed and go into the world and so forth.
But I'm not a type A. I can't imagine somebody wants
to sailboard off of Jesus' arms in Rio there, off Sugarloaf
Mountain, wherever that is. That would be cool, but I
wouldn't do it. Or any sort of sport that's
those sports they have now, those extreme sports.
For me, getting out a chair is an extreme sport.
Do I take risks? I take risks because I probably
didn't know what I was getting into.
So, for example, my career is not a typical career.
There is nothing you'll see anywhere that is what I do for a
living. So I had to invent it.
So there's that. But it wasn't so much a risk as
it was desperation. There's a slight difference
between being desperate and doing anything and taking a
calculated risk. So I'm not, like an investor
might take a risk and so forth, I don't do that.
Thinking innovatively. Once again, that's pretty
subjective. Once, when I was a kid actually,
I came up with the idea for The Clapper before it existed.
You know, The Clapper, where your granny can clap her hands
and the TV goes on or off. Unfortunately, it also shuts off
her husbands hearing aid and pacemaker, but that's another...
[LAUGHTER] That's probably a
good thing for her. I don't know, it might be a good
thing. But I never had an innovation
unless it is the fact that I could make basically being me
into a career. So that's pretty innovative in a
way because, really, there's not much of a use, initially you
wouldn't think there's much of a use for a Michael Feldman.
I can see you agree. [LAUGHTER]
So if you're doing something like in radio, now
radio they have things that are called radio personalities but
usually they're not. In fact, they told me on the
radio, I won a contest in high school to be on the radio one
time. I was shooting my mouth off and
talking and play weird, Louie Louie and songs like that, and a
guy afterward told me, it was Bob Berry, who was a very big DJ
in Milwaukee at the time, rock DJ, the fifth Beatle, actually
the five millionth and fifth Beatle but that's what he called
himself, he said just play the records, give the weather and
get out. He told me not to really
consider that as a career. But there were radio
personalities, and there's some leeway in terms of actually
expressing something you feel about or something you think
about and playing music that you think should be played that
perhaps isn't being played and that sort of thing.
But they don't encourage it. In fact, it almost doesn't exist
anywhere. There's Rush Limbaugh now and
guys like that and Howard Stern. They do have that leeway but
they're very few and far between.
So maybe that's innovation. Luck.
I would advocate if you're going to have anything, have luck.
Have good luck. You may, in fact, now for me the
problem was teaching was cool but it wasn't going to be my
life work. I was an artistic type.
Maybe you are as well. In the sense of I wanted to have
an art in the worst way, and all my art was about the worst you
could ever see. Anything I would do artistically
was terrible. I couldn't paint.
I couldn't draw. I couldn't sing.
I couldn't play an instrument. All these things that I really
admired. Just to draw something that
looked like something would have been a great thing for me.
And I appreciate all those things.
And music, I love music but I've tried, well it never went
anywhere. I don't have the knack.
I don't have an ear, and I don't have an eye.
And I have a mouth. That's about all I have.
And maybe something that you've run into too is if the need to
express yourself is sort of important to you, than you are
quite possibly and artistic type.
You may not be an artist. That's something that you have
to establish. But it's sort of a problem
because if you don't immediately have an art, that's apparent.
You have to come up with something eventually.
So you try a lot of things, and I think that's probably the best
thing about college is you could go off in a lot of areas that
you never even thought of before and explore them and think,
well, this is cool, maybe I can't do this or maybe something
that really turns you on in a whole new way of looking at
things or a way of expressing yourself.
If expressing yourself is not important to you, then you don't
have this problem at least. You may have other problems.
So it's a question of how are you going to do that.
Photography, I tried photography for a while.
I tried ceramics. So I was very desperate.
I had wheels throwing terrible pots.
All my friends are musicians or artists, and I was like the odd
man out and I really wanted to have an art.
So the only argument that I could come up with is that what
I do on the radio is an art form.
It may not be high art, but it certainly is low art.
I'll say that. So that's just sort of the whole
thing about radio and how that happened.
