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Sept. 27, 2008 - No Agenda
01:17:53
49: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
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So close, yet so far away.
It's time once again for No Agenda, coming to you this week from Gitmo Nation West in two locations overlooking the Financial District and the Bay.
It is the Curry Condo where I'm coming from.
My name is Adam Curry.
And I'm up here on the other side.
I can see you from here with my binoculars.
Let me wave.
Hey, John.
Don't fall out the window.
If only I had a window to fall out of.
That's the only thing wrong with this place.
Anyway, I'm over here in northern Silicon Valley.
So, you don't have a window?
Is it like there's no light coming in?
No, no, no, no.
I have 180 degree floor to ceiling windows here, except the only two windows you can really open to get fresh air.
I'm on the 24th floor, by the way.
And one is in the bedroom, which is nice.
And then here, there's only one kind of rectangular window that just opens up from the bottom and gives you some fresh air.
That's the only thing wrong with this place, is no real access to atmosphere, if you will.
Well, they don't want you dropping, you know, because you're in California, they figure you'll be dropping pennies out the window and hitting people.
And this is a one-bedroom.
The two bedrooms have a balcony.
That's really what I want.
But, you know, who needs a two-bedroom place when I'm only here, you know, once in a while?
I think you should lease the place out when you're not there to hookers.
Who says I'm not doing that already?
Okay, never mind.
It is the perfect place for in-calls.
Oh, my goodness.
All right, John.
Well, we haven't seen you yet, even though I've been in town for a couple days.
You've been in meetings all day.
Yeah, most of the days.
But we're really getting some cool stuff cranking next week.
Less meetings, more doing.
So I'm excited about that.
But we are having dinner tonight, which is cool.
Well planned, actually, because I'm glad we didn't have dinner last night.
Otherwise, we'd have nothing to talk about.
Yeah, no.
Well, we wouldn't have been able to do it because...
Right, because we had to watch the debate.
Yes, we did.
Yes, we did.
You want to start off with the debate?
Is that what you want to go right for?
Well, I don't know.
Why not?
I mean, you know, I think a lot of people...
You know, there's a lot of suggestions saying that we should be streaming our commentary during the debate.
Oh, please.
Which...
That's...
Oh, no.
Just every once in a while, you could say something.
I don't think you have to be...
But you're probably right, because I was actually watching most...
I watched the debates on all the channels.
To see the difference in the presentation because they did present everybody slightly different.
The main networks had the guys pretty much the same, but they were blocked in by the big logo.
Well, hold on a second.
But it was a pool video feed, right?
It wasn't like everyone had their own cameras and their own switching.
It was one...
They had their own...
No, obviously everyone had their own switching because...
Switching, but not camera shots.
The shots were predetermined, I presume.
I think the shots were, but there was a bunch of these fixed shots, and I think people could flip between them, because I saw, because I was watching simultaneously, I could see.
And the weird thing about it, by the way, is that the soundtrack...
The delay.
Yeah, no, delays.
I noticed that, too, as I was switching around.
It would be one or two seconds difference between the channels.
And they were all different.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I didn't find any two that were synced up at all, which I thought was peculiar.
Well, and I thought about that for a second, and then I was like, it actually is kind of logical, because if they're all switching, if they're all getting these feeds, so they're getting, you know, from multiple cameras, and I presume they were, I don't know if they're getting multiple audio feeds or just one makes signal, but that's all going through their own digital trucks, their own processes, you know, each system works a little bit differently.
And maybe, you know, maybe someone wanted to have a little delay on there for some reason in case they wanted to dump out of it.
Some of them were pretty long delays.
But anyway, so I noticed the, but anyway, they're pretty much the same except for CNN and C-SPAN. C-SPAN had essentially the close-ups of the two guys on a side-by-side split screen, and that's all they did.
Oh, that's nice.
Because then you can get all the reactions.
You can see the grimaces and you can count the amount of times Obama said, that's not true, John.
That's not true, John.
That's not true, John.
He kept saying that.
So what I did is I stuck with one channel.
I stuck with CNBC. I'm not quite sure why, but I always feel like those guys are...
Kind of honest.
I don't know.
So I left it on CNBC. But what I did is I paid attention to the language.
I really paid attention to what people were saying.
And what I, in some cases, presumed to be code.
Yeah, there's a lot of code.
So anyway, first I checked all the different channels out, but I ended up watching it in HD on CNN. Because CNN had a...
Oh, I'm so happy.
Wait, can I just ask you a question?
I could not tell on my screen.
I don't have an HD screen here.
What was on the pin that Obama was wearing?
Was that a flag?
Because I couldn't tell.
It didn't look like an American flag.
It looked like a flag to me.
Oh, okay.
It was illegible on a regular resolution.
It was a crappy-looking flag.
Yeah, it was a lame-ho flag.
But if I remember, it was a flag.
Anyway, they were in high def, but what was interesting was it was distracting, and in fact it was hypnotic, and I think people who watched this thing on CNN probably didn't really get the same effect.
I actually had to turn it off a couple of times because they had a graph running at the bottom of the screen.
They had a lot of real estate.
They had a graph running at the bottom of the screen that showed a real-time focus group.
Oh, and you could see who was liking who, so you had like a blue line and a red line, one of those deals?
There was three lines, and the thing was there was a blue line, a red line, and a green line for independence, and it was the green line that was interesting.
Yeah, because that was the sway, right?
That had the most movement, I'll bet.
Yeah, and the blue line and the red line, they just, you know, when Obama spoke, the blue line went way up.
When McCain spoke, they flipped, and the red line went up.
It was ridiculous.
Predictable, right?
It was unbelievably ridiculous.
Once in a while, all the thing would cut, there'd be some confluence, and it would all become one line, and that was interesting.
But Obama achieved that more than McCain did.
Unless, except when McCain was dull.
So, and or when McLeary, every time McNeil, or Lair, when every time Lair spoke, the thing took a nosedive, it was hilarious.
You know, he was pretty interesting, because first of all, he did something which I thought, you know, I'm sure they all agreed to this, but I really do not like when you have a public performance of any kind.
Let's face it, a debate is a public performance.
Where you start off by saying, the audience is going to shut up.
No applauding, no laughing, no applause, no nothing.
And that's like, ugh.
And so it really made it uncomfortable because I thought John McCain actually was a lot looser than Obama.
He's very comfortable when he gets kind of into his jokey mode, which I appreciate, I have to say.
But everything fell flat because everyone was afraid to snicker or to laugh or to do anything.
Well, I'm in a disagreement with you on that, because the problem is that when you don't try to shut this audience up, you end up with a loaded audience.
Because one side or the other will stuff the audience with a bunch of shills.
But then why do it at the university at all?
Why not just sit in a studio and have it be a much more controlled environment?
I mean, that's useless.
You couldn't even see the audience.
It was so dark.
Well...
It's useless.
No, I'm not arguing, but they did laugh once in a while.
The audience wasn't dead silent the whole time.
Here's the one thing that my ears pricked up when I heard Jim say...
I wrote it down here.
How are your policies going to affect the country or the way you...
Are you dialing out?
No, I kicked the keyboard.
He talked about the candidates ruling the country.
And I was like, you don't rule the country as president, do you?
He said that?
He said rule?
He said rule the country.
How was it going to...
He said, yeah, when...
I have this on tape.
I have to go back and see that.
This was right after McCain was talking about the 45 nuclear plants, and then I wrote down, affect the way you rule the country.
So I'm not quite sure what he was talking about, but he asked the question, how will this affect the way you rule the country?
And I was like, there's not a king.
It's not royalty.
It's like you govern the country, or you lead the country, or you're our main actor.
I don't know, but it's not rule.
I have to go back and say, if he said that, that's embarrassing.
I thought, yeah, so I picked up on that.
I'm sure, no offense to the Democrats out there, but I'm sure they'd like to have a king.
And McCain, could he be any more inaccurate and outrageous the way he talked about, whenever Israel came up, you know, the Holocaust, you know, Ahmadinejad, which I thought was hilarious, because the guy's name is not Ahmadinejad, it's Ahmadinejad.
You know, this guy wants to obliterate the stinking corpse of Israel.
Now look, I already believe that the translation of that famous line of, you know, we want to obliterate Israel, I already think that was quite an exaggeration.
