June 30, 2025 • 32 mins
How do you help a loved one find their path? To find the answer, we tell the story of how one man — armed with a “talent on loan from God” — helped guide his cousin toward a life-changing decision.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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Speaker 2 (00:28):
Red Pilled America dot Com Now on with the show.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
This episode was originally broadcast on May seventh, twenty twenty one.
It's always hard to see people we love struggle to succeed,
whether they be adolescents having trouble with their grades.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
What's wrong with you?
Speaker 4 (00:49):
What don't you like yourself?
Speaker 5 (00:51):
Sounds stupid?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Gout?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm failing shop twenty or thirty somethings trying to excel
in their careers.
Speaker 6 (00:58):
Thank god, it's payday, Jules, you're advanced on your Salaryvite two.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Or middle aged friends flailing after losing a job.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
You're fired these guys for all they contribute. You're fired too.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Now I'll fire when those moments come when you see
a loved one struggling to succeed, what can you do
to help them find their way?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I'm Patrick Carelci and I'm Adriana Cortes and.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
This is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We're all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
The media mocks stories about everyday Americans that the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth. Welcome to
Red Pilled America. There's nothing more important on this earth
(02:09):
than family. So when you see someone dear to you
struggling to find themselves in naturally worry. Maybe they're failing
at school, or having troubles at work, or perhaps they've
lost their job and are having problems locking in on
a new one. When those moments come, when someone close
to you is struggling to get by, how can you
(02:30):
help them succeed? Define the answer. We're going to tell
the story of a young man whose parents were worried
about his failing grades until a family member came along
to help convince them to let their son drop out
of high school.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Stephen is not someone you would peg as a high
school dropout.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
And there's like sort of an artistic science to music
that's Stephen. That is sort of I would say, reflective
of esthetic realities that all humans perceive. Thing is either
let's say, consonant or dissonant.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
After one conversation with this guy, it's easy to see
that he has an intellectual approach to life. His unorthodox
journey to become a talented music composer provides a lesson
to all of us that have kids or a loved
one struggling to find their way. Stephen comes from smack
dab in the middle of America.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I was born in Cape Gerardo, Missouri, which is a
small river town in southeast Missouri right on the Mississippi River.
From what I understand, they immigrated from Germany. My genealogy
is a little hazy until about the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
What he does know for certain is that his family
eventually settled in Bolinger County, Missouri.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Which is close to Cape Girarda where I was born.
They were farmers, nineteenth century farmers, very very poor. Life
was very spartan at that time. As one can imagine,
they didn't have running water, electricity, all the things that
we enjoy today. Of course, his.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Great grandfather was born in the early eighteen nineties.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
He always showed growing up a penchant for learning, had
an excellent memory, and.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
He became obsessed with Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
And you got to remember, he had relatives that he
knew that fought in the Civil War for the Union,
by the way, and he was fascinated with Lincoln. Lincoln,
of course, was a lawyer and one of America's great orators,
and this passion for one of the American heroes drove
him into wanting to learn about law and become a
(04:32):
lawyer himself. He was the one to first go to college.
He went then afterwards to the University of Missouri for
law school, and then started a family law firm in
I think it was the nineteen teams or right after
World War One, and from then on, pretty much everybody
in the family went on to get a law degree
(04:54):
of some sort. My brother, who's younger than me, was
a lawyer there before becoming the Missouri Governor's chief legal counsel,
and now he's a circuit judge in the state of Missouri.
I mean, every single person. My dad was a Bush appointee.
My grandfather was a Reagan appointee for the federal bench.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
So almost through genetics alone, Stephen was destined to enter
the field of law. But as a young and he
didn't necessarily display a loyally demeanor.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
My early childhood was mischievous. You know. I enjoyed doing
things like blowing up ant hills with M eighty's and
that sort of thing. I mean, this was playing with
ninja turtles. I mean, that's what I wanted to do
as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
But at a very young age he was introduced to
a musical instrument.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
My dad tried to make me take piano lessons. The
governing philosophy, I would say in the family for the
boomers and greatest generation members was that an individual should
be well rounded, so the study of music should absolutely
be included in that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
By choosing the piano, his father may have been trying
to spare his ears and his nerves.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
At the very least, if you press a key, the
sound is the sound more or less with other instruments,
violin I mean the beginning stages of that. For parents,
I mean, it's like a cat dying in the house
because they can't. You got to keep the thing you
know in tune and it's real scratchy and it sounds
absolutely awful. Same thing if they got to learn, like
(06:35):
clarinet or whatever. My dad is an amateur pianist, and
I always had music around and I was always, I
guess interested in it. I mean, what kid isn't affected
by music, right? I mean, something comes on and kids
want to dance around or they want to emulate it
in some way.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
So when he was in kindergarten, Stephen followed his father's
direction and took piano less.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
I maybe had nine months of suzuki or something like that,
but I was kicked out of it. I was not
well behaved. I didn't want to do it. I didn't
like it, Honestly. I think the main turnof was just
normal kid stuff. It's really hard to sit still and
practice hot cross buns or peanut butter, jelly sandwich or whatever,
(07:25):
any of those Twinkle twinkle, Little Star. It's hard to
just sit down and do that, even if it's just
for twenty minutes. Most kids that I was running around with,
and I think most kids out there, they want to
go outside and they want to go do stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
But then around the end of his elementary school years,
something kicked in a little masculine ego.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
I think it was about twelve and I saw a
friend at one of my parents' dinner parties or whatever.
He was playing some cheesy version of fan Of of the
Opera on the piano, and I got jealous of the attention.
From that jealousy, I want to I can do that.
I can do that. Come on, And so by that,
since I wanted to do it, I took to the
(08:05):
instrument extremely quickly. By the end of the first year,
I was playing Fantasy impromptu by Chopin. You can't be
a slouch and handle that piece proficiently. And once I
was doing that, I guess because it was something I
was good at with little effort, I wanted to do
more of it and put more effort into it.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
At the ripe old age of twelve, Stephen had found
his calling.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
I would say that, you know, some artists want to
do it because they have to be self expressive. I
wouldn't say that being expressive was the thing that forced
and compelled me into this life. It's instead this intellectual
curiosity with the for lack of a better term the
(08:56):
science and like the quote art of music that I
find so fascinating and that I'm good at automatically.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
But this new passion caused a problem. Just as he
became obsessed with tinkering with an instrument, his grades began
to take a nose dive.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
My mom's a stockbroker, for example, talk about dollars and cents.
