Larry Wert | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #63

You know, when I started, the business model between networks and television stations were we'll give you our network programming station and thank you for airing it. So we'll give you some money, right? And then at some point the demand started shifting and then the network said, hey, TV station, we're going to give you that programming, but we can't afford to give you money anymore. It's too expensive to make programming. It's getting competitive. A very pivotal, fortuitous time in my life. It was early 81 of my mentors who was actually one of the news leaders in la, became a first time general manager in my hometown Chicago. He handpicked me back to be a sales leader. And so I was lucky enough to come home and get that promotion and do that job. And then he did something even better for me. He hired Uncle Winfrey. We watched that develop from obscurity to phenomenon.

Hey folks, welcome back to on the Home Front. I'm your host, Jeff Duden. And today we've got a legend in the broadcasting world. 40 years. You know him as the man who was on the team that hired Oprah Winfrey and who showed Jerry Springer and Howard Stern the door in Chicago. A true titan in the broadcasting world, Larry Wirt. We're taking a dive into Larry's incredible journey from his humble beginnings in radio to his influential roles at abc, NBC and beyond, all the way to his current status as an entrepreneur. But that's not all. We're also tackling a burning question. How do we navigate the ever evolving media landscape while avoiding the pitfalls of sensationalism and misinformation? Larry's got the goods and the insights and advice you need to stay ahead of the game and and make a smart media choices. If you like what you hear today, leave a like comment or subscribe to see all the content we have coming your way. And if you have any questions regarding business franchising or just about the show, use the links in the description and we'll get right back to you. Thanks for listening. Welcome everybody. This is Jeff Duden and we are on the home front. And today we are with Larry Wirt, who has had an esteemed career in media and broadcasting in the Chicagoland area and parts unknown. Welcome, Larry.

Hey, good morning. Jeff wasn't as steamed, but maybe it was just plain steamed.

Well, we'll let the listeners be the judge of that. Well, it was great. I got to meet you at an event where we were looking at. It was an investment event for an NBA team and we quickly figured out we were both Chicagoland people and decided based on our conversation, to have you on the home front. So really appreciate you being on this morning.

Thank you. I'm honored to be here. I really enjoyed meeting you and learning about your journey a bit. And so it's fun to be here with you this morning.

Awesome. Larry, did you grow up in Chicago?

I did. I grew up in a town called Riverside on the west side, and I went to a place called Fenwick High School in Oak park and worked my way to the University of Wisconsin on an athletic scholarship. I was a diver. I always was into aquatics in my youth, helped me get my first job. I put aquatics director in my experience background and they said, what would that be? And I said, it's a lifeguard, basically just a cooler name. But I competed at Wisconsin and while I was there, I had aspirations to represent our country and compete. And then I went to the Olympic trials and I saw Greg Louganis and I decided I had to get a job, right? So that little pivot. I was lucky enough to get my first job at a Chicago ad agency called Leo Burnett. And before all the consolidation in the industry, and that was kind of the. The eighth or ninth inning of Mad Men. What a wonderful place to start. And they were one of the biggies. While I was there. I met so many people who were on the sales side of broadcasting, selling commercial time, and they all told me that I was miscast in my job and that I really should be doing that. So I was lucky enough to get an opportunity on the west coast with ABC Television, my first sales job, and there was only three networks then. There was no cable, there's no Internet. There was not even a Fox. I mean, it was three networks, some radio and a bunch of newspapers. That was media, you know, that was the media landscape. And it was very memorable times. The morning show on our TV station was hosted by Regis Philbin locally in la. What a blast. My first five years and exposure to Hollywood and television and sales business.

Larry, I don't want to get past this point without asking you what your best dives were.

You know, I guess I was considered strong but not pretty. I didn't have the greatest alignment and.

Toe point, but I can resonate with strong but not pretty.

I competed pretty well and I could do harder degree of difficulty than many to overcome my lack of form and beauty. And so I was using a 3 1/2 somersault and inward 2 1/2, 1 meter. I enjoyed twisting backward and reverse twisting. So I was really more Comfortable with the higher degree of difficulty optionals than I was, you know, simple front dives. But I.

And that's off the, off the low springboard.

I competed on 1 meter, 3 meter and a little 10 meter and. Okay, loved it. You know, the Big Ten back then, they were, they had the dominant coaches. Actually. Greg Louganis coach, defected from Ohio State to go coach him in California. If you were, you know, fifth in the Big Ten, you were about, you know, seventh or eighth in the world. The Chinese weren't doing it yet. There was always a great Italian and a great Mexican diver. But it was, it was wonderful to compete, you know, then and just, just have that experience along with, you know, my overall college experience.

