Mike "T-Bone" Tierney may have known more classes in JPZ's history than anyone - having worked at Z89 as a high schooler, undergrad, and grad student. So it's no surprise many of his contemporaries consider him one of WJPZ's greatest program directors.
T-Bone went to Nottingham High School, and saw a recruitment flyer for summer staffers while visiting Bird Library. He walked in that day, was immediately training, and worked his way up from overnights to the Top 8 at 9 that summer.
You'd think this would have led him immediately to SU, but he actually spend at summer at Fordham University downstate. But pull of the atmosphere and people at WJPZ brought him back to the 315. And he's quick to point out how the lessons he learned served him well in his illustrious career.
At the station, he worked with Carl Weinstein, Scott Meach, Gigi Katz, Hot Shot Scotty Bergstein, E Double R, and so many others. These were truly the "flamethrower" days of the late 80's and early 90's - with Janet, Michael, U2, LL Cool J, INXS, and more. And while 93Q was making headlines for not playing George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" and LL Cool J's "I Need Love" - Z89 was banging out the hits. In fact, T-Bone has a great story about how WNTQ called the University to complain about Z89 kicking their asses - and a hilarious conversation that followed with Dr. Rick Wright.
After receiving his Masters, Mike followed Carl and Kevin "Tippy" Martinez to Seattle, where he lived on their couches before landing gigs at KPLZ, then the legendary KUBE. There, he'd meet one of his great mentors, Jerry Clifton. T-Bone, the 25-year-old wunderkind PD, learned how to balance his programming chops with people skills. Despite being a ratings leader. his station was too buttoned up, and he needed to rekindle some of the magic he was part of at WJPZ.
Following his run in Seattle radio, Mike went to VH1, where he learned the limitations of television. He also had a stop at Epic Records, and at one point tour managed for a band.
Later, his former intern, Julie Pilat, recruited him to Beats One, before it merged with Apple Music. An online music platform in its infancy, it had hired a bunch of influencers to be air talent. Through airchecking, T-Bone found out who had the skills, and who was not interested in learning the formatics.
Mike's now been at Amazon Music for 4 years, the longest tenure he's had anywhere since Syracuse. He loves the gig because of the ability to change jobs under the umbrella. And rather than a program director, he considers himself an "off air music director" - yes, they still exist in the digital space, if extinct from radio.
We spend some time talking about the new life cycle of music - breaking at streaming then going to radio. And how to reach Gen Z - a generation that did not grow up listening to the radio. Their behavior as music consumers must be catered to. And how does radio need to reinvent itself? Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM's) are changing every industry; music and radio are no exception.
We wrap with a hilariously off-color story about T-Bone handing the controls over to E Double R for Zappy Hour one Friday afternoon.
The Book T-Bone Referenced: Range by David Epstein: https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214506
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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0:00:00 - JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. Super excited to get to know today's guest. He's been called by several of his contemporaries the greatest program director in the history of WJPZ, although he would never tell you that himself. His resume would take me the entire podcast to read to you. Here a couple of highlights. KUBE Seattle, VH1, Epic Records. Apple Music. Now the director of global programming for Amazon Music. He got a Bachelor's in 91, masters in 93. So he knows many, many classes. You may know him as T-Bone. Mike Tierney, welcome to the podcast.
0:00:31 - Mike: What's up, Jag? How you doing, man? Good to see you. Good to be here.
0:00:35 - JAG: And it was Carl Weinstein, actually, that hooked us both up. So I'm excited to hear more of your story and a lot of the crazy stuff that happened during your tenure at the radio station. Let me start off where you grew up and how did you find out about Syracuse and the radio station?
0:00:47 - Mike: I should first of all say that it's pretty apropos that Carl connected us because basically, all that I have and all that I am, I owe to Carl Weinstein, who was the program director when I was the assistant program director. Basically him. I'm going to tick the shout out box of my lifelong friends first, please. Carl, Kevin "Tippy" Martinez, those two guys I'll be paying back couch rent to for the rest of my life.
0:01:12 - Mike: And Jammin James Mahoney was the Assistant PD when I was the PD. That's like my brother. We're still kind of best friends to this day, do fantasy baseball together and all that. And then I got to shout out Gigi Katz, who was the music director when I was the program director, still kind of one of my favorite people in the world. We were born the same hour of the same day. Like, she was born in California, I was born in Indiana. We were PD and MD at the same time. I got to imagine that's maybe the only time that that's ever happened that the PD and MD were born at the same time.
0:01:47 - JAG: That's fate, JPZ kismet gods or something. Yeah, exactly. Okay.
0:01:50 - Mike: It really is. And Gigi was, like, one of the best natural DJs I've ever heard. Like, not only at Z89, but ever. She was so good, and she just didn't care. Like, she was just there for fun. Her claim to fame was that she had an outfit to match the cover of every Madonna single. So she'd roll into the station, dress like La Isla Bonita, which is my personal favorite. But, yeah, incredible ears, incredible taste in music. And those music meetings, especially when it was kind of Mahoney will tell you to this day that I was wrong. I was too conservative about Public Enemy and NWA. And he's absolutely right. History, I think, is on his side. I think there was a line there I drew. I don't remember why.
0:02:33 - Mike: And then Gigi had, like, the kind of Madonna Covergirl, Sweet, Sensation side of things covered. It was a pretty formidable music meeting, and music meetings can be tough.
0:02:44 - JAG: Yeah.
0:02:44 - Mike: And those were pretty intense ones, but they were super fun. Hollywood Hal came along. I think he was part of some of those. It was a pretty great group.
0:02:53 - JAG: Glad to hear you name all those names, because so many of the names that we've had on the podcast so far have mentioned you by name, so yeah. So tell me, you said you grew up in Indiana. How do you end up at Syracuse, and then the radio station?
0:03:02 - Mike: Actually was born in Indiana.
0:03:05 - JAG: Okay.
0:03:05 - Mike: My dad was in school in Notre Dame. I grew up in Syracuse.
0:03:09 - JAG: Oh, you did? Okay.
0:03:10 - Mike: Went to Nottingham. Go Bulldogs. I grew up, like, half a mile from Manley Field House.
0:03:15 - JAG: Okay.
0:03:16 - Mike: Pretty much all of my friends’ parents were professors. We grew up on campus. Like, we were those kids, the kind of bad townie kids, like, sneak into the UU movies and go into the UU concerts. When I started my teen years, I think the drinking age was still 18, and then it went to 19 so we could get into the G bar and then the Jabberwocky when we shouldn't have been able to, and just kind of low level mischief. Not anything kind of that rose to the felony level, but we were kind of those kids.
0:03:51 - Mike: And I was in Bird Library. It was June of 1986. I have no idea that I had no reason to be in Bird Library. But there we were, my buddy Adam, and there was a flyer on the bulletin board that said Z 89 was looking for summer interns, students, non-students, whatever. I think Z89 on FM was a couple of years old at that point.
