3.21.2025 -- NLS -- Marv Hepworth’s 40 Years of Radio Legends

On this episode with Neal and Julie, they welcome the legendary Marv Hepworth, a longtime Sandhill Media staple known for his engineering expertise and signature suspenders. Marv shares his journey through 40 years in radio, from his early days in Hailey, Idaho, to overseeing the technical side of multiple stations across Southeast Idaho. He recounts wild stories from his career, including treacherous mountain rescues, unexpected wildlife encounters, and the transition from traditional to digital broadcasting.

Neal and Julie also dive into current events, discussing Donald Trump’s recent executive order dismantling the Department of Education, the political landscape, and economic impacts. Marv chimes in with his perspective on media evolution and what it takes to succeed in radio today. Plus, a hilarious ghost story from Marv’s early career rounds out the conversation. Don’t miss this fun and insightful episode!

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Transcript

And good morning. It's 807 on a Friday here on Newstalk 107. Hi, I'm Julie Mason, and we're sans Neil Larson this morning. He's off gallivanting in some national park in southern Utah this morning. But the studio is not even close to lonely because I've got more of the legend, marvelous Marv Hepworth, who wears too many hats to count here at Sand Hill Media and also is famous for his amazing suspenders he's doing with that.

Yeah, that's what it is. Marv is joining me this morning. Good morning Mark. Good morning. It's so fun to finally get to come in and visit with you. And and the greatest part is I finally get in on the morning show, and I get the best half of the, the two halves. So hopefully it's the easier to look at one.

Absolutely. And you know, my saying I might not be the cutest in the room, but I'll always be the best smelling, so it's going to be the best smelling half of you, though. And it's true. Well, I'm so glad you're here. For those who me? I don't know who wouldn't know you, but for those who don't know, Marv Hepworth and your, legend in the industry, introduce us to Marv Hepworth.

Well, I have been with KP Sand Hill Radio for 40 years as of about two weeks ago. Just celebrated my 40th anniversary here. Congratulations. So it has just been a wild ride and and so much fun. And the growth since I have been here at the at the time that I started, we were just a little couple.

I am and I am. And now here we are, 40 years later with, eight radio stations and, locations all over southeast Idaho and translators and boosters. And so I'm the one that gets to go take care of them. Yeah. So that's one of the many hats he wears here. He's our our lead engineer, which means you trek up mountains in deep snow and blizzards and windstorms.

And that's the funnest part. Yeah, I do love the studio work and always have always loved, you know, being behind the microphone. But, getting out and actually going to the places and the things that happen to you there just don't happen to anybody else because they are usually under duress. You're you're climbing a hill in a blizzard or, or after there has been a large snowfall of some kind and.

Yeah. So we end up with some great stories. Yeah. You do. Okay. Well, we love that you're here. We are so lucky. People believe you're such an expert, and they're accurate, that you get called by other stations and people check in with you to help fix things. So we love that. And we're so grateful that you're part of ours.

But how did you even get this start in radio? Radio kind of fell into my lap. And and the here's the fun part about this story, is that my voice is almost a carbon copy of my father. So when I became about 14 years old and my voice dropped, I could imitate my father and anybody that would call.

I could imitate him and just carry on conversations with people and, providing that they didn't want to know things that were very specific. I could make them believe that I was my father. But I happened to be in church, one Sunday morning, and the Sunday school teacher, heard me answer a question. And he happened to be the owner of the local radio station, and he just kind of grinned and looked at me and he said, see me after class.

And here I am, 48 years later, still working for the same man. Yeah. The owner of our radio station now. Yeah, was the owner of Little Car Sky in Hailey, Idaho, where I started and now he is, well, he's huge in the industry. And, and here I am still working for, Mr. Kent Franson. Yeah. So, yeah, he was the one that got me started.

And and for that reason, he just said, yeah, I think this has chosen you. So. Yeah, we've got an option here. You talk about our owner, Ken Franson. For people who don't know, here, here at Sandhill Media, it's not just the group of radio stations in Idaho Falls. We have a massive group in Logan and a massive group in Saint George as well.

And he has others, besides that, that he runs through, alums that, you know, our, our run by other groups. But yeah, he, he's a big player in, in the group. And it's been so fun to watch him and he's my namesake was most people don't know this, but his real name is Marvin. Is it. Oh that's great.

And I tease him about that all the time. It was fortuitous. He grew up right here. He grew up in in Little Fourth, Idaho, just outside of, basalt. So, yeah, it's it's so fun to get on and tease him every now and again. Yeah. He's a fantastic owner. We're very grateful to have him here. All right.

