RUSH: Diane in Coronado, Florida, hi I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Well, thank you. Thank you. To start with, I have ordered a case of your tea.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: And thank you. And also I was wondering, are we able to buy stock in your company?
RUSH: No, it’s privately held.
CALLER: Oh, okay. Too bad.
RUSH: Privately held.
CALLER: My deceased husband started a business back in 1973 here in Tucson, Arizona. That’s where our main home is. We’re vacationing right now in Coronado. And my husband and I, I’m a Rush lady, and my husband listens to you, my new husband, we’ve been married ten years, and he had his own — he was a custom home builder, but both of us, you know, we started with nothing.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: We had to scrape our money to start anything, to get a business going.
RUSH: So did I.
CALLER: Well, yeah, but not with your teas.
RUSH: No, but the tea wasn’t the first thing I’ve done in my life.
CALLER: Yeah, but —
RUSH: I had to make some money first. I worked for most of my life.
CALLER: I know. I appreciate all you’ve done, really. I know just about everything about you and I just love you and you can tell Kathryn’s good for you ’cause you really are a different person since you married Kathryn.
RUSH: Well, that’s true, that’s very true. Diane, thanks much for the call.
CALLER: Are we through?
RUSH: Appreciate it.
CALLER: I haven’t even begun to talk.
RUSH: Well, I got 30 seconds left, you’ve used up most of your time. See, I thought you were gonna complain about something.
CALLER: Okay, what I was gonna say is you didn’t start your tea from scratch. You have a lot of money to put into it to begin with. You have your own advertising, your number one show. How many people start off with a new business with all that you have going for you?
RUSH: I didn’t start a new business with all that. I had to succeed after a number of failures and going broke, I had to succeed for a long time before doing this. And I’m not guaranteed a success doing this. There’s no guarantee that this is gonna turn a profit. It’s all a risk. At least I’m not asking for some government grant here or a subsidy to do this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The website is TwoIfByTea.com, or 866-662-1776. Website’s easier: TwoIfByTea.com. We’ve got lots more straight ahead, folks. Sit tight. Don’t miss anything. Big today.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, see, everything’s a learning experience. Snerdley was not going to take that call, ’cause he thought that the woman was gonna be too insulting. And I had to intercede in there ’cause I saw he was blowing up, there was smoke coming out of the ears in there. That’s how loyal Snerdley is. You don’t call here and rip the host. And I had to tell him, give me the call, ’cause it’s an opportunity. There are life lessons in that call, there really are. Greetings, great to have you back. Friday on the EIB Network.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: The life lesson — (interruption) jealousy, yeah, but it goes deeper than that. That’s the crossroads we’re at in this country. That’s exactly the problem that we face. Everything I have is from being a businessman, pure and simple. I haven’t been subsidized. I haven’t been granted or given anything, and yet there’s this deep resentment for it. Now, that’s always been the case, human nature, jealousy, envy, what have you. But it’s reaching new heights and new proportions out there. For example, I mean she’s a nice lady, but when she finally got to the point she wanted to condemn my new tea business.
I’m investing my own money. I didn’t ask her for any. I didn’t take any money from a pool that she would have access to, resulting in a smaller pool for her. I didn’t inherit anything. Nobody gave me anything. I never ask anybody for anything. And yet, “Well, easy for you to do, you had your own money; the rest of us would have to go get a loan.” Well, I decided to wait, if the day ever came, until I had the money to invest rather than borrow. That’s just me. Other people go out and do whatever they have to do to access money, borrow it or what have you. It’s the way of the world. It’s fine and dandy in that regard. But this is actually one of the reasons that we endeavor to do this in this economic climate.
I sit here and I talk all the time about the private sector, how it works, and in my own sphere, in broadcasting and media, I am a businessman, and I know that business left and right. I know it in and out. I know it backwards and forwards. But I’ve never taken a product to market from scratch. I know theoretically what all’s involved. I know people who have. I know the hoops that they have to jump through and the obstacles, but I had never experienced them, and now I know them. And to bring a product like this to market from scratch, the regulatory hoops that we had to go through, there’s a lot of obstacles that you have to deal with. The FDA, all kinds of legals, you wouldn’t believe the intricacy of the legals. It took us a month to get legal approval on the label for the bottle, the way the ingredients are. All of this has been a tremendous educational experience for me because it helps me relate to other people who have done this both large and small.
Another reason that I wanted to do it, ’cause when I was in the process of doing it, my family knew and a select small number of people. I couldn’t tell anybody because I didn’t want the secret getting out. We’re doing it ourselves, small little outfit here and if some big corporate entity got word of this they could have beat us to the market with this because they’ve got systems in place to bring a product to market. They’ve already done it. We didn’t. They coulda slam-dunked us. We had to keep this secret. The people who did know, said, “It doesn’t make any sense. Every day you talk about how this economy’s not conducive to this kind of stuff, and yet here you are doing it, are you stupid?” And I said, “Well, there’s a part of me, I’ve always said that when they give recessions, I don’t participate,” and that’s irritated people.