That's fantastic. And, and then you moved, you got into media, which very fortuitous. I mean, media has, has just exploded in ways that you probably couldn't foresee back in the day. I mean, before the Internet, really. I mean, it's just the evolution of where we get our content and the impact that it has on us. It's. I'd love to unpack your thoughts on what's going on currently a little bit later. But. So you're, so you're. You moved out to la. Are we on the west coast for this job?

Yes, I did. I did my first five years out there. Came back to Chicago for a stint, and then I ended up in New York. It was a time where the three big networks kind of dominated media consumption. And people had to make an appointment to watch the programming they wanted. They wanted to get their daily news, they had to go watch when it was available, a couple, three times a day, and that was it. They wanted their entertainment programs, they had to make an appointment. Pretty soon technology started rearing its head. And you had recorders, right? You had the ability to put a cassette recorder in and tape a show so you could watch it when you wanted. And then really, you know, the advent of technology kept coming. And technology eventually made it easy to record your programming right on your, you know, your set top box. And then more programming outlets started proliferating. Actually, the. ESPN was one of the early cable frontiers and came in quietly with a different business model. It wasn't reliant on advertising like we were. It was reliant on subscription fees from people who were starting to buy cable. And obviously there was fewer limits on cable station capability. So, you know, there might have been in any given market, you know, five, six, seven TV stations, but soon there was 10, 20, 100, 400 cable channels. And this was all, you know, all before the Internet started popping, which became another media platform. But as we all recall, our first experience with it was more of a dial up to communicate with people in chat rooms and the bandwidth just didn't allow content to be transferred in any reasonable time. Right. There just wasn't enough capacity at that time. So all of this happened, I'd say through the 80s and by the time we're in the 90s, you just can see a different landscape, developing a media landscape. So in big summary, you have technology which started immediately changing consumer behavior and consumers started, instead of having to make an appointment, they were, you know, they were, they were, they were having their own programming to themselves. That was a big deal. You know, when I started, the business model between networks and television stations were we'll give you our network programming station and you know, thank you for airing it, so we'll give you some money.

Right.

And then, and then at some point the demand started shifting and then the network said, hey TV station, we're going to give you that programming, but we can't afford to give you money anymore. It's too expensive to make programming and it's getting competitive.

So are you saying the content creators were paying to have their content put on the television stations and the networks? So the television stations were. My wife was in media. She worked for like Trumper Communications. And then over the course of, maybe in Charlotte and then maybe over the course of 10 years, I think it was bought by somebody else, then ultimately gobbled up by Clear Channel. So what you're saying is, and, and also pick this up from the. Bob. Oh geez, who's, who's the guy that did the happy little paintings? Bob Ross. I also, I also picked this up from the Bob Ross documentary. So. But it was, you know, most of these television stations were locally owned and operated, so they, they had control of the airwaves, Is that correct?

It's true. You know, thousands in the country and the networks each owned a few of their own. You know, give it 5, 10 or 15 in each market, the big markets, because they, they wanted to have some access to, to programming locally as well. So they always had a relationship between networks and then owning some stations. But you're right, that was, that was the relationship back then with networks and stations and how programming got disseminated.

Yeah. And I've met several people that we've had in our homefront brands, franchise owned radio stations in the, in the Triad area, Raleigh, Durham area. That's what their family did for 30 or 40 years. And of course they got an offer they couldn't refuse. The local family business that owned the radio station here and the television stations. And so really interesting that access was what had value inside of that versus the content where now it's really shifted to where content is king and it finds every avenue possible. There's. And you can get it any. There's so many ways to get content and new ways coming out every day. I can only imagine the, you know that the half. And we've seen the impact in the newspaper industry, we've seen the impact in network television, we've seen the impact in ESPN where an upstart like barstool sports can come out and just absolutely crush.

Yeah, it's such an amazing sea change when you think about what it was and what it is and, and where it's still headed because audience fragmentation and choice is still, I think, expanding sideways.

And who'd you work for in New York? In New York, who'd you work for?

I worked for NBC, the network. Okay. And then another time I worked for Tribune Media when I worked for ABC in the 1986. That was the first media acquisition of any size in any notable nature. A small company called Capital Cities came in and borrowed a few billion dollars from Warren Buffett and they bought ABC for 3.5 billion 1986 and I believe they sold it to Disney 10 years later for 18.7 billion. So once Warren Buffett had some vision and made a good investment there.

But yeah, I think now it might not be popular, but I think Warren Buffett one day will be very successful.

You think?

I think.

Well, success is relative, Dan. I mean, Jeff, you know, I wish.

