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May 3, 2008 - No Agenda

01:36:39

29: The Zen "Offer"

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	Ladies and gentlemen, time once again for the program that comes to you from different ends of the universe, and I'm not just talking geographically.
	It is your weekly No Agenda, coming to you from the United Kingdom in the Curry Manor.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm here in Northern California.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.
	And we have a beautiful weekend here, John.
	It's about time we had some good weather.
	I hope it's shitty where you are.
	No, as a matter of fact, it's quite nice.
	It's probably going to be around 72 today and maybe 75.
	Oh, okay.
	Hey, we have a new mayor in London.
	Did you know that?
	Oh, you got rid of that communist guy?
	Yeah, Red Ken.
	Yeah, he's gone.
	We got Boris Johnson as our new mayor.
	Boris Johnson, it sounds like he's a Norwegian.
	Have you ever seen this guy?
	Do you know anything about him?
	No, no, nothing.
	I didn't really know him as a politician first.
	I saw him as he was a host of several television shows.
	Kind of like, you know, stuff like, what is it, have I got news for you, I think?
	He certainly, well, they have a rotating host.
	I've seen him on that a number of times.
	He is a spectacularly, completely British, funny guy.
	I have no idea if he can run the city of London, or London, I should say.
	But he's a joker, dude.
	I mean, this guy is funny, capital F. Now...
	It's funny, I really don't know anything about Boris Johnson.
	What's his name again?
	Boris Johnson, he's a conservative.
	Boris, as in Boris?
	Yeah, as in Boris.
	And Natasha.
	Yeah, Boris Johnson, he's with the Conservative Party, and of course this is the big deal because Gordon Brown is labor, and they lost, I think, 400 council seats around the country, which is just, that's devastating.
	Of course, projecting onto the...
	The job that Gordon Brown is doing, the current Prime Minister, and he's with the Labour Party, so this is a huge deal now that he no longer has a direct party connection to London.
	This is big.
	I just don't know if this guy...
	I love the guy.
	I think he's funny, but I have no idea if he can run London.
	Well, what do they just vote on any...
	Do they put people just randomly...
	I mean, how do these guys run?
	I mean, this always reminds me...
	These elections would be, besides Red Can and Boris now, it sounds to me as though it's like a college election where some guy puts himself up who happens to wear clown suits.
	It's not quite like that.
	And he always wins.
	It is a party-driven system.
	So we have Labour, we have Conservative, we have the Lib Dems, the Liberal Democrats.
	What is interesting though, and I haven't quite, you know, this only happened yesterday or two days ago basically, is that when you vote you have to vote for your favorite candidate and then your second favorite.
	I'm not quite sure why, but you have to cast your favorite and second favorite.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	I think there's like some tiebreaker deal or something that they put in there.
	I was like, alright, the second guy, we'll let him go.
	But I was just cruising around the net.
	It's more like a survey.
	Here's your five candidates.
	Pick them in order.
	Win valuable points.
	Get points for valuable prizes.
	Cross off a couple boxes.
	But I had asked on the Daily Source Code for people to explain it to me or tell me what's going on or what's up with Boris Johnson.
	I got literally no response.
	Just no one responded at all.
	And what I did see surfing around the net, I see a lot of people are really pissed off that he's become mayor.
	And I see people twittering stuff like, I'm so disappointed in this city.
	So I think a lot of people really don't like him.
	Well, it's got to be better than this other guy.
	He was a real clown.
	Yeah.
	Well, the thing that really made me laugh recently about Boris is it relates to that Jerry Springer show we were talking about, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth.
	But someone asked him the question.
	He said, have you ever slept with a man, Mr.
	Johnson?
	And his answer was, well, not yet.
	So that kind of guy, that's funny, man.
	That is funny to say, especially if you do it in this kind of naive style.
	Not yet.
	And he's always jogging, as these politicians do, right?
	They get up in the morning, crack at dawn, and they'll jog around the block, and the reporters follow them.
	Except he wears like a, and he has quite a distinct, huge mop of blonde white hair, but he'll wear like a skull and crossbones scarf on his head.
	I mean, he's nuts, man.
	It's just like a typical, what I love about British nuts.
	I'm looking at the telegraph and it says, senior conservative sources said that they would be gobsmacked if Mr.
	Johnson did not win the mayoral contest.
	What is gobsmacked?
	Well, you obviously understand what they mean with it is just completely flabbergasted.
	Yeah, but gob means face, right?
	I think gob is...
	Yeah, maybe it is.
	Are you looking that up?
	Are you looking that up?
	I don't know.
	Remember we had gobstoppers?
	Right.
	Candy?
	Let me see.
	Gobsmacked.
	Hmm.
	Worldwide words.
	Okay.
	What can you tell me about the British term gobsmacked?
	It's a fairly recent British slang term.
	The first recorded use only in the 80s.
	Hmm.
	Really.
	Though verbal use must surely go back further.
	Hmm.
	Not necessarily.
	The usual form is gobsmacked.
	A combination of gob, which is mouth and smacked, means utterly astonished or astounded.
	There you go.
	I guess it would be the same as jaw-dropping.
	Yeah, right, right, right.
	It sounds more British.
	Well, you know, the Brits over the years, especially recently, have done a lot more for the English language in terms of being inventive.
	The other forms of the English language, the American form and all the rest of them, are pretty conservative by comparison.
	I mean, we're almost like the French compared to the British.
	They're making stuff up constantly.
	Oh, I don't know.
	We have a lot of technical terms, I think, that we made up in the U.S., Yeah, but that's an interesting point.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Not you mentioned it, but it's out of necessity.
	Wait a minute.
	You've invented something and you've got to call it something.
	It's not like you're casually livening up the language with newer adjectives and screwball imagery.
	To Google?
	That's pretty lively.
	We made up a word there.
	All right, all right.
	Forget it.
	I'm sorry I brought it up.
	I'm writing it down.
	I got another Yes, You're Right from John.
	I've got three so far.
	Four now.
	No, I think it's four.
	So anyway, I just got back from Holland.
	Oh yeah, how'd that go?
	Your wife got a contract extension or what happened?
	Well, no, not yet.
	This is the first, now that they do four, I think four or five live shows until the winner of Holland's Got Talent is announced.
	Oh, who won?
	Well, so this was a pre-qualifying round.
	So they've already pared it down from 200 people to 30 people.
	And so now they do...
	That's right.
	They do 10 for the next three weeks, including last Friday night.
	And then the fourth week is when they do the final...
	That's the real finals.
	Is it broadcast live, the final one?
	Well, this one was broadcast live, too, last night.
	Or Friday night.
	How do you do four, then, if they're broadcast live?
	That doesn't make any sense.
	What do you mean?
	You said they're going to shoot four.
	No, I didn't say that.
	No, no, no.
	They're going to do four live shows.
	They did one last Friday night.
	They're going to do one next Friday night, the Friday night after that, and then the 30th of May, I think, will be the final Friday night, and that's when they have the final, final contestants.
	So are you flying there in your private plane?
	Unfortunately, I think I told you this, my wife refuses to fly with me over the channel unless I have a safety pilot, and I couldn't get anyone who could stay overnight and stay with us.
	And actually, we took KLM. It was such an infuriating experience once again, and partially KLM. But Heathrow Airport, I usually fly out of Gatwick unless I'm going with Virgin, but Virgin has their own entrance and you don't even see anything of Heathrow.
	So, BAA, which is owned by a Spanish conglomerate, is running Heathrow.
	And, of course, these guys are responsible for Terminal 5, which is...
	Hey, wait, wait.
	Stop, stop, stop.
	I thought BAA stands for British Airways or something like that.
	No, no.
	BAA is British Airport Authority.
	And it's run by the Spanish?
	So, a Spanish conglomerate runs BAA, which includes the two major airports, Gatwick and Heathrow.
	So, there's no competition.
	Hold on a second.
	Wait.
	Stop, stop, stop.
	I thought the British were known for their management skills at levels like that.
	How come the British don't run their own airports?
	Because this is part of the nationalization.
	They were fucking greedy.
	They wanted to make money.
	So they sold it to the Spanish.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You made that point a while ago.
	You said this is what nationalization always leads to.
	Then some other freaking government winds up running your shit.
	It's unbelievable.
	It is.
	And so, you know Heathrow Terminal 5 is messed up.
	Gatwick has been under construction for 40 years, although I think it is a pretty well-functioning airport.
	But now, they have this...
	You know, I've flown into Gatwick once.
	It's in the middle of nowhere.
	You have to drive right through the city streets to get back to where you're going.
	You must be talking about London City Airport, because that's not true.
	Gatwick is literally underneath Heathrow.
	You mean below it, on the map?
	On the map, yeah, below it.
	So, that must have been London City or something where you landed, because Gatwick is...
	It's the same to get from Gatwick into the city as it is...
	Okay, then I'm mistaken.
	Anyway, so...
	It makes me so angry.
	So, the only airport I fly in and out of, and I fly out of a lot of different airports...
	At London Heathrow, they have a welded rack, and your carry-on bag has to fit into this rack, otherwise you can't take it with you on board.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	It is the size of a cigar box.
	And I know this because, well, first of all, whenever I go to Heathrow, it's through Virgin, and so you don't actually go through the BAA part of the airport.
	You know, Virgin owns that part.
	And so it's their decision to say, okay, whatever size you want, you can take on.
	And you know my bag, right?
	The famous Adam Curry's office bag that I schlep everywhere with me.
	Yeah, and it's a funny-shaped thing.
	But it's oblong.
	It's rectangular, but it's perfect.
	It fits in every single aircraft overhead bin that I fly on.
	Okay.
	And I know it does, it fits into this thing except for the wheels.
	The wheels won't actually go into this welded frame that everything has to fit into.
	So I know this.
	So I'm already like trying to, you know, push my wife along my side, you know, so that no one can really see I'm carrying the bag.
	And then there's this shithead, like, oh, excuse me, sir, you have to see if it fits in this rack.
	You know, and so I say, yeah, it fits.
	Look, no, but the wheels have to go all the way down.
	I'm like, it will fit in the overhead bin.
	Oh, yes, sir, but this is a BAA regulation.
	So it's only for their airport that your bag can't be over a certain size.
	And my bag's not huge, and it fits in every single overhead bin, and so I always wind up getting into a fight with these guys, and then I have to go and check my bag and take my computer out and do all this crap, and it just really pisses me off.
