Keith Olbermann (55:14)
Oh, so here we go again. As I mentioned, an awesome offhand comment or retweet by plastic woman, Congresswoman Nancy Mace of I Forgot Stupidville has now joined the list of people who have promised to end my career or how I should know that if you Criticize Charlie Kirk, St. Charlie of Kirk, your career is over. All I can say is, madam, take a number. We'll call you when we are ready. I'm still dealing with the other three or four dozen people who have told me in the last 41 years that my career is now over. To our number one story on the Countdown. And good evening and welcome to the end of our careers, or more particularly, the end of my career. No, I'm not retiring. I'm just quoting myself from 1993 and the launch of ESPN2 and the subject of career ending announcements. Career ending announcements. Recently a colleague of mine told me he was done and I had to go through all of the times I have been told I was done. The first One was in 1984. This would be in a previous century that I know to a lot of younger listeners seems like it might as well be 1884. I have told before the story of my limited career in Boston, for which I waited about a year to start and lasted about half as long because I went to work at the wrong place in the wrong city, outside in the wrong suburb of Boston with the wrong boss, where they said, don't make any jokes, And I said, what did you hire me for? And I left very, very quickly. And then they tried to fire me while I was filling out the terms of my contract and staying there until they could get a replacement, and the whole thing went up in flames. And the result of this was that the news director of the station Channel 5 in Boston, a man who actually answered to the name Philip Scribner Balboni, went to the Boston Globe TV sports writer, when they had such things as TV sports writers, and said, oh, it was such a shame about Keith. He was potentially such a major talent. I will not deny that the use of that phrase did inspire me to some degree to get cracking on my career. On the other hand, I didn't work for nearly a year later, as I was taking care of some family business back home and sort of put everything about my own interests on the shelf. Off the record. The general manager of the station I had worked for, a man named James Coppersmith, said to my agent something that made Balboni's statement look like a compliment. Coppersmith said he will never again work in our business. That got me motivated, I believe. I read recently that Coppersmith died. In any event, I worked again in his business. The punchline to this one, and they all have punchlines, is that at some point around 2007, I got an email at MSNBC and the return address was Philip Scribner Balboni. And there was a great email from my old brief news director Boss in Channel 5 in Boston who explained that I had been potentially such a major talent and was quoted on the record as saying that. And now he was saying how he watched Countdown every night and was so proud to have been in there at the start of my career. Not a word about the other part about the oh, potentially such a major talent. I guess he meant it in the past future perfect sense of the I don't know, my grammar education is not what it should be, but he managed to wriggle out of it, never made any reference to it. And the one thing about surviving repeated announcements that your career is over is to never really go back and criticize the people who were wrong about it, because they know they were wrong and your success is the best answer. Nevertheless, this all came up and I thought I'd retell it to you because I had to retell it to a friend who recently told me his career was over. But as I said, that was just the first time that it ever happened in a fully professional setting in 2001. And I was just reading this, I guess about a year ago I came across it somewhere online. I was reading it for a punchline in and of itself. It was a piece in Sports Illustrated by a man named Chris Ballard, I believe. And Chris Ballard wrote an article about my being fired by Fox Sports, which he wrote, as I had resigned from Fox Sports and went on to explain that I did not respond to Sports Illustrated's request by emails and phones for comment. I never received any of them because it never occurred to him that when they fired me and told everybody I had resigned, they cut off my access to my email and my phone. And they said to him when he wanted to talk to me, oh, just, just send him an email, he'll get back to you. And I didn't, and thus he made me look like a jerk. In any event, the article explained in 2001 that having gone through ESPN and now ESP, sort of mini me rival Fox Sports News, that there was nothing left for me to do in the business. I had tried news briefly in 1997 and 1998, and clearly my career in both fields was over. I could not possibly work again in television, in news or in sports. We're now coming up next year, if I get to it. What? Well, it's been 23, 24 years. Okay. I recently saw this article and was inspired to look for it online because Chris Ballard was retiring from Sports Illustrated and I'm still here. One