Brian Thomas was never supposed to be on the radio.
For 16 years, the 55KRC morning host practiced law. He had a career, a path, and a plan — none of which included a microphone. But sometimes the best things in life come from the paths we never intended to walk, and for Thomas, the road to Cincinnati talk radio was paved with a father’s, Jerry Thomas, retirement, an unexpected phone call, and a conscious decision to ignore the advice of the one man who knew the industry better than anyone.
His father spent 46 years in radio. When the elder Thomas finally hung it up, the station came calling for his son. The offer caught Brian completely off guard.
“I had no intention of being on radio by way of background,” said Thomas. “When my dad retired, they called me up and offered me the job, which came as a complete shock. I struggled with it for a while — and my dad tried to convince me not to do it.”
It’s a curious thing — a man who gave his life to radio actively discouraging his son from entering the business. But the reasoning, Thomas explained, made perfect sense once you understood where his father was coming from.
“He lived through the heyday when it used to be fun to work for a radio station — the 50s, the 60s, the 70s,” the 55KRC host said. “Then along came corporate ownership, politically correct rules, and the whole nature of the industry changed. He’d had it up to his eyeballs by the time he retired, and I think that was his problem.”
Thomas listened to the warning. He considered it carefully. And then he did what any self-respecting litigator would do — he argued the other side.
“Dad, I’ve always worked for assholes,” Thomas said he told his father. “I’ve never had it any other way. I practiced law for 16 years, after all.”
The other argument Thomas made — to himself — came from a more philosophical place. He leaned on Mark Twain, or at least the wisdom attributed to him: that we regret the things we didn’t do far more than the things we did. How often, Thomas reasoned, does an opportunity like this land in front of you? So he took the leap, kept his law license as a safety net, and gave it a shot.
Come December, it will be 20 years.
That decision has since earned Thomas recognition far beyond the Queen City. He recently landed 10th on the Barrett Media Top 20 Mid-Market News/Talk Radio Morning Shows list — an honor that left him, in his own words, stunned.
“It’s quite frankly pretty unbelievable. I didn’t expect it. I’m quite humbled by it, and honestly, a sense of disbelief that I’m there,” Thomas stated. “I’m humbled that anybody even listens to my program, to be quite frank with you.”
That kind of self-deprecation is genuine, not performative. Thomas describes himself in exactly one word: self-deprecating. He has no social media presence — by choice — and bristles at anything that smacks of celebrity. He is, in many ways, the anti-influencer who built an audience by simply refusing to play by modern media’s rules.
That independence extends to the show itself. While crosstown competitor 700 WLW runs a tightly formatted clock — weather and traffic on the ones, rigid segment breaks, hard stops — Thomas operates in a different universe entirely. At 55KRC, if a guest is compelling, the conversation goes where it needs to go.
“I don’t even pay attention to the clock, quite honestly,” Thomas said. “If I get a great guest on and I only have them for one segment, I am going way past quarter after — all the way into 20, 21, 22. And he’ll just pack the commercials in at the end. I’d rather have the content, the flow, the back and forth. That’s the luxury that I get that they don’t.”
It’s a philosophy rooted in something deeper than format preference. Thomas credits his litigation background — deposing everyone from garbage collectors to corporate CEOs — with giving him the ability to extract compelling conversation from virtually anyone on virtually any subject. He approaches each interview the way he once approached a jury: assume they know nothing, boil it down, and let curiosity drive the questioning.
“I try to put myself in the position of the listener,” he said. “If they could ask a question, what would it probably be? You pretend that nobody has any information on the subject matter, and you can get a lot out of somebody when you start from that premise.”
It works. After two decades, Thomas looks back at the roster of authors, politicians, and public figures he’s interviewed and calls it, simply, “an amazing variety show of guests.” That, he says, is the best part of the job — better than the solo segments, better than the caller calls, better than anything else the business has to offer.
“I have been blessed with being able to speak with so many prominent people,” Thomas stated. “I look back at 20 years and the people I got to talk to — it’s just been an amazing experience.”
His father warned him about the industry. He wasn’t wrong about a lot of it. But for Brian Thomas, the gamble paid off in ways neither of them could have predicted — and somewhere, surely, the old man must be smiling about that.
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