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May 10, 2008 - No Agenda

01:20:01

30: Authoritarianism

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	Coast to coast and around the world, we're bad, we're nationwide, but we have absolutely no agenda once again for you this week.
	Coming to you from a sun-soaked United Kingdom where it's been 80 degrees today in the Curry Manor.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. Dvorak up here in Northern California where it looks like it's going to be 80 today.
	Hey, there you go.
	Well, what did you think I was talking, Celsius?
	That would be rather hot.
	Welcome back.
	Welcome home, John.
	Thanks.
	I followed your trip to Korea.
	You were twittering here and there, and I heard some interesting reports on Tech 5.
	And I'm sure you've got lots to talk about.
	Nah.
	Wouldn't that be awesome?
	It's like, yeah, I got the slideshow, though.
	It's like crazy Uncle John, and he's going to show...
	Did you have an uncle like that?
	I had Uncle Stanley, and he would do slideshows, family gatherings.
	Oh, my God.
	I was like, and here we are at the Great Wall of China.
	Like, uh-huh.
	Just fantastic.
	You had a good time, though.
	Yeah, I did.
	I... Actually, one of the things I accomplished quite a bit, and I met a lot of people I wouldn't have normally met, and got to hang out, and it was pretty good.
	This was a conference.
	Were you attending or were you speaking at the conference?
	I was a moderator at a panel.
	Oh, okay.
	Is that me or you feeding back?
	I don't know.
	It sounds like you, actually.
	Okay, well let me turn this thing down.
	Here we go.
	Well, maybe I'm a little loud too.
	Man, it is so hot here.
	It is unbelievable.
	It has been just absolutely beautiful all week.
	Well, I don't know what it was like here since I was in Korea.
	Actually, in Korea was, you know, the weird thing about Korea, this is an interesting, first thing you do, you get up in the morning and it is so smoggy.
	Really?
	Yeah, it's from China.
	Like Los Angeles-like smog?
	No, it's really grimy looking.
	It's like maybe Los Angeles smog in the 60s.
	But that's floating in from China?
	Is that what you're saying?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	Yeah, no, China, if you look, there's some stuff you can look at.
	There's some satellite imagery of the smog coming off, the smoke and crap coming off of China.
	If you dig them up on Google, you'll be stunned because this stuff floats out halfway to the Pacific and sometimes on certain occasions it gets as far as California.
	Really?
	It's a mess.
	You've never seen anything like it.
	It's just like this big gob of goo coming out of China, and it comes all the way across the ocean, and it just nails Korea.
	I realize that I was such an incredible dork, I think I Twittered you about it, that I'm so stupid.
	My uncle was ambassador to North Korea.
	He's president of the Korea Society.
	He definitely could have hooked you up with something a little more interesting than whatever you were doing.
	North Korea?
	Yeah.
	No, South Korea.
	I'm sorry.
	South Korea, not North Korea.
	That's dumb.
	Yeah, well, geez.
	I'm sorry.
	I completely, completely forgot.
	It's so stupid.
	Ambassador Greg, they still call him that.
	I mean, that could have been your passport, dude.
	I messed that one up.
	I apologize.
	I'll get back there.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	Well, it's okay.
	I was actually pretty busy.
	Yeah.
	I did manage to get downtown to the touristy area near one of the bases, which is called Itawan, and they have all these tailors.
	And so I got a suit and a linen jacket tailor-made and a few shirts.
	Nice.
	And the price has gone up since the last time I was in town, but it's still pretty much the same.
	And I've always been convinced that the, although I don't know for sure, that almost all the tailors in the...
	Not necessarily for the suits and jackets, but definitely for the shirts.
	All go through the same factory someplace in Korea because they come back.
	If you bought from three different vendors, you're going to get the packaging comes back.
	It's identical.
	But anyway, one of the things I've been working on for the past 20 years is kind of like my own shirt.
	Wait a minute.
	What do you mean your own shirt?
	This is more than just a custom shirt, these guys.
	The John C. Dvorak autograph model?
	Is that what you're going for?
	I should probably market the shirt.
	It's got, for example, the pockets.
	I have two pockets that have buttons on them, and the pockets are just the right size to hold a CD jewel case.
	How nerdy.
	Totally.
	You can slip a jewel case into your shirt pocket if you want to.
	Awesome, dude.
	An optical disc.
	Yeah, an optical disc.
	Awesome.
	And they also have the Perry Ellis pleats.
	Oh my goodness.
	You don't wear that, do you?
	Yeah.
	Perry Ellis has these pleats in the shoulders.
	Which they patented, by the way.
	Really?
	For a while, one of the big stores in New York had their own brand of shirts and they put that pleat in there and they got sued and they had to take it out.
	But, you know, these are custom shirts, so, you know, put the pleat in.
	And anyway, there's other aspects to it.
	I have a double stitching here and there and things like that.
	But a trip like that, I'm sure that there's a whole bunch of things that happen, and you're probably going to process it.
	We're going to hear about it over the next couple of weeks, probably.
	Is that just added to your arsenal of stuff, your baggage that you carry with you?
	Crackpot stories.
	Ah, exactly.
	I love the one about Bill Gates reinventing history that he invented the personal computer.
	I thought that was a good thing.
	It was unbelievable.
	That was interesting.
	We had a table full of people that was, you know, they put us so there was like a table of English speaking, you know, people in the business.
	The honkies, the white guys.
	Right, the ghetto.
	Yeah.
	And so...
	When he went into this thing about how it was unbelievable, because, I mean, it was just astonishing.
	He starts talking about how he saw a microprocessor, and as soon as he saw it, he realized that it was going to just get more and more powerful.
	How he realized this, I don't know.
	It was going to get more and more powerful, and it was going to need software.
	And that insight of his is what led to the PC revolution.
	Yeah.
	Meanwhile, the real story is, at least the way he's been telling it for the last 40 years, is that he was at Harvard with his buddies, and he saw the picture of the Altair on the popular electronics.
	Yeah.
	Did a little research and realized they needed a programming language, and so then they recoded somebody else's BASIC. Somebody claims it was Dartmouth BASIC. Some other people say it was a Deck 10 BASIC. But they just kind of recoded it for the Altair, and then went down to New Mexico and sold it to...
	The guy who was running that company, Bill Roberts, or Ed Roberts.
	And David Bunnell, I think, was down there at the time, too.
	And he actually probably knows the story better.
	And how do you go from that story to, I saw the microprocessor, I saw the future, and my insight is what led to the PC revolution.
	It's just astonishing to me.
	Well, you know, maybe...
	Maybe someone told the story that way and then he retold it once or twice.
	The brain can do amazing things.
	Yes, I guess.
	I can show him how to edit his wiki page, if that's any help.
	Hey, talking about wiki pages, so one of the people down there is Gina Smith.
	Wasn't she early at CNET? Didn't we do that pilot with her as well?
	Wasn't Gina Smith there?
	Yeah, she was there.
	She was at CNET. She went on to ABC. Now she's a book writer.
	What is she doing?
	Book writing.
	Well, she's book writing.
	She did a book on the genome.
	Hot.
	Well, I didn't think much of doing that as a topic either.
	But she did the I Was book, and that turns out to be a bestseller.
	Huh.
	And so she's doing great, and I'm probably going to do a book with her now.
	Where's she living?
	She's in the Bay Area.
	Anyway, she says hi because she tells me this I didn't know.
	She's the one who put up your original Wikipedia posting.
	Oh, really?
	I didn't know that.
	Yeah, you didn't know that, did you?
	No.
	Hmm.
	And she's been trying to keep it, trying to dog it for you in the back.
	You're kidding me, really?
	She's covering your, she's covering for you.
	That is so incredibly nice.
	You know, I never ever look at, in fact, I make a policy of pretty much not looking at Wikipedia at all.
	Because, you know, I look at my own page, I know it's full of shit.
	So, unless it's really something general, I'm just going to think it's probably, there's a likelihood that it's a version of the truth.
	But it's really nice to know that someone's on my side, on my page.
	That's very cool.
	I'll have to take a look at it because, you know, it's so wrong.
	It really is.
	Send her a note.
	And it's funny because my wife now is running into...
	She's from the Bakelite phone era.
	And in fact, it was quite an accomplishment for me to really sit her down and walk her through a menuing structure, like on her mobile phone.
	She's just not from that era and has never had to deal with it and would...