I think there was some nuance there that was probably purposely translated incorrectly.
But he certainly never, you know, Ahmadinejad certainly never spoke of, you know, the stinking, rotting corpse of Israel.
I thought that was pretty inflammatory.
I was like, man, that's not okay.
You know, looking at the graph, let me go over the things that I noticed based on the graph.
Mm-hmm.
I only took notes based on that, except I did get one.
I was looking for some quotes talking about language.
I got a beauty from Obama, which has to go into the flub, one of those flub websites.
He says the following, word for word, 700 billion is potentially a lot of money.
Potentially.
Only potentially.
$700 billion isn't potentially a lot of money.
It's a lot of money.
There were a couple of real zingers.
And McCain, man, he kept coming.
So first of all, everyone's saying this, Wall Street to Main Street, Wall Street to Main Street.
Can we shut up already?
Main Street makes me think of Disneyland and the Main Street Electrical Parade.
One of the commentators on one of the evaluation shows after, you know, one of the post-mortems.
I watched none of them.
I hate those.
I didn't watch a single one.
I watched all of them.
So one of the post-mortems, somebody mentioned that McCain never once said middle class.
Yeah, I can't recall him saying middle class.
No, he was talking about Main Street and, of course, miscongeniality.
That's my favorite that he's doing.
He's using that a lot now.
He did that twice.
Twice, yeah.
I'm not miscongeniality.
No, you're ugly.
That's why you got Sarah Palin, dude, to balance out the ugliness factor.
Well, he also did one thing.
I wish I could go back and I'm sure it would be on YouTube.
There's one thing where he gave a long-winded response that became a shaggy dog story and then he kind of wandered off the topic and then he tried to bring it back.
It was a complete botch.
I don't remember what that was.
I'm watching him go, what the hell is he doing?
Yeah.
So, okay, here's the deal with the up and down graph.
In other words, what got the most effect?
And the main thing, by the way, only Obama managed to really spike this thing.
And he only did it once.
He almost did it twice.
But the main thing, here's a couple of things that I noticed.
And this is on McCain's graph in terms of the independents, which are the swing voters.
Uh-huh.
Earmarks.
It got nothing.
When he started talking about corruption, though, the word corruption tended to boost his numbers.
Corruption really got him some good numbers.
And then when he talked about kids, he said double dividend for kids.
That got him some numbers.
When he started talking about education, which he didn't do much of.
When he talked about nuking anybody, down.
Down, yeah, of course.
Well, he talked about getting, in fact, he did a nuke, jobs nuke, and it was really weird.
He talked about nuking, and then the thing started diving, and then he started talking about jobs, or nuclear power.
And he says, nuclear power, and it started going down.
He said, but it'll give us a lot of jobs.
It went up again.
Then it went back down again, because it went back to nuke.
Oh, that's funny.
When he talked about partnering, it went down.
When he used the word partnering.
Really?
When he talked about 9-11 and fix it, and I can't remember what this was about, it went up.
And when he talked about no more torture, it went up.
Which means that people were concerned about that.
But every single time he attacked Obama head-on, it went down.
Yeah, I believe that.
And here's the thing that got me, and I've talked about this before, is that if you listen to right-wing talk radio guys, they say, especially Rush Limbaugh, who, this is one of his litanies, he says, you know, the thing is, the Democrats always have a negative and negative and negative approach.
They never say something positive about anything.
And that's their problem.
We always have a positive message in the Republican Party.
I didn't see it in this debate.
And let's go over Obama's graphs.
When he interrupted and attacked McCain the few times he did, he went down.
Down.
Down, yeah.
Down instantly.
Now, what he did say consistently, which I thought was very interesting, he would start off many sentences by saying, well, John, you're absolutely right, John.
And that became an immediate advertisement 20 minutes before the end of the debate.
But you can't actually say you're absolutely right except, you know, because if you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right.
There's no...
No point in discussion.
Yeah, that's the end of it, right?
Yeah, I know.
I thought it was crazy.
Dumb.
I thought that was dumb language.
But anyway, back to his ups.
Here's where he got the big numbers that damn near spiked to 100%.
He talked about...
I wanted to guess.
Go ahead.
What is it?
Um...
I give up.
Energy independence.
Really?
He did a thing about energy independence and then brought automobiles into it.
We have to have more efficient cars.
We've got to get energy.
Biodiesel.
Biodiesel.
Right.
He brought a very positive message.
Actually, when McCain mentioned this stuff, he got a boost, too.
But the way Obama phrased it, he spiked it.
How were the graphs whenever, because McCain talked about veterans a lot, very purposely.
Nothing.
Nothing?
Didn't spike at all?
No.
Interesting.
No, nothing.
But this was so, this energy independence and cars thing spiked so much.
On my notes here, I have two up arrows and the word wow.
Okay.
Now the other ones, here's the other ones.
He got a boost, nothing like this one, but he got an up arrow on 30%, something about 30%, I don't even know what this means, but when he started talking about healthcare, the way he did it, he got up arrows, and he got a huge up arrow when he started talking about competing in education.
Education gets big numbers.
Here's another one that's interesting.
How about the financial crisis?
The financial stuff did nothing.
Nothing, right?
I mean, I got no notes on it except for the earmarks.
We're so dumb.
We're such stupid sheep.
Corruption got some numbers, but that's it.
And that was McCain.
And I love it where McCain's going to fire the SEC chairman.
I don't think he actually has that power.
Well, he does if he's the ruler.
Yeah, true.
So here's another one.
Obama kind of flatlined on health care, but when he changed from health care to R&D, boom.
R&D is important.
Another one, he started talking about vet care because he wanted to slam McCain because I think McCain voted against some veterans thing.
And as soon as he started talking about vet care, it actually went down.
Nobody cares about the veterans in this country.
That's, you know...
That's a tradition, by the way.
Yeah, but you need them, right?
You need them to win an election.
Yeah, you really do.
Okay, you got some more.
This is the last couple.
When he mentioned Al-Qaeda and going after him, nothing.
Zip.
Flatlined.
Because no one believes it.
Torture took him up again.
He brought up in torture a little bit.
Up.
Every time he attacked McCain down and...
Here's the one that at the end, the two of them went off against each other.
McCain got nowhere.
But here's the one that got Obama a big spike.
Again, relating back to what Rush Limbaugh says.
Obama started talking about American pride and how we can get our reputation back in Europe.
And we are the greatest country.
He started with this positive message.
We're this great country and we should be respected more and we have pride and blah, blah, blah.
Boom!
Big numbers.
Unbelievable.
So I was just listening to language, as I said earlier, and what's it called when you take a phrase where you say, like, this isn't the beginning of the end, it's the end of the beginning?
That has a definition, a term.
What is that called?
I'm sorry, repeat that?
So, when you construct a sentence where you switch things around, so you'll say, this isn't the beginning of the end, it's the end of the beginning.
Yeah, I don't know what that's called.
McCain is doing that a lot, I'm noticing.
I don't know what the point is.
Oh, here's one more note I took on the back I've got to mention.
This is interesting.
Obama, and this is not about the numbers, this is something Obama said that I thought was peculiar.
Uh...
By the way, McCain also got an up arrow when he started bitching about the pipeline in Russia.
Obama goes on and on, and he says, isolationism doesn't work.
We can't go on, because McCain's pushing the idea of just cutting off Iran, isolating them with embargoes and whatever.
And Obama...
Came out and said, it doesn't work.
We should stop all these embargoes right now.
And then he named all the countries and curiously left off Cuba, knowing it would piss off everybody in Florida if he threw it in.
I thought it was chicken shit.
Yeah.
I learned a couple things, though.
I learned from our host, Jim, that only one of them can be president.
One of you will be president, so there's no independence apparently running.
I mean, I know it doesn't matter because they never get invited to the debates, but I just thought it was kind of crude to just say that.
And he was really trying to, you know, in the beginning, it was like, address Mr.
Obama, address, you know, trying to get some fireworks going, you know, trying to get that.
Which I think was part of the whole make the audience shut up.
Because what I was also looking for was the soundbite.
What are these soundbites?
And from a general show business perspective, this was just boring, John.
It was a really boring show.
It was not...
There was no moment where somebody...
No singer.
In fact, I don't know.
Who do you think won the debate?
