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June 22, 2008 - No Agenda

01:41:19

36: Yahoo+Microsoft=Britney Spears

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	Coming to you not only from opposite ends of the globe, but also opposite ends of the generational gap.
	It's time once again for No Agenda.
	Coming to you from the affluent suburb of Surrey known as Guilford in the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
	It's affluent, huh?
	Oh hell yeah.
	I'm John C. Dvorak coming to you from the less than affluent sections of Northern California.
	We're well known as the affluence.
	The real people live.
	The real people.
	No, man.
	The salt of the earth is in Guilford, my friend.
	There might be some salt there, but that has nothing to do with the population.
	Hey, we didn't do our weather check.
	I've got a beautiful day.
	How are you doing in San Francisco?
	It's kind of foggy, which means it could be really hot this afternoon.
	It's been very hot in the last few days.
	It was 100 the other day.
	Oh, crap.
	We've had some extremely hot weather, which always results in this fog.
	Now, whether or not it's going to burn off is another issue.
	It's been nothing like that over here, obviously.
	But it has been nice.
	We have a nice day today, a little bit of a breeze, a little bit of sun, a couple of clouds.
	It's nice.
	I don't know how you can see anything.
	You were partying all last night.
	Tell us about it.
	Yeah, so actually, normally we record the show around, what is it, probably around 5.30 p.m.
	my time.
	It's about 9.30 a.m.
	your time.
	On Saturday.
	And I'd already sent John a note and said, look, we've been invited to this party and it's in Brighton, which is about an hour from here, down south right on the coast, which is famous for a number of reasons.
	I think one of them is there's some political conventions that take place there, but Brighton does have some, I think, some pretty big historic significance.
	There's a beach there.
	It's Brighton Beach.
	Correct.
	And you know what?
	The architecture and the beach, and interestingly enough, it being the gay capital of the United Kingdom, it has a very interesting San Francisco vibe.
	Huh.
	Yeah.
	It really does.
	I didn't know it was the gay capital.
	Well, I don't know if it's the capital, but yeah, I think it has that dubious honor.
	And it does have a beach.
	Anyway, so this was a party that was being thrown by David Hill, who's the president and founder of E3 Entertainment.
	Basically what they do is they provide all the entertainment for the big Thomas Cook vacation packages, which is kind of interesting because that's everything from trips to Disneyland to the big cruise ships.
	Yeah, and so Patricia and I were invited by Super Agent Keith, and it was a charity dinner for two children's charities.
	So it's one of those things, kind of like a rubber chicken type thing, but let's go see, let's go hang out, let's go to Brighton.
	Was it a gay event?
	Yes and no.
	I mean, a lot of like cruise theater, you know, cruise line type theater stuff with dancers and can-can.
	And so, yeah, that was obviously some major camp aspects.
	Yeah, it was kind of a gay event in a way.
	Which usually can be pretty funny.
	I think the funniest thing about this was just our table.
	You have not met Keith Bishop, who we call Super Agent Keith, but he's tied into 20 years at the BBC and he's been independent for a number of years.
	And so he knows everybody and knows everything about everybody.
	And he has friends like Mickey the News Agent, Mickey Kebab Knife, all of these shady kind of figures who travel in his circles.
	And, you know, some D-Leberties.
	Anyway, it was a very...
	Sorry?
	Sounds like a laundry list of personalities from the movie Goodfellas.
	Well, there was one thing...
	Exactly.
	It does kind of sound...
	And it was a bit like that.
	And what was interesting is, so, you know, one of these round tables where you sit with ten people, and I'm sure Keith bought the table for, you know, like a thousand pounds or whatever it is.
	And, you know, so you're kind of interacting with people, and then as the evening goes on...
	Now, remember, this is a first for us kind of in the British culture.
	As the evening goes on and the wine flows more freely, boy, you know, things get kind of loose and pretty funny.
	And there was this one guy...
	Kevin the Comedian.
	I don't know his last name.
	I do recognize him from several of those stand-up shows that they have over here in the UK, very similar to the States on television.
	And at one point, he said, okay, here's what we're going to do.
	On the count of three, we're all going to start laughing and like someone just said something really hilarious and everyone will think we have the funniest table and the best place to be.
	And they all did it.
	And it was absolutely something that I think I will repeat today.
	No matter where I am at one of these rubber chicken dinners, it's pretty funny because everyone looks over like, crap, man, I'm at the wrong table.
	I should have been sitting with those guys.
	It's like Woody Allen on the wrong train in Stardust Memories.
	If only I had seen it, I could comment.
	Oh, great movie.
	Actually, that's a movie you should see.
	A lot of people believed it was the swan song to the funny period of Woody Allen because it was about all the other movies he did previous.
	Actually, a lot of people, including myself, think it's one of his best movies.
	You got a copy?
	I'm sure you can rip one for me, or do I have to actually go through the process of finding it?
	Talk later.
	But anyway, it was really nice.
	The most amazing thing is Brighton, just in general.
	I was completely blown away.
	It's a rather large city.
	It's only 25 minutes from Gatwick, which is interesting because where we are is also 25 minutes away from Gatwick, but it's on the sea.
	It has...
	A lot of entertainment, nightlife, etc.
	It has a fantastic pier.
	It has an old one that is still kind of decrepit there in the sea, which is, I think because it's protected, they don't get rid of it.
	But the new one is just amazing, which is very much like a Coney Island type of pier.
	I believe that Gordon Ramsay did one of his Kitchen Nightmare shows.
	I'm sure he did.
	I'm sure he must have.
	There must be a ton of places for him to work on in his management skills there.
	It was really nice, you know, and honestly, after just driving down there and being around there, you know, driving through it a bit, Patricia and I were like, you know, we should consider moving here.
	I mean, it's like...
	There's no difference from London, except, you know, here's actually, it appears to be still very British.
	The architecture is exactly the kind that we like, which, as I said, is kind of like that San Franciscan, but also London, Terrace Houses.
	You've got the sea, you've got a beach, you've got Shoreham Airport, 10 minutes away, which is good for Daddy-O. Gatwick, 25 minutes away.
	It's like, oh, you know, that might be an option.
	Why don't you do it?
	Well, we're looking.
	In fact, it was funny because I said to Patricia, as I was making my tea before the show, I said, okay, hon, I'm going to go do the show.
	Is Christina home?
	No, she's out at Liz's house.
	Okay, could you please not surf and I'll just close your email?
	She's like, oh, great.
	I just had my cup of tea and I was ready to sit down and look at real estate and writing.
	Okay, well, I guess I won't then.
	You know, one of those jobs.
	I guess I won't.
	But we can't both use the internet at the same time for bandwidth intensive applications if one of them is Skype.
	Yeah, no, you should get a second line.
	I put an order in months ago with Virgin, which is the Virgin Media.
	They bought NTL, the cable company, formerly known as NT Hell, and nothing has changed in that regard.
	You can't get them out.
	You can't get them out here.
	Maybe in December.
	It's like, okay.
	Well, I'll probably move to Brighton by then.
	How's the connectivity in Brighton?
	Have you checked into it?
	Because I know that one of the reasons you wanted to move in further was to get better connectivity.
	I have a feeling it's going to be a hell of a lot better.
	I mean, compared to Guilford, Brighton is big smoke.
	I mean, it's major.
	It's a real...
	It's a metropolis.
	That's what kind of blew me away.
	I'm sorry, you think you can get more house for your money?
	No, I think it's going to be about equally as expensive.
	In fact, the vibe is, from the people that I spoke there, it's like everyone from London is now moving here, keeping a pied-à-terre in the city, of course, for when you have your West End show.
	But no, I think it's...
	Well, in general, real estate here, they're predicting the papers now that there's going to be a 9% decline in prices overall, 40% decline in actual properties sold.
	That's good.
	It's the buyer's market.
	That's when you buy.
	I think I'm going to wait just a little bit longer.
	I don't think it's quite there yet.
	Meanwhile, of course, the interest rates for mortgages are going up.
	How crazy is that?
	That's one of those deals.
	What do we call it?
	Stagflation.
	I see it everywhere now since you taught me the word.
	Stagflation.
	A classic.
	Almost.
	Let's go back to the party.
	So you said this party had fireworks and everybody was plastered.
	Yeah, it was very British.
	Patricia and I don't really drink a glass of wine, but then near the end there, so everyone went outside on the balcony and there was fireworks.
	It was a nice little display right off the beach.
	And then everyone went back in and just started to drink and dance.
	And I'm like, dude, it's like midnight and I'm tired.
	I got an hour to drive back and I'm not going to sit around here and drink anymore.
	And you just see people kind of melt away.
	But I'll tell you, the British, when they drink, they're funny.
	By the way, they're funny when they don't drink.
	But they're not annoying drunk.
	They're just nicely drunk.
	That seems to contrast with the Irish.
	I have no experience with the Irish.
	But they've certainly got their wits about it.
	If you go to more pubs in London and you run into these Irish later in the night, they tend to be argumentative.
	Well, just look at the Lisbon Treaty.
	I think that that's probably a genetic thing.
	It has nothing to do with drinking.
	They are definitely argumentative.
	So while we're on the topic of the Brits, did you see the, by the way, if you get a chance, my blog posts that are up now, which, of course, by the time people hear this, they'll miss it, but check the weekend stuff.
	So Martha Stewart was banned from going to England because she was busted in the U.S. for that ridiculous insider trading scandal.
	I guess she's a threat to society over there.
	They can't handle her.
	She's going to come in there and corrupt the public?
	Well, probably.
	But I guess the law here is they don't hand out visas to convicted criminals.
	They have the places crawling with terrorists.
	That's not really true, John.
	Just don't tell anyone over here.
	Yeah, no, they're not convicted terrorists, okay?
	They're the terrorists of the non-convicted kind.
	So that's the deal.
	If you're a convicted criminal, then you're denied entry into the UK. And, you know, so obviously no one wants to touch that one because if they're going to let Martha Stewart in, then, you know, okay, so that's an exception to the rule.
	What other exceptions are there?
	They'll never let her in.
	No one wants to deal with that shit right now.
	And by the way, screw her.
	I don't want her over here either.
	Well, she has business interests, I believe.
	She needs to take care of.
	No, I think she wants to start business interests.
	That's the report I read.
	At least she should just get a second citizenship.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm sure there's some rules about convicted criminals for dual citizenship as well.
	You can always buy one in Canada.
	It's so funny, though, to see Charles Koppelman, who...
