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April 24, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:34
April 24, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hiya, folks, greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
It is time once again for Compell Broadcast Excellence.
It's great to be back with you, L Rushbow here at 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, it's 800-282-2882 in the email address, L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
You people on the other side of the glass are going to help me out because I didn't what was said about my I don't even remember what I said.
Does anybody know?
Does the audience know where I was and what happened?
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Weeks ago I did, but did the guest hosts specify where I was.
Okay.
All right, okay.
Sorry for the confusion here, folks, but uh it's been a week, hasn't it, since I've been here.
It has been a week.
So anyway, what I did, uh, and I alluded to this, but of course, I'm so famous now, I can't tell anybody in advance what I'm gonna do, or there will be a mob where I am going to either try to sabotage it or to report on it, or to misreport on it or what have you.
But after exhaustive research, which included even witnessing a live surgery, I decided to get a cochlear implant on the right side.
When I got my original cochlear implant 13 years ago, I still can't believe it's been that long.
13 years ago, I was told to leave my right ear alone.
Because what happens in a cochlear implant surgery, they uh well, I was told back then that they take, in essence, the uh the guts of the ear out, and so that if there were to ever be a cure, um, I need my right side untouched so that the cure could be applied to it.
And then I was told, and they say a cure might be happening in 10 years.
10 years came and went, and I I was assured there's not going to be a cure for what caused your deafness anytime soon.
The cure, incidentally, for what caused my deafness would also be the cure for for baldness.
The human ear has 35,000 hair cells.
That's a lot.
They're microscopic.
You can't see them except under microscope telescope, and they're they're different sizes, widths, lengths, as I understand it.
And that many hair cells are what create the frequency response of the human ear.
Enabling you us to hear whatever we're able to hear.
Dogs, of course, animals have have better hearing than we do.
Their frequency range is higher.
Ours is what it is.
There are 35,000 of them in both ears, 35,000 each, and mine are laying down dead.
My autoimmune system thought that my ears were a disease, flooded my ears with white blood cells.
Uh as at fending off what it thought was an illness.
And what they tried to do to stop it was to give me chemotherapy drugs and and and all kinds of stuff to just stop my immune system, and it didn't work.
And it was a drug, I had I've never been on as many drugs and with as many side effects in my life during the process of losing hearing in my left ear.
I left the right ear vacant in case they came up with a cure for baldness.
Well, they're obviously gonna not gonna come up with a cure for baldness.
Also, 13 years ago, the best thinking in the in the science of cochlear implants was you only need one because the frequency response replacing those 35,000 hair cells are depending on the implant, you get 18 to 21 bionic or man-made electrodes.
And there's simply no way that those electrodes can come anywhere near replicating the natural human ear in the 35,000 hair hair cells.
It's impossible for me to describe or anybody that has a cochlear implant.
It's impossible to describe what things sound like.
It's totally artificial because there in my memory of hearing, there isn't anything I ever remember hearing that sounds like the way I hear things now.
The closest that I could come to it, and in and this doesn't get there, but I mean this is the closest in trying to help people understand how I hear things is scratchy static y AM radio.
And that but that's not it, but that's as that's as close as I can get.
Music, I don't have the frequency response to identify melodies.
Even music that I've heard, my memory supplies the melody.
I i I can turn on a song that I one of my favorite songs from the 70s, turn it on.
If I don't know what the song is, so if I don't have a piece of text, or if I don't have somebody tell me what I will not recognize it.
I need to know what it is.
When I do, then my memory supplies the melody and the lyric, and I can hear it.
But if I don't know what it is, it's just noise of the same note.
Uh music in a movie, the soundtrack to a movie, it sounds like viol or fingernails on a on a chalkboard.
That's what violins sound like.
But it's I'm not complaining, I'm just trying to explain it.
You adapt to it.
It's it's it's miraculous.
I mean, the way I look at this is you look at the timeline of humanity, whatever length of time, billion years, 10,000, whatever number of years human beings have been on the air, make that a 50-foot string in your mind.
