Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard tells the Aunt Tilly story in September and it kills.
He tells it at the Wednesday class, twenty-six people on folding chairs in the back room of the Barn, the coffee urn ticking, the good chairs taken by the four women who arrive at seven for a class that starts at seven thirty. He tells it the way he tells everything, standing, no notes, one hand in his pocket.
“Stanley Fish (b. 1938). Literary critic. He has a graduate student at Johns Hopkins who tells him she can walk into any English class in the country and get an A without reading the book. She has four or five moves. Nature against culture. Myth. The poem is secretly about writing the poem. The narrator is displacing his own fears onto the material. Any book. Any professor. It works.”
He waits.
“And then Fish says: there is one thing she cannot do. She cannot stand up and say the meaning of this poem was given to her by the ghost of her Aunt Tilly.”
The room laughs. Barry Teitelbaum laughs with his head back. Michael Danziger says something to the man next to him about a client.
“Why not?” Grossbard says. “Not because it’s false. Nobody at Hopkins has disproved Aunt Tilly. They’ve never looked into it. It’s because there’s no move to make after it. If I say the text is displacing anxiety, you can say it isn’t, and we have a class. If I say Aunt Tilly told me, we have nothing to do for the next fifty minutes but look at each other.”
Adina Reiss puts up a hand. “So it’s a rule of the game.”
“It’s the game,” Grossbard says. “There’s no game underneath it. The rules are the only thing there is.”
They love this. It’s the kind of thing they come for. Three people repeat it that week at their offices, and a man at the early minyan tells Grossbard on Thursday that he explained it to his son-in-law, who works at a studio, and the son-in-law said it explains his entire industry.
In November they learn Chayei Sarah.
Grossbard runs the November classes on the parsha because attendance holds and because the material does the work for him. Sarah dies at the top of the portion. The Akedah ends the portion before it. Abraham comes from Beersheba to mourn her and buys a field with a cave in it for four hundred silver shekels from a man who offers it to him free three times and takes the money anyway.
He gives them ten minutes and asks who has something.
Barry Teitelbaum has something. Barry has been doing daf yomi for forty-five years and holds the Artscroll on his knees with three fingers in it. He gives them the Ramban on the burial, the Da’as Zekeinim on the juxtaposition, and the question of why the Torah spends twenty verses on a real estate closing. He is careful. He names his sources and he stops when he is done. The room nods. This is a legal move and it lands, and two people write down the Da’as Zekeinim to look up.
Michael Danziger has something. Danziger is a CPA with six people under him and he reads everything as a transaction. He walks them through Ephron the Hittite, the offer, the refusal, the counteroffer, the phrase about four hundred shekels being nothing between friends. He says the parsha is about acquiring title in a country where you have no standing. He says the servant’s mission at the end is the same deal in a different market. He says the word for money appears more than the word for grief.
The room likes this. Marla Feig says out loud that she has read it thirty times and never seen it.
Adina Reiss has something. Adina converted in 2016 and beats everyone in the room, and knows it, and works to conceal it, and fails. She counts verses. The servant at the well gets sixty-seven verses and repeats his own story to Rebecca’s family at full length so the reader hears it twice. Sarah, at whose death the parsha opens and after whom it is named, does not speak. She has no line anywhere in the portion that bears her name. Adina says the subject of the parsha is what the narrator declines to say, and that the length of the servant’s speech is the measure of the silence it sits next to.
Grossbard lets that one breathe. “Say the last part again.”
She says it again.
Sarit Menkin’s daughter, home from Barnard, has something. She says the text fragments and relocates its own dread, that Isaac is missing from the Akedah’s return and missing from his own courtship, that the servant does the son’s work because the son cannot be shown. She says the word she uses is displacement. Two men in the back go still in the way men do when they have decided not to say anything. Grossbard says that’s a reading and asks her what evidence would count against it, and she says nothing would, and he says good, that’s the trouble with it, and she takes this well and the room relaxes.
Yehuda Ostreicher has something. Yehuda is twenty-three and back from a year in Jerusalem and says the real question is what each of us is willing to give up for Hashem, and whether we would walk our own son up the mountain.
The room finds this corny and lets it stand. Nobody looks at the floor. Grossbard says amen and moves on. It costs nothing.
Five readings. Five acceptances. Grossbard has been doing this since 1998 and can feel the room accept a move the way a driver feels a gear catch.
Then Ronit Farkas puts up her hand.
Ronit Farkas is sixty-one. She has come to the Wednesday class for two years and has never spoken. She sits in the fourth row on the aisle with a Koren she bought in Jerusalem after her husband Mickey died in 2019, and she keeps a pen in the gutter of it and never writes anything down. Grossbard has buried three people from her family. He knows her mother’s Hebrew name from memory.
He calls on her and something in his chest goes up, because she has never once done this.
“Sarah knew,” she says.
“Knew what.”
“That he was taking Isaac. She knew before they left. She let him go.”
Barry Teitelbaum turns halfway in his chair.
“That’s a strong reading,” Grossbard says. “Where are you getting it?”
“My aunt Fradl. She died in 2004. She came to me three nights in a row in September and she told me. She said, Ronit, the mother knew. She said that’s why the two of them never live in the same place again after the mountain. She said Sarah’s silence is the loudest thing in the book and I should stop being afraid of mine.”
Twenty-six people look at the space eleven inches in front of their own shoes. Danziger examines his phone under the table. Yehuda Ostreicher, who nine minutes ago asked them all to imagine walking a son up a mountain, has developed an interest in the coffee urn. Adina Reiss looks at Grossbard, and Grossbard watches her decide not to help.
Ronit sits with her hand still half up, as though the sentence had not finished leaving her.
Her reading is better than four of the five that preceded it. Grossbard knows this inside two seconds. The midrash has Satan going to Sarah with the news and her soul departing. The text puts her death against the Akedah with nothing in between. Abraham comes from somewhere else to bury her, and after Moriah the father and the son are never in a verse together again. Ronit has read the same silence Adina read and gone further into it, and she has done it with a source that ends the conversation.
He could rescue her. He has the material. He has Joseph Karo (1488-1575), who wrote the Shulchan Aruch and was taught at night by an angel he recorded in a diary. He has Rav Yaakov of Marvege in the thirteenth century, who put his halachic questions to heaven and got answers back and published them, and rishonim who cited him. He has the Ari. Four hundred years of men who made exactly Ronit Farkas’s move and won with it.
He does not use it. He works out why later, in the car, and it takes him the length of Pico from Robertson to Doheny.
Karo’s angel worked because other men had angels. The move was in circulation. Any one of them could go home and try it. Aunt Fradl belongs to Ronit and to nobody else in that room.
He says: “Six readings tonight. Five of them got in. One of them is the best one and it got nothing, and every person here knows which is which, and I want you to sit with what just happened, because I taught it to you.”
He tells them he gave the Achnai drasha three years ago, the one that traveled, where the walls lean and the stream runs backward and the voice comes out of heaven for Rabbi Eliezer and the sages tell heaven it has no vote. He tells them they applauded it. He tells them they applauded a story about a room refusing a message from above and that they have now run the procedure on a widow in the fourth row without a word of instruction from him.
“You did it clean,” he says. “You did it in silence, in under four seconds, and not one of you had to be rude.”
Ronit Farkas has her coat over her arm before he finishes.
The recording runs eight minutes. A woman recorded it for her husband, who had a work thing. By Sunday it is in Teaneck.
Ezra Malik, who has an agent now, does the whole class in the parking lot behind the pizza place for eleven kids, all six voices, including Ronit, and stops doing Ronit after the second time because it does not get a laugh and Ezra is a professional.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes it up on the following Thursday. He calls it “The Widow in the Fourth Row.” He writes that a certain West Coast pulpit has become a place where a grieving woman is corrected for the crime of hearing her aunt, and that the tradition of Israel has always had room for the dream, and he cites Karo and Marvege, the two sources Grossbard had loaded and left in the chamber.
Marla Feig calls the house at 7:40 in the morning.
“He’s not wrong,” Grossbard says.
“Rabbi.”
“He’s running a routine. Outrage on behalf of a woman he’s never met, using sources he looked up on Wednesday. It’s a good routine. It’s the best routine in the business right now. He’ll get four hundred shares and the widow gets nothing out of it, and if he had been in that room he’d have looked at his shoes with the rest of them.”
“Then say that.”
“I can’t say that. That’s the whole problem. There’s no move after it.”
In the coat room on Shabbos afternoon Zalman Fried asks him what he is going to do, and Grossbard says he is going to go over there, and Zalman says that is not what he asked.
He goes on a Tuesday, which costs him, because Tuesday is his.
Ronit Farkas gives him coffee in a cup with a saucer and they sit for forty minutes and talk about Mickey, and about her son in Sacramento, and about the noise the neighbor’s gate makes. She has the Koren on the side table with the pen still in the gutter.
At the door she asks him.
“Was she wrong? My aunt.”
“I have no way to check,” Grossbard says. “That’s not modesty. There’s no instrument. I run a room, and a room can only take up what the next person in it can pick up and carry, and nobody in that room can carry your aunt.”
“So it’s the room.”
“It’s the room. It was always the room. Every yes you heard that night was the room and so was your no, and if it makes any difference to you, the room was wrong and it will go on being wrong, because it has to be, and I am paid one hundred and ninety thousand dollars a year and housing to keep it running that way.”
She stands there with her hand on the door.
“Sarah knew,” she says.
“I think she did too,” Grossbard says.
He is on the 10 at Overland when he hears himself deliver the first line of it from the bimah, and by La Cienega he has the shape of the drasha, and the Fish story goes in the front and the widow goes in the middle and Karo and Marvege close it out, and he tells himself he will not give it.
He gives it in January. It goes eleven minutes and the room is silent in the good way and Ezra Malik memorizes the whole thing standing at the back with his arms folded and does it in the parking lot on Sunday in his father’s gray sport coat.
Ronit Farkas is not there. She has been going Friday nights to the young rabbi in Culver City since the week before Chanukah, where she has not spoken either.
A student of mine recently demonstrated this knowledge when, with an air of giving away a trade secret, she confided that she could go into any classroom, no matter what the subject of the course, and win approval for running one of a number of well-defined interpretive routines: she could view the assigned text as an instance of the tension between nature and culture; she could look in the text for evidence of large mythological oppositions; she could argue that the true subject of the text was its own composition, or that in the guise of fashioning a narrative the speaker was fragmenting and displacing his own anxieties and fears. She could not, however, at least at Johns Hopkins University today, argue that the text was a prophetic message inspired by the ghost of her Aunt Tilly.
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In 1998 she grants that marriage benefits women and allocates the surplus to men, and holds both. In “Something for Nothing” she tests her reciprocity principle against liberal theory and concedes she cannot derive the work obligation from first principles, which is a concession against her own conclusion. In 2014, in “Diverging Destinies Redux,” she says that definitive proof for her conformity-gaps account is lacking and offers it as no less plausible than the economic story. That is the last concession of that kind I can find in the published record. After 2014 the qualifications remain, and they qualify other people’s claims rather than her own.
The visible break is July 2019. She stands at the National Conservatism Conference, says the country will be better off with more Whites and fewer non-Whites, and tells the press the speech recapitulates the Georgetown article. It does not. The article puts that position in the third person and attributes it to people she describes from outside. She is wrong about her own text, and the one reader in the world guaranteed to catch that error is her. That is the diagnostic. Misdescribing what you wrote nine months earlier is what happens when nobody in your reading circle has an incentive to say you have this wrong. The Bletchley error follows the same shape in 2020: a fact any competent hostile reader catches in a minute, published under her name, in a piece carrying two footnotes where the previous one carried eighty-nine.
So the installation date is March 13, 2018, and the first symptoms show sixteen months later.
What keeps a person permeable is an audience that can punish being wrong. Law review referees do that. Colleagues at lunch do it. The whole apparatus of footnotes exists to expose you to it. After Ruger pulled her from the first-year course, her professional environment began imposing the identical penalty for accuracy and for error. Say something true and unwelcome, get sanctioned. Say something false and unwelcome, get sanctioned the same way. Once the punishment stops varying with the truth of the claim, criticism carries no information, and a rational person stops reading it for information. Her feedback channel stopped transmitting, and she was left with an audience that rewards the volume rather than the accuracy.
That account is unflattering to Penn and it does not exonerate her. She chose the replacement audience. She could have kept a small circle of people who disagreed with her about conclusions and would still tell her when a citation was wrong. Loury was available for that and pushed her in public more than once. Nothing in the record shows her taking it.
Podcast talk produces four things that look like concessions and are not. The first is the genre concession: reasonable people can disagree, I could be wrong about that, we’ll see. It costs nothing and commits to nothing. The second is the hypothetical concession, which is argumentative structure wearing a concession’s clothes: even granting your point about X, Y still follows. She does this constantly and well, and it is a debating move rather than an update. The third is the tonal concession, where she grants that she phrased something badly while holding the content. That one is worth logging separately because it tells you what she thinks the cost of a sentence was. The fourth is the factual concession that leaves the conclusion untouched, where she accepts a correction on a number and the argument continues unchanged.
A true concession has three marks. It names a position she previously held, it moves against her interest with the audience in the room, and she cannot walk it back later without the tape contradicting her.
I count seven concessions across nine years of public speaking.
October 26, 2017, the Buckley lecture. A Trinidadian-American woman tells her the lumping is offensive and that Caribbean and African Black populations show different patterns. Wax answers: “I am lumping and there’s no question about it but there is a lot of splitting to do.” She names her own method as a defect, to a hostile questioner, in public. This is the cleanest one in the record.
March 21, 2018, with Loury. Two in one hour. He asks whether she thinks Black students are inferior. She says “I do,” then catches herself inside the same breath and moves the claim from capacity to effort. Later she narrows: facts are not the only thing that matters, other things matter too, one needs to be circumspect. That is her conceding Loury’s civility argument. She holds it about two minutes and then drifts back to the stronger claim. The drift is the diagnostic. She can accept a correction. She cannot keep it.
August 29, 2022, with Hanania, twice. On why men permitted the feminization of institutions: “You can only impose something on people that they allow to be imposed upon them, and that is the part I have never understood.” She names an unsolved problem inside her own framework and does not paper it. Then the push-cart passage, where she applies her generational-decline frame to Jews and notes Jewish fading from the professions. Applying her own instrument to her own people, in front of an audience that would have let her skip it, is a real cost.
August 14, 2024, with Perry. Asked whether we should return to women at five percent of the student body: “Ideally, but I’m not sure how to get back there.” She concedes the ideal is unreachable and routes it back through merit procedures. That is a concession about feasibility.
August 23, 2025, Vancouver, twice. She grants that some traumatology claims have empirical merit and cites Haidt on adolescent screen time, then says the line between bogus and legitimate harm claims is a challenge. That is her opponents’ framework conceded as sometimes correct. And the Trump critique, four numbered points against her own coalition’s antisemitism enforcement, on the ground that the structure being used against pro-Palestinian protesters is the structure that was used against her.