0:04:14 - JAG: Sounds about right.
0:04:15 - Mike: Yeah, the music was great, and so I kind of knew all about it, and I was like, that sounds super interesting. I'm pretty sure the call to action was not, like, walk directly to the radio station, like, right now. But that's what I did. You snooze, you lose. I didn't want to kind of miss out, kind of have it be all the slots be filled or whatever. I wandered into the station that night. I don't remember who was there. It was somebody was on the air, obviously. It was probably 07:00 at night. It was probably someone like that summer. It was someone like Diamond Jim Ryan or Rockin Ron Chanel.
0:04:50 - Mike: But I do remember there was, like, an orientation the next day. Went to orientation. It was Diamond Jim Ryan and Christy Perry who led it. It was the first summer that Z89 tried to stay on the air. They had always kind of gone dark over the summer. And it was like those two, Diamond Jim and Christy, they did it. They kept the station on the air. Carl was still around, and that was kind of one of the magical things. It was 1986, and so the recent grads, Happy Dave, Rocco Macri, Chris Bungo, they were hanging around like they hadn't kind of peaced out yet. And so I would eventually have a chance to meet them at the beginning of that summer.
0:05:27 - Mike: Carl, I think, hung around for the beginning of the summer, and I kind of remember him coming in late to the orientation. I don't remember much else about the orientation, although it was the first time that I kind of got turned on to clocks and rotations, all that stuff that kind of growing up, listening to the radio, like, you knew were things, kind of finding out that they were things. And I kind of went through orientation. I'm pretty sure I shadowed that night.
0:05:54 - Mike: I'm almost positive I did my first, like, two to six that night.
0:06:00 - JAG: It was just right in, right away because they needed the help over the summer.
0:06:02 - Mike: They were just trying to keep the station on the air. It was maximum, like three days between Bird Library and my first air shift.
0:06:11 - JAG: That's amazing.
0:06:12 - Mike: Yeah. I can say for sure that the number of people who heard my first Z89 break was zero. Not because nobody was listening, but because the guy who was on eleven to two came in after my first talk up and told me the mic had been an audition, and so I needed to put it in program. I was off to it.
0:06:27 - JAG: I was surprised how often a story like that has come up on the podcast. Either I didn't pot the mic up enough. I didn't turn the pot on. It was in audition. That has happened to a lot of guests on this podcast so far.
0:06:37 - Mike: Yeah, they were super nice. I can't remember who it was. It was the eleven to two person. Couldn't have been nicer about it. I was so stressed. I do remember it was like an amazing talk up of Invisible Touch by Genesis. I can tell you this day, the post was 16 seconds long. You can look that up. And I know also that I had my Latin final at Nottingham later that same day. I think I went home at six, like, took a shower, went to school, took my Latin final, and then by the time I graduated Nottingham, I'd done my first top eight at nine.
0:07:08 - JAG: Oh, my G-d.
0:07:09 - Mike: Yeah, it was crazy. I was about to say I was off to the races. The first Top 8 at 9, I got I definitely was not ready. And the reason I got it was because literally everyone else at the station went to Vernon Downs and they just wanted to go have fun at the racetrack. And maybe I wasn't 18. They didn't care if I was there for the racetrack or whatever. Priorities threw me on the air. Yeah, totally. Somebody's got to go out there, put the kid on.
0:07:33 - JAG: So it seems like it's predestined this point that you go to SU, right?
0:07:36 - Mike: Yeah, but I wasn't. I decided I was going to go to Fordham. I don't exactly remember why, but summer ended. And that summer was so much fun. In my memory, the DJs, which was like a few of us, like townie kids. There was a kid named Danny O'Day who had turned up, and he was great. And another guy named just plain Joe, like, some students who were around. Kristen Sloan was around.
0:07:59 - Mike: A guy who called himself Dexter Smith. Dexter Smith. Dexter Smith was an amazing Z89 ZJ. It was just so much fun. In my memory, I've had periods kind of where I've been looking for weekenders and they've been hard to find. Everybody who was on the air that summer was just great on the air.
0:08:17 - JAG: Yeah.
0:08:18 - Mike: And so summer ends. I'm getting ready to go away to school and then kind of the students start coming back and it's like, it's Larry Barron. It's Hot Shot Scott Bergstein. It's Rusty Berrell. I'm still doing shifts and stuff because they haven't even kind of had orientation and gotten the students sort of back on the schedule and stuff. So I meet all of those guys and it's kind of like I didn't know people like that.
0:08:42 - Mike: They were so smart and so serious and they were having fun, but they had ideas about what they were going to do with their lives. Like Larry and Scott already knew they were going to go to Hollywood. And Carl Weinstein wanted to own radio stations. That was his sort of stated goal. I didn't know how to own a radio station, and I was definitely looking for that. I lost my father when I was a teenager, and I didn't really have any sort of idea about how to have a life. And I pretty much picked Fordham semi at random.
0:09:16 - Mike: But I leave all those folks behind, like super impressed. Like, haven't been on the air all summer. And I get to Fordham, which is an amazing radio station. WFUV is like a 50,000 watt flamethrower that friend of mine runs now. But it was kind of like, everybody knows this story. It's like you'll kind of hang out your freshman year like empty trash buckets. Your sophomore year, we'll teach you how to write and produce your junior, and maybe you can get on the air when you're a senior. And I was just like, I'm eff this.
0:09:44 - Mike: I've been doing it. I just got to get back there. So I basically applied to transfer to SU right away. Newhouse didn't take applications for the spring semester, so I applied to Arts and Sciences, got in and, like, literally, I did one semester at Fordham and then was back at Syracuse to start the spring semester.
0:10:03 - JAG: So what year is that?
0:10:04 - Mike: January of 87 would have been when I started. And so my classmates were Gigi and Scott Meach. I got there with the Class of 90. Carl immediately made me his APD. I don't remember what the circumstances for that were. If he had to swing somebody, give him the Zig, but I somehow end up being the APD. Scott's, the MD GiGi was assistant music director. And we were like, that was the squad there. I think I maybe was taken kind of, whatever, six credits.
0:10:34 - Mike: I really did have, like, a red shirt freshman season a lot because of the radio station. So I ended up graduating in 91 and kind of did SU and JPZ on the five year plan.
0:10:45 - JAG: And this is really we talked about this era of the radio station, kind of the flamethrower era. You guys are giving away cars at the State Fair. You guys are just killing it. At that point. You've mentioned all the names, but what was it like to be part of the station during those days where it's pulling ratings and 93Q is all pissed off because you're pulling ratings away from them. Take me inside.
0:11:06 - Mike: It was insane. That part of it. I think that Jag, I know probably everybody you've had on the podcast will insist that the best music in JPZ history was the music the four years they were there. Some of them might be right, but they can't all be right. And the main reason they're not right is that the late 80s was the best era for music in JPZ history. It was insane. I was literally just thinking about this.