And on that 50-foot string is the time we're alive.
And that's a speck of sand on that 50-foot string.
Maybe not even that big.
And isn't it amazing that the time I happen to be alive on that 50-foot string also coincides with when humanity's brilliance and intelligence, technological achievement has advanced to the point of inventing the cochlear implant.
If this had happened to me uh 10 years before it did, it would have meant the end of my career, and there wouldn't be any of this today.
And think of 10 years and a whole timeline of human, it's it's it's miraculous.
So I'm describing this, and I'm not complaining at all, don't misunderstand.
Nobody that it's it's not point anyway.
It's I'm just trying to help everybody understand what happens here because it's totally artificial.
Now, I just I saw a story yesterday, fascinating story, out of I think it was New Zealand, Australia, where some teams are testing electronic impulses in cochlear implants that are actually regrowing audio nerves in what?
Uh uh thing what hamsters.
So hamsters.
That's a long way.
It's never going to happen in my lifetime.
They're never going to get that done for human beings in my lifetime, but there's progressing made all along.
Anyway, so since they said that there would not be a cure in my lifetime, I decided to go get the implant done on the right side because everything changes.
The best science 13 years ago has been replaced by we now think bilateral, meaning both ears is the way to go.
If it doesn't improve your speech comprehension, it will at least improve your awareness of where sounds are coming from.
Right now, I can't tell you where sound is coming from.
I mean, I can I can be in a room with one person with no other noise.
And if I don't see that person and they start talking to me, I don't know where they are.
I'm not able to tell.
I'm not able to identify where a sound is coming from.
If if I'm in the studio alone, an alarm goes off, and so I have no idea what it is.
I have to have somebody come in and identify what's alarming.
What's I have no idea where Sounds come from.
Maybe that'll be helped by this.
But anyway, the surgery, folks, is an hour and a half, and 80% of it, and I don't want to gross any of you out here.
But I went and I watched one of these things, actually watched one of these before I did a week in advance.
I watched Dr. John Lee at the surgical center, the laser surgical center at Palm Beach Gardens, graciously in the patient, gave her permission to come in.
Let me watch.
I had to sign an autograph photo to her while I was in surgical gowns, standing over her in order for her to grant permission.
Lillian was her name.
She was from Winterhaven, I think.
So it's sculpture of the skull.
80% of this is a high-speed drill, the surgeon used a high-speed drill like a dentist, and just carves out, sculpts a place in the skull for the implant to go.
And cannot drill straight down because you don't want to go to the brain.
You've got to stay just short of that.
So drill down at an angle and you and you drill it.
The implant, I don't know, it's about thinking of trying to give a shape.
A bell shape, then it's it's about two inches long and uh maybe an inch and a half at its widest and a half inch at its narrowest.
And you they have to they have to sculpt a trench for it, and then they have to sculpt a canal from that to the cochlea in the ear.
So they connect it, and it takes tissue from another part of your body to connect it, and then they sew you up.
So the opening and closing of the incision is uh 10%.
Another 10% is putting the implant in and connecting it, and 80% is sculpture of the skull.
It's just an it was amazing.
So I've still got all the giant bandages on.
That's why there's no ditto cam today, by the way.
There'll be this audio on the ditto cam, but there's no video uh simply because I I look like Claude Reigns with the invisible stuff not working.
It's the best I can describe it.
It's unsightly.
But anyway, there's not there hasn't been any discomfort, not like the last time there was a lot of discomfort, but this time there hasn't uh there hasn't been much at all.
And so I come back.
The bandages come off today.
As soon as I finish today's excursion into broadcast excellence, I'm gonna head out of here.
I'm gonna have the bandages removed.
That is going to be the most painful part of all of this.
Because it's going to be ripping hair out, and it that's going to be the most painful part of all of it.
Then I uh I will return once the swelling of the surgery recedes, goes down for you and Rio Linda, then I shall return to the medical center where the implant will be activated, turned on.