	Wow.
	It really started me off wrong.
	And of course, just the fact just going through all this crap of commercial flying.
	EasyJet is great!
	Compared to KLM, which is like a scheduled flight where a crew shows up and then you have to wait for the ground staff to do shit and priority boarding.
	Whereas EasyJet, the plane comes in, throw everyone off, empty the sick bags, put the new passengers on, and we're off, ladies and gentlemen.
	I love it.
	It's like Southwest.
	Oh, I love it so much.
	The CEO of Southwest, somebody asked him, how come you're one of these airlines that makes money?
	And he says a lot of these airlines don't realize that the only way you can make money, or no, he said the thing you have to know about the airline business is that planes sitting on the ground do not make money.
	Yeah, it's extremely expensive.
	And so he just, you know, his operation is the same thing.
	They run the plane in, they offload it as fast as they can, they beg people to clean up after themselves, and then they throw another group on as fast as they can, and off they go.
	It's a total spreadsheet business.
	I actually had a very small airline myself with helicopters.
	And you have what they call a DOC, a direct overhead cost.
	So you know exactly, and that includes maintenance per hour.
	It's all by hour.
	So maintenance per hour, fuel burn per hour.
	Obviously stuff like oil, but also every piece that's going to have to be replaced.
	Contingency, which is a percentage of overall.
	So you know that this aircraft will cost...
	It's like an Airbus 320.
	I'm probably just making it up, but let's say it'll cost you $6,000 an hour DOC, right?
	And then per extra person...
	I mean, it's all down to a spreadsheet, so they know everything, but you're absolutely right.
	That's only if the plane is operating.
	If it's sitting there, it is just costing shitloads of money, because that's the other side of the spreadsheet is the...
	The financing and the depreciation.
	And it's really simple.
	It's a very simple business.
	It's just that no one wants to pay a lot of money to fly anymore because it's so heavily subsidized for years.
	Hmm.
	Well, so EasyJet is a good one?
	I've never been on them.
	That's a European cheapie?
	Yeah, EasyJet.
	That's Stelios, you know, the Greek shipping magnet who started the airline and then he started a cruise line.
	And he's kind of like a Richard Branson, only without class or style.
	Totally.
	And his color is orange, right?
	Everything is orange, which is just an atrocious color.
	But I think it's kick-ass.
	The only thing that's sad, and I had heard that this was going to happen, is they used to have four flights between London and Amsterdam daily, weekdays, and they've brought it back to two.
	And that's purely because of the oil price.
	What's the cost of a flight from London to Amsterdam on EasyJet?
	Well, this, of course, depends on how much in advance you book.
	What's the range?
	The range is one way.
	The range is between 38 pounds and 138 pounds, I'd say, if you book the day before.
	So you can go to Amsterdam casually for 75 bucks or so U.S.? Yeah, yeah.
	And you can get deals, and you could probably do it consistently for a round trip about 100 bucks, I would say.
	It'll be fun.
	Americans, we're over here in an entirely different hemisphere, and we don't realize that there's always a certain cosmopolitan.
	Not everybody in Europe is cosmopolitan by any means.
	In fact, I remember watching some report once talking to people in Germany who have never been to Paris, even though it's just a short train ride.
	And they never left the country.
	I mean, there's a provincialism all over the world.
	But the opportunity exists if you live anywhere in Europe to just about visit all this cool stuff for almost next to nothing.
	And it's something Americans don't understand because it actually costs us a lot of money just to go to the Grand Canyon, which is in our own country.
	Yep, exactly.
	And it's funny because I know a lot of cab drivers in Amsterdam and they love, they love, they love doing this Schiphol Airport into the city run on Friday afternoon because that's when all the Brits, en masse, hop on the EasyJet, fly over to Amsterdam to get completely shit-faced all weekend long.
	And then, so the ride the cab drivers absolutely hate is a bunch of puking, sick-ass Brits on Monday morning trying to get back into the city to be in their office by lunchtime.
	It is the worst ever.
	So we just get invaded.
	And the Brits are a rowdy bunch.
	I thought they were going to see the museums.
	Of course, the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, yes.
	And the red-light hooker district.
	Now they all get stoned and tanked up and laid.
	And then they go back home.
	It's a form of tourism.
	Amsterdam does not like being known for that as their main tourism.
	I did want to say...
	Well, it's a classy town.
	I mean, I think a lot of people...
	Americans need to visit this town because I consider it one of the really cool towns of the Western...
	or the Western...
	of the Europe...
	of Europe because it's...
	I mean, it's the bicycles and the trains going every which way and the cool little shops and the really outstanding museums and...
	And while we still have a reasonably small amount of listeners, if you're going to Amsterdam, you can hit me up personally.
	Just email me and I'll help you find whatever you're looking for.
	I'll tell you the best places to go.
	As a service, from no agenda to you.
	Oh, that's nice of you.
	I do it all the time.
	People are always emailing me saying, Hey man, I'm going to be in Amsterdam.
	What should I do?
	Where should I go?
	What do you tell them usually?
	Well, it really depends on who it is.
	You know, some people, believe it or not, that I know, actually do want to go see the museum.
	Well, I recommend, by the way, both museums are good, but the Van Gogh is quite interesting because that museum has got so many Van Gogh paintings in it.
	I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds of them.
	Because every once in a while, they pack up a bunch of Van Goghs from all around the world, and they put them on a tour of the U.S. museum circuit, which they do with all kinds of different things.
	And I remember one of those things, Van Gogh in particular, showing up.
	In San Francisco years and years ago, and it was like, there were like, you had to get tickets, and there was a line a million miles long, and you had to pay a fortune to get in, and it was like a slow-moving process.
	Meanwhile, you can go to this museum, and you get to play, I mean, it's just...
	I mean, there's 20 times more paintings, and it's just like, you know, there's none of this hassle.
	It's a fantastic thing to do.
	So, there's also the Rijksmuseum, which usually has the Night Watch, one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings on display.
	That's a great one to see.
	I always recommend people go to see the Museum of Modern Art, the Stadelic Museum.
	Have you ever been there, John?
	I have not been to that museum.
	Oh, it's a really good one.
	I think you'll enjoy that.
	And then depending, I may say check out the Anne Frank house, although I find that to be kind of disappointing.
	I think it's depressing, the whole concept.
	And that does have a line.
	Oh, that's a huge line.
	But what I recommend to others is the Blow Boat, which is a canal cruise with goodies to smoke.
	That's a pretty good cruise.
	Alternatively, you can take the Wine and Cheese Cruise, which is also good.
	Seeing Amsterdam from the water is a great way to see some fantastic parts of the city.
	You've done the canal boat tour, I'm sure, John.
	Not the blow tour.
	I never heard of that one.
	I was thinking something else, by the way.
	No, I have thought about setting that one up, but no.
	The blow tour.
	No, the blow tour.
	It doesn't operate all year round.
	The blow tour.
	Do you sit around a big table?
	I don't know, anyway.
	No, no.
	It's just like in a coffee shop.
	You can buy some stuff, and then you sit there, and you smoke, and the guide tells you.
	And it's beautiful, man.
	You're like, oh, wow.
	Yeah, look at that.
	Look at the fake facades.
	They're so pretty.
	Right.
	One of the reasons I like Amsterdam is it's a photographer's dream come true because of the architecture.
	And also, last time I was there, I went to, in Old Town, there's this thing called the, I think it's called the Hidden Church or this.
	It was this old Catholic church that's built into a bunch of apartments.
	Oh, you mean where the nuns still live?
	No, I don't think anybody's living there.
	It's almost purely a museum now.
	But it's right off the main, it's right walking distance from the, well it's right as you first go into Old Town if you're coming from the train station.
	And it's a really cool exhibit.
	And you've seen it, the Americans have seen it because they highlight it occasionally on various documentaries.
	But it's like a church that's in the roofs of about five or six buildings.
	And during some period of history, it was used as a Catholic gathering place because being a Catholic was illegal for a while.
	And it's a whole infrastructure into these houses that's a church with an organ.
	The authorities couldn't tell this was going on.
	They had this huge organ inside.
	I don't know.
	It's funny.
	I don't know what you're referring to, actually.
	Yeah, I'll have to send you a link.
	I'm surprised you haven't been there.
	It's actually worth checking out.
	And to eat, I would just recommend a couple things if you're in Amsterdam.
	If you have a chance, and although not a Dutch...
	It's an imported food...
	But it is a very typical Amsterdam snack, particularly after you've been out at night drinking or whatever, whereas in the UK people would get a curry or a kebab.
	In Amsterdam you have to get a sawarma.
	Are you familiar with the sawarma, John?
	No, I'm not.
	Okay, so it's a pita bread, and in there is very much kebab-like, but cut up into small bits of strips, usually veal, I think.
	I think I saw this on a tourist show, you know, rough guide or something.
	Right, but what you want is you want to find Ben Cohen's place, it's on the Rosenkracht, and tell him I sent you.
	What, do you get an extra piece of meat?
	You'll get all kinds of love.
	Trust me.
	You've got to have it with the garlic sauce, the white garlic sauce.
	That's the best.
	And typically, even, people drink two glasses of milk with it, which is just astounding.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah, I know.
	But it's an Amsterdam treat, I'm telling you.
	Well, the food in Amsterdam is not necessarily typical of all those countries.
	Denmark, Amsterdam, all those Nordic and Scandinavian countries and Holland.
	They don't know how to cook.
	And in fact, the best cuisine in Holland was Reistafel, whatever it is.
	Yeah, Indonesia.
	Yeah, it's Indonesia.
	It's not even their food.
	It's Reistafel, which literally translates to rice table.
	And you want to go to Samasebo for that.
	Now, I will say this.
	The last time I was there, there's some people that do the Tao Neue Press, T-A-N-E-U. There's some crazy European press that produces all these cool books.
	If you can go to an architectural store, you'll find them.
	There's a builder's source bookstore on 4th Street in Berkeley for anybody in the Bay Area.
	They should go there.
	And look at these books, and there's this series.
	They're called Cool Hotels, Cool Restaurants, Cool Bars, and they'll have them like Cool Restaurants in Amsterdam, or in Holland or Amsterdam, Cool Bars in New York, Cool Hotels in San Francisco, and they're inexpensive books.
	And they're not meant to be tourist guides, but the fact is I got the Cool Restaurants of Amsterdam before I went and looked and found about...
