It's recommended by the Office of the President-Elect, an essential part of a balanced media diet.
It's no agenda.
Coming to you on this end from the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. Dvorak here in Silicon Valley, North, where it's another hot day.
Oh, and you are awake, John.
You're energetic.
I took the red eye.
I flew in from New York this morning.
And boy, your arms too.
Yeah, actually from Newark.
I love flying out of Newark.
What a great airport.
You like Newark?
Oh yeah, it is the most undervalued of the tri-state area.
It is fantastic.
It's usually much easier to get to from the city.
There's less traffic.
I think it's easier to get to LaGuardia, to be honest about it.
Yeah, but then LaGuardia itself is such a pain-in-the-ass experience.
You know, Newark is big and looming.
Well, it's an old dog of an airport.
And you can't fly to...
I don't think you can fly from London from LaGuardia.
You can't fly coast-to-coast to LaGuardia.
It's only for Midwest and East Coast jumpers, puddle jumpers.
Yeah.
So...
So I'm a little bit...
I'm less energetic than you are today, I guess.
Oh, so you were in New York with the guys?
Yeah, it was the full week.
You didn't know that?
No, I did know that.
I knew that Jeff and Ron were in New York, but I didn't know you were there.
Yeah, well, it was really important.
First of all, this was our big go to see all the advertising agencies, or really the media buying agencies.
But also, Jeff Karp, who's been in the company, what, all of six weeks now?
Yeah.
You know, we need a little bonding experience.
You know, what the hell do you know?
I mean, we talked to the guy for months before we asked him to join the company as CEO. It doesn't mean you actually know the guy.
You know what I mean?
Did you take him out drinking?
Oh, well, dude.
As I said, it was bonding.
Not everything is appropriate.
No, but that's really important.
You know, you get to know a guy.
You get to know his jokes.
You get to know what he likes to eat in the morning.
You know, I've known Ron for 14 years.
You know, it's different.
How was New York?
I love New York.
Once again.
You're a borderline New Yorker.
I have to say I am.
And even with what they've done with Times Square, I think it's actually improved it.
I think they've done a great job.
Broadway looks beautiful.
Technically, yeah, they've improved it.
I mean, ever since Giuliani got in there, they cleaned up the place.
But it doesn't have its old charm of hookers and muggers.
No, no, no.
I disagree.
The muggers, yeah, there's not as many muggers.
In fact, I didn't see any.
But it does still have the charm.
It's not exactly that way on 40s.
But look, we were doing business in New York.
It's still the same buildings.
It's still kind of the crappy elevators.
The wind is whistling through the buildings.
Rooms are too hot or too cold.
It rains.
The guys with the $10 umbrellas come out.
That's also New York, John.
Yeah, but that's not just, yeah, but that's all over the city.
And Flash Dancers is still there, doing fine, I might add.
Did you go there?
Yeah, of course.
Really?
You took Jeff?
No, no.
I went by myself.
You went by yourself?
Yeah, I had like three hours to kill before I was getting picked up for the airport.
I'm like, what am I going to do?
I'm already checked out of the hotel.
I got literally three hours.
It's drizzling.
And I'm like, because from our hotel, I could literally see David Letterman's place, the...
Ed Sullivan Theater.
Ed Sullivan Theater, yeah.
Which has, you know, beautiful Letterman Tonight Show signs outside.
And I thought, oh yeah, he's always showing Flash Dancers.
So I wonder where that is.
And so I get out my...
Oh, you've never been in there before?
No, I haven't been to Flash Dancers.
So I get out my Google phone...
And I type in Flash Dancers New York, and it's like, oh, it's right across the street or on the corner.
So yes, I had a $10 beer.
It was pretty cool.
$10 beer.
Did any of the girls recognize you?
No.
No, no, no.
That's too bad.
But it was very dark.
And empty.
Because, of course, Wall Street is bust.
Yeah, well, there should have been a lot of guys in there crying, you know.
I was talking to the girls and they said, yeah, when Lehman Brothers went down, which is not far from there, there were guys who came in and she said they were white as sheets and they were crying.
And since then, business is only 30% of what it was before all the malaise started.
Business is only 30% of what it was at Flash Dancers?
You mean to tell me that that place was supported by Wall Street?
No.
You think?
Unbelievable.
Are you kidding me?
That's what all these places are supported by.
The guys who are in these strip joints are the sleaze buckets who are taking hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.
Because that's all they did.
They take that money, go down to Flash Dancers or Scores or String Fellows or whatever and spend thousands on not getting laid.
Yeah, that's about it.
Getting, you know, getting rubbed up.
If that.
Well, go see Alexa.
The only thing they massages your wallet.
Yeah.
Dang.
So that was, I think that was part of why I wanted to go in there to find out how that was doing, because when we had bank clients in New York.
Oh, that's the reason.
Okay, I get it.
Well, you know, it was part research.
I'm writing it off.
To my friend of mine, who used to be a major book writer, I should mention his name, but maybe I shouldn't, but he used to be a writer for PC Magazine, lived in New York.
A major, major Windows book writer put a Windows tattoo on himself.
Oh, man.
He became an aficionado of all the strip places in Manhattan.
Really?
First name basis with all the girls.
Cool.
So I said, well, geez, you've got to take me around.
Excellent, excellent.
So he took me around.
I met all these different girls who were all just, you know, they were all falling all over themselves.
When I saw him, I guess he was a big tipper.
And everyone knew him.
And, you know, I'm wandering around like this.
The fifth wheel.
But anyway, we went to that place.
Flashdance?
Flashdance.
Yeah.
When they were closing.
So we stayed after they closed.
Oh, that's when it gets fun, man.
Well, a couple of the girls come sit down so they can talk to him.
I keep resisting saying his first name.
And so one of them sits down, and we get into a conversation.
The first thing they do is they tear off their pasties.
They all have pasties.
And they just hate these things, and they just tear them off.
So they're sitting there.
I've never seen pasties in Flashdance.
Oh, they used to have.
Well, in these days, it was apparently a lot.
What is it, 1930, John, when they still had tassels?
No, these pasties, you can't see them.
It just looks like it's a piece of clear goo.
Oh, and it's just to keep form and to keep it up?
Or what is it?
No, it's just to...
When Giuliani came in, they required this, and it was a way of getting around, flaunting the law.
Oh, but they were completely topless here.
Yeah, well, you can't see this stuff.
Anyway, so they...
I think I was close enough to know, John.
Oh, okay.
Well, they apparently changed the law.
But anyway, they had to take it away.
So anyway, they're sitting beside the point of the story.
Yes, yes, yes.
So they're sitting there naked, essentially, with a G-string.
Yeah.
And one of them talked about, you know, she said, well, you know, I'd like to get out of this town.
I'd like to go someplace else.
But, you know, I'm a stripper, and I just have to find someplace else to go.
I'm just waiting for my sugar daddy.
And I said, with all my infinite wisdom, said, you ought to go to Atlanta.
Yeah.
There's a million strip clubs down there, and it's really pleasant down there.
Was there Cheetahs?
Is that in Atlanta?
No, the big at the time was the Gold Club, Cheetah 3, Cheetah 4.
There was a bunch.
The place was crawling with them.
John, once again, you amaze me.
You are an aficionado in truly everything.
John C. Dvorak, he knows something about everything.