Do I have a headache now?
Oh, no, I no, no, you know when you when you rip tape off a hairy portion of your body, that's what's good.
That's the kind of pain it is.
It's not I'm not no, it's not gonna be headache pain.
It's just it's just gonna be there's I mean, you ought to see this.
I'm not gonna publish a picture of it because I'm just not, but it's it's gonna be major.
Anyway, come back here on uh May the 9th to get it turned on, and the mapping process begins.
And that that that's the great unknown.
I don't want to get too technical with all this because I know some of this uh bores you, but there are two different ways that you can program a cochlear implant.
One, the old-fashioned analog, and the other digital.
And of course, the digital is considered the high res or high definition uh best audio quality.
That for me does not work on my left side.
I am stuck with the analog.
There are 19 or 20 electrodes in my implant on the left side.
I've had to turn off or deactivate over half of them because they caused facial ticks around my eye at normal volume.
So I'm stuck.
When I originally got this implant, I was at 80% speech comprehension.
And now I'm at 55%.
It's gotten worse because I've had to turn off over half the electrodes, the frequency response being what it is.
Nope.
Well, you they don't do it.
I asked them, do you ever go in and put new implants in?
No, we don't just really don't do that.
Especially now with the other side to play with.
So I'm now a I'm not a lab rat for all these audiologists and doctors.
Because now I got a fresh ear.
I got a brand new implant, and they're not even going to turn on the analog side.
Believe me, when they turn, when they do a map, a map of just programming, and the way it works, you sit for four hours, folks.
This is the most stressful thing.
I can't.
They pump sounds, various tones, at frequencies, and volumes.
And you are supposed to let them know the instant you hear.
Well, the volume.
And it's precise.
This is this is this mapping process determines the best way to program.
And then you have to be honest with them, and you have to be as precise as you can about when you hear each of these tones.
And the volume is so low on purpose that sometimes you think you hear it when you don't, and sometimes you hear it two or three seconds after you've actually heard it.
That's why you have to do it three or four times.
Get an average.
And the high res or the digital state of the art on my left side, if I if they act, I've got it in a position here.
I can turn it on.
Everybody sounds like chipmunks to me.
High sounds like chipmunks.
There's no explaining it.
Other people, it's j it just it's it's lifesaver.
It's like normal hearing.
For me, it's like chipmunk.
And everybody's different.
There are no predictors.
They cannot predict how any person's gonna do because everybody's different with these things.
So they're gonna not even do the analog side.
They're gonna start with the high-res map on on this side with all the electrodes, see what happens, and that all starts on um on May the 9th.
And anything can happen.
It can be better than what I'm used to.
It can be worse than, I mean, the right side of my brain's been dormant.
It hasn't been used for hearing.
It may have forgotten how.
You never know.
It's it's just the whole process is amazing.
So uh there are a lot of factors that go into it.
Anyway, that's what I did.
That's why I did it, and now I've got to take a brief time out here.
And there's a lot of news that I want to get to that I've been paying attention to while I've been gone.
It's just the most amazing things happening out there.
I I'm actually glad to be back because I can't wait to talk about them with you, but I gotta take a break now.
We'll do that.
We'll come back and continue right after this.
So don't go away.
And we are back.
And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to inform you that I have a cold.
Um, and the reason is that my voice apparently sounds different.
Does it sound different?
A little deeper, a little groggy, did you say?
Well, and the fear is here that some of you might think that the implant surgery has permanently negatively altered forever my voice.
It has nothing to do.
I've had a cold.
I caught a cold.
Actually, I got a cold a month ago.
I don't think I've actually gotten over the damn thing.
I think actually what's happened, the congestion, it just finally started breaking up.
And so that's the uh the reason for the voice sounding the way it does.
It has nothing to do with the uh surgery, oral cavity, unaffected uh vocal cords, uh, all of that.
Anyway, um so they just to just to wrap this this all up, um what some of the questions I get from people, well, do people sound like they used to?
Yeah.