	You know, essentially dial numbers manually and wouldn't even use the address book.
	And then, you know, once she really got into it, she really loved it.
	Now, of course, there's a lot of media exposure for her.
	Although she uses her iMac and she loves it and she uses it all the time, you know, for web browsing and email and some of the basic things, now she's having to deal with, you know, people masquerading as her on a Dutch social networking site called Hives, which is...
	You know, like a Facebook type thing, Bebo, whatever.
	And it's just amazing.
	She said, well, how can someone do that?
	Why do they do that?
	Why are they trying to be like me?
	And then, you know, we got into Wikipedia and she said, wait a minute, so if you can't actually write or change things on your own page, I'm like, no, you can't do that.
	And she's like, you know, huh?
	It's quite alien.
	We take it kind of for granted now.
	It's quite an alien concept.
	Alien is not the word.
	Stupid is the word.
	And this brings me to something I saw in the Financial Times yesterday.
	It was an editorial piece, but basically it was saying, you know, when Bill Clinton said, trying to censor the Internet and cyberspace through China, his quote was something like, that's like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.
	I think it was a famous quote of his.
	And it turns out that, yes, there is a great firewall of China, except exactly the opposite has happened.
	There's a lot of anti-Western, you know, or anti-Western, or Western hate, basically.
	You know, particularly if you look at the Carrefour, the French grocery store, because they're pro-Tibet.
	Now they have these angry Chinese men and women who are, you know, banning the stores and roughing people up.
	Well, did you?
	This is a...
	In fact, we've been meaning to...
	Me more than you...
	You're excited.
	I can hear.
	Yeah.
	Mention the fact that the two of us were standing outside the offices of what is now Medio.
	Right, right, right.
	That's right.
	During the torch protest.
	During the torch protest.
	and there was a whole bunch of pro-Chinese people protesting what they had, flights from China, and they were going from place to place.
	And we ran into one guy who pulled out what looked like an itinerary.
	Yeah, itinerary and a map.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And a map.
	And he had a flag from China.
	He looked like a national.
	Yeah.
	And he was, like, seeing where he had to go next to do his phony baloney pro-China thing.
	The Chinese are going to get busted for trying to pull this crap.
	This is so old-fashioned, it's ridiculous.
	There is something happening, John.
	I really have the feeling, just reading these reports, and it's kind of bubbling under.
	And, of course, it immediately makes me think about how we're being indoctrinated here.
	Basically, look at Google News, right?
	Every news item has been repeated and copied and republished thousands of times, whether it's correct or not.
	I think the same thing's happening in China.
	And maybe the government is kind of smart about getting nasty word out there and it propagating through the net.
	And maybe they are creating their own kind of online hate culture against us.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, it's possible.
	I mean, all I know is, I mean, generally speaking, if you're a Westerner in China, you still get treated better than a lot of the Chinese.
	So we don't know yet.
	But, you know, you have to visit it a lot and you'll figure it out after a while.
	I gotta go.
	I really gotta go.
	Spitting in your food at the restaurants.
	But there's a name for these angry Chinese young men.
	And every decade or so, there's a new version of them.
	And now they're all anti-Western.
	Yeah, these are the same idiots that were part of the Cultural Revolution.
	If it wasn't for Chiang Kai-shek moving all the antiquities out of the country, they would have probably trashed the whole place.
	Yeah, those guys.
	Those guys.
	There's a lot of them.
	Yeah, there's lots of them.
	There's too many of them.
	They're idiots.
	But, you know, this is kind of playing into your theory that the Internet is actually really bad.
	It's really a bad thing.
	You're really anti-Internet, John.
	I know.
	I don't hate...
	I mean, I just think it could be...
	Yeah.
	Well, here's the interesting thing happening in China right now.
	That this is a...
	You know, China still has issues.
	And, you know, one of the things that nobody...
	This kills me.
	And people out there who watch...
	The TV reports from Beijing coming in pre-Olympics.
	You take a look at these reports.
	It's just hilarious.
	There's a guy.
	There's a reporter on the scene.
	I was watching one of these the other day.
	None of these anchors, these pathetic anchors that have obviously no powers of observation.
	They have a monitor.
	I'm sure they're looking at it once in a while.
	No, man, they're reading the prompter for their next line.
	Well, I mean, when the correspondent is standing in some place in Beijing and behind him, you can't see anything because of the smog.
	And you see a vague bus go by.
	It looks like something from outer space.
	You can barely make it out.
	Looks like a beautiful morning there in Beijing, Pete.
	And nobody says, isn't it a little smoggy there?
	You know, it's just, I mean, every one of these reports I've seen, with no exceptions, I'm sure there will be, you know, a real wind.
	Even if it's a windy day, it doesn't help.
	No, wait a minute.
	I actually, it was, I think it was, maybe it was even Gordon Brown who was in China.
	And the BBC did a very funny bit, although it was short, but they did a very funny bit about, you know, so everyone's standing around and literally you see this smog, like, wafting through.
	And they did show it, but it wasn't like...
	You know, it was so tongue-in-cheek, it was off-the-cuff, it was almost insulting, but it was really nasty, just this shit just wafting through.
	It's crazy.
	So anyway, besides that, somebody's got to point this out because I have yet to see a report from China where it's not just completely smoked in.
	And now as we get to summer, it's not going to be any better.
	But anyway, the real problem going on in China, my wife pointed this out to me last night, was his hoof and mouth disease.
	Oh, wow.
	There's a form of hoof-and-mouth disease.
	It's a form of cocksackie.
	Yes, correct.
	Which is something kids get.
	My daughter had that.
	It's the scariest thing I've ever witnessed.
	Where all of a sudden she's crying and you go to her bed and there's just this huge flood of blood coming out of her mouth and covering the bed.
	My stepson Eric had this and he had the same thing.
	It's like your mouth is filled with blisters.
	It's a mess, but it only lasts for a couple of days.
	Yeah, but it's very frightening for parents.
	Yeah.
	Well, it turns out there's one that's called, I think, EV71, or it's got a specific version of the virus which is breaking out now in China that is deadly.
	And they've already killed 35 kids.
	And apparently to the typical of the Chinese people, they've underreported it, so it's now slowly perhaps getting out of control.
	There's cases in Macau, and they're coming in from all over the place.
	And it seems to be deadly to kids, especially around the age of four.
	If it's anything like regular foot-and-mouth disease or hoof-and-mouth, sometimes they call it that as well, because I've lived through several versions of that in the farmlands in Belgium and over here as well, it's highly contagious.
	Yeah, that's the real problem.
	It's extremely contagious.
	Not good.
	No.
	So now what?
	Well, I mean, it seems as though it's, you know, if it starts getting out of the country, I mean, well, here's what the question is.
	What happens when the public hits, when the strong of people go to the Olympics?
	And, you know, if this thing is breaking out all over the place and it happens to be the timing might be just perfect for it to be hitting Beijing in a big way, it's going to be a disaster.
	So wait a minute.
	So is it located north now?
	Is that where you said it was?
	See, here's the interesting thing about this particular disease, especially the deadly one.
	Adults can get it, and they do get it, apparently, but there's absolutely zero symptoms.
	All you become is just a carrier.
	Wow.
	And the way the Chinese have handled these things in the past, you know, not telling anybody anything.
	And the thing that says my wife makes her concerned is that it seems as though America is already involved and we're sending people over there in some sort of a panic move.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Like the CDC, Dustin Hoffman?
	Kind of thing.
	With the hoods?
	I don't know.
	I'm just telling you.
	If you start looking it up, you can see the story starting to form.
	And the stories out of China are all kind of downplaying it a little bit.
	But the potential for something like this is pretty high.
	I do recall reading about the 30 people dying.
	I recall that somewhere.
	But it wasn't a big story.
	No, no, but in fact it should be.
	It's much more important to know if Hillary Clinton is a lesbian or not.
	That's the kind of news we're interested in here, John.
	I think maybe she's trying to get the lesbian vote, but that might put her on the top, I mean over the top.
	I interrupted you, I'm sorry.
	Well, I'm just saying, I mean, this kind of thing, now we have, like, the train in Canada that was stopped and quarantined, and then we have norovirus breakout at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
	I didn't know about that.
	No, not at all.
	The Java 1 conference, 35 people got norovirus from something or other.
	How come I didn't hear about that?
	I haven't read one speck of news on that.
	It's on the blog.
	Check it out.
