Doc (0s):
< > Hey everybody. Welcome to another reality. 2.0 This week is usual with Petros Koutoupis you're still in Chicago. Petros, I assume. Yes I am. And it is cold right now. I mean, we're in the teens right now. So it's a high of like 14 or 15 degrees today. It's it's cold here today and Santa Barbara where it's at 62, something like that. And our, anyway, our guest is Dean Landsman.

Doc (45s):
This is going to be our, and later Paul Walker, this is our one on radio. I'm I'm an old radio veteran and radio has been my life all my life. I've always been obsessed with radio. I grew up around New York, outside my window. I looked at the towers of most of new York's am stations and was fascinated by the movie. We'd go down and visit the old engineers and learn how it was done and got interested in radio from far away and, and then had a very brief career in it that gave me a nickname. My nickname doc is what's left over from a character called Dr. Dave on the radio in North Carolina.

Doc (1m 27s):
And that was brief. And, and, but it still left me with this little, this little asset. And I wanted to bring in to anchor the show. My old friend, Dean Landsman Dean is also a much longer radio veteran. He's been in addition to being the talent he's owned stations. He's, he's been a consultant. He was, I think, a landmark consultant for, for some, some formats and, and, but remains active in, in peripheries of the business. And especially in the tech world, he's involved in some number of projects that I'm also involved with on a voluntary basis.

Doc (2m 8s):
So I, and I could say a lot more than that, but just I'll just say hi to Danny. We also live in like about a block apart in New York city when I'm there, which I'm not right now. I got quarantine that West where it's 38 degrees. It's 38, it's hot next to Chicago, but they're, you know, Chicago is sending that weather East. So you're going to get it in a few days. So S so Dean, I, I, there's way more than an hour's worth of stuff we could talk about and I'll try to frame the, the first part of it, of what radio was and what it still is. I mean, there, the radio, as we know it today was really born in the 1920s. In fact, am radio, which we still have is basically a 1920s technology.

Doc (2m 51s):
And it was, you know, it was where people went for programs and then that moved over to television. And we had prime time on radio. And then when TV came along a of the shows that were on, on radio, moved over to TV, and, and then we had formats that top 40 in R and B and country and Western and so forth, and they fractured some more. And then the internet came along and it's satellite radio. And now that's picked up a lot on what radio did, but it's still there. It's still there in the dashboards of our cars. So someone, it would kind of give us your take on what most of the rest of us don't know about radio. That's kind of when maybe that's a way to approach it.

Dean Landsman (3m 33s):
Well, radio began as the federal radio commission was born in the 1932 or 1936. And the purpose in those very early days was for a department of defense and department of war to have a handle on giving out information. It wasn't perceived as entertainment in those days, and it was to be local. And there was a whole government interaction that was a planned didn't work very well, and they didn't really know how to do it. And the next thing, you know, there were licensing radio stations to local broadcasters who said, Hey, I can do something with this.

Dean Landsman (4m 14s):
And next thing you know, we had radio stations and that became exciting because you could then have local news, local information, local programming and commercials, no, the local, this, that, or the other thing store could sponsor the afternoon sing along the afternoon, this the afternoon obituaries, which were very popular in small towns, because some small towns only had the weekly newspaper and in bigger cities, it got, you know, sophisticated it radio was as sophisticated as the city in which it was in. And it was really quite exciting.

Dean Landsman (4m 54s):
And people who had an IRA, an ear for talent, found ways to use that talent and broadcast it, and radio tended to grow from there. And radio was very unify because no matter where you were in town or in the coverage area, you heard it the same way someone else in the area heard it. And so it was incredibly unifying. And I just want to add something that gets us a little bit further down the road, but it was immediate. And so as a source of news and weather advertising, but then you think about what's really hyper-local at local sports and then school closings traffic events.

Dean Landsman (5m 37s):
If the local bank was burning down and, you know, there was a time, way, way back where there were three or four banks in town. And not more, especially when you go back to the 1920s when it began well, you know, hearing that on the radio had people running out to the bank and doing a small town run on the bank before the big run came with the first depression, sir, radio was unifying. And that was an amazing thing, more so than any other technology of its time.

Doc (6m 5s):
So I remembering that, I'm just thinking about how we in stations and w you know, we had re every small town would have a railroad station and, and a radio station. The idea of a station is, I mean, it is derived from, I guess, stasis in Atlantan. I mean, something that's steady, it's one place it's not going anywhere. And that's, that's an interesting thing. I think people looked and, and once they spread radio stations out on a dial, you knew, you know, in New York where we grew up, you know, WMCA was on five 70 and w NBC's on six 16, w ABC's on seven 70 and we're Petros is in Chicago.

Doc (6m 47s):
And yeah, WGN is in seven 20, and WLS is on eight 90. And, and, and they're not going anywhere. Right. You know, that that's, that was part of it. You know,

Petros Koutoupis (6m 59s):
I dunno, I, I, actually, one thing that you mentioned was the fact that radio was not originally intended for entertainment. And, and I'd love hearing that because isn't that the same story? I mean, we hear this story all the time. You know, the same thing with the internet, the internet was not designed for entertainment. And then even if you go back in time, we're talking about even 5,000 years ago, writing was not invented for entertainment. I mean, it was originally invented for accounting and keeping inventory lists, you know, for the King or whatever in ancient Mesopotamia.