question that came up as I was retelling the story of my various career ending moments that did not, in fact, end my career, from my friend who's very worried about this, was how I managed not to have my career. And when Ballard's premise was not completely wrong, he was certainly looking at what he thought happened in television. He was not the TV sports writer for Sports Illustrated for very long. It was not a natural subject for him. Most people who did this job thought that it involved simply watching sports on TV and then writing what they thought, as opposed to understanding an industry or its complexities or its parameters or its sort of weird voodoo customs. In any event, I said, well, look, it's not very difficult to survive these things. You just have to acknowledge that perhaps your next job, after some sort of cataclysmic departure from an ESPN or Fox Sports or an MSNBC or wherever else, perhaps it's not gonna pay you quite as much as the last one did. And so when my agent and I began to look around for more work in 2001, and I might add that after FOX fired me, they had to pay me for another eight months at $100,000 a year. And if you can' survive on a job that requires you to do nothing for eight months and pays you $800,000 that you can salt away, if you can't survive on that and enjoy your life while you're doing it, you're doing things wrong. In any event, what I said was just the next job. Just take a job that allows you to do what you can do and do it well, and. And you will succeed in it. You have talent, a lot of other people don't. You will be low cost. So they're much more likely to overlook anything that happened in. And most importantly, if it is successful, you can then hold them up on the second contract negotiation. So I went first to CNN after the Fox Sports Experience started to work for them for not a lot of money. And although they did not ultimately exercise this, they signed me to a contract to do the 8pm show on CNN for a certain large amount of money. And there were two finalists. They wanted us lined up in advance, and they made the clever decision to choose Connie Chung instead of me. Me. But they had sort of reauthorized me. They had reestablished me by. It was well known within the industry that I was the runner up for the job at 8 o'. Clock. And within six months of them saying, nah, we think Connie's the right person to lead us into the Future here. Within six months of that, I was doing the 8 o' clock show on MSNBC for in fact, twice what the agreement had been at cnn. And within three years they'd signed me to a new deal that was worth three times that more than I had ever made in my life. Life. So the key thing to it is to be flexible financially. You sock them for the money while you're successful. And then, by the way, once again, if you can't succeed in the business, if you can't succeed in life, when you have received in one year anything north of $3 million in one year, $4 million, maybe I forget what the actual financial floor is, but if you've made that much money in one year and can't live basically off that and simply interest from the bank that that will provide you. If you can't do that, you must have some sort of addiction to drugs because guess what? You can go a long way still. I mean, yeah, it's true. $4 million isn't what it used to be, but guess what, it is now. It's still really good. I never fail to see one of these articles in which somebody who's lost a job, paying in and, you know, the tens of millions of dollars, and it's like, well, he's finished now. It's like, yes, he's finished now. He can sit on a beach, he can hire somebody to do his exercise for him. He can sit on a beach and, and, and eat the money and it won't make a difference. He doesn't have to do it again in any event. So the pattern here that I have described already has continued in subsequent years, even after I came back from the dead after my experience in Boston, where I was dubbed the Dark Prince of T and was winning awards in Los Angeles the next year. Although, to be fair, after that quote in 1984 about how I was potentially a great talent, I did get down to about my last hundred dollars in the bank. And actually I actually had to borrow money from my dear sister to get on the bus to take me to the airport in New York so I could take the flight to Los Angeles to start my job there. That's how close I cut it another week, and I would have been borrowing money for food. That's where was. But you have to be willing to walk that tightrope to pull this off, in any event. So that was. Boston became the Los Angeles job. And the Los Angeles job, when they eliminated that, it's like, well, his career is over now. The next job was espn. ESPN led to NBC. When that didn't work out, and I pushed to get out of there, they sold me to Fox for a million dollars, and they paid me a lot of money and continued to pay me a lot of money even after they stopped putting me on tv. And that led to a doldrum period where I got to read about the guy who's now retired from Sports Illustrated, explaining what network will sign him now, what team will sign him now. Wither Keith. This is 2001. I