Luke Ford

Luke: G’day, mate. Luke Ford here, and my guest today is media strategist David G. Hall. David, how did you get into radio?

David: I got into radio when I was twelve years old. My first job was as a call screener at a top 40 station in Sacramento, California, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Luke: I moved to Sacramento in 1980. I worked in radio at the same time you did there. What was the top 40 station you started at?

David: It was KROY, the big one at the time.

Luke: Did they have the big morning zoo?

David: No, not then. That was a few years before all that. In 1980 I was working at KWOD, Quad 106 in Sacramento, as a board op, and also at KXPR, the public station. Where were you when you worked there?

Luke: I started out at KHYL, Kill Radio. KHYL was the Sacramento station. 101.1 and AM 950. I was at the Mighty 950. I did news reports. I was in high school until 1984, then I came back from a year in Australia and anchored the news on weekends for KHYL from May of 1985 until August of 1988.

David: That station is still going.

Luke: Talk to me about your progression through Sacramento radio.

David: I worked at some music stations, all off the air. I worked at a tiny little station in a cornfield in Davis, KL 105.5, which is really the first time I was on the air. Then I moved to San Jose, worked at KEZR, and then KNRY in Monterey on Cannery Row, also music. KNRY is where I switched from being a DJ to being a news anchor. That’s when I started spoken word, and that was in 1983. Then I went back to KFBK in Sacramento as a news reporter and left there five years later as the assistant news director, and came down to KFI in Los Angeles.

Luke: Did you work with Rush Limbaugh when he was on the air in Sacramento?

David: I did. I was his news anchor. We had two desks butted up against each other. I was the news anchor on his show, and he was local in Sacramento.

Luke: When did you first start working with Rush?

David: I was the news anchor and he was the talk show host. It was October of 1984. He started maybe a month or two earlier, if I’m not mistaken.

Luke: How long did you work with him in Sacramento?

David: In 1988 he moved to New York and WABC and then went syndicated. So from 1984 to 1988.

Luke: What did you learn from working with Rush that shaped your career?

David: He always said he’s not a journalist, he’s a showman. And he was. So I learned a sense of show from Rush.

We had a funny moment once. When I was the news anchor on his show, some state politician had been arrested for drunk driving and spent the night in jail. In California, if you are arrested for drunk driving, it’s mandatory that you spend the night in jail. Everybody does. Rush was making a huge thing about this guy. It was so bad, he must have been so drunk, because he ended up in jail. During the break I said, everybody goes to jail if they’re arrested for DUI. And he said, “You think I don’t know that? This is a show. This isn’t the news. You do the news. I’m doing the show.”

That was a great lesson. And he’s right. There were a lot of moments like that, where just watching him do a show was educational.

Luke: How would you describe your relationship with him on air and off?

David: On air I was the pinko commie news anchor from the newsroom. That’s how he used to introduce me. Off air we got along quite well.

Luke: Did you give it back to him, or did you play it straight?

David: I played it straight. I was the news guy, so I had to play it straight.

Luke: When did you realize you could be good at directing a news and talk operation?

David: About that same time. It was kind of funny. I was mostly a reporter, even though I anchored the news on his show. I had my forty seconds for my report, and at some point I thought, I only get to control the forty seconds. The rest of it, I have no control over the quality of what we’re doing. So I took myself off the air and got into management, so I could have more say over the overall news style and sound and content.

Luke: What can you do in news? I moved here from Australia in 1977. I was eleven. I got a radio. I listened to KCBS and KNBR and KGO, and I was a big news fan. San Francisco had an all-news station. But when I worked in news, a sixty-second story was fairly long. What can be done to make a forty-five second or eighty-second news report more compelling?

David: Two things. It’s all in the writing and it’s all in the sound. If you have great sound, and if you’re a good writer, and it is very difficult to write creatively in forty-five seconds, but if you’re able to do it and you have good sound, that makes all the difference.

Luke: How did you get the job at KFI? Why do you think they hired you?

David: I was assistant news director at KFBK, and our program director at the time was a guy named George Oliva. I remember having a conversation with him once about why nobody was doing news and talk in Los Angeles. There was KABC, the huge talk station, and in fact it was the top billing station in the United States at that time and the number one station in audience in Los Angeles, and had been for a long time. Then there was KNX, the big all-news station, and KFWB, the little scrapper all-news station. But there wasn’t anybody doing both. I was talking to him one day and I said, somebody should try to do both. He said, yeah, that’s interesting. Then he went to KFI to be program director and called me a few months later and asked if I wanted to go there to be news director, and do pretty much what I had described to him in Sacramento. Put on a serious news department amid a bunch of talk shows, which just was not being done at that time in Los Angeles.

Luke: What kind of resources did you have?

David: They made quite an investment. It’s very different from today. At its peak I had about eighteen people in the news department at KFI. We had a couple of news cars and all the equipment we needed, and a good way to get reports back to the studio. This was right as cell phones were coming into being, so we didn’t really have the use of that yet. We needed two-way radio to get reports back to the station. We had a great staff. Writers and anchors and reporters, an Orange County bureau, a Washington bureau, and a stringer in Sacramento at the Capitol. We were a serious news operation.

Luke: How many minutes an hour did you get?

David: Four at the top and a minute and a half or two at the bottom. And no network. It wasn’t like a five-minute network feed and then we would come on. We had to do both national and local, which I always preferred.

Luke: I assume many of the people you were directing had worked in the medium much longer than you. So you were learning from them, and you were repeating certain things to those working for you and with you. Can you share some of those things?

David: I was really young. I think I was twenty-two when I got to KFI as news director. Virtually everybody in that newsroom had been in radio longer than I’d been alive, I think every single one of them, and a couple of them had been at that station longer than I’d been alive. That always presents its own challenge.

We brought other people from Sacramento. There were four of us that came down at the same time, including our big reporter from KFBK. That really helped. I was able to build my own team in the news department, because I had a very different vision from what they had been doing.

I should also say that when George Oliva got to KFI, he flipped the station from still playing some music to talk, and actually news talk. My first day working there was the last day an actual record was played on KFI. Then it was all spoken word starting the day I started. So it was about putting on a completely different kind of programming, and my mission was to put on a very different kind of news than had been done there or in the market before.

Luke: I came to UCLA in 1988. I was twenty-two. Did Terri Rae Elmer come down to KFI with you?

David: She did. 1989 is when we came. July 17, 1989 is when we got to KFI.

Luke: Dave Grosby. I remember he did sports.

David: Yes, he did. Terri Rae Elmer, her husband Jerry Wallace who did weather, Andy Friedman, and myself.

Luke: So July 17, 1989 was your first day. And that was the last day KFI played any music.

David: Yep.

Luke: I was there [in LA]. All of this has additional resonance for me. What were some of the things you found yourself telling other people in the news department repeatedly? What were you trying to communicate that required many repetitions or different ways of getting it across?

David: I wanted to focus on active reporting. I wanted reporters out in the field almost all the time, which in Los Angeles with the traffic is not an easy thing, but I was insistent on it. I wanted the sound of the news to be fast-paced and conversational. No battling blazes. No gubernatorial moves. No legislative whatevers. No deceased vehicle one, no suspect apprehended. None of that jargon the old news stations had at the time. Conversational, fast, and a lot of active reporting with a lot of sound.

Luke: Did they get it? Did you have to repeat yourself?

David: It took a while. Andy Friedman, the reporter who came with me from Sacramento, had already been doing it, because I had started that transition at KFBK before I moved. So he got it. Then slowly we built the team of people who really got it and knew what we were looking for. There wasn’t anybody doing that, certainly not in Los Angeles at that time and not much anywhere else in the country. So I couldn’t just hire people who were already doing it. I had to hire people who had the right kind of talent and ambition and then train them. Once we started to find those people, it went very well.

Luke: Were there any radio hosts who had a particular impact on you before you were eighteen? You started listening to radio very early.

