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Aug. 1, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
August 1, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the first day of the 26th year of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, a network named after the talent and ability of the host.
That comment dedicated to all 24 and 25-year-old women.
It is the door just opened.
I thought we'd already done everything.
It is the 25th anniversary of the Excellence in Broadcasting Day.
August 1st of 1988 is when this program began on a national scale.
Happy anniversary!
Happy anniversary!
Thank you all very much.
Ah, this is what, that is a gorgeous-looking macaroni cake.
That is gorgeous.
The whole staff is here.
Well, the Florida contingent is here.
We did the big blowout on the 20th anniversary.
Five years is too soon to do another big blowout, but it's still 25, and that's silver, and that's big.
And it's about 24 and a half years longer than the drive-by media forecast that it would last, and 25 years and nine months longer than the Democrat Party predicted or hoped that it would last.
Let me hold the cake up.
Somebody have to come pick the thing up because I'm getting sticky fingers and the paper is going to hang.
I just want to show it on the ditto cam.
There you go.
There it is.
The 25th anniversary cake for those of you watching on the Ditto Cam.
And so we're here.
No, no, take, take it.
I'll start eating it, which would not be cool.
Anyway, it's true.
We start, actually, the, I'll tell you what we're going to do today, by the way.
We're going to have some sound bites from the past, some audio clips, and we're going to go back and play.
On the 20th anniversary, we went back and did the humorous things.
What we've done, what Cookie put together today, is a series of soundbites from the past 25 years that illustrate how the Democrat Party hasn't changed, how the American left hasn't changed, and how their approach to me and this program and to conservatism hasn't changed.
And it's amazing, and you'll hear it.
Also, and this is coming up fairly soon, one of the most often requested replays that I get from people who were listening to the program back in 1991, which was year four, was my grandfather's 100th birthday.
And we were in Kansas City.
He was being honored by the Missouri Bar Association at their convention.
And he came by the radio station.
I was doing my program from there in honor of his 100th birthday and his award.
And he came by and he sat for an interview for an hour.
And people have requested that.
People had heard it.
He was 100 years old.
He was born 30 years after the Civil War.
He'd seen so much in his life, so many transformations and major changes in inventions, technological advancements, cultural changes.
And as an attorney, he'd been at the forefront dealing with many of them.
And it was a fascinating sit-down.
And people were fascinated hearing him.
And people have requested to hear it off and on ever since.
So we have put together three soundbites.
Actually, Four soundbites from that interview with Pop.
That's what we all call him.
He's Rush Limbaugh Sr.
And that is coming up as well.
Plus, we're going to mix it in with everything that's current and happening today.
So it's going to be a hodgepodge and it's improv.
Nothing's planned.
I don't know when I'm going to do what.
So you have to listen a whole three hours to find out what happens and what we do here.
But I don't often look back.
I don't often spend time thinking about the past because I'm so focused on the next day.
And I'm obsessed with meeting everybody's expectations every day.
And there are many days where I think I haven't been nearly as good as I could have been.
So I look to the next day to fix that, get better.
And so I don't sit back and reflect.
And I found, you know, as I was younger, when I was younger, and climbing my own ladder, one of the great perks of my success has been to meet other successful people, people who are the best at what they do.
I haven't met everybody I would like to meet, but I've met a number of them, and a number of them became very good friends.
And I was able to get very close and learn from them.
And I asked the question to each and every one of them.
Because when I was younger and imagining what it was like, when I was younger and imagining the kind of success I envisioned for myself, the kind of success that I wanted, and it was specific.
I was aiming to be number one.
I didn't want to be top five.
And I wanted it to be real.
I wanted to be number one because my audience was the largest, not because a bunch of PR or buzz, people saying that it was big, but not really being big.
I wanted it to be substantively the biggest.
And I moved to New York in 1988 with that objective.
