The Hidden Side of Media — Lessons from a 50-Year Insider | Steve Edwards | Ep 48

What does 50 years inside the media machine teach you that they'll never say on air? Steve Edwards knows — and he's finally talking.

In this episode, Aimee Rickabus sits down with Steve Edwards — legendary Los Angeles broadcaster, former host of Good Day LA, and a man who spent five decades on-air without ever getting fired — for an unfiltered conversation about the hidden side of media.

Steve reveals:
- The truths about media they'll never say on camera
- Why tribalism has overtaken nuance in modern news
- The devastating impact social media is having on young girls
- What it was like covering 9/11 live — and the weight of that responsibility
- Why gratitude became his secret weapon for surviving an industry that chews people up
- How to stay relevant for decades without losing yourself

This isn't a polished media interview. This is a 50-year insider pulling back the curtain on an industry that shaped how we see the world.

Whether you're building a career, raising daughters in a digital age, or just trying to make sense of today's fractured media landscape — this conversation will change how you see it all.

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Transcript

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🎶 Music Outro 🎶 Today's conversation is about longevity, reinvention, and the quiet discipline required to stay relevant across decades of cultural change. My guest is someone many of us grew up watching, a journalist whose voice helped shape the rhythm of morning television and whose career has spanned some of the most transformative chapters in modern media. As co-anchor of Good Day LA, Steve Edwards didn't just deliver the news. He helped define how millions of people began their day. But what fascinates me most about Steve is not simply the length of his career. It's the mindset that sustained it. Before broadcasting, he was studying clinical psychology, already drawn to understanding human behavior. He built his career by saying yes to opportunity, by mastering the craft through repetition, and by adapting as the media landscape shifted from shared national narratives to the fragmented realities we navigate today. He has experienced extraordinary success, public reinvention, professional disruption, and the kind of perspective that can only be earned through time. So today, this is not just a conversation about media. This is a conversation about resilience, identity, relevance, and what it truly means to build a life, not just a career, that lasts. Steve, it is a genuine honor to welcome you to The Manager. Well, I'm very impressed with your guest. Is that me you're talking about? That would be you. Okay. All right. Hi, Amy. Thank you for having me here. I'm so glad you're here, Steve. So, so glad. So when you look back across your career, what do you believe most allowed you to endure, not just succeed briefly, but to remain relevant across generations? Well, mainly enthusiasm and curiosity. And also the fun of it. You know, I don't go into a very, very deep analysis of that part of it. I often thought of my career was much like when I was a kid and I put on my clothes and go to the playground and I play all day and I play hard and I go in and lose and get knocked down, knock people down and, you know, all that stuff and came back the next day and just loved all of it. That I kind of looked at my career the same way. Just have fun. Well, start with always having fun. Not every moment was fun. And of course, there are moments of such depth and seriousness that fun would never be an award. You would apply to it. But even in the worst of times, I was glad that I was participating. Absolutely. So originally you were on the path toward clinical psychology. Looking back now, how much of your success has actually come from understanding people? It's hard for me to say that, but what I would say that is that a lot of my curiosity comes from why are you you? You know, why am I me? Why are people who are tremendously successful and reached all their dreams miserable? And why are there people who the brakes never went their way, but they have a smile on their face and they light up the room and they make other people feel better? Why are we At best, three steps from punching each other and five steps away from countries going to war. What is that all about? The human frailty. Why can't we get it right? We get a lot right, but why can't we all get along? It's impossible. So I want to know. By the way, I don't have the answers at all. I still have the same questions. I'm not sure we'll ever know the answers, but it's always interesting to see the different perspectives. And like as you're you have way more life experience than I do. And you've had such a different kind of vantage point, you know, being behind the scenes in a newsroom versus, you know, us civilians. You know, you've had it. You've had a different vantage point. Well, participating in what's going on, you know, being a kind of a participant observer at the same time. does give you a take on things. And sometimes it's just the, ah, what do I say about this? How do we report on this? How do we handle this? The thing that comes to mind all the time is 9-11. Being on the air 9-11, realizing that as things were happening, it isn't just a news story. And you also didn't know in the moment, how widespread is this? Is something happening in every American city at this very moment? Are there hundreds of thousands of people who are going to attack the United States at this moment? Or is it just what we know and dealing with the amount of information that we have, which wasn't much, and realizing that people listening to this, they're not only unsure, they're in a state of mild panic at least, buildings now dropping as we're on the air. So the sense of such responsibility, trying to get it right, knowing you're not going to totally get it right, Not wanting to scare people, not wanting to soften what was happening out there. And that's the time where, would you call that fun? No. No. But I was glad to be, I was happy. I felt, oh, there's some use in life for me in doing this at this moment. Yeah, that's really important to be there for all of us because we really trusted you. You were our guy. You're our morning guy. And this went down during your show. It went down to the degree that I got on the air was already happening. I took over for Tony McKeown, who was doing the early morning. And I took over and Dorothy and Jill were there and things were happening. And one building went down. And then I see what I think is a video of the same building. And I'm saying, oh, this is horrible. This is we're showing you again. And Dorothy and Jill, I think, said to me, Steve, no, it's live. It's another building. oh my God, you know, where are we going? What else is going to happen? We're hearing now about Washington. And I'm thinking, what about here? What about Chicago? What about Detroit? What about, is it happening everywhere? Is it happening around the world? You just didn't know the answer at all. Yeah. So scary. It was such a scary time for everyone in the whole world. I actually