You know, portfolio is in the red or the black.
I mean these are very clear, black and white things
for a stockbroker. I mean it's your grade is either
a good grade or is it a bad grade? And
if you want to get into college, you must have
good grades. But I hated school. I didn't want to
(09:36):
do it. I despised it. I didn't like the teachers.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
This, of course, created a big issue. Stephen's family was
made up of lawyers and judges. Careers have a proven
track record of success and security. The path of music
did not have that reputation, not even close, and that
worried his parents.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
The profession of music overall was something that was I
guess you could say it was seen as something that
is so incredibly difficult to become sixs cessful in that
you can still do great things with your life and
make something of yourself without having to suffer through the
difficulties of being an artist struggling financially, which all artists
(10:16):
at some point will unless they grow up really wealthy
or whatever. And so I would say that, while it
wasn't outright discouraged, there were constantly conversations to have a
backup plan. So I was scolded for not having very
good grades, for example, because if the music thing doesn't
(10:37):
work out, I have to be able to go do
something with my life. For me, though there was only
one option. Music was going to be the only thing
I was going to do with my life professionally, and
I didn't care if I never made any money at it.
And so I had to make an appeal to somebody
(10:58):
I knew who had a similar life path, and that
was my cousin rush.
Speaker 7 (11:04):
I know that I am so good at this that
I make it look easy. Many of you sitting at
home think that you could do this too. You can't.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Stephen turned to his cousin Rush Limbaugh. By his own
family standards, at the time that Stephen Limbaugh was born,
Rush Limbaugh looked like a slacker. The famed radio entertainer
took a different path than the rest of the family.
Speaker 7 (11:29):
I've been a broadcast veteran for started in nineteen sixty seven.
My father ot a radio station came Gerada, Missouri, a little
town about a hundred miles south of Saint Louis, and
I worked there for four years through high school.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
He didn't graduate from college. I think he had like
a total of sixteen total credit hours or something like
that before he quit and then went to Pittsburgh.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
I got an offer from ABC in Pittsburgh, and I went.
I quit college after one year to take it.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Rush became a radio DJ, a job that wasn't pulling
in a lawyer salary.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
I mean he was making nothing, maybe eighteen thousand dollars
a year or something like that in Pittsburgh to do
weather and a couple of shock jock radio prank type
things in the morning. But I mean that was I mean,
that's scratching by even in the even in the seventies.
I mean, you're not you're not moving to the burbs,
(12:23):
you don't have a nice car. It's not the best life,
but for him, it's what he wanted to do. He
just wanted to be on the radio.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
In nineteen seventy five, the Pittsburgh station Rush worked out,
was sold, and the new owners fired all of the DJs.
L Rushbo was out of a job, so he picked
up and.
Speaker 7 (12:51):
Moved Kansas City in seventy five. I was at a
radio station there for three to four years and got
tired of it. I was tired of being in a DJ.
I was tired of not being and seriously, I was
tired of being considered a dope, smoking pothead who knew
nothing other than Donnie Osmond records.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
So in the late seventies, one of the most successful
radio broadcasters of all time took a detour.
Speaker 7 (13:15):
I went to work for the Kansas City Royals for
five years in sales and marketing, and that was the
best thing I ever did, because I met people I
would have never met. I saw the real world function.
You cannot you cannot possibly imagine what life's really like
if you do it from behind a camera, if you
do it from behind the microphone, and you never get
out amongst the real world. I never learned any business.
You don't learn any business as talent. So after those
(13:38):
five years I grew tired of it. Wasn't an ego
satisfaction type thing.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
He left the sales job and never looked back.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
And I went into spoken word format radio.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
At that point, Kansas City was the home of Rush
Limbaugh's first radio talk show. Then a year later he
moved it to Sacramento again Stephen.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
But even then he was making you know, forty grand
a year. I guess in the mid eighties, you know
that's not a bad salary. I mean, you're middle class
that point right.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Rush wasn't making much, but he was constantly working on
and honing his craft.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
He always wanted to be better and be bigger. I
mean he loved a guy like Paul Harvey. For example, Hello.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Americans, I'm Paul Harvey, and this is the testing time.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
He looked at those people and saw that's where I
want to be.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Unlike many of the talk radio personalities of today, Rush
Limbaugh was working towards becoming a true entertainer. He wanted
to put on a show in the Hollywood sense of
the word.
Speaker 7 (14:36):
I believe people turn on radio to be entertained, to
be entertained, to be entertained, and no matter what they're
turning it on for what kind of programming, it has
to entertain him.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
In nineteen eighty eight, the Rush Limbaugh Show was nationally syndicated.
After twenty one years of sweat, frustration and low wages,
Rush Limbaugh became an overnight success.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
Most of his life he was kind of broke, to
be honest, but it didn't matter because he was doing
what he wanted to do and he'd like literally made
it and transformed everything. But getting there it was a
very circuitous route and it took a very very long time.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
At around the time Stephen Limbaugh discovered music was his passion,
he began to notice the success of his cousin and
he was drawn to him.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
At family gatherings, he then sort of comes in as
like a I don't know, like a godfather type, one
of these types that I would say that, you know,
kids won't listen to their dad, but they'll like listen
to their favorite uncle kind of thing. You would come
in for Thanksgiving or Christmas or something like that. I
was always trying to ensconce myself at the adult table.
(15:43):
I didn't want to sit at the card table and
with all the kids, I wanted to sit and I
wanted to hear what the adults were talking about. I
would listen to anything Rush would say, because I saw
what his passion was and how far it took him,
despite even what I knew whenever I was young, how
difficult it was for that guy to actually make it.
And from then, whenever I could had a chance to
(16:06):
listen to him, I would so, especially by the time
I was driving. He was on noon to three Eastern,
and that's you know, that's during the lunch hour we had,
like in our high school, we had off campus lunch,
and so I just flip him on. I tried to
stay in the car as long as possible before I
had to go to class next, just to listen to
as much as I could, and figured, this is a
(16:27):
career or a person to emulate, because it's so unorthodox
compared to everybody else.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
By his junior year in high school, with his grades
in the basement, Stephen decided he wanted to take a
drastic step. He wanted to drop out of school and
focus entirely on music, but his family, with their long
history of high education, weren't too happy. Steven had to
figure out a way to convince them, so he turned
(17:04):
to his cousin for help, and what Rush Limbaugh told
them was the kind of wisdom every parent should embrace.