	Ten cool places that were just astonishing, because this is like a book for architects, so they can steal each other's ideas.
	And it turned out that the food was good, too.
	So, you know, there is good food to be found, but it's a little rough.
	But there's just some typical Dutch things that if you run into them, you know, like the, well, Reistafel would be...
	It would be a typical fare for going out.
	But if you can get poffertjes, which is seasonal, but that's the little pancakes.
	I mean, like really half-dollar-sized pancakes, you eat them with powdered sugar and melted butter.
	And, of course, if in season, the herring.
	And it's literally raw herring, although it's been in salt, I guess, or whatever.
	It's been cured.
	Yeah.
	With onions on it.
	You pick it up by the tail and you just eat that right up.
	And then hit it with some Dutch gin.
	All you're talking about is snack food.
	Well, the Dutch fair is basically meat, potatoes, and cauliflower.
	That's what they've been eating all their lives, you know?
	No wonder they had to go to sea.
	Yeah, but if you're on vacation, you want to, you know, catch the local culture, you know, it's like they eat french fries over there with mayonnaise, you know, it's kind of weird, but you should try it.
	Yeah, it's snack food.
	No, you're right.
	In fact, Denmark's the same way, and so is Belgium.
	They all eat french fries with mayonnaise.
	I'll never forget 1972, and we were in Somfort, and the Formula One races were still on that circuit at the time.
	And as my dad and I went to have a look, and he said, I'll get us something to eat, and he came back.
	And I'm like, what the hell are you thinking?
	Yeah, I'm seven years old, right?
	Are you out of your mind?
	Are you going to get french fries with mayonnaise?
	But I've really learned to love it.
	Well, it's actually not bad.
	It's a little on the...
	I mean, it seems to me it's about a grease overload.
	I mean, even with the ketchup, there's a little vinegar in there to cut it.
	I mean, the other extreme of eating french fries is the British style, where they don't even use ketchup.
	They cut to the chase, and it's just vinegar.
	Vinegar, right.
	Yeah.
	Which I love.
	What I wanted to say, though, about being in Holland and this show, and this actually relates to the DVD that didn't work that you gave me.
	You said George Carlin was on it with his most recent HBO special.
	So, of course, I went to Google and video.google.com, and of course, the entire thing is online, right?
	That only makes sense.
	And I watch it.
	And there's this one segment in there, John.
	You'll probably remember he's talking about how the kids today...
	Well, he's done this routine before, I think, in a different version about how the kids that are growing up today are all pussies.
	And they're never taught to lose.
	Do you remember that piece?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	The kid that comes in last these days, he didn't lose.
	Like, oh, Johnny, you were the last winner.
	Right.
	And I related that to the show.
	So the show...
	By the way, a live television show with an audience and with 13 cameras.
	It is very exciting to watch.
	I'd kind of forgotten how cool it is.
	And I could basically go anywhere and stand anywhere.
	And, you know, multiple cranes.
	Just a big production.
	It was impressive.
	And I'm always...
	I'm excited how that works and to see it all come together.
	It was very cool.
	But it kind of clicked for me after having seen that George Carlin bit that why this type of program works so well because it is so...
	It seems really harsh but basically just like the Olympics which of course are also extremely exciting because on these types of events, Olympics and performance based reality shows, people actually do lose.
	And they cry about it.
	And they cry about it, exactly.
	And on this show, it's kids, too, which is really, really heart-wrenching.
	So it was just, it was good to watch, man.
	I love it.
	I know you hate that kind of TV, but wow, it really sent me up and down on the emotional rollercoaster.
	I hate it because it ruins these people's self-esteem.
	Oh, you're kidding me.
	Come on.
	This happens every single day in auditions.
	Auditions everywhere.
	You're shitting me, right?
	Did I just fall for that?
	Did I just step in that?
	Oh, God.
	I'm horrible.
	I've got to switch topics real quick.
	How embarrassing.
	That is bad.
	I'm tired, man.
	Come on.
	I've been like a bitch boy for my wife, carrying her suitcases, getting her tea, keeping people out of her dressing room.
	I've been total...
	I've just been subservient.
	I've been beaten down.
	I was watching an excellent documentary on the BBC. It's a series, I think a four-part series, and hopefully I configured it right to record the other ones.
	It's about BRIC, and we talked about this.
	BRIC is this new acronym for Brazil, what was it?
	Russia, India, China.
	Yeah, thank you.
	Brazil, Russia, India, China.
	So it started with Brazil, makes sense.
	Here's something I didn't know.
	And I've never been to Brazil.
	I've never even been to South America, which is really on my list.
	I want to go.
	You'd love it.
	I'm sure I would.
	So did you know that in Brazil, the houses are bought with 100% cash that up until a few weeks ago, six weeks ago, you could not get a mortgage, but you literally would buy a house from someone for whatever the asking price was, and you'd give them a check with the full amount?
	No.
	Huh.
	And what's happening now, and I'm like, wow, this is pretty amazing from a financial perspective, is they've now opened it up, and it makes sense.
	You know, the world needs another money supply.
	Well, basically, they're going to start pumping all this money out of Brazil because now everyone can get a mortgage.
	And people are like...
	And by the way, the mortgage rates, 68%.
	68% interest.
	I'm going to have to...
	You know, I write for a magazine in Brazil for a decade or more.
	Decades.
	Is that Tranny Gazette?
	It's called Info.
	I'm going to write my editor and check this story out because that...
	I don't know.
	It doesn't sound right.
	Okay.
	I mean, it was a...
	It's a pretty credible documentary, and I was flabbergasted.
	They're like, hey, what a great place to go get some money.
	We'll just start offering mortgages.
	And I can see a number of institutions that would be very interested in grabbing some of that cash for everyone.
	All of Brazil is basically loaded with equity.
	Yeah, I would think so, if that's true.
	You know, it's a possibility.
	I've only been to a...
	I have been to a number of private residences, and I never thought to ask how they were financed, but...
	Excuse me, did you pay for this fucking thing yourself?
	Did you pay for this?
	You know, I mean, it's just one of those weird things that you can go to a country half a dozen times or more, and then the next thing you know, there's some screwball fact you never thought to ask.
	Damn!
	How could you not think of that one?
	Too off the wall.
	Well, for us, yeah.
	But when you think about it, maybe we're just off the wall.
	You know, that's the thing why I find this story somewhat incredible.
	Because most nations, even China, they look at what we do and copy it.
	It's not like what we're doing is crazy.
	Everybody copies our form, especially the United States form.
	And actually, the British and the United States are pretty much the same when it comes to how we do capitalism.
	And everybody copies it.
	And, you know, it's not like, you know, all of a sudden, you know, 100 years into it, somebody says, gosh, let's do mortgages.
	I never thought of that.
	Ah, geez, you know, slap in the foreheads.
	It just doesn't sound right.
	Well, I was really paying attention to it because I was like, holy crap, I had no idea this was...
	And, by the way, was it like 19 million people in Brazil?
	I'm sorry?
	19 million people live in Brazil?
	Yeah.
	That's how many people live in Rio.
	In Rio, right.
	I'm sorry.
	No, you're right.
	I meant Rio.
	Yeah, Rio's probably around 19.
	Sao Paulo's probably around 25.
	You know, in Sao Paulo, they don't know what the population really is.
	You get different estimates from 20 million to 35 million.
	But I'll tell you, the first time you see that place when you're flying into it, if you're coming from the right angle, you think you're landing on Mars or something.
	I mean, there are just buildings right to the horizon in every direction.
	It's amazing.
	And with no seeming structure or organization.
	It's kind of a mess.
	Yeah, Rio.
	Well, maybe it was just Rio then.
	Maybe it wasn't all of Brazil with the mortgages.
	Well, Rio's got issues.
	Uh-huh.
	Particularly on the other side of the river.
	Well, it's not just the river.
	I mean, it's mostly in the hills.
	All the best, you know, like somebody once said, this is what town would you have where all the best view lots and everything that is really cool is all slums.
	It's the favelas.
	They're all on the hills.
	And it's like a separate city within a city.
	And it's like if they ever could get rid of that, it's too late now because they let it fester.
	But if they cleared that area, it would be some of the most amazing property in the world.
	Yeah, but they can't do that now because a big part of the workforce lives there, right?
	Not that I can tell.
	I don't know how much of the workforce comes from the slums.
	I'll go back.
	I'll check my Skybox later on tonight and I'll find out the name of the documentary because I'm sure it's on Google.
	And by the way, why doesn't Google get sued for that?
	What's up with that?
	It's like no one gives a shit anymore.
	It's like have copyright, have mainstream copyright authorities given up on Google?
	You mean the George Carlin thing?
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	It's a good question.
	You never hear anything about it anymore.
	Yeah, once in a while you still hear about a takedown request for a song from some guy who taped his three-year-old dancing to Michael Jackson or whatever.
	But you never really hear anything.
	And here it is, only a couple weeks after, a month after Carlin's new HBO special was on.
	This thing, of course, was up the day after.
	It's nicely categorized.
	This guy's got a whole page filled with all of George Carlin's work.
	It's like, oh, here's this series, here's that series, and it's all just up there.
	I don't understand.
	They're just not getting called on it.
	I mean, it's fine.
	I'm happy, right?
	If it was on YouTube, they probably would get called on it.
	It's on YouTube as well.
	It's just shittier quality.
	Yeah, it's on YouTube.
	The thing is somewhat baffling.
	People do, you know, things get taken down that should be up there, and things are up there that should be taken down.
	It never made any sense to me.
	I mean, somebody puts a little clip of Jon Stewart, which is like a short, which is nothing more than a publicity.
	Everyone freaks out.
	It's like a free advertisement, and then the Comedy Central guys get all bent out of shape about it.
	There's no free advertising with the George Carlin thing, but there's free advertising with the Jon Stewart thing, and the Jon Stewart thing gets taken down, and the Carlin thing stays up.
	Exactly.
	I know.
	It's like the British Airport Authority.
	It's like no fucking consistency.
	That's the Spanish.
	Oh, man.
	And Boris Johnson's going to take us through the Olympics.
	Wait a minute.
	No, that's not true.
	He doesn't get to stay that long.
	So I was at the library.
	Our library here has these sales every once in a while.
	I always go to them.
	I bought a cookbook.
	I said this is an aside because it was a callback to a show we did.
	Or a couple weeks ago.