David: I grew up listening to KFRC in San Francisco, which was one of the really big top 40 stations in the country. I was very influenced by the DJs and the news department at KFRC. If I had a sound in my head that I was trying to emulate, it was that KFRC sound, even though we weren’t playing records. It was that same feel I was going for.

Luke: That was the number one station with my friends in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.

David: It was huge. And it was very, very good. Very well programmed.

Luke: How did you get into talk radio? You were the news director. How did your career progress at KFI?

David: I was news director for two years, and almost exactly to the day two years later George Oliva left to do other things and they were looking for a program director. I had no programming experience whatsoever. I had been news director there, and before that reporter, anchor, writer, and assistant news director at KFBK. But I applied for the job and got it, which is crazy, because it’s a big station in a big market. They probably could have hired anybody from anywhere. I guess they liked what I was doing in the news, and they liked what I said we could be doing or should be doing on the programming side. I got the job as program director in July of 1991.

Luke: How would you describe the ratings and the sound and the feel of KFI before your first day there?

David: It was middle of the road. They had started doing some talk shows. They did a game show. Tom Leykis was doing afternoons, so they had a loud, attention-getting, engaging talk show already in the afternoon, but they were still playing some music in the morning.

My very first day there is a good illustration. I went to the general manager’s office to meet him in the morning, and the door was closed. His assistant, sitting outside, said he was firing the morning show, because there was a middle-of-the-road morning show on and we were going to change to Terri Rae and Dave Crosby. So I waited, and when the door opened, out came Gary Owens, who of course is a huge legendary Los Angeles personality. I certainly knew who he was. He had done national television and all of that. He had just been fired as the morning host. He comes out and sees me, and I stand up, and he introduces himself, and I introduce myself, and I said, today’s my first day, I’m going to be the news director. He shook my hand and held it for a moment and said, “Well, welcome to Los Angeles, and I hope this market is as good to you as it has been to me. I absolutely wish you all the best.”

Such an amazing thing for him to say, having been fired five minutes before. That was the outgoing sound of the station, and I was part of the incoming sound of the station. It was an amazing moment, because I really looked up to him and had listened to him for years, on and off, when I was in Southern California. For him to be that gracious was really cool.

Luke: I presume that when you lived in Sacramento you loved nighttime, when you could pick up Los Angeles stations. How would you describe the sound or the feel between Los Angeles radio, San Francisco radio, and Sacramento radio before you moved to KFI?

David: When I was a kid I used to listen to KFI at night, and during the winter, when it gets light later, I would listen to the morning show. I won a Bee Gees album from KFI. I was the whatever caller from Sacramento at probably five or six in the morning, and they never sent it. So when I started working at KFI I said, hey, where’s the fabulous prize closet? You guys owe me a Bee Gees album. It’s here somewhere. It’s got to be.

I used to listen to KFI all the time when I was a kid. At night, like you say. KHJ in Los Angeles was very similar to KFRC. They were the same company, they had the same consultant, and a lot of personalities went back and forth. But I always found KFRC to be better programmed. That might just be because it was Northern California and I was more familiar with it. Whenever I was in Southern California I would try to listen to KHJ, and I would always listen to KFI. As time went on and FM became bigger, I would try to listen to KMET 94.7 and KLOS as much as I could. I always appreciated hearing Los Angeles radio.

Luke: Is there a certain personality who does better as a Sacramento host versus a San Francisco host versus a Los Angeles host? Are there any generalizations?

David: No. I think the things listeners listen for are pretty universal. These days I’m consulting full-time, and have been for a long time, with clients all over the world. One thing I’ve found is that the needs of listeners are pretty universal. Whatever makes somebody turn up a radio in Los Angeles is the same thing that makes them turn up a radio in Sacramento or Madrid or Bogotá or Mexico City or Toronto. It doesn’t really matter.

Luke: How would you describe KABC? What was going on with it when you moved to KFI in July of 1989 and worked as news director for a couple of years?

David: KABC, as I said, was the number one station in the market by far. It wasn’t close. They were the top billing radio station in the United States. They had huge personalities. Michael Jackson, who had been there a long time. Ken Minyard was doing mornings and had been there a very long time.

They were comfortable, really professional, very entrenched, and pretty inside. I found that station to be very good for people who had always listened to it and less good for people who hadn’t. That’s where I always thought KFI had a real opportunity to grow audience. We weren’t going to steal audience that had been listening to KABC for forty years. We were going to steal from the fringes, which is exactly what we ended up doing.

Luke: Tell me more about stealing from the fringes, because I experienced that. I was there when KFI was the upstart, the brash one. Would it be fair to call it shock talk radio, KFI in 1988, 1989, 1990?

David: No. Before 1991 it certainly wasn’t that. I’ve never called it shock radio, the whole time I was there or since.

What I tried to do with KFI starting in 1991 was be as different as I could from KABC. KABC was very comfortable, certainly informative, serious interviews. Everything they did, I wanted to be the opposite of that at KFI.

We even used to run billboard campaigns against the Dodgers, which is a crazy thing to think of now, because it’s such an institution. KABC carried the Dodgers, and I knew from audience research that every time they ran a Dodger game, a significant portion of their audience that didn’t want to hear a Dodger game, whether they were a fan or not, started spinning the dial looking for something else. That was another great opportunity for us. That’s why we did those billboards. I tried to be everything KABC was not, so we were a serious alternative and not just another flavor of the same thing.

Luke: How would that show up? I assume your demographics were ten years younger.

David: Yes. Here’s a good illustration. When I put Bill Handel on in the morning doing a talk show, I don’t think there was another show in the morning on a spoken word station in America that was anything like what Bill Handel was doing. What KABC was doing was Ken and Bob, Bob Arthur and Ken Minyard, a very traditional and extremely successful morning show. They would do the dumb office fact of the day, that kind of thing.

I had Handel go on and go back and forth between giving his opinion, like a talk show, which did not occur in morning drive anywhere at that time, and explaining. Helping you understand what’s going on today in no uncertain terms and in easy to understand terms, and giving his opinion on it. Rather than the dumb office fact of the day. I don’t mean that as a put-down of that morning show at KABC. They had been extremely successful doing it for a long time and had a much bigger audience than we did. I just needed to be completely different.

Luke: Do you remember the date you took over as program director at KFI?

David: July 19, 1991.

Luke: At that time, what were your ratings compared to KABC?

David: I don’t remember. A ten share, an eight share, something like that. And we were about a 0.8 or 0.9.

Luke: Wow.

David: Yeah.

Luke: By the way, what did you notice about how Rush Limbaugh changed when he went national?

David: He didn’t change for a long time. After several years of being national he became less entertaining and more serious. That was probably the biggest change over the course of his career. He was really entertaining when he was local, and when he went national he was at least as entertaining. He used to beat up on Teddy Kennedy, on the National Organization for Women, all kinds of things. He had a lot of fun doing it. He had song parodies. He had a lot of fun, which was the show aspect he brought to what he was doing. Later in his career he didn’t do the parodies as much, and there wasn’t quite as much humor. I think he was more and more focused on trying to get people to understand his point of view from a more serious standpoint. That was the biggest change. But it wasn’t when he went national. When he went national, the entertainment value of his show was one of the things that made him take off from the get-go.

Luke: If you had to name a year when Rush changed on his national show from primarily hilarious and entertaining to something different, what year would you say?

David: Maybe 1998.

Luke: You take over as talk radio programmer at KFI. What do you start doing, and what do you start learning?

David: There were two things that were part of my programming of KFI from pretty much the day I started, and well beyond when I left, I think well into Robin Bertolucci’s time.

The first one is that we did a lot of audience research. Even though you use the word shock, and even though we were pretty out there sometimes, almost none of it was by the seat of our pants or random. I used a lot of audience research. At one time I probably had a budget of a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, and I did focus groups and big studies and content studies, where I would play pieces of audio and have people comment on what they thought we were doing. It was like a very good music station, just like KFRC in San Francisco in the 1970s. It was a well-researched product, very much aligned with the audience I was trying to attract. That was from the very beginning.

