All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 6, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:29
August 6, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, Rush Limbaugh and the thriving Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
There is no imminent demise here.
I don't care what you've read.
I mean, the latest narrative, the latest template on me is that I may not be around in three years.
I may not be around in five years.
I have been a fad for 25 years, may not be around the next three or five, and it's now surfaced again.
Now, while all of that is being written in newspapers, the very newspapers writing this are in fact imploding.
Falling by the wayside, losing value faster than anyone ever believed possible.
When the New York Times bought the Boston Globe in 1993, it paid $1.1 billion.
It bought the Worcester, Massachusetts paper for $295 million in 1999.
Now, stop and think of that.
Just 14 years ago, the New York Times paid $295 million for a newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The Washington Post was sold yesterday for $250 million.
The entire New England media group that the New York Times owned, that included the Boston Globe, is now worth $100 million.
They bought it for $1.1 billion in 1993.
And despite even the lower price that the Globe fetched, $70 million for the Boston Globe, folks, $70 million for the Boston Globe.
The owner of the Red Sox bought it.
Mr. Huber, an expert analyst here, called the Globe a management headache.
Brian Tierney, a Philadelphia businessman, bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister newspaper, the Philadelphia Daily News, in 2006 from McClatchy for $515 million.
And after Mr. Tierney's purchase, national advertising plummeted.
Circulation continued to tumble.
Despite laying off 400 people to cut costs, the newspaper company ended up in bankruptcy in 2009.
To show you just what has happened to newspaper value, Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post for only twice what Paxton Media paid for the Herald Sun in Durham, North Carolina just eight years ago.
The Herald Sun in Durham, North Carolina, eight years ago fetched twice what Bezos bought the Washington Post for.
It is clear that the Graham family had given up.
It is clear that the Graham family had no idea what to do.
They had not the slightest clue how to grow that newspaper.
They had not the slightest idea.
And isn't it fascinating?
As I mentioned earlier, they didn't have the slightest idea because they couldn't really, when you get down to it, I know that they'll reject this and they'll, if they react to this, they'll say that I'm, as usual, just wrong in making it whatever they say.
But you have to have total disregard for your customer base for this to happen.
And I think this has been one of the fascinating aspects of the news business because it is a business.
It's also a greater calling and it's also a business with constitutional authority and importance and so forth.
The people in it take it so seriously.
They are so full of themselves that the very people you would think the papers published for are held in contempt more often than not.
Do you think in any editorial meeting it has ever surmised what might appeal to the public?
That's what the comics are for.
And that's what the crossword puzzle is for.
And that's what the classifieds are for.
But when it comes to the precious liberal agenda content, we're not going to screw with that.
And it's not just newspapers.
It's the same kind of thing at MSNBC.
It's the same thing happening at CNN.
Left-wing news organizations simply have no concept of customer service.
They have no concept of they're in a business that actually has an audience.
They don't look at it that way.
Whereas, just to use myself as an opposite example, day in and day out, in my mind, every day, this program is about one group of people, and that's you.
I don't care what other radio people say about it.
I don't care what other TV people say about it.
I don't care what print journal, I don't care what anybody says about it.
I care what you think about it.
That's what meeting and surpassing audience expectations is all about.
Empathy.
Respect.
Not viewing you with contempt, but rather respect and understanding that you were all highly intelligent.
Don't have to dumb anything down here.
Don't have to write for a third grade level as they supposedly do in newspapers.
The whole thing fascinates me.
So here you have a guy who is totally focused on customer service, has bought the Washington Post.
How is that going to work?
Again, as I say, if this is just a toy purchase, then nothing's going to change.
If Bezos is buying this thing just to play games with it and have a little fun and continue to use it to advance whatever political ideas he's got, it's not going to change.
But if he's actually going to look at this as an ongoing, growing, thriving business, he's going to have to do something manifestly different with it.
And he did say it's going to change.
It's going to get Bob Woodward running around.
Well, at least this isn't Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal.
Translation, well, at least we don't have some wacko conservative buying this.
Kid you not.
Now, Bezos, this is fascinating.
I have always been fascinated.
Apple's, let me put it this way.
Apple's stock price high occurred last fall.
After the iPhone 5 hit and a number of revisions with the iPad, the iPad Mini came out, Apple's stock price hit $705 a share.
And all of the experts predicted that it was heading to $1,000.
And then something happened and the bottom fell out.
And it wasn't long before Apple was at $425 a share.
And for a couple of days, it was under $400 a share.
Now, all this time, Apple was showing massive profits.
They were reporting profits that were leading the industry, but they were not the profits that the experts expected.
Their profit was smaller than what was forecast by Wall Street analysts.