More after the break.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Welcome back by his junior year in high school, with
his grades in the basement, Stephen decided he wanted to
take a drastic step. He wanted to drop out of
school and focus entirely on music. But his family, with
their long history of high education, wasn't too happy. Stephen
had to figure out a way to convince them, so
he turned to his cousin for help, and what Rush
(17:37):
Limbaugh told them was the kind of wisdom every parent
should embrace. Stephen hated school, and his grades reflected it.
His parents were justifiably concerned, and Stephen recalls their words, Hey,
you know you have a D minus in history. I
know you know history. Why are you doing this to yourself?
Speaker 4 (17:57):
I mean, this is kind of what boys do if
they don't have their attention held with something that they're
actually interested in. And that was the main point of contention,
was that because I wasn't well behaved in class, because
my grades were slipping.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Stephen's idea was to enter a music conservatory, which is
a fancy word for a music school. But the problem
was he was at a geographic disadvantage.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Remember we're in Cape Gerarda, Missouri. There's not a youth
symphony there.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
The nearest city where he could get proper training was
Saint Louis.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
And you can't travel up to Saint Louis, which is
two hours away. If you're in high school five days
a week, you can't do it. The only way he
could swing it is if he dropped out of high school.
It was a major step seeing his cousin take such
an unorthodox path to success. Sixteen year old Stephen reached
out to Rush for help, convincing his parents, but Rush
(18:47):
didn't sign on immediately. He probed the young man first
to figure out his intentions. In talking with me, he
was able to identify that I'm actually serious about it.
I don't want to do art because I don't want
to do school. I want to do art because I
want to do art. Most of the time, the artists
are doing it for the wrong reasons. I will say,
(19:08):
especially at that age, it's because they want to be
in the drug scene. Very often that there's a lot
of that, Or it's because they are just doing it
because they want to be a rocker and pickup chicks
or whatever it is. I always wanted to be the
best I could at music. I didn't want to do
it for all the superficial reasons. Once Rush understood that
(19:30):
Steven's intentions were pure, he went to Stephen's dad to
give his advice. I mean, Russia essentially told him, He's like, look,
he's going to do this whether you like it or not.
So the best thing you can do is support him
and trust me. If he's got the passion for this,
he's not just going to be some drug addict artist
that's going to live in a loft and be a
loser his whole life.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Once this piece of wisdom was imparted, tension in the
house was lifted. Steven's parents agreed that their son could
focus on music full time. But now Stephen had to deliver.
He had to make his way in music.
Speaker 4 (20:11):
So I got a GED, which was I could have
passed whenever I was in fifth grade. I mean, this
was the dumbest test I've ever taken in my life.
And passed the GED. And then it was a matter
of preparing for auditions at music conservatories. Now that takes
a serious, serious amount of effort.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
So he secured a tutor in Saint Louis.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
And so dropping out of high school allowed me to
take the car up twice a week for private lessons
with one of the Saint Louis Symphony members.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Now, the competition for piano is and was extremely high,
and spots and music programs are limited, so Stephen decided
to switch focuses to.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
A different instrument. The original goal was to play trumpet
in a symphony orchestra. You know, I was really into that.
So I was playing trumpet taking lessons with the Saint
Louis Symphony assistant principal. I was able to play in
the youth symphony up there, and then I was able
to get into the Interlock and Arts Camp.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
That's a prestigious arts camp in Michigan. They only accept
a very few trumpet players from the entire country each year.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
And so that was the place to where I could
compare myself to the other musicians that were my age
across the country who were going to go to Juilliard,
who were already some of them were already accepted into
Eastman School of Music at that point.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Juilliard and Eastman are both very prestigious music institutions. Now,
many of these kids had been studying music with the
best of the best since they were ten years old.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
I mean, these are serious advantages. However, whenever I got there,
because I practiced so much and I was obsessed with
it and I had some talent, I was competitive at least,
so it wasn't like I got there and I was
freaked out. I was like, you know what, I don't
stand a chance. I saw it as an opportunity not
just to learn, but also to compare myself to the others,
(21:59):
so I would know what it takes to get into
one of these conservatories.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
He mentioned a well with the other students enough to
be accepted into a coveted conservatory position, and.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Then went to school in universit of Missouri Kansas City
Conservatory for three years.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
What he was learning about music fascinated him that there
is an attribute to some musical compositions that we all
instinctively recognize as beautiful.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
For lack of a.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Better time, there's like sort of an artistic science to
music that is sort of I would say, reflective of
esthetic realities that all humans perceive or we recognize as
something something that's ugly or something that we see is beautiful.
I'm fascinated by those dualities because with music it is
so so abstract. I mean, we're talking about these are
(22:47):
a series of sound waves that hit your ears. There's
no visual it's only one sensory perception. Unlike a movie.
With music, you get one sense that gets to perceive
the whole thing. And so it's an extremely abstract and
subjective art. But great musical composition is music that is
resistant to a person's subjectivity and subjective opinion. It's when
(23:12):
so many people can all point to a work and say,
you know what, that's great, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
He was learning about the art of sound. But then
the reality of the symphony world began to settle in.
It was stuffy, and it was suffering from an unexpected obstacle, communism.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
And I also had noticed that there had been a
crisis a composition for the last fifty years, essentially since
nineteen fifty nineteen sixty. You had half of the world
under communism at that point, and Russia, before World War One,
had dozens and dozens of top artists in every art form,
whether it's poets, musicians, novelists. I mean Stanislavsky, who's basically
(23:56):
the Bible whenever it comes to knowing how to act.
Every single school of thought and acting comes from this
Russian guide that was born, you know, in the belly
Poc Russia or whatever, Czarist Russia. And then Communism hits
and they go down to basically like two composers Prokofievn's Trustkovich.
