Mouth of the Peninsula October 2006

by Barbra Alexander
Images by H. Benson

Barbra Alexander has been broadcasting her Money Dots talk show for the past decade, entertaining her listeners while enjoying the entrée that the show provides into the minds of her often-fascinating guests.

I’ve never been one to reserve my opinion and now I am in the fortunate situation of being able to broadcast my opinions to millions of people all over the world each week through a syndicated radio program called Money Dots.

The problem is that I don’t take real advantage of the opportunity but rather use that hour to permit other people to talk about their opinions. I know that my listeners would rather hear Steve Forbes talk about money, for example, than to listen to me give my opinions about anything in the world. So I get movers and shakers to pop in for an hour and for the most part relinquish the microphone to them.

I never had a guest on my show who wouldn’t return if I invited them to come.

In July I got Newt Gingrich for an hour show, which was amazing since he’s usually booked in 15-minute increments. I get people like him to come as guests because they’ve gone on my www.moneydots.com website and they get enthused about what I’m doing.

I’m running an eclectic program – one that defies pigeonholing. I call it “Your Resource Radio Show.” My programs are all over the landscape – from money, to marriage, to politics, to who-knows-what’s-next?

Learning on the Radio
My great adventure as a talk show host began (as great things in our lives so often do, it seems) as a nearly perfect accident. I was trying to sell mortgage services. Eleven years ago I started a mortgage company, Goldcoast Financial. I’ve followed a marketing strategy for many years that consisted of finding out what other people in a particular industry are doing and then doing something completely different. I do everything outside the box. The only advantage I could ever see of conducting research into marketing strategies is to find out where a particular “box” is so that I can stay completely out of it. Nobody was marketing mortgage services by hosting a radio talk show, so that’s what I began to do.

“You learn by doing,” they say. One thing I learned right away through my talk-show experience was that my little thousand-watt Monterey station hardly had enough horsepower to carry my message to Pacific Grove so I joined a 10,000-watt omni directional station in Santa Cruz, called KSCO. Four years ago the show was picked up for syndication and now reaches a world-wide audience. I don’t pay attention to how many listeners they tell me I have. Millions.

Another thing I learned through the experience was that I really like hosting a talk show. I took to the lure of the radio waves like a TV evangelist to the smell of money.

The third lesson taught by the experience was the most dramatic one. It took just over two months to figure out that talk shows had never caught on as a marketing tool in my industry because, next to listening to somebody describe grass growing, an hour of talking about buying, selling, and financing properties is the most boring way you could spend listening to a radio. I needed to identify interesting topics and then to enlist fascinating and knowledgeable people to talk about them.

My first show was called “Trash Versus Treasure.” My guest instructed listeners in how to recognize a genuine antique. It was a great show! It was entertaining and instructive, and returned good value to people in exchange for them giving up an hour of their lives.

I continued learning as I went. One of my show’s signature elements became the short music-bite that always greets listeners as we return from one of the station breaks. I have worked hard in assembling a truly amazing collection of often irreverent, usually catchy, and always hilarious samples of music bites from people like Ray Stevens, Capital Steps, Tom Lehr, and the Austin Lounge Lizards, which is the band that gets my vote as the world’s most talented musical group. I once ran into an 80-year-old fan of my show in Tulsa, Okalahoma who gushed at me, “I love your show! I could listen to it just for your music!”

What’s to Like About Money Dots?
I think there are reasons besides my catchy song-bites for listening to my show. For one thing, I really do get interesting people sitting on the other side of my desk. Some of them are famous. Most of them are brilliant and talented. All of them have things to say that are well-worth listening to.

This is my first year with a producer. Her name is Barbara (The Hawk) Sparhawk. She is an amazing person! There’s nowhere Barbara can’t get into. With these high name-recognition types you have to conduct numerous conversations with a lot of their people before you can get them on the air. Barbara has a talent for persistence and knows how to speak to people to get the response she wants.

Another reason people like my show is because I always try to bring my guests down to a human level. We tend to set apart the movers and shakers in this world as either demigods or beasts – depending upon whether we agree with them or not. In either case we ignore their humanity forgetting that they step into their knickers one foot at a time in the morning, just like the rest of us do. I attempt to break through that depersonalizing shell and to provide my listeners with at least a brief view of the humanity that my guests share with them.

For example, I did some research on Steve Forbes before he appeared on my show and discovered that he had five daughters. So when he first put in his appearance I congratulated him on surviving in a house with six women. The comment caught him up short for a moment, but then he came right back with a great response. “Yeah, and the dog is a girl too,” he said.

All of a sudden, Steve Forbes had descended from his celestial status as a billionaire-guru that nobody could identify with and had become someone we could understand. Commiserate with even.

