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Nov. 1, 2008 - No Agenda

01:36:21

54: Obama Armbands

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	Balancing the ever-tipping scales of Gitmo Nation from opposite corners of the Constitution-free zone, this is No Agenda.
	Coming to you from Gitmo Nation, east in the affluent suburb of Surrey known as Guilford, I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. DeVore.
	Gitmo Nation, north?
	Or actually, west?
	I don't know.
	I'm in Silicon Valley.
	West, of course.
	That's Gitmo Nation West.
	Come on, you should know that.
	You know, it changes.
	It moves around.
	It's a moving target.
	It's not going to be Gitmo Nation anymore after the election.
	Oh no.
	What will we have to talk about then?
	I don't know.
	Probably something worse.
	No, no, no.
	It's going further into Gitmo Nation.
	Could be.
	Hey, it's good to be back in the UK, back into the news cycle.
	Boy, is it different.
	Yeah, you were here for a while, and then you came back.
	I mean, you took a couple of trips.
	And the thing was, I don't think we talked about Chapeau, which would be our last restaurant review for those out there who hate the fact that we even discussed food.
	I'm getting so many positive responses to our food discussions.
	And indeed, we have not discussed Chapeau, which I would have to say was one of our better meals.
	Yes, I would say I agree.
	And it was reasonably priced.
	And I got to have a wine that I haven't had for 20 years that I thought...
	Before we get to that, let's just start at the beginning.
	Beginning of the end.
	The beginning of the end.
	We walk into the joint, and it felt like we had walked in the back door.
	Because you're literally, the minute you walk in, you're standing in between two tables.
	And all the action is at the other side of the room.
	So I'm like, wow, this is kind of weird.
	I'm still wondering whether we did walk into the back door.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	That's probably what happened.
	And we got a great seat, a little booth right by the window, which was nice.
	There was no...
	It's a weird place.
	There was no...
	Normally in almost every restaurant you go to, even if it's a little place in the middle of nowhere, France, there's a little stand someplace where you know to go.
	Someone will check your name.
	Yeah, because it's like a little, it's like a podium.
	In fact, every restaurant has one.
	Now they think about why.
	Yeah, with a greeter.
	Somebody could keep it in the back of their pocket, you know, the list.
	But, you know, yeah, there's usually a podium, and you go to the podium, and yes, yes, what can I do for you?
	Well, I have a reservation for two at 630.
	Name, uh, Dvorak, uh, oh yeah, there you are.
	I wanted to ask you a question about that, because I've seen you, um...
	I do this a couple of times now, because you always take care of the reservations.
	And you'll walk in and say, yeah, dinner for two or table for two.
	You never say reservation on a Dvorak.
	You always say dinner for two first.
	I do.
	Any particular reason?
	Yeah, I want to see if you can get in without a reservation.
	Okay, right, check.
	I mean, of course, I do it through OpenTable, so I need to get those points for the unknown reasons.
	I'm getting email now from OpenTable about points, but that I'm foolish because, for whatever reason, I'm hanging out with you too much, you're getting all the points.
	I should look that up.
	That was a fascinating email.
	Anyway, so, yeah, I dislike people who say, no, no, don't worry, I'll make the reservation for you.
	So, anyway...
	No, I usually do that.
	By the way, I've always done this.
	I go in and see if I can just get a table.
	And then if there's no tables, they always say, do you have a reservation?
	Now, in the case of a situation where I want to get my points, I go in and ask if there's a...
	It's kind of nice to know if you can just wander into a place.
	So it's one way of finding out.
	Anyway, so I go in there and I say...
	3 or 2 or 4 or whatever.
	Depending on if we have the hookers.
	And they say, yeah, we can put you over here.
	And I say, I have a reservation.
	Oh, yeah.
	And I said, you know, I give him my name and then they go back and they check it off the box.
	And he had, I mean, as opposed to just taking the table because if I don't tell him I have a reservation, there'd be this reservation still sitting there.
	Yeah.
	And with the name Dvorak on it.
	And I look like a stiff.
	So the email I got was, OpenTableTurns10, plus Thanksgiving specials and 1K points.
	More points.
	Well, it turns out...
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Somebody sent me a note saying you get $50 off and you get a coupon at all these restaurants.
	We've got to redeem that, man, because this is an expensive show.
	You need 5,000 points for $50.
	I'm not there yet.
	5,000 points.
	We need to go to some 1K point restaurants.
	That's what we need to do.
	I've only done that once.
	I've actually tried to slip a couple 1K restaurants in on our little soirees.
	I don't recognize any on the list.
	So, what was interesting to me was that, I think it was like a family-run restaurant, seemed like a family of, what would you say, Koreans, maybe?
	It looked like it, but if you look at the list, they're too French.
	François Wu.
	I'm saying.
	Yeah.
	I don't know, everybody there was Asian.
	We never saw anyone that wasn't Asian.
	Place was packed and the service was very interesting because although efficient and prompt and a tent, they did mess up a couple things, which was just unnecessary and dumb.
	I had a list of four things they screwed up.
	All right, let me see if we can knock them off.
	First of all, just getting situated, getting someone over in the beginning took a little long.
	There was some confusion.
	Someone came up to take a drink order after it had already been taken.
	then we didn't get our palate cleanser, which we expressly ordered.
	Right.
	This is one of the few restaurants.
	There's a thing for people out there who really care.
	In a higher-end restaurant, this is not a high-end place.
	It's kind of medium.
	But in high-end restaurants, they usually give you one of these things free, and they're called an entremant.
	And they're a little piece of this, usually a little sherbet.
	Not a sherbet.
	Nothing with milk in it, but like a fruit sorbet or something.
	They just kind of get a lot of acid.
	Sacre bleu, but entremant.
	and my derrière It's got a lot of acid in it.
	It's supposed to cleanse the palate for the next course.
	This one costs nine bucks, this palate cleanser.
	Well, I think it would be funnier to have a restaurant say palate cleanser.
	Then they come out with a toothbrush.
	This restaurant did have some gimmicks.
	But anyway, you had asked for the lamb, I'm going to say, rare.
	Yes.
	And I had asked for the beef medium.
	And although I did get the beef and you did get the lamb, they made the beef medium or the beef rare and the lamb medium.
	Yes, which was annoying, to say the least.
	Somewhat.
	I bitched.
	Somewhat, yeah.
	It wasn't bad, but the lamb should have been rare.
	Actually, the beef was good because it was rare.
	I don't know why you keep ordering medium.
	Well, I don't like rare.
	You ate the thing up like you were just...
	I'm surprised you didn't...
	Excuse me, I didn't finish it, and I said, here, would you like this?
	I can't finish it.
	Okay.
	Because it was just like grossing me out.
	But I didn't want to say, hey, I'm really grossed out by this piece of rotting flesh, bloody flesh on my plate.
	Would you like to harsh that down?
	And you always would do what you always do.
	Hey, could you put this in a box for my dog?
	I really do have a dog.
	And then put the bread in there.
	And you're like taking everything off the table.
	Hey, this scrap here.
	Wait a minute.
	Wait, there's a crumb.
	Give that put in there.
	And I'm like, yeah, put the salt and pepper shakers in there.
	Go ahead, man.
	Put it all in the box.
	By the way, they don't do the doggy bags in Europe.
	No.
	Do not try this in Europe.
	Do not try this in Europe.
	But I do have a dog.
	Yes, you do.
	And we feed our dogs, all of them, scraps as much as we can.
	We make our own dog food.
	And so I'm not lying.
	I'm not taking the food home to eat it.
	Since it was overcooked.
	But here's the thing you didn't know.
	I didn't tell you this.
	They didn't put anything in there except the one piece of meat.
	Oh, they didn't put the bread in?
	You expressly asked for the bread.
	Exactly.
	Oh, what a cheap bastard.
	I think they just fell off the list.
	Well, I mean, it's just like they were careless.
	It was a careless, the service was extremely careless.
	But the food made up for it, and what really, the appetizer, we need to talk about that for a second.
	Appetizer we had, didn't we have two separate appetizers, and then a, I think, what did I have, John?
	We had something in the middle, too.
	I don't remember.
	Okay.
	We had some sort of salad or something.
	Yeah, but it was good.
	It was good.
	No, the appetizers were good.
	Yeah.
	But of course...
	Apparently not memorable.
	So the wine, though, this was a funny moment.
	Um...
	Where you had found what you would call a gem, and I'll let you expand on what it was in a second.
	And so the waiter comes over and you say, hey, this is really amazing that this wine is on the menu.
	You can't get this anywhere.
	The guy's like, all right, we got it.
	And then you took it one step further.
	No, no, the guy made a snide comment.
	No, no, no.
	The snide comment came after that because...
	He was being nice at first, and then he went, look, I can't get this anywhere in San Francisco.
	And then the guy said, well, maybe you need to go find a better place.
	Which tripped me out, and you're like, snap.
	You had nothing to say.
	I didn't have a comeback.
	Zero comeback.
	You could have at least said, hey, you Korean fuck, who do you think you are?
	Well, I did some research.
	Yeah.
	The one is not available.
	Well, where did he get it from then?
	Obviously some distributor came through town and they sold them half the wine list, but none of the local stores have it.
	I looked it up on the internet as a matter of fact.
	This stuff's hard to find.
	It's been hard to find for years.
	Okay, so tell the audience what it was.
	It was a Chateau Cannon from Cannon Fronsac.
	It wasn't from Saint-Emilion.
	It was a 2005.
	And so I think it's one of these, I think, from the new owners.
	I think the ownership's been changed.
	Although I wouldn't know, because you never see this wine.
