I built a little 100milliwatt transmitter which will reach like three houses around your house. I had a record player, is very into electronics, is a ham Radio Operator when i was 13. I built a little Radio Station and i did that at home when i was a kid. When i was 16, i got a job at msu and brody hall and the Radio Station. This is a a major dorm that had a Radio Station. I did that for about six weeks, made a tape and got a job at w itl, w itl lansing michigan, which was a country western station. Number one station in lansing. I was a weekend dj and i thought, i hated Country Music and i discovered that i absolutely love Country Music. I was a teenager in the 60s and was like rock n roll or nothing. I worked there for a year and then did an online show, did top 40, then went back and did news for seven years. And then i got out of that and in 2002, november 2002 in thanksgiving were living in for mark, i joe back to michigan with to visit with my wifes family and all of the way there all i could get was it was odd it was like someone repeating themselves three or four times on a 14 hour try. He was doing a live room mode from habitat for humanity and he was talking about how no liberal is going to get this house. Which offended my sensibilities but more than that i was thinking, half the country. A cry, roughly. Not like we are a totally red country. There has to be a market for the leftwing market of what hannity is doing. So i wrote an oped for Common Dreams in december 2002 title thousand two title talking back to talk radio. It was a business plan. Ive been in radio, i knew how work. Heres how you can do it from a business point of view, from a programming point of view. I put that out there. Then i thought, and 97 we sold an ad agency in atlanta, and we are were essentially retired. I thought thought maybe that would be fun to try this out. So i put my money where my mouth was and we found a Radio Station in vermont that put me on the air for two hours on saturday morning after the swap meet. For a few months there i did a morning show, about half the calls i got was that is a john deere tractor Still Available . Again i made tape and brought it to the America Network and it is out of detroit and they pick me up and found 29 stations in serious xm. Thats how the show started, and then i was asked to go to chicago, they read my article and were start thinking of starting to a network. After after a year or so of competing with air america, maybe two years, they started syndicating my show. I always on the show. I think i was was the only show, ring of fire was the other one, only two shows that were owned by the host as opposed to not. Host why do you think air america when under . Guest i think it was a mixture of things. The biggest one is they were undercapitalized. Fox news, roger ailes back in the Nixon White House had proposed or signed off on a proposal of gop tv which was an early fox news. Nixon couldnt raise the money so never happened. Then he met murdoch and murdoch said sure lets do this. They lost 100 million a year for roughly five years before they made any money. You could say hey sean hannity lost them. In the aggregate may be 400 million. Isnt that a terrible failure. While no after the fifth year they start making money and now they make a lot of money. When they declared bankruptcy i think they had gone through like 16 or 17 million over five or six year period. Not a lot of money for a National Radio network particularly one part of the Business Model was a net Radio Station. So i think being undercapitalized was the biggest thing. There was a management problem. Some people in management should not have been there. There are some programming issues that i disagree with. I thought there creating some programs are more Like Television and radio. There is a a real big difference in those mediums. I think the big problem dash. Host in several of your books you talk and about being a serial entrepreneur. Guest yes i started in 17 from a tv repair shop it was in the back of a headshot. It was joint with a tv antenna on it. Then we got a little less hippie, what i was doing was the guy who owned the head shop, i rented a shell for him for 25 per month. People would bring electronic equipment into be picks. I would pick it up at night and fix it. I would bring it back the next day and he will collect the money and took a percentage of the money. I think it was a quarter. We grew out of that shop in about four months so we moved down the street and had four technicians and six or seven employees total. My soontobe wife was my bookkeeper. It was the First Business i ever owned. It is the only business i started that went on the planes. I learned a lot from that. And then after that we started an Advertising Agency in 78, the reason i moved to New Hampshire. In 83 we moved back to them it started a travel agency. Built that from nothing up to about 6 million. It sold in 1986. Retired to germany with our kids for a year working and living with a Nonprofit Organization with salem international. Then we came back in 87 from germany. To atlanta and started an Advertising Agency and that is the company i sold in 87. Ninetyseven. It was going to be a hobby. Now im doing for hours of media every day, five days days a week. Host where you living. Guest ive live in the southwest washington dc. Spee1 what did you start and why did you start writing books . Guest again it goes back to my childhood. My mom was was an english major. She graduated magna cum laude in the late 40s. Her aspiration was to be a writer, she held a writers way of what people think today of movie stars. My dad dad had 20000 books in the house. He had it organized like a library. He was a very organized guy. I