	So I got this cookbook that was a dollar, and it's from 1940, and it's Ruth Wakefield's Toll House Tried and True Recipes, which apparently Ruth Wakefield was like the Alice Waters of the 1930s.
	Wait a minute, wait a minute.
	You just said nothing.
	That meant nothing.
	The Alice Waters?
	I know Julia Child.
	Alice Waters is the one who does Chez Panisse.
	She's famous in the West Coast.
	This is the problem with...
	With the trendiness of cooking comes and goes.
	So tell me about Alice Waters first, so I understand.
	Well, Alice Waters is the one who kind of rejuvenated fresh Mediterranean-style cooking, which became California cuisine in the 70s.
	And she runs this restaurant, Chez Panisse, which has become kind of a mecca for foodies.
	Although I don't go there much anymore because I think it's...
	It's lost a little of its trendiness.
	It lost something.
	And the audience is...
	I mean, I don't like really going to restaurants where I'm the youngest person in the restaurant.
	It just doesn't work for me.
	So, um...
	But anyway, she...
	But this woman from the 40s...
	But what's cool about this...
	There's a couple things I wanted to mention.
	I don't want to get into too much of a food discussion.
	But there's a couple cool things.
	One, inside the cookbook, there was a penny postcard that was dated June 11, 1940.
	And it actually has a one-cent stamp on it.
	That's a penny postcard that used to be a penny.
	And this woman was bragging about how she loved this...
	This restaurant she had eaten there.
	And the other cool thing is that the book is apparently autographed by Ruth Graves Wakefield.
	And the thing I really wanted to bring up, and this is for a dollar, by the way.
	I was just about to say, how would it cost?
	One buck, huh?
	One buck, yeah.
	But the thing that's weird about it is that there's a picture early in the book, even though I can't find a recipe for it, of grapefruit stuffed with crab.
	Oh my goodness, that's your favorite.
	So I was gobsmacked when I read this.
	And I looked at it and went, oh my god, this isn't even a new idea.
	Because as anyone who listens to the show consistently knows, a few weeks ago, Adam and I went to La Folie and one of the dishes was this crab...
	And on the plate was a bunch of grapefruit ground up.
	It was like a grapefruit sauce.
	And I thought the combination of crab and grapefruit was horrible.
	And I just want to say that my wife eats that quite regularly.
	She'll make that for herself as a little snack.
	I believe the difference is in the grapefruit.
	I think she sugars the grapefruit a little bit.
	And that was probably what threw you off.
	Well, the grapefruit was a little bitter.
	But...
	But I'm still trying to imagine, because I'm pretty good at kind of, you know, imagine the taste of crab and grass, and I'm not getting it.
	I'm not getting that this is a good combination.
	When you come over here, I'll have Patricia make hers for you.
	Maybe you will get it.
	Maybe.
	I'm already prejudiced now, though.
	I mean, it's going to be hard for anyone to turn me around, even though I saw this old recipe from the 1940s, which makes me think it's an old-style thing that's never really caught on.
	It's maybe only spotty.
	With the Dutch.
	But, you know, it could be Dutch.
	The Rotterdam faction.
	I've always supported libraries.
	I've famously done a big hair poster for the ALA, the American Library Association, which is still laughed about.
	Can I get a copy of that?
	Yeah, I still have a couple of the full posters.
	Why does a library sell books?
	To make space?
	Well, sometimes there is only so much space and they get a lot of books in and they move some of the older ones out.
	And a lot of these, they have a sale at the Albany Library twice a year.
	And I think a lot of the books are donated or they come from someplace else or from closed libraries because there's more books for sale than the library ever had.
	And I have boxes and boxes of books that I've bought, usually huge sets of reference books that you can get for next to nothing.
	That are sitting in the basement because I can't resist buying the 45 volumes of How to Prune a Tree.
	Of course.
	As one does.
	For $6.
	How can you not buy this thing?
	That's a little known fact about me.
	People will say, for my birthday, what do you want for your birthday?
	What is a guy like you want?
	It's always the same.
	Just buy me a book.
	Any book will do.
	I'm preferential to coffee table books actually, but I am really.
	I love big picture books and that's my favorite.
	But what I like about someone giving you a book as a gift is it says just as much about what that person thinks of you.
	It's like, oh, well, gee, thanks.
	You really think I would read this?
	I love it.
	It's my private little joke.
	Now everyone knows.
	But anyway, one of the things my wife and I both do is when we see these book sales of any sort or we go to a used book place, we're always looking for antique, really, really old, especially if we can find public domain cookbooks that go back into the turn of the century, especially or even before.
	And we have a pretty large collection of interesting cookbooks.
	and it's in And this book, this particular one, which I think is the 11th printing, I guess it was very famous in its heyday, it follows a certain weird style that these old cookbooks used to have, which is the beginning of the cookbooks.
	And I don't know when this ended, but I suspect in the late 50s.
	The beginning of the cookbooks had nothing to do with cooking at all.
	It was just a bunch of household tips, like tons of them.
	Huh.
	You know, here's like this, right to page 37.
	Huh.
	Cuts and scratches.
	Remember that all cuts and scratches are dangerous if neglected.
	It goes on.
	Epileptic fits.
	It talks about how to deal with them.
	What do you do against that?
	Place the patient in such a position.
	What does this have to do with the cookbook?
	Cooking.
	I just pulled out one of my favorite books because it just...
	And by the way, it's hardly even cracked.
	I used to go to the bookstore and we lived in New Jersey and every week I'd seen one of these books would come out and I'd buy it because I knew that I was in it.
	Seriously, well, I'm not kidding.
	One day I'll really enjoy this.
	And this is actually the first moment.
	When I was a kid?
	When I was a kid.
	I can prove I was in this book.
	That's right.
	Come sit on my knees, sonny boy.
	I'll tell you.
	Now, I'm looking for the publish date on this.
	1994 New Writers Publishing.
	It is the New Riders' official internet yellow pages.
	Yeah, these guys were a publishing company on the west coast out here during the heyday of the computer book business before they were all bought up by Pearson.
	Yep, and it looks like the yellow pages.
	It's as thick as the yellow pages.
	Even if you look at the side of the page, it has all those little black marks for the letters.
	Yeah.
	It's crazy.
	If I show this to my daughter, which I should do, she'll laugh because it even says here, as easy to use as the phone book with over 10,000 entries.
	Your internet yellow pages is a fantastic service.
	Nothing like it exists anywhere, says Bill Arms, Vice President of Computing Services.
	I wish I had a copy.
	That's a collector's item.
	There was two of them actually that came out during that year.
	I have the other one too.
	I have the other one.
	Really?
	The other one I think was from Osborne McGraw-Hill.
	And they had the same title.
	And the things people don't realize is that book titles are not copyrightable.
	So, you know, you can go write War and Peace if you want to.
	So let me just go look at my entry for a second.
	And so I remember the editor of, one of the editors at McGraw-Hill moaning just horribly, wanting me to write in PC Magazine what a rip-off this other one was.
	Really?
	I'm going to answer the phone.
	I'll be right back.
	Oh, yeah, you go ahead.
	You answer that phone, John.
	I mean, it's not like we're doing a show or anything.
	Let's see.
	So I'm looking in my...
	That's interesting.
	I wonder, maybe I should look under the M for MTV.com.
	That's usually where I'm listed in these things.
	I'm back.
	Yeah.
	I'm just trying to find my entry.
	I think it might be under MTV. I thought you were going to pull out when you said it was in this book one of those crappy, what was that one?
	The Who's Who books.
	Oh, I have that one too.
	I'm in that as well.
	The Who's Who of Rock and Roll.
	I actually was invited to be in the real Who's Who once.
	The English one.
	The Who's Who book.
	But I never followed up.
	I was too lazy to fill out the form.
	But the other ones, the ones that you see in the United States, are all these Who's Who in business, Who's Who in the West, Who's Who in California.
	And the whole idea, the business model for those books is to...
	Try to get 5,000 people.
	You're going to order 50 copies for yourself, right?
	Yeah, because nobody else is going to buy these damn things.
	And so you put somebody's name, it's just like your name here, and then you buy the book for some ridiculous price, and then you're in the who's who.
	So when I go to somebody's house every so often, I do see one of these books.
	If I ever see a who's who in the West on somebody's bookshelf, I know that person's in there, and they're an idiot.
	There's two things I can conclude.
	One, they're in the book, and the people that have the book are complete idiots, and I should not want to be their friend.
	So I have an even older book, a McGraw-Hill publication.
	That's the one.
	I'm sure you have this one.
	The Internet Complete Reference, the most comprehensive guide available, includes extensive catalog with more than 750 Internet resources available.
	That's 750.
	Wow.
	And it's all like command line stuff, right?
	It's all news groups and Unix.
	And then there's the whole Earth Online Almanac by Brady Publication written by Don Rittner.
	A topical A to Z resource guide.
	A guide to the internet libraries.
	Cool.
	Hey, man, we've come a long way, haven't we?
	Well, now that you're bringing out books...
	I knew it.
	Here comes John Sidemorak's collection.
	This is not a collection.
	This is one book that I'm going to sell someday.
	And I want to make it clear that people know I have a copy.
	Let's see here.
	What's inside?
	Oh.
	Oh, I found a...
	Interesting.
	A publication contract for Cybex.
	Which is in this book for some reason.
	One of the dummy contracts.
	Anyway...
	The cover's got a couple bends on it now, which really annoys me to no end.
	But, except for that, this is the Macintosh Basic handbook that came out before Macintosh Basic was ever released, and this is the Basic that was never released.
	Wow, that's nerdy!
	It's totally nerdy.
	This is the big scandal that took place because apparently Bill Gates puts the screws to John Scully and they pulled this programming language off the market and it never was released.
	Cool.
	It's got a lot of cool things in it.
	I mean, this is a very...
	This book...
	Now, the Mac never had BASIC. You could never program in BASIC on it, right?
	No.
	This was going to be it.
	Cool.
	And I don't even see...
	This book is so big, they don't even have page numbers.
	I swear to God, it's unbelievable.
	I'm looking at it now.
	There's no page numbers in this thing.
	It must be 2,500 pages.
	Anyway, so...
	How unique is it?
	How many do you think were printed of the manual?
	Well, I don't believe this manual was ever released.
	I just happened to get a preview copy of it before it went to the printer.
	What killed that?