Tell us about all those 40 plus years in radio. How's it been? You know, this has been such a fun career. And and as a kid, when I got started, in, in high school, it was an ego trip. That was a big thing to, to be on the radio. And of course, this was before there was ever any kind of social media.

There wasn't any cell phones in anything. So somebody heard music. They were either playing it on their eight track player, or if they were really uptown, they had a cassette player in their car. But most of everybody got all of their music and all of their information just right there on the radio. And so, for you to do anything, to say anything, it was heard by just about everyone.

And, you know, as a kid, especially a 15, 16 year old that was, that was quite. That's pretty cool. Yeah. That was a lot of fun. Good for you. Do you have a favorite music genre? Oh, it's always been pop. It's been pop music. And, but I have done, you know, virtually every format. But yes, when it comes to what I listen to, it's, it's basically what I was listening to when we were in high school and, you know, pull out a good Boston album or, you know, Styx or any of the great rock bands from the mid to late 70s, all the way through the 80s and 90s.

But I have played, not just on radio, but in all of the other church dances and school dances. Yeah, weddings and all of that stuff. You know, you get out and it it's called, anything for a buck.

I've done that before. Yeah. Well, good. Okay. Some things had to have happened to you and all these years. Tell us potentially one of the craziest stories of your career in radio. Well, that obviously comes in the engineering part of it. When when you're out and you're, you're taking care of things that you know, will happen when, there's a heavy snowfall.

And then, funny, one of the things that will do the most damage is frost, in radio. And people don't realize that a, a heavy frost like that will, sometimes fill up your antennas. And the next thing you know, you've you've got reflected power and you end up going off the air. And probably one of the funnest things that, that I've ever had to talk about really wasn't fun at the time.

But we had one of those days when it was really frosty like that, up here on a couple, his main, antenna. And it was starting to affect our signal, and we couldn't get out very well. And so I knew what I had to do was go up, and you actually have to hit the antenna with a long stick.

All right? It's what it amounts to. You just end up with a pole. And, so I was I was going up there on a snowmobile, and in order to hit it, I had to have about a 15ft mast, a stick to be able to knock this off the antenna. So I'm riding up. I on a on a snowmobile with this giant 15ft pole between my legs like a lance.

And so I'm going up the hill. You're jousting, and and it looks like I'm trying to joust. Right? But, the funny part was, it was an a heavy fog. Really heavy to the point where you could only see about 10 to 15ft in front of you. And as I'm going up the hill, there's this massive black blob right in front of me.

And I thought, who tried to drive a truck up here? And so I locked up the brakes and I look, and it's a giant moose, a big moose, big bull. And sometimes they feel like they're as big as cars and and of course, I, I said, oh, probably out to try and turn, so I, I turn and go the other direction and get about another ten feet.

And here's another one. This is the cow moose. And, I just go, wow, what are the chances I'm going to drive right in the middle of these two? And so I turn around and I try to go the other way, and I drive up on the baby. Oh, you and her, do you? And I left in the middle of the family home evening.

Yep. And, so here I am, stuck in the middle of three of them and, just had these wild stories in my head of, you know, mothers trying to protect their their babies and charging. And I've seen so many of the videos of people, who had been attacked by these moose. So I had to try and ride this old snowmobile out of the way.

And we're talking about the older sleds before they, they could do the maneuvering. And so I eventually got up there and beat the ice off the dish, and, and we were able to get back on. But as I'm coming down, I said, you know, I'm going to avoid this one area and, just take a different route.

And in the meantime, they didn't like being disturbed. So they moved exactly where I had decided to drive off the hill. And I drove right in the middle of them again. And so, Oh, yeah, you're lucky, dude. Yeah, you end up with a lot of wildlife stories and, and of course, you end up with a lot of times when you were trying to, to get to a site and, if you saw the conditions of the mountains that we have to go on, the roads can be upwards of 20 to 40ft deep, buried in snow.

And so as you're coming down, you'll slide off the side of a hill and a snowcat or a snowmobile, or you'll roll something and. Oh, yeah, there's, there's so many of them. But, when it comes to that, you don't remember just the standard trip up to the transmitter site. It's always when you get up there and and you've had, quite the experience in either sliding down off the side of a mountain or, or getting stuck or stranded and, you know, there's been many times when, when we've been going to sites where, the equipment will break down, you'll break down on a four Wheeler or a snowcat, and somebody

has to come and rescue you. And, you know, on many occasions, we've had to be. It's a little bit like Donner Pass. Well, in in some of them, yes. And then in probably one of the more memorable ones was when, we were rescued by Frank Vandersloot helicopter and he actually came out and, sent his pilot out to, to rescue us.

