Epoch Times - Larry Elder Answers Personal Questions From Fans | Larry Elder
Aired: 2021-02-15
Duration: 09:51


=== Got Into Talk Radio (05:11) ===

[00:00:03]  I get letters, comments, criticism from fans and non-fans.
[00:00:07]  And let's take some time to respond to some of them, shall we?
[00:00:14]  How did I get into talk radio?
[00:00:16]  Kind of a long story.
[00:00:17]  I was living in Cleveland.
[00:00:21]  And I was writing op-ed pieces.
[00:00:24]  I would send them into newspapers.
[00:00:25]  I didn't have a column or a deal.
[00:00:27]  I would just write something and I would send it in.
[00:00:29]  And usually I'd get a little rejection notice saying, thank you for sending it in, but we don't think we can use it.
[00:00:33]  But that was undaunted.
[00:00:34]  I kept sending them.
[00:00:35]  I kept sending them.
[00:00:37]  And finally, one day, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published an article that I wrote.
[00:00:40]  This is over 30 years ago where I said that racism is no longer a major problem facing black America.
[00:00:46]  Now, you say that today and people call you a denier.
[00:00:49]  Imagine 30 years ago.
[00:00:51]  So I got a phone call from a radio host, the producer of a radio host in Cleveland, And he said, I read your piece in the newspaper.
[00:00:59]  Are you black?
[00:01:01]  And I said, I think so.
[00:01:03]  And he said, you don't believe racism is a major problem in America anymore?
[00:01:06]  And I said, no, I believe that you work hard, stay focused, and don't make bad moral mistakes.
[00:01:09]  You can be fine.
[00:01:10]  And he said, would you mind coming on my guy's show tonight and talking about this?
[00:01:14]  And I've never been on radio before.
[00:01:16]  And I said, sure.
[00:01:17]  So I was on for a whole hour.
[00:01:18]  Now that I'm in radio, I realize that is an eternity for somebody who's never been on radio before.
[00:01:24]  Cleveland is almost 50% Black, so most of the people who were calling the show were Black, and they were ticked off.
[00:01:30]  I was called Uncle Tom and Sellout and Bootlicker and Coconut and Oreo and bug-eyed, foot-shuffling Uncle Tom.
[00:01:41]  And I was called everything you can imagine, including the name that you call somebody when you really want to hurt a Black person.
[00:01:48]  I was called Republican.
[00:01:50]  And I remember saying to myself, I'll never do this again.
[00:01:53]  I get back to my office, the phone rings, and it's the station manager.
[00:01:57]  He said, I heard you.
[00:01:58]  He said, you were amazing.
[00:01:59]  I said, I was?
[00:02:00]  He said, oh God, you were funny.
[00:02:02]  You were witty.
[00:02:03]  You have a good speaking voice.
[00:02:05]  You took difficult positions and you defended them without losing your sense of humor or your temper.
[00:02:11]  Have you ever thought about doing talk radio?
[00:02:13]  And I said, no.
[00:02:15]  And he said, why?
[00:02:16]  And I said, I don't like being yelled at, and I don't like yelling at other people.
[00:02:21]  And he said, are you married?
