The Michael Berry Joe Well I know where your head space goes when you hear this because it's exactly

where mine goes. It was on this day 73 years ago that Rush Hudson Lim the 3rd was born and of course we lost him at 70 on February 17th 2021. It's been almost three years. On August 1st of 1988 they launched him into national syndication.

On the first day there were 56 stations.

And... And I cannot begin to tell you having studied radio as I have, the industry.

What a difference our world is today because of Rush Limbaugh. It is incredible. We tend to take for granted that things are the

way they are and that they were necessarily

going to be that way because that's how things are. But that's not how it works.

Things But that's not how it works. Things could have been very different. They could have

been dramatically different, but for what this person did or didn't do.

And when I think about how important talk radio is to our political and cultural landscape today,

and that we wouldn't have talk radio as we do now had it not been for Rush Limbaugh.

Had they not put his show into national syndication and it not succeeded beyond anyone's expectation.

Most of those AM dials which is still where talk radio is located more often than FM,

most of those radio AM dials would be dead today.

Most of them would have gone away because FM had entered the landscape and

FM was a tighter, richer signal. Doesn't go as far, but that was the new and improved.

The AM was done, the old amplitude modulation, we were done with that, we had frequency modulation

is a tighter signal better for music

because that's what the radio was music. Spoken word was mostly limited to

home improvement, maybe a consumer lawyer, what was the guy that,

Tom Martino, you might have a consumer law advocate, there would be gardening shows, some home improvement shows,

maybe some car repair shows, and maybe some investment shows. But none of them,

...