Since 2010, popular Czech actor and presenter Jan Kraus has been hosting a talk show that bears his name. The 21st series is already being broadcast on TV screens. On this occasion, Kraus visited the show hosted by Lucie Výborná. Behind the microphone, the presenter revealed what has been causing him problems for many years.
It sometimes happens to each of us that we cannot remember the name of an acquaintance or colleague at the least appropriate moment. Most of the time, it’s just a small memory lapse, which we smile about and move on. However, there are people who are bothered by such “windows” for a long time and more often than it would be pleasant. This is exactly what Kraus is experiencing. “I can’t remember any names except family members,” he said bluntly.
In his talk show, he has never misrepresented a guest he was welcoming. But he has a knack for it. “If you look closely, that’s all I have on paper, those names. And when I get up, I’ll take a look anyway. I look before I get up, when I get up, I look again. I have some disease. I’ll mess up the name before I remember it, there’s a better version than messing it up,” he explained.
Such a distortion of his name happened to him at just the wrong moment. “I represented the Slovak president and messed up his first name. Not on television, in Slovakia at a big event where the Slovak president was an honored guest. He was Andrej Kiska and I said Alexander Kiska or something… I’ve had it since time immemorial. I don’t remember names at all, and I don’t remember faces either,” he described the unpleasant situation. Andrej Kiska was the Slovak president from 2014 to 2019.
He doesn’t have a bad memory for everything. “Now artificial intelligence found it out for me as part of DNA analysis, I have an excellent episodic memory, that’s true. What I remember, I remember that I could give you a movie. But for the price of this memory, which is almost unusable, I don’t have those elementary memory cells, like names and faces… It’s actually for a disability pension,” admitted the moderator honestly.