0:11:28 - Mike: It was Madonna. Michael, Janet at their peak, it was Whitney and Bobby. LL Cool J, Run DMC, Beastie Boys George Michael Like, the best U2 album, the best INXS album. Jam Master Andy Reninger would be mad if I didn't shout out Debbie Gibson but Debbie Gibson and Tiffany and Paula Abdul. The music was so good. It's literally one of the things I've kind of learned as a programmer is that you're really only as good as the music.
0:11:58 - Mike: The music will make you look smart. And really where you kind of earn your living as a programmer is when it's a doldrums, right? When the music isn't good is when you really have to kind of gut it out. But the music was so good, and the music meetings were so much fun, and it actually coincided with an incredibly lame, especially lame period in the storied history of WNTQ in Syracuse. They were so lame.
0:12:26 - Mike: They were terrible, basically. I mean, in their defense, they had Y94, which was a really good radio station on one flank. And so they were trying to cheat and lean kind of a little bit of adult, and we just came up and just shoved it up their ass. I specifically remember it must have been the summer of 87 when I Want Your Sex was like the biggest song of the summer. And they wouldn't play it. And there's a Post Standard article about why they wouldn't play it. And we were just, like, playing it every hour.
0:12:56 - JAG: Yeah.
0:12:57 - Mike: And then kind of LL had I Need Love and they wouldn't play it. And then they maybe put it in in nights. It's one of the most important records of the decade in a lot of ways. And we never dayparted anything, really. Certainly not because it was like hip hop or whatever. we were just smashing the hits and kind of the reactive, fun hits that everybody really wanted to hear, and they were kind of super adult top 40, and it just was easy. And it's actually another thing that I learned well, that was one of those summers they actually called the University and people talked about this. They called the University and tried to get us to stop, to just stop trying so hard to stop doing what...
0:13:41 - JAG: 93 Q called the university?
0:13:43 - Mike: 93 Q called the university. And said, they shouldn't be doing this. It's a student run radio station. Why are they essentially up our asses? Make them stop. I don't remember who they called. It was someone of the administration who, of course, talked to Rick, who kind of comes over like, T-Bone, and you'll never guess. And I'm like, "Rick, fuck them, right?" And he's like, "I think, fuck them, T-Bone." And so it was just I caught that we had literally sort of stolen their professional pride at that point. Can you imagine, like, any JPZ'er in history?
0:14:20 - Mike: I want you to imagine, like, begging the competition to, like, stop. You know what I mean? It would it would never happen. I remember it being basically because of George Michael and LL Cool J. It could have been because of whatever the famous 8.9 in Birch that we had. But it was like that era. And that was another thing that I learned kind of to this day. It's sort of like the Bill Belichick Sun Tzu thing of like, if you wait long enough by the river, the body of your enemy will come floating downstream.
0:14:51 - Mike: We were merciless, and that's where I learned that kicking 93Q
0:14:57 - JAG: As a Patriots fan, I always appreciate a good Bill Belichick or Sun Tzu reference. So the flip side of this, obviously, the station is kicking ass and taking names. 93Q is wounded, calling the University.
0:15:05 - Mike: Please make them stop.
0:15:06 - JAG: They're kicking our asses. But on the more serious side, and Carl talked about this in the podcast and others have as well. This was also a time where there was a real threat to the format of the radio station in the late 80's. The station is on FM and the Student African American Society comes in and Hot Shot Scott talked about this in his episode as well and they're like, hey, we want more representation. We want to be more of a typical college format radio station and have different types of shows and different viewpoints. And you're coming in and saying, no, we are teaching students how to be a top 40 radio station. What do you remember about that period and the difficulties of that whole situation?
0:15:39 - Mike: I mean, I get it. I got it then, and I get it kind of to this day, like, the point of view of anybody. I loved kind of alternative music. This is probably where I should point out that, for the record, I never wanted to be Bob Costas, Jag.
0:15:52 - JAG: So you are not on my tote board. Okay, got it. All right.
0:15:55 - Mike: Yeah, I was basically a music guy. I kind of have always been a music guy, first and foremost. When I saw that flyer at Bird Library, it was like, Oh my G-d, I can go in there and play music, right? And growing up in Syracuse, there aren't many ways for you to do anything that has anything to do with music, right? So when I walked in the station, it was the end of the Future Radio era, and there were still all the records that I loved, kind of in gold, A Town Called Malice by The Jam. I still remember when Carl and I were like, sort of flushing out the gold and he pulls out the index card for The Jam, A Town Called Malice and is like, T-Bone, this is going to break your heart, but I don't think it stays.
0:16:39 - Mike: But my heart was with, I loved kind of alternative what we now call alternative new wave, kind of college rock, whatever. I loved hip hop, like from Curtis Blow, The Brakes. Sure, those were my kind of jams. And I think I got sort of gradually kind of brainwashed into the whole power hits thing. I loved it, and I think this was the whole point. I loved the education part of it, and I loved the shows that we kind of Saturday Night Dance Jam and the Love Flight kind of, which were small compromises that got made out of that period. But we should have been kind of doing that. We should have been doing more of that.
0:17:22 - Mike: I think. Carl and I were talking the other night. The original power hits shift was so tight. It was so tight. It was tighter than any top 40 station I've ever programmed commercially. When Carl first switched it to Power Hits, that was the real flamethrower. And we gradually got to a point where I really think we were playing the music that people on campus were listening to. Anyway, again, by the late 80s, if there was alternative crossover, U2, INXS, like, I said we played it. We were playing the music we were playing that was kind of hip hop and R&B was the same stuff I was playing when I DJ'ed at Brags, and it was like the dance floor packers. It was what the students were listening to. So I think after things settled in from my POV, we really were playing kind of reflecting the taste of the people on campus, the sort of kind of somewhat broad kind of taste of people on campus. But it really stopped being a thing to an extent because the playlist loosened up and the music got better and more diverse.
0:18:25 - Mike: And I think that one of the things that I really took away from that personally was just anybody who wanted to change it could come and walk in the station, apply, get on the air, hang out, kind of get involved, run for senior staff. If you really were here, you want to kind of change something, come on down and make a difference. And the fact that everybody probably says it, the smartest, most talented people I've ever worked with in my career were the people that I worked with at JPZ. Hands down.
0:18:58 - JAG: Sure.
0:18:59 - Mike: Never had a team of that caliber. Everybody just wanted to win. And I feel like we didn't have anybody telling us what to do. There was no pressure from outside. I honestly think kind of the great gift that Professor Wright gave us all of those years was giving us air cover with the university when we needed, but he never told us what to do. He just really let us get on with it and let us kind of teach one another.
0:19:26 - Mike: And the lessons I learned there I still kind of used to this day, and I think it was just making JPZ the best me classroom on campus.
0:19:36 - JAG: So you mentioned the lessons learned and all the stuff that you took with you in your career. So you start to get to your career. So you get your undergrad in 91. So you had the red shirt year ion the front end, and then you have the two additional years of eligibility, getting the Masters after that. Do I have that right?