Many people know John Stossell as the anchor for 20/20. John let me do a remote interview with him while he was attending a soccer game that his kid was playing in. He would occasionally interrupt himself to shout things like, “We scored!” and “Look at that kick!” Far from detracting from the show, the context of him watching his child play soccer served to humanize him; to show him as a person with passions and familial love just like the rest of us.

Another reason people like my show is because I always read “the book.” I know what my guests are talking about. I discovered when I went on tour with my own book that a great number of talk-show hosts don’t read their guests’ books. Some don’t even know the title. The more witless among them don’t even realize that there’s a book they haven’t read.

If I don’t read my guests’ books, how can I know about their thought processes? How can I know what to ask?

Straight Talk with Lots of Laughter
Another thing I do to make my show interesting is to encourage straight talk mixed with laughter. When the blunt and outspoken Ann Coulter was a guest I stopped her at one point and asked her if she had taken a mental health day at Cornell on the day when they were teaching PC (Political Correctness). She threw her head back, laughed, and said that she had been there the day it was taught but that the subject didn’t take.

I’m no fan of PC myself. We shouldn’t deliberately annoy people and hurt their feelings, but at the point where political correctness begins to limit our ability freely to say the things we believe, PC begins extracting a heavy cost from us. People stop saying what they mean. We end up measuring every phrase against a ubiquitous censor that prohibits us from voicing opinions that might hurt someone else’s feelings.

Just as harmful is the fact that extreme PC takes from us our ability to be funny. Life is bizarre and hilarious, in my opinion. All of it! We must be able to laugh at terrible things. Laughter provides an important relief valve that enables us to cope with the horrible and depressing issues in this world that lie beyond our poor abilities to understand or explain.

On one of my shows, Warner Fornos told one of the greatest stories I ever heard. He was working with NATO on a population control program by going around the world with a team of people who were attempting to teach villagers in rural areas about using condoms. The team used broomsticks in order to demonstrate to people how to put these things on. They discovered that the population continued to increase because the people had started going to bed at night with a condom stretched firmly over the end of their broomstick, just as they had been taught.

They put a movie theater in a poor city in India and that year the birth rate dropped by 25 percent. The people had found something else to do. They weren’t really randy; they were simply bored.

I asked Fornos, “What about the simple enjoyment of sex?”

“Well, Barbra,” he answered lightly. “Not every ejaculation deserves a name.”

The population explosion poses a serious threat to our world, but those stories are absolutely great! And instructive!

Laughter and honesty are a marvelous pair of resources with which to face life. I sometimes say things to guests gathered around my dinner table that make a few of the diners clutch at their throat. That’s good for them! It helps their digestion. We must learn to laugh and sneer and to say the thing as it really is.

So I encourage my guests to say what they really mean. Say it even if it annoys and offends some people.

Taking the High Road
On the other hand, another reason people like my show is because of my standard of enforced civility. Effective communication not only demands that we speak our mind without self-censure, but that we also speak it without personally attacking any individual with whom we disagree. I caution guests that I will not tolerate hateful, abusive, or insulting language.

Some shows thrive on conflict. Surveys have shown that people who love Rush Limbaugh will listen for an average of an hour-and-a-half to his three-hour long daily thunderstorm. People who hate him, on the other hand, will listen for an average of two hours. They’re apparently just waiting for him to say something to annoy them. If Limbaugh ever turned over a new leaf, those sick people would be grumpier than hell.

I prefer my own style, which is to give people a voice. Not to criticize, anger, or arouse. For the sake of open communication I will, however, confront my guests. I will say things like, “Did you really mean what you just said?” I push back at them. I don’t jab at them, but I ask questions that are designed to enable the listener to get more information than a sound bite’s worth. I do my pushing and probing with music, humor, and questions. I think of these sessions as a dinner table conversation.

I once had a Taos Pueblo Indian named Howard Rainer from Santa Fe, New Mexico on my show. It took me three months of hard work to make that happen. The man was an incredible photographer and poet who had published an amazing coffee table book. Because the man was an Indian himself, other Native Americans let him photograph their rituals. He would go to Native American public schools and tell the children, “This is what I do. You can do it too.” He donated part of his income from the book to helping Indian children.

I got one caller on the phone who said, “Barbra, while I was growing up all the Indians in my town just drank.”

I said, “What’s your point?”

“Well,” he said. “You should know that Indians like to drink.”

“What’s your point?” I asked again.

“I guess I don’t have a point.”

I shut the guy off and said, “A moron is born every minute, and unfortunately most of them get to live.”

Before the show was over my guest had sold 300 of his books.

That was good! Money Dots is a kick! Life is great!

That’s my opinion!°

For more information on Money Dots or to listen to the program go to www.moneydots.com.