	Wasn't he a bigwig at Viacom, Charles Koppelman?
	The name rings a bell.
	I don't remember.
	So he's now the president of Martha Media or whatever it's called.
	But they're also living together if they're not married.
	I don't know.
	So it's kind of funny to see that.
	See different statements show up.
	Charles Koppelman, never mentioned as Martha's partner, making statements.
	But, you know, I understand.
	Look, of course, you know, the woman's not a threat to society.
	No more than what's going on in the city of London right now with these traitors who are jacking up the price of oil.
	You know, there are some guys that are onto that, John.
	Yeah.
	Michael Greenberger is one of them.
	So, what I've read over here, and people have not heard previous episodes of No Agenda.
	So, the general thinking of one of the reasons why the cost of oil has skyrocketed so quickly is that there's still a loophole.
	Very similar to the one that Enron used in the energy trading crisis, which ultimately resulted in rolling blackouts in California.
	But that has not been closed for commodity trading in oil futures.
	And interestingly, it turns out that there's a huge amount of that going on in London City, which is the financial center of the UK, of Europe, I would say, arguably.
	And they've even introduced something called the Balls Clause.
	Have you heard of this?
	No, tell me.
	It's kind of like a blocking action, because the U.S. is now trying to reach out and say to the City of London, hey, you guys have got to have limits on the amount of commodities you're trading, and they also have to provide more disclosure as to what their positions are.
	And they have all kinds of...
	Because the City of London has its own law.
	Did you know that?
	It's its own entity.
	It's not actually...
	It may not even be a part of England as far as I know.
	I kid you not.
	Yeah, I know some of that.
	I don't know about that part, but yeah.
	But yeah, it has its own mayor.
	It's a square mile.
	It's its own entity.
	It has its own tax laws.
	That, I think, is true.
	Right, but you should mention to people that London, the greater London is one thing, but the city of London is this little bitty piece in the middle.
	Yeah, and it's a square mile.
	It's a square mile where all the banks are, all the financial trading takes place.
	They have their own mayor, their own laws, and God knows what else.
	And they have their own police uniforms.
	Yeah, their own police uniforms.
	I think all of their services, fire, everything is all separate.
	Anyway, so they don't want the U.S. meddling with what they're doing, and so they're trying to block that.
	And in fact, I should look this up.
	The European Union is also on to this.
	Yeah, almost everybody's on to it except the American press.
	The American press has still been running stories about, well, it's because there's a shortage, we're running out of oil, and we're wasting it, and we need to be more green.
	And that green thing, it's starting to bother me more and more now that I'm looking at, you know, what taxes are being written and what examples are being given.
	I mean, is it all, does it all, John, just boil down to this one report by the IPCC, whatever those guys are called, the International Poobah Grand Commission of whatever, who came out with a report that said, you know, basically we're burning up the earth.
	Is it all based on that one report?
	Is that how all these CO2 taxes all of a sudden came into play while we were asleep, apparently?
	No, I think it's all based on Al Gore's work.
	Well, it's part of the same thing.
	Al Gore was the public version of the IPCC report.
	Yeah, yeah, no, Gore's been instrumental in creating this panic.
	Like, what's changed, you know?
	There was a funny report in the Financial Times, I think it was yesterday, and it was a review of one of Al Gore's speeches, because I guess he still goes around the world and does these speeches with his famous PowerPoint.
	Right, he flies around in his G5, you know, or...
	Yeah, well, it gets better because...
	It's in the Hummer.
	The Hummer is rolled out of the C-130.
	But wait a minute.
	It gets better because, you know, he has a disclaimer, which I guess is pretty normal that you hand...
	Or not a disclaimer.
	Maybe it's just a document that's handed out to...
	It's like a non-disclosure, isn't it?
	It's not really non-disclosure.
	I know this for a fact.
	He won't let the media listen to this stuff.
	But what it says, it's part disclosure Where he says that, you know, he discloses that he represents several investments in firms, in green technology, etc.
	And, you know, basically one of those forward-looking statements may not represent, etc.
	So it kind of sounds like what he's doing, he's going around, he's saying, we're all going to die, but invest in these companies who are trying to keep you alive.
	Yeah, I think there's a requirement for him to do that.
	I think there's an SEC requirement because he has interests in all these things he's promoting.
	It's like those crazy statements you see in the bottom of certain kinds of press releases.
	He's just covering his ass, basically.
	Because he's doing that, I guess.
	Yeah, well, he's a shill for his, you know, he's making money.
	I mean, he left public life, you know, basically worth a couple million dollars.
	Now he's worth $130 million or something like that.
	Really?
	Yeah, he's really worth a lot.
	But it's got to be from the speaking engagements and from the investments.
	It's not from the movie.
	The movie doesn't make anything.
	No, no, no.
	The movie was just a promotional tool for his other stuff.
	Right.
	I mean, basically, the movie is what you call an advertorial for all practical purposes.
	Well, it's an outrage.
	It's an outrage.
	I'm outraged!
	I'm pissed off.
	I remember when this IPCC report came out.
	I was there when Al Gore presented the movie for the first time at the Kleiner Perkins CEO retreat in, what is it?
	I'm thinking Pebble Beach, whatever it is.
	Not Pebble Beach.
	Anyway, it doesn't matter.
	I was there, you know, and I'm looking at this like, okay, that's interesting.
	And then I start reading a bit of the controversy about the IPCC report.
	And all of a sudden, you turn around and it's like there's tax increases in petrol and everything you can imagine all for this greenhouse.
	I'm like, well, that's kind of, that happened pretty quick.
	Yeah, we go from zero to 100.
	It was too busy building a company.
	How dumb was I? Imagine the public just running around like chickens with their heads cut off, waving their arms about this stuff.
	But without even really...
	I mean, there's lots of ulterior research, but no one ever does anything with it.
	And by the way, how come people can predict...
	How we're going to burn up within the next hundred years, I'm obviously just editorializing for a fact.
	I know where you're going with this line.
	I was hoping to use this line myself.
	Well, here it comes.
	They can't even predict the fucking weather for tomorrow.
	Exactly.
	That's what I want to know.
	They can't predict the weather for tomorrow.
	Neither can I, by the way.
	I can do six hours.
	I can see some systems where you can reasonably predict when and where it's going to hit, but 10 years, 20 years out?
	No way!
	And I'm just talking wind.
	I'm not even talking temperature.
	Well, the other problem that we've noticed is that anyone who comes up with any counter-argument whatsoever, no matter how...
	Yeah, they're demonized.
	They're shouted down.
	It's amazing.
	In fact, I get the biggest kick out of it.
	I think it's hilarious because the public...
	We post a lot of stuff on the blog about this.
	We have both sides of it because we have an interesting, well-rounded group of bloggers.
	But the funny thing is that it always gets a bunch of comments because people are coming in and out of the woodwork about this thinking it's a scam.
	And then the other ones say, well, then you have the true believers and you have these two guys shouting at each other.
	But to tell you the truth, I think the public is pretty much split down the middle on this.
	And they're probably more on the side of being skeptics than being true believers.
	I think that's actually a minority.
	I think it certainly warrants a little bit more investigation or just a little bit more because there are some obvious questions.
	And before we just continue with all of this taxation and there's so much tax that everything you do, there's a CO2 tax on it.
	I'm like, that can't be right.
	CO2 tax, I love it.
	Isn't that true?
	That's what it always boils down to, CO2 tax.
	Oh, okay.
	Don't forget your carbon footprint.
	That's my favorite one.
	Why did that show up in a nomenclature?
	Here's how that happened.
	I know what happened there.
	What happened is, first the carbon credits came into play, right?
	So you could offset your carbon usage.
	So to offset your carbon usage, of course, you had to have a calculator, and there's a million of these on the internet, and they all give you different answers, by the way, that calculates your carbon usage, i.e.
	your carbon footprint.
	I think that's the genealogy there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's a beauty.
	I mean, I consider myself fairly adept at marketing strategies, but this one here is way over...
	I mean, this one's beyond...
	This is almost like...
	I actually ran into the woman who did this, by the way.
	I was a student of marketing, and one of the things I've always admired, although it's now kind of missing, is you remember during the VCR days, there used to be this thing called VCR Plus.
	Oh, yeah, in the newspaper.
	You'd have a little scanner or a code.
	It was a little code.
	Yeah, yeah. yeah.
	So this thing became like a licensed system on all these VCRs.
	Every VCR started to get them, and it was called VCR Plus.
	And then the newspapers all ran the numbers, and it was amazing to me.
	So I finally tracked down the woman.
	It was a woman who dreamed this whole concept up, who was a marketing person.
	And I had a long chat with her because I admired, you know, basically just a compliment for pulling off a stunt like that because to me it was like, wow, how do you make that work?
	Because that's a lot of work.
	Yeah.
	It rolled out internationally, Ben.
	It was all over the world they had that thing going.
	Yeah.
	Of course, you know, once somebody, you know, I mean, I don't know, it just died.
	I think, I don't know what the licensing fees were.
	I actually would like to get a hold of her again to find out what she thinks happened that would kill it completely.
	It's gone.
	I think what happened is there were too many channels, too many cable and satellite channels coming on board, and there was no effective way to get the information.
	That could be.
	But the whole thing was a formula.
	It was the channel, this and that, and the other thing.
	But anyway, I think it was also because I think the Dish Network and DirecTV, they all have different channel numbers, so the numbers probably wouldn't work.
	So how does that relate to...
	Well, that's what I think.
	That's where I think the same kind of thing with carbon credits, carbon footprints.
	This is all a marketing scheme because, you know, this gore is part of a carbon trading company that, you know, trades your carbon credits for somehow.
	I don't know even how it works, but what it relates to is the fact that you can manage a worldwide marketing effort with something that's just made out of thin air.
	Well, I don't think it's management anymore.
	I think, you know, these guys probably went, holy crap!
	Look what just happened.
	Of course, they may not have...
	First of all, I've got to believe Al Gore actually believes what he's selling.
	And he looks like it.
	He looks like he believes what he's selling it, so that's fine.
	And it may be true.
	Well, no, that's good.
	He should believe it.
	Yeah.
	You have to be a true believer yourself, obviously.
	You've got to be a believer, yeah.
	And I'm not saying that I'm not concerned.
	I'm saying that I'm not too sure, and I don't see conclusive evidence, and I see a lot of other noise that I'd like to investigate.
	Okay.
	So, he believes in it.
	But this took off...
	It's almost like...
	A self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.
	Well, you know, I don't think so.
