July 18, 2025 • 32 mins
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Just reviewing pulling data going back to February first of
President Trump, and it is approval and disapproval just by Republicans.
(00:21):
And the disapproval by Republicans was down at about five
percent on February first. It is now up to eleven
point five percent. However, that is not all Epstein's stuff,
(00:44):
because once he started doing things, and we'll put that
at second week of February, we started getting more and
more disapproval numbers and that has stayed up between ten
(01:06):
and seventeen percent since then. And people will say, well,
why is that? How can that be? Everybody loves Trump,
Everybody that you know feels the way you do. We
all have a bubble, an echo chamber. There are a
(01:28):
lot of people that are considered in this poll as Republicans,
but you have to realize that includes Liz Cheney or
Dick Cheney or George Bush or any of his family,
or any of the swamp who were kicked out of Washington,
d C. It has tended to be the case that
(01:49):
corporate Republicans are not MAGA. They don't like maga. You know,
so much of who and what we are has to
do with what we do for a living, and that's
not always the case. You may say that's not true
of you. Fine, everybody says that about everything, but whatever
(02:10):
it is. Oftentimes people view the world through the lens
of how they make a living, how they live their life,
what they personally believe, their own religion, and so that
colors to the extent that one guy thinks the sky's
(02:31):
red and the other guy thinks the sky's green, and
the other guy thinks the sky is purple, based on
that's what they do for a living, that's how they
make a living. People's view of tariffs tends to break
along the lines of if you are an importer of
(02:51):
goods from China, you don't say, well, I'm against tariffs
because it'll hurt my business because I import products that
compete with American products, and my products are cheaper because
they have child labor there, and because they take very
(03:12):
very aggressive measures to put the cheapest product into the
American marketplace in a short term to make money in
the long term, to put I mean in a short term,
to put American business out of business, and in the
long term to make more money as a result of
having a monopoly on it. We've seen that we saw
that with silicon chip dumps in the eighties with Japan.
(03:34):
So that person doesn't say I'm against tariffs because it'll
hurt my bottom line. That person will typically say no, no,
I'm for free trade. Okay. There are people who have
actual principles and they're considered freaks. Thomas Massey, Ran, Paul
(03:55):
Milton Friedman, Thomas Soul And that is because so many
people view everything in terms of whether it helps or
hurts them. People on welfare, they're not for reforming welfare
as a general rule. People who make their income, people
(04:16):
who have wealth and receive only dividends, they're all for
increasing the tax rate. Warren Buffett, that arrogant, hypocritical bastard,
came out during the Obama era and said, I support
President Trump's plan. I mean President Obama's plan because I
(04:38):
pay less as a percentage in taxes than my secretary does.
And that's just not right. And people said, oh my god,
maybe Obama's onto some the rich get rich or the
poor get poor. Even Warren Buffett says he pays more
(04:58):
in taxes in his terry, pays more in tax than
he does. Well, why is that because his secretary pays
based on income. The income tax is the primary means
by which we raise money for government in this country.
Warren Buffett doesn't take much, if any income. He takes
(05:20):
his wealth or converts his wealth from the stock market
from equities into cash, just to spend it. He doesn't
pay himself a big salary. The problem is we tax
the transaction between the employer and the employee. We don't
(05:40):
tax to the same extent the dividend, which is where
will real wealth is held. A lot of people get
sucked into the political nonsense that we want to tax
the rich. You're not taxing the rich, you dumb ass.
You're taxing a high earner. A high earner is relatively speaking,
(06:01):
just one wrung up the ladder from you. The rich
don't take salaries. That's what people don't understand. The rich
don't take salaries. The rich have dividends. They make their
money off investments, capital gains, and those are much lower
taxes than you're paying on income. But people say, I
(06:23):
lose all my money if I'm a small business, I
pay the payroll tax deduction, I pay my Social Security,
I pay my unemployment, I pay all these things. All
of these are an impediment to hiring. One of many
reasons that we started importing illegal aliens because illegal aliens
don't require all that you pay somebody under the table.
You don't have to pay for social Security, payroll tax
(06:45):
and all the transactions that make an employee more expensive,
all of the lawsuit abuse folks, when folks, when you
have all the labor law lawsuits, you drive up the cost.
All of those things drive up the cost of employees.
But you know what's gonna happen. We're going to lose
that as robots replace the laborer more and more, and
(07:06):
government's gonna have to find a new way to tax
that relationship. They'll have to tax the robot. Phone lines
are open seven one three nine one thousand, seven one
three nine, one thousand. We would get to it in
just a moment. Lena Hidalgo is asking for a tax increase. Ah, yes,
(07:29):
she's asking for more of your money. You can't believe
this would happen, but it is. We'll play that for
you in just a moment. I wanted to go back
to the radio business, and I use television as a
comparative because they are still media businesses and there are
a lot of overlaps when when you're in a major
(07:53):
city like Houston, you have several radio usters. I don't Cumulus, CBS, iHeart,
Iheart's the one I work with. Each one of them
has few stations now they have whatever K love is
part of. I don't keep up with it like I
(08:14):
used to, so I'm a little short on my knowledge.
And then you'll have a few independent stations. The independent
stations are like the station I grew up with, KOGT
in Orange. Gary Stelly still runs a website which is
kind of the news of Orange, and he does podcasts,
he does interviews, but he doesn't do the station anymore.