The other thing, from the day I started as program director until the day I left in 2002, is that I never programmed the station to be liberal or conservative. I programmed it to be stimulating. That was the word for me. Today I think a lot of stations try hard to be very conservative, more and more over time. I never once looked at it that way. I just looked at stimulating. We were More Stimulating Talk Radio. Every single thing we did, every show, every person I recruited, every segment of every show, the main measure was, is it stimulating? KABC at that time was not seen as stimulating. They were seen as very comfortable, as was KNX. That was my way of flanking both of those radio stations with KFI. Again, with a lot of audience research, and very methodical and intentional.

Luke: How do you know the research represented something real?

David: Because the more we followed it, the better the station did. The more we started to grow.

Luke: Do you remember some of the insights you got from the research?

David: I’ll give you one. Bill Handel in the morning used to talk about his wife all the time. One of the things that came back in research was, I’ve got my own wife, I don’t need his wife at six o’clock in the morning. What I need at six in the morning is to know what’s going on in the world and what I do with it.

So I really focused his show on explaining. We added a thing in the morning, in the six o’clock hour, called Handel on the News. The team would throw news stories at him. Hey, did you see this? What do you think about this? And Bill would comment and explain, helping us understand what was going on in the world. That hour was the first hour of his show that really took off. And it came straight out of audience research. The audience saying, in the morning I don’t just need the headlines. I get that from KNX and the newspaper. What I want is to really understand. I don’t need the dumb office fact of the day. I don’t need another set of headlines. I just want to understand what’s going on. He’s personally a student of history and incredibly knowledgeable, and he was the right guy to pull that off. The audience research said if you do this, people will really listen. So we did it, and we took his wife out of it, and people really did listen, and that show took off.

Luke: Do you get clues from your physiology, from what’s going on in your body, precognitive cues about what works in good radio?

David: That’s a great question, Luke. When I was a little kid growing up listening to KFRC for hours and hours, and I mean I spent hours listening to KFRC, and KROY in Sacramento, I felt touched. John Mack Flanagan did afternoons on KFRC and he was talking to a million people, the whole Bay Area. I was way off to the east in dusty little Sacramento. And yet every time he was on the radio it was like he was talking right to me. He touched me.

So my entire career, and to this day consulting, that’s something I feel for as I’m listening. Sometimes I feel it and sometimes I don’t, and when I don’t, I try to figure out how to help a personality get there and communicate in a way that will make a listener feel touched. Because if you can make one listener feel touched, you can make them all feel touched.

Luke: The cliché for what you just described is that words that come from the heart are heard in the heart.

David: I’ve never said it that way. I look at it like, I say something on the radio and it makes you look at the radio, literally physically look at the radio, and what you’re thinking is, wow. That’s the moment. That’s the thing KFRC used to do for me, and I tried to bring it to everything I did at KFI, as both news director and program director.

Luke: Bill Handel, Tom Leykis. Who are some of the other big names at the station as we move through your talk radio career into 1992, 1993? I think Dr. Laura comes along about 1994.

David: 1993 is when I put Bill Handel on the air. Tom Leykis left. I put the very controversial police chief Daryl Gates on the air as a kind of interim between Tom Leykis and John and Ken. John and Ken started in September or October of 1993, I think. Laura was already on the station when I started, but as a fill-in. I put her on at night, and then I ended up putting her on during the day, and then she went on to become syndicated. Then I added Stephanie Miller, who I think is still doing a syndicated show out there. And then Phil Hendrie. There were others in between, Mr. KFI and others, but that’s how it evolved. I think I put Handel on first, then Laura, then John and Ken, then Hendrie. That ended up being the lineup that stuck. And in the case of Handel and John Kobylt, thirty-something years later it’s still going.

Luke: How would sessions work between you and hosts? I assume you don’t tell them you need to coach them up. And I’m sure you had to communicate with each one differently. How did that happen?

David: It completely depends on the host. Bill and I would sometimes meet in the office, sometimes go to lunch. We used to go to dim sum in downtown Los Angeles, and that’s where we talked. John Kobylt and I had one meeting in the office that did not go well and we ended up screaming at each other. After that we always ended up over a burger in Beverly Hills at a particular place he liked.

Everybody had a different way of communicating and a different comfort zone, and almost none of it was in the office over the desk. To this day it’s like that. I work with these personalities, some of them really big and really successful, all over the place, and the relationship with each one and the way we meet and communicate is completely different for each one.

Luke: When did the ratings start heading up, and were there any major milestones in your early years as program director at KFI?

David: It took about two years. The first big milestone was right after I became program director. A weekend host on KFI made a comment that turned out to be controversial about a television news anchor at the time. That comment was misconstrued, and then a PR firm was hired, and it was blown up, and an FCC complaint was filed against us, and there were protests outside the radio station, over a comment that had been completely misconstrued, and I think probably misconstrued on purpose.

That was the first time we got a bump in the ratings. Because I was brand new to programming, I didn’t yet know how that worked. I learned it firsthand, in real time, in a very scary way. A weekend host makes a comment, it gets blown out of proportion, totally misconstrued, becomes a huge thing. I was sure I was going to get fired, and the station was going to get an FCC fine, and all of that. None of it happened. Then the ratings came out and we had, I think, a hundred thousand listeners more than before all of that happened. And I thought, wow, that’s really interesting how that worked.

Luke: If I’d spoken to the leadership at KABC and KNX from 1989 to 1993, they would have told me KFI is vulgar, low class, shock radio. Is that a fair description of how the stations on top in news and talk in Los Angeles saw KFI?

David: Absolutely. They paid no attention to us whatsoever. They totally wrote us off, which really helped with my strategy and all my audience research and everything I was trying to do, because they never played defense. They never blocked it until it was too late.

Luke: How did you spend your time? Take the first year as program director. Were you working forty-hour weeks, fifty-hour weeks? How did that get sliced up?

David: I don’t think I ever worked a forty or fifty hour week the whole time I was at KFI. It was a tough job and well beyond full-time. A lot of it was spent talking to personalities. Some of it was spent with the news, though I had replaced myself with a very good news director, a guy named Mark Thomas, so I didn’t have to worry about the news as much, because I knew he was on it.

It was just trying to keep people to the strategy, on air and off air. Be more stimulating. Explain things. Have a lot of fun. Never take ourselves seriously. Big talk stations at that time took themselves very seriously, and so we very deliberately never did, or tried not to. It was really just working on those fundamentals all the time with the entire staff.

Luke: What was the typical commercial load? Twenty minutes an hour?

David: No. When I started there I think it was fifteen or sixteen, and when I left it was twenty-two.

Luke: I remember in the eighties there were all sorts of top talk stations that had twenty-two plus minutes of commercials an hour. I don’t know how you do it.

David: We didn’t for a long time. We kept it to sixteen for a very long time.

Luke: When did KFI become the number one talk station in Los Angeles?

David: Probably 1994 or 1995, when KABC started to come down, really come down, and we continued to go up and passed them. I don’t remember exactly, but probably in there. It took a couple of years. I started in July of 1991, and it took a couple of years just to get the station set and start to build the audience, and then probably another couple of years for it to really turbo with the audience.

Luke: How would you describe your sources of energy? Were they coming from success, from the excitement of running a radio station, from your personal connections inside the station? What was fueling you?

David: Success. Starting with that first thing with the weekend show that I described, the more we followed the strategy, the more the audience grew, and it was pretty cool to experience that.

At the same time Rush really started to take off. It took Rush about two years to get any traction whatsoever in Los Angeles, but once he did, he really started to take off. It was a multifactor thing. Rush was bringing a lot of audience into the radio station that I was trying to spread around to other shows, and he very quickly became the number one show on the station. The other things we were doing were starting to kick in. The news was starting to kick in. We were finding that more and more people would listen to us for news, because then they didn’t have to listen to the all-news station. They could get everything they needed from us and then be entertained by the talk shows, which was the whole thing I had described to the program director in Sacramento all those years before.