I've volunteered at WORT. That's how I got on the air in
the first place, and I found that I have three basic skills
that work in terms of doing radio.
That is I can speak in front of a group of people and free
associate. It's really a dysfunction that I
have. So if you can make your
dysfunctions pay, this could be very important for you.
I can free associate. I used to do it in my classes
all the time. Kids would get me off on
tangents, and I'd just keep going.
I'd be talking about one thing and they say what about, and so
I'd go that and I would never get to what I was going to do
because that's how I think. And it's a dysfunction based on
nervousness. So it's a nervous disorder that
I made pay. So that's cool.
Otherwise I would be tranquilized and years of
therapy. I probably should have therapy
with a lot of this stuff because it could have been therapized,
or whatever they do, therapeutized, but I wouldn't
have had a career. I would be on the air, for
example, doing my show from the greasy spoon, and it was whoever
came in including people off the streets and stuff, and I could
work with all of them because I was just free to talk to people
and so forth and get something from them.
Someone called in one day and said, you know, you're really
messed up. You're very neurotic and you
have a lot of problems, and he said don't ever change.
So if I had therapy I wouldn't be able to do that because I
would have been at peace with myself.
But you can't be at peace with yourself and make a complete ass
of yourself at the same time, so that's very important that I
didn't do that. I do want to say something about
old media and new media because I'm definitely old media, so I
wish you guys a lot of luck with the new media.
I'm making forays in it. I do tweet or Twitter or
whatever the verb would be. I do that.
And now that's part of my nervous disorder now.
It's a very strange thing. First of all, I believe that our
history will be divided into pre-cell and post-cell.
Or BC and AC. That will be our generation.
Before cell and after cell. Now, I am before cell.
For me a phone is black. It has a rotary dial.
There's a cord. If you want privacy, you drag it
into the bathroom and lock the door and your brother knocks on
it the whole time trying to get in it.
But that's a phone. You didn't take a picture with
it, for example, and there was no social networking.
We didn't social network in my day.
We didn't have social media. We had social diseases.
That occurred. Social studies.
We definitely had social security.
You probably had one of those three things, but that was all
the social we had. There were social organizations,
rotary and your elks and so forth, but there was no social.
And, frankly, I feel I'm sort of relieved in a way because, first
of all, I have a phone. Where'd I put it there?
And I'm supposed to leave it on my daughters tell me, one of
whom is there actually. I wasn't going to mention her
but there she is. I finally got the phone.
Dad, take your phone with you, leave it on.
Alright, I don't want to be that available.
See, now, that's the difference between your generation and
mine. Why would you want to be that
available? It's the same thing with
Facebook now. Everyone knows what you're doing
every step of the way, and why do you want that?
It's none of their business where I am now.
Unless I'm expecting a call, but I don't expect somebody I don't
even know on Facebook to know what I have just done which is
probably trivial anyway and none of their business overall.
So that's why I'm not of this generation.
It wouldn't work out for me. But I do use my phone now.
Occasionally I turn it on. So that's cool.
They're cool devices. Now, I'm Android simply because
I'm sort of anti-Apple simply because I don't know why.
[LAUGHTER] Since that Mac that looked like
a TV set, I thought it was really ugly looking,
those old Macs, and then they came out with a laptop that
looked like a toilet cover and that was it for me for Mac.
I keep thinking about that toilet cover Mac.
Who invented that? Now they're doing a lot better
design-wise and so forth. To me, the whole Apple thing is
such a closed system. They control all the content
going in, the content coming out, and so forth.
And to me that goes back to my University of Wisconsin days.
That's the man. Apple's the man.
Of course, Google is the man also.
There's a lot of men now. [LAUGHTER]
Amazon. The whole cloud thing now is
very scary to me as a member of the old media because you've got
your Amazon cloud, you got you Apple cloud, you got your Google
cloud, and eventually there's going to be warfare between
these clouds. [LAUGHTER]
And ships of destruction will fight one
another in the clouds, in the various clouds, and it will be
the end of the world as we know it.
But that's new media, what can you do?
