Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth 20151005 : vimarsana.com

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 i got a job at msu and brody will. The dorms had a Radio Station so i was on wrp. I did it for six weeks, did a tape and got a job at w. Itl. W. Itl lansing michigan which was the country western station, the number one station in lansing. I was a weekend dj and i hated Country Music and i discovered that i love Country Music to assist the teenager in the 60s and rock n roll. I worked there for a year or so and then went into an allnight show top 40 and then went back to woodland and did two years. Then i got out of that and in 2002 november 2002 thanksgiving we were living in turmont and the reason i drove back to michigan to visit family for thanksgiving and all the way there all i could get was actually it was odd was like Sean Hannitys show repeated itself three or four times on that 14 hour drive and he was doing a live remote from a but but habitat for humanity only he was talking about hannity for habitat hannity for humanity. I was thinking that half the country votes democratic roughly its not like we are a totally red country. We are purple country and theres got to be a market for the leftwing version of what hannity is doing so i wrote an oped in december 2002 titled talkback talk radio which was basically a business plan. It can in the business and i knew how it worked. Heres how you can do it from a business point of view and heres how you do it from a programming point of view and i put that out there. And then i thought in 97 we had sold an ad agency in atlanta and we were essentially retired and i thought it would be fun to try this out to see if we could do this. So putting my money where my mouth was so we found a Radio Station burlington vermont that would put me on the air for two hours on a saturday morning after the swap meet and for a few months i did a morning show. About half the calls i got was this said john deer tractor Still Available . Again we made a tape and took it to the Radio Network which was at the time the only progressive Radio Network. It was out of detroit owned by the uaw and they picked me up in the industry and put us on 29 stations in serious xm or serious at that time. Thats how the show started and he asked me to come to chicago and meet with him and john simpson. They read my articles and they were thinking of starting a Network Based on what i had written about and they did start air america. After a year or so of competing with air america, two years, whatever it was, they started syndicating my show. But i always owned the show. In fact i think i was the only show. Ring of fire was the only one. The only two shows owned by the host. Host why do you america went under . Guest i think it was a mixture of things. The biggest one was that they were undercapitalized. Fox news, roger ailes back when he was in the Nixon White House had proposed or signed off on a proposal for something called gop tv which was an early fox news. Nixon couldnt raise the money so it never happened and then he met murdoch and murdoch said sure we can do this but they lost 100 million a year for roughly five years before they made any money so you could say hey sean hannity lost them an aggregate of 400 million. Isnt that a terrible failure cracks after the fifth year they caught an audience. Air america when they declared bankruptcy to think they have gone through 16 or 17 million over a five or six year period. Not a lot of money for a national Radio Network. Particularly the win the Business Model was leasing Radio Stations. So i think being undercapitalized was the biggest sin. There were management problems and there were some programming issues that i disagreed with. I thought they were creating programs or more Like Television and radio and theres a real big difference in those mediums. I think the real big problem was they were. Host in several of your books he referred to yourself as a serial entrepreneur. Guest i started my First Business when i was 17. I was a tv stereo repair shop across the street from Michigan State university. Host is a head shop wasnt a . Guest it was in the back of a headshot. We got a little less hippie. What i was doing was the guy who owned the head shop i rented a shell from number 25 a month and people would bring a electronic equipment in and i would pick it up every night and go home and fix fix it fix it at back the next day and he would collect the money and took a percentage of the money. We grew out of that shell for the head shop in four months so we moved down the street and rented a place and ended up with more technicians and six or seven employees total. My soontobe wife was our bookkeeper and the First Business was also the only business that i started that went down in flames. I learned a lot. It costs a lot. After that we started an herbal tea company and we started an Advertising Agency. In 78 the reason i moved to New Hampshire we started the community for kids. We moved back to atlanta and started a travel agency built that from nothing up to 2 Million Value and got on the front page of the wall street journal. Sold at an 86 and retired and moved to germany with the kids for a year, living at and working with a Nonprofit Organization i have been working with since 1978. Then we came back in 87 from germany back to atlanta and