And in those days, when I imagined what it would be like if I ever did succeed and get there, I had a chance to talk to people who, in my view, had made it to the pinnacle of what they did.
And I asked each of them a question, among other things.
But I asked them if at night, when the house lights were down and everybody had gone to bed, I asked them if they ever sat around and thought about their success and what they meant to people and what their success and their careers had meant to the universe of people affected by what they did.
And to a person, I don't think there was a single exception to this.
To a person, they all said no.
And I believed them.
Some people might fudge it and make it up, try to sound good, but these people, they were all serious.
In fact, they all kind of poo-pooed the notion.
And they all said in their own way what I just said to you.
They did not get nostalgic and they did not sit and reflect on anything that had happened because they were always looking forward.
Now, I do, I mean, I don't sit around and reflect.
I remember things in a nostalgic way because nostalgia has the magical component of always reminding you of good times.
But I do look back on it.
I do occasionally think of all the things, the getting fired seven times, in Missouri, my first job when the transmitter blew a tube and the owner didn't seem to have any urgency about getting it replaced.
I drove to St. Louis at age 16, scrounged up some money to buy a tube and drove back down and had somebody put the tube, it's a big vacuum tube, in the transmitter so that the radio station could go back on the air.
I skipped the last month of my senior year in school to spend time at the radio station.
I mean, you couldn't keep me out of it when I was 16, 17, 18, but then left home, went to Pittsburgh.
I think back all of what I do consider to be hard work.
And now at age 62, I look back on it and I asked, could I do that all over again?
If something necessitated me, if this all blew up and I had to do that all over again, could I?
There's something about youth and there's something about inexperience and the desire to acquire it that none of that, I mean, some of it was tough and some of it was arduous and long hours and all that.
But I do think, could I do that again?
I asked Brett, my friend George Brett the other day.
You know, George has gone back to a uniform position with the Royals, he's a hitting coach.
And George Brett worked for, he played baseball, I don't know how many years, but he was a Hall of Fame third baseman, one of the greatest hitters of all time.
He worked incredibly hard at it.
And I talked to him, you think you could do it all over again?
He said, well, yeah, if you take me back and I'm that age, yeah, I'd do it again.
But starting now doing it all over again, I can't even, and I'm the same way.
I can't imagine, I can't believe some of the things I did.
I don't mean out of bounds things.
I don't mean anything that was risque or inappropriate.
I just mean I can't, my degree of commitment, some of the things that I did, and it's not quite expressing this properly, but that's what I reflect on.
It was a considerable amount of hard work.
And at every step along the way, and this is true for everybody, at every step along the way, there were people who said, you can't do it.
You're not good enough.
And that happened to me.
I can't tell you how many times I was told that.
That's not unique.
It happens to many people.
And I never listened to any of it.
I continued to plod on against all these so-called odds, against all of the experts.
I had a senior executive at ABC Radio tell me in 1972, you just, if you want to stay in this business, you had better go into sales because you, I mean, you just don't have the talent.
You're never going to.
And it turns out I had made him mad one day on the radio with something I'd done, and that was his get back.
But the point is, I never listened to the naysayers.
And at first, it was, it's always seductive to hang around people who have failed at something and tell you how mean the business is, whatever your business is, and how unfair it is, and how they got screwed by a bunch of people that didn't care.
It's easy to find failures.
And it's easy to be seduced by failure.
It's much easier to think, well, everybody else has failed, no big deal if I do, than to ignore that and plod on the other way.
And it takes love and passion for what you do to overcome that.
Didn't take me long to realize that I was going to be irreparably harmed if I continued to hang around failures because they were not interested in anybody else succeeding, obviously, psychologically.
So I made B-lines for people who had succeeded and tried to hang around them or get to know them and learn from them.
But I don't sit at night and reflect on what's happened other than when I imagine the daunting challenge of doing it all over again.
And then I say to myself, gee, that is just – and don't misunderstand.
I'm not talking about how unique, special – it was just tunnel vision.