0:19:49 - Mike: Yeah, that absolutely right.
0:19:50 - JAG: You are the Van Wilder of WJPZ.
0:19:53 - Mike: I 100% am. If you like Happy Dave and them, I got to shout out Happy Dave because he shouted out me, and that was, like, the highlight of my career so far. Shout out happy Dave. Like those guys in the class of 86, like, probably started in 82, and then the people who started the year I got my Master's probably graduated in 96 or something like that. So if you went to Syracuse between 82 and 96, yes.
0:20:15 - JAG: That's fantastic.
0:20:16 - Mike: You might have known me. We might have crossed paths. Yeah. I am that guy. Yeah.
0:20:20 - JAG: So you're there two additional years. You get your Masters, and you've had quite the career in the 30 years since. Take me through some of the places you've been, some of the things you've done for those who aren't familiar with your story.
0:20:29 - Mike: The first thing that happened was that I kind of knew during my grad school season, there was a moment where I think I was watching Even Flow by Pearl Jam on MTV, and I was like, fuck this. I'm going there. I grew up sort of baby boomer parents who kind of made me feel like I had missed all the cool stuff, like something cool had happened in their era and I'd missed it. And I was like, this is just my people like having their moment. I'm not missing this.
0:20:56 - Mike: And Kevin and Carl. Kevin Martinez and Carl Weinstein had moved to Seattle and were working for the Mariners. And I'd kind of gone out there and spent some time with them the summer between undergrad and grad. So when I finished my Master's, there was no doubt in my mind I was getting on a plane, one way ticket to Seattle, and I was just going to crash on their couches for as long as it took. And I had met some kind of media people through them kind of during my travels. And there was a guy named Randy Irwin who's still kind of one of my best friends to this day, who was the Ballpark DJ for the Mariners, basically.
0:21:29 - JAG: Wow, okay. Yeah.
0:21:29 - Mike: And he was the music director of KPLZ in Seattle. And he called me and was like, I'm leaving to go work at Sony. Casey Keating needs a music director. You need to call him.
0:21:39 - JAG: Wow.
0:21:40 - Mike: Yeah. So I called Casey Keating, and he kind of brings me in for an interview. Casey is an amazing guy. He was a really great mentor to have. We hit it off in kind of a job interview and all that. And I'm like, oh, my G-d, I think this might be happening. And Casey says, I want to make you kind of music coordinator first, and then if it works out, we'll put you on salary and you'll be the music director. Wow, that sounds amazing. And he's like, and you know how to run Selector right?
0:22:09 - Mike: Now, I had sort of run Selector because Carl was programming a radio station in Lansing, Michigan, and I kind of went up there on a weekend to help him load his selector database. Right?
0:22:21 - JAG: Yeah.
0:22:22 - Mike: And then we had scheduling software at Z89 that was like a competitor, and it was Mac based or whatever. Like, I knew what it was. Right. So in the moment, I looked at Casey and I said, yeah, I know how to run selector. And he's like, all right, then you got the gig. And I was like, can I take the manual home and kind of brush up over the weekend? And the manual was like, the phone book. I don't know if you've ever seen the selector manual.
0:22:44 - JAG: Now, for our younger listeners, a phone book. No, I'm kidding.
0:22:46 - Mike: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Everything about this. Like what's that? So I took it home. I was on Kevin's couch that weekend. Yeah. I'll never forget it. And I kind of just casually sort of inhaled the selector manual that weekend. And then I went in on Monday to KPLZ, did the music logs for Tuesday, and kind of eventually, like, within a few weeks or months, I don't remember, ended up being the music director of KPLZ. This is like, literally a few months after I left Z.
0:23:14 - JAG: Probably seeing those F keys in your sleep at that point after reading that whole manual, right?
0:23:18 - Mike: Oh, yeah. Literally, I was there seven days a week. I was doing kind of weekend shifts. I was doing all the logs. I had done an internship at Hot 97, shout out Rocco. But this was really my first radio station besides Z89. And I was there for it. And it was the period where Dr. Dre, The Chronic and Nirvana were on Top 40 radio for a minute. It was super fun. I was at KPLZ the day that Kurt died.
0:23:49 - Mike: So, yeah, that was my first station, KPLZ. And then about nine months into it, I got the Zig. I got laid off. The station had gotten sold. This ended up being sort of more important than the first thing. The first thing is if anybody asks you if you have a skill that you can reasonably teach yourself over the weekend, lie, get the job, and teach yourself a skill over the weekend.
0:24:10 - JAG: Good advice. Yeah.
0:24:12 - Mike: Then the second thing is the rug gets pulled out from under me, right. Like, at this point, I'm just unemployed in Seattle. I'm literally back to where I started.
0:24:19 - JAG: Carl and Kevin's couches.
0:24:21 - Mike: I at least had my own couch, but how was I going to kind of keep paying rent? At that point, my job was gone. And then somehow, I kind of got connected with a guy named Bob Case, who was the PD of KUBE, which was KPLZ's competitor. And to be honest, they were kicking KPLZ's ass. They had gone full crossover. They were KUBE 93 Jams, and it was a bloodbath. And that was part of why the KPLZ sale went down.
0:24:46 - Mike: KPLZ had been owned by, this is just great to say, Gene Autry. The Cowboy.
0:24:52 - JAG: Oh, wow.
0:24:52 - Mike: Used to own a bunch of radio stations. And so that was my first signature on my radio paychecks, was Gene Autry the Cowboy. So he sold it. And I just sort of figured out they wanted Casey gone, right? They wanted the PD gone. So they sort of took away his company car and he didn't leave. They literally took away his guy. That was me. I was just collateral damage. He didn't leave, but eventually he gets the job at Y100 in Miami. And so as I'm talking to Bob Case at Seattle, Casey circles back, and Casey's general manager circles back, and he starts talking to me about doing Casey's job, right?
0:25:30 - Mike: So I end up in this weird freaking kind of situation where I literally get offered the program director job of KPLZ and the program director job of KUBE at the same time, 25 and not a year out of SU and not a few months from getting laid off. So I kind of just thought about it at the time, and two things kind of significant. The first was that KPLZ had gone hot AC. And as cool as it would be to be a 25 year old PD, like, I could be playing Celine Dion or I could be playing Dr. Dre. And it was like, that was no contest. But the other thing that happened, KUBE wanted me to be on the air. And KPLZ was an off air PD. And I remember at that time thinking that I didn't want to be on the air anymore. I wanted to be an off air PD. Yeah, again, I didn't want to be Bob Costas. I wanted to be a program director, and I wanted to be a really good program director.