And then the long knives came out in the tech media, and it became every day, let's kill Apple.
While Apple was reporting massive profits, 73% of all profits in the domestic smartphone sector are Apple's.
Their market share is small because they only make, well, one, three phones, but they make one phone at one price.
Well, that's not true.
They do sell the previous two models out there, and they do sell well.
But they don't have a new phone every five weeks.
They don't have 16 different models and variations and colors.
They've got one phone.
Their market share is tiny, but they own all the profit.
And yet, Wall Street abandoned them.
And there were people trying to figure out why.
But at the same time, Jeff Bezos Amazon was showing loss after loss after loss.
And when Bezos, when the company would do the quarterly conference call to report earnings to Wall Street, another loss or just a smidget of profit would be reported and Wall Street would go nuts with excitement.
And the stock price for Amazon launched ever higher.
And as an average ordinary, so I think Wall Street, I've always, ever since the Federal Reserve began propping it up, Wall Street to me is a rigged game I'm not part of.
That's been my attitude.
Because I know that whatever money Bernanke's pumping in there, I'm not seeing any of it.
But somebody is, and they're getting incredibly rich, and Wall Street's being really propped up.
$800 billion of stimulus from the Federal Reserve into Wall Street that's ended up buying securities, essentially.
QE3 is the most recent.
And whenever Bernanke makes a public statement about maybe this is it, there is no more, you watch what happens.
There is a massive sell-off and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges.
There's abject fear.
So Wall Street's not being propped up by mom-and-pop investors.
It's being propped up right now by the Fed.
That's a little bit of another story.
In the midst of all this, a company that was showing no profit and no growth was loved and adored, respected and eagerly sought.
And a company that owned 73% of every dollar of profit in the sector, had never shown a loss, had always grown, the profits were growing every quarter, was on the outs.
So how can this be?
So I got in touch with some people that I thought might be able to explain it to me.
And here's what I was told.
Wall Street analysts, the people that Work at these brokerage houses and issue notes to investors giving their forecasts what they think company X or company Y is going to do in the next quarter, the next two quarters, the next year, which is essentially these investor notes or investment advice.
I was told that these people always look at growth potential, not what's happening now.
And so the story on Apple was that they can't get any bigger than they are.
Not with what they're doing.
The phone is, what, since 2007 is six years old.
The iPad's three years old.
There's nothing new that anybody knows about.
There's nothing that people see is out there that's going to grow it.
Maybe they can't even sustain it.
They were at 705.
Now they're at a recent run lately.
They're at 460.
This is what I'm told.
This is the way the quote-unquote experts look at it.
On the other hand, Amazon is nothing but growth potential.
Precisely because it hasn't shown a profit.
The profit's going to come.
Just hasn't yet.
Because Bezos is busy investing in infrastructure.
He's building new data centers.
He's acquiring property and building new warehouses and things.
He's acquiring more data to sell and distribute.
And so the profits are going to be there.
And occasionally, I was told Bezos will even report a small quarterly profit just to show that he can do it.
But Amazon is viewed as a company that's going to break out big sometime.
Nobody knows when, but it's going to happen sometime.
And you better get in on it as that's being touted.
But it isn't now.
I just, intellectually, I had the toughest time understanding why invest in something that's not showing a profit while it's growing.
Even the profits that it does report now and then are just infinitesimally small, minutely small.
And then the guy said there's a phrase that you need to associate with Bezos if you want to learn how he operates and the things he does.
It's called free cash flow.
And here's what free cash flow is.
Bezos sells books and whatever it is on the internet, and you buy with your credit card and he gets the money that day.
Now, in terms of books, he doesn't have to actually pay for the books that he's selling.
They have to pay the publishers for sometimes 60 days.
So he's got free cash flow for two, sometimes three months that he can invest however he wishes.
But it's his money.
He doesn't have to pay what he owes for a couple of months on money he gets that day.
He gets at the point of sale.
Apple is this way in a way.
I mean, Apple has one of the largest universes of credit card customers on file.
I mean, it's huge.
And Amazon, too.
But Bezos free cash flow is what these analysts say, look at this opportunity, this guy's got, he's just taking in all this money, but he didn't have to pay it back or pay it out for 60, 90 days.
He's got this money to invest, grow, what have you.
It's more complicated than that.
I'm just trying to give you the basic shell of it, as it was explained to me.
But essentially, the reason Amazon is so highly valued right now is because it's thought of as uncontainable.
At some point, Bezos is going to be unable to not report profit.
That's how good it is.
I don't know if any of this is true.
This is just what these experts tell me in comparing Apple, for example, with Amazon.