was 42 years old. It's like, I get nostalgic reading that going, yeah, you were 42 years old. They fired you at that point. People thought your career was over. Yeah, but I was 42. My hair was dark most places, in any event. So that led into the MSNBC job. And the MSNBC job, as sort of messy as that ended, the second one anyway, led to the Current TV job. And as disastrous as that was, since it was kind of a confidence trick, there was a day where between the money I got for leaving NBC and the money I got for joining Current TV, I made $68 million in one day. I had to sue a lot of people afterwards to get all of it, but I got just about all of it. In any event, I'm now boasting back to the point of this whole story. An old friend of mine came in when I was doing the videos for GQ, the Closer and the Resistance in 2016 and 2017, came in to watch me do this and started to ask very, very graciously and very gently about, well, isn't this something of a comedown for you from the MSNBC experience, where you had a staff? And I said, well, first off, the MSNBC experience consisted of two cameramen and a floor director and me and sometimes a guest in a studio. The staff, whereas they were all certainly dedicated to the project, consisted of basically a core of six or seven people. It never really felt like a big deal. I know it had more influence than I was ever led to understand, but it wasn't like, oh, well, you know those movies that you did with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise? And now you're just sitting at home with A camera. It didn't have that feel in the slightest. And I said to him, did you see the thing from CBS News the other day? And he went, what thing from CBS News? I said, don't you have the Google at the New York Times? And he said, yes. I said, google, social flow, Facebook. And he did on his phone and he read this. This political pundit Keith Olbermann, found a way to channel concerns about Mr. Trump. This is July 2017. Started hosting a series of political commentary and special interviews titled the Resistance with Keith Olbermann, with the first episode featured on GQ on November 16, 2016, reaching 54 million people, equivalent to 1 in 6Americans. And I said, look, I understand that if you measure things solely by the idea that I'm on your TV every night. Well, yeah, that the doing a video and coming in into a studio that isn't really designed for tv. And there's an echo in it might seem like the end of my career. 54 million people saw that video and interacted with it in some kind. They either forwarded it or watched it or put a comment on it, or sometimes all three. That was in fact the number one political video or story on Facebook in the period of time after Donald Trump's election. I think that's something of a success. And I said, by this point, I don't need the damn money. The money I'm making from doing this is going to dog charities. Okay? So we could go on at length about other small versions of that. I once went back and forth with this guy who now is one of the people at Puck News, who insisted that I had not been negotiating with the then chairman of NBC, Jeff Schell, about returning to MSNBC in 20, 19, 20 and 21. Because NBC News had insisted it wasn't true. And I said, who told you that? And they said, a spokesman. And I said to this guy, his name was Dylan Byers. I said, well, who was the spokesman? Well, it just was supposed to be a spokesman. I said, so they wouldn't even put their own name on it? Not even a made up name? Jim Jones, NBC News spokesman. Which would have been, by the way, an appropriate name for a series of NBC News spokespeople. They didn't even do that. And he said, no, they were insistent. There's never been any contact between you and Jeff Shell. And I, I went, hang on. And I called up from my phone 23 emails and texts from Jeff Shell. I photo shotted them, I screenshotted them and gave him to the guy. And I don't think this guy Byers has recovered since his worldview was totally destroyed. He was writing a story about how I had deteriorated to the point where I was hallucinating about being in contact with Jeff Shell from NBC News or from NBC about returning to NBC News and MSNBC when we were deep into negotiations about it and were delayed only by the pandemic. And as I pointed out here before, the vetoes of certain people working on the air at msnbc, most of whose careers I started. But that's another story which I've already discussed. His whole worldview was shattered by this because he could not comprehend that an NBC News spokesperson would lie to him. And he really said this. He said, I don't understand. Why would they lie to me? And I said, you don't have to understand that the idea that they would not put their own name on this statement might have suggested to you that they were lying to you. Oh, I'll. I'll keep that in mind. Well, he didn't keep that in mind. But that's again, another story about Dylan Byers, and we'll get to him someday, some day. Two, somewhere soon, somebody asked towards the end of July 2024 about my recent comeback and how I just gotten back into political commentary now with the pot, the new pot. And