August 17, 2025 • 19 mins
Kentucky Sports Radio Host Matt Jones
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh man, Well, I started doing podcasts first, and so
we did it in the basement of my buddy Hubby's house.
This was literally twenty years ago. I was listening to
MPR and I heard Adam Curry, former MTVVJ, on there
saying that he had created that there was this new
thing called a podcast. He had like invented the word.
(00:22):
And he said, you know, you can talk about anything
and you don't have to get a job at a
radio station. And I thought to myself, man, I can
do that. That's like, I'll just do it about Kentucky.
And so I bought the equipment and we set it
up at Hubby's house and you know, we just rolled.
And then for years I went to every radio station
in Kentucky, literally everyone that did any talk, and I volunteered.
(00:46):
I said, you don't even have to pay me, just
put me on the radio. I have this podcast. I
have a couple of few thousand listeners. Just put me on.
And every single one of them said no, most of
them said I didn't have a voice that sounded like radio.
And so I just kept doing the podcast. And then
eventually there was a black gospel station that a guy
(01:07):
bought the airtime and put us on and then it
just kind of went from there. So it was it
was really random, but it also was a different time, right,
So it was a time where the idea of you know,
there was a conventional way of doing things. If you
didn't do it, people didn't people didn't want to have you.
But the first time I was live, that's scary when
that button comes on and you go, oh, people are listening, but.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
You hear the processing and there's a difference to a
podcast feed when you hear your voice amplified in headphones.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. I mean I was a lawyer, so I had
heard oral arguments that I had done, so I'd heard
my voice. But for a lot of people, just hearing
your voice is odd in and of itself. But yeah,
there's something about I really like, I'm probably gonna lose
my hearing at some point because I really like to
kind of turn it up because you're right, there's something
about hearing it amplified in your ears that sort of
(02:01):
gets me almost energized. You know. I think there's a
I know there are some people whose styles to be
more laid back, like Paul Finebaum, but for me, energy
and keeping people My goal is to make it to
where nobody knows what's going to happen next, and everybody's
hanging on it. And I think you have to have energy.
If you're bored, the audience will be bored, and so
(02:22):
I always try not to do that. For me, high
points all in radio have come from when something happened
that showed how much it was reaching the audience. Right.
So maybe it was the first time you come in
number one in the writings, maybe it's the first time
we did I still remember the first time I did
a live show and invited the audience and there were
(02:42):
a ton of people at the twenty twelve Final four
Kentucky did a show in New Orleans, and here we
are Kentucky was playing in New Orleans. We did a
show at a restaurant in New Orleans and hundreds of
people were there and they were like lined up out
the door. That was one of those I remember that
one distinctly because it was like, oh, and you know,
I started this show in twenty ten, in the fall
(03:05):
of twenty ten, and I begged to have a podcast.
Back then, radio stations didn't do podcasts, at least iHeart
didn't because they sort of thought, we need people to
listen live, and I said, you know, hey, there's a
lot of people that are not in our listening area.
So even streaming. At first, they didn't even want to
stream it, and so I really pushed for that, and
(03:27):
then that made a local show become If you're from
Kentucky and you live in New Orleans, this is your
way to stay connected to Kentucky. And I think a
huge part of our audience over the years have been
people who have gone somewhere else and this is their
way they stay connected to home. And I've always tried
to remember that and Terry, we have traveled to probably
(03:51):
two hundred plus cities in our years of doing this,
and there's never been a show where we didn't get
at least a handful of people to come. I'm talking
a Native American reservation in New Mexico, the Mountains of Utah, Deadwood,
South Dakota. There's a Kentucky fan somewhere that will show
up everywhere we go.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
What's the farthest away on the planet Earth you've been
contacted by a fan?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Oh so I spent a summer in Europe and didn't
happen a lot, but Athens, Greece, Dusseldorf, Germany. I'd be
walking down the street and somebody go, are you Matt Jones,
And there was a somebody from Kentucky who, for whatever reason,
was there. So I would say that happened. I was
in Europe for two months. Probably happened ten times over
(04:39):
the course those two months, So you know that the
people are everywhere. But like we did a show in Montreal,
Canada once at a youth hostel and thirty five people
from who lived in Montreal came. It's a while. There
were probably two or three times where things that we hosted.
