You know, I didn't do this for the money, even though when they say when it's not about the money, it's about the money, but I did this unexpectedly after I had retired from Westwood one and it popped up and I thought wow, this is too good to miss.

Today we're talking with my good friend Norm Patis, one of the most successful and influential business men in Los Angeles.

If you've ever seen a Lakers game, you've seen him sitting courtside, often yelling at the coaches or the players or both.

He has transformed the entire radio, may entertainment industry with his ideas and businesses and now he's aiming to do the same with digital and podcasting.

We'll discuss all this as well as how he's become a region at UCLA and a pointy of both Bush and Clinton as well as how business intersects with influence political and otherwise.

Now let's hear from Norm Patis.

You were so early in the radio syndication model that I tried to find who was doing it before you and I can find anybody.

Did you invent it?

Kind of well, you know, it's hard to say invent who knows, but on a large scale, we were certainly at Westwood one, the first ones to go out and create sort of a Viacom syndicated radio and take it to national advertisers because there was a syndication business, but it was mostly cash, you know, the radio stations paying 40 bucks a week for a month.

40 bucks a week for American top 40 40 bucks a week. Oh, yeah, just because it's like it was better than zero. Well, you know, 40 bucks a week was a lot more back then, but not that much more was a Casey case. Yeah, it's Casey, but you know, he had four or 500 radio stations.

So that was enough to support the company that produced him a company called Watermark.

But then we were probably the first player to go to national advertisers to support syndicated radio shows of any consequence.

How did you find a market opportunity where there was no market opportunity? I mean, what were you things were you looking at back then? Or was it just like you're having a beer one night? You thought this is a good idea that nobody's doing.

It always happens because you find yourself in a circumstance, you know, in circumstances that you never planned for. I was the sales manager to television station here in Los Angeles.

And it was KCOP, which at the time stood for keep changing or programming. We referred to ourselves as the number one station in the market because we had more ones than anybody else. Nice. I'm not sure that's the metric. No, it isn't it isn't for sure.

But I was sort of unceremoniously dispatched. I heard this. Yes, I was fired for the new general managers younger brother. And that was a few days before I was getting married.

I read that it was three days before your wedding. That's correct. So if I hadn't moved fast, there would have been one noticeably empty table at my reception. Yeah.

I mean, I was borderline devastated. I mean, I was the ultimate company man. I really liked that job. My strategy at the time was to go become the general manager of a major market television station.

You know, fate threw me a curveball. So I spent a little longer on my honeymoon in Hawaii. Right. And when I got back, I ran into a friend of mine who was trying to syndicate a radio show.

Didn't really know how to do it. And he said, you know, why don't you help me do this? You know, I didn't know anything about radio syndication, but there's one universal law that I have found, which is if you don't know the rules, you can't be limited by them. Nice. Yes. Yeah.

Because you don't know what you're breaking because you don't even know the existence. Sure. You're not setting out to do anything wrong. You're setting out to accomplish a goal. And if you break a rule that's really a bad when somebody's gonna let you know, and you're gonna have the opportunity to change direction.

I knew from the television business where syndication was commonplace that you could go to advertisers and they could buy advertising directly from you as a syndicator that was not common in radio because radio syndication, you know, was all paid for, you know, radio stations pay a set amount to carry a radio program syndicated radio program. And it wasn't really even that much.

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