0:26:19 - Mike: And so I basically made that choice based on I think there was like $5,000 more in salary at KPLZ, and I didn't have to be on the air. And so I went to Bob Case at KUBE and I was like, yeah, I think I'm just going to go do this for KPLZ. He's like, what? Why the fuck would you do that? And I was like, I don't want to be on the air. It's like a little bit more money. And he's like, Kid, like, seriously? You just don't want to be on the air? And I'm like, no. He's like you're good. I'm like, I won't be able to pay enough attention to the job if I have to be on the air for kind of 4 hours a day. So he was like, all right, you have to promise me you'll do a couple of weekend shifts a month because it's really important for a PD. This is great advice. It's really important for a PD to be on the air to prove to the staff that you can be on the air, to prove to yourself that your formatics work and all that stuff. So I was like, that's like that.
0:27:08 - JAG: Old cliche about those who can't, teach. Like you're proving that you still can.
0:27:12 - Mike: Oh, yeah. And I did basically every Saturday when I was at KUBE. I did the hangover zone. I did. I think it was like 09:00 a.m to 01:00 p.m on Saturdays. And I knew every jock who I'd ever airchecked at the station was like, listening to make sure that I could kind of walk the walk. And I just was not going to not crush it. There are a few periods where I did like we were between jocks, and I did afternoon drive for kind of a few months at a time. But that was where I kind of just really became finally made my decision. I just wanted to be a programmer and not a personality.
0:27:48 - JAG: So it sounds like you got the best of both worlds. You got to the dominant station. You didn't have to do too many airshifts, and you were like you said, playing Dr. Dre, not Celine Dion.
0:27:55 - Mike: Yeah. And it was great. And I would have washed out, as amazing as it was and as fortuitous it was for me to get in that position. I would have washed out in a second if it hadn't been for JPZ. And if it hadn't been for how seriously we took ourselves. Actually, there are two really kind of pivotal moments in my kind of cube tenure. I had a consultant named Jerry Clifton, who kind of is one of the two people who has taught me the most outside of JPZ in my career.
0:28:23 - JAG: I know the name.
0:28:24 - Mike: Yeah, this was a serious guy. Jerry Clifton is a radio genius. Invented formats, programmed everywhere. And I was scared shitless of him. He's a scary guy. He really can be like a scary guy. And so the first time I met Jerry, we decided to go out to get coffee. And we're walking up Queen Anne Avenue in Seattle to go get coffee. And he says to me, like, apropos nothing. He says, kid, you got yourself a good job.
0:28:48 - Mike: You probably got yourself a two-year job, and I'm going to tell you why. And I'm like, okay, Jerry. You're going to be here two years, either because you try to be everybody's best friend, tell them what they want to hear, and then get swung after two years for being an ineffectual loser. Wow, okay. That sounds terrible. He's like, or you're going to be here for two years. You're going to do whatever it takes to win. You're going to go up somebody's ass sideways when they're going to get sick of you, and they're going to swing you because they figure you're too much trouble than you're worth, and they could do it without you.
0:29:20 - JAG: Wow.
0:29:20 - Mike: And I'm like, okay. He's like, the only question is which position do you want to be in when you go looking for your next job? And I was like, got it. Yeah. I told this story to somebody on my team recently, and he was like, Mike, have you ever thought about the fact that you might have been trapped in an abusive relationship with your mentor? I was like, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't know one fucking thing about anything if it wasn't for Jerry Clifton. That's how much I idolized this guy. Ask anybody on my team.
0:29:50 - Mike: I talk about him to this day.
0:29:52 - JAG: I had a radio mentor who was kind of a sociopath, but he taught me more than I would ever learn anywhere else. Outside again, JPZ, about radio. That's stuff I still use to this day. So it's funny sometimes you take that trade off to have somebody who you might be a little scared of, but they give you some really good advice.
0:30:07 - Mike: Yeah, I remember I think it was Larry Barron pulling me aside when I was a PD Z89 and telling me that people thought I was kind of a tyrant and that I should back off a little bit. Incredibly important lesson to learn. I definitely did not have the kind of EQ to be running anything, probably as a 19 year old.
0:30:24 - JAG: Yeah. But who among us doesn't look back at those days at 19 and 20 and say, boy, if I'd known that what I know now, I would have handled that situation a little bit differently.
0:30:32 - Mike: Oh, yeah. No, totally. I was listening to one of your podcasts with someone who I haven't met, Liz Doyon Gupta. She was super smart and self aware about, like she told the story about the “your mother doesn't work here” email that she sent out. And I was like, I definitely hung that sign kind of on the wall of the senior staff office. And it was great to hear. But kind of anybody who probably was at Z89 with me would kind of laugh now at the notion that I ever was going to be the kind of guy who gave everybody what they wanted and kind of told everybody what they wanted to hear. I probably wasn't ever going to be that guy, but it was like my first month on the job, and Jerry just laid it all out for me, and I'm really glad he did. And then there was a second thing that I think also feeds back to Z. This is probably the most important thing that ever happened to me in my career.
0:31:18 - Mike: Jerry comes back a couple of years later, and I'm not scared of him anymore. I kind of got him and realized that he was just sort of testing me a lot and all that and we had a 6 share. We were number one. We'd kind of just sort of come out of a rough patch, and Jerry comes town, and it was like just sort of lollipops and rainbows like, literally did not say one bad thing about the radio station. We would drive the market, listen to all the radio stations, go into record stores. (Kids, ask your mom.) And walk the store and see what people were buying and talk to the clerks, which is another thing I learned at JPZ. There was a guy named James Cole who owned Cole's Music World, which became a sponsor of the station. And Jammin James and I would go see him every week to find out what we sell kind of in his little store down on, like, Fayette Street, I think it was. But I learned that. But Jerry was passionate about just running the market, so not one bad thing to say about it. It's like the last day of his visit, we go in to see my bosses, who are Bob Case, who hired me, who'd been kind of kicked upstairs to a VP job, and Michael O'Shea, who owns the radio station.
0:32:24 - Mike: And they have Old Home Week, and they're like, okay, Jerry, tell us what you think about the radio station. And Jerry goes, well, I've always thought that a great Top 40 station is like, the hottest party in town. And if this is what a party is like at Mike's house, I'm glad I'm not invited. Yeah. So everybody laughed. It's a great line. I basically sunk into the couch. I remember where I was sitting. I basically just sunk. If I could have crawled in between the cushions of that couch, I would have done it, right? And so everybody laughed, and they kind of talked about kind of what was wrong. And I remember, like, Jerry said, he's like, the music sounds good, but it sounds a little too good. It's like a jukebox, and everything I hear is basically on the nose. And I never get surprised or delighted in any kind of wow, unexpected way. And Mike kind of needs to loosen up a little bit.
0:33:16 - Mike: The DJs sound good, but they sound like they're being air checked to within an inch of their life. And Mike needs to loosen up because if he manages them that way, they're never going to do anything that surprises him pleasantly or unpleasantly. He needs to just learn how to kind of have fun. And Michael O'Shea sort of he eventually says he's like, you're right, Jerry, and it's a really good point. I'm sure Mike's going to kind of take this all in, but like, come on, the kid's doing something, right? He's number one with a six share.