And, I do not know this story. Yeah, well, we were on our way out to the east Twin Butte. That's the one out here on the desert. East of of Idaho Falls. And, the equipment we were in, happened to blow a clutch. It, it blew the belt and the clutch, and we were stuck in.

So I was hauling another engineer at the time, and he happened to be, working for, Frank, and he just called and said, hey, could I have to have some help out here? And the next thing you know, I got, got a helicopter ride up the ride out. It was kind of fun. I love that great video out of it as well.

Okay, so I know there's a question that gets asked of Neal Larson all the time because he's been in radio for over 30 years now. And why didn't why didn't you go bigger? Why didn't you try to, you know, take the steps up the ladder to different markets and and his is clearly that he wanted to stay in Idaho.

He has a love for Idaho. It could have happened for you as well. You could have you could have stepped up. And how come you didn't, exactly the same reason. I have so many acquaintances, people that, that did do that and went into, you know, much bigger markets and that there is really good money in it.

But at the same time, it's a very big lifestyle change. And I happen to have a love of southeast Idaho, especially grew up in central Idaho, Stanley, Stanley, Sun Valley, Haley, Ketchum, that area. And, you know, but you can't broadcast to a lot of elk and moose. And so I came over to a place where there was at least a little bit more of a population.

And and so I have loved southeast Idaho, love, love the lifestyle, the, close knit community. And so that is why I chose to save here. Because there is no better place, in my opinion, to raise a family, than right here. And it's, it's the reason that I stayed. But it didn't mean that I couldn't do things nationally, so I did.

I did a lot of of national work and, enjoyed always enjoyed doing that. But, you know, radio changed so you didn't have to locate, to where that was. You could do it from right here. Yeah. Geography didn't become a speed bump anymore. Yeah. It's, it's been a lot of fun to be able to do that.

So, I did take a road trip. This was about, for coming up on five years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic, when I drove my son out to the East Coast, he, moved out to Boston. And so as we're driving along, we took I-80 east and ended up, going through so many of these communities that I had never been to.

But I realized, oh, I did a national campaign for, a bunch of casinos was, the voice of many of the casinos and ended up in Council Bluffs, Iowa. And we actually got to go there, and, I took care of the Ameristar line that was there. And then we went to Chicago when I was, over the Millennium Line in Chicago and then Detroit, where it was the, MGM Grand.

And, so all of these that I had been the voice of for so many years, I finally got to see and even Buffalo, New York. And, when I went out to, Niagara on our way out there, we're driving by, going to go, hey, I was I was the voice of this particular casino for years.

That was a lot of fun to go see those. And, of course, it's $1 million voice, so I'm not surprised that they chose you for those campaigns. That's awesome that you got to add that to the road trip with your son in that on the engineering side, what's it been like to switch from, you know, terrestrial radio, the the old school radio to everything going digital?

How's how's that transition been when digital happened, everything, became so much smaller. If you look at, what we've done, even here in the studio since, the advent of audio over IP, which means you you no longer have to have a dedicated pair of wires from this particular device to that particular device. Everything is converted over to a digital signal.

So now our boards are one third the size of what they were. That's been a lot of fun. Digital transmission, everything going over the internet? Yeah, it has it's dramatically changed things, and it's done it in a very short amount of time. Once everything went digital, it it became very interesting and kind of challenging at the same time because it meant relearning whatever we had learned before that, it felt like you had to fall back and relearn to take a new language.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everything, became network and, and programing, rather than just, red wire to red wire, black wire to black wire, it wasn't that way anymore. And so now you have to learn, network coding. And. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun, though. Been a great, really rewarding career. I've never seen you be slow to react.

You have tried to learn as we and I mean, I've. I've been over here for almost four completely years. Is that crazy? Wow. It doesn't seem like it's almost four complete years in June. And, I would never say you you didn't accept a challenge on on learning something new. So, for someone who doesn't, you know, do that side of it.

I'm incredibly grateful that that we have people who are willing to embrace that. It's funny how, in what it used to be was an audio engineer, and now, it is much more a computer software engineer. Yeah. That, is is what is that your job title? Yeah. Building block. If if anybody is interested in becoming, a broadcast engineer, almost all of it now centers around computer programing, but a lot of fun that way and very, very open to for new things that are coming along.