Now what the distribution shows.
The concession never moves the frame. It always lands on a fact and never on an analysis. Loury shows her the two-equilibria argument in August 2019 and she answers that we cannot know whether it plays out that way. Loury corrects her on Loudoun County in December 2021 and she takes the correction while keeping the claim about an Asian elite. She grants the selection-bias point on Asian immigration in the same conversation and keeps the conclusion. In March 2026 she concedes Cofnas’s point that all-male 1750s Harvard ran the same speech codes, then keeps the feminization thesis his objection was built to refute. Nine years, one shape: accept the narrow correction, retain the broad picture.
The interlocutor predicts more than the year. Sort the record by who is asking rather than when. Loury draws six of the seven best moments between 2017 and 2022. Hanania draws two. Saad, Perry, Gray, Krauss, and the friendly conference audiences draw essentially none because nobody asks the second question. The Saad interview is where she floats the innate Ashkenazi IQ advantage and Saad answers with a joke. The Perry interview is where the composers claim, the marital-sex evolutionary claim, and the race extension all run as assertion and Perry accepts each one.
Loury’s pushback stops landing somewhere between 2021 and 2024. In December 2021 she is still accepting narrow corrections from him. On October 18, 2024, he tells her American culture is dripping with what Black Americans made, and she calls his language “very mellifluous” and asks for specifics. The eloquence was the specifics. On March 2, 2025, he draws the distinction between banning reverse discrimination and eliminating public concern about racial disparity, which is the sharpest thing anyone says to her in the whole archive, and she pivots to the Oakland study. Twice in six months, the best available interlocutor makes his best argument and she answers something adjacent. That is the closure, and it dates to the stretch between the sanctions recommendation and the lawsuit.
The 2025 Vancouver break with movement conservatism costs her something with the only coalition still paying attention to her. She tells a friendly right-wing audience that Trump’s antisemitism initiatives are wrong, that vague antisemitism law requires compromising free expression, and that conservatives mortgage their own protections every time they cheer a prosecution. She refuses to use Jewish campus distress as a wedge even though it is sitting there for her. On March 29, 2024, with Loury, she says outright that she is suspicious of claims of antisemitic upset on campus because she is a free speech absolutist. A woman fully captured by her audience does not do that. Whatever closed in her, the part that pays costs for consistency is still running.
So the honest count is seven, the trend is downward, and the exception is that when she breaks now, she breaks rightward against her own side rather than leftward against her old one.
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Marcus Ridley hears the words come out of his own mouth at 10:42 on a Tuesday and he does not recognize the man saying them.
“I want to sit with what Priya just named,” he says. “I don’t want to rush past it.”
Nobody had named anything. Priya said the Denver warehouse missed its Q3 pick rate by nine percent. Marcus has forty-one seconds of thinking to do about Denver and he has spent eleven of them on this.
Around the table, heads move. Small nods, the kind that cost nothing. Priya says thank you. Fielding, the VP, who has said four words all meeting, says, “Yeah. Yeah.” He writes something on a legal pad, which is what Fielding does when he wants the room to believe a thought has occurred.
Marcus watches his own status rise in real time. He can feel it the way a man feels a change in air pressure. Eight seconds of talk, no content, no risk, and he has moved from the guy who runs the numbers to the guy with judgment. He tries to remember the last time a true sentence about Denver bought him anything like that.
He gets his forty-one seconds back later and uses eleven of them on Denver. Nobody writes anything down.
Denise Okafor has to write the statement by four.
The thing happened Saturday, twelve hundred miles from any facility the company owns, and involves nobody the company employs. This does not matter. Two other firms in the sector put out statements Monday. A third put out nothing and got written up in a trade newsletter for putting out nothing.
Denise has a folder on her desktop called PRIOR. She opens it. There are nineteen documents in it going back to 2020 and she is proud of exactly none of them, though she will defend all of them, because each one worked, which is to say each one produced no consequence at all.
She starts from the June one. She swaps the nouns.
The trouble is always the verbs. “We condemn” is strong and strong is expensive. “We are saddened by” reads like a funeral home and the younger employees will screenshot it. “We are watching closely” sounds like the company owns binoculars. She lands on “We are heartbroken,” which is a lie so total that no one will be able to hold her to it.
Legal wants “certain events.” Comms wants a link at the bottom to somewhere people can donate, because the link converts a statement into an action without the company doing anything. Denise adds the link.
She reads it once through. It says nothing. It offends no one. It will be forwarded to nine hundred people, opened by two hundred, read by forty, and remembered by none, and if she had not written it, some fraction of those nine hundred would have concluded that the company had gone quiet on purpose, and quiet is the only sound in the building that anyone hears.
She sends it at 3:51 and eats her lunch at her desk at 4:15.
Dave Kowalski has run ops out of the Vernon facility for nineteen years and until March he thought all of it was noise.
In March they took eleven hours a week of overtime off his crew and gave the headcount to a new analytics group upstairs, four people with two monitors each who produce a deck. Dave went to Fielding with a spreadsheet. Fielding looked at the spreadsheet the way a man looks at a dog that has brought him something.
So Dave learns the language. He learns it the way he learned forklift certification, which is to say completely and without any feeling about it. He watches how the upstairs people talk. He takes notes on his phone in the parking lot.
In June he goes back to Fielding and does not bring a spreadsheet.
“I’ve got a concern about equity in how we’re distributing opportunity,” Dave says. “My floor is seventy percent Latino, and every hour we cut off that floor is an hour of income leaving a community that’s already carrying the load. Meanwhile we’re funding four roles upstairs. I’m not saying anybody meant it that way. I’m saying that’s the outcome, and I don’t think we want to be a company where the outcome falls where it’s falling.”
Fielding writes on the legal pad for a long time.
Dave gets six of the eleven hours back inside a month. The analytics group loses a req they had not filled. Nobody mentions the spreadsheet, which sat in Fielding’s inbox for eleven weeks and said the same thing in numbers.
Dave tells his wife about it at dinner. He is laughing when he starts the story. He is not laughing at the end of it, and he cannot say why, and she does not ask.
Renata Voss does four sessions a day when the calendar is good and the calendar has been good for six years.
She is in a conference room in El Segundo with twenty-two people from a medical device company and a slide that says COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS. She has said the words on this slide something like nine hundred times. She has a house in Altadena because of this slide.
The two women in the front row answer everything. The man by the window has his arms folded and has decided that folding his arms is a form of dissent. Three people are on their phones under the table, holding them at the angle men hold phones when they believe the table is thicker than it is. One woman cries at the eleven-minute mark of the second module, which happens in about a third of sessions and which Renata has learned to move through without slowing down, because slowing down invites the room to compete.
At the break a young man comes up to tell her he found it powerful. He wants her to know he already reads a lot on this. He has read more than the others. He would like her to see that he has read more than the others. Renata says that is wonderful and asks if he has questions.
He does not have a question. Nobody has had a question in a year.
That is her private measure. She used to fight with people. In 2016 a man in Torrance argued with her for twenty minutes about Baltimore and she went home shaking and could not sleep and thought about the argument for a week, because parts of it were good. Nobody argues now. They have learned that the session is weather. You put your head down, you get through it, you go back to your desk. The compliance form gets signed.
She invoices for the day on the drive home. Four sessions, eighty-eight participants, zero questions.
Grace Lim believes all of it, which is the worst possible position to be in.
She is twenty-six and she took this job over one that paid more because of a paragraph on the careers page, and she has since watched that paragraph get used as a shield in eleven separate meetings by people who could not tell you a single thing it says.
In the Slack channel called #belonging there are four hundred and six members and about nine posts a month, seven of which are a heart emoji under a photo of food from a cultural heritage lunch. Grace posts something real in April, about how the two women of color on her team both got put on the internal tooling project, which is the project nobody gets promoted out of.
Within forty minutes she has six reactions and a direct message from a director she has never met saying this is such an important thing to raise and can they grab time.
They grab time. The director is kind. The director listens with her head tilted for twenty-two minutes. The director says the word “surfacing” four times. At the end the director says she wants to be careful not to speak for anyone and asks Grace whether she has raised it with her manager, and Grace says her manager is the one who staffed the project, and the director says that’s helpful context, and nothing happens.
Grace understands by June that the language is not a tool for getting things done. It is a tool for making sure nothing gets done in a way that anybody can be blamed for. The people who fake it have understood this for years, which is why they sleep fine.
She stops posting in #belonging. She keeps her heart emoji on the food photos, because she has learned that much.
Tomás Reyes says “you guys” in a design review and the room takes a quarter second it would not otherwise have taken.
That is all it is. A quarter second. He hears it and the woman across from him hears it and everyone hears it and the meeting continues, and for the rest of the hour Tomás is doing two jobs, the design review and a running audit of his own mouth, and he does both badly.
Afterward Kevin catches him by the elevators to tell him it was fine, man, nobody thought anything of it, everyone says it, his own wife says it, it’s regional.
Tomás did not think anything of it until Kevin explained that nobody thought anything of it. Now he will think about it in his car.
The thing that gets him is that he is Mexican and grew up in Pacoima and he is the one standing at the elevator getting absolved by Kevin, whose father is a periodontist in Newport Beach. Kevin is being nice. Kevin means it. Kevin has been waiting eight months for a chance to be nice about exactly this kind of thing and Tomás has handed it to him for free.
The hiring committee for the senior product role meets on a Thursday.
There are four candidates. Everyone in the room knows they are going to pick Amara, who is the strongest of the four by a distance that would be obvious to a stranger reading the packets cold. Nobody says this.
Instead they talk for thirty-five minutes in a code that has one purpose, which is to build a record showing that the decision was made for reasons other than the reason everybody can see. Amara is described as bringing a lens. She is described as understanding the customer base in a way the team currently lacks. She is described as an incredible culture add, the word “add” doing a great deal of labor.
Amara has eleven years of experience and shipped the thing all four of them use on their phones. Two people in the room mention this. It comes up fourth.
She takes the job. Within six weeks she has heard from three separate colleagues, each in a spirit of warmth, how glad they are to have her perspective, and she has begun to understand that a floor was built under her without her permission, and that the floor is also a ceiling, and that there is nothing she can say about it to anyone in the building without sounding like the kind of person she does not want to be.
She calls her sister on Sunday and says the job is good and the money is good.
The all-hands is on a Thursday at eleven, which is the slot they use when they want attendance.
Fielding opens with a land acknowledgment. He is on Zoom from his kitchen in Manhattan Beach, and he acknowledges that the company’s headquarters, which he is not in, sits on the ancestral land of a people whose name he pronounces from a phonetic guide someone put in the speaker notes. He gets it about eighty percent right. He looks up after and there is a beat where he is not sure whether to smile, so he does the thing where he presses his lips together and nods once.
Six hundred squares of black on the grid. Four cameras on.
In the chat, one person types a folded-hands emoji. Nobody else types anything. Not because they object. Because typing anything in the chat during this part is a decision, and there are six hundred people watching, and nobody’s day gets better from making a decision.
Then Fielding announces a hiring freeze and a change to the health plan deductible and the chat runs to ninety messages in four minutes.
Marcus Ridley is in his car in the structure on Figueroa at 6:20 and he cannot let go of it.
Eight seconds. Sit with what Priya named. He did not decide to say it. That is the part he keeps turning over. There was no moment of choosing, no calculation he could point to and be ashamed of. The sentence arrived assembled, the way a phrase in a second language arrives once you have stopped translating.
He is forty-four. He has a mortgage in Torrance and a daughter who will apply to college in three years. He has watched two people get walked out of that building in six years and neither of them for being wrong about anything. He has never once seen anybody get hurt for talking the way he talked at 10:42. Not slowed down, not passed over, not pulled aside. The floor under that sentence is concrete. You can jump on it.
And there is the rest of it, the part he does not say out loud in the car, which is that it felt good. Not the safety. The rise. Priya said thank you. Fielding wrote it down. For eight seconds Marcus was the most serious man in the room and it cost him nothing and required nothing and produced nothing, and some part of him that he does not admire went looking for that feeling again before the meeting was over.
He thinks: I am a man who says things he does not mean to people who know he does not mean them, and we all agree not to mention it, and I am paid well for this, and I am good at it.
He backs out of the space.
Wednesday morning there is a meeting at nine about the Phoenix contract. Someone from finance says something clumsy about the vendor’s staffing, and Marcus feels it coming up his throat the way a good line comes to a man who has been on stage a long time.
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: 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 KAHI–KHYL, 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. TThen 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.
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: Yes, he did. Terri Rae Elmer, her husband Gerry 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.
In a bizarre sideshow to the international furor surrounding Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” KFI-AM (640) told morning talk show host Geoff Edwards not to report for work Monday, suspending him indefinitely in a feud over another KFI host’s reaction to the controversy.
Edwards’ 9 a.m.-noon talk show was hosted instead by Tom Leykis, the KFI afternoon host whose plans to burn the recordings of former rock star Cat Stevens sparked the turmoil at the station.
Leykis launched the campaign against Stevens last Thursday to protest the singer-songwriter’s professed support of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s order to kill Rushdie because of what the Iranian leader regarded as his novel’s insults to Islam.
On his show Friday, Edwards condemned Leykis for planning to burn artistic material and threatened to resign if a promotional spot for the record-burning was played during his show. He said he would not be “joining forces with those who want to burn anything.”
“If this radio station is supporting that . . . then I’m out of here. I don’t want to work here,” Edwards told his audience.
He also said that he believed that whatever Leykis did on his own show was “up to him,” but that the burning was “fascist.”
Station manager Howard Neal confirmed Monday that KFI programming director George Oliva had approved Leykis’ campaign but said the reason for Edwards’ suspension was that promoting one radio personality’s show during another’s is a long-standing practice that would not be changed to suit one staff member.
In the latest round of shake-ups at KFI-AM (640), a producer, newsman and associate producer who worked on radio personality Geoff Edwards’ morning show have been fired.
While the three said they were not given reasons for their terminations, a station publicist said Thursday that they were fired to make way for a syndicated talk program that will be airing in the morning slot. New York-based Rush Limbaugh, known for his conservative views and and combat-radio style tactics, will be featured as the host of the 9 a.m.-to-noon talk program, beginning today.
Completing its two-year transformation from pop music to all-talk, KFI-AM (640) has raided a Sacramento radio station to recruit a new morning talk team and a new news director in an effort to compete head-to-head with Los Angeles’ three current news/talk stations.
Terri-Rae Elmer and David Grosby, the agricultural reporter and sportscaster, respectively, at all-news/talk KFBK-AM in the state’s capital, will replace KFI morning veterans Gary Owens and Al Lohman in their 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday time slot beginning July 17.
KFBK’s news director, David Hall, will also switch to KFI at the same time, signaling a ratings strategy that will attempt to lure listeners from all-news KNX-AM (1070) and KFWB-AM (980) as well as KFI’s arch-rival talk station, KABC-AM (790), Southern California’s top-rated AM station. Hall will replace Dave Blake, who was fired with Owens and Lohman last week.