started writing as a young teenager. By the time i moved out of the house at 16, i had 56 rejection slips and papered my bedroom wall. Mostly for bad poetry and true stories. I just kept doing it. Now i have, i think 25 books in print. Spee1 the first several books he wrote were about attention deficit disorder. Guest several that i published yes. I had written written probably ten or 12 books before that. None of them, thankfully were published. It add. That that was the product of two things. I was the executive director of the president ial facility in New Hampshire, my wife is the program director. My job was to raise money and publicity and things like that. The administrative stuff. I notice that virtually all of the kids that came in were coded as hyperactive or back then is referred to as hyperkinetic children. In 1978, the year we started that, the year before that ben had published a book why your child is hyperactive and he proposed that it was a food issue. That that these children were reacting to and functionally like an allergy. He was an allergist by the way so he had certain bias. We did a study on our kids over six month period putting them on his diet and what we found is out of 34 kids, we had one that we could turn on and off like a light switch by taking stuff in and out of his diet. He also had horrible psoriasis and it seemed to make his rises worse. For a very small subset of the population there is that allergy pop entree connection. For most i think its a way of brain wiring. My First Published piece on that mustve been in 1980. It was in the journal of molecular psychology on the hyperkinetic syndrome suggesting that it was not a disease but a simply different way of having your brain wired. When one of our children was diagnosed with adhd in high school, in the mid 80s, the psychologist that in the room with him and said, forget about going to college, you you should become a car mechanic, youre good with your hands. By the way, if youre going to be a car mechanic, work on something where the pay is better. At this point my son had tears in his face. He wanted to go to college. And i thought, this sucks. It was a terrible way to describe this. So i wrote my first book, add a different perception. Essentially to my son and saying youre not broken, your nothing is wrong with you you have a different skill set. You also have a lot of people in your tribe and now he has a masters degree in science, hes running the business of his own based in a field, god bless him. So i wrote a few books on that. That became a Time Magazine it became a national bestseller. My publisher said he wanted another book and another book. Host who are we talking about, this is a quote. He is the poster child for add, if he didnt have add we went have United States of america. Guest probably ben franklin. Its been a while since i wrote that book. Clearly in add, different perspective i profiled few different people and i recall ben franklin, thomas edison, sir richard whats his name, say mean as a guy who married elizabeth taylor, burden. He was such a classic case. Probably he had add to given his bouncing around and whatnot. Host why do you say that about ben frank . Guest ben franklin never held one truck for more than three years. He reinvented himself himself over 30 times, literally changed his profession. Moved all over the world. He was easily bored, i think add can be for a person who has a lower iq, more of a challenge than someone like franklin who is a genius, it can be a really useful combination. I think it for everybody can be useful. Host would you say he is a serial entrepreneur. Guest yes definitely. An inventor, writer, publisher, and like i said he helped create United States of america. Host 2004, what would jefferson do, what where did that become from . Guest i wrote that book because i kept encountering revision of history, specifically and particularly about jefferson. It was about a resurgence of interest in jefferson, largely after 911. There were a couple of historians who had quotes, not sure sure they had degrees in history, who suggested jefferson was a bible hunting christian and america was founded on christian values means there several very well organized groups out there pushing. A number of other myths about jefferson that i thought were important to knock down until the actual story. One to tell the life of his story and what he did, what he was promoting. Host i think you write about the fact that living in New Hampshire you discovered some jeffersonian materials in the house youre living. Guest it was vermont actually. In fact thats really what got me into it. I had forgot about that. As time passes. We bought this house in 2001 in montpelier. In the addict there were a few boxes of old books. They were just horribly weather damaged. They had no value. Whoever had the house before just left them there. In fact they had been left there for a long time, their newspapers in, there are newspapers in the box from the 1930s. There were ten or 20 volumes that that elected writings of Thomas Jeffersons which had only been published once in the history of the night states. It was in 1909 by the Thomas Jefferson memorial association. It has his personal diary, letters, biography, all of the stuff. I was retired and i spent a year living inside of jeffersons brain. Then i am reading all of the stuff in the world and it completely contradicts what i learned, i realized that theres something to be said for objective voice of history. Jefferson and a lot of his writings is thinking about the posterity, thinking about his own reputation. The history is fairly clear. That also led me to, when i started writing a book the first draft became jefferson would be horrified