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April 27, 2008 - No Agenda

01:39:55

28: The Future of Media

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	Regardless of the weather, rain, sleet, snow, or even sunshine, once a week, you're guaranteed you'll get exactly what you want, and it's not scheduled.
	It's, well, it's no agenda.
	Can you tell I'm jet-lagged from the Curry Manor in the United Kingdom?
	I'm Adam Curry.
	I'm John C. Dvorak up here in what's going to be a hot day in Northern California, and it is Sunday.
	We are a day late.
	Adam was on a plane and sounds like it too.
	Thank you.
	Actually, it was nice in Los Angeles.
	I was there Thursday afternoon, Friday, and part of Saturday.
	It was absolutely beautiful.
	I mean, it's a messed up town, but they got some weather, man.
	Let me tell you.
	Well, you know, if you really want the great weather in California, it's San Diego.
	I mean, I can't imagine any place.
	It beats Los Angeles, actually.
	I've only been to conferences in San Diego, which I'm sure has given me a very skewed view of the city.
	Yeah, well, it's not as exciting as Los Angeles by any means.
	Yeah, man, LA is so full of shit.
	It's just unbelievable.
	But it was fun.
	We had a good time.
	Yeah, except for the traffic.
	Well, let me think.
	We were up Friday.
	We had a Friday morning breakfast meeting at 7.30.
	And I recall saying to Ron in the car, I said, Dude, where is everybody?
	He says, Man, you're driving through Beverly Hills at 7.30 in the morning.
	These people don't work at this time.
	Yeah, give them a few hours and they'd be there.
	Exactly.
	Hey, I just wanted to say, or did you want to start off with something?
	No, go ahead.
	I've got a couple items that have been...
	By the way, so I got on Twitter.
	Yeah.
	How many you got now?
	You passed 10,000 on followers?
	Yeah, I'm at 10,270 or something like that.
	Unbelievable.
	It's not bad for...
	Like somebody pointed out, I've only been on for 20 days.
	Dude, I don't even have 5,000.
	I'll get you some more.
	Yeah, could you please pimp me out a little bit?
	I need more fans, more followers.
	Is that how it works?
	Now, you know, the thing is, it's not the number of followers, like I'm an expert now.
	It's not the number of followers.
	It's the quality of the followers.
	Ah, yes.
	I have to say, though, my 10,000 are high-quality people.
	Of course they are.
	Of course.
	That goes without saying.
	But no, you're right.
	We had this conversation last week.
	You want to have people who are going to take your information and do something with it.
	Hopefully propagate it further.
	Well, that or give you stuff you need to know about.
	I mean, I query the group every once in a while for stuff.
	In fact, I'm going to put out a...
	I need to find...
	In fact, I'll put this on the Twitter.
	I need to find the best program that's out there, the shareware, open source or whatever, that takes a DVD and then turns into a viewable file on your laptop without, you know...
	In other words, I want to move my DVDs to a laptop for a trip.
	For a trip, but I don't want to bring the DVDs with me.
	Well, I know on the Mac there's lots of programs that'll do that.
	Yeah, there's a bunch on the PC too, but I haven't found one that I like.
	Right.
	You know, they either screw up or they give you the wrong...
	The file's like weird or...
	I don't know.
	I just started looking for this yesterday, so...
	Give it a couple days.
	On the Mac, because I had to do this the other day.
	On the Mac, it's called Fast DVD Copy is the program I use.
	And it was fast.
	It was like, boom, you know, just did it.
	And I could either make a copy or just spin out a file to my desktop.
	That was great.
	Hey, I watched the, you know, you gave me two DVDs.
	Oh, yeah.
	One was empty.
	You're kidding.
	It kept coming up as...
	What did it say?
	Maybe I didn't finalize it or something.
	What did it say?
	I mean, what was written on the thing?
	Yeah, hold on.
	I'm getting it.
	I'm getting it.
	The one...
	Let me see.
	Okay, so the one that was good was Indie Spirit.
	Okay, I know what the other one is.
	There was a couple comedy things.
	I'll bring you another copy.
	The Indie Spirit Awards was kind of fun to watch, actually.
	I thought you'd get a kick out of it, because when I saw it, I was kind of amused by the fact that, you know, this is probably the way the Academy Awards were when they began in the 30s or whenever it was.
	Yeah, it was cool.
	It was laid back, and everyone was having a good time, and it was nice.
	Right, you had all the celebrities there, but it seemed like a lot more fun, and it was a little more profane, which is probably, you know, I'm sure you appreciate it.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	The other DVD was Stanhope and Carlin.
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah, those two comic things.
	George Carlin?
	Yeah.
	That's George Carlin's latest thing.
	Oh, shit.
	Wait a minute.
	Is it brand new from George Carlin, or is this something that came out like a year ago?
	No, it's brand new.
	It just came out.
	Because he did one about, maybe it was two years ago, and that was his favorite?
	No, no.
	This is like a month ago.
	No, I understand.
	But did you see that one when he, like his big comeback thing?
	Yeah, I've seen all of them.
	This one's better.
	Because he felt off to me.
	His timing wasn't what it was.
	No, he was terrible.
	He was like he was sick or something.
	This one here, he superseded that.
	He's gone beyond that one you saw.
	And now he's actually funny again.
	He's my hero.
	I love that guy.
	He's like a hyper curmudgeon.
	So it's very funny.
	Hyper curmudgeon.
	I read that a lot.
	It's like, no agenda.
	Curry and the curmudgeon.
	Yeah, people like the word because I think they can spell it.
	It's alliteration.
	Bring that disc back, by the way, because I want to see what happened.
	What went wrong?
	Okay.
	So here's one thing I wanted to say.
	And it's something that probably would be better for a blog post, but I'm just too tired to deal with the follow-up and all the comments.
	Whenever I blog something about anything controversial, it's just too tiring.
	So I just want to say it here.
	Podshow changed his name to Mevio.
	M-E-V-I-O. And in general, the acceptance, people are like, okay, we get it.
	It makes sense.
	Don't really understand where the name's coming from.
	And if anything, the most comment is, what the fuck is that name all about?
	Are you guys so stupid you couldn't come up with a better name?
	Yeah.
	Some people will always say that.
	Well, yeah, but I just wanted to say, because we did go through a process, and this is literally the Web 2.0 conundrum, if you will.
	We had hundreds of great names.
	I mean, really, really good names.
	The URLs, unfortunately, the domain names were absolutely unobtainable.
	I mean...
	We had some good names, dude.
	We had like Mojo was one.
	I liked that a lot.
	The Show was another one.
	Dude, people were asking $200,000, $300,000 for a freaking domain name.
	And really, non-negotiable, or negotiable, but they just wouldn't give it up for anything that we felt was reasonably, just reasonable.
	Yeah, you know, I don't think Mebio's that bad.
	By the way, Callie Lewis and iCalley.com on her blog, she has a very good post on the name change.
	You mean the one where she says, I'm still a podcaster?
	Yeah.
	I didn't like that post.
	I liked it because I thought it was explanatory.
	I thought it was pretty good.
	I also had a post on my blog where I cracked down.
	I like that.
	But there's a misconception.
	Now there's this kind of meme running around.
	People saying, well, did you see the video that Ron did?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so you've seen the comments on it?
	No, you know, I'm over it.
	You know, I saw what I saw, and then, you know, maybe it was a fine name, and I'm on to the next thing.
	But no, I didn't read all the comments about Ron.
	It was something else.
	Well, no, it was something else.
	You know, Ron said...
	There's no business model in user-generated content.
	And a lot of people are like, well, what are we doing then?
	And what a slap in the face of independent producers everywhere and podcasters.
	And it's like, no, this is user-generated content.
	Am I wrong or is that not clearly understood as to be basically everything that's on these sites like YouTube and...
	And social networking sites.
	Isn't that more the definition of user-generated content?
	Yeah, it is to me, but I think when the way it was presented, it sounds as, you know, the problem is what we're doing here, which is commercially viable, the No Agenda Show.
	It's user-generated.
	And by the way, let's take a look at the Star Wars movie.
	By a broad definition, it's user-generated.
	There's a person involved.
	It's not done by a robot.
	But no, I think there has to be a better term.
	That's the problem.
	Inside baseball people like you and me, people that are in the business as it were.
	That's user generated.
	No, I know what I'm saying.
	Our definition of user generated means YouTube one-shot videos.
	Yes, exactly.
	Or MySpace stuff.
	Viral stuff on Facebook or MySpace.
	That also is...
	Whatever it is, that's user generated in my mind.
	Or just your pictures on Flickr.
	It's a lousy word.
	It's a lousy term.
	It's not very descriptive.
	Or it's too broad.
	So when Ron says something in public, the next thing you know they're all over him.
	The best comment I heard is that people thought he looked like the Fonz No, I did see that one.
	That was pretty funny.
	He does.
	So I came back and we have a small pond in our backyard.
	We have a very English garden.
	It's maintained meticulously by the woman who grew up in this house.
	It was built in the late 20s.
	And so she grew up here and she's always done the garden.
	And now she's a gardener and she maintains the garden.
	And it's really, really beautiful.
	It's very mature.
	And we have a pond, which is a man-made pond.
	I mean, it's small.
	It's maybe oblong, so maybe it's six feet by four feet, something like that.
	Maybe a little bit bigger, but about that size.
	And two ducks have come into our backyard.
	And now we're living in the pond, which is great.
	Because I'm sure they're brooding.
	So it's a male and a female.
	And we've had property before where birds and ducks would come to roost or to breed or to brood, whatever the hell it is, to lay eggs.
	But I was looking in the pond and there's about a four or five inch fish that has appeared.
	And it looks really weird.
	It has a whole bunch of fins.
	I'm trying to get a picture of it, but the minute, of course, it comes to the surface and I'm there with the camera, it pops back down.
	Is this evolution at play?
	How does a fish all of a sudden show up in basically a swimming pool?
	How did that happen?
	I don't know.
	You're asking me?
	Well, actually, yes, I am asking you.
	I'm not sure what your, you know, maybe your gardener threw the fish in or somebody threw it over the, who knows?
	Maybe there was a fish egg that got thrown in there.
	Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out because this is really strange to us.
	And Patricia said, well, I think a bird flew by and dropped it.
	And I'm like, that sounds ridiculous.
	It's possible.
	Maybe a bird ingested something and pooped out an egg.
	Is that possible, do you think?
	No, that seems unlikely, but I think the bird could have dropped it.
	Well, I'm going to have a picture of it.
	I got a bunch of predatory birds around my house.