It's all I cared about.
It's all I did.
There were no distractions or diversions from it.
The mental focus is what I guess I'm really talking about.
Do I have at age 62 the ability to have that kind of mental and I do because I still do now.
But the idea that, oh gosh, I'd have to do it for 30 more years to get back here.
But that little recounting of history, the only reason I mention any of that is because that's the closest I get to reflecting on anything.
Because like all these other people I've asked who are successful in their own way, they too answered the question like I do now, legitimately, by the way, and honestly, that they're always thinking about the next day.
They're always thinking about the next requirement challenge or what have you.
Now, you probably have heard people say that it's more fun getting where you're going than it is once you've gotten there.
And what is meant by that, and I understand that to an extent too, what is meant by that is that when you're on the way, it's perfectly fine to have a couple slips off the ladder.
It's perfectly fine to have a failure here or there.
It's perfectly fine.
And when you're on your way up, nobody's gunning for you.
But when you get to where you're going, and if others perceive where you are to be the pinnacle, and the whole focus changes, and everybody's after you.
And it's a legitimate sense.
It's a competitive, legitimate sense.
I'm not complaining.
And that makes staying where you are harder than getting there ever was.
One of the things, I do tell this to people a lot, one of the things that I'm most proud of out of all of this, and the business side of this has been one of the proudest things.
And it's also one of the least reported.
1988's when I started, and there was no alternative media.
The only cable news outlet was CNN.
And it wasn't until the mid-90s that I was joined by other people nationally doing conservatism in the media.
Fox News didn't start until 1997.
Prior to that, the blogosphere got going, but not much before that because the internet had not yet blossomed.
Talk radio was starting to build out.
Many of the first guest hosts of this program ended up getting their own shows locally and nationally.
What has happened is that in the sense that broadcasting, radio broadcasting is a business, there was a pie, an economic pie that existed in 1988.
And then I moved in and wanted my piece of it.
And that pie ended up expanding incredibly.
Entire new markets were created as a result of the success of this program, which is good.
Don't misunderstand.
The thing that I'm proud of is that while all of that happened, I didn't lose any audience.
This program did not get cannibalized by any of the success that it spawned.
And so there's a whole new market, conservative alternative media, both on the internet, on television, and on radio.
And it's been a financial boon for a lot of people.
But it's been profoundly successful.
And the reason that I haven't lost any audience is all because of you, you people, and your undying loyalty and your bond that you have with this program.
And that's something that a whole it can't be said by too many people, or businesses rather, that inspire growth in the area where they are leading the expansion.
They all end up getting cannibalized.
So the iPad mini capitalized the major iPad, the big iPad.
It could not do that because it's smaller and it's cheaper price.
This program hasn't been cannibalized.
We kept growing, did not get smaller.
It's just stunning.
It's amazing.
And an entire industry was brought along with it.
That's how thirsty and hungry the American population was for conservatism in the national media.
Now, folks, I went a little long in the opening monologue, but, you know, I don't phone it in here like Anthony Weiner does.
I just, I go for the whole thing.
And there are just a couple of other things that I want to explain about the early days of this program and the obstacles that I had to overcome.
Now, they were not unique.
What I'm doing today had been tried, but in the daytime, that was the case.
It never worked.
It had never worked.
This was the first time it had.
So when I tried it, industry experts wished me well, but they didn't expect it to work because there was a guiding principle back then in radio, this 1988.
It had to be local.
You had to be talking about local issues.
You had to have local guests and you had to have a local phone number for people.
And if you didn't in the daytime, people didn't care outside their communities.
It wasn't going to work.
And yet it did.
Why?
And we are back on the 25th anniversary of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
If you're just joining us, we're doing a mixture program today.
And as is always the case, nothing structured here other than formatically.
But content-wise, it's all improv.
And we're going to mix reflections from the past 25 years, audio soundbites, past 25 years.