	You see a lot of other Fronsacs and Canon Fronsacs, which is a very specific area of Bordeaux that used to be extremely popular, apparently, at least if you read the literature, in the 1600s or something like that, because it's a little closer to Paris.
	But...
	I've always liked these wines from this area because they have a distinctive flavor that's kind of unique and tasty.
	And Cannon is essentially the chateau that they named the subdivision Cannon Fronsac after because it was so good.
	And in fact, the wine was tasty.
	Yeah, it was outstanding and a great value.
	It was, I believe, $60 for the bottle?
	Yeah, it was $60.
	If we were in Paris, that wine would have been probably $100.
	And by the way, when I say a reasonable price, that's all relative, obviously.
	For these restaurants, that's a very good deal.
	For people out there who are wondering, that's pretty high.
	I only pay $8.
	But the fact is, the restaurants we've been going to until we downgraded...
	Until we downgraded?
	Oh my goodness.
	Until we downgraded, it was like pulling teeth to find a wine under $100.
	The total bill for this, I believe, was $250.
	$30, about as expensive as the other restaurant, the previous one we went to.
	Right, which actually I think was a little cheaper, and this restaurant, which was ISA, I think it was a little better.
	And it wasn't like $250 for two people.
	You thought ISA was better than Chapeau?
	No, no, Chapeau was better.
	I say it was better and cheaper, is what I'm trying to get to.
	Okay.
	And...
	And for people out there, you know, 250 bucks, this meal, there wasn't anything that we didn't do, except that we didn't have any after-dinner drinks.
	Although I think we had a white wine to start with.
	We had a white wine to start with, a full bottle of wine, and then I think we had an after-dinner sauterne or something.
	Oh, and of course, the pièce de résistance.
	Exactly.
	Which just blew us both away, the desserts.
	I think, did you get the sorbet?
	Oh wait, the pièce de résistance for me was the guy slipping us a Sauternes that wasn't the one we ordered.
	Oh yeah, true.
	Another faux pas in these places.
	These guys have a lot of guts.
	A lot of guts.
	A lot of guts.
	We should go back there and say, you know what, we thought you were pretty good, but you're off the list now!
	Because of your shitty service.
	Very cute at the end there, though.
	They give you a little hat.
	Of course, chapeau being French for hat.
	And your bill is in there.
	I want to take a dump in it.
	It's a hat.
	It's an actual hat.
	Yeah, it was a real hat.
	But what was just awesome was the one dessert that I ordered.
	When you see a hat, do you want to take a dump?
	Is that what you're saying?
	Yeah, I saw that one.
	I was a little annoyed by the service.
	But it evened out because the food was so good.
	And at the end, let me get to it.
	I had a banana, strawberry, kiwi kind of mashup.
	But what they had done is they kind of floated that in basil oil.
	And it was an outstanding combination.
	I'm glad you remembered that because I actually forgot it, but now that you mention it, I was stunned by this dessert.
	It was one of the tastiest things, combinations of flavors.
	We're talking about classic combinations of a custard, a banana, a strawberry, something else.
	But with this basil oil, it just took this thing to another dimension for some reason.
	It was absolutely phenomenal.
	And basil, you know, I associate that with some Italian dishes, certainly more hearty, you know, not something sweet.
	But when you combine it with those other sweet fruits, it is, I mean, absolutely heavenly.
	Amazing.
	Yeah, I mean, I was stunned.
	So, anyway, that's our review of Chapeau in San Francisco, if you happen to be going by...
	When you go in, if anyone comes into San Francisco...
	Tell them Dvorak sent you.
	No, go in there and say, I understand your service is kind of crappy, although your food's good.
	Hey, let me take a dump in that hat of yours.
	I don't know either.
	I've been alone.
	I came home...
	Check this out, man.
	It's like being on tour.
	First, three weeks in San Francisco, then I rushed back to the surprise party in Amsterdam, then flew out almost a day after we got back for another full week in San Francisco, Los Angeles.
	And I come home, and I've delayed flights until I'm home late, and everyone's kind of getting ready because Patricia, Christina, and Dexter, Christina's boyfriend, they all went to Holland yesterday.
	So I've been home alone for two days.
	Me and the admin, the stuff that piles up in a few weeks' time is just so, not just frightening, but annoying.
	It's like an albatross.
	Like what?
	What are you talking about?
	It's just stacks and stacks of envelopes that have to be opened and dealt with.
	And it's amazing because when I go through it, the actual signal-to-noise ratio is very low.
	I mean, yeah, there's, you know, there's like basic utilities, a couple of bills, you know, but honestly, 150 envelopes.
	And it's all kinds of bullshit that really doesn't need any attention at all is, you know, overkill.
	And you have to wade through all of it.
	Ugh, I hate it.
	You know what's interesting is I thought this was supposed to be eliminated by electronic email and things like that.
	Oh, it's junk mail.
	Well, it's not even junk mail.
	It's just the vendors that I do business with one way or the other, be it the banks.
	The banks are the worst.
	They send you so much crap.
	It's like, no, get a clue already.
	I'm not going to take the credit card.
	card.
	I'm not going to take your insurance.
	In the UK, is this the same in the States where you pay for the water coming out of the tap and you also have to pay for the amount of water that goes down the drain?
	I don't know that we...
	Well, there's a sewage tax, but that's...
	No, this is not a tax.
	They actually measure...
	Well, they say they measure how much water you flushed.
	You shouldn't have even mentioned it now that I think about it.
	Some idiot in Berkeley will decide, hey, there's a good idea.
	Paying for it both ways.
	I never heard of such a thing.
	How do you measure it?
	Let me grab a bill.
	Let me see what they say.
	Hold on.
	Do they have a meter on your outflow?
	They have a meter on my ass.
	They can see how much is coming out.
	How much farting are you doing?
	Hold on.
	Hold on.
	Let me see.
	They meter everything for carbon credits.
	Here it is.
	Here it is.
	Check it out.
	So, your water services bill for 15th April 2008 to 2 October 2008, 191 pounds 80, consisting of water...
	Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Yes.
	What's the period of time for 191 pounds, which to us Americans is about $350?
	Yeah, April to October.
	April, May, June.
	So a six-month bill.
	Yeah, a six-month bill.
	So bad.
	Okay, in that time, 100...
	Oh, interesting.
	Oh, man, I've got to go check my meter.
	So here it is.
	How do they know?
	Well, they basically say, okay, the estimate that you use, you know how they do that where you get an estimated charge and then when you move, then they throw a $20,000 bill at you?
	So they say, well, we estimate in that period you use 100 cubic meters of water At 107 pence per cubic meter.
	Wow.
	So that's 118 pounds.
	And then they say, well, since you used 100 cubic meters, your wastewater was also 100 cubic meters at 51 pounds, pence.
	They're just basically doubling.
	Oh, this is chicken.
	Isn't that horrible?
	By the way, what if you just drank all the water and peed elsewhere?
	Yeah.
	I bet I can prove it.
	I can prove I used that water and I pissed it down someone else's toilet.
	You've got to compensate him and bill him more.
	Could be.
	It's going to happen.
	Gitmo Nation.
	Well, that's pretty ridiculous.
	How can the English public put up with this crap?
	Well, it's funny you mention that, because the English public has snapped.
	I came back, and the whole country is in an uproar.
	I'd already read about it the last day I was in Los Angeles before I got on the plane.
	I was like, what the hell is going on?
	An absolute uproar.
	I'm talking about ten minutes...
	A ten minute long discussion, items, reporters live on the scene.
	At the top of the news, the 10 o'clock BBC News, not ITV or Channel 4, but the BBC News, all of the news outlets were doing it.
	You know, the BBC 24 News Channel.
	These two presenters, one of them, you probably know both of them.
	One is Russell Brandt.
	He's the guy who hosted the MTV Awards.
	He's an English comedian.
	He's also in that movie Forgetting Sarah, I think it's called.
	Kind of a rock and roll looking guy.
	He looks a bit like Michael Butler.
	Okay.
	And Jonathan Ross, who is, of course, the top talk show host, has his Friday night show, makes six million pounds a year.
	Jonathan Ross is, I think, the highest paid, quote, entertainer on the BBC. And, of course, the BBC is publicly funded.
	So people are always bitching about it.
	And Russell Brand is also reasonably, I think he's up there in salary.
	But anyway, they did a show together.
	I think it was a Russell Brand show and Jonathan Ross came on.
	And, you know, they hear two guys who are probably off the radio.
	They're really funny together because they're probably really good friends.
	But then they got together and it just became a trumping, one doing crazier than the other.
	And they called up an actor, Andrew Sachs, who was Manuel in Fawlty Towers.
	And, you know, and so they're just talking trash into his voicemail because the guy didn't pick up.
	And then at one point, Jonathan Ross says, well, and he literally says this.
	He says, oh, go ahead, Russell, just tell him that you fucked his granddaughter, which apparently is true.
	And then, you know, it just went downhill from there, right?
	So, if anything, there should be an outrage because it was not funny.
	It was just dumb.
	But this has resulted in a huge, I mean, just, John, astronomical front page of the Financial Times, even.
	The BBC, it's gone too far and this has to stop.
	And Russell Brand resigned.
	Jonathan Ross suspended for 12 weeks without pay.
	The director general had to give public statements.
	And now what's happening, they're saying, well, the BBC clearly needs more and tighter editorial controls.
	It's really amazing to see what's happening.
	So from two ends.
	One...
	The public, they're so frustrated and angry that here was an opportunity, I believe, to yell at...
	Because basically, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are public servants, if you look at the way the payments are structured to the BBC. To just get pissed off like they were bank executives getting bailed out.
	It's just huge outrage.
