“My job is to make you guys rock stars.”

I love this conversation because even though we've never met Gavin Spittle and I are in sync radio programmers a generation apart. He’s the captain and daily inspiration behind Audacy’s 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, the best sports talk station I’ve ever heard. Yeah, I’m a Fan fan. I didn’t even bother to edit this. I just enjoyed it. Here, Gavin is understandably in promotional mode and hits all the company talking points but his genuine love of it all is infectious and inspiring. That’s why 105.3 The Fan works. Recorded May 10, 2024, during the NHL playoffs. Gavin is a hockey nut and host of his own podcast via Audacy: Spits and Suds.

Dallas radio listeners were recently shocked by the news that MIKE RHYNER, also known as The Old Grey Wolf, had been fired by iHeartRadio and that the talk station known as The Freak would flip back to rock and roll as it had been just 16 months earlier. Rhyner is a radio legend in Texas. Over his 26 years at The Ticket in Dallas, he created the most unique and popular sports talk format in America. To date, the station has won four Marconi Awards as the Best Sports Station in America. Rhyner was inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame on July 3, 2014. In this conversation, he talks about how both stations evolved through him and what went wrong with The Freak.

ROBIN BERTOLUCCI has been Program Director of KFI, Los Angeles, for 22 years and the station has never fallen out of first place. The thing that's remarkable about Robin is she hasn't got a lot of complicated philosophies about her job or her station. She just gets the best people in the news and talk business and lets them do their thing.