Elmer’s husband, KFBK weatherman Gerry Wallace, has also signed on with KFI, but will remain in Sacramento until he has sold the couple’s home and a photo finishing business they operate.
“Part of KFBK’s big mistake, I guess, was that they didn’t have any of us under contract,” Elmer, 32, told The Times on Monday. “We were free to come and go.”
KFI program director George Oliva, himself a KFBK graduate who moved to KFI at the beginning of this year, was not available Monday for comment on the latest moves. He did instruct KFI publicist Mike Venema to release the following statement:
“Having Grosby, Elmer and Hall on board at KFI reflects our commitment to increased credibility and competitiveness in the talk radio arena.”
Since KFI began phasing music out and phasing talk radio in two years ago, station management has attempted to increase credibility and competitiveness by adding to its lineup tabloid talk jock Tom Leykis, curmudgeonly talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and psychologist Toni Grant.
Despite the changes, the powerful (50,000 watts) station has continued to flounder in the quarterly Aribtron ratings. KFI has failed to climb into the ranks of the 20 most-listened-to stations despite frequent advertising campaigns and publicity stunts, such as Limbaugh’s plan to bus the homeless to Malibu and Leykis’ much-publicized destruction of several dozen Cat Stevens records earlier this year.
(Leykis railed against Stevens, now a Muslim, for his approval of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence against novelist Salman Rushdie and urged listeners to send him old Stevens albums so that he could publicly destroy them.)
Owens and Lohman remain under contract to KFI, but don’t expect to return to the air following their final show on July 14. Lohman, currently on vacation near Palm Springs, will probably not return to the air at all.
“We were humorists and entertainment-oriented folks, so basically with the news format change, they (management) felt it was not cohesive with their new all-talk programming,” Owens said. “There will be no music on the station at all.”
Elmer said she was uncertain how the new morning program will operate, though she hopes to bring her agricultural expertise with her to KFI.
“I’m real big on poison cheese and poison watermelon issues,” she said with a laugh. “It’ll be interesting to watch the water issue from down there too.”
Grosby, who did play-by-play for the Sacramento Kings while at KFBK, has worked with Elmer as his afternoon sidekick at the station for the past six months.
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 Grosby. So I waited, and when the door opened, out came Gary Owens, who 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 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: 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?
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.
In April 1992, I was working as the marketing and promotions director of KFI radio. Our offices were at Sixth and Ardmore in Koreatown. I’d been with the station for about six years, starting off as an intern, then working as a news editor and occasional reporter before moving into the marketing role in 1989.
When the verdicts came down at 3 p.m. on April 29, I had just finished a meeting with an ad agency in Beverly Hills. Rather than head back to the station, I went home to Costa Mesa down the 405. It’s about a two hour drive with traffic. I’d listened to our news department covering reaction at the Simi Valley courthouse and in other spots around LA. We also got a lot of listener reaction ranging from incredulous anger to smug satisfaction. I flipped on the TV when I got home and watched along with everyone else as fires and protests started to flare up around LA.
Monitoring KFI at the same time, I heard our field reporters put themselves in very difficult situations while trying to provide first hand information. Andy Friedman was at Parker Center and took a bottle off the head. And kept on going.
As the night came on, the flames at Florence and Normandie and the rioting downtown dominated the coverage. There was a sense of the rioting expanding, but not to the point of an area outside of South Central. Still, it was clear that it was going to be a long night and maybe a long couple of days for the news staff at KFI.
I grabbed a little sleep and got up around 1 a.m. I picked up some food and water from the market for the news staff. Healthy stuff like oranges and bananas and stuff that the staff would actually eat like chips and soda. Around 2 a.m. I started the drive back to Ardmore. This wasn’t received very well by my wife Katie. Our son Ben was only five months old at the time. Katie didn’t like the idea of being home alone with civil unrest going on. However, nothing had been reported in Orange County and there was no sense that anything would be happening. Of greater concern to Katie was the fact that I worked at a radio station. Katie had lived in Ghana for two years. In that time, Ghana had two coups and neighboring Togo had one. In each of the coups, rebel forces had made tv and radio stations high priority targets. Control the media and control the message.
While it didn’t seem likely that control of a radio or tv station was on the minds of rioters, it was still a factor in Katie’s thinking. And she just didn’t want me heading into an area that was in harm’s way.
The impression from the news was that the rioting, arson and looting were all contained south of the 10 Freeway and west of the 110. As I drove north on the 110, I could see fires to my right. And turning west on the 10, there were fires to my right again. That was the direction of the station. Not a lot of fires, but fires nonetheless.
The next twelve hours are pretty jumbled. KFI staff reported for work and then were sent home at noon by general manager Howard Neal. It was clear that the area was not going to be safe. Shortly thereafter Mayor Bradley issued a city wide curfew.
Chief engineer Marvin Collins set up a satellite studio in his home in La Canada. Rather than have hosts come to Koreatown, they went to Marv’s home and broadcast from his living room. The decision was made early on Thursday to keep programming local. That meant no Rush Limbaugh for the LA audience. The news team kept following and reporting on rioting as it moved north from Florence and Normandie toward and into Koreatown. And Howard brought in our security adviser, an ex FBI agent and his team, to evaluate our situation on Ardmore.
By about 3 p.m., there were very few of us left in the building. Program director David G Hall, producer Marc Germain, Howard Neal, the security guys and me. I grabbed about an hour’s nap and woke up at four. The light outside the building was not right. Going up on the roof, the reason became clear. There were fires in every direction. The largest and closest were six blocks west at Sixth and Western and six blocks east at Sixth and Vermont.
While there were no cars on the street, there were groups of rioters/looters on most of the streets. They didn’t seem particularly angry. Just looking for opportunities to smash something of high visibility or grab some available merchandise. Our building was very non-descript and we may have covered the call letters on the side of the building. However, with the fires and the looters, we were now inside the perimeter of the riots.
Over the next couple of hours, with night coming on, we were weighing the safety of staying at the station. There were benefits to staying in the building as going on the streets was not really a great idea. But if the building became a target, it wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun to stick around. From the roof, we’d scouted a couple of ways to move to the roofs of adjacent buildings if we had to make our way out that way. And our calls to the LAPD Emergency Operations Center hadn’t yielded any guarantee of assistance if needed. They had plenty of other things to do.
As the sun set, our security guys deemed the situation to be unsafe and recommended evacuating. Evacuating would have meant that KFI would go off the air. While the hosts and the broadcast studio had been moved to La Canada, we still needed the central controls on Ardmore to stay on the air.
Howard, David, Marc and I decided to stay. The security detail decided to leave after observing hand guns and rifles in the groups walking the streets. David and Marc had been running the board most of the day. They were coordinating the hosts, our field reporters and phone calls that went on the air.
Howard was working to evaluate the station as well as conferring with his bosses in Atlanta on what to do about the facility. They left it up to him to make the call based on our situation locally.
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 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?
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.
On the broadcast the host, Jane Norris, appeared to question the wisdom of the local news anchor, Bree Walker-Lampley, who is expecting a baby in mid-September. Ms. Walker-Lampley has ectrodactyly, a malformation of the hands and feet that can cause fingers and toes to be fused. Experts say there is a 50-50 chance that the gene that causes the condition will be passed on to her baby. Ms. Walker-Lampley has a daughter from a previous marriage who has the condition.
“Is it fair to bring a child into the world that you’re pretty sure has a very good chance of having a disfiguring disease?” Ms. Norris said on the air. “Is it fair to that child?”
“People judge you by your appearance,” Ms. Norris went on, according to a tape of the broadcast made available by advocates of the disabled. “They judge you by the words that you use. They judge you by your education; what you dress in. God knows they’re going to judge you by the shape of your hands, and the shape of your body and the shape of your face. They just do.” ‘I Felt Terrorized’
Ms. Walker-Lampley, who worked in 1987 and 1988 at Channel 2 in New York City, was not invited to participate in the broadcast. She and her husband, Jim Lampley, who also anchors a local news program, learned about the program the following day.
“I felt terrorized,” Ms. Walker-Lampley said in a telephone interview from California. “I felt that my pregnancy had been terrorized.”
Ms. Norris, who has been a host at the radio station for about a year, said in an interview that her intention was not to judge Ms. Walker-Lampley’s decision, but to get at the “larger issue” of the ethics of bearing a child when there is a strong possiblity the child will have an impairment.
Nancy Becker Kennedy, a member of the Southern California chapter of ADAPT, a group based in Denver known for forcefully pressing for the rights of the disabled, said: “I couldn’t be more shocked that this was even a topic of discussion. What’s next, a discussion of whether black people should reproduce?” Ms. Kennedy said her group would picket the station. ‘Politics of Eugenics’
Barbara Faye Waxman, a writer who is co-editing a book on the sexual and reproductive rights of disabled women, said Ms. Norris’s comments promoted a kind of eugenics, the once-popular theory that society can be improved by selectively breeding out undesired charateristics.
Physical limitations and deformed hands did not prevent Walker from becoming one of the most visible and respected anchors in L.A. during her years at KCBS. She was nationally recognized for her contributions to disability awareness and was on the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped. She reportedly made about $800,000 a year. Even shock jock Howard Stern made crude but admiring jokes about her, commenting on her beauty.
Asked if her photogenic presentation helped take focus off her hands, she replied, “I’ve always tried not to have my hands noticed. I had to make concessions for the world that made it less convenient for me. And all news anchors are attractive people. I practiced as carefully as I could as a teenager to learn how to apply my makeup so that people would pay attention to my face and not my hands.”
But there was a darker side to her high-profile job. Walker got caught up in an on-air scandal in 1990 when she became romantically involved with her co-anchor, Jim Lampley, while they were still married to other people.
When the anchors finally had their respective divorces and married each other, another firestorm erupted when Walker became pregnant. Jane Norris, a KFI-AM fill-in talk show host, blasted Walker for conceiving a child, given that there was a 50-50 chance that the child would inherit her condition. Norris then opened the phone lines for listeners to discuss whether they felt the couple had been irresponsible.
“Jim and I were on the set for the 11 p.m. news when I first heard about it,” said Walker. “That evening I cried and cried. I was in disbelief. I went catatonic for a few days. Then I vowed to fight.”
The couple filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against the station in an effort to get its license revoked, maintaining that the station violated the FCC’s Personal Attack Rule by airing factual inaccuracies and impugning her character. The FCC ultimately rejected the complaint.
Aaron James Lampley, afflicted with ectrodactylism, was born in August 1991.
Walker remembers the furor as a major personal turning point. “It was where the rubber met the road,” she said. “Before then, I had been such an ambitious, creative person, but I decided after that that I was no longer going to let my career guide my heart. It was a rude wake-up call. I became much more active in fighting for the rights of the disabled.”
She added, “I’ve had a wonderful but stressful life. It was truly stressful living in a fishbowl while trying to raise two kids.” After leaving KCBS, she anchored for a few years at NBC affiliate KNSD in San Diego but left in 2000. A self-described news junkie, she watches CNN and other newscasts but has no burning desire to return to the anchor desk.
Walker resides in a gated community in Del Mar with her children (16-year-old Andrea also has ectrodactylism). She and Lampley, who will anchor daytime coverage of NBC’s broadcast of the Olympics in Athens, divorced in 2000 but remain a couple. Walker at times refers to herself as “Bree Walker Lampley.”
Though Lampley, who also is a sportscaster for HBO, recently declared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that he and Walker would soon remarry, Walker expressed a little more caution about the future.
“There were lots of strains with a traveling spouse,” said Walker when questioned about the split. “We were juggling our careers, and we both had some growing up and childhood issues to deal with. There was a lot of therapy,” she said with a chuckle.
“We’ve talked about getting married again,” she added quietly. “We’re still working through our issues.”
I ask Claude: “Was the KFI host right that this was an interesting decision? Both children have the condition.”
Claude says:
Both children have it. Andrea, born around 1988 and so predating the marriage to Jim Lampley (b. 1949), and Aaron, born August 1991. The fifty percent figure came up twice.
That settles less than it looks like it settles. Outcomes don’t grade the decisions that preceded them. A fifty percent risk that materializes twice was still fifty percent when the choice got made, and if Aaron had been born with ten fingers, Jane Norris’s argument would have been exactly as strong or as weak as it was. Anyone who thinks the second birth vindicates the broadcast has to accept that a different roll of the dice would have refuted it, which is a strange position for a moral claim to occupy.
The stronger point in Norris’s favor is that the question she raised is a real one. People do weigh heritable conditions when they decide whether to have children, genetic counselors exist to help them do it, and pretending the calculation is illegitimate would be its own kind of dishonesty. Walker’s condition is not cosmetic. It costs function, it invites surgeries, and it draws the sort of cruelty that arrived early enough in her own life to come from her brother.
Where the argument fails is the inference. Norris moved from “there is a fifty percent risk” to “conceiving was irresponsible,” and that step requires holding that a life with ectrodactyly falls below the line where existence beats non-existence. The counterexample was sitting on the KCBS anchor desk making $800,000 a year. Ectrodactyly shortens no lives and touches no cognition. If a woman who has built a career on network television while carrying the condition still shouldn’t pass it on, the principle sweeps in most of the human genome and every family with a dominant trait in it.
Walker also occupied the best epistemic position available. She had lived the condition for four decades and already raised one daughter with it. Whatever the calculation was worth, she had more of the relevant information than any caller on the line.
The format is where the thing goes wrong, and I’d separate it from the substance. Norris did not open a discussion of prenatal risk. She named a pregnant woman, described her unborn child’s odds, and put it to a listener vote. A bioethics seminar can ask whether people with dominant heritable conditions should reproduce. A call-in show cannot ask whether this woman, right now, carrying this child, has done something shameful, without producing a boy who grows up able to find the transcript of the broadcast where strangers debated whether he should exist. The abstract question survives; the referendum on a named fetus does not.
The FCC complaint deserved to fail, and Walker’s own position made it harder. She had spent years as a public advocate on disability, which made her disability a legitimate subject of public comment. Seeking revocation of a station license over a talk segment was out of proportion to anything Norris did, and the remedy would have set a worse precedent than the offense.
So: right that the decision carried a known and substantial risk, right that the risk was worth naming, wrong that the risk made the decision blameworthy, and wrong to litigate it on air against a woman by name. The two children with fused hands are evidence about genetics. They are not evidence about whether Norris should have picked up the microphone.
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.
“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.”
Talk radio listeners may know him only as a character on the Phil Hendrie show–maybe a real person, maybe not–who provides a regular foil for the outrageous host. But few probably know how much David Hall has shaped what they’re hearing.
After 11 years as program director at KFI-AM (640) in Los Angeles, Hall is moving up the ladder of the station’s parent company, Clear Channel Communications, shifting next month to oversee some of the company’s nationally syndicated talk and sports programming. But the past decade has been one in which both Hall and events have changed talk radio here and around the country.