Petros Koutoupis (7m 40s):
Right. I just love the fact that it was not its original intent. And here we are. I mean, it's through the evolution of radio and what we will eventually get to during the course of this, this program. I mean, it's just, it's nothing but entertainment,

Dean Landsman (7m 56s):
Right. And the same can be said of art, because if you think about art that was in caves, it was not intended as art. It was attended. As you should know this, now there, there are three bulls over there. There are three elephants over there. It was not, Oh, look at the elephant. You know, it's got two tusks, no, it was be where elephants are be the knowledgeable of elephants.

Doc (8m 19s):
That's interesting thought, you know, the petroglyphs and hieroglyphs that on, on cave walls and on the sides of mountains and things, you know, course we don't know what they stood for in most cases, but they might've been warning us or something else like that. I think the regional, the local and regional nature of, of radio like local newspapers and read regional newspapers were, were also very similar, you know? And, and that's a, and I wonder whether we're losing that now to some degree, I think we have topical locality with podcasts, but, but we're kind of losing the, you know, the, the, the regional locality. One of the things that when we first came to New York, my then 15 year old son, he's now 24 actually asked what the point.

Doc (9m 8s):
Cause we went out to buy a radio at radio shack at 180 first street, which is now gone the streets still there, the radio shack is gone and, and, and they didn't have any radios. Right. You know, they had a couple of, like, there was a windup one that like for emergencies, it was changed to the bottom shelf in the back of the store and the person running the store didn't even know what that was about. You know, that, Oh yeah, we have radios, I guess. And, and he asked me, you know, what, what was the point of range and coverage? Because his frame of reference is the internet, you know, and all these stations are on the internet. And if he, there was a station you liked, it was at Emerson college that did acapella music, which he like, he was an acapella groups and, and they had acapella like all weekend, w E R S at, I think it is at Emerson college.

Doc (9m 55s):
He listened to it under it on the internet. He didn't listen to it on, on, on the air. You didn't care. You know, I gave him a radio once that, that, that he could use it for that purpose. He didn't even get good reception up there, but where he was, he went to high school in New Hampshire. But so it's a great radio that could get it, but in what he didn't even bother to go to the trouble, really, you know, it was like, there's not any internet, I'm not listening. And I think something's lost with that. I, I developed a sense of the inverse square law, you know, that says for every doubling of distances, a half of having of power. And that's part of what you run into as you drive away from town, you know, and, and I understood ground conductivity, you know, which, you know, as much higher as say in Chicago, you can, you can get WGN and WLS and, and w you have to have some of the others, you know, the big ones WBBM well into Michigan and up into Wisconsin.

Doc (10m 52s):
Whereas in New York grind, conductivity is not as good. You're not getting any New York city stations in Massachusetts. You're barely getting them in Pennsylvania. You of get them in Bermuda because the, the, the grind conductivity of saltwater is great. I don't know if you remember this team, but D w I N S and WMCA, and it used to take requests from Bermuda because their signals aimed down that way. You know, that there, you couldn't, you couldn't get them in, in Montauk, but you could get them in Bermuda.

Dean Landsman (11m 20s):
Well, the interesting thing is WMCA used to do its annual WMCA. It was a top 40 station, very creative, very entertaining. And they used to do an annual picnic. The WMCA picnic and people looked forward to it. It was a blast. And one year they decided to have it out somewhere in Suffolk County, the furthest East party in the New York metropolitan area. And they were promoting it to death. It was going to be great. And they were going to be all kinds of bands, playing blues bands of notes. And only about 500 people showed up. Because first of all, it was Suffolk County. It was out there, you know, which to many, many new Yorkers is the middle of nowhere.

Dean Landsman (12m 4s):
And you can't hear it in Suffolk County.

Doc (12m 7s):
It it's, it's, they're, they're actually putting like 15,000 Watts in that direction. They're only putting a hundred back in toward New Jersey. They've they have the most seam transmitter it's side of the New Jersey turnpike, but it seems across the city, but it's only 5,000 Watts and maybe 15 in that, that direction and long Island from Brooklyn, East long Island has the lowest ground conductivity in the country. And the only thing close to it is Atlanta. Atlanta has bad conduct and conductivity, and, you know, they didn't even know this, but the very much when they laid out the stations, but on the same channel, five 70 WNX and Yankton, South Dakota, same size covers all of South Dakota.

Doc (12m 47s):
Most of North Dakota, Northern Nebraska, Southwestern, Minnesota, Northwestern, Iowa. And

Dean Landsman (12m 55s):
On that, on that very

Doc (12m 56s):
Same channel on five 70. And my mother used, grew up listening to WEX and Yankton, South Dakota. I looked it up it's 240 air miles away across the Prairie. And it's only a 5,000 watt station, which is one 10th would. One of the big stations are like ABC.

Dean Landsman (13m 14s):
At some point in the, I believe it was the late forties, the FCC redid the, the structuring of protection protection signals to make up for the grandkid activity. They just didn't know about when the did early allocation.