Now, this is, ladies and gentlemen, an example of somebody stepping all over your material.
Sorry.
So anyway, I say to the girl who's sitting there with her friend, basically nothing on, and I say, you should go to Atlanta, and she pipes up kind of adamantly and says, huh, I would never do that.
They dance nude down there.
Oh, man.
I couldn't speak after that.
I was just like, what?
Well, I think it's a fine service.
And I'm all for it.
It's just a bunch of girls that can't get work otherwise and usually have a pretty cute figure.
No, the girl I met was Polish.
And she was studying business.
And she was supplementing her student income by working three days a week.
Yeah, right.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Oh, man.
Anyway.
My favorite, you know, there's a couple of, I don't like these clubs, by the way, for anyone out there who wants to know.
Because at some point, when you're younger, you go to enough of these places.
And I've actually gone through two iterations of these things.
It's boring and expensive at the end of the day.
Well, actually, it's not as expensive as it could be.
And it's not as expensive as some of those mobbed up places where they really take you for everything you have.
But I have taken it upon myself because you run into a lot of people that get to go to Manhattan and, you know, they're from out of town or they're wherever they want, and they want to go to these places.
I'm talking, I go to a business meeting with some, like, big software company or somebody.
That's always pathetic.
That's pathetic.
Oh, hey, we're not home.
Our wives are away.
We're all guys together.
Let's go to a strip bar and drink and hoot and holler.
Yeah, I hate that.
Well, the worst, so I usually make sure to go, not because of the strip club, but to keep these guys from getting ripped off.
Now I know who you're talking about.
Yes, okay.
And so you go in and you just see these girls are like vultures.
And especially when they can spot these out-of-town guys a mile away.
And they swarm and then they come in and the next thing you know, you can just see the money.
They talk these guys into buying ridiculously priced crappy champagne, one thing after another.
And I have actually in more than one occasion...
I insisted that they leave immediately.
And without explanation, I said, you have to go now.
Just take my word for it.
I do it in some sort of a way that makes it sound like something bad is going to happen.
Yeah, because something bad is about to happen.
Yeah, something bad is about to happen.
And I get them out of there.
Yeah, we used to have to take guys there.
Do not go to those places, people.
When we took Think New Ideas public, right after we hit the tape, as they call it, so after the market closed that day, then all the traders who would, because when you go public, it's a whole event, a whole company, it's a whole bunch of stuff that happens.
Actually, that's almost worth a book, just writing about that experience.
Let's do it.
And then they're like, hey, come on, let's, I think it was, it wasn't scores, it was some other one.
I can't remember where it was.
You know, let's go.
And so it was like, you know, it was the typical thing, like 15 guys, you know, and they all made money that day off of our company.
We didn't, but our company had money now to go and grow and be, you know, and operate, which was fun.
But I remember, you know, we all sat in the private room, and then these guys are getting completely wrecked, and they're getting sweaty, and their ties are halfway off, and one guy's leading over to the other one, hey man, can you spot me a thousand bucks?
I'm not liquid right now.
I'm not liquid.
A thousand bucks.
A thousand bucks, yeah.
And it was icky.
Icky at best.
But this was just, you know, I was like, I just want to get a beer, just want to go sit, and I thought, hey, what the hell?
Well, unless you learn something.
I mean, in fact, if you can get a couple of these...
In fact, if you can get some of these girls into an honest conversation, which is possible, because most of them are just surrounded by sleazy girls.
A lot of them are idiots, yeah.
You find out some interesting things.
Well, this was a typical...
She fit the profile.
From Poland, goes back once a year.
I think she sends money back when she wants to...
She's studying business and children's psychology.
I don't know.
She was pretty interesting.
There's some of these...
She might have been for real.
Let me have my fantasy.
Let me have my fantasy.
Stop.
Anyway, I have here in my hands...
Before you finish that, let me just mention one more thing.
If anybody wants to, you know, if you like Chris Rock, find a copy, which is all over the internet, of There's No Sex in the Champagne Room.
Oh, I should take a look at that.
I have in my hands a VHS tape.
It has an old MTV Networks Inc.
label on it.
And I got this from a good, good friend of mine.
I had to be in New York to get a hold of it.
And it has eight years worth of MTV outtakes of all of your favorite VJs.
The ones that never made the air.
Yeah, you on there?
Oh, yeah.
All of us.
Are we going to post the ones of you on Mevio?
No, we're going to put every single one of them up.
Oh, you got permission?
No.
No, in fact, I'm not allowed to say who I got it from.
And I said, look, I'm going to put it up.
I'm going to burn a Mevio bug in it.
So if we get a cease and desist, someone will upload it to YouTube.
They'll live on in perpetuity.
It's great material.
And the reason why I'm doing this, A, because they didn't invite me for the Headbangers Ball reunion, and now they're doing the last TRL, Total Request Live, which of course started as Dial NTV, another show I was doing years ago, and they're not inviting me to that.
So I'm inviting all of them to my party on MeVM.
So how come you became persona non grata?
Well, dude, I quit on air, then we had a huge lawsuit.
Well, what did you expect him to invite you to these things for then?
Well, that shouldn't be so childish.
It's just business.
Exactly.
For us, it's just...
No, for me, it's personal.
So I'm putting that up.
That'll be fun.
But now I've got to find a VHS machine so I can digitize this stuff.
I went to all the camera shops along Broadway and a couple on Fifth.
They didn't even have VHS players anymore.
Just find some local studio, some independent production house and schmooze them.
They'll do it for free.
That's what I gotta do.
Or pay for it.
Yeah, no, I'll pay for it.
I just gotta find someone who does it in the neighborhood.
But there's gotta be two or three places there that'll do it.
That'll do a better job than you'll do.
But this stuff is...
Thank you.
These outtakes are not just bloopers.
It's not like America's Funniest Home Videos or some stupid shit like that or something you'd see on the E! channel.
This is stuff where...
You know how you could be doing a segment, and it's on tape anyway, so it's okay if it goes wrong, but then you just take it in a whole different direction.
It usually winds up with sex with animals or something like that.
And of course, it's never actually going to make it on the air, but you kind of complete the thing anyway.
So it's a lot of that.
Oh.
And you'll be amazed at what downtown Julie Brown does.
Yeah?
He may besides sue you after you run this thing?
She won't sue me.
She'll laugh.
Oh, okay.
What are we going to get?
Cease and desist?
What is she doing now?
I have no idea.
She always had the best name.
Downtown Julie Brown?
Yeah, good name.
What she never had was talent.
Well, that's pretty much par for the course of that place, if I'm not mistaken.
But most of the people like Martha and Mark Goodman and I think Alan as well, they're all on the 80s channel on Sirius Satellite.
So they got some kind of work.
Who are now merging...
Yeah, good luck.
Yeah.
They're merging all the technology now, too.
I think the business model is still lacking.
Who was I talking to the other day?
Well, the business model is not only lacking, but the problem is their distribution is getting radios into cars, and right now the car industry is not selling cars.
Well, no, I'm talking to, I went out to lunch with a venture capitalist on Thursday and found a new interesting place, by the way, for business lunches.
Oh, good.
Anyway, he was talking to me about, you know, he's got a Bentley.
And he, and it's got one of the, I guess he's got one of those plugs for an iPod.
And he says that he, you know, used to have a subscription to both those services.