wasn't in town. I was in Costa Rica and, And my mom woke me up and said, Amy, you have to come and see what's on the television. And I was, I think I was 21 or 22. And we just sat there with our mouths open, watching it live from the jungle. Yeah. Wow. Thinking, is the world ending at this moment? So part of that is, listen, Good Day LA was a funny, kooky morning show. where things were said and done that weren't said and done in other places. It was kind of a reality show before reality shows. And there was a lot going on. But at some point, what mattered, the only thing that was important was getting the information out and getting it out correctly. Yeah. And you guys did a good job of it and doing it in a friendly way, you know, that was relatable. You guys were so relatable. Well, you know, interestingly... the highest ratings we ever had were for the two or three or four or five weeks afterwards. And I realized it was neighborhood, neighborly, comfort food. Oh, good. They're there this morning. The world's in place. Those people are sitting there this morning. Good. Yeah. Because in a program like that, it's really a relationship with the audience. It's not so much, did you have a good guest? Did you do this right? Did you do that right? It's this relationship we have. And the relationship is such that they will forgive you for things. They'll be with you through a lot of things. But they're relying on you. When they need you, you're there. Yeah. Yeah. We would turn you guys on in the morning and there you were. And it was, you guys were relatable and you guys were predictable. We knew you guys were going to be there. You're going to make us laugh. You're going to give us, you're going to give us the daily update so we can have conversations on the phone with other people and know what's going on in the world. you know, we could grab those little bites so we could have, so we could be in communion with all the other people that are experiencing the day. Like we are, you know, it's a, it is, it seems like a, like a little trivial thing to have a morning show, but it's such an important part of our society because now we live in this world of the screens tell us, you know, what the world is. And you guys lived in a time where the screen, you know, the TV was kind of, yeah, it's, It was changing before our very eyes. I mean, when I started on Good Day Life, the internet was going. Social media wasn't going yet. It was about to start. People got their information kind of in the old-fashioned way. You know, you turned on the television. At 6.30, people turned on to watch the national news to get the news of the day, which is a very quaint notion now that anybody would wait until 6.30 to get the national news of the day. It was crazy. In flux while we were on. You could tell. You could feel the change. Go to our website. I remember promoting the website, promoting the website. And I would joke on there saying, it's very important news. I'm not going to tell you, but go to our website. Yeah. I mean, the world changed before your eyes. What year was it when you got started in the newsroom or on the radio? My first job in radio was back in 19... 04. Out of Tuesday. No, it was 1967. Wow. Yeah, 1967, when most people were listening to this were not even a thought of yet. I wasn't. No, I walked into, I was in a PhD program at the University of Houston, studying to be a clinical psychologist. And I had a little bit of, you know, like an epiphany of, I'm not sure I want to do this. I'm not sure I want to do this. What do I want to do? And I want to be in broadcasting. And so if you talk to any people I grew up with, there's no surprise. Ask my sister, because I sit with her hairbrush and do play by play in my bedroom, you know, and announce things and, you know, all like every broadcaster's ever done. I took a leave of absence. which I'm still on. And I just called every radio station. And it was a simple enough time that people, I got a couple of meetings and I ended up getting a job. And I went from a guy with a fantasy of being in radio to having a six hour radio show with playing with music and news. And I was doing everything. I was doing everything. And it was a tremendous education. I think I had an audience of six. On a good day, three on a small day. But I didn't know that. I didn't know that. And in a relatively brief period of time, again, because of enthusiasm and curiosity and playing, playing, going to the playground, I ended up being the morning man, the sports director, the sales manager. And I did that for about 11 or 12 months. And I thought, you know, now I'm ready. And there was a station that I listened to, and it was the big talk news station. And that's where I wanted to go. And I called them and I got the guy who was the program director, who was also on the air. And I said, I want to come to work at your station. And he said to me, well, what's your, he had the big voice, what's your broadcast background? I said, honestly, a minute. And he said, well, this is, you know, veteran award-winning 25-year veterans. And what's your educational background? I said, well, I'm actually still kind of in a program for PhD at University of Houston. He said, well, come on in. So if people ever ask me, what did your education ever do for you? Very overtly and clearly, it got me that meeting. That's amazing. That I wouldn't have gotten, probably. And I went, and we had lunch, and then we had dinner, and then we had drinks, and I had a career after that. It's a wonderful story about the benefits of education. And by the way, let me give you a perspective on education. It never ends. I'm learning more now than I ever did in college. At this late stage in my life, I'm still learning more. There is a kind of small thrill you get from learning. What are you studying? What are you studying now, Steve? Everything. Everything. And because of, you know, I go back and forth on the Internet. Is it plus plus for humanity or not? And I don't have an answer for that because it's also awful and it spreads misinformation and hatred and all of that. But boy, all the knowledge of the world is at our fingertips. You can get educated in everything and it takes no effort. I can remember when I was in radio and I had a show where I would interview people. I would go to the library. And I'd sit there and I'd go through something called a periodic guide of literature. And it would show you, oh, there's an interview with so-and-so in this magazine. And then you get the thing and you make the points and whatever. And you're there for seven hours for an interview that's going to last seven minutes. Now you go, thank you. I got it all. Like there's no excuse for anybody not to learn. Oh, I love learning. I walked into my son's room and he said, oh, you know, I've been... studying Japanese. I said, really? He said, yeah, I have a 200 day streak on Duolingo. This kid is 11 years old. So he's been teaching him Japanese, some self Japanese without even telling me for 200 days. I didn't even notice. Wow. Yeah. And that's, that's the great part of this. You know, do you want to know something about the Etruscan civilization? Like somebody said, what's the Etruscan? Okay. In