But the point is that Amazon's here to grow.
Amazon, however, didn't buy the Washington Post.
Bezos did.
It's a personal buy.
So we don't know if the same operating philosophy is going to be applied to the Washington Post.
We won't know for a while.
And as I say, our first indication will be how many journalists begin to have conniption fits after the first few staff meetings when Bezos takes over.
Welcome back, folks.
Rush Limbaugh, half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
Pasadena, California.
Hi, Don.
Great to have you.
Hello.
Rush.
Wow.
A long time listener, like 20 years.
Congratulations on 25 years.
Thank you.
Thanks for it.
25 years and thriving, let's point out.
25 years and expanding and growing.
Yes, sir.
So I humbly submit a possible weakness, if you will, in your theory about Bezos.
What theory?
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
First, state the theory that you.
Okay, well, okay, as I understand it, you're positing that perhaps the WAPO will become it might try to tend a little bit in the conservative direction.
No, it might.
Now, this is the reason I wanted you to, this is fast.
The way people hear what I say fascinates me.
No, no, no, no, don't, I'm not being critical.
Do not, I'm fascinated to read email or go home.
I thought I have been brilliantly clear about something, and somebody took it the entirely opposite way I intend.
I never and do not think that Bezos is going to take this conservative.
What did I say that made you think that?
Because clearly something did.
Yeah, yeah.
I was inferring that I was hearing a possible comparison to your 25 years of tremendous success and rolling to, okay, now Bezos is going to, he's got the Washington Post.
What's he going to do since he's a master of marketing and building a successful company for the long term, like you, what's he going to do to make this newspaper vital?
Okay, stop right there.
Stop right there.
This will not take away from your time.
If I have to hold you through the break, you will be able to say everything.
See, I'm glad you said this because you mistakenly, it's my fault, but you mistakenly assumed because I was comparing myself to the way current liberal media looks at audience, that I was saying that Bezos might decide to look at it the way I do.
And that was not my intention.
I was simply trying to illustrate the difference in how I look at you in my audience and how news people look at theirs.
I was not saying that Bezos is going to replicate me because I don't think he's going to.
But I do think the audience for the Washington Post, for the most part, is liberal.
Now, you do have Northern Virginia.
You've got a lot of Republicans there.
But the audience, in their view, would be mostly liberal.
I don't think they've even served that audience so much.
But see, the illustration I was making about me and the way I was meant as an aside.
And because of where I put it, you took it as my positing that Obama, or that Bezos might duplicate what I was saying.
And I in no way meant to imply that or even state it because I don't think at all that that's a possibility.
Now, I've got to take the break.
Hang on there, Don.
Be patient.
Don't go away.
We'll be back.
Okay, back to the phones, Don and Pasadena.
Now we got that cleared up.
By the way, I want to thank you.
That's going to help me in the future.
No way do I think Bezos is going to be anything other than what he is with this.
So now continue.
I know there are other things you wanted to say.
Okay, so then my layman's guess is that if Bezos is going to market this paper, make it successful, turn it around, I would guess that he would look to the, what's the most, one of the most successful marketing campaigns in the last 10 years.
Well, it's Barack Obama, 2008.
And so my thought, and what is that?
That's, to me, that's socialism marketed to the masses.
And so my guess would be that that would be sort of the path that Bezos would take, that this will be, you know, socialism marketing.
Now, wait a second.
Okay, hang on just a second.
The Washington Post already is doing that, and they're failing.
Now, remember, we're talking about a dead tree newspaper here.
What you're described is an online digital marketing campaign that Obama ran.
The Washington Post has an online business, and it is not nearly in as bad a shape as the dead tree version of the Washington Post.
But I don't think that Obama, just to slightly disagree, I don't think that Obama campaigned on socialism, he would have lost.
I think what Obama campaigned on was something that is highly seductive to young people and women, and that is a better tomorrow, a brighter future.
And I'm the guy that's going to, if you go back and look at the image that was concocted of Obama, he's going to end all the acrimony.
He's going to end all the bickering and all the argument.
He's going to bring about love, and the country's going to be respected, and everybody's going to have a job.
He was selling utopia.
He wasn't selling socialism.
If he would have sold socialism, he wouldn't have won.
Socialism is what they hid.
Well, yeah.
But that's.
It was the Julia ad.
Now, the Julia, you and I saw the Julia ad, and we laughed ourselves silly at it.
But do you realize that ad was seductive to a lot of people who didn't look at it as socialism?
They saw that as fairness.
Look, young people, when we've talked about this week, young people particularly, but most everybody, is pessimistic as they can be.
In fact, I had this as a primary discussion topic today until all this news broke.