I would...
I would say Obama by a hair.
I would agree with you 100%.
I think he won by a hair.
But it was a draw for all practical purposes.
Well, they agreed on everything.
They agreed on everything.
There was no differences.
And it didn't do McCain any good.
And by the way, I thought Obama was actually a little smoother at the beginning.
McCain was, besides Obama making weird...
He talks a little like John Kerry.
He's a little long-winded.
But McCain was clearing his throat constantly like a nervous guy.
Well, what was interesting also is Obama started out looking right into the camera.
When he was answering his questions, he was so aware.
In fact, throughout the entire debate, he looked into the camera like it must have been twice as much, if not more, than McCain.
I thought that was interesting to notice, because when you look into that camera, you really are talking to someone sitting at home.
It just works.
It's media training 101.
I had a couple things.
Interesting to note that McCain is so sure that the French will come and support us in Iran.
I would beg to differ.
They actually speak French in Iran.
It may not be that simple, Johnny Boy.
Obama kept saying, when I'm President of the United States, I thought that was well done.
McCain didn't say that once.
That's mind control.
It's really important to say that stuff.
When I hear somebody say that, either one of them, I find it totally offensive.
Well, that's not that I don't find it offensive, but I think it's interesting that he's saying that, and I think most people at home don't find it offensive.
They just pass over it.
I would like to do a poll on that from our listeners.
Yeah, but our listeners are not your typical American listeners, I don't think, John.
They're the ones that are switched on.
We need the sleeping people.
And I learned something very important, that the average height of the South Korean is three inches taller than the North Koreans.
Yeah, I heard that, too.
I was like, my God, they really are suppressing those people, aren't they?
Were they putting bricks on their head or something?
That was hilarious.
By the way, talking about tall, Obama appears to be rather tall.
Yeah, he is.
He does look tall, doesn't he?
How tall is he?
Do we know?
I think he's up around six feet.
It has to be.
No, no, he's over six feet.
He looks like he's about 6'2", 6'3".
He's about as tall as I am, probably.
And at the end there, on CNBC, they left his mic open.
I don't know if you heard that, but he, you know, so Michelle comes up.
First of all, they were congratulating each other, you know, like, almost like WWF, you know, like, hey, that was a good match, man.
Yeah, you really threw me into that cage good.
Okay, hey, great, John.
Yeah, great, Obama.
You know, it was like, the hell was that?
Oh, I didn't know this.
Yeah.
Because they didn't leave the mic on what I was watching.
Yeah, no, they had the mic open.
In fact, Michelle came up on stage and you heard Obama go, well, how'd we do?
How'd we do?
Which is exactly what my wife says to me or what I say to her after a TV show.
And I'll say, how'd we do, hon?
How'd it look?
How was it?
How was the show?
The big show.
Mm.
So anyway, and not a single word about the temporary cancellation of the debate or anything like that.
It was not a single thing.
Not a single thing.
I think that, well, somebody pointed out, one of the guys, there was something they were supposed to pound home.
Damn it, I can't remember this one because I didn't take a note on it.
But one of the guys and one of the commentators in the postmortems said that...
And it was one of the...
I think it was Fred Barnes on Fox.
One of those guys.
They said that McCain was supposed to go in some direction on this economy thing because of something Obama did.
And he was supposed to use it as a thematic thing.
And he didn't do it.
And they think it was a complete botch.
And of course Obama was supposed to...
Yeah, he definitely tried to make it sound like this was just a continuation of the past eight years.
You know, the thing that, I think if we boil it down, we go back to what we said earlier, it was a boring debate that probably had a huge audience, because everyone wanted to see these two guys go at it.
I think it's going to be up to Palin.
My God.
It's going to be a problem because she has not performed well ever since they started coaching her.
I think that, you know, instead of coaching her to be natural, they've coached her into being a robot.
And I'm totally convinced, and I wrote this in an essay that's on the Dvorak.org slash blog essay.
You can look it up.
It's called, you know, Is McCain Surrounded by Idiots?
And it has to do with the fact that he stiffed Johnny Carson.
He stiffed David Letterman.
And Letterman was then laced into him, you know, that night and the night after.
Because it was bullshit.
Because he said they had to fly back to Washington.
So he canceled the show with one hour.
Oh, yeah.
Totally.
Yeah, totally.
And then he didn't even go.
He went over to Katie Couric's and spent the night in New York.
And he went the next morning.
So it was all bull.
And then meanwhile, one of his dumb spokespersons come out and say, Well, we didn't think it was right to do a comedy show.
Yeah.
With all this, you know, going on.
Right.
Meanwhile, when Katrina hit, McCain was sitting there with Bush with his birthday cake, laughing and having fun.
The point is, is that, you know, this was stupid.
29.5 million viewers.
That's not bad.
Let me see if they compare it to anything, if there's a comparison to...
Because they thought it was going to be as big as the Carter-Reagan debate.
There you go again.
What do you mean?
That was the line that got Reagan elected, everyone thinks.
Oh, I don't remember that.
I'm not that old, John.
Speaking of old, I am so tired.
And I see this all over the place.
On CNBC, what's the guy, Mark?
The kind of chubby guy who's their main anchor for Squawk Box?
Yeah.
No, wait a minute.
I'm sorry.
No, it was Keith Olbermann.
He plugged into...
Olbermann is not on CNBC. No, I know.
He's on MSNBC. He talks to the woman who...
She has really thick, horn-rimmed glasses, and she's from...
I want to say she's from...
Like a real serious publication.
Maybe Wall Street Journal, maybe New York Times.
I can't think of her name right now.
You're not helping us.
I know.
But she really...
And I see this all the time about John McCain's age.
And it's really starting to piss me off.
It's ageism.
Well, to me, it is...
I'm not quite sure why, maybe because my friends, my wife, they're all 60.
Maybe because of that, but to me, it's almost like...
You know, race discrimination based on skin color.
It's like, what the fuck is that about?
It's really angering me.
Yeah, well, I think it's irking a lot of people, but I have to say, one of the pollsters, and I think it's the guy who works for Fox, I think his name's Lutz, and he's one of the better guys, and in terms, he does the audience response stuff, too.
He says that the, uh, that the, uh, At least now, generally speaking, the older voters who come out in droves, by the way, compared to younger voters, the older voters are not skewing necessarily toward McCain, although they may as the election approaches.
And I think what will happen is that this ageism thing will keep coming up, because these guys, you know, I mean, I find it...
It's weirdly offensive because the Democrats are the ones who are wanting equal pay for equal work and they're against sexism and they're against racism and they're against this and they're against that.
But why are they all of a sudden all ageists?
And in a country where you cannot conduct a job interview and ask anyone their age, you cannot even say, when did you graduate college?
Because then from that you could deduct someone's age.
If you don't hire that person, they can sue you successfully in court for age discrimination.
Exactly.
I mean, how is this possible?
And from really smart, I would presume, intelligent people.
I'm just not glossing over that really easy.
And I'm not that old, I don't think.
44, I feel old.
But it's like, that's not okay.
It's just not okay.
Right.
And I think it's going to continue because they don't really have any, you know, I don't know.
I don't think they're very creative in how they go about their campaigning.
That's why I think they keep losing these elections.
And, you know, even though Obama keeps putting himself into the lead, you know, the whole mechanism of the Democrat Party seems to keep, you know, making it more even.
And that's one of the things they do.
And they may have learned something from what happened on this debate, though.
And I'm quite pleased, though, with this financial crisis.
The rescue plan, formerly known as the bailout plan, is that Dr.
Ron Paul is getting massive airtime on every single station with huge amounts of respect because, of course, he's been predicting this for years.
And, by the way, another guy who's in his 70s, I might point out, although you never hear anyone accusing him of being an old fart, Yeah, you call him a nutter and a kook.
I never said he was a nutter.
I call him a kook.
But it's fantastic to see how much traction he's getting in his message.
I'm really pleased about that.
And what blew me away, and I can only think that this thing is a setup, it has to be some form of setup, that the House Republicans walked away and said, we're not going to do this.
We're not going to vote for this.
That blew me away.
I did not expect that.
Well, here's another thing going on.
It looks like if you start doing some work into this, or look into this, this bailout thing that the Democrats, by the way, are totally promoting, totally behind.