In my day, you have AT&T, but in my day it actually was American
Telephone & Telegraph. So that's it in a nutshell.
Just left the telegraph behind and we had the telephone, a
wonderful thing. Now you actually make calls on
your cell? Probably not, right?
My youngest daughter is shocked when her phone rings.
It doesn't ring, it plays some heavy metal anthem.
Phones don't ring anymore. You don't dial anything because
there's no dials. But anyway, if it rings, she's
shocked because all she does is text.
She's a different creature from me, as is Ellie.
Ellie has gone totally Siri. Siri is the only person she
talks to now. [LAUGHTER]
Because that's the one person who always responds.
I can understand that. It's a wonderful thing, but Siri
is not real. She's not real.
I don't think. Maybe she is real.
Maybe there is someone there who's behind the scenes being
Siri, but I don't think so. So I guess all I'm saying is I
don't get all this stuff, especially Facebook, I think,
more than anything. Facebook is interesting because
here is a guy, Zuckerberg, who had no social skills whatsoever.
[LAUGHTER] And invents this
thing because of that. That's amazing.
Talk about my lack of access to what's really happening.
He's totally asocial. He just didn't have any social
skills. Terrible social skills.
You saw the movie, right? I think that's pretty accurate.
Total lack of social skills. He's now worth how many billions
of dollars? That's an amazing story for
someone with social problems. So that's interesting and, once
again, this is all new media stuff.
Radio is probably the only surviving thing of the old
media. Even television now has gone
different, high def and whatever.
Soon television will be more interactive.
It will all be one big thing and so forth.
Radio is still there hammering away.
I'm on the AM here in Madison, so how cool is that?
With the basketball games, the high school basketball games,
and "Whad'Ya Know?" In my day, the basically the big
innovation in radio was we got the six transistor radio which
made it possible for the first time to gouge out a textbook and
conceal a radio in it. You take a knife, history books
work best I find. [LAUGHTER]
And you make a little thing in there and the rest your
little six transistor radio. This is, consider the height,
state of the art. And then you run, there was a
single thing that goes in your ear, it looked like a hearing
aid basically, and run up here and stick it in there.
And you just sit like this and listen to the World Series or
whatever. Just for special events.
You can't do it all the time. So that was it but that was a
big deal. Suddenly you're portable and
that, all portable devices now, that was like the first portable
device. Suddenly we've got that six
transistor radio. That's a life changer.
But you couldn't do much with it.
You couldn't take pictures with it.
You couldn't find out where your friends were and where they
weren't and summon them all. I do like flash mobs.
[LAUGHTER] Ellie always told me
I use the term wrong, but this is about the coolest thing
because we used to, in the days here when the revolution was on,
say the revolution will be televised.
The idea that everything that was happening on campus, all the
riots and protests and kids getting beat up and all that
stuff, was all on television. So they said the world is
watching, the revolution will be televised.
It didn't quite work out that way.
But now I think the revolution will be on Facebook, if there is
one, it will be called Facebook. You'll all know where it is and
where to show up and so forth. But I see a flash mob kind of
thing where everyone gets together and has a revolution
instead of a dance thing, actually stage a revolution.
And then they go away and do something else.
I don't know. I think that's pretty cool.
There's that sort of social aspect of it, which I think is
very cool I got to admit, which didn't exist before.
It's possible if you look at Egypt and countries overseas
where there's been a total regime change, all of that was
made possible by this new technology which didn't exist
before. So that's pretty amazing and
that's a pretty powerful tool. So I do have a lot of respect
for that end of things. However, radio is still AM.
[LAUGHTER] And scratchy and
doesn't reach very far. They have tried to do
innovations in radio. They have an HD radio now.
I don't know if it stands for high density.
I don't know. Hound dog.
I have no idea. It's really not high def or
anything. And no one has it anyhow.
Now you can get Sirius and so forth.
That's cool but it's expensive. So it does offer more options
though. For us, the main thing we had
were records and the stereo. The stereo was an amazing
invention. We went from one speaker to two.
And amplifiers, someone figured out that you can get, like, 100
watts and up and build speakers that were really huge.
