This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
There we go, another one of The Gary and Shannon Show.
Weekend fixes opportunity for us to talk about stuff that we didn't get to during the rest of the week, because you know, twenty hours is not enough out of five days for us to squeeze in everything that we need to talk about.
I like seeing us on the weekends. This is nice. It's very casual, wearing our pajamas. We've got a cup of coffee, fireball.
I only wear slippers in my house on a Saturday morning. That's the only time, and it's even then. It's only maybe a couple.
Of What kind of slippers are we talking about?
The old like literally like look like grandpa slippers, brown suede.
Those are the way to do it. I have those two with the wool inside. Yeah, I've got two pairs, but.
I can only do it for about ten minutes. My feet gets super hot. Yeah, I got hot feet.
You get clammy feet with all that hair.
Oh my toes, my toes get super hot. Yeah.
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Is that the word You wouldn't put Chewbacca in a moccasin? Would you?
No need? No need?
So you're saying I have Chewbacca feet is what you're getting it today. I thought this was kind of an interesting discussion. There has been a lot of talk. It actually was prompted by earlier in the week the stories about how the administration was going to start collecting payments on student loans.
Again.
Remember during COVID, the administration did away with student loans and or at least you didn't have to pay them, but they didn't wipe them out, or tried unsuccessfully to wipe them out. And I thought about you and I both went to Chico State. We detailed that in one of the other stories. But what was it that prompted us to go to college?
Like what I mean?
Because in this industry, now looking at it, having worked in it for a long time, I don't think a college degree is necessary to work it.
I don't know either.
But when we were growing up. It's funny my husband's older than I am. When he was growing up, college was not a conversation in his house. In my house at that time, it was the only conversation. It was absolutely, you're going to college. And I remember as my brother, who was not academically inclined, could fix or put together any puzzle or fix anything, rebuilding a transmission when he was like sixteen years old. He remarkable mind, but just
not an academically inclined person. Hated it, always hated school. And I remember it was this great conversation, not a great conversation, It was a conversation that kind of dominated the house of like is Andy even gonna graduate high school? It was like a whole thing, and he's not going to go to college. And it was all about because my parents don't have a lot of money, so it
was all about out getting a scholarship. My dad always tried to have us play sports, and that was the way in his mind that we were going to get sports colorship. And we were both awful athletes, awful. But I love that raise optimism, raise optimism. Bless his heart, Oh my goodness. But yeah, yeah, like when when my arm came out of the socket playing around with my brother when I was little, and Andy popped my arm back in the socket. They were like, we've got a
doctor on our hands, you know. But anyway, when so, it was a big deal when my brother didn't go to college and then he went to a JC and that was kind of like, okay, it kind of mollified my parents a little bit. And then he that wasn't his thing, and it ended up going to trade school route, which is the route he you know, he always should have gone, and I think that they knew that.
Too, and has his successful career.
And has the successful he has his own plumbing business and everything. It was a roundabout way of getting there. But he always had work. If you could work with your hands, you'll always have work, and he can. But for me, there was no option. There was no like if you don't go to college, than what it was, you're going to college, just where And it was never a where do you want to go to college conversation? I mean, yes, we did tour some of the colleges
state schools in California. The idea of going to some place like Boston, which was my dream, was a dream like there was no chance in holl my parents had the money or were going to spend the money to send me someplace that was like a boutique degree.
I didn't.
Did you ever even think of adjoining states like university and nevatt Areno or Oregon State or any too expensive?
It was too expensive because I we weren't. We weren't going to be capable for getting financial aid. But we are, you know at least.
Right, you were in that middle zone, right, Yeah, I was in the same I was in the same boat.
Yeah.
Did both of your parents go to both of your parents went to college?
Yeah, so I was in that same boat. Both parents went to college. I had an old two older sisters, and they had both gone to college. So by the time I as a junior in high school and that conversation gets ramped up, like you, there wasn't a conversation. It wasn't a maybe you take a gap year and you travel, you know, travel through the andes or something like that.
No, No, no, it was it was where you were going to go.
And to your point, also tempered expectations about where what was possible because at the time they had my parents have been paying for both of my sisters to be in college. So by the time I got there, my oldest sister had just graduated college. So then now they're going to be paying for two people to be going to college. So it had to be a state school. I didn't even I didn't bother applying at any UC's
or anywhere out of state, like you said. So I applied to San Francisco State because it was close, and Chico State, and that's it. That was, that was Those were the only two. I just figured I would get in. I had good grades that the time. There was very little problem. I didn't have an expectation that I wouldn't get in.