	Oh, excellent.
	What a fantastic resource.
	So, yeah, we actually try to keep up with epidemics.
	No, I'm a little cautious.
	I'm a believer in that kind of shit.
	It does actually spread.
	That actually can happen.
	Well, with these crowds, I mean, you know, everything has become like, you know, the stadiums are bigger, the malls are bigger.
	And you know what else is happening?
	They're more and more crowded.
	You get like a Java One conference and you got all these nerds and they're all saying, hey man, let me see your iPhone.
	And they're all like touching the same surface the whole time and they're touching each other's things.
	And there's a whole lot of this.
	I think there's much more touching going on or, you know, touching the same surfaces with all these geeks.
	Yeah.
	They're bringing us down.
	Well, like somebody said on...
	I actually Twittered that thing about the...
	Norovirus.
	Norovirus.
	And somebody said, what do you expect from a bunch of grimy, unwashed programmers?
	Well, that's another thing.
	Keyboards, man.
	Oh, that's so...
	I mean, there's more nastiness on your keyboard than on your toilet seat, as we well know.
	Yes.
	If you get your keyboard in the right light, you just get grossed out.
	It's like, this thing needs cleaning.
	It's very nasty.
	It's just getting your grease on it constantly, dust in the air.
	It's just horrible.
	Hey, there's something I'm sure you didn't read about in the U.S. Big news over here in the U.K. You know we have 4 million cameras in the U.K., the Civilian Society known as the United Kingdom.
	Yeah.
	Turns out that they're not working very well, that they're responsible for only 3% of all crimes solved.
	Yeah, no, we actually got that story.
	Oh, you did get the story?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	That story, but that's not as good as the other story that's developing, where there's now becoming a trend to moon the cameras.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That was on the front page of the newspapers here.
	Yeah.
	But that's the speed camera.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's not a trend.
	It's just one guy did it and then put it on the front of all the papers.
	Well, there's a guy in Australia that there's similar incidents happening around the world.
	Yeah, but, you know, so that's not news.
	That's like...
	It is to me.
	I know a guy who did a morning show on the radio in Holland, and he actually got in trouble.
	He had to go to court because he incited his listeners to basically bring down the man and knock down all of the speed cameras, and people started doing it, and it turned into quite a national scene.
	Wow, that's cool.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Well, you know what a lot of people do now?
	You can buy these very cheap GPS units.
	I think they have them in the States as well, but they're kind of community-based.
	They've been around for about seven or eight years.
	And basically, all it is is just a little database.
	So you connect it to your computer.
	You know, once in a while and it updates the database.
	But if you see a speed camera or if you're coming up to a speed camera, it's just a GPS receiver and so it'll start flashing saying speed camera coming.
	But you have a button on it.
	So if you, you can basically tag a new speed camera and then that gets uploaded to the community.
	So people are pretty current on where all these things are.
	And, you know, there's really no reason you'd have to hit one.
	Unless you, of course, want to moon it and then you speed up.
	Well, most of the cameras here are used for traffic light violations.
	Yeah, for people going through the red light.
	But these are actually speed cameras on a stretch of road.
	In fact, they have a system in Holland, which is unbelievable.
	There's a strip, or like a sensor, and then there's a large section, maybe like 20 miles.
	And what they do is they detect you when you hit that 20-mile strip, and then if you hit the other end too quickly, then they know exactly how fast you were going, that you were going too fast, and then they send you a ticket.
	So you have to pace yourself in that 20-mile stretch, which I just think is outrageous.
	Well, you know, there is a speed law.
	Yeah.
	But it's, you know, that's like...
	Ah, well.
	If you don't like it, you know, if you don't like the fact that you haven't changed the law, make the roads faster, make them like Germany.
	I agree.
	Parts of Germany where there's no speed limit.
	Well, the problem there is they've got too many cars.
	There's every single morning, every single afternoon, there's hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of traffic jams.
	It's just, it's horrible.
	We're in Amsterdam?
	Holland, yeah.
	In Holland?
	Yeah, and there's no escape routes.
	You can't get off and drive through villages or anything like that.
	The news literally every hour is at least five, sometimes longer, five minutes or longer of, okay, here's where all the traffic jams are.
	It just goes on and on and on and on and on.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Well, we have that problem in Los Angeles.
	I mean, you can't go from here to there any time of the day.
	It's about the same.
	Yeah, it's about the same problem.
	Only in Los Angeles, what?
	How many people live there?
	30 million?
	Well, not quite, but there's a lot.
	Yeah.
	Well, Holland is only 17.
	Well, the thing is, you know, with Los Angeles, at least, like what you say, is like when you're trying to go from one end of the area to the other, you can get off the freeway and take city streets and actually entertain yourself.
	Right.
	Now, this is actually getting, I mean, the only highways in the Netherlands are between the cities.
	You know, and so you can always get off at some little village.
	That's not a problem.
	But if you want to go into any city, forget about it.
	In or out of any city is just horrible.
	And they have these rings around each city.
	It just doesn't work.
	Well, somebody's got to redesign the system because it seems to me to be, you know, people moaning and groaning about energy savings and, oh, my car gets a million miles per gallon and I'm just going to use a hybrid.
	Yeah, we're just burning.
	And you're sitting there dead in traffic.
	Yeah, we're just burning.
	I mean, I suppose with a hybrid that makes a little sense because you don't have to, you know, I like the things where the engine stops.
	You might as well just stop your engine and run on battery.
	Yeah.
	But then, you know, if it's a hot day like today, then your air conditioner doesn't work.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	You've got to keep grinding away.
	So you're just wasting gas.
	In fact, in Berkeley, where they have this, I don't know what the point of it is, but they have to put bike lanes in everywhere.
	And there's nobody on these bike lanes because there's only a few people that haven't been killed driving a bike.
	And it's hills, right?
	It's a lot of work.
	Well, there are hills.
	There are a lot of hills.
	But in the flat area, which is the main part of the city, there's still a lot of these bike lanes, and nobody's using them.
	I mean, it's not like Holland, where, you know, if there was a bike lane, there's thousands and thousands of people on bicycles.
	Yeah.
	I mean, literally, there's just hundreds and thousands of people that are on bicycles going up and down.
	Here, there's like one person every two or three hours, maybe, on these bike lanes, which have moved the traffic, but they take a lane away from the cars, and so the cars are all backed up, stopped.
	You know, forming this long line of cars idling and just burning gas.
	It's a complete, it's like an ecological disaster.
	It's burning more, you know, fuel than it would have if you didn't have these idiotic bike lanes because, ooh, we have to have a bicycle.
	We have to encourage it.
	What are you going to encourage?
	I mean, this is too far from point A to point B for people to be using bicycles.
	And, you know, we have to encourage more bicycle riding.
	What about, you know, the 60-year-old lady?
	You know, she's not going to be on a bicycle.
	Anyway, so the whole thing is ridiculous.
	And meanwhile, the price of oil is $126 a barrel.
	Yeah, I'm still thinking.
	It's going to $200 before the end of the year, baby.
	$200.
	I'm thinking $200.
	Before the end of this year, though, right?
	Well, it's going to be pretty quick because I think when it hits $200, it's going to reverse.
	I mean, it's unbelievable.
	Although, I was looking, someone sent me a chart, and when it comes to the actual cost of fuel per gallon, you know, the U.S. is still, you know, 111 on the list of most expensive countries.
	The U.K. I think is number three in about $8.40 a gallon.
	Hmm.
	So I think it's actually, it's probably going to double in price.
	You'll probably see six or seven dollars per gallon in the U.S. before people start to freak out.
	Did you see...
	Seven bucks would do it.
	Seven bucks would freak them out.
	Yeah, I think then people just start just going frickin' nuts.
	You know, that and food costs, which of course are rising.
	And I think, you know, that seems like a scam to me too.
	Someone's just jumping on some bandwagon and, I mean, there seems to be no actual economic reason for this to be happening other than...
	Futures traders.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Futures traders just jumping from oil and saying, hey, we can do this with rice.
	You know, we can make up some bullshit about biofuel using up too much of the commodity resources and we'll start jacking up the price.
	Isn't that exactly what's happening?
	Well, somebody sent me a note because we've been discussing these economic things over the last number of months.
	And unfortunately, I don't have his name in front of me.
	But a pretty good analysis saying that the way to go is that you go long on oil and short the dollar in futures.