	You know, let's back up a minute.
	When he was running for president in 2000, and even when he was vice president under Clinton, I think he wrote some book when he was the vice president just before he, you know, this was like, this would be, what, almost 20 years ago.
	He had started on this road.
	Somebody can find it.
	We can look it up on the net.
	But this early book that he wrote was pretty much all whack job stuff.
	I remember critiques of it back then about this guy's crazy.
	Did you write any review of any of his books, maybe, in one of your columns?
	No.
	It was this really early book that he did.
	When he was running for vice president initially, which would be when?
	90...
	What was that?
	94?
	Yeah, something like that.
	I have to think about it.
	But anyway, whatever the case is...
	Earth and Balance?
	It goes back.
	Ecology and the human spirit?
	Maybe.
	Whatever the case was, it's not like it happened overnight.
	And so I'm thinking...
	1992, that book.
	Earth and Balance.
	1992?
	Yeah.
	Well, there you have it.
	I mean, that's a ways back.
	So that might be the one.
	Yeah, 15, 16 years ago.
	So it's not like this happened overnight.
	This is a long-term strategy.
	It was very carefully orchestrated, which is the way all good marketing schemes work.
	They always look like they...
	I mean, it's like the overnight success.
	No way.
	You see some actor, actress.
	You find out they've been doing this for 25 years.
	Yeah.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	But anyway, I think what they tried for a while is they tried to set up some...
	They tried to make the carbon unit into like a tradable commodity.
	It felt like, you know, so you could trade your, first, the government started that.
	You could trade your carbon credits.
	Well, we'll produce, you know, less carbon this year, and China will sell that to you for X, Y, and Z. And I think they tried to bring that into trading systems.
	And maybe that's even done today.
	I don't know.
	I think there is a trading system out there, but the fact of the matter is, if you think about it from some logical perspective, there's really nothing to trade.
	I mean, it's just all air.
	It's literally air.
	There is literally.
	It's like if somebody looked at this from a distance, they would say, how silly is this?
	I mean, it's like crazy.
	Well, no crazier than the taxes that are being put on us based on it.
	You know, the whole thing is nuts.
	Yeah.
	Not, you know, but like I've said, you know, people, if they turn out, you know, I still am dubious about the green thing.
	When I sit over here on top of a hill overlooking San Francisco, and I see every night that city's lit up like a Roman candle, thinking, you know, how serious are we about this?
	If we're in that much trouble, turn off the lights in San Francisco, darken the place.
	Well...
	Just turn them off.
	Turn off the entire city of San Francisco and Los Angeles and Kansas City and New York.
	And I guarantee that we'll be saving a lot of carbon.
	Yeah, there's a lot of ways.
	Are we serious about this or are we just joking?
	Is this just a joke?
	I don't know, man.
	I don't know.
	I'll tell you one thing.
	We invaded Iraq.
	I'm sure you blogged or one of your guys blogged it that now all the big oil companies are now finally, after 30 years, they're allowed to do business with Iraq and they're allowed to set up oil fields.
	Yeah, no shit.
	Oh boy, isn't that great?
	Wow, isn't that fantastic?
	We installed a democratic government and now we can do contracts, finally.
	So they're all doing these deals.
	They're chopping it up exactly the way the plans always show that have been available on the internet for years.
	And the prices are still high.
	Go figure.
	Well, the prices are high because of these traders in London and Dubai.
	Yes, exactly.
	And you know what?
	Even the European Commission...
	Who I guess are kind of boss when it comes to this, said, yeah, we should go look at that because that's not right.
	And we should have a report done by October 2008.
	A report.
	Yeah, which will then be discussed.
	Yeah, it's like, we're going to discuss the report in November?
	It's like, we need action now.
	And then the Irish will vote against it.
	You know, since you brought it up, Of course, that's the hottest topic in Europe, is the Lisbon Treaty.
	And I've been thinking about this, about the whole idea of a referendum, which is interesting.
	And I've been looking into it, and in America, certainly some states, California most notably, have a lot of different ways that you can call a public referendum.
	Which is known as, I guess, direct democracy.
	But that's kind of interesting, you know, in these days of text voting for your favorite American Idol or X Factor or kicking someone out of the Big Brother house.
	It's an interesting solution to changing things.
	Yeah, I know in California you can put a petition together and then get just about anything you want put on the ballot.
	It's like a proposition, is that what it's called then?
	Yeah, well, that's the way it ends up.
	But the exact, you know, I think I have to think about it.
	I think it is a referendum or something like that.
	I don't think we take advantage of probably the multitude of possibilities that a referendum offers.
	Believe me, in California, they take advantage of all of it.
	I mean, the number of petitioners you've got to get is pretty high, which is the problem, but they're trying everything.
	I mean, they've had anti-gay marriage, they had the Proposition 104 some years ago when they froze all property taxes, and that's still in play.
	And there's a whole bunch of stuff.
	Most of the stuff gets voted down.
	Why?
	Why do you think most of it gets voted down?
	Most of this stuff gets voted down because it's always written in a confusing language.
	We see these things so much, these propositions, that we're always skeptical about being tricked.
	Which is exactly the problem.
	This is interesting.
	That's exactly what 40% of the Irish said.
	They said, I voted no because I felt like I was getting tricked because it was too complicated.
	How interesting is that?
	Yeah, well, that's one of the problems that you have with these things.
	They have to be simplified, and they have to make sense, and then they have to have a bunch of people on board.
	And then you have to worry about people who, you know, that are against them because they're of vested interest.
	And so they'll run TV ads that will try to make you think you're being tricked, or they will tell you to do one thing and hope that you do another.
	And it gets pretty...
	It gets pretty intense.
	So 90% of the time, people just vote no.
	And then people go back to the drawing board.
	Some of these things keep coming back over and over and over again.
	Interesting.
	Well, I found out that in the Lisbon Treaty, there's actually something called the European Citizens Initiative.
	And it's one of the differences between the original Constitution of Europe, which got voted down by the French and the Dutch, and has turned into the Lisbon Treaty, is there's a method.
	And of course, the language is so freaking ambiguous that I think that's where they fucked it up.
	If you have a million signatures, and of course it doesn't specify if that's written signatures or electronic signatures, etc.
	If you have a million of them from enough significant member states, which of course is not defined, then you can put legislation before the European Commission...
	Who then can, no, no, you can invite, that's the language, you can invite the European Commission to put a legislative move towards European Parliament where a vote would be taken.
	Which I think is a pretty good move, except for the whole invited bit.
	It's like, it shouldn't be an invite, it should be, you know, like, mandatory.
	But it's an interesting move, just in...
	Yeah, you're right.
	It sounds pretty wimpy.
	For one thing, a million signatures has got to be a problem.
	No, I think that's easy.
	I think that's really easy.
	Well, yeah, if it was electronic, it would be.
	But what if you have to actually, people sign things and then check?
	One of the things they do here is that they actually go over, you know, it has to be a signed thing, and then you have to, then they check.
	But look, John, here's where I got them.
	Here's where I got them.
	The Eurovision Song Contest, which is a European Union initiative, I don't know about, I mean, what's legal about the song contest is just a, you know, it's just a TV entertainment show.
	It's not like anyone's legally binding or anything that you can trust.
	It's a huge economic impulse if you win the contest.
	It's like the Olympics, and the contest is in your country next year.
	I mean, it's all bullshit.
	I'm not defending the Eurovision Song Contest.
	I'm just saying that I think there's an argument to be made.
	Let's say that they allow...
	Text voting.
	The EU would fall apart if they allowed text messaging petitions...
	Because people would be petitioning him for everything.
	If you get on television for 10 minutes, you could probably initiate something.
	Yes, I'm liking that, John.
	That's my point.
	I'm liking that.
	That sounds like a good idea.
	Of course, they'd have nothing but 100 petitions a month.
	Yeah, you're right.
	It's probably pretty funny.
	It would be great, but that's not, yeah.
	But remember, you have to do it from a significant number of member states, so that may mean that you have to get...
	What does that mean?
	Does it mean 10?
	Does it mean all of them?
	What if it means only one person from each one?
	I mean, can you have like a million or 999,000 from one country and then 10 from here and 10 from there and 10 from here and 10 from there?
	That would be all of...
	Well, there's one proposal that's out there for what they call the fundamentals is it would have to be from a minimum of four member states, which probably means four different languages, four different campaigns.
	Not trivial, you know.
	You do have to put some effort behind it to get it done.
	But I think it should be possible, you know.
	It would be kind of interesting.
	There's a lot of people doing it already.
	They're treating it as law already, and they're putting together all kinds of campaigns for trying to get their million signatures.
	I think you're overlooking something.
	Okay.
	You're overlooking the fact that the EU is created to kind of repurpose Europe as a fascist state, not so they can be pushed around by the public.
	I posed that exact language to a minister of European Parliament earlier this week, and I said a colleague of mine in the United States said it sounded like a fascist state takeover, and his literal answer was, I wouldn't want to go that far.
	Which I thought was pretty funny.
	I'm like, okay...
	I don't know.
	I'm looking at both sides of this.
	To me, it's just absolutely fascinating.
	I'm discovering that I'm a closet politics junkie.
	Particularly these days where you can download anything, read any parliament member or commission's member speeches, voting records.
	It's fascinating to look at this stuff.
	Yeah, well, when you're in the gulag, hopefully you'll have a connection.
	We can still do the show.
	Let me just mention one more thing and I'll get off of the topic.
	This is kind of funny.
	So, after Ireland voted no in the referendum, obviously, politically, just to keep the vibe alive, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of the UK, had to get this thing ratified.
	In the House of Parliament, you know, in order to save any kind of face, of course, in being in close proximity to Ireland, etc.
	So they ramrodded this through.
	The Queen signed her, put her signature on it, which means now has royal assent.
	And they're acting like it's all been ratified, but it hasn't because there's this guy, he calls himself a Euroskeptic, Stuart Wheeler.
	You've got to look this guy up.
	He's 72.
	He was, at one point, very wealthy from business that he had done.
	But he is suing the government.
	He's suing Gordon Brown and the government over the fact that they promised to hold a referendum on the constitutional document of the European Union.
	And the court...
	Actually wrote a letter to the Parliament and said, you know, you don't really think, I'm paraphrasing, but really strong language, like, please don't really think that you're just going to ratify this treaty without the court's decision whether it's legal or not to have done this without a referendum.
	And that, I think, is highly interesting, and I'm really liking this Stuart Wheeler guy for doing that.