“It’s very different now, compared to what it was 10 years ago,” Hall said. “We kind of redefined what talk radio is all about. It seemed talk radio should be a mix of what’s very entertaining and very informative. We also made a pretty big change in thinking what information should be.”
When he started, Hall, 37, said his image of a talk radio host was a middle-aged guy peering over half-glasses at a stack of newspapers. He sought to change that, and instead of just the headlines, he wanted topics on shows to include universal truths and experiences that would resonate with listeners.
So Bill Handel’s KFI morning show tries to give commuters a full dose of information and insight on the hot topic du jour: Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, the latest earthquake, the Raiders, Monica Lewinsky, terrorism, Enron.
By changing the presentation, Hall was looking to reach an audience different from the stereotypical talk radio listener.
“I always pictured guys in jumpsuits and comfortable shoes listening in their garages,” he said. “We’re not like that. We’re younger and more female. That’s a pretty concerted effort we’ve had over the past decade to be different.”
The effort seems to have worked. When Hall arrived at KFI as news director in 1989, the station’s ratings barely registered–about 0.7% of the listening audience. According to the most recent Arbitron ratings of listeners age 12 and older, during the fourth quarter of 2001, KFI was the fourth-most-listened to station in the area, with a 4.2% audience share. “David has been so tremendously successful at KFI, I’ll just try not to screw it up,” said Hall’s replacement, Robin Bertolucci, who oversees a trio of talk and sports stations in Denver. “He’s invented and created a lot of the personality at the station. He really built KFI. He turned that whole paradigm on its head, filling a void the other stations didn’t know existed.”
“People have tried to get me to say bad things about him, but I don’t have anything bad to say,” said Erik Braverman, who programs KFI’s archrival in the talk business, KABC-AM (790). “When he got the job of program director he inherited some great talent. But it lacked focus and direction, and David brought that…. Even with all that [on-air] talent, he’s the heart and soul of the station.”
Hall says his thoughts about diversifying talk radio with a combination of perspective and news were borne out after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In other markets, listeners sought out all-news stations, he noted, while ratings in Los Angeles showed KFI and KABC at fourth and 12th in the market, respectively, beating out AM all-news outlets KNX (1070) and KFWB (980), which were 16th and 20th.
“After the World Trade Center, people didn’t care about other people’s opinions, they wanted information; 9/11 shows that talk radio is pretty well-rounded, and giving people what they want, when they want it,” Hall said…
KFI was one of the first big-market stations to carry Limbaugh’s show, and Hendrie, John & Ken and Dr. Laura Schlessinger all became syndicated after laying foundations at the Los Angeles station. Among his earliest changes, Hall moved Schlessinger from a late-night weekend shift to midday weekdays, and worked to differentiate her from the pack of on-air therapists.
Hall also brought Hendrie from Miami, where he went after an earlier stint at KFI. In return, Hendrie added “David G. Hall” to the cast of characters he voices during his frenetic, four-hour show, portraying Hall as a scratchy-voiced “vice president of syndication” forever complaining about the style of the show, encouraging Hendrie to cater to spurious advertisers and making impolitic comments about women or ethnic groups.
“Phil Hendrie, he’s just a trip,” Bertolucci said. “I don’t want to be the next David Hall character.”
Not every move was a home run, including the acrimonious departure of Tom Leykis in 1992 after a contract dispute. Hall also programs Clear Channel’s other Los Angeles-area AM properties, sports station KXTA (1150) and talk station KLAC (570).
Despite his relative youth, Hall has already logged a quarter-century in the radio business. “I knew I wanted to be in radio from about the time I was 9,” he said. At the age of 12, he lied about his age and secured an internship at the local Top 40 station in his hometown of Sacramento.
Hall soon learned just about every job at the station, working the control boards when deejays left to meet groupies, and answering request lines.
“Here I was, this seventh-grader from Catholic school, and every day after school I was talking on the phone with 16-year-old girls,” he said. “It’s still the best job I’ve ever had.”
After getting his chance on air (“All I wanted for years was to be a big deejay; I finally got the chance, and I was just awful,” he said), Hall became a news reporter at Sacramento station KFBK, winning awards for his coverage from Mexico, Nicaragua and elsewhere. He was named news director there before leaving in 1989 to take the same job at KFI. Two years later he was promoted to program director, when the then-struggling station just started carrying Limbaugh.
“We had no ratings,” Hall said. “We had nothing to lose.”
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: 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. 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, 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.
LAT: ‘David Hall will try to work his KFI magic at KABC’ (Dec. 22, 2008)
When David G. Hall first went to work at KFI-AM (640) in 1989, the station had just adopted a talk format and people were scoffing at the notion of an upstart thinking it could challenge the dominance of KABC-AM (790), the nation’s first talk-radio station. When he gave up the program director’s job in 2002, KFI was one of the most popular outlets in Southern California, and KABC wasn’t even a close runner-up.
Can he now turn the tables and do for KABC what he did for KFI?
Radio listeners will find out in the months ahead. After five years as program director at all-news stations KFWB-AM (980) and KNX-AM (1070), Hall on Friday was named director of operations at Citadel Broadcasting’s KABC, effective Jan. 5. He replaces Erik Braverman, a 12-year veteran at the station.
His first project, Hall said in an interview, will be to build a news staff. The aim is neither to replace the talk programming nor to compete with what his former all-news colleagues do, but to enhance what KABC already offers.
If the hosts are talking about L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Hall said, “it really helps to have a reporter at City Hall in the middle of it.”
He said he doesn’t know yet how many people he will be hiring but expressed admiration for the commitment Citadel had made to him to expand the staff at a time when other media companies are contracting.
In the most recent quarterly Arbitron ratings for the L.A. and Orange counties market, KABC tied for 19th, averaging 2.1% of the audience — less than half of the 4.4% share that KFI had in its No. 2 perch. KFI’s weekday schedule still features the formidable lineup that Hall helped put in place: Bill Handel, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Schlessinger and the team of John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou.
But Hall, 44, said overtaking KFI is not his goal.
“It’s a big market; there’s plenty of room for all of us,” he said. “My goal is to find the right place in the market for KABC and to help the station serve the market as well as possible.”
Robin Bertolucci, who succeeded Hall as program director at KFI, said she wasn’t fazed by having him as a competitor at KABC. That station is only one of many talk rivals, she noted, including KLSX-FM (97.1), KGIL-AM (1260), KRLA-AM (870) and KTLK-AM (1150).
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.
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.
Claude says:
You got a good tape. The best of it sits between minute three and minute fifty, and the single best moment is Limbaugh in the break saying you do the news, I’m doing the show. That is the seed of everything Hall built, delivered by the man who planted it, in scene, with dialogue. Lead with it. The chronological open buries your strongest thirty seconds seven minutes deep.
The Arbitron story is the piece nobody has published. A program director walks into the ratings company and buys a forensic read on a rival he has not yet faced, and comes out with a distinction that holds up as theory: some hosts carry the station, some get carried by it, and the same number means opposite things depending on which. That is a contribution to knowledge, not an anecdote. It also explains a decision that looked like nerve at the time and was arithmetic.
The other keepers are the Handel research finding and the audition test. I don’t need his wife at six in the morning is exactly the kind of thing focus groups produce and stations ignore. And John Kobylt just choked on a pizza, you’re on in thirty minutes, what do you talk about, sorts talkers from people who want to be talkers in one question. Both are usable by any reader who makes anything.
Now the misses.
You never got the name of the consultant. He talked to this man every working day for eleven years, credits him with the KFI strategy and with his entire second career, and the man goes unnamed through the whole interview. Cambria, central coast, on KFI before 1989. That is enough to find him. Get the name and you have a second interview.
Daryl Gates gets one subordinate clause. He put the LAPD chief in afternoon drive between Leykis and John and Ken. Depending on the exact months, that is either just before the King verdict or just after, and either way it is the most consequential booking decision in the interview. It went by unremarked.
The tension you left alone is the good one. He says four times that he never programmed liberal or conservative, only stimulating. His lineup was Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, John and Ken, and Gates. The research told him what Southern California found stimulating, and what it found stimulating had a direction. He would not concede that, but he might describe it. Ask it as a question about the research rather than about him: did the audience studies ever come back saying something stimulating that you decided not to do. That gets you the boundary without accusing him of anything.
Same with shock. He rejected the word three times, and he also told you complaints are how he knows the station is touching people, and that the format’s job is saying what people can’t say at work. Those sit close together. Not a gotcha, just an unresolved place he might resolve if asked once more.
Two structural gaps. Premiere, 2002 to 2004, gets four sentences, and he was senior programming executive at the company that syndicated Limbaugh at Limbaugh’s peak. You have the only person alive who anchored Rush’s local newscast and later sat above his national show. That reunion is a whole segment and you skipped it. And Hendrie voicing him as a character for thirty years, which you raised as aggravation and he waved off, deserved the direct approach: describe the character, what did your kids say, did any executive ever ask you about it.
He deflected every interior question. What price did you pay, healthy versus unhealthy drives, do you read people. Three refusals. But watch what happened after the third one. He said not really, then immediately told the pizza story. He will not give you feeling and he will give you scene. That is your handle for next time. Never ask him how something felt. Ask him what happened in the room.
On your own performance, one thing to watch. The office-bloke passage runs two long turns and states a thesis, and he agreed with it politely and then twice steered back to his own point about local and daily topics.
And an irony worth using. Hall’s own diagnosis of bad interviews is that hosts fire the big question early and never reset, so anyone arriving after minute three has no idea who is talking or why. Your tape runs an hour and forty-four with no reset. He would aircheck you for it.
I ask Claude what the articles above add to the interview.
Claude says:
The largest thing these add: they identify the incident Hall told three times and never named, and they show his account of it does not hold.
The comment was Jane Norris on July 22, 1991, and the subject was Bree Walker-Lampley, then anchoring at KCBS, seven months pregnant with a fifty percent chance of passing on ectrodactyly. Norris asked on the air whether it was fair to bring such a child into the world, then opened the phones. The New York Times quoted the tape, which advocates had made available: is it fair to that child, and God knows they’re going to judge you by the shape of your hands. Those sentences are not ambiguous in either direction. Hall told you they were misconstrued, and probably misconstrued on purpose, and he has been telling himself that for thirty-five years. That is the sentence in your transcript most likely to be quoted against him and against you.
He took the program director’s chair on July 19, 1991. The broadcast aired July 22. He was three days into the job. That explains the fear he described, and it also means the episode he built his entire theory of complaints on landed before he had run a single ratings book of his own. The lesson he drew, complaints are good, complaints are how I know we’re touching people, was drawn from a segment about whether a disabled woman should have a baby, and drawn while a woman he had never met went catatonic for several days in Del Mar. Braxton’s 2004 piece supplies her side: she cried, she went catatonic, she vowed to fight, and she dates the rest of her life from it. She was still calling it the turning point thirteen years later. Her son was born in August 1991 with the condition.
Hall also gets the shape of the complaint wrong in a useful way. He said an FCC complaint was filed against the station, as though it came from nowhere. It came from the Western Law Center for the Handicapped at Loyola, with Paul Steven Miller (1961-2010) as director of litigation, and Miller went on to the EEOC. The Personal Attack Rule was the theory. The FCC rejected it. Norris said her aim was the larger ethical question. ADAPT planned to picket. Barbara Faye Waxman called it eugenics on the record. This was not a mob. It was a law school clinic and a disability rights movement one year into the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they were organized enough to hand the tape to a Times reporter in New York.
And Howard Neal is quoted in the same article saying he always encouraged his hosts to take opinions, popular or unpopular. That is the exact behavior Hall praised him for in your interview, in Neal’s own words, on the record, in the middle of the worst of it. Your portrait of Neal holds up completely. Neal also conceded it probably would have been appropriate to have Walker on and said he invited her to rebut. Hall did not mention that either.
The second large thing is the riots, which Hall never brought up.
Bill Lewis puts him at the board on Ardmore for twelve hours with fires six blocks east and six blocks west, security gone, looters on the street with rifles, the station off the air from 7:15 to 7:30 on April 30, 1992, and Marc Germain beside him. And the decision, made by Hall and Neal, to keep the biggest show in America off KFI so the station could stay local. Limbaugh called that Saturday to ask whether his politics were the reason. He was told no, it was the local mandate.
You asked Hall about milestones, about what fueled him, about what price he paid. He gave you a weekend host and a bump in the book. He did not give you the roof. That omission is worth thinking about, because it is his best story and his best evidence. He preached live and local for an hour and forty minutes. He pulled Rush Limbaugh off the air during the largest civil disturbance in modern American history to prove it. Either he assumes everyone knows, or he does not narrate himself in the heroic register, which fits everything else about him.
The third thing is that the confrontational KFI predates him and he knows it. The Cat Stevens record burning, Geoff Edwards (1931-2014) suspended and then resigning for objecting to it, and three of Edwards’s staff fired to clear the slot for Limbaugh, all ran February and March 1989, under George Oliva, months before Hall arrived in July. Add Limbaugh’s vacuum cleaner and the plan to bus the homeless to Malibu. When Hall told you KFI before 1991 certainly was not shock radio, he was defending a station that had burned records with the fire department supervising. He may mean something narrower, that the shock was not the strategy. That is a defensible distinction and he never got to make it because the question came as a label instead of as a fact.
Then a set of corrections and gaps, in descending order of consequence.
KFI passed KABC in fall 1992 according to Baxter, working from Arbitron at the time. Hall told you 1994 or 1995. He understates his own turnaround by two years, which puts the crossover inside his first fifteen months and inside the riot coverage.
He was twenty-four or twenty-five when he arrived, not twenty-one or twenty-two. Margulies gives his age as forty-four in December 2008.
McDougal calls him KFBK’s news director, and he told you assistant news director. He replaced Dave Blake, fired with Gary Owens (1934-2015) and Al Lohman in late June 1989. The firings were public by July 4 and the Owens and Lohman farewell show was July 14. So the scene of Owens walking out of the general manager’s office on Hall’s first day, having been fired five minutes earlier, cannot be the firing. Something in that memory has compressed. The graciousness may be exactly as he remembers it. The staging cannot be.
John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou jumped to KABC in early 1999 and later came back. Hall said thirty-something years and still going, which is true of the run, and the defection is a hole in the middle of it that he did not mention and you did not know to ask about.
The 1994 Auschwitz stunt, sending two neo-Nazis to the camp with Bill Handel, and the March 1999 Tammy Bruce suit naming Hall, Hendrie, and Neal, are both absent from the interview. Together with Norris they make a fourth question available: what did you decline to put on the air, and what got past you.
The one that helps him most is Karel Bouley and Andrew Howard, an openly gay couple in afternoon drive at KFI in 1999, following Limbaugh and Schlessinger in the same day. That is the strongest single piece of evidence for his claim that he programmed stimulating rather than conservative, and you did not have it, and he did not offer it. He let his best defense sit while you asked him twice about ideology. It also reframes the Hendrie bit where the fictional Hall orders Phil to do a gay friendly show. The real Hall had already put one in drive time.