	There's a bunch of hawks, and every once in a while one of them is carrying something that's a little too big of a load, and they drop it.
	Yeah, he drops it.
	But it's a four-inch fish.
	It's just like it appeared out of nowhere.
	I'm like, damn.
	Well, you should throw some fish in there.
	No, it's not really meant to be a fish pond.
	We've had that.
	I don't know.
	I don't like fish.
	I'm not into fish.
	I'm not big on fish.
	No.
	Unless I'm eating it.
	Unless it's on my plate.
	So, we're talking about food.
	Yeah, you know.
	We missed our date.
	I'm sorry.
	I apologize.
	Well, I'm bummed out.
	People liked us.
	I don't want to get back.
	I just want to thank John Arnold, who does photowalkthrough.com.
	He's a British photographer.
	Yeah, he has a show on the network.
	And he sent me a care package from England with some teas in it.
	Oh, how nice.
	Finally, somebody.
	And what he sent was he got some British Tetley, some Yorkshire that's in a different package.
	And I'm always suspicious about the teas.
	You know, like the twinings that we get in the United States is packed in North Carolina or someplace like that.
	And you always find it on there.
	You have to look carefully and you'll see it.
	And it's never as good.
	It seems stale.
	But the stuff from England is very good.
	So he sent me a big giant box of twinings.
	I've never seen this tea before.
	And he says this is what he drinks instead of PG Tips.
	Which one is it?
	It's called Every Day.
	Oh, I've seen that.
	Twinings Every Day.
	I've never seen it.
	I guess I have to go back to England more often.
	But anyway, it says Twinings Every Day.
	And I guess it's obviously meant to be a competitor with the Tetleys and the PG Tips and whatever else is Every Day.
	So I was actually going to do a taste test with you.
	So I Try it.
	It's actually pretty good.
	It's somewhere in between.
	It actually tastes somewhat in between the regular PG Tips and the PG Tips gold.
	It's a little more earthy.
	It's pretty smooth.
	It's actually not bad.
	I'll pick some up tomorrow.
	Check it out and see what you think.
	I certainly will.
	I did have dinner at Koi in Los Angeles.
	You familiar with that restaurant?
	Yeah.
	That was damn good, man.
	They had a cod.
	It was like a slab of cod with the skin still on it.
	And it was kind of in this sweet, like this kind of sweet sticky sauce that was over it.
	And the cod sliced chunk, if you will, was laid over a bed of rice.
	It was like addictive, man.
	It was awesome.
	You familiar with that dish?
	Never been there.
	You've never been to Coy?
	Oh.
	I don't go to L.A. much.
	I mean, you know.
	Yeah, you're right.
	So I'm sitting there and then someone walks up to the table.
	Excuse me, is your name David?
	Like, well, is there any benefit if I am?
	He says, no, my friend said you just look like David the stylist.
	I said, no, no.
	Oh, David the hairstylist.
	Do you know him?
	Do you know David the hairstylist?
	No, I don't, but I can just see somebody seeing you thinking you're a hairstylist without hair.
	Oh, man.
	Los Angeles, I tell you.
	What a town.
	Yeah, it's an interesting place.
	I mean, I think it's vapid in a lot of different ways, but it has its moments.
	It's very entertaining if you want to just kind of lose yourself in a brain-dead, shallow environment.
	Well, what's been interesting is, of course, now the business in general, I think, is in so much turmoil.
	And there's lots of consolidations and shit going on.
	Because these studios, the finance for a movie, it comes from hedge funds.
	Have you ever read The Kid Stays in the Movie?
	The Robert Evans autobiography?
	No, but I've heard about it.
	Well, don't read the book.
	Get the audio book.
	Because Robert Evans reads it himself.
	He had the intonation.
	That's great.
	And he has a great voice.
	Robert Evans is the guy who produced Love Story, The Godfather...
	He was married to Ally McGraw.
	I mean, it's a fantastic story about Hollywood.
	And the guy made a lot of money, lost a lot of money, and he's still around.
	He's not rich by any means, but he's still a Hollywood icon.
	In that book, I listened to the audiobook version.
	He goes meticulously how the Godfather was financed.
	This was like the days of Gulf and Western.
	Big industrial, like the old German guy would cough up the money.
	And so this is a town in trouble because money is kind of scarce right now.
	And so there's less projects.
	There's less stuff getting greenlit, as they say.
	And everyone's talking about the web and the internet and they have all these little buzz stories.
	And even though no one's ever seen it, I'm sure they're...
	They're just copycatting what people are saying about projects like Quarter Life.
	I don't know if you've followed any of that.
	But all these failed projects.
	But they're just all so full of shit, John.
	No, they're totally full of crap down there, that's for sure.
	It's something you can get used to, though.
	Now, what you say is kind of interesting, but it kind of contradicts what's actually in some ways going on, which is discussed in great detail on Shootout.
	Which is a show I recommend people watch if they're interested at all in actually the business side of Hollywood which is hosted by Peter Guber and Peter Barton.
	Guber is of course a famous producer and also a professor at UCLA. And where can we find this shootout?
	It's on AMC and the cable channel.
	And then Peter Bart is the editor-in-chief of Variety.
	And they have all these guys on that are amazing.
	But let me preface it by mentioning the last time they had Coppola on where he's complimenting Evans.
	And then as an aside, he says, but he's an incredible liar.
	Oh, but in the book they hated each other because Coppola wouldn't deliver the movie and he wouldn't deliver a movie under six hours.
	So they literally took the...
	Well, that's what I think the incredible liar part comes in.
	But anyway, but the Coppola anecdote that he brings up, which is that with Godfather 2 or Godfather 3, I think it was Godfather 2, he suggests bringing in another director...
	And he suggested Martin Scorsese.
	And Evans said, no way, this guy's the loser.
	He goes on and on.
	He'll never make it.
	He'll never make it in this town.
	But anyway, what they say, though, is not that there's a bunch of stuff that's dying on the vine, but two of them both say that in Hollywood right now they're actually overproducing.
	There's way too many movies being cranked out that are junk from Canada and every place else.
	And that the companies that are doing all these movies, all the people that own all the studios now are all these big companies like General Electric or Viacom, and they don't really have any interest in the business.
	And so everything to them is kind of a bottom line item.
	And the business is just a mess.
	Well, so I think that what's happening is up until probably a year ago or maybe two years ago, there was a thriving DVD retail market, not just for blockbusters or movies that had hit the cinemas, but there was an actual market where you could produce a movie and it could be maybe a $5 million movie or a $10 million movie and you could make money by sending it straight to DVDs.
	And that retail market of DVD has melted.
	It's gone.
	So these are probably projects that were funded 12 to 24 months ago, and now there's no outlet for them.
	And it is.
	There's disarray, for sure.
	And they all want to go online.
	They all want to do something.
	And they all want their money up front, which is not going to happen.
	Yeah, in fact, one of the things I've noticed as a trend, I've been watching this show for a long time, is that there are more and more of these movies that become successful, and they're actually really good movies, like Little Miss Sunshine, for example.
	They bring these different people on from the show, and each of them says, you know, I did this on...
	I'm talking about big-time actors and directors.
	Yeah, I did this on spec.
	Or spec or on scale, right?
	Spec.
	They didn't do it on anything.
	Wow.
	They basically worked for free.
	Well, that was the same thing with the Indie Spirit Awards.
	A lot of big-name actors were there who worked either for scale or on spec.
	Right, which is an interesting labor of love versus mercantile approach.
	And I think there's a lot more of that going on in all forms of art.
	Hell yeah.
	I mean, I think writers are doing books on spec more than they used to.
	Obviously, people were doing movies on spec more than they used to.
	So the amateur now is the one who comes up and goes about, I need my money up front, I need this, I need that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I guess spec, the Web 2.0 version of that is what we call rev share.
	Right.
	Hey, by the way, you open a chat room because I'm getting people twittering me about whether or not you, like you did the last time.
	No.
	I didn't do anything.
	I mean, are you going to open a chat room?
	I didn't open a chat room last time.
	You opened something, didn't you?
	Was it a chat room or an IRC channel or something?
	No, no, no.
	I don't know.
	What show were you on, John?
	It was a show with you.
	I'll go back and listen to the tape.
	Are you sure it's not something Leo did?
	Your real friend?
	No, no.
	Leo does that.
	He's always done that.
	But you did something off the wall.
	And that's why I got a bunch of Twitters this morning from people saying, well, is this Adam going to stream this?
	Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I know what it is.
	I know what it is.
	Okay.
	What I always do, because people always want to know, whenever I fly somewhere, myself or commercially, when I land, I always Twitter, landed safely, at fill in airport code.
	And this morning I landed, and I said, landed safely, London Heathrow, no agenda 28, coming up later today.
	So that's what happened.
	So people are waiting for it.
	That's what it is.
	Hey, just staying in Hollywood for one second.
	Have you followed this Wesley Snipes story?
	It's weird.
	Dude, this is fucked up.
	Yeah, I mean, what do they, how do they, you know, what do you throw, this is, you know, because it's not as though we haven't got enough, you know, we have, this stat came up recently, people always complain about, we have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners.
	I mean, it's like we just want to throw everybody in jail for any reason.
	And so now we're having pauper's jails.
	I thought that was always considered impractical.
	What you want to do is what they did with Fresh Prince.
	What's his name?
	He was at a tax bill like this, and they just attached his salary for 10 years.
	Okay, but so here's the story.
	So Wesley Snipes was advised by one of those kooky guys who, of course, I'd love to do this because being a Ron Paul supporter, we all feel the IRS is illegal, was never ratified, and the government has no right to take your money at a federal level.
	And Wesley Snipes got one of these guys, one of these advisors, who says he can prove that you don't have to pay any income tax.
	So they literally did not file.
	One guy got four and a half years, the other guy got ten years.
	So the statement here is, you do actually have to pay income tax.
	Apparently you do.
	But what pisses me off is you've got these Hollywood bitches like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan driving around the city fucking tanked out of their mind an actual threat to society and they go in for 24 hours.
	This is ridiculous.
	It's just killing me.
	Meanwhile, O.J. Simpson is a free man.
	He's golfing.
	He's going to do a reality show.
	I've been going through some tax stuff in the US, even though I paid my taxes for '99 through 2004 or whatever.
	You have to file a form, even if you're living in another country and paying taxes.
	So either the forms weren't made up or whatever it is, so that has to be all reverse engineered.
	And let me tell you, man, these guys are heavy on me.
	And now I'm seeing this, I'm like, it's...
	Well, you know, he's the example.
	They always do this.
	You know, this has been going on forever.