	He's my hero.
	Can you see like 72?
	And he's like, fuck it, I'm just going to sue these guys.
	And everyone's poo-pooing it, but wow, wouldn't that be a freak out if the court said, you know what, it's illegal, you have to do a referendum in the UK. What do you think would happen?
	Well, I think it would be voted down immediately in current status.
	Look, what it boils down to is exactly what you said.
	Everyone's skeptic.
	Everybody loves Europe.
	Everyone in Europe is into the whole thing.
	We like working with each other.
	We like playing soccer against each other, football, if you will.
	We like going to each other's countries and doing business, and all that stuff is great, and we see all the benefits, but we don't trust these fuckers.
	You know, it's...
	It's a bunch of legal speak.
	No one understands what it's about.
	Everyone's running around.
	There's thousands of these guys.
	They sit in Brussels.
	They sit in Strasbourg.
	It's like we didn't elect them.
	It's distrustful.
	Somehow someone has to figure out how to turn all of that skepticism into a positive pro-Europe positioning or feeling, I guess.
	How about this as something I'm not quite getting?
	You know, they've already taken down it throughout Europe.
	You can travel from one country to another pretty effortlessly.
	There's no more of those border guards.
	Excuse me, except for the countries who have a protocol.
	So, the United Kingdom had a specific protocol when they joined, which is another thing that pisses me off.
	And they said, yeah, we'll participate in Europe, but none of that let everyone travel around shit.
	We only let people in that we want to let in.
	Well, I don't blame them for that.
	But anyway, so, but generally speaking, once you get to the continent...
	You can freely go from country to country to country until you get out of the EU.
	Yeah, no passport control.
	Yeah, you don't need a passport.
	You're not stopped at every border on the train with some guy coming in and looking at everything in your papers, please, and then stamping your passport left and right.
	And you can use the same money everywhere.
	And the money's been normalized, pretty much.
	And their trade agreements are in place.
	What's wrong with just stopping where you are right now and just going with it, as opposed to adding this bureaucratic overhead?
	I'm not getting why all this other stuff even has to be passed.
	It seems like they've done most of it.
	I can give you the answer.
	Good.
	Because that question has been posed directly.
	And here's the answer that Barroso, the current president, gives.
	He says, it's for immigration policy.
	So, who do we let inside the borders of the EU? Because, of course, now you have a whole bunch of entry points.
	It's about terrorism and safety.
	There you go.
	Big hit words.
	So, how do we protect the EU from terrorism?
	And it's about financial stability.
	Which is, of course, the central banking and where a lot of the distrust is right now.
	So it's for those...
	Oh, and of course, the universal human rights.
	And that's what it's about.
	It's about those main things.
	So let's go over these issues.
	Let's start with the...
	So right now, anyone who wants to come into the EU as a free pass, is that what they're saying that they're worried about?
	I mean, right now, if I'm a terrorist coming out of Pakistan, let's say, from an Al-Qaeda camp...
	I can go move right now into Hamburg just effortlessly.
	No, I think what they're saying is that there are inconsistencies.
	Every country has its own policy, its own security and anti-terrorism measures.
	They want to harmonize all of that so everyone's working off of the same playbook.
	So yes, I think that you can easily enter one country or...
	Look, dude...
	I can fly from almost anywhere and land almost anywhere and get in.
	It's all kind of academic anyway.
	You think you can fly in from Pakistan?
	Yeah, I think these things are...
	Look, it's not hard to get into any country.
	Unless you're going through the main airport, yeah, it's going to be a little more complicated.
	But that's really what it's about.
	It's about harmonization.
	About each country having...
	It's all about databases, too, John.
	It's all about sharing the information, which is a huge point.
	No one wants their government to share...
	You know, the personal data of their citizens with other countries yet, unless they really understand what's being done with it.
	That's what it is.
	It's all about, in a way, locking down the global borders of Europe.
	That is certainly one of it.
	And I can see where if you want to have that kind of uniform protection, you've got to set it up.
	And it's got to be legal.
	So I wonder if Martha Stewart can get into Paris.
	Well, I'm sure that she...
	Well, who's the...
	Remember the photographer?
	What was the filmmaker who married the 13-year-old?
	What was his name?
	The American?
	Roman Polanski.
	Polanski, yeah.
	By the way, I would recommend, before we even talk about Roman Polanski, anybody out there to find a copy of the documentary that had just been finished about this case...
	I heard you talking about that somewhere.
	Was that on Twit again?
	No, I don't think so.
	The technology show?
	Whatever the case is, I would recommend people watch this before they make any comment because it turns out to be a little more interesting story than we're led to believe.
	Yeah.
	Anyway.
	But the point...
	Yeah, but he wasn't, you know...
	So the answer is yes.
	I think it's easier to get into one country depending...
	Yeah, I think Martha Stewart could probably get into Amsterdam.
	No problem.
	She could jump in the back of my plane.
	I'd land that bitch right here.
	No problem.
	She couldn't jump in the back of your plane because you're taken off from England.
	No, I'd be in Amsterdam.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'd pick her up.
	So you could fly her in if she wanted to get in.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Not a problem.
	So maybe that's what she should have done.
	She should have just gone to France instead of England directly, got on a tunnel.
	No, because remember, England has their own protocol.
	They get to deny whoever they want.
	Okay, but she could fly in on your plane.
	Yeah, it would be illegal, but she could get in.
	That's my point.
	Oh, okay.
	It would not be a legal process.
	So when you fly into England on that little plane of yours, you don't check into anything?
	You just fly in, like, Adam Curry coming in, I'm landing, and then you land, and that's it?
	No, I'm glad you asked.
	No, you have to...
	In fact, the only country in the Union, you have to fill out what's known as a GENDEC, a General Declaration.
	And you have to send that in 24 hours before the actual inbound flight takes place.
	Now, you can land at a number of airports where they have passport control.
	Ten minutes from where I usually land is big in Hill.
	You land there, you show your passport, and then you can go wherever you want.
	You can take off again, fly anywhere you want in the UK. So if you have a field that doesn't have passport facilities, like Fair Oaks, the one that I use, you fill out the general declaration, you send it off, the tower faxes it to the authorities.
	But dude, it's not like they're there.
	By the way, they are there often to check.
	But certainly not every single time.
	I mean, on a Friday or Saturday, yeah, they're almost always there because that's when everyone's going off to France and coming back and forth and they're checking all kinds of things.
	But during the week, no, I've never had anyone check on me.
	So Martha should get a hold of you.
	No, absolutely not.
	So then there's the other one, John.
	I think really the financial one is the main one.
	It's all about the European Central Bank.
	It's all about the numbers.
	Keeping inflation in check, keeping the GDP numbers in check, they're all set targets.
	They've been that way for many, many years.
	So all the EU countries are trying to keep their economies balanced.
	And that's what it's about.
	And it's not a bad thing.
	Yeah, no, it's not a bad thing, except for the fact that, you know, I don't think that the Germans should be telling the French how to make cheese.
	So let's go back to this Martha Stewart thing.
	It has nothing to do with cheese.
	It does.
	And when it boils down, I guarantee cheese is going to be involved.
	So let's go back to the Martha Stewart thing.
	I don't care about Martha Stewart.
	How did this come up in the news anyway?
	Why didn't Martha just fly to France without making a big...
	You don't need a visa.
	I mean, I could fly to England.
	I can get on a plane tomorrow and boom, I'm in London and that's the way I stamped the thing when you walk in and that's the end of it.
	Well, I'm sorry, but...
	And she's there floating around for a few days, and then she gets on the channel, and she goes to England, and then she comes in, and they see her, and they say, oh yeah, and boom, and they stand.
	I mean, it seems to me that somewhere along the line, she announced she was coming, and some bureaucrat picked up on it, and then they put her on the no-entry list.
	I mean, it didn't happen when she was bumping against the border.
	It wasn't happening when she was trying to get in.
	It happened before she even tried to fly.
	That's very interesting.
	Well, it sounds like she tried to acquire a visa.
	But why?
	You don't need a visa.
	Well, no, hold on a second.
	There is a lot of shit going on with the visas right now.
	Because the U.S., there is a visa issue.
	There is.
	And the visa issue, I'm not quite sure what it is, but the U.S. now is demanding that anyone who comes into the U.S. has to have a passport, you know, a new machine-readable passport.
	And...
	What they're saying now is, or the request is, what I've seen at the European Union level, is they want all European Union countries to reciprocate.
	And that's when the visa issue goes away.
	But there is a visa issue in some cases.
	But you're right.
	But I would say you're probably right.
	Why the hell is she raising the visa issue before she even flew?
	Because typically you wouldn't even think of it.
	You just get on the plane and you go, right?
	Right.
	Yeah, something's fishy about the story now that I think about it.
	Oh, I know.
	I know how it would happen.
	So here's what happens.
	She books a plane ticket, right?
	The airlines are obliged now, I'm sure you know this, to send all passenger data to the United States prior to the flight.
	Right.
	In fact, I've written about this on the blog.
	And they've actually added some new provisors.
	We're essentially very similar to the way it was in the Soviet Union, where you can't get out of the country without permission.
	It's almost an exit kind of situation.
	We have exit restrictions now.
	Wow.
	In fact, there's two articles on the blog that ran this on Saturday or Sunday.
	Let me read you the headline.
	Dude, we are so living in a science fiction movie.
	Well, I mean, it's just the Soviet Union is the same way.
	People are going to just get used to it.
	Starting today, you may not travel around the country.
	You can't even go around the country as an anonymous American anymore.
	Americans who prefer to fly without showing ID will be turned away by airport security beginning June 21st.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	New policy, blah, blah, blah.
	And then we get the Martha thing, which is an exit control, yeah.
	You know what they're doing?
	I'm sorry, do you have an article to read?
	Well, no, I'm just saying Martha Stewart's thing was, I claim it's a version of exit control, which is what you had in the Soviet Union.
	That's why people couldn't get out of the country.
	And also all the fascist countries had exit controls, which I suspect will eventually happen with the EU, where you can't leave the EU. You can go all through the EU, but you won't be able to leave it.
	Without having to write papers.
	You'll love this one, John.
	So this is from the Surrey Times.
	Okay?
	So Surrey is the...
	What do you call it?
	It's the part of England where we live.
	A mobile device that can be used to check the identity of suspects stopped by the police is set to be tested in Surrey.
	Police officers across the country will be using handheld fingerprinting units as part of a national pilot scheme known as Lantern.