And the billboard. Hall told the Times in 1999 that KFI ran one reading We Don’t Know What the Hell We’re Doing, and that he loved it because it was largely true. He told you the station ran on two hundred thousand dollars a year of focus groups and content studies and nothing by the seat of the pants. Both are him. Read the pair to him and see which way he goes.
Carney is the most useful of the batch because it is Hall talking in 2002, at the moment he left, and you can set it against Hall talking in 2026 and see what held and what drifted.
What held, almost word for word across twenty-four years: the middle-aged guy peering over half-glasses at a stack of newspapers, which is the same figure as the recorded public meeting and the press release; the mix of entertaining and informative; younger and more female as a deliberate target rather than a happy accident; and we had nothing to lose. He has been telling this story in the same shape for a quarter century. That consistency is evidence the theory is real and not retrofitted.
What drifted is the ratings arithmetic again, and it drifts the same direction. He told Carney 0.7 on arrival in 1989 and 4.2 in the fourth quarter of 2001, fourth in the market. He told you 0.8 or 0.9 against KABC’s eight or ten in July 1991. Margulies has KFI at 4.4 and second in 2008, six years after Hall left, which means Bertolucci grew it further. Between the three numbers, Hall’s arrival share is stable and his memory of KABC’s share is the soft spot. Nobody had an eight or ten share in Los Angeles in 1991. KABC was third overall in the market around then per Baxter. The gap was large. It was not that large.
Two things here are new and neither came from your interview.
The Hendrie character has a job title, and it is not program director. Carney has him as a scratchy-voiced vice president of syndication who pushes spurious advertisers on the show and makes impolitic comments about women and ethnic groups. That is January 2002, weeks before the real Hall took the syndication job at Premiere. So Hendrie either anticipated the promotion or was riffing on it as it happened, and the joke is sharper than the version in your draft: the fictional Hall was the corporate syndication man before the real one became it. Worth checking whether the title migrated later.
The Leykis exit was acrimonious, in 1992, over a contract dispute, and Carney lists it as a move that was not a home run. In your interview Hall said only that Tom Leykis left, then moved on to Daryl Gates. That is one of the few places he shaded something by omission rather than by memory.
Then the small biographical corrections. He lied about his age to get the internship at twelve, which is a better detail than the one you have, and the job was call screening plus board work when the DJs slipped out to meet groupies. He was a seventh-grader from Catholic school talking to sixteen-year-old girls on the request line, and he called it the best job he ever had. He also says he wanted radio from about nine. And he told Carney flatly that when he finally got on the air he was awful, which is more candid than anything he gave you about himself and cuts against the pattern of deflection you ran into.
He was thirty-seven in January 2002 and forty-four in December 2008, so born around 1964. Arriving at KFI in July 1989 makes him twenty-four or twenty-five, and program director at twenty-six or twenty-seven. Not twenty-two. He also won awards at KFBK for reporting from Mexico and Nicaragua, which he never mentioned to you at all, and which is the only foreign-correspondent work in his record before the consulting years. That connects to the international second act more than he lets on.
Two corrections to the received story of the departure. Carney says Clear Channel, not Cox, owned KFI by 2002 and that he was moving up inside the parent company to oversee syndicated talk and sports. He told you Premiere wanted him because Premiere was syndicating all his shows. Premiere is the Clear Channel subsidiary, so both are true, but the framing differs: he described it to you as a pull from the syndicator and to Carney as an internal promotion. Cox owned the station during the years he described to you; the sale happened somewhere in between and you never established when. Worth pinning down, because his story about geographical distance from Atlanta protecting him has an expiration date.
And he was programming three stations at the end, not one. KFI plus KXTA 1150 sports and KLAC 570. That changes the picture of the job he left.
The other thing Carney supplies is testimony from the rival. Erik Braverman, then programming KABC, said people tried to get him to say bad things about Hall and he had none, that Hall inherited great talent lacking focus and direction, and that Hall was the heart and soul of the station. Seven years later Hall replaced Braverman at KABC. That is a clean, quotable arc and neither man mentioned it to anyone in your material.
Bertolucci’s line about not wanting to be the next David Hall character is the best single quote in the file for your Hendrie section.
Last, the September 11 claim is a testable version of his whole thesis and he made it three months after the fact. Los Angeles put KFI fourth and KABC twelfth while KNX sat sixteenth and KFWB twentieth, and in other markets listeners went to all-news. His reading of it is a little tangled, since he says people wanted information rather than opinions and then cites the talk stations beating the news stations, which argues the opposite of what he seems to be claiming. The numbers support his news-and-talk hybrid rather than either pure form. It is the one place in the record where he has a natural experiment and does not quite know what to do with it. If you get a second sitting, that is a good question, and it does not require him to feel anything.
0:09. The G stands for Gordon. He has never used the name. Norm Woodruff, the KFBK news director, assigned the middle initial as an air name.
1:11. Hall claims 44 years in radio as of 2022. The host Dave Williams claims 53.
1:19 to 3:24. Radio is dying and the industry will not say so. “Twenty-first century lamplighters.” Live and local registers as nothing to his 21-year-old daughter, a senior at a University of California campus. On demand replaced it. Radio paid for the house she grew up in and the college she attends.
4:06 to 6:12. KROY at twelve. Listened at seven and eight on a hand-me-down clock radio from his father. Went for a tour, saw high school and college kids interning, lied and said he was in high school or maybe college. Pulled carts, answered request lines, watched the board when the DJ went to the bathroom.
6:29 to 8:07. KNRY Monterey, three employees. DJ seven to midnight. The general manager said he was paying eight hours for five, so do news. A regional blackout hit, somebody said aren’t you the news guy, he drove to the power plant and talked his way through the gate. Came back and volunteered for a twelve-hour day.
8:23. Fired at eighteen for running up the long distance bill calling his mother.
8:56 to 11:27. The Woodruff audition. Drove the tape three hours. Woodruff made him write a newscast, record it on an unfamiliar board, and packed the room with newsroom staff to rattle him on purpose. Sent him out on a story. Ended the day with two questions: how many members of Congress, and what did George Deukmejian do before he was governor. Hall was the first news applicant to get both right. Hired that day.
11:41. Arrived October 1984, within days of Limbaugh’s local start. The intro: “Pinko news anchor David G. Hall, now with misinformation.”
12:21 to 15:12. Limbaugh offstage. A wallflower who sat in the corner at parties, polite, gracious, from an upstanding Missouri family. He came to Hall’s 1986 wedding. Hall’s wife ran women’s health clinics in Northern California. Limbaugh spent two hours at a table with eight of her colleagues, nurse practitioners from those clinics, while he was calling women feminazis on the air, and that table was the loudest and happiest at the reception. He also drove to the host’s 1988 wedding in Nevada City, showed up in a suit at a Western-attire wedding, and wore a borrowed cowboy hat.
17:02 to 18:38. Hall froze live on air covering the Kings’ arrival in Sacramento. The host covered, called him in the break, and told him to change the subject, start talking about the weather, and work his way back.
18:38 to 20:26. Brett Burkhardt, four seconds of dead air, then “that’s the sound of a log floating by.” The host asked to hear it again.
20:45 to 22:30. Nobody talks about the craft in newsrooms now. He blames consolidation and the debt taken on to acquire stations.
22:30 to 24:12. Hall’s job in three parts: find the strengths, manage the weaknesses, carry best practices between markets. Every station opens with “oh Jesus Christ, another consultant.”
24:12 to 25:00. Reception is the same everywhere. Abroad the standing objection is that it is different here.
25:07 to 26:10. Chris Davis at WIBC Indianapolis as his proof that passion survives.
27:07. He says he was 22 leaving KFBK, maybe 23 when he became program director.
27:30 to 28:41. Five people left KFBK for KFI. Oliva was there about a year before Hall replaced him.
28:57 to 30:24. Bill Handel was already on weekends doing Handel on the Law, telling listeners he was not supposed to give this advice but here it is. Hall had a failing morning show and nothing to lose, so he put a straight talk show in morning drive, which had not been done.
30:33 to 33:32. The inherited lineup: Mother Love, Christopher Bartlett, Joe Crummey, Tom Leykis. The general manager told him not to make any changes. Within two years the whole lineup turned over, mostly by attrition. Dr. Barbara De Angelis had a contract negotiation that failed, and he had Dr. Laura Schlessinger (b. 1947) working part time.
33:55. Her doctorate is in physiology.
34:21 to 38:43. The Hendrie origin. Oliva fired him from KFI just before Hall took over. He landed at a small Ventura station doing an angry opinion show and got no calls, so one day he became the caller. He never hid it and people believed the characters anyway. Nothing is scripted. The company hired him for afternoons in Miami, then sold that station, and Hall asked that Hendrie be held out of the sale, which lowers the price of a talk property. They did it. Hendrie came back to KFI nights, then Premiere, where Hall followed.
38:52. The reversal. The host was Hall’s boss in 1985. Hall was his boss in Los Angeles twenty years later. At twelve someone told him to be nice to everybody because they will be working for you someday.
39:31 to 41:44. Current clients in Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. Formerly New Zealand, Poland, the UK, Sweden. He speaks Spanish, gets by in Portuguese, uses translators for French and Greek, and wants a translator who conveys sarcasm rather than words.
41:44 to 46:35. Poland in full. Cox invested in the first commercial station after communism and wanted something that sounded like KFI. In the first meeting the staff explained that expressing an opinion about the government is how people disappear. Two years later, with the president hiding from the press during his reelection campaign, the staff rented a flatbed, mounted concert speakers, parked under his third-floor window, aimed the speakers up, and told listeners to call because he can hear you now. Callers were courteous. The next morning’s front page showed the truck, the banner, and the president looking down through the glass with a phone in his hand.
51:11. Sweden, wine, “do you people know how beautiful you are,” and the host’s reply: “we’ve been made aware.”
52:49 to 59:24. What he learned abroad. America is seen as arrogant and as indifferent to the damage it does, which he says is probably true. The Swedish ophthalmologist who took cash for pink eye and then pointed out that fifty-seven minutes of the appointment remained. The film of worry Americans carry about catastrophic illness. He adds up income, property, sales, and gas taxes and concludes he pays about the same, differently allocated.
1:01:02. Ten clients. One full-time assistant, two part-timers. He gave up on scaling. He forgets to send expense reports because he is already onto the next station.
1:06:28 to end. The reversal completes. Hall interviews the host about the spark in his eye. The host’s mother was often depressed and told her children that this can be a good day or a bad day and it is entirely up to you. Paul Harvey (1918-2009) as the model. His father at fourteen: you have a right to an informed opinion, and if you do not know what you are talking about you should shut the hell up. Then the last line: “I don’t believe in my own ability.”
Thoughts
This tape has four things mine does not, and one of them is the answer to a question I asked and did not get.
The Hendrie origin is the biggest. Oliva fired him. He went to a small Ventura station, ran an angry opinion show, and nobody called. He invented the act because the phones stayed dead. That reframes the protector story you have. Hall did not discover a bold experiment. He re-acquired a man his own predecessor had fired, whose invention came out of failure, and then paid real money to keep him: he asked the company to withhold its number one afternoon personality from a station sale, which cuts the sale price, because a talk station’s value is its people. That is a concrete cost, documented, and it is a better answer than anything he gave me about protecting talent.
The Limbaugh wedding is the second. Iasked about the relationship on air and off and got “we got along quite well.” Here you get a man who introduced himself as the pinko news anchor’s tormentor sitting two hours at a reception table with eight women who ran women’s health clinics, and that table being the loudest in the room. The public and private were separate persons, and Hall’s account is that the on-air man was the same man projected larger. Both claims cannot fully hold, and Hall does not notice the tension. It is a good place to press.
Poland is the third. I got a sentence and a station name. Here is the arc that makes it a real story: the staff explaining that opinions get people disappeared, and the same staff two years later parking a sound truck under the president’s window. Every claim he makes about the universality of the method rests on that, and it also says something he does not say out loud, that what he teaches is permission rather than technique.
The fourth is what he will not give me and gave a peer of fifty years at the end of eighty minutes: I don’t believe in my own ability. He also told me the consulting years were delayed twice because he lacked the confidence, and Carney’s piece has him saying he was awful the first time he got on the air. Three data points, one theme, and none of it available through a direct question. He gives interiority sideways, to people inside the trade, when the question arrives as a compliment. That is the technique to steal for a second sitting.
On the discrepancies. He says here he was 22 leaving KFBK and 23 as program director, which matches what he told me and contradicts the Times ages of 37 in January 2002 and 44 in December 2008. He also says Oliva was at KFI about a year before he took over, when the record shows Oliva arrived January 1989 and Hall became program director in July 1991. His self-reported age drifts young in both interviews and his tenure math compresses. Trust the contemporaneous ages.
He also gives the sentence that complicates his neutrality claim. To me he said whether he agrees or disagrees has nothing to do with it, that he is only in it for the radio. Here he says Americans are seen abroad as arrogant and careless about the damage they do, and that this is probably true, and then walks through a healthcare comparison at length while twice announcing it is not an opinion. He has opinions. What he has is professional discipline about where they go. That is a more accurate and more defensible version of his claim, and it is available in his own words.
The host Dave Williams asked almost nothing in the John Sawatsky manner. He told stories, offered himself first, flattered openly, and traded memory for memory, and Hall opened up further than he did with me. Hall is a coach by trade, and coaches disclose to colleagues.
Hall said: “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.” What are some applications of this now in California?
The listener already holds the thought and lacks the words or the nerve, and the host supplies both, and the relief the listener feels is the product. When a host reaches for the forbidden thing he does not already believe, the audience hears the reach, and the trick dies.
In California right now the richest ground is the space between what people vote for and what they say at work.
Proposition 36 passed in November 2024 with about seventy percent, carrying every county, including the ones that had passed Proposition 47 a decade before. George Gascón lost the district attorney’s race to Nathan Hochman by a wide margin in a county Kamala Harris won easily. Those two results describe a large population of Californians who vote for Democrats and also lock the car, take the package inside, and cross the street. Almost none of them will say the second part in a meeting. A host who says it, in the register of a man describing his own errand to Target, gets the look-at-the-radio moment Hall describes.
Homelessness runs the same way and has for fifteen years. The public sentence is about housing costs. The private sentence, held by people who donate to the food bank, is that a large share of what they see on the sidewalk is untreated psychosis and methamphetamine, that the compassionate thing and the pleasant thing have come apart, and that nobody in charge will name the split. The unsayable second half belongs to the same people. They also fight the shelter proposed six blocks away, and they know why they fight it, and they will not say that either.
Housing is the best example in the state because the contradiction sits inside one person. A homeowner in Los Angeles supports affordability in the abstract and checks his Zillow estimate and does not want the four-story building on the corner. Both feelings are real and only one is speakable. Proposition 13 is the same object at the state level. A young family pays five times the property tax of the neighbor who bought in 1978, everyone in Sacramento knows the arithmetic, and no elected official touches it.