Doc (13m 31s):
Yeah. And, and part of that was too, as, as they were going to allow a few stations go, like, one of them does WLW in Cincinnati, went up to 500,000 Watts and it was for awhile. And then they, then they dropped it, which is ridiculously expensive. You're actually sucking more than twice that off the grid, at least with the old transmitters. But the, the, and now all of them have worldwide coverage on the internet. Right. That's what they, what they have. So, and, and by the way, something is happening to am right now is that if the land under a transmitter is worth more than a station, they sell it, they sell it, they sell off the station, may not go on WQXR, which is now WFME in Queens are four towers in Maspeth in Queens, put out 50,000 Watts and it's going away.

Doc (14m 18s):
They sold the land out from under the station for $51 million. And there's nothing new that are going to, they're going to go away. It's going to be gone and nobody's going to miss him for that matter. So, so we're, I mean, in, in the way that it's fracturing right now into, into streaming, I mean, first, I mean, let's, let's visit what happened to, to top, to top 40. I mean, it was interesting to me that it was actually the smaller stations in, in most markets, like WMCA you mentioned in New York, they were, and before that was WMG and they just got out of it, but wens had a secondary signal, WIB G and WAFL in Philadelphia were not the major stations we am in Washington WTO be in Winston-Salem you were on one of them, the rock of Raleigh, w

Dean Landsman (15m 8s):
I sure was. I consulted a WTO B.

Doc (15m 13s):
Yeah. And, and, and it barely got out of Winston Salem. Right. And, and it was it's competitors. There'll be air, which is no bigger than, than WNC, which yeah. And, but, and it WLS in Chicago and w ABC in New York with it only two, full-size what they call clear channel stations that, that carried, that carried a top 40. And, and, and, and that is fractured, you know, that, that, that fractured. And I mean, if, if you listened to top 40 radio in 1962, you would hear country songs on there. You would hear Patsy Cline, you would hear, you would hear R and B songs and Motown made it because top 40 made it right.

Doc (15m 57s):
It kind of went over from the R and B stations to, to the mainstream, but still, you know, formats fractured. I was, while you were doing top 40, I was doing, I was working for a progressive rock station. But to me, the interesting thing about that is that the progressive rock station, I was on w DBS in Durham, the littlest station in the market, when, when it was sold, I told them the news, you know, the, the guy who was going to the new owners, not only go urban with it, but name it Foxy one Oh seven. And then you consulted that stuff

Dean Landsman (16m 36s):
And broken the name. Yes.

Doc (16m 39s):
Yeah. And on top of that, I want to bet by saying they would be number one in one book, even though they had the weakest sound, the weakest signal in the market, which they were

Dean Landsman (16m 49s):
Well it's actually, I, I, I I'm, I must, with all due respect, I must correct. You Feel free to, but I'll give you the other, the facts. They weren't number one in one book, because the guys who bought it, father and son team were not capable of running radio station. And so they didn't beat 57 Willie where I did one shift, by the way. Well, I was, I was capable of doing the perfect voice invitation of the guy who was their program director.

Dean Landsman (17m 30s):
Who would you used to work with me at the rock of Raleigh and

Doc (17m 34s):
The fifth for the trivia's sake. That was w L L L E also in five 70, like WMC in New York and the one.

Dean Landsman (17m 41s):
Yeah. Yeah. And it was the black station in Raleigh for years. And I guess the, the R overnight guy at the rock of Raleigh got a job there as PD program director. And so he was really happy there. One Sunday, he was sick as a dog and he calls me up and he says, can you do my shift? I said, what do you mean? He said, I'm sick. I feel terrible. I said, you want me to come over to Willie and do your shift? He said, you could do me. And it was true. I get a perfect imitation of a guy. So I drove over there and did six hours. Anyway, the guys who bought Foxy, I forget what the earlier call that as well.

Dean Landsman (18m 21s):
The guy said, Oh, it was DVS. It was DBS to say, let's do some DBS. Anyway, the guys who bought it, rich something in his father whose name? I don't remember.

Doc (18m 31s):
Yeah. They were from the Midwest. They did w D U R the own w D U R I think,

Dean Landsman (18m 35s):
Oh, that's right. They did badly there too, but they had, they, they were just rolling in money. So anyway, they bought it and they mismanaged it to death and it, it got sold to a pinnacle broadcasting. I can, I consulted a good many parts of that company to anyway, pellicle bought it. And the manager, who's a wonderful guy, brought me in because he knew of my successes in other markets during the black format. And so I came in there, I renamed it Foxy and yeah, in one book we were number one. And we remained there even when a hundred kilowatt monster station came in, because we understood how to program and they didn't.

Dean Landsman (19m 21s):
And although th th the competitive, the competition was actually very good, but, you know, we had, you know, just a few things up on them. I mean,

Doc (19m 30s):
Another co owned. I think that that was a station from South Boston. Yeah. It could have dropped in, on the Raleigh market by moving a transmitter. Yeah. Yeah. So, so now, okay. So two things are going on that are interesting. So three things that are interesting to me, one is radio is still there. Okay. It's still in cars is still has ratings. It's still gets advertising. It's still listened to, but a couple of other things that come along, like first satellite radio, really in the arts in the mid aughts came along. They got Howard stern, which was really brilliant.