	So what this thing is, is you'll get stopped on the street or a traffic stop or whatever.
	It's an electronic fingerprint reader.
	And, of course, the article misses the whole point.
	They say, well, you know, so now all of a sudden, you know, your fingerprint will be taken and then you'll be scanned.
	And then if you're wanted for anything, then they nab you.
	But, of course, the point is, and they even say it here.
	Hold on, I should read this.
	The mobile fingerprinting units work by electronically scanning a fingerprint, which is sent using encrypted wireless transmissions, to a database.
	From there, fingerprints can be cross-matched against the 7.5 million prints held on file.
	So, the thing that they neglect to point out here is, of course, that your fingerprint has just been scanned and it's on file.
	Yeah, right, so make sure you can get everybody's fingerprints in the system.
	But that's like science fiction, dude.
	I'm surprised they're not taking the DNA from people as they walk by.
	They can just stick a thing in your mouth.
	That's happening all over the place, too.
	Baby's DNA is being taken.
	Baby's DNA, we already talked about this weeks ago.
	Yeah, true.
	Newborn baby's DNA, first thing it's done is it's taken, put it in a database.
	It's been happening for decades.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, you know, this is just part of the whole, I don't know what the point is, to be honest about it.
	I mean, control issues obviously are part of it.
	I mean, it's like the exit controls.
	I mean, you just don't want people roaming around.
	But I don't see how it's beneficial to the economy or anything.
	There's some other thing going on here.
	Well, isn't it...
	Well, okay, so the conspiracy theorist in me says, well, of course, it's to keep you afraid and keep you diligent.
	Well, maybe it's just also to keep you voting for the right party.
	You know, I've always believed that half of these things, all the surveillance stuff is essentially to...
	I mean, what it always boils down to is not for anything other than control.
	So you have, you know, you can see who your political enemies are.
	It would be very easy to do if you can.
	Now they have this new thing they just passed, which is that the U.S. government was requiring all the credit card companies to turn over all the data.
	In other words, all the purchases you make.
	Of course, this will drive people back into cash.
	Which is probably better anyway.
	Anyway, in fact, we blogged this one, too.
	Now that I think about it, I'm getting pretty depressed here.
	You sound like my wife.
	She's like, would you please stop?
	I don't want to hear about it anymore.
	Stop, stop, stop.
	I don't want to be afraid of the future.
	And you know, the funny thing is, is I remember I was at a direct marketing conference once, and they had, at the time, of Federal Express...
	Made the comment, he says, you know, we have all this data, we can pretty much put a dossier together on anybody and tell you who they're sleeping with, you know, if they have an affair going on, because the data is just such that you can do, with data mining technology, you can figure out what people are up to.
	And this is Federal Express who said this?
	Yeah, the guy at Federal Express said this, but we don't do it.
	No, right, no.
	God, I'd hate to do that.
	But he said it'd be very easy to do if you wanted to.
	I mean, they do certain kinds of profiling, and I've mentioned this before, I think, on this show, which is they profile your spending.
	And it's always amazing to me, because when I try, like, all of a sudden I'll show up in Korea, and, you know, the computer sees, well, this is interesting, and it starts to track me.
	And so when I was in Korea this last time, I did two purchases in a row that one of them was a little sketchy.
	So they froze it and then they opened the account shortly thereafter.
	But they're always worried.
	They look for certain patterns that they think are suspicious.
	And I've challenged people to do this and people have written me back saying they've done it and it does work.
	And it's the following process.
	You take your American Express card and then you go and buy two tanks of gas in a row.
	Mm-hmm.
	With two separate purchases right in a row.
	One, then another.
	And then you go to a locker or a foot locker or someplace and buy a pair of Nikes.
	And an iPod.
	Or that would probably do it too.
	It doesn't take much.
	But then your cart is frozen right there.
	And the guy from Federal Express actually is the one who told this group about this particular process.
	And he says, you know, what it is is that as soon as somebody steals a card, like especially a kid, the first thing they do is they fill up their tank and then they fill up their buddy's tank.
	Their friend's tank, yeah, of course.
	And then they go buy tennis shoes.
	He says this is a standard pattern.
	Yeah.
	So people have actually done this and...
	I'm sure you have a Costco card or something like that.
	They're totally giving you the biggest discounts on buying stuff that you want.
	They're totally locking you in.
	Those guys have more data on you than Federal Express.
	Well, at Costco, you have to use a credit card generally.
	No, but I'm talking about the incentive cards, the membership cards, stuff that you get special discounts if you present your card.
	But here's the point.
	If the U.S. government now is requiring all these card companies to give them all their data...
	Well, you've got a powerful way of profiling anybody.
	You can tell what party they're voting for.
	You can tell what stock they're buying.
	You really see a lot of what they're up to, and then you can use it for crowd control.
	So surely our credit card companies are denying this request?
	Oh, no.
	They're all over it.
	It's no problem.
	They're going to hand it over, really?
	Yeah, well, you know, the government wants it, you do it.
	I mean, this is like the latest thing, they just, the House, the Democrats, or spineless Democrats have passed the bill that says that...
	The FISA bill?
	The bill that says that the telephone companies can give up all this data that they were legally required not to give up through various privacy laws that were passed specifically aimed at the telephone companies.
	And so they've been given a free ride that, no, they won't be prosecuted from, you know...
	But how did that happen?
	I don't understand how that happened.
	And I see some severe disappointment amongst Obama supporters because what I understand is he, in effect, endorsed it and said, yeah, go ahead.
	Yeah, he signed off on it.
	It's fine with him.
	How about Ron Paul?
	Tell me he signed against it.
	Oh, of course he did.
	We don't even have to ask, do we?
	But how outrageous is that?
	This was a huge debate.
	We've got him.
	We've got him by the balls.
	And what happened?
	How did that flip?
	Yeah, probably because of people having these dossiers.
	I mean, this is the reason that the government tries to get as much information.
	They probably have, you know, the goods on everybody.
	You know, once you get all this data, especially credit card data, you can, you know, intimidate anyone.
	So, is this Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, I mean, all these guys, they're turning over our credit card data to the government?
	That's a fact now?
	Well, I don't know that they've started yet, but the...
	This has been passed.
	It's a law.
	Yeah, well, let me find it.
	It's on the blog.
	I don't know if I blogged it, to be honest, but I might have.
	That's an outrage.
	The trouble is the blog is getting to be kind of nutty.
	But the world is going nutty, John.
	That's what's happening.
	Yeah, there's the domestic spying one.
	What is happening?
	And then, here's the danger.
	I'm one of these schmucks who smokes a couple joints.
	I go to YouTube and Google Video.
	And talk about it.
	And I start watching these videos about how it's the evil banking families who are taking control of us.
	And we're all going to be...
	Essentially, we're already living in the matrix.
	We're enslaved to our homes and cars and jobs and...
	Is it really true, or is that just all perception?
	Well, I mean, I think it's going.
	I mean, it's a trend.
	I don't think it's true at all.
	So I'm not sitting here sweating, you know, oh god, now what next?
	Yeah, but imagine you were going through, you know, there's half a billion people in Europe, you know, imagine you're going through those feelings, and then all of a sudden here's all this language that shows up, and all these documents, and like, fuck no, you know, that doesn't sound right.
	Well, that's why they've got to take the public out of the picture.
	How do you do that?
	How do you do that?
	Well, they're doing it.
	The EU is showing how to do it.
	They're leading the way.
	I mean, except for this little thing that happened in Ireland, the EU is showing us how to do it.
	You know, you just put in a bunch of people not elected like you said.
	Here it is.
	It ran on June 19th.
	Senate housing bill writer requires tracking.
	Oh, yeah, this was slipped in to another bill, to a Christopher Dodd bill.
	Senate housing bill requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and all credit card companies to report transactions to the government.
	Oh my God!
	This is an unreported...
	I ran this under underreported news.
	Nobody's really talking about this.
	Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of all America's small businesses.
	The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate...
	Of course.
	Would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.
	And by the way, they're all electronic transactions now.
	My God, this is fantastic.
	Yeah.
	According to Dick Armey, he says, quote, this is a provision with astonishing reach, and it was slipped into the bill just this week.
	Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction in America, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay's PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout.
	That are used by many small lines of business.
	The privacy implications are breathtaking.
	Meanwhile, of course, nobody's writing about this.
	Now, this was a part of what bill, specifically?
	The 630-page Senate housing legislation.
	Christopher Dodd's big bill.
	Oh, man.
	So that's even separate from FISA? Yeah.
	Yeah, this is another thing.
	But this, again, was not, you know, the general media...
	It wasn't even debated on the floor!
	No, this is, you can find this at freedomworks.org.
	I mean, and there's a link to the bill, by the way, itself, at freedomworks.org.
	And I got this, by the way, off of a Twitter.
	One of my Twitterers sent me this link, and I'm just reading it the same way you did.
	It was shocked.
	And in fact, I sent it back.
	I said, is this bullshit?
	That's one of the typical John C. Dvorak response through email, but this was on Twitter.
	Did you say bullshit on Twitter?
	I said BS. Okay.
	Good man.
	But anyway, it's on the June 19th.
	Here, now I see it.
	I'm looking at it right now.
	This is cool, freedomworks.org.
	I haven't seen this site before.
	It's a good site.
	Wow.
	So, has this been passed?
	No.
	Oh, I'm sure it'll be passed.
	Well, there may be time to stop it.
	Hmm, seems unlikely.
	If they can't stop that other thing that Obama signed off on, how are they going to stop this?
	Where's the outrage over that?
	That just doesn't make any sense.
	I don't understand.
	And this is the thing that freaks me out.
	Whenever there's language like, well, of course, under certain circumstances for national security against terrorism, it's like, I just don't want to be safe.
	You know what?
	I'll just live dangerously.
	I'll take my chances.
	You've got to be careful.
	You're already asking for trouble.
	What do you mean?
	A friend of mine who lives in Cornwall can't get into the United States anymore because he was a musician who was arrested for smoking pot in the 80s or the 70s.
	And he can't get into the country now.
	John, let me tell you something.
	People like me, you know, they snuff them out in a huge public way.
	They don't pester them with little shit like that, you know, because they know that it'll only fuel more.
	They'll become a martyr.
	You know, they don't want that.
	Martyr.
	I finally get my 52 virgins.
	No, man, they don't want that.
	But you know what?
	Well, you haven't been arrested for anything anyway.
	No, I haven't.
	But let me say, John, I really just don't care.