The overwhelming pessimism that everybody in this country has about their economic future.
It is bleak, particularly among young people, and particularly among the people who voted for Obama.
They are the most pessimistic, and they're the ones that got us all this.
And what Obama does is promise the sun and the moon and stars and flowers and light and peace and love.
And he's selling this brighter future out there with no substance whatsoever.
Bunch of lies, actually.
But that's what people want.
And I think the fact that it hasn't happened, I think that's why I think conservatism is so automatically called for some optimism to tell people that this country can be what they want and they can be what they want to be.
It's made to order.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I mean, it'd be a fantastic thing if lightning struck and Bezos went in that direction.
But yeah, as you've said, that's not who he is.
But, I mean, going back to perfect illustration that you gave us with the Julia ad, yeah, that was very seductive.
But would it be fair to say, though, that the Julia ad is really socialism marketed very, as you said, very seductively.
So wouldn't it be possible that that would be a sort of a general way that Bezos might go?
And, you know, I'm a total layman.
I don't know how it all works.
They didn't sell it as socialism.
They sold it as fairness.
They sold it as being taken care of.
They didn't sell it in the intellectual academic sense of socialism.
They didn't go out and say, the government should take care of you and the government will take care of you.
You don't have to do anything.
They went out and simply portrayed in animated cartoon form how wonderful your life can be with Obama.
I don't think the Julia ad was seen as socialism by the people who liked it.
They saw optimism and a brighter tomorrow, a better tomorrow.
They saw just a bunch of sweetness and light.
And it's an illusion, but it works.
It's seductive.
I have, Don, thanks much.
Let me find it.
I've got a story here.
Now, I've got so many stacks.
Now I don't know what stack it's in.
But this was a primary item I was going to discuss today.
Here's the first of it.
Democrats have taken advantage of millennials.
This is a story by Alex Smith, who's a national chairman of College Republicans.
And this is fascinating in and of itself, but that is just one aspect.
Let me find the other one.
It's just the notion, I guess maybe this is it.
And from this, yeah, I had a bunch of thoughts that flowed from this.
What I concluded from this, and by the way, I've written an op-ed for a millennial's website, and I've been paying a lot of attention to this.
And what I have detected is that there is a massive pessimism out there, folks.
Let me call it depression, but young people do not at all think they have a future economically.
They see themselves burdened with student loan debt that they can never repay.
They see themselves in many cases with degrees that aren't going to, that don't matter to anything.
You have the Democrat Party, Obama exempted.
Democrat Party, the news media focuses on pessimism.
They focus on what's wrong, by definition.
Everybody in this country is inundated with negativity at every turn.
Newspapers, television, movies, TV shows, songs, whatever.
The negative pessimism is there, and young people are just obsessed.
You've got 21% or 21, I forget the number of millennials that the age group, now up to 18 to 25, I think, right now, living at home still.
And the first thought that I had about this was, I recall what Stephen Ratner said, as Obama's first car czar.
He's little Pinch Schulzberger's best friend in New York, Stephen Ratner.
He's an investment banker of sorts.
He's worked at Lazard Ferrer.
You know, wherever the liberals need a mr. Fix it, this guy goes there.
He was talking about Detroit.
And he said, aside from participating in elections, the people of Detroit are no more to blame for what happened to their city than people that don't live there.
And I said, but isn't that the point?
They voted for it.
They are responsible for it.
What do you mean, aside from participating in the Democratic process, they're not to blame?
They voted for it.
The people in Detroit voted for what...
I'm sorry to yell at you.
I know I'm scaring 25-year-old women.
They voted for it.
Well, the millennials voted for this.
So when I hear that they're depressed because they don't think they have a future, they don't think they have an opportunity for a future because there isn't a growing economy.
There's no place for them.
There's no opportunity.
You know, I get frustrated and I say, yeah, well, you voted for it.
When are you going to wake up and realize that you are partly to blame for it?
You voted for this.
And then I remember the Limbaugh theorem, where Obama is not held accountable for any of this, especially among people that voted for him.
He's constantly campaigning.
As far as people that voted for the guy are concerned, he feels the same way as they do.
He's worried.
He's pessimistic.
He's trying to fix it.
But then intellectually, and this is the trap I fall into.
Intellectually, by intellectually, I mean thinking about it.
They elected it and they're living it.
When they voted for Obama, they thought the exact opposite of this was going to happen.
I'm sure they thought they were voting for a brighter future.
Sunshine, lollipops, and roses.
They thought they were voting for panacea, utopia, or whatever.
And they got the opposite of what they wanted.
And there was a part of me, you're all pessimistic.
I don't feel sorry for you.