five minutes, You will know as much as somebody who goes to Cambridge University to learn about it, because it's all right there. It's all right there. I know. I got a degree in art history, and now I can just look everything up. I can just ask Chachi Petit. Which is phenomenal. It is phenomenal, isn't it? It's amazing. It's like lazy. It's almost lazy. You just have to work to learn it. Now you don't have to work so hard. No. You don't have to worry about forgetting anything anymore, though. That's true. It's all there. So very few careers last. What separates the people who sustain relevance from those who fade? Well, first of all, luck. Luck has to do with it. I fall back on, again, on enthusiasm and curiosity and feeling the playfulness of a career, even when it's serious. Wanting to be there. I always felt like I was doing my avocation as vocation. It's something that I would have done for nothing, much less have a professional career, earning a living at it. For me, that would be my answer. And the fact that I'm interested in everything so that there was lots of slots I could always fill. You know, I was a sportscaster. I was the weather guy. I was the entertainment guy. I did entertainment tonight for a year. I think that's a small part of my background uh i did sports talk on kbc radio for a bunch of years uh i did the weather. You know, it's nothing i really ever wanted to do, but i did the weather. I basically always thought of myself as a talk show host slash news junkie. That would be like the combination because i realized early in my career when i went to television and i was a news anchorman in houston that I found it boring. And because what it was, was reading copy, either written by somebody else or by me, and just reading what you've already know is on the page. And I discovered something about myself. I'm more excited if I don't know quite what is on the page or what's around the corner. This is why I like breaking news and live television and things going on and a certain degree of comfort and chaos. I get that. I understand that. I'm a mother, so I have comfort in chaos in my daily life. I get that all the way. Well, and also, and I'm going to try not to interview you. It's a reflex for me, you know. Go ahead, Steve. It's very hard for me not to. This whole thing about chaos of motherhood, first of all, you have like 17 children. How many children do you have? Six. Six. You have 17 children. And you're doing this and you have a book and you have a business and you're still expanding your horizons. And not only do you want to do it for you, you want it to have a positive impact on so many other people. So it's not just me, me, me. Although it's got to be a healthy part of me, me, me in it because you can't do for others if you're not doing for yourself. And This idea you have, which is so simple, so obvious, and yet people miss it. And that is so much what you do as a mother and running a house and a family requires so many skills, so much decision-making that as a society, we don't value it. So you don't get credit for doing some stuff that's not easy at all. And the other thing is it never ends. You know, if you have a career, you go home. The career's over for the day. Home never ends. Kids never end. It never, ever ends. No, you don't. There are no vacations. You just move locations. So let me turn it on you, okay? How do you always have the energy? I know you're a human being. I know that there are times when I'm sure you go off in a corner. But what do you do? once in a while to look at the pile you have in front of you and think, I can't do it. I can't do it. What do you do? I really good at compartmentalizing my life. So when I'm at home, I really try to just put my mama hat on and turn off, you know, usually I'm not, I'm not writing my book. I'm not thinking about my podcast. I'm not thinking about work. I'll just be home. Cause I do have a three-year-old and a five-year-old still and, So when I'm home, it's like they need me. They need my attention. They need me to sit on the ground and build magnetile towers with them. And you have to go into their world. They're not going into yours. Yeah. Yeah. It's not fair to expect them to be able to come into my world. They're babies. But I can go into their world for a few minutes or for a few hours a day. I can, you know, and I enjoy it. I want to color with my daughter. She found these little golden tattoos. And so now every time we get together, she's like, mama, put another one on my hand. So, you know, it's always some little sweet thing that we're doing and they like to help me cook. So we'll cook dinner together. And, you know, it's just when I'm there, I'm there. And when I'm here and I'm at the office and I have my podcaster producer hat on, that's what I'm doing. And I really will put my phone on, do not disturb. And there are other big people that can handle their problems for the few hours that I'm focusing and concentrating on what I'm doing. I don't believe in multitasking with different hats on. I think I can keep one hat on at a time, stay focused for a few hours on that kind of work. And that keeps me kind of sane. That keeps me sane. How do you sleep? Very well. I am a big sleeper. Sleep is huge to me. It's like at least eight hours a night. And my husband, the first time he took me away, like on a takeaway trip before we got married, He cracked up because I have my sleeping socks, my sleeping mask, my earplugs. And he laughed at me. He was like, are you serious? Well, wait, wait, where's your white noise machine? I didn't bring it with me. But yeah, he's like, oh, whoa, this chick really takes sleep seriously. But I do. I do. I need like I need eight hours of sleep for real every day. And some people don't need sleep. I need sleep. I love sleep. Sleep is good. Well, but you you have a pretty big battery to charge with everything you're doing. Yeah. Yes, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Sleep's always been kind of it's non-negotiable. How do you handle anxiety? You know, I'm not a very anxious person. I don't get very anxious. I do get scared sometimes. I do. I would say it's not really anxiety for me, but I do have self-doubt. And a lot of times when I'm scared or have self-doubt, as I'm getting older, I actually push into it. So things I'm afraid of, I actually realize those are the things I need to do. It's kind of like thinking there's a monster under the bed. You look under the bed and it's not really there. You're not afraid of it anymore. And that's sort of life. There's a phrase you can use for that psychological phrase. You're being counterphobic. Counterphobic. Counterphobic. I like it. Yeah. So that's sort of what I've learned. And my next book that I'm writing right now kind of really gets into that shadow work and how we can use our fear and the things, the emotions that we're running away from and the problems we're running away from in our life to help us actually meet and exceed our potential. You write and talk much about the wound. the wound. Yeah. Yeah. In the book, the second book really gets into the wound even more, honestly. Um, it was one of the, one of the big questions that people were like, okay, tell