We've hosted a multiple Kentucky governor debates, and there was
(05:02):
a debate we did that I think changed the race.
In the twenty fifteen Kentucky Republican primary, Matt Bevin came
on and it's a lot of background, but he made
a statement that the polls, his people will tell you
elevated him from third to first in the polls. He
ended up winning the primary and then ended up winning
the election. People outside of Kentucky will not know what
(05:26):
the name Katina pal is, but there was a Louisville
basketball sex scandal and I was the first person to
get the woman at the center of it on the air,
and she said some wild stuff that still gets quoted
to this day and still gets brought up all the time.
I think that was probably the one that was the biggest.
But you know, in twenty sixteen, the Republican presidential primary
(05:49):
and the Democrat both came through Kentucky. So we had
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, did not
have Trump, but we ended up having all those people
on and those were kind of and I'm not even
a political show, but just having those moments, it was
kind of like, Wow, I can't believe we're talking to
Hillary Clinton. You know, that's crazy. Yeah, I mean the
key is to make that I'm a big believer that
(06:11):
local radio is about making your listeners feel like they're
in a community. I mean, that's not rocket science, but
you want listeners to feel like they are engaged in
a community with you and with the rest of the audience. So,
you know, during COVID, and I highly recommend this for people,
I have a text number that people can text in
(06:33):
during the show. A lot of people are scared to call,
so I have them text in and people send texts
all day right all day every day, and during COVID,
a lot of people were using that to express what
they were going through. They were saying, my mother just died,
I'm lonely, I'm sick, and it actually became a lot
(06:55):
to sit and read. But it also gave me a
sense of like how important this is to people because
this is their community in the same way COVID had
cut them off from the people in their town, their church,
et cetera. And they were feeling this community from us.
And I remember when COVID hit, thinking what are we
gonna do? Right, no sports, what we're gonna talk about?
(07:15):
It ended up being the biggest growth of our audience
of all time because people didn't have anything else to do,
so they sat and listen. And our audience grew more
during COVID than at any time in history, and a
lot of it stayed, which I think was interesting. After tragedies,
so when the big there's a bad tornado in Marshall County, Kentucky,
(07:38):
floods in eastern Kentucky, tornado in London, Kentucky, at those moments,
again people seemed to use it as a community gathering space,
and you just hear these tragedies. I mean the tornado
in Marshall County was tough because it happened. We were
on hours after it for a basketball postgame show, and
(07:58):
it just turned into people we calling worried about their
loved ones. You know, somebody talking about how multiple hurst
were driving by their house, and we end up. I
remember we were on a road trip. We were in Wisconsin,
and we're at an outback in Wisconsin doing this show,
and all of us are crying listening to these people.
So that's probably that's probably the toughest. But you know
(08:23):
I'm saying all this, I'm not talking about a lot
of sports. I think it's really important to remember people
can hear sports anywhere, right. The issue is can you
make it to where they want to hear you talk
about sports. So I use the example of my radio
he hero as Tony Krnheiser. Tony Kornheiser is a huge
Washington Nationals fans. I do not care about the Washington Nationals,
(08:45):
but I wanted to hear him talk about the Washington Nationals.
So if something happened, I was like, what's Tony gonna
say about it? That I think is when you know
you have that connection. Do you have it to where
they don't just want to hear about sports, they want
to hear you talk about sports, And that, I think
is how you really know you've gotten something. I'm honest,
(09:07):
like I lived my life on the air. Every single
thing that happens to me becomes part of my show.