(08:38):
And and for everyone who says, you know, the independent
station's going away and that's corporate evil, corporate greed or okay,
maybe that's true, and that kind of fits into my
lifelong mindset that you know, the big guy's bad, the
little guy's good. But let me let me give you
a case study of KOGT.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So I grew up listening to this little station in
Orange and they played a combination of country and local talk.
They read the cafeteria menus of the local schools for
the week, no joke. That's why that's why Shirley Q
Licker did that. That came from KGT. They read the
cafeteria menus. When we went to the state playoffs in
(09:22):
Litle League, they came up. One guy came up and
broadcast our games live and interviewed us between games. In
a little town like Orange that doesn't happen. It was
hyper local radio. The car dealer, the restaurant, the lawyer,
(09:43):
the dentist, the doctor. It was almost more what I
do now a sponsorship of the station than it was advertising.
The community believed in the station, and the community supported it.
The businesses of the community, not not listeners supported. There
wasn't a membership or anything like that. And so Gary Stelly,
(10:09):
who was a couple years ahead of Meat orange Field
High School, he ends up buying the station early to
mid twenties of his twenties, and he is just a
bundle of energy. Loves Orange, did a great job with it.
A couple of years ago, I get the message that
Gary's giving the license back, given the federal broadcast license back.
(10:34):
Tried to sell it, couldn't and because nobody's buying these
little independent stations anymore. So and I talked to radio
brokers all the time. It's hard to sell these little
stations because there's no money in them. So he gives
the license back. And I called him one night and
I said, Gary, how much would it cost to put
(10:54):
your to keep from that license lapsing because you have
like a thirty day or sixty day kind of lemon law,
you know, regret that you can get it back. And
he said, oh, Mike, it's too late. I don't want
to do it. I said how much what it costs?
He said to be one hundred thousand dollars. I said,
how about this. I will headline an event. I'll put
up the first twenty five thousand. I will break arms,
(11:17):
bend arms, beg borrow steel, get artists to come and perform.
We'll raise two fifty We'll give you a cushion doing operating.
We'll give you some operating cash to work with. I
don't want to see KLGT go away. And he said,
are you trying to buy the station? I said, hell no,
I don't want the headache of that. By the way,
(11:37):
I'm under contract. I can't do that anyway. I have
no interest in running a little station that can't make
any money. It's just important to me being from Orange,
that it's still be there. I don't want that, you know,
it's part of my memory. And he said, no, no, no,
no no, I'm not running the station anymore. I'm running
the website. The website is good for me. I'm not
(11:59):
a young man anymore. I get to do what I do.
He's basically the mayor of Orange without being the official
mayor of Orange. And you know, he keeps everybody informed,
he tells the stories, he does all the wonderful things
that you should do if you're the mayor and love
the town. But in fact he just owns the radio
station now, just the website, KOGT. And we had a
(12:23):
long talk about the economics of that. And I find
out after that from a radio broker the number of
licenses being sent back from independent stations like KOGT because
they don't make sense anymore economically. Well, that's not corporate greed.
(12:45):
I'm all for I'm against big Pharmer, I'm against both
big everything. But there are things that kind of ran
their course. And that might mean that the town carnival,
it might mean the local radio station. So that's what
happened with those stays when those stations are still in existence,
and there are still plenty, and KLGT was a great example.
(13:07):
It is locally owned by a guy who's probably not
making any money and he just loves what he's doing.
He's got the insurance agency in town, or he's got
the real estate firm. This is very common. When you
drive through a place like Tyler or Orange or parts
of Louisiana or West Texas, you'll have an independent station
(13:32):
where the owner is also on air in the mornings
and then they then they flip to some music or
our show or whatever else. If they're a music station
in a town like that, they're typically not making any money.
But that's okay. It's it's it's a it's a passion,
(13:52):
it's a hobby. It's a project. But if you were
to say I want more radio like that, that's like
going to a backyard barbecue and loving the barbecue and
saying I want more of this. But he's bought the
best cut of meat, the best sauce, and he's cooking
it twice as long as anyone else. You wouldn't actually
(14:14):
pay for it. It's unrealistic. It's a one off hobby project.
That's what this guy does so in the big cities.
It is a corporation just like everything else, car dealerships, restaurants,
everything else. And so media is a business. This is
hard for some people to understand. They think media should
(14:35):
be you know, hell church has become a business. Media
is a business. It has investors. It's public for most
of them. They're publicly traded. They want to return on
their money, the whole deal. The only reason our show
gets to work the way it does is because we
built an audience of you, which is the holy grail.
(14:58):
Other stations don't do that. They just have to try
to get as many people as they possibly can. We
fortunately don't have to do that. That's why I can
tell people to kiss off of Jim. Can you pot
up Bill online? To please? Bill? You were on the
Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Sir, Thank you Michael. Yeah, this is my birthday. I
turned eighty two today. Well, glad to be on and
always glad to talk to you. I've got it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, hold on, But how is being eighty two different
than you expected it to be when you were, say,
twenty five.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Well, I've done a whole lot more things and enjoyed
every bit of them and did not know how far
I would go. My mom died when she was eighty two,
but so it's one of these things. And I'm still
going a lot stronger than she was. So we'll see
(15:58):
how this goes.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Should be interesting, all right, You said you had a
couple of things.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, when we go back to the Obama era with
the if you lost your job, learned to code. It's
kind of funny because I was nearly fifty years as
an IT professional programming manager in programming, and I can
teach you to program, but I can't teach you the
application if you don't understand what time management is, or
(16:28):
inventory or all the other kinds of things that we
need programming for. Teaching you how to code isn't going
to do a dangmit of good. You know, you need
to understand the application. What are we trying to do
with this program? What do you need? Yeah, and that's
the hard part, And so many people don't have a
grasp of or there's two kinds of people, people that
(16:51):
see details and people that see the big picture that
can't see the other. There are very few of us,
I found out that can see both. And that's a
miracle when you can, you can get things done.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
It's interesting when you come across the GUYDN with both
technical expertise and the ability to communicate, because we sort
of think of computer people or engineers or mathematicians, as
you know, put them in the lab or the room
and give them the work to do, and then the
big money is in the guys that are better communicators.