	So are you telling me that there was a pent-up hostility towards the BBC? No.
	I think towards authority in general and perhaps in particular people who are doing quite well, doing seemingly nothing.
	Well, that's everybody in broadcasting.
	Exactly.
	But so now what's happened on the political side is it's really being...
	I can see it happening.
	They're grasping this.
	It's like, we need stricter editorial controls.
	And you know what that does to the DNA of a broadcast company?
	It makes everyone afraid to say anything.
	Right.
	It ruins everything.
	Yeah.
	And so the BBC was just basically, you know, if you believe in Naomi Wolf's shock doctrine theory, then, wow, they got to club in on this one.
	Well, you know, the BBC has been pretty, I mean, it's been a weird operation for the last number of years in terms of its politics.
	They've been extremely politically slanted.
	No kidding.
	And I don't know that the public, you know, we have one of our talk show, right-wing talk show characters, actually is more of a libertarian type, I guess, but who's popular and successful is Michael Savage.
	And he has this thesis that, and of course anyone who listens to this show knows that, and you to a lesser extent, but right-wing talk shows are extremely popular and well-produced, and it's a shame that the liberals don't listen to him because there's a lot of entertainment.
	There's a lot of learning.
	There's good information.
	Well, it's not learning as much as it's interesting perspectives that need to be addressed.
	He has this thesis that the reason the American newspapers are doing so bad, in terms of they're losing, they just keep losing circulation, and he went through all the numbers over the last quarter.
	I mean, no matter, even the Times, everybody's just like losing numbers, like there's no tomorrow, kids don't read these things.
	And the public is getting tired of it.
	And I think a lot of it has to do with what came out in a Pew research report, We're doing an analysis of every story written about the Obama-McCain campaign.
	Even though we already knew this, even though there was some denial for a few years and the denial went away, which is that the media is extremely liberal.
	And the Pew Research Report showed that 80% of the Obama stories were positive about Obama and 20% of the McCain stories were positive about McCain.
	And it was overt.
	We're not talking about something that was mild.
	It was overt positive writing about one guy and overt negative writing about the other.
	You know what I'd call this, John?
	Because I totally agree with what you're saying is taking place, and really when you look at it, I call them the elitist media, and we're definitely, part of us is elitist, which is really West Coast, East Coast.
	It talks to a very small audience.
	The Jon Stewart Show has a very small audience, much, much smaller than...
	The NASCAR country and western media, what I call it, Rush Limbaugh, or many other forms of news and entertainment, which is meant for a broad audience.
	As a broadcaster, it was hammered into me, go broad, go broad, because you will wind up with no audience, and I believe that's what's happening to these newspapers.
	That's his theory.
	That's my theory.
	Well, that's his theory too, so you're in agreement.
	You guys should get together for a drink.
	Anyway, the point is that the public...
	Excuse me, you wouldn't be jealous if I got together with a Manhattan drink?
	Get an autograph.
	Anyway, get a free book from the guy.
	He's always giving his books away.
	Anyway, the point is that the audience can only put up with so much of it because they have an opinion and they just keep having this stuff thrown in their face constantly.
	A lot of it's just BS and you can tell and you know it after a while.
	I mean, you just sense it.
	The public is becoming like Russia, you know, where the population, in fact, to this day, they're extremely skeptical of any kind of reporting.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And, you know, you have a public that's so skeptical because the media is not really doing its job.
	It's just promoting its personal agenda, even though they deny it because, oh, we're supposed to be so objective.
	But the fact of the matter is, you know, it might as well all be like democracy now, where they just at least let you know where they stand.
	At least they're up front, yeah.
	I mean, nobody's fooling anybody with that show, instead of trying to trick you.
	And I think the public resents it at some point, or they get sick of it, or they just get tired of it.
	And I don't know.
	And the news choices, of course, which is what, if you listen to the, if you want to call them right-wing philosophers, but the people that are conservative that took over the country, For a while.
	They had this thing, which I always thought, Richard Vigery, who is one of the great direct marketing people, but he does mostly political stuff, in history, wrote a bunch of books.
	He tells you how to do all this stuff.
	A lot of people have great skills, and all you have to do is read their book, and you can pick up all the tips.
	You can do it, too.
	Vigery says that, and I've always agreed with this, he says it's not so much the way they write the stories, it's the stories they decide to cover.
	Of course.
	And we run into that.
	In fact, I have a headline on my blog, and all the other guys, all my other editors, that blog there, you know, it's called, you know, underreported news with a subhead.
	Why?
	Ask yourself why you're reading this on a blog.
	And there'll be a lot of scandalous and interesting stories that you, just, it's almost impossible to find.
	Many of them covered in the European newspapers and are completely avoided here.
	Yeah.
	No, it's true, and although I'm just imagining a little bit of this, our numbers are shooting through the roof.
	I think people are slowly switching on to the idea that there is some alternative out there, and there are other smart people, and we're starting to brand ourselves appropriately, and people are picking up on more information, and there's more choices.
	There's more angles you can look at things from.
	So you can start to define your own opinion.
	It's so obvious when you come from a broadcast background like yourself and I, When you know how it works.
	Actually, I was talking to Ron about this, because he was showing Augie, his son, who's 26, he was saying, play the flashback game.
	And so he loads up Fox News on one channel, then loads up CNN on the other and flashes back and forth with the last channel.
	And then all of a sudden becomes apparent, hey, wait a minute, these guys are all hyping up Obama, and those guys are all hyping up McCain.
	And only when you see it in that context does it really start to dawn on you.
	And most people don't realize this is taking place and don't realize how it really works.
	You know, the ownership structure, which, you know, there's rarely a guy sitting in a room with a white cat going, you know, turn up the Obama!
	That kind of trickles down through the DNA of a company.
	And if you've worked in any type of media organization, you know what this is like.
	Oh, we don't do that here.
	We don't talk about that here.
	No, that's not really what they want.
	There's a very mystical they.
	And I've always said, who's they?
	Get they on the phone, because I've got a question.
	No, no, no.
	It's not that simple.
	That kid, by the way, usually gets you fired.
	Well, yeah, that you become the, what was that movie with Tom Cruise that he played the sports agent?
	Jerry Maguire?
	Yeah, Jerry Maguire.
	It's actually people who haven't seen that movie, or people who have seen it should revisit it, because it's only for the beginning.
	Because the guy's this gung-ho superstar, and he decides to stupidly reveal a memo that he wrote showing some of the ways that they can improve the company.
	Oops, big mistake.
	And he's out.
	You always have to be careful because the companies are corporate.
	I mean, corporate cultures are animals.
	They'll shred you and spit you out.
	They exist on their own.
	And what's interesting to me about the newspaper situation, which I think is not discussed much, but I sure remember because I used to be, you know, here we go again.
	Ah, wait a minute.
	You used to be Lou Grant.
	I used to be a paper boy.
	Ah, of course.
	And so, um...
	So was I, by the way.
	Sorry, you were?
	Oh, yeah.
	He must have been the last one.
	Anyway, so, um...
	And I was working for the old Contribune, and I remember the newspaper business back when I was a kid, because I think my dad would bitch about this, because he was like a liberal Democrat, you know, union guy.
	And, you know, labor.
	And, um...
	He would always say, well, you know, and the rule was all the newspapers were owned by right-wingers, and all the reporters were left-wingers, and that's the balance that you had.
	And you could never really, you know, get too far out of control because you had a boss, an owner, like Noland in Oakland, who became governor, that wasn't going to let it happen.
	But in today's environment, it's like the owners are the liberals.
	They're the rich.
	You know, there were a lot of people...
	There's a study that just came out showing that especially the hyper-rich are all Democrats, the rich are all Republicans, and everybody else is a Democrat.
	But the super-rich are all Democrats, and I can name names.
	They're actually socialists.
	Right, they're socialists.
	They've got a lot of money in there.
	You know, Warren Buffett's in this category.
	Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, John Doerr.
	Right, all of them.
	Soros.
	Soros, right.
	It's a good example.
	These guys are billionaires.
	So anyway, these people who own the media now are also, I mean, we don't have the balance anymore.
	In other words, you don't have the owner who says, well, I don't care what anybody thinks in the editorial room.
	This paper is for the Republican.
	Right.
	And here, you know, they put out, you know, we recommend you vote for this guy.
	Now, like, I think the results have just come in.
	It's like 80% of the newspapers around the country, the USA, have endorsed Obama.
	And 20% of them, which are the hangers-on, the 20% endorsed McCain.
	And, you know, there's no reason for the thing that, in the olden, it should never have that.
	If the Republican was the worst guy in the world, it would still be pushing for him.
	So the balance is missing.
	So now it's just all liberals.
	I'm sure you called that Obama threw three journalists off of his plane, all three whose newspapers had endorsed McCain.
	No, I didn't know this.
	Oh, yeah.
	And it was under the guise of, well, you know, we need to let some other reporters on.
	And the reporters replacing them, I think, was like Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine.
	No.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's pretty funny.
	By the way, what you just described, by the way, is going to get worse.
	Yeah, well, I mean, we only have a couple days left, so it doesn't make that much difference.
	No, no, I'm talking about when Obama, if Obama's elected, it's going to be worse than the Clinton administration for, like, you know, marginalizing everybody and taking over the media and making those press conferences, like, really, they're going to be embarrassingly fawning.
	Who do you think would be a good press secretary for Obama?
	I would.
	Oh man, you caught me mid-swallow in my water.
	I could have been...
	I almost spewed on that.
	That was funny.
	I do have some thoughts about Obama.
	We'll get to that when we talk about the Obammercial.
	Maybe we should talk about it now.
	I can't remember where we were.
	Are we talking about your dad and about the balance?