Yeah.
You know, because these guys, he says he just canceled them both.
He says he just listens to podcasts.
Really?
Yeah, he says a lot of his other friends are just, you know, they basically, once they get into the podcast groove, they just listen to podcasts because there's no commercial interruptions.
They're easier to listen to.
You can listen, you know, start and stop, which is a big deal.
Because if you're listening to something interesting on XM, you know, there's no TiVo capability in these things yet.
Actually, there is.
Sirius has, I forget what they call it, they do have one that will actually record the broadcast, like a TiVo functionality.
But still, it's recording, it has to do it whenever the show is being broadcast.
Right, there's no versatility.
And you can't be in the tunnel, stuff like that.
I think once time switching became obviously a big deal, I was skeptical at first.
But why would I? Because I've been using VHS machines since they first came out to do the same thing, right?
Right.
And so once people decided that they didn't want their content handed to them on a schedule that they had to obey.
Obey to, yeah.
Adhere to.
I think the world changed, and I think that's what opened the door for these kinds of things we do with this podcasting thing.
I agree.
Gee, I wonder who started that.
That must have been a pretty smart guy.
Dave Weiner?
Yeah, exactly.
A little present for you here, John.
There you go.
People basically bought it for Stern.
Everyone listened to Stern.
Maybe they listened to some of the ESPN stuff, maybe BBC America, but I think that's pretty much it.
Right.
I still think that podcasting, which is interesting to me that you invented it so far ahead of the curve, because I'm always interested in people that get so far ahead of the curve that by the time the thing really becomes a big deal, they're probably dead.
Not quite.
Yeah.
No, I know, but I'm saying in 20 years, I think everything's going to be distributed this way, and I think there's going to be more independent productions, and I think it's going to be a little more competitive.
I mean, sure, I'm sure everyone still downloads the PBS stuff, and now that everyone's gotten into the act.
Well, I do think there will be one maybe minor difference that, you know, if we actually could have complete ubiquitous bandwidth everywhere at reasonable throughput rates, then there might not be that much reason to have to download stuff before you can listen to it.
It may actually be able to be streamed and started and stopped live, but, you know, it requires a huge infrastructure, which we clearly don't have.
So right now it's...
But I think what's overlooked, because you're not the only guy who said this, but I think what's overlooked in this analysis is that that's actually a throwback.
We don't need to do...
I mean, I think it'd be great if we could stream stuff, and I think it's still important for, like, sporting events and things where you really don't want to listen to it on tape.
But I'm just talking about saving more time.
Because, you know, yeah, there's lots of people using iTunes for podcasts, but I don't really know how well it works if it's really downloading in the background.
You know, I think that probably when someone wants to load up, they say, okay, give me all my stuff.
And that the speeds are now fast enough that it kind of comes in and you can do it as a, you know, maybe a 20-minute ordeal if you've got a couple of shows you want to download.
But it's not really fully automatic.
So all I'm saying is just to make it easier that you, that it may, so it's not about the live stream.
It'll be on-demand streaming is what I mean.
It's not like live in, in real-time live.
But you can just access it on demand.
I think that will happen more and more.
It's just because it saves the audience more time at the end of the day.
Yeah.
No, I think it'd be better if you just had a big menu.
Yeah.
Here's just ideally what I'd like to see.
Okay.
Here we go.
You have your player or maybe not even your player, but you have a connection to a player that's built into the car or who knows what that's through Wi-Fi.
You have a menu that comes up on your screen and you just click on...
The ten podcasts you want or subscribe to them so they update automatically to some wireless system.
And then you're done.
Or you go to a website and some guy has a podcast.
You just click on that and there's some mechanism.
It just automatically throws it onto your playlist.
It goes right into your car or wherever you listen to this stuff.
So it's just basically one-click stuff.
Well, so I almost have it set up that way, because what I've done is on Mevio.com, which, by the way, I think the homepage is starting to be something now.
But on Mevio.com, I'll make a channel of favorite shows, so I have...
Let's see what I have in there.
The New York Times front page.
I've got Fresh Air.
I've got the BBC News Pod.
I've got Pacific Coast Hellway.
I've got Tech 5.
And then it's all in one channel, so it's one feed.
And I subscribe to that in my Nokia podcast application.
And so it's literally one click.
It'll bring in the whole list of new episodes in the shows that I like.
And then I can just say, okay, download this one, this one, this one, this one, or all of them if I want to.
And that's it.
And then I'm good to go.
And that's getting pretty close to perfect, I would say.
Yeah, I need something like that.
I mean, I'm still...
Well, you have an E71. You can do the same thing.
Yeah, I don't listen to this stuff through the E7. I'm going to have to start using the E71's multimedia capability a little more.
Well, I got this bitchin' headset.
That's what's really working for me.
Did I show you that headset?
The Motorola Bluetooth behind the...
It's made of solid plastic and it goes behind the neck.
I'll show it to you.
It's awesome.
Let me see if I have another model number on this.
It doesn't say.
You're looking it up?
You're Googling?
Yeah, I'm Googling.
Yeah, I picked this up at the San Francisco airport last time I was leaving and it's awesome.
So you've got beautiful stereo.
You can start and stop from the headset.
No wires, which is really what I hated.
And I can even have this thing on when the plane is taking off, when you're supposed to have everything off.
If they catch you with earphones in, then they almost rip them out of your head, right?
So this just goes right underneath the hairline.
You don't see it.
And I'm sitting there chilling, listening to shows.
And if a call comes in, then it interrupts it.
It's great.
Hmm.
No, you have to send me a link.
Yeah, I will.
But anyway, yeah, I still burn CDs.
Well, a lot of people do, actually.
In fact, you know...
Well, I'll tell you what the problem is with burning CDs, because I have a bunch of them.
You know, when I go into the San Francisco office, one of the things I do is I've downloaded a lot of the ad tech...
Ad Tech, which is one of the big conferences for people out there who do a lot of blogging and stuff, they want to kind of understand this business a little better.
You can go to the Ad Tech site and they have all their speeches for all their conferences available as podcasts.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, that's good.
And we're talking like dozens and dozens.
But do they have an RSS feed?
Well, the problem is there's so many of these things you want to pick and choose.
So here's something that would be great.
If you could go to Mevio and then you could create a channel of the ones you think are good and then publish that.
That would be cool.
I'd listen to that.
I'd listen to your feed if you were putting stuff in there.
So anyway, the problem is that you can only get one.
The problem with CDs is that they only hold 70 minutes.
Right.
You know, when you have an iPod, you could load that baby up with hours and hours and hours and hours of material.
Or even with the E71, how much does that hold?
Like, whatever that memory card comes with.
Well, yeah, it's a 2-gig memory card, so you can store tons of stuff on it.
Yeah, so it's a big difference.
So you end up burning a lot of cheap CDs and throwing them out.
Yeah, but I find that that's good for the car, because I've tried the Bluetooth to the car radio.
That sucks.
I've never gotten that to work reliably.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I'll burn stuff to a CD for in the car.
In fact, I made a big stink about this, and the download links are coming back, ladies and gentlemen, on Mevio.
Oh, you, oh, no.
Yeah, of course, it's stupid.
I mean, it's like, you can't force people to listen to shows on the computer, you know, or force them, you know, it's like, why make it difficult?
Just give me a damn download link.