Doc (20m 10s):
And he helped them a lot still there, but you go up the dial on, on, on serious now, Sirius XM. And they're far more formats than you've ever heard on over the year on terrestrial radio. And it's also in the internet too. I I've been a subscriber forever. I'm paying my, whatever it is a year, 12 bucks a month, 12, 13 bucks a month. And we've got it in the car. And it sounds great. And, and I get it on an app, but on top of that, there's pretty much all of the series radio stations are on the internet and, and podcasting and all kinds of formats, zillion formats are there. And, and there's podcasting.

Doc (20m 52s):
And on these things, you can pause. You can rewind, you can, you know, like this podcast, you want to listen to what we're saying right now at one and a half speed or two speed or half speed. You can do that. How does, how does radio stay competitive with that? Or should it, or should it not? I mean, is it going to go away after awhile?

Petros Koutoupis (21m 15s):
It's ironic that, that you've mentioned that's because just before dialing into this, into this meeting and meeting into this yeah, yeah. Into this conversation, I was listening to serious sex. I'm turbo on, on my, on my laptop, my Mac book. And, you know, it's just, like you said, it's access to everywhere. And if the content is more focused to, you know, to my liking

Doc (21m 47s):
Yeah. I mean, they've got a channel there called POTUS that's about nothing, but the president of the U S it tries to be very non-partisan. It was really interesting to listen to for the last four years. I think it's gonna be kind of dull now, but it's, it's just ridiculous what the, what, the choices there are. And, and

Petros Koutoupis (22m 7s):
Less commercials, no commercials,

Doc (22m 10s):
No commercials on most of the music. And, and, and they, I think they bought, did they buy Pandora or did they bought Pandora? I don't think you can beat what Pandora does either. You know, I think the way that they give you music, that's like the music you just listened to and you voted upper and voted down. Oh,

Dean Landsman (22m 31s):
Allow me to completely disagree with you. Pandora is an abject failure. Pandora said that it was a worthy experiment. That's for sure. But Pandora said, pick, pick the music you like, and we will take that and make your music genome and give you the music you like from now until forever. Unfortunately it never did that successfully. It just kept giving you the music you already knew, and didn't expand it properly. One of, one of the problems with that was that if you listened to a progressive or just a regular album, rock station is a big difference between progressive and album rock.

Dean Landsman (23m 16s):
And you liked, you know, a van Morrison album or Jethro toll album, or a led Zeppelin album. You might actually not just let that album play. You might really like, you know, two cuts on one side and three cuts on the other back when there were two sides of an album or on a CD, you might like just certain tracks. Pandora made the assumption. You liked the whole album, and we just play your cuts from the whole album. You might actually despise some of the songs on that album. Pandora never took that into account Pandora. Couldn't also figure out like type songs. Like you might enjoy two John Denver songs and just be appalled by the rest of his catalog.

Dean Landsman (24m 2s):
Like, say me. But if you like to John Denver songs, they gave you a whole diet of John Denver songs. And they also did not understand the segway. You don't go from John Denver to whole lot of love by led Zeppelin, or should I say the John Denver salt, like I would like, and they just didn't get a concept of programming and, and what has to be smooth and programming now from the radio business, there was a wonderful program called Satish still is called selector. And you could program selector in any number of ways. It's this computer program to determine what flowed well into another would kind of Tambora a song had with this, with that all kinds of values of a song in order to program successfully and have a smooth, our Pandora had none of that.

Dean Landsman (24m 55s):
And it kept failing and Pandora didn't grow. I mean, Pandora should have had news and sports and talk, but it said, no, we're the music genome thing. And it also didn't know how to sell advertising when it felt forced to do advertising,

Doc (25m 7s):
But he had sound horrible on it too. I mean, I don't know what they do. They run them through some kind of filter. This sounds terrible, but here, let me, I'm, I'm going to defend them a little bit and I'm thinking we should have Tim Westergren on here. Cause I know him. He's the guy who started Pandora. He's gone now because it's sold it. So we have a Sonos system at our house here and Pandora's on it. There are lots of other music sources too. You can, you have Apple and Amazon and the rest of it. And every guest we have here, I mean that guests, I mean, we, people rent the house and, and they let me, as I rented all the time, but we do rent out parts of it. And, and they find, you know, if you have a Sonos app on your phone, it will find the Sono system in the house you're in and you can now control it.

Doc (25m 53s):
And, and they have added a ridiculous number of, of, of music, music types to it. I mean, I'm just looking here she's I was going to where to go. I just took screenshots of it on purpose. So I wouldn't, so I wouldn't like run it. There are people in the house right now and I don't want to screw with it anyway, it's there, there, there are hundreds of different artists that are on our, on our Pandora system that we never did. But I agree with you that they, that the music genome thing is weird and, and I'm, and, and we'll go into that. But like, we, we, I pro I brought put on the Beethoven thing and it gave EV like Moonlight Sonata over and over and over again, I finally voted down and I still get moonlights tonight.