	They always find some guy and they make an example out of him.
	This is the worst case scenario.
	So he got, you know, made an example of just to scare the public.
	Which is, you know, it's almost like a publicity technique.
	But what bugs me the most is the jail thing because it's not as though that they attach and, you know, took his mansion or whatever.
	But it's just that we look for any excuse there is to just...
	Throw people in jail!
	There are people in jail, and somebody pointed out on one of these right-wing talk shows that I like listening to that, you know, the problem is that many of these jails are privatized, and these companies are making money by having more prisoners, and they're lobbying Congress to pass more laws to make more things illegal with mandatory prison sentences because it's a money-making operation.
	And I realized the other day in California you have, I don't remember the term, you have a special type of jail that you can pay.
	It's like room and board.
	It's a jail only you pay a set fee per day and it's a luxury jail.
	And this is where all these Hollywood bitches go to.
	Have you heard about this?
	Yeah, I don't know anything about it, but I have heard about it.
	It came up in the conversation some recently, and then I kind of lost track of it.
	Actually, I should look into it.
	You should.
	Because it's ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous.
	If you have money, you can go to a more luxurious jail.
	What a great country.
	Amazing.
	Why are they going to jail at all?
	Half the time, these people shouldn't even be in jail.
	I mean, they have people on minor drug offenses.
	You know, they've walked around with them, or they...
	Who knows, but...
	Some weed on them, and the next thing you know, they're in jail for 10 years.
	I mean, who needs this?
	And the worst part about that Wesley Snipes thing that bugs me the worst, instead of collecting the money from the guy by making him do a million films, and then just taking all the money and putting it in the tax coffers, putting the guy in jail costs me money.
	Because it costs $40,000 a year to keep a guy in jail.
	And it's like, why am I paying for his tax issue?
	I mean, why don't they just leave him out of jail and make him work it off?
	I mean, it doesn't make any sense that the guy would go to jail.
	And he showed up with $5 million in checks and said, you know, let me give you a down payment.
	You know, he has to pay $17 million or something like that.
	And he showed up with money.
	$5 million!
	Which they did collect, by the way.
	Oh yeah, and they still throw him in jail.
	But it just seems to me to be a complete back-assword way of doing things.
	And the fact is that we're getting...
	Prisons are just ridiculous.
	We have more people in jail per capita...
	I mean, this includes China and Russia and all these other crazy places.
	What's wrong with this picture?
	And then I was just watching the other day, Schwarzenegger was on America's Most Wanted talking about how we need more prisons and we need to put more people in jail.
	I'm thinking, well, how about doing something about the crime?
	I mean, why is it happening?
	Well, we're doing very important work, John.
	We're making sure that death by lethal injection doesn't hurt too much.
	We've been doing a lot of work on that.
	Have you been following that?
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	God, it's messed up.
	I want to go back to a guillotine.
	Yeah, isn't that much less painful?
	I would think.
	Yeah.
	Over.
	Done with.
	And I'm a big, well, fan is the wrong word, but I feel, you know, this should be televised.
	We put everything in the world.
	We put kids getting shot up the fuck up in the desert.
	We put it all on television, but then we're going to hide it when we kill someone who we think deserves to be killed.
	Really deserves it.
	And that's a reality show.
	We should do that.
	It's been discussed before.
	I've actually figured that some years ago that this is one of these days.
	I mean, it's like the Roman Empire or whatever.
	We're going to have to televise these things.
	But, you know, the fact is there's so few and these executions are so few and far between.
	They just as soon keep these guys on death row, you know, forever.
	But that's what's great.
	Mark Burnett will do a fantastic job because we'll actually call it death row.
	And every, you know, it's like the big brother house meets the guillotine.
	Because, you know, you follow the inmates, you fall in love with them, they become endearing to you as they're on death row, and then we kill them.
	Yeah, well, that's never going to happen with this group that's currently running things.
	They'd rather just put people in jail.
	So, talking about...
	The society being kind of skewed.
	No, we're finishing up.
	You probably didn't notice it because you were too busy with meetings.
	But this last week was Green Week.
	No, I did notice.
	I saw buttons, badges, and posters.
	This is what we...
	We always love to pay lip service to these things.
	Buttons, badges, and posters, everybody.
	How green are we?
	I've been actually recording a few of these things because they have special...
	There's two things that have cropped up in the Green Week.
	One is if you start to really start looking at some of the reports that were going on, there's always the one that always sneaks in, which always makes me suspicious, is there's always some anti-meat.
	Anti-beef, let's don't eat cattle, kind of a slam in there, which indicates to me that there's like a bunch of vegetarians behind Green Week.
	I've heard you talking about this.
	Is this the meat from a test tube?
	Well, the meat from a test tube came out this week, too, which is PETA's idea to make meat in a test tube, which is sickening, if you think about it.
	I love that.
	Hey, I'm making fish in my pond.
	Why wouldn't we make it?
	But I'm watching, I started off at the beginning of the week with watching Bill Maher.
	And they're going on, and out of the blue, they're talking about some green thing.
	Out of the blue, Bill Maher goes, oh, and there's one other thing we need to talk about, which is meat.
	People eat too much meat, and meat uses so much grain and all the grain.
	It doesn't talk about grass-fed, which is really the trend in beef today, because people don't want grass-fed.
	They want grain-fed beef.
	They want grass-fed.
	That means a cow can graze on an otherwise useless field.
	Actually, it's part of a cycle.
	It's very important for them to exist there.
	The buffalo used to do that.
	The Netherlands has cattle.
	You eat grass.
	So where's the grain thing coming?
	But it's part of the propaganda.
	And so Margo's off the deep end like some vegetarian nutball about how this is the worst thing in the world.
	So meanwhile, a couple of days later, I'm watching a green report on one of our local stations, Channel 11, in San Francisco Bay Area.
	And they have this green report.
	And then they have special logos and some screwball correspondence that look like a bunch of...
	Green report.
	Green report.
	Sorry.
	So they bring on these kind of, you know, look like vegetarian vegans.
	And so the woman comes on and she goes, and then the real problem is meat.
	And she brings up the meat thing again.
	And then her thing, though, wasn't the fact that they eat a bunch of grain, but that they're, this one here, which is always like an eye roller.
	It's because they fart.
	And they give off all this methane, and it's the methane from the cows that is causing global warming.
	I love that.
	Yeah, I've heard that one.
	And I've heard this, but every time I hear this, I go, what are you, criminally insane to even bring this up?
	Throw that person in jail, not Wesley Snipes.
	Are you nuts?
	So anyway, but this is all part of this green week, and it's just like there seems to be some vegetarian undercurrent, you know, with the whole thing.
	And it just makes you sick to watch it, because it's like obvious propaganda, and the news reporters say nothing about it, especially this idiotic methane thing from the cows.
	They say nothing.
	And by the way, if they stop feeding them grain, they probably have less farting.
	They're just grass-fed, but that's beside the point.
	But anyway, nobody brings anything.
	Nobody questions anything.
	They just parrot whatever shows up from whoever's behind the whole thing, and I'm suspicious of that.
	And I find the whole thing just incredibly annoying.
	It is.
	Do you want to make myself clear?
	I love it when you get pissed off.
	I believe it's related to the food prices, which is another big story.
	Everyone's talking about rice.
	They should be talking about that rather than this.
	But I think it's related to that.
	And by the way, can we just say that the $116 or $120 a barrel of oil, can we just say this is a scam?
	Totally.
	Can we just let everyone know that the $11 billion, which who's going to report tomorrow?
	Maybe Shell.
	$11 billion in profit.
	Come on.
	Can't you see where the scam is?
	Throw those fuckers in jail.
	Free Wesley Snipes.
	There used to be a thing called the excess profit tax.
	Why isn't that implemented anymore?
	I don't know about this tax.
	It used to be very popular in the 20s and 30s when some company would all of a sudden corner the market and then start making so much money that it was ungodly.
	They just pass a bill in Congress and say, there's an excess profit.
	Give us the money.
	Well, John, do you really wonder why that isn't implemented now?
	I mean, let's go talk to Dick Cheney and see.
	Gee, why is that, Dick?
	Hey, Bush, why is there no excess tax?
	Where's the excess profit tax?
	That's what I want to know.
	For the oil companies.
	Exxon should have been paying it.
	These guys, they make everybody suffer when they're suffering, but then when they're doing well, do they throw the money back into the pot?
	No, they stick it in our back.
	We're knifed.
	How do we stop that?
	Excess profit tax.
	We need a Congress that's got a backbone.
	But you see, the problem is it's all been set up over the years since the 80s about this kind of...
	Non-regulatory drum.
	Can't have regulation.
	Deregulate everything and don't have any control.
	Just basically become an anarchy and let people run rampant.
	That's the way.
	It'll all work itself out in the end.
	It doesn't work itself out.
	I don't see...
	This is an interesting thing to think about.
	The people who are free market, deregulate everything, this group of thinkers, they always have the argument that the free market will work itself out.
	Yeah, well, working itself out also entails the government stepping in and taking excess profit tax from these guys.
	That's part of the system, it seems to me.
	But that won't actually help us because we're still paying four bucks for a gallon of gas.
	The tax won't alleviate that.
	I know, but at least it makes me feel better.
	Oh, so we can buy more weapons and kill people in deserts.
	It makes me feel grand.
	Well, it's better than me paying for it.
	But whatever the case is, the point is that there's a lot of things that aren't being done to slow this down.
	And I agree with you.
	I think that, by the way, the barrel of oil is going to go to $200 before it collapses.
	Wait a minute.
	Excuse me.
	I told you that last week.
	No, I told you.
	No, I told you.
	I said it was going to be a $2 euro and it was going to be $200 a barrel of oil by the end of the year.
	And you said that's not going to happen that fast.
	I don't think it's going to happen that fast.
	We're in agreement, though, on the pricing.
	I think it can head that way, and I think if it did, it wouldn't surprise me.
	But the fact is, I think a lot of people observe this, which is the futures guys are trading this stuff up, and they're taking all their profits and trading it up higher.
	They're pyramiding.
	I mean, they're all in, as it were.
	To take this thing up as high as it can, but the problem is when it finally hits the brick wall, because in fact demand is down for these things, it's going to collapse like there's no tomorrow.
	It's going to be a very interesting short sight if people can figure out what the timing is.
	So you think it'll then just collapse onto itself and go down to something reasonable like $23?
	I don't know if it'll go that far, but it'll definitely go below $50.
	Because that's what it is, right?
	It's just futures trading and commodities markets and just people just, you know, because the minute someone lights a fucking firecracker in the Gulf somewhere, then the price goes up five bucks.