	I mean, this is a finished copy, but it was never sent into distribution.
	So the number of copies out there has to be probably less than 100.
	But what killed the BASIC on the Mac?
	Bill Gates, this is documented in John Scully's biography.
	Bill Gates went to Scully, I believe, and said, look, we don't want anything competing with Microsoft Basic.
	We're going to pull Microsoft Office off the Mac if you release this thing.
	Oh, wow.
	I didn't know that.
	Yeah.
	And so they did.
	They pulled it off.
	The Apple pulled off BASIC. They never released it.
	And Thomas Blackadar and Jonathan, I guess it's Kamin, K-A-M-I-N, the two guys who wrote this book, had to be the most disappointed guys in the world.
	Because this book is huge.
	And these guys had to do a lot of work.
	By the way, just to tell you I have it, I have here the Osborne McGraw-Hill, the Internet, Yellow Pages, second edition.
	That's the one that they were complaining to me about.
	A must-have book for anyone who wants to explore the vast reaches of the Internet.
	Don't venture into the ether without it.
	The Wall Street Journal.
	They said that they did theirs before New Writers, but New Writers became a big hit for some reason.
	And so they were moaning to me, John, you know, because I was writing books for them.
	I actually had an imprint at the time.
	Can you say something in PC Magazine about how they ripped off our title?
	But, you know, the fact is your titles are not copyrightable.
	Wow.
	Were they on Helium when they talked to you like that?
	Yeah, they were all on Helium.
	So where would I... You'd be in this, wouldn't you?
	I know I'd be in this somewhere.
	I don't think I'm in anything.
	Yes, you are.
	You're cool, John.
	Oh, it has all of the Usenet groups listed.
	I think half of those groups are still there.
	Yeah, like alt.religion.monica.
	Oh, yeah.
	.monica.
	Oh, them word of days, huh?
	Them word of days.
	Anyway, so this book is available for anybody who wants to buy it.
	Take it off my hands.
	Are you kidding?
	Anyway.
	Where'd you fall?
	Where'd you go into the kitchen?
	I'm sorry.
	No, I went into the library.
	Here at the manor.
	Well, that was fun.
	What's your most prized book?
	Which is the one you're most proud of?
	Well, I don't have any books I'm proud of.
	No, I mean, what book do you look in often?
	You know, it depends on what book's lying around.
	It's not as though I'm, like...
	I don't really have anything that you're trying to describe.
	I have lots of books.
	I have, like, so many Civil War books, it's ridiculous.
	I have a lot of financial books.
	I have a lot of books on economic cycles, because I'm working on that myself.
	And...
	There's a book called The Language of Pattern or Pattern Language, or Pattern Language, something like that.
	I pick that up and breeze through it every so often.
	It's about architecture, but it's really radically weird.
	You know, I've got some Toynbee laying around once in a while.
	That'll put me to sleep.
	But this is the thing, though, about books.
	I don't know if you care or not, but I like a book not just for content, but to me, a book can really look pretty.
	You know, it's the cover.
	I like hardbound books.
	I like them in my bookshelf.
	You know, they...
	I don't know.
	I like the physical object of them.
	Yeah, no, but books are objects, and many are designed to be pretty.
	Or useful, or, you know, a lot of reference books actually are put together in a useful way, physically in a useful way.
	That's why I like coffee table books, you know, lots of big, different shapes.
	I like it.
	I got a coffee table book lying around here that I was going to sell off.
	I'm giving it to you.
	Oh, thank you.
	I have a lot of cookbooks, and I'll thumb through those constantly.
	But have you ever seen the book Century as a coffee table book?
	No.
	It's a humongously big book.
	And what's funny about it is you'll see this book on television shows all the time because it was at the turn of the century, for some reason it became the gift to give to your business relations.
	I guess these guys did some great marketing.
	And it's a century worth of history in pictures.
	So you can imagine how big this book is.
	And on the back of the book, so when you see it in a bookshelf, you see with big white letters, century.
	And from time to time, I'll be watching a show.
	Like, the last time I saw it was on Studio 60 on Sunset.
	That show, unfortunately, got canceled.
	But it was in the producer's office.
	It was in this bookshelf there.
	And you see it all the time.
	And it's a great book.
	I see this book.
	It's a Bruce Bernard, The Century.
	It's hardcover.
	It's 1,236 pages.
	And it is available used for nine bucks.
	You're shitting me.
	Nine bucks?
	Can you find out what the original price was?
	One, two, three copies.
	966 at Tower.com, 924 at the Golden Gate Bookstore, and 942 at Word Lover Books.
	And then it goes up from there to 19 and on.
	40, 14, 29.
	It's a great book.
	It's a fantastic book to look at.
	It really is cool.
	I'll get a copy for nine bucks.
	Yeah, you should.
	For that, yeah.
	I mean, what is it?
	It'll be 12 for shipping and handling?
	I don't know.
	If it's that big, it's probably going to cost you $20 to ship the damn thing.
	It's very heavy.
	It weighs a freaking ton.
	It's one of those things you use when you're gluing shit and you're like, what can I put on this?
	Get the Century book.
	That's what I mean.
	It's a great object.
	It's multifunctional.
	Yeah, 100 years of human progress, regression, suffering, and hope.
	I love that.
	It's like a reality TV show.
	Huh.
	Okay.
	Of course, I'd better order it now before our listeners all buy them up.
	The list price on this thing is only $14.95.
	I'm telling you, it was a huge hit as a giveaway.
	In fact, I received two copies myself.
	I gave another copy away.
	1,000 photographs.
	I never forget.
	It's funny.
	I miss this one.
	Yeah, it was a big hit in the turn of the century.
	Good marketing.
	Turn of this century.
	Yeah, turn of this century.
	Yeah, it came out in June 2002.
	Well, no, that's not correct because I received it in 1999.
	No, this version, this published, this is obviously a reprint.
	Okay, yeah, in 1999.
	Well, let me just see.
	Mine should say 1999, right?
	Hold on.
	It weighs two and a half pounds.
	Yeah, this has got to be a smaller version.
	This is a different one because this is only five inches by five inches.
	No way.
	Here it is.
	So you got the big giant one.
	Here, check it out.
	I'll just drop it on the table.
	Yeah, it's the big giant one.
	And this was given to me by...
	So the one I kept, apparently, by RTL Veronica and the Holland Media Group.
	And they put some little, you know, they had a little inscription there.
	Oh, actually, it's an inlaid page with the Holland Media Group.
	So it's even a special print.
	It's a special run.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah.
	It has their logo in it.
	It's conceived and edited by Bruce Bernard.
	Right.
	Got that.
	Let me just see.
	I think this came out, obviously, as a package thing.
	It was a package job.
	If you're in the publishing business, you can...
	You put the book together for the publisher.
	The publisher doesn't do anything but really print it and distribute it.
	It's called packaging.
	And so this guy obviously packaged this thing and sold it to a number of different publishers around the world in different formats.
	But there's no date?
	That's crazy.
	Oh, okay.
	So there's a foreword, a preface, I'm sorry, which is by Bruce Bernard, 1999.
	But there's no other date?
	There's no copyright date in there?
	No.
	Huh.
	That's crazy.
	On that page where the inscription is basically saying, hey, have a great new century.
	Have a great new century.
	Let me just see what they actually say.
	I'll translate it on the fly.
	The end of a new year, the start of a new century, and a new millennium, looking back...
	We'd like to stop and think with you and reflect on what was.
	And as far as we're concerned, what will be again?
	More than just a good relationship.
	We're looking out to lots more.
	And fuck you very much.
	So one of these guys that's selling this book, the small version, even though it says hardcover, It's Tower Books.
	And they have this big website.
	So Tower Records became like music video books.
	I didn't know that.
	I don't know if that's universal across all stores that closed.
	Well, I think this is for the online.
	Oh, okay.
	It looks like a clone of Amazon.
	You know, there's a big problem with Amazon.
	I'm sure you followed this, and it didn't really register with me until I found out.
	You know, we have this Podshow Press thing that Mark Namcoff runs?
	Right.
	So, the deal is, you know, we do the audiobook, and we get the advertising from that if we're fortunate enough to sell it, and then we will pay for the cost of printing, you know, proofreading, some typesetting things or whatever it is, you know, layout, and cover art even, and then the printing.
	But now Amazon has decided that they'll, I guess, did they buy an on-demand printing company, John?
	You know, I have not followed that.
	I've only heard about it.
	I haven't gotten, I've been too busy to check out what the hell they're doing with this.
	I know they've done stuff like this before.
	They may have bought an on-demand printing company, but I know they can do short runs.
	The thing I know is that they will only now carry on-demand printed books from this one supplier, which I know is not the one we were using.
	And the reason why is because the one they use exclusively or purchased is apparently really shitty and the pages fall out.
	The Amazon ones are crappy?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Huh.
	It's quite a...
	I don't think it's a story that's been covered well enough.
	Well, I'm going to look into it because I'm kind of...
	It's one of the few little subsections of the business that I actually do follow.
	I've been to the On Demand show in New York a couple times and I keep up with some of the technologies out there and what these companies do.
	It's actually somewhat amazing.
	You can actually...
	People out there don't know this.
	These books are referred to in the business as toner-based printing.
	So instead of having a printing press print the book, it's printed on what essentially is a high-speed copying machine.
	But it's not a copying machine.
	And so what you can do with toner-based printing, and if you ever get one of these books, you've probably seen them, but as soon as I get one in my hands, I can immediately tell that it's a toner-based book.
	It's an on-demand book.
	They have a certain feeling.
	And look, and the paper, and the way the fonts look on the page, and everything about these books just reeks.
	And it kind of bothers me, because I think it, maybe most people don't notice it, but I find them to have a slightly cheap quality that is indefinable.
	Anyway, people should understand that the mechanism out there, there's actually a mechanism, there's a End-to-end mechanism now that you can literally do the following thing.
	You give the printing company a PDF file and an illustrator file which consists of the entire innards of the book and the cover.
	Theoretically, they don't very rarely do this, by the way, but theoretically, the printer can do the following.
	They can take your PDF file and your Illustrator file.
	They can take somebody else's PDF file and somebody else's Illustrator file, and it goes into the computer, and out comes, it goes right through this machine and makes all the pages and binds it and puts a cover on it.
	It comes out one copy of your book followed by one copy of the other guy's book.
	Bang, bang.
	Just like that.