Doc (26m 39s):
Right. So it is a little bit of a broken record thing, but, but as part of the, but as part of the choice that's out there, okay. Maybe it'll fail. Maybe it's an unqualified fail, but they, I mean, there are, you know, I read her length when cousin Brucey was on, was still on serious. He played really deep cuts from the fifties to sixties. I mean, it's stuff you'd never would have played on WIBC, which is back on now, you know, for, for, for just fun. Yeah. The only disc from that time is still alive. Didn't smoke himself.

Dean Landsman (27m 11s):
Well, it's interesting what you're saying, w what you're talking about is post-purchase Pandora, which I didn't realize was such an interesting thing to say. After Sirius XM bought Pandora, they threw away much of the Pandora concept of programming and, you know, put their people in charge of it and made it much better. The Pandora you now have is not the Pandora of its origins.

Doc (27m 37s):
Oh, really? That's interesting. So, okay. So I'm just curious. I'm, I'm guessing. I won't guess it would, you know, we, we talked about wait lists with us. So Petros, what, what besides serious, or maybe serious, serious, all you listened to what's, what's your, what's your media input there?

Petros Koutoupis (27m 56s):
It's pretty much just serious right now, serious success. I haven't turned down terrestrial radio. As, as you have come to college in, in ages, it's been probably six or more years since I've dialed into an am or FM station. Serious is the only way I get my, my, you know, radio, you know, that's your radio, that's my radio.

Doc (28m 29s):
That's your radio? Do you, and you have it in your car, I assume, but you have it in your house, on the app,

Petros Koutoupis (28m 37s):
In my car, my wife's car. I access it through my, you know, through my phone, on an app, on my, on my Mac books, through the website and that's. Yeah. And, and I have it connected to, you know, all these devices connected to the, all the speakers in the house. So, so I can walk from one room to the other and it'll just continue playing whatever station I was listening to.

Doc (29m 4s):
So something I've started doing with, with, with Sirius is I found it easier to pause on the app. And especially with the music stuff, like you, you, you look at the, you know, I'll look at well, let's see it's one of the country stations. And well, let me take a date there. One of the, the blue station, there's one, that's, that's a BB, the BB King station. So let's say it's, it's going to have a BBC King song. That's about to come up right now and it'll pause. And it started after I start listening. Right. It doesn't, whereas I'm listening on the radio part of it. I'm going to get some part of the song. The app will kind of the hat. The app is a little bit more adapted to you. And so I'll when I listen to the car, I'm listening more on the radio.

Doc (29m 49s):
I mean, not on the radio, but on the phone, the Sirius app on the phone, rather than a serious radio in the car. And another thing with that is that if, if I'm going, we live in an area where if I'm going under trees, or if I go in our garage, our garage has a metal roof. And so it's gone and it is no, where's it. Where are you living in Chicago? There's actually like a way of sup they have a, a ground transmitter, a terrestrial transmitter that, that supplements was coming from the sky, which is helpful. Yeah.

Petros Koutoupis (30m 20s):
But if I go through a drive-through at a fast food restaurant, that also comes right.

Doc (30m 24s):
Yeah. And an interesting thing there is, you know, that satellite is 25,000 miles away. It's kind of amazing.

Petros Koutoupis (30m 32s):
Well, no, that's, that's, that's an interesting point that you bring up and it's a feature that I've always enjoyed from the app and from the, the, the internet version, as opposed to the one that's going straight to my car. And that is you don't go immediately into the live feed. You essentially start at the beginning of the song that is currently playing, which is an awesome feature. So you don't miss out on any of it. And yet you have the ability to pause and resume, but nowadays, a lot of cars also get fitted with hard drives while it's not the same, you know, have similar functionality where you just like a DVR, you can pause it and then resume.

Petros Koutoupis (31m 18s):
But then when you turn off the car or you switch the station, you just lose it.

Doc (31m 23s):
So, so Dean, maybe a good way to move toward wrapping this. Cause you need to have time for Paul as well. Is, is it, it seems to me that, you know, the, the distinction that, that Petra has just made, you know, between something that is like old radio, and you're going to hear what's on right now, nothing else. And, and what you can do with an app where you can stop and start and stuff like that. And go back because that, I mean, if I'm listening to Howard stern, I can go back. I can jump forward. And back on that show on, on the app, I can't do it in the car.

Doc (32m 5s):
That's more controlled for the individual. And where do you see radio going? Or what succeeds radio going and control in the individual's hands.

Dean Landsman (32m 15s):
I'm going to go backwards and forwards with that 25 ish years ago, maybe a little longer ago than that. I was telling a little of my clients that they needed to have a website and they needed to have a web presence. And I got left out of a lot of offices or left off phone calls for saying that, and many managers would say to me, well, where's the profit in that? Where, you know, how do I make money with that? And they'd say, do I need to hire another engineer? Our engineer doesn't know how to do that. And I say, no, no, no. It gives you red. Pres I give them all the positives, but they just couldn't see it.

Dean Landsman (32m 58s):
The jokes on them now. Right. Well, yeah, that's just it. Then about seven or eight or nine years later when I was deeply involved now in, in, you know, doing what I do, you know, being on the web, doing, you know, internet things, I would get calls back from them saying, remember when you said that back when we were working with you, you said we should do that. What is that thing called? The interweb, that's it? Yeah. And they say, do you think you could do that for us now? And I said, well, we can discuss this. And they say, so what does that cost? And then I'd throw a number at them. They say, Oh, well, maybe we're not ready yet. And because I wasn't going to do a garbage website for them. And I also started explaining to them, the people they needed to keep it updated, blah, blah, blah.

