RUSH: Tim in Robbinsville, Minnesota, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I wanted to comment real quick on James Hansen’s little harebrained idea. I think it could be the absolute best thing to possibly happen. It’s obviously a defensive response to what’s been happening to their claim. I mean, if you look at what’s going on over in Europe they had a poll that came out a couple weeks ago that showed that about two-thirds of people in Europe do believe that in fact it’s just hype —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — that the scientists are overstating it.
RUSH: They’re not buying it. And you know why? Because they have been paying for it a lot longer than we have. They’ve had their taxes raised they’ve had restrictions on what kind of cars they can drive. They’ve had incredibly high taxes on their petrol over there and yet after all of this the people who raised their taxes under the premise they’re going to reverse global warming, are still raising all these wild ass claims about it as though it’s getting worse and worse and worse and these people are saying, ‘Wait a minute! We’re paying all these taxes and we’ve made all these alterations to our lifestyle, and it’s not helping? Screw you,’ and, you know, that’s going to come to the rest of the world at some point. You’re right.
CALLER: Exactly. You got Greenpeace is being sued in Spain. John Coleman wants to get Algore in court to debate. This could be the opportunity to do that. If they call him to the stand, he’d have no choice. I’d love to have him up on the stand, ‘the earth has a fever.’
RUSH: (laughter) Yeah. What thermometer did you use and in what orifice did you insert the thermometer in the planet?
CALLER: Exactly. Rush, if I could, I’d like to ask you one last question.
RUSH: What would that be?
CALLER: You had a young man a little while ago who was, I believe, just graduating and you wanted to give him a graduation gift, and you asked him what he wanted. Okay? I want to ask you — and I’ll admit, at the moment, I couldn’t possibly buy whatever it is you would want, but I want to know. What do you want? Every listener to your show owes you a debt that could never possibly be repaid.
RUSH: Now, now, now.
CALLER: No, no, no, no. I’m only 34. I know living in this country at some point I will be successful enough to buy you something. I want to know what it is you want, Rush.
RUSH: (sigh) Man, you know what? This is an interesting question because it’s like asking me to name my favorite movie. I draw a blank on all that I’ve seen and I ask the people who ask me that to give me some time while I search my memory of the movies I have seen. When people ask me, the first movie that comes to my mind is The Graduate, so I guess it’s my favorite movie, but I don’t really know because I’m forgetting things that I have also enjoyed. What do I want? I’ve gotta think about that. Nothing.
CALLER: No, no, no. Come on, now, you got time. Like I said, am by no means successful yet, but —
RUSH: Okay, how about: ‘I want world peace.’
CALLER: You know, if I could possibly do that, I guarantee you I would.
RUSH: I’m making it up. I don’t believe it’s possible. I’m trying to sound like a Miss America contestant.
CALLER: I’ll tell you what, Rush, eventually you’re going to slip. You’re going to say there’s something out there that you don’t have that you want, and if that’s the time I’ve got the finances, it will show up on your door unannounced.
RUSH: You know, there is something I want that I don’t have, and I’m having a hell of a time with them, and that’s gardenia-scented candles — and I don’t mean little dinky ones. I’m talking about giant ones. But I’m in the process here of working that out. Don’t go messing around with gardenia candles. I have that handled.
CALLER: (laughter) I don’t know if I feel manly enough to walk into a store to buy those anyway.
RUSH: Let me tell you something: a guy who is confident enough to tell you he loves gardenia-scented candles is a guy who is robustly confident in his masculinity.
CALLER: (laughter) Well, Rush, I really mean that when I say that though, that the listeners to this show and this country owe you a debt for what you do.
RUSH: Now, now, now.
CALLER: They do.
RUSH: It’s a little over the top.
CALLER: I know you’ve committed you don’t do very well at accepting compliments, but it’s something to do. And I appreciate you taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: You bet. Thanks.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: What do you think I want? I mean if you’re going to ask me this question you’ve obviously got something in mind.
CALLER: You know, actually I don’t. I’ve listened to you for about two years now. I was actually prompted by a liberal to start listening to you. I was always being accused of being influenced, having never listened to you, so I started listening. And I owe the liberals, I guess, a debt of gratitude for pointing me in your direction, but I don’t know you well enough to know what there would be that would put a smile on your face.