	And you just keep doing that and doing that and doing that until you get to the point where the oil price is ridiculous.
	The dollar is ridiculously low.
	And then you reverse it and you can run the thing back the other way as fast as you can and make just millions and millions of dollars.
	And just reverse your straddle, basically.
	Is that what a straddle is called?
	Well, it's kind of a straddle, but actually it's really more, I don't know what you'd call this, double leverage or something like that.
	Because if you're doing both and they're both going in the same direction, you're not really straddling anything.
	No, that's true.
	But my question was, do you think that this is just future traders just jacking up the price of some of the commodities like rice, grain, all that other stuff?
	Yeah, and the dollar is the best example of this.
	I mean, there's something wrong with this.
	I mean, the dollar is obviously still weak because of this war that we've got.
	But still, there's something wrong with this picture when someone in France can come over here and buy a bottle of their own wine at almost half the price.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I mean, that is not right.
	Yeah.
	So there you go.
	We're getting shafted.
	It's all part of a grand scheme of things.
	Totally is.
	The shaft job isn't going to be fair.
	I mean, Americans, except for the price of gasoline, even though nobody seems to be complaining much about it.
	People don't complain much about anything, which is a problem.
	That is the problem.
	Take a look at this week's Market Watch column, where I think it's called Watching the Watchdogs, where I start to moan about, because when AIG went, you know, apparently showed up with an $8 billion loss.
	This is the insurer that tanked the street last week, right?
	Thursday or Friday?
	Right, last week.
	And then Standard& Poor's says, well, we're going to have to lower their rating to double A minus.
	They were triple A rated?
	I'm thinking, what?
	What?
	These rating agencies are a complete bogus scam.
	This is like, and I equate it with being a weatherman.
	Damn, we've got a clue.
	But that's the shit they've got to be looking at.
	That's illegal, man.
	These ratings agencies, what are they, on the take?
	I mean, this is messed up.
	Well, talking about that kind of thing, I got a lot of interesting stories at this Korean conference about some of the stuff, the weird stuff that was going on in the late 90s before the dot-com crash, where these companies would come in and say, well, if you do this and that, let us be your underwriter.
	We'll give you the big write-ups and the good ratings and the rest of it.
	Well, that's the way it worked.
	You go with the right investment firm that has a well-known analyst who has a track record, which of course is just based on luck pretty much.
	Although a lot of them do have some really good models for well-established businesses.
	And those two sides of the house, that's the so-called Chinese wall.
	Where they're not supposed to talk to each other?
	I don't know if anyone's ever looked at that Chinese wall, but there's a lot of holes in it.
	Massive.
	Something cool...
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	No, nothing.
	Just to change the topic completely.
	I'm at the airport in Seoul, Korea, and there's a Skype store.
	Oh, with Skype apparel?
	No, for Skype, I guess you could get an account and a little phone to take with you or whatever, because they use CDMA there, and most of the phones don't work.
	I mean, I took a phone from the office that was supposed to work, and then it wouldn't charge, and then I had my Sony Ericsson phone, which I bought in Europe.
	I thought it was universal, could be used anywhere.
	No, can't find a transmitter.
	I mean, I think the GSM thing, oh, the great thing about GSM is you can use it anywhere in the world.
	It's not even close to being true.
	I have not had any problems.
	I'm surprised.
	Yeah, well take one of these phones that you think you've had no problems with and take it to Korea where they use CDMA GSM. I wonder if the iPhone works in China.
	How messed up would that be?
	No, it doesn't work in China because, in fact, I got somebody that twittered me asking whether they ever think that the iPhone ever will work.
	Well, no, in China it will work.
	I'm sorry, I was thinking Korea.
	It should work in China.
	Oh, okay.
	But not in Korea.
	Hmm.
	No.
	Yeah, well, the CDMA thing, isn't that what Sprint still uses in the U.S.? I don't know.
	Well, I don't know.
	Maybe.
	Yeah, there's one carrier that did.
	I was actually going to change the topic and say that something really cool launched here in the UK, which I just think is amazing.
	FreeSat UK. Have you heard of this?
	Nope.
	So it's a free satellite system.
	So actually, you buy the set-top box for, I think it's 60 pounds, so about 100 bucks.
	Or it's even cheaper than that.
	I think with installation, all told, maybe $120, $130.
	And then you basically flip it on.
	There's no subscription charge.
	It's like Freeview.
	If you know that over here, you can receive digital channels right over the air.
	And so now you have HD quality of all of the publicly available channels.
	And of course, if you want, you can just dial a number and then you can Take a temporary subscription, like a one-day for the porn service, or you can get some other package.
	But I love what they're doing.
	I mean, they're really leading with this.
	Here it is.
	Get your cheap set-top box.
	We'll sell you all the upgrades you want, but basically, here's your television.
	You don't need anything more.
	You get your BBC, you get your ITV, your Channel 4, your CNN, your BBC 24 News, all that good stuff.
	And if you want more, you can just order it a la carte.
	I think it's fantastic.
	And pure satellite.
	But don't you have to have somebody install a dish?
	Yeah, you can install it yourself or they'll install it for you.
	That's built into that price.
	Huh.
	So what's the price again?
	Like $130, installed, everything ready to go, and no monthly charge.
	So it's a one fee, let's put a dish up, one fee, and then you just, you know, whatever.
	Yeah.
	Except for premium.
	Yeah, if you want premium, and you can just order that over the phone.
	Huh.
	Well, you know, one of the things I've been wanting to do, there's now a version of, you know, the long-forgotten technology, which is still one of the better ones.
	Is C-band.
	Those big dishes.
	Yeah.
	You know, the early, the first, you know, people that lived out in the country, they'd have these huge dishes because they'd pick up the direct feeds from the networks and all the other stuff.
	Usually those dishes were located right next to a trailer.
	I see it, man.
	Exactly.
	You know what I mean, right?
	It'd be a big dish.
	And that's where they got the feeds of Dan Rather picking his nose and shit like that.
	Oh, that's right.
	The good old days.
	But anyway, that has not gone away necessarily, but it's gone to HD. And so there's a bunch of HD channels now that are up there.
	That, in fact, everything up there is now coming down in HD, and if you get the new receivers, in other words, this technology is not dead, it's just kind of being overlooked a lot, and it still has more versatility.
	I've been thinking about actually going to a C-band dish, because I have a pad in my backyard, and I'm in a really good spot, I think, to hit the...
	A helipad?
	No, a pad for a dish.
	Oh, okay.
	Not a helicopter pad.
	It's not that big of a backyard.
	But anyway, I have the thing, the pole, the whole thing.
	And so I could put that thing up there and then get the HD. But what I think is cool, and I think...
	I don't know if the free set people do this, but it would be cool if they did.
	I'm sure they don't.
	But there are systems that you can subscribe to for the premium stuff, and it's all prorated.
	You can get HBO for a day.
	Right.
	There was a while when I was really deep into that shit, into the satellite stuff, and I knew all the guys who had, like, the gold cards, you know, which is kind of code for cracked decoding cards, and there's a whole community, there's all kinds of shit happening on satellite.
	You know, like that crazy movie you saw the other day from Shell, but there's a lot of really weird channels and experimentation going on.
	Yeah, there's a lot of really weird channels.
	And I'm sure that C-band, you're right, you know, because that's huge frequency range, isn't it?
	Don't they have a lot of bandwidth on that C-band?
	Yeah, as far as I know, I mean, and the great thing is that...
	Again, you could do, I mean, besides all the free stuff that's up there, because once you buy this, you know, it's not as cheap as, I mean, obviously it's going to cost you a couple thousand dollars to get up to speed, but then again, once you get it, you never have to pay again.
	And if you do want to go for that premium stuff, there's these systems where you can, you know, there's a movie coming up on HBO HD. You want to watch it?
	Boom.
	You just buy the HBO for that week or for that day, and you don't have to, you know, keep paying and paying and paying.
	And those are the old cool systems where you have to have a rotor attached to your dish.
	Oh, absolutely, yeah, because there's different birds.
	You have to keep repositioning the...
	And the rotor actually will slowly turn with the rotation of the earth to stay in sync.
	Isn't that...
	Well, those are geosynchronous satellites, so it shouldn't have to turn at all, but the satellites do wiggle around a little bit.
	Yeah.
	Now, that's cool stuff.
	I remember the days, I've talked about this before, a long time ago.
	The BBC did it.