Somewhere in the '70s, I think, this occurred.
And so maybe a student such as yourself or yourselves could get
the biggest damn speakers, and suddenly you dominate your
space. That's the cool thing about all
this technology. A lot of it now is you
dominating your internal space. But you could really work the
whole block with the right speakers.
And that was kind of powerful because the music also is part
of it. Sort of a revolution going on.
The Beatles somewhat but also Bob Dylan and all these people,
and they weren't exactly calling for a revolution but it was a
whole new way of doing music, and it was very
anti-establishment. So that was the cool thing about
it. And it was everywhere.
It was on the radio everywhere, and it was blasting from your
dorm. That was sort of the one
unifying social factor that we had going for us.
If we had anything going for us, I'm not sure we did.
This Twitter thing is, I've gotten, it's addictive in that
on my show I have a monologue, monologue so called because I'm
the one speaking it, so I start each show with a news monologue.
All the news that isn't I call it.
And it's basically what's happening, what I think is
funny, and trying to put a spin on it and sometimes
successfully. But I've been doing that on
Twitter. Something comes up, John
Travolta, okay, let's get something out on the John
Travolta masseur thing. Not too hard to do.
So I do it almost, sometimes I think I'm doing it in my sleep.
I'm actually tweeting, if that is the verb, in my sleep which
is an odd feeling. It also is sort of bad in terms
of composition because you're limited to 140 characters.
And that's a different way. I always wrote, and I try to
write humorous pieces and stuff, and they always end up being
about a page and a half maximum. That's all I could say.
Usually I would take a one-liner and expand it, and I get about a
page and a half out of it, and sometimes I get a newspaper
column out of it or something like that.
So that's cool. But now with Twitter, you're
limited to 140 characters. And if you look at it, perhaps
no literature will ever be written again if this becomes
the norm for writing in 140 characters because that's like,
what, 20 words maybe. And if you think about it, I
looked it up and the bible is 774,746 words in the bible.
That's both books not including book of Mormon.
Figuring it's seven letters a word, words were longer in those
days because they had, like, speaketh, sayeth.
You always had the eth endings on everything.
So that comes out to 5,423,222 characters in the bible, which
would require 38,737 tweets. However, the 10 Commandments are
more doable. I actually worked out the 10
Commandments. I can do them in 51 characters.
Here they are. No god, images, cursing,
killing, sex, steal, covet, Sundays, honor folks.
10 Commandments. It doesn't have the same impact.
[LAUGHTER] If Moses had actually
tweeted, I don't think it would have the same impact, and I
think today our entire western culture might be entirely
different because I don't think people would have thought this
was necessarily the tweet of God.
[LAUGHTER] Okay.
I just thought about that so I thought I'd tell you.
Let's see, I've got a couple things I want to say here.
Okay. Feldmaneurship, I actually felt
under a lot of pressure because Jeanan is so into this and she's
so good at what she does and she is all these things.
Do you know about her? She's absolutely amazing, by the
way. She is in so many things and so
many areas, and she has got the business acumen but she uses it
for the good of people. It's almost never been done
before. She's an amazing individual.
And she is so organized and so goal-oriented and so
follow-through on everything that she is the exact opposite
of me because my approach to life is to stumble over
something, and then as you're getting up you see if it
actually works for you or not, and maybe you'll stumble over it
again. So totally disorganized.
The opposite of Jeanan. J-Moe as she's now known.
[LAUGHTER] So I try to think
what would Feldmaneurship be? I came up with a few things
here, and I'll just give these to you quickly here because
they're of no use to you. [LAUGHTER]
Number one, no goals. [LAUGHTER]
How can you have goals when you have no idea what
you're doing? [LAUGHTER]
Goals are usually somebody else has foist it on
you anyway. People like to pretend that
whatever they may have achieved in life is what they intended to
but they're delusional. They're rationalizing what may
have been some pretty bad choices along the way.
It's like Toddlers and Tiaras, right?
Those kids are out there because of their mothers' needs.