He was my relative.

I take, I do too. Although he doesn't give a lot of money to his relatives, remember.

Why would he? You'll ruin him forever.

That's what he said. But you brought up Trumper. So I just had a communication with Jeff Trump. I mean, you know, some of the pioneers in this business are, you know, they're still around and when we reflect on what was and what is, it's mind blowing.

Yeah, absolutely. So how'd you get back to Chicago?

So a very pivotal fortuitous time in my life, it was early 80 and interest rates were about 22%. Just got married and just got pregnant. And one of my mentors who was actually one of the news leaders in la, you know, when I met in those earlier years, became a first time general manager in my hometown Chicago and he hand picked me back to be a sales leader. And so I was lucky enough to come home and, and get that promotion and do that job. And then he did something even better for me. He hired Oprah Winfrey. I just, I was in the room. I was around. I. But a guy named Dennis Swanson gets full credit. A lot of people, you know, take credit, but, you know, we watched that develop from just from obscurity to a phenomenon.

So what, what did, what did you see and what did, what did your team see in Oprah Winfrey that led you to take a chance on her?

It's funny you say that. Before she was selected, we had a room with piles of DVD tapes of applicants to be the morning show host in Chicago only. And everyone in the room at some point voted, and most people voted for someone else. But Dennis Swanson, I remember him saying, you know, I have a feeling about this one. And, you know, Oprah was in Baltimore. She was kind of a not very high profile TV host. She, she looked pretty atypical to what you might see in a morning host position in a market like Chicago. And he, after seeing her tapes and meeting with her, he felt she had a unique quality that might resonate with. He was spot on because her ability to connect with people in an authentic way that gave credibility to that communication was just amazing. And some people say, could that have happened today in this environment with all this media? I don't know. But it was a vertical climb to call it overall national audience acceptance.

Now, she was, she was in the Color Purple, right? And was that. Had she, had she been acting at that point or was this basically very beginning of her career?

It all came off of her, you know, local Chicago television show, and about 10 or 12 months into it, a syndicator named Roger King and his brother Michael. The King brothers, they owned, I think they owned the Little Rascals. And they just had a feeling. So they came to our station and Mr. Swanson and they said, we'd like to syndicate Oprah. And, you know, he said, what's in it for us? And they gave him a deal for Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, because they were just acquiring that. Anyway, that was the deal. It still, it actually, until Opal retired. That was the deal. You know, 28 years. Those are the most.

So she, she is basking in a, in a. As Jerry Seinfeld said, he's living in a dream, dream world of residuals.

Gosh, she, she did very well. So did the people around her. And yeah, she, you know, that, that was a remarkable phenom, you know, but it was neat to, to be there at that time. And then the acquisition of ABC was also an interesting culture change. And you could see things were starting to really change. And I was approached by a radio station in Chicago at the time, and they were actually my client and they said, look, we're going to acquire a station in la. And the general manager, would you go back there? And now I was a sales manager. He's offering me a general manager position. But I would have had to go back to LA. So in a short order, after 10 years with ABC and a little bit of stock equity and my career was going fine, that was a moment where the idea of going back to LA didn't sit well at home. So they said, okay, what if you take Chicago and I go to la? And that's what happened. It was a small company called Evergreen Media. The station here was called the Loop. And the irony is that that small little team in the acquisition of LA under a guy by the name of Jim DeCastro, became the world's large, the country's largest local radio company. Was that Steve Dahl?

Was that Steve Dahl? Was that Jonathan Brandmeier, who was, who was all in the Loop?

You're correct, it was Steve, Gary. Steve Dahl and Gary Meyer. It was Jonathan Grammeier, Johnny B. Kevin Matthews brought in Danny Bonaduce. We had sports with a guy named Chuck Coppock.

That's right.

Actually, as we sit here now, one of the projects, my passion projects I've been working on with some people for four years is a documentary on the Loop in Chicago in the 80s that's worth doing.

I'll tell you what. So I grew up in Chicagoland and I was not very well traveled growing up. I think I went to Wisconsin twice. But, you know, we, and then as I started moving around the country in my athletic career and my business career, I would see, you know, I'm like, why are there so many Cubs fans? Right? And I mean, wgn, wls, the Loop, I mean, people all over the country knew about these people and, and consumed content on these stations. And I don't know if it was because it was syndicated programming and, and you did a great job selling it out or whatever. But yeah, I was really kind of proud, actually, when I would, you know, be able to, you know, pull that stuff up, I, I, we identified with it. It's what we grew up listening to. We didn't have a lot of options. So it, that was it. And whatever Steve Dahl was doing, you know, we talked about in school. So, yeah, that Must have been really something. And you must have done a heck of a job with that team to really develop that content and distribute it in the way that you did.