Dean Landsman (33m 43s):
And you know, that the problem is that radio, oddly enough, was not ready to take the step. And it was rampant throughout the business. And I mean, I would get calls though, from people further down the, the ranks, not, not managers, not groupers, but program directors or sometimes sales managers saying, how do we do this online? And the problem was they either didn't have the budget or the authority to go ahead and do it. And so that was a problem. And this was happening as the, the decline of radio due to wall street was going on.

Dean Landsman (34m 29s):
I mean, as you mentioned earlier, doc, I owned a radio station. I was in the, you know, I was in the ownership side of the business at one point, and then came that period of time when wall street fell in love with radio and all these groups, or newly formed groups developed simply to go public. And the financial projections were just, I mean, that color blue had not been invented for blue sky yet. And I remember sitting with one of my clients, the very well known individual in the record business and his New York financial advisors, and very well known, affirm.

Dean Landsman (35m 16s):
And they were showing their projections of how much money he'd make based on a variety of things. And I sat in the meeting and I stood up and I said to that, I do in the presentation. I said, if you ever been in the radio business, he said, well, no. I said, no, I didn't think so. I said, in these markets, you expect these kinds of increases in revenue year after year, and you don't expect increases in operating costs. And I just went over the whole thing. And I said, well, no, but you know, I've got a financial education. I said, I don't give a damn about your financial education. Have you ever been written, do you have any way to, you know, how do you base this?

Dean Landsman (35m 58s):
I kind of tore the guy apart. And he still just kept telling me that he knew finance. And so I turned to my client and I said, listen, I'm your consultant. I've never led you down a wrong path. If you follow this yoga bankrupt, you'll own people money. This guy is going to make a really hefty fee on his commission for selling you this garbage. A lot of people are going to go into the black and you know, this is just a horrible thing. Well, the, the guy from the financial firms threw me out my client by the way, met me in the, at the elevator bank and hugged me and thanked me for telling him that. But that was a very bad period of time.

Dean Landsman (36m 39s):
And radio was behind. And a lot of radio companies fell apart. And then what happens is we have what we have now, which is, is, you know, maybe eight really large radio companies, which didn't go forward, but what's now begun to happen. And it's not, it's not doing well, is they are streaming. Some of them, not all of them, some of them, including Clinton, clear channel, which is now iHeart. They, they, you can get some of their programming and actually get it from the past and stop it. But they don't really understand what is the model of a series XM, where you can find you might've listened to something two weeks ago and you can probably go back there and get it, doc.

Dean Landsman (37m 26s):
You know, I love baseball. There's a friend of mine who often tells me that, Oh yeah, last week I was listening to you and this there's a number of baseball programs on a series. And he'll say, you know, so-and-so, and so-and-so, there's some duo. He really likes, we're talking about businesses really? He said, yeah, I'll capture it and send it to you. And it's when two weeks ago, this is really good. This is really good. Use of audio, medium and radio. Doesn't do that yet. Funny thing is NPR does that NPR really leads the way, but for mercial radio has not caught on. And it, I find it very sad.

Doc (38m 1s):
Well, public radio is actually the, I was actually looking Raleigh and I thought we expect to see Foxy one to seven, which is now also on one Oh four for the big station. That's pretty far out of town, but it does get in, there is number two, the w UNC, the public station is number one at the moment. So here's a sort of final kind of a question and just a little history. So back in the, whatever, I'll put it this way, if you've ever been to Europe, or have you ever driven a European car, like, let's say you're to BBC radio four, you don't look for radio four on, on, you know, like say, you know, eight 89.5 or something like that.

Doc (38m 51s):
You, you tune in radio Ford happens to be on 89.5 here, but as you're driving somewhere else, it'll switch to another transmitter and other transparent, another transmitter. And that's called AF I think for ultimate frequency and it's done by RDS. And what RDS does in the U S is just tell you what the song is, or the name of the station. It's that sort of all uppercase alpha texts that runs on a screen, and it's not HD radio HD radio is a subsequent thing that came along. But what RDS allowed stations to do is, is have a fleet of signals that, and radios would hunt from one to the other in the U S when RDS was coming along, the, the rule of limiting the number of radio stations could be owned, was still there.

Doc (39m 36s):
And, and so the U S decided the U S engineers decided they would not do that. Had they done it? They would be in a much better position than they are. Now. You can just, you know, you could just tune in NPR rather, and he was driving everywhere and there it is. Right. And, but so now I think there's a, you know, the, the way that they've tried to save am is with translators NFM. So you're a WCHL and chapel Hill, nobody listens to 1360 anymore. They're listening to the translator in 97.7. It covers chapel Hill. And not much more than that, it's a little, 251 translator, but it does do the job and it covers chapel Hill, but that's how they're saving am is just like putting some of the stations on FM.

