Look to the Right

I want to end this week with one more note related to that most melancholy of subjects, the death of Rush Limbaugh.

For a few years, I have been nursing a dream for a new model of radio and a show I wanted to do. The nice thing about Rush Limbaugh is that everyone knows there will never be another Rush. It gives those of us in talk radio permission to not be like him or do a bad impression of him, but to be ourselves. In fact, I dare say the people who will try to be like Rush will be the ones who are least successful. One cannot match Rush so learn from him, but do not try to be him.

I have hesitated to write so much on him this week because I do not want to convey the impression he was my best friend or I had a unique connection to him. He was generous with thousands of people and for so many people all you had to do was reach out and he was good for advice.

I reached out a lot. I learned a lot.

In radio, national hosts rely on a syndicator. That syndicator finds the stations and the advertisers and takes a cut off the top. The local stations have to play the syndicator’s ads and if the local station has to pre-empt the syndicated show, the local station has to play those ads anyway, often by ditching its own advertising. It can become bureaucratic with lots of paperwork.

Two years ago, I had an idea for how to do something different with radio — essentially buying my own satellite time and bypassing traditional syndication so local stations would not have to run my ads if they pre-empted me. I’d give the show away for free; deliver a great product; and rely on subscribers to this email to help cover the upfront costs until the ad revenue started rolling in.

It is not the usual way. I ran the model by Rush before I ran it by anyone and, to this day, he is the only person who intuitively got it out of the gate and loved it. He understood what I understand — as radio companies internalize radio is dying and they’re trying to ride its profits to the end, nickel and diming everything along the way, there’s still a way to provide a product to people who want news right now and for small market stations that need content without bureaucracy, affidavits, and make good demands.

Now I am doing it and it is working as I intended and a lot of that has to do with readers like you subscribing to this email to help me get it all off the ground.

But along the way there’s something else.

For the last decade, I’ve been able to turn to my right and have a sounding board who gave unparalleled advice. Hands down, Rush Limbaugh has delivered me more wisdom about how to do radio and the business of radio than anyone.

As we grow up, our hair grays and our body aches, but like a shadow slowly creeping, one day you realize you’re in the middle of the dark and there’s no one on the right you can turn to, but a lot of people on the left looking right at you. You become the guy everyone turns to. To paraphrase Hemingway, it happens slowly at first and then all of a sudden.

When I was a lawyer, I could turn to my law partners when I was an associate and get advice. As law clerks and younger associates came to me, I either knew the answer or could turn to my right and get the answer from someone else. Over time, there were fewer people on my right to turn to and more people on my left looking to me.

In my business now, I am more and more mindful that there are more people to my left and fewer to my right. The one guy I would turn to is now not here. I am grateful he navigated me to a great radio agent with lots of wisdom who I can turn to. This phenomenon comes on slowly, but sometime around middle age you realize whether you like it or not, you have to make the decisions, call the shots, and have few people to turn to for guidance. You must take the sum of your experiences and knowledge and help them form a judgment of how to proceed. You won’t always get it right, but a lot of humility helps.

This week, a lot of conservatives feel shut out of power and now have lost the voice of modern conservatism who became the soundtrack for their lives. What on earth are we to do? How shall we proceed? I can’t email him to ask. But I think I know what he would say.

One foot forward. Then the other. Then the other. Back and forth, one foot in front of the other, and always towards the light. Conservatism isn’t dead or even dying. But it needs to move always and optimistically toward the sunrise.

And so we shall each of us with our voice in our own way more forward toward the light.

Have a good weekend.