	No, you were...
	We were talking about Obama's going to clamp down on the right wing or the conservative sides of the media.
	They're not going to be in the press conferences.
	They're not going to get any access at all.
	They're going to be denied access.
	I mean, that's what a president can do.
	I mean, it began years ago with, I don't know, maybe it was Nixonian.
	I'm not sure where it really began.
	Well, didn't Bush eventually throw Helen out?
	Not that I know of.
	Well, I think she resigned.
	She was so disgusted with it all, she left.
	She decided not to cover it anymore.
	I think she retired.
	I don't think she was...
	She wrote a book.
	She wrote a book, which I have on my list.
	I really should read that, because, man, she was there for everything.
	But I think this guy's going to be...
	Potentially beyond the rest of them, because he knows he can get away with all this stuff, and everybody's going to cheer him, because all the liberal friends that I have that are Democrats, or most of them don't call themselves liberals.
	The real extreme ones are progressive, which is kind of a throwback term.
	They are so irked at being cut out of the deal for so long that they'd be cheering Hitler.
	Just to give you a perspective on how, well, I can't say Europe, but certainly the United Kingdom is looking at these last days before the election.
	And they are following it quite closely.
	They have their reporters on the ground.
	They're using studios in Washington with audiences.
	And those are pretty funny, actually, because they'll have a panel of two or three Obama people, two or three McCain people.
	One will be like a Republican, not affiliated with the campaign.
	And there's usually one person who is actually in the campaign.
	But the audience, it's like...
	I love it.
	You can pick them out.
	The audience is so stacked.
	They went to central casting and said, give me some Republicans, give me some Democrats, give me some undecideds.
	And literally, the Republicans are great.
	They're like 16-year-old boys, full...
	Full suits, ties, very articulate and very...
	You just want to slap them upside the head, one of those little bastards.
	Oxford debaters.
	Exactly, on the debate team.
	And then you can see which ones are...
	I mean, you can just tell, right?
	It's totally stacked.
	But what's really interesting is the main thrust of the conversation I picked up on is that it's really the question about race, which I see...
	Well, I saw less of that in the U.S. in the last four or five weeks than just the little amount that I've watched of coverage here in the U.K. And they really go in-depth into this question of race and are we going to get the Bradley effect, all these different things.
	And there was one woman who was a news piece, and I don't know who she was.
	And she said something really interesting.
	She was black.
	She said, just so you know, Obama is not an African American.
	He does not come from slave roots.
	Ergo, he does not necessarily represent the African Americans in the United States.
	And it didn't really hit me until I realized that that's really an interesting statement.
	And it just shows you how racist people actually are, because they are judging, in many cases, judging his perceived culture and background based upon his skin color, and not really on his real background, which indeed has nothing to do with African Americans' descendants from slaves.
	Yeah, no, this is a specific type of African American.
	He's obviously an African American.
	But this issue came up, you missed it probably, this came up in this election cycle during the early primaries when he was running against Hillary.
	This became a huge issue for a couple of weeks.
	It was brought up by the Sharptons or the Black...
	The people that marginalized...
	Is this when Al Sharpton tried to say off camera, oh, I don't like the way he talks to black people?
	That was Jesse Jackson.
	Jesse Jackson, right.
	But it was one of those guys.
	They brought it up, and it became kind of an issue.
	He's not really black, and I think it was...
	It may have been Sharpton, but it was one of these guys that said he's not black enough.
	And then they started talking about the slave...
	But am I crazy, or is that the most racist thing you can say?
	It's pretty bad.
	I mean, that seems like an outrageous racist comment to me.
	Well, nobody calls anybody on it.
	They're giving a pass on this stuff, and that's just the way it goes.
	And nobody was not going to give them a pass on it.
	It's like, oh, bring it up some other time.
	Now, the thing that's interesting is that I have a...
	Bring it up some other time.
	I'm sorry.
	Shut up.
	Bring it up some other time, will you?
	So, if I could find it, I'd send it to you.
	But somebody sent me, and maybe we can play it next week after the election's over, although it wouldn't do any good.
	Apparently, Howard Stern sent his man on the street into Harlem.
	Have you heard any of this?
	Is this the piece where the question is, do you think that having Barack Obama and Sarah Palin on the same ticket would be good?
	Exactly.
	The idea was to prove that blacks are just voting for Obama because he's black and there's no thought at all involved in the whole thing, which is, again, another racist thing.
	And so he goes into the street and the idea was he brings this guy out there.
	Of course, you can do this with any population in the United States, so it's kind of artificial.
	Because, I mean, Jay Lando's been making a career out of this thing called jaywalking.
	But anyway, so the idea was you go into the street and you take some, just any casual person in Harlem, a black person, and you ask them a question about Obama and whether they agree with his policies, and then you reiterate McCain's policies.
	Yeah, I've seen this video.
	And then after they agree to that, you say, and you don't think it was bad that he has a vice president like Sarah Palin as his running mate, and see what they say.
	And they all agreed with McCain's policies, and they thought Sarah Palin was fine as his running mate, even though she's not.
	And the whole thing was ridiculous, but it's a typical...
	The more you listen to these kinds of things, and jaywalking that Jay Leno does is actually worse.
	It just makes you shake your head.
	The only thing I take issue is people forget, and I see this with very highly intelligent people, They forget that there is an editor who put this together, and obviously it's a lot less spectacular if you see a couple people answer it quite intelligently and not falling for it, and you just put all the idiots together.
	There are many examples of this type of video on YouTube.
	Tons.
	It's like, name a country that starts with the letter U. Of course, if you think about America, not a lot of people think about United States of America.
	They're like, Utah?
	That's right.
	They say Utah.
	Well, there was this one kid roaming around, and I think we blogged this one, or I did, who goes around, some joker goes to some haughty college, some haughty private college somewhere, and he hated the place, and he goes to the women one after another saying, you know, getting them to sign a petition against women's suffrage.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, he gets them all to sign.
	Oh, women's suffrage.
	Oh, yeah, I'll sign that.
	You know, those girls.
	That's the woman's right to vote.
	Right.
	And meanwhile, this one girl, all four, she's signing away, and her boyfriend shouts out, you can't sign that.
	That's talking about, he knew it was about the right to vote, and she was like, I don't know what he's talking about, and she signs it anyway.
	Yeah, I know.
	And then finally there was the one girl who knew, you know, out of the group.
	But again, you're right.
	I mean, these things are, I mean, you edit them for effect.
	You can't imagine with Jay Leno how much footage that they actually get before they find these incredible dummies who don't know, apparently, don't know anything.
	So, from that very perspective, and this is a unique perspective that John and I have, because we know how television works and how it's made, and I probably know more of the dirty tricks, because MTV is full of them.
	And they're not considered dirty or bad, by the way.
	We just do it as a force of nature.
	The Obama-mercial.
	Should be on next topic.
	And thank you for sending me the link so I could watch it in its entirety.
	Were you able to watch this in high def, by the way?
	Yeah.
	How did that look in high def?
	It wasn't special in high def.
	But the tone and the color of it, it felt to me like it was one of those red filters.
	It wasn't film, but it was video that was kind of drawn into film.
	What did you think it was?
	I think that was just a bad copy.
	I mean, not a copy, but that was ripped to Flash, the one that you looked at.
	But still, when I looked at it, it felt to me like they had put some form of nice effect into the entire piece to give it kind of like that film look.
	Well, you know, it's possible.
	I mean, I would initially guess it was the transcoding, but now that you mention it, and this is just a guess because I never looked at the little version that you have, it's possible that there was something going on like that, that when it was transcoded became more apparent.
	Well, I'm all...
	You know what?
	It wouldn't matter if it was...
	If they did it, then I would be able to see it, because I just know.
	And I can always pick up on these things.
	And with the knowledge that, you know, that video of the horrible Obama-Jugent singing that was done by Jeff...
	Was it Zucker and...
	Yeah, the NBC guy.
	NBC guy.
	But also they specifically thanked the Red Corporation, the Red Lenses, whatever it is, people who make that.
	Oh, I didn't know that.
	Yeah, yeah, because they had the Steadicam operator, another famous guy who does a lot of, you know, is director of photography and a lot of different movies.
	Anyway, so of course there were no credits, which is what I really wanted to see, but it looked like, you know, I like the way they did that.
	Yeah, well, you could tell that production, before you give your analysis, let me just say what I thought, which is that I thought the thing was extremely Hollywood at the beginning.
	You could tell that they used some expensive people, and Obama's team, whoever is really running things, are really adept at getting who they need to get to make this guy look the best he can.
	And then I thought they kind of blew it at the end with that live thing.
	I thought that was like lame.
	Well, that wasn't on the video because I only have the whole video.
	I didn't have the switch over to live.
	I did hear audio of it when they switched to Florida.
	Was he in Florida?
	Yeah, it was in Florida.
	It wasn't one of the biggest groups.
	It was some empty seats, which obviously they didn't have the right people there to fill those seats up.
	And it changed the tone.
	And I thought the whole effect that was being developed throughout the regular party...
	Good, and then they ruined it with that.
	Then they ruined it with it, and they used to, you know, up there, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, with the same old, same old.
	You know what that sounds like?
	And it was like...
	That sounds like feature creep.
	It sounds to me like the production team was, okay, we're going to make this beautiful video, and then we're going to switch live via satellite to Florida, and it'll be a beautiful thing.
	That feels like a director who was just given a little bit too much rope.
	Could be.
	But I think whatever impact the first part of it had, which I guess is all you saw.
	I didn't know that that other part wasn't at the end.
	I would have gotten you a copy.
	And then it was like, wow, what an amazingly well-produced, good, you know, the guy wasn't pushing it too far.