(17:28):
And maybe they're visionaries, and maybe they're big thinkers, but
often they're just good communicators. And I find it interesting
that people think that the importance of communication has diminished
because of technology, and I would argue that the importance
of communication has increased because of communical because of communication,
because of technology. And interestingly, Donald Trump is a study
(17:54):
in communication in that which is surprising because he's not
an eloquent speaker. He's not in the way that Reagan was,
or in the way that a great debater or orator
would be. Trump's unique superpower is that he has an
(18:16):
ability to speak directly to the masses apparently, I mean,
especially working class people, in a language that is unvarnished,
very direct, and punches very hard. I describe it as
sort of an oratorical earnest hemingway there are no flourishes,
(18:37):
there's no unnecessary there no parenthetical statements. He doesn't doubt anything.
When he makes a resolute statement, he doesn't double back
to say, well, of course there would be this. He
just states what he's stating in a very clear, concise manner.
And I think it's incredibly effective, and it makes media
(18:59):
and pointy heads and academics. It makes them crazy because
they think that this is the language of the poor,
and they hate the poor, as they call them, and
so they don't like that there is a sort of
dog whistle language with which he can he can communicate.
But anyway, go ahead, Bill, I'm sorry I took over
your time.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I appreciate that. That's one of those things that happened
to me growing up in my grandfather's waiting room with
old people. So I was this little boy and I
could see the pictures understand the pictures, but I couldn't
understand the words, and these people would talk to me.
So by the time I was six or seven, I
had a college vocabulary. Well, I found that worked in
my detriment, because you can't use four and five syllable
(19:45):
words with people that don't understand.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yes, you know, what they they become. Big words can
become for many people a barrier to act sess and
intimacy and connection. And that's hard for people to understand
that they think. You know, it's funny when when people
(20:09):
think how lawyers talk, they assume that lawyers talk in
a manner that uses big words, but in fact quite
the opposite. Let's go to SID. Jim, I'm having trouble
with with the with the phone system, so you have
to handle it for me. Let's go to SID. SID.
You're on the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Go ahead, Hey, Michael just said, Oh, that's all how
radio works. And then also small town stations. I through
my life experiences, was blessed to have a dream come
true and it all started with In Rosenberg. I used
to go and listen to this guy on kf r D,
(20:52):
George Lasher, and he did a coffee pot show in
the morning Monday through Friday. Did a character Uncle Charlie,
kind of like you know Hudson Herridon used to do
on KLT. But on Saturdays he would do a show
called the Sound of Today and he would program all
his own music album Morion had Rock five Hours that
seed planted in me. And years later when I lived
(21:15):
in KC, Kansas City, I had the opportunity to go
and work at KKFI, which is a community station. They
ran PACIFICA radio things and I got to do a
show once a week two and a half sometimes three hours,
mostly three hours, and wrote the whole show myself. It
was like a seventies type board WKRP in Cincinnati type board,
(21:38):
but we had a tower for three CD players versus
two turntables, and man, I got to write all the
music and program it and do everything. And I would
have people call in and go. That song brought me
back to this, and I understand it was never if
(21:58):
I said, hey, we're going to play Jetro Tall Yes
and led Zeppelin, You're not going to guess what I'm
gonna play. Ramone reminds me of the guy that got
me to break into radio station, because this guy's Ramone
has a musical expanse. It's vast, right. But it was
just such a blessing to be able to do that.
And you're right, Michael. When prisoners write, they used the
(22:20):
whole piece of paper. Man, when they write a letter.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
It fascinates me. I cannot help myself when a letter
comes in from an inmate. It has to be marked
and stamped and all that on the outside. I mean,
it's it's very clear you don't. It doesn't and and
I carefully open it because there's going to be writing
on the inside of the envelope. There's going to be
writing on it. Is It's interesting, you know you. I
(22:47):
would have guessed you have some broadcast experience because you
have a great voice for broadcast, which I'm guessing is
a little bit cigarette fueled. You probably started with a
good voice and it became a great voice. But you
also have a great delivery for broadcast, as somebody who
has has done a fair amount of it. And yeah,
(23:08):
good on you. But you know, I tell people all
the time there for the heyday of radio that people
think of and remember, it was almost impossible to get
in when I got into radio, which was which was
later into that process but kind of beginning the real
ascension of talk, it was almost impossible to get on
(23:33):
the air. I worked for two years for free. I
didn't draw salary for two years, just to get an
opportunity to do it. You know. On the subject of
content and looking for content, we like when I'm in
Colorado and I go for a hike. It's going to
(23:54):
be two to three hours, and it's when I clear
my mind. It's when I like to think. It's also
when I like to consume content, and so if I forget,
I don't have any good content. I have subscriptions to podcasts,
but I will sometimes go looking for a book on tape.