This is what I'm saying to AL, you can hear me saying it.
AL, don't make it so fucking difficult.
Well, the problem is that there's a difficulty monetizing these kinds of things, but the fact of the matter is there's ways, A, and B, people want to download.
I have to get the phone down.
Yeah, no problem.
Go ahead.
Well, give me a story first.
Now I've got to cover.
Let me see.
I've got a good story.
I'm so happy.
You there?
Yeah, I'm back.
Alright, you want to continue this or you want to talk about something else?
No, I think we're boring people, Steph.
Alright.
So, I picked up, as I always do for my girls, I pick up People Magazine, I'll pick up Us Weekly or whatever it is, and I'll pick up the National Enquirer and Globe.
And I'm so happy with our new president because now politics are really in the supermarket tabloids.
And I had to pick this up.
Obama's wife attacks Oprah.
Back off!
There's only room for one first lady in the White House.
And it's great because, in essence, I'm sure that a lot of this is taking place.
So, you know, the story, of course, which is hyped to no end...
Well, wait a minute.
Before you go on, where did this one run?
Because for people out there that don't know any better, the National Enquirer is quite accurate.
Yes.
Oh, but this is the Globe.
The Enquirer has its own story, but this is an exclusive to the Globe, which I'll put in the same league, although Enquirer may be better.
And it's really saying that Oprah, who of course did do a tremendous amount for the Obama campaign, she had a big fundraiser at her house, like a $3,000 a head dinner.
Declared him the messiah.
Did that, talked about him.
She's a key maker.
Well, she's huge on television.
She is massive.
And so now, you know, of course, so this is how it works, right?
The campaign ends, the twittering stops, you know, the emails drop off the face of the earth, because it's done, right?
We've got nothing left to say to anyone who did anything.
That's the way it goes.
But, of course, Oprah, you know, who's been dedicating a lot of her personal time, but also a professional taking risk, even, you know, she had...
Remember, in the beginning, people said, oh, she's going to lose her audience.
People will hate her.
So there was some significant risk involved.
So you're not Oprah, and it's not like all of a sudden, okay, thanks, I'm a president.
No, she's calling up, and she's going like, all right, so I'll be hosting the inaugural ball.
This is the dress that I'll be wearing.
And oh, by the way, I've got an agenda.
Here's some things you have to do, because I'm Oprah.
Yeah, this was all expected.
Of course it was.
Well, people don't think about it, and that's why I'm so happy that this is showing up in the supermarket tabloids, because now I have a reason to read these things again.
And Michelle Obama is apparently really pissed off.
She's like, back off, sister.
Yeah.
Well, because Michelle Obama is indeed, or will be in January, the First Lady, and Oprah is not the First Lady, although Oprah was kind of a de facto First Lady of the black community, and now she's going to, you know, she must, this is going to be interesting, because you're right, this could turn into a little hissy fit here.
Well, even crazier than that.
I was talking to Patricia about this, and she approaches this from a very different angle.
She sees it as celebrity gossip.
She's not even that into the whole presidential thing the way I am, certainly.
And so I mention this to her, and she says, oh yeah, I've been seeing Oprah, man.
She's not married to Stedman.
Her sexuality has always been in question.
She's really like the most eligible woman.
Bachelorette in America, I would say.
Even though she has this guy, maybe just her mustache or beard, whatever you call it.
It doesn't matter.
But Patricia was saying that everywhere, Oprah's hanging on Barack.
Patricia put it a little more crudely, but she says she's just gliding over him continuously.
And I bet she would have loved to have been...
That's what she said.
Oprah is...
She said it in Dutch, so it doesn't really translate.
But she said Oprah is just moist for Barack.
That was the essence.
I get it.
And I thought about it.
I said, yeah, I could totally understand where Oprah would think, shit, this is the guy for me.
I like him.
Now, she can't do anything about it now.
I think that's way too late.
But you bet that she has an agenda.
And she's going to call Barack on it.
Yeah, no, it's going to be interesting to see why he does it.
But the problem is, you know, a lot of people believe that the black community, which has never had this much access to power, is going to be all over him, you know, pushing him in one direction or another.
He's going to have to essentially pull a Nixon and pretty much isolate himself.
So you just can't get a hold of him.
Oh, he's got enough people he's considering for his administration that have worked with Nixon.
Well, and Clinton, and he's got that mean-spirited chief of staff.
Rahm Emanuel.
You know, I looked up a couple of things on some of these people.
I didn't have a lot of time.
I don't know if we talked about it last week, but Rahm Emanuel was on the board of directors at Freddie Mac in 2002 when there was, you know, huge money was being laundered and lost and...
All these people that are around him in the administration are just kind of scary.
I mean, you probably get a weird background if you're in politics long enough anyway, but hmm.
So the word here is that Hillary Clinton's going to become Secretary of State.
Yeah, I followed that whole thing.
Friday, it kind of like, well, she doesn't want to say, and insiders are saying, but then I heard Hillary give a speech where she said, I'm going to respect the President-elect's process, so it sounds like she indeed could be...
Well, you know, during the election, when the two of them were still battling each other and she had to give in and not, you know, make a big fuss at the end, they had that secret meeting to just the two of them.
And they came out and she was smiling and everybody thought there was some sort of a quid pro quo deal that was done to get her out of the race.
And many people assumed it was that she was going to be the vice president.
This may have been the deal.
Well, it's the right gig for her, I'll say that.
She's definitely the right person, although, of course, she works for the evil Uber overlords.
You know my opinion on that.
But just from what she knows and who she knows and the world she's traveled around in, I think she would be pretty good.
Maybe.
Just another neoliberal.
Well, of course she is.
I mean, it's all show anyway.
I just want pretty pictures to look at.
By the way, Sarah Palin now with her hair down at that Republican get-together.
So it turns out you watched Bill Maher last Friday.
I didn't see the one last night.
I never watch it, yeah.
Well, you shouldn't.
I can't.
We already went through this.
I can't get it over here.
Oh.
Well, you know, once we get our sling boxes...
Sling boxes, yeah.
When we get the sling boxes, yeah.
And there's a thing called Sling Catcher that puts it on the TV. I'm going to get some units and I'll figure out how to do it.
Excellent.
Anyway, so...
Bill Maher was one of the guys ranting and raving about what an idiot Sarah Palin was because she thought Africa was a country.
And it turns out it wasn't true!
Yeah, she denied it.
Nobody paid any attention to her denials, but they decided to go with it.
And it was a blogger who was a hoax guy, and it was a big hoax in the Los Angeles Times.
You know, the media in general.
MSNBC. They all jumped on this poor woman for something that didn't even happen.
It was just...
I thought it was sick.
Despicable.
Yeah, well, that's the media.
That's why it's better now to buy...
I bet you this story in the globe is true.
It's more true than that shit.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I know, it's pathetic that we have to read tabloids to get news.
Well, I was going to say, it reminds me of Men in Black.
I think it was the first Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones is showing Will Smith the ropes.
And then he walks by a newsstand and he stops and he picks up the National Enquirer.
And then Will Smith says, you know, what's that for?
He says, this is research.
You know, it's for all the stories.
It's all true.
Everything in here is what's happening in the real world.
Well, you know, the one thing that's come out over the National Enquirer doesn't get any respect because they buy a lot of their stories.
They'll actually pay sources to spill their guts.