We had a lot of things going right for us at the same time. In those days, unlike now, we had some marketing money. Not a lot, and I don’t think we had as much as KABC or KNX, but we had some, and we had a very good marketing director. Our strategy for marketing the station to draw a new audience was to focus it. Instead of doing a billboard campaign with billboards all over Los Angeles, where you wouldn’t really see any of them because we couldn’t afford very many, we grouped them. In one area you would see us all over the place, like we owned it. If we could only have twenty billboards, rather than diluting them over the whole metro area, we would use them all in one place, or with one campaign. I think that really helped. The way we marketed, and a lot of guerrilla marketing. Every single one of those was a big factor. And the more successful we became, the more energy I got from it.

Luke: Did you have mentors during this period, once you became news director at KFI and then program director? Was there some guy in New Orleans or New York you’d reach out to first when you didn’t know what to do?

David: Absolutely. We had a consultant who lived in Cambria at the time, up the central coast, and he had been the consultant at KFI long before I started. I think he might have had something to do with how I got hired without having any previous experience. He and I talked every single day except when he was on vacation. Every single day I worked there until I left in 2002. I would run everything past him and he would say, oh, that’s a great idea, or, be careful about this, or, you’re not thinking about that, or, somebody tried that over there and it didn’t work. He was a great consultant. He’s the reason I’m a consultant now. He really inspired me. We really programmed that radio station together.

Luke: Can you give me a taste of what those conversations were like?

David: It was just daily programming. Handel wants to do this, I don’t really see how it fits, what do you think? John did this and it was great, I want to get him to do more of that. Is there a blind side? Is there something I should know that I’m not seeing? Questions like that most of the time.

Luke: What kind of feedback did you get from your advertisers? What did they want?

David: They want their phone to ring. We were a very engaging station. We were not the kind of radio station you could have on in the background across the office while you do your work. People who listened to KFI really listened to KFI. So the products we sold sold very well. When Bill Handel would do an endorsement for something, people would buy it. The advertisers got tremendous response from KFI, much more than from KABC, much more than from KNX, much more than from music stations, just because we were so foreground and so engaging.

Luke: Did you go to national conferences with other radio elites, and did you learn at those conferences?

David: I didn’t learn too much. What we were doing at that time was so different from what the format was doing anywhere. There wasn’t really anyone else for me to listen to or talk to. It was kind of lonely, to be honest with you. There were very few other stations, if any, doing anything similar to what I was trying to do at KFI. So I would go to those things, and I’m sure I learned a thing or two, but not very much.

I learned mostly by doing. Let’s try this, and if it doesn’t work, it’s just radio. It’s not brain surgery. Nobody dies and we move on. And if it works, then we’re on to something. That was a big part of my philosophy.

Luke: How did you help your hosts find the emotional center of a story?

David: There’s one thing a great host does, to this day, and this is in my work currently in different countries. That is to say what people are thinking but don’t necessarily say. It took me a minute to figure that out, but I figured out that’s what really makes hosts authentic, vulnerable, and engaging. They say things you’ve been thinking all along but don’t say yourself, and then all of a sudden you hear it coming out of the radio and you go, oh my God, that guy is so right. Thank God somebody’s finally saying it. And you turn the radio up. That’s how somebody becomes a very loyal, longtime listener. That’s how the host really connects with the listener.

I’ll give you an example that’s not from KFI. It’s another show I’ve worked with for several years, a nationally syndicated show. One of the guys is very pro-Second Amendment, no gun control, that kind of thing. The Sandy Hook school shooting happened, and he was on the air saying, we’ve got to figure out how to keep guns out of the hands of wackos, because at Sandy Hook it was a mother who owned the gun the shooter used. And another guy on the show, his partner, goes, you know what, don’t look now, but you’re talking about gun control, which you’re completely against. And the first guy goes, I know. I know, and it’s driving me crazy, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I know I’m against gun control, but I know we need something.

That’s being vulnerable. It’s not being a know-it-all and it’s not being the smartest guy in the room. It’s being authentic and vulnerable, and people can relate. That’s what I try to bring to every star I work with now. We did that at KFI.

Luke: How do you think John and Ken lasted so long together? Usually tensions crop up in these arrangements.

David: They were very professional. Like a lot of teams I work with, I think they were friendly and social, but I don’t think they were necessarily friends. They were business partners. It’s like how long-term business partners work together. Ron Howard and Brian Grazer have extremely different personalities. They come to realize, and I think John and Ken realized this before I even met them, hey, we don’t have to be friends. We don’t have to be best buddies doing the show. We’re in business together. So we show up and bring everything we can to support the business, and we want a business that’s bigger and better than any one of us individually. I think those guys were particularly good at that.

LAT: ‘KFI Celebrates 10 Years of Stirring Up ‘More Stimulating’ Talk’ (July 29, 1999)

Kevin Baxter writes:

“This is entertainment,” Handel confessed later as he turned away from a plate of Spam and guacamole. “But you can’t do it just on entertainment. Obviously, there has to be information. The whole point of the show is to bring something new to the table that people otherwise would not know.”

It’s a novel approach to talk radio, mixing fact with fun–or at least it was novel when KFI-AM (640) started doing it a decade ago. Since then, however, it’s come to be known by another term: successful.

“Up until that time, talk radio had been just hosts and callers,” says talk-radio superstar Rush Limbaugh, whose nationally syndicated show helped define KFI’s format. “And this brought an entirely different dynamic to it. I think what we’ve done is revitalized a lot of AM stations and made AM a place where people actually tune now.”

And for a while, more of them tuned to KFI than to any other talk station in the country. Based on national Arbitron figures for the winter of 1998–10 years after KFI first switched to talk–the station’s weekly cumulative audience of 1.3 million was the largest of any talk station in the United States. And although KFI has since slipped to fourth nationally, that achievement nonetheless completed a remarkable rise for the station, which joined the talk-radio wars only as a last resort, then proceeded to redefine the format entirely.

Today, for example, the station carries the conservative political commentary of Limbaugh and tough-love moralist Laura Schlessinger. But it follows them with local personalities such as Karel Bouley and Andrew Howard, an openly gay couple who host the afternoon drive-time show, and evening host Phil Hendrie, whose unique style mocks the very premise of talk radio.

“It’s a whole different way of doing things,” says Handel, a practicing lawyer who, for six years, has hosted one of the few issue-driven morning drive-time shows in the Southland. “KFI is a different station. It’s a very unique station.”

Eleven years ago, the only thing different about KFI was the fact that it had one of the largest signals but one of the smallest audiences in the Los Angeles market. It had been a music station almost since its inception, but by the time George Oliva took over as program director, music on AM was dying and KFI’s ratings were fading faster than Michael Dukakis’ presidential hopes.

“We needed to do something,” remembers David G. Hall, who was Oliva’s news director at both KFBK in Sacramento and at KFI before succeeding him as program director in 1991. “There was one huge all-talk station in town . . . and that was KABC. And then there was Spanish and there was religion. And if you’re a big AM station, what are your other choices?”

New Format Arrested KFI’s Ratings Slide

The obvious target was KABC-AM (790), even though the station so dominated its competitors that a court once ruled it had exclusive rights to the slogan “talk radio.” And the opening skirmishes of radio’s war of the words gave no indication that was about to change: Although the new format arrested KFI’s slide, lifting the station five places to 20th in the local radio rankings in less than a year, the audience for third-ranked KABC grew almost as much.

Oliva made the transition slowly, phasing in talk-intensive programs hosted by the likes of Tom Leykis and a former Cleveland comic known as Mother Love around a mix of music, advice and game shows. So although the station marks its first day as a full-time talker as July 17, 1989, the day after it played its last record, it had actually adopted the format in principle more than a year earlier.