(24:16):
Audible does a great job with that, and there's a
whole library throughout history of great books that maybe you
read before and haven't read in a long time, or
never read and now would be a good time for that,
or podcasts. I'm just blown away that whatever your interest,
(24:39):
there is somebody who's doing a podcast on that. Cigars, bourbons, wines, beers,
True crime has to be the number one category. Automobiles,
classic cars, Aviation. Chance McClean sent me a thing, a
guy that does everything you want to know about private aviation, chartering, owning,
(25:05):
the types of planes and maintenance. He said, it's really geeky,
nerdy stuff, but I figured you'd get a kick out
of it. There is so much content out there because
in this sense, for everyone pining for the old days,
in this sense, we're in the golden era of content creation,
(25:26):
because in the past, would you would have whatever. The
radio companies had more power before than they do today.
Hear me out on this. In the past, the only
way you could hear what somebody had to say is
if a radio station the gatekeeper allowed their content onto
(25:51):
the distribution channel. Now, granted, there was a greater diversification
of radio stations, but it was still extremely limited and
unless you were listening at that moment to that station,
you didn't hear the content. There was no way to
hear it again later unless they rebroadcast again. You had
(26:11):
to be a real time consumer of that narrow bandwidth.
Today's world, there is no limitation. If you have a
microphone and plug it into a computer, there's every podcast
app known to mankind that you can literally just talk.
(26:32):
You want to tell stories, you want to interview people,
you want to go do a travel diary, whatever it is. Now,
you're not guaranteed anybody's going to listen, but if you're
any good they will. They'll find you, And if you're
halfway aggressive, you post on social media and you get
(26:53):
a few other people to start telling your story of
what you're doing, and before you know it, you're out
there you can compete with the biggest radio station out there.
I mean, Rogan wasn't picked up by a radio station.
I think it's I think it's a black eye on
the radio business. Considering the audience he built. And think
about this, Think about the qualitative, not just a quantitative,
(27:17):
the size of the audience. Think about how loyal a
listener is if they will listen to the entirety of
your podcast. In your podcast is three hours long, most
people Mike Road does five to twelve minutes or so,
just little bite sized pieces. And I like that. I
(27:39):
think Rogan is a very important part of the media landscape.
I think he's even good for the country because he
challenges people to think. A lot of people will love
Rogan nine days out of ten, and then they'll say
he asked a question about this, and they get upset.
But if you are a true pursuer of honesty and
(28:00):
and truth, and you understand that you pursue paths that
turn out to be dead ends, you end up entertaining
ideas that are stupid or ridiculous or silly or whatever else.
But if you do not dismiss things out of hand,
because you really do want to question and to challenge
(28:20):
and you do understand that a lot of people lie
to you, then you appreciate things like that. I wouldn't
want that every day, but a lot of people do.
My point is the podcast enabled a guy who had
been a mediocre comedian. I don't think Rogan's a great
comedian by any stretch. I don't think he's a bad comedian.
(28:42):
He made a living in it, and then he goes
into kind of whatever you have to do, the stupid
TV shows and all that. But all the way, he's
building life experiences, he's building relationships, big part of his success,
and then when he goes into the podcast world, he
parlayed those relationships and a very inquisitive mind into the
(29:08):
biggest podcast of them all. And radio couldn't hold him back.
Corporate radio couldn't hold him back, nobody could hold him back.
He built an audience with whom he communed directly, and
because the technology advanced to the point that companies can't
control it any longer. We saw that with newspapers. The
(29:30):
newspaper controlled what was printed and published, or the book publisher.
But just stick to the newspaper for a moment. They
controlled what got in and what didn't even all the
way down to the letters to the editor. That was
their attempt to try to get some common man injection
into their otherwise closed society. Well then the blogs started. Well,
(29:53):
then the bulletin board started, and then the blogs started,
which very few people do anymore. And then social media
st and that allowed anybody and everybody who had a
thought to be able to distribute that to as big
an audience as was willing to consume it. And some
people feel that was a negative thing. Oh well, now
(30:14):
you've got a bunch of dumb ideas out there. Can't
you sift through the dumb ideas? Yeah, but they're out
there saying this, this, and this. A person making a
stupid statement doesn't make it true. If a person making
a stupid statement challenges your connection to the truth, or
in your opinion, challenges the truth itself, then you have
(30:36):
to ask yourself, is the truth really the truth as
you know it and not Scalia. Clarence Thomas gave a
speech a few years ago where the speech can be
known as true North, and if you find it on YouTube,
you'll see it for yourself. And he said, true North
(30:58):
is true North. If you're being washed around in the
sea on your boat and you've lost your compass. True
North doesn't change, You're just trying to find it. The
truth doesn't change, no matter what happens, no matter what
winds blow, no matter what people say. Truth doesn't change.
(31:18):
And you don't need to be threatened by the fact
that there are idiots out there saying things that are crazy.
A lot of our folks go go mad trying to
silence or understand crazy people. Whether it's the incoming mayor
of New York or AOC or Sila Jackson Lee or
anyone else, they're crazy. Once you understand that, you have
(31:41):
a certain peace of mind, don't associate with them, don't
hire them, don't marry them, don't be friends with them,
don't have them as your token friend, don't follow them
or have them follow you on social media. Move on
and live your happy life. There's a reason I don't
live in Saudi Arabia. There's a reason, and I don't
live in China. I wouldn't be happy there, So why
(32:03):
would I associate with crazy people on social media or
gopher beers with them or whatever else. It's a good, good,
good recipe for being a whole lot happier,
Just reviewing pulling data going back to February first of
President Trump, and it is approval and disapproval just by Republicans.