0:33:46 - Mike: And then Jerry goes, you know what? I've heard a lot of number one stations that I didn't think were great stations, but I've never heard a great station that wasn't number one.
0:33:57 - JAG: Wow.
0:33:57 - Mike: Mike needs to stop worrying about the ratings and start worrying about being great.
0:34:02 - JAG: Wow.
0:34:02 - Mike: And then he'll be something. It's unbelievable, right? And I was like, oh, fuck. I get it. I fucking get it. I get it. I had been kind of part of the best party in town, like those years at Z89, we were the flamethrower. I knew how to do that. I knew how to access that. I knew I had that gear. But I definitely kind of never would have if it wasn't for Z89. And the kind of I think I heard it was like Howie Deneroff and a couple of people who talked about I think Jay Nachlis, too, talked about the perfectionism.
0:34:34 - Mike: We were so hardcore, ruthless, and that perfectionism. The perfectionism I got from Z89 was what kicked in at that point, I was like, I know how to do this. And kind of the ratings just got better. And I think the next year we had a seven share, and Michael O'Shea took us to Vegas on a bet because he had bet me that I couldn't get a seven share. We couldn't get a seven share. KUBE was really the sort of the furnace, and Jerry Clifton was sort of the pressure that kind of really kind of set me down the path of the programmer that I probably am now. But, Z89 lit the fire. There's kind of no two ways about it.
0:35:13 - JAG: And look, T-Bone, you're very quick to give credit to your coworkers at JPZ and to Jerry Clifton and to the people around you. But look, you're pulling a six and a seven chair in Seattle as a mid-20 something year old PD. Some credit needs to go to your abilities and what you were able to do with that radio station. Where did you go from there?
0:35:30 - Mike: I just celebrated four years at Amazon, and it's the longest that I've ever been anywhere since Syracuse. I looked it up on my own LinkedIn, and it was like three years and nine months at KUBE. And then I went to VH1, and I did that for a couple of years and kind of figured out that I didn't like TV because TV sort of compromises the music in radio. You can just walk down the hallway and put stuff on the air. Right. And DJs can kind of bring things to life with theater of the mind. As anybody who's kind of worked in TV knows, you have to actually shoot it. You have to hire people and have talent and shoot things.
0:36:08 - Mike: I would make changes to the music, the video hours or whatever, and it would be on the air three days later. We would do the music for pop up videos or whatever, and it would be on next season. And so I've just felt like music television was, like, not enough music and too much television.
0:36:24 - JAG: This is 25 years ago as opposed to where it is now.
0:36:26 - Mike: Right.
0:36:27 - JAG: Yeah.
0:36:27 - Mike: Oh, yeah. No, totally. It was there were probably, like, six or eight video hours a day on the station, and they got the worst ratings, and we only really did them so that we could get the artist to do "Divas" or whatever. And then I went to Epic Records after that. And my version of Bob Costas was like I could tell you what label any artist was on when I was a kid, and I would memorize the addresses from the labels of I knew Warner was in Burbank, and I knew Epic was The Clash's label and Pearl Jen's label. And it was kind of all I wanted to do.
0:37:01 - Mike: So I went there as, like, a kind of senior vice president and kind of realized the level of politics at a major record company was definitely not for me. Kind of all of the tough love from Jerry Clifton notwithstanding. I was there for a few years and I worked for Dave Matthews' label and then started a little label, did management and did management kind of on my own for a little while, which is like what I like to call the eat what you kill business model. That was terrible.
0:37:29 - Mike: Every time I sort of needed a gig, I would just go back to programming, kind of radio stations. It was the one thing that I could always do to get myself paid.
0:37:39 - JAG: Do you feel like your time at VH1 and your time at record labels made you a better PD because you understood the other sides of the business?
0:37:46 - Mike: Yeah, there's a really great book called "Range," by a guy named David Epstein. And the subtitle is "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world." I get bored, let's be honest. I kind of get bored and I like kind of finding my next challenge. One of the things I really like about working at Amazon is that if I get bored, I can change my job without changing my job. There's just so much to do.
0:38:09 - Mike: I think that's one of the reasons why I really liked working in tech. But I would just sort of get bored. It wouldn't be challenging enough. I remember somebody who I really love was a friend of mine, Greg Strassel, who was the head of programming at CBS at the time, who I've worked with since, and he was like, T-Bone, you're a great PD. Your problem is you care too much about music. And I was like, Greg, I get what you're saying, but I've never seen that as anything but kind of an asset, and I'm not going to let you start making me think of it as a liability at this point. I love music.
0:38:40 - Mike: I think our customers, listeners kind of love music. So to me, music was always my real passion, literally. I've never made $1 as an adult that wasn't in a music related job. I'm so lucky. But I really wanted to try to do every job that I could for just a little while. There was a few one summer when I was a manager, I realized I'd never tour managed before. And I had a band called High Highs who got offered a tour opening for Vampire Weekend.
0:39:11 - Mike: Those gigs, those support slots on big tours pay like $200 a show. That's it. And the bands need to get tour support from their label, the opening acts, in order to be able to go. And so I kind of told my band, I'm like, Look, I'll TM for you because that's going to save you, whatever, $500 a day that you don't have. And so I got in a van with my Australian band and drove them around the country open for Vampire Weekend one summer and it was like 2013.
0:39:38 - Mike: But I just really wanted to tick the box of being a tour manager. And it was actually one of the most fun jobs I've ever done. Because basically the goal is to make the show happen at the end of the day. Right? And if you get from, whatever, Boston to Toronto and the show which goes through Syracuse, that was when I stopped on Marshall Street and showed my band where Acropolis was.
0:40:01 - JAG: R-I-P acropolis.
0:40:02 - Mike: Yeah. But yeah, it's like in every other gig, especially in radio, it can be sort of a little bit slippery, like where's the bar is a six share or seven share. But the thing about tour managing bands, like if the show happened, it was a good day. So that was super fun. And yeah, I've really loved every kind of stop along the way. And to answer your direct question, there is this thing where I think now just because when anything comes up, because I've in the past thought about something as a programmer, thought about something as a label guy, thought about something the way the artist will think about it, thought about something as a manager. The processing just happens really fast.
0:40:42 - Mike: And being able to empathize right kind of gets you to a place where the artist is never going to say yes to that. But if we sort of find out what the artist wants to have happen, we'll be kind of way more likely to get to a yes. It's 100% true. And my wife of 21 years, G-d bless her, I think my resume drives her a little bit crazy. Like she is pretty happy kind of I am where I am now. But yeah, I wouldn't recommend anybody
0:41:10 - Mike: kind of have a career of I get bored, I leave. But it's kind of served me pretty well.
0:41:16 - JAG: And to your point, T-Bone, you really did follow music after that. I mean, even outside of radio to Apple and now to Amazon. Tell me about your time getting in the tech space and again, still staying connected to music.