Right, right.
And this is considered bad practice.
Yeah, I'm reading The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Greg Pallast, have you ever heard of him?
No, I haven't heard of him, but I heard of that book.
Excellent book.
Excellent book.
And it's really, he's a journalist.
He's uncovered a lot of amazing, amazing things that have gotten no attention in mainstream media.
So it's partially about the truth that he's uncovered, which goes back to the 2004 elections with voters predominantly black, but almost all Democrat being scrubbed off of the eligibility or voter list in Florida.
But really it's about how he has tried to get these stories into mainstream news in America and has failed.
And what I'm already reading now is he's saying, no one's doing any research.
It's a lot safer just to buy your story.
Because that's what they all do, John.
They buy a package story.
They don't buy the news or the information from the person directly.
But they'll just buy a package of news.
They'll take a press release, turn it into a news story.
And there's no report.
It's too expensive.
No one wants to spend the money on reporting.
In fact, the line that I like...
Yeah, the newspapers are at some point making something like 20% margin when they're in their heyday.
And so they keep cutting back on the quality and then people stop looking at the papers because the quality sucks.
And then they cheapen it more thinking people are going to want that.
I've made this argument a million times.
It's like, why do you make your product worse if you want more people to buy it?
I mean, this never made any sense to me.
And then meanwhile...
It's so bad, and I thought there was a point of irony here.
I was on a call recently for the Bulldog Reporter with a bunch of other writers talking to public relations people about how they should do their job.
This is common.
And Kara Swisher was on at the Wall Street Journal.
And she's talking about her website.
They got all things digital, whatever it is.
there's kind of a blog that's separate from the journal itself although it's edited i believe anyway she said that the most popular feature on there is press releases run full cloth yeah she says it really shocks her but you run a press release full cloth and it gets more page views than most of the stuff that she does she says she just kind of mentions this in passing and i'm thinking think about Isn't that crazy?
So, I mean, the press, you know, okay, well, anyway, so the whole newspaper thing is just completely, now somebody made the, or mentioned the possibility that they are going to be next in line to beg for a bailout.
These guys don't need any more money.
Just before we get into that, so somewhere in the beginning of this book is the line that this is so rare that journalists actually do any real investigative reporting that that's why they had to make a whole movie called All the President's Men because...
Who were the guys?
Woodrow...
Bernstein and Woodward.
Bernstein and Woodward.
It was so rare that they had actually done all that investigative reporting to uncover the Watergate scandal that they had to make a movie about it.
And the point is well made.
I never thought about that, but you're right.
Yeah.
I mean, so what's so special?
These guys actually did their job.
It was so unusual that this ever happened.
And this was in the 70s, by the way.
So unusual that anybody would do something like this that it made it into a movie.
You might like this book, John.
It's an updated version.
The best democracy money can buy.
Isn't that funny?
Expanded election edition.
Well, okay.
This is a...
Paul Parkinson gave this to me.
I've known many an arrogant PR person who have essentially said, you know, we make all the news.
People just do what we tell them to, and that's the way it is.
Well, the sad thing is that the audience doesn't give a shit.
Well, yeah, whatever.
Well, they don't give a shit because they're not really given much of an option.
No, but I don't think...
And they're used to it.
Yeah, they're used to just believing whatever.
It's like...
Remember that Isle of Jersey thing?
I think I was telling you about it the other day about...
They found all those bones, children's bones...
And there's been, you know, 30 eyewitnesses and testimony for years.
And, you know, so they finally uncovered, you know, bones of like 12 children.
And so, you know, now, whoops, they replaced the deputy or the chief of police.
Whoops, someone else went in retirement.
Oops, the judge changed.
And now the news came out.
Oh, no, no.
There was no children bones at all.
It's all animal bones.
There was no torture whatsoever.
And people are emailing me.
You really need to make a correction.
You were wrong.
I'm like, what are you talking?
You're going to believe this piece of shit over anything else, let alone me?
I mean, 30 people testifying that this was going on?
Yeah, man.
You know, you see that when you do...
This is the great thing about, actually, modern media and blogging and modern magazines that use comments.
Because you can roll out, like, the most scurrilous piece of information that you know is true...
I mean, global warming falls into this category.
Michael Crichton, by the way, I saw it.
Michael Crichton came out, and I saw his last interview with Charlie Rose.
I have a copy, I should give it to you, of all his interviews.
And he says he knew he was going to get slammed for this, but he says he thinks, as far as he concerns, it's a crock of crap.
But, you know...
You could have evidence that it's a crock of crap, but because people have subscribed, they have subscribed their personality.
In other words, it's almost like, you know, I've always felt this way with, you know, this Mac versus PC thing that happened.
It began in 1984 and it just really never ended.
And you criticize a Macintosh and the person who has subscribed to the Macintosh by buying one and thinking it's really good.
They think you're criticizing them.
Yep.
They've internalized.
People have internalized outside information and this is a form of materialism that is very destructive to one's personality.
And this type of materialism can take the form of being materialistic about information.
So you are totally, you've bought in to something to such an extreme that if anybody says that the information might be invalid, you defend the information even if it is invalid because you are 100% in.
This is not healthy.
But this is rampant, John, particularly in high tech, particularly Silicon Valley stuff.
And it's programming.
It's social engineering.
But look at those ads.
I mean, basically, hi, I'm a cool guy.
You know I'm getting laid.
And I use a Mac.
That's the whole message.
And the other guy clearly is not getting laid.
By the way, I'm in New York and I asked Ron and Jeff this.
You know, Ron's a pretty smart marketing guy.
Jeff's been, you know, marketed electronic arts all of North America for eight years.
You know, billions of dollars worth of video games.
And I say, you see that bus going by that says, Windows, Life Without Walls.
Can you explain that positioning statement to me?
And neither of them could.
Do you know what that means?
I have a theory.
Well, let me think about it.
This is so weak.
I remember seeing it myself.
Life without walls.
Windows.
So the window is just sitting there without a wall holding it up, I guess.
But I'm just trying to think of some crazy things.
I got it.
I got it, man.
And it's a total West Coast, Silicon Valley thing.
Get it.
Walled garden.
The Mac being a walled garden.
Oh my god, you're right.
How lame is that, huh?
How lame is...
You're right.
That's exactly it.
It's a ton.
Yeah, and I'm looking at it, and I'm like, this is not the best positioning statement in the world, and neither Ron nor Jeff, they said the same thing.
Well, it's like no walls, and it's transparent, but it was not good.
How does that sound for Microsoft?
They said, yeah, that's like the way they package their shit.
Yeah.
But there's a pun in there, and I think because of the whole Mac PC thing, and now they've got the, hi, I'm a PC, which, by the way, I think those ads are pretty good.
I think they stink.
No, I think they're well cast.
I like them.
I like the people they cast.
Here is the big $64 question about these ads.
When you're zooming by advertising using your TiVo or your DVR, whatever it is, and you go shooting by all these ads, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and you see a Mac ad, one of those are the two guys, you will stop and watch it because you know you're going to be entertained.
If you see one of those PC ads, are you going to stop your DVR so you can watch the ad?
No.
No, you're right.
But that's the difference between advertising and making a better ad and doing something which I believe is the next, and what we are doing, the next level of advertising, is you turn it into entertainment.
Those ads are entertaining.
