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Nov. 2, 2007 - No Agenda
34:36
2: No Agenda 002
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Well, hi everybody.
Welcome to No Agenda, the show that has no jingles, no theme song, no commercials, and, well, actually, no talent and no agenda.
Exactly.
It's Adam Curry in the Curry Condo in San Francisco, and John C. Dvorak is in the Dvorak Mansion, south of here.
North of here or south of here, John?
Where are you?
It's actually kind of across.
I'm in the sunny community of Albany, which is the San Carlos of the East Bay.
The San Carlos of the East Bay?
Nice.
So as we're getting the show together and the format, so we actually, just before I hit record, we're going through the topics.
So I think we have, what was your first one, John?
Well, the writer's strike is interesting to me, which is the Writers Guild of America, you know, the guys who do all the TV stuff.
Now remember, I said a couple weeks ago this was going to be a big deal.
We had a conversation in the hallway about this.
Yeah, well, it's a big deal on one hand, but I think it's a huge blunder.
I think it's a strategic blunder, and I'll explain why.
And it doesn't surprise me that they'd make this mistake, because this is like the people that didn't get the distribution over Napster.
I mean, it's just one of these things where new media impinges old media, and all the people that are involved in old media just don't understand how to deal with it.
Okay.
On the side of the writers, on the side of the television companies, or both?
No, I think, well, there is both, obviously.
But I think in this case, the writers are wrong.
And here's what I'm thinking.
If they'd wait, right now there's no metrics.
Essentially what they're doing is they're shooting themselves in the foot.
By the way, this has nothing to do with the fact that maybe they're getting screwed or probably they're getting screwed on DVD sales.
Right, because that seems to be one major point of contention.
That's a no-brainer.
That's what they should be going out on.
But when they start talking about new media and the Internet, I think this is where they're making a mistake.
I think you're right and you know in some of the more in-depth reporting that I've been looking at you know the discrepancy on the DVD stuff seems to be much much larger than this indeed this unknown you know like anyone's fucking monetizing properly on this stuff yet you know you want 0.3% of what zero?
Exactly.
And what they should be doing is just going after the DVD thing and then focusing on it.
But now they're focused on something that nobody even knows if anybody's making any money.
They may actually be losing money in a big way.
A lot of these, like NBC and some of these other guys who are going off and doing their own thing and they don't know what they're doing.
I mean, it's laughable.
And, yeah, the works are being redistributed, but it's not like the DVD thing where there's actual sales.
In many ways, it's kind of a joke, and what the writers should have done is they should have just focused on the DVD and then waited until there was something going on on the other side.
Where they could bring something to the table and say, hey, look what's going on here.
Here's how we're getting screwed.
Right now, they've got nothing.
It's all vague.
And so it's weakening their whole position.
I think it's a complete blunder.
And here's the worst part about it.
By doing this now, they may actually be making the networks pull back on their Internet approach and all the new media stuff, which is going to benefit everybody in the long haul.
But if they have to pull back and rethink how they're going to do it so they can find some other way to screw the writers because they really haven't been screwing them on that yet, it's just a bad idea.
What you're going to end up with is a lot of the stuff is going to be written in the contracts now in such a way that the writers are going to probably not do as well as they would have if they just waited to see where this whole new media thing was headed.
So I think there's two things.
One is the studios or the TV companies, the only real way they're making lots of money is still on DVD. If you're not lucky enough to get...
Syndication.
After three seasons, something can go into syndication.
That's where you really start making some money.
That's actually five seasons.
You want five seasons for syndication?
Is it now five seasons?
Wow.
Because that gives you five days a week for one year.
Oh, yeah.
You're right.
You're right.
Five seasons.
But that, of course, is also dwindling because...
Or at least I think everyone can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Okay, so...
Clearly, online has huge potential.
That's where the money will be shifting.
We know that the eyeballs are shifting towards online.