	Right.
	Well, right now, like somebody will say is that, you know, essentially the smart money has been selling dollars and buying oil.
	And then at some point you reverse it and you start buying dollars and selling oil and then, you know, you make your money going both ways.
	Right.
	Well, let's try and predict that timing, John, because I wouldn't mind making some Soros money on that.
	And, oh, by the way, you're right.
	I read in The Economist, we talked about it last week, or maybe the week before, that Soros was everywhere on television saying the bailout was the right thing to do of Bear Stearns.
	He bought Bear Stearns at $45 today.
	The Wednesday before they did the back room deal and when the stock went to $2.
	And so he got scrooed.
	Well, not completely scrooed because he didn't lose everything, but wow, he must be pissed off.
	Somebody suckered him.
	Big time.
	Big time.
	I got a deal for you.
	I got an absolute certain one for you, dude.
	This is going all the way, Georgie.
	I got another note for somebody else asking about the chat room.
	I didn't say I was going to set up a chat room.
	And I'm not streaming it live either.
	Nor do I want to.
	I don't blame you.
	One of these days we've got to reverse it though.
	I want to be an early morning side of the equation.
	I'm always the end of the day or when I'm messed up and when I've been flying for 12 hours.
	Yeah, that's no problem.
	We did it once at night.
	We did?
	Your night?
	Yeah, one time.
	Yeah, early on.
	And my morning?
	I don't even remember that.
	Well, it probably sucked, so let's not do that if I don't even remember it.
	It sucked.
	I don't remember it either, but I remember doing it.
	So here's the big comments I got.
	First of all, lots of people still angry about the non-explanation of soy milk shrinking your brain.
	I'm just going to take your word for it.
	My son is the guy who's nutty about this stuff.
	I mean, he has all the documentation.
	Tell him to send me some links.
	I will.
	I'll have him do that because he's the one who got the family off of soy altogether, soy oil and the rest of it.
	And the soy oil thing is not an unknown issue.
	It has an estrogen-type effect on some people.
	Okay.
	And I've always said it's what's causing the current uptick in man breasts.
	Noobs.
	And also, you know, the other oil that I don't like, which is canola, because I know people say, we're real healthy, you know, we only use canola oil.
	And I'm thinking, have you ever seen a canola plant?
	I always ask them.
	And, well, what do you think it looks like?
	Well, I don't know.
	I can't think of it.
	I don't know.
	What is it?
	Like a palm tree.
	It's a rapeseed.
	And so he said, no, it's rapeseed.
	Of course, for marketing purposes, you don't want to ever sell rapeseed oil.
	It doesn't sound very good.
	But rapeseed oil is naturally, it's got an acid in it that's naturally bad for your heart.
	And they have, with canola, they've managed to process the acid so it's reduced so much that it's not as bad for you.
	But canola stands for Canadian oil with low acidity.
	There's no plant.
	It's just a marketing term.
	And the fact that the health food nuts are all over this...
	I didn't know that.
	Oh, yeah.
	And so the health food nuts are all over this.
	They don't have a clue.
	They think it's a plant.
	Yeah, the canola plant.
	There it is.
	I got one growing up my lawn.
	With my fish, my four-inch fish.
	You know, just doing some self-examination there, John.
	I think I should cut back on the soy.
	I'm developing kind of an A-cup here.
	You know, olive oil is this oil of choice.
	I mean, there are a couple other healthy oils that are out there that are traditional.
	They're old, like grapeseed oil is very good for you.
	It doesn't have any harmful benefits.
	Sunflower oil and safflower oil are good for you, although the commercial ones tend to be hexane extracted, which some people don't like the idea of that.
	What's hexane?
	Hexane is a solvent that's used to extract oil from seeds in commercial environments, and most of the oil, whether it's soybean or anything else, is hexane extracted.
	You use the hexane, pulls the oil out, and then you flash off the hexane.
	And you end up with just oil, with probably a minuscule amount of hexane dissolved within the oil.
	But it's so small, I'm not a big nutball about that as much as some people are.
	So how is the soy milk created, and why is that so bad?
	Soy milk?
	Yeah, what's that mean?
	Well, for one thing, there's no such thing.
	So it's obviously artificially made.
	I don't know what the process is.
	I'll look it up.
	But somehow they emulsify it and they get a milky color and they probably add some sweeteners to it of some sort so it has some flavor because it should be naturally tasteless.
	I mean, if you ever have tofu, there's not a lot of flavor there.
	It's just something that you soak in things.
	Yeah.
	That said, I've always been a fan of tofu skins.
	I think they're pretty tasty.
	And I like those little beans that they have in the Japanese restaurant, which are soybeans.
	Yeah, I like those too.
	Edamame.
	Man, they're popular.
	They're popular.
	Go ahead.
	Okay, I was just going to say the only other thing is we really hit a nerve with China.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	In fact, I just got a new post on my blog, which by the time they hear this, they'll probably scroll off.
	What's that address again, John?
	Dvorak.org slash blog.
	In the search box, type in China space Congo, and you'll hit this particular post.
	Somebody sent it on Twitter, actually.
	The Real Dvorak, by the way, if you want to put me on there.
	It's an article from BBC, but it's mostly from BBC, too.
	It's not necessarily pure BBC news.
	They got some reports, but a deal was just signed with the Congo.
	And let me just read this, because there's a kicker paragraph at the end, which is exactly what we were talking about.
	Due to be signed in Beijing in the next few days, it gives the DR Congo $6 billion of desperately needed infrastructure, Which includes 2,400 miles of road, 2,000 miles of railway, 32 hospitals and 145 health care centers and two, count them, two universities in exchange for the Chinese having access to all the mines that produce copper and cobalt.
	And, of course, my comment is, any bets they get started on the mining before the 32 hospitals?
	Yeah.
	The kicker is this one right here, which is what I was talking about last week.
	And this is in the same article.
	A copy of the original DR Congolese-Chinese Memorandum of Understanding obtained by Newsnight appears to exonerate the Chinese side from all taxes and customs duties until the promised building work is completed.
	Really?
	This is where they bring in everything they can.
	They set up shop in the country.
	They never complete the work.
	So they essentially can bring anything they want duty-free into the Congo.
	And what they do is they, according to everybody who's witnessed this, they'll bring in like computers by the ton, open computer stores, put everybody else out of business, sell, you know, some of it somewhat dubious quality, computers, power supplies, and everything else. some of it somewhat dubious quality, computers, power supplies, and And also bring in, you know, household goods and food and essentially take and ruin the local economy with all these duty-free Chinese goods pouring into the country.
	Never really finish these projects.
	And then either, you know, colonize the place or just bail out after a few years, you know, after you get all the cobalt out of there and leave the place decimated.
	And this is only in the Congo?
	No, it's going on all over Africa.
	This is the latest deal.
	Okay, so who runs the Congo?
	It's kind of a dictatorship.
	Well, yeah, figures, but...
	They do these deals.
	The worst governments are the ones that buy into this because you can buy off their bribe-incented.
	And you just basically take over the place for a while.
	You can stay there or not.
	I figure my scenario is that if they try to stay and colonize, at some point the locals go crazy and just start killing them.
	And then, of course, the news media says, oh, the poor Chinese are getting butchered in the Congo.
	Let's go help them.
	Bring in the U.N. Yeah, and then they'll bitch to the UN, and then we'll help them.
	I mean, the whole thing is a joke.
	But let it play out.
	I mean, I don't know.
	We'll end up buying our copper from the Chinese, I guess.
	Where are we going with this world, John?
	To hell in a handbasket.
	Speaking of which, I did this on the Daily Source Code, but I really wanted to bring it up with you.
	Researchers from the Cancer Council of Victoria, which I guess is that...
	Is that New Zealand or Australia?
	Victoria?
	Yeah.
	I think that's New Zealand.
	That's a bad thing to mess up.
	Anyway.
	Yeah, amongst our New Zealanders.
	Yeah, sorry guys.
	We actually have a lot of New Zealanders that listen to this show.
	Yeah.
	So researchers from the Cancer Council of Victoria found that men who masturbated more than five times each week were one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer.
	Yeah, that's been all over the talk shows all week.
	But here's what I found interesting.
	Why do they say men who masturbate, what if you just have sex five times a week?
	Why does it have to be masturbation?
	Well, one of the guys, one of the reports say that the problem, I think for one thing they're trying to prevent people from having sex, as usual.
	Wait a minute, I can't see you very straight, John.
	Hold on a second.
	So they say, well, because with sex you can have STDs, with masturbation you can't.
	And it's like, okay, whatever.
	Yeah, but that's not what they're saying.
	They're saying men who masturbate.
	I mean, it's just, it's weird.
	Yeah, it's a screwy thing.
	So that came out of Victoria, New Zealand?
	Yeah, this is a foxnews.com story.
	Not Victoria, Canada, huh?
	Oh, maybe it is Canada.
	I think it's possible.
	Hold on.
	How come it doesn't say that?
	It just says...
	Cancer Council of Victoria.
	Maybe it is Canada.
	That actually kind of makes more sense to me.
	Well, it makes more sense to me that it'd be New Zealand, actually.
	No offense to you New Zealanders.
	You know what I'm saying?
	I don't want to talk about the sheep or anything.
	You had to take it there, didn't you?
	I just heard this morning on the news coming in that a German high-speed train derailed in a tunnel because it hit a flock of sheep.
	That's not funny, man.
	What's the sheep doing in the tunnel?
	I don't know.
	Not good.
	I don't think we can ask them anymore.
	Anybody get killed?
	I don't have details on that.
	I can take a look.
	I thought those tracks were pretty well protected, the high speed.
	I know in France, people want to take the high speed train all the time.
	It's fine to take the high speed train in France, except for one thing.
	You don't get to see anything.
	Because most of the tracks are in a ditch.
	25 people injured.
	Anyway, the high-speed trains in France are the best, fastest ones, but you can't see anything because they're all in ditches, basically.
	Right, you're really low and you go through trenches.
	It's more like trenches.
	Yeah, trenches.
	They're like a trench that keeps, you know, whatever, for whatever reason, they have them in trenches.
	Or aerodynamics.
	Probably that and to keep, you know, people from throwing rocks at them or whatever.
	And, well, I'm thinking like an American.
	Never mind.
	I don't think that's so much.
	But you've been on these, right?
	Because I took it to you.
	Oh, yeah.
	I've been on the ICE. I've been on pretty much all the high-speed trains.
	This is the ICD, the Germany.
	ICE, yes.
	Beautiful trains.
	I love the ICEs.
