A hundred years ago, radio was the new form entertainment that captivated the world. The radio receiver occupied prime real estate in American living rooms and families would make sure that dinner was over and the dishes cleaned before the evening’s entertainment was broadcast to their radio. This was the first Golden Age of Radio.
Television
When TV came along, the radio would lose its place of prominence in the American living room. Radio, due to the advent of the transistor would find a new home in the bedrooms of teenagers and in the dashboard of automobiles. Radio’s original stars would move to the medium of television and radio would give birth to a new type of performer, the Disc Jockey aka the DJ.
It would be a position that didn’t exist before records or radio. It required a new kind of communication skill, one filled with personality and imagination.
Expiring Skills versus Permanent Skills
One of the most popular instructors at West Point was Robert Walter Weir. Weir taught painting and drawing offering this class not to broaden a cadet’s perspective on the world, but because in the 19th century, military officers were expected to draw maps of the battlefields they fought on, and be able to record their topography quickly.
One of Weir’s best students would be Union General Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated Confederate General Robert E. Lee during the Civil War.
Drawing, it turns out, was an expiring skill, as today’s West Point offers classes in mapping software and technology, but no longer in painting and drawing.
Morgan Housel, a partner at The Collaborative Fund and an expert on behavioral finance and history, says that every field has two kinds of skills:
- Expiring skills, which are vital at a given time but prone to diminishing as technology improves and a field evolves.
- Permanent skills, which were as essential 100 years ago as they are today, and will still be 100 years from now.
Is Being a DJ an Expiring Skill?
Over the past month, everyone’s been talking about what artificial intelligence (A.I.), like Futuri’s RadioGPT means for the future of air personalities. Radio owners seem to be excited about A.I. but radio personalities view this new technology with trepidation.
You might be wondering if being an air personality is something that will no longer be relevant and can be replaced by a robot.
If we’re talking about replacing mindless voice tracking, maybe A.I. is an improvement, but if we’re talking about making a human connection, I think not.
Most permanent skills are human-centric, meaning that they are not something a chatbot can duplicate. Sharing of human experiences can only be done by another human. Permanent skills require emotional intelligence which compound over time.
People who spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, will be ones in demand.
The Lesson of Family Feud
The popular TV game show, Family Feud, began airing on ABC in 1976. It would be the personal charm and witty banter of host Richard Dawson that would make the Feud hugely popular with television audiences.
The show continued on after Dawson left, hosted by Ray Combs, Louie Anderson, Richard Karn and John O’Hurley, but it wasn’t until radio star Steve Harvey took over in 2010 that Family Feud saw renewed success. Ratings for the program increased by as much as 40%, and has become the fifth most popular show in syndication being renewed once again through the 2025-2026 season.
By the way, Steve Harvey hosts the #1 syndicated morning radio show in America too.
Personalities like Steve Harvey are not worried about being replaced by artificial intelligence because they have developed a useful and permanent skill in a world that is constantly changing.
Being human is something artificial intelligence will never be.
A lot of people think that a new decade began in 2020, but the reality is, it’s the last year of the current decade. 2021 begins the next decade.
If your job can be replaced by a mathematical equation, a logarithm if you will, consider your future employment to be at risk.
I often wonder if today’s youth would gravitate to the style of radio that attracted me to make radio broadcasting my career for five decades. Would they be attracted to a Dan Ingram, Robert W. Morgan, Dave Maynard, Ron Lundy, The Real Don Steele, Big Ron O’Brien, Larry Lujack or any of the countless other personalities that so influenced me as I was growing up?
AM radio. Mine was a Zenith Royal 50 that came with an ear phone, that allowed me to listen to the Red Sox while in elementary school or to radio stations from far, far away after it was ‘lights out’ and I was supposed to be asleep.
That got me to thinking that maybe a new radio format could be created bringing back deceased personalities like Robert W. Morgan, Dan Ingram, The Real Don Steele, Big Ron O’Brien, Ron Lundy, Larry Lujack among other greats by using the power of artificial intelligence. These incomparable radio personalities would “live again” via talented writers and programmers who would tell them what to say. Can you imagine how it might sound?
In a lot of ways, the future is here, now.
Last week I told you about how our world is exploding with media to the point of over-saturation. Not only are we drowning in a plethora of media, the rate of new ways to communicate keeps accelerating at an unfathomable pace.
I wasn’t at CES 2019. In fact, I’ve never been to CES.
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