But it's interesting, this timing, although it was planned with their negotiation schedule, we're on the verge of the launch of Hulu.
Which I think, when you can't go there and get last night's episode or whatever it was because there was no episode last night, I think it's going to be a lot less interesting than what the networks probably overvalue their back catalog, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, that's a possibility.
And we don't even know.
I mean, the reviews are coming in.
I haven't gotten an account on Hulu.
Yeah, me neither.
I applied, but, you know, it's like...
I applied.
I'm on the TSA list, man.
How can I expect to get on the Hulu list?
You know, I should be able to get on this list just from the fact that I have all these outlets.
You're a street cred, man!
But I don't even know who to talk to.
Well, didn't you sign up?
I just signed up for the data.
So I signed up on the website and I got the letter, oh, you're on the waiting list and you'll be on one day.
It's like joining Bohemian Club or something.
It'll be 14 years later, I'll get in.
So...
So I'm a little disappointed there.
But other people have gotten on.
I actually could probably call these guys and say, hey, can you let me borrow your password?
Let me go check it out.
I haven't bothered.
But the reviews are coming.
They're kind of mixed.
But there was an article that ran in the New York Times discussing this.
And the cool thing about this article was in bits or whatever that thing is.
The cool thing about the article was they had a lot of interesting comments from the commenters, the normal readers.
And many of them were very critical of the whole concept.
And the way NBC was approaching this and their pals at Fox.
Interestingly enough, you just said something there, John.
You don't have a beta account.
I don't have a beta account.
Who are these people that have seen this and why did they get on the list?
I don't know.
It's worth asking.
You can find someone to ask.
Who do you know that's gotten on the list, that has written about it, someone of influence?
No, I think there's a couple of people at CNET if I remember.
If you go to Google and look it up, you'll find people who are reviewing it.
And they tend to be the early...
Rah-rah boys, you know, guys who, like, they've never seen anything in their life.
This is the greatest thing ever, you know, and that usually fades after, you know, some more realistic people come into the scene.
So maybe they're just slipping it to the shills that are going to give them high PR. I don't know.
All I know is that the whole thing is messed up, and it's, I can't believe it.
Most people don't think it's going to be successful just out of the gun.
So just back to the Writers Guild of America.
Actually, I've been out all day.
Is the strike on now?
Have they started that?
From what I understand from the last news report I saw, it's a done deal and it's going to happen on Monday.
Okay.
Pencils down.
Pencils down mean pencils down.
But whether it really does, I mean, things end at the last minute.
It could be a threat, an idle threat.
So do you think it'll affect our world?
No, I think it's actually beneficial to, you know, indie new media.
Right, so it affects us in a positive way.
Yeah, I think it's because people are going to be looking around at other things.
You know, it's not going to really make much of a difference right off the bat because, I mean, the only people that are going to be immediately affected are the late night shows and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Jon Stewart, half the time, he's on vacation anyway.
Let's face reality.
But he actually has to...
I mean, he's in WGA. Letterman's in WGA. You know, they actually have to go on strike.
Yeah, they'll have to go.
Letterman will be out.
Leno will be gone.
The Daily Show will be gone.
Colbert.
But, you know, those guys...
Colbert and Daily Show, those guys are half the time they're gone anyway.
I will say, I'm all for unions.
I'm maybe not agreeing with the leadership and what their decisions are, but unions are a good idea, and I think people should be able to organize, and this shows power.
Well, just to one-up you on this, I actually used to be a union organizer.
A teamster.
I wish.
I helped organize a union and we got it underway and the whole thing.
So I went through the whole process and got a lot of training.
I know the whole litany on both sides of the thing.
And I'm pro-union.
I was in a number of unions when I was younger.
When I was working, when I was going through college and I worked during the summers, I joined different unions.
And even when I was in high school, I was in various unions.
Well, you know, I joined AFTRA and I got a SAG card and really it was all about the insurance.
Just having good health insurance, that's really what I cared about.
Well, you know, that's important.
