AM Radio: Solid Gold

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1:01podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Everybody, we have a big announcement, but Josh, I think you need to do your traditional tour announcement. There we go. That means it's tour time, everybody. We took off 2025 because it just felt like the right thing to do, but we are hitting the road again next year, and we are super excited. Yes. Get this. So we're going to start hitting the road in January, starting January 27th at the Paramount Theater in Denver. The next day we'll be at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. And on January 29th, we'll be back to our beloved Sketch Fest at the Sidney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, CA.

1:40That's right. That's our January run. And then in April, we're going to hit the Midwest and we're going to some cities we haven't been to yet. And I'm super excited because on April 16th, we'll be in Madison, Wisconsin at the Orpheum Theater. On the 17th, we'll be back in Chicago at the Chicago Auditorium, a city we love. And then to my wife's hometown, finally, April 18th in Akron, Ohio at the Goodyear Theater. That's right. And get this, for the January leg, tickets are on sale now. And we're actually running a presale today, November 18th. You can use our code SYSKLIVE to get tickets early.

2:18Go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com. It'll have all the tickets and info that you need. and you can buy Sketchfest tickets right now as well. That's right. Sketchfest on sale the 16th of November. There's no pre-sale on that one. General on sale is happening as we speak. That's right. So we'll see you guys in 2026. We're really excited to get back out there. We hope you're excited too. If you're not, just fake it when you see us. That's right. And pay attention, the Great White North, because there is more to come this summer. That's right. So we'll see you soon. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

3:03Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we're just kicking it old school, real mellow style, which is what I understand all the kids say today. That's right. And hey, before we get going, this is probably the perfect episode to mention, that our episode on how vinyl works that was released on vinyl is being reprinted because that thing sold out. And I think people would love to have one of these things for Christmas. Yeah, we're releasing it just in time for the holidays. As a matter of fact, it's coming out on Black Friday, November 28th this year, which also happens to be record store day, from what I understand.

3:44And our friends at Born Losers Records put this out again. They did the first one, did a magnificent job, of course. And they printed 300 red and black marble records that are just beautiful. Those are available online at syskvinyl.com. Yeah. And then for the actual record store where you have to leave your home, probably put on a cap because it's late November. Give you a coat. Go down to your local indie record store. Yeah. Do it. There might be a chance that they have one of the 300 gold royalty records. Those are exclusives for record stores. Well, you can bet your boopie I'll be going to my local record store and supporting ourselves by buying one.

4:30That's awesome. You should draw more people by just spending like a full day there and telling everyone. Oh, yeah. Maybe I could work something out with Wuck Street here in town. I can go sit up there and those guys can not talk to me. We'll see if we can get a cutout of you, too, to stand behind you while you sit there. That's great. I'm really excited this is back out, though, because people really seem to enjoy it. And what is it again? SYSKVinyl.com? That's right. Awesome. And thanks again to our friends at Born Losers. You guys are great. Yeah, they're the best. Yeah, they are. Okay, Chuck.

5:04So, yeah, this is a really good episode to shout out records because we're talking about AM Radio. And we talked a little bit about it in our beautiful music short stuff, a.k.a. BM. That's right. I'll never get over. But there's a lot more to AM radio. And in fact, I didn't realize this. Julia helped us with this one. And I didn't realize before that AM broadcasting basically set the standards for all sorts of different things, like how news is presented, soap operas, all sorts of different stuff that lasted for decades and decades and decades. It all started with AM radio because ultimately it was the very first form of mass communication that was not printed.

5:53Yeah. I mean, top 40 radios started on AM, which is, I mean, I think these days the kids, if they hear of AM radio, probably either don't know what it is or may not if they have, as we'll see, a newer model car, especially EV, may not even have AM radio or a radio in their house, like a transistor radio or something or receiver. But they may think AM radio is as like, you know, news talk, sports talk, maybe some foreign language stations, maybe some if they're driving through a rural community, some like weird farm report or something that they've never heard. I remember that. And that's that's kind of what AM radio became.

6:32But it launched top 40. It was the up until like 1978. It beat FM and FM had been around since what, like the 30s? Yeah, it had. And everybody said, nope, we're really happy with AM and stuck with it even after FM came around for quite a while. But let's talk about this because you hit on some really good points and we're going to touch on all of those. But let's start at the very, very beginning when AM radio really started to come around. Because people had been messing with AM broadcasting since the very early 1900s. There were some inventions that all kind of came together around the same time.