	Amazing, isn't it?
	That's what print-on-demand can do.
	Now, they generally don't like doing it because it's just a data entry.
	I'm not sure exactly why they just don't do it.
	I think it's also, you know, you've got a bunch of books that are all mixed up.
	But, you know, they'd rather print like 500 to 1,000 copies so they can put them in a box and get them, you know, they don't have to deal with, here's one copy of your book and another copy of this guy's book and another copy of the other guy's book and what do we do with all these books?
	They don't like that.
	It's not that organized.
	It would be really cool.
	What's missing from the picture is that one book comes out bound, chopped, falls off the edge into an envelope that is a shipping envelope and a label slapped on it and it's automatically sealed and goes right into the UPS truck.
	That would be cool.
	They don't have that end part yet as far as I know.
	Let me just read from an email from Mark Nemkoff to me.
	I'm sure he'll be okay with it.
	So, there's a slight problem with the book publishing thing I didn't want to bother you with yet.
	Of course, good little soldier.
	Long story short, Amazon has said it will no longer carry print-on-demand books done by companies other than their own, which is called Book Surge.
	The problem is that Book Surge has a terrible reputation for bad quality, pages falling out, etc.
	Very high costs and lack of availability.
	This just came up about a month ago, and I've been waiting to see how it gets sorted out before proceeding with putting out books.
	There has, of course, been a loud outcry from the indie publishing community that I've read.
	The Washington State Attorney General is looking into possible RICO implications involving Amazon Book Surge's attempts to strong-arm publishers into taking their less-than-adequate deal.
	interesting interesting Sounds like we need to look into it.
	Yeah, sounds like you need to make sure you're really following these things.
	Well, it sounds like, yeah, no, I haven't gotten that far, but I think it's a good, this sounds like a MarketWatch column for me, since Amazon's a publicly traded company.
	Well, I'm happy to have been able to source some of that for you, John.
	I mean it, I like that, I love it.
	MarketWatch to me is a pretty mainstream brand, you know, stuff gets out to the front that way, I like that.
	Well, you know, MarketWatch is an interesting operation to write for because once you realize what you're doing in terms of what the audience wants, as opposed to like PC Magazine or some of these other things, and once you realize that essentially a brand like MarketWatch is good for one thing and one thing, it's very much like CNBC. You're there for stock tips.
	That's it.
	That's it.
	You can learn about how to paddle a boat or you can learn about how to buy stocks or how options work.
	You're there for tips and lots of them.
	And that's the difference between CNBC and Fox Business.
	Fox Business is not caught on yet because they don't get that.
	They have shows, they got talk shows, and they got little dingy girls.
	Yeah, people just want to know how to get rich, that's all.
	They just want, you know, what's the stock doing?
	Is it a good stock?
	Should I buy it?
	One guy says yes, one guy says no.
	There's actually a show I listened to on, one day I was driving around Massachusetts in a car that had a Sirius, I think it was Sirius.
	It was either Sirius or XM, one of the two, whatever.
	And I was tuning around and there was a section of these radio talk shows that don't get a lot of distribution.
	I think this was only on the satellite.
	And it was a stock tip show that had a unique format that I really liked.
	And I wish if somebody out there listens to the show, they can send me an email so I know who these people are.
	But it consists of like four experts from different...
	And they would say, what do you think of such and such, you know, this, and they'd name a company, and then one guy would say why he was recommending it, another guy would say why he doesn't recommend it, and then another guy would say, you know, it thinks the company stinks, the other guy thinks this company's great.
	It was actually kind of interesting, because then they'd argue about it, and you'd get some sort of a consensus out of it as to whether this was a good stock tip or not.
	Well, one thing I think would be very interesting, John, I think that that holds true for our audience here.
	I think you should do a stock tip every show.
	Yeah, I should.
	Or just tell us what you're buying.
	I mean, you disclose it, obviously.
	I don't buy anything in tech, though, because I write about it in so many...
	Yeah, but who gives a shit whether it's tech or not?
	Oh, well, there's stuff out of tech.
	Oh, excuse me.
	This is not Twit.
	I know you're confused because it's the weekend.
	You don't know if it's Saturday or Sunday.
	Oh, here we go again.
	You know, I heard you last week, man.
	You guys had like a two-hour show.
	All of a sudden now, it's okay for Twit to be long.
	You're talking about...
	It was right after you did this show, and you're talking about the same topics, and it's pissing me off.
	Oh, brother.
	Don't do that, man.
	I'm going to have to ban you from Twit.
	This is going to stop.
	Let me give you the stock tip that I'm thinking.
	I'm not into this, but I should.
	If I hear you talk about this with Leo, I'm going to be so upset.
	I don't think Leo likes stocks.
	But you guys aren't even talking about tech anymore on Twit.
	Well, that's not my idea.
	I'm the one who keeps bringing up the news items.
	But we're not talking about Twit.
	We might as well talk about Twitter.
	By the way, if you have a Twitter account out there, Dvorak is my name.
	I need to get a couple hundred more and I'll be in the top ten.
	That's what I'm trying to do.
	Anyway, a lot of people are looking at Capital One as a short.
	Hmm, interesting.
	Now, they're the credit card company, or are they just credit cards?
	No, it's mostly credit cards, because COF is the symbol.
	It's Capital One Finance, I think, financial.
	Yeah, you think something's got to happen with the credit card companies.
	There's got to be some shit going on there, too.
	There's got to be tons of defaults.
	Ever since the Bear Stearns collapse, everybody's really skeptical about all these finance companies because they all made the same mistake.
	A lot of it had to do with the fact that they were these fake AAA ratings that were just bogus.
	And I had lunch with somebody the other day who was in finance and they were talking about how the whole lending system has changed so drastically because it used to always be you'd sat across from the person that was borrowing the money and now it's all done on computers and it's done out of India and it's all offshore and you know, who knows?
	So people were, obviously the scammers just came in.
	And the rating agencies I think are the largest to blame because they're the ones that put AAA status on all this crap.
	Yeah, no, the rating agencies are to blame.
	They should all be taken out and hung.
	I think we're still not even halfway through this game, man, because I'm really into this, and I'm just reading all these horror stories, and there's no money flowing.
	It's just not flowing.
	It really is not.
	It's not a pretty situation to find this.
	Everyone was fucking everyone else in some minute, small way, and it was all, you know, it's just all come crashing down.
	It wasn't just these, you know, mortgage securities.
	All kinds of shenanigans have been going on.
	Yeah, it's been the shenanigan era.
	Damn.
	But this took place in the 20s, too, and it's very similar.
	Yeah, we'll get over it.
	It's just how long will it take, you know, because you keep talking about it.
	Well, we'll get over it when the economy collapses, you know, in about a year and a half.
	What happens when the economy collapses?
	What actually takes place?
	Well, it upsets a lot of people.
	It's great fodder for news.
	It's great for news stations.
	You're like a pundit, you know.
	It upsets a lot of people.
	I'm really pissed off now this economy has collapsed.
	It is.
	I'm trying to work at my British understate.
	That was a good one.
	It was a good one.
	So, what happens?
	Hyperinflation?
	What takes place?
	Well, that's the question.
	So, here's the question.
	What happens is...
	I believe hyperinflation is what's going to happen.
	And the reason why is because we're so deeply in debt worldwide that the fastest way...
	Even my dad told me this when I was a little kid.
	Exactly why he's telling a little kid this.
	I'm not sure.
	But he says...
	These guys like inflation because that way you can pay off your debts with cheaper money.
	Wait a minute.
	Let me just stick with that for a second.
	Clearly you were scarred for life by this.
	So hyperinflation, they can pay off their debts with cheaper money?
	If you're $100,000 in debt, and all of a sudden we go into a hyperinflation mode where everything goes up in value drastically and it costs more to do everything and you have to obviously get raises and get more pay, the relative value of the dollar stays the same, but now you have 100 times more of it.
	Because you have to to keep up with hyperinflation.
	And by the way, the Brazilians are the best at dealing with this.
	They used to have it as a common problem in the country for a decade or more.
	And the Brazilian banks are known to be the most advanced in the world because of their ability to deal with hyperinflation.
	Anyway, so now everything is...
	It just costs a lot more, and so you still have the $100,000.
	That doesn't change.
	Yeah, so that's basically worth $1,000 now, that debt.
	So I can pay it off and I'm done with it.
	Yeah, so you give them the equivalent of $1,000, you're out of debt.
	I mean, what could be better than that?
	So if you're heavily in debt and all screwed up, hyperinflation is the way to go.
	And we're internationally heavily in debt, and it's possible that hyperinflation would fix it.
	But hyperinflation's also got all kinds of other issues.
	So run me through the scenario for a second.
	So let's say we have hyperinflation, so the dollar devalues.
	No, wait a minute.
	The prices go up tenfold.
	Does the dollar then go down tenfold?
	Is that what happens?
	The value versus the euro?
	Yeah.
	Relative value does.
	And only if, of course, you demand you get paid more because, you know...
	Yeah, otherwise you starved it.
	Right.
	Right, otherwise you starved it because you got nothing.
	Right.
	Now, the thing is, what happens to real estate?
	Real estate obviously goes up in value because it's real estate.
	By the way, you don't actually own the land.
	I just want to point that out.
	You only own the real estate shit on top.
	Actually, you do own the land.
	Oh, I beg to differ.
	But anyway, you don't own the mineral rights generally, but you generally own the land.
	Because you can buy lots.
	How does that work?
	So anyway, so the price of all that stuff...
	I just want to say, John, you just asked me a question and waltz over it, okay?
	We'll get into that another time, but don't think you can just blow past me because you don't own your land.
	Well, okay, we'll stop right here.
	Let's explain it to us.
	No, I don't...
	I've been lectured on this, and I'll have to get...
	By a constitutionalist.
	It's a Ron Paul thing.
	It's a total Ron Paul thing.
	So I gotta look into it.
	Alright, so then we know it's a little nutty.
	Alright, besides the point, one way or the other, for all practical purposes, you do, even if you don't, based on some crackpot theory.
	Oh, man!
	Anyway, the point is...
	You don't talk to Leo like that, ever!
	He never comes up with crackpot theories.
	If he did, I would.
	Anyway, the point is that hyperinflation creates one form of a weird economy.
	The other one, of course, is the one that they hate the most, which is deflation, which is the one where real estate becomes worth less and the dollar becomes worth more, so you want to be in cash and not in property, or debt for sure.