[00:02:23]  At the time, I was.
[00:02:25]  He said, do me a favor, go home to your wife and talk this over and call me tomorrow.
[00:02:30]  I said, fine, I'll do that, but I'm not going to change my mind.
[00:02:33]  So I went home to my then wife, and I told her about this.
[00:02:36]  And she said, well, what do you think of talk radio?
[00:02:39]  What do you know about it?
[00:02:40]  I said, I know nothing about talk radio other than it seems shallow, glib, and stupid.
[00:02:45]  She said, it is.
[00:02:46]  You'd be good at it.
[00:02:47]  And so I agreed to sit in for that one week.
[00:02:52]  And after 20 minutes, I heard angels singing.
[00:02:55]  I just knew this was what I wanted to do.
[00:02:58]  It took me about two years to meet the right people.
[00:03:00]  Ultimately, I met Dennis Prager, who is a radio host at KBC Radio.
[00:03:04]  And he had me on his show as a guest.
[00:03:07]  And station management heard me.
[00:03:09]  They gave me a two-day audition.
[00:03:11]  And the rest is pretty much history.
[00:03:13]  And I've been on TV and radio now for about 35 years.
[00:03:17]  In fact, TV even before radio, but that's for another story.
[00:03:21]  So that's how I got into talk radio.
[00:03:23]  Larry, what would you have done had you not gone into talk radio?
[00:03:30]  Well, I've always, always, always wanted to be a writer, and I'm a writer now.
[00:03:35]  But that's what I wanted to do.
[00:03:36]  But I also knew that you could not likely make a living out of being a writer.
[00:03:40]  Most writers that I admired, many of them died, broke.
[00:03:43]  They got famous after they died, that kind of thing.
[00:03:45]  I didn't want that.
[00:03:46]  But I always wanted to be a writer.
[00:03:48]  And I think you get addicted to it if the first thing you publish that you write gets published.
[00:03:54]  And I wrote a poem about Sandy Koufax when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, and it got published.
[00:03:59]  To see your name in print just blew me away.
[00:04:02]  Well, fast forward several decades later, guess who I'm able to meet at a black tie affair in Beverly Hills?
[00:04:10]  Sandy Koufax.
[00:04:12]  I knew somebody who knew him, so we were able to walk down to his table.
[00:04:15]  My friend introduced him to us, to me.
[00:04:19]  And I said, Sandy Koufax?
[00:04:21]  I said, I just, I can't believe it.
[00:04:23]  I told him the story about the first thing I wrote was a poem about him.
[00:04:27]  And I said, I'll just give you the first stanza, Sandy.
[00:04:30]  Koufax is on the mound.
[00:04:31]  The game has just begun.
[00:04:32]  He gets a sign from the catcher and swish, strike one.
[00:04:36]  And Sandy had a big smile, put his hand on my shoulder and said, don't quit your day job.
[00:04:45]  Larry, were you popular when you were in school?
[00:04:48]  Not much.
[00:04:49]  I remember in the eighth grade, my first sort of official girlfriend, Cheryl Sheffield, I met her at a record hop dance at the school and she was holding a cup of punch, red punch.

