hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado on the golden eib microphone with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair these were words that uh i heard often throughout the years as a child and later on in teenage and adult life from the great rush limbaugh today it's a profound sadness to report that rush died he died of advanced lung cancer he announced that he had stage four lung cancer last year and like many people afflicted with that illness it's often fatal and unfortunately he slowly declined lost 100 pounds and perished you know uh life takes sometimes i remember when bill buckley william f buckley died and i remember when christopher hitchens died you know when you're an intellectual when you're a person who cares a lot about knowledge what you tend to do is develop a cohort of people you listen to and it doesn't mean you idolize them or believe all the things that they say but it gives you a view into how people with radically different values can view the world and it allows you to better understand the world as a whole and rush was an example of that he was a titan in the conservative movement and spoke for tens of millions of people throughout the last four decades and there are a few people in american society that were as idolized and hated as him i and wherever you sit it is a loss to the global conversation to lose people like that because you no longer get to hear what tens of millions can't say but like to say i remember as a kid i worked at a cat rescue run by a name a lady named judy and it was called the recycle critter rescue i don't know exactly how you recycle a cat but that's what they did and her husband hated cats and so he mostly lived in the garage because the place was actually filled with it was a house filled with cats and judy lived with over 80 of them and adopted them out so he'd sit in the garage chain smoking and oftentimes on the radio it'd be rush limbaugh i must have been about 11 12 years old and i'd listen to his show and many generations of people have similar stories whether their dad was a long-haul trucker or they were working as a mechanic or whatever during the afternoon you'd probably just have it on as background noise and every now and then he'd say something crazy or say something fun like art bell or the rest and commenting on something and always topical to the generation now that form of communication is very quickly fading away uh russia is probably the last of the great am champions he revitalized the uh the networks uh and now with him gone there's not much reason to stay in them they've been replaced by a different type of communication uh and i would argue a better one lex friedman and joe rogan uh and sam harris and all these others the kind of the intellectual dark web for lack of a better term are floating around and each and every one of them not only do they broadcast but they actually listen which is something we tend not to do and they sometimes can actually separate the objective reality from the subjective opinions of the day i enjoyed rush limbaugh not because i agreed with the things he said oftentimes i wouldn't but i enjoyed the bravado i enjoyed the confidence and i enjoyed the fact that he was completely self-made no one gave him anything he just kind of built an empire by himself and everybody prognosticated uh his death they saw in a few years no one will listen anymore he'll be gone and he kept sticking around year after year after year don't believe me take a look at a 60-minute special it's still floating around youtube and i think it was shot in 1990 or 1991 when he was still the new kid on the block and uh they talked about how yeah he's probably only going to be around for a little bit and they had people say by 95 he's gone and he just kept sticking around and he just kept broadcasting with half that brain tied behind his back he had an interesting personal life a lot of ex-wives people in his position often collect uh kids floating around and a lot of shoulder rubbing with various people and he's one of the few people in american history in the broadcast medium that sitting u.s presidents would call into the show i'll never forget years ago when bush was still president george w bush i and he and i think his brother jeb called in and 2007 i believe it was it just said hey let's talk for a little bit rush said okay we got the president on the line hello caller i'm listening uh and also when he was hot back in the early 90s and h.w bush was worried about the rise of ross perot he was trying to bring the republican party back into fray so he invited rush limbaugh to come to the white house and stay in the lincoln bedroom and president h.w bush carried his luggage himself into the lincoln bedroom still didn't work out so well for him i guess that's the police clap moment of the hw presidency uh wherever you sit hate or love uh i'll miss them and uh it's hard to replace shoes like that and it's hard to replace a medium like that but the world goes on and we find new heroes and we find new villains and we find new ways of communicating and listening with each other and in many ways this feels like the end of the era of the radio broadcaster you know it's like that old store video killed the radio star well limbaugh killed the radio star so rest in peace rusty we'll all miss you in our own ways even if we hate you we'll miss you because we don't have you to hate anymore and if we venerate you we'll miss you too for my own part one of the lessons of the limbaugh era is that i firmly believe we as humans are at a very vital point in society where we actually have to fundamentally change the way that we communicate and understand each other russia's world was very simple america was the good guys the world was countries it was us versus the chai comms and before that the russian comms uh you know in it was very black and white and it's tremendously appealing to people that don't want to deal with the complexity it's tremendously appealing to people that have a principles or values based life and as long as i believe in these 12 things it's all going to work out for much of human history having an outlook like that was a benefit because it protected you from getting into the extremes that would usually get you killed excommunicated or burned at the stake and usually they would provide enough value to feed your family and get to the next generation and it gave you some meaning purpose and clarity in life we are living in a post-simplicity culture now where it no longer makes any sense to just have a collection of values because it turns out that there's more to the story as paul harvey used to say that's the rest of the story another famous radio legend and as a consequence we now live in an age where we have to entertain extremely complex ideas on a regular basis because they're being thrust upon us how many of you on a day-to-day basis really think a lot about the nature of consciousness how many of you on a day-to-day basis really think a lot about whether we have free will or not how many of you on a day-to-day basis really think about a reality where human beings are not the most intelligent species on the planet and there's something else that exists there how many of you really think about what is a right versus a privilege versus a responsibility and a duty what does that even mean or what is truly ethical or not the reason why these things are relevant is that we're due for an upgrade in social systems in humanity and as people like the rush limbaugh's die off that comfort that they provided in a simple world view sometimes right sometimes wrong a shield against all that true complexity that the world has that the intellectuals tackle with and often go crazy from is gone and it leaves us all to take a moment of self-reflection and say what's next that's the reason why joe rogan is the most popular podcaster in the world with a larger audience than fox news and cnn combined and his audience rivals that of rush limbaugh because he's not telling you what the world ought to be or what you should believe rather he's just a fellow traveler exploring this complexity giving you access to all these minds you didn't even know existed that's where we're going my industry plays a role in this there are other industries like the ai people and the quantum computer people and the nanotech people and the biotech people that also play a role in this and in the coming decades we're all going to be faced with deep questions which don't have completely satisfying answers and we will see the limbaughs of the future come and try to sell us on simpler times but i don't think anybody's ever going to pull it off the way that he did and it's time for all of us to no longer need these things and to grow up and upgrade ourselves because what's coming is going to be pretty special and if we survive it it will lead to an age we consider to be an unimaginably beneficial to all of us so rest in peace rush i'll miss you i think we all will and it's the end of an era in a certain respect cheers everyone