I looked at San Diego State Long Beach, San Francisco State, and Chico and San Diego State. There was something about it. I knew I would just end up in a gutter, like it was the party school more than Chico at that year at that time, and I was like I went to visit and I was like, oh, hell no, Like this is too beautiful.
That's all.
It's such a mature thing to be able to know, well eighteen or even.
More mature was. I realized that the classes were super impacted in every major. So it was taking everybody six years to get out of San Diego State at the time, and I was driven up, driven enough to be like, I want to graduate in four years. I want to get out there. I want to make money.
How did you choose then?
I don't remember what they changed it to, But when I graduated, the degree I have is Information and Communication Studies, same thing with a concentration in media art.
Yeah, same thing.
Okay, why that? Well, how did you choose that?
I have no idea. I have no idea. I went in as a police sign major, took my first polypside class and realized I didn't want to listen to other people's politics for four years, that that was not something I was interested in because I kind of thought I was thinking about law school at the time. But who knows what they want to do when they're eighteen years old. I mean, and I got a job at the radio station when I was nineteen, and I changed my major
to communications because I liked the radio station. I didn't know that that was going to be my future, but I liked it there.
Not the campus radio station, no, yeah, the local one. I knew that that that I wanted to do something in radio or TV. Felt completely out of love with television pretty quickly. Yeah, because you do those things where you do internships or you do a shadow day where you follow somebody around, and those I don't know if it was the was local TV in Chico, I mean, because they had a couple three four TV stations at the time.
It was so cutthroat.
Yeah, the young, the young reporters who knew that that was just a stop on their way to bigger and better things.
They know what I hated more the fact that you had to be so perfect and beautiful and fake, or that I was so so terribly bad at it. I think it was a real ding dong. I couldn't imagine just putting on a smile for the sake of putting a smile. I mean, it probably would have done me a lot of good to learn that back then and then carry it through life. But you know it just I was awful at it from go, Like even in those those those college courses you'd had where you'd put
on the newscast or whatever. Oh my god, like.
Zero would great to go back and find some of those tapes.
Oh, I already know what they look like, because I never got any better, and yet people still had us do TV stuff and it was always awful.
But like I said at the beginning, I would have if I had the opportunity to say to eighteen year old me what to do in college, I would have said, get a degree in anything else. You don't need the degree in the communication field. That I would have gone with a polysai or something I didn't.
Need to learn about the Communications Act of nineteen forty eight or whatever the hell. My eyes would glaze over and literally all the classes, I learned everything that I needed to know for this job at my job at the radio station.
Right.
And I've said to before blast from the past name from the KFI archive. Jody Becker and I did a discussion at cal State Fullerton one time, and she was younger, She's probably ten years younger than my your age. So she said something to this class and we're talking to one hundred and fifty communications majors there, you know, all in want to get into radio and TV. And she said at the time, do something else. Yeah, not don't get a job in radio TV.
Something you know about so then you can bring that to if you're a communicator. If you're a talker, no one's going to take that away from you, right, So learn something.
That's basically what she said is if you've got it and you're going to get a job on the air or in a TV station or whatever, it's baked into your person, you're not going to exactly exactly.
That's what I keep telling myself every day. I wake up and I go, what are you going to learn? I'm still doing that And how's that going about?
You?
Well?
Uh, what do you mean? Well across from you for four hours?
No, no, no, no, It wouldn't hurt us to go back to school and do something like online or whatever and learn something in some other field. You did the constitutional course.
The other day, right, which was I mean it was it was a lot of refresher. Not fun, but it's a good refresher. It's a good it's a good reminder of some of that stuff that's so covered with cobwebs in your head.
I do this three times a year where I get into a local college and the courses and I look at things and like, what should I do? I can do this? I can I have time to take an online course or in person or whatever.
Well, and my wife going back to nursing school, you know, in her late was an example of how different you approach education after you've been Actually you approach it. You know it, you understand it, you understand that you have you have time management skills, you know how to study, you know how to do the extra work that's required or not required, But would you know, help help your education?
The want to is a lot.