RUSH: Well, I have a smile on my face most of the time. I’ve been really blessed; I have a charmed life here. I’ve been blessed with being able to do what I’ve always wanted to do and to do it pretty well. That’s how I’ve always defined success. When friends get together when you’re young and you start discussing success and what would it be and how you would define it — and it’s interesting to have these discussions with people because when you’re young, you tend to attach financial aspects to success. In those discussions, it was always fascinating to me to ask people in their twenties, ‘What do you think big money is? If you were going to go out and earn big money this year, what would it be?’ And it was fascinating. There was no wrong answer to it. It was just fascinating to me to listen to what people thought was big money.
You could calculate it, and it always was a percentage above what they already earned. It was a specific figure, as I did my calculations. When we’re talking about success, it took me awhile to finally understand it. I’d been fired a bunch of times and so forth. But success to me manifested itself some years ago in something that was very simple proposition: doing what I have loved — I say born to do — that’s nothing more than doing what you love. Finding your passion, and then doing it well. That’s success, and there’s no monetary attachment to it. If you find what it is you love to do and you do it, and you do it well, all those other things fall into place. The people who define success financially and pursue it on that basis, they might get the money, but they’re not going to be happy. Odds are they did because the focus on money will mean you never have enough. If you focus on money you’re always going to be judging and comparing yourself on money based on others.
Somebody’s always going to have more than you do, and so you’re always gonna find yourself coming up second or third or way down the list. So success is not that hard a thing. The most difficult thing about success is identifying what your real passion is and then finding a way to get people to pay you for it. Most people’s real passions — Brian, you could testify to this — are their hobbies. You’ve seen people that really have hobbies, all the time they spend on those hobbies. The minute they get out of work they start focusing on whatever the hobby is, and if they could figure out a way to get paid for their hobby — and this is the one country where you can do that, where you can figure out a way. You can create your own job, you can create your own service, you can create your own product.
You know, speaking of gardenia candles, since this whole conversation yesterday that I had with the customer representative at Jo Malone named Beth — who, by the way, sent me another note yesterday afternoon, right after the program. ‘I am the most requested woman at Jo Malone. I am just being…’ She said, ‘We’re almost shut down here with requests for candles, and they’re all from men, Mr. Limbaugh. You tell your audience that it’s all men calling here wanting gardenia candles.’ So I spent some time yesterday afternoon doing a little bit more extensive Internet search on candles. My original search, when I didn’t know what I wanted, I didn’t spend a lot of time on was ‘large gardenia candles’ and it turned up lots of things but nothing that lit my fire.
So I decided to expand the search — and as I did that, you would not believe the number of little entrepreneurs all over this country who have started candle businesses ’cause they loved candles when they were a kid, and they wondered how they were made. There’s this one place called Giant Candle Company. I don’t even know where it is because their website doesn’t tell you where they are. But custom-made. You can choose your size, you can choose your scent, you can choose your color. It’s amazing. And there were other little places, too, that were engaging in this kind of thing. And I reminded of this only because here are people who, for whatever reason, not only do they love having candles, they were fascinated about how they were made; how they were scented; why they were made in certain shapes; why people didn’t make ’em bigger or smaller.
So they’ve done it. I don’t know how well they’re doing, but they love it. You can read when they give you their history of how they came to be existence in their website. You can see they’re just following a passion, and they’re in the process of fulfilling a dream here and becoming successful and they’re in the process of doing what they love, and that drives them. You know, they may not have large advertising budgets, so we’ve taken care of a couple of them here (laughing) who may have had that problem. See how it works out. Entrepreneurs find entrepreneurs. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Tim. That was Tim. What do I want? People aren’t going to believe this: I don’t think about what I want; I just buy it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Last hour I’m talking about entrepreneurs and candles and so forth in my never-ending quest to find gardenia-scented large candles. So I mentioned one of the places I found during the search, Giant Candle Company, which is appropriately named. So I went and looked at their website. It’s a very cool website. It’s amazing. I told you about it. So I mentioned this to them. I sent the guy out there a note: ‘By the way, your website might be overwhelmed for just a minute because I just mentioned your website on the air.’ He sends the note back, ‘Thanks, but we can handle it. No problem.’ That kind of motivates me to shut down his website because we shut down websites here. I mean, temporarily. GiantCandleCo.com. We did shut down the MoveAmericaForward.org website for mere moments when people went there, but we have not succeeded in shutting down the GiantCandleCo.com website. I’m not giving marching orders. I’m just giving you the name of the website.