They're fun to watch.
So it's entertainment, ergo good.
And then, of course, that's the kind of shit that when you consume it as entertainment, you internalize it, and then you get all that crazy fanboy shit.
Well, it has messages in it that work.
I mean, I think they're just, they're fantastic.
I mean, it hasn't sold me on anything, but, you know.
But the fact of the matter is, it's the machine I do recommend people buy.
If somebody says, what should I get, blah, blah, blah, just get a Magintosh, and, you know, you won't have to worry so much.
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
And I saw it once again on the road, man.
Because we're using Ron's laptop as the presenting machine, so it's fully loaded and has, in case there's no...
You go to these agencies and you get an hour with one of the top media buyers responsible for huge brands.
I'm talking about everything from Pepsi to Dr.
Pepper to movie studios to...
Other consumer packaged goods like Gillette, on and on and on.
And then you want to present to them.
Sometimes the Wi-Fi is all fucked up and you wind up presenting upside down in the craziest ways.
Half the meetings I spend on my knees on the floor.
I mean, it's real schmata selling stuff.
Right, because you have to go down and find a plug.
You've got to find a plug and all that.
The internet connection is usually dead.
Exactly.
And then what's the guest password?
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
And these are media agencies, so we're supposed to be sophisticated in this stuff.
Anyway, so actually we had a lot of good luck.
We were able to get a lot of it working fairly smoothly.
But it's a PC, and so whenever you connect to either...
We did have our own projector, which we always carry with us in case someone has absolutely nothing, because there's nothing more pathetic than, hey, let's all look over my shoulder at the screen or trying to navigate a presentation upside down.
Right, Matt.
But every...
Every different projector we ran into or every flat screen TV. You spend 15 minutes configuring the fucking options.
You know, the size, the frequency scan rate, the resolution.
And with a Mac, you plug it in and it works!
It just works.
Hello?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, uh...
Did I internalize that?
It sounded a bit...
I think so.
You sounded like a little too happy about it.
Yeah, no, I agree.
The whole thing's a disaster.
And I use the Google phone a lot.
What, I'm sorry?
I use the Google phone a lot this trip.
Oh, I didn't know you had a Google phone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got one from the office.
Well, I was supposed to get a Google phone.
They never got me one.
Well, no.
I got you the E71. Listen, you don't want the Google phone unless you want to test it out because the battery life is...
Yeah, that's what I want to do.
I want to test it out.
Okay.
Well, you can have mine.
I'm done with it.
Is it a dog?
No.
Is that what you're saying?
No, what I'm saying is...
I thought I told you this.
The phone itself is a dog.
HTC makes it, and the battery life, because of all the shit that's in there, whatever, it's like three hours.
That's not worth it.
There's still a lot of basic stuff missing.
Real basic stuff like, you know, I'd like to send a webpage via email to someone.
Forget all that.
This is an operating system that combined with the Google services, here it is, the cloud, Is absolutely at consumer-friendly enough level, and I could see this operating system, unlike Symbian, I could see this going on to netbooks.
I could see this being a very lightweight operating system that works with all the Google services, giving you enough to have a real experience in life, free, as an operating system.
I'm really quite...
Yes, I'm surprised by it.
I'm surprised by it.
So you think Google, you think this may be a Trojan horse?
Not in the sense of a virus, but in the sense of like, here we come, we're going to do this phone.
Look, look, it's just a phone.
We're just doing a phone.
No, no, no, no, we're just doing a phone.
But in fact, they're working on blowing out a real operating system that's going to be on real computers, running all these cloud apps before you know it.
Yeah, well, I know that they're already going to do it on a Sprint phone.
So they're just going to be pimping the OS out everywhere they can.
And I don't see why they wouldn't put it on bigger devices.
It just makes perfect sense to me.
So then Microsoft was right in their paranoia.
Yeah, I think so.
And it could do it, John.
It really could.
It already has the touchscreen hooks built into it.
So that's kind of cool.
Which, by the way, the hotel we were at had those big Microsoft coffee tables.
It's kind of nice because...
What hotel was this?
The Sheraton Towers.
A pretty shitty hotel.
But right in the middle where we needed to be for this trip.
So you have these coffee tables which are, I don't know, about four feet by...
Two and a half feet.
And it looks like you're looking from a top view of the beach.
There's a little starfish there and there's some shells and sand.
And when you put something down on the table, because I didn't recognize it at first, but you put something down and the water starts to ripple.
And then you notice, yeah, in the four corners, there's a little tab, you hit it, and then boom, you get Google Maps, or Google Earth, I should say, or it's probably Microsoft Live, but it looks like Google Earth.
There's pictures of the hotel, and you can do all the rotating and the pinching and the expanding, and yeah, it was good.
That's the shit Microsoft should be making.
Yeah, well...
If it's even Microsoft.
It worked too well for it to be Microsoft, honestly.
Well, they're not going to, you know...
They drift in and out of these things.
It's like weird.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I mean, the...
More people, you know, apparently the government of Holland has decided to go open source.
Yeah, they've been working on that for a long time.
I think that's a damn good initiative.
That started in Amsterdam, I believe.
That's where the initiative started, like, ten years ago.
I was sitting down with a guy, the Dutch guy, yesterday.
Oh, yeah?
Where was he from?
From the government?
Philips.
Oh, right.
He was just going on and on about how his company doesn't, you know, they're running Linux and OpenOffice because, you know, he says, why should we be spending $800 a head for Office when we can just run OpenOffice and it does most of 99% of what you want done?
And he mentioned, I didn't know this, but the newest version of OpenOffice actually will read and write a docx file, which I've told everyone in my family never to use.
Yeah, I hate those.
You've got PowerPoint X files as well, completely not backwards compatible.
With anything.
Yeah.
Well, this is why Kleiner Perkins invested in, what's the name of the company, Kim Polisi's company?
It's like an IT services company that will service installs of Linux.
Yeah.
For the Linux organization.
You need that anyway.
If you've got a big company, you need someone on the outside helping you.
Unless you want to have thousands of consultants running around.
Or IT guys.
You really need somebody from the outside?
I ran a 700 person organization.
Yeah, you need help from the outside.
You really do.
You can't have like two good IT guys and know what they're doing.
Dude, you have no idea what you're saying.
This shit is hard.
I mean, forget about just the physical layer of keeping that working.
The idiocy.
I mean, you need two people full-time for the idiots.
Actually, every office needs at least one person.
I lost my password.
My computer won't start.
All of this shit.
And then, you know, with Microsoft, keeping compatible versions of Office?
Are you kidding me?
So then you have to have all this central install stuff, and then people want laptops to be mobile, and then that's the worst.
Because how are you going to maintain that?
Oh no, hats off to the IT people of the world, man.
Shit.
That is not an easy gig.
They should send the wineware.
No, I'm serious.
Speaking of Dutch, the big G20 financial summit taking place today, Saturday, November 15, 2008.
Now that you mention that, I was watching the Jim Lehrer thing.
They had a long discussion about the G20 meeting, and I did tape it, and I was actually probably going to try to send you a disc of it.
It turned out to be too long for me to upload, but...
Go on.
Because I have some thoughts on it.
Well, so I have many thoughts, but just I was going to kind of ease into it by saying that I was reading this morning on the way back from the airport online, because I was just surfing my phone, that Jan-Peter Balkanenda, who was the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, rushed back to Holland.