“We may or may not be 10 years old,” Hendrie says. “Who cares? We’re having a party anyway.”

But in a sense, KFI never completely abandoned its music-format roots–a fact that has contributed to its success. The station employed rock music “‘bumpers” to transition in and out of commercial breaks, irreverent “in your face” promos and a frenetic on-air style.

“There was no passion. It was just talk,” Hall says of traditional talk radio. “I guess I kind of made the conscious decision that a news/talk station can sound and feel like a Top 40 station does. The whole style of the radio station, I think, comes from that. There were no other stations in the country . . . quite like us.”

But while Oliva and Hall can claim credit for making KFI unique, Limbaugh is the one who made the station successful. KFI was still struggling to find its voice when it replaced Geoff Edwards with Limbaugh’s New York-based show in spring 1989. Limbaugh’s entertaining style, unabashed point of view and eschewing of guests provided a jolting contrast to the more balanced, interview-intensive approach of Michael Jackson, who was a Southland morning fixture on KABC. Twenty months after joining KFI, Limbaugh’s show was outperforming Jackson and, by fall 1992, KFI had passed KABC as the top-ranked talk station in Southern California.

“I truly believe that Rush Limbaugh has had a lot do with the re-attention and the success of AM radio,” says KFI traffic reporter Mark Denis. “He set a trend. The product was working; it was going to work. [But] it seemed like we filled the car up with supreme when Rush came.”

And the station did just as much for Limbaugh. Before it was picked up by KFI, Limbaugh’s show was heard in 109 markets, but his home base of New York was the only major market that carried it. But after going on the air in Los Angeles, Limbaugh was suddenly drawing more listeners in one market than he had drawn nationally just a few months earlier.

“Los Angeles was technically and literally the acquisition that woke everybody else up,” Limbaugh says. “I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in Los Angeles. Early on, they promoted the show. When they took it, they didn’t act ashamed of it. They were very proud of it, which was a key factor. I mean, they hired a PR guy. First time I ever worked with a PR guy was when KFI had one.”

Perhaps more important, however, was the fact that Limbaugh’s vision mirrored that of Hall’s; both thought talk radio should be about more than just talk.

“I had always wanted to do things other than just talk,” says Limbaugh, who is still the most listened-to English-language radio personality in L.A. “I had always wanted to use music for themes and as entertainment. I looked at talk radio not as a political vehicle, but as an entertainment vehicle.”

…KFI has encountered some bumps in the road along the way, of course. The station endured a wave of protests for its ill-conceived–and ultimately unsuccessful–attempt to send a pair of neo-Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp with Handel in 1994, for example, and a suit filed in March by former overnight host Tammy Bruce–charging the station, Hall, Hendrie and General Manager Howard Neal with sex discrimination, sexual harassment, wrongful termination and slander–is still pending.

In just the last five months, the station has had to deal with the loss of popular afternoon drive-team hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou–who jumped to rival KABC–and the weekend duo of Scott Hasick and Casey Bartholomew, who did their final KFI show on Sunday. They will soon join “New Jersey 101” in Trenton.

“Any time we do something that works, someone else copies it or they hire away our people,” says news anchor Terri-Rae Elmer. “So we have to continuously keep coming up with something that’s new and different.”

That’s all part of the process, says Hall.

“We did a billboard [that] said, ‘We Don’t Know What the Hell We’re Doing.’ I loved that because, to a large degree, that’s true,” he says. “We never expected to beat KABC. We never expected to be the leading talk station. We certainly never expected to be in a position where every time a show would leave here, one of our competitors would pick it up.

“That puts us in a very different position, to tell you the truth. And a very interesting one.”

Luke: I’ve got a commercial question, not a moral one, about Tucker Carlson’s final years at Fox, when he would get monster ratings but nobody wanted to advertise on his show. Did you have to deal with anything like that?

David: We had advertisers bail. Not very much. We produced such great results. The advertisers we had were mostly local, mostly direct business advertisers. We never did very well with advertising agencies, even when the ratings went way up, because we did so well locally. We just made their phones ring. I don’t think they cared that much. I’m sure over the years we lost a few, but not very many, and certainly not like that.

Luke: When you were program director, what was your attitude toward syndication versus local programming?

David: I did not like syndication, which is funny, because now I work with some syndicated shows that have become very successful. But I was not a big fan. I wanted KFI to be live and local as much as possible.

Luke: I used to listen to Ronn Owens because I was in Northern California. I listened to him for years, and then I was like, oh wow, he’s come to KABC. But that didn’t work. And in Australia, big Sydney radio hosts don’t do well in Melbourne. Any thoughts on that?

David: It was worrisome to me when I heard he was going to do both and be on KABC, because I also grew up listening to Ronn Owens on KGO. My dad listened to KGO when I was a kid, so I was very familiar with his show, and I always thought he did a great job.

I was pretty worried when I heard he was coming to KABC, and here’s what I did. I went to Arbitron, which at the time was the ratings company, now Nielsen, and asked if I could do a deep dive into his ratings in San Francisco. I did not have audience research for San Francisco the way I had it for my own market, and I’ve already talked about how much I relied on that. I wanted to understand his audience, and I wasn’t going to have enough time or budget to do an audience research project in a market I don’t even broadcast to. So I went to Arbitron and did this big deep dive.

What I discovered is that KGO was so big, as you remember, that there were certain people who carried KGO forward and moved it up, and there were some people KGO brought along. You could have a high rating on KGO, but really your high rating is because of KGO. A rising tide floats all boats. It was a huge discovery for me. It surprised me to see that Ronn Owens at that time, and I know he was a big leader of KGO for many years, but at that point he had crossed over to being more carried by KGO than carrying KGO. That meant that if he came to Los Angeles he would certainly draw an audience, but he would depend on the existing audience of KABC, which was dwindling and way down at that point. As long as I played good defense against him, I probably wouldn’t have much to worry about. Which is exactly how it turned out.

Luke: At a lot of stations the top hosts earn four or five times what the program director earns. How does that affect relations between the program director and the host, in your experience?

David: It’s never been a factor for me, ever. I can’t speak to how others have dealt with it. The way I always look at it is, if Bill Handel can go on the air in the morning in this market against Rick Dees or Ryan Seacrest and KABC and Howard Stern and Mark and Brian, the absolute biggest personalities not just in this market but in this country, and win and beat them and draw more listeners than they do, and sell things that generate millions of dollars of revenue for the radio station, I would want to see him paid very fairly for that. I never looked at it and would never look at it like, wow, this is what I make and that’s what he makes. That just wouldn’t come up.

Luke: Were there any hosts you stopped giving notes to because they were so good at what they did?

David: Laura, I think, kind of got to that point.

Luke: Dr. Laura. What was it about her? There was some compelling quality I can’t describe.

David: She did that thing I described earlier. She said what people were thinking and wouldn’t say. Somebody would call her up and say, my boyfriend and I are still in love and we’re going to move in together. Well, they wouldn’t be calling her if the person making that call didn’t have some doubt somewhere deep in their mind. Why on earth would you call Dr. Laura with a question like that unless you had a doubt? And she would go right to that doubt. It’s like she had x-ray vision. She was particularly good at putting into words things people were thinking and sometimes couldn’t even admit to themselves. It’s that whole thing I described earlier, saying what people are thinking but don’t necessarily say. She does it at a completely different level. That’s her superpower and always has been.

Luke: What did your bosses say to you? I don’t want you to violate confidence, but what sort of feedback were you getting from the people above you when you were running KFI?

David: We were owned by Cox Enterprises, based in Atlanta, so we had real geographical distance from the home office, which I think was good, because there are a lot of things we did that probably made them pretty nervous.