Yeah, well, they're totally behind it.
They're totally promoting it.
They're the ones that control the purse strings of nobody's notice for the last two years in Congress.
And, you know, they want to give all, and within this money, there's a whole bunch of pork.
I mean, first they're going to take $700 billion of the taxpayers' money, and it's not just for bailing these guys.
It's not just for a whole bunch of social programs, that Acorn thing gets a couple million or more, or God knows how much, you know, which is just the thing Obama worked for.
And it's just like the whole thing is rife with fraud and corruption, and it's ridiculous.
I heard someone call it the No Banker Left Behind program, which I thought was kind of funny.
Did you ever get a chance to read Brzezinski's book?
No, I have not gotten to it yet.
I really want you to read that.
It turns out that four of his sons are in pretty key spots.
Oh, really?
Zygmunt Brzezinski is the advisor for Obama on foreign affairs.
And I'm just looking at this article right now because I just got a hold of this.
And his sons have very interesting spots within politics.
Let me just bring this up.
I'm sorry.
For some reason I fucked it up.
Here we go.
His son, Mark, is the Director of Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, or was, under Clinton, and one of the prime movers of the 2004 Color Revolution in Ukraine.
Ian Brzezinski, currently the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and NATO Affairs and backer of Kosovan Independence, NATO expansion into Ukraine, and Georgia and U.S. missiles in Poland.
Mika, His political commentator on MSNBC is Mika.
It must be his daughter.
That's not his son, I don't presume.
Maybe it is a guy.
It says here, whose interview with Michelle Obama contributed to the general media Obama-mania.
And Matthew...
Is U.S. envoy of the Czech opposition.
I mean, these guys are so entrenched.
Sounds like the shadow government.
Totally!
Well, thank you.
This is why you need to read this book.
You need to read it because everything is all spelled out, man.
Every single thing is taking place.
Do you have it?
Did you order it yet?
Did you get it?
Yeah, I ordered it.
It should be coming on Monday.
Okay.
You'll enjoy it.
You really will.
Because I know that bit by bit, John, and people are sending me messages about this.
They're so happy that you're waking up to the true reality.
Oh, please.
That'll be the day.
They sent me the same message saying, poor Adam, he's going to be locked up in an insane asylum if he keeps going this way.
Oh, they're both right.
Oh, man.
Let's see.
Okay, I'm kind of done on...
Yeah, we're done.
Forget it.
Those two guys can do it.
We'll wait to the Palin thing.
We'll do the show after that.
When is that?
When's the vice presidential debate?
Next Thursday.
Oh, God, fantastic.
Oh, I'm looking forward to that.
Because, you know, obviously Palin interests me enormously.
And we talked about this last week.
You know, she went to the George Bush training school where she's taught to speak in bursts of sound bites, which are directly from the Talking Points memo.
And, you know, it's so easy to confuse her because it's one thing to talk like that when you're in the Rose Garden.
It's another thing when, you know, you're being interviewed by Katie Couric.
You know, that just doesn't work.
But she's got to be more personable.
I mean, the whole thing about her, it seemed to me the reason you'd be attracted to her is because she seemed very personable.
Now, a good example is, you know, they have this negative YouTube video of her in a church.
Yeah, I've seen that, yeah.
And she's very personable.
I mean, yeah, she's obviously a religious speaker.
She's a very good speaker.
She's walking on the stage.
She's very natural.
She didn't have any trouble talking in that environment.
When did she become a robot?
Now she's stiff.
She never had any back and forth.
And my argument about this is when she was with Charlie Gibson.
She had this...
One answer she had for one question, Gibson asked him about what happens if Israel bombs Iran.
What would we do?
And she said, I don't think we can second guess what Israel does.
It's not our position to second guess.
So Gibson asked the question again a second time, reworded.
So she says...
The exact same answer.
So he tries the third rewording of the exact same question and she says it again exactly the same way the third time.
Now, why doesn't she say, Charlie, you're asking me the same question over and over and over.
Like a politician would.
It's the same question.
I give you one answer.
You want the same answer 20 times?
I mean, what's the point of that?
Why doesn't she do something like that?
No.
She robotically says, oh, no, it's not our job to second guess.
Oh, it's not our job to second guess.
I mean, this is not a conversation.
This is no back and forth.
She's just getting...
She looks like an idiot.
Have you considered that maybe she is a robot?
And that she's got...
A fembot.
Come on, she's been chipped, man.
I'm telling you, these fuckers have been chipped.
One day you'll understand.
Anyway, that's going to be a good one.
I can't wait.
We might even have to do a show on Friday, or maybe Thursday night, because if we do it on Saturday, it'll be too late.
Maybe.
Yeah, we might have to.
A couple of the things that last week we talked about, me and my gold, which I got a lot of response to, but I was not that crazy as now Fortis Bank...
Which was my main bank.
Looks like they're going down the tubes.
My wife says to me when I told her about the gold bar, she says, I hope Adam knows that when one of these banks folds, they shut it down and they lock down all the safe deposit boxes and you can't get your gold.
That's why it's not at the Fortis safe deposit box because then I wouldn't have had to take it with me, would I? Now, she thinks that you should just paint the thing kind of silver-colored so it looks like a lead bar and leave it on the floor as a doorstop.
That's a good one, or make it a brick color and just put it into the wall or something like that.
Yeah, that's good.
I had a friend of mine I used to work with years ago who was a gold prospector, and he collected quite a bit of gold.
He must have had about a few pounds of gold in his house at least.
Pounds?
He turned the gold into picture frames and painted them black.
And they look like cheap-ass picture frames.
That's funny.
That's the last thing they take were these horrible-looking picture frames.
That's funny.
Well, you know, in the meantime, I'm not the only one thinking this way because the U.S. Mint has now said, we don't have any more 24-carat gold coins.
Stop.
We're out of them.
They've been bought up.
Everyone's saving this shit.
Well, you know, that's what happens when people get panicky.
I'm not panicky, man.
I'm just smart and I'm prepared.
Prepared.
You always hit somebody with that brick.
I'm very prepared.
I wanted to ask you a chemical question, knowing your background in chemical engineering or whatever it is.
You seem to have done so much.
I was a chemist.
Yes, you were a chemist.
Well, I'm a chemist.
I was a real chemist, not a chemist.
Better living through chemistry is my motto.
This melamine in China, I wanted to understand a little bit more about Why melamine is used, why it's showing up in milk, and it seems to me like this is probably a much larger scandal that is going to be unraveled and that it's not just in Chinese products and probably in other things that have to show a protein count.
I mean, have you followed this at all?
On and off.
I remember when it first became scandalous.
Yeah, you don't care about babies dying.
No, I do care about babies dying, but, you know, that cropped up on the radar.
It's some sort of a thing that confuses tests.
Yeah, it shows a higher protein count in the product.
Yeah, but it's poison, right?
What is melamine?
Well, let's find out.
Oh, okay.
I thought you might know.
No, I don't know this stuff.
I was not in the food industry.
There was even a scare going around that there was melamine in Oreo cookies.
Was it Kraft, I think, who makes them?
They immediately jumped on that one and said, no, no, no, no.
In fact, there's nothing of any value in Oreo cookies.
Please do not be alarmed.
It's just lard.
It's colored lard.
You looking at melamine?
Yeah, I'm looking at it.
Wikipedia's got a pretty good little thing on it.
You can check it out there.
What is it used for?
It's a product used to make plastics.
A product used to make plastics?
And they're putting that into food?
Yeah, it's interesting because it's combined with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, which then becomes a thermosetting plastic.
It's one of those things that you use.
I would see this.
Yeah, China would have a lot of this because they're...
Yeah, they make plastics.
Yeah.
Yeah, and the plastics.
I mean, the Chinese, in fact, the Taiwanese in particular, are the world's greatest plastic makers.
Somebody told me this once.
They do plastic.
This years ago, I went to Computex, and I was looking at some routers that somebody had...
We're selling.
It was some company.
And these things were gorgeous.
And they were locked together in some funny way.
And they were all plastic.
And they were just the coolest looking things.
And they were all beautiful.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I asked the guy where the case is.
He said, we couldn't get these.
It was somehow in the conversation.
We couldn't get this produced in the United States because nobody can do injection molding like the Chinese.