And we'll eventually get to the important things that we want to talk about that are happening today.
So it was August 1st, 1988.
But before I got there, I was in New York.
Before I got there, I had to get a lot of breaks.
And it's dangerous, risky, when you start mentioning people that have helped you along the way because success has many fathers.
Failure is an orphan.
But whenever there is success, all kinds of people who want to touch it.
In my case, there were a lot of people, and I can't mention them all.
And I don't mean to slight anybody by leaving them out.
But the first name that I would mention, Little Willie Bryan, who gave me my first ever radio job at age 16, having not ever done it in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
He's a well-known racon tour in our little town.
Little Willie, we call it.
He was a radio personality himself.
And he owned this little radio station.
Norman Woodruff was a broadcast consultant from San Francisco who I met when I was about to get fired for the fourth time in Kansas City in 1983.
He was consulting a station there.
And sure enough, I got fired because of a commentary I did about Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart, 84 Democrat presidential primaries.
And it was, by today's stand, was nothing.
I mean, all I did was express an opinion.
Back there, you did not do that.
You did not.
And they call me on the carpets.
Well, Peter Jennings does.
No, he doesn't.
Yes, he does every night.
Why can't I?
You can't.
You're gone.
Two weeks out of work, and I got a call from Woodruff asking me, how would you like to be a star in California?
Oh, California.
Wow.
Cool.
Never been there.
Now, in radio, when you hear California, you think San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego.
So I waited.
Which of those three was it going to be?
And he would not tell me what city until I had said yes, which told me immediately it wasn't one of those three.
It turned out to be Sacramento, California.
And he consulted that station as well, KFPK.
Sacramento became, as you all well know, by now my adopted hometown.
But that was the first, that's 1984.
And I started in radio 1967.
1984, that was the first time after all those years, the first time anybody ever, really let me do a radio show the way I wanted or thought it should be done.
First time.
1967, 84, whatever, was that 17 years?
And that led to meeting another consultant named Bruce Marr, who was instrumental at that station because the pressures, radio shows succeeded there.
And there were pressures to change the show.
You've got to do guests.
You can't do a show without guests.
Every talkster's got to have guests.
I said, I don't want guests precisely because every other show has guests.
But I said, the main reason I don't want guests is because they're not interested in whether or not my show succeeds.
So why should I turn over hours and hours and hours of my show to people who don't care about it, other than how it might help them sell their book?
They're going to be on every other radio station and radio show.
I don't need it.
And it was Bruce Maher who ran interference for me and made sure that the local management did not force me to change the way I was doing it.
That led, you talk about a confluence of events.
Edward McLaughlin, who was the president of the ABC Radio Networks, short version to this, when Capital Cities merged with ABC, a lot of the ABC executives were given retirement packages as the Cap Cities people were installed in management positions.
And one of Mr. McLaughlin's exit package items was they gave him two hours of satellite time from noon to two.
They said, this is yours, and you can do with it whatever you want.
You can put whoever you want in there and you can sell it, monetize it, however.
So Ed knew these people in California.
They had told him about me.
He came out unbeknownst to me.
He's in town listening.
And it led to my going to New York.
This is no longer applicable in radio, but in syndication, you have to be in the number one market.
Your sponsor's commercials have to run in New York, or you don't have a prayer.
It's all academic if that's not the case.
And that's still true today.
But there was nobody in New York that was going to take a national show because back then, as I said, everything had to be local.
Local numbers, local guests, local hosts, local issues.
Nobody was interested.
Particularly, people in New York never heard of me.
So McLaughlin had to pull strings and get me a local-only show on New York on WABC.
And when that show was over, I went to a different studio and did a two-hour national show.
And this was for the first two or three years.
In order to, quote, go national, I had to do an exclusively local New York show for two hours.
And that WABC agreed to run our national commercials in my show.
And that's how we were able to tell our advertisers that their spots were going to be heard in New York.