All right. Well, we've got Marv with us. He's going to join me for the rest of the hour. But, in the next, in about 835, we're going to do a Flashback Friday for our studio for covers. Morgan Sellner is going to play, we had him on in the middle of November. His guitar skills are beyond phenomenal.

You heard him. I am open for Bachman Turner Overdrive. He was unbelievable. Yeah. All right, so. But first we've got, commercial break. We've got to go to. And we'll see you on the other side. All right. We're back on Newstalk 179. And, Marv is joining me. Neil's on vacation. And so real quickly, Marv, I want to talk about Timberline home, but I have a question for you about Timberline Home.

Sure. Okay. There's a fun fact going on with the sale that Timberline Home has going on right now. How many, or what I should say is, what's the percent of Americans that don't sleep in their beds? They either sleep on the couch or in a recliner. You know, it's funny. I actually have a mother that's doing that.

She sleeps on the couch, and sometimes in her recliner. I would have to say it's probably about 15%. Okay, that's about what? Neal. Guest. Yesterday. It's 10%. So if you're if you're that person who just wants to get better sleep and sleep differently than in a traditional bed, Timberline Home in Idaho Falls is the home for a cleaner recliner.

These are recliners that are usually made to he slept in. They're not meant for actual TV watching. They're there to be slept in. Zee cleaners have multiple options like heat, massage and recline options. And also you can get zero gravity for increased circulation in your body, which is going to make for a better night's sleep. And there's another really huge perk.

They have a fabric that covers the Z cleaner that is infused with minerals that speed up blood flow by about 30%, and that is backed by science. So it can actually help your body while you're resting or sleeping. So right now at Timberline Home in Idaho Falls, you can save an additional $300 on a Z cleaner, but it's only for a limited time.

That's Timberline Home, 711 East Anderson in Idaho Falls, and you can also go to shop timberline.com. Does it do anything for snoring I well I don't know maybe in that if you because it's got multiple recline options maybe sitting up a little bit. Well as long as it would get me out of the bed. Yeah. My wife might be really interested in me.

She might go into her savings account to make sure that we get one of those. Okay, so I have to get him on down to Timberline home and look at these recliners. All right, we got a text from somebody on the stones automotive group text line and they said, Does Marv have any ghost stories? So I mentioned that to him during the commercial break, and he told me a hilarious story.

So I want you to tell the listeners that story about when you were looking at working at that little teeny radio station in Haley. Yeah. Well, I, I didn't have a ghost story, but I did have one that that really scared me. And and it happened to be when I was still in high school. At the time, I was, still going to, early morning seminary, doing that at, like, 6:00 in the morning.

So I was getting up at about 530, do a full day at school. I'll do afternoon football practice, and then you'd go to work at the radio station and work until midnight. And we ran a program called the 11th Hour. So at 11:00 every night, we would track an album completely through without saying anything, just let the album play.

And this was on vinyl. So you're you're sticking it on there and, you know, let it go. And then we wouldn't even say anything in between. We just pull the needle off, turn it over, set it on and let it go. And basically it was a way for people to run a cassette and hear a new album. And I'll never forget the night that we ran the Rolling Stones new album, Emotional Rescue.

And everybody was so excited about getting this album, you know? So they all had their cassette players going. And, you know, I was living on such 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night, and I went out into the front room and sat in a very comfortable chair and fell sound asleep. And so I wake up and there's somebody banging on the front door of the radio station, and it happens to be a cop.

And and he's going, hey, you're off the air. And so I woke up very confused, you know, where am I and what time is it? And I ran into the studio, to flip the album over. And it takes about 20 minutes aside. Right. So I look up expecting it to be close to 1120, and it's, 12:45 in the morning.

Oh, wow. So, for about an hour and a half to record and sit there, it was it was at the end. The cop says, you know, we've been getting calls at the, the police station. I think the DJ killed himself. So. So there's my ghost story from a little, it's 10:40 a.m.. We've got listeners who have no idea what that sound like sound is when an album plays its way through.

Oh, there you go. That's, that's dating me right there. Dating both of us. All right, we need to take a quick break for the bottom hour news. And when we return, we'll have that flashback Friday studio four cover with Morgan Sadler. Probably one of my favorite bumper musics that we play coming back, and it's one of my favorites.