me more about the wound. And the wound is, you know, in the bigger sense, the wound is the patriarchal wound that was left on the female psyche from, you know, millennia of patriarchal rule that told women they were less that told women that what they did wasn't important. Um, that it was, you know, women's work wasn't really considered high level, high skilled. That's really one of the things that I wanted to, I wanted to change the narrative on that with my book, with the manager. It was, let's change the narrative on this. You know, women, the work we do with our families, with our husbands, with our children, this is highly skilled management organization. This is emotional IQ. This is Some seriously highly skilled work that nature has actually helped us evolve to do. And let's own that. The fact that we are doing this work and that is skilled labor and that it's a really a masterclass in leadership as a whole. So for any woman who's out there who feels like she isn't a leader, if you're a mom, you know how to lead. I'm giving you permission. These skills really translate well. into the working world. Nobody gives it too much credit yet. And observe that. But when you're skilled at all those other things, hey, being in an office, working with people, that's easy if they're not kids. Do I really, like, my eyes really lit up in 2020, my husband got sick and I had to step in and run our two IT companies while he was unwell. And I... I had just given birth to Indy. She was born in 2020. And in 21, I got pregnant with Paul. So I ran these companies for quite a few years. And as I was running the home and running all these kids, all of a sudden I sort of realized at some point that there was just a lot of crossover in the capital management, people management, and systems management that go into both a household and in running a company. And so anytime I felt like I couldn't do it, I just went back to how am I doing this at home? What are my standard? I have plenty of standard operating procedures in my home. I have lots of strategic action plans in my home. If I'm going to have a home birth, that's a strategic action plan. Let me outline it. You know, this, this, this, and this, who's going to be there? Where are we going to do it? What are the logistics of it? Do I have all the equipment? This is a strategic action plan. You know, you're planning to buy a house. That's a strategic action plan. You can put that together step by step. You know exactly how you're going to get there. Where your spoons go in your kitchen is a standard operating procedure, SOP. And in business, we use SOPs for everything from, you know, how accounting receives purchase orders. I mean, there's an SOP for absolutely everything in business. And in our homes, it's very much the same. Just no one ever taught us the words SOP. So it's about reclaiming the language, I think, of business in the home so that we can take credit for the work that we've been doing there all along. And of course, you just dropped in quietly home birth, which as if, oh, yeah, all that home birth thing. What kind of reaction did you get from your family when you decided to do that? So, you know, my mom is she has got a Ph.D. in pharmacology. She did her internship at Cedars-Sinai and I was born at Cedars and she was like, what? Like why? Why would you want to do that? So I had already read like five books on it and I was very low risk. I was very young. Well, I was not too young, 30, right in the zone of safety. And I'd read a lot of books that actually having a home birth was less risky than having a hospital birth in America. And that midwifery model of care is actually the standard in socialized medicine countries like Sweden and England and pretty much all of Europe. And I thought, well, let me see if I can find a midwife. There were really, really had been wiped out, Steve. I don't know if you know this, but during the 90s, midwifery was banned in California. And midwives were getting locked up for assisting women with their births at home. Didn't know that. What is the status now? Now it is legal. I think it became legal again in 1999. But actually, my first midwife, Anne Summers, actually did get locked up in the 90s for being a midwife. Really? Yeah. So we've come a long way. But it was in 2009. It was kind of hard to find a midwife because there had been kind of a collapse of midwifery in the state of California. Yeah. There are so many fabulous midwives now. I've definitely had a resurgence. And the midwife I used for my last two babies is Lindsay Miles. And she's total boss and celebrity midwife and has an amazing career. And she's a fabulous human being and a very good friend of mine. But I'd love to see the resurgence of home birth, you know, if it's safe, you know, if you're low risk. And I always tell women, if it scares you, don't do it. Like if you feel, however you feel about birth, whatever feels like it's going to be the safest option for you is the safest option. People, if they didn't know you at all, say, oh, crunchy granola, right? A little bit. A little bit, but crunchy granola, business driven orientation. Those things usually don't go hand in hand. No, they don't. And Steve, I'm also a yogi. I've been doing yoga for 17 years. Um, yeah, no, I, and I'm very, it's funny. Chat actually told me that I am a spiritualpreneur is what it told me. And I thought, okay. Okay. Yes. All right. Listen, also people, uh, have to learn how to say the word midwifery. It just flows out of your mouth. Midwifery. Okay. I know it does, you know, cause it's, I've actually had five babies at home, Steve. Wow. Any problems? None. No. It actually got easier every single time. Okay. And you live near a hospital? Yeah. Just in case. Just in case. Okay. Yep. Just in case. Yeah. And you know, you're constantly being monitored, but I don't know. I just, you get to a place where you trust your body too, especially when you've had, I feel like once you've had two home births, your body really knows what it's doing. And it's birth is really just a biological function at that point. You just trust it. Let me ask a crude man question. Are you done? I wish I could have another baby, but we're aging out. I would totally have one more if I could, but I, I think I've aged out. Okay. All right. You asked me something. So let's see. Did you all, since you, you know, you're so adaptable, Steve, did you always know how to adapt or did adaptation teach you? I think it's probably a combination of two things. The adaptation comes from, again, the fun of wanting to try stuff. Even being slightly, let's use this phrase again, slightly counterphobic. Am I afraid to do that? Let's do that. People ask me, did you ever get nervous when you're on the air? And I say, I would get nervous the first time I ever did anything for the leading up to it and the first two minutes of it. And that's it, because now you're doing it. You know how it is. The fear of something happening is much worse than the event itself quite often. So that certainly was a big part of it. And I think it's always key to say, don't say no. Don't say no. You brought this up in the introduction. Don't say no. I wanted to do everything when