That's how hard it was.
There was no other way.
I had to do two radio shows four hours a day, not complaining about it, but it's not even a factor today.
Today, people end up, this is what I mean about the pie growing.
People end up with syndicated radio shows who have never done it, whether they're on in New York doesn't matter, because the pie has gotten big enough now that they can all make it, certain extent, survive it.
But this was not the case back then.
And back then, nobody ever thought this would work because of this local, local, local angle.
But it did.
We started for two months.
I just did a New York-only show.
July 4th is when I actually started New York only on WABC.
And then I did a local show for Sacramento after that.
So probably, yeah, it was four hours.
I did two hours local New York and then two hours for KFBK only for two months.
Then on August 1st, the national show started and the Sacramento station picked it up, but New York didn't, so I'm still doing two shows.
And that went on for two or three years.
But then it all, for all the reasons that it worked.
And why did it work when it had never worked before?
You know, syndicated radio was a success only at night.
And that was because nobody listens at night or did then.
So that's when syndication programs aired, was at night.
Because when television came on, homes using TV hut levels went way up.
Radio usage went way down.
So it made economic sense to syndicate some person that was not even in your radio station, take his show, run some local commercials, and monetize it that way.
But in the daytime, no way was that going to happen.
Radio stations made their nut in the daytime.
It wasn't, they were not going to give up three hours of daytime for a national program.
But it all ended up working, and I'll leave it for others to explain why.
I've always believed it's content.
When I had people telling me that it wouldn't work, I said, well, how come Donahue does?
Donahue's got a national TV show, and people don't care where it comes from.
People don't care where he is, whether he's in Cincinnati or New York.
What does it matter?
Why does it matter in radio?
It doesn't matter in TV.
So radio is a much more local.
And it is, by the way, radio, a good radio program will establish a far deeper and far more personal connection with an audience than any TV show ever can.
And the reason for that is there's no pictures on radio.
The host has to make the picture.
The audience has to imagine the picture, paint their own picture with the help of the host.
TV provides the picture.
There goes half your imagination.
There goes half your attention span.
That's another reason why I love radio so much more, because the connection that you can have is much more intimate.
It is, it is, it's a much more intimate, deep connection to people than television can be.
Television is like music in an elevator.
I mean, it'll be on in a room, but everybody might be watching.
Some might be.
Others are doing other things and just hearing it.
A good radio show, that's all you do, is listen to it.
You turn everything else down so you can hear it.
The only way you can get it all is to really focus.
And it takes content.
It just has to be good.
And if it's good, it's what I always believed, then people won't care where it comes from.
I never believed that radio listeners actively said to themselves, I'm not listening to something that doesn't come from my town.
Because they did at night, didn't care where it came from.
So I had to shoot that formulaic belief to Smithereens and did.
And the rest is history.
So that's just a brief recap of how it happened, key people who took great risks.
And it was a risk.
I mean, Mr. McLaughlin's given two hours of satellite time.
He's retired.
And he puts a no-name on.
And it was, it was fun.
You know, all kinds of, you know, the excrement started hitting the fan.
And Ed never planned on any of that.
He would have been at 200 radio stations and producing a little income and fun.
But he did.
My ambition was not 200 radio stations.
It was 600.
It was 1,200, whatever.
But everybody about hung in there.
And everybody, my family's already always hung in there.
Everybody has always hung in with me.
I mean, my gratitude goes so deep for so many people.
I couldn't possibly mention them all to you.
But anyway, that's a brief recap.
So we'll take a break and we'll come back and get started with what I call all the rest of the program, including your phone calls today.
And if you have, you know, whatever you, we'll do a modified, Mr. Snurdly modified version of Open Line Friday.
It's sort of Thursday.
So if you question or comment about anything, feel free.
800-282-2882 is the number, and we will be back.
Don't talk first call.
And we're taking a call right now because I'm fascinated by this.