And you can take them as a prototype and they'll make an injection molded version that's just dynamite.
Somewhere there's a CEO of a Japanese plastics company who's saying, oh, I watched this movie to graduate.
Okay, that went over everyone's head.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, so I don't think it went over anyone's head, but we're talking about the Chinese anyway.
Who are even shorter than the North Koreans, I'll have you know.
So anyway, so I guess it can get into all kinds of things.
But it's not getting into it.
They're purposely putting it in.
It's just because it shows up in a test.
Yeah, but that's poisoning people!
Well, I don't think they mean to.
Okay.
No, the Chinese...
I will say, though, that my...
My warning signals about Gardasil, the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer, thank goodness now mainstream media is picking this up.
Eight girls have died already, I think in the UK. Thousands have gone into convulsions, nausea, joint pain.
This is bad, bad shit.
Why don't you review us on that because you haven't brought that up on this show.
Well, I did, but it was a couple weeks ago.
So what I noticed, because I kind of scanned three news sources, I'm looking at the UK, I'm looking at continental Europe, mainly through the Netherlands, which of course reports on Germany and France and a number of different countries, and of course US news.
And what I saw is simultaneously I saw this big push towards this vaccine for cervical cancer and the way they're dispensing it.
And by the way, it's a combination of three shots for the treatment combined about five or six hundred dollars.
And it's made by Merck, who of course have a pipeline problem because all these products that they already have, their patents are expiring.
And you can even read it right there in their annual reports, which I think you'd enjoy, John.
You can see how they have billions in the pipeline for the pandemic flu virus, and this is one of them.
So it's in the plan.
And you see this simultaneously being marketed to 12-year-old children, girls only, which is interesting because boys can also carry this virus.
And it came up at the same time.
It's being dispensed through schools.
They're trying to make it mandatory.
And when I saw the commercial in the UK, it just blew me away because it's really hip.
And Christina and I were laughing about it because, of course, it's targeted towards girls younger than she is, so she's starting to see through this stuff.
And it's like, hey, I'm on my Facebook, I'm on my MySpace, I've got my mobile, I'm doing my hair, I'm going to school.
Yeah, and a cute little tune there.
And I'm going to get the jab.
And they have a little fake tattoo.
I got the jab.
You know, complete mind control of this drug.
And now, thank God, schools are saying, no.
We're not going to let this be injected on our premises.
That's the same as endorsing it.
And we don't know anything about it.
And now children are dying.
They're dying from this shit.
They're dying!
And the way it's marketed, it's like, oh, take this shot, you'll never get cancer.
But that's not what this is.
This HPV is a sexually transmitted disease.
And of every 3,000 girls who have it, 2,000 boys have it.
They're not getting any vaccinations.
And so it's A, obviously, a huge-ass money scheme.
Yeah, well, it's 500 bucks.
That's unconscionable.
It's huge.
It's a scam.
It's not just a scam.
It's a scam and a travesty.
Thank you.
And luckily, though, I'm seeing more and more, mainly schools and parents, just saying, no way.
Just not going to do this.
And I'm so happy because thousands of girls are getting sick from this, and eight of them have died.
Well, I'm glad somebody's on it.
Yeah, there you go.
You.
Yeah.
How about Warren Buffett, though, pumping five billion bucks into a Goldman?
Yeah, I thought that was weird.
Interesting, huh?
I guess that'll save the company.
I think they've got to keep Goldman in business for some reason.
I think there's something shady about them.
Well, first of all, the general...
Even Kramer was saying this the other night.
Everyone on Wall Street hates Goldman Sachs.
I'm not quite sure why, but they are generally hated by other firms.
Um...
But it's very clear that Paulson just hired another Goldman guy to advise him.
He, of course, is also a Goldman.
He was the CEO of Goldman Sachs.
I mean, Goldman Sachs is clearly...
They're in the shadow government.
Yeah, not just that, but they're the spider at the middle of the web somehow, or at least of the financial web.
Yeah, they're somewhere.
And so we have Washington Mutual.
Yeah, that was pretty weird.
My wife was really concerned about this.
She said, how can the government do that?
They just say, you're going to do this.
I haven't heard a good explanation for it, but I have a theory.
Well, I think that at some point, they were given a, I think they must have gotten some government money with a proviso attached, that if they didn't turn something around, then the government could just take them over and tell them what to do.
Well, but they haven't been taken, the FDIC has run in, right?
No, I know, but they didn't, I know, they just said, here's the deal, you guys are going to do this, whether you like it or not.
And this is like when they made Bank of America buy those guys.
I mean, the whole thing is weird.
And now in the UK, the largest mortgage lender about to go under?
Was it Bing and Bramley or something?
Yeah, I don't know who they are.
This mortgage thing's not over yet.
No, this has got to be just the beginning.
No, it's not the beginning.
It's the end.
Oh, please.
You feel the bottom yet, John?
You didn't see the market go below 10,000.
It bottomed out, bang, bang, bang, just bouncing around the top of that number.
Right.
Around 10,400.
And then it shot back up to 11,000 and now it's stabilizing.
Right.
Right.
But it all depends on what's going to happen.
So I presume that they're actually going to pass a bill And, you know, the way I see it happening is they're already positioning this and saying, well, you know, we'll give you a couple hundred billion, like it's chump change.
Give you a couple hundred billion, and then if you want more, you have to come back to the trough.
But the real interesting thing is about this oversight.
No court, no committee, nobody can look at what we're doing.
That's the thing that I'm interested in because that power, that's the scary, the evil shadow government power that they've been looking for.
Yeah, I hate that kind of stuff.
They need to be sued.
There's also something else going on that's kind of interesting.
The EFF is suing the government over a new copyright treaty.
Really?
A new copyright treaty?
Oh boy.
Yeah, there's some new copyright treaty that's floating around and they won't divulge its contents.
The government won't?
Right.
You're kidding me.
I was just nuts.
And you know what that means?
It means it's like one of those European ones.
The Brits have a couple of these things.
Where it's against copyright law to divulge the contents of the law.
Because in there, there's a bunch of provisos.
There's a bunch of new...
The WIPO people have been trying to do this for years.
I've written about this at least a half a dozen times.
Where they put a copyright law together.
One of the things is to protect patents.
You can't even talk about the patent.
And to protect this, you can't talk about the law that protects the patent from being talked about, even.
I mean, it's just this ridiculous onion of kind of, you can't do this, you can't do that, and it's part of the law.
And it's just, to me, it's like, this stems back to the reverse engineering.
You can't reverse engineer something.
I mean, stuff like that is in these laws.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA. That's what it's about?
I don't know.
Announced 2007 as a partnership to combat counterfeiting and piracy that the U.S. and several of its trading partners view as critical threats to their business and the cause of billions of dollars lost in revenue annually.
Hmm.
Is this a China thing, maybe, because of the counterfeiting?
No, that's the problem.
I don't know, because we can't read the bill.
It could be about how to make donuts, for all we know.
Crazy.
Crazy.
I mean, so I don't know what it's about.
I'm just saying.
Once somebody gets the bill released so we can actually read it, we can figure out what they're trying to do.
You know, if there's something like that's going on, they're trying to pull a fast one.
There's no other reason to do something like that.
Oh, that's scary.
There's a whole thing here on EFF. Well, that's too much to read now, but...
Yeah, I would talk about it later.
Yeah, a lot of countries involved.
Switzerland, Japan, European community, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Canada.
Hmm.
I wonder.
I bet you it's a pure information thing.
I bet you're right.
I think your instinct there is spot on.
This is about being able to even...
Maybe it's to combat the Freedom of Information Act.
I mean, we don't know.
Crazier things have happened.
We can guess until we're blue in the face, and it could be anything.
It could be something really weird.
It could be just something stupid.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, hopefully they'll get this thing, you know, some judge somewhere along the lines will say, what is this BS? And then, you know, make them reveal.
Of course, they won't right away.
Okay, well, we'll have to find it first.
Okay.
This is the kind of thing, this is a game that used to, in fact, they still play this game in Silicon Valley.
And I'm always surprised when somebody doesn't know how to play the game.
But I've been involved with enough, you know, as an expert witness in enough court cases in Silicon Valley to know how it's playing.
It's quite hilarious.
And it basically goes like this.
Let's say we take two companies like AMD and Intel, for example.