And that's because they essentially killed everybody else off cultural
revolution in China, I mean, you have a crisis at
(24:19):
this point. These countries and these peoples who have a rich,
rich cultural traditions are essentially smashed out. And then in
the West you've got the rise of postmodernism, which is
a bunch of noise music that tried to reject everything
that had to do with beauty and truth. And so
(24:52):
I saw that there was only a couple places to
where you could do music that even in an elevated form,
let's say that also was sort of budding in this
new indigenous music that was popping up, whether it was
hip hop or even rock. You know, the generation before
there was an opportunity there to still do good stuff.
(25:14):
There's like a system of theory that basically was figured
out two hundred years prior about how to organize music
in an effective way that could do something aesthetically nice. Well,
the moderns and then the postmoderns throw all this stuff out,
and I was like, look, if I want to do
the kind of music that I want to do and
actually be successful in it, I've got to go into
one or two routes, the rock band route or the
(25:35):
film route.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Getting into the film scoring business is really tough. So
he moved to Los Angeles and started a rock band. Now,
at the time, the music industry was in a weird state.
If you ever wondered why the music from decades ago
is so much better than today's crap, the late Frank
Zeppa had an interesting theory.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
One thing that did happen during the sixties was some
music of an un new, usual or experimental nature did
get recorded or did get released. Now, look at who
the executives were in those companies.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
At those times.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Not hip young guys. These are cigar chomping old guys
who looked at the product that came and said, I
don't know who knows what it is, record it, stick
it out of it solves all right.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Frank argued that those executives were better than what came
after them. The young know nothings.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
And you know how these young guys got in there.
The old guy with a cigar. One day, he goes, well,
I took a chance. It went out and we sold
a few million units. All right, I don't know, I
don't know what it is. Well, we got to do
more of it. I need some advice. Let's get a
hippie in here. So they hire a hippie, bringing the
guy with the long hair. Now that I'm not going
to trust him to do anything except carry coffee and
(26:46):
bring the mail in and out. He starts in there
carry the coffee. Well, we can trust him. We brought
the coffee four times on time. Let's give him a
real job.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
It becomes an A and R man from there, you know,
moving up and up and up. Next thing, you know,
he's got his feet on the desk and he's saying, well,
we can't take it. Founds on this because it's just
simply that's not what the kids really want.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
And I know by the time Stephen Limbaugh came to
Los Angeles to start a rock band, the finances of
the music industry were in disarray. Digital downloads collapsed the market,
and these former hippie record label executives had an even
smaller appetite for risk, so instead of experimenting to find
the next Pink Floyd, they turned to artists with big
social media followings as a kind of insurance policy against failure.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
And then they go onto MySpace and they look, oh wow,
this unknown artist has seventy eight million plays.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
The problem was that many of those artists were faking
their popularity.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Now in retrospect, we're all like, there's no way that
was real. But they thought it was real. So they
started signing all these idiots, all of these idiots, and
guess what, hardly any of them popped.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
That practice made it hard for creative artists like Stephen,
so he turned to Rush, and the radio legend gave
him some advice that could be adopted by anyone looking
to succeed, regardless of their profession.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Do you want to hear Red Pilled America stories ad free?
Then become a backstage subscriber. Just log onto Redpilled America
dot com and click join in the top menu. Join
today and help us save America one story at a time.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So, by the time
Stephen Limbaugh moved to Los Angeles record labels were signing
musicians not on their talent, but on whether they had
a large social media following. That practice made it hard
for creative artists like Steven, so he turned to Rush
Limbaugh for some advice.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
Once I got to Los Angeles, I was constantly able
to bounce things off of him, and I did learn
a couple lessons through him before I made the mistakes
that so many artists will fall into, and one of
them was don't try to market yourself into success. You
need to be good first. There are a couple times
(29:04):
where I flirted with that, where I really did try.
I was like, Okay, well everybody's cheating their MySpace plays.
I'm going to as well, and so it looks like
you're succeeding. You were not succeeding. You need to get better.
You need to practice more, you need to go back
to fundamentals. You need to write three hundred horrible choruses
until you get a hit. Rush was really, really, really
(29:26):
insistent on making sure that I take care of being
good first. He said, don't worry about all this marketing junk.
Don't worry about just trying to be famous. That's the
wrong reasons.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
So, with the rock scene falling victim to the social
media scam, Stephen turned to the last avenue of music
where creativity had a home, film scoring, and that's where
he's found himself flourishing. He's become a real force in
the music scoring business. He's composed music for Dinesh to Suze,
his films, for Mike Cernovich's Hoaxed and many other films,
and it all may not have happened if it weren't
(30:01):
for Rush Limbaugh's timely which leads us back to the
question how do you help loved ones succeed? The answer
is you help them find something that they're good at
and are willing to do whatever that is for free
(30:25):
radio is widely thought to be near the bottom of
the entertainment industry totem pole, but Rush Limbaugh had both
a skill and passion for it, and after years of
plugging away, he turned his talent and passion into a fortune.
Stephen Limbaugh was flailing in high school, but thanks to
his cousin's intervention and the wisdom of his parents, they
(30:45):
helped him focus on a passion for which he also
had a natural gift, and he's on his way to
major success. If you can combine a skill with passion
and persistence, it's hard to go wrong. And that goes
for any field you name the industry, from janitorial services
to space exploration. Someone is making a fortune in it
and you don't necessarily need to take the traditional path
(31:07):
to make it happen. Some of the most successful people
in the world don't even think you need a higher
education to reach your dreams anymore, including Elon Musk.
Speaker 6 (31:16):
You don't need college learn stuff. Okay, you can learn
anything you want for free. It is not a question
of learning. So I think colleges are basically for fun
and to prove you can do your chores, but they're
not for learning.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
So if you or someone you know who is struggling
to find success, take a step back and try to
identify what they're both good at and passionate about. Then
encourage them to put everything they have into it and
to never stop until they reach the mountaintop.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Nobody just gives you anything, American people. Rogan He's Lucky
No Man his full podcast a week. He works out
five days a week. He writes, he didn't just become
the UFC announcement. You know that he was a fan.
He picked the performance, and he called Dana White and
you offered to do it for free. How many people
willing to do that? Are you?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
America's an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's produced by me Adrianna
Cortez and Patrick Carrelci for Informed Ventures. Now, our entire
archive of episodes is only available to our backstage subscribers.