(00:21):
And the disapproval by Republicans was down at about five
percent on February first. It is now up to eleven
point five percent. However, that is not all Epstein's stuff,
(00:44):
because once he started doing things, and we'll put that
at second week of February, we started getting more and
more disapproval numbers and that has stayed up between ten
(01:06):
and seventeen percent since then. And people will say, well,
why is that? How can that be? Everybody loves Trump,
Everybody that you know feels the way you do. We
all have a bubble, an echo chamber. There are a
(01:28):
lot of people that are considered in this poll as Republicans,
but you have to realize that includes Liz Cheney or
Dick Cheney or George Bush or any of his family,
or any of the swamp who were kicked out of Washington,
d C. It has tended to be the case that
(01:49):
corporate Republicans are not MAGA. They don't like maga. You know,
so much of who and what we are has to
do with what we do for a living, and that's
not always the case. You may say that's not true
of you. Fine, everybody says that about everything, but whatever
(02:10):
it is. Oftentimes people view the world through the lens
of how they make a living, how they live their life,
what they personally believe, their own religion, and so that
colors to the extent that one guy thinks the sky's
(02:31):
red and the other guy thinks the sky's green, and
the other guy thinks the sky is purple, based on
that's what they do for a living, that's how they
make a living. People's view of tariffs tends to break
along the lines of if you are an importer of
(02:51):
goods from China, you don't say, well, I'm against tariffs
because it'll hurt my business because I import products that
compete with American products, and my products are cheaper because
they have child labor there, and because they take very
(03:12):
very aggressive measures to put the cheapest product into the
American marketplace in a short term to make money in
the long term, to put I mean in a short term,
to put American business out of business, and in the
long term to make more money as a result of
having a monopoly on it. We've seen that we saw
that with silicon chip dumps in the eighties with Japan.
(03:34):
So that person doesn't say I'm against tariffs because it'll
hurt my bottom line. That person will typically say no, no,
I'm for free trade. Okay. There are people who have
actual principles and they're considered freaks. Thomas Massey, Ran, Paul
(03:55):
Milton Friedman, Thomas Soul And that is because so many
people view everything in terms of whether it helps or
hurts them. People on welfare, they're not for reforming welfare
as a general rule. People who make their income, people
(04:16):
who have wealth and receive only dividends, they're all for
increasing the tax rate. Warren Buffett, that arrogant, hypocritical bastard,
came out during the Obama era and said, I support
President Trump's plan. I mean President Obama's plan because I
(04:38):
pay less as a percentage in taxes than my secretary does.
And that's just not right. And people said, oh my god,
maybe Obama's onto some the rich get rich or the
poor get poor. Even Warren Buffett says he pays more
(04:58):
in taxes in his terry, pays more in tax than
he does. Well, why is that because his secretary pays
based on income. The income tax is the primary means
by which we raise money for government in this country.
Warren Buffett doesn't take much, if any income. He takes
(05:20):
his wealth or converts his wealth from the stock market
from equities into cash, just to spend it. He doesn't
pay himself a big salary. The problem is we tax
the transaction between the employer and the employee. We don't
(05:40):
tax to the same extent the dividend, which is where
will real wealth is held. A lot of people get
sucked into the political nonsense that we want to tax
the rich. You're not taxing the rich, you dumb ass.
You're taxing a high earner. A high earner is relatively speaking,
(06:01):
just one wrung up the ladder from you. The rich
don't take salaries. That's what people don't understand. The rich
don't take salaries. The rich have dividends. They make their
money off investments, capital gains, and those are much lower
taxes than you're paying on income. But people say, I
(06:23):
lose all my money if I'm a small business, I
pay the payroll tax deduction, I pay my Social Security,
I pay my unemployment, I pay all these things. All
of these are an impediment to hiring. One of many
reasons that we started importing illegal aliens because illegal aliens
don't require all that you pay somebody under the table.
You don't have to pay for social Security, payroll tax
(06:45):
and all the transactions that make an employee more expensive,
all of the lawsuit abuse folks, when folks, when you
have all the labor law lawsuits, you drive up the cost.
All of those things drive up the cost of employees.
But you know what's gonna happen. We're going to lose
that as robots replace the laborer more and more, and
(07:06):
government's gonna have to find a new way to tax
that relationship. They'll have to tax the robot. Phone lines
are open seven one three nine one thousand, seven one
three nine, one thousand. We would get to it in
just a moment. Lena Hidalgo is asking for a tax increase. Ah, yes,
(07:29):
she's asking for more of your money. You can't believe
this would happen, but it is. We'll play that for
you in just a moment. I wanted to go back
to the radio business, and I use television as a
comparative because they are still media businesses and there are
a lot of overlaps when when you're in a major
(07:53):
city like Houston, you have several radio usters. I don't Cumulus, CBS, iHeart,
Iheart's the one I work with. Each one of them
has few stations now they have whatever K love is
part of. I don't keep up with it like I
(08:14):
used to, so I'm a little short on my knowledge.
And then you'll have a few independent stations. The independent
stations are like the station I grew up with, KOGT
in Orange. Gary Stelly still runs a website which is
kind of the news of Orange, and he does podcasts,
he does interviews, but he doesn't do the station anymore.