	When's the day they're going to stop people from coming into the country who have parking tickets?
	It's going to happen.
	It's going to happen.
	Or they make you pay the parking tickets before you can...
	Dude, dude, that happens in Holland already.
	That happened to me 20 years ago.
	You show up at the Dutch border, this is pre all this Europe stuff, and they literally made me pay parking fines on the spot before they let me in the country.
	Wow.
	Yeah, that's a while ago.
	Well, I'd like to get back to that any minute.
	That's a good way to collect parking tickets.
	You know what they've done here in the United States, which is really interesting, is they've privatized all these parking, you know, like in San Francisco.
	It's not run by the city.
	It's run by a company.
	And so they're not accountable to anybody.
	Dude, this is happening all over the world now.
	In Amsterdam, you can park paying with your GSM phone.
	So, you park in a spot, you go to the little meter thingy, it gives you a code, you SMS some code, and then it's paid for.
	Of course, handily, they know exactly where you were at what moment and how long, you know.
	And of course, that data's safe.
	Just like your credit card data.
	And, you know, this is these modern...
	I mean, yeah, I can see the convenience.
	Convenience, they shouldn't be charging for parking anyway.
	I think the parking thing is that, you know, parking was never meant to be a profit center.
	It was meant to keep traffic moving.
	So you'd have, like, in France, you'd have the blue disc and all these things where you just, you know, you'd say you'd make an agreement, you know, you'd be out of there in an hour or so.
	Yeah, it's like a shared resource.
	Yeah, but now it's like in San Francisco, especially around the Mevio offices...
	It's so funny because the meters, which, by the way, they're all empty.
	I have photos of this.
	Nobody's parking there.
	They park a mile away because you can't park there.
	It's 25 cents for five minutes.
	Five minutes?
	Yeah, the meters right out in front of the office are 25 cents for five minutes and all around there's 25 cents for five minutes.
	By the time you load up to have like 15, you've already blown the first five minutes.
	And I don't even see, and if people actually use these parking spots, these meter boxes would be so full of quarters so quickly that they would be clogged and you wouldn't be able to use them at all.
	I mean, the whole thing is a joke.
	So do they process the fines?
	Is that how it works?
	They collect the fine money as well?
	And it's 50 bucks, by the way.
	And they collect that?
	These commercial companies?
	Yeah.
	You're kidding me.
	So it's not like a city thing.
	It's an actual commercial company thing.
	Yeah, and that's why the prices have been jacked up to the extreme, and the fines are extremely high because you can't really fight it.
	You could go through the court system because there is a way to protest, but this is not going to happen.
	You might as well just forget it.
	John, you're a smart guy who I have in high regard.
	So obviously, we get the government we deserve.
	So what do we need to do to change that?
	Well, the first thing you can do is stop voting in guys like Gavin Newsom, who's obviously behind this thing.
	I mean, these mayors, these do-good Democrats and these phony baloney Republicans, both parties, are full of crap.
	They're obviously in bed with each other.
	They wouldn't have passed that thing where Obama's in on it.
	And, you know, it's just ridiculous.
	We've got to find alternative people who aren't crazy.
	And the problem is, if you look at who runs the political spectrum, like in San Francisco, you have these nutjobs.
	Running against two or three people who have some creds, and the guys with the creds are the ones who put these 25 cents for five-minute parking meters in.
	I mean, you can't win.
	I think it's hopeless, actually.
	Oh, no.
	No, no, no, no.
	We've got kids, man.
	They've got to grow up in some kind of society that's better.
	There are little towns around the country that are okay.
	In fact, there are places where there's no parking meters.
	So you're promoting separatism?
	Just get out of these places.
	They want to exploit the public?
	That way, screw them.
	I don't do business there.
	I mean, I don't see why anybody does business in San Francisco.
	You can't even park to visit one of these companies in that area where there's the 25 cents for five minutes.
	I mean, if you had to do business there, there's no way, without spending like $20 for parking, or $10, depending.
	If there's a baseball game, it goes to $40.
	You can't do business there because you can't park.
	Yeah, but that's easy to say.
	Public transportation is a joke, especially in San Francisco.
	I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.
	No wonder nobody wants to do business in San Francisco.
	But people still do business.
	That's where money is made.
	It's with every metropolis.
	If you want to make a living, you've got to go there.
	We have to fight it.
	We have to get out of these cities that are onerous like this and do business elsewhere.
	You can do plenty of good business outside of San Francisco.
	Hmm.
	I don't know.
	You know, it's hard to get people, it's hard to get staff.
	The location of the Mevio offices was certainly determined by what type of people, what type of personnel we wanted to attract.
	You could have moved to Alameda for that matter, because half the people that work at Mevio live in Alameda or in the East Bay.
	Interesting.
	Yeah, I guess we could have.
	And Alameda's amenable.
	They got a bunch of...
	That's where MySQL guys are in Alameda.
	There's a whole bunch of companies in Alameda.
	And they don't have these onerous parking meters and all the rest of it.
	I'm surprised they don't have...
	They keep on the charge.
	It's five bucks to get across that bridge.
	It's unbelievable.
	San Francisco is not a business-friendly city.
	People should reject using it as such.
	Yeah.
	I was looking at a little more meta level in San Francisco, obviously, when I'm asking that type of question.
	You know, there's even restaurants in that area south of Mark.
	In fact, the one place we like to go, which is Fringal.
	Yeah.
	The French place?
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you go there for lunch, the meter maids are flying around.
	They're trying to get tickets.
	To get you.
	To get you.
	Seriously.
	It's becoming a game.
	Yeah, they're trying to get you.
	Damn them.
	Out to get me.
	So that's it.
	That's our recourse, huh?
	We've got to vote better people in.
	Yeah, there is no recourse.
	The recourse is rejection.
	Yeah.
	Hmm.
	Well, we're not doing a very good job with a lot of things happening right now when it comes to rejection.
	No, I think the public has been cowed.
	They've just been so beaten that they just don't care.
	But that's sad.
	I feel really bad about that.
	Well, I mean, I just think it's a fact.
	I think it's been going on for a while.
	Of course it's been going on for a while.
	And television and the whole Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, you know, distraction culture is rampant.
	And everyone loves that because let everyone be occupied with all that stuff.
	You know.
	And meanwhile, you're paying 25 cents for five minutes of parking.
	Right.
	And a meter that, you know, have these...
	I don't know what the deal is with these meters.
	It's ridiculous.
	This does come back to what we talked about at the very end of last week's show where you said that...
	You didn't even say no offense.
	You just offended me outright and just said, look, you don't matter.
	You know?
	I didn't mean to.
	You said you didn't matter either, which was heartening to some extent.
	But still, I got a lot of responses from people on that.
	And they said, you know, it does matter because you guys, you and I, John, we open people's eyes to other stuff and they do become aware.
	But it just seems like there's no action.
	It's a lot of posting.
	We're posting a lot.
	And by the way, I'm the biggest perpetrator of that because I'm not doing anything.
	I'm just sitting there complaining and observing.
	Yeah, no, that's the two of us.
	I mean, I think we serve a useful purpose for the system, because the system needs to blow off steam, so it keeps people that they think at least something, at least people are complaining, at least people are noticing, which is part of a really idealistic version of a kind of a fascist system, as opposed to the old Soviet style, where if you were a protester, or if somebody says something bad against Putin, for example, you know, you end up in jail.
	That's interesting.
	And it turns out this is better, this works better, you know.
	People get to blow off steam.
	They don't change jack shit, but at least they feel better about it because they complain for a little while.
	Yeah, but the joke of it, of course, we still have more prisoners than they have in Russia, but in Russia they know better than to say anything.
	Yes.
	And 70% are black of the 10% of the population that's incarcerated.
	Hmm.
	Yeah, well, it's the Latinos are trying to catch up, the ones that are coming in from Mexico.
	It's a race.
	Yeah.
	But the point is that...
	So it's true then.
	Look, I'm just trying to round this off.
	It's true.
	So we're truly fucked.
	That's it.
	The system needs guys like us.
	Yeah, but how can guys like us change something?
	Can we motivate anyone to do something?
	No.
	We can't even get somebody to pay us a dime.
	Let alone save the world.
	Yeah, right.
	We get no money from the No Agenda show and we can't get in.
	You know, I won the...
	Last night they had a raffle and I won a three-day Disneyland Paris trip for a family of four, including Eurostar rail transportation.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, and Patricia and I were like, you know, we have some other plans and we can't really, you know, take a whole bunch of vacations because, you know, it's like stuff is busy at Mevio and etc.
	And I said, well, why don't I give it away on no agenda?
	And she said, well, that won't work for anyone unless they live in the UK. I was actually thinking about giving that away and trying to...
	Well, there's also different kinds of laws about giving stuff away, you know, but if you want to give it to somebody, say, I can bring my kids over there and we can all go with, you know, we can do it.
	I'm going to give it to you.
	Why not?
	Because you don't make a difference in the world.
	I want to give it to someone who's really making a difference, not just the hot CO2 you're emitting, my friend.
	Well, then maybe you should find, you know, we should create a gifting.
	We should find somebody that's worthy and then give it to them.
	Well, that's a good idea.
	I bet you that would make a lot of money.
	It would be like, I don't know about that, but it would be like the Nobel Prize.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Sure.
	The Nobel Prize.
	Nice.
	Oh my God.
	There was a documentary here on Friday, speaking of Nobel Prize, about Bill Gates.
	So I guess Bill is really on his final farewell tour.
	At least that's the way it's being.
	He was over here.
	He met with Gordon Brown.
	Everyone's saying this is his big farewell, his swan song, and now he's going full-time into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
	Yeah, he's working for Warren Buffett now.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And the commentary from, I believe, John Battelle, because I interviewed two people.
	Battelle, which, by the way, I didn't find to be the best two people to interview on the subject of Bill Gates.
	Battelle and some other journalists who I've seen on the net with an R. I can't remember his name.
	It might pop up.
	And according to Battelle, all that Bill Gates wants is a Nobel Peace Prize.
	That's what it's all about.
	He'll do anything to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
	That's a good thing.
	I like the theory.
	It's interesting, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it could happen.
	Yeah.
	It could happen.
	Why not?
	They've got to give it to somebody.
	They might as well give it to him.
	He needs the money.
	Maybe it should.
	Well, yeah.
	He's given his fortune away.
	Those are on the interviews that he's doing with the BBC are on YouTube.
	And I... Sorry, they're not on YouTube.
	They're on the BBC site.