	They're really nice.
	And they actually go on some of the main routes so you can actually see something out the window.
	They're not in a ditch.
	But they don't go quite as fast as the French train.
	Three people suffered broken bones.
	Twenty people received slight injuries, cuts and bruises.
	Yeah, it looks pretty gnarly.
	Literally, it went right off the rails.
	Doesn't take much, huh?
	You'd think that sheep wouldn't do that, but...
	I think you just plow right through the sheep and you just have a bunch of, you know, chops left.
	I mean, I don't know.
	That really seems pretty vulnerable.
	I mean, so if you throw anything on those tracks, it can derail pretty quickly.
	Well, a flock of sheep probably adds up.
	I'm sure a big cow would have probably done that.
	How many is a flock?
	I don't know.
	It's not a flock, it's a herd.
	Okay?
	They're talking about a bird, not a flock.
	So, you know, in the olden days, when they used to have steam trains, they used to have a cow catcher on the front.
	On the front, yeah, it would scoop you right off.
	And it would scoop the cow off and throw him aside.
	Maybe they should think about a sheep catcher or a cow catcher in the front of these high-speed trains.
	Yeah, because the nose looks destroyed, almost like a plane that went through a hailstorm.
	I'll have to check it out.
	All right, man.
	What else do you have written down there?
	I know you got some notes.
	No, my only thing was the Chinese story about the Congo because of this one paragraph that just cracked me up when they talked about the duty-free thing because it's exactly the scenario that was described to me two years ago.
	Yeah.
	There's a good site people should check out.
	This guy, I think it's Jim Kunstler.
	He's got a website.
	He's a writer that does all these books.
	He also writes some harum-scarum kind of economic dire predictions.
	It's kunstler.com, K-U-N-S-T-L-E-R.com.
	And you can read this, read him or not, but the thing that's cool about the site is not...
	I disagree.
	Since I'm a person in the cycles, I disagree with this.
	K-U-N-T-S-L-E-R? Yeah, K-U-N-S-T-L-E-R, I think.
	Freudian slip on my side, sorry.
	I noticed.
	And is that he's got this eyesore of the month.
	Which is just hilarious.
	People out there should just go flake through these eyesores of the month because some of them are just like, wow.
	I'm looking up today's eyesore.
	Go back a couple because there's one in Czechoslovakia they're going to build that is just like you look at this thing and you go, my God, what are they thinking?
	What is this one?
	Huh.
	I gotta go through a couple of them, I guess.
	Is this showing something from Rome or Greece?
	What is that?
	That's kind of a tongue-in-cheek one.
	That's not a good example, that one of the Parthenon or whatever it is.
	Okay, I see it.
	What the hell is that?
	You're talking about the one from Czechoslovakia?
	I'm looking at the Paragon Prairie Tower.
	Oh, no, you got to go back a couple more.
	That's a minor one, too.
	But anyway, this is a funny feature.
	I thought it was a good idea.
	I should have, you know, something I look at and go, ah, man, I should have done that.
	It's a great idea.
	Because I think you do an eyesore of the week.
	That is cool.
	You know, it's like another good site people should always check in on.
	I never check in enough on this site.
	I don't know why, but it's engrish.com.
	And E-N-G-R-I-S-H. And it's always hilarious.
	I mean, it's like, it's essentially some guy who mocks the misuse of the English language in Asia with all kinds of posts of stuff that just...
	Just amazed, flabbergasted.
	A friend of mine has a retail, no, it's a wholesale fashion accessory business in LA. And so they get a lot of orders from the Far East now, which is where all this luxury stuff is going, so to China, etc.
	And they had literally written something and they asked when they could expect the deribery.
	And I thought it was so cute, you know, that...
	That they don't have spell checkers.
	So you know how Asians will mispronounce L's and R's, but they literally wrote it in an email.
	When can we expect the deribbery?
	Yeah.
	I know, they phonetically do it wrong.
	Yeah.
	Don't they have spell checker?
	Use no hooks, handle with cake, keep fire away.
	I'm looking at it now.
	English.
	Yeah, Ingrish has always got a couple good ones, and usually two or three chuckles.
	I'm still into the kid from Brooklyn.
	God, that guy's so funny.
	Well, it's pretty much this one gag is a one-trick pony.
	Yeah, but he does one every day.
	It's worth it, you know?
	It's amazing that some, yeah.
	Those guys used to be more common in the United States when we actually had a working class.
	Yeah, that doesn't exist anymore, the working class, according to Financial Times.
	I don't think it does either.
	And it's a shame because it got wiped out by a number of factors, but the white-collar class is one of them.
	Because I remember my dad's working class when he was raising us, and he always made more money than the white-collar guys, and he'd always talk about it.
	It's kind of like a user-generated content definition, working class.
	I work, so am I not part of the working class?
	Yeah, good point.
	But the working classes, I think we know what we're talking about.
	People actually work.
	I always...
	My understanding...
	No, you're not.
	Fuck you.
	My understanding was working class is like factory type, factory truck driver.
	That's kind of the visual I get.
	Is that incorrect?
	Yeah, factory truck driver, machinists, you know...
	More industrial.
	Industrial.
	Construction worker kind of, more or less.
	Guys who actually work.
	Guys who sit around shooting the crap like we do.
	We work hard, John.
	Don't say that.
	But I've worked in all those environments.
	I know what it's like.
	Because when I was a kid, you could actually get a job when you were in high school.
	You'd get a work permit because you couldn't work if you were under 16 or something legally because it was child labor laws.
	But you could get a special permit Which kind of defeats the purpose of it.
	But you can get a work permit when you're a kid.
	And then when summer rolled around, you can go get a job.
	You know, at 15 or even 14 if you really had a lot of ambition.
	I used to go out in the fields, man.
	I grew up in farmland.
	We used to go dig up potatoes and turnips.
	And I worked in a, that was actually a pretty fun job on a rose farm that grows roses.
	And I learned a lot about roses.
	And basically, we'd sort the roses by differently of the first sort, the second sort, third sort.
	And then you have kind of the trash, which is the fourth or the fifth sort.
	And at the end of your summer vacation, you'd have a lot of money.
	And you'd realize why.
	Because from the tip of your finger up to your shoulder, you would be just covered in cuts.
	Just completely covered.
	Swollen.
	Yeah, swollen, infected.
	Nice.
	Well, when I was, I remember we had in the Fremont area of Northern California that used to be an agricultural area almost without, I mean, it was apricots and cherries.
	And the cherry fields outside of Niles, which are now non-existent, We're producing some of the finest chariots I've ever had, and I can still remember them to this day.
	When I was a little kid, we used to eat them constantly.
	But anyway, they used to have a thing called...
	You could work in the apricot orchard picking, and there was a thing called cutting cots.
	I never did this, but I knew what it was.
	They have these big apricot orchards, and then there used to be one right near the...
	The biggest one was right off where it's now the Thornton Avenue exit off a highway...
	17 or 880 or whatever it is down there.
	Anyway, it's huge.
	And you'd cut the apricot in half and then you'd lay them out on these giant trays and then the trays would go into the drying room and that's how they dried the apricots.
	It was all natural.
	I think there was some sulfur.
	They would burn a wick in there or something to keep bugs from getting in there.
	And...
	That was all torn out eventually for condos.
	And then the whole area now is just all housing.
	And the other great agricultural area in Northern California was the Santa Clara Valley, which is also...
	They used to have some of the greatest vineyards and cherries and all kinds of agricultural products that were high grade.
	And that's all been wiped out for housing.
	And so now everything's just essentially moved to the hot...
	San Joaquin, Sacramento Valley, which is just extremely, you can grow anything there, but you don't have the same kind of soils and really high-end quality there.
	You get more of just a lot, a lot of stuff that's tasteless.
	I'm just browsing through.
	I read two things on the plane, The Economist and Financial Times, the weekend edition.
	It was probably in the Times, which it didn't bring with me.
	There was a list of common fruits and vegetables, but it really focused on vegetables and how many different kinds we used to have.
	Oh.
	Like cucumbers.
	There were 300 different varieties of cucumbers.
	Now, four.
	That's really freaky.
	Yeah, no wonder we're all, you know, sick.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We're killing ourselves.
	Well, you know, the problem is you have to blame the public.
	The public doesn't demand it, so they don't get it.
	Yeah, but they don't know.
	And the big growers say, well, you know, if people are just going to buy this one cucumber that's a high-yield cucumber, we can make it by the ton and pick them by machine, that's what we're going to make, because we make more money that way, and the public doesn't care.
	And the fact of the matter is the public doesn't care.
	I was sitting at a meeting, I may have told this anecdote before, but I'm going to tell it again anyway, because not everybody listens to the show every week.
	I was giving a speech to the Produce Distributors Association.
	I'm a really big operation.
	They had a big trade show of produce distribution.
	It was amazing.
	And this is a paid gig, right?
	They asked you to come and speak?
	Yeah.
	What are they expecting?
	Technology?
	Yeah, some technology angles.
	Everyone uses computers.
	They need to know what's going on.
	You don't give a shit.
	You're just like, I want to meet these guys and make some money, have a good time, be in a new city.
	No, I do give a shit, and I give a pretty good speech.
	Actually, my current speech that I'm doing now is really outstanding.
	So I'm having lunch because I always want to have lunch with the speakers.
	So I'm sitting around with a bunch of these hot shots.
	They're all big-time distributors.
	They're all running multi-million dollar distribution companies.
	And we got into a discussion about potatoes.
	And it came up in the conversation that, you know, there's tasteless potatoes that we eat compared to some of these, you know, really wild...
	And I talk about my experiences in Peru where I was confronted with...
	They have something like 5,000 kinds of potatoes because that's where the potato came from.
	And they eat them all.
	And it's kind of fascinating.
	Anyway, to get to the end of the story, the thing that came up in the conversation is that these guys would love to sell and distribute more interesting products, but the American public wants one thing and one thing only, cheap.
	Cheap, cheap, cheap.
	And they said the only country that comes close to being as bad as Americans would just want – you want a bunch of carrots?
	It's got to be Scotland.
	No, it turns out to be Germany.
	Really?
	They said the Germans are almost as bad with the cheap, cheap, cheap.
	We don't want the variety.
	We want cheap.
	We want the cheapest carrots we can get.
	We want the cheapest potatoes we can get.
	We want the cheapest lettuce we can get.
	You know, I'm thinking, John, that the Amish and even these guys, these polygamists, you know, had that compound going and were kind of in their own self-contained separatist world.
	They might have a good idea there.
	Yeah, they probably do.