(08:38):
And and for everyone who says, you know, the independent
station's going away and that's corporate evil, corporate greed or okay,
maybe that's true, and that kind of fits into my
lifelong mindset that you know, the big guy's bad, the
little guy's good. But let me let me give you
a case study of KOGT.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So I grew up listening to this little station in
Orange and they played a combination of country and local talk.
They read the cafeteria menus of the local schools for
the week, no joke. That's why that's why Shirley Q
Licker did that. That came from KGT. They read the
cafeteria menus. When we went to the state playoffs in
(09:22):
Litle League, they came up. One guy came up and
broadcast our games live and interviewed us between games. In
a little town like Orange that doesn't happen. It was
hyper local radio. The car dealer, the restaurant, the lawyer,
(09:43):
the dentist, the doctor. It was almost more what I
do now a sponsorship of the station than it was advertising.
The community believed in the station, and the community supported it.
The businesses of the community, not not listeners supported. There
wasn't a membership or anything like that. And so Gary Stelly,
(10:09):
who was a couple years ahead of Meat orange Field
High School, he ends up buying the station early to
mid twenties of his twenties, and he is just a
bundle of energy. Loves Orange, did a great job with it.
A couple of years ago, I get the message that
Gary's giving the license back, given the federal broadcast license back.
(10:34):
Tried to sell it, couldn't and because nobody's buying these
little independent stations anymore. So and I talked to radio
brokers all the time. It's hard to sell these little
stations because there's no money in them. So he gives
the license back. And I called him one night and
I said, Gary, how much would it cost to put
(10:54):
your to keep from that license lapsing because you have
like a thirty day or sixty day kind of lemon law,
you know, regret that you can get it back. And
he said, oh, Mike, it's too late. I don't want
to do it. I said how much what it costs?
He said to be one hundred thousand dollars. I said,
how about this. I will headline an event. I'll put
up the first twenty five thousand. I will break arms,
(11:17):
bend arms, beg borrow steel, get artists to come and perform.
We'll raise two fifty We'll give you a cushion doing operating.
We'll give you some operating cash to work with. I
don't want to see KLGT go away. And he said,
are you trying to buy the station? I said, hell no,
I don't want the headache of that. By the way,
(11:37):
I'm under contract. I can't do that anyway. I have
no interest in running a little station that can't make
any money. It's just important to me being from Orange,
that it's still be there. I don't want that, you know,
it's part of my memory. And he said, no, no, no,
no no, I'm not running the station anymore. I'm running
the website. The website is good for me. I'm not
(11:59):
a young man anymore. I get to do what I do.
He's basically the mayor of Orange without being the official
mayor of Orange. And you know, he keeps everybody informed,
he tells the stories, he does all the wonderful things
that you should do if you're the mayor and love
the town. But in fact he just owns the radio
station now, just the website, KOGT. And we had a
(12:23):
long talk about the economics of that. And I find
out after that from a radio broker the number of
licenses being sent back from independent stations like KOGT because
they don't make sense anymore economically. Well, that's not corporate greed.
(12:45):
I'm all for I'm against big Pharmer, I'm against both
big everything. But there are things that kind of ran
their course. And that might mean that the town carnival,
it might mean the local radio station. So that's what
happened with those stays when those stations are still in existence,
and there are still plenty, and KLGT was a great example.
(13:07):
It is locally owned by a guy who's probably not
making any money and he just loves what he's doing.
He's got the insurance agency in town, or he's got
the real estate firm. This is very common. When you
drive through a place like Tyler or Orange or parts
of Louisiana or West Texas, you'll have an independent station
(13:32):
where the owner is also on air in the mornings
and then they then they flip to some music or
our show or whatever else. If they're a music station
in a town like that, they're typically not making any money.
But that's okay. It's it's it's a it's a passion,
(13:52):
it's a hobby. It's a project. But if you were
to say I want more radio like that, that's like
going to a backyard barbecue and loving the barbecue and
saying I want more of this. But he's bought the
best cut of meat, the best sauce, and he's cooking
it twice as long as anyone else. You wouldn't actually
(14:14):
pay for it. It's unrealistic. It's a one off hobby project.
That's what this guy does so in the big cities.
It is a corporation just like everything else, car dealerships, restaurants,
everything else. And so media is a business. This is
hard for some people to understand. They think media should
(14:35):
be you know, hell church has become a business. Media
is a business. It has investors. It's public for most
of them. They're publicly traded. They want to return on
their money, the whole deal. The only reason our show
gets to work the way it does is because we
built an audience of you, which is the holy grail.
(14:58):
Other stations don't do that. They just have to try
to get as many people as they possibly can. We
fortunately don't have to do that. That's why I can
tell people to kiss off of Jim. Can you pot
up Bill online? To please? Bill? You were on the
Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Sir, Thank you Michael. Yeah, this is my birthday. I
turned eighty two today. Well, glad to be on and
always glad to talk to you. I've got it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, hold on, But how is being eighty two different
than you expected it to be when you were, say,
twenty five.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Well, I've done a whole lot more things and enjoyed
every bit of them and did not know how far
I would go. My mom died when she was eighty two,
but so it's one of these things. And I'm still
going a lot stronger than she was. So we'll see
(15:58):
how this goes.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Should be interesting, all right, You said you had a
couple of things.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, when we go back to the Obama era with
the if you lost your job, learned to code. It's
kind of funny because I was nearly fifty years as
an IT professional programming manager in programming, and I can
teach you to program, but I can't teach you the
application if you don't understand what time management is, or
(16:28):
inventory or all the other kinds of things that we
need programming for. Teaching you how to code isn't going
to do a dangmit of good. You know, you need
to understand the application. What are we trying to do
with this program? What do you need? Yeah, and that's
the hard part, And so many people don't have a
grasp of or there's two kinds of people, people that
(16:51):
see details and people that see the big picture that
can't see the other. There are very few of us,
I found out that can see both. And that's a
miracle when you can, you can get things done.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
It's interesting when you come across the GUYDN with both
technical expertise and the ability to communicate, because we sort
of think of computer people or engineers or mathematicians, as
you know, put them in the lab or the room
and give them the work to do, and then the
big money is in the guys that are better communicators.