Except dating. I learned that's a bad idea for a
lot of reasons. But besides dating, every single thing that
happens I express through the air. Now, I know a
lot of people are hesitant to do that, but I
do so. When I had about a few months where
(09:30):
I was having mental health struggles, I talked about it
on the air. I showed vulnerability. You know, if you're
going to be on the radio, you're, by nature, to
some extent arrogant if you're going to be on the
radio and think people should care what you talk about.
But I try to counter that by being vulnerable about
my weaknesses. So I'm in a state where everybody hunts, fishes,
is republican, has guns. I'm none of those things. I'm
(09:52):
a Democrat who scared of guns, does it, can't swim,
and you know all that stuff. But they know that
and I'm honest about it, and that makes it to
where they accept it. They can accept that difference. So
I think by living it's not easy. You know, We've
had I've had since I've done the show. My co
host has gotten divorced and he had to kind of
(10:15):
live that out through the show. I've lost relatives and
I've had to live that out through the show. I've
gotten fired from other jobs and had to live that
out through the show. It's not easy to be vulnerable,
but when you do, I think the audience gives you
some grace to then when you make a mistake or
when you make them mad, they'll they'll give you a
(10:36):
break because they know you just like they would their friend.
So it's hard. Listen, I was in the hospital, got out,
really struggled, but I knew at ten o'clock the button
comes on, you do it. But I would say this
is a hard day and like and I think the
audience appreciates that, and that's why I do it. Yeah,
all the time. I mean, I'm sure you're like this.
(10:57):
Anybody who's good at anything, it's probably just some extent
of perfectionist, right, and so nothing ever goes exactly like
you want. And there are times where I really was
excited about something and it was just a flop. The
person wasn't interesting. Maybe I didn't ask the right questions,
but you just have to keep going. That's one thing.
I'll dwell on it. But then you know, that's the
(11:17):
great thing about live radio. There's another day, right. You
don't have to sit there and stew in it. There's
another day the next day. And sometimes I look back
and go, Okay, when I'm done with my career, people
are not going to go back and listen to shows
from twenty years ago. So there's a sense that it's
not permanent. But the good thing is when you fail,
(11:38):
that's not permanent either. You're kind of judged by your
next one, so you might as well try to make
it good. I think it's very easy to live in
a bubble and forget who's listening to you. So, I mean,
I don't know if other shows are like this, but
every Friday we do a remote in front of people,
and we probably have at least fifty people every Friday
who come see me at some business. Because of that,
(12:01):
I can see on people's faces when I have them,
and when I don't, I can literally see if I
talk about this, I have them. If I talk about that,
I don't. I watch it, I feel it, and then
when you go on the air, you go you use
that as this is what works, this is what doesn't.
(12:22):
It's easy with radio people because you don't see your audience.
It's easy to kind of get detached from them, to
not not understand when they are in interested in you
and when they're not. But because I'm fortunate that every
Friday I see this visual thing, I can I'm sure
you're like this. I can feel on the air when
it's not working, even if I'm the only person sitting there,
(12:45):
I can feel it. I can feel when I don't
have the audience. That is something that takes time. But
I think radio people have to do it because if
you don't, if you're just talking about stuff that interests
you and the audience is interested, what's the point, you know?
So I don't do segments. Okay, So I think again,
this is just me and I not everybody agrees with this.
(13:07):
I think like cheesy, you know, deal or no deal?
Who's the chicken of the week, Like I hate this.
I just think it's so. I think it's so manufactured
and so stupid. What I do look forward to is,
you know, I sort of stole this from Tony Korneiser.
He would come in out of the break and whatever
rather than just playing generic bumper music. That's like, he
(13:33):
would play a song that was about what they had
talked about in the last segment and then talk about
it to start the segment. I think that I completely
stole that idea. So my producer, Shannon the Dude, he
listens to the segment. If we're talking about wedding rings,
he plays Golden Ring by George Jones coming in, and
(13:53):
then we go, oh, George Jones, and it can lead
to a conversation. I've been doing that for years, and
to me, that's brilliant because the one thing about music
is everybody likes music, and so that that's a little thing,
but it's really the only manufactured thing I do. I
genuinely hate when people are like, it's time to play
(14:14):
Forgotten Ner, Waiting, Lincoln or Brick. Yeah, I just hate it.