But anyway, the point is, so I'm not, you know...
Anti-union by any means, I think they're good things.
I think they're a little passe.
I think they need to be rethought the way they work.
Yeah, Union 2.0, the social network.
Now you're talking.
But it just seems to me that the leadership of a lot of unions is flaky.
And in this case, I think there weren't...
It's not leadership.
It's just kind of a knee-jerk kind of thing, this whole attacking new media before they even know how it's going to unroll or roll out.
They're unsure.
So it's weird.
Perfect timing.
Ten minutes in.
That's what we should keep the topics to.
Let's try that.
I like it.
So let's see.
What's next?
Blackwater?
Well, you've got the Blackwater topic.
You're coming from the Europeans' perspective.
What are they thinking over there when they see all this Blackwater stuff?
Well, first of all, I don't think the Europeans are aware of Blackwater at all.
Really?
Oh, not at all.
We did a round of press releases, and our PR agency in the UK went to all of the highbrow broadsheets with my Ron Paul interview.
And just as an example of the lack of knowledge.
And 40% did not know who the man was.
And these were the political editors of, you know, like, well, I don't want to say which ones specifically, but all the big ones, like, you know, the Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, you know, the real broadsheets.
40% didn't even know who he was.
And then they said, well, you know, he's just an isolationist, and he's not making any noise, so he has no traction.
They were unaware of the amount of money, don't really understand the significance of it.
I'd have to say that knowledge level of how our political system works is very, very low.
And the story about Blackwater, it just gets drowned out.
By the way, the United Kingdom has some crap of their own going on there.
That also is in the news.
It's not just about what's going on over here.
But no, they have no knowledge of Blackwater.
However...
I'm going to interrupt you because the reason that's interesting to me is because one of my bloggers on Dvorak Uncensored, dvorak.org slash blog for anyone who doesn't know, who posted the Blackwater story went on to a kind of a tirade.
Which I actually edited out because I thought it was over the top.
But before I edited it, it went on about, no wonder, you know, talking about Blackwater, no wonder the Europeans and all these countries hate us because we're doing stuff like this.
And now you're telling me they don't even know we're doing stuff like this, which makes the commentary ludicrous.
No, no, no.
Also, here's my issue.
And there's actually, there's a great, I think it's the only interview that I've been able to find of Eric Prince.
This is the guy who, the CEO and founder of Yeah, the head guy.
By the way, while you were in London, he was on a lot of TV. Yeah, but this is a one-hour Charlie Rose interview.
Did you see that one?
Oh, okay.
No, I didn't see it.
So, you know, when Charlie Rose really...
And Rose was fucking great, as always.
You know, he just, like, really calmly just sticks the knife in.
And I gotta say, first of all, you know, the guy is from Dutch descent, which is kind of interesting.
Makes sense.
Just to me personally.
Uh-huh.
And he was spotless, the way he went through this.
A couple of things that are interesting.
First of all, what he's claiming, at least, is that what Blackwater really does is they train.
So they also train Army and Navy and Air Force and Marines.
They're just a training facility, an outsource, essentially.
They train people, and then they hand them over— They are actually under military command.
That's the way he made it sound.
And I watched it back a couple times.
Like, okay, so they're not operating completely in a vacuum there.
But...
Okay, besides the fact that he's part of the war industrial complex, there's really no difference between a service that he's providing or companies that are making fighter jets and ships and catering.
I mean, there are more commercial companies I've come to understand, and I've got to believe there are more commercial companies in Iraq, personnel headcount-wise, than our military personnel.
You just don't think of it that way, but all of the infrastructure, all of the support, that's coming from commercial companies, which, of course, is pumping money into the economy.
There is a, generally speaking, at least the word here is that half the soldiers over there are contractors.
Exactly.
And half are military.
Yeah.
And some of the people are complaining about the fact that, for example, the Army's not even, especially in the Green Zone, supposedly, and I have friends in the Green Zone, I have to verify this, but I'm hearing, that they have catering companies that are independent contractors doing the food for the Army.