	And I gotta tell you, by the way, those women, those polygamist women, which is just the way they're being described everywhere, those polygamist women, I think it's hot, man, the clothes they have on.
	I love that.
	I love that frontier out that kind of like Laura Ingalls, you know, I thought she was hot, Little House on the Prairie.
	Remember that?
	Remember Laura?
	Yeah, that's what the look is.
	I love it.
	By the way, I'm also a sucker for the headscarves.
	I love that.
	I find that to be incredibly sexy.
	I mean, some women just aren't sexy, but wow.
	It's a huge scandal over here, what's going on with that polygamy thing, because they took all these kids away from their moms for no, what was the point of that?
	We don't know.
	Meanwhile, we celebrate the Pope coming into the country who runs a company of sodomists.
	And all he says is, oh, we'll do better.
	You can send your email to adamcurry at...
	Well, I'm taking it to the extreme, but let's be honest about it.
	The Pope was excoriating that whole scene to an extreme, and the Italians don't know what to do about the American...
	Yeah, but they took 500 kids away from their parents.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's ridiculous.
	That border's probably on illegal...
	Well, there's going to be a lot of lawsuits flying.
	I don't know what's going on.
	This is Texas.
	This is the same area.
	They burnt down a compound in Waco and killed a bunch of people for whatever reason because they felt like it.
	That was during the Clinton administration.
	But Texas seems to be the—I don't know what's wrong with Texas, that they have this situation that just continues.
	Of nutty kind of cults, but at the same time there's a murderous approach toward them that doesn't seem like such a Christian state.
	Oh, gunslinging and gun-toting Texas?
	That's john at dvorak.org.
	I always get it.
	I think the Texans, there's no Texans listening to this show.
	Are you kidding me?
	Oh, dude, that's absolutely not true.
	There's lots of Texans.
	I like Texans.
	I like Texas.
	I love Texas.
	I go there whenever I can.
	I think it's great.
	The food's good, the people are nice, but there's something wrong with it.
	That's where I did my mass wedding.
	I married 70 couples in Austin.
	That's right.
	You talked about that before.
	Yeah.
	No, I love it.
	This is a cute little town.
	But getting back to the original point is, damn, man, we are just killing ourselves.
	And we're robbing ourselves of all of this wonderful stuff that comes from Mother Earth.
	And all the good stuff is either not being produced anymore or is illegal.
	Right.
	That's one of the things.
	I have to say, I've actually now started collecting the Gordon Ramsay Kitchen Nightmare show UK version.
	Oh, really?
	I still like the US version better, but okay, it doesn't matter.
	The US version is wimpy compared to the UK version.
	I like Gordon Ramsay.
	If I were a woman, I'd be hot for him.
	He's a very commandeering but yet sensitive guy.
	I don't know.
	I like him.
	He's cool, man.
	Well, he has...
	What I look at when I watch that show, Kitchen Nightmares, not his other shows I don't care much for, but the Kitchen Nightmares show, if you're watching a guy who's in the consulting business...
	And it's like you get to see a consultant at work and what he has to go through to get anyone to change.
	Basically, the show doesn't change much from episode to episode.
	He goes into a place.
	The guy's all screwed up.
	He won't, you know, he's in denial.
	No, no, no, no.
	This is the format.
	I'm a student, John.
	First week, he goes in, he sits down, and he orders food off the menu.
	Right, right.
	Then he either...
	It's always crap, by the way.
	Sometimes he throws up.
	Have you ever seen one of those episodes?
	Yeah, he's thrown up a couple of times.
	Yeah, he goes to throw up, and then it starts.
	And then the owner of the restaurant, or whoever, always has a chip on his shoulder.
	He's like, who the hell are you to come in and tell me how to run my business?
	The chef is usually just completely...
	What do they say?
	They lost their love of food.
	Or they're totally incompetent.
	Or they really just suck.
	And he always buys them a nice sign and does the redecoration.
	Oh, but you're missing a couple other little items.
	No, the promotion.
	There's always a little assistant to somebody else working in the kitchen who is a gem.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Right, exactly.
	Who's going to step up.
	Yeah.
	In fact, there's even one show where he actually, the restaurant folded.
	It was one of the best shows.
	Once in a while he fails, which makes the show interesting.
	What I've noticed is he doesn't go back anymore.
	I don't see the episodes where he goes back three months later.
	They stop doing that.
	No, I've been watching it.
	He still does that.
	Maybe the U.S. version they don't do it anymore.
	Oh, the U.S. version I don't watch.
	But anyway, he's failed a couple of times, but my favorite one was a restaurant in Paris that was a vegetarian restaurant in Paris, which he thought was ludicrous.
	I remember this one.
	It was a veg restaurant in Paris.
	I remember this one, yeah.
	And wasn't it the girl who had a rich father, like a Texan-type dude?
	Right.
	With a hat and everything?
	Didn't really want to work.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And she had like, she called her girlfriend.
	Yeah, come on and do some waiting.
	And the girlfriend was like, I don't want to go.
	And, you know, it was a mess.
	And the chef was a Brazilian crackpot who was a maniac.
	And the whole thing was absolutely one of the better episodes.
	And he was so disappointed.
	But anyway, I recommend the show for people who want to watch.
	It's basically a business consultancy show that is very educational in terms of like, you know, even though there's formulas there.
	Like the other formula, by the way, that's in the show is that he always...
	He insists that they make simple food that is locally sourced.
	The simple food that's locally sourced, that's basically the theory.
	And he breaks the plates.
	Have you ever seen those?
	These plates, they're too big, they're too small, they're too square, and then everyone does a plate smashing contest.
	That's a good show, man.
	He's good.
	So anyway, so we opened up a place when we were in New York last.
	Yeah, I stayed in the hotel at the...
	The London?
	The London, yeah.
	Did you use a restaurant?
	Dude, booked up until after the new year.
	You're kidding?
	Not kidding.
	In that area of the hotel, you have kind of like a bar, which does have tables.
	You can sit down there.
	If you're lucky, you can get a table.
	Then you have the restaurant right in front of that, and then behind there, they call it the London Proper.
	And that's the real restaurant.
	And it's booked up until...
	I mean, I only inquired.
	I didn't have time to eat there anyway.
	I'm sure that there's a way to get in.
	But that's what the maitre d' said.
	It's built up through the new year.
	Damn!
	It's not small, you know, so I can imagine.
	Yeah, he knows how to make money, that guy.
	Hell yeah.
	I mean, basically, if you start looking at his websites and stuff, you see he's actually kind of a...
	It's a cool hotel, too.
	He's an entrepreneur.
	It's a cool hotel.
	I didn't realize until I was looking it up that that's the old Riga Royal.
	Yes, correct.
	And they've done it up nice, John, really.
	It's a good hotel.
	Well, when it was the Riga Royal, it was a good hotel.
	I mean, I guess it got a little threadbare.
	But I was at the Riga Royal.
	I used to stay there all the time.
	And one time, there's a lot of New York moments that took place in that joint.
	One time, I'm down, they used to have a bar that was quite popular, which is probably part of that restaurant now.
	But anyway, the bar, one time I'm in the bar with some PC Magazine folks, and there's this guy who's drunk off his ass.
	He started singing.
	He had an accompaniment.
	He just decided, he wandered up to the, there was a piano there, nobody was playing it, so he brought, he started, he drug one of his pals over there to start playing the piano, and he started singing, and then the piano, and then eventually started singing a cappella.
	And he had this gorgeous voice, but the guy was just barely could stand up.
	And there's a group that I could see where he came from.
	So I said, who is this guy?
	He said, well, it's Engelbert Humperdinck.
	No way!
	Yeah.
	And so I'm thinking, oh, this is interesting.
	So we stayed there until about three in the morning.
	He just kept singing.
	It was unbelievable.
	It was like a free concert.
	The guy had a heck of a voice, I have to say.
	And a cappella?
	Stunning.
	Because he's one of the big guys in the Tom Jones League.
	Yeah, that style.
	Big voice.
	What were his big hits?
	Engelbert Humperdinck.
	I don't know.
	Who cares?
	I care.
	What do you mean?
	Who cares?
	But I mean, it's just like, you know, it was one of those, in New York you have what they call, especially if you don't live there, well, even if you live there, they call those New York moments, or some screwy happens like that.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Yeah, it happens all the time.
	One time I was walking down, I think it was Park, and here comes Mike Tyson.
	Hey, John, John C. Dvorak, the blog.
	Yeah, right.
	So anyway, this guy, he had flanking him, walking down the street, pretty much pushing anybody out of the way.
	They happen to be on this pretty wide sidewalk as it is.
	Three guys on each side of him that were twice the size he was.
	And all in black leather.
	And he had sunglasses on and they just come zooming down the street.
	I don't know where they were headed.
	I wasn't going to follow them.
	But it was like, wow, that's what you call your entourage.
	Because the other guys you see roaming around in Manhattan, they're just by themselves.
	You don't think much of it.
	This is not a New York moment, John.
	This is a brush with greatness.
	A brush with greatness, yeah.
	Oh, I had a brush with greatness on the flight.
	I had Dolph Lundgren was sitting two seats up from me.
	Remember him?
	Yeah, is he still alive?
	And he looks good.
	Dude's got to be 50.
	I'm 60.
	No, he's not that old.
	He's my height, and he's big, man.
	He's cut.
	Did you talk to him?
	Did you say hi?
	Hey, Dolph!
	Yeah, I'm that asshole.
	Hi, gee, I've met your ex-wife, Brigitte.
	Engelbert Humperdinck, please release me.
	Let me go.
	Yeah, that's his big hits.
	That's the big one.
	That's the big one.
	Be careful, you get one more word in SASCAP. Oh, I heard someone pontificating in L.A. You know Jimmy Iovine?
	Do you know who that is?
	No.
	Jimmy Iovine.
	I think he started as a...
	I don't know if he's always been a record producer, but as far as I know, he did a lot of the big music videos in the heyday of MTV. He was a director.
	And he had Interscope Records, I think.
	I think that's who I'm thinking of.
	Anyway, he runs Warner Records with Doug Morris.
	And listen to this scheme.
	They're so desperate trying to figure out what to do and how to make money that their new scheme is...
	Wait, wait.
	Stop, stop.
	Do you eavesdrop this or did they tell you?
	I was told...
	I don't feel comfortable telling you who told me, but it was someone...
	Okay, okay.
	Go on.
	Very senior in Hollywood.
	All right.
	Like top of the fucking...
	I got it.
	I got it.
	Go.
	I got it.
	Their scheme now...
	They want to make music videos that include advertising.
	So they want to do...