I do some work for a national sports stay well
ESPN Radio, and they do that all the time, and
I'm like, oh, this is awful. I love Kentucky plays
basketball games I do the pregame show. I love the
fifteen minutes before a big game. At the end of
(14:35):
my show, you know, maybe we're on location. We were
in Indianapolis last year before the Sweet Sixteen at a
bar with hundreds of people. You do your prediction. They're
hanging on every word. I love it. I also love
the moments after a big win. Okay, so when you're
doing a postgame show, that first moment after you come in,
when you've just won something and the fans are going crazy.
(14:57):
I really like that. I love in a world of podcasts,
video podcasts, streaming, all of that, the one thing we
have on live radio then nobody else has that we
can't lose is that in the moment excitement, where you are,
you are expressing to people the first reaction to whatever happened.
(15:22):
Maybe it's on a postgame show, maybe it's breaking news
during your radio show, but you are the person letting
this story come out through you. No other meentity can
do that, and that to me, when that happens, that's
the best. I remember Howard Stern was on radio when
(15:43):
the tower, when the planes hit the town. I've gone
back and I was listening. Love I've gone back and listened.
There's no more powerful I can see the video. It's
not the same as Howard Stern finding out processing it,
trying to figure out what it means, pain like that.
That's what radio does, and that's a tragedy, but it
(16:04):
also can do it in something positive. Radio I mean,
because you know, I mean there's times, but I actually
think radio, at least to me, is on a little
bit of a upswing post COVID, right, I mean, the
podcast world obviously it's grown exponentially, but it's also made
people reappreciate the value of audio. TV is actually much
(16:26):
less interesting to people now than it was ten years ago.
So I see podcasts and radio working together and sort of,
you know, the creation of words. We are so overwhelmed
by this and videos that now making it to where
you can do like the you know, the tricks of
the mind and talking and people visualizing it themselves, I
(16:49):
think has kind of been a rebirth. So I hope
that doesn't go away. And I also definitely hope, I mean,
local doesn't go away. I get the idea of the
nation's more, you know, it's we're closer together and all this,
but local is where it's at I do listen. I
(17:10):
do a national ESPN radio show. I enjoy it, but
it doesn't have half the impact that a local show
has in terms of how it really affects your audience.
I think it's I mean to me, it's on the upswing. Now.
The economics of it is a different thing, but in
terms of how much people want it, I think it's high. Look,
(17:32):
newspapers are going away, local television stations are becoming more
and more consolidated in a handful of companies, blogs and websites.
That's the world I come from, are there are fewer
and fewer. Local radio becomes the thing that is the
local connection to people, and that's why it tends to
(17:53):
have a little more staying power. You know, we all
thought radio go away because people could plug in their phones.
I still think people get in the car and turn
on the radio a lot of the time. And so
that's I think I'm much more optimistic about it today
than I was five years ago. It's personality driven, oh yeah,
and nothing lets you know a person better than radio.
(18:15):
You can be fake on TV, you can be fake,
and writing. You can even be fake in podcast because
you can edit. You cannot be fake in radio. You,
as my teacher in school would say, you is who
you is on the radio, right, And so I think
that's I think people appreciate that authenticity. Well, They've given
(18:36):
me a lot of opportunity over the years. I mean,
like I said, fifteen years ago, I was literally begging
somebody to work for free. And now you go through
all this time and I've had a chance to advance.
I've had a chance to help other people grow their careers,
and I've had a chance to pass on some of
the goodness that was passed on to me. You folks
(19:00):
can't see, but the guy interviewing me had me one time.
I made a joke about him on social media, and
instead of getting mad, he had me on And it
was kind of the first time that the iHeart building
even knew who I was. And I don't know that
I would be here without that. So to be able
to try to give up people those opportunities and kind of,
(19:20):
you know, pass on whatever goodness has been given me
is a good thing.