I started, whatever it was. I want to try that job and this job. And I love being on the air. And I can't believe everybody wanted to be on the air. Now I'm on the air. All right. I never wanted to forget in the endless career that I had the thrill of, wait a minute, I'm doing this. Once in a while I forget because business and taking care of things and looking at the ratings and sales and all that stuff. Wait a minute. Wait a second. Let's remember the thrill of this. Let's remember that, wow, I'm still doing this. Pinch myself. I'm still doing this. And I'd often want to remind people of that. Because, you know, sometimes work is work. You can be in the most heightened place, but if you're doing it all the time, it's just what you're doing. And somebody else comes along and says, wow, you get to do that. Reminds you, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Steve. Well, was there ever a moment when the version of success you were chasing quietly changed? Well, yes. I never intended... to be thought of as a news person. As I said, I started in music radio for a little while, you know, and then in talk radio, which was very news oriented, but I always liked talking about news and talking about the issues, not being the newscaster. And the perfect amalgamation of that for me was doing Good Day LA because I got to do all of it all the time. So if you notice a lot of newscasters, Don't talk like people. And one of the things that I learned, remember when I first started doing television news, before I'd go on, I'd say, good evening. Good evening. And that was back in the days of the stern, serious newscasters. Good evening. Good evening. So every time I was on, I was slightly somebody else until I realized, stop it. You know, fine. Don't find your voice. You know your voice. I don't have to find it. I'm faking it when I go in. And what happens with a lot of people, they fake it so much that they think that's how they talk now. Good evening. I love when I see a 24-year-old kid on TV. My colleague, I said, you never say colleague in your life. Why are you saying that? Because you're putting up adult clothing and you're pretending. Another observation. Here's another observation I When I first started, we all wanted to seem older. Not anymore. Everybody wants to seem younger. Everybody wants to be back then. You want to be perceived as someone with a little maturity, some age on you and experience on you. Now, if you look at pretty much any person in the news, with very few exceptions, you look at every local news station and then you look at the social media and everybody's cute and adorable and funny and doing silly things. That would be unimaginable when I got into the business. People wouldn't present themselves that way unless they were doing some kind of goofy show, but not if they're doing something attached to news. That's a big change. Yeah. Tell me more about that time, Steve. Back then, first of all, it had to do with a lot of the degree of what was being put on the air and disseminated was determined by scarcity. I mean, you only had a couple of places. So that when I watched the news... the name that would always come up is Walter Cronkite. So if you're watching Walter Cronkite, he's on for half an hour, which means like 24 minutes, and 25 million or 30 million people would be watching him every night when the population of the country was about 190 million. Now the number one primetime newscast, the 630 newscast, gets 8 million in a country of 340 million people. So There weren't a lot of places to go. So we were living in a monoculture where people were sharing the same experience. Because either you were watching Walter Cronkite or the other two national newscasts, or you were hearing about it. So that when Walter Cronkite said, relative to the Vietnam War, the best we can hope for now is a stalemate. America knew it's time for us to get out. Because there's nobody like that now. There's nobody like that now. Also, because there were so few places to get news, the newscasters, the newscasts, they weren't chasing an audience. In other words, they weren't doing... Now, it's kind of, what do people want to hear? What do they want to hear? And we'll go with that. It's true of the important national newscasts, but more so where most people consume their news, which is on cable news, on streaming, and they're playing... what they think you want. Back then, you had, you know, it was kind of elitist. You had these elitist news guys, the gatekeepers, thinking, what is important for America to hear? Not, hey, what do they want to hear? You know, the Kardashians never would have been on a newscast. You would have never heard of them. When Elvis Presley died, what a story, right? Elvis Presley died. He was the second or third story on the CBS Evening News about a minute, 10 seconds. That was it. Wow. Wasn't even the lead story. Now, of course, they would cancel all programs and it would be wall to wall because, well, that's what people want to hear. Yeah. May not be the most important thing, you know. And back then, they had the time to talk about and show issues about They're a little more complex than now because you're afraid of losing the audience. Yeah, totally. And we were talking about narrative affirmation. I love that word. You're the one who came. I was like, man, that is exactly the word. It came up while I was talking to you. It's not only narrative affirmation. It's like emotional narrative affirmation. And, you know, if you turn on cable news, they're going to do the thing then. First of all, you'll agree with and it'll work you up and you'll want to watch more of it. And then you'll ganger about what they're doing in the other part of the world. So that once was a world where we could disagree, but we weren't at each other's throats. But now everything gets ramped up. The loudest voice gets heard and you have to be loud to be heard. And when you have a loud voice, a louder voice will come back at you. So now you're ramping up even more so that the complexities of life and issues get lost. Yes, totally. It becomes very polar this or that, but there's no more like middle ground. There's nowhere you can go to get like middle ground news. It's hard. It really is hard and is nuanced. It's just gone so that we tend to have a side and that's what we root for. So you give me any story, Let's say right now, it pertains to now, what's happening in Minneapolis. If you're watching around this time, you know what I'm talking about. The shooting of the woman in the car. We've seen it from every angle. And isn't it interesting when people walk away with what they think happened, you could predict before they ever watched. You could predict how they'll come out of this because they have an emotional predisposition to see it rooting for their side what they think hurts or helps their side in issues. And so everybody can be looking at the same thing and you get absolute two different, completely different points of view. Yeah. Polarization. So we've now basically a country that was never supposed to be divided has been divided using the media? Well, using the media and the media also helps the division. It's very hard. I mean, I