Doc (40m 23s):
Yes. But the real way to save it, the real way to save both am and FM is to have it do like RDS does, you know, whereas where you're in your car and even it could be involved with, with, with serious, I mean, serious itself could play a role in this. They could put, you know, you, you don't know what you don't know, whether you're listening to something that's coming in over the cellular system, or it's something that's coming in over the air, whether it's an am or FM or something, and integrating them and saving am and FM that way, do you see that ever happening or do you think they're just not smart enough or capable enough to do that?

Dean Landsman (41m 2s):
Well, both. I see it eventually happening. There are some government things that what's your whole complete other discussion, which would take hours to have it's highly political and would require the FCC doing a transformation. Like you can imagine. I mean, it's entirely possible, and it should, but there not only is it it's political and financial, and it would so change the economics of broadcasting, as we know it w I mean, we're actually for the better, but not in, not in the immediate, I mean, I say this as someone who owned a radio station, and it could well have destroyed us in the beginning, unless we, you know, got, you know, like five years of operating money while we went through the change, I could see how to do that.

Dean Landsman (42m 10s):
And, you know, I like to think I was always forward thinking, but I could also see how clients of mine, what jumped out the window at the thought of it. They just, they wouldn't have been able to see past three months, especially the publicly traded ones who worry about how they're going to look in the next quarter. So, yeah. And I don't think it'll all be serious. I think that some other incredibly well-funded, or some others that are incredibly well-funded, we'll get into the Sirius XM game, which I think will be better. You know, competition makes things better, not worse.

Doc (42m 42s):
That's an interesting thought that, that, I mean, we think of Sirius XM as of a satellite radio, but it's really internet rated that happens to have satellites for a satellite. It's probably made, might be more than one. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Well, th this has been great. If the audience wants more, they can ask and I, I'm gonna, so, so thanks for being with us, Dean. I really appreciate it

Dean Landsman (43m 10s):
For what it's worth. I had taken a whole bunch of notes and we've barely gotten into my notes.

Doc (43m 14s):
Yeah. Well, that's why we, you know, it's, there's a lot, a lot of optionality here. So our next guest is Paul Walker who runs and participates in an, in a number of really interesting Facebook groups that are private. The rest of the world's not seeing them when people entirely by engineers and other one people in love with am radio Dean is also on that one, Dean landsmen and, and, and I'm on I'm, I'm a net one and one called I take pictures of transmitter sites. And I'm very active in that one. And that one is one that Paul started, but more importantly, Paul is a lifer in this stance.

Doc (43m 56s):
He's a, he is a DXer. I was a huge DXer as a young man and both as a teenager. And then once I was an adult and moved to North Carolina and I was working in radio, but I love listening to faraway radio station is that when reason I know all the coverage that all the, all the States, the WNX and now South Dakota covers is because they can visualize those States. I visualize it cause I stared at maps and I stared at maps because I was listening to faraway radio stations. And, but Paul still does that. He moved to Alaska to do that. There's so many stories. I think Alaska exists in some ways, just for stories to occur, because it's all, it's a, you know, it's a hard place to live and it takes, it takes Hardy people to move there and do the Hardy things that they, that they do, whether it's, you know, panning for gold or, or panning for radio signals, which is, I think, what would Paul does?

Doc (44m 57s):
You know, Lee's not making signals, he's panning for them.

Paul Walker (44m 60s):
Well, my, my, my Alaska story is not anything quite as monumental as that, but I I've been in radio for, for 18 years. And when I was younger, I just knew I wanted to be in radio. I didn't really have any other concept in mind beyond that. And I got started in radio and, and I kind of knew though, that I never really wanted to be like Orlando or Memphis or anything like that. And a couple years into it, I started really small, not as small as McGrath, but small and, and something.

Paul Walker (45m 41s):
I think like a lot of people, I guess you could say almost got the Alaska fever. I'm like, I want to see if I can hack it in Alaska. Because even back when I started 15, 16 years ago, there were TV shows about Alaska. And I wanted to see if I could do it. So it, it took, it took about 10 years for me to make it to Alaska as the program director for <inaudible> in Galena. And it was again, largely to see if I could hack it. But B I also wanted to do radio that legitimately was depended on, was, was needed because in, in the service areas of <inaudible>, we are the only radio station anyone can really hear, unless you are like me and set up, you know, extravagant and setups, you can hear Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Paul Walker (46m 47s):
But as I told my boss in Galena, we were chatting one day after I'd been there about a month. I said, you know, one of the reasons I came up here was DXC. You know, I wanted, I wanted to do that. And I left Alaska for the lower 48. And I'd say less than six months after I left, I was like, I'll be back in Alaska sometime. And here I am. So can you talk a little bit about DX thing? It's something that doc mentioned in an email to me and I had no clue what he was talking about. It's, it's tuning the dial for distant radio signals. And it usually involves as a lot of us know, am radio.

Paul Walker (47m 31s):
Even people who don't really know radio kind of understand when they were kid, they probably heard skip from Chicago or Dallas or, or whatever. When I was in Connecticut, I could hear stations from Cincinnati, from Cleveland, from Boston at night, like they were 20 miles down the road. And DX in kind of takes that to a, another level because you kind of look for the signals that are not the every day common things. You look for stuff far away.