	It was just, well, it was tastefully done.
	And then they throw you to some horrible convention live thing with him yelling and screaming like Hitler, you know, on top of a podium.
	And I'm thinking, geez, this wasn't what I was looking for.
	Yeah, um...
	I thought the casting was really well done.
	You put people on that could be the people watching.
	That's the whole point.
	Not a bad audience, by the way.
	$30 million, so about $10 million per network.
	That's probably tenfold what these networks usually get during election coverage.
	So a very good deal for everyone all around.
	I think the price was still quite reasonable.
	$3 million to reach $30 million.
	So steal.
	Yeah, I think that's a really good deal.
	What I did not like was the writing.
	I thought the writing really fell flat.
	It didn't grab me at any moment.
	It was too many examples of people.
	There was not enough.
	The setup was good.
	The opening was good.
	The whole opening scene in the office.
	Well, you might have something there.
	Because when I watched it, I wasn't going to take sides.
	I was going to watch this thing.
	And I thought the thing wasn't poorly written.
	But when I read the post-mortems...
	And I would listen to some of them.
	And people brought up some of the ludicrous aspects of the presentation, including this woman who has a fairly new SUV and seven kids with the little stickers on the back.
	And she has a big refrigerator and each kid has their own rack where they have their own snacks.
	And they have to budget their snacks because they're running out of money or whatever.
	I know, I know.
	What are you kidding me?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And do they have their uniforms on?
	I don't remember.
	I'm surprised they didn't have their armbands.
	So, by the way, that's what we're going to do.
	We're going to bring out some Obama armbands.
	I think they would be great.
	Awesome.
	It's going to be a hit.
	I've got to get a hold of our t-shirt guy.
	I'm going to see if he can do armbands for us.
	I'm all for it.
	I've got to find out whether we can use the logo or not.
	I looked into it.
	I did find the company that made it.
	They did all the branding for the Obama campaign.
	Oh, who?
	I'll look it up.
	Okay, we should bring that up to our listeners because it's interesting because it's extremely Madison Avenue.
	They got the logo.
	They got the, you know, the certain font that they use commonly.
	Those posters like the Obama, you know, Hope, Dope, Smoke, whatever those things say, those were done by independent artists on the side.
	There's a lot of independent art that kind of came into the campaign and they've adopted.
	But in fact, the actual messaging, and you can see it at the Democratic National Convention, it's extremely, you know, it's art-directed.
	And, you know, everyone would hold up the same poster, and then they'd hold up another one, and there'd be a bunch of them.
	I blogged this, and I showed a lot of examples of it.
	And these goons would come in with their, you know, they wore a look like one of those guys that works on a roadway.
	You never see a homemade sign in the background, unless it's an extraordinary one.
	Well, they would hustle over there and grab the guy, and I don't know if they beat him up, but it's possible they clubbed him.
	Tased him!
	They tased him!
	Give him a regular sign that he's supposed to be holding.
	And so it was extremely orchestrated to kind of a...
	I mean, I thought it was...
	There's a lot of soullessness to the Democratic National Convention.
	So here's what I missed, John, in the writing.
	Because I see this as a show.
	And the McCain-Palin part of the show.
	It's like on Happy Days.
	Sometimes you just don't see a lot of Richie.
	That's just the way miniseries work.
	So now we've got the Fonz.
	We've got Obama right, front, and center.
	But there was no motivation.
	There was no, you know, we're the youngest country.
	Look at Europe.
	They're three times as old as we are.
	We have a very dynamic, great, you know, force.
	We love to get the shit done.
	Americans are awesome.
	The young people are really going to make stuff happen, and we're making this change, and we have this hope for them.
	It wasn't.
	It was all for people who, the way I felt the writing was, It came across as, okay, you know, yeah, I'm middle class, you know, let me be upper middle class.
	You know, save me.
	That's basically what it was.
	There was no inspiration for the country.
	No, the messaging is all, and people have pointed this out before, most of Obama's messaging is negative.
	Not negative campaigning.
	I'm talking about negative messaging.
	The country's screwed up.
	You know, we've got to turn around.
	We've got to fix things.
	We've got to redistribute the wealth.
	We've got to make things more fair.
	There's all these bad things.
	He's not saying anything bad against McCain, even though he does.
	He calls them Bush every time they turn around, which seems like an insult if you ask me.
	So, oh no, Obama's not doing any negative campaigning.
	Well, I think calling John McCain Bush is negative campaigning.
	You know, the thing about, so here's the latest trip he's on.
	And I want to remind our listeners that neither John or I are voting for either candidate.
	They're calling me a socialist.
	Well, yeah, I do remember in kindergarten, I do remember sharing my toys and giving my friend half of my peanut butter sandwich.
	And I don't understand why they don't rip into him on this.
	That's a really bad analogy because it's a little different when the teacher forces you to give up half of your peanut butter sandwich.
	There's a big difference.
	Yeah, no, that's a good point.
	But, well, I mean, he gets away with anything he wants to get away with because, let's face it, it's a long, I mean, it's decided by the people who'd be criticizing him that they're not going to, he gets a pass on everything.
	So, I know John McCain makes no chance unless there's an interesting twist just at the very end, the final series, The final in the series, unless they have rigged the voting machines and then John McCain wins, that would be a very interesting turn in the whole plot.
	But I'm just going to presume that Obama becomes president.
	So I'm really looking into what he's doing.
	And I'm looking at the plans, which are all on the website, barackobama.com.
	And really, what I'm seeing is doubling of the military, doubling of homeland security resources, And I see new internet everywhere, databases everywhere.
	And it's right there.
	There's stuff in there about working with private industry and government to create a new, safer internet.
	I'm like, huh?
	Yeah.
	And you can see all these little things that he's done throughout his career as a senator.
	These little bills that are put in, these one-paragraph bills basically creating some kind of commission for this or commission for that or who's going to determine what's safe on the Internet.
	There's another commission.
	And he's passed all these bills, and to me it seems like a beautiful puzzle that's now coming together.
	And I look at this policy, and I'm like, wow, that's sure hope and change, but there's a lot of details on what he's going to do with tax credit refunds, refundable tax credits, and his health insurance plan, but not a lot of detail on all this other stuff.
	And it seems quite far-reaching in many cases.
	Yeah, it could be militaristic for all we know.
	I mean, nobody's going to, you know, nobody breaks any of this stuff down.
	They're just, you know, working 14 hours a day for Obama.
	I mean, I got a note from somebody the other day that was like, uh...
	Yeah, so when you forwarded me...
	Yeah, he said, well, you know, I would like to get together sometime, you know, but I'm down in New Mexico.
	You know, this is a person from the Bay Area.
	I'm down in New Mexico working 14 hours a day for the Obama campaign.
	Boy, I'm glad when this election's over.
	And then you have your next-door neighbor who's, like, at Obama camp...
	And these people are just, I mean, amazing job of creating a bunch of volunteers.
	I mean, this just shows you, by the way, that volunteerism is alive and well.
	And not many people take advantage of it.
	But people do like to get involved in movements that are historic or even interesting or fun.
	And literally work themselves to death on behalf of somebody else who they'll probably never meet.
	Or they might meet in some sort of a line where they're all standing there.
	The guy's basically giving the fist thing, bing, bing, bing, down the line as fast as he can to get out of there.
	And that's it.
	I'm thinking, what a thankless job.
	So, you know, and I like Barack Obama.
	I like him.
	He seems like a good guy.
	You know, he's programmed and he's being run by, well, what you would call the shadow government.
	Well, you would call Brzezinski.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Well, yes, for sure.
	And I'm thinking that there must be a way to hack into the system.
	Because if we the people could truly get him to do the things that we want, that would be pretty awesome.
	Yeah, that's never going to happen.
	Well, I don't know.
	Maybe there's a way to hack into, to reprogram his thoughts.
	As soon as he gets in office, they drag him aside, three goons grab him, and they inject him with something.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And then you never see him again in public.
	You'll love this.
	But he's always giving speeches.
	This reminds me of that Star Trek episode.
	Before you get into that, I've got to tell you this.
	As a part of the plan, he has worked and will support and will make available $4 billion for the avian flu.
	Yeah?
	That freaks me out.
	Why?
	Because there is no avian flu.
	Well, there definitely won't be if they spend a billion dollars.
	Four billion dollars.
	Okay, you're sorry.
	So you said a billion?
	Four billion?
	Four billion with a B. Four billion dollars is set aside.
	I think there is an avian flu, and I think our little operation, Adam, the avian flu elimination project is going to need some funding.
	Damn, you're so right.
	Hmm.
	We must get on this immediately.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Okay, yeah, the Star Trek episode.
	Yeah, the Star Trek, one of the older ones, everyone who's seen Star Trek, you know, the original series, probably seen it a million times, but this is the one where they show up on this planet.
	The place is fascist.
	Everyone was wearing Nazi armbands and whatever.
	And the guy who was running the place, some guy from the Federation or whatever, I forgot what it's called.
	But he's one of the Star Trek guys.
	He's like a guy that was sent out on a different mission.
	And next thing you know, he's now essentially a fascist.
	And then they determined, of course, that he just did the fascist thing to try to straighten out what was an out-of-control society.
	And they got carried away.
	away and then some evil people because he became so popular they drugged him and made him do their bidding you know behind a glass wall and they had to rescue him and then take him off these drugs so he could say no you know we got i did so he give his last speech and say this is all wrong wrong wrong and of course and they shoot him the bat you know the bad guys do and then they arrest the nazis and it's just it was actually one of the better stories it was very interesting it's um Wizard of Oz.
	Thank you.