by the corporation of a person. Host why . Guest the corporate performance in modern performance, although the company was the first modern corporation that Queen Elizabeth charted in 1601. She did that and made a fortune on that. Her and other members of parliament. Then they chartered another company. In 1773 jefferson had published a pamphlet called a summary view of the rights of british americans, as i recall. Its been a most two decades. It was basically a booklet about how to be a good british citizen in north america. That was in the summer. In late fall or early winter england was suffering through a recession, a serious recession and so they passed an act. For some reason most people think it was a tax on tea, what it was actually the east India Company was almost all owned by members of the parliament and royal family. The british east India Company was going down the tubes because of the recession. They had a monopoly on most of the business in the United States. Teat was what everybody drank. People did not not drink coffee in the early colonies. On every block had a tshirt shop on it. It is a Cultural Centers it was the largest Corporate Tax cut in the history of the world at that time. Not only did the east India Company have over 10 million pounds, it was a massive amount of tea in stock in the uk. They are ready pay tax on it. So it was a tax rebate on all the stuff. So they got money back from the government and the goal was to sell that to north america. The problem theyre having is half of the tea being consumed in all of these tea shops were from smugglers. It was being brought in illegally and they tried stopping that trade, they went all the way back and they couldnt stop it. Theres no way to stop it. So they decided to undercut it. So the company was bringing all this discounted tea into the United States. The citizens citizens from philadelphia to boston just freaked out. They started this Huge Campaign to block petit from coming inches in charleston they prevented him from coming into the harbors, and in d. C. Too. But they found a dock and that led to basically 1 million, in todays in todays dollars act of vandalism. They vandalize three of the ships, quietly, respectfully, interestingly enough. I tracked down a copy of the only eyewitness account and got the original book which was published in 1883 and it was George Roundtree hughes. It had a long title. In fact he was the guy who came up with the phrase Boston Tea Party. You know 50 years later but a much everyone is dead and he had been 16 or 17 years old he participated in it. He wrote the book and it was remarkable. This was an active and alyssum against the Largest Corporation in the world. So when he say why would jefferson be horrified by it, it be the corporation as a person. After the Boston Tea Party jefferson stop talking about how to be a good citizen in the United States and started talking about separation. This led to 1776. So in a very real way, america was founded on a revolt against corporate power. Host thats what you write on equal protection. The revolution was the vote, the misbehavior of corporation, our our nation was founded in anticorporate policy. Guest sure. Host you also a theme i picked up in your book was that we were not an aristocracy. The white men who formed our nation were not necessarily an aristocracy, or rich aristocracy. Host . Guest that was one of the most fascinating things i got out of jefferson stuff. And digging deep into the history of that era. Its what would jefferson do. The myth of the rich founders. Theres been a few good histories about that and published since that time. The wealthiest man among the people who signed the declaration of independence was john hancock. His network in todays dollars or in 2004 when i put the put the book, would be about 700,000. He was not a mindboggling rich guy. Some of them had fancy houses but their fancy houses in the standards of north america. They went even be considered a squires house in the u. K. These people were not rich. They were rich people at the time of the American Revolution. The Johnson Family for example, they had a castle on the hudson. Several hundred african slaves, several hundred european slaves, as knights of the roundtable. They recreated this. They were. They were fabulously wealthy. There were a number families like that. Virtually all of them left. After the revolution, jefferson died bankrupt, washington died bankrupt, madison was having problems, they were all just skating by. Among the slaveowners slaves or their principal asset. A terrible and and grim part of our history also. The other part was jefferson worked aggressively to try to stop slavery. When he was in his early 20s he introduced legislation, he was punished by it that they passed a law saying if anybody in virginia previously that slave would be arrested and as i recall, Something Like two years of hard labor and then sold back into the slave market. So i just want to set the record straight. Host from your book, 2013 book the crash of 2016. History tells us that when the foundations collapse and societies cultural core is hollowed out and the madness takes hold, its members will pretend all is well. Life seems to go on as average citizens try to get by while the very rich you understand what is happening consolidate their power and wealth before the final crash. Guest is a fairly typical cycle. People see these things coming. When we started the childrens village back in the 70s it was a Vegetarian Program by then. Ive been a vegetarian since 68 or maybe 67. So we have some promise to vegetarians on our board. Gary swanson was one of them. I used to go to new york every six months and we would make dinner in our apartment a c