RUSH: Dan in Columbus, Ohio. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Truck driving dittos from Columbus, Ohio.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: In honor of Earth Day I let my Freightliner idle all night long although it was 64 degrees.
RUSH: Hubba, hubba.
CALLER: So I did my part. Rush, I have a question and then I’m trying to get some information about one of your sponsors. And my question is real simple.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: When you first made it and made it in quotation marks, when there was enough zeros in the checkbook, so to speak, what did you go out and buy?
CALLER: What did I buy when I made it?
RUSH: When you first made it, in other words, I know how you always talk about how you’ve been fired seven times and so on and so forth, but when you first made it, like I said, when there was enough zeros in that checkbook, when it didn’t make a difference, I guess is kind of what I’m trying to say —
RUSH: Okay, you want to know what I bought when I first didn’t have to worry what it cost, is basically what you’re asking me, right?
CALLER: Exactly. The reason I asked this question is I heard an interview with, who was it, Mark Cuban, who I’m sure you know who that is from the Dallas Mavericks —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and when he answered the question it amazed me. He said that when he was first forming, I guess one of his businesses, he was in a house with a bunch of guys, and he could never find a towel. And he says that one of the first things he bought when he had money was enough towels that he would never have to worry about having towels again. I just thought that was kind of a goofy answer but still, you know, a —
RUSH: Okay, now, wait a minute. I can sorta relate to that in a way. This is not when I made it, this is before I made it, but when I was in Sacramento and I got a raise to $45,000 a year, I reveled in being able to buy enough toilet paper at one time that I would not have to go to grocery store every week or so for that. I always had towels. I was not a slob. But, you know, toilet paper was not a food product. You go to the grocery store, you buy necessities. But to be able to buy enough toilet paper to stock the closet and not have to worry about buying it for a long time, but when it didn’t matter what things cost, I guess the first thing would be — I was on a cruise, a listener cruise in the early days of this program we did those, and someplace in the Caribbean, I don’t even remember, it might have been Grand Cayman, but I brought a Rolex. I bought a $10,000 Rolex President, President watch, and when I got back — you know, if you’ve taken a cruise, you know, you get X-amount free stuff, duty free, but if you go over that, you have to declare it.
CALLER: I know fully well what you mean by that.
RUSH: So the Customs guys are the on cruise ship, and we’re all going through there giving them the cards we filled out and I listed the Rolex and the price of the Rolex. The Customs guys looked at me and started laughing, ‘You’re declaring this?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, you could have worn it and we’d have never known.’ I said, ‘Nu nah.’ Somebody would find out someday, and if I had known this is a key to being nominated to a position in the Obama administration I would not have declared it so that I would have had a tax problem. But the next thing that I did when it didn’t matter, but I gotta tell you, I still — you know, my upbringing was such, I chartered a little Learjet to go to my brother’s birthday party in Missouri because I’d have had to fly to St. Louis and drive south for two hours and drive back, and schedules were such that I won’t be able to get there so I chartered a Learjet that cost $1,500 an hour. I could afford it, but the fact that I was paying it when normally $1,500 at that point in time would have bought you first class to China and back, there was a little guilt, ‘Oh, I’m wasting it. Oh, I’m getting extravagant,’ and so forth. That lasted about a month. I got over that. It didn’t take me long to start chartering larger airplanes.
CALLER: Well, you solved the problem by getting EIB One, is what you did.
RUSH: Yeah, and it’s my second one. Now I have a G550. But if I hadn’t sprung for that first 1,500 bucks an hour to charter that Lear 35, who knows. But I gotta tell you, even spending $10,000 on a Rolex, I’d never had the money to do that, and doing it, I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, am I being stupid to spend this much money on a watch?’ That lasted about five minutes.