The general manager I worked with, Howard Neal, was amazing at letting us do what we needed to do and playing good defense for us in the community and with the ownership. He was always fighting Atlanta, and he was always fielding calls from community groups or whoever was offended or didn’t like what we were doing, and letting us do it. He was involved in all the audience research, so he knew this wasn’t me trying to be liberal or conservative or anything in particular. He knew what the strategy was. We all agreed to the strategy together, and it was my job to execute it, but he was aware of it, and I think that made it possible for him to defend us both to corporate and in the community, and also to really sell us and speak very well of what we were doing. He was amazing in his ability to do that. I don’t know that I’ve worked with many managers since who have been able to do that to the extent he was. He didn’t take it personally.

Luke: Was there a moment when you realized talk radio was in decline as a genre in the United States?

David: I left for Premiere and launched some shows there and was there for a couple of years and really enjoyed it. Then I came back to local radio, to KNX and KFWB, and I ran both of those together and got back to the news, although I tried to bring a little bit of the show side to KNX. The very last thing I did in local radio before I started consulting full-time was put in a little bit of time at KABC.

When I got to KABC I realized the extent to which talk radio had become purely ideological. As I said at the beginning of our conversation, for me it never was. I didn’t want us to be talking about politics very much anyway, except for Rush Limbaugh. But it was never ideological. It was never righty, lefty. When I got back into talk radio I saw it had turned pretty conservative and hard right, and the whole format was doing the same thing.

Without agreeing or disagreeing with that personally or ideologically, because that has nothing to do with it, it limits the audience. It’s like if all rock stations go yacht rock at the same time. That limits the audience to people who only like yacht rock, and not people who like hard rock or metal or singer-songwriter or any other genre in that format. The same thing was starting to happen in talk radio.

Luke: Let me give you a theory for part of that. For a regular bloke who’s not liberal, who has a job in an office, he has to walk a minefield. He has to squelch his natural reactions to the world around him. Your average bloke who’s an employee in an office feels castrated, and things that are blindingly obvious to you, you cannot say at a workplace. You have to behave like a castrated bloke. And talk radio is a way of letting off steam. Does any of that make sense to you?

David: Totally. And it does exactly that in one category, politics. But there’s a lot of other things to talk about, and that’s why at KFI I tried not to be political, especially nationally political, and tried to keep it to more local things, more real life things, more daily things.

Now the format is really just politics, isn’t it, to a large degree. Not entirely, but to a large degree. And yes, that bloke, I don’t know how many blokes we have here in the United States, but that bloke definitely now has a voice and an outlet and people he can agree with, who are saying on the radio things he was probably thinking all along, which is very powerful, as I’ve said. But that’s just one category. That’s just one genre.

Luke: But your average bloke, there are blokes who’ve gotten into trouble for the most innocuous comments, to me anyway, at work. I’m thinking of the minefield of male-female relations. In elite media you can crap on men all day long, but if you ever suggest women have a weakness. Or the struggles and challenges of dealing with different groups, not the politics of it, but that we’re raised with different codes. There are all these parts of life you cannot talk about at the office or in polite society, if polite society is university graduates. Forget politics. Just male-female relations, relations between groups. You saw something and you were horrified, but you cannot say out loud how horrified you are by what you saw.

David: That’s where talk radio should come in, right? That’s where we say the things. Howard Stern was particularly good at this. He would say the things everybody thought and didn’t feel they could say. That’s what we did at KFI, and that’s what the people I work with now try to do, to the extent they can. That’s exactly it. They solve the problem you’re describing. That’s what the format at its best does.

Even morning shows on music radio stations are sometimes able to pull that off, and I think that’s great for the audience they have, that they’re able to say things their audience thinks and would never dare say.

Luke: How much is talk radio like top 40 radio, in that you have a host who plays the hits, whether it’s constitutional conservatism or whatever his shtick is?

David: These days, probably not very much. When I was at KFI, KFRC was in my head every single day. I think it’s very different now. There’s not nearly as much audience research being done. KFRC and KHJ and KIIS-FM were highly researched radio stations, and mine was no different at KFI. These days there’s no budget for that, especially on the spoken word side. Music stations still do some research, but talk stations rarely do. So there’s a lot more flying by the seat of your pants, and being an echo chamber for the audience or for the people who are calling in anyway, and not trying to figure out where the line is or where the boundary is. Much less now and much more thirty years ago.

Luke: Who are your peers you have the most respect for? Not the hosts, but the programmers and coaches and consultants.

David: I’ve been away from the radio station level here too long to be able to say. I don’t know.

Luke: Why did you leave KFI in 2002?

David: Because all of my shows were being syndicated by Premiere, and Premiere wanted me to go there with those shows and create more shows. I had been at KFI a long time, and it had been a really good run, and I felt that would be an interesting next chapter.

Luke: What price did you pay for being a great talk radio programmer at KFI?

David: I don’t know. I worked too much. I don’t know how to answer that question.

Luke: Let’s skip it. When did you stop being a radio programmer primarily? Was it 2008?

David: July 2010 is when I left KABC.

Luke: What kind of radio station did you leave in July 2010?

David: A very conservative talk station that fits right in with conservative talk radio all over America today.

Luke: How long had you been there? And was it a congenial experience?

David: I was there a year, maybe. It was a tough experience, because if you think back over the hour of this conversation, that’s just not how I ever programmed before. It was more difficult, more challenging, than I expected.

Luke: What were you thinking about where you would go after you walked out of KABC in July of 2010?

David: When I left Premiere, before I went to CBS and the news stations, I knew I wanted to start consulting full-time, but I didn’t have the confidence to do it. I thought, nobody’s going to hire me, I’m going to starve. So I went to CBS, ran the two all-news stations for a few years, enjoyed that. When I left there, and I didn’t get fired or anything, I left to go to KABC, it was the same thing. I don’t know that I could really do this consulting thing full-time. I really wanted to. I was inspired by that consultant I mentioned who I had at KFI for all those years. I just didn’t have the confidence. And then after KABC I had the confidence, and I just did it, and I’ve been doing it ever since, and never starved so far.

Luke: What are the advantages or disadvantages for you between being a consultant versus being the guy in charge of a station?

David: A badge. When you’re the guy in charge of the station, you wear a badge. When you need people to do something, they do it. As a consultant, I can highly recommend that people do things, and if they don’t do them, there’s not much I can do about it.

Luke: Is there any reading you assign to people who hire you?

David: No. I never have. Never even thought about it. It’s a great idea.

Luke: So there’s no book about communication or radio you regard as particularly important?

David: I wouldn’t say that. There’s just no reading I assign, like, okay, go read this book and then we’ll work together.

Luke: What do you think are the best books about radio or communication, off the top of your head?

David: Valerie Geller’s books are really good. I know her. We worked together at KFI. She was in my news department in the very beginning, in 1989. I think she’s done a great job in all the different things she’s done and the places she’s worked, and I think her books have been very helpful to people. If someone were to ask me about a book, I’d recommend Valerie’s.

Luke: Have you worked with hosts, given notes to hosts, who you recognized were really good at what they did but who just made you feel lousy, and you didn’t like them, or it took a toll on you even interacting with them?

David: Not really, because it’s just never been that personal to me. Like I said before, whether I agree or disagree doesn’t matter. I’m in it for the radio. I’m in it for producing a really great product that comes out of a radio and makes people turn it up and want to come back for more. It isn’t about what I like or don’t like, or whether I get along with somebody well or don’t. It doesn’t matter.

Luke: But don’t people give you a feeling? You meet someone and you relax inside. You meet someone and you get excited. You meet someone and you start having all these questions. We all have strong emotional reactions to people. Surely that plays a role in what you do.

David: Not really. I don’t let it be a factor. Sometimes people are easier to work with, or a little more complicated to work with, but that’s just part of the challenge. I’ve never been that way. It never mattered whether I liked Handel personally, or whether he rubbed me the wrong way, or John, or Laura, or anybody, or Hendrie. It just does not matter.

I look at it like music formats. I’m a classic rock guy. I’m not a country guy, but I worked at a country station, and in fact I was on the air at a country station, and I did okay. It did not matter that I wasn’t a country music fan working at a country music station. And it does not matter whether I feel better or not as good about a person I’m working with. That’s not what I’m in it for.