It's, Julie Mason here on Newstalk 107 on a Friday, filling in for Neil Larson. I would have been here anyway, but he gets to be on vacation. And truly filling in for Neil Larson is Marv Hepworth. Thanks for joining me today. Pleasure I love being here. Thank you for asking. It's fantastic. So I have a favorite clip of the day and I wanted to play it for you.

It's J.D. Vance. He was on with Vince a so with The Vince Show took over for the Dan Bunch and yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll just play it and will react on the other side. How are you doing the job differently than Kamala did? It?

Well, I don't have, you know, for shot the vodka before every meeting. That's that's one way, I think that Kamala really tried to bring, her herself into the role is, is these word salads. And I think that I would need the help of a lot of alcohol to answer a question the way that Kamala Harris answered questions.

I mean, look, man, I don't know my senses. And this is a little bit of guesswork. Obviously, I don't talk to Kamala Harris or Joe Biden very often, but my sense is that all right. So love it. You laughed right out loud. That's why it was my favorite clip, because it's it's so much truth. And JD Vance is not even scared to say it.

Oh, no. The days of, trying to be politically correct, I think are are pretty much, gone. But, yeah, that, somebody needs to get out the Viera because there was a definite burn right there. There was, it does it I you know, I'm not going to make you assign what political party or you're you follow Marv.

But does it make you excited that we have a little bit more life in in politics now? We went through four years of not really being able to understand what Kamala Harris was saying. For years of Biden being on vacation more than any other president we ever had, and not meeting with his cabinet, not taking questions, not holding pressers, never even really speaking except on select moments.

How what's it like going into this new what Trump calls the golden age? Well, it's been definitely, eye opening because, looking back over the political landscape of the last 50 years that I've been in, in the business here, we've never seen anything that's this open right? Transparent and transparent. Right. They're not hiding anything that they're doing.

And and if they see they're going to do it, they do it. And so I've, I've actually loved to see how that's been developing. The kickback on the other side, I thought would be a lot more intense. There's, there's been a lot of talk, but so far there's not been a lot of, real pushback, on on all of the stuff, the executive orders that have been signed and, what it did Trump say has been up over 90 of them now.

Oh, yeah, there's a massive amount. And I, I'm always brutally honest about Trump. It's not my favorite way to handle things because I prefer it to go through the halls of Congress. But we're deadlocked even when even with the Republicans, owning the House and owning the Senate currently by very small margins, we're still not getting anything done with with, Congress and the way that they act.

And we have evidence of the continuing resolution that was passed, it was a little bit more beneficial for Republicans because there were some tax cuts in it, but it wasn't all that Trump wanted. Yeah, he wanted far more than that. So these executive orders is the way they're the way that he's kickstarting things. If you weren't joining us in the 7:00 hour, I mentioned a whole bunch that Trump signed an executive order yesterday, a dismantling the Department of Education.

Governor little was there. He was there for the signing, and he is 100% in support of this. So, yes. Promises made, promises kept. That's really what's happening with these executive orders. As I was listening to the clip and your, monologue this morning about that, I was really wondering, because it was formed in 1979 and it was formed by an act of Congress.

What's it going to take to dismantle it and yet leave the portions of the Department of Education that are still going to be intact? Who will get those, who's going to administer the Pell Grants and the student loans and the things that will go along with that? I just don't know, how that's going to be administered and who's going to have control of it?

And will it take an act of Congress to thoroughly dismantle it? Yeah, those are all great questions. And it it really does need to have Congress involved. Education Secretary Linda McMahon did mention that in her remarks. And she said, we've got to get Congress on board with this. Said it has to happen. And, preemptively, Trump is saying we're going to have to the title for funding.

So that is Pell Grants, loans and everything. They'll put that under another agency title, one funding, which helps kids with learning disabilities that will go into another agency. People are worried that kids you'll see Democrats there too, talking about that, the fact that kids aren't going to be able to eat well, that's just not accurate. That's already under the Department of Agriculture.

It's not even it doesn't even have anything to do with the Department of Education. So the food programs are still going to be funded for kids. And in fact, there might be more money. So you'll see you might see some of these local schools start offering a year round breakfast programs, because the state will have more money to make, that function a little bit so that they can allocate.

That doesn't come from the Department of Agriculture. Right. So I think those are all good questions. It's going to be bumpy. Somebody did send in a text, this morning that said it's just like cleaning a garage. You never clean a garage. And it continues to look better step by step. When you clean a garage or an engineering room, right, you pull everything out.