To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and click support
in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
This is Red Pilled America. Why aren't you a Red
Pilled America dot com subscriber? We need your support. You
can listen to all of our episodes add free by
going to Redpilled America dot com and clicking join in
the top menu.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you believe in honesty and value the truth and storytelling,
then join us.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Become a Red Pilled America fanband member by going to
Redpilled America dot com and clicking join in the top menu.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Red Pilled America dot Com Now on with the show.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
This episode was originally broadcast on May seventh, twenty twenty one.
It's always hard to see people we love struggle to succeed,
whether they be adolescents having trouble with their grades.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
What's wrong with you?
Speaker 4 (00:49):
What don't you like yourself?
Speaker 5 (00:51):
Sounds stupid?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Gout?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm failing shop twenty or thirty somethings trying to excel
in their careers.
Speaker 6 (00:58):
Thank god, it's payday, Jules, you're advanced on your Salaryvite two.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Or middle aged friends flailing after losing a job.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
You're fired these guys for all they contribute. You're fired too.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Now I'll fire when those moments come when you see
a loved one struggling to succeed, what can you do
to help them find their way?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I'm Patrick Carelci and I'm Adriana Cortes and.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
This is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We're all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
The media mocks stories about everyday Americans that the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth. Welcome to
Red Pilled America. There's nothing more important on this earth
(02:09):
than family. So when you see someone dear to you
struggling to find themselves in naturally worry. Maybe they're failing
at school, or having troubles at work, or perhaps they've
lost their job and are having problems locking in on
a new one. When those moments come, when someone close
to you is struggling to get by, how can you
(02:30):
help them succeed? Define the answer. We're going to tell
the story of a young man whose parents were worried
about his failing grades until a family member came along
to help convince them to let their son drop out
of high school.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Stephen is not someone you would peg as a high
school dropout.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
And there's like sort of an artistic science to music
that's Stephen. That is sort of I would say, reflective
of esthetic realities that all humans perceive. Thing is either
let's say, consonant or dissonant.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
After one conversation with this guy, it's easy to see
that he has an intellectual approach to life. His unorthodox
journey to become a talented music composer provides a lesson
to all of us that have kids or a loved
one struggling to find their way. Stephen comes from smack
dab in the middle of America.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I was born in Cape Gerardo, Missouri, which is a
small river town in southeast Missouri right on the Mississippi River.
From what I understand, they immigrated from Germany. My genealogy
is a little hazy until about the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
What he does know for certain is that his family
eventually settled in Bolinger County, Missouri.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Which is close to Cape Girarda where I was born.
They were farmers, nineteenth century farmers, very very poor. Life
was very spartan at that time. As one can imagine,
they didn't have running water, electricity, all the things that
we enjoy today. Of course, his.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Great grandfather was born in the early eighteen nineties.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
He always showed growing up a penchant for learning, had
an excellent memory, and.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
He became obsessed with Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
And you got to remember, he had relatives that he
knew that fought in the Civil War for the Union,
by the way, and he was fascinated with Lincoln. Lincoln,
of course, was a lawyer and one of America's great orators,
and this passion for one of the American heroes drove
him into wanting to learn about law and become a
(04:32):
lawyer himself. He was the one to first go to college.
He went then afterwards to the University of Missouri for
law school, and then started a family law firm in
I think it was the nineteen teams or right after
World War One, and from then on, pretty much everybody
in the family went on to get a law degree
(04:54):
of some sort. My brother, who's younger than me, was
a lawyer there before becoming the Missouri Governor's chief legal counsel,
and now he's a circuit judge in the state of Missouri.
I mean, every single person. My dad was a Bush appointee.
My grandfather was a Reagan appointee for the federal bench.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
So almost through genetics alone, Stephen was destined to enter
the field of law. But as a young and he
didn't necessarily display a loyally demeanor.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
My early childhood was mischievous. You know. I enjoyed doing
things like blowing up ant hills with M eighty's and
that sort of thing. I mean, this was playing with
ninja turtles. I mean, that's what I wanted to do
as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
But at a very young age he was introduced to
a musical instrument.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
My dad tried to make me take piano lessons. The
governing philosophy, I would say in the family for the
boomers and greatest generation members was that an individual should
be well rounded, so the study of music should absolutely
be included in that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
By choosing the piano, his father may have been trying
to spare his ears and his nerves.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
At the very least, if you press a key, the
sound is the sound more or less with other instruments,
violin I mean the beginning stages of that. For parents,
I mean, it's like a cat dying in the house
because they can't. You got to keep the thing you
know in tune and it's real scratchy and it sounds
absolutely awful. Same thing if they got to learn, like
(06:35):
clarinet or whatever. My dad is an amateur pianist, and
I always had music around and I was always, I
guess interested in it. I mean, what kid isn't affected
by music, right? I mean, something comes on and kids
want to dance around or they want to emulate it
in some way.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
So when he was in kindergarten, Stephen followed his father's
direction and took piano less.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
I maybe had nine months of suzuki or something like that,
but I was kicked out of it. I was not
well behaved. I didn't want to do it. I didn't
like it, Honestly. I think the main turnof was just
normal kid stuff. It's really hard to sit still and
practice hot cross buns or peanut butter, jelly sandwich or whatever,
(07:25):
any of those Twinkle twinkle, Little Star. It's hard to
just sit down and do that, even if it's just
for twenty minutes. Most kids that I was running around with,
and I think most kids out there, they want to
go outside and they want to go do stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
But then around the end of his elementary school years,
something kicked in a little masculine ego.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
I think it was about twelve and I saw a
friend at one of my parents' dinner parties or whatever.
He was playing some cheesy version of fan Of of the
Opera on the piano, and I got jealous of the attention.
From that jealousy, I want to I can do that.
I can do that. Come on, And so by that,
since I wanted to do it, I took to the
(08:05):
instrument extremely quickly. By the end of the first year,
I was playing Fantasy impromptu by Chopin. You can't be
a slouch and handle that piece proficiently. And once I
was doing that, I guess because it was something I
was good at with little effort, I wanted to do
more of it and put more effort into it.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
At the ripe old age of twelve, Stephen had found
his calling.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
I would say that, you know, some artists want to
do it because they have to be self expressive. I
wouldn't say that being expressive was the thing that forced
and compelled me into this life. It's instead this intellectual
curiosity with the for lack of a better term the
(08:56):
science and like the quote art of music that I
find so fascinating and that I'm good at automatically.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
But this new passion caused a problem. Just as he
became obsessed with tinkering with an instrument, his grades began
to take a nose dive.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
My mom's a stockbroker, for example, talk about dollars and cents.