=== Cheryl Says Quits (04:20) ===

[00:05:04]  And I asked her to dance and she said, I'm holding the punch.
[00:05:07]  And I said, set it down.
[00:05:09]  And her eyes got big, and she thought that was forceful and commanding.
[00:05:12]  Later on, she told me that.
[00:05:13]  Don't ask me why.
[00:05:14]  So we started going out.
[00:05:17]  And after a few months, she came over to my house.
[00:05:19]  My brothers and I were in the living room watching television.
[00:05:23]  Doorbell rings.
[00:05:24]  My brother opens it.
[00:05:25]  It's Cheryl at the door.
[00:05:27]  And of course, she asked for me.
[00:05:29]  So I come to the door.
[00:05:30]  Again, my brothers are there.
[00:05:31]  And she says, it's quits.
[00:05:34]  I said, what's quits?
[00:05:35]  We're quits.
[00:05:36]  It's quits.
[00:05:37]  It's quits?
[00:05:37]  We're done.
[00:05:38]  Why are we done?
[00:05:39]  She said, we're just done.
[00:05:40]  I said, why?
[00:05:41]  She said, you're too nice.
[00:05:43]  And she walked away.
[00:05:46]  That's an example of Larry Elder's social life.
[00:05:50]  And it kind of went down from there.
[00:05:52]  So no, I was not particularly popular.
[00:05:59]  Larry, what were some of the other things that happened to you in high school that formed your outlook on life?
[00:06:03]  I'm not sure whether or not you can call this something that happened that formed an outlook on life, but it certainly showed me a lot of deep-seated anger that I often talk about in my videos and on my radio show.
[00:06:18]  I applied for a job with the LA County one summer, and it was about four or five hundred people from all around the county.
[00:06:24]  Most of them were white applying for a job.
[00:06:27]  You had a three-hour exam.
[00:06:29]  It was math.
[00:06:30]  It was reading comprehension, stuff like that.
[00:06:32]  And there was a guy from my high school there who I knew sort of, but not very well.
[00:06:36]  His name was Gilbert.
[00:06:38]  And Gilbert was kind of a likable guy.
[00:06:39]  He wasn't a troublemaker, but I never thought of him as somebody who was really concerned about school.
[00:06:44]  And so he was there applying for a job too.
[00:06:46]  He took the same test I did.
[00:06:48]  So after the three-hour exam, you go out into the hall and you sort of wait for them to grade the exam.
[00:06:54]  And he said to me, Larry, watch out.
[00:06:58]  They're going to get us.
[00:07:00]  And I said, who's going to get us?
[00:07:02]  He said, you know, the white people.
[00:07:04]  I said, you mean the people giving the test?
[00:07:05]  He said, yes.
[00:07:07]  I said, Gilbert, we don't even put our name or race down on here.
[00:07:11]  How are they going to know that we're black?
[00:07:12]  They're going to figure it out and they're going to F the black people.
[00:07:15]  That's what he said.
[00:07:18]  As he was speaking, he had his hands on his hips, arms akimbo is what it's called, and he swung his arm and accidentally crashed into a white young lady who was holding a cup of cocoa.
[00:07:32]  She was wearing a white, beautiful white dress, and the cocoa spilled all over her dress when Gilbert's elbow hit the cup.
[00:07:40]  And she went And Gilbert looked at her and turned back to me and ignored the whole thing.
[00:07:49]  That's how angry Gilbert was at white people who had done nothing that I could tell to him.
[00:07:55]  He was just angry in general towards white people, much the way we saw how many blacks were angry in general towards white people during the O.J. Simpson case.
[00:08:04]  That's when I saw one of the first glimpse of this kind of deep-seated, senseless anger towards white people who've done nothing whatever to people like Gilbert.
[00:08:12]  Larry, was your social life any better in college?
[00:08:20]  Yeah, it got a little better, but I had a girlfriend I liked a lot named Phyllis.
[00:08:24]  And Phyllis was from Canada and she played guitar and she sang.
[00:08:29]  And I never met anybody like that before.
[00:08:31]  She spoke French.
[00:08:31]  She was black.
[00:08:33]  And we were sitting in my dorm one time.
[00:08:35]  This is shortly after we met, maybe a few weeks afterwards, few months afterwards.
[00:08:40]  And she said, what do you want to do when you finish school?
[00:08:42]  And I said, I want to be rich.
[00:08:46]  And she said, no, seriously, what do you want to do?
[00:08:47]  And I said, I'm serious.
[00:08:48]  I want to be rich.
[00:08:49]  I want to do something interesting and that I think will be uplifting and something I'll have passion for, but I want to be rich.
[00:08:57]  And she said, what a superficial thing to aspire to.
[00:09:01]  And I thought she was joking at first.
[00:09:03]  And I said, well, what do you want to do?
[00:09:05]  And she said, I want to help people.

=== Demonetized But Un silenced (00:45) ===

[00:09:06]  I want to go to third world countries.
[00:09:08]  I want to do this.
[00:09:08]  I want to do that.
[00:09:08]  I said, I think it's wonderful.
[00:09:10]  I want to be rich.
[00:09:11]  And that pretty much was the end of our relationship.
[00:09:13]  She thought I was crass and shallow and superficial.
[00:09:19]  What can I tell you?
[00:09:22]  Now, good news, as you may or may not know, we have been demonetized by YouTube.
[00:09:27]  Epoch Times channels, all of them including mine, have been demonetized.
[00:09:31]  Good news, we must be doing something right.
[00:09:33]  Frankly, I'm surprised it took them so darn long.
[00:09:36]  You can follow me and support me and get me on demand and uncensored by going to LarryTube.com.
[00:09:42]  That's real simple, LarryTube.com.
[00:09:45]  And I am Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save.
[00:09:47]  I'll see you next time.
[00:09:49]  Fill us.
[00:09:51]  Cheryl.