	Well, not really, but okay.
	In a way, in the metaphoric sense that the seeming power really is powerless.
	Yeah, well, that's true.
	The guy was a phony, but he wasn't like...
	The difference is that one was unwitting and the other one was, you know, volunteer, so it's slightly different.
	The Manchurian candidate.
	Well, there's that, too.
	By the way, if anyone hasn't seen The Manchurian Candidate, the original one, which shows up on TV every once in a while, the black and white movie with Frank Sinatra, is much better than the second.
	The second, you know, they redo these movies and they change the story.
	The original story and the novel, by the way, if you want to read a good book, read The Manchurian Candidate, the book.
	It actually has a lot of interesting...
	It's well-written, let's put it that way, and a great read if you haven't read it.
	Rather than read this new stuff, go back and read some classics.
	But Dementia and Kennedy is one of them.
	But the original movie, of course, was never successful because it came out just as John Kennedy was assassinated, and the thing had to actually be shelved.
	I don't think it ever made any money.
	But it is a great, great film.
	I got a question for you.
	This show has been going for over a year now.
	We actually forgot to celebrate our one year anniversary.
	Honey, I'm sorry.
	Lo siento.
	I think somewhere around episode 20 we were talking about China in the Congo.
	Oh, yeah.
	And right now...
	Well, in Africa, throughout Africa.
	Right, but specifically they're in the Congo.
	There's 750,000 Chinese workers now in Africa.
	Yeah, because they can't find workers in Africa, apparently.
	Yeah.
	And...
	You know, they promised to build hospitals, schools, roads, you know, all this stuff.
	In the Congo, in particular, roads are very important because they've got the red mud.
	I actually know a little bit about that.
	I can remember getting stuck in the red mud as a kid in Uganda.
	And so, you know, they move in quite aggressively.
	They need the gold.
	They need all the minerals.
	What's this stuff that's in mobile phones, John?
	It's another mineral?
	Either palladium or...
	Not cobalt, but...
	I don't know.
	I mean, there's a bunch of...
	Yeah, I know what you're saying.
	I thought it was Palladium, but maybe I'm wrong.
	No, well, it was something on the BBC, but I forgot what it was.
	It sounded like Cobalt.
	I don't know.
	So, you know, obviously very important for China, because most of our mobile phones come from China.
	Look at your iPhone.
	And I'm thinking that...
	I use a Nokia E71. Ah, so do I. They come from Finland.
	Yeah.
	Where, by the way, the internet has the regulation Australia's getting.
	But anyway, so the Chinese move in pretty aggressively.
	This has only been going for about a year, and in fact, if you've been listening to this show, you know that John and I are a fan of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, the book John Perkins.
	The author of that, who spells out how this works, and I was looking through some articles today, and I saw that Bechtel, that's the company that John Perkins worked for, was all over...
	No, actually, no, he worked for a small consulting firm.
	It wasn't Bechtel.
	I thought later he worked for Bechtel.
	I don't know, maybe.
	I don't remember that.
	Well, he references Bechtel many times in the book.
	Yeah.
	And so I read that Bechtel is in there setting up huge contracts.
	They're basically kind of like a go-between team.
	And the way John Perkins explains it is so first, you know, the economic hitmen go in, they find out who they need to bribe, and they give them hundreds of millions of dollars, and they sign off, they basically sign their countries away.
	And then those contracts go to mainly U.S. companies, and if, you know, they default on loans and the IMF, and they take everything away.
	I mean, it's a huge scam, basically.
	And what the guy specifically says is that when that doesn't work, then they send in the jackals.
	The jackals being, you know, black ops, CIA type stuff.
	Troublemakers.
	Troublemakers to stir shit up and to throw people from power.
	And when I look at what's going on now, where it's exactly the reverse of the 90s, where the...
	Let me think if I'm saying this right.
	The Hootsies were getting their ass kicked by the...
	No, the Tootsies were getting their ass kicked by the Hootsies.
	Hoot-toos and Tootsies.
	I like saying Hootsies and Tootsies.
	It's easier to remember.
	The H's and T's.
	Now the T's are kicking the H's ass.
	And it feels like jackals all over this thing, John.
	And it feels like, this time, China's involved as well.
	Well, I think China's our competitor in this deal.
	And...
	I think the problem we're having is that China is like, you know, they're doing a bunch of stuff we can't do.
	I don't know, maybe we're partnering with them.
	I mean, it's always possible that behind the scenes, you know, we let China...
	Or, or, or, this could be the front.
	It could be.
	You know, this could be where the front of the war between the U.S. and China takes place.
	I'm thinking it's more likely that there's some sort of an agreement in the back room.
	Because one of the things we could never do in Africa in particular was support these creeps who hated us anyway and pull the economic hitman stunt that we could easily do in South America.
	Well, we tried, but we always seem to fail.
	Yeah, we always screw it.
	It never works.
	The model for Africa is unknown to us.
	But the Chinese have an interesting model, which, of course, I elucidated before.
	Just to bring it up again, they basically scam these people.
	And this was introduced to me by a German entrepreneur some years earlier who started to see it back, I think this was a while back, He said, he outlined exactly what the process is.
	And as soon as he did, it made sense to me that every time I looked into it, this is exactly what was going on, which is the Chinese find some government, no matter how horrible these people are, do a deal to build their infrastructure out.
	And in the process, as part of the deal to build out the infrastructure, they are allowed to bring in duty-free anything they want and their own workers.
	And so they flood the place.
	With a bunch of supposed workers who set up little communities and towns and stores, and then they take all these duty-free goods, which nothing can compete with.
	This is why the German guy was irked.
	Because you can't compete with duty-free when you're paying 50%.
	For the same thing.
	And they bring in a lot of the stuff's inferior.
	And they bring all this crap in, and then they start flooding the market with products that are duties that are cheap as part of this process to build out their infrastructure, build a dam, do this and do that.
	But they never complete the project and let this situation go on forever where the Chinese start importing just tons and tons of stuff, people, and they end up taking over the country for all practical purposes, at least economically.
	And it's something we don't have the...
	It's just nothing we would do.
	Am I crazy?
	But is that not exactly what's taking place with Europe and the United States?
	Aren't the Chinese doing exactly that?
	Aren't they bringing stuff in constantly?
	Maybe they're taking us over very quietly economically in the background just by importing all this stuff.
	I mean, they've got all kinds of...
	They've negotiated, I'm sure, with all these sovereign wealth funds.
	I'm sure they've negotiated many of the import contracts.
	Maybe that's their whole modus operandi.
	Well, the problem with doing that to us, first of all, is they're not doing it as a cheat.
	In other words, slipping in some crazy idea so they can get the stuff in duty-free.
	I mean, it's already duty-free.
	And the other thing is most of what we're paying them with It's not minerals.
	I think the Canadians ship them a lot of logs, but we don't really ship them anything that's anything other than essentially debt that they own.
	Here, take some of our credit cards.
	Take some of our debt.
	Oh, by the way, can we borrow more money from you?
	So I'm wondering who's scamming who in this deal.
	Well, it takes two to tango, I guess.
	Well, it all shakes out in the end, and at some point it's an unstable situation.
	And, of course, my thinking is that we're heading for an economic crisis, but not until we have a nice bull market.
	Right after the election.
	That's my guess, yeah.
	So, anyway, I bought, I don't want to get into the stock market stuff, but I did buy an exchange-traded note.
	So is that for the upside or the downside?
	It's a downside.
	It's a double short, actually.
	And it's an exchange-traded note, which is one of these crazy financial vehicles.
	And this one was created by the Deutsche Bank in Germany.
	And if anyone wants to know what it is, you can look it up.
	It's DTO. It's an oil short.
	It's a commodity.
	But it's not.
	It's a short.
	But it's done as an exchange-traded note, so you just trade it openly on the market.
	But it's structured like a credit default swap.
	In other words, it's one of these crazy things that it doesn't, you know, it's like one of these investment concepts, right?
	Yeah.
	So apparently, when you buy, I would recommend people just somehow get one and buy it and sell it.
	I don't care.
	But you want to get it long enough so they have to send you the document which explains it.
	So it came in the mail the other day.
	I've been itching to get a hold of one of these things because I know they exchanged all these crazy ideas that would have been these financial vehicles or whatever they want to call them.
	I've always wanted to get a hold of one of the documents that explains how it works.
	So what's the value of one of these ETNs?
	An ETN, well, that's kind of explained.
	There is none, in fact.
	The whole thing is something like a house of cards, so you have to get in and you don't want to hold them forever.
	Although they expire.
	This one expires in 2036.
	But you can trade it on the stock exchange.
	But anyway, so I got the document finally.
	It showed up.
	Holy mackerel.
	So this is like you're kind of betting against the house where you say, okay, I'm going to put $5,000 into this ETN and you have a marked point where you bought in and then depending on what it does, you win or you lose?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	Okay.
	So tell me about the document.
	The document is the size of the Manhattan phone book.
	It costs like 10 bucks to ship me this thing.
	It's huge.
	And now, I've realized that no matter what happens to this ETN, this document has got to be the greatest cocktail party conversation piece ever.
	Because I've gotten documents from companies doing IPOs, and you've seen these things.
	Is it really thin paper and really small print?
	No, it's small print, but it's not necessarily thin paper.
	But it's just regular laser jet paper.
	But the thing is so big, and it's a convoluted mess.
	It would take you a year or two to read it, if you could.
	And it's one thing after another, and how the bank does this and that.
	Anyway, it's worth the price of admission just to get this big piece of paperwork in the mail.
	Holy crap, I didn't know it was this complicated.
	But that's what a lot of these crazy investment creations are.
	They're just like some...