	And deflation is the one that scares them the most.
	The last time we went through an economic situation, we had this thing called stagflation, which was something totally different than anything anyone's ever witnessed before.
	You had a lot of hyperinflation in the cycle before that.
	And it always takes on some sort of different form.
	That's the problem.
	Even if you could accurately, and I think you can, accurately predict an economic downturn, you run into a bunch of issues.
	One, everyone wants to know why.
	I don't think there's a why.
	I think it's a cycle.
	And then everybody wants to know what in terms of what is it going to be like?
	Is it going to be hyperinflation?
	Is it going to be stagflation?
	Is it going to be something new?
	And what would that be?
	That's the question you really can't answer.
	It's just like you don't know because every one of these things is so different.
	I don't know what to recommend.
	The only thing that's been consistent over every economic downturn has been farmland.
	If you can buy farmland at the bottom of an economic collapse, which tends to be in this next one would be 2013, that farmland will increase in value for about seven years while everything else is going all over the place.
	So I notice you've actually moved your target from 2012 to 2013.
	No, no.
	The target's still October 2009 for a crash, and then it cycles down to 2013, which would be the bottom.
	It would be the same as 1933, as a matter of fact.
	Okay, hold on.
	October 2009, and the bottom is when in 2013?
	I don't know.
	Summer.
	Summer.
	Could be any time in 2000.
	It just bounces around on the bottom in 2013.
	That's the bottom.
	And then it starts to pick up.
	This is the way the cycle works, by the way.
	Well, let me ask you this then.
	Since clearly some questions can't be answered.
	Ultimately, everyone within the collapsed economy gets hurt.
	How do you think that's going to look?
	I mean, what is the hurt going to be like?
	Does that totally depend on whether it's a deflation, hyperinflation, or stagnation?
	Stagflation.
	I like stagnation better.
	Stagnation.
	I don't know.
	I mean, like, everybody gets hurt in one way, shape, or form.
	But, you know, some people get through it.
	They get lucky.
	Do you have a strategy for each scenario so that we can get unbelievably wealthy?
	Well, if you can short...
	You know, and drive the thing into the ground, you can make quite a bit of money if you have the guts to do it.
	Right, that's driving the actual collapse.
	But once you're in the collapse, what can you do?
	Is that when you want to just be at the bottom, get your farmland, that's it?
	That's pretty much it, yeah.
	Only farmland, huh?
	I mean, that's the safe bet.
	That's the only safe bet.
	Oh.
	And then you'd sell the farmland in the year 2020, and then it goes back to its old price.
	Because at the end of the day, we need to eat, right?
	I think the Swedes came up.
	I have the documentation for this farmland idea somewhere, but it'll be in this book when I get the damn book done.
	But the farmland thing, the Swedes, I believe, are the ones who documented this strange effect.
	And it seems to be valid.
	And if you think about the logic of it, it makes sense.
	That's fascinating stuff, man.
	Okay, so we've got to look out for the shorts on the way in, and that's going to be before October 2009.
	Do you want to explain?
	There's three ways that these cycles begin.
	There's the one that essentially, sometimes you can carry the thing, whatever the case is, in 2013, that is a bottom of something.
	It might not begin in 2009.
	It might not begin in 2010.
	The cycle that was in 1890 really didn't start with a crash in 1889.
	Everything was looking good for a number of years, and then it collapsed, and you had a depression, quote-unquote, in 1893, and it was called the Great Depression of 1893.
	And then it followed the rest of the cycle.
	So the beginning of the thing has a number of different...
	The entries to the collapse are varied.
	There could be some of them...
	I think ideally you have a stock market crash after a little mini boom.
	And a lot of people don't see a mini boom coming and you can't have a crash without a boom.
	Would you not say that...
	I think there is one.
	I think next year, I think in 2000, I think as soon as John McCain is elected president...
	Yeah, everyone laughs at me.
	No, no, no.
	Listen, dude, I'm all over the world.
	I'm telling people, oh, John McCain's going to win.
	Like, I fucking made it up, okay?
	So I'm totally there with you.
	So when John McCain's elected president, and I think the scenario would be different if the other two got in, but if John McCain's elected president, I can assure you, because this kind of happened, we've seen it a couple times, that the stock market's going to take off like a rocket.
	And then if he can get us out, you know, if all the guys running...
	He's the one guy who could just pull us out of Iraq, just out of the blue.
	He could just say, you know, I looked this over, and I guess I was mistaken.
	These guys are screwed up.
	I didn't realize how bad it was.
	We're leaving now.
	He would have the chops to do it, and he's the only guy with the credibility to pull that off.
	If it was Obama or somebody, they would think he's just a big weenie or a wimp.
	But McCain could pull that out.
	He has the charisma, yeah, absolutely.
	If he did that, on top of the fact that he just got elected, the stock market would go crazy.
	It would explode, absolutely.
	Now, you have to remember, I'm sorry, you have to remember 1929, before the market crashed.
	Well, some of us can remember that, John.
	Well, when I was a kid, when the stock market crashed in 29, you have to know that it was 1929 where the thing went crazy.
	It wasn't 1928.
	Or the equivalent of 2008.
	It was in 1929, and within that one-year period, the entire Dow Jones tripled, which means that the Dow Jones that it is today would go to over 30,000 sometime before the crash.
	So you just basically buy indexes then, just to be safe.
	Yeah, that would be a good bet, and then short them.
	What do you mean short him?
	Because first it's going to take off and then we short him, right?
	Yeah, you wait for it to take off, then you short him when it crashes.
	Actually, the crash usually has a bounce, so you can usually short at the bounce.
	But be that as it may, I always tell people, you know, Dvorak, this theory of yours, which you've been talking about for years now, is crazy.
	And I always say to them, look, here's the only thing, just do me this one favor.
	If the Dow Jones hits $30,000, consider the theory on the money A and start getting ready to sell everything you own.
	Well, so let me say this.
	I'm in.
	You know why?
	No, seriously, because I don't give a shit.
	Right now, I have nothing but cash.
	I have no stocks, no bonds except what I own in Mevio.
	Everything else, I'm completely out because I just don't want the headache.
	However, I will go into your strategy full force.
	I buy it.
	Because if I lose, I'm like, I don't give a shit anyway.
	Alright, well then if you're heavy on cash, the thing you have to do, and boy, of course, you could put some money in the market when it starts to pick up after McCain gets elected.
	You want to put your money in Swiss banks in Swiss francs because that'll be indexed against any sort of up or down.
	Right, but that's the cash that I'm not putting into the market, you mean?
	Yeah.
	I'll do 50-50.
	Yeah, that'd be fine.
	You've got so much money, who cares?
	50-50.
	I'll put 50 into the indexes or indices.
	Is that what you call them?
	I don't know.
	And I'll put 50 into Swiss francs.
	That's cool because then I also get one of those bank account numbers that no one else knows.
	No, you have to ask.
	That's a rare account.
	Very few people get those.
	Those are crazy.
	That's got to be the biggest sucker's game in Switzerland.
	I'll tell you, you know what the biggest sucker's game is?
	So the minute you show up at a private bank, right?
	So, you know, there's banks...
	People might not know this, so maybe it's interesting to talk about it.
	But when you have a certain amount of money, you will be aggressively marketed by banks who basically want to, you know, manage your money and use it to, you know, do shitty loans and stuff.
	And...
	What the hell was my point, John?
	What the fuck were we just talking about?
	You were talking about that private banks is the biggest scam.
	Oh, here it is.
	Here it is.
	Okay, right, right, right.
	So, when you have over a certain amount, then they always come to you in this meeting.
	It's like, well, and then we have...
	We always have all these different programs and vehicles.
	Basically, it's like charges, right?
	There's just stuff to take money away from you, not even using your money, just fees that you will pay.
	Fees, fees, exactly.
	And by the way, some of them are really good and very personable, and I have a good relationship with some bankers.
	But the one that really always freaks me out is, well, we have the kidnap insurance.
	And yeah, oh yeah, it's nuts.
	And it's never actually signed in your name, so no one ever knows that you have the insurance.
	You only get a number, and it's like you get a number and a sealed envelope, and then should you or someone in your family or whatever who is insured is kidnapped, then you're insured up to whatever amount, but only by number.
	You're not known by name, because of course...
	You know, if someone knows you have this insurance, which of course the guy who was selling it to me knows no matter what, whatever my number, he knows I have it.
	It's a freaky thing.
	How much did they charge?
	I don't know.
	I always said no.
	I said you can keep her.
	Yeah.
	And she said the same thing curiously.
	Isn't that coincidental?
	It's not worth it.
	I'd rather have the interest.
	When we had our public company, I told you this before, they were waiting outside the door.
	Our stock went from $7 to $45 over a couple of months.
	It bounced around and then we missed a quarter.
	Typical public company stuff, although we actually were pretty much profitable all the time.
	Then you get these shareholder lawsuits.
	And what would happen is they start suing the companies, the publicly listed companies.
	You have to go through all these procedures.
	This is before Sarbanes-Oxley.
	And lo and behold, they'd pretty much go for the amount of money that is known as a basic insurance rate for these types of lawsuits.
	And so at the end of the day, when it got to that point, everyone said, oh, okay, well, here we go.
	And then they get a check just for being dickheads.
	Horrible business.
	They're just sitting there, just waiting to sue you for whatever reason.
	They can find any kind of cause, and it's always for the exact amount that you're insured for.
	It's another sub-loop of this big theft that's going on in Wall Street.
	Yeah, well, it is an issue.
	So...
	I bought some raw milk the other day.
	Like straight from the cow raw?
	I wish.
	Have you ever had that straight from the cow, from the udder?
	Yeah, when I was a kid.
	Yeah, me too.
	It's good.
	Yeah.
	It's kind of warm.
	It's kind of a weird way of consuming.
	Well, I've got a photo in one of these crazy old cookbooks that shows that I guess in these little towns in Italy, some guy would wander into town with a cow with a bell on it, ding, ding, you know, with his wife, and they would sit down, and they'd set up shop.
	Yeah, and then you'd bring your bucket.
	In the farmer's market kind of thing.
	Yeah, you'd bring your bucket, and they'd squirt in a bunch of milk, and you'd walk it home.
	Ah, the good old days, my friend.
	I remember them well.
	Squirting cows.
	But I'll tell you this, there's no comparison.