	In fact, I think lots of different countries I heard were doing it.
	I was living in the Netherlands.
	I had a Commodore VIC-20 and later a 64.
	And there was a program on national radio, on FM. And they would broadcast programs.
	And you would record those on the cassette tape and then load them into your computer.
	It was the most awesome distribution ever.
	Yeah.
	I always love those kinds of systems.
	Yeah, those things come and go.
	But anyway, so I'm thinking of getting a C-band thing.
	I keep talking about it.
	It just seems like an interesting kind of a solution to...
	Well, I see a trend of people moving.
	Their media habits are now really accelerating in different directions, primarily away from network-based broadcast television.
	I was reading the ratings the other day.
	After the writer's strike, all ratings except for American Idol, that's the only exception, so Fox kind of wins in this, and of course they had the Super Bowl.
	All the ratings are down 14%.
	Only a small amount of their new shows, the new season, even did over 4 million viewers per episode.
	I mean, that's small, man.
	These audiences are getting outstripped by other media, or certainly aggregated, if you looked across all other media, pretty quickly.
	Well, I think they're going to have to rethink the way they look at this stuff, too.
	My concern is that what we're going to lose...
	You can kind of see the shift with a lot of different kinds of broadcasting.
	The show that we're doing, for example, is essentially what could have been done on radio, but without the same convenience.
	The radio doesn't have a TiVo.
	There's no way of subscribing to a show like this over the conventional system.
	But with this over-the-internet approach, it's got more versatility, and it's obviously going to make things different, because this is really the way to go.
	For this kind of format and programming, yeah, I agree.
	That's the way to go.
	Right.
	It's perfect for us.
	In that media.
	But with TV, I mean, it seems to me it is slowly shifting away from what I would miss the most are good dramas and good sitcoms.
	And the thing is that I've noticed over the years a lot of the...
	I mean, there's still good material on television.
	It seems to be scattered about much more than it used to be.
	It's not as compact, easy to find, and reliable.
	And some years ago, they started moving the shows too much.
	I mean, it would be Wednesday night, then they'd change it to Thursday night.
	It used to be always considered...
	I think you're kind of already offering up your own solution for this, and I agree with you.
	I mean, I watch lots of drama, and I also know how hard it is to make it, how expensive it is.
	An episode of Lost will be anywhere between two and a half and three million dollars.
	And by the way, the production does actually get paid.
	Everyone on the set and everyone involved in the production up to what we call tape on desk, they're all paid and they're done.
	So then it's up to the broadcaster to go make money.
	And of course, there's also a distributor because there's international distribution, etc.
	But I think we're getting closer to the point where there will be enough vehicles, enough outlets...
	To either sell or through other monetization mechanisms to actually grab that kind of scale as long as it's actually available and not just free to air on television.
	I think that type of budget and recouping on that is probably viable.
	I think it is, especially if they monetize it in more than one way, which I think is one of the keys here.
	And that's why I think when they first started putting a series of TV shows on DVDs.
	Yeah, exactly.
	For example, the Firefly series, which was a really outstanding program that Fox screwed up.
	But on DVD, people would just buy the DVDs.
	And watch the thing, and I think it may have paid out over time.
	And also, you know, people who missed the first couple seasons of Alias, or the one that I think is hot right now for DVDs is The Wire.
	And people would watch, because I always told people, because The Wire was one of the great dramas ever put on television.
	I always say, well, don't even start watching it on HBO.
	Get the DVDs and catch up to the story, and then, you know, start watching it then.
	And people would, you know, everybody in my family has watched The Wire mostly off the DVDs.
	And there's money to be made off of that, because that's how the movie people do it.
	And the budget, you know, if it would cost $2 million an episode to make a TV drama and you do two of them, that's like one DVDs worth of material for a $4 million outlay, as opposed to what a movie costs to produce, which is an average of $66 million, according to everybody.
	And there's a lot of money to be made.
	Obviously, the margins are different.
	So I hope that the...
	They don't stop doing these things if they can get these other channels to work.
	Here's one thing that...
	You know, Ron and I have been in Los Angeles a lot in the past couple of months.
	And we've pretty much struck a couple of interesting deals.
	In fact, one agency, a large one...
	They represent, I think it's like 110 pilots that basically didn't make it, that didn't get on the air.
	And that's not because they were bad, obviously.
	There's only so many shows that can enter rotation on a seasonal basis.
	And I think we've pretty much secured the rights to be able to put those up on our network and see if anything strikes.
	And that could actually be a way to start one of these up.
	We'll see, but at least we'll have a good laugh at 100 pilots that didn't make it.
	Yeah, no, that'd be fun.
	There actually used to be a TV show that did that during the summer.
	They would run all these old pilots.
	Television doesn't work for a lot of things, especially non-episodic things at just random.
	I think TiVo has helped a lot, but TiVo is not the complete solution.
	The real solution to the whole thing is IPTV, where everything is actually distributed over the net when you want it off of huge catalogs.
	Which is where we're going, dude.
	That's what the WiMAX Cloud is all about.
	You know, WiMAX isn't helping things much, but it is where we're going, somehow.
	An on-demand world.
	And, you know, that'll also shake out, you know, the cream of the crop will come, show up different ways.
	And also let's niche markets develop.
	I mean, our show, for example, or any of the tech shows that are out there, are totally niche.
	They're not necessary for everybody.
	It's not the mass market, but there is a mass market if you take a worldwide audience and you can let everyone tap into it.
	I mean, if you have...
	On a domestic basis, you have 200 million people in the biggest market in the world, which is in terms of dollars, the U.S. market.
	You have 200 million people and you can get 10 million to watch something.
	That's a success.
	But if you have a worldwide market of billions of people, you can get the same 10 million only from a broader grouping much easier over the Internet and distribute it cheaper so your whole business model has completely changed.
	Yeah.
	It's definitely happening.
	I can feel it.
	No, I can't.
	I really, really can't.
	And it's still going to be another 10 years, I'm sure.
	Yeah, it always takes longer.
	When you're surfing the wave, it doesn't...
	That's what I mean.
	You can totally feel the wave, but my experience has taught me, slow down, boy.
	Slow down.
	It's going to be a while longer.
	We could all be dead by the time our vision actually takes place.
	But John will be dead together.
	Won't that be fun?
	Yeah.
	So, anyway, but it is obviously the major underlying trend.
	But the fun part is when you have a trend like that that's so apparent, it's kind of fun to watch people scramble around trying to either deny it or fix, you know, do whatever, which brings me to Sumner Redstone, who I got to meet in Korea.
	I've met him.
	He's a very interesting guy.
	Coot would be the word that comes to mind.
	That's a good description.
	People are very afraid of him at Viacom.
	Very afraid.
	Well, you know, they probably should be.
	He's a man with opinions.
	I think I'm going to take his side, though, on the suit against YouTube.
	He's totally right.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, but I also have a twist to it, which I think I'm going to run this as a column at PCMag on Monday.
	And it's going to have a twist to it that I think is going to be very interesting because it just came to me when I was flying back from Korea.
	I'll take his side, but then I'm going to twist it in some interesting way.
	I mean, he's not going to be able to, you know, he'll never read or hear of this column, I'm sure.
	But the funny thing was, his main complaint over in Korea, and by the way, I got some great contacts over there now that will be helping me expose some of the commonplaces that are inaccurate.
	Oh, nice.
	And it's very interesting.
	But anyway, his main complaint is that the Koreans, even though they are the people who do the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon, because all the cartooning is done in Korea now, most of it.
	All the animation.
	The factory.
	Animation.
	Right.
	They've got a bunch of studios all over the place.
	They make the cartoon, but they don't subscribe to the SpongeBob show.
	They don't like it.
	They don't dig it.
	I'm telling you, he gave this speech and then afterwards...
	Mr.
	Leadstone, it is a talking splunge.
	The problem, I think, that he's missing, and he loves the show, apparently, but if anyone, I never knew about it.
	When my daughter was young, she was always watching Spongebob, and I kind of got into Spongebob, Dog, Cat, and all those crazy shows they had on Nickelodeon, the Amanda show.
	But the Spongebob and Squarepants show, We're good to go.
	That transcends.
	That's the sign of a great cartoon, right?
	Is when the parents can be laughing and the kids as well, only two totally different reasons.
	Right.
	But it's not in the intellectual sense of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons where there was a lot of asides.