0:41:25 - Mike: Yeah, another super important thing, my intern at KUBE, I ran the Cube music meetings a lot like I ran the JPZ music meetings like they always were. Of course the intern was in the music meeting every week. The intern at KUBE was a woman named Julie Pilat, who she might be the only person in my career who ever pushed me far enough to the point where I had to say, because I'm the fucking program director.
0:41:50 - Mike: So that was Julie. And Julie went on to be the music director of KUBE and the music director of KIIS in LA. And she ended up being at Beats Music, working for Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. And then when the merger happened with Apple Music, she stayed on to launch Beats One. And so always be nice to the interns. Julie kind of offered me a job at Apple Music, and on Beats One, I wasn't there for a sign on, but it was like a month later, and they kind of knew what they needed fixed, and so they kind of brought me in. It was one of those things where it was like, we need somebody to do programming. We need somebody for production, we need somebody for editorial. And I was like, oh, programming is my thing. And then it was like, okay, we hired you, but now you have to do all three jobs. And it was freaking amazing.
0:42:31 - Mike: I was doing editorial stuff, and I hadn't really kind of had to access any of that stuff since I was at Newhouse, and that was really fun. Beats One was just sick. Zane Lowe is the sort of smartest broadcaster and best on-air talent that I've ever been around. Like, hands down, he was the most influential person on me since Jerry Clifton.
0:42:52 - JAG: When you say programming at Beats One, tell me what that looks like for someone who might not be familiar with the platform.
0:42:57 - Mike: Beats One, which is now Apple Music One was a 24/7 ephemeral streaming service. Right? It was basically an online radio station. And we had three studios, one in London, one in New York, one in LA. We had a 24/7 schedule to fill. So much like, when I was at kind of VH1, where programming meant filling the schedule, part of programming was kind of just deciding with Zane, like, what was going to be on when, like, figuring out the schedule. And we had artist led shows.
0:43:28 - Mike: Drake had a show. Frank Ocean had a show. Travis Scott, Elton John. I had a team of producers. There were like 20 something producers around the world who would make these long form radio shows with artists. It was amazing. Zane was an anchor. Ebro was an anchor. We had live DJs. We did that thing where before I got there, they had hired, like, 30 influencers, and they were going to make them, like the DJs. And then that was kind of the yeah, literally, that was the first thing Zane said to me, was like, Fix it.
0:44:00 - Mike: And I was like, look, if I had a station, there'd be like, one DJ who was this green, and they'd be on every night, and I would be air checking with them every day. There's 30 of these people, and they're in three different cities. Like, what am I going to do?
0:44:15 - JAG: When will corporate and I go back to radio when I say this, when will corporate understand you're better to hire somebody with talent than who has a big Instagram following?
0:44:23 - Mike: Yeah, I do think that there is. Like, Zane was like, it looks like you're getting on a plane, Tierney. So I was literally I air checked everybody. Literally air checked everybody. And some people were like, I don't want to work this hard and just peaced out. There are others who are still on the air on Apple Music One that, if you kind of listen to them now and I won't name names, but they're great. And I do kind of believe that you could teach somebody how to be a DJ, follow a clock, like, keep a break short, all that kind of stuff. You can't teach someone how to be cool and passionate about music and have something to say that anybody would kind of care about.
0:44:58 - Mike: One of the things I had to say to Zane was, you can't help these people. Like, you thinking that you can teach them would be like Michael Jordan teaching your son how to play basketball and shouting at him because he can't dunk. I was an okay DJ, but I know what it's like to struggle, and I know what it's like to need notes, and I know what it's like to get notes. You have to leave these people alone and just don't even talk to them.
0:45:22 - Mike: We'll see kind of who can actually learn this. Everybody wants to be great, but if you don't sort of teach people what makes people want to tune in and what makes people want to tune out and now I realize we didn't have that at JPZ. We really didn't. Maybe it was because everybody wanted to be Bob Costas. Like, everybody really wanted to be on the mic. And it's just like to go back to Gigi and ERR, they were so good without even trying.
0:45:48 - Mike: But, like, learning, having to teach people how to talk on the radio, who kind of had never done it before, but were kind of cool and had something to say, that was a gig. I loved that part of the job. Yeah. Beats one. During that era, from like, 2016 to 2019, it was the most fun I've had in my career. A lot of those shows are still on demand on that service, and there are some great, great shows that we made there.
0:46:12 - JAG: And so now Seattle. Amazon comes calling. How does that go?
0:46:14 - Mike: I always wanted to get back to Seattle. The gig that I have isn't so much being, like, the program director of a streaming service. It's a big company. The sort of program director job is split up about five or six different ways. I always kind of say that the gig that I have is kind of like being kind of the lead of all the music directors. And I love that off air MD, which I think again. Kids, ask your parents.
0:46:38 - Mike: There used to be off air music directors.
0:46:41 - JAG: Yeah.
0:46:41 - Mike: Those are the best gigs I ever had. I just loved those moments in my life. And so now I really get to think about programming music. And the great thing about streaming, when I was at MTV Networks, there had been a thing again where there were still people around who had launched MTV and they were really careful to let you know that you missed all the good shit. Yeah, always. And so, I kind of feel like streaming is still pretty new and the rules are kind of still being written. There are a lot of things that are really different than radio.
0:47:13 - Mike: For a start, our customers or subscribers. They're not going to probably cancel their subscription because there's a Latin music song on the all-hits kind of playlist. If anything, they'll just skip it and go to the next song. Or they'll go to another station or playlist, and those are our stations and playlists. They're not punching out and going to the competition. So that sort of scarcity mentality, that kind of fear of we can never have anybody tune out in kind of this world. It's more like let them skip. They pay to skip. If they don't like something, why shouldn't they skip it?
0:47:47 - Mike: You can see the Gen Z customers. The extent to which they skip would just make you want to quit your job.
0:47:57 - JAG: If you've ever been in a car with one of them.
0:47:57 - Mike: Yeah. No, totally. 100%. And they kind of skip to ad. They sort of hack our programming to just get stuff into their library. So it's like, skip, skip, ad, skip, ad, skip, skip, skip, ad.
0:48:08 - JAG: Wow.
0:48:08 - Mike: Yeah. It's just a new kind of customer behavior, but it changes the entire dynamic of how to kind of think about putting music together for the customers when it's not just like, well, KUBE's pretty big and everybody's here and kind of new music is tuned out. It's kind of the opposite of that. And it's been super fun and kind of a really great challenge.
0:48:31 - JAG: T Bone, you're teeing me up for something I've been dying to ask this whole podcast. Talk to me about where the music industry is in terms of radio versus streaming right now. And we've talked about this with people in the podcast who still work in radio or have worked in radio. You're kind of at the forefront of having been a successful program director for so long, but now also in your role at Amazon, you're seeing where things are going now here in 2023.
0:48:53 - JAG: Talk to me about radio's relevance and the music industry and where all that sits right now from your eyes.