Dude, Burger King and fucking, what's it, Domino's Pizza Hut.
I was in Basra, on the base, and there's a fucking Burger King and a Pizza Hut.
Did I just blow you away?
Did you not come back on me there, John?
No, I'm here.
Okay.
So, the point is, what happened to the KP, the Army cook?
I mean, why aren't they cooking for themselves?
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, even worse, the guys who were there on $35,000, $40,000 a year...
They're looking at these other guys and saying, fuck, you know, this guy's making 100, 200 G's maybe?
These guys are highly paid.
You're highly paid.
And so they're like, you know, that's what I should be worth.
I mean, isn't that completely demoralizing?
Well, I think that's a reason they're having trouble recruiting people, because people are saying, why should I go into the Army if I can get a job with Blackwater?
I can make ten times more money.
Exactly.
Well, I guess the revelation here is I don't think the American public even is aware of exactly this.
The fact that we have more contractors over there than enlisted contractors, Servicemen and women about these discrepancies in pay.
I mean, I think that's really the big eye-opener and people are going to start saying, wait a minute, this isn't right.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.
And I think the guy I know that's over there who I email with every so often, he says they're making more money than God.
And he's like, you know, driving a truck.
So every single time you write off one of those checks to the IRS, that's literally what's being done with it.
Actually, I paid my IRS bill on October 15th because I'm one of those guys.
But I'm in line at the post office with about 10 other guys all my age.
You know, same kind of thing.
And they're all standing there to get the postmark on the check or on the envelope.
And we start chatting with each other, you know, as fellow comrades.
And the guy says, I wonder how many, yeah, I got his big check.
I wonder how many bullets it's going to buy.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I think I bought a jet or two.
Well, I probably only bought a Humvee, but it was more than I wanted to spend.
As long as you got a Hummer out of the deal.
Yeah, I wish.
It would have been nice to have like a...
I would have rather bought a used Humvee.
So anyway, I guess my hope from all of this is that there's some kind of...
What I don't think is constructive, and this is what I'm seeing a lot of online, is people are attacking this guy.
He's evil, and here's his evil castle.
That's the wrong place to focus the energy.
Look at the structure of this, how this is working.
He's just an opportunist.
He's a smart guy.
Yeah.
I was telling people, instead of complaining, I said, gee, how do we get in on this deal?
Well, there's really only two kinds of businesses I've never been interested in, and this is one of them, and the other one is pussy.
There's lots of money I can make in sex, sex business.
I mean, that's easy.
I'm not interested in being in that business.
What, you mean selling your body?
Oh, I see what you mean.
You mean being a pimp.
Would you know that the best online porn guys, it's all in Amsterdam.
Yeah, there's a lot of it there, I have to say.
In fact, I ran it years and years ago.
I went through Holland.
I was at some event, and it was an early Boardwatch magazine thing.
It was in Germany.
And I ran into a bunch of these guys, and they said, well, you want to just take a run over to Rotterdam, and we'll go through Belgium, and we'll taste some beer and whatever.
And we got in the car and went over there, and we stopped and visited a friend of a friend, and he ran, and this was like in the early 90s, In the early 90s, before the net was even going, it was the old bulletin board scene.
And he had his nice little house, and it was just fine.
Oh yeah, a sex farm, that's what we call them.
And then in the back room, he had a bunch of servers, and they were cranking out porn like there was no tomorrow.
Regulation was real easy, and it's socially acceptable to set up a business like that.
Yeah, and he was cranking away, and I thought it was like, well, that's interesting.
He was nonchalant about the whole thing.
Yeah, that's the way we roll with it, man.
Us Beneluxers.
Beneluxers.
But anyway, yeah, those businesses, you don't have to go to those businesses unless you have to.
But it does look like easy money if you wanted to get caught up in it.