	If anyone out there has a raw milk dairy nearby, they should get this stuff.
	It should be a nearby dairy, and it should be a small one.
	There's a big conglomerate that makes this stuff, and it's just terrible.
	It goes bad, and it's just a...
	No, no, you don't want that.
	But the good raw milk...
	Or go to a farm.
	Go to a farm.
	When you're driving by some cows, go to the farm and say, Dude, can I please suck your cow?
	I would like to try some milk.
	That's not a bad idea.
	I'm sure they'll sell some milk to you if you come around milking time.
	Depends.
	I mean, it depends on how freaky they are about the health department.
	There's been a thing that's been done in this country to brainwash people that raw milk is bad.
	And so that way, you know, these big giant dairies can make all the money.
	But if you're up in Washington, there's the Dungeness Creamery.
	Which is the first raw milk dairy in the country, which is near our house up there.
	And you can actually drive over there.
	The place is so spotless, this dairy.
	And the cows look so happy.
	It's hilarious.
	What does a happy cow look like?
	It's just like the contentment you can't describe.
	Have you ever gone cow tipping at night?
	No, I never have.
	I really hated it, but it was like, because I grew up a certain couple of years really in farmlands, and we'd do that kind of shit, go out at night, and then tip cows over.
	I really felt bad.
	It's really sad.
	It is kind of mean.
	It is.
	It's incredibly mean.
	But, you know, that's the way they are.
	It's not like you killed the cows.
	No, of course not.
	No, that was the local butcher.
	We used to go peek and we'd look through the doors, the crack in the door of the abattoir, and we'd see how he'd slaughter the cows.
	Yeah, it was pretty quick.
	So we were talking about the...
	About the fact that we buy animals off the hoof.
	And these small farmers have these guys that come around that sometimes are in trailers, but these guys are called offers.
	I never got to this conversation before I wanted to bring it up because I was talking to my wife about it.
	So these offers, these professional guys who kill the animals...
	As in offing them?
	Is that why they're called offers?
	Yeah.
	Cool.
	And apparently, you've got your steer that you've been raising, and he's nine months old.
	You decide you're going to off him and eat him.
	By the way, this is a good conversation for this particular show because this gets rid of any of the vagans that might be listening, I hope.
	Those of you still left...
	You know, go someplace else.
	So anyway, but the way it's done apparently is they come up and they, you know, pet the animal and then they, you know, do all this stuff.
	Talk nice to him.
	Whisper sweet nothings in his ear.
	Shock.
	Electric shock, right.
	And that changes the nature of the meat because these slaughterhouses, all the animals are freaky.
	They're going up the steps.
	Yeah, they know what's going on.
	They know what's happening.
	They know what's going on and they're all nervous and all their hormones are in their meat and you wonder why the public...
	We're all screwed up because we eat this crap, which has been all excited.
	This animal is excited and scared, and now you're eating the same hormones.
	This is just not a good thing.
	Well, anyway, the end of the story is there's apparently one guy up in Washington who is so good at this that he's called the Zen Offer.
	The Zen Offer.
	And the Zen offer apparently can go up to just about any animal and sweet-talk them, and the animal just relaxes hell, and it just feels so good about life, and then boom, dead.
	And so my wife's comment is, I wonder if that guy can even get a date.
	Hold on.
	Zen Offer.
	Let me see if the.com is available.
	Zen Offer.com.
	Oh, it's already taken.
	All right.
	Who has it?
	You're kidding me.
	Of course.
	I told you, man.
	You can't get a.com domain name anymore.
	That's unbelievable.
	Zen Offer.com.
	Loading.
	Hold on.
	Loading.
	Maybe it's him.
	No, it's a parked page.
	It's a very friendly page.
	No, it's a parked page.
	Airline tickets, hotels, car rental, flights.
	Oh, it's a parking site.
	Yeah, parked page.
	I hate that.
	That means it costs $100,000.
	It's got pop-unders.
	Oh, jeez.
	I hate that.
	I need to tell the story about the Zen offer.
	Yeah, that's cool.
	Apparently the menus in Holland, although they weren't all that great to start with as we established earlier, they get all their meat now from Argentina.
	They're not even eating their own meat anymore.
	Wow.
	And it's become so expensive that they have had to pare down the menus.
	You just can't get certain cuts of meat anymore because they would be like 50 bucks if they actually had to charge fairly for it.
	Some restaurants are not even putting it on the menu anymore.
	Hmm.
	It's messed up, man.
	It's a globalization thing.
	Well, yeah.
	What sense does it make to ship a carcass from Venezuela?
	Yeah.
	Or wherever.
	Argentina, I guess, which is where their place is loaded with meat.
	If you go down there, that's all they eat.
	Yeah.
	It's actually pretty good, by the way, the meat down there.
	Plenty of good cows to kill in our own backyard.
	Well, you could.
	I mean, there's plenty of grass around.
	I mean, the thing is, there's all this propaganda against meat starting to crop up again.
	And it all happened during this green week that we had.
	Yeah, we talked about that.
	And we had guys like Bill Maher, you know, going on about how bad meat is.
	I'm thinking, what is this guy's problem?
	Did you read that article in the...
	You read the International Herald Tribune, don't you?
	Once in a while, usually only when I'm traveling.
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah, it was yesterday's edition.
	There was a whole thing about the...
	Actually, it was something we said we might touch on.
	Basically, the article was America has no energy policy, and he took the...
	Hillary and Obama measures, I should say, which are now known, which we actually talked about, they said, well, if they became president, both Obama and Hillary Clinton would remove the gasoline tax, essentially.
	And, um, so this whole story went a little bit deeper how, um, this absolutely...
	No, I think Obama said he wasn't going to do that.
	I'm sorry, McCain.
	I'm sorry, McCain and Clinton.
	Yeah, Obama said he wouldn't.
	Um, and then this article went in deeper as to, you know, how we have...
	So poorly thought out our energy strategy that, you know, we're still putting billions of research and subsidies into R&D for, you know, liquid extraction and all these other petroleum-based versions of getting energy out of the earth.
	And no investors want to step up, you know, like Kleiner Perkins, as an example.
	They're hesitant to step up because, you know, it seems like there's no subsidies for any of, you know, the solar or not...
	I don't even know if that's going to work that well, but, you know, the solar...
	Wind energy.
	And it's like a real conundrum.
	Just looking at this article, I'll see if I can get it online.
	It looks like in the U.S., we're pretty boneheaded right now when it comes to just, you know, setting out a couple strategies for the future.
	Other than invading other countries that have oil.
	Well, that seems to work.
	I reckon Chris harkens back to confessions of the economic hitman.
	Yeah.
	And let's just wrap it up, John, because we're already pretty long right here.
	I wanted to ask you, both Obama and Clinton were quite clear that they would bomb Iran.
	Why did that come up again?
	Can you just explain to me?
	I'm really afraid that that's going to happen.
	It just seems like it's weird, because now we've got all of them talking about it.
	We know McCain's done a song about it, but now to have all three potential candidates, of course we know it's going to be McCain.
	Do you think that could really happen?
	Could we really bomb Iran?
	I would doubt it.
	I think maybe...
	I just can't see it happening.
	I mean, the real threat that, according to Hillary, who's the, you know, the get-tough candidate all of a sudden, she says that if Iran bombs Israel, then they bomb Iran or obliterate them.
	Can Israel do that all by themselves?
	Don't they have nuclear capacity?
	Yeah, they do.
	That's the point.
	They could, you know, it would probably be unlikely.
	And so I think the whole thing is saber-rattling and probably just to get to, I would think maybe the Jewish would swing for them.
	There's that word that's saber-rattling, and that's, to me, that means like there's code of something I should be understanding that I don't know.
	I mean, why are we saber-rattling Iran?
	Why?
	I don't know.
	Okay.
	Probably...
	I just want to try and understand.
	Maybe to destabilize, maybe it's code for some...
	I don't know, to destabilize the country or to get...
	I have no idea.
	And why is it saber-rattling?
	Why isn't it not pistol-cocking or some other cool word?
	Well, saber rattling is the term.
	Can't we make a new one?
	I know.
	Can't we make a new one?
	Pistol cocking?
	Pistol cocking?
	It sounds profane.
	That's why I like it.
	I think saber rattling is a good one because it harkens back to a historical context, meaning that people have done this for a long time and it has large-scale context.
	And it's also silly, if you think about it.
	If you can imagine Hillary holding up a saber and rattling.
	First of all, how does a saber rattle?
	It's like a piece of crap.
	It's a shitty ass saber you got there, Hill.
	That fucker's rattling.
	You might want to check that out before you go up against Tehran.
	That's funny.
	Anyway, so no, I don't know.
	I guess they used to rattle the sabers, maybe in their scabbard.
	Oh, you mean just put your hand down on a thing and shake it?
	Yeah, something like that.
	Yeah, it shouldn't be, but this is usually leatherish.
	Yeah, didn't they used to have jewels?
	Maybe they had some, like, you know, a couple of rubies and shit in the...
	Rubies.
	On my saber?
	All right.
	Hey, John, I think we've had a pretty good day.
	I think we should keep it at this.
	Alright, well, I'm going to be in Korea next week, so I should be back on Saturday to do the next show.
	Well, you just give me a jingle whenever you're in.
	And you're going to Korea for a conference, I think, isn't that it?
	Yeah, it's a big summit, and all kinds of hot shots are going to be there.
	It'll be kind of interesting.
	I haven't been to Korea for a while.
	I like it.
	It's a nice country.
	And I think I'll be sitting on a 30 megabit per second line, so I can make phone calls.
	Sweet!
	And what are you going to eat?
	What are you going to be looking out for?
	They've got some good shirt shops there and a couple of tailors that are pretty...
	Yeah, that might not be so tasty, though.
	Oh, you mean to eat?
	Yes.
	Kimchi, of course.
	What?
	There's a lot of good food.
	They have a kimchi.
	It's the pickled cabbage, hot pickled cabbage from Korea.
	But no, there's a lot of good food in Korea.
	It's a nice cuisine.
	It's very tasty.
	Lots of little dinky things.
	You have whatever the meat or whatever it is you're eating.
	There's a million little bitty dishes with all kinds of strange pickles.
	Can't wait to hear all about it.
	But you will.
	Coming to you from the United Kingdom, where we make up words all the time.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. Dvorak here in Northern California.

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