Well, look, the documentary starts in 79, when there was a radio promotion with Steve and Gary at the White Sox game. It was a doubleheader that they, they decided they didn't like disco. And it was. That's right. Got a disco demolition event.

That's a disco. Death to disco.

Yeah. And it's funny, it kind of starts the timeline of our documentary. But Disco Demolition has been featured in many documentaries lately. You know, just the Bee Gees, there was one on that alone. There's a little controversy whether it was a racial homophobic event or was just a promotion that went bad that, you know, they used too much dynamite. And the records, people brought their record to get in the game free and then they got blown up and there was chaos. But that's right.

Yeah, they sell for people that don't know. They, if you brought an album, a disco album, they were going to explode it. They were in the middle of the field, right?

Yeah. And they, like I said, use too much dynamite. Records flew everywhere. There was chaos, you know, police authorities, fire trucks, and they had to cancel.

The shards of vinyl and children.

Yeah, yeah. Good old, good old baseball game.

Well, you know what they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Well, that was really what happened. And then my, you know, my. The lead guy at the loop, Jim DeCastro, brought Stephen Gary over to the Loop because they got fired from their station. And you know, then Brandmeier, what happened? The rock and roll great station known as the Loop started playing less music and more talk. And these guys became so popular as a cool, hip water cooler that we became a bit of a phenomenon too. You know, we, you know, we put, we brought Howard Stern here. It didn't work out. That's, you know, because there was an audience expectation of what they wanted in Chicago. So I think it'll be a fun show. I think we're going to call it Turn It Up. You know how Chicago's Loop changed the face of radio. It was about a 17 year run and excited about it. But it's also about Chicago in the 80s. You know, the Cubs, Chicago 85 Bears, maybe the greatest NFL team ever. You have, you have Oprah. Bradmeyer became a giant phenomenon. Our other guys, I mean, it was an interesting time here.

Was Jerry Springer there?

Jerry. Jerry Springer is a, is another pivot point in my career.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Well, after 10 years of this radio role and we grew to 430 stations again. Evergreen went public, became Clinton, deregulated radio. And we just got big. We became, we sold the Clear Channel. But at that point, I get a call from an old mentor, Mr. Swanson, who had migrated to NBC after a lot of years. And he's in 30 Rock. He goes, kid, some idiot put Jerry Springer on the late news in Chicago and all the anchors quit. And it's real crazy. I saw that, Dennis. And he said, well, they want to know who could fix it. And I said, either me or you. And he goes, I'm not going. I already did that. There, it's your turn. And he didn't even give me a choice, but I owed him so much. That's how I joined NBC in 1998, running the station in Chicago. And it began, that was 15 years after that was all over. Jerry Springer, you know, and who, by the way, rest in peace. I adored him. Great guy. We lost him last year. He had very interesting, smart guy. He made more fun of his show than anyone. But I did have to fire him. When I got there, I took his show off the air and it went to Fox. But I had to keep him in the building as a, as his landlord because we needed the revenue and it all worked out.

Nice, nice.

I'm sorry.

Oh, that's no problem. So, Larry, you've had this incredible career and when we met, you know, we were talking about current business, current opportunities. What kind of stuff are you working on today?

Yeah, you know, this. I did have 40 interesting years and great, great people that guided me. And then, you know, all this change, I got to witness it and participate in it. My, my last, I call it part of my grown up career. I, I ran Tribune Media, which was a Chicago based giant media company. Most people even here see it as a newspaper. But they owned television stations in, you know, 12 of the top 20 markets. The big ones in LA and New York and Chicago. Superstitions like WGN and WPIX and KTLA in Los Angeles. And when I went there, the company had gone bankrupt. They owned the Cubs, they sold them. It was. Unfortunately, the company acquired the LA Times in the 2000s. And then something came along. A third of all the revenue in newspapers were classified ads. And Craigslist showed up, they lost a third of their revenue. And we overpaid, we tribute at the time overpaid for the LA Times and it bankrupted the company. The people who bought the debt brought it back. And I got recruited to come in post bankruptcy. And the decision was to make two companies newspaper and then broadcasting and double down in broadcasting. So we did that and we became the nation's largest local television group. And then President Trump did some deregulation and that Obama eventually undid. But we were able to sell our company in 2019 to a company called maybe 2018 called Nexstar, a Dallas based media company. They're the largest now in the country, about 72% of the country's TV stations. And for the first time in my career I tried to just take a breath and say, okay, now I don't, you know, what am I going to do? I don't want a boss for once or a board of directors. And I always was kind of a frustrated entrepreneur in some ways. And I tell people now that in this last four years I kind of screwed up retirement. I really messed it up because I got over involved in too many things. So that's how I got to this chapter now. And I'm doing several things. I'm running a home health care company which is Chicago and Indiana based.