We got a call from my adopted hometown, Sacramento.
It's Kitty.
Kitty, great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hi, how are you?
Good.
Thank you.
I was saying back, oh, 87, you were in Sacramento locally.
Right.
And you came into where I worked, and everybody in the department, it was a hospital.
You made a visit.
And everybody in the department was just going, oh, Rush is here.
Rush is here.
And I would like roll my eyes and go, big deal.
I couldn't stand you.
Couldn't stand you at all.
Just didn't listen to you.
Then I started listening to you.
And I got to tell you, I am in awe.
Wow.
And I just, your insights, your perceptions just amaze me.
I thought I was universally loved and adored in Sacramento.
I didn't know there was anybody who didn't like me, except there was a guy on the FM side that hated my God.
It's Gary something.
I think he's picking up trash today.
But I didn't know that you.
So the whole time I was there, you were not particularly enamored.
You didn't listen.
You only started listening 10 years ago.
10, 12 years ago, something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't like, well, I didn't like you.
I was a Democrat.
I was just very, well, I can't say I was a liberal.
I wasn't an old hippie, but I wasn't really liberal.
And now I switched over to the Republican Party, and now I'm sort of not real happy with them.
And I'm looking at being independent.
But your insights, your knowledge just amazes me.
And when you go 99.7%, I'd make that 99.8%.
Well, I do too, but the opinion auditing firm hasn't moved it up in a while.
Well, you don't know about me.
That's awfully not.
What part of Sacramento do you live?
I'm in Rancho Cordova.
Rancho Cordova.
Saints Grand know all these places.
Yeah.
Rancho Cordova, South Datomas, all those places.
Yeah, but I got it.
No, she's no, no, she's not from Linda.
I can tell you that by the way she sounds.
She's not from Rio Linda.
No, Snirdley wants if you've been to Rio Linda.
No, you don't have to answer that.
I'm sure people recognize your voice.
You don't have to admit.
No, don't answer whether you've been to Rio Linda.
I wouldn't do that to you.
You're a big fan now.
Oh, yeah, huge.
Well, Kitty, thank you.
I appreciate it.
I really do.
Oh, not as much as I appreciate it.
What changed your mind?
People?
Just your perceptions and just saying, you know.
Yeah, but something had to be, you didn't like me, whatever reasons, and something 10, 12 years ago, you started listening.
What made that happen?
My husband.
My husband would listen to talk radio.
And he had you on, and I'd start to listen to you.
And I just started, I mean, you kind of had no choice.
It was on, and you were sort of a prisoner to it.
And then it somehow.
It got through, and it's like, this guy's right.
He's right on.
He knows exactly what's going on.
And I started listening.
So now do you think back to those four years when I was Sacramento and what you missed?
Yeah.
And what could have been?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I was thinking about it.
It's like, I didn't get a chance to meet him.
And I just, I'm in awe of him now.
Well, I always, I'm due to make a return there.
I still have a tremendous number of friends out there.
Yeah.
And I've got so many things like that pile up that you want to do that time sometimes doesn't seem it's going to make itself available.
But anyway, Kitty, I appreciate the call.
Great call and thank you.
Perfect day for you to get through with your message, and I appreciate it.
Bottom of my heart.
Back after this.
Don't go away.
So apparently, all of the 24 and 25-year-old women who are afraid of me just need to get married.
Just need to get married and then become fans.
Well, I mean, not all of them are doing hookups, snurdly.
I mean, it may be a trend, but that's a college thing.
It may bleed over.
Anyway, when we come back at the top of the next hour, I'm going to probably be the best time to do this because it's so often requested over the course of many years.
Interviewed my grandfather on his 100th birthday back in September of 1991 in Kansas City.
His 100th birthday was being awarded service award from the Missouri Bar Association.
He came by the radio station, and we've got some audio sound bites from that.
So that's how we'll kick off the next hour and go from there.
Sit tight.
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