Schools. The professional-class parent who moved for the district, or went private, and gives a reason that is not the reason. Gifted programs, tracking, discipline policy, the gap between the stated philosophy of a district and the private sorting behavior of the families in it. This one is potent because the guilt is fresh and the person has never heard it said out loud by anyone he respects.
Fire and insurance since January 2025. The unsayable thing is arithmetic. Some of what burned should probably not be rebuilt at the density and in the places it stood, the actuarial market has been telling the state so for years, the FAIR Plan is a promise the state cannot fund at scale, and every politician answers with a pledge to rebuild it all faster. People who lost houses know the math. So do their neighbors who did not.
Immigration. The employer who complains about the raids and hires the same way he always has. The homeowner who wants enforcement and pays cash for the yard. Restaurant owners in this county in the summer of 2025 could not say publicly what they were saying to each other about staffing. A host who describes the arrangement honestly, without flattering either side, says something a great many Californians have thought while pretending not to.
Then the reverse cases. The listener who left for Texas or Idaho and misses the ocean, the food, the friends, and will not admit it on Facebook. The man who says the state is finished and has never seriously listed his house. The audience that wants government out and depends on Medicare, the mortgage interest deduction, and a federal water project. Say those and you get the same physical turn toward the radio, from the same person, and you earn the right to say the other things.
The failure mode is a Los Angeles specialty. A host learns that transgression pulls a number and starts reaching for the forbidden thing rather than the true thing, and after a while he is performing candor for an audience of people who already agree, which is the inside problem Hall named, and the new listener hears a man doing a bit. The test is whether the sentence would make a stranger look at the radio or make a fan cheer. Only the first one grows anything.
When I write about artificial intelligence and intimacy, people tend to imagine A.I. girlfriends or tech fanatics. Only extreme users would use chatbots to manage their social and emotional lives, or so the thinking goes. But in conversations with other Gen Z-ers, I’ve found that young people are relying emotionally on A.I. more than we realize. That subtly changes our relationships, even with people who have never touched A.I. When a flood of synthetic support enters the worlds of those around us, it distorts our mechanisms for intimacy and makes everyone a little lonelier.
In writing a book about A.I. and relationships, I interviewed people in their 20s and 30s across the United States and Europe about how they use chatbots. I found them through research calls, follow-ups with readers, friends of friends. They let me into the most intimate corners of their psyches. I was sometimes the only person they’d ever told about their chatbot use.
Despite speaking to chatbots every day, most of them also maintained full social lives, and in many ways A.I. enriched them. Several interviewees told me that it helped them think about their relationships more clearly and deliberately. But it also began to form the scaffolding of their consequential decision making: encouraging breakups, de-escalating arguments that the chatbot had decided weren’t worth their time. “If I’m more rational and less emotional, I’m doing good,” Lavish Daksh, a 21-year-old in Germany, told me. A.I. had allowed him to make more clearheaded decisions, he said. But he described wanting to strip emotion from his relationships entirely.
The piece has one good idea and doesn’t do enough with it.
The idea is that the costs of chatbot use fall on people who never open the app. Most writing about AI and loneliness stays with the user: is he lonelier, is he deluded, is he substituting a machine for a girlfriend. Lassman turns the question toward third parties. Your friend processes his feelings with Claude at midnight, arrives at brunch pre-digested, and you never learn what he was going through. You lose something and you never know you lost it. That’s a real observation and the essay’s one contribution.
The scene with the friend home from a good date carries it. He wants to tell someone. His roommates are asleep. He prompts the chatbot to play flatmate, she texts back in time, and the conversation goes to her instead. The counterfactual is right there in the anecdote. Had she been asleep too, the machine would have absorbed a moment of elation that would otherwise have built something between two people. Twenty seconds of writing, and it does more work than the surrounding economics.
The economics is decoration. “Negative externalities” means costs fall on people outside the transaction, which she then explains in a clause, which means the term added nothing an ordinary sentence couldn’t carry. An economist has better tools available and uses none of them. What’s the substitution rate? When a man takes a feeling to a chatbot, what fraction of the time was the alternative a friend, and what fraction was nobody at all? That number decides the argument, and she never asks for it. Her own interviewee gives the answer that cuts against her: Jeffcoat, the therapist, wants to know who will be truthful, hold space, and stay competent with confusing material. He’s describing a supply problem. Most friends are bad at this. They interrupt, they compare, they make it about themselves, they get bored. If the chatbot wins, it wins partly because the human offer is weak.
She concedes more than she can afford. Several interviewees say AI helped them think about their relationships more clearly. She grants it, then proceeds as if she hadn’t. An essay that admits the benefit owes the reader a reckoning: here is the gain, here is the loss, here is why I think the loss is larger. She skips to the loss.
The debasement claim is the weakest load in the structure. Intimacy as capital, chatbot affirmations as counterfeit currency, each synthetic “I understand you” cheapening the real ones. But intimacy doesn’t get verified by phrases. It gets verified by cost. A friend who listens at 2am has given up sleep. A friend who keeps your secret has taken on risk. A friend who tells you something you don’t want to hear has spent credit. The machine can produce the words and none of the costs, which is why nobody confuses the two, which is why the currency doesn’t inflate. Her better argument sits one step over and she only brushes it: rehearsal effects. Practice vulnerability with something that never judges, never gets tired, never brings up your last three failures, and you may lose your tolerance for the friction of a person who does. She writes that we’re becoming less unfiltered with each other, then moves on.
The comparison she has to answer and doesn’t is therapy. For a century people have paid strangers to hear what they won’t tell friends, and the same complaint was available: you’re outsourcing intimacy, you’re renting a listener, your friendships will thin. The defense was that friends were bad at the work and relieved of it. If the chatbot is therapy at zero marginal cost and infinite availability, the question is whether scale changes the answer or only the price. She should have to argue that.
The evidence won’t bear the weight. Interviews sourced from research calls, her own readers, and friends of friends, with no count given. That population is preselected for people who think about AI and intimacy enough to read a Substack about it. One survey appears, unnamed, with “recent” standing in for a citation and a two-thirds figure attached to adolescents while the essay is about people in their twenties and thirties. And the thesis is built so that nothing can disconfirm it. Friends withdrawing confirms it. Friends not withdrawing is the invisible cost you failed to notice. She writes that it’s easy not to notice, which converts the absence of evidence into evidence.
Two of her claims sit badly together. Frequent use is taboo, hidden, confessed to her and to nobody else. Also, “so my AI told me” is now casual among her friends. Both might be true at different rates for different acts, but she doesn’t sort them, and the essay needs the taboo for the hiddenness and needs the casualness for the spread.
The omission I find hardest to explain: she runs a Substack called The Intimacy Economy and never mentions that someone is selling this. No product design, no engagement optimization, no discussion of what happens when a company with a subscription business discovers that emotional dependence retains users. The externality she describes falls on friendships. The revenue accrues somewhere. An economist should follow that.
The strongest material is the Daksh quote, and it gets three sentences. A 21-year-old says he does well when he’s more rational and less emotional, and that he wants emotion out of his relationships. That’s a man using a tool to complete a project he already had, and the tool is very good at it. Whether AI accelerates an existing flight from feeling, or supplies it to people who wouldn’t have gotten there alone, is the question underneath the whole essay. She has the quote. She doesn’t open it.
Best sentence: the one about learning romance through screens and danger through screenshots. It’s sound over argument, but it earns its place, and the iPod Touch opening buys her the standing to speak for the cohort.
What it is, finally, is a book thesis in op-ed clothing. The claim gets stated, illustrated, and left. That may be the right use of the space if the book does the work. From here I can’t tell whether the book has the numbers.
Posted inAI|Comments Off on Alice Lassman: ‘A.I. Will Affect Your Social Life. Yes, Yours.’
Both sides of the Jason Arday affair are making the same error.
One camp holds that Arday was selected for destruction because he is Black and autistic, and treats that as an answer to whether he plagiarized. The other holds that his thesis contains dozens of unattributed near-verbatim passages, and treats that as an answer to whether he was selected. Neither follows. A man can be singled out and guilty. The selection question and the truth question are separate, they have separate evidence, and every participant in this story has been using one to avoid the other.
Sort them and the useful questions appear. Some of them are for Simon Baron-Cohen (b. 1958), whose intervention was the strangest thing in the case. Some are for Cambridge, which investigated one academic for eighteen months over an essay and declined for two years to look at documented plagiarism in another. Some are for the people who turned out to be right about the facts, and who have not yet been asked to defend their explanation of them.
Start with the autism claim, because everything Baron-Cohen said rests on it.
On X he wrote: “In 2014 we published the first large-scale study of suicidality in autism, subsequently widely replicated, revealing that 1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide. That’s why I’m very concerned about the impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic. He has been accused of plagiarism and he was cleared of any academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by Liverpool John Moores University. And yet he continues to be systematically discredited over every detail of his life, daily. We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards. However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop.”
Baron-Cohen stated Arday was autistic, without qualification, as a fact. He is the director of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, knighted for services to people with autism, and this year’s Grawemeyer laureate in psychology. When that man asserts a diagnosis, the assertion carries evidentiary weight that no journalist’s assertion carries, and it is understood by every reader to be more than a report of what the subject says about himself.
So the question is what it rests on. If Baron-Cohen has clinically assessed Arday, he has a professional relationship with the man he publicly defended, and he should have disclosed it, and he cannot discuss the findings without consent. If he has not assessed him, he is repeating a self-report, and that says something about his judgment and credibility.
I have sent two emails to Baron-Cohen. So far, no response.
The stakes are higher than they look, because the diagnosis is not separable from the biography in dispute. Arday’s public story runs that he was diagnosed with autism at three, could not speak until eleven, and could not read or write until eighteen. They are the claims that made the appointment a story in the first place, and they are among the claims that fell apart. A defense mounted on the autism cannot bracket the parts of the autism narrative that are contested. Which parts does Baron-Cohen vouch for, and on what basis?
The second question concerns the structure of his argument.
He cited his 2014 finding that one in four autistic people have planned or attempted suicide, said he could not stand by while an autistic man on the ground continued to be kicked, and called it a safeguarding matter.
Now ask what the argument licenses. If publicising documented misconduct by an autistic person creates a safeguarding risk that should stop the publication, the principle applies to every autistic student accused of plagiarism, every autistic defendant, every autistic employee under investigation. Baron-Cohen has spent forty years arguing that autistic people possess full moral agency, that they are systematizers rather than incompetents, and that treating them as fragile is its own form of contempt. The defense he mounted implies the opposite of his own position. Where is the line, and does he hold that an autistic academic bears the same accountability for plagiarism as anyone else?
Yuan Yi Zhu made the practical version of the point. If the concern was a vulnerable man’s mental state, the letter circulated under the heading urging colleagues to sign an anti-racism letter for Jason Arday, warning of a coming public attack, was calculated to raise the temperature rather than lower it. A man is safest when the questions get answered quickly. Accusing the questioners of racism guarantees that they will not be.
Jason is the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism. We can’t let them. Stand up to their hate and division by adding your name.
We, the undersigned, are appalled by the sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Professor Jason Arday.
Entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday and referred to two universities. Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. The relevant academic journals also found no basis for the claims.
Yet despite these unequivocal findings, rightwing media have attempted to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career. That should concern everyone who believes in academic freedom, fairness and due process.
It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.
Professor Arday, a working class Black man, became the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His remarkable journey, scholarship and leadership should be celebrated, not overshadowed by campaigns built on allegations that have been comprehensively rejected.
Professor Arday has contributed to public life for many years, building a distinguished record of charitable and community service. This latest smear campaign and the spread of misinformation are deeply alarming – not only because of the impact on one individual, but because of the message they send to aspiring Black and Brown young people who seek to attain positions of leadership.
The demonisation of Professor Arday, and recently on Misan Harriman, risks creating a chilling effect, signalling that success and public service may be met with hostility, misrepresentation, and disproportionate scrutiny.
We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.
There can be no place in higher education for campaigns that weaponise baseless accusations to damage reputations and careers. Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the colour of their skin.
The third question belongs to Liverpool John Moores University.
Baron-Cohen told the public that Arday was cleared of academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by LJMU. He used that clearance as the ground for saying the plagiarism accusations had been dealt with. The thesis in question was awarded there in 2015.
Nobody outside LJMU knows what that investigation covered, when it ran, who conducted it, what software it used, or whether it examined the passages later identified. Baron-Cohen characterised it in public. LJMU can say whether the characterisation is accurate. Until it does, an institution holds the single document that would settle whether one of Britain’s most decorated scientists was passing on a finding or passing on a claim.
So the question to LJMU: publish the scope. And to Baron-Cohen: what did he know about that investigation before he cited it, and did he read the report or take the conclusion?
The fourth question is for Cambridge.
Cambridge placed Nathan Cofnas under investigation for eighteen months over a Substack essay. During roughly the same period, an academic named Dave Harris brought documented concerns about Arday’s work to Cambridge administrators and to journals, and was brushed aside. A journalist at Times Higher Education pursuing the plagiarism received a letter from a defamation firm. A university spokesman described the questioning of Arday as a vile campaign to undermine his credibility. Cambridge opened an investigation in August 2026, and it did so after other universities publicly denied the affiliations Arday claimed with them.
Set aside every view anyone holds about Cofnas’s opinions. The comparison is about process, and the process ran fast against one man over an argument and slow against another over documents. So: what is Cambridge’s threshold for opening an investigation, stated as a rule rather than as an outcome? Why did Harris’s complaint not meet it? What did the appointing committee read in 2023, given that the candidate had moved from senior lecturer in 2018 to a Cambridge chair in five years, and did anyone on that committee read the thesis? Who authorised the vile campaign statement, on what evidence, and does the university stand by it now?
Jesus College has opened its own inquiry. It should say whether the inquiry covers the fellowship decision as well as the fellow.
The fifth question is Arday’s.
He told the Times that the reason it was him is aligned to ableism and racism. The reflexive answer is that the documents are the documents. That answer is a category mistake. The documents establish what he did. They establish nothing about why he, among all the people who have done comparable things, became the subject of a global story.
Test the claim. Look for cases with similar documentary substance and dissimilar consequences. Neri Oxman (b. 1976), whose MIT dissertation was found in 2023 to contain unattributed passages, apologised and the story died within days. Claudine Gay (b. 1970) resigned the Harvard presidency over allegations of comparable technical seriousness. Both investigations came from the political right. One subject is white, one is Black, and the outcomes ran opposite ways. That is one data point in each direction and it is not a study, which is the point: nobody has assembled the comparison class, and everyone is arguing as though the answer is obvious.
Arday can be right about selection and wrong about substance at the same time, and that his critics can be right about substance while having no account of selection. Cofnas found the story because a whistleblower brought it to a man with a public grievance against Cambridge and a platform. That is a fact about how the story surfaced, and it is compatible with everything in the story being true.
The sixth question is for the people who were right.