I said, it's two years old. On August 1, it was approaching 500 episodes. We're doing like a million listens a week, a million audience participants a week. I mean, it's challenging certain hours on CNN for total audience. Good God. What do you mean, recent comeback? But this is, as I said, If I had $10 million for every time somebody told me my career was over, my career is sort of over because I'm now of advanced years. And now I've done something that I really didn't understand until the year 2011, until I left MSNBC to go to Current TV. And there was built into this transfer a three month period of time where I could not work anywhere in television. I had not had such a period of time, except for the aforementioned period when I was taking care of family members who were in trouble. In 1985, after the Boston experience, I hadn't had such a length of time without being on the air somewhere. And in fact, during that period in 1985, I did a lot of freelance work just to, you know, get the cash that I didn't have to borrow from my sister, who was, by the way, 17 years old at the time. Yeah, Jen, have you got, you got a 20? Yeah. Thanks. I need to go buy a cigar. In any event, the point of this was until 2011, I'd really not had a day or at least a week without deadlines, media deadlines. You have to have this written by eight o' clock because the show is starting with or without you. I hadn't had a day or a week without those since I was 16 years old. And I was, to my shock, I found I really enjoyed not having those deadlines. And when we went back on the air and Current TV in June of 2011, I was kind of disappointed. Not, not because the studio was actually not a studio, but more like a, you know, a portal to hell. And not that part of it, which was disappointing, but not as much as I really enjoyed, you know, not shaving every weekday and not having to write, you know, 10,000 words a day and not having to read the 12 seconds of script inside the 12 second window before the sound hit. And just the number of deadlines I suddenly didn't have. So since 2011, I decided to cut back to four days work a week. Generally speaking, that's my concession to my mid-60s. And as I was preparing this to tell you this story in light of the experience I had with my friend who thought his career was over and I was reciting this, I realized that I had left out in telling him the story and I have deliberately left it out of the chronological order of these tales of the actual first time I was told my career was over. I had forgotten completely, completely about the day that the sports director, what was then a prominent radio station, told me that not only would he and the news director there not hire me, even though I had been told I was a candidate for a sports job there, but he told me that I would never get a job in radio or television of any prominence because of my attitude. No one will ever hire you. His name was Ernie Jackson, and I believe he left the town we were in to get a job selling airtime on a radio station in Cincinnati. And after that, I don't know what the hell happened to him. The news director was a guy named Bob lynch, and he shortly thereafter moved to a job that I think he spent his entire professional career at. Traffic reporter in a plane above the beautiful city of Rochester, New York. The date that Mr. Jackson, on Mr. Lynch's behalf, told me that my career was over. The first time I was told, you will never again work in this business. The first good evening and welcome to the end of my career was October 1977. I've done all the damage I can do here. And yet I'm still here. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Chenale, our musical directors of Countdown. Neither of their careers is over. It was produced by TKO Brothers, Mr. Ray on the guitars, bass and drums, Mr. Chenale handling orchestration and keyboards. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Foust, who's also heard that same message and whose career is also not over. The Olbermann theme from ESPN2, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Is the sports music. I can't speak to Mr. Davis. I don't know him personally. But how many times has ESPN been declared dead since 1979 and it's still here. Other music arranged and performed by the group no horns allowed. I don't think they're still in business. Individually, they're all still in business, but I don't think the group performs anymore, so maybe their career's over. My announcer today was my friend Johnny Banks from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. His career ain't over. Everything else was, as always, my fault. So that's Countdown for today. Day 246 of America held hostage again. Just 1,227 days until the scheduled end of Trump's lame duck lame brained term. Unless he is removed sooner by MAGA than Jeffrey Epstein or Tom. I put the hoe in ho man. Or the pavement on Trump's hand or whatever. The next scheduled countdown is Thursday. Until then, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night and and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of I Heart Rated. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