But the funny thing is about, because when I was doing the tech TV show Silicon Spin, we used to have different people on.
I used to have Danny Ash on a lot.
Wait, who's Danny Ash?
Danny Ash was Danny.
She makes like, we figure $4 million a year, just softcore.
Oh, okay.
She's a softcore girl, and she has a bunch of, she has her sites, Danny's Hard Drive.
Oh, Danny's Hard Drive.
Okay, I've heard of that, sure.
And she's the sweetest thing you ever wanted to meet.
She's gorgeous, too.
But she's a businesswoman.
She's actually a hardcore businesswoman.
And she would have some real interesting insights into all this stuff.
And her husband was like a lawyer.
So she was like the businesswoman.
He's a lawyer.
She's a stripper, or not a stripper, but whatever she was.
She was an exhibitionist.
High-end sexy shots.
Hot shots, right?
That's about it.
But we did some calculations at the time, and this was in the late 90s, 98 maybe, 99, something like that, that we figured she was made about 2.5 based on her numbers and the rest of what we knew.
But other people would come through this show, and they were porn people, and you could tell that they were being corrupted by it.
Dani, less so, because I think she was pretty...
Just a normal exhibitionist type woman.
But other people you could see, especially men, you could see them just slowly creeping toward that.
I think I'd look pretty good with that big gold necklace.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe I should open my shirt up a little bit more.
I'm growing some hair here with the gold necklace.
I think it's going to look pretty good.
That's a good look.
Yeah, that's real good.
You can just see them falling into it.
I could grease my hair a little more.
I think maybe that would look good.
What about a mustache?
Take away from this, when we're standing in line at the post office to put in our big-ass IRS checks, we'd much rather they go to porn that we at least can enjoy the fruits of our labor that way than through bullets and shooting hot lead at other people in deserts.
What, are you advocating the government invest in porn?
Yeah, right on.
I'm running on that ticket.
You wait.
It might work.
All right.
What do we have next?
Your turn.
Well, a lot of people in Europe don't realize that we have this weird drought.
In fact, I think a lot of people in the United States, unless they're local to Georgia and Tennessee and places like that, don't realize there's been a drought going on there for about a year.
Really?
Apparently, some town in Tennessee went bone dry.
So everybody in this whole city, you open the taps, nothing.
Nothing came out.
Wow, what a nightmare, huh?
Well, it's not only a nightmare, but it causes all kinds of other issues.
Because when you take the water out of the system, the pipes now don't have anything holding them up in some places.
and they start corroding real fast because oxygen is now hitting them.
And you end up with a long-term problem that's hard to resolve.
But nothing is going to get resolved unless it starts raining, and it won't probably rain in that area for another month.
So has FEMA moved in yet?
Well, that would help.
Isn't that what they're there for?
Well, that's the emergency management agency.
They're supposed to step in and save everyone.
They got the truck in water, I guess.
But it's interesting that we're having a drought...
Well, like, you know, over the last couple of years, they've been having these floods, especially in England, in those nice coastal areas around Cornwall.
Not even the coastal areas, man.
It was from Wales on up.
And it started to hit London.
That's when all of a sudden the emergency relief came in, is when Gordon Brown's hush puppies started to get wet.
So what would happen if those tubes all flooded...
Yeah, for real.
Yeah, for real.
For real.
Well, I don't know.
It would certainly fuck up my commute, that's for sure.
You could fly in.
No, but I didn't know that.
But is this like a big town?
Is it 100,000 people?
I just found out about it.
It's probably a small town, but it's the beginning of many towns.
They're going to start drying up, it looks like.
And Georgia's the next state to get hit hard.
They're like down in, you know, I think they're down to 60 days worth of water, and then they're done.
Wow.
So that's interesting.
Meanwhile, the glaciers are all melting.
Why can't they use some of that water?
And that's one I wanted to hit on.
I think I read it on your blog, and then you...
No, you talked to...