The other thing that came up this week that I thought was interesting because I don't think we've we've spoken about a lot is the use of the word journalist almost as a pejorative or or as an elevated uh status of someone who's a reporter, anchor, news gatherer, whatever word. Because you had George Clooney going after Megan Kelly uh suggesting that she's not a journalist and then her fighting
back against it. And then also a CNN guy was working at the White House was talking about these right wing influencers that have been allowed into the White House Press briefing room that are unabashedly right wing. They talk about their bias, they say that they're biased, but that they they wear their bias on their sleeve. Was basically their their excuse or their explanation, and he asked a couple of them, well, do you actually consider yourself a journalist?
So I thought that was an interesting question because I've never despite working in the business of journalism as a reporter, as an anchor, as a writer, I've never considered myself a journalist.
You spent more time as an anchor and as an entertainer than as a reporter. Is that fair?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Yeah. I never, when I was a reporter, considered myself a journalist. That was always like Walter Cronkite to me. I always thought that those were the serious newspeople. I was a news reporter, but I never considered myself a journalist. I would have never introduced myself. I'm a journalist. I'm a reporter, is what I would say. I still say that, but because because that's really what you are. You're reporting
things you're not. It was never a newspaper journey. That's the other thing I think it goes with newspapers journalism, and the term now is so loose. I remember when I was still in the field, and that's when the blogs were starting, and our bloggers journalists and that was the big thing and should they get press credentials And I think it's a very loose term. Now you go on X and everybody's a journalist.
Everybody's a journalist.
You know, everyone's got their their their news camera right in their hand and they're telling you what they see and they hear. And I used to hate it as we got into it, and now I kind of love it. I kind of love that you're having everyday voices tell you what they see and what they hear and what's going on. And I love going to X for breaking news and getting you know, reports from people that don't consider themselves journalists because I like to hear it like it is.
You know, when canceling people was a big deal for things that they would say. One of the things that we kind of touched on repeatedly, whether we said it directly or not, was the more voices in any instance are are usually better than fewer voices, Yeah, because you have a fuller picture of what is actually.
Always hated a pool reporter and I still do. Yeah, one person in the courtroom or wherever telling you what happened. I hate that because.
You can't it's the thing that that I think bothers me about the use of the term journalists now is it elevates people to a certain to a certain status that they may never have actually earned.
That true, and you.
Are expecting someone who is a journalist, big jay journalist to give unfettered, unbiased just and that's gone now in certain instances. I mean, on our radio station, we have people who are reporters and anchors and news gatherers, but we don't discourage personality. Bias is different than personality. You can have a personality, you can deliver the news. You can deliver the information in a clear, cogent way with personality. But if you're a journalist finger quotes big Jay journalist,
you're not supposed to have any of that stuff. And I think that people use it now. They elevate people that they think are journalists and put a crown on that person and then assume that whatever that person says is absolutely the God's honest truth.
We're humans, we can't do that.
I never had an opinion when I was a reporter. It didn't dawn on me to have an opinion. I mean, part of it was that I was young, but I would I was completely objective. And I remember one time when I started this talk show that means the Sunday morning stuff that you started on this station, and then when you left and I picked it up, and that was such a hard thing to do, of giving my opinion on anything. And I remember being at home and talking to my husband what I was going to talk
about on the show, and I was going through. I was doing it like I would do an expository essay, basically just going through, Okay, here's a topic, and then so and so says this, and so one says this, and this is what's going to happen next. And my husband said to me, what do you think? And I remember that moment because I was like, nobody had ever asked me that before, and it never dawn on me, like what do I think about this? Right?
It just it's not a muscle that you it's not at all at all.
So anyway, now there's no shortage of people telling you what they think.
Listen.
We do the show every day Monday through Friday, nine am to one pm every day. Right after the show, it's packaged as a podcast and you can listen to any segments that you like that you don't like that you missed whatever it was. But then we also do these weekend fixes, so on Saturdays we will drop an extra extra few minutes whatever it is, on whatever topic.
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I don't care however you do it ron. That sounds great, That sounds like fun.
We're running out of steam. Well I hope not.
It's Saturday morning. I got to go out and do stuff.
We'll take your slippers off, put your pants on, and be a man.
Thank you. We'll see you on Monday.
That sounded really weird to put your pants on. You have to know the reference.
That's all. You've been listening to The Gary and Shannon Show.
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app