started an Advertising Agency and that is the company has sold in 97 and moved to vermont to quote retire and start the radio show which turned into it was going to be a hobby and now im doing four hours every day. Host where you live living . Guest i live in the southwest. Host when did you start in why did you start writing books . Guest again this goes back to my childhood. My mom was an english major and graduated magna cum laude in the late 40s. Her aspirations to be a writer and she held writers the way people today think of movie stars and my dad had 20,000 books in the house. He added organized like a library. He was a very organized guy and i started writing as a young teenager. By the time i moved out of the house when i was 16 i had 56 rejection papers on my bedroom wall, mostly for bad poetry. I just kept doing it. Now i have got to think around 25 bucks. Host the first several books that you wrote for about attention deficit. Guest the several i had published. I had written probably 10 or 12 bucks before that but none of them thankfully were ever published. They say the first million are your practice and its true. But yeah yeah add and that was the product of two things. I was the executive director of the president ial Treatment Facility in New Hampshire and my wife was the Program Director and so my job principally was to raise money and get publicity on the administrative stuff. But i notice that virtually all of the kids were coded as hyperactive referred to as the hyperkinesis syndrome. Hyperkinetic children i believe ended 78 was the year we started it and the year before mine gold published the book why your child as hyperactive and he proposed it was food dyes and these children were reacting to functionally an allergy. He was a pediatric allergist so we had a 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 kid that we could turn on and off like a light switch by taking it in or out of his diet but he also had horrible psoriasis. They seem to make his psoriasis worse so i think for a small subset of the population there is that allergy connection but for most of think its a way of brain wiring. It published by First Published piece on that was it must have been around 1980 and it was in the journal of psychiatry suggesting that it was not a disease but a different way of having your brain wired and then when one of our children was diagnosed with adhd in high school, and the psychologist said in the room with him and said you know forget about going to college. You should become a car mechanic you are good with your hands you know and by the way if you are going to be a car mechanic work on the foreign cars because the pay is better. Few work on a mercedes you make more and he had tears in his face. He wanted to go to college and i thought this was a terrible way to describe this. I wrote my first book essentially to my son saying you are not broken. You have a different skill set than many of the kids that there are a lot of people in your tribe and he has a masters degree in science and has a business of his own based on that field, god love him. I wrote a couple of bucks on that and that became Time Magazine did a story on it and it became a national bestseller. So i wrote another book another book. Host who are we talking about. This is a quote from you. Hes the poster child for add and if he didnt have add we wouldnt have the United States of america. Guest probably ben franklin. Its been a while since i wrote this book. Clearly in add theres a different perception. I profile a couple of people with ben franklin and Thomas Edison and the same name as the guy who married elizabeth taylor. He was such a classic. Probably Richard Burton Elizabeth Taylors husband had it to given his bouncing around and whatnot. Host why the say that about ben franklin . Guest ben franklin never held one job for more than three years. He reinvented himself over his 30 years, literally completely changed his profession. Lived all over the world. He was easily ward. I think add can be fourperson who has a lower iq is more of a challenge for a person like franklin who is a genius and it can be a really useful combination. I think for everybody its a useful combination. Host would you say he is a serial entrepreneur . Guest yes he definitely was and a writer and publisher and like i said he helped create the United States of america. Host 2004 what would jefferson do, where did that book come from . Guest i wrote that book because i kept in countering revisionist history specifically and particularly about jefferson. It was kind of a resurgence of interest in jefferson largely after 9 11 but there are a couple of historians. Im not sure that they have have degrees, who were suggesting that jefferson was a bible thumping christian and part of this whole america was founded on christian values meaning they are are several well organized groups out there pushing, and a number of other myths about jefferson that i thought were important to knock down until the actual story of what he did and what he was promoting. Host i think youre right about the fact, living in New Hampshire you discovered some jeffersonian materials. Guest was vermont actually. In fact that is what really got me into it. You are right, how could i forgot that . We bought this house in 2001 i think it was in montpellier and in the attic there were a couple of boxes full