Oh man, Well, I started doing podcasts first, and so
we did it in the basement of my buddy Hubby's house.
This was literally twenty years ago. I was listening to
MPR and I heard Adam Curry, former MTVVJ, on there
saying that he had created that there was this new
thing called a podcast. He had like invented the word.
(00:22):
And he said, you know, you can talk about anything
and you don't have to get a job at a
radio station. And I thought to myself, man, I can
do that. That's like, I'll just do it about Kentucky.
And so I bought the equipment and we set it
up at Hubby's house and you know, we just rolled.
And then for years I went to every radio station
in Kentucky, literally everyone that did any talk, and I volunteered.
(00:46):
I said, you don't even have to pay me, just
put me on the radio. I have this podcast. I
have a couple of few thousand listeners. Just put me on.
And every single one of them said no, most of
them said I didn't have a voice that sounded like radio.
And so I just kept doing the podcast. And then
eventually there was a black gospel station that a guy
(01:07):
bought the airtime and put us on and then it
just kind of went from there. So it was it
was really random, but it also was a different time, right,
So it was a time where the idea of you know,
there was a conventional way of doing things. If you
didn't do it, people didn't people didn't want to have you.
But the first time I was live, that's scary when
that button comes on and you go, oh, people are listening, but.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
You hear the processing and there's a difference to a
podcast feed when you hear your voice amplified in headphones.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. I mean I was a lawyer, so I had
heard oral arguments that I had done, so I'd heard
my voice. But for a lot of people, just hearing
your voice is odd in and of itself. But yeah,
there's something about I really like, I'm probably gonna lose
my hearing at some point because I really like to
kind of turn it up because you're right, there's something
about hearing it amplified in your ears that sort of
(02:01):
gets me almost energized. You know. I think there's a
I know there are some people whose styles to be
more laid back, like Paul Finebaum, but for me, energy
and keeping people My goal is to make it to
where nobody knows what's going to happen next, and everybody's
hanging on it. And I think you have to have energy.
If you're bored, the audience will be bored, and so
(02:22):
I always try not to do that. For me, high
points all in radio have come from when something happened
that showed how much it was reaching the audience. Right.
So maybe it was the first time you come in
number one in the writings, maybe it's the first time
we did I still remember the first time I did
a live show and invited the audience and there were
(02:42):
a ton of people at the twenty twelve Final four
Kentucky did a show in New Orleans, and here we
are Kentucky was playing in New Orleans. We did a
show at a restaurant in New Orleans and hundreds of
people were there and they were like lined up out
the door. That was one of those I remember that
one distinctly because it was like, oh, and you know,
I started this show in twenty ten, in the fall
(03:05):
of twenty ten, and I begged to have a podcast.
Back then, radio stations didn't do podcasts, at least iHeart
didn't because they sort of thought, we need people to
listen live, and I said, you know, hey, there's a
lot of people that are not in our listening area.
So even streaming. At first, they didn't even want to
stream it, and so I really pushed for that, and
(03:27):
then that made a local show become If you're from
Kentucky and you live in New Orleans, this is your
way to stay connected to Kentucky. And I think a
huge part of our audience over the years have been
people who have gone somewhere else and this is their
way they stay connected to home. And I've always tried
to remember that and Terry, we have traveled to probably
(03:51):
two hundred plus cities in our years of doing this,
and there's never been a show where we didn't get
at least a handful of people to come. I'm talking
a Native American reservation in New Mexico, the Mountains of Utah, Deadwood,
South Dakota. There's a Kentucky fan somewhere that will show
up everywhere we go.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
What's the farthest away on the planet Earth you've been
contacted by a fan?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Oh so I spent a summer in Europe and didn't
happen a lot, but Athens, Greece, Dusseldorf, Germany. I'd be
walking down the street and somebody go, are you Matt Jones,
And there was a somebody from Kentucky who, for whatever reason,
was there. So I would say that happened. I was
in Europe for two months. Probably happened ten times over
(04:39):
the course those two months, So you know that the
people are everywhere. But like we did a show in Montreal,
Canada once at a youth hostel and thirty five people
from who lived in Montreal came. It's a while. There
were probably two or three times where things that we hosted.