	Or even the Simpsons cartoons which are almost adult sitcoms with a children's kind of cartoony quality.
	Where there's just really nasty humor.
	Where they just go after it.
	This is the weirdest kind of thing I've ever seen in terms of its humor.
	And I just don't see a lot of cultures even coming close to getting it.
	If you don't get the meta joke in there, it's not funny in the least.
	least.
	In fact, it's the stupidest show ever.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And so he's just like, you could just see he's frustrated by the fact that the Koreans, they draw the cartoon for God's sake.
	Why aren't they watching it?
	One time I took advantage of the Viacom corporate culture and I went to the Nickelodeon Studios, which is, I think it's in Florida?
	I don't know where they are.
	Yeah, I think it's in Florida.
	And we had the whole VIP treatment, and my daughter was on the show, and we all got slimed.
	Your daughter's probably too old for that now to appreciate the slime.
	She's probably at the limit, yeah, 13.
	No, no, no, no.
	Christina was, I don't know, 7 or 8, and it was just awesome.
	Absolutely awesome.
	They know how to do that.
	They take care of their own there at Viacom.
	How do you get that crap off you?
	It's, uh, you got a shower.
	They have a shower, a whole setup right there.
	I think they should invent some sort of slime like that that you can just get slimed and you just shake like a dog and it all comes off.
	Boy, we'd be rich if only we could come up with that.
	We would.
	Professor Flubber.
	The product would be that.
	It would be some green slime, but it would fall on you, and it would get all over you.
	It would be a total mess, and you'd shake like a dog, and it would fly off you, and then it would disappear.
	Well, don't you remember that there was a product called slime at one point?
	Remember that?
	Yeah, I know.
	In the green canister?
	That was reasonably good.
	Yeah, it wasn't that good.
	It should disappear.
	It should have some quality, so it just completely disappears.
	It just evaporates.
	Like alcohol.
	Yeah.
	And we'll have it made in China.
	Right.
	And it ended up being toxic, unfortunately.
	Here's a trend.
	Boys in Britain with increasing rate do not want a French kiss.
	You're kidding.
	Yeah, and I had a whole conversation with my daughter and a couple of her friends that were here in the garden today.
	Is it because the Brits hate their French that much?
	That was my question, too, but no.
	Like, we hate these fucking French!
	No more de tongue.
	It's called a freedom kiss now instead of French kissing.
	No, they're just not into it.
	Believe me, they're into a whole bunch of other stuff because I did get all the details, but no, they don't like French kissing.
	It's going out of vogue.
	Pun intended.
	That's interesting.
	Yeah.
	And so I've told my daughter...
	What's the sociology, you think, behind that?
	I really don't know.
	You know, the first thing I said is, baby, maybe you need a Tic Tac.
	You know, she's like, no, no, no, Dad.
	And then, you know, her friend Liz and a couple of these girls say, yeah, more and more boys just...
	They don't like it.
	They just don't like it.
	Is it the boys?
	The girls don't, one way or the other, they're not...
	No, the boys.
	It's the boys who don't want a French kiss.
	That's kind of trippy, isn't it?
	That's wild.
	I wonder if that trend is developing here.
	I have no idea.
	Personally, I'm a big fan.
	What, French kissing boys?
	Yeah, especially the young ones.
	It's just the way you set it up.
	What am I supposed to say?
	I know, I know.
	It was an open goal.
	An open goal.
	That's what we say over here.
	Open net, we'd say here.
	It'd be more of a hockey term.
	Okay.
	Open goal is for football, which, as you know, is the real soccer.
	Yes.
	I'm becoming quite a pimp that way.
	So yeah, no, I thought that was a pretty interesting trend though.
	I have no idea what the sociology behind it would be.
	I really, I really can't figure that one out.
	I mean, you still see it in all the porn.
	I'm reliably informed.
	Yeah, but I don't know how many kids, I mean, I don't know how many people, you know, how many teenage boys watch porn.
	I mean, I think they look at porn on the net, but it's just different.
	Yeah, they're all looking for the latest sex video.
	That's really a big thing.
	And they make their own.
	There's a lot of that going on.
	Oh, did you see so-and-so sex tape?
	They're totally mimicking the Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears type thing, which is kind of sad.
	It's totally sad.
	Everybody go do these sex tapes and put them on NudeTube, which is one of the outlets.
	There's a whole bunch of them.
	There's a whole bunch of them.
	Just type in it.
	Put in anything tube and you'll find some porn.
	NudeTube.
	Some smart money guys, they're in the same classes, are going to be collecting these things.
	Then when you and the other guy are working at the same company, You know, looking up for the same promotion, even though, what, I'll never work for a company.
	Yeah, that's going to surface.
	You're going to end up these things thrown in your face.
	Yeah, it's going to surface.
	But, you know, I mean, that's...
	Think ahead, people.
	Think ahead.
	But that shit's changing too, John.
	I mean, it's the same thing with, you know, so now, you know, as we were talking earlier, now the Brits are going to store all these images from the CCTV cameras in a database.
	I'm thinking we should sell the whole kit and caboodle to Mark Burnett and call it Britain the reality show.
	And just let them switch it live, make a whole channel 24-7.
	Why not?
	Did you see that band?
	This was a fantastic...
	I think it was on Boing Boing.
	A band shot their video clip by doing performances in front of all of these different cameras in London, maybe in Manchester as well, maybe in Birmingham.
	And then they submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the footage, and they strung it all together and made a music video out of it.
	No, I didn't know that that's a great thing.
	Yeah, I think it's on Boing Boing.
	Oh, it's fantastic.
	And then you see all these different angles.
	It's really funny.
	It's pretty funny.
	These cameras are ridiculous.
	Yeah, but this is why I did our reality show back in the day.
	It's like, yeah, this is what's happening.
	It's going to be real normal for people to be putting all their shit out there.
	And not necessarily even thinking about putting their shit out there, but they just put it out and then it gets out there.
	Well, that brings me back to the original Albert Brooks movie that went back for years.
	I think it was his first film.
	And I can't remember the name of it.
	I'll have to take a look at it.
	Look it up in his filmography.
	But it's where these people being followed around.
	This actually predates all this reality stuff.
	It's obviously very interesting.
	These people have these cameras on their heads, a whole crew of people, and they move in with this family and basically film everything they do.
	And who knew it was actually going to be a trend, but the movie itself is quite revealing.
	I'll look it up.
	I'm looking right now.
	When was it from?
	It was Albert Brooks' first movie.
	His first one?
	Yeah, it was called...
	It was really old.
	I mean, it was in the 70s, I believe.
	I'm looking at IMDb right now.
	I'm seeing a lot of appearances.
	Yeah.
	AlbertBrooks.com.
	He's got all his movies on here.
	Let's see what he's got here.
	Real Life, 1979.
	Real Life.
	I'm trying to think of...
	I've seen that.
	Yeah, you've seen it, I'm sure.
	But anyway, the thing about the thing is these people that were filming, you know, doing the reality show, they had these big cameras on their heads, so they looked like they had Pope hats on.
	And they were walking around with this, like, all constantly.
	It was actually quite funny.
	That was the old vision.
	One day we'll have cameras on our heads.
	Well, it was meant to mock the whole idea, because I think the concepts were just being first thought out right around the late 70s.
	And anyway, so he does this movie and it turns out that how I mean, it's just just amazing film if you look at it in terms of the Truman show and some of these other films that came out much later.
	And I don't think Brooks is ever really, you know, he did real life in modern romance.
	I forget what that was about.
	That was kind of here's a story for oriented thing.
	Lost in America was really a good film.
	And then it started, you know, Defending Your Life was his big budget movie that was pretty good.
	But after that, I guess they wouldn't give him any more money.
	I'm looking at his filmography here.
	It starts in 1979, 1981, 1985.
	He's between...
	Five and six years between films.
	1991, 1996, and 1999.
	The Muse, which was kind of just a commercial nothing film.
	It was in broadcast news in 87.
	Those are where he's starring.
	I'm talking about the ones where he's written, produced, and directed.
	Or written and directed.
	The Muse, Mother, Defending Your Life, Lost in America, Modern Romance.
	So, in 2000...
	2000, maybe even end of 99.
	That was around the time the Truman Show came out.
	And we were back in Holland.
	We had just moved back.
	And I got a call at like 1130 at night.
	It was John the Mole of Endemole.
	You know who Endemole is?
	No.
	Endemole, the big production company.