The conference had just started, and he turned around and went back because his father passed away, which is sad.
But what I thought was...
Kind of interesting is the Netherlands is not a G20 country.
And there are several non-G20... It's like they call it the G20 like it's some secret club, but then they invite everybody else.
I don't get it.
Other than that the Dutch royal family is, of course, part of the Illuminati and Hildebrand group.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they have bullshit.
Sure.
Why else is he invited?
You done?
Yeah.
So they had...
A pretty good analysis of the professor and all of them were expats from someplace else.
The one guy came up with it, obviously.
He says everything was fine right after World War II and the first meeting was a G2, which was England and the United States, and then they figured out how they were going to do things.
He says they should go back to a G2 with just the United States and China figuring out.
because it says that's the real crux of all this problem is China and the United States.
The rest of these guys are just, they have their own agendas.
He says nothing's going to come out of this meeting.
It's a photo op.
Yeah, it's going to be just a bunch of guys arguing.
Because everyone has...
And I outlined every one of these countries that are involved.
Each one of them have their own financial mess.
And then they said they're criticizing the U.S. and its banks.
It's the worst banks in the world, apparently.
And I think we blogged this.
In England and Great Britain, the American banking system is not as bad as especially the Germans.
And who are just leveraged up to...
It's unbelievably leveraged.
And it's just a fiasco.
Well, first of all, you can't have just a G2 with the U.S. and China.
It has to include the United Kingdom because the British Empire is...
In my mind, largely responsible for a lot of what's happened in the financial sector or globally.
And we cannot ignore the fact that Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel, Trichet, who is the president of the European Central Bank, they are literally calling for a new world order and a new world financial order where the IMF now, they're saying, they want the IMF To be the central, like the spider in the middle of the web of a new global financial system.
And from what I understand, these guys have already kind of figured out what they want to do.
And out of this meeting, this photo op will come and look for it in the press.
That Europe is going to say, okay, and with Europe I'm going to include Russia, and maybe China will go along with it.
They're going to say, okay, here's how we're going to run it.
IMF in the middle.
I guarantee you there's going to be some carbon shit in there, and then America will have like 100 days to comply.
And then we either go along or we get kicked out.
Something like that.
Well, hopefully we won't go along and see what happens.
Oh, the thing you were getting to was the financial bailouts, and this is indeed just crazy.
So now we have the automotive industry wanting $50 billion on top of the $25 billion for retooling.
You know, this...
You're so right.
You know, what's next?
It'll be the airline industry, and then it'll be, who did you just say it was going to be?
Newspapers.
Newspapers, because of course there'll be no true news, no real news if they go away.
Like there's any now.
There was a day when we had horse and buggies.
You know, those guys went away.
They didn't get no bailout.
You know, sometimes shit just has to change.
But it's not about cars, it's about the pension funds.
The pension funds, what they don't want is they don't want to screw millions of people out of their pensions, out of their gold standard pensions.
And Obama, of course, who took millions of dollars from the unions, will, if Bush doesn't do it, he'll do it.
He has to, because it's all about the UAW. Right.
Well, you know, they made the deal.
And they're supposed to try it at least.
But, you know, I think they should probably just go bankrupt.
I agree with you.
I totally agree.
But you listen to this and say, well, you know, you go bankrupt and you're going to leave a bunch of these pensioners in soup lines.
It's going to be a disaster because there's lots of them.
There's way too many.
Yeah, but someone has to hurt.
I mean, do we want to kill our children's future by having it shit for everybody?
Or maybe we can find some kind of middle ground.
But, yeah, someone has to hurt in all of this.
And it's not the bankers.
Well, the guys I know for a fact that won't be hurting are the executives who screwed it up.
Yeah.
No, of course they won't.
And also, our government has a very different pension plan than you and I. The senators and representatives, they got a great pension plan.
Yep, and they have great health care.
Yep.
They should share the same shit they're offering us.
Maybe that would change it.
Yeah, that's going to happen.
Yeah.
So what else?
Let's get off this topic.
You come up with something.
I don't have anything.
That's the funny thing about this week.
I don't think anything interesting happened.
I thought it was a pretty slow-moving week.
It's after the election.
You know, you have the most interesting thing is this Oprah and Michelle catfight.
That was the most interesting thing.
It is.
Isn't that terrible?
That is kind of rough.
I'm heading to Portugal.
Oh, that's happening?
Yeah, I'm leaving on...
Yeah, the trouble is they're running me through Frankfurt, so I can't stop by.
When are you going?
What's the date?
I'm leaving on tomorrow.
Really?
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Then I'll be back on next Monday, so we have to push the show off to Monday night.
Because I don't think I can do it.
I just don't think I'm going to have the bandwidth.
Maybe.
Why not?
If you're in Frankfurt, do you know Frankfurt is...
I'm not going to be in Frankfurt.
I'm going to be in Lisbon.
Oh, I'm sorry, Lisbon.
I've done shit from Lisbon.
They're pretty wired.
Yeah, but I'm not going to be in Lisbon that long.
We're going out to visit all these high-tech companies all over the middle.
They should be wired out there, but I don't know.
I would like to point out that in 57 episodes, or 56 so far, not once have I actually made us do the show not on a weekend.
And I travel a million miles.
And now you have one little measly trip and we have to do it on Monday?
No, if you look back, we've done a number of shows on Thursdays.
And you just don't, you're just obviously getting old.
We did a number of shows on Thursdays and we've skipped, we've done a lot of, we have done a couple Sunday shows I have to say.
And I do remember doing a Monday show.
But people do get out of whack man.
They got out of whack.
Look, if it works out, I'll be around Saturday.
I'm going to go to Holland with Patricia on Friday.
I want to see the live show.
But I'll be back Saturday.
So if you want, we can do it Saturday, Sunday, or Monday is fine too.
I'm cool.
Okay, well I'll try to do it on Saturday if I can.
But just bring your headset.
By the way, how does this mic sound?
You won't believe this.
Well, I didn't want to take my whole Heil microphone and everything with me, and so I just took my little, what's the name of this setup?
It's the Lectro, it's actually the wireless lav set that I always carry with me, and I hooked it up to my Mac, so it's input directly into the processing chain in Ableton Live, and I must have gotten 10 emails from people saying, dude, this microphone setup sounds like 10 times better than your normal setup.
So now I'm literally down to a pair of headphones and two little boxes with a lav microphone.
And that's it.
You're using a lav now?
Well, I have it stuck on a mic stand.
So it's not clipped onto my collar or anything.
I'm just talking directly into it.
And I have to agree, it sounds a million times better.
And I've got all kinds of outboard gear and external mixers.
I think I've got to re-evaluate my entire processing chain here at the Manor.
Well, there's a lot of new microphone technology showing up that uses MEMS. What's MEMS? MEMS is a micro-electro-mechanical system.
The DLP from Texas Instruments is one of the first examples of a MEM, which is a semiconductor.
It's made like a semiconductor, but it has moving parts.
Wow.
And there's little mirrors on that thing.
Is that like nanotechnology?
Sorry?
Yeah, it's nanotechnology.
In fact, when you go to, you find a lot of scales now in some of these high-end hotels.
You've seen them.
They're like expensive.
It looks like just a piece of glass.
Yeah, you step on it.
Yeah, sure.