	I'm sorry, it's like these guys say, nobody can understand them.
	I was watching CNBC Friday as they were wrapping up.
	Oh, Erin Burnett.
	God, I'm in love with her.
	I love her so much.
	She's everybody's favorite.
	Oh my God.
	I could live with her.
	I would worship her.
	I could.
	I wouldn't even have to have sex just to lay next to her.
	Yeah, I'm sure you wouldn't get any from her either.
	Anyway.
	So Bernanke was on, and Bernanke, around 2 o'clock Friday afternoon, Eastern Time, he starts doing this live speech.
	And they already have the speech, so at a certain point when it gets kind of boring or long or whatever, they just tune out, and then they start talking about what he hasn't even talked about because they've been sent the speech ahead of time.
	And essentially, what the message was...
	That they can't find a way to put into place a U.S. government-backed, government-sponsored enterprise.
	So what they're saying is the pyramid of mortgages...
	That exists today, kind of winding up with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, that that cannot exist without explicit backing from the government.
	And they're talking about this way of doing it called covered bonds.
	Have you heard of this?
	No, but I'm sure it will.
	Yeah, so essentially, you know, there's bonds that the U.S. government guarantees, and so that would be the vehicle.
	I mean, it's really, it's quite interesting to see, because that is one of the big changes that they're making now into the new global economic order, as Sarkozy and Gordon Brown are calling it, and Merkel.
	I believe in Merkel.
	Yeah.
	Andrew Horowitz wrote in his online news blog, The Disciplined Investor, and I'm going to blog it too, which is that apparently $60 billion of that bailout are going to salaries and bonuses for the executives.
	Oh yeah, this guy's getting $500 million.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And the New York Times had a great piece where a reporter called into an employee conference call.
	What a huge lack of security these things are.
	The stuff that's discussed on conference calls is just outrageous.
	And we're probably really bad at it at Mevio.
	So he called in and the question was asked, so what are we going to do with the money?
	Well, we're going to make acquisitions.
	We're going to hold on to it for better times.
	But basically, no, we're not giving this to any smaller banks.
	This is not moving down the line.
	We're keeping it.
	So we can do business and acquisitions.
	Acquisitions, of course, mean fees and bonuses.
	Right.
	Sorry?
	I'm just saying it's a scandal.
	What's really interesting is that Barclays Bank here in the UK, which I also bank with, they went out and they raised 7 billion pounds, like 12 billion dollars from the Saudis, from the Middle East, because they didn't want to take the government money.
	They refused it, and everyone's like really tripping out over this.
	And so they gave a really sweetheart deal to some Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.
	And so they're still independent.
	They don't belong to the government, which is a very interesting move.
	Yeah, well, they'll probably still be in business someday.
	Exactly.
	And I was quite happy to see that.
	Well, I know that Wells Fargo, when the government came calling, they...
	They said, no, we don't want your money.
	And they said, no, you're taking the money and you're giving us so many preferred stock shares, even though it turns out that it wasn't as good a deal as Goldman Sachs got on some of these same offerings.
	In other words, the taxpayers have to pay the premium because our Treasury Secretary is an ex-Goldman Sachs guy who's looking after his own people.
	So is his little assistant, the guy doling out the money, Neil Cash and Kerry.
	And so they didn't want it.
	But the argument was interesting to me was, well, everyone of you banks have to be in on this because if some of you buy in and some of you don't, then the public will know which banks are insolvent and sketchy.
	And we don't want anyone knowing anything.
	Which, of course, is kind of insulting to the public.
	Why is the public, you know, you may have a run on the bank.
	Nobody has a run on the bank.
	I mean, because we have the FDIC, so your money is insured.
	You're always going to get it.
	But I think it'd be nice to know which banks are flaky.
	Of course.
	It's total protectionism.
	Anyway, what else?
	That's a depressing topic.
	So, just a quick swing back to the Congo.
	The one thing that's really irking me is that regardless of which news channel I'm watching, and I would expect a lot better from the BBC, here's what I'm really outraged.
	Forget Jonathan Ross and the other fellow.
	I'm really outraged that every single report You know, starts by saying, well, it's really bad in the Congo, and here's so-and-so who has details on why this is taking place.
	And then you see five minutes of horrible pictures of children, you know, there's no food, they're on the run, they're going to go die in the bushes and the woods.
	It's horrible, hundreds of thousands.
	They don't actually give you any information about why this is happening.
	None of them, not a single story, not anywhere can I actually get some information about what is taking place.
	Because they don't actually know, is my belief.
	And I really think that this has China and us written all over it.
	Could be.
	And we should be outraged about that.
	That's what we should be outraged about.
	Well, you know, I bet you if you read it, if you go into, and I hate to say that you have to do this nowadays to get information, I believe that if you go into the African blogs or you go to some of this more specialized information coming from other types of reporters, you're going to find the facts.
	Although the problem is a lot of it's going to be slanted, but I think at least you can get closer to it.
	Obviously, I'm able to find some information, but what I'm talking about is that they'll go into depth about all kinds of bullshit, but this seems to be a really important one.
	It's the top of the news, but really it's only the top of the news because there's frightened-looking people...
	Falling over each other and children crying and being trampled upon.
	It's porn.
	It's news porn.
	They're not actually giving you any information or anything we can do to change it.
	And where's Bono?
	He can fix it.
	Bono and Bob.
	Come on, guys.
	Get out here.
	We need some help.
	Where's Bono?
	Call up Ted Leonsis.
	Let's do Live 9.
	No, that's the cynic in you.
	Ah, it pisses me off.
	Remember We Are the World?
	Oh, the whole thing is a scam.
	USA for Africa?
	That was 25 years ago, John.
	25 years ago.
	Look at Turn On the Television.
	What have we done?
	What happened?
	Something's bullshit.
	And the same thing with Hands Across America.
	Do you remember that one?
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, you've got to tell our listeners.
	A lot of people don't know about that.
	It was too long ago.
	Hands Across America.
	This was about...
	I have to get the date.
	You might want to look it up on Wikipedia.
	Yeah, you talk about it.
	Yeah, get me the date.
	But anyway, so I actually met one of the guys who was the original designer of the whole process.
	And the idea was we're going to have...
	We had too much poverty in the United States and we're going to pull together as a nation.
	We're going to eliminate poverty and homelessness.
	I think homelessness was maybe when the word first started to become popular was during the Hands Across America thing.
	They decided to make a big event out of people starting on the West Coast holding hands One after another, after another, into a long stream across the entire country, like the Great Wall of China, from one end of the country to the other, all holding hands.
	And there was like little buttons and stickers and pins that had...
	And arm bands.
	Yeah, but the armband.
	And it was like little people holding hands.
	It was very collectible now.
	And it was called Hands Across America, and it was going to be the beginning of the end for homelessness.
	And it was just another big bunch of bullshit.
	May 25th, 1986.
	Yeah, there you go.
	7 million people held hands in a human chain for 15 minutes along a path across the continental United States.
	Participants paid $10 to reserve their place in line.
	The proceeds were donated to local charities to fight hunger and homelessness and help those in poverty.
	You know what would have been cool?
	If you could hook up a big-ass battery to one end, Do you think it would go through all those people?
	And jolt the guy at the other hand.
	Whoa!
	Taze him, dude.
	Well, taze him.
	Well, the problem was is when all is said and done, there were gaps all over that thing.
	Yeah, there were gaps.
	They never made it.
	That was like, it was a disappointment because we didn't pull it off.
	You know, we failed.
	Fail!
	Well, they didn't fail making a lot of money.
	That's a big meme now these days, fail.
	Have you noticed that?
	Yeah, it's a meme.
	Yeah, you see Photoshop pictures of Bernanke and Paulson in Congress, and then behind them, a guy holding up a sign, fail.
	Really?
	Yeah, it's a meme.
	It's a meme.
	It's a good one.
	Yeah, it's fun.
	Well, I have to start using it then.
	Yes, we should use it here on this very show.
	We need to propagate.
	Fail.
	Well, sometimes this whole show is fail.
	Actually, I don't think we really had a totally dog show.
	Not really a real dog show?
	No.
	No, we've been pretty lucky.
	Well, it really depends though.
	And gosh, it's so important for me to be somewhere else away from you.
	Well, for no other reason than your connection is better.
	I'm convinced that's my router.
	I got to fix that.
	Get a new router.
	But I don't know if I'm going to be in San Francisco before the end of the year.
	I'm going to be in New York.
	Got to do some sales stuff.
	Hitting the road.
	Well, New York's a short trip for you.
	It's a good trip.
	Yeah, right now there's only four hours time difference between London and New York, which is...
	Yeah, no, if I lived in New York, I'd probably be going back and forth to London or Paris constantly, because it seems like a good weekend thing to do.
	It's inconvenient from here, because it has another four or five hours, and it's just, forget it.
	Well, ergo, having my own aircraft.
	Right.
	Well, for you, I mean, going to Paris is like, you know, or, you know, Holland's got just an hour or so for you, right?
	How long does it take?
	Holland, Rotterdam, about an hour.
	Paris would be about, I don't know, an hour 45.
	Yeah.
	Have you landed in Paris?
	Yes.
	Do you go to the wine country?
	Like Bordeaux would be a nice little place to fly.
	No, I've not done that yet.
	That's a little further.
	Where most pilots from the UK go, if you just want to go to France, is Le Touquet.
	Where's that?
	That's a coastal...
	It's in Normandy or something like that?
	Now I'm confused.
	I don't know if that's what it's called.
	I don't think it's La Touque.
	Maybe it is La Touque.
	That's how they pronounce it here, La Touque.