	I would have put them on the blog, but the BBC site, at least one of these channels, they won't let you embed, which is stupid.
	But anyway, I find it hard to watch Bill now that he's reminiscing because he's changing his story a lot.
	It's just like, I don't know.
	He's building his legacy and then he wants to go.
	You know what I think it is?
	I think he really...
	He fears that he'll miss the limelight of being Bill, which of course he pretty much ran away from the limelight.
	But I think he's going to miss it.
	There's something about it that he's struggling with internally.
	I think you might be right because he really does enjoy being Bill.
	Being a celebrity and being involved in it.
	Right.
	In fact, I was on a flight once.
	He always supposedly flies coach.
	But the fact of the matter is nobody lets him fly coach.
	He's always shoved into first class.
	And I was on a flight with him once, not with him, but on the same flight, and I was sitting right behind him and chatted with him for a minute or two.
	But it was interesting that people would keep coming up to him out of the blue, just constantly, as he was doing his email, which is apparently what he does all the time.
	And they're just saying to him, pretty much the same thing, thank you so much for inventing the computer, and thanks for everything you've done.
	It's like, listen, it's going to be like, oh, you're welcome.
	I think he's been told.
	I did that before breakfast, Sonny.
	I think he's been told this so many times that he actually thinks he believes it.
	Yeah.
	Well, I can see why that would happen.
	I bet if you went out on the street and asked people in America who invented the automobile that everyone would say either an American or Henry Ford.
	No one would say a German.
	Well, if they can remember Henry Ford, there may be some people out there that say, you know, Jack Toyota.
	I mean, you don't know what the American public is going to say.
	Tommy Toyota.
	Tommy Toyota.
	We should start popularizing that.
	Tommy Toyota, the inventor of the automobile.
	I bet you we could make a wiki page out of it and it would stick.
	Tommy Toyota.
	We dispute the claim to the invention of the automobile.
	We think it was Tommy Toyota.
	Yeah, Tommy Toyota.
	He did it in 1880.
	And again in 1970.
	Hey man, you sent me an article you wanted to talk about.
	You still want to talk about that or not?
	I don't know.
	What was it?
	You sent me your Market Watch, which I'd read already, your Market Watch article about Microsoft and Yahoo.
	Oh, yeah.
	I don't know.
	I don't think it's a little off topic.
	Yeah, I wrote a good article for anyone out there who wants to read it in MarketWatch.
	If you say humbly, with all modesty, he wrote a good article.
	It was.
	It was a good article.
	It was an open letter, kind of, but it wasn't really, but it was, to the shareholders and complainers about the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, because All this moaning and groaning is that they jump over Jerry Yang for what?
	For not wanting to sell his company?
	Who's going to start a company and put their life's effort to it and just dump it?
	Well, this is the whole culture.
	John, I read that.
	It's ridiculous.
	I read that, and it's the whole culture of Silicon Valley.
	It's the whole culture of all the blogosphere that surrounds it.
	It's all about...
	The only thing people get excited by these days is who's buying who or who's investing in who.
	There's almost no love for the technology itself anymore.
	The minute something cool comes out, instead of like, wow, this is freaking cool!
	You know, you get, well, you know, they could strategize with this company and then probably insert ads this way and then they can ramp it up and they'll scale and they'll be sold off to Google.
	Yeah.
	I know.
	It's totally a Silicon Valley thing.
	I mean, people in Michigan don't think like this.
	No.
	But why did the media get all over it?
	I mean, the whole thing was triggered to me by a friend of mine who wrote something.
	You know, I'll tell you why, John.
	Let me answer the question before you tell me about your friend that wrote something.
	The reason why is because talking about Yahoo being sold to Microsoft is a hell of a lot more exciting than talking about boring old credit card data that's being given to the government.
	That's the bottom line.
	Well, there's that element.
	In fact, they don't even talk about the boring credit card data at all.
	That's the real...
	Yeah, because they're all following the Yahoo-Microsoft merger.
	Well, it's becoming, you know, now that you mention it, it's essentially a version of Britney Spears.
	Thank you.
	Now, my point exactly.
	It's all porn for the masses.
	Absolutely.
	That's what it is.
	And we crave it.
	We freaking crave it.
	It's all we want.
	Actually, the funny thing, MarketWatch editor, I said, well, you know, because I've written about Yahoo, Microsoft numerous times.
	And I said, you know, can we do one more thing?
	Because I got this open letter I want to write, and it says, you can't, apparently these readers can't get enough of it.
	I was just going to say, I'll bet if you wrote an article, and the article is Yahoo, Poopity Poop, Poop, Microsoft, and the article had 18 words, and you repeated them constantly, and three of them, three sentences, it was like poop, it would still get huge numbers, because people are just looking for that shit.
	They just want to read poop.
	About Microsoft and Yahoo.
	In fact, why don't you put Microsoft...
	Here, try this.
	Microsoft, Yahoo, Britney Spears.
	I bet you it's going to be the best read article ever.
	You can do it, John.
	I bet you somehow you can relate Britney Spears into the Microsoft Yahoo.
	I think I should do a posting on the blog where the headline is, Microsoft Yahoo, Britney Spears porn.
	No, no, no.
	You're going too far.
	That's like your April Fool's joke.
	You went a little too far on that, too.
	You might be right.
	Do it subtly.
	But somehow, you know what?
	Screw it.
	Work in Amy Winehouse.
	That's more sophisticated.
	Okay?
	I thought she was passe already.
	No, no, no, no, man.
	No, she's still hot.
	Working Amy Winehouse somehow into a Yahoo Microsoft story, I guarantee you most views ever.
	It'll be a test.
	Let's try it out.
	It'll work.
	I might do that.
	Actually, I could do that as a column because it's essentially a rewrite of that porn column I wrote some years ago about how using porn in the headlines always gets you a lot of readers.
	Essentially, the column had porn in the headlines, but it wasn't about porn.
	It was about the effect of using it in the headlines.
	I could probably do the same thing here.
	That's too easy because porn is just too easy.
	I'm not going to use porn.
	I'm just saying, I could use an Amy Winehouse Microsoft Yahoo and probably get...
	And it's essentially the modern use of the word porn.
	It's been updated.
	Now we have personalities and this idiotic non-merger.
	Which I predicted from the beginning, by the way, never happened.
	You know, it's funny.
	A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on my blog.
	I don't post that.
	I mean, a lot of the shows get posted automatically, but I don't necessarily post a lot on the blog.
	But sometimes I do.
	And instead of...
	I can't remember exactly what it was, but let's just say it was Microsoft Yahoo.
	And instead of putting Microsoft and Yahoo, I did Microsoft, then a plus sign, and then Yahoo.
	And I got so many more search result hits from that.
	Just by putting a plus sign instead of using the word and, it was significantly interesting.
	Huh.
	So I think it should be Microsoft plus Yahoo plus Britney.
	Maybe even do an equals after that, just to fuck with people.
	In fact, that's going to be the title of this show.
	That's exactly what it is.
	It is Microsoft plus Yahoo equals Britney.
	There you go.
	That's going to be the title of this show, by the way.
	Okay.
	Microsoft plus Yahoo equals Britney.
	That's a good title.
	You watch.
	You watch through the roof.
	Donations will come pouring in.
	Donations.
	We don't even have a donation thing set up.
	We're too lazy.
	Exactly.
	We're just like everyone else.
	We're insignificant and lazy.
	We're insignificant and lazy complainers.
	And we complain about being lazy.
	That's terrible.
	We're horrible.
	Keeps us off the street.
	We're the worst case example.
	I hope kids don't be like this.
	Don't you have to do Twit today?
	Isn't that coming up?
	Yeah, it is coming up.
	But I'll be talked out.
	So that's good news for you.
	I love it when you go...
	You always bitch about my doing Twit.
	You're always complaining bitterly.
	If anything, it's promoting, dude.
	What are you talking about?
	I'm promoting it.
	Yeah, well, I promote this, and Leo now mentions the show, which is a plus.
	It took him a while.
	You know, based upon your conversation on Twit last week, I saw a lot of postings of people saying, man, they don't even pay Dvorak anything.
	Yeah, we don't pay you a lot, but we do pay you something.
	I mean, come on.
	No, I wasn't talking about getting paid for me.
	I'm talking about getting paid for doing the No Agenda show.
	I know, but that's how people interpreted it.
	They interpreted it as in you don't get paid at all for anything.
	I don't.
	I don't get paid by anybody.
	I'm actually living on my mom's money.
	That's a horrible thing to say.
	That's nasty.
	So the point is that, no, that was a misinterpretation.
	I don't know if people should listen more.
	I don't even know that they associate...
	I didn't know anyone even associated this show with Mevio.
	Now, you would be amazed to find out how poorly...
	Not just how poorly I think people listen to this show in particular, but really maybe how poorly we...
	We communicate what we're saying because people really sometimes walk away with a very different impression than I think I have about what we said on the show.
	And I'm like, wow, how did they pick that up?
	How did they get that angle from what we were saying?
	It continues to amaze me.
	That happens in writing, too.
	I mean, a lot of my columns have had this happen.
	She will say, how can you say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And I'm thinking, I never said that.
	And I usually send back a note because I do answer all my email.
	I say, look, pal.
	Show me exactly where, and I'll quote from him.
	I say, well, where did I say this specifically?
	You tell me where that is.
	And that's the last I hear from him, because it's these, I don't know, people read, I mean, you'd think that if we're talking about something, it would be clear, because we are actually saying it, and they're listening, and it's harder to misinterpret.
	But the stuff that's written is even worse.
	But, you know, I mean, if you think you get...
	People not understanding.
	You ought to see when you write something out.
	And then the kind of response you get from characters.
	Dvorak said blah, blah, blah, blah.
	I never said it.
	It's unbelievable.
	And it's all more of the system's steam-blowing process that we're proud to be a part of.
	It's weird to me that, you know, sometimes it's almost as though people are looking for something.
	They're looking for...
	To project.
	To project.
	Maybe they can't read.
	I think maybe the public's becoming illiterate.
	Well, I think that's probably a fact.
	I bet you there's data on that.
	Well, there might be.
	I'm telling you.
	It's just distressing.
	I don't see how anyone can misinterpret what we say on this show.
	We're pretty straightforward about it.
	You'd be amazed.
	You would be amazed.
	No one's ever emailed you something that you said, holy crap?
	Not as much on this show as I get from when I write something.
	Well, I can see where that would happen.
	I don't write that much because I know I'm not a great writer.