We've hosted a multiple Kentucky governor debates, and there was
(05:02):
a debate we did that I think changed the race.
In the twenty fifteen Kentucky Republican primary, Matt Bevin came
on and it's a lot of background, but he made
a statement that the polls, his people will tell you
elevated him from third to first in the polls. He
ended up winning the primary and then ended up winning
the election. People outside of Kentucky will not know what
(05:26):
the name Katina pal is, but there was a Louisville
basketball sex scandal and I was the first person to
get the woman at the center of it on the air,
and she said some wild stuff that still gets quoted
to this day and still gets brought up all the time.
I think that was probably the one that was the biggest.
But you know, in twenty sixteen, the Republican presidential primary
(05:49):
and the Democrat both came through Kentucky. So we had
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, did not
have Trump, but we ended up having all those people
on and those were kind of and I'm not even
a political show, but just having those moments, it was
kind of like, Wow, I can't believe we're talking to
Hillary Clinton. You know, that's crazy. Yeah, I mean the
key is to make that I'm a big believer that
(06:11):
local radio is about making your listeners feel like they're
in a community. I mean, that's not rocket science, but
you want listeners to feel like they are engaged in
a community with you and with the rest of the audience. So,
you know, during COVID, and I highly recommend this for people,
I have a text number that people can text in
(06:33):
during the show. A lot of people are scared to call,
so I have them text in and people send texts
all day right all day every day, and during COVID,
a lot of people were using that to express what
they were going through. They were saying, my mother just died,
I'm lonely, I'm sick, and it actually became a lot
(06:55):
to sit and read. But it also gave me a
sense of like how important this is to people because
this is their community in the same way COVID had
cut them off from the people in their town, their church,
et cetera. And they were feeling this community from us.
And I remember when COVID hit, thinking what are we
gonna do? Right, no sports, what we're gonna talk about?
(07:15):
It ended up being the biggest growth of our audience
of all time because people didn't have anything else to do,
so they sat and listen. And our audience grew more
during COVID than at any time in history, and a
lot of it stayed, which I think was interesting. After tragedies,
so when the big there's a bad tornado in Marshall County, Kentucky,
(07:38):
floods in eastern Kentucky, tornado in London, Kentucky, at those moments,
again people seemed to use it as a community gathering space,
and you just hear these tragedies. I mean the tornado
in Marshall County was tough because it happened. We were
on hours after it for a basketball postgame show, and
(07:58):
it just turned into people we calling worried about their
loved ones. You know, somebody talking about how multiple hurst
were driving by their house, and we end up. I
remember we were on a road trip. We were in Wisconsin,
and we're at an outback in Wisconsin doing this show,
and all of us are crying listening to these people.
So that's probably that's probably the toughest. But you know
(08:23):
I'm saying all this, I'm not talking about a lot
of sports. I think it's really important to remember people
can hear sports anywhere, right. The issue is can you
make it to where they want to hear you talk
about sports. So I use the example of my radio
he hero as Tony Krnheiser. Tony Kornheiser is a huge
Washington Nationals fans. I do not care about the Washington Nationals,
(08:45):
but I wanted to hear him talk about the Washington Nationals.
So if something happened, I was like, what's Tony gonna
say about it? That I think is when you know
you have that connection. Do you have it to where
they don't just want to hear about sports, they want
to hear you talk about sports, And that, I think
is how you really know you've gotten something. I'm honest,
(09:07):
like I lived my life on the air. Every single
thing that happens to me becomes part of my show.
Except dating. I learned that's a bad idea for a
lot of reasons. But besides dating, every single thing that
happens I express through the air. Now, I know a
lot of people are hesitant to do that, but I
do so. When I had about a few months where
(09:30):
I was having mental health struggles, I talked about it
on the air. I showed vulnerability. You know, if you're
going to be on the radio, you're, by nature, to
some extent arrogant if you're going to be on the
radio and think people should care what you talk about.