(17:28):
And maybe they're visionaries, and maybe they're big thinkers, but
often they're just good communicators. And I find it interesting
that people think that the importance of communication has diminished
because of technology, and I would argue that the importance
of communication has increased because of communical because of communication,
because of technology. And interestingly, Donald Trump is a study
(17:54):
in communication in that which is surprising because he's not
an eloquent speaker. He's not in the way that Reagan was,
or in the way that a great debater or orator
would be. Trump's unique superpower is that he has an
(18:16):
ability to speak directly to the masses apparently, I mean,
especially working class people, in a language that is unvarnished,
very direct, and punches very hard. I describe it as
sort of an oratorical earnest hemingway there are no flourishes,
(18:37):
there's no unnecessary there no parenthetical statements. He doesn't doubt anything.
When he makes a resolute statement, he doesn't double back
to say, well, of course there would be this. He
just states what he's stating in a very clear, concise manner.
And I think it's incredibly effective, and it makes media
(18:59):
and pointy heads and academics. It makes them crazy because
they think that this is the language of the poor,
and they hate the poor, as they call them, and
so they don't like that there is a sort of
dog whistle language with which he can he can communicate.
But anyway, go ahead, Bill, I'm sorry I took over
your time.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I appreciate that. That's one of those things that happened
to me growing up in my grandfather's waiting room with
old people. So I was this little boy and I
could see the pictures understand the pictures, but I couldn't
understand the words, and these people would talk to me.
So by the time I was six or seven, I
had a college vocabulary. Well, I found that worked in
my detriment, because you can't use four and five syllable
(19:45):
words with people that don't understand.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yes, you know, what they they become. Big words can
become for many people a barrier to act sess and
intimacy and connection. And that's hard for people to understand
that they think. You know, it's funny when when people
(20:09):
think how lawyers talk, they assume that lawyers talk in
a manner that uses big words, but in fact quite
the opposite. Let's go to SID. Jim, I'm having trouble
with with the with the phone system, so you have
to handle it for me. Let's go to SID. SID.
You're on the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Go ahead, Hey, Michael just said, Oh, that's all how
radio works. And then also small town stations. I through
my life experiences, was blessed to have a dream come
true and it all started with In Rosenberg. I used
to go and listen to this guy on kf r D,
(20:52):
George Lasher, and he did a coffee pot show in
the morning Monday through Friday. Did a character Uncle Charlie,
kind of like you know Hudson Herridon used to do
on KLT. But on Saturdays he would do a show
called the Sound of Today and he would program all
his own music album Morion had Rock five Hours that
seed planted in me. And years later when I lived
(21:15):
in KC, Kansas City, I had the opportunity to go
and work at KKFI, which is a community station. They
ran PACIFICA radio things and I got to do a
show once a week two and a half sometimes three hours,
mostly three hours, and wrote the whole show myself. It
was like a seventies type board WKRP in Cincinnati type board,
(21:38):
but we had a tower for three CD players versus
two turntables, and man, I got to write all the
music and program it and do everything. And I would
have people call in and go. That song brought me
back to this, and I understand it was never if
(21:58):
I said, hey, we're going to play Jetro Tall Yes
and led Zeppelin, You're not going to guess what I'm
gonna play. Ramone reminds me of the guy that got
me to break into radio station, because this guy's Ramone
has a musical expanse. It's vast, right. But it was
just such a blessing to be able to do that.
And you're right, Michael. When prisoners write, they used the
(22:20):
whole piece of paper. Man, when they write a letter.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
It fascinates me. I cannot help myself when a letter
comes in from an inmate. It has to be marked
and stamped and all that on the outside. I mean,
it's it's very clear you don't. It doesn't and and
I carefully open it because there's going to be writing
on the inside of the envelope. There's going to be
writing on it. Is It's interesting, you know you. I
(22:47):
would have guessed you have some broadcast experience because you
have a great voice for broadcast, which I'm guessing is
a little bit cigarette fueled. You probably started with a
good voice and it became a great voice. But you
also have a great delivery for broadcast, as somebody who
has has done a fair amount of it. And yeah,
(23:08):
good on you. But you know, I tell people all
the time there for the heyday of radio that people
think of and remember, it was almost impossible to get
in when I got into radio, which was which was
later into that process but kind of beginning the real
ascension of talk, it was almost impossible to get on
(23:33):
the air. I worked for two years for free. I
didn't draw salary for two years, just to get an
opportunity to do it. You know. On the subject of
content and looking for content, we like when I'm in
Colorado and I go for a hike. It's going to
(23:54):
be two to three hours, and it's when I clear
my mind. It's when I like to think. It's also
when I like to consume content, and so if I forget,
I don't have any good content. I have subscriptions to podcasts,
but I will sometimes go looking for a book on tape.