The desperate needs of their overweight, overbearing mothers
to have been a beauty queen. So these poor little kids have
to pay for it. Unless you're a Manning, a good
rule of thumb is to do nothing that your parents have done.
[LAUGHTER] Goals are limiting
many interesting, even profound, avenues and dead ends you may
have taken. In Feldmaneurship, we get out
there and stumble over things. Take the wrong direction on the
wrong path, start over, and stumble again.
Eventually, you stumble over something worth the fall.
Then it's a question of how I can keep having the same happy
accident over and over again. And, really, because you try
things and this doesn't work, that doesn't work, and to find
something that I could do then, and then the question of
actually doing it. So for me I said I can do radio
because I can talk, I can hold a microphone, and I can answer the
phone. So the three qualities you need
for doing a radio show. But then it's really a question
of actually developing the skills because they don't just
come naturally. You have to have the talent.
There has to be some talent there.
And that's a problem I've had in a lot of areas.
There's stuff I really want to do but I didn't have that
talent. Finally you find something, this
is something I can do. Then you've got to develop the
talent. So that's the thing.
Number two, no ambition. Very important not to have
ambition I don't mean to be a stoner or whatever they're
called now. Are there still stoners?
What do you call someone who's like, ya know?
A stoner. >> A stoner?
Cool. [LAUGHTER]
I'm down with that. By the way, in school, myself,
in high school in particular, I was very, not conservative but
just kind of... [LAUGHTER]
What does this mean? What's a word for this?
A kid who's like this? I used to wear dickies.
I used to wear turtleneck dickies and white shirts, and
you could see the dickie outline underneath.
[LAUGHTER] Penny loafers, you
don't know what those are but they are little shoes that
actually had pennies. I'd take the pennies out because
I was cool. [LAUGHTER]
Black stay-press pants and penny loafers, and I
eventually went to hush puppies. I really got pretty hip.
And white shirts. I looked like a junior
accountant. My dad was an accountant.
Maybe I got it from him. I don't know.
And I had a sense of humor and stuff, and I was pretty funny
and stuff, but I was pretty closed off.
Whatever. That was me.
But the guys that I admired, we called them greasers in our day.
We had these greasers because of all the grease.
They were the coolest guys in the world because they would
talk back to teachers and stuff, and I loved it because deep in
my heart I wanted to do that. I hated high school.
It was all abuse of authority, especially in those days.
You needed a hall pass. No protests in our high school.
It never occurred to us to do that.
So the greasers were my heroes. They were pretty cool guys.
But anyhow, no ambition, don't be a stoner but be whatever you
have to be just not to have ambition.
I don't know if we're all here for a reason, but we are all
here and we can make up reasons. So you don't really have to have
an overriding ambition. Those are usually imposed on you
anyhow. Rich and famous are the two
absolute worst ambitions you can have.
I think maybe you could be rich or famous.
That wouldn't be so bad, but if you have them both, it's not a
good thing because they sort of take over your life.
Ambition should be to do something you love to do because
if you do something you love to do then you'll never feel like
I've wasted the past 30 years of my life at the Department of
Motor Vehicles. Good job, probably gratifying in
some sense of the word, but it's not what you wanted to do.
You wanted to dance. So go for the love thing, I
would say. Forgot the ambition thing unless
your ambition is to make the most of yourself.
That's a good ambition I think. And there's no reason that
shouldn't pay good money. Ideally, you'll do something you
love and get paid for it. That's the only ambition.
Make mistakes. Very important to make mistakes,
constantly, repeatedly, same ones over and over again.
You should have a wife there to confirm all that.
[LAUGHTER] That's very helpful.
Or a husband who can tell you that, in fact, you're making the
same mistake. Of course that was a big mistake
in the beginning but never mind. [LAUGHTER]
You think Edison didn't come up with some stupid
inventions? I bet he came up with hand
buzzers and nose hair trimmers and stuff, but he came up with
the light bulb and the phonograph.
Of course he stole all those ideas but still.
Without mistakes you never get anything right.
So make mistakes. It's normal.
Don't try to make them. That'd be weird.