And so...
They made some agreement, and Intel's supposed to provide AMD with something, and then all of a sudden they decide, you know, I think we shouldn't be providing this anymore.
So AMD will sue Intel, and then...
The judge will say, well, first there's a lot of stalling and a bunch of, the court, the case takes forever to be resolved and then the judge says, okay, you have to give them the documents.
And so then Intel gives them the documents, but they don't give them the real documents, they give them phony documents.
Phony documents.
It takes like six months to figure out these documents are no good, they're the wrong documents.
Oops, sorry.
So they have to go back in the court and the guy says, oh, and then the in...
Oh, hold on, John.
Hold on.
Ah.
Ah.
I hate this.
Don't move.
Alright, I got you back.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
All of a sudden I just got static from Skype.
Anyway, so this kind of thing goes back and forth and back and forth with a bunch of game playing.
And by the time everything is finally kosher and the documents, it's too late because the technology and everything else has moved on by a year.
So what I learned here is that you've been an expert witness in these types of court cases.
Yeah, I have.
Like an Intel AMD or something else?
I've done a couple.
I did a whole bunch.
I've done something, you know, for the guys that were being sued by Hayes Modem.
I did a Modem case.
I did the 287 chip case.
I did something about there's a key lock thing somewhere in Denver.
I did a case.
I mean, I've done about maybe ten of these things.
I was going to be an expert witness for Rodney Dangerfield, actually.
And then he died.
Well, no, he won this case.
I mean, it was one of these things where sometimes he'll bring somebody like me in to be You know, just to scare the other side, and the other side got scared.
This is like your lawyer buddies?
Do you know Rodney Dangerfield, or how does that work?
I never met him, no, but I have a check signed by him from my fee.
And I made a big blow up of it.
And then I did the Linspire case, where Microsoft was suing Lindos, and it came down to the end, and then Michael Robertson ended up with a pot full of money, and they changed the name to Linspire.
And actually, I had a deposition in that case, I think was probably the thing that was the best in the case, to be honest about it.
But I don't do it, I don't solicit, you know, there's a couple of these agencies that will ask me to Put my name on it.
I don't normally solicit this work because it's actually kind of...
Boring and tedious.
It's totally boring.
But I'll tell you what's cool about it is that you get all kinds of inside dope.
That's the only reason...
To be honest about it, the only reason...
That's the only reason to do it.
It's the money.
And there's some money to be made.
But you find out weird stuff because these lawyers have access because they do discovery, right?
And so they find out all kinds of crazy things.
And it's like they tell you about them.
And you go, wow, that's crazy.
Do they train you like they do with medical witnesses, like a medical doctor?
Okay, here's what I want you to talk about.
Here's what I don't want you to talk about.
Here's the direction you should take your answer in.
Do they do that?
Yep.
Totally, yeah.
There's a system for you.
Come to America, people.
If you've got money, you can win.
Well, basically, they don't do it in such a way that they tell you what to say because you get grilled by the other side about that.
The other side will grill you about, did they tell you to say this?
You can't lie, right?
You can't lie.
No, you don't lie.
You don't have to.
Because you're not brought into the case to lie.
No, but if they say, did they tell you about this?
Did they tell you to say this?
You have to say yes or no.
Yeah, and generally speaking, the way it's set up, you're never really told.
It goes like this.
If you're going to be an expert witness, you go and, for one thing, it's like a job interview.
You have your opinions about stuff, and they grill you, in other words, the side you're working for.
And they'll see what your answers are going to be for the different kinds of questions.
They'll never tell you to say anything.
But they figure out that, yeah, first I read the case so I know what the case is all about, and then I figure out how to give the right answers so I don't say something stupid.
And then I only answer yes and no to certain things.
And I only talk about, you know, typically an expert witness, a lot of people don't realize this, an expert witness only has one point to prove usually, like one single thing that has to get into the record.
So you would be there to say something about something that's specific, and then you're done.
That's it.
Even though they'll grill you and try, the other side will grill you and try to make you say that you are mistaken or, you know, you're stupid.
And then they try to just embarrass you.
They try to find out what you're educating.
They ask you about your education, the other side, the competitors.
They ask you about your education, and they ask you about whether you really should even have a job.
Yeah, that's to discredit you, right?
Yeah, and they bring up, like for my case, I get all these columns.
I've written thousands of them.
You know, some unbelievable...
Oh, and they'll pull something out.
Well, in 1923, Mr.
Dvorak, you wrote in CBS Prehistoric Market Watch that...
Yeah, no, they do that.
And then the worst part, the most embarrassing thing, and I've decided this is...
This happened to me twice and never going to happen again.
When you do video depositions, decide that you're working on it because the video deposition is going to be seen by someone.
They put makeup on you.
So you look healthy and proper.
Yeah, you don't look like you're dying on there.
It's funny, because when MTV sued me over the MTV.com domain name, I'll never forget.
Well, first of all, they did Discovery, and this was in 1993, okay?
They did discovery, and they had like two interns, were the only ones who had any knowledge of HTML, literally.
And I had to bring in all of the files that I had on the server.
Now, the server was like a Headless Sun 3 at DigX in Virginia.
So, you know, I spent like days downloading stuff and then put it all onto floppy disks, if you can believe it.
And they went through all these files, and they would literally come up with not just, okay, well, this was a file that was apparently on this server, whether it was public or not, right?
I mean, this was just, the server was also kind of a dumping ground.
These are early days.
And this was like free, this was...
The web had just kind of come around.
There was a Gopher server installed on it.
But then in these proceedings, they actually would roll out videotapes of me on MTV. And you're like, well, you were talking about this in this type of manner.
And you just sit there and go, holy crap.
You almost feel guilty sometimes.
I'm an evil guy.
Clearly, I had no idea what I was doing.
It's scary, is what it is.
Well, the thing that I wanted to mention about the makeup is they put the makeup on, so the other side, they come out and they start grilling you about the makeup.
Oh, why are you wearing makeup?
Exactly.
Is there a problem?
I like it.
Don't you think it brings up my skin tone?
You're always tempted to have a one-liner like that, but essentially you go up to them and you say yes and no, yes and no, and then you make your opinion about something.
Usually your side makes you expose the information that they want on the record, and the other side just does nothing but try to discredit you in every imaginable way, embarrass you, try to make you out to be an idiot that probably shouldn't even be in the job.
Why are you even here?
What kind of money can you make with that?
Was it an hourly rate, or how does that work?
There's a minimum.
The way I finally got, you know, years ago somebody who is an expert on expert witnesses, you basically charge them up front.
You know, you have a minimum, period.
And then usually you never get to that.
It's almost like a book advance.
Okay, Ms.
Palin, please answer the question.
What kind of money are we talking about?
You can get, depending on who you are, you get anywhere from $200 to probably $1,000 an hour.
Wow.
And this was a while ago.
Is this still current prices?
No, it depends on the person.
I mean, I don't get to $1,000 an hour, let's put it that way.
But there are people that do.
Good deal.
All right.
Hey, 5.30?
Well, you know, you're...
No, I appreciate the thought, me being on UK time and everything, at the Ritz-Carlton?
That's an interesting choice.
I had no idea they had an award-winning restaurant there.
I think the Ritz-Carlton right now is one of the top three restaurants in San Francisco.
For those of you who don't know, John and I, of course, always try to have dinner together.
It's going to be a couple times, John.
I'm here for weeks.
I'm not going anywhere.
I'm staying until we've got these hosted channels up and running and all this stuff we're doing.
Right, I figure we'll have about three major, or at least two major.
I want to do this one.
I don't know how we're going to do it, but there's a restaurant in the city I haven't been to called Qua, C-O-I. I've eaten at Qua's.
No, you haven't.
Yeah, I think I have.
How long has it been around?
Not long.
Isn't it on Embarcadero?
No.
Oh, then I must be wrong.
But isn't that a...
Jesus, wasn't that a UK restaurant?
Maybe it was a London restaurant called Coi.
C-O-I? Oh, no, I'm sorry.
No, I'm thinking of something with a Q. No, I'm wrong.
Okay, so that's a major restaurant we have to go to.
So we should do at least three, and it would be great if you would cook for me, since I'm here all by myself.
Mm-hmm.
I gotta get sex from someone else.