realized even in talking to friends, they don't want to hear it. They, if you say, yeah, that did happen, but you know, this happened also. They don't want to hear that. It's counter narrative. They don't want to hear it. Yeah. Nobody wants to hear the middle because everybody wants to go all the way tribal. You're either this or you're that. And if you're not this or that, then. If you, if you question that you're like an enemy. Right. You can't question, the narrative cannot be questioned. It's now dogma. So it's a religion. It's the who side am I on? You know, I think about in history, in England, we think of England's the most civilized of all countries, right? Because they have British accents. That'll do it. Somebody with a British accent, you already say, oh, that's a smart person. In the history of England, in that period of time, there was a period of time between, you know, from Henry the eighth establishing the Anglican Church because the Pope won't give him an annulment. So he becomes the head of that church. And then suddenly you have tremendous anti-Catholicism going on. And then Mary comes in and she's Catholic. And then you have anti-Protestantism going on. And then it changes again. And if you've voiced an opinion in one way or the other, you could lose your head. I mean, literally, I don't mean lose your head in an argument. Lose your head. Yes. And we are the wire that way. You know, it seems like when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, I don't remember this at all, Steve. Like, I remember that there were people in my neighborhood and some people were Republicans and some people were Democrats and it didn't matter. Everybody was friends and you could still talk about politics and nobody's feelings got hurt. You could have different points of view. But at what point did we switch to pure tribalism? Well, I can tell you. The Internet and cable news. That was it. Things that, you know, you think about politics a little bit, maybe you disagreed with your neighbor, but now you go online and you're assaulted with things and everything gets revved up and ramped up. That access to all of that stuff is a driver of the polarization, without a doubt. It really is. Because these are the same people who were in your neighborhood before. Yeah. These are your parents' friends, you know, that was the friend group and they're still the friend group. But now, you know, I've found, you know, my parents' friends don't talk to each other anymore. Well, yeah. And also we're living in a time and, you know, we have, without getting into all of it, we have the most unusual president in the history of this country who is driving a lot of it because he's on social media every moment and likes to fight and pushes it and, Whereas most presidents at least pretend to be uniters. That's not the polarization that we're living in now. It's me versus you. Yeah. Either you're on my side or not. I'm not going to reach across to you. You've got to come to me. Yeah, it's very polarized. It's like you can turn on Fox News and you're living in one planet and you turn on CNN and you're living on a completely different planet. Completely. And in terms of also what are they picking up to talk about when they sit there and come on? And I've been around it. What do you choose to have on the air? And if you're doing one hour shows in the evening, personality driven, they're really just like talk radio shows, but they're under the cover of news. What you choose to talk about determines what people know. And if you overemphasize an issue, that issue becomes bigger than it should be. Tell me more about that. It goes back to this affirmation thing again. Let's make up a situation so that it's not political. So people watching this don't go into their own little tribes and lanes listening to this. Let's say that I know you are the viewer and I heard that you like lollipops. Now, lollipops are not the most important food group at the moment, but I know that you like lollipops. So tonight I'm going to talk about the war against lollipops. And now across the way at the other place, they're going to have on the doctor who will expose why lollipops will kill you. Now, meanwhile, lollipops aren't that important, but now they are. Now they are. It's a silly version, but you get the point. I get the point. Absolutely. Yeah. We are taking it to another level that we've never seen before. But at what point can we return to some sense of normalcy in our country. At what point can we come back to a happy, messy middle? Maybe another 9-11. But even that didn't work. I mean, I was I remember I was cynical is the wrong word, but skeptical because we all came together for like for four minutes and I was saying, this is a cheap joke, but it has meaning. Until you can't get a parking space on Tuesday. You know, You're fighting over the parking space. And sure enough, instead of bringing us together, it did for a little while. And we had flags flying out of our cars. It didn't take long at all. No, it didn't. Yeah. I remember seeing people in the streets with their American flags and everybody was so united. I'd never seen America like that. The 80s were pretty pro-American, but it was both affirming and hopeful. And yet at the same time, time I felt like oh I was a little I guess I'm rarely anxious but it did make me a little anxious too because I did feel like we were being maybe just a tiny bit manipulated to see how much of that was left in us or we were manipulating ourselves. You know, we may be doing it ourselves, but the time that lasted, I remember a guy, a famous magazine publisher, Graydon Carter, afterwards said, printed, It's the end of irony in movies. It's the end of gratuitous violence in movies because now we understand how bad it is and we all have an understanding. And that lasted less than a week. Movies became more violent, more irony, more stuff. You know, we say things to make us feel good and then we don't do them. Yeah, you're right. So do you think in this information age that we're living in now, do you think people are becoming more informed or are we becoming more affirmed? More information, less wisdom. True. Because sometimes all that information works against wisdom because we're choosing the information that we want to hear. We're getting very serious here. I know. I'm sorry about that. Yeah. So I've got it. This will lighten it up a little bit. So if you were 25 years old today and you're entering this fragmented media world with no platform, how would you build trust? Showing up. I mean, just, you know, showing up, doing your best, be content driven because the technology, if I'm 25 now, by the time I'm 30, the technology will have changed, but content doesn't change. Try to be true. The effort you're making to be fair, to be right, you can't be perfect ever. We're human beings. We are flawed. I like to say that we're sophisticated, we're grown, we're civilized, and we're slightly removed from when we live in caves. And a lot of this stuff comes from the fear of the other cave and the other tribe or somebody who doesn't look like you or whatever it is. It's still underlying all of this. It is. Yeah. Ancient human behavior is still