But you'll make them. Roger Clemens even would hang
the occasional fastball in the letters and shoot the occasional
needle in his butt. [LAUGHTER]
So everyone makes mistakes is what I'm saying.
Still a great pitcher. Hope he gets off.
And I always think Columbus, remember, was looking for India.
Big mistake. Only a couple more of these.
Money is only a problem when you don't have it.
Okay. It can't be money-oriented.
Definitely I have been broke, and it's a good thing to be
broke just to know what it's like not to have money.
And to know that you don't care for that feeling.
At one point here, a low point in my life, actually I was
driving cab, I quit my one radio job for some reason, on the air
by the way, don't ever do that if you're on the air.
[LAUGHTER] And so I ended up
driving cab and was a terrible cab driver.
Definitely not my life work. I had the lowest revenue per
mile in Union Cab because I turned off the radio because I
didn't want to be bothered. [LAUGHTER]
Plus, I grew up on campus here, grew up, I guess I
grew up, and I didn't know there were streets called the Grand
Tetons. Did you know that?
On the west side of Madison? The Grand Tetons.
They'd say number 24, pick up Grand Tetons, and I had no idea
we had Grand Tetons in Madison. On the far east side of Madison
there are streets named after the developer's daughters.
So Donna. You've got to know developer's
daughters to know what street you're on.
It's a very confusing thing if you've never been off campus.
Broom Street, Bassett, cool. [LAUGHTER]
By the way, Mifflin Street block party, Mayor Paul
Soglin was the first guy arrested at the original Mifflin
Street block party. Where was he?
I'm sorry. It really bothers me.
Our motto was the streets belong to the people.
We were wrong. [LAUGHTER]
But why were there horses in the street and the
people were on the sidewalks, it was the worst possible
situation, scenario. It's amazing nothing worse
happened than arresting Montee Ball.
[LAUGHTER] And who turned in
Montee Ball? We've got to find him, we've got
to, I'm not saying hurt him or anything, I'm just saying.
[LAUGHTER] Mess up his porch a
little bit. You know what I'm saying?
[LAUGHTER] That was the weirdest
event of all time, I think. Do something you love.
I covered that one already. Finally, this is the last one in
Feldmaneurship, learn how to dance.
It may seem inappropriate with the other ones, but I guess
mainly to the guys out there because most of the females
probably already know how to dance.
For women it's innate. For men it's acquired.
It's an acquired skill. But it's a tremendous advantage
to you. You guys, you're still in the
sifting and winnowing, the great Wisconsin Idea of the whole
mating game or whatever, and if you can dance it gives you, how
many times have you stood up in front of a band there while the
only girl there that you would have wanted to dance with gets
asked to dance by some guy who knows how to dance?
Now, I'm not saying that would have been the girl for you, but
you know what I mean. Learn how to dance.
Take some lessons. Don't tell anyone you're doing
it. That's humiliating.
[LAUGHTER] Because I guy does
not learn how to dance unless he has a sister who teaches him,
and I had three older brothers. None of them taught me how.
They taught me how to defend myself from a headlock and how
to breathe with my neck being pressed against the floor.
[LAUGHTER] But no dancing.
So I would say it's a tremendous advantage.
And that's what I would advise to you.
So that's pretty much me in my life and times.
It's not much but it's my life. [LAUGHTER]
So I would be happy, now you may have questions not
so much about me but about, let's say, radio or broadcasting
or how do I get into this sort of thing.
If I can help you, I'd be surprised, but I'd be glad to
entertain any questions you might have.
The students know that they put their hands up, and then I
go ahead and hand off the mic. Do I see any hands?
I see one at the back. >> So I'm watching her move.
She moves so well. >> If you guys could make sure
your backpacks aren't in the way of my running through.
Public Television there. >> Hey there.
I know your daughter Ellie, and I know she went to West.
I went to Memorial. Which high school did you go to
in Madison? >> I didn't go to one.
I taught at one. >> Oh.
I taught at Shabazz. >> Oh, Shabazz.
I'm from Milwaukee. I went to Milwaukee Washington.
Okay. I was just wondering.