Luke: Talk to me about the trajectory of your career once you walk out of KABC and start consulting.

David: I had already been consulting internationally. I put on the first talk station in Poland right after communism, in the early nineties, which is one of the things I’m most proud of in my career, and it’s number one in Poland even today. It’s called Tok FM. I put on a talk radio network in the UK, the first real network to go up against the BBC a little bit. Talk Radio UK, it was called. I did that in the mid-nineties. And I had been consulting in Mexico and New Zealand before I ever left KFI or Premiere. So I had already been doing quite a bit of consulting.

When I finally got the confidence to go out on my own and do this full-time and really start the business, it was those international things. Then I started to work with some different groups around the United States, and then it went international again, and now most of my clients are outside the United States. I still have clients here, and some great ones and important ones, but I work in Latin America and in Europe in several countries, and around the US. That’s been the trajectory.

Luke: How did you discover podcasts?

David: I became interested when they first started to become a thing. I think I was an early adopter. Like when I first started programming at KFI, I wanted to understand how they work and what the appeal is. So I started to study them and listen to a lot of them, different ones, and try to understand them as best I could from the very beginning.

Luke: What are the most common things you say to your clients?

David: That’s a great question. Everybody I work with who is either on the radio or produces a podcast has, in my experience, a superpower. There’s always a thing or two, maybe more, that they’re really good at. And often they shoot themselves in the foot. I see my role as trying to get them to shoot themselves in the foot as little as possible, while highlighting their strengths and the things they do best, maybe better than almost anyone else, as much as possible. You would think that would be a no-brainer, but that ends up being the challenge almost every time, for different reasons.

Luke: What are the most common ways people in the audio business shoot themselves in the foot?

David: They’re very inside. They do a show for people who have always listened to them, which makes that show very difficult for somebody who has never listened to them. That keeps them from growing an audience. That’s probably the biggest thing I see, and I see it all the time. Even shows that do a really good job, at some point they assume the audience knows all their tricks and all their nuances, and they get into a shorthand, and new audience doesn’t know that. It makes it very difficult for new audience to listen.

Another is that interviews can be really difficult. They’re better on podcasts, but on radio interviews are really difficult to do, because you introduce the person at the beginning and most hosts forget to reset and reintroduce the person later. If you hear the first three minutes you hear the introduction, who the person is, why we’re talking to them, and the best question, because every host thinks of the big question he wants to ask and usually asks it in the first couple of minutes. After that it’s an ongoing conversation. Anybody who tunes in after that first three minutes often doesn’t get who the guest is or why they’re there, and never gets the big question, because it’s already passed by the time they come in. It’s pretty hard to do an interview well.

Luke: Being a professional in the audio business, how does that affect your ability to get pleasure from choosing to listen to audio?

David: I don’t listen to spoken word audio recreationally. I only do it for work. I listen to music radio and music when I’m on my own time. But it never really turns off. This is kind of embarrassing to say. I’ve been in church watching a priest do a sermon, wanting to aircheck him, wanting to say, no, no, no, you should start with a story, and you should explain this, and you should do that. Coaching him. Unfortunately it doesn’t turn off.

Luke: If there’s anything that turns it off, what is it?

David: Music or movies. Mostly music.

Luke: Do you have favorite songs, a favorite band?

David: My favorite artist is Simon and Garfunkel, going way back to my early youth. But I like a lot of different kinds of music. As I said, I’m probably more naturally a classic rock guy, but I also grew up listening to all the big top 40 hits of the seventies on KFRC, so I guess I’m also a classic hits guy. In Los Angeles I listen to KLOS, I listen to K-Earth, I listen to 93.1 Jack FM. All very well programmed radio stations.

Luke: How did you have to grow to make it in your new consulting business, or did it just flow naturally? Did you have to learn new skills, new ways of working with people?

David: It mostly flowed. As I said, I had been doing it part-time from the early nineties anyway, so I had a lot of experience, and I had a great mentor. The consultant who helped me all that time at KFI also inspired me in what I’m doing now. I had a really good role model.

I’ve adopted some things that have helped over time. One of the things I really live by, and I tell my clients this all the time, is that I’ll give them my best thinking and I’ll make recommendations, but the decisions are theirs, because they’ve got a business to run and I’m not on the hook for their business. They are. Once they make a decision, my role changes. It goes from having the ideas and making recommendations to supporting whatever the decision is, even if it was not my recommendation or not what I would have decided. I really do live by that, and I think that’s what you have to do in this role. I make recommendations, they make decisions, and the moment they make a decision my role becomes making their decision successful.

Luke: I assume that pretty much everyone you’ve ever worked with, from radio to consulting, has an enormous drive to succeed. Am I wrong?

David: I would say that’s very true.

Luke: I would assume for most of the people you work with this is the number one thing in their life. It’s not number three.

David: Sometimes it’s not. I’ve worked with some people who had a lot of television experience, and they often don’t do very well in radio, because they miss television when they do radio. Radio is a little too simple for them sometimes. But for the most part I would say that’s accurate, Luke. They’re driven, and this really is the most important thing, or one of the most important things, in their lives. That’s great for the relationship, for me as a consultant or coach or program director. I have their attention.

Luke: Are there healthy drives you notice and unhealthy drives? Everyone you work with is incredibly driven. Do you think in those terms? One person trying to get back at a girl who rejected him in fifth grade.

David: No, not in my work. Not really. If I were a psychologist, probably. And sometimes I feel like a psychologist in this job. But no, not really.

Luke: How much have you been required, in your professional work in radio and other forms of audio, to reassure people, to tell them they’re good?

David: That’s a big part of the job. But from the beginning, when I first started programming, I realized it isn’t really helpful to say, hey, you’re doing a great job. It’s much more helpful to say, wow, you’re doing a great job, because I heard you do this and this and this. When you do those things, man, you are on fire. To be very specific and genuine about it. That’s what I’ve done my whole career.

Luke: Which hosts caused you the most aggravation, not because they were bad people, but because they were so provocative? I assume Phil Hendrie caused you more than anyone else.

David: No, not really. We have a great relationship. We had great communication when we were working together. Whenever I was going to be a so-called guest on his show, he told me. I knew what he was going to do. I always had the opportunity to say, oh man, I don’t know, that’s gotten a little close, I’ve got kids in school. So no, not really. My aggravation in my career has come from outside partnerships.

Luke: But you got more complaints. Didn’t you get more intense complaints about him?

David: I don’t care about complaints. Complaints are good. Let me tell you, the day I don’t get complaints, that would be a scary day. I love the complaints.

Luke: But they make your life complicated.

David: No, no, no. That’s part of the payoff. That’s how I know we’re touching people.

Luke: So the most controversial was that situation around 1992, the comment made by a radio host about a television news anchor, and that was somewhat scary for you.

David: It was, and that was probably the moment when I realized complaints are good and complaints should not complicate my life. They did during that time, because I didn’t know any better. But after that, they didn’t. It was such a great lesson for me.

Luke: And after that, things fell into place for how you regard complaints.

David: There are always a lot of complaints. I always just took them as good news. The more complaints, the better.

Luke: What do you do with podcasters that’s different from what you did with radio hosts?

David: The first thing is to understand that podcasting is its own medium. Television and radio are separate media, and podcasting is its own medium. There are a lot of people who start a podcast thinking they’re doing a radio show, but it isn’t a radio show. People use podcasts very differently, and that’s the most important thing for people to understand when they’re doing a podcast.

Also, radio is broad. It’s broadcasting, and it’s mass, and podcasting is niche. That’s a pretty big difference too. There are things about it that are very different from spoken word radio. It is spoken word content, but it’s really its own medium, more than a lot of people appreciate.

Luke: What separates the people who are great at what you do from the people who are merely good?