Cofnas argues that Arday is what DEI produces. The claim needs a control. In the same interview he said there are thousands of academics across the Western world publishing in the same journals, doing work just as useless, who receive tenure and teach students. If that is true, then the audit method that caught Arday would catch a great many people who were not diversity appointments, and the DEI explanation loses most of its force. It would then be an explanation of why nobody checked rather than of why he was hired, which is a different and smaller claim.
That smaller claim may be the right one. It also implicates a chain of institutions with no interest in race: a doctoral supervisor who did not run plagiarism software available to any academic for a decade, examiners who passed the thesis, peer reviewers at multiple journals, four universities that promoted him, and a hiring committee at Cambridge. Every one of those failures is a failure of ordinary diligence. So the question is: what proportion of the failure survives if you remove race from the account, and how would anyone tell?
The second question for the critics concerns their own standard. Cofnas called this the most extreme case of plagiarism in the history of academia. The superlative is unfalsifiable, unnecessary to his case, and exactly the kind of unsupported magnitude claim he spends his career attacking in others. A man who demands that opponents distinguish the existence of an effect from its size should not reach for the largest available adjective when the documents are strong enough without it.
The last question is for the signatories and the publisher.
A reported fourteen thousand people signed a letter defending Arday’s academic integrity. Almost none of them read the thesis. The question to each is what evidence they reviewed before lending their name, and what finding would cause them to withdraw it. An answer of none to the first and nothing to the second describes a coalition signal rather than a judgment, and there is no shame in saying so, but it should be said.
Simon and Schuster’s 37 Ink still has Arday’s memoir scheduled. A memoir is sold to readers as an account of what happened. The claims now in dispute are the claims the book is built on. What verification did the publisher perform, what does it intend to do now, and if the answer is nothing on both counts, does it hold that a memoir carries no factual warranty at all?
None of these questions has an answer anyone can predict, which is the test. The ones being asked instead have answers everybody knew a month ago. Whether Arday plagiarised is settled by documents anyone can read. Whether DEI is bad is a question people arrived with. What remains unknown is what LJMU’s investigation actually examined, what Cambridge’s appointing committee actually read, what Baron-Cohen’s assertion of a diagnosis actually rests on, and whether the failure that produced a Cambridge chair in 2023 is a failure of racial ideology or a failure of the ordinary checks that were supposed to run and did not. Those are answerable. Somebody with the standing to demand answers should demand them, and the institutions holding the documents should stop waiting for the attention to move on.
Supporters of Prof Arday became aware last year of questions about his academic legitimacy, and responded with furious accusations of racism.
Prof Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre, and cousin of the comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, and Ricardo Sabates, professor of education, circulated an open letter under the heading: “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI-RACISM LETTER FOR JASON ARDAY.”
It referred to an earlier letter that “was sent to the Minister of State and to which there has been progress in terms of how to tackle these issues” and warned of a “potential public attack on Jason”.
Parliamentary records show that on Sept 15 last year, Jacqui Smith, the women and equalities minister, met a “range of academics to discuss the harassment of black academics”.
A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said: “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop. Allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question. Professor Arday has been cleared by those investigations of any wrongdoing.”
Liverpool John Moores University said in a statement: “In September 2025, the university received allegations of academic misconduct against its former PhD student, Professor Jason Arday. A confidential procedure was conducted in response to those allegations and Professor Arday’s PhD still stands. We will not comment further on a private matter between the university and a former student.”
Posted inAutism, Jason Arday|Comments Off on Questions for Simon Baron-Cohen, for Cambridge, and for the People Who Were Right
Nine years of writing about Amy Wax (b. 1953) has produced a large literature and almost no new information. The reason is that both sides stopped asking questions. Her critics ask whether she is a racist, which they have answered, and her defenders ask whether a university may punish a professor for her opinions, which they have answered. Each camp interviews her to confirm what it already holds. She has now given the same six answers for most of a decade, and she gives them well, because she has argued fifteen cases in the Supreme Court and knows how to hold a position under fire.
A question is good when neither camp can predict the answer. By that test, most of what gets asked of Amy Wax is not a question. What follows are the ones that survive it. Several are hard on her. Several are hard on Penn, and on the people who have spent nine years asserting that her central factual claim is false without producing any evidence that it is. A reader who finds only one of those categories useful has come for something other than the truth.
The first question comes out of a single year in her bibliography.
On July 31, 2020, on Glenn Loury’s podcast, at 27:34, Wax says “I would bet that there are some innate factors at work.” That fall, in the University of Chicago Law Review Online, she wrote that the etiology of the disparities has been attributed to racism, poverty, culture, and innate group differences, and declined to choose among them. Same author, same year, same subject. The law journal brackets what the podcast asserts.
The pattern repeats two years earlier. Her 2018 Georgetown article distinguishes creedal nationalists, who hold that American commitments can be adopted by anyone, from cultural distance nationalists, who doubt it. She writes the second group in the third person from beginning to end. An assumption appears to operate among them. Some of them go further. She never says she is one. She endorses the policy conclusion, low and slow, which she has already told the reader creedal nationalists can reach on their own premises. In July 2019 she stood at the National Conservatism Conference, said the country will be better off with more Whites and fewer non-Whites, and told the press the speech recapitulated the article. It does not. The article attributes that position to people described from outside.
The question is what the bracketing was for. There is an innocent answer and she should be given room to give it: a legal argument that does not require a causal claim should not make one, and a scholar who writes only what his argument needs is doing his job. If that is the answer, it is a good answer, and it means the scholarship is the careful version and the podcast is the loose one, which has consequences for how much weight you should put on the podcast. The other answer is that the journal audience could impose a cost the podcast audience could not, and that the hedges tracked the enforcement. She is the only person who knows which. Nobody has asked.
The second question follows from her own method.
Wax is at her best when she separates a causal claim from the evidence for it. Correlation establishes nothing. A laboratory effect need not explain a population gap. Identifying a channel does not identify a remedy. She has applied this to implicit bias, to stereotype threat, to structural racism, and to the claimed benefits of diversity, and she has been right often enough that her opponents have never answered her on the merits.
Then look at what carries her own arguments. The 2018 article opens by demanding dispassionate analysis, facts, reasons, evidence, and the details of the law, and builds that demand out of four anecdotes: a lunch with a former friend, an exchange between two cable hosts on election night, a newspaper column, and a tweet. It closes by resting a claim about the attitudes of Asian immigrants on three essays that crossed her desk, two of them undergraduate op-eds in a student newspaper. The 2020 essay tells courts to require employers to prove the benefits of a diverse workforce with accepted, well-defined, quantitative metrics, and to refuse deference to assertion. Two pages later it answers the question with Apollo 11, Bletchley Park, and the Antwerp diamond trade, and then states in the same paragraph that a priori generalizations are baseless.
One of those three is wrong. She describes the staff at Bletchley Park as mostly young, male, well-educated Caucasian British citizens. At its January 1945 peak Bletchley employed roughly ten thousand people and about three-quarters of them were women, most of them Wrens operating the Bombe and Colossus machines. She can retreat to the senior cryptanalysts, who were overwhelmingly men. She wrote about the staff.
There may be a principled defense here. A party asking government to coerce, redistribute, or reorganize an institution can be required to carry more than a party asking government to refrain. If that is her rule, the asymmetry is an allocation of burden, and it is the ordinary allocation in American law. So is that the rule, and where has she stated it? Because she has not stated it in the places where she relies on it, and without it the pattern reads as one standard for other people’s evidence and another for her own.
The third question is for Penn.
In September 2017 she said to Glenn Loury on video at 49:04: “Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.”
Penn removed her from the required first-year course on March 13, 2018. Dean Theodore Ruger called the statement false. Penn has never released the data.
Consider what that means. A university stated publicly that a professor’s factual claim about its own students was untrue, holds the records that would settle it, and has declined for nine years to produce them. Wax has asked for them repeatedly. Every journalist who has written that her claim was debunked has written a sentence he cannot support, because nobody outside Penn’s registrar knows. The privacy objection is solvable, since aggregate class-rank distributions by race can be released without identifying anyone, and universities publish comparable figures routinely when the figures help them.
So the question runs both ways. To Penn: what do the numbers show, and if they contradict her, what accounts for nine years of not saying so? To Wax: what does she predict they show, stated as a number, and what result would make her say she had it wrong? She has spent a career insisting that empirical claims be treated as empirical. Here is one of her own. She should be willing to be tested on it, and Penn should be willing to run the test.
The fourth question. Wax is a theorist of the power of culture. People imitate, absorb expectation, respond to prestige, internalize convention, take habits from families. Norms grow strong enough to suppress basic appetite. In the immigration work, cultural habit is sticky enough that crossing a border does not erase it, and sticky enough to justify selecting newcomers by country of origin.
Race, Wrongs, and Remedies (2009) is partly an assault on explanations that make people seem too constrained by culture. Influence is not destiny. People can work, refrain from crime, marry, stay with their children, and resist a local expectation. She objects when social scientists use causal language that makes choice sound mechanical.
Both propositions can hold. The trouble is that each argument needs its proposition at full strength and needs the other one weak. If a destructive American subculture can be escaped through individual resolve, the cultural inheritance of an immigrant population should be escapable too, and the case for selecting by origin weakens. If inherited culture is sticky enough to justify that selection, it constrains the native poor more heavily than her rhetoric of self-help allows, and the moral weight of her prescription shifts. Her answer will run through the distinction between hard struggles and brick walls, which is in the book. The follow-up is where the answer lives: what evidence locates the line, and why does the line fall in a different place for the two populations?
The fifth question is about her prediction record.
In 2020 she argued that shifting affirmative action from remediation to diversity removed its endpoint. Remediation contains a stopping point because the rightful position is a destination. Diversity contains none, because composition is the goal. Sandra Day O’Connor (1930-2023) borrowed a twenty-five-year sunset from a framework her own opinion had discarded. Three years later John Roberts (b. 1955) treated that horizon as the outer limit of an indulgence and ended the practice.
She got the structure right. She also predicted that a significant tightening was improbable and expected Harvard to survive with modest adjustment. She read the incoherence and misread the appetite. So the question is what the error tells her about the model. Her account of elite institutions predicts that they absorb pressure and continue, and here an institution she had written off acted against its own preferences. What in the model produced the wrong answer, and where else does the model make the same mistake?
There is a live test running. Harvard’s class of 2029 came in at 11.5 percent Black, down from 14 percent. The figure that circulates in hereditarian argument, drawn from litigation exhibits, is that colorblind admissions would produce a class under one percent. Either Harvard is still reaching the old outcome through proxies, or the simulation never described what colorblind admissions produce. The gap between those two readings is large and it is now measurable. Anyone who cites the sub-one-percent figure and has not looked at the post-2023 numbers is asserting a prediction that the world has begun to answer.
The sixth question.
The free speech framing holds that Penn punished a professor for opinions expressed outside the classroom. The Penn framing holds that her statements damaged her ability to teach and evaluate students fairly. Both are stated as though the answer follows from the label.
The distinction that would settle it is one nobody makes. There is a difference between a professor’s claim about a subject and a professor’s public characterization of the performance of identifiable people in his own custody. Wax did not say that Black law students in general perform less well. She said that her own students at her own school did, in a class small enough that the students knew who was being described. A professor who says the same thing about a national dataset is doing empirical work. A professor who says it about the twenty people in his seminar is doing something else, and the something else is closer to an evaluative act than to speech about the world.
That distinction cuts against her and it also constrains Penn, because it defines a narrow ground rather than the open-ended one Penn used. If the harm is to identifiable students in her care, the remedy is removal from required first-year courses, which Penn did in 2018 and could defend. The sanctions imposed six years later, the loss of summer pay in perpetuity and of the named chair, reach conduct that has nothing to do with her own students, including the classroom guests she invited and what she said on podcasts.
So the question for her: does she recognize any category of statement about her own students that a university may act on, and where is its boundary? And the question for Penn: if the 2018 removal was the proportionate response, what happened between 2018 and 2024 to justify the rest, given that Penn’s own process took six years, stopped short of termination, and produced a sanction that a university confident in its case would have imposed faster and a university without a case would not have imposed at all.
The seventh question is asked of dissidents constantly and of institutions never, so it should be asked of both.
What has changed Amy Wax’s mind in thirty years, and what would? She has been criticized by people she respects, including Loury, who has pushed back on her in public more than once. Naming a single instance where that changed a position would answer the charge that her method has become a machine for reaching conclusions she already holds. Failing to name one confirms it.
The mirror is exact. What would change Penn’s mind? At no point in six years did the university state what evidence would have exonerated her, or what she could have said that would have ended the matter. A disciplinary process that cannot describe its own acquittal condition is not applying a standard. Her critics are entitled to demand falsifiability from her only if they can supply it themselves, and the record does not show that they can.
The last question is about audience, and it belongs to everyone in this story.
Wax is a Jewish woman who now speaks primarily to a coalition parts of which are openly antisemitic. She has touched this herself, in the 2022 exchange with Richard Hanania (b. 1985) about Jewish decline. She has never been asked what she thinks it does to a writer to be needed by an audience, and whether she has noticed her own positions moving toward the ones that audience rewards. The answer will not be a confession. It might be a description, and a description from someone with her analytical equipment would be worth more than another round on immigration.
The same question belongs to her opponents. The people who signed letters against her, who sat on the hearing board, who wrote the columns, also had audiences, and the cost of opposing her was zero while the cost of defending her was a career. An account of her behavior that runs entirely on her incentives and grants everyone else pure motive is a coalition document.
None of these questions has an answer I can predict, which is why they are on the list. The ones that get asked instead, whether she is a racist, whether tenure should protect her, whether the culture has gone too far, have answers everyone in the room already knows before she opens her mouth. Nine years of that has produced a great deal of writing and almost no knowledge. The grade data still sits in a registrar’s office. The Third Circuit has not ruled. She returns to a Penn classroom this fall. Somebody should use the time better than we have.
Posted inAmy Wax|Comments Off on Questions for Amy Wax, and for Penn
0:00 David Starkey (b. 1945) opens by calling Nathan Cofnas (b. 1987) the David who brought down the monster of DEI at Cambridge.
0:32 Both men name their motive as vengeance. Cambridge expelled Cofnas after two years, Starkey after fifty-six.
1:20 Starkey credits X and social media, and says the BBC and the mainstream press would have buried the story.
2:54 Cofnas gives his history: MPhil at Cambridge in 2015, DPhil at Oxford, return in 2022 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow on a three-year contract, plus a research associateship at Emmanuel College.
3:31 He describes his field as philosophy of biology and divergence between ancestral populations. Starkey translates: race differences in intelligence.
4:17 January 2024, he launches a Substack. The first essay argues the right has a stupidity problem.
4:43 He cites the General Social Survey: respondents who attribute racial disparities to genetics score lowest on the abbreviated vocabulary and logic tests.
6:20 Stereotype accuracy. He offers Jews and wealth, Jamaicans and sprinting.
7:33 Nobody at Cambridge objected to that essay. No complaint about grading conservative students.
8:29 The follow-up argues a coherent right requires hereditarianism.
9:08 February 2024, “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” including the American case.