	I think the place to go if I were you, or if I was visiting and you wanted to go somewhere, I think Champagne.
	Well, the good thing is there's airfields everywhere.
	And you can almost just say, okay, I want to land somewhere over there, and there's going to be an airstrip.
	Well, I'm sure there's a bunch of airstrips in the Champagne area.
	Oh, yeah.
	Just basically grass strips.
	Just the kind of stuff you can bop in and out of.
	You pay the guy whatever you...
	It's basically a donation.
	It's fun.
	Is that what people do?
	You're flying over France and there's a little airship.
	You land and give the guy some money and he lets you sit there.
	You don't have a car or anything.
	There's no car rental place in the airship.
	John, this is aviation, man.
	This is the hardcore stuff.
	You can usually rent a car.
	In the States, you can do this all over the place.
	Same in many of these smaller fields.
	In the States, it can be five bucks.
	You can rent a car and it's basically just someone's car.
	Yeah.
	We miss you.
	There's no cause it's a little.
	It's just the car, you know, the, That's how it works.
	Sometimes it's like a real proper budget, or it hurts.
	But yeah, usually it's just a car.
	They have local restaurants, and they have hookups.
	If you go to the Isle of Wight, when you're arriving, you can say, hey, we're going to the Uh, the lobster pub.
	Okay, we'll have a cab ready for you.
	You know, you land, cab takes you up there.
	Doom, you have some lunch.
	It's nice.
	We gotta do that when you're over here.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it sounds like fun.
	After you cook on my aga.
	So I'm thinking about this.
	I don't want to bring in a little paranoia in this, but I was thinking about this aga thing.
	Uh-oh.
	I want you to run this past your wife.
	Okay.
	Because she seems to be more in agreement with my views often when I consider something to be a setup.
	Well, that's because you guys are from World War II. So anyway, I'm thinking, well...
	Maybe they've got to keep an eye on Adam.
	So what are we going to do?
	He's going to move into this new place.
	How are we going to do this?
	Well, I'll tell you what.
	Why don't we listen to some of his tastes and let's get a place and let's wire it up with microphones.
	And how are we going to make him buy this place?
	I know exactly how to do it.
	Let's put an AGA in it.
	Put an AGA in it, and I'll tell you, this idiot's going to buy the place.
	And he'll be in there, we'll have the whole place wired, and we can listen to his conversations 24-7 just in case.
	And bingo.
	The reason I thought of this, not that I'm thinking in these terms normally, is because what a coincidence that out of the blue...
	A house appears.
	A house appears on the market.
	She's in on it.
	She's a shill.
	She's part of this black flag operation.
	Out of the blue, just as you're looking for a place, there's another house with the stove you love.
	Which are rare, by the way.
	This is not for people who want to know about this stove.
	I've never heard of anybody even owning one.
	Now we have two of them.
	And it shows up and you like being reeled in or...
	So here's my thinking.
	There could be hard wires, which is harder to deal with than bugs that are sending out transmissions.
	You have to bring an expert, a bug expert, to go through your house and make sure the place isn't wired for sound.
	No, I think quite the opposite.
	I need to find the main transmission unit, and then I've got to jack that shit into the net so we can stream that for a fee.
	Totally.
	This is good.
	But I'm just saying.
	Anyway, that was a thought that passed my mind.
	It's not like I'm paranoid as you are.
	Run it past your wife and see what she thinks.
	Okay, I'll ask her.
	I think she'll...
	She may give it some thought.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	She's coming back in about an hour or so.
	Man, outrageous audience again.
	Last night, her first live show.
	Yeah?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's like 35% market shares.
	Unbelievable.
	Well, that thing probably has legs then.
	She'll be making money for a few years on that deal.
	Yeah.
	Well, she starts Holland's Got Talent in February.
	So it's just, you know, she just bops from one to the other.
	It's awesome.
	And she's so multi-talented.
	Well, you know, it sounds like easy money.
	I keep telling her.
	She's buying me my next plane.
	Yeah, you can get a nice...
	What do you think you're going to get?
	Well...
	You got a twin engine in mind?
	Not necessarily.
	You can really blast around in one of those things.
	Well, yeah.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I like the Piper Meridian, which is pressurized, single engine, turboprop.
	Which, you know, the requirement is it has to have steps in the back that open up, otherwise my wife won't fly with me over the ocean.
	And I want to get high enough so that, you know, there's no turbulence, so that's when I need pressurized.
	But also...
	What's the ceiling on that thing?
	22,000 feet.
	I don't think that's high enough, but okay.
	Oh yeah, it is.
	It's right in the middle of the clouds at 22, isn't it?
	No, no.
	22,000 feet?
	No.
	You're way above the clouds.
	I remember one time I was flying across country on one of the first 767s, and they typically fly around 36,000 feet, and we're bumping all over the place where the pilot says.
	It depends on where you are.
	Obviously, mountainous terrain will give you different height results.
	And the pilot says, we're going to go up to 42,000 feet, because the 767 just shoots right up to 42,000 feet where there's no turbulence.
	And we shot up to 40,000 feet, and it was just smooth.
	And I'm always thinking you need to get to 42,000 feet to avoid all turbulence.
	So you know those clouds sometimes you see when you have that turbulence?
	It's really the columnist nimbus cloud, and it reaches up to 42,000 feet?
	The Nimbus.
	Yeah, the Nimbus.
	What's crazy is, you know, so you see those at the bottom, so you're flying around at a couple thousand feet, and if you were to fly into one of those, you actually, this has happened before, you can get sucked up to 40,000 feet and then blown down again.
	Wow.
	Oh yeah, nobody ever wants to fly into one of those regardless of how big the airplane is.
	Yeah, I've heard that, that a Nimbus is a cloud that you fly way around.
	I was in Texas once flying out of Dallas on this pile.
	It was a MD-80 or something like that, and the guy really liked it.
	And he went and he flew around.
	It was a huge pile of these Nimbuses.
	They were all over the place.
	And so he was flying and banking heavy banks and going around one, going around the other.
	It was actually one of the most fun flights I've ever been on for a commercial flight, because this guy was just...
	You know, really taking it.
	Rolling around, yeah.
	And he missed every one of them.
	He just went around.
	There was a little map, I guess, he had of how to get through the mess and never went through a cloud.
	He didn't want to hit one.
	It's called radar, John.
	Oh, okay.
	The little map.
	How does that work?
	A weather radar.
	But anyway, he was flying.
	Which, by the way, a lot of people don't understand that the whole point of being an airplane in the sky is that you can actually not fly into the rain cloud.
	Sometimes unavoidable, the direction you're going, but lots of times, it's like, I don't want to go.
	It'll take me five minutes longer if I just go around it.
	That's pretty common stuff.
	But basically, he did not want to fly through it.
	No.
	But it was telling you, the view, because you get to see all these big nimbuses, which I think is one of the prettiest clouds there are.
	Spectacular.
	It's just a beauty.
	Spectacular.
	And if it happens to be a nimbus, which has decided to become a thunderstorm, where you see the light inside the cloud, you know, it's like a light show, ping, ping.
	It's quite a sight.
	One time I was flying into Chicago.
	This was actually the other really great sight I ever saw from an airplane.
	Actually, I saw a number of things from an airplane.
	I also saw the Aurora Borealis.
	But I was flying into Chicago one time.
	That's when you were in search of the crystal skull in the...
	The crystal skull.
	So anyway, I was flying into Chicago and there were about 50 funnel clouds in the sky.
	Yeah.
	They were all over the place.
	I mean, it was just the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
	I've had those next to my plane.
	A little mini funnel cloud, it's really kind of frightening.
	When you see a little, you know, just the beginning development of a funnel cloud.
	Yeah.
	It's kind of scary.
	Well, anyway, it was like, but this was very early in the morning, and they were lit with a kind of a golden color.
	It was just like, wow, where's the camera?
	Anyway, enough of that.
	Hour and a half, my friend.
	I guess we're done.
	Yeah.
	So we've got the election coming up.
	Now, you want to do a special broadcast right after it?
	Yeah, I'm thinking that, let's see, we'll probably have to wait until Wednesday, because Tuesday, it'll be really early morning, Wednesday morning for me, I think.
	And who knows?
	Who knows what happens?
	We may go into recounts.
	There may be all kinds of stuff going on.
	Well, I'm sure they're going to demand recounts here and there.
	I mean, that's a foregone conclusion.
	And there's apparently a number of states, like Mississippi, have 20% more registered voters than the population.
	Have you seen Hacking Democracy?
	Have you seen that HBO special?
	No.
	I don't think so.
	Oh, you really need to see it.
	It came out, I think it was over a year ago.
	And it's basically these grandmothers, and don't think really old grandmothers, but, you know, 60-year-old grandmothers.
	And they go to find out if the voting machines actually can be manipulated.
	And, well, I won't spoil the ending for you.
	Yeah, right.
	But it's about, you should, there's a link from curry.com.
	Okay, I'll check it out.
	The show notes from the Daily Source Code, I talked about it.
	It was really phenomenal.
	Hacking Democracy.
	It really will surprise you at what's possible.
	Well, I'm, whatever the case is, you know, whether it's Obama and Sarah Palin winning.
	I'd be all for that, man.
	I get horny no matter who I think of.
	Or it would be, you know, McCain and whoever he's, I guess Biden's running with him, I'm not sure.
	All right, my friend.
	All right.
	Okay, uh...
	Well, I'm going to be here for, I think, at least another week, so probably, well, after the election.
	That's when we'll do the next show.
	Maybe the day after the election.
	Okay.
	Until then, coming to you from Gitmo Nation East, I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm up here in northern Silicon Valley, also known as Gitmo Nation.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.

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