	Most famous for Big Brother.
	Okay, yeah.
	Okay, worldwide success.
	Sold to Telefonica for several billion.
	He called me around 11.30.
	He says, Adam, Adam, Adam, come to my office.
	I want to show you something.
	I'm like, alright, that's kind of weird.
	But he was already a pretty big television producer.
	I'm like, alright.
	So I go and he says, I got a mood tape for you.
	I said, okay, I know what a mood tape is.
	He says, it's kind of Biosphere meets Truman Show.
	And he showed me this tape, and it was literally, they had it, it was a mood tape, so it was all stuff cut together and voiceover to make it kind of look like it was real.
	Essentially, it was called Golden Cage, and the idea was that we'd lock in ten people, five men, five women, lock them up for a full year, and then whoever would come out as the final person would be the...
	Sorry about that.
	Would be the winner of like a million euros or whatever.
	And that, about three months later, became Big Brother.
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah, and I was right there at the very, very start, and it was completely influenced.
	And I bet you the pieces of real life were in that mood tape.
	I'm going to see if I can find it, because I have it somewhere.
	The original Big Brother mood tape.
	And later, actually, Endemol went on to create Golden Cage, which is like a really harsh version of Big Brother, with people having sex and getting drunk and shit on camera.
	He tried to sell that in the States.
	They wouldn't even take it.
	We got our standards.
	Yeah, boy, we sure do.
	Please.
	Anyway, so yeah, it's an interesting situation.
	And the funny thing is about those things, they don't translate well to the secondary markets.
	So you have to make all your money right away.
	Because I don't see anybody renting DVDs of Big Brother.
	No.
	The whole DVD retail market is gone, John.
	It's pretty much melted, which is a big Hollywood problem.
	We talked about that last week or the week before.
	Yeah, I know, but there's still, I mean, there's still, I'm talking about distribution of secondary, you know, secondary viewing.
	And yeah, maybe change from DVD to downloads or whatever, but the point is, is that secondary viewing, you know, of old, you know, two-year-old Big Brother is not going to be the same as a two-year-old, you know, some of these classics that people can watch for the next 20 years.
	No, you can make more money off of, you know, Baywatch from 15 years ago than you can off of last year's Big Brother.
	That's just a fact.
	Right.
	Because that whole show was built around audience participation.
	I mean, it truly is an engaged audience.
	You have to be a part of it, otherwise you miss it and it's no good.
	Right.
	And the repeats are no good.
	It all has to be witnessed kind of in real time, which I think is the genius of it.
	It's a genius on the one hand, but it doesn't do much for residuals or long-term...
	What are you talking about?
	That's genius.
	Excuse me, let me just put my producer hat on.
	Are you nuts?
	That is freaking genius.
	There's your man.
	There's the real Adam Curry coming up.
	Absolutely.
	I love it.
	No residuals.
	Take the money, I'm out of here.
	Screw you.
	All these little kids are under contract.
	They can't do shit without us.
	In the UK... These, you know, girls who are like third or fourth, but had the right vibe going on, they're doing, you know, like a hundred thousand pound photo shoots for, you know, with their clothes on for the newspapers.
	I mean, they're big, big celebrities.
	It's huge business.
	Yeah, for them individually.
	Yeah, and people seem to love it.
	You know, everyone's so numb.
	Well, you know, that's another issue.
	I mean, people seem to love it.
	The public is just, the public on some level is just pathetic.
	John, if you put Chantel on the front page of your newspaper, you sell 500,000 more copies.
	It's a known fact.
	So they just do a calculation.
	I'm not saying it's not a known fact, because it is a known fact.
	And even on the Dvorak Uncensored blog, until it got completely ridiculous, we would put a lot of Britney Spears stuff up there, even though these nerds would moan about it.
	They'd all be reading it.
	It's a male audience.
	You know, Britney Spears is cute.
	She's photogenic.
	She kind of does stupid things.
	It's funny.
	But then it got pathetic, and even my wife says, you guys ought to stop this Britney Spears stuff.
	This girl is in trouble.
	And so we stopped doing it.
	I can't believe you were actually participating in that circus.
	I'm shocked.
	You know, you shouldn't be shocked.
	But the point is, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
	I wouldn't do it saying it's a good thing.
	I mean, I say it's a bad thing, but I'll do it.
	It's like saying public drunkenness, you know, is a good thing.
	It's not.
	Boris Johnson, our new mayor, is...
	As of June 1st, this is going to be funny, he's banning open containers of alcohol on public transport.
	Good fucking luck.
	I can just see the poor train conductor trying to take it.
	You can do a lot of things, but taking a beer away from an inebriated Brit is just not one of the things you want to have high on your list to do.
	Right, especially if he's Irish.
	Thank you.
	Because I sit in first class on the train home, like at 5.30 or 6 o'clock, and man, some people are toasted, toasted.
	In first class?
	Yeah, well, they don't have first class tickets, but they just come in, you know, barge in.
	And everyone just ignores them, right?
	No one says anything and they're like burping and shouting and farting all over the place and the conductor comes by and he takes one look at them and goes, I'm going to fucking deal with these bozos.
	Hey, you shouldn't be here, gentlemen.
	Yeah, right.
	No, man.
	Wait until we get some Liverpool fans on the train.
	Yeah, that'll be fun.
	Put your beer down, son.
	I was in Germany when there was some big soccer match with a bunch of Brits.
	It was a World Cup match or whatever, but it was some big match.
	I was on one of the trains, and it was like they all of a sudden got filled up with a bunch of these British footballer fans.
	Just the roundiest bunch of punks I've ever run into, and they're all middle-aged.
	They're middle-aged hooligans.
	What is the deal with that?
	I mean, it wasn't like they're a bunch of teenagers.
	Well, okay, so now you're understanding why soccer is the biggest sport in the world.
	It is the common man's sport.
	You are seeing, there is a working class still in the UK, I believe, and you're seeing it.
	You know, that's why you get great players from South America.
	It's because any kid, the dream of any kid is if you can kick this freaking ball and you can get it in that net and you can do it consistently, you can become world famous and, you know, etc., etc.
	And that dream is there.
	And for these guys, that's all they really know.
	Their social community is the club.
	In the UK, some of the supporters actually make the decisions about what the club has to do.
	And they have delegates who go into the board of directors meetings and say, alright, you can't trade this guy.
	Or, you know, we'll basically rip down the stadium.
	No, it's a huge, huge cultural thing.
	And that's what you're seeing.
	And I think it's sad.
	I think it's a sad statement.
	Everyone can, you know, love enjoying sports, but it just seems like that's all they've got.
	Yeah, well, it's weird because, although I have to say, like, if you took a look at American football fans, a lot of them are...
	Middle-aged, too.
	In fact, there's probably more middle-aged people who watch the Oakland Raiders than kids.
	It's just something weird about running into, I mean, you see these guys tearing down, you're fighting and having all these really, I mean, you don't see a lot of fights, even though they're nasty looking at the Oakland Raiders.
	I mean, it's not like it is in Europe where they're just, where the fight breaks out.
	Kill each other.
	And same thing in Brazil.
	I went to the big stadium in Rio once, which holds 350,000 people.
	Unreal.
	And they have the section for the visiting team.
	Actually, there's like a barbed-fenced wire in the stadium blocking the two sides so they don't go at each other.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	And so they have names.
	Like, in Holland, you have F-Side.
	They call them sides.
	And you have...
	What do we have?
	Fuck S. I mean, there's all these different...
	They're hooligan gangs, but they're really supporters.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, they're hooligan gangs, and they're all 38 years old.
	It's weird.
	They're overexcited.
	And why is it, by the way, in the United States, when your team wins, you go nuts, you burn up the streets, and you riot, but when gas goes to four bucks a gallon, you sit at home and smoke the crack pipe.
	That drives me up the wall.
	This is addressed in my column in Market Watch where I ask, how did the public get to be so passive?
	And I think a lot of it has to do with this terrorism thing because they've got the public scared.
	If anybody hasn't noticed this at the airports...
	All the U.S. airports have been on orange alert for five years straight.
	It's never moved to yellow.
	It's never moved to red.
	It's never moved to green.
	It's been orange.
	And a lot of the posters that say orange, orange alert, you know, watch out, watch orange alert.
	And those signs are printed.
	They're permanent.
	There's no way they even swap the sign out.
	It's like it's been printed on the wall, orange alert.