Is it medical or non medical?

Yeah, well it's for post acute care at home. So people have orthopedic surgeries or they need wound care, whatever they might need, we follow them home and give them clinicians and nurses to take care of them. And we generally bill their insurance providers or Medicare or Medicaid, whatever it might be. Interesting business. And then I'm also running a food and beverage company for a company called Jackson and Partners that got, you know, you know, plant based food was, has gone through an interesting iteration and they were focused on it. And so I joined my, my, my partner's a bit notable. His name's Bo Jackson. He was, he was a fairly good athlete.

Yeah. And I've heard of him.

Yeah. And he's, but he's also a food guy. And so we, we've pivoted a little bit. We still, we still sell plant based items and we, we still sell Bo burgers. Great. You know, but we, we comprised and designed a hydration product last year, 17 months ago and we just launched it two, two weeks ago.

Oh, congratulations.

Thank you. That was a first. You know, from beginning to end conception through, you know, regulatory approvals to you know, execution and manufacturing and, and then learning how to get it up on the world's biggest store, Amazon and our website, creating a website.

So is the, is the Bo. Is the Bo burger competitive with the impossible and the beyond meats?

It's not. We're actually true Angus beef. Okay. But we have some other products that are plant based. We have different shreds and chicken, plant based chicken items. And we have some jerky, so some small meals. But Bo's just a great guy and he loves this project because there's so much. This is a big new category. Energy drinks are and were but hydration. 75% of Americans are dehydrated. And when we learned, you know, the big dog in the category Liquid IV had so much sugar, we started thinking, what else could we put together?

Right?

And we learned with our partner Carry International, that there's there, there are a couple ingredients out there that no one were using yet kind of new in terms of their efficacy and clinical findings. One's called Capros and it, it stimulates blood flow, so cardio support. And one's called IU Flex and it naturally lubricates joints. And we said, well, what if we put, you know, those two ingredients with the right amount of hydration, no sugar. And I'm thinking of these three things and came up with BO 3.0 and it's, you know, go to bo3pleo.com you can look it up on Amazon. But we love the product. Three flavors right now, no sugar. We added some wellness with vitamin C and zinc and potassium and we're excited about it. So.

Well, I tell you so I'm an early stage investor in Impossible Foods.

Yeah.

Did what we've done well and you know, I mean, we've still got a long way to go there with that product. But, you know, it, it has good distribution and it competes well with the Beyond Meats. And then one of our more. I've had two guests on that really hit this food thing. I had a DNA expert on called Cashif Cashies. Kashif Khan. Kash Khan. And he's a DNA expert and he really talks about how your foods are so critically important if you get your DNA testing right. I mean, think about this. You have a family of five, you all have slightly different DNA makeup that you shouldn't eat certain things. It, you know, you can, you might, if you eat certain things and you don't clear certain amino acids that you're going to be more susceptible to Alzheimer's or dementia or these other types of things. But if you don't eat those foods or you take this supplement, you can head those off. So that's one of our more popular episodes. And then another one we had Andrew Zimmern from Impossible Foods and it was all about foods and food scarcity and the stuff like that. So we kind of have celebrity chef slash DNA health, you know, track running here on the home front. And I'll put it. I'd love to have Bo on to talk about Bo 3.0, if we could make that happen.

Yeah, we definitely can make it happen. I mean, he's, he's just, he's getting busy again. He's, you know, this is the start of the baseball season, so he's going to go to some training camps, but we'll definitely make it happen.

All right, well, we got to get him before deer season because I think he's a. Yeah, he'll. He goes into the woods, doesn't he?

All the time. I mean, you know, every. Every day around his house. It's either squirrel or woodpecker season too. So he's a hunter, but, you know, he's. We're excited about this. We'll. We'll definitely. He's a much more fascinating hero interview than I am. So we'll set that.

I don't know. This has been pretty fun.

Thanks. So that's the food and beverage and I've got two spirits businesses I'm involved in.

Okay.