	Crotic placement?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Smirnoff.
	Of course, it's all hip-hop.
	That's the only videos that are kind of still being made.
	So they want to do just all advertising, all liquor, bling, whatever it is.
	And that's their new business model, or at least one of the new ones.
	And I heard someone tell me this of such stature, with such conviction.
	I'm like, dude, that's not a good plan.
	Yeah.
	That's really not something we ought to try.
	I just don't think that's going to work.
	That's crazy.
	Are they going to work the product placement into the lyrics?
	Oh, why not?
	Yeah, you might as well go all the way.
	I'm sure that's being done here and there anyway.
	That's probably already happening.
	Yeah.
	I'd like to see the fee schedule for that.
	It'd be kind of interesting to find someone who had it.
	Well, that's the problem.
	Everyone thinks it's so easy, advertising.
	Just because Google can do it with billions and billions of eyeballs and clicks with very low-rent advertising.
	No one has really done advertising successfully online.
	Not big brand advertising yet.
	Except for that new company I hear about, that Mevio thing.
	Mevio, it's an operation.
	They know what they're doing.
	So what would happen, do you think, if online never got beyond what Google's doing?
	Wow.
	All these newspapers and all these other people doing all this different kind of stuff all moving to online.
	I mean, I know that they're actually making a profit at PC Magazine online.
	So, I mean, you can do it to a point.
	But what if it just...
	What if where we are right now is it?
	I don't think that...
	Okay, I'll answer that.
	I've got to answer it two ways.
	First of all, I don't believe that that scenario can ever play out because it's just about the...
	We just have to all agree on numbers, right?
	What's the circulation of the New York Times?
	A million?
	I should know that number.
	I think it's more than that.
	I think it's like two and a half, but I don't know for sure.
	Wall Street Journal.
	It's the same.
	It's going to be 800,000 to 2 million.
	Let's just say that.
	Geek Brief TV does 2 million a month easily, and sometimes 10 times that.
	You know, so I just don't see how...
	Dollars always follow audience.
	Always, always, always.
	So I don't think your scenario is going to play out.
	However, should that happen, I just got to go shoot myself.
	Well, we don't want that.
	Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine that.
	That would be...
	I can't even come up with a scenario.
	What do you think?
	What is your thought if this was it?
	Okay, I'm just looking at the editor and publisher here for some Cirque numbers.
	You know, it's one of those things...
	You know, people don't realize that...
	Everything is so experimental, you know, it's like the Twitter thing, which I don't want to talk about.
	But the fact is that there's these things...
	These initiatives and these crazy ideas keep cropping up left and right and left and right that always end up looking for...
	The eyeballs can be had, but then monetizing them is not necessarily...
	You still have to do a sales job.
	You can have great fish at the fish market, but you've still got to sell it.
	You've still got to move product.
	You still need Gordon Ramsay to straighten you out in your restaurant.
	MTV, 20 years ago...
	New York Times is 1.037.
	It's 1 million.
	It's a million.
	Wall Street Journal is 2.
	And the USA Today is 2.2.
	So listen to this.
	So when MTV started in 1981, I didn't get there until mid-80s.
	The cable was...
	Advertisers did not know what to do with it.
	It wasn't television.
	I mean, that's not TV. And it's hard for people to realize that that was the thinking at the time, but I remember doing the pitches to Budweiser.
	We'd record pitches for them because we desperately wanted Budweiser to advertise on the channel.
	And that's how Spring Break, MTV Spring Break and The Beach House came to be.
	Not because MTV said, hey, you know what's a great idea?
	Let's...
	Let's go do spring break and we'll make that into a tentpole promotion every year.
	No, it's because they were trying to get Budweiser.
	And if you look at some of that footage, it may have changed maybe a different beer brand now.
	But every single shot is filled with either a vodka brand or some other type of alcoholic beverage.
	But the ratings for MTV at the time, even when I was there, were 0.4 on average.
	Which means that about...
	300,000, 400,000 people are watching MTV at any given moment.
	And today, that rating is still between 0.4 and 0.6.
	It's not a lot of people.
	In aggregate, in QM, yeah, and the brand, of course, is phenomenal, but it's just not a lot of people that are watching.
	And people have this idea, you know, consumers have this idea that, you know, everyone watches MTV. It's huge.
	But no, the ratings just aren't there.
	In fact, that's why MTV, you know, MTV is not stupid.
	They were brilliant, although they alienated their core audience.
	But this always happens.
	And, you know, it'll happen in our form of media as well.
	It's already happening.
	MTV said, well, wait a minute.
	These videos, they're being commoditized.
	BET, which Viacom later bought for probably this very reason, they were getting the Michael Jackson world planetary premieres.
	So they weren't getting the product.
	They weren't necessarily the only place where you could watch music videos on television.
	And they thought to themselves, you know, what we really need to do is if only we could make like a game show, but we really don't have the money for a game show, so let's do this.
	Let's throw some Barco loungers in the corner.
	Let's get a cute girl to do dumb prizes, and we'll get a dorky host, and we'll call it remote control.
	And boom, the rating went up to a 1.0.
	And they never look back.
	That's why MTV is what it is today, 30-minute, you know, reality-based shows.
	With no audience.
	Right.
	I watched The Soup, which is another great show.
	It's a fantastic show.
	And they go over all these reality shows.
	You never have to watch them because all you have to do is watch Joel McHale.
	He'll bring you up to speed on all these things.
	But there's so many of these reality shows.
	It's just like jaw-dropping.
	I mean, you never heard of half of them.
	I don't know.
	I think we should just stop calling them reality shows and just call them what they are.
	Television.
	That's what television is going to be from now on.
	That is the genre.
	No, that's pretty depressing.
	Well, look, dude, I watch C-SPAN, and luckily we have some of that, but why is it depressing?
	I get my media fill online.
	I like to watch a good drama or a good comedy that's well-written once in a while.
	Sure.
	Well, it's kind of getting too expensive.
	You know, this is reminding me of this transition that took place in radio, because if you remember, you don't remember, I don't remember, because we weren't really listening to radio in the 30s since we weren't born.
	No.
	But the radio, but I've collected it, and the radio used to be a big spot where people, it was good dramas and well-written scripts and a lot of acting, and then when television came along, you know, it just basically died and became, you know, spinning music, because somebody said, well, you know, you can make as much money spinning these records.
	As you can, you know, going through all this expense of producing real, you know, real dramas and anyway everything's going to TV. So everything transitioned and then that even deteriorated to now it's just essentially chatterboxes on the radio and especially on AM that can talk for three hours.
	That's what I like about the BBC. They still have radio dramas here.
	They have the Arches, which has been running for, I don't know, 50 years or whatever.
	Ongoing radio drama.
	And people here listen to the wireless.
	They literally just listen to...
	They call it the wireless.
	And it's really good.
	But, you know, it's BBC, so it's being paid from public funds.
	Everyone gets a bill.
	Each kind of gets a bill, but you have to pay for it individually outside of your taxes, and you're getting good stuff delivered for it.
	It's not commercially viable.
	Yeah, I guess there's an advantage to sometimes have the government involved in media a little bit.
	But the point, yeah, the point is that if television deteriorates to nothing more than these unscripted shows, you know, it's just kind of...
	I mean, who wants to watch that crap?
	But John, no...
	First of all, the same people who don't give a rat's ass if they only have two cucumber varieties versus 300, they're the ones who are watching that, and they're watching it in droves, just like you look up the circ numbers, I know rating numbers, and people are watching this.
	It's relatively inexpensive to produce.
	And it's a simple equation.
	The audience is leaving television.
	It's no longer the cultural epicenter of what's going on in the world.
	It's the latest show that you've seen, or it's the kid from Brooklyn.
	That's the cultural conversation that's taking place through IM and email.
	Social networks.
	People are spending more time doing something else.
	So the audience is going away, and that's a direct equation to how much money these guys can ask for a 30-second spot.
	So I just don't see how the economics of it will work.
	It's...
	If a show costs $50,000 per episode to produce versus, you know, for a reality-based show versus Lost, which is $2 to $3 million an episode, and you get the same type of ratings, you know, Lost is not getting Dancing with the Stars numbers, I'll have you know.
	It does good, but not that good.
	Gladiators kick Lost's ass.
	Gladiators, dude.
	So, it's the economics of it.
	So, that's what I love about online.
	Because, you know, you can still kind of create something worth watching.
	The message can still be true, even though you may not have all of the high-value productions of a studio.
	But even that, I don't think is that necessary anymore.
	So that's where we've got to get it, I think.
	I don't like the sounds of this.
	Well, I don't know much, John, and in this conversation, I love looking at the waveforms of the recording software because you basically see your track is all waveform and you only see me bump in once in a while.
	But this I actually know something about.
	Yeah, I know you do, but I'm not an ignorant person regarding this particular category of discussion myself, but I'm not like you.
	You seem to be, like, happy about it.
	I find the whole thing depressing.
	What difference does it make?
	It's just a different box where you watch it.
	No, I'm talking about the overall effect on the culture.
	I mean, having a bunch of people watching Gladiator, which should actually be banned from the air as far as I'm concerned, and with the effect on the culture, it's like the Jerry Springer show.
	I think you're missing it.
	I mean, now it's affected.
	Now, Mortar Povich, which became a clone of the Jerry Springer show.
	I didn't realize it until recently when I watched it.
	And these shows, besides being somewhat fake, are essentially just...
	The public's not dumb enough.
	I mean, just like we dumb down the public anyway with the two cucumbers.
	And, you know, they don't have any sense about anything.
	They're already stupefied.
	And then we just make it worse with this stuff.
	And then we just take advantage of them by advertising to these boneheads.
	And then the situation gets worse and worse and worse.
	And then when all hell breaks loose for one reason or another and the public doesn't realize that the government's made a big mistake because they're too busy watching gladiators to worry about anything or Brittany, what she's up to.
	And then we bitch and moan about the public being a bunch of boneheads.
	Hey, whose fault is it?
	It's your fault, Adam Curry.
	Okay, well, it's not because I don't live there.
	I don't contribute to that.
	No, but listen, here's what I will say.
	I absolutely agree on the cultural side.
	Again, I'll say the actual cultural conversation is no longer really taking place on television.
	But with the system set up in the United Kingdom, this is why it doesn't bother me that much.
	Because yes, there's plenty of reality-based crap programming.
	I have Sky Plus and I don't have to watch it when it's on.
	It records it automatically and there's 900 channels.
	But...
	There's some fantastic programming on BBC. Absolutely culturally valid, really well thought out, awesome stuff being made.
	And that's purely because of the system.