You know, portfolio is in the red or the black.
I mean these are very clear, black and white things
for a stockbroker. I mean it's your grade is either
a good grade or is it a bad grade? And
if you want to get into college, you must have
good grades. But I hated school. I didn't want to
(09:36):
do it. I despised it. I didn't like the teachers.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
This, of course, created a big issue. Stephen's family was
made up of lawyers and judges. Careers have a proven
track record of success and security. The path of music
did not have that reputation, not even close, and that
worried his parents.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
The profession of music overall was something that was I
guess you could say it was seen as something that
is so incredibly difficult to become sixs cessful in that
you can still do great things with your life and
make something of yourself without having to suffer through the
difficulties of being an artist struggling financially, which all artists
(10:16):
at some point will unless they grow up really wealthy
or whatever. And so I would say that, while it
wasn't outright discouraged, there were constantly conversations to have a
backup plan. So I was scolded for not having very
good grades, for example, because if the music thing doesn't
(10:37):
work out, I have to be able to go do
something with my life. For me, though there was only
one option. Music was going to be the only thing
I was going to do with my life professionally, and
I didn't care if I never made any money at it.
And so I had to make an appeal to somebody
(10:58):
I knew who had a similar life path, and that
was my cousin rush.
Speaker 7 (11:04):
I know that I am so good at this that
I make it look easy. Many of you sitting at
home think that you could do this too. You can't.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Stephen turned to his cousin Rush Limbaugh. By his own
family standards, at the time that Stephen Limbaugh was born,
Rush Limbaugh looked like a slacker. The famed radio entertainer
took a different path than the rest of the family.
Speaker 7 (11:29):
I've been a broadcast veteran for started in nineteen sixty seven.
My father ot a radio station came Gerada, Missouri, a little
town about a hundred miles south of Saint Louis, and
I worked there for four years through high school.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
He didn't graduate from college. I think he had like
a total of sixteen total credit hours or something like
that before he quit and then went to Pittsburgh.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
I got an offer from ABC in Pittsburgh, and I went.
I quit college after one year to take it.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Rush became a radio DJ, a job that wasn't pulling
in a lawyer salary.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
I mean he was making nothing, maybe eighteen thousand dollars
a year or something like that in Pittsburgh to do
weather and a couple of shock jock radio prank type
things in the morning. But I mean that was I mean,
that's scratching by even in the even in the seventies.
I mean, you're not you're not moving to the burbs,
(12:23):
you don't have a nice car. It's not the best life,
but for him, it's what he wanted to do. He
just wanted to be on the radio.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
In nineteen seventy five, the Pittsburgh station Rush worked out,
was sold, and the new owners fired all of the DJs.
L Rushbo was out of a job, so he picked
up and.
Speaker 7 (12:51):
Moved Kansas City in seventy five. I was at a
radio station there for three to four years and got
tired of it. I was tired of being in a DJ.
I was tired of not being and seriously, I was
tired of being considered a dope, smoking pothead who knew
nothing other than Donnie Osmond records.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
So in the late seventies, one of the most successful
radio broadcasters of all time took a detour.
Speaker 7 (13:15):
I went to work for the Kansas City Royals for
five years in sales and marketing, and that was the
best thing I ever did, because I met people I
would have never met. I saw the real world function.
You cannot you cannot possibly imagine what life's really like
if you do it from behind a camera, if you
do it from behind the microphone, and you never get
out amongst the real world. I never learned any business.
You don't learn any business as talent. So after those
(13:38):
five years I grew tired of it. Wasn't an ego
satisfaction type thing.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
He left the sales job and never looked back.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
And I went into spoken word format radio.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
At that point, Kansas City was the home of Rush
Limbaugh's first radio talk show. Then a year later he
moved it to Sacramento again Stephen.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
But even then he was making you know, forty grand
a year. I guess in the mid eighties, you know
that's not a bad salary. I mean, you're middle class
that point right.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Rush wasn't making much, but he was constantly working on
and honing his craft.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
He always wanted to be better and be bigger. I
mean he loved a guy like Paul Harvey. For example, Hello.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Americans, I'm Paul Harvey, and this is the testing time.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
He looked at those people and saw that's where I
want to be.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Unlike many of the talk radio personalities of today, Rush
Limbaugh was working towards becoming a true entertainer. He wanted
to put on a show in the Hollywood sense of
the word.
Speaker 7 (14:36):
I believe people turn on radio to be entertained, to
be entertained, to be entertained, and no matter what they're
turning it on for what kind of programming, it has
to entertain him.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
In nineteen eighty eight, the Rush Limbaugh Show was nationally syndicated.
After twenty one years of sweat, frustration and low wages,
Rush Limbaugh became an overnight success.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
Most of his life he was kind of broke, to
be honest, but it didn't matter because he was doing
what he wanted to do and he'd like literally made
it and transformed everything. But getting there it was a
very circuitous route and it took a very very long time.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
At around the time Stephen Limbaugh discovered music was his passion,
he began to notice the success of his cousin and
he was drawn to him.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
At family gatherings, he then sort of comes in as
like a I don't know, like a godfather type, one
of these types that I would say that, you know,
kids won't listen to their dad, but they'll like listen
to their favorite uncle kind of thing. You would come
in for Thanksgiving or Christmas or something like that. I
was always trying to ensconce myself at the adult table.
(15:43):
I didn't want to sit at the card table and
with all the kids, I wanted to sit and I
wanted to hear what the adults were talking about. I
would listen to anything Rush would say, because I saw
what his passion was and how far it took him,
despite even what I knew whenever I was young, how
difficult it was for that guy to actually make it.
And from then, whenever I could had a chance to
(16:06):
listen to him, I would so, especially by the time
I was driving. He was on noon to three Eastern,
and that's you know, that's during the lunch hour we had,
like in our high school, we had off campus lunch,
and so I just flip him on. I tried to
stay in the car as long as possible before I
had to go to class next, just to listen to
as much as I could, and figured, this is a
(16:27):
career or a person to emulate, because it's so unorthodox
compared to everybody else.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
By his junior year in high school, with his grades
in the basement, Stephen decided he wanted to take a
drastic step. He wanted to drop out of school and
focus entirely on music, but his family, with their long
history of high education, weren't too happy. Steven had to
figure out a way to convince them, so he turned
(17:04):
to his cousin for help, and what Rush Limbaugh told
them was the kind of wisdom every parent should embrace.