One is a whiskey. That interesting day today because our CEO was on the talk yesterday and announced a book that's coming out. But it all started six years ago when she showed me a picture from the Wall Street Journal of Jack Daniels and about, you know, 80 people with them guys. And then she pointed to one black face and she goes, who's that? I said, you know, she goes, nobody knows. She goes. But I've been researching it for a year and his name is Nathan Green and he taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey. So I think he was the nation's first black master distiller. And he came up with this process called the Lincoln county system with maple. So anyway, she wanted to make a movie and then the family that she researched said, you should do a whiskey in his honor. Anyway, it is now the nation's most awarded fastest growing whiskey for four years. And it's right now globally becoming that. And the distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, Shelbyville, exactly where it is near Jack Daniels is the seventh most visited distillery in the world. And, you know, she just announced the book. It's a real exciting project. Uncle Nearest whiskey.

Uncle nearest.

Okay, yeah, yeah, I should have brought.

Some props, but that's a little early.

But, you know, it's Friday in Chicago. We doze, but never close when it's happy. And then we launched a tequila a few years back. First A seltzer, organic, called Freshy, very clean. But then the new tequila is called Authentico. Same distillery in Mexico. And we have no additives and no, it's fully organic, USDA supported, and there's thousands of tequilas out there. But we think ours is in the cleaner, affordable space and we're excited about it. So, like I said, Jeff, I did not retire well. I maybe over amped my next chapter, but that's why it was so great to meet you and learn a little bit about all you've done and continue to do, even with scratching your curiosity niche like this with your audiences. I. I think it's pretty cool.

Well, look, we can't leave. You know, I asked. I asked that, got asked that question last week. I was leading some roundtables out in Phoenix for our industry association. And you know, why? Why don't you just walk away? Why don't you know why? You know, I sold my main company when I was 50, and it's like, why would you want to leave with everything that you've learned, why would you want to stop meeting new, great people, solving problems, businesses? You know, business is full contact. It's a sport.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's just. It's. It's like, you know that if you want to fish or you want to hunt or you want to golf and you want to do church stuff or you want to volunteer at the hospital, I think all that stuff's great if you want to do it. But, you know, for me, who I mean and started building businesses when I was 19 years old, then, you know, I don't know anything else, and I don't know any. I don't know another way to contribute. Well.

Admirable. And I've already raised my hand to you off, offline to. To tap into some of your expertise on franchising because there's another business I'm newly involved in as well, so.

Yeah, we'd love to do it. We'd love to do it. Can I Media today.

Yeah.

Carefully wading into the topic. It's, you know, it's gotten very. It's gotten interesting. There's a lot of impact. There's a lot of influence. Oh. Both 3.0. Got the hat on. Awesome.

I don't want him to get mad at me. You didn't even promote it. Well, come on, bro. We got a pack of 15 right here. Your three flavors. So awesome.

You know, like, what's. What. What perspective can you provide for somebody like me who, I mean, I just. I don't know where to get my news anymore and I don't know, you know, how to filter it. I mean it used to be, you know, I'd watch 60 Minutes, I'd take it at face value. I'd watch, you know, public broadcasting, I'd watch the documentaries. I mean I, I really, growing up, I mean it was like, this is where I get my news and this is where I get my truth. This is where I get my education, my information. This is, I broaden how I think about things and I just. Advertising has gotten so pervasive and you know, influence and special interests inside of that. It's really hard to understand, you know, not be suspicious of everything that I listen to.

Boy, is that a tough question. You know, because like you said, there's 24 hours a day, there's just so much out there. Right. And so I don't think there's a magic formula. I think that question and that struggle exists for everybody and depending on, you know, your tribal environment, you know, who you hang with and who you live with and you know, you, which is a big influence, you have to surf and trust, you have to decide. And I, look, I, I spent a lot of days on panels defending local news because I Learned in the 90s when I was at NBC, it's funny, we were struggling with MSNBC, the channel. It was actually losing a lot of money. People probably don't know that Ms. And MSNBC stands for Microsoft and they had making a, made a 99 year deal with Microsoft. And I remember Steve Ballmer pounding a table, being so angry at how badly the channel was doing and NBC was so focused on doing a, you know, objective down the middle, you know, news channel. And, but they were losing to Fox which had now been six, seven years underway. And so I know people are rolling their eyes that I said a network was trying to be objective with a news channel. But I believe that was always the goal for true journalists. What happened was made clear and what I've learned is love and hate get higher ratings than like and dislike. So what does that mean? Well, Fox and Rupert Murdoch picked a lane, right. Because there's more love and hate over there. And then so finally I'm in a big room at 30 Rock and so why don't we pick the other lane? And there was a whole lot of we can't do that. And, and then someone finally said, well, we better.

And so that's if you're, yeah, if you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space. I Mean, you know, no, I'm people vanilla content. Right. I mean, if we're not on this podcast, educating, entertaining or inspiring, then nobody's coming back.