of books. The Carriage House was attached to it and they were just horribly weather damaged and they had no value. Whoever had the house before us had just left them there an impact they have been left there for a long time. There were a bunch of newspapers in the boxes. There were 10 or 20 volumes collected writings of commerce jefferson which had only been published once in the history of the United States in 1909 by Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association and that had his personal virus and all those letters and autobiography. All this stuff than i spent a year. I was quote retired and i spent a year living inside of jeffersons brain. And then like i said im reading all this stuff and it completely contradicts what i just learned. I realize theres something to be said for an objective voice of history. Jefferson obviously in a lot of his writings was thinking about the posterity and presented himself well as you would expect. But the history is fairly clear. So it led me to that book. That also led me to, when i started writing that book the first draft became a book on equal protection actually. Jefferson would be horrified by the idea of the corporation. Host why . Guest because first of all the corporate form although the British East India Company was the first modern corporation and it was the first chartered in 1601. The First Corporation was that golden hine. She made a fortune on that so than they chartered the british India Company and in 1773 jefferson published a pamphlet called a summary view of the rights of christians as i recall it was basically a booklet about how to be a good british citizen in north america. That was in the summer. In the late fall or early winter , and glenn was suffering through a recession, a serious worldwide recession and so they passed the tea act which for some reason most people think was a tax increase on tea but what i was actually east India Companies was loaned by the British Parliament and the royal family and the east India Company was going down the tubes. Because of this recession and they have a monopoly on most of the businesses in the United States and tea was what everybody drank three people didnt drink coffee in the early colonies. Every block or every other block at a tea shop on it. They were Cultural Centers and so the tea act of 1773 was the largest tax credit that point in time, Corporate Tax cut in the history of the world. Not only did the east India Company have over 10 Million Pounds as i recall it but whatever it was it was a mass amount of tea and stock and they had already paid a tax on it. So was a tax rebate on all that so was the tax cut. They got money back from the government and the goal was to sell the tea to america. The problem they were having in america was half the tea being consumed in all of these tea shops was from quote smugglers Trading Companies that were american Trading Companies and it was brought in illegally. They stopped the trade. They couldnt stop. There was no way they could stop this so they decided to undercut it so the British East India Company was bringing all this super discounted tea into the United States and the citizens from philadelphia to boston just freaked out and started this Huge Campaign to block tea from coming in. It in charleston they prevented it from coming into the harbors but they finally talked and that led to basically a Million Dollar in todays dollar vandalism. They vandalized three of the ships quietly, respectfully interestingly enough. I tracked down a copy of the only eyewitness account and got the original book published in 1883. It was George Roundtree hughes and they had a long title. In fact he was the guy who came up with the phrase the Boston Tea Party. They had all sworn silence to each other and this was 50 years later and ready much everybody else was dead. He was 16 or 17 years old when he participated so he broke the book and it was remarkable. This was an act of vandalism against Largest Corporation in the world. So when you say why would jefferson be horrified with the idea that a corporation was a person . After the Boston Tea Party jeffersons stop talking about how to be a good citizen in the United States and the u. K. And talked about separation and this led right to 1776. In a very real way america was founded on a revolt against corporate power. Host thats what you write in unequal protection. Our nation was founded and anticorporate power. One of the things that i picked up in your hook was that we were not an aristocracy. The white man who formed our nation were not necessarily a rich landowning aristocracy. Guest yeah that was one of the most fascinating things that i got out of reading jefferson stuff and then digging deep into the history of that era. The myth of the rich bounders and there has been a couple of good histories about that published since that time. The wealthiest men among the people who signed the declaration of independence was john hancock and his nap worth in todays dollars or in 2004 when i wrote the book would be about 700,000. He was not a mind of glowingly rich guy. Land had very little value so they had fancy houses but they were fancy houses by the standard of north america. They would have been considered a squires house in the u. K. These people were not rich. There were rich people at the time of the American Revolution. The Johnson F