7:14And I do not understand how this could possibly happen. But putting these disparate inventions together and figuring out how to broadcast radio waves that have encoded sound in them is just, I mean, hats off. That's like mad genius stuff. But that's what happened in the very early 1900s. Yeah, there were people broadcasting AM signals at the time. And, you know, the only people that had these AM receivers that could listen were like soldiers at sea or something like that. This is before they made it into the homes of Americans. That paused during World War I because they said, hey, we can't have you broadcasting your daughter playing violin, even though our soldiers love it, that are out at sea.

7:57We need to kind of lock this down for now. But starting in about 1920, in fact, exactly 1920, was when commercial broadcast AM radio started with KDKA Pittsburgh. Yeah, that was the very first one. I think that they read the results of the Warren Harding election. I can't remember the other guy's name. Somebody Cox. Warren Harding obviously won. But right after that, I mean, like, this was so clearly a groundbreaking medium. um yeah it was basically for the people in the 1920s it was what the what people in the early 90s experienced with internet yeah it was almost like like holy cow i can't like you can't even begin to imagine all the different ways that this thing is going to change the world you just know it's going to change the world that's kind of what happened and so right after that first broadcast um it just exploded all over the world and one reason why it exploded all over the world is because the person who's considered the father of radio, Guglielmo Marconi, he set up companies everywhere.

9:02So very quickly, radio stations started to develop in just a year or two after KDKA went on the air. I'm, by the way, a little mad at you because ever since you sent me the Marconi tidbit this morning, I cannot get... We built the city on rock and roll out of my head. How? Why? That's odd. Marconi played the mamba. Oh, I never knew this. Listen to the radio. I got you. Yeah. And I mean, I hate that song so much. And I can't get it out of my head. All because I just saw the word Marconi typed in an email. I always thought, seriously, it was some gibberish I had in my head. I knew it wasn't right, but it was like, and Anale says La Bamba.

9:46Something like that. I had no idea Marconi was name checked. But that's appropriate. Yeah. I'm not really mad at you. But boy, that thing really gets rooted in your head pretty well. But like you said, by the early 1920s, everybody was on board in 1922. In fact, AT &T had the first radio network built when they linked 38 radio stations by phone lines and could broadcast, you know, W.E.A.F. out of New York all around the country. So like people, it was it was literally like you said, like the Internet, it was American life before and life after as far as AM radio. Well put. Well put. And not just American life, too.

10:25Like this, like I said, it spread around the world very quickly. The BBC started broadcasting in 1922. Australia's first radio station, 2SB, which is now ABC Sydney, they started in 1923. Canada got its first one in 1932, XWA out of Montreal. y 'all. It was just like the Internet. It's not like it was just one country. It was everybody who got involved because it was a humanity altering invention. Yeah, for sure. By the late 1920s, the major networks had launched. And, you know, these were radio networks, NBC and CBS. These were international broadcasts from the United States all over the world.

11:08and you know they worked by you know you had to have a receiver so early on uh you know vacuum tubes um worked with radio receivers connected to loudspeakers and that's how you could hear things later on transistor radios came along and that's what really changed the game because that's when it was like tvs for the olds uh the young people were had these little radios in their pocket and then they started you know uh putting radios in cars but it's funny to think about a time when like, yeah, TV is outdated and we want AM radio in our pocket. And then it came roaring back eventually. Thanks to LA Law.

11:46You mentioned something that I think is worth calling out too. You mentioned that there's a speaker that converts that sound signal back into actual acoustic sound. They weren't headphones, they were speakers. So that meant that early radio was a thing that the family gathered around. It was a social activity, listening to all the stuff that was on the radio, which is really important because, I mean, that's definitely become fragmented and fractured today as, you know, personal media has become like more and more available. But that was like whatever was on the radio right then, probably whatever your parents wanted to listen to, that's what the family was listening to.

12:25Yeah, for better or worse. I think by 1930, there were 40 % of U.S. homes had AM receivers. Hopefully most of them had speakers. Otherwise they just sit there and look at it. There were more than 600 radio stations in 1930. Obviously all of them AM. But like we mentioned, FM came along pretty quickly in the 1930s and had a better sound. But, you know, it just didn't take over until 1978. I think by 1940 even, 83 % of the households in America, I mean, that's really massive coverage, had AM radio signals being broadcast through their homes. Yeah. And you said, I mean, FM was around, but people said, no, we're sticking with AM.

13:10One of the big reasons is because the FM receiver needs more power because of the way FM radio is pumped out. And that was a big thing for a long time. That was one reason people stuck around with AM. But there's definitely an affection that developed for AM radio over the years. Yeah. There's also something called FM drift. Like, you know, if you're driving around listening to an FM station, it can kind of go in and out, you know, to the left or to the right. I guess you could kind of turn your dial a little bit and try and dial it back in. But that was an issue. And we'll talk about some of the AM radio issues.