You're exactly right. And so look, is there, is there a place or a role for, call it, you know, completely objective news? I, I used to make the case for local media. Although stations and local markets are a little bit indigenous to wherever they are. Right. We know that the, they're red, purple, purple, blue states and everything in between. Right. But I think they strive to do that. When I was at Tribune, we did 82,000 hours a year of local news. And I can promise you that with news director meetings and daily check ins, that was our goal. Consumers don't believe that anymore because they're just pounded with, you know, with what really is editorial. Right.

Can I ask you a question? Can I. Yeah, it's editorial. Well, so like observationally, there's two, there's two real drivers here. Number one is the dollars. Like what are you, what's going to get the clicks and the eyeballs to be able to make sure that the station or the outlet makes money. And then number two is there's people behind all of it. So if people, you know, to your point, you got to pick a side, you got to pick a lane, everybody gets in their echo chamber. So now people that are actually at the point of it, and we've seen it go bad with some of these big companies where they maybe throw, maybe they throw a commercial out there that didn't land the way they wanted it to, right. And they upset, you know, part of their base and so now they've got to come back the other way. But somebody made the decision to say this resonates with me, it's going to resonate with other people like me and it should resonate with everybody because in my echo chamber, I'm right. Now answer me this though, this is my question. Have you seen those little Internet videos where they clip like 25 different local news stations together and they're saying exactly the same phrase, exactly the same way, with exactly the same buzzword? How does that happen?

I have seen some of those montages. Yeah, I think, I think, I think a lot of that has to do with the edit room. I do, you know, again, I, I manage 42 stations and I've watched them a lot. So I think, look, I think you can. We give, we give them enough capability to make that right. But there's also, you know, some liberty taken in the edit room.

So it's a combination well, look, so like, we. I own a fitness thing, right? A fitness franchise. We put the workouts in, and then every franchise delivers the same workout. So to your point earlier, if the, if the Tribune Media owns 42 different stations and it only makes sense to centralize the production of content, and then it just gets put out there. So everybody's reading the same teleprompter. It's really not collusion and it's just.

Business efficiency is that there's some centralization and standardization and economy of scale. Right, right. Like you acknowledge. But at the same time, you know, again, I go back to. Each market has its own, you know, indigenous environment, and you have to customize for them. You know, McDonald's looks different in China than it does in, you know, in your market. Right. Sometimes. And the menus are a little different.

Right.

You know, I think that's true about local tv, but boy, yeah, we sure look bad when someone does, you know, homogenizes an edit like that.

Well, anybody who doesn't realize that news. I've been. I've done a lot of news. And what I realized is these people are so incredible at reading what's in front of them. They have no input. They're not. I mean, they're. They're just reading like they're. The teleprompter's going, they're reading the script. It sounds conversational. They deliver it so well, and they just. They don't have to prep at all. I mean, I'm standing in the back with some of these people that are getting ready to go on. They're not, they're not reading anything. They're just. They just plop up there and, you know, they read the content, they deliver the news like they're supposed to. So, yeah, there's no.

Rarely write it, they rarely research it. And.

Right.

And then mistakes are made on both sides. Mistakes are made on the content creation and the edit. And then sometimes things are misread. And then if you clip those things. Right. Because it's live. It's live. It's. Your local news is live. National network news is live. And so, yeah, stuff happens. And if you edit all the blips and the, you know, it. It can be entertaining.

It can be. It can be. So any vision into what, where the opportunities are in media over the next five to 10 years? Is there any trends that you see that maybe the rest of us aren't aware of yet?