10:15 Starkey presses on provenance. The Harvard number was not Cofnas’s own.
11:26 The figure: Black enrollment around 12.5 percent, falling under grades and scores alone to under 0.7 percent.
12:34 Cofnas says the White share would rise a couple of points and Asians would take most of the displaced places.
13:08 He turned down an offer from an Asian university because Cambridge had adopted a strong free speech policy in 2020 after the Noah Carl firing.
14:18 Starkey on the Regent House revolt: tolerant instead of respectful, the Chicago principles, the fall of Stephen Toope (b. 1958).
16:20 Student protests, chants, the student paper, the Daily Mail chasing clicks.
17:45 Bhaskar Vira named. Cofnas alleges administrators and the head of faculty met student protesters, then opened an investigation.
19:04 The university hires a lawyer to decide whether hereditarianism is a protected philosophical belief under the Grainger test.
21:46 Cofnas describes a three-hour interrogation and a hostile investigator.
22:25 The report finds his belief fails Grainger and falls outside academic freedom for want of scholarly competence.
23:02 He alleges the report treats 0.67 as larger than 0.7 and misses the count of Black Americans above IQ 135 by two orders of magnitude.
24:14 Not sacked. Quarantined. Emmanuel later terminated the associateship.
24:38 Support came privately. A letter to the Times, signed by a few, including Matthew Kramer (b. 1959), who called Cofnas an idiot while defending his speech.
26:17 Starkey proposes revenge as the motive for the Arday audit. Cofnas denies it, then concedes the sequel appealed to him.
27:13 A Cambridge whistleblower contacted him on June 13.
27:39 He left Cambridge in September 2025, before the rumors became an open secret.
28:10 Journalists had been deterred by legal threats.
29:13 The dissertation: alleged copying from a then graduate student at Brunel.
29:31 The biography as presented: autistic, nonverbal to eleven, unable to spell his name to eighteen, 600 miles in six days, thirty marathons in thirty-five days, over five million pounds raised, PhD to Cambridge chair by thirty-seven.
31:03 Cofnas says recovery of normal speech after being nonverbal to eleven has no precedent he can find, and that two GCSEs still require writing your name.
32:01 He feared a vexatious suit and confined himself to the published record.
32:42 Copyleaks output, retained copyediting errors, a stray comma in the dissertation title.
33:48 The heart of the piece is not the thesis. It is the ten items Arday lists on his own faculty page as principal publications, 2018 to 2023.
34:43 His three tests for each: plagiarized, substantive, and actually his.
35:27 Allegations of invented data, a “data analysis” section without statistics, and a convenience sample consisting of three friends.
37:21 Starkey turns to the institution and says Cambridge swapped him out for Jason Arday.
38:03 The appointment board was chaired by Sally Morgan (b. 1959), Blair’s former political director and Master of Fitzwilliam, the college that removed Starkey in five minutes.
39:31 Labour threads: David Sainsbury (b. 1940) as former chancellor, Chris Smith (b. 1951) as current one.
40:31 Cofnas names Simon Baron-Cohen (b. 1958) among Arday’s defenders.
41:10 His thesis: wokeism rests on an empirical premise of identical innate group distributions, and everything follows from that premise plus Christian moral sentiment.
44:24 Starkey pushes back. There are second-order causes, cultural and legal.
45:16 His evidence for the shift: in 2009 he shared the Cambridge 800th anniversary American launch with Stephen Hawking and fronted the Open Day for free.
46:26 His date is 2012. David Willetts (b. 1956) lifts the fee cap to £9,000. The condition is access enforcement through OFFA under Les Ebdon (b. 1947). American DEI is imported wholesale onto that frame.
48:30 The enabling statute comes from a Conservative government.
49:36 Cofnas answers that law follows elite belief and that the ideology of the bureaucrat outranks the text.
50:17 His long history: race denial crystallizes in the late nineteenth century, hardens after 1945, then the civil rights prediction fails and affirmative action ratchets upward for sixty years.
53:08 Starkey adds Jonathan Haidt and the iPhone, and describes cancellation as heresy trial and execution in one motion.
54:36 They agree DEI and scholarship cannot coexist.
55:40 Starkey notes that Arday’s defenders argue the case damages the moral and practical case for DEI.
56:28 The Korea thought experiment. Cofnas concedes a bonus for North Korean applicants would be rational. Starkey supplies East and West Germany.
59:02 The claim that DEI requires assent to a proposition free speech would expose.
1:00:15 The Chicago principles as remedy. Cofnas doubts they work, citing a Chicago department’s 2020 announcement restricting admissions to Black studies.
1:02:20 Lionel Shriver (b. 1957) and Mania as the reductio.
1:03:38 The most damaging line in the hour: thousands of scholars are as weak as Arday and simply do not plagiarize. Absent the copying and the biography, there would be no story.
1:05:31 Optimism from information access. Cofnas learned of the literature at seventeen in a classroom. Zoomers found it in a search box.
1:07:43 The Free Speech Union.
Cofnas took the ten publications Arday nominated as his best work and asked three questions of each. That method needs no theory of population genetics, no view about the Grainger test, and no opinion about Cambridge. Anyone can run it against any professor, and the subject supplies the sample. That is a portable audit, and it is the part of this that will outlive the news cycle. It also worked. Arday resigned on August 5, 2026, hours after Cambridge opened a new investigation into his qualifications and honorary appointments, separate from the misconduct review already running. Jesus College opened its own. Cambridge had defended him in June, calling the campaign vile, and reversed within weeks.
The second exposé is an argument about why the first was necessary, and it runs on assertion. Cofnas says at 36 and 43 that Arday is mentally disabled, could not do addition, is mathematically illiterate. None of that is in the documents. He is entitled to think it. Putting it in the same hour as the plagiarism analysis hands the defense its best material, and the Good Law Project took it. Their petition frames the plagiarism claims as fake and racially motivated, and Arday told the Times he had made mistakes and should be held accountable while denying he is a liar and a fraud. A finding that survives independent replication is one thing. A characterization of a man’s intelligence is not replicable, and it converts an audit into a fight about the auditor.
Starkey’s date is 2012 and his causal chain runs from Willetts through the fee cap to OFFA to Ebdon to imported DEI. The chain is off. OFFA was created by the Higher Education Act 2004, under Labour, alongside the first £3,000 cap. Willetts raised the cap to £9,000 and Ebdon took the directorship in 2012, so what changed that year was the price and therefore the leverage. The weaker version of Starkey’s claim survives and is better: an access regulator with little to withhold became an access regulator with a great deal to withhold, and the compliance apparatus grew to match. That is a testable proposition about access agreements before and after 2012, and nobody in the hour tests it.
Grainger plc v Nicholson (2010) sets five criteria for a protected philosophical belief, one of which excludes an opinion based on the present state of information available. Forstater v Center for Global Development (2021) then narrowed the exclusion so that only beliefs approaching Nazism or totalitarianism fall outside protection. A university that promises to protect all lawful speech and then asks whether the speech is separately protected under employment discrimination law has changed the question. That substitution is the most institutionally significant thing in the interview and gets four minutes.
The line at 1:03:38 undoes the frame Starkey spent an hour building. If thousands of scholars produce work as thin as Arday’s and are safe because they do not copy, then plagiarism is incidental and the real charge is against a field’s standards of evidence. That charge is larger, harder, and needs different work: sampling published articles in the sociology of education, coding for method, showing what a convenience sample of three friends yields relative to what the field accepts. Cofnas gestures at it and moves on. Nobody has done it. Someone should.
What the hour never does is ask what would falsify anything. Starkey supplies the vengeance frame in the first minute and Cofnas accepts it with a grin, which means every claim that follows arrives pre-labeled with a motive. Liverpool John Moores investigated the thesis and attributed the problems to honest and reasonable error. That finding is not mentioned. Neither is any account of what Arday’s supervisors and examiners did, which is the question Cambridge cannot answer by investigating one man. Simon & Schuster still plans to publish his memoir this month.
2:16 to 2:52. Cofnas says he argued in January 2024 that conservatives, his own group, have lower average IQ for genetic reasons, and that Cambridge said nothing. A month later he wrote the hereditarian piece and the investigation began. He is building an argument about selective enforcement, and the setup is the strongest rhetorical move in the hour. He applies his framework to the tribe he belongs to.
7:59 to 9:56. The method, which is the part worth stealing. He ran the dissertation through Copyleaks. Then he took Arday’s own faculty page, the section listing principal publications, and audited each of the ten against three tests: is it plagiarized, does it contain scholarly content, did he write it. Using the subject’s own self-selected best work as the sample removes the cherry-picking objection.
10:20 to 11:39. Arday called the police on Dave Harris, the academic who raised questions in 2023, and on Jack Grove of Times Higher Education. Carter-Ruck sent a letter to the journalist. This is the part of the story with the most legs and the least coverage.
14:33 to 15:55. The framing war stated openly. Grove’s angle is research misconduct that could have happened to anyone. Cofnas’s angle is DEI. Both men are describing the same documents. Cofnas calls it the most extreme case of plagiarism in academia, which is the kind of superlative that invites a counterexample.
17:34 to 19:33. The reversal. Cofnas says he would remove responsibility from Arday and offers the bar-braggart analogy: if I appoint a man boasting in a pub to a Cambridge chair, the fault is mine. Marshall pushes. Within a minute Cofnas has Arday morally culpable, aware he was stealing, and careful to plagiarize only people without institutional power, including a graduate student at Brunel. Then the line that undoes his own analogy: “he’s not as mentally disabled as he claims.” Strategic plagiarism requires the calculation the bar-drunk framing denies.
20:32 to 21:05. Simon Baron-Cohen (b. 1958) signed the Good Law Project letter and defended Arday on Twitter on autism grounds. Cofnas calls this the most surprising signature and declines to speculate about why. He speculates freely everywhere else.
21:13 to 24:28. The best transferable idea. Signing the letter costs almost nothing, since the worst case is mild embarrassment on a list of prominent names. Opposing carries real career risk if the consensus holds. So the expected value runs one way. That accounts for the signatures without requiring anyone to believe anything.
35:32 to 40:09. The buried lede. Marshall spends twenty minutes trying to get the race realist to endorse colorblindness and cannot. Cofnas advocates open racial quotas. Set aside a stated percentage, choose the best candidates within it, and stop pretending. His argument is that colorblindness plus real gaps produces representation so low that no multiracial society will accept it, so the choice is between honest quotas and the current system of personality scores and denial.
40:25. The crime and prisons analogy for why his stated preference does not govern his policy.
51:38 and 55:54. The load-bearing claim. If the root is genetic, money cannot close the gap, and the Flynn effect has “basically maxed out,” and we are “very close to” an environment where people reach their genetic potential. He asserts this. Marshall lets it go.
1:04:17 to 1:07:15. Antisemitism as an application of the same logic he attributes to wokeness: a group does better, sameness is assumed, so the success must be theft. He is making the hereditarian case as a defense of Jews and of overseas Chinese and of Indians in Africa. Whatever else it is, it is consistent.
1:13:02 to 1:15:42. Marshall catches the slide. Cofnas said conservatives have lower IQ for genetic reasons. Under pressure it becomes people who currently identify as conservative, then “there isn’t like the definitive study,” then the General Social Survey, then indirect evidence that conservatives cannot build institutions. The GSS instrument is a ten-word vocabulary test. The claim that started his troubles rests on it.
1:16:07 to 1:18:26. The Emmanuel College position was unpaid and terminated. The three-year university contract expired. He distinguishes the two carefully, which the coverage has not. The Ghent yogurt attack, the identified assailant, and the prosecutor declining to act.
Now the thoughts.
The story nobody will write is that the man the Guardian files under far-right race realism spent half this interview advocating racial quotas. Not colorblindness. Quotas, stated openly, applied to Cambridge chairs and Harvard admissions. He reaches affirmative action from the hereditarian premise, and Marshall, who wants him to say something else, keeps handing him openings he declines.
In “Pursuing Diversity” Amy Wax argues that shifting the rationale from remediation to diversity removes the endpoint, so preference becomes permanent, and she offers that as a reductio. Cofnas reaches the same destination and calls it policy. If the gaps are genetic, no remedy closes them, so any society that wants representation needs permanent preference. Affirmative action forever, from opposite premises, by two people who would each find the other’s route intolerable. Neither cites the other.
The empirical test has now run and Marshall missed it. Cofnas rests everything on Harvard at 0.7 percent under colorblind admissions. SFFA ended race-conscious admissions in 2023. Harvard’s class of 2029 came in at 11.5 percent Black, down from 14 percent. Either Harvard is using proxies to reproduce the old outcome, which Cofnas would say and which the Court may eventually test, or the simulation was never a good prediction of what colorblind admissions produce. The gap between 0.7 and 11.5 is the whole argument, and nobody in the room raised it.
The Flynn passage is where his own standard fails. He demands that everyone else show the magnitude of an effect and not merely its existence. Then he asserts that environmental intervention has approached its limit, which is the claim doing all the work in his argument, and gives no evidence for it. Apply the test he applies to others and the hereditarian case has the same shape as the case he attacks: a real phenomenon, an unmeasured share of the variance, and a policy conclusion arriving early.
The Fryer passage. Marshall says trumped-up charges, Cofnas agrees, and the segment proceeds as though Roland Fryer (b. 1977) was punished for the policing paper. Harvard’s stated basis was a Title IX finding on unwelcome conduct. You can argue the sanction was disproportionate or that the investigation would not have happened to a differently positioned man. Repeating “obviously motivated by political considerations” as established fact costs you credibility.
Baron-Cohen is the unwritten story. The world’s most cited autism researcher publicly defends a man on autism grounds, and the autism-adjacent claims in that man’s biography, nonverbal until eleven and unable to read until eighteen, are among the ones most in doubt. Cofnas notices and declines. I have asked Professor Baron-Cohen what evidence he relied on.
Marshall (b. 1987) does both things in one hour. His short neutral questions produce the best material: why does that matter, can you explain to me why, what would be an example of a positive thing to have come out of this. Then from about 1:07 he starts announcing his own position, “you still haven’t won me over,” “I’m not persuaded,” and the last fifteen minutes turn into a debate where Cofnas defends instead of describes. Compare what he gets before and after that switch. It is the clearest demonstration I have seen recently of why questions should not carry a moral judgment or thesis.
The interview posted August 8 and the events moved under it. Arday resigned from the university and from Jesus College on August 5, hours after Cambridge announced an investigation into his qualifications and honorary appointments, with separate misconduct complaints proceeding under the research policy. He denies wrongdoing and says the resignation is not an admission. He told the Times he made academic mistakes and that the campaign against him was racially motivated. Jesus College opened its own inquiry. Simon & Schuster’s 37 Ink still has his memoir scheduled. Cofnas speaks in the transcript as though the quitting is settled and the investigations are not, which is right, and the story now has three separate proceedings running rather than one.
Posted inAcademia, Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas|Comments Off on “Here’s how I exposed Jason Arday and Cambridge” | David Starkey Talks to Nathan Cofnas
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