The dinner I figure I could at least get from you.
Is this thing on?
Hello?
Hello?
Yeah, the tech guys were joking about that.
They were sending me porn.
Say, here, for your weekend.
Yeah, it entails me cleaning up.
So, anyway...
I'll do the dishes if you cook.
Don't worry.
I got a dishwasher.
I don't need the dishes clean.
It's not the problem.
You don't seem like a guy who would have a dishwasher.
For a guy who doesn't have a microwave, you probably have something about...
No, no, no.
Dishwashers are the world's greatest things.
I want to have a garbage compactor, but my wife is dead set against it.
My uncle, Don, would always say, I don't believe...
He's 80.
I don't believe in dishwashers because you handle the plates twice.
I always thought that was quite interesting.
You handle the plates twice.
Yeah, because you handle them going in and you handle them going out.
So?
Well, he feels that's not a good use of his time, clearly.
Oh, it's better to hold a plate for a half an hour scrubbing it clean?
I don't think so.
Well, what I like is, and I desperately want, when we move, I hope we can get one of these if it's the right house and space is one of those dishwasher drawers so that you actually put the plates back where you're going to get them from.
I love those.
To be honest, I did a lot of research on dishwashers before, because we had a dishwasher in this house that was one of the most advanced.
It was $1,000.
It was made by one of these companies that makes all this high-end stuff.
Stainless steel.
It had the most...
Water pressure of anything ever would just rip.
If there was something on a dish, it would rip it off.
But the pump kept blowing up, and the thing was a noisy contraption.
So I did some research, and I found that if you start really looking into it, when you buy a dishwasher, you don't want an expensive one.
You want one of the cheap Kenmore's.
And you want the following features.
You don't want stainless steel inside.
You want plastic because stainless steel dishwashers make a lot of noise.
Plastic dishwashers are almost dead silent.
It's amazingly different.
You want a dishwasher that has push buttons that are just mechanical because if you...
Yeah, you don't want no electronics.
None of that fucking digital readout.
The LEDs always burn out.
The programming messes up.
Right.
Screwed up by the moisture and the heat.
Just on.
On-off.
That's what I like.
On-off.
Well, I mean, it's got a little knob, too, that changes the style.
Yeah, you don't need that.
You don't need it.
But the point is that you get these, you know, just a basic, good quality dishwasher that holds wine glasses.
You've got to make sure that the racks will hold wine glasses, especially the upper one.
And I always, actually, when I buy wine glasses, I always buy one first and see how it fits into the dishwasher.
See if it fits.
Of course you do.
Because I don't want some...
But listen, but these drawers, what I like about these dishwashers is it's two drawers, either side by side or...
I like the way you pronounce that word.
Draw?
Is that wrong?
Drawer is what I think.
Yeah.
But anyway, go ahead.
I'm from England.
Drawer.
So it has two drawers, either side by side or one above each other.
And the theory is one of them is in use and the other one is then the storage.
So after you've eaten, you put your plates away, you close it up, and then you get your plates from the other drawer.
And so I don't know how well they clean, obviously, but just the idea of that's where the dishes go, I really, really like.
And not just dishes, the utensils, everything.
It's just like a utensil drawer.
I can't even pronounce it.
I've been listening.
There's a couple things you pronounce differently.
Another one is measurement, where I'm used to saying measurement.
I don't think I've ever used the word measurement.
Well, you've used the word measurement.
You can't measure it, you said to me several times.
Can I measure it?
Measure it.
Well, I have a slight Midwestern accent, so it comes out once in a while.
That's okay.
We won't hold it against you.
The ones I had to correct because the family got sick of it.
I used to say, like you would say in Chicago, I would say milk instead of milk.
Milk, yeah.
And then the other one, which I finally just changed.
I said, screw it.
I can say milk.
It's not that hard.
And the other one was pillow instead of pillow.
It's pillow.
Well, it is pillow.
Are you from Chicago?
Or if you live in Milwaukee, it's probably pillow.
Where are you from?
Are you from the Midwest?
No, but my mom and dad were, and I did live in Chicago for a little while when I was a kid, so what can I say?
It's like people from Buffalo, New York, they also have very interesting pronunciation.
Boston, let's hit the home run here with weird pronunciations.
This whole country is just illiterate.
It's not illiterate.
What about Britain?
You can't understand a cockney.
Let me tell you, you can go to North Guilford and not understand them.
You don't need to go to anywhere exquisite.
I'm pretty good at it.
I can listen to almost any accent, any nationality speaking...
English.
I can figure it out.
For some reason, I'm really good at that.
But I look at Patricia, and I could just see, even though she's been speaking English with me for 22 years, lived in America, lived in the UK, but some accents, it's just impossible.
And that's on television.
Well, I had a guy who, when I was in high school, who was a, I think he taught German or French or something, I think, but he was a German.
And he was fascinated by his southern drawl because he couldn't understand a word of it.
So, somebody talked like this, he wasn't picking up a word of it.
Really?
And so I thought that was kind of interesting, but I've noticed when I used to write for PC Magazine UK, and so I would go to England a lot, and all these editors, you know, are all fairly well educated, and they would sit around at lunch or something.
I couldn't understand a word that any of them said, because the Brits are starting, especially the upper class ones, they're starting to mumble so much.
Yeah, but also a lot of what they say is very intertwined with local cultural knowledge and stuff, you know, that they refer to very quickly that you just, if you don't know it, you're never going to pick up on it.
Maybe.
Like politics.
Oh yeah, everything they say is there's always some irony or joke about politics or something else that's cultural that's going on.
I love them.
I love those Brits.
I miss them.
Yeah, well, it's expensive.
Uh-huh.
To say the least.
So how's the economy doing over there?
I understand it's in the tank.
Totally in the tank.
Yeah.
And everyone's just...
The answer is drink more.
Here in the States, it's go shop.
And in Britain, it's drink more.
Now, it's totally in the tank.
Gordon Brown, they had their big party...
Who, how, shindig, and they all get together, and there's been a question of should there be a leadership change, and of course Gordon Brown is saying, no way, I'm the guy, you can't switch to someone, to a new leader, and from the same party, from the Labor Party, not even talking about a general election.
It's kind of weird the way they can kick someone out and do all kinds of stuff and switch it around.
But the best, and I recorded it, of course I didn't bring it with me, I did record it for you, was an interview with Alistair Darling, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
And it was about the financial bailout.
Man, he is worse than Bush, the way the bullshit that comes out of his mouth.
He really just has no idea.
Has no idea what's going on.
And Jeremy Paxman, you know him?
The journalist?
Yeah, he's been coming up in the conversation.
Yeah, so he interviewed him.
Jeremy Paxman is great.
Because he'll sit there and he doesn't give a shit who you are.
He's the guy who does Newsnight, right?
Yeah, exactly.
He'll laugh at you.
He'll just say, what are you talking about?
And he'll throw his head back and roll his eyes.
I love that guy.
He's really good at interviewing statesmen.
Well, the Canadians do that kind of interviewing, too.
It's only in the United States where they're so deferential.
Yeah, and we have to be so proper.
How did that happen?
Political correctness, of course.
It's doublespeak.
It's the Orwellian age we're moving into.
That's what that's about.
Absolutely.
And we all have to be so proper.
Senator McCain.
What is Palin?
What is she?
She's a governor.
Governor.
Governor Palin.
Just for once, say, Miss Palin, Mrs.
Palin, Sarah.
Just for once.
Like Ron Paul.
I know, you think we have the Queen of England over here with a bunch of etiquette crap.
Exactly.
Well, according to Jim Lehrer, we do.
Our next president's going to rule.
The ruler.
I've got to get that sound bite.
When you rule the country, it's right after the nuclear thing, about the 45 nuclear plants.
Which I didn't know about that plan, by the way.
Plan for 45 nuclear plants.
I didn't either.
I guess that's the energy plan.
Well, we've got a lot of coal.
A lot of people don't realize that we are the Saudi Arabia of coal in the United States.
Right now, running at the current capacity for all the energy needs that we have, we have enough coal.
If we just drop everything else, we have enough coal to power this country.
And that would include making electric cars and using electricity to power everything.
We have enough coal for 350 years.
So what's the drawback of coal?
Well, actually, there's not really a lot.
I mean, you get a lot of...