I still believe that personality matters. I always have. I mean, that's what made this loop experience so Unique, because we assembled some unique, great, albeit different, but, but aligned personalities all in one place. So whenever you hit the button, you knew you were going to have some escapism and some entertainment that was all improv. Right. Nothing was scripted and, but I, you know, these news cable shows, those are personality driven talk shows. Most of them fail. Personality driven sports. Talk sports shows, you know, not when you have an athlete to have a personality. They really stick out, don't they? Absolutely. When they have both. Right. So I just think there's value to talent and personality and you know, but it is, the fragmented universe of consumption is, I think it's going to continue. And so, you know, we have so many channels and platforms we can consume from. The net result is more overall consumption growing up, believe it or not. But there's only, you know, so many hours in a day. So the only thing that can ultimately drive that is population. And you know, people really, they still watch a small number of channels with, even with all this choice. I mean, you know, so how do you become, you know, the, the choice, right. How do you, how do you resonate, stand out? Look at podcasting didn't really exist, I would say, you know, 15 years ago per se, I mean it was possible, but it became, you know, once it became clear that content didn't have to be live and people were becoming more accustomed to programming to themselves when they want, where they want. Right. All of a sudden this podcast platform became. Because the barrier to entry is pretty low now. What have we learned? There's new ones every day, but there's a small percentage of them that get some sort of a scale and some sort of a targeting to that scale. And so it's really what you deliver and then who you recruit to be, to be your loyal fanship, you know, I mean, you know, this we're all striving to, to create a connection and garner a loyalty because that's the great business model. And, and of course scale is relative. You know, they don't all, you know, it's not just the numbers qualitative and quantitative together on matter, but yeah, it's still looking down the road a little bit. The interesting part to me is how do you monetize things so you can support them so they can survive? And those models keep changing. I'm in the spirits business and it used to be a couple consolidated big distributors and then you realize they have so much they can't care right. About a brand. So then you fall back and you find some boutique passionate ones all in this Environment a way to cut through in media. The model's moving from advertising to subscription. So you either get people to decide that they're going to pay a daily, monthly, a la carte fee to consume, or you put advertising in front of them, or both. But there's been a big shift towards some sort of a subscription model. And of course, free content is just trying to get enough scale to then monetize it later.

Well, that's true. And I'll say the ones that you're willing to pay for are the ones that are farther out on the edge, the ones that really serve your echo chamber and the stuff that you want to hear more of, you're willing to, to pay anything to be able to be, you know, served what it is that you like and to reinforce some of the positions that you have. I, you know, you don't see a lot of the, I mean, I don't know, you don't see a lot of the really clearly objective stuff monetizing out there. And, and there is so much free content out there, you really don't have to pay for anything to be able to get 10 or 15 minute snippets of the stuff that's behind the paywall. Anyway, they're just teasers, but there's, there's a lot of it there, so. Well, hey, Larry. No, go ahead, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, you know, phenomenon that's going on is there's so much choice that people are starting to sign up for and subscribe to things that they can never get to and consume. Right. And so now some businesses, they count on that part of the model. I'm involved with a company called Restaurant.com that just merged with a company called Card Cash. And that's a lot about, you know, you know, getting, you know, aggregating cards that you've earned a balance on one way or another. Points are a balance and people don't use them all. So Card Cash actually brings value to, to those and there's an aftermarket for those cards. And you know, everyone eats and goes out to eat. So that's a great partnership with Restaurant.com and we're very excited about, you know, you know, for the consumers, helping them use, monetize, you know, those type of benefit cards, those type of loyalty clubs, along with having, you know, local restaurant choice and the ability to, you know, connect all of that.

Yeah, I'm familiar with those two companies and that we've participated, I think, in some fundraisers using some of those, some of those things. Larry, I want to be respectful of your time. I know you got to jump and get on the road, so we're going to get you out of here on time. Last question for you. If you had one sentence to speak into somebody else's life, what would that be?

I guess it's what's on my mind. But you know, just, just prioritize your time. You know, your time. I mean, it's. I don't want to cliche, but obviously health and family and all of those things, but your time and how you use it is the number one currency you might have because it's finite. It comes and goes. So I try to get the most I can out of every day. I could tell you do. I hope people realize what an opportunity it is to have the ability to maximize time. Maybe too. I don't know, generic and lofty, but at the same time.

But interesting, incredible, incredible truth. I heard last week that 18 minutes a day is a hundred hours a year. So think about the things that. How many things do you do that waste 18 minutes. 18 minutes a day where you could develop a hundred hours of a skill you could learn to you. In 18 minutes a day you can learn to speak a foreign language, you can write code, you can develop a business model, you can, you can write a book in 100 hours. You actually, I mean, like with the tools you've got today, there's so many things that you can do, but you know, and then you burn. You know, two hours on Tick Tock first thing in the morning. Right. So it's, it's, it's very sage and there's so many distractions on our time and our attention now. I think it's harder and harder to sort that.

They say. I've heard that in 100 hours you can learn any skill and be pretty adapt at it. So think about that. That's a great, interesting factoid.

Yeah. 100%. Larry Wirt. This has been amazing. How can people get in touch with you if they wanted to?

I'm pretty accessible. I'll put out an email. I. It's just my initials L.J.W. larrywirt.com to a fault. I get back to people. I'll do my best, but you know, again, that time management thinks a son of a gun. But yeah, thanks for having me on. Great to see you again and look forward to more, you know, learnings with you together.

Yeah, 100%. And that's Larry W E R T is how he spells it. So thank you, Larry Wirt, for, for being on the home front today with Jeff Duden. And thank you, everybody out there for listening.