there. It's one of the things we talk about. It's like the technology is great. What we're having the issue with is the humanity aspect of it. So I talked to a woman who actually helps companies train their people to catch up with the technology that the companies have put in because it's not the technology that's holding them back. It's actually the employees, you know, reluctance to learn the technology. But in some ways it's like, We've come into this very exponential growth into AI and automation. And all of these things are going to profoundly change our world in the next four years now. Because everyone's saying by 2030, there's going to be this profound change. And here we are in 2026. And I'm like, how are we going to adapt? What do you think, Steve? This is the fastest I've ever seen the world change. You can't say I have my fingers crossed. If you went to sleep. in the year 817 on a Thursday, if you went to sleep in 817 and you woke up and it was 1126 and you looked out the window, you'd think it was the next day. You wouldn't know. Everything is the same. The modes of transportation are the same. The houses look the same. The water well is exactly the same. Nothing has changed. Nothing. This is, I made up years, but what am I, about 400 years or whatever it is. Nothing has changed. 40 years from now, do you think we'll recognize anything? No, I was sitting in my kitchen last night. I love to reflect on this because this is sort of my world that I feel like this is my world where I stand here. I've worked in digital transformation with these big companies for the last six years since 2020. And I've been able to see how digital transformation has transformed the way they do business. And now that we're seeing digital transformation at a consumer level, I was thinking if I could see myself right in this moment, when I was 14, what would trip me out the most? It's like probably the fact that I'm using some AI assistant on my phone to help me prep a meal in my kitchen. while talking to another AI assistant, asking it to set timers for me and asking it to put groceries in my grocery basket for me. You know, we do have quite a bit of technology, but I think, holy moly, in the next four years. Have we psychologically and emotionally caught up to it? No, I don't think so. I mean, I just look at what I think is the damage done to young girls because of social media. Mm. it's a nightmare. First of all, comparing yourself to everybody else, and everybody's lying anyway to begin with. The bullying that can go on, the measuring yourself against other impossible things, phony role models, ugliness, pettiness, all of that, that little girls never got exposed to. Ever in history, the worst was they'd look at a movie magazine and think, I can't be that beautiful. I mean, that was it. You're talking about transformative. This really is transformative and not in a positive way. What do you think? How do we address these issues, especially with the young people? How can we get ahead of it, Steve? Well, first of all, you've got to get the tablets out of their hands. You've got to get them out of the schoolroom. There's a movement afoot right now in Denmark and Sweden. And now in Norway, get them out. Don't have them in there. Have them work with books and turn pages. And write papers with their hands. And write papers and do the work. And do the work. And see the work that you're doing coming from your hand to the page. Because it's a whole different process here. The brainwaves that are open when you're doing hands-on. And it's not doing it for you. You know, and it's like I had a big advantage growing up. I grew up in the Bronx in New York in those days. And the advantage was, I'm going to act like it was a tough neighborhood. It wasn't a tough neighborhood, but it was out there. It was physical. You were out there. And I mentioned every day I'd go out to play. And you go out to play, and you made up the rules, and you had the teams, and you won, you lost. You got cheated. You cheated. Find out what happened when you cheated. You had to go to the bathroom, but you had to finish playing out the game. All those things were incredible school for life. An incredible school for life because it was all hands-on. It was all hands-on. You go to school. You had to do the work in school. You had to present stuff. It was tremendous. Now, we would be like Dolt when he would come to IT. Now, but boy, we knew a whole lot about living. Yes. I think your generation knows way more about living even than my generation. We didn't, we grew up with TVs and cable TV. You guys had a lot less screen time than we did. Well, I didn't, I didn't have a television in my bedroom. Yeah. Okay. So TV was an event. You went to the living room, right? And when, when it was Paris said it's off, it's off. And by the way, it was different because you had to get up and walk across the living room to change the channel. Imagine that. Old school, Steve. It was old school. But then it seemed like, wow, I can go over and turn this thing and the picture changes. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. So what has become clearer to you with time that you simply couldn't see when you were younger? It's a larger statement. We think things will stay the same. They won't. We have to make sure that we're not losing us in technology, that we're not dehumanizing things in technology. It's important to talk to each other. A lot of people I worked with, especially some of the women I worked with who were the younger ones. I said, I'll call you tomorrow. Call? Call? What is that? Yeah, we've gotten away from calling. Yeah, no, they would call each other. You've seen it sitting in the same room And they're texting each other. Yes. I see that sometimes in my own house. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Call. I mean, get on the phone and talk. Yeah, things will continually are going to keep changing. And it's, you know, after a lifetime in the public eye, what have you learned about what truly matters? Well, nothing is new about that. It's family. It's family. It's friends. What I do, I do something called a ramble, which I haven't been doing much lately. But I always end it by saying two things. One is forgive. Forgive. Because when you forgive somebody, you're not allowing that person to own a piece of you that you're carrying in a negative way. That person still has impact on you. Forgive. First of all, forgive that person because that person maybe made a mistake or did something bad for a moment. Everybody does something bad sometime, right? Forgive that person and breathe. It's gone. It's gone. And the other most important thing is gratitude. Gratitude will get you through the day and get you through the night. Because what happens is we all get caught up in negative cycles. Even you, you're the most positive minded person I've talked to in a long time. But I will bet you there are Sunday nights when you start going down, down, down, down, down, down. And it's important to stop that. Take a moment. Take a breath. And say, what bad thing didn't happen today? A couple of bad things happened. Are my kids okay? No? All right? Okay. Am I breathing? Good? Getting