More after the break.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Welcome back by his junior year in high school, with
his grades in the basement, Stephen decided he wanted to
take a drastic step. He wanted to drop out of
school and focus entirely on music. But his family, with
their long history of high education, wasn't too happy. Stephen
had to figure out a way to convince them, so
he turned to his cousin for help, and what Rush
(17:37):
Limbaugh told them was the kind of wisdom every parent
should embrace. Stephen hated school, and his grades reflected it.
His parents were justifiably concerned, and Stephen recalls their words, Hey,
you know you have a D minus in history. I
know you know history. Why are you doing this to yourself?
Speaker 4 (17:57):
I mean, this is kind of what boys do if
they don't have their attention held with something that they're
actually interested in. And that was the main point of contention,
was that because I wasn't well behaved in class, because
my grades were slipping.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Stephen's idea was to enter a music conservatory, which is
a fancy word for a music school. But the problem
was he was at a geographic disadvantage.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Remember we're in Cape Gerarda, Missouri. There's not a youth
symphony there.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
The nearest city where he could get proper training was
Saint Louis.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
And you can't travel up to Saint Louis, which is
two hours away. If you're in high school five days
a week, you can't do it. The only way he
could swing it is if he dropped out of high school.
It was a major step seeing his cousin take such
an unorthodox path to success. Sixteen year old Stephen reached
out to Rush for help, convincing his parents, but Rush
(18:47):
didn't sign on immediately. He probed the young man first
to figure out his intentions. In talking with me, he
was able to identify that I'm actually serious about it.
I don't want to do art because I don't want
to do school. I want to do art because I
want to do art. Most of the time, the artists
are doing it for the wrong reasons. I will say,
(19:08):
especially at that age, it's because they want to be
in the drug scene. Very often that there's a lot
of that, Or it's because they are just doing it
because they want to be a rocker and pickup chicks
or whatever it is. I always wanted to be the
best I could at music. I didn't want to do
it for all the superficial reasons. Once Rush understood that
(19:30):
Steven's intentions were pure, he went to Stephen's dad to
give his advice. I mean, Russia essentially told him, He's like, look,
he's going to do this whether you like it or not.
So the best thing you can do is support him
and trust me. If he's got the passion for this,
he's not just going to be some drug addict artist
that's going to live in a loft and be a
loser his whole life.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Once this piece of wisdom was imparted, tension in the
house was lifted. Steven's parents agreed that their son could
focus on music full time. But now Stephen had to deliver.
He had to make his way in music.
Speaker 4 (20:11):
So I got a GED, which was I could have
passed whenever I was in fifth grade. I mean, this
was the dumbest test I've ever taken in my life.
And passed the GED. And then it was a matter
of preparing for auditions at music conservatories. Now that takes
a serious, serious amount of effort.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
So he secured a tutor in Saint Louis.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
And so dropping out of high school allowed me to
take the car up twice a week for private lessons
with one of the Saint Louis Symphony members.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Now, the competition for piano is and was extremely high,
and spots and music programs are limited, so Stephen decided
to switch focuses to.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
A different instrument. The original goal was to play trumpet
in a symphony orchestra. You know, I was really into that.
So I was playing trumpet taking lessons with the Saint
Louis Symphony assistant principal. I was able to play in
the youth symphony up there, and then I was able
to get into the Interlock and Arts Camp.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
That's a prestigious arts camp in Michigan. They only accept
a very few trumpet players from the entire country each year.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
And so that was the place to where I could
compare myself to the other musicians that were my age
across the country who were going to go to Juilliard,
who were already some of them were already accepted into
Eastman School of Music at that point.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Juilliard and Eastman are both very prestigious music institutions. Now,
many of these kids had been studying music with the
best of the best since they were ten years old.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
I mean, these are serious advantages. However, whenever I got there,
because I practiced so much and I was obsessed with
it and I had some talent, I was competitive at least,
so it wasn't like I got there and I was
freaked out. I was like, you know what, I don't
stand a chance. I saw it as an opportunity not
just to learn, but also to compare myself to the others,
(21:59):
so I would know what it takes to get into
one of these conservatories.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
He mentioned a well with the other students enough to
be accepted into a coveted conservatory position, and.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Then went to school in universit of Missouri Kansas City
Conservatory for three years.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
What he was learning about music fascinated him that there
is an attribute to some musical compositions that we all
instinctively recognize as beautiful.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
For lack of a.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Better time, there's like sort of an artistic science to
music that is sort of I would say, reflective of
esthetic realities that all humans perceive or we recognize as
something something that's ugly or something that we see is beautiful.
I'm fascinated by those dualities because with music it is
so so abstract. I mean, we're talking about these are
(22:47):
a series of sound waves that hit your ears. There's
no visual it's only one sensory perception. Unlike a movie.
With music, you get one sense that gets to perceive
the whole thing. And so it's an extremely abstract and
subjective art. But great musical composition is music that is
resistant to a person's subjectivity and subjective opinion. It's when
(23:12):
so many people can all point to a work and say,
you know what, that's great, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
He was learning about the art of sound. But then
the reality of the symphony world began to settle in.
It was stuffy, and it was suffering from an unexpected obstacle, communism.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
And I also had noticed that there had been a
crisis a composition for the last fifty years, essentially since
nineteen fifty nineteen sixty. You had half of the world
under communism at that point, and Russia, before World War One,
had dozens and dozens of top artists in every art form,
whether it's poets, musicians, novelists. I mean Stanislavsky, who's basically
(23:56):
the Bible whenever it comes to knowing how to act.
Every single school of thought and acting comes from this
Russian guide that was born, you know, in the belly
Poc Russia or whatever, Czarist Russia. And then Communism hits
and they go down to basically like two composers Prokofievn's Trustkovich.