13:47But if you're looking at the dial, AM, according to the FCC, AM waves have to be broadcast on frequencies between 535 megahertz and 1.7. And FM is from 88 to 108. Sounds legit. That's right. Let's check out based on the radio call signs I'm familiar with. Do you ever listen to AM radio anymore? Yeah, I listened to the Bulldogs game on the way home from Yumi's parents' house on Saturday. Wasn't that nice? The ball game or listening to the radio? Listening to a sports broadcast on the radio. Yes, I used to do that in college. I can't remember the sportscaster's name, the legendary one for Georgia with the hobnail boot.

14:35Yeah, yeah. Larry Munson. Larry Munson. And yeah, back in college, I would listen to him and watch the game. Yeah. Like on mute and hopefully they would sync up. Yeah, that was the preferred method. But I still love and it doesn't happen a lot because, you know, I watch the game on TV generally. But if I'm traveling like you were just talking about or I remember when I built, we couldn't afford to build like to get a fence company to build our fence 20 years ago. So I built our privacy fence like picket by picket over the course of two months. Oh, wow. And a lot of that was spent with me listening to Georgia Bulldogs on the radio.

15:16I mean, it was pre-podcast even. And it's just it's still, to me, a great way to catch a game. For sure. Not even nostalgia wise. Like it really is a great way to listen to catch a game. Oh, yeah. The play calling is like you have to be really good. There's no assist there. You're telling everybody what's going on, you know? Yeah. I say we take a break because we're getting nostalgic already. What do you think? Yeah, I'm going to park that and we'll stick to the facts. Okay, baby. We're taking a break, everybody. We'll be right back.

16:00New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link.

16:33Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

17:08This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:45So if we're talking the golden age of radio as a whole, that was about a three to four decade period from the 20s through the mid 50s or so. That was when AM radio starred. We'll also talk a little bit later about sort of the 70s period when AM radio music was like, you know, the mellow gold stuff was a big deal. But that, you know, that first decade of radio ushered in, you know, it was blowing people's minds. Like they had never heard sometimes any of this stuff or certainly had not heard any of this stuff live, like a live broadcast. And speaking of sports, in 1921, over about 125 ,000 square miles from where it broadcasts out of Jersey City, New Jersey, people listened to the heavyweight boxing championship.

18:34And I can't imagine what that was like to hear a sports broadcast like that for the first time as it happened. Well, hopefully the commentator knew what he was doing, too. And there weren't like long pauses like the boom goes the dynamite guy. One of them's punching another one repeatedly. Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention Carpentier just went down. That's right. One of the other things that we'll see about AM radio to Chuck is that it's it was long considered a public good so that the government had like a little more willingness to be like, no, you can say this. You can't say that. And you have to do this.

19:11One of the reasons why is because it was very quickly used to kind of spread public information like presidents took to it very quickly. Remember I said that KDKA announced the results of the Harding election. Within just a couple of years, Warren Harding was using it to talk to America. And FDR was probably the most famous president who used the radio to talk to America. He had a series of just informal speeches basically called fireside chats that really made a lot of the country just fall in love with him. But it was very clear early on just how much influence it could have on people's political opinions.

19:51Well, and it was a lot of people the first time they ever heard the president's voice speak. Is that what he sounds like? Yeah. It wasn't around during Lincoln because everyone would have been like, really? But yeah, there was definitely public good, and we'll dive into that a little bit, along with tons of entertainment. You know, it was basically like 15 minute chunks for a long, long time of all over the map variety style stuff, kind of reminiscent of vaudeville. Like there were hosts of shows, but the DJ thing didn't come along till much later. So you had like advice shows and news shows and obviously comedy stuff, game shows, you know, radio dramas were a big, big deal.

20:33Yeah, that's where soap operas came from, too. They were broadcast almost exclusively with women as their target audience. And at the time, this is just post-World War I, where women had helped the war effort in the factories. The men came back and they were like, get back in the house. And women were stuck in the house all day. So these radio dramas were broadcast to them. And they were almost exclusively sponsored by cleaning product companies. That's right. So they became known as soap operas. and one of the longer lasting soap operas of all time actually made the jump successfully from radio to TV.