0:48:59 - Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a simple thing. There's like a virtuous circle with the sort of life cycle of music. Right. It all starts at streaming. Right. The store is going to turn tonight, like kind of Thursday turns into Friday, and all the new music comes out. And all of our programming will be brand new and all of the new music will be in some of our playlist and stations. Right. Like, we reinvent ourselves every Friday when all the new music comes out.
0:49:22 - JAG: Wow.
0:49:22 - Mike: And nobody in Radio thinks that way. Radio might react when there's a new Foo Fighters or when there's a new Adele, but nobody expects it to everyone expects all the music to start out at streaming. And that's like the first sort of bottom quadrant of the circle. And then Radio watches to see what happens, kind of it's streaming. And then if something kicks in, it's streaming. They'll pick it up. Right.
0:49:47 - Mike: And that's the second quadrant of the circle. And it gets to a point where it really stops working for us. Like, it's not new anymore, it's streaming and everything kind of it just sort of falls off a cliff. Right. When the labels are trying to get it to kick in at Radio, they have a trick now that you probably notice where that's when they'll drop a new version of the song with, like, Demi Lovato on the vocal.
0:50:08 - JAG: A featured artist remix. Yeah, exactly.
0:50:11 - Mike: It's all to get the kind of streaming to be fresh again while it goes on a radio. And then the fourth quadrant is when something comes all the way home. And then it's just like streaming getting played on the radio. It's like, literally bigger than it's ever been. And that's like the Bad Bunny, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift kind of territory. Not everything gets there, but it's really hard and it's kind of complimentary. But it's based on the fact that literally no one expects Radio to play new music. And I would posit that probably no one in that audience really expects to hear it that much.
0:50:46 - JAG: Well, I'm sure you've seen all the numbers. Talk formats are doing well, news, talk and sports as compared to music. And you're talking about Gen Z and people who did not come up listening to the radio like you and I did. How does music radio stay relevant at this point?
0:51:00 - Mike: I mean, it might be too late. I don't know. The challenge is that I don't think they can get back to where they would need to be to kind of push the reset button. That's kind of what I worry about, is that when you have young customers who crave novelty and like the “new new” and you're built on like, well, we have one or two slots a week. There's no kind of flipping a switch on that. There's no way to kind of deliver on the expectations.
0:51:32 - Mike: I think it has a role, but it's certainly, like a diminished one. And I just kind of worry if there has been just too many decades of kind of cost cutting neglect yeah. And just no innovation. Right. What was the last new music format at Radio? I mean, it might have been rhythm crossover or alternative or AA or like.
0:51:53 - JAG: The hip hop throwback type stations.
0:51:57 - Mike: Maybe a little bit, but yeah, that's just like oldies with hip hop. It's literally, like, kind of here's an oldies format, but instead of the Beach Boys. It's got Tupac and Dre and LL on it. Not exactly innovative. And now kind of all the stuff that's going on with AI and large language models and kind of machine learning, I really do feel like this is going to be the most disruptive technology since file sharing 20 years ago. It's just going to make it sort of easier than ever for kind of the robots to kind of take over. And I was actually just texting with Hollywood Hal about this.
0:52:32 - Mike: On the one hand, I worry that the only way for the radio has left to meet its margins is to turn it all over to the robots.
0:52:39 - JAG: Yeah.
0:52:40 - Mike: And then kind of if you have artificial intelligence creating all the music logs, which, by the way, artificial intelligence is going to create all the music logs.
0:52:49 - JAG: Right.
0:52:49 - Mike: And then you have voice modeling, so that artificial intelligence is basically doing all the DJ shifts, and by the way, voice modeling will make it so that kind of artificial intelligence can do all the DJ shifts.
0:53:01 - JAG: The timestamp that we're recording this on April 27, and sure, by the time this air is probably in the fall, it's going to be even more proliferating everywhere than it is at this point.
0:53:10 - Mike: So, yeah, I don't really care what a lot of work you're in. I had a friend who I was just hanging out with who's a lawyer, and I was just showing him what large language models are going to mean for contracts and boilerplate templates and all that stuff, and it's just like, lawyers are like, that's never going to be the same again. If you're kind of not tapping into what LLMs mean for kind of the future of work, probably should.
0:53:33 - Mike: I kind of always joke that I believe eventually kind of artificial intelligence is going to make me obsolete. I used to think that it was going to be safely after I was retirement age and all that, but I think it's really like if people aren't thinking about it, especially in music and radio and especially students, if you're not thinking about kind of what the actual need for kind of humans is going to be. In a world where more and more of the tactical work just gets turned over to machines, it's not going to be kind of a fun time to be trying to have a career.
0:54:07 - JAG: That's fair. I don't want to leave it on "the robots are all taking over."
0:54:12 - Mike: Robots are all taking over. They are.
0:54:15 - JAG: So let me ask you this final question. Give me a funny story or two. If you could think from your time at JPZ, you've got 15 years of alumni that you've interacted with, so give when you were there. Give me a funny story or two that comes to mind.
0:54:27 - Mike: Most of my funny ha ha stories involve the accidental airing of curse words, and usually they involve E Double R. If there is a more explicit sentence than the one that I will not repeat, but that I unwittingly helped E Double R air when he was doing The Zappy Hour. I think he was doing he had a bit called the Nude Line, and he asked for my help cleaning something. And instead I inadvertently aired it. Like the dirtiest part I aired instead.
0:54:55 - JAG: This was of a listener call or?
0:54:57 - Mike: This was of a listener call, and it was, like, filthy. Had probably six of the seven words in it.
0:55:03 - JAG: Tell me off the air when we're done recording.
0:55:05 - Mike: Yeah, totally. But that kind of made me remember E Double R. I was on before him. He was doing the Zappy Hour, like four to seven on Fridays. That was his show. I must have been filling in for somebody. I was doing one to four and E Double R rolls in at, like, whatever, 4:06, after I've run his top of the hour and segued the first couple of records. And he's like, T Bone, man, sounding so good today. I was like, listening to your entire shift. I'm like, oh, great, E Double R. He's like, And I don't mind telling you, I was doing The Nasty.
0:55:39 - Mike: I like, okay, later, E-Dubs. Thanks for the thanks for the visual. Actually, yeah, that might actually be the highlight. Happy Dave name checking me was pretty good, but E Double R doing The Nasty to my Friday one to four shift was that's pretty high praise. Indeed.
0:55:53 - JAG: All right, little afternoon delight. Mike Tierney, T-Bone, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. It was really great hearing all the stories you have. Congratulations on all your success. And on behalf of the alumni, thanks for all you've done and continue to do for us.
0:56:05 - Mike: Jag, seriously, I can't thank you enough. This has been absolutely amazing. Catching up, things I remember, things that I missed, hearing, kind of, whether it's Kendall B or Dion Summers or like, some of the people came after me and catching up on chapters of the station's history that I didn't know about. It's been really fun. So thanks for the opportunity to do this and thanks for working so hard on this pod.
0:56:25 - JAG: I appreciate that. Thank you.