If I've heard somebody's voice before I lost my hearing, then it sounds pretty close to what they used to sound like.
But it's like music.
If I'm hearing somebody for the first time, their voice is distinctive to me, but I don't know if it's the way their voice really sounds to other people.
Um I do not recognize a car alarm because of the frequency.
I do not I recognize a car alarm when I hear one because I know the changing sound of it, the the doo, woo, woo, uh, whatever it is, but I don't hear the tone that it is.
I don't hear uh high notes on a piano, I don't hear them.
I hear it, but I don't hear the note.
Just it just all music sounds flat.
To me, the best way I can describe it.
Uh a car horn sounds like a buzzer to me.
But you adapt, you learn what things are, and you said you relearn how to hear, and everything is actually quite normal.
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day, Rush Limbaugh back at it.
Back in the saddle here at the Limbaugh Institute for advanced conservative studies, and telephone numbers 800-282-2882, and the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Folks, there's something that I want to spend, if it takes the next two days, discussing with you, and it may.
There's a new book out.
I became aware of this while I was out post-op.
Some French socialist Marxist communist economist has published a book, and the left in this country is having orgasms on it.
The number one book on Amazon.
The guy's name is uh Thomas Piketty.
And it is it it is timed coincidentally, maybe not coincidentally, you know, the Obama regime and the Democrats are all on this big kick of income inequality and what to do about it.
And this guy's book gives them ammo.
It's the most outrageous set of assumptions that I have ever.
It's it's it's in fact it's nothing new, it's just repackaged.
But I'm telling you that the people on the left literally can barely contain themselves with their giddiness over this.
And it is it it it portends grave danger for this country if it were if any of this guy's suggestions were to ever become adopted.
And Obama is on his way to trying to adopt some of them, all on the basis of getting rid of income inequality.
Now, can somebody tell me when has there ever been income equality?
And if you can tell me when there has been income equality, can you tell me what kind of lives those people had and what kind of country they lived in?
And what kind of liberty and freedom they had.
This guy is suggesting an 80% tax rate on incomes over $500,000 a year.
Not to raise revenue for the government, but to eliminate those incomes.
This guy's objective is to simply wipe out the wealthy.
And supposedly everybody is going to be deliriously happy after this.
It's it's just it is absurd.
It's stupid.
It's dumb.
It's ignorant.
It's been tried and it is being tried in every place in the world.
You wouldn't want to live.
And yet the left in this country, and wherever you have the Democrat Party in the media, they're just, they're just chomping at the bit, excited as they can be.
And I want to go through some actual factual analysis of incomes in this country and wealth and census data evidence that proves that this is the land of opportunity.
The top 1%'s not a static group.
The top 10%'s not a static group.
People move in and out of income groups all the time in this country.
People make and lose fortunes all the time.
They make a lot of money, they lose it.
It's not the same one percent for 50 years.
It's not the same one percent for four years.
People move in and out.
It's just it really is um problematic what what this guy is is suggesting and the way it's being embraced in this country by the movers and shakers of the left is what uh Harbinger's ill will.
And I just want to inform you of it so that you're up speed on it.
But I've got to get a call here first because this is something that I saw while I was out that I had near the top of the stack today.
So we're gonna go to Raleigh.
Excuse me, Paul, glad you called, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I'm glad you're back and doing good.
Thank you.
My qu my question for you is does your percentage of being right go up?
Uh with the um when you call meet the press, meet the depressed, and with the news out of NBC and the uh psychologist checking out David Gregory.
You know, is this not the most amazing story?
I mean, I've got so many.
I've got a stack here today that I could call everything in it.
Is it not the most amazing thing you've ever heard?
There's four or five of them in the stack.
I don't know which one's more amazing than the other.
My accuracy rating ought to go up.
You're absolutely right.
I've been calling this show Meet the Depressed for years.
Folks, if you haven't what would Paul, what have you heard about this?
I'm I'm gonna be up to speed with what the latest, because you've been out there consuming the news on it.