You voted for it.
Live it.
And it's frustrating that they don't see that.
It's frustrating that they're not asking themselves if they're partially responsible for this.
And I get nuts.
I go crazy wanting to know why these young people that are very smart haven't figured out that voting for liberals and Democrats is what's making them pessimistic.
And then I catch myself and I remember that African Americans have been voting for Democrats for 50 years and haven't seen why they're in such a mess.
So why should I expect millennials to see it?
And practically every other Democrat special interest group is in the same boat.
They've been voting for Democrats for years under the premise that the Democrats are going to protect them, elevate them, get even with their enemies.
All that happens is their lives get worse.
They become more dependent.
And yet they never blame the Democrats.
So I ask myself, why am I asking the millennials to understand what they've done?
Well, that then dovetails into a discussion of the Republican brand, where I think it is safe to say that as we sit here today, anything in politics can change, obviously, but as we sit here today, young people and women are just closed-minded when it comes to the Republican Party.
They're not even willing to listen.
So firm are they in their minds that the Republican Party is evil, rotten, uncool, unhip, whatever.
So you can almost say it boils down to a sense of personal responsibility.
Why is the Washington Post in trouble?
Could part of the answer to the question be that the reporters, the people at work there who put out the product, don't understand why their paper is such a mess.
Do you think they're asking themselves what they're doing wrong?
Guarantee you they're not.
They think they're great.
They're elites, after all.
They're special.
The paper's in trouble because you're stupid.
You're not smart enough to see how good it is, how brilliant they are.
It's not their problem.
So you combine all of these things, the sense of personal responsibility, the desire for utopia panacea, the believing, the belief that Obama's the guy that's going to deliver that, combined with the Republican Party is a bunch of old-fashioned, stuck-in-the-mud, uncool, fat white guys.
And where are we?
We've got utter pessimism out there.
And most of this, look at you and I, people that did not vote for Obama, we're pessimistic for a different, we're pessimistic because we are asking ourselves, why is the rest of the country such a bunch of idiots?
Can I be honest?
That's what we're depressed about.
How in the hell is this happening?
How is this country so popular with so many stupid idiots?
They are depressed because the promises they thought were made to them haven't come true, and they're now thinking it isn't possible.
There is no future.
To me, this is ripe for good old-fashioned plain conservatism.
Optimistic, you can do it kind of conservatism.
Optimistic, you must do it kind of conservatism.
Optimistic, it can be done kind of conservatism.
Optimistic belief in individuals that they can do it.
Pep talk time.
In other words, got to take a break.
Back in a second.
Okay, let's go back to the phone.
So we'll continue on this way of thinking.
I do want to share this millennials story with you in the next hour.
Meantime, John in Westfield, New Jersey.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
Yes, hello, Rush.
How are you?
Very well.
Thank you.
Yeah, you're up.
Okay, good.
I was trying to talk about why Apple is going to go down.
I am short Apple stock right now, and I think you're missing one key point about Apple versus Amazon.
And the key point is that Apple is a closed system, so it's not going to be creative in terms of product expansions and new product introductions, and their margins are decreasing now, and it's going to go the way it did in the past.
Well, now, wait, that comparison ought to be made to Android, not Amazon.
No.
The fact that Amazon, well, Amazon's not open or closed.
I mean, Amazon's not the same business as Apple is.
I was simply discussing the way Wall Street people look at the two businesses.
But Apple being a closed business model as opposed to open like Android.
Is that what you mean?
Android's open, you customized.
Well, Android is an open system, but so is Amazon.
Amazon is selling stuff.
It also sells other people's stuff.
It's a fairly open system.
But the key isn't that Amazon is an open system.
The key is that Apple is a closed system.
So it's competing with the Androids, the Samsungs, the HTCs, and all the other products.
Well, who is Amazon competing with?
Well, they're competing with all the other sellers.
Walmart, for instance.
Open.
Right.
But they're getting.
Target, which is open.
I know what you mean by closed system, but I think, and I can understand why you're going short, Apple, but I think if you're going to talk closed versus open, that's a comparison of the Apple operating system for its computers and smartphones and iPads versus Android's operating system, which is open.
which is open.
Users can customize it all they want, and Apple, you can't.
You've got to do what they give you, use what they give you, and that's it.
And there are arguments for both.
But I don't see Amazon in that.
Now, I know what you mean about why Amazon's looked at profitably when it isn't and so forth.
It's open for growth.
But Apple, I'm out of time.
Damn it.
The precise reason why I am a devout Apple Mac iPhone user is because it's closed and not wide open and can't be screwed up by a bunch of doofus hackers.
▲
Export Selection