First, I heard it on Tech 5, and then I went to your weblog, and there was...
Yeah, I haven't actually fully blogged this yet.
I know what you're going to say.
Yeah, this is about this...
Well, you called it like a mountain of plastic in the middle of the ocean, which it isn't.
But I did find this fascinating.
It's called...
I think it was a gyre.
Is that what it's called?
G-Y-R-E? Or a gear.
I'm not sure how you pronounce it.
Yeah, well, there was a link.
One of your readers had posted a comment to a Google video.
There was this little mini documentary about this team of volunteers that went to go check it out.
And so this is like 3,000 miles off the coast in the middle of the ocean.
Yeah, why don't you explain to listeners out there what we're talking about.
Okay, so a gyre is a natural phenomenon, and there's a couple of them.
Basically, the way the currents flow, there's kind of like this big toilet bowl kind of motion, although, of course, there's no hole at the bottom that the water drains down into, but you do have an epicenter of this swirling water, and it just collects stuff.
And what does it collect?
Well, stuff that's floating.
Like plastic.
Plastic and bottles and wood.
And I couldn't really understand how large this area was, but I'm thinking like 10,000 miles, just some unbelievable area of water.
And they went through it and literally...
Now, it's not like...
What you almost automatically imagine is this huge, like all these plastic bottles floating.
Of course, that's not really true because plastic does break down.
In fact, it gets really brittle because of the salt water and the sun.
And it breaks up and it breaks into very microscopic bits that, of course, the plankton-feeding organisms are now feeding on.
There's a whole sub-story there of new, deformed sea creatures, like these monsters that are going to grow out of this shit.
But there's ten times as much plastic in the water as there is plankton.
And it's just unbelievable.
You see stuff that just gets discarded and it goes out to sea, but where does it go?
It goes into this big fucking cesspool in the middle of the oceans.
It's supposedly the size of Texas.
Right, that's more than 10,000 square miles.
No, no, no.
Well, I don't know how many square miles it is, but it's probably...
I don't know.
It's big.
It's a big piece of gob of goo out there, and apparently birds land on it.
And often get trapped.
Well, there's plastic rope, there's buoys, there's all kinds of stuff that you'd kind of expect to be there.
But there's fluorescent tubes.
I just love the idea of a big buoy with a belt on it dinging.
Yeah, but it's just like, that's where all the trash goes.
It was pretty wicked.
If we're done with this one, I got a story that just blew me away.
Well, wait a minute.
Let's not get finished.
I think they should nuke it.
Nuke the gyre?
Anyway, your next story.
Okay, thanks.
Now, this is like a music business story.
Do you know who Seymour Stein is?
The name rings a bell, but no.
Okay, Seymour Stein is the guy who first, he, legend in the music business, started Sire Records.
And Sire Records had many famous artists, but Seymour Stein is really known for Madonna.
He really took Madonna into mainstream, did the first big album with her.
Sire was her record label in the very beginning of her career.
And Seymour Stein is a real...
And I've hung out with him back in the, I don't know, like mid-80s in London.
And just one of these really weird guys, typical music industry guys.
Like he had a fish tank in his office with 100-pound...
50...
What was it?
No, 50-pound notes at the bottom of this aquarium, and there were piranha swimming in the aquarium.
It's like, you're welcome to go grab the 50-pound note if you don't mind your hand getting eaten by a piranha.
This is really one of these guys, right?
Hilarious.
And his ex-wife...
Linda Stein was also a legend in the music business.
She was a manager, famously, of the Ramones.
And she was the most abrasive woman you can imagine.
She would yell, she would scream at people, she'd tell Joey Ramones, shut the fuck up!
When they were touring in England, he was complaining about everything.
He didn't like the food.
And she just said, then get the fuck back to America, you fucking...
This is legendary.
And it's funny because as far as I know, Seymour Stein was gay, if not at least bi.
But it was really weird, these two.
And of course, they did break up eventually.