Just curious. [LAUGHTER]
West has been our school here, though.
Both daughters went to West. >> Right here and then I'll come
down front. >> Hi.
My name is Michael. >> Hi.
I was just wondering, if you could go back and give yourself
one piece of advice while you were in college, what would that
be? >> Don't get married.
[LAUGHTER] Alright, okay, no one
ever gave me advice, and anything I would say to you, I
expect you not to pay any attention to because I wouldn't
have either. So I graduated college, I was
21, I was living with a certain person, and I thought I'm going
to get married because my brother Clayton got married when
he was 21 and he was still married and he's still married
now. But that was Clayton, and he
didn't marry the person that I did.
So I would say, for some reason I thought that I had to get in
line, in step, with expectations.
Get married, get a job. So I would say don't do that.
Are you crazy? [LAUGHTER]
Hi. My name is Justin.
Hey, Justin. >> First of all, thanks for
coming. It was really enjoyable.
Oh, thank you. >> So you made the distinction
between old and new media. >> Yeah.
Your radio show is on the internet, how do you make that
connection, I suppose? How do you reach new people with
old media? >> I would tie it to a brick and
throw it through a window if that's all, in terms of delivery
of the material. The material is very much
traditionally delivered. It's sort of repackaged through
the internet and so forth. It's not really internet
friendly in the sense that it's not interactive, which would be
nice for me to do that more. I would use whatever is
available in terms of broadcasting.
We do have podcasts and so forth, and I have never actually
listened to a podcast. I don't know what sort of pod
you need. [LAUGHTER]
I think it's like a body snatchers thing where the
pod comes and takes over your body.
Replica of you kind of thing. But I'm not sure what the
technology is there. I find the new technology very
interesting for all the reasons I said earlier, I guess.
It's sort of beyond me. Especially all the social media
part of it I, personally, don't get.
For you, I'm sure for all of you it's like second nature.
You think about the cell phone thing really didn't hit that
long ago, but you grew up with that.
So that's really totally different orientation.
Michael, "Whad'Ya Know?" is very, very popular, and it's
obviously gone through a lot of transitions over the course of
the last 25 years. What do you think is the
riskiest thing you've ever done with the show when you think
back? >> Risky?
Yeah. >> I think showing up is the
biggest risk. Honestly, it's not a risk sort
of show. Do you know what I mean?
No one's life is in danger by the doing of it.
[LAUGHTER] We may have had
impact on some people listening for one reason or another.
I know that people have told me that their mother in the home,
she listened to the show and she loved it, and it tied her into
things that were happening back here in Wisconsin.
That sort of thing. So that's risk exactly but it's
sort of having an effect of some sort.
So that does occur. And, really, what I like is not
so much the risk of it, it's actually connecting.
So I say all that stuff about social media, but for me radio
was maybe the original social media in that you go on the air
and you're talking to people around the country who maybe
have the same point of view as you, or similar, and they're
funny, they're interesting, they tell you something about they
are and where they're at, and I love that sort of connectedness.
To me, that's really what makes it interesting.
That's not really a risk thing. It's sort of a risk to put
yourself in that position. It can be.
You went through a lot of different positions, jobs,
careers, and, obviously, "Whad'Ya Know?" is very,
very popular. Was there ever a point when you
realized you'd made it? >> No, not yet.
[LAUGHTER] No.
And I'm already in my decline. It's sort of slipping away I
feel like. It's hard to maintain and arch.
That's why it's an arch I guess. But no.
Making it? No.
Surprised that I'm still on? Yes.
So there's that. I really do think if you stay on
long enough, you become grandfathered in, especially in
public radio. Commercial radio, you probably
have a two-year life span before you get fired or they change
format of your station. I've worked with commercial
guys. They're always reformatting
stations. So you go in and it's jazz one
day, the next day it's Spanish language, and you may not make
that jump comfortably. But that's commercial radio.
Public radio just goes on and on and on and on and on and on.
Any final questions for Michael before we close?
Well, I know you all join me in thanking Michael Feldman.
[APPLAUSE] >> Thank you guys.