What's the latest you've heard on this?
What do you think you know about this story?
I don't know how accurate I have it, but um NBC hired a psychologist to check out David Gregory and his family and friends.
Yeah, but but why?
Because of the ratings.
Yeah.
That's right.
Folks, on the in the in the old days, in the old days, you know what happened?
You just get fired.
If your ratings went a tank, you would get fired.
It happened to me seven or eight times.
It is absolutely true.
NBC's meet the press has fallen to such raving lows that network brass ordered psychological research of the host and his family in a bid to make him more likable.
It's unheard of.
You either are or you aren't in this business.
Psychological research for the host and his family in a bid to make him more likable.
Why did he get the gig in the first place?
Friends of Gregory and even his wife were interviewed by a psychologist commissioned by NBC to find out how the host of the Sunday morning show might relate to audiences better.
Hey, this is so simple.
It's not Gregory, it's liberalism.
If you get somebody to host the program that knows there is a Missouri and a Nebraska and a Texas, And doesn't think you need a visa to get into them.
You've got half the problem solved.
Find out how they might relate to audiences better.
I don't have that problem.
They haven't need any psychological analysis here.
Washington Post reported last year the network undertook an unusual assessment of the 43-year-old journalist commissioning a psychological consultant to interview his friends and even his wife.
The idea, according to a network spokeswoman, Megan Pianta, was to get perspective and insight from people who know him best.
But the research project struck Summit NBC as odd, given that Gregory has been employed there for nearly 20 years.
Exactly right.
What do they not know about the guy?
The days of Meet the Press ruling Sunday mornings seem a long time ago.
Now it's in third place.
During the first three months of this year, the NBC program finished behind Slay the Nation.
And this week needs David Brinkley on ABC.
In the final quarter of last year, viewing of Meet the Depressed among people between 25-54 fell to its lowest level ever.
Gregory said, I get it, told the Washington Post, do I want to be number one in the ratings?
Every week I want to be number one.
We fight like hell to get there.
And it's tough right now.
It's a fight.
I'm just, I'm not just trying to sell you.
Well, I am trying to sell you, but I'm I'm not going to BS you either.
Yeah, it's hard.
I see what our challenges are, but we're going to fix our problems.
Look.
This is not hard.
If you view half the country with disdain, if you view the way over half the country thinks with derision, you're going to produce a program that reflects that.
Now, who in the world wants to watch a program where what they think and what they believe and what they cherish and what they hold dear is going to be laughed at and mocked and made fun of every Sunday.
Meet the press long ago ceased being a news program.
When Tim Russert passed away and they passed the torture, it ceased being a news program.
It became an agenda arm of the Democrat Party.
The old audience of the Meet Meet the Depressed didn't view it that way.
This really is a mind-boggling thing.
Just why wouldn't you fire the guy and go hire somebody the audience likes?
If you don't want to fire him because that would look bad for the news and look bad for liberalism, just like firing Dan Ratherwood, reassign him to something.
You know, put him somewhere where the audience likes him.
Give him a Moscow Bureau assignment or whatever.
But but send him over to North Korea.
Let him shine some light there.
And relate to people there, I guess.
Send him to Beijing.
I don't know.
Maybe Havana.
Try to open a new pathway.
But this is mind-boggling.
Are they telling us that there's nobody that's any better psychologically prepared at NBC to host this show?
Hell, I could do it.
I could I could bring the ratings of this show up back to where they were inside of a month with no guests.
Inside of a week with no guests.
That's to be the problem.
They'd make me do guests.
I mean, it's to meet the press.
That reminds me.
I may have mentioned this to you people once.
Back in Sacramento.
Oh.
What a story this is.
I swear to you, it's the truth.
I'm standing across the glass from a guy who knows the guy who did this and can attest to it if it ever came to that.
The manager of the station came to me one day and said, you know what?
You seem out of sorts.
You just don't seem happy.
You seem sort of down on the dumb.
So you're feeling a little bit depressed.