So she was X for a reason.
So, legendary woman.
In fact, as she had cancer, and she had been operated on cancer, and this is just one of those famous stories about her, so take it with a grain of salt.
Four hours after the operation, she was already on the phone yelling at someone who would fuck something up.
Just crazy.
They found her bludgeoned to death in her apartment yesterday in New York on Fifth Avenue.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
It wasn't in the news out here.
Well, there you go.
But it's just, it's one of those, you watch, the stories will come out, I'm sure, because, you know, lots of artists dealt with her, so I'm sure people are going to be talking about this.
You watch.
It's going to be an interesting story.
I'm sure that it'll...
Well, yeah, it sounds like something that's going to develop.
That's interesting.
And, you know, who, I mean, she, it's like, you know, who...
Who really were her enemies?
Who would have wanted to do this?
So the answer is, fucking everybody!
Everybody could have gone off on this woman at any time and bludgeoned her to death.
Of course, she's kind of been out of the business for many years, so for this to happen now is just crazy.
The sounds of your story.
What's that?
Well, it sounds like everybody was trying to kill her, so I don't know.
It sounds like a crime that's unsolvable.
Yeah.
Maybe we should get Grisham on the scene.
He'll take care of it.
Well, we're talking about that kind of industry.
We should mention the last story, I think, should be this one, which is the Rick Cotton saga, which is another story that's developing.
If you think that other one's going to get legs, I think this one might get legs in the blogosphere.
Okay.
Because it's just starting to come out now, and it started with a posting in kind of a private newsletter, then it went to Ars Technica, and one of my bloggers picked it up, and I have it on the blog, which is the Rick Cotton, the...
The general counsel for NBCUniversal, apparently representing the company, made the suggestion that the society, I'm going to quote from the article, society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.
Ha ha ha!
And here's the great quote.
Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned, Cotton said.
If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft to fraud to burglary, bank robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year.
But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Go figure.
Is this guy like clinically insane?
Go figure.
Now I'm thinking, well, here's a guy who's just, you know, a mouthpiece for the company, but in April, I did some more research, and in April, he was making noise about getting the White House to install a cabinet-level position for anti-piracy.
What's wrong with these people?
What shows does NBC produce?
What is this incredibly important stuff that is so important to society?
Heroes, I think, is something.
And then there's a couple other shows.
Get a fucking clue, dude.
You know, it's unbelievable to me.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, well...
I mean, the fact that NBC would let this guy say that on their behalf...
That burglary, you know, essentially what we're talking about is burglary robbery, bank robbing, all this kind of thing is meaningless compared to their crappy business and the junk they put on television.
What was the context of this?
Where did you say this?
I guess it was at some meeting or an interview or something like that.
I'm going to have to backtrack.
We've got to source that.
I've got to know more about that.
Actually, right now, it's a little hard to find.
If you go to Ars Technica, they're the first people that actually started running with it, and they sourced it back to kind of a newsletter.
That's online, and they probably have the original source of it.
Dodgy.
Sounds dodgy.
Dodgy.
No, it sounded dodgy to me at first, and then when I found out that this guy was already working on this cabinet level, he wanted a secretary of anti-piracy in the White House.
I figured it makes nothing but sense that he would say this.
Unreal.
I had to think.
Well, I hope everyone rips this off and copies this wide.
Please.
Feel free to try.
If you can sell some advertising against it, go ahead.
Insert some ads around it.
Knock yourself out.
We've got no agenda.
Exactly.
We've got no agenda.
All right, John.
Next week, we can do it on Friday as well, actually.
Did you do Cranky Geeks today?
No, Cranky Geeks on Wednesday did it.
If you're around next week, maybe we can get you over there.
Meanwhile, we've got no agenda, and next week we're going to have more no agenda.
No agenda, exactly.
All right, I'm Adam Curry at the Curry Condo.
And I'm John C. Dvorak.
Okay, we'll talk to you next week.
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