(24:16):
Audible does a great job with that, and there's a
whole library throughout history of great books that maybe you
read before and haven't read in a long time, or
never read and now would be a good time for that,
or podcasts. I'm just blown away that whatever your interest,
(24:39):
there is somebody who's doing a podcast on that. Cigars, bourbons, wines, beers,
True crime has to be the number one category. Automobiles,
classic cars, Aviation. Chance McClean sent me a thing, a
guy that does everything you want to know about private aviation, chartering, owning,
(25:05):
the types of planes and maintenance. He said, it's really geeky,
nerdy stuff, but I figured you'd get a kick out
of it. There is so much content out there because
in this sense, for everyone pining for the old days,
in this sense, we're in the golden era of content creation,
(25:26):
because in the past, would you would have whatever. The
radio companies had more power before than they do today.
Hear me out on this. In the past, the only
way you could hear what somebody had to say is
if a radio station the gatekeeper allowed their content onto
(25:51):
the distribution channel. Now, granted, there was a greater diversification
of radio stations, but it was still extremely limited and
unless you were listening at that moment to that station,
you didn't hear the content. There was no way to
hear it again later unless they rebroadcast again. You had
(26:11):
to be a real time consumer of that narrow bandwidth.
Today's world, there is no limitation. If you have a
microphone and plug it into a computer, there's every podcast
app known to mankind that you can literally just talk.
(26:32):
You want to tell stories, you want to interview people,
you want to go do a travel diary, whatever it is. Now,
you're not guaranteed anybody's going to listen, but if you're
any good they will. They'll find you, And if you're
halfway aggressive, you post on social media and you get
(26:53):
a few other people to start telling your story of
what you're doing, and before you know it, you're out
there you can compete with the biggest radio station out there.
I mean, Rogan wasn't picked up by a radio station.
I think it's I think it's a black eye on
the radio business. Considering the audience he built. And think
about this, Think about the qualitative, not just a quantitative,
(27:17):
the size of the audience. Think about how loyal a
listener is if they will listen to the entirety of
your podcast. In your podcast is three hours long, most
people Mike Road does five to twelve minutes or so,
just little bite sized pieces. And I like that. I
(27:39):
think Rogan is a very important part of the media landscape.
I think he's even good for the country because he
challenges people to think. A lot of people will love
Rogan nine days out of ten, and then they'll say
he asked a question about this, and they get upset.
But if you are a true pursuer of honesty and
(28:00):
and truth, and you understand that you pursue paths that
turn out to be dead ends, you end up entertaining
ideas that are stupid or ridiculous or silly or whatever else.
But if you do not dismiss things out of hand,
because you really do want to question and to challenge
(28:20):
and you do understand that a lot of people lie
to you, then you appreciate things like that. I wouldn't
want that every day, but a lot of people do.
My point is the podcast enabled a guy who had
been a mediocre comedian. I don't think Rogan's a great
comedian by any stretch. I don't think he's a bad comedian.
(28:42):
He made a living in it, and then he goes
into kind of whatever you have to do, the stupid
TV shows and all that. But all the way, he's
building life experiences, he's building relationships, big part of his success,
and then when he goes into the podcast world, he
parlayed those relationships and a very inquisitive mind into the
(29:08):
biggest podcast of them all. And radio couldn't hold him back.
Corporate radio couldn't hold him back, nobody could hold him back.
He built an audience with whom he communed directly, and
because the technology advanced to the point that companies can't
control it any longer. We saw that with newspapers. The
(29:30):
newspaper controlled what was printed and published, or the book publisher.
But just stick to the newspaper for a moment. They
controlled what got in and what didn't even all the
way down to the letters to the editor. That was
their attempt to try to get some common man injection
into their otherwise closed society. Well then the blogs started. Well,
(29:53):
then the bulletin board started, and then the blogs started,
which very few people do anymore. And then social media
st and that allowed anybody and everybody who had a
thought to be able to distribute that to as big
an audience as was willing to consume it. And some
people feel that was a negative thing. Oh well, now
(30:14):
you've got a bunch of dumb ideas out there. Can't
you sift through the dumb ideas? Yeah, but they're out
there saying this, this, and this. A person making a
stupid statement doesn't make it true. If a person making
a stupid statement challenges your connection to the truth, or
in your opinion, challenges the truth itself, then you have
(30:36):
to ask yourself, is the truth really the truth as
you know it and not Scalia. Clarence Thomas gave a
speech a few years ago where the speech can be
known as true North, and if you find it on YouTube,
you'll see it for yourself. And he said, true North
(30:58):
is true North. If you're being washed around in the
sea on your boat and you've lost your compass. True
North doesn't change, You're just trying to find it. The
truth doesn't change, no matter what happens, no matter what
winds blow, no matter what people say. Truth doesn't change.
(31:18):
And you don't need to be threatened by the fact
that there are idiots out there saying things that are crazy.
A lot of our folks go go mad trying to
silence or understand crazy people. Whether it's the incoming mayor
of New York or AOC or Sila Jackson Lee or
anyone else, they're crazy. Once you understand that, you have
(31:41):
a certain peace of mind, don't associate with them, don't
hire them, don't marry them, don't be friends with them,
don't have them as your token friend, don't follow them
or have them follow you on social media. Move on
and live your happy life. There's a reason I don't
live in Saudi Arabia. There's a reason, and I don't
live in China. I wouldn't be happy there, So why
(32:03):
would I associate with crazy people on social media or
gopher beers with them or whatever else. It's a good, good,
good recipe for being a whole lot happier,
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