better? Actually, do I feel good? Yeah, I do feel good. Yeah. Hey, okay. Things are okay. Gratitude is just so important. When you're feeling good, you should remember you're feeling good and be grateful for that. And if things aren't lining up exactly right, then gratitude becomes even more important. I love that, Steve. That's such good words from a wise man. I love that. So after decades of curiosity, preparation, reinvention, and showing up, how do you define a well-managed life? A well-managed life means that you haven't hurt too many people. You've had a good time. You haven't wasted too much time in life. And maybe you've done a couple of things that have helped. Because other than that, you know, we pretend that we're not surrounded by chaos, but we are. We are. And we structure, structure, structure to keep chaos away from us. I hear you. Chaos is life. Chaos is the truth and change is the truth. Always. You know, there's a saying in sports, nobody's ever beaten father time. Every athlete gets old, doesn't matter how great they are. The world is going to change no matter how hard you hold on to it the way it is. Your kid's going to grow up. You're going to sit. You're probably already at the point looking at pictures and saying, oh, I wish I could do that little again. But you can't. You can carry the memory in your heart. You can look at the photos. It moves on and it moves on. There's nothing you can do about it. We're here for a certain set of time, a certain amount of time. You choose to do what you want with it. And some people are born with advantages. They're taller. They look better. They're smarter. But going back to why I wanted to be in psychology, you're not necessarily happier. They're not. And sometimes you have to manage your happiness. A little bit of a responsibility to be happy, because if you're not, it affects everybody around you. Yes, it does. Let me tell you the story with. Dorothy and Jill. We worked together for almost two decades, every day. But when I went over there, Dorothy was there. I came in to anchor it, and it wasn't really working. I used to say there were five morning shows, and we were 12. Now, Jill was doing the evening news, but we brought her to the morning show. We're doing the show, and I had to go to the bathroom. Now, this was in the old building before we moved to where it is now. This is an old building in Hollywood. And I had to go down the hallway and whatever. And so I had thrown it to a reporter who I thought this would go about four minutes. And I run down the hallway, men's room, go into the stall, take everything off because I was after this and that and all of this stuff going on. And I hear just as I'm settling in, the reporter saying, thank you very much, Captain. He's ending it. He's ending it. I'm here. I'm on the toilet. Pull everything up and pull everything up and attach the things and go running down the hallway. And I can hear the show and Dorothy and Jill are there. And I hear one saying, Steve's stuck in the john. He's on the toilet right now. And I thought, what is this? And I come walking in and I said, You were in the toilet. You weren't able to. And I thought, is this humiliating or is this wonderful? And this is wonderful because a moment, a landmark had been crossed here. Suddenly a fourth wall has broken that this is truly real. I was stuck in the toilet. Yeah, you're a real person. And that set the tone for how we approach things after that. I used to have an argument with a director who would say, and she was a very good director, and she said, well, we never want to show how the sausage is made. Because I said, no, no, no. That's what this show is. We're showing how the sausage is made every minute. We're not fooling anybody. This isn't life in this studio. It's a studio. It's a desk in a corner of a place. This isn't real, but this is real. Yeah, you guys came off as very authentic and it was something really, really different than we'd ever seen before. And I think that's why we watched you for so many years. I mean, from 1995 to 2012, you were my morning show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And thank you. I was pleased to be your morning show. And the key is, you know, I've talked to a lot of classes and Dorothy teaches like two classes a year and I always talk to them. And even the people I worked with, I always say to them, Be yourself. Be the best version of yourself. Don't be something else. Don't be phony out in the field. A lot of the reporters who work with us and work with me through the years learned, because I always say, my goal is to get you out of your comfort zone into a new comfort zone and get you out of that comfort zone into yet another one. And eventually you can handle everything. Yeah. And that's, that's how you did it, too. You kind of took it piece by piece by piece by piece by piece by piece by piece. Just relax. Just be real. Just be in the moment. Be truthful with the people and the responsibility. Also have a good time. Just have a good time. Steve, listening to you today makes me feel less like hearing a career story and more like receiving a masterclass in endurance and adaptability and perspective. Your journey reminds us that relevance is not accidental and It's built through curiosity, humility, and the courage to evolve. And perhaps most importantly, that the meaning of life is not measured only in professional milestones, but in the wisdom we gather along the way. Thank you for your voice, your example, and the depth you brought to this conversation. It has been a true privilege to sit with you. And to everyone. Yeah, thank you so much, Steve. Thank you. This is a good time. I had a good time. And I, by the way, I enjoyed interviewing you. You're an excellent guest. I'm going to actually have, I'm going to do the manager podcast where you interview me. Fair enough. Heck yeah. You just be like, you sparked me. I'm like, oh my gosh, I could actually have people come on and interview me on my show. We could do that. I'm allowed. I'm the producer. I'm saying yes. You know, here's the thing about rules. Ultimately, there are no rules, rules or guidelines you work through, but sometimes breaking the rules is, that, that creates creativity and wisdom. Yes. Yeah. I like breaking rules. It's kind of one of my favorite things to do. And to everyone listening, if this conversation reminded you that reinvention is always available, share it with someone who is still becoming Steve. What an honor. Thank you for being here. Where can we find you on social? Where are you? Well, uh, I'm on Instagram and Facebook, uh, Instagram. I'm, uh, i'm steve S. Edwards on facebook and steve edwards LA, I believe, on Instagram. And I do rambles live at about 11 30 when i do them during the week and then they get posted awesome and by the way i leave i leave this and i'm going into a zoom meeting uh with producers and dorothy and Jill. We may be doing what what else a podcast Yay, you should. I love it. Do it, Steve. People are always asking for it. Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Steve. It has been an honor. I've had so much fun getting to know you this week. So thank you so much for spending time with me.