John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou spent nearly 40 years together, climbing the news/talk ladder to become one of the format’s most formidable duos. But when Chiampou announced he would retire from the KFI AM-640 afternoon show in December, questions persisted about what Kobylt’s future entailed. However, those questions never came from Kobylt, who knew exactly how he wanted to handle his longtime partner’s exit.
“There was no hesitation in what I wanted to do. I want to keep working for a long time,” Kobylt said after noting Chiampou had considered retirement since 2008. “I’m not designed for retirement, and I’m five years younger than he is. I’m just at a completely different place.”
After doing talk radio with a partner for the better part of four decades, it would be logical to think a new show, with a new partner, would be on the horizon. But The John Kobylt Show was launched of Chaimpou’s retirement for a specific reason.
“The station asked me if I wanted a partner. I said no. I couldn’t imagine having a stranger sitting in the room with me after having 36 years with Ken. I would be uncomfortable. The show would be more about me handling the new chemistry rather than about me talking to the listeners.”
Kobylt felt strongly that doing a solo show at this stage of his career would be exponentially easier than learning the intricacies of a new partner.
“I know what I want to do. I know what topics I want to cover, I know my own world view…it would be a stranger. We don’t have anybody at the station that is an obvious choice (to replace Chiampou), otherwise they would have their own show by now,” Kobylt said with a chuckle. “When you’re starting out in your 20s, you often get paired up with people, and oftentimes it doesn’t work. So chemistry has to be organic. It has to come from the people that want to work together. Force chemistry, I have found, doesn’t work”.
Many in the space believe talk radio hosts are born, not made, and Kobylt shares that belief, noting that his gut feeling has taken him this far, including his decision to link up with Chiampou in the first place.
“I always go by instinct. I have no patience for research, no patience for focus groups or testing. The public doesn’t know what they like until they hear it in action over a long period of time. There’s no way to test for this sort of thing,” he said. “I have an instinct, and I had one for him, and it worked perfectly.”
Those instincts included topic selection, which now — for the most part — falls on his shoulders after splitting the load with Chiampou for all those years. John Kobylt admitted it’s a slightly different process now that his longtime partner isn’t there to bounce ideas off of.
“After 36 years, I should have an instinctive reaction to whether I want to do a story or not, right? So as soon I read something, it’s like, ‘I want to do that.’ Or as soon as I read another story, it’s like, ‘That’s kind of dull.’ There’s certain things you can’t explain on the radio. There’s certain things that your particular audience just doesn’t care about,” Kobylt said.
“It’s not even a matter of what opinion they would have or what my opinion is, it’s just an issue they don’t care about. There’s a lot of stuff in the media that normal people have zero interest in. And one of my jobs every day is — I will see a lot of the same story covered by a lot of outlets, and there’s always this nagging feeling inside of me like, ‘You know what? I’ve never heard a normal person ever discuss this issue. I’ve never heard anybody bothered by this or invested in it’ — and that’s kind of it really,” admitted Kobylt.
“It really is all instinct. I read it, and it hits me right away…And a lot of it is following up on specific stories and issues. That we’ve covered sometimes for months or years. So it really falls into place pretty quickly, because I know what the audience wants to talk about and likes to hear.”
Since Chimapou’s exit, John Kobylt has taken the opportunity to become retrospective about the duo’s success, and looking back at their career together has been an interesting exercise for the Los Angeles-based host.
“When you’re doing 230-odd shows per year, You don’t get time to rest very much and think back, reflect on anything because you’re gonna have a show tomorrow,” Koblyt posited. “There’s four more hours tomorrow. That’s 16 more segments, and that might be a dozen different stories…it’s really like factory work. The next day, you gotta go in and shovel more coal into the furnace.
“We’ve been involved in some tremendous stories over the years. But you know, after a couple of weeks, it’s as if it never happened. We got some highlight tapes and put those together. I was listening to them, and I’d forgotten some of those things. I figured out I must have said ‘This is The John and Ken Show one million times in 36 years. Literally a million times, if you keep doing the multiplication. So there’s no way to remember it all.
“When I was I was looking for some audio, I went online because some fans over the years have posted audio or video of us. I just randomly hit stuff. And there was a reason they posted it, and I thought ‘I have no memory of this’. Apparently. this person thought it was so good. They posted it on YouTube, but I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s just a pipeline where stuff just keeps getting stuffed in the pipeline day after day.”
John Kobylt concluded that he’s committed to continuing to host on KFI AM-640 for several more years. But in this era of his career, it will include more monologue radio, with a rotating cast of characters joining him both in studio and out in the field.
But, like many of their longtime listeners, Kobylt will always hold a special place in his heart for what he accomplished — both personally and professionally — with Ken Chiampou.
Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