But I try to counter that by being vulnerable about
my weaknesses. So I'm in a state where everybody hunts, fishes,
is republican, has guns. I'm none of those things. I'm
(09:52):
a Democrat who scared of guns, does it, can't swim,
and you know all that stuff. But they know that
and I'm honest about it, and that makes it to
where they accept it. They can accept that difference. So
I think by living it's not easy. You know, We've
had I've had since I've done the show. My co
host has gotten divorced and he had to kind of
(10:15):
live that out through the show. I've lost relatives and
I've had to live that out through the show. I've
gotten fired from other jobs and had to live that
out through the show. It's not easy to be vulnerable,
but when you do, I think the audience gives you
some grace to then when you make a mistake or
when you make them mad, they'll they'll give you a
(10:36):
break because they know you just like they would their friend.
So it's hard. Listen, I was in the hospital, got out,
really struggled, but I knew at ten o'clock the button
comes on, you do it. But I would say this
is a hard day and like and I think the
audience appreciates that, and that's why I do it. Yeah,
all the time. I mean, I'm sure you're like this.
(10:57):
Anybody who's good at anything, it's probably just some extent
of perfectionist, right, and so nothing ever goes exactly like
you want. And there are times where I really was
excited about something and it was just a flop. The
person wasn't interesting. Maybe I didn't ask the right questions,
but you just have to keep going. That's one thing.
I'll dwell on it. But then you know, that's the
(11:17):
great thing about live radio. There's another day, right. You
don't have to sit there and stew in it. There's
another day the next day. And sometimes I look back
and go, Okay, when I'm done with my career, people
are not going to go back and listen to shows
from twenty years ago. So there's a sense that it's
not permanent. But the good thing is when you fail,
(11:38):
that's not permanent either. You're kind of judged by your
next one, so you might as well try to make
it good. I think it's very easy to live in
a bubble and forget who's listening to you. So, I mean,
I don't know if other shows are like this, but
every Friday we do a remote in front of people,
and we probably have at least fifty people every Friday
who come see me at some business. Because of that,
(12:01):
I can see on people's faces when I have them,
and when I don't, I can literally see if I
talk about this, I have them. If I talk about that,
I don't. I watch it, I feel it, and then
when you go on the air, you go you use
that as this is what works, this is what doesn't.
(12:22):
It's easy with radio people because you don't see your audience.
It's easy to kind of get detached from them, to
not not understand when they are in interested in you
and when they're not. But because I'm fortunate that every
Friday I see this visual thing, I can I'm sure
you're like this. I can feel on the air when
it's not working, even if I'm the only person sitting there,
(12:45):
I can feel it. I can feel when I don't
have the audience. That is something that takes time. But
I think radio people have to do it because if
you don't, if you're just talking about stuff that interests
you and the audience is interested, what's the point, you know?
So I don't do segments. Okay, So I think again,
this is just me and I not everybody agrees with this.
(13:07):
I think like cheesy, you know, deal or no deal?
Who's the chicken of the week, Like I hate this.
I just think it's so. I think it's so manufactured
and so stupid. What I do look forward to is,
you know, I sort of stole this from Tony Korneiser.
He would come in out of the break and whatever
rather than just playing generic bumper music. That's like, he
(13:33):
would play a song that was about what they had
talked about in the last segment and then talk about
it to start the segment. I think that I completely
stole that idea. So my producer, Shannon the Dude, he
listens to the segment. If we're talking about wedding rings,
he plays Golden Ring by George Jones coming in, and
(13:53):
then we go, oh, George Jones, and it can lead
to a conversation. I've been doing that for years, and
to me, that's brilliant because the one thing about music
is everybody likes music, and so that that's a little thing,
but it's really the only manufactured thing I do. I
genuinely hate when people are like, it's time to play
(14:14):
Forgotten Ner, Waiting, Lincoln or Brick. Yeah, I just hate it.