	So it's a non-commercial system, or kind of not.
	There's a lot of commercialism going on in it.
	If you really are sad, then why don't we set it up that way?
	Why don't we change PBS to link that into the ownership of the television?
	Just like they're trying to do the music tax.
	If you have a computer, then you'll pay tax.
	If you want some good television, you've got a TV, you pay...
	150 bucks a year, and we'll make good programming for you.
	Well, you know, actually the PBS does still, we still have Nova and Frontline and American Experience.
	These are really well done shows, I have to say, and they're obviously not cheap to produce.
	But they're all, no, this is bullshit.
	They're all sponsored by big conglomerates.
	It's a very commercial industry.
	It's cutthroat, man.
	These are independent producers.
	Who are selling their stuff to PBS. It doesn't even come close.
	Okay.
	You mean because it's all sponsored by Archer, Midlands, McDaniels, whatever the name of those guys are, that are Monsanto or these other people, so you never do a report on them?
	Yeah, or GE. Yeah, it bothers me a little bit, yeah.
	No, I'm totally upset by the fact that GE... So here it is.
	You've seen Top Gear, right?
	We've discussed this.
	You've seen Top Gear?
	Yeah.
	Top Gear could not exist in any type of sponsorship or advertising model because somewhere along the line, Toyota is going to want to advertise on the station and it just won't happen because those guys over at Top Gear crashed one into a jet engine.
	These guys do all kinds of weird shit or they chopped it in half and tried to make it into a desert crossing limo.
	So...
	It would never, ever happen.
	So that's destroying the culture, is not having that type of media outlet that is subsidized literally by the users.
	Yeah.
	No, you got me on that one.
	I can't argue against this point, so I'm not going to try.
	But I will say that probably it would be the model that we should use here at No Agenda.
	Well, isn't that exactly what we're doing?
	Well, no, I'm talking about we're doing it on our own dime.
	Oh, you mean people should pay us $150 a year.
	Yeah, I think that's a fine plan.
	But they won't.
	There's too much free material out there.
	That's the problem.
	It's an interesting dilemma because who's going to pay the $150, like for the TV or one show?
	Here's what kills me, John.
	Here's what kills me.
	How long is your speech?
	This new killer speech you have?
	The new presentation?
	How long is it?
	It's 45 to 55 minutes depending on how much time they give me.
	Do you do Q&A after that or you'd never do Q&A? It depends.
	I do Q&A sometimes.
	It depends on what they want.
	You have to customize it generally.
	There are organizations.
	There are companies.
	I'm sure that there's upstanding and some even maybe non-profits who, of course, will pay.
	You don't have to be non-profit for that, but really upstanding, interesting companies who are paying you, I'm sure, anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000 to go to present.
	And here you are getting the same John C. Dvorak for free.
	With the same killer material.
	Well, it's not the same material, actually.
	It's just two guys talking.
	John, work with me here, will you?
	Work with me.
	Oh, okay.
	I'm sorry.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's free.
	Go on.
	I guess my point is, this is not out there.
	This is a very valuable property.
	I don't think that you can get this...
	Hey, our numbers show it, man.
	You don't actually have the stats.
	I sent you a screenshot.
	Do you see how this shit is building?
	Yeah, we're getting about...
	We have something like 10,000 core listeners and it's gone up, I guess, to 12 or it's going to go to 15, 20.
	No.
	Three episodes ago hit 25,000.
	For one episode?
	Yeah.
	Oh, that's not bad.
	That's good.
	There's money there.
	We should be able to monetize that.
	Well, so here's how it works.
	25,000 is 25 CPM units.
	In audio, we could probably sell that for $20.
	So what's 20 times 25?
	That's 500 bucks.
	So there you go, my friend.
	500 bucks per episode.
	Now, that's only if we sell one ad.
	Of course, if we do two ad units, then it's $1,000.
	See how it works?
	But we don't want to put a bunch of ads in the show, although if the show's an hour and a half, which it tends to be, we could put in three ads...
	No, man, I don't want to ruin the show.
	Of course it would.
	Of course it would.
	But I'm just saying, so this is the big, actually, you know, that's how all these other audio shows, they're kicking ass making so much money because their audiences are so loyal that they're able to sell them stuff.
	Everyone's going to buy a domain name eventually, so of course I'm going to use Callie Lewis's code.
	And that's how a lot of money is made, without this whole stupid CPM model.
	It's very interesting to me.
	This is...
	I really love it.
	That's what that e-music thing is.
	We did it with the Nokia.
	I understand that, but the thing that I still see missing from the equation is shows that are not sponsored, not trying to get people to buy stuff, but in the old-fashioned, although this is a little bit of a PBS model, underwritten.
	So in other words, we get General Electric to just give us $15,000 to do the show, and then we just say General Electric pay for the show.
	Yeah, but that's the PBS model.
	The problem is people say, well, you know, then we won't say anything bad about General Electric.
	Well, I don't know what to say about General Electric anyway.
	Well, it could be General Electric, it could be NBC, it could be any other subsidiary.
	It could be a foundation, it could be the Catherine and John of Arthur Vining.
	You know, I mean, it could be anything.
	That I'd take.
	I'd take that.
	Well, maybe not.
	No, that would be okay.
	We need a grantsmanship person, though.
	There's an expertise getting that kind of money that neither one of us have and probably will never obtain.
	I know you could probably do a mediocre job, but there's probably somebody out there that listens to the show and says, oh, I can get that money in a minute, boneheads.
	And, you know, so we're waiting to hear from them.
	Yeah, damn straight.
	Adam at Medio.com.
	I finally fixed my Curry.com email after it being on the fritz for a year and a half.
	Did you get swamped with mail?
	That's a long story.
	It's not that interesting.
	So in other words, if somebody said Adam at curry.com, they would just die?
	No, you'd get an email sent back.
	Most people mistake for your mailbox being full, but actually if you read the, and I find that people never ever read bounce messages, and boy, you can learn quite a bit from them.
	If you took three seconds, you lazy pricks.
	Same with error mess, error dialogues.
	Just read it for a second before you start saying you don't get it.
	You'll see that it says, has exceeded bandwidth.
	That's why it was being stopped.
	And there's a whole explanation for it.
	But basically, the curry.com domain name, and this is interesting when you're not just looking at your personal email account, but when you see the amount of email that would be coming in To curry.com.
	And just try anything, right?
	If you send it to webdude at curry.com, the way it was set up, it would actually go in.
	It would go to an administrator account.
	So the spam was terabytes.
	Just fucking terabytes.
	And the issue was that it wasn't being redirected.
	It was being forwarded.
	From the service that I use for my email.
	So like a terabyte a day of data was being forwarded to my Gmail account.
	And that, of course, they have some limits set up.
	You just can't be forwarding a terabyte of data every day of crap.
	Not for your 50 bucks a month, Mr.
	Curry.
	We're just not going to allow that.
	But it's a terabyte of crap.
	And actually, I'm a bad netizen for not having solved that much earlier because, yeah, I was just sending crap.
	Filling up them pipes.
	And let's just finish the show with that.
	I love these stories.
	And I don't know where these are coming from, but the internet is full.
	Video is going to break the internet.
	I love these stories.
	You following me?
	Yeah, no, I actually have criticized these stories because there was one of them that said, well, the internet is going to, it was AT&T. They had this thing and they said, the internet is going to be full by 2010.
	And they expect it to increase by another 50% by 2015.
	I said, wait a minute, how can I increase it all if it's going to be full by 2010?
	There's this really weird discrepancy in the way the story was presented.
	It was like, this makes no sense.
	I think I know what's behind it.
	Now you said it's AT&T. I betcha.
	They want to make WiMAX or HDSPA or whatever it's called.
	They want people to see that as the high-level service internet, wireless.
	So people kind of wean them off of the idea that...
	Do people really, consumers, they all understand the difference between Wi-Fi and WiMAX and, hey, this one works pretty good.
	And by the way, I hear that the internet is going to be full in 2023.
	It sounds like one of those jobs to me.
	Yeah, you might be right.
	It's going to be full.
	It's full.
	Full of clothes!
	Go home!
	Ah, yes.
	Well, on that note, we're full.
	Go home.
	What do you got going on this week, John?
	I've got to go on Monday.
	I'm going to run down to Xerox Park for a special event.
	I get to meet a couple of really hot shot guys.
	I've been itching to meet over the years.
	Really?
	And I'll report back on that later.
	Can you give me any clues on who these hot shot guys are?
	Is this a seminar or a conference?
	It's something there's like an open house they're doing for certain journalists.
	I'm not absolutely sure, to be honest about it, but it's being done by the Xerox printer people.
	And so it'll be interesting.
	I'll take pictures.
	You mean the document company?
	Yeah, the document company, them.
	Alright.
	Well, I'm going to be hanging around here.
	I'm going to actually...
	I've got to do my wife's first live...
	Hey, dude.
	She's ruled Friday evening with that show.
	Holland's Got Talent.
	Number one show of the entire day.
	Every single Friday.
	So she's doing her first live show on Friday, so I'm going to go over there and see how they do that.
	It'll be very interesting to see.
	Yeah, totally.
	And to start renegotiating season two.
	Well, it sounds like you have the upper hand.
	Yeah, well, we got it now, that's for sure.
	All right.
	Oh, thank you, hon.
	I just finished.
	Snack time.
	Snack time.
	How great is my life, man?
	My wife brings me...
	Let's see.
	Let me just...
	Oh, this will be a quick culinary moment.
	So this is...
	What is this, hon, in the glass?
	I can't hear you.
	Red wine.
	Red wine?
	Just pure red wine?
	You can't tell?
	Well, you've got to ask.
	Because I don't want you.
	Is there a...
	Hon, hold on a second.
	I can't hear you when you're standing over there.
	Hold on.
	Patricia wine means with a bit of wine...
	A little bit of wine.
	Hon, this is the microphone.
	Okay, put a little bit of juice in it.
	See, John, this is what she does.
	She does red wine and then she puts grape juice in it.
	Yeah.
	Why?
	Why?
	Because I don't want you to fade away.
	Okay.
	Because you're tired and you just came back.
	All right, let me just say we have here meatballs.
	Yes.
	And myself made meatballs.
	Meatballs.
	We have some pickles.
	And we have some salmon with cream cheese on a little cracker.
	Melba toast.
	Yes.
	And some gurgans.
	All right.
	What do you have, John?
	I have a cup of coffee.
	I'm going to go have that wine with grape juice.
	From the Curry Manor in the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
	And in Northern California, Silicon Valley, I'm John C. Dvorak.

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