It looks like a tornado hit it. But when you put everything back in, in its appropriate places, you have a good finished product. And I think that that's really what's going to happen here with the Department of Education. I think you just given me an idea of what I have to do for the rest of the day back here as well.

There's always cleaning to do at Sand Hill Media. The house cleaning that I see taking place is, is something that can be an inspiration. And, and I'm really looking forward to see where this ultimately ends up, because it could be something that, would be the plan, the blueprint for everything else. Let's. Hey, this is something that, because of the years that it's been in play, needs to just be torn down and and let's start from the ground up and rebuild.

Yeah. And with the kids at the forefront. That's the purpose behind it. So we had that we had the Department of Education being dismantled. We've also had the ongoing problems with these Teslas being burned and everything. So I want to play a clip for you that came out yesterday. We actually played it yesterday, but I wanted you to be able to hear it before, we had this conversation.

So this is Tim Walz. He's doing some kind of a, like a meeting. He's on stage and he's talking about the stock prices of Tesla saying on my phone, I know some of you know this on the iPhone. They've got that little stock app. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. 225 and dropping.

So.

I had and if you own one, if you own one, we're not blaming you. You can you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know, and take out just telling you okay. So he took so much heat for that because in his home state the one that he's governor of. Right. They have retirement programs that include ownership and air and Tesla stock.

So his own portfolio was getting hit by by watching this stock app and making a big deal out of this. And then there's other people there saying, why would you want to demolish an American, a completely American run company, a car that you can purchase that, by the way, was supposed to be helping your Green New Deal, your climate change.

Right. And an all American company. So on CNN, yesterday, yesterday evening, Kevin O'Leary had this to say about what Tim Walz, said about the stock prices. I'm talking about Tim Walz and his comments about the Tesla stock. He says it gives him a boost to see that stock going down. That poor guy didn't check his portfolio and his own pension plan for state.

It's beyond stupid what he did. He's talking down a 3.5% weighting his own pension plan. I mean, what's the matter with that guy? He doesn't check the well-being of his own constituents. That's they're investing your point. What a bozo. Yeah, so what a bozo. It's just one more way that that Tim Walz just made himself not look like the person you want.

Leading America and showing people that there's a reason that they lost with him as vice president on the ticket makes me wonder how, how dedicated Ellen has been to all of this to, have suffered, the personal loss in Tesla stock alone, that he has had to, to go through. And, so I really wonder how much longer the that stupidity is going to last.

The people are out vandalizing Tesla cars or cybertruck's. And yeah, that doesn't take a lot of, IQ to do that. You and me both, Marv, you and me both. All right, we got to take a commercial break. We'll be back in here in a moment. On Newstalk 1079 inspired Shelf stable. All right. That were those were our four prerecorded, segments that Neil and I put together before he left on his vacation.

To close out this 9:00 hour, a big thank you to Marv Hepworth for joining me in the 8:00 hour. He was fantastic. And, now y'all know why I love having him as a coworker. We'll finish with this. We've got a, just a minute or two. I wanted to let everyone know that, Donald Trump called out Senator Jim Risch yesterday on doing a tremendous job representing the incredible people of Idaho.

He then wrote that it's a state that he loves, that he won big in 2016, 2020 and 2024. The, true social that he also, then posted on X reads is as follows. As the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Rash is fighting tirelessly to advance our America First agenda. He is working hard to grow our economy, create great jobs, strongly support our farmers and ranchers, champion American energy dominance, secure our border, strengthen our military veterans, defend our always under siege Second Amendment and restore peace through strength.

Senator Jim Risch has my complete and total endorsement for reelection. He is an exceptional man and he this is all in caps. He will never let you down. So ringing endorsement from our president, saying that Senator Jim Risch is that was a long list of, of things that we need here in Idaho and endorses him for his reelection campaign.

So, we will be talking with Senator Jim Risch on Thursday. He was going to try to, join us today. That didn't quite work out. His schedule got conflicted. So we'll do our regularly scheduled interview with him on Thursday of next week, and we'll make sure we ask him about this truth Social by Donald Trump. And to finish out the hour, just to let you know how Monday will work, because Neil will still be on vacation.

We're going to, try out something really cool, though. He is going to be remote. Joining me, it's been something we've been working on so that we could do the show in different places if we needed to. So we're going to be doing that together on Monday. So he will be with us. He just won't be with us in studio.

And again, big thank you to the audience. I appreciate all the nice text that came in today with me running this, plane by myself. I appreciate it.