Oh, come on.
There's got to be some tax we can throw on something there.
Well, the drawback is, you know, it has a bad reputation.
Modern coal plants with the floating bed do a really good job of burning coal without creating a lot of pollution.
But there's still an issue with the little mercury getting out.
And nobody wants a coal plant, you know, upwind from them.
Upwind, yeah.
You don't want to plant upwind.
You don't want to be downwind of a coal plant.
I don't think that they've solved the odor problem necessarily.
But you know...
I think combining coal with wind power...
I mean, I've mentioned this before.
I mean, I had on my old radio show, Real Computing, I had the father of modern wind power, who happens to be an American, who says that in the United States we're on Generation 1 while everybody else is on Generation 3 and 4 around the world.
Yeah, the generation...
And we could power the entire U.S. grid.
All the power needs that we can have are all doable from North Dakota.
Yeah, because of the wind in North Dakota.
I bring this up all the time.
I think you mentioned that before.
Well, of course it's not going to happen because the shadow government and the energy elites, that's not their game plan.
And that, by the way, is tied into the dollar and the petrodollars and the oil, so it's never going to happen.
Of course we could do it.
And that's why I'm about no bailout plan, fuck Wall Street, let them burn...
Let it burn all the way up to the White House lawn.
We're Americans.
We can figure this shit out.
We are very resourceful.
And we have the resources.
But we're just not taking advantage of the opportunity to make this change now.
Right.
Well, it's academic.
My thinking about this is a cycle anyway, so it doesn't make any difference.
Yeah.
It just bugs me.
I have to say, it bugs me.
Apparently.
Yeah.
You got anything else?
Oh, there's one thing.
I'm sure you blogged this.
The methane gas in, was it the Arctic?
Did you hear about this?
Yeah.
I think somebody may have blogged it.
Your thoughts?
I don't know.
Because what they're saying is methane gas, these chimneys, it's, well, first of all, immediately, oh, it's worse than CO2. Yeah, it's always something.
Yeah.
It's like three times as bad a greenhouse gas as CO2. Right.
I don't know.
I don't know if it is.
But you don't have any more insight into that?
No, actually, when I read it, I was like, huh.
I mean, I'm just, you know, I think we're all kind of inundated with this greenhouse gas, you know, and everything just has to be green, and all the money is going to these investments, and I don't know, I think it's just one of those, you know, it's like...
Well, you know who's huge in all this green stuff, right?
I'm dubious, let's put it that way.
You know who's doing all this green stuff investment is Kleiner.
Yeah, I know, big time.
Well, that's because they've got Gore working for them.
Yeah, they've got Gore.
In fact, Ray Lane is doing a lot of that work.
Well, Ray Lane and John Doerr are both kind of green.
It's funny because Ray is such a Republican and John Doerr is such a Democrat.
It's interesting to see them working on those things side by side.
Yeah, I think Doerr was a Republican originally.
He's a massive Democrat right now, I'll tell you that.
Well, yes, because his goal is to become an ambassador or the Secretary of State or something like that.
A Nobel Peace Prize!
I mean, if you have everything, right?
I think Bill Gates is going to get one of those before John Doerr does.
Well, I'm investigating the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation kind of on the side here, and from the things I'm starting to find and read, I don't think he's in line for any Nobel Peace Prize soon.
Why?
Because they're...
You think it's a little shady?
Yes, very shady.
Once you get past the handing out mosquito nets to people, then there's...
Apparently, in Seattle, there are many, many office buildings that you can't get into.
You can't get invited to.
These are laboratories working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
There's no signage.
The people who work there, you can't meet them at their office.
They have to meet you somewhere else.
out vaccinations in Africa primarily, but it's not like antiviral vaccinations.
It's like DNA changing shit.
So they're experimenting on...
How do we know this?
Is this something else you got from one of your Nutter friends?
Yes.
Yes.
So that's why I said I'm investigating it.
I'm not giving you facts.
I'm just telling you what I'm hearing.
Apparently there's some whistleblowers out there, which would be interesting to see if anything makes it into the mainstream news.
I wouldn't say it was a money laundering operation, but I would say Well, no, of course it is.
Of moving money around.
No, John, of course it's money laundering.
Well, it's not laundering, but it's like Turner.
He gave a billion dollars to the UN, whatever.
I mean, there's no tax on it.
It's a whole interest deductible thing.
I heard they never delivered the check.
No, of course not, because it's like the IMF of the World Bank.
First of all, there's no money.
It's like, okay, here's my computer entry.
Now, you can change it over there.
I mean, please.
But it's not like you're giving away a billion dollars and you're down a billion dollars.
That's just not the way it works.
And it's over time, and it's an annuity, and it's a big tax thing.
No doubt about it.
But...
The Bill and Melinda Gates thing, and you know what, I don't think Bill Gates is evil.
I don't know his wife.
But it's probably, you know, you put $40, $60, $80 billion into the pot and you get all kinds of people showing up and they can talk a good game.
And I think that under the auspices of R&D, you know, Gates is going to be really interested in that.
Unfortunately, we're testing it out on African...
Children.
And killing them.
I have a good friend who is, I actually know a lot of people there, but I have one friend who's working directly with the foundation.
He's an Africa expert.
He's always going back and forth to Africa.
So I'll bring this up.
Please don't use my name, okay?
Don't use my name.
Yes, heaven forbid no one's going to know that you're interested in this since we only have 100-something.
By the way, everyone out there who listens to this show, please get one more friend.
One friend so we can hit 250.
We've got 100,000 listeners.
We want to make it 200.
No, we had like 130, man.
We want to make it 200.
Well, a quarter of a million is what I think is really something we should be able to reach.
And then we've got to go make some money.
What about our t-shirts?
We're going to sell t-shirts.
You know what the problem is?
It's me.
I don't do enough work.
So anyway.
Thank you.
Finally.
You know what?
Ron Bloom agrees.
Ron Bloom.
Depending on what day it is.
Yeah, of course.
So...
Anyway, the point is that I'll ask him, and then I've also got other people.
I don't think so.
I think it's maybe just a way of moving money around, but I just don't see some nasty weirdness going on with Mr.
Burns.
But again, this is not nasty.
It's not Bill Gates who has some evil plan, but it's totally pharmaceutical.
Or biotech, bioengineering companies who, you know, they present a PowerPoint and they're saying, look, we can modify the human DNA so they'll now no longer be susceptible to these illnesses or etc.
But you're messing around with people's DNA, man.
That's heavy shit.
We'll see.
Yes, we will.
I'm going to continue to do some investigation, and of course we have drop.io slash noagenda where people are posting stuff pretty regularly, so if you find anything, any research, pass that on.
Very interested.
Yeah, please do.
Because the only people who are going to save the world is you and I, John.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the ticket.
As usual.
We're the only ones that can do it.
All right, man.
Unless you got something else.
No, no, but I expect we'll have a lot of stuff for next week's show after the Palin thing.
Yes.
And hopefully we bring a better perspective to the analysis of these debates than all these other Yahoo shows.
I get sick of that.
I know you watch them all, but I just, ugh, I can't stand it.
And I always get one or two little insights that helps me to think in a different way.
I don't agree with these guys necessarily, but the guy I really like when he's on is Karl Rove, believe it or not.
Yes, I know.
He's really good.
He's a show business.
He understands this shit.
Yeah, and of course he says one thing one minute and something else the next, but it's still really good analysis.
And the other guy, and people out there think he's a jerk and whatever, I think Rush Limbaugh is one of the best deconstructionists working on radio today.
I mean, he takes stuff apart in a very unique way that is always kind of fascinating.
I mean, he's one-sided about everything, but But it's really just like watching a master.
It's amazing.
That's why the guy makes, you know, he got a contract for $400 million.
It's not because he's a slouch.
Exactly.
All right, so we'll continue our conversations.
Are you going to pick me up?
Yeah, I'll pick you up at 5.15?
5.
Oh, really?
We need half an hour to get there?
5.15.
Okay, 5.15.
Alright, coming to you from the Curry Condo overlooking the Bay in the Financial District of San Francisco, my name's Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. DeVorek here in northern Silicon Valley overlooking the Bay from the other side.
Both of us in Gitmo Nation West this week.
We'll talk to you again next week right here on No Agenda.
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