I do some work for a national sports stay well
ESPN Radio, and they do that all the time, and
I'm like, oh, this is awful. I love Kentucky plays
basketball games I do the pregame show. I love the
fifteen minutes before a big game. At the end of
(14:35):
my show, you know, maybe we're on location. We were
in Indianapolis last year before the Sweet Sixteen at a
bar with hundreds of people. You do your prediction. They're
hanging on every word. I love it. I also love
the moments after a big win. Okay, so when you're
doing a postgame show, that first moment after you come in,
when you've just won something and the fans are going crazy.
(14:57):
I really like that. I love in a world of podcasts,
video podcasts, streaming, all of that, the one thing we
have on live radio then nobody else has that we
can't lose is that in the moment excitement, where you are,
you are expressing to people the first reaction to whatever happened.
(15:22):
Maybe it's on a postgame show, maybe it's breaking news
during your radio show, but you are the person letting
this story come out through you. No other meentity can
do that, and that to me, when that happens, that's
the best. I remember Howard Stern was on radio when
(15:43):
the tower, when the planes hit the town. I've gone
back and I was listening. Love I've gone back and listened.
There's no more powerful I can see the video. It's
not the same as Howard Stern finding out processing it,
trying to figure out what it means, pain like that.
That's what radio does, and that's a tragedy, but it
(16:04):
also can do it in something positive. Radio I mean,
because you know, I mean there's times, but I actually
think radio, at least to me, is on a little
bit of a upswing post COVID, right, I mean, the
podcast world obviously it's grown exponentially, but it's also made
people reappreciate the value of audio. TV is actually much
(16:26):
less interesting to people now than it was ten years ago.
So I see podcasts and radio working together and sort of,
you know, the creation of words. We are so overwhelmed
by this and videos that now making it to where
you can do like the you know, the tricks of
the mind and talking and people visualizing it themselves, I
(16:49):
think has kind of been a rebirth. So I hope
that doesn't go away. And I also definitely hope, I mean,
local doesn't go away. I get the idea of the
nation's more, you know, it's we're closer together and all this,
but local is where it's at I do listen. I
(17:10):
do a national ESPN radio show. I enjoy it, but
it doesn't have half the impact that a local show
has in terms of how it really affects your audience.
I think it's I mean to me, it's on the upswing. Now.
The economics of it is a different thing, but in
terms of how much people want it, I think it's high. Look,
(17:32):
newspapers are going away, local television stations are becoming more
and more consolidated in a handful of companies, blogs and websites.
That's the world I come from, are there are fewer
and fewer. Local radio becomes the thing that is the
local connection to people, and that's why it tends to
(17:53):
have a little more staying power. You know, we all
thought radio go away because people could plug in their phones.
I still think people get in the car and turn
on the radio a lot of the time. And so
that's I think I'm much more optimistic about it today
than I was five years ago. It's personality driven, oh yeah,
and nothing lets you know a person better than radio.
(18:15):
You can be fake on TV, you can be fake,
and writing. You can even be fake in podcast because
you can edit. You cannot be fake in radio. You,
as my teacher in school would say, you is who
you is on the radio, right, And so I think
that's I think people appreciate that authenticity. Well, They've given
(18:36):
me a lot of opportunity over the years. I mean,
like I said, fifteen years ago, I was literally begging
somebody to work for free. And now you go through
all this time and I've had a chance to advance.
I've had a chance to help other people grow their careers,
and I've had a chance to pass on some of
the goodness that was passed on to me. You folks
(19:00):
can't see, but the guy interviewing me had me one time.
I made a joke about him on social media, and
instead of getting mad, he had me on And it
was kind of the first time that the iHeart building
even knew who I was. And I don't know that
I would be here without that. So to be able
to try to give up people those opportunities and kind of,
(19:20):
you know, pass on whatever goodness has been given me
is a good thing.
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