And there's no movement.
Right.
Yeah, you're right.
There is.
There's no, your foot doesn't depress anything.
No, there's nothing to press.
There's a MEM device in there, and it tells you what you weigh.
Well, anyway, I think, I'm not sure, because I haven't really looked at it, but one of the hottest microphones out there right now is the Countryman.
And the countryman mic, you've seen it, everyone has seen these things.
They tend to be flesh-colored, and it's got a little bitty thing that comes around in front of your mouth.
And the thing has just got, it's like a pinpoint.
It's just an extremely small little thing at the end.
And a lot of country and western singers use them.
Almost everybody does.
Oh, right.
On the headset, sure.
Oh, really?
They use it on lots of TV shows now, and I used to be against it because it would never really sound good.
But in the theaters now, when you go to a Broadway play or maybe the West End, sometimes you can see the mics.
They're now becoming completely invisible, and the sound is phenomenal.
The sound on a countryman, because the first time I used one was about a year ago, and somebody says, I said, yeah, I've seen these things.
He says, you won't believe the sound.
And so you use it, and it sounds like a big condenser mic.
It's gorgeous, the sound.
They cost about $350, and it's just a really nice microphone.
And they're called countrymen.
You know what the problem is, though?
I mean, I'm pretty old school when it comes to broadcasting, and I like kind of having a nice fat thing in front of my face.
It's phallic almost, John.
I mean, the idea of having a little puny, little tiny dick mic, it just doesn't feel right.
I've got to have a grab onto it there and move it around when you're talking.
Yeah.
I guess you don't have to say it.
Yeah, you and Ed Sullivan.
It's like having the big boom mics that were over the head.
I got this email.
This is something I did want to talk to you about.
Oh, fuck, now I've got to find it.
Apparently, and there's some pictures circulating the net...
There's some so-called technology, and I say so-called for a number of reasons, called like PPP, like progressive picture something or other.
I've got to look up this email.
Where they've taken a video still of an airplane flying, like Flight 177, just before it flies into the towers.
Let's see if I can find this fucking email.
And then they're able to zoom in digitally, as it were, and render the faces in the cockpit.
I'm surprised you haven't seen this because you certainly would have blogged it.
I probably would have debunked it.
Oh, well, I totally think it's fake, but I'm receiving this from tons of people right now, which is weird why I can't find one of these emails.
Here we go.
First ever images from cockpit, oh, flight 175.
I'm reminded of the, you know, I always get the biggest kick out of the TV shows that they'll have, you know, they'll have some crappy camcorder outside on a...
Of a gas station, and so they say, okay, and there's a typical CSI thing.
Okay, zoom in.
Zoom in.
Can you now enhance it?
Enhance it.
And they get the license plate from two miles away.
Oh, but dude, those license plates, here in the UK now, every single gas station you go to, you walk in to pay, and right there there's a monitor, and you see the previous 20 license plates that have gotten gas.
And you see your car right there in the picture, and you see their license plates been scanned.
It's pretty amazing technology.
Look at that link I just sent you.
Yeah, unfortunately my browser's not working.
I think my stack's out of sync.
I'd have to reboot the computer.
Oh, shit.
Oh, well.
Anyway, that might be something you want to blog to...
I agree to debunk, but I'm getting a lot of it.
But anyway, that's what it reminds me of, this kind of thing where they say, enhance it more.
Okay, the computer geek knows it.
And he has a special trick.
He types something in.
You know where they do that on, what's the show, Vegas?
Vegas.
Yeah, they used to do that in Vegas.
All the time.
In fact, they used to do all the fancy stuff where they did the point.
And my other favorite one is, run his prints through the database.
And like, within two seconds, you know how long it takes to run prints?
I don't know.
It could take days.
No, wait a minute.
Don't you have like a monitor and you have two, uh, and you have the fingerprint?
And then you have the guy's face come up.
Boing!
Yeah, and it goes, oh, that's a Jimmy!
Match!
Partial match!
You know, the other pile of crap that's on TV all the time that I'm always amused by is to create a point of interest or a point of suspense.
Actually, my kids are all aware of this, too.
It's like the family collectively rolls its eyes when this one comes on.
It's like a guy calls up.
He's like a kidnapper or something.
Run a trace on his phone.
Okay, the trace is on.
Hold him on the line.
Hold him on the line.
Two and a half minutes.
Keep him on a little longer.
Oh, he hung up.
Information comes over instantly with the call.
There's no tracing anymore.
Ever hear of caller ID? This is like from years ago.
I mean, 20 years, I think maybe 30 years ago, on almost every call, whether you even use caller ID or not, there's enough information on the data that initiates the call that you know exactly what the number is and where it's coming from.
But they keep using this as a suspenseful note, and I think it's just such bull crap that I wish somebody would just bust it, say, you know, at some point, or unless they're trying to keep dumb criminals thinking that, you know, I don't know, I don't know what the point of it is.
No, I think it's to condition you, you know, or it's just lame writing.
Maybe that's it.
Just lame writing.
Because I mean, I could think of a million conspiracy theories easy for that one.
Easy.
Yeah, we talk about Echelon and all that stuff, and we know that everything's being traced and tracked and recorded.
Hey, that thing in Australia is really happening now, John.
They're implementing a test system as we speak.
What, the censorship system?
Yeah, the censorship, yeah.
And I get emails from people, and I'm amazed.
They say, like, well, you know, this is outrageous.
I've got to stop this.
I mean, sure, we should stop the kiddie porn scum.
And it's the same thing.
I'm like, if they can...
It's not that hard to find out where a server is, okay?
It's not that hard to take down a server with your military botnet.
You know, if people are processing credit cards, it's just not that hard to figure it out and shut it down.
You know, do not accept any type of filtering.
Do not accept it, because the next thing...
No, third on the list...
It's going to be kiddie porn first, and then it's our show, John.
Then it's like, yeah, we can't have anti-Americanism and we can't have anti-patriotic talk.
That's the next thing that's going to happen.
Well, I'm surprised they're not blocked in the EU already.
Well, in the EU, they're already absolutely public Wi-Fi that blocks certain sites.
You betcha.
That's taking place.
Well, you know, there's always, you know, as long as you have a, I don't know, you can block content that is like just a downloadable podcast.
It's pretty hard to search that stuff.
I mean, they'd have to actually go out of their way to block us.
No, not at all.
Curry.com is now blocked on Vodafone.
Is it?
Yeah.
But curry.mevio.com is not.
We spend a lot of money.
This is the scam.
And by the way, it's only going to get worse.
We spend, I'm going to say, between $40,000 and $50,000 a month To stay on whitelists for email, whitelists for ISP blocking, for NetBanny, for StrongMail.
It's fucking outrageous, because these guys, it's a scam.
They have it set up with all the ISPs, with all the big email companies like MSN and Gmail, and they'll negotiate for you, and by proxy, they'll maintain the whitelist For all these companies, because it's a business.
It's an absolute profitable business they're running, and it's a scam.
And now the government's going to get into the game.
Watch.
Yeah, you're probably right.
It is a scam.
It's ridiculous.
I wish people realized it.
Well, the Australians are idiots if they're going to let this happen.
Thank you.
I'm glad you added that.
Because I'm going to go to...
They're supposed to be...
I mean, Australians are always these tough guys.
I mean, they always