	What kind of bullshit is this?
	Well, I have this thing called a drop.
	You can find it at drop.io slash daily source code.
	And basically, it's a kind of cool system, John.
	Just take a look at it.
	You can drop any type of media file in there, and you literally drop it, and it looks like it kind of turns into a weblog.
	But anyway...
	Someone put a PDF file in here, which I've been reading.
	It's about 300-odd pages.
	I'm just looking for it now.
	Of course, it's not easy to find.
	It's a book on authoritarianism and how authoritarianism, I think that's the word, is less about the authorities who are suppressing the people, but more about the attitude of the people who are allowing themselves to be...
	Authorized.
	Well, I mean, the classic work on authoritarianism was done by a guy named T.W. Adorno.
	And I believe his book, I think it was two volumes of it, something called, I don't remember the title, but I think it was maybe just authoritarianism.
	But this book was written as a definitive work, sociology, probably around 1940 to 19, maybe right after World War II, one of the two.
	In the 40s, for sure.
	And it outlines most of this.
	In fact, I used this book when I was in college.
	I first read it.
	It's actually quite interesting.
	But authoritarianism is quite the thing.
	But I'm not sure exactly why we have...
	I guess it's completely out of control in this country because nobody protests anything.
	And when they do protest, it's just a bunch of whack jobs protesting marine recruiting centers and things like that.
	And moaning about not having enough bike lanes.
	That kind of thing.
	It's unbelievable.
	Oh, we need more bike lanes.
	Yeah, that'll do it.
	That's going to change things.
	That'll get us out of Iraq.
	I wish I could find this thing.
	But it seems like there is a theory out there as to why we're doing this and why we're so passive and why we're just not getting up.
	And I can feel it when I reach out and say, this is what my show has become, my daily show, DailySourceCode.com.
	And people are starting to wake up.
	Go Bull, they're not waking up.
	Yeah, I think they are.
	You know, two people that listen to your show, maybe.
	Well, that's two more than they've woken up from your show.
	In fact, your show puts them to sleep.
	I keep my show short.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, there is an issue here.
	But again, I moan about this.
	And one of the things that I mentioned in this column, which is you should read because it's pretty funny.
	I wrote it, actually.
	I was figuring I wasn't going to get this column done until I got back to the States because, you know, it was like you leave Korea at Friday afternoon and you get home Friday morning.
	Yeah, mindfuck.
	It's like, what?
	But anyway, I was going to get home in time to write the column for MarketWatch, but I woke up that morning and I read this thing about AIG going...
	I just got angry about the fact that nobody's complaining enough about these rating agencies.
	And then I started on a rant about nobody complains about these bank charges and 18% interest rates, which used to be illegal.
	And these pay...
	These check cashing places that will give you an advance on your paycheck and then they have, you know, essentially loan shark rates and all this other stuff that's going on.
	Oh, whatever, you know, it's just too bad.
	And the government's not doing anything about it.
	They're in bed with these people.
	It's unbelievable to me that, no, well, you know, it's just the way it is.
	I know.
	It's like communism.
	We've got to do something about the terror.
	We have to be careful about the terrorists, the orange alert.
	It is The Authoritarians by Bob Ultimeyer, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.
	Okay, that gave me the title.
	It's called Authoritarian Society by T.W. Adorno.
	Yeah, he actually references that here as that being...
	But what he's trying to do is he's trying to just, of course, with any book, I'm making this for the common guys, and you can understand this incredibly complex crap I'm trying to smack down on you.
	But he does a pretty good job.
	It's been an interesting read.
	And he also has some solutions at the end, you know.
	Here's what we can do to stop ourselves from being authoritarian.
	Oh, wait, wait.
	I'm sorry.
	It's The Authoritarian Personality by T.W. Adorno.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	It's interesting because I think there's something there.
	There's something wrong with everything.
	Well, so...
	But, you know, people, you know, I think there's going to be also a point where you start, there's a build-up.
	Because people know that they're being scammed, ripped off.
	I mean, people are going, you know, getting screwed by the credit card companies.
	The credit card companies go out of their way, and they get Congress to change the bankruptcy laws.
	So, when you go bankrupt in the United States now, where you're supposed to have all your debts forgiven or have them reorganized, though, the credit card companies are completely out of that loop.
	You still have to pay them, even if you, you know, you're in a bankrupt situation.
	It's ridiculous because the credit card companies are part of the reason people end up going bankrupt.
	And in Brazil, it's really bad.
	Did you get that note?
	Well, you know, by the way, 120% interest on credit cards in Brazil.
	Well, nobody uses them.
	And the guy, somebody wrote me, I haven't followed up on this, but they said that's bull, that crap that you have to buy a house with cash.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah.
	Well, I got a couple people confirming it.
	Yeah, they're probably Americans.
	Maybe they had bought their house with cash, but I've got people that...
	I'll get the scoop on it.
	I just haven't followed up enough.
	I'll get the whole real story, but it doesn't make sense.
	I don't know, man.
	I don't make up the news.
	No, but other people do.
	Anyway, okay, so what else do we have to complain about?
	Let's see, I think I had something written down here.
	No, actually...
	Yeah, what was that?
	We got a nasty gram.
	Didn't we?
	I didn't get one.
	I got a couple nasty grams about people saying we're harping too much on people who don't eat meat, but I think they're kind of missing the point.
	When do we harp on people not eating meat?
	Well, that's what I mean.
	That's why they're missing the point.
	Well, because we both agree that meat is good for you.
	And there's a lot of people out there saying that meat is bad for you.
	Oh, that's because these guys are, you know, I'm sure that a lot of meat isn't good for you.
	And if you eat too much of it, it can't be great.
	I mean, eating too much of anything.
	But these anti-meat people, you know, they shouldn't be listening to this show.
	Does that mean vegetarians as well or just anti-meat people in general?
	You know, vegetarians, you know, I can put up with a certain amount of it.
	As long as they're not pushy.
	I just heard many, many iPods drop.
	Oh, man.
	So what you got coming up this week?
	A couple of lunches and, I don't know, not much.
	I think it's going to be a pretty slow week.
	I'm trying to catch up with some stuff.
	We'll probably put together a book proposal, try to finish my depressions book.
	And we're doing a pilot with Becky Worley.
	Yeah, is that still happening or not?
	Yeah, it's on Thursday.
	We're going to do something.
	We're going to work on something then.
	And then we'll have that finished.
	I really like the idea.
	I think it's going to be good.
	I think so.
	And it's going to be an editing thing.
	And that's about it.
	I think...
	You know, it's going to be the same old boring week.
	You got a Cranky Geeks on Wednesday?
	Yeah, I got a Cranky Geeks.
	We haven't got any guests lined up yet, but I think we'll have...
	I was trying to do two, because the first week of June, I got to be in New York on a Wednesday, so...
	And we got a big party here on Tuesday.
	It's the big introduction of the company to the press.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah.
	British Telecom is putting it together.
	It's like, you know, really big deal.
	Shortage house.
	It's going to be wall-to-wall celebrities from the underground.
	Oh, man, you should have flown me over for that.
	I should have, yeah.
	But guess what?
	I didn't.
	I noticed.
	Actually, I need another long flight like a hole in the head.
	Yeah, I can only imagine.
	I'm not like you.
	I really actually enjoy the 10-hour flights back and forth and back and forth.
	Yeah, well, it's been good, man.
	I think I'm going to be here for hopefully the rest of the month at least.
	You said that the last time.
	Yeah, and then the next day I was in front of your doorstep.
	Pretty much, yeah.
	No, no, it's good.
	We've got a lot going on over here, so that needs attention too.
	That's right.
	So, okay.
	I think we're wrapping up.
	We've got our 80 minutes in.
	It's more than enough.
	Is that actually it?
	Holy crap.
	Okay.
	Well, usually we're looking for a theme.
	I don't think we had a theme this week, actually.
	Complaining.
	Oh, yeah.
	We've got to come up with a name for the show.
	Oh, the complaint department.
	Yes.
	May I take your number, please?
	Next.
	All right.
	So maybe we'll get some more career stories out of you next week after you've processed it?
	Could be.
	Okay.
	Coming to you from the Curry Manor, where it is still nice and toasty hot on a Saturday afternoon at five minutes to seven.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. DeVork, where it's just warming up here in Northern California.
	And we'll talk to you again next week, right here on No Agenda.

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