21:11Which one? That was Guiding Light. No way. Yeah, it started in 1937 on the radio and was finally canceled in 2009 on TV. It was 72 years of Guiding Light. Every weekday, too. I had a very, very brief foray into soap operas. I guess it was in college or something. I don't know why, but I got hooked for, I mean, not too long, but I was, I was hooked. I was like, these things are stupid. I was like, yeah, but what happens? Yeah. The same thing happened to me again in college too. Um, and I cannot remember the name of it, but it was just off the chain. I know there was a main character named Marlena and she was possessed by the devil at one point.

21:52Someone will remember. Yeah, certainly. That's like a very famous plot line. Um, that was going on when I was hooked on them. And then I got hooked on them enough that I would switch channels during ads and see what was on other soap operas. And on General Hospital once, there was a scene where this couple was in bed and they did such a poor job of editing that they left in the director saying, cut, and the two actors roll out of bed. I'll never forget it. It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen on television. They're like, the sheets are pulled up, you know, to their bare skin. Right.

22:27And then they roll out of bed and they have on like blue jeans. Yeah. I don't remember what they were wearing or anything, but yeah, I'm sure it was just like that. That's really funny. It was. Oh God, to have that time again where you could just like maybe sort of get hooked on a soap for no reason. Yeah, for sure. Religion was also a big deal early on AM radio. All of a sudden evangelists could broadcast far and wide from what they called the electric pulpit. And they became like, you know, big time personalities and stars during the Depression era. Yeah, one of the first people that the question of freedom of speech was raised around was Father Charles Coughlin, who was a bigoted hate speech Catholic priest who really kind of pushed the envelope, you could say.

23:12I think he said the Nazis didn't go far enough during Kristallnacht, like he was that kind of guy. Wow. So he definitely rose to prominence during this time. On the lighter side, one of the most popular long-running shows was the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show. Yeah. Which was a ventriloquist act on the radio. Yeah. I mean, the jokes still work, but it's definitely a visual medium. For sure. But he managed to make it, like, super radio-friendly, and it was super popular. You said that the golden age of radio ended around the 1962. And we should say this was, this depends on your perspective.

23:57Because a lot of people say, nope, golden age of radio went all the way to the 70s. This would be like the first wave of golden age radio where it wasn't music. It was like dramas, scripted comedies, like sports, all this stuff. Like what TV is today? Right. This was the first iteration of radio, and it was all AM radio. But there was a year, 1962, when two shows were canceled, two long-running shows, and people point to their cancellation as essentially the end of that era. What were those? Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Okay. It was about an insurance fraud investigator. Sounds like true crime.

24:36It is. It sounds interesting. Each episode was a flashback of him going over the line items for his expense report for that particular case. And then each line item would kind of bring up like a new scene. Pretty interesting. The radio network guy is like, can he kill his lover? And then suspense was another one. And it sounds like it was a little bit of a predecessor to like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and maybe The Twilight Zone here or there. and both of those were really well-produced shows and they got canceled the same year and everybody said, that's it. That's the end of the golden age and they spat on the floor.

25:15Well, you mentioned the public good starting in the 1920s to jump back a little bit. You know, like you mentioned president speaking, inaugural addresses were being broadcast and the government really realized, hey, like we have a sort of a public service we need to enact when we're sharing information, because we got to get the word out about stuff sometimes. And this is the way to do it. So the USDA radio service began talking to farmers in 1926. The U.S. Bureau of Home Economics had a chat program they launched, I believe in the same year, where they could talk about like, you know, any emergencies happening in regards to kids, like health and safety stuff, like a new disease going around that your kid maybe should get vaccinated against, stuff like that.

26:02The company's newfangled polio. But by the end of the 1920s, they were like, hey, there's a limited bandwidth and people are getting political messages out. And we need to make sure that everyone in America is getting sort of equal access to these messages. So, you know, no particular message gets out more than any other. And that's where the Fairness Doctrine came about, right? Yeah, we talked about that in the presidential debates episode, but I think it deserves its own episode. It's so controversial. But basically, the Fairness Doctrine is what I was talking about earlier when I said the government wasn't shy about getting involved in regulating radio because of what you just said.

26:44Like, you can't just use radio at the time. You couldn't to just put out one, say, specific political viewpoint. So the Fairness Doctrine said you have to have equal time when you're talking about political matters. You have to give equal time to both opposing viewpoints. It also said some other stuff, too, that I thought was pretty cool. It made sure that commercial concerns did not eclipse social ones. So you couldn't screw over the public for your own bottom line, which is just refreshing these days. The radio served the public good. and that you have like a kind of public programming that's essentially like in addition to all of the, you know, ventriloquist acts and soap operas and all that, you have like stuff that makes people, helps people be more informed citizens.