Paul Walker (48m 12s):
And you know, people in say Wyoming and Colorado, where I used to be. We'll hear things that people in Texas won't hear and being in Alaska, you know, I go outside before sunset and I'm hearing Japan, China, and South Korea, like it's 50 miles down the road. It's basically hunting for distant am radio signals. Now it can also involve short wave and in mostly the lower 48, it can also involve FM when certain special weather conditions are present, but AEM and short wave DXE and signal skip happens year round.

Doc (48m 57s):
Yeah. And it's interesting to me that, I mean, you, I mean, I grew up in New York or near New York and D DX and made my life in a lot of ways. I mean, I remember, I mean, I grew up, I mean, I get into radio. I get into interested in radio because out my bedroom window, I could see the tops of the towers of most of New York Sam stations. And I could ride down there on my bike and visited, visit the transmitters and visit the old, the old guys who ran the transmitters. Almost all of them are run remotely now, but, but you need those things needed to be manned in the back in the day and, and tended like, like an aquarium or something.

Doc (49m 37s):
And the care and feeding of a transmitter was, was a careful exercise. And, and most people don't know that I'm on am. The whole tower is that is the, is what radiates on FM is just a little contraption on the top of the tower on top of the building, but an am the whole towers radiate and collections of towers are our directional arrays that push signals in one direction or another. And, and then this fascinated me. And, but then one day I heard WK BW from Buffalo and it coming in like a local at the top end of the dial where most of the ethic and the classical stations and stuff like that more. And I just got so fascinated by that. And, and then I, and I was, I was, then I became a ham radio operator.

Doc (50m 19s):
And for a year I was a novice and I never, I never got past that because I didn't pass the code test. The last two times I missed a space and my, I was busy being sent away as a, as a bad student to boarding school at the time. So I never got to pursue it beyond that. I probably could have stayed home, but anyway, but I, I used the ham radio that I had not to listen to short way, but to listen to far away am stations on, on my Hammond Tena in the backyard, it was a 40 meter antenna. And, and I get KFI from Los Angeles and, and all these big stations from Chicago and KSL from salt Lake city. And it educated me.

Doc (51m 0s):
I mean, it developed, I developed a really deep appreciation for geography and, and, and also how radio waves propagate, how they bounce off a lit, an invisible layer in the sky called the ionosphere and suddenly bounced multiple times when Paul hears Thailand is bounced several times off the ocean and land to get to him. That's, to me, that's just deeply interesting that that that happens, you know, and, and, and that the inverse square law applies, which says for every doubling of distance, from an antenna, there's half the signal strength, but when you're dealing with even a fairly weak station is, you know, can carry an awful, awful long distance.

Doc (51m 42s):
And it's like fishing I'm. And I think what Paul does is his kind of fishing in a way

Paul Walker (51m 48s):
What's interesting doc is when you're in locations like mine, and you've got stations along, you know, coastal parts of China and Japan and Taiwan, anything is possible. And you talk about something that baffles the mind just a couple of days ago, I heard a station in Japan, that's all of a hundred Watts because it's right down the water and I am in just the right location for it.

Doc (52m 22s):
Yeah. I, I remember figuring out that KFI from Los Angeles bounced twice off the sky, but in between bounced off flat Prairie land, whereas w OHI in San Antonio in middle had to do two bounces to get to me also, but in the middle, I had to bounce off the Appalachians. So I hardly ever got it in, in Hawaii. Everything on the West coast comes in pretty well at night because it's bouncing off the ocean in the middle it's it's, you know, and, and there there's so many to me anyway, fascinating things about am that are, you know, that there's so many variables involved in it. Like for example, seawater is a great conductor of am waves, which is why, as we discovered on one of the, one of the several forums that Paul is active in that I was wondering how well in the daytime am stations from the East coast come in and Bermuda.

Doc (53m 17s):
It turns out they'd come in pretty well. Cause I remember as a kid here in New York stations dedicate songs to people who called in from Bermuda and not just at night, which is when Pam signals bounce off the sky over great distances, but it had to go across the ocean and even small stations like WMCA in New York, which is just 5,000 Watts rather than 50,000, which is the max come in really well in, in Bermuda. And anyway, that's fascinating to me. But

Paul Walker (53m 47s):
One thing that is also interesting to note is Ks Kao is on FM now where I'm 89, five, we've got 90 Watts at negative 81 feet above average terrain, but when S K O started 40 years ago, this summer, it was on am. It originally started either with 1000 or 5,000 Watts, and then subsequently upgraded. I think it started with a thousand and upgraded twice to 10,000 Watts on eight 70 non-directional, 24 seven. And it shut off the am five years ago, because while the FM tower is at our studio in is on city power, which by the way is like 60, 70, 80 cents a kilowatt hour.

Paul Walker (54m 42s):
The am was not on city power. It was fueled by a generator around the clock, which was costing the Kuskokwim public broadcasting corporation, $60,000 a year in fuel alone. And that got to be too much. They replaced it with FM transmitters in various villages. And we now serve more people reliably with smaller FM transmitters. Cause they're in, you know, the FM transmitters are right in a village, 120 550 miles away where you could probably hear the am there somewhat well, most of the time now you've got a full-time FM signal.

Katherine (55m 31s):
Thanks everyone for joining us for these couple of conversations. Thank you. Especially to doc and to Dean and to Petros and to Paul. We'll see you next time.