David: Talent, which can’t be taught. A sense of humor, typically. And the ability to boil things down, whether it’s a podcast or a radio show, which is really key now, maybe more than ever. We’re living in a more complicated world all the time. Mostly those things.

Luke: Are there things you tell people that no one else has told them, that open up vistas? Things you’ve been able to get through to people that they say no one else could?

David: There are some things I tell people and the reaction is, wow, never thought of it that way before. Nobody has ever said that to me. I’ve been doing this for thirty years, or twenty years, and nobody has ever said that to me. That happens, and it’s very rewarding when it does.

But more often it’s, no one has ever said it like that before. I’ve heard that over the years, and I couldn’t really do much with it. And then the way you just said it, I can work with that. I can do something with that. You really made that make sense for the first time. I hear that a lot. It’s not that I’m saying something for the very first time. I’m just saying it differently.

Luke: One thing I’m taking away from this is that a successful radio host or podcaster is often able to say things other people feel but no one says out loud. Then you have to have incredible courage to do that on an ongoing basis. Are you thinking of people who had the ability to say those things everyone else is thinking but doesn’t say, but who, when push came to shove, couldn’t deal with the pushback? Or have you only dealt with people so driven they’re willing to pay the price?

David: I’ve dealt with people who couldn’t deal with the pushback. What’s more common is that because everybody now has a phone in front of them, they’re looking at what people are posting or commenting, or what their friends and colleagues are texting or emailing them, and they let that drive what they do. That’s a really common thing these days, unfortunately. I wish I could take the phone out of every studio.

Luke: Are there people who, when they tell you they don’t follow social media, are telling you the truth? Or are they pretty much all hooked?

David: I think they’re all hooked. Everybody’s into social media and gives way too much weight to the comments. They don’t get that complaints are a good thing, the way I do.

Luke: Were you surprised how well your techniques translated to Poland and other places?

David: Yes, because I never thought of the basics of what makes a listener listen to radio as being as universal as they turn out to be. Now, of course, having done this a long time on the consulting side, I totally get it.

You’re in your car in Madrid. It’s hot. It’s already ninety-something degrees at eight in the morning. You’re in traffic. Your boss is an idiot. You’re ready for vacation. You’re hungry. You’re already thinking about what’s for dinner and about the weekend. And you’re listening to the radio. What is it we’re bringing to make you think, to put a smile on your face, to make you nod your head, and most importantly, to make you physically look at that radio? It does not matter whether that person in that car in that heat is in Los Angeles or Madrid or São Paulo or Paris or wherever. The things that make someone listen carefully to a music morning show or a talk show or a podcast are universal.

Luke: What constitutes a great radio host or podcaster? Is it eighty percent talent? Forty percent talent, forty percent discipline? How would you describe the components?

David: Probably seventy percent talent and thirty percent discipline, plus show. They have to have a sense of show, which is the thing I learned from Rush Limbaugh in the very beginning. They do have to be disciplined. They have to understand the environment they’re in. But I think the rest of it is talent.

You asked me before what things I end up telling people over and over. One of them is that people, especially when they’re newer at this, tend to think that people listen to their show or their podcast the way they do. Every time you do a video, Luke, you watch the entire thing, but of course your audience doesn’t. The good news with YouTube is you can see what percentage they actually watch, over time or per episode. It’s the same in radio. Somebody listening in the morning in Los Angeles is listening to anyone’s show for about twelve minutes, and the person doing that show hears four hours of that show every day. Plus his mom, probably. So they assume everybody hears the whole show, when in fact people are only hearing eleven and twelve and thirteen minute snippets of it.

Where that comes up, and this is both in music morning shows, which I also work with, and talk shows, is that they tend to shoot their wad first. They go on the air at six o’clock and they have all their best material, and they don’t repeat it. They don’t go back and touch it, because they already talked about it and the audience already heard it. But the audience listening at 8:20 certainly wasn’t listening at six o’clock when they did that. That’s where the discipline really comes in, and the understanding of how the medium works and their place in it, to work that to their advantage instead of against them.

Luke: When Dennis Prager was getting started at KABC, one of the challenges for him was that he kept getting the instruction, more energy, more energy, more energy. I think one thing that distinguishes those who do it from those who listen is that the listener doesn’t understand that a successful radio or podcast host has to bring at least five times the energy he’d bring to an in-person conversation. Am I in the ballpark?

David: I think that’s often the case. In Dennis’s case, when he started at KABC they had already lost a lot of audience and KFI was really starting to do well. Unfortunately for Dennis, I think a lot of that direction came from an urgent need to somehow follow KFI. We were really energetic, so they needed to be energetic. That was the secret sauce and why we were winning, and they needed to grab that back. And that’s not his style. That’s not who he is. It’s not his talent. He’s much more philosophical, and there’s a lot more to him than that. In that case I don’t think I would have given him that direction.

Luke: One thing I remember from working in radio is how absolutely wiped out hosts typically were after a show. Is that your recollection?

David: Absolutely. It was like that for me when I was on the radio, and it’s like that for just about everybody I work with.

Let me say one thing here that has to do with that and is kind of important. You watch a show like Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel, who comes from radio of course, he was on KROQ here, or Jon Stewart, or Stephen Colbert, and they have a writers room of twenty-two writers, or twenty, or fifteen, writing the monologue and the script and all that. Bill Handel was on the radio every day for four hours and it’s all off the top of his head. All of it. He has to keep a train of thought, and remember what he’s going to say, and be creative, and think about what his opinion is and how he’s going to express himself. That is remarkably challenging. I don’t think people appreciate that a radio show generates two or three or four or more hours of original content every day, all by themselves. Whether it’s one person or two people. Rush used to do three hours because he had no guests. Three hours every day, all original content, all generated by himself. He had no writers. That’s amazing when you compare them to people in national television and the support they have. So yes, of course they’re exhausted. They should be mentally exhausted.

Luke: I feel like I can get a read on someone from one, two, three seconds of their voice. When I call my friends or family, I immediately know where they are emotionally, what’s going on with them. I do a lot of twelve-step work and sponsorship. I can immediately tell whether someone feels beaten down, whether someone’s making progress. It’s so quick. The voice just screams somebody’s state at me. How about you? Do you feel this?

David: I think I’m pretty good at reading people. I have a sense, especially when I’m listening to them, whether they’re a music morning show or a talk show or news or a podcast.

You’ll find this kind of entertaining. I used to do this at KFI, and maybe even at Premiere a little bit. Somebody would want to do a talk show, so they’d come in and pitch me their show, and invariably, every single time, I would say, John Kobylt just choked on a pizza, I need somebody to go in and do afternoon drive in thirty minutes. If that’s you, what do you talk about? What are you going to go on the radio with thirty minutes from now?

Ninety percent of the time they would say, oh my God, I haven’t even looked at the paper today, I don’t know, let me look at the paper and see what’s going on. A good talk show host is dying to talk about stuff. You just need the microphone in front of you. You don’t need to look at the newspaper first. You would know immediately. All the best people I’ve worked with have been like that. I would ask that question and they would say, oh my God, the thing nobody’s talking about is this or that. And they’d jump right into it.

Luke: My mind immediately goes to, what are the obvious truths you can’t say out loud, particularly in polite company? I would just start making a list. Male-female differences. Relations between groups. Blindingly obvious things you cannot cop to or admit in polite company. That would be endlessly fascinating.

David: Yeah. That’s good. See, I would have hired you to do a talk show.

Luke: Well, what have I not asked you about that I should have?

David: This is pretty extensive. This is the longest interview I’ve ever done, that’s for sure. I think you asked some really good questions.

Luke: Thank you. I’ve thought about it for years, because I’ve loved radio since I came to America in 1977.

David: I can tell. Very impressive, Luke. Your knowledge.

Luke: Thank you, David.

David: Thank you so much.

Luke: I’ve been looking forward to this for years.

David: All right, great. Thank you very much. Let’s stay in touch.

Luke: Sounds good. Cheers, mate.

David: Cheers.