	And I certainly get misinterpreted whenever I do write something.
	Well, you must get a lot of interesting input from the daily source code.
	Which is a show, by the way, you don't plug that much on here, which you should.
	Yeah, I should, I guess.
	I think it's one of the original podcasts.
	It's probably been on the air more than anything ever.
	Since July or August 2004, to be more or less precise.
	So I just did episode 771, which, you know, I think there are people that are creeping up to, or if not, have certainly surpassed that number.
	And you'll get there, too, pretty quickly if you just look at the no agendas, of course.
	I do this by myself.
	I don't have a producer.
	It does involve hours and hours of pre-production before I ever just do one show.
	I mean, it's like two hours of...
	I just sit down.
	I've got to listen to all these voicemail comments because it's really a show that I put together with input from everybody else.
	So everyone else calls in.
	I don't fully understand why you don't get an intern to help you produce that show.
	Because I know the show is overproduced.
	It sounds like you have a staff of people doing it.
	But I know that you're doing it all yourself.
	But it seems to me that it might be good to train a couple of people.
	They would love to work for you.
	Yeah, I've thought about it.
	You know, the problem is...
	It's very organic.
	I think that's part of the success of it, is that I'm deciding what the agenda is.
	I mean, there's a million things, a million people that call in.
	I like the most challenging voices are my favorite.
	When someone contradicts me or is against me, that's my favorite part.
	But I just need to hear it.
	The show is who I am, so I have to listen to all those things and be able to figure out where I want to take it, you know, based upon what's incoming.
	I just don't see how to do it.
	I've tried.
	I've tried other people helping me out.
	It just doesn't work, doesn't feel right, and then it becomes kind of a process.
	There used to be a guy, you know, there used to be, in radio, there used to always, you know, you used to have a DJ and you have a guy working the controls, and there used to be a guy, and I think they still have this type of personality, but a radio personality is called a combo man.
	And he would work the board, he would do all the engineering, he would do all the talking, he'd play the records, he'd do everything himself.
	And these guys are usually in small markets because they couldn't afford to have two people working the same job.
	Well, that's exactly the point, John.
	That's right.
	That's how I learned to do it, too.
	Do everything yourself.
	And then what happens is, the minute you get into a situation at a bigger station or there's more money, then you say, hey, man, I want a producer.
	That's what all these guys do it.
	I want a producer.
	And then before you know it, you become complacent.
	You get laid back.
	You start missing stuff, you know, because you got more time on your hands.
	It's not a good process for me.
	Yeah, okay.
	Well, that's fine.
	You should still have an intern anyway, at least getting your tea or something.
	True.
	I definitely need an intern.
	In fact, thank you.
	That's what I'm going to do.
	I have to get myself a personal assistant, and the only thing that person has to do is get my tea and take care of my administrative duties of the household.
	Because, boy, that's the thing that really hurts.
	All those little things that just have to get done, it just takes away from all of the time for production.
	But production, I've got to do it myself.
	Yeah, you've got to do what you've got to do, but you still need an intern.
	Would you want someone scanning the stories for you for Tech 5?
	Wouldn't you feel like someone might miss out on something?
	Uh...
	Yeah, well, I mean, the Tech 5 News Scan, I believe, serves two purposes.
	One, it makes me keep up a little more than I normally do with the news.
	And so it's probably better that I... I'd have to scan them all anyway because I figure if I'm going to do that, I might as well look at all these news stories to see which ones catch my eye.
	And I also look for a different dimension than someone else might look at that makes it my, you know, the stuff I'm interested in.
	It's about, you know, me.
	And so it would be hard to do...
	I mean, I would do a show where somebody else is doing all the everything and I could just come and be a talking head.
	It doesn't bother me to do that.
	But generally speaking, for that particular show, it's mostly me scanning the news and then finding the five or six kind of offbeat or interesting news items or trend items.
	I have a different perspective.
	I'm always looking for redundant stories.
	Why is this thing being covered?
	It's like the Tim Russert thing.
	Tim Russert died last Friday, not this last Friday, but the Friday before, and he was being eulogized for over a week, day after day, night after night.
	It was unbelievable.
	I mean, Sidney Pollack, I believe, died during the same period, and he didn't even get a mention anywhere, and he's probably as culturally important as anyone.
	Absolutely.
	And, or probably more so than Tim Russert, to be honest about it.
	But nothing.
	So this went on and on and on.
	I'd like to identify these kinds of strange things that happen and then comment on them, at least mention them, because I find it peculiar.
	By the way, if anybody wants to, you know, I still find that Russ's preoccupation is something unusual, but it was actually, I heard Rush Limbaugh, of all people, and everyone knows I listen to the right-wing talk.
	Rush Limbaugh actually explained it in some symbolic way.
	It was, and I can't, I'll tell you what he said exactly, but it was like...
	Because he was baffled by it too, this never-ending coverage of one TV personality.
	I mean, TV personalities die all the time.
	But he explained it as some sort of the end of an era.
	And that's why it was important to keep covering it, the end of an era of...
	A type of broadcasting that we're never going to see again.
	And he went on and on about it, and I thought it was absolutely right on the money.
	It wasn't Tim Russert that they were lamenting.
	It was the end of this era where you have this type of commentary or this type of interview style.
	It's over.
	Now it's all gone.
	Highly partisan.
	That's interesting.
	Yeah, he felt that it was a very interesting analysis.
	I was actually stunned by it.
	He said that Russ Sturt, even though he was a liberal, and he worked for that senator in New York, what's his name, that puffy-faced guy, I can't remember his name offhand, but anyway, he's always a Democrat.
	The Republican or the Democrat?
	The Democrat, that puffy-faced guy years ago, he had kind of a lisp.
	He was peculiar.
	And he was extremely liberal.
	But Russert was a liberal.
	He was a speechwriter.
	Always a liberal.
	But when he did this, it was almost as though we had this liberal guy who could present himself very objectively in the middle, as the middle of the road, and he did a really good job of it.
	And that is over.
	There's no more guys like that.
	It's either going to be a right-wing guy or a left-wing guy who's just obviously left-wing.
	And so that was really what Heath believed was why it was, you know, so sad.
	Did I read somewhere that they want to bring back the equal airtime regulations?
	That comes and goes, yeah, the fair, what's it called?
	Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
	Yeah, the fairness or fairness doctrine.
	Fairness doctrine, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, they've been bitching about the Fairness Doctrine.
	This happened...
	We're running late on the show now, but I have to explain this.
	Until 1987, there was a thing called the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting in the United States, and that means if you came out and said, well, I think Obama's the greatest guy in the world, the Fairness Doctrine required that somebody else come from the other party and say, well, I think that...
	You know, McCain's the greatest guy in the world.
	And then they would balance it.
	Okay, it's fair.
	So everything that was broadcast over the airway, since they're licensed by the government, had to be balanced and fair.
	And so they pulled the plug on that during the Reagan administration.
	They just said, screw it.
	What's the point of this?
	This is stupid.
	And so the Fairness Doctrine was taken off the books in 1987.
	And that's when Rush Limbaugh, who again, not to extol him as a genius, but as a marketing guy, he must be because he picked up on this immediately.
	He jumped right on it.
	He was the first one.
	He's the one who actually established biased political diatribe.
	On the radio.
	And so he was in early.
	And meanwhile, of course, the other guys who have cropped up are all, tend to be, that are successful, are all right-wingers.
	I mean, for every one of them.
	There's not, I mean, Air America tried to do something, but they could never get any traction.
	And there's not really anybody who's not either conservative or a little right-wing or extremely right-wing that do talk radio with much success.
	And then, of course, John, There's us.
	Exactly.
	Well, we're not licensed.
	But anyway, so now they're thinking, well, you know, because they couldn't compete, literally.
	The Democrats can't come up with anybody that's either funny or, you know, I mean, the joke of it, of course, is that they don't realize that they have...
	Probably more leverage with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
	Yeah.
	And they're on television.
	But they don't seem to realize that if they pull the plug on the Fairness Doctrine, that takes, you know, Jon Stewart and Colbert are going to be screwed.
	So let me ask you this.
	It will be Saturday Night Live and everything else.
	Everybody will be screwed.
	Everyone's screwed.
	So let me ask you this.
	Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart, are they significant?
	Well, Rush Limbaugh, yeah, I think they're extremely significant.
	I think Limbaugh to almost an extreme.
	He has 15 million listeners a day.
	And he can actually...
	I mean, it's not like...
	You know, he can change things necessarily because he sure couldn't get Clinton, you know, out of office when he ran for re-election.
	Didn't have any effect at all.
	But with 15 million viewers, you can kind of make people think a certain way about things.
	That's a lot, or listeners, that's a lot of people.
	So that's our goal, John.
	15 million.
	15 million.
	It'll never happen.
	I don't think so either.
	If we get a million, it would be like, wow.
	A million still wouldn't be significant.
	No, I don't think it would be.
	It wouldn't be significant in the true sense of the term, but it would be interesting.
	Oh, how frustrating it is.
	I think we could sell some ads.
	I'm done with you now.
	I gotta go eat.
	Every time I bring up anything commercial, you always hang up the phone.
	No, no, not at all.
	It's just like, we beat that one.
	It's a dead horse.
	There's no money in this.
	Well, we should probably put up a donation button.
	I think that would help.
	You know what?
	Here's what it is.
	Here's how it works.
	If no one's gonna help us out while we do this, then we're just gonna take it to radio.
	That's the threat.
	Yeah, they wouldn't like that.
	No, of course, he'd be seen as traitors and betrayers of new media.
	Yeah, and actually, new media is better.
	Oh, it's totally better, because look at this.
	This show would not be on the air anywhere.
	Ever.
	Yeah, especially not running 149.
	We've got to stop, man.
	These poor guys who have to listen to the show.
	Oh, God.
	You know, most of our listeners say, yeah, yeah, you can make it real long, because they listen to it back and forth on their car.
	You know, they burn it to a DVD. But this is like a CD. You've got to put two CDs to the show.
	Two CDs.
	You know what I'm going to do?
	I'm even going to compress this at a lower MP3 bit rate than normal.
	It's just going to be such a huge file.
	Let's stop.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Let's see what people think about this length.
	How do you like that length, huh?
	Take them minutes.
	Yeah.
	Well, we'll do this again.
	I know.
	We'll do it again next week.
	Excellent.
	And we hope you'll join us.
	From the Curry Manor in the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from still foggy Northern California, I'm John C. Dvorak.

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