And that's because they essentially killed everybody else off cultural
revolution in China, I mean, you have a crisis at
(24:19):
this point. These countries and these peoples who have a rich,
rich cultural traditions are essentially smashed out. And then in
the West you've got the rise of postmodernism, which is
a bunch of noise music that tried to reject everything
that had to do with beauty and truth. And so
(24:52):
I saw that there was only a couple places to
where you could do music that even in an elevated form,
let's say that also was sort of budding in this
new indigenous music that was popping up, whether it was
hip hop or even rock. You know, the generation before
there was an opportunity there to still do good stuff.
(25:14):
There's like a system of theory that basically was figured
out two hundred years prior about how to organize music
in an effective way that could do something aesthetically nice. Well,
the moderns and then the postmoderns throw all this stuff out,
and I was like, look, if I want to do
the kind of music that I want to do and
actually be successful in it, I've got to go into
one or two routes, the rock band route or the
(25:35):
film route.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Getting into the film scoring business is really tough. So
he moved to Los Angeles and started a rock band. Now,
at the time, the music industry was in a weird state.
If you ever wondered why the music from decades ago
is so much better than today's crap, the late Frank
Zeppa had an interesting theory.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
One thing that did happen during the sixties was some
music of an un new, usual or experimental nature did
get recorded or did get released. Now, look at who
the executives were in those companies.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
At those times.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Not hip young guys. These are cigar chomping old guys
who looked at the product that came and said, I
don't know who knows what it is, record it, stick
it out of it solves all right.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Frank argued that those executives were better than what came
after them. The young know nothings.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
And you know how these young guys got in there.
The old guy with a cigar. One day, he goes, well,
I took a chance. It went out and we sold
a few million units. All right, I don't know, I
don't know what it is. Well, we got to do
more of it. I need some advice. Let's get a
hippie in here. So they hire a hippie, bringing the
guy with the long hair. Now that I'm not going
to trust him to do anything except carry coffee and
(26:46):
bring the mail in and out. He starts in there
carry the coffee. Well, we can trust him. We brought
the coffee four times on time. Let's give him a
real job.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
It becomes an A and R man from there, you know,
moving up and up and up. Next thing, you know,
he's got his feet on the desk and he's saying, well,
we can't take it. Founds on this because it's just
simply that's not what the kids really want.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
And I know by the time Stephen Limbaugh came to
Los Angeles to start a rock band, the finances of
the music industry were in disarray. Digital downloads collapsed the market,
and these former hippie record label executives had an even
smaller appetite for risk, so instead of experimenting to find
the next Pink Floyd, they turned to artists with big
social media followings as a kind of insurance policy against failure.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
And then they go onto MySpace and they look, oh wow,
this unknown artist has seventy eight million plays.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
The problem was that many of those artists were faking
their popularity.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Now in retrospect, we're all like, there's no way that
was real. But they thought it was real. So they
started signing all these idiots, all of these idiots, and
guess what, hardly any of them popped.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
That practice made it hard for creative artists like Stephen,
so he turned to Rush, and the radio legend gave
him some advice that could be adopted by anyone looking
to succeed, regardless of their profession.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Do you want to hear Red Pilled America stories ad free?
Then become a backstage subscriber. Just log onto Redpilled America
dot com and click join in the top menu. Join
today and help us save America one story at a time.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So, by the time
Stephen Limbaugh moved to Los Angeles record labels were signing
musicians not on their talent, but on whether they had
a large social media following. That practice made it hard
for creative artists like Steven, so he turned to Rush
Limbaugh for some advice.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
Once I got to Los Angeles, I was constantly able
to bounce things off of him, and I did learn
a couple lessons through him before I made the mistakes
that so many artists will fall into, and one of
them was don't try to market yourself into success. You
need to be good first. There are a couple times
(29:04):
where I flirted with that, where I really did try.
I was like, Okay, well everybody's cheating their MySpace plays.
I'm going to as well, and so it looks like
you're succeeding. You were not succeeding. You need to get better.
You need to practice more, you need to go back
to fundamentals. You need to write three hundred horrible choruses
until you get a hit. Rush was really, really, really
(29:26):
insistent on making sure that I take care of being
good first. He said, don't worry about all this marketing junk.
Don't worry about just trying to be famous. That's the
wrong reasons.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
So, with the rock scene falling victim to the social
media scam, Stephen turned to the last avenue of music
where creativity had a home, film scoring, and that's where
he's found himself flourishing. He's become a real force in
the music scoring business. He's composed music for Dinesh to Suze,
his films, for Mike Cernovich's Hoaxed and many other films,
and it all may not have happened if it weren't
(30:01):
for Rush Limbaugh's timely which leads us back to the
question how do you help loved ones succeed? The answer
is you help them find something that they're good at
and are willing to do whatever that is for free
(30:25):
radio is widely thought to be near the bottom of
the entertainment industry totem pole, but Rush Limbaugh had both
a skill and passion for it, and after years of
plugging away, he turned his talent and passion into a fortune.
Stephen Limbaugh was flailing in high school, but thanks to
his cousin's intervention and the wisdom of his parents, they
(30:45):
helped him focus on a passion for which he also
had a natural gift, and he's on his way to
major success. If you can combine a skill with passion
and persistence, it's hard to go wrong. And that goes
for any field you name the industry, from janitorial services
to space exploration. Someone is making a fortune in it
and you don't necessarily need to take the traditional path
(31:07):
to make it happen. Some of the most successful people
in the world don't even think you need a higher
education to reach your dreams anymore, including Elon Musk.
Speaker 6 (31:16):
You don't need college learn stuff. Okay, you can learn
anything you want for free. It is not a question
of learning. So I think colleges are basically for fun
and to prove you can do your chores, but they're
not for learning.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
So if you or someone you know who is struggling
to find success, take a step back and try to
identify what they're both good at and passionate about. Then
encourage them to put everything they have into it and
to never stop until they reach the mountaintop.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Nobody just gives you anything, American people. Rogan He's Lucky
No Man his full podcast a week. He works out
five days a week. He writes, he didn't just become
the UFC announcement. You know that he was a fan.
He picked the performance, and he called Dana White and
you offered to do it for free. How many people
willing to do that? Are you?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
America's an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's produced by me Adrianna
Cortez and Patrick Carrelci for Informed Ventures. Now, our entire
archive of episodes is only available to our backstage subscribers.
To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and click support
in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Adryana Cortez
Patrick Courrielche
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