But this is the United States of America. Everybody has the ability to try to not participate in a recession. You have the ability to create your own job. That has been one of the greatest things about this country, entrepreneurism. So we did this for a whole host of reasons, and I’m not gonna hold one or the other above any of the rest as something holier-than-thou, but I wanted to do this to show that it could be done despite the obstacles that are there. And even at that, as I told our caller, there’s no guarantee of a profit. Nobody has the guarantee of a profit when they start this.
You know, look at George McGovern. He had a bed and breakfast. It was the biggest eye-opening experience for him he ever had. He had no clue what it was actually like to run a business. Here he had been voting on legislation, proposing legislation making it harder and harder for people to run a business, he ended up owning a bed and breakfast and he did giant eye-opening turnaround on government regulation, oppressive or otherwise. He was just trying to say to run a little bed and breakfast.
So the life lesson in the woman’s call is that we have a growing number of people who just do not like the disparity of outcomes that is inherent in capitalism. And a growing number of these people who want to punish those who do well, ’cause it’s not fair that somebody does well while somebody else doesn’t, and they want the equalizing agent to be — in this case, the president — generically the government. They want the government to decide outcomes on the basis of fairness, even if it ends up harming the country, even if it ends up harming nation’s economy. And this woman sounded to me like she was actually a regular listener and somewhat of a fan of the program, but even she had been seduced by this whole class envy, “Well, you didn’t have any trouble getting money. You didn’t have trouble getting advertising.”
Let me tell you something. The only reason I had money is because I’d been working to try to earn it at this show alone for 23 years. Nobody gave me anything. There’s no subsidy here, and I am paying full rate card for the advertising on my program. I’m buying this advertising. Everything is aboveboard on it, plus it’s all fun. It’s all ended up being fun, and we’re not on any shelves, but if we were I could say it is just rolling off the shelves. Now, here, from a business standpoint, today — yesterday a little bit — but today is going to be a fascinating day for us, because today is the day that the tea starts to arrive. Today is the day that people start to taste it. Today is the day we learn whether or not they like it. This is a huge day. Our shipping is free, anywhere from two to three days, continental United States.
If they like it, there’s gonna be word-of-mouth and a whole new avenue of advertising will begin just by virtue of that. If people don’t like it, well, then, they don’t like it and we’re up a creek. This is the risk you take. But this is a big day. Now, I’ve told ’em all about it, I love it, greatest tea I’ve ever tasted, all true. They better like it, too. It’s the market totally at work here. Hundred percent, we have subjected ourselves totally to the good graces of the American people and the US market. We’ll see where it ends up. TwoIfByTea.com, that’s the website, $23.76 per 12-pack. Free shipping. Snerdley, what was your other question? Oh, no, no, IPO, no, no, no, we’re not thinking about that, no, no, no. No way, down the road, no, no, no, no. We got many other things along the — (laughing) No, we don’t want people complaining about how we do business. They already are. They’re complaining that we are doing business, not how. So $23.76 per 12-pack, two flavors, both sweetened and unsweetened, naturally and artificial, and the shipping is free. You can’t beat the deal.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I got this e-mail. It’s very heartwarming, ’cause as I said earlier: When it comes to Two If By Tea, this is an important day in our rollout because this, for a lot of people, is the day the tea is delivered.
This is the day that people begin sampling it and so this is the day find out if they like it. If they like it, then you have a whole new avenue of advertising opens up called word-of-mouth. “Dear Rush: I ordered a 12-pack of your sweet tea first to see how good it is, and it lived up to your hype. It was just slightly sweet, very smooth. It’s one of the best teas I have tried but now it created a problem at home because I thought I would have it to myself since my wife doesn’t really like sweet tea, but I was wrong. She took a taste of yours and loved it. So now we’re fighting over who gets it.” This is from a guy named Guy Adams. I don’t know where he lives. He’s a subscriber at RushLimbaugh.com. (chuckles) Before you know it, the tea is gonna get blamed for divorce.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Before I get outta here I want to thank everybody. The tea product that we rolled out on Wednesday, Two If By Tea, and that’s the name of the website, TwoIfByTea.com. Folks, it has blown past all of our expectations, and I am now getting e-mails from people who are attesting to how good it is, and we spent months — I’m now a fully accredited tea taste tester, and we strive to find the absolute best-tasting tea, and we’ve got other flavors in the pipeline hopefully that we’ll release down the road, but these teas, some are made with sugar, and no fructose, genuine sugar, and some are calorie free. The calorie free tastes just as good as the original, raspberry and standard, straight tea. It’s been a learning exercise, and it’s been a lot of fun. Rush Revere on every label, Founders Father’s Day is coming up this weekend, and we’ve just had a blast with it, we’ve had a tremendous economic education in the process. So I can’t let the program end without a sincere and heartfelt thanks to all of you. I mean the numbers blow us away, humble us,
END TRANSCRIPT
*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.