And I thought the guy was being compassionate and supportive.
And I said, well, no, I'm just adjusting to the move.
Look, I got an idea for you.
I want to send you, there's a great rehab place over in the Bay Area.
Um I want to send you in there.
Send you in there for the two or three weeks, and let them give you a psychological work over, and you come out, and I think I can sell them some spots you can endorse the thing.
I said, you want to send me to a mental rehab joint for the sole purposes of me admitting I'm depressed so that when I come out I can I can tell these audience what a great bunch of people at this clinic are who got me undepressed.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you seem a little honest to goodness, that that that's the closest anything like this ever happened to me.
I I refuse to do it.
There's no way when I realized what was going on.
I think I actually tried, you should have seen this.
He actually came on to me as one of the most caring in, you know, you really seem down and so I love you, man.
I you you do you have every reason in the world to be happy, you know?
And and the reason was that you know I had established well, I don't get it, I had established uh at that time this ability to anyway.
That that's the closest I've come to anything like this.
Uh but m I saw this story.
I still can't get over it.
I still cannot.
This story tells me how much not just broadcasting, but how much our culture is changing than as much any other story I've seen.
It's just it it's hard for me to comprehend this.
And uh and Gregory seems unfazed.
Unfazed.
I would be so profoundly I'd go hide in the hole.
I would I would be doing anything I could.
Maybe I can send David Gregory over to MSNBC and send Al Sharpton over to moderate and meet the press.
Who knows?
Shake things up.
Uh Dixie in Ashburn, Virginia.
Welcome to the EIB network.
I'm glad you called.
Hello.
Good afternoon, and thank you so much for taking my call.
You bet.
I am so excited to get to talk to you.
I've listened to you for a long time, and usually I'm listening to you for political reasons, but today you really hit something even more special for our family.
You're talking about your cochlear implant.
And I just wanted to say thank you so much for articulating so clearly the cochular implant process.
Um, we have a daughter that was adopted from China as an infant and was not diagnosed with hearing loss until she was three.
It turned out it was progressive.
So a couple of years ago at age five, we had to make the decision to go ahead and do a cochlear implant.
And I had done a lot of research on the process, but as you were describing earlier, even the surgeons aren't exactly sure how the entire thing works.
And so when we were asking for information, the best they could give us were guesses.
And so to hear from you as an adult who sent through the process, explain it, it's been fascinating.
And the only thing I really appreciate since our daughter was so young at the time of an implant and really had no hearing prior to having the implant.
She hasn't been able to communicate to us what she's experiencing.
We know that it's working.
So I just want to thank you so much for sharing your journey.
Let me uh let me give you a couple more tips.
Okay, um, since you have a daughter that has one of these things, is it's it's it's really hard for people to imagine deafness.
They can't self-create it.
You can imagine being blind by closing your eyes.
You can imagine being um uh paralyzed not being able to walk, but you can't turn off your ears.
You just people who can hear cannot Imagine deafness.
And the one thing that you anybody that deals with anybody cochlear implant or anybody has a hearing, understand one thing.
There is no amount of practice that improves how someone hears.
There's no amount of concentration that improves how much how much someone hears.
Um I have friends who know that I can't hear who still whisper to me in the wrong ear on the golf course.
Because that's habit.
You be quiet on a golf course.
I have the even when I turn my left ear to them, no, that they've known for 13 years that I can't hear, and they still, some of them.
I've I've maybe there are three people who know how to talk to me who get right into my left ear and speak to me.
I can't hear people from across the room.
And you and your daughter won't be able to either.
You've if somebody's wearing cochlear implant or hearing air, you've got to get right up, especially if there's ambient crowd noise, you have to get closer.
It's hopeless.
Because there's no it's it's it's not you can't tell a blind person try harder and have them see.
You and and somebody that can't hear, you you it is what it is.
So don't ever forget those things because they're crucial in having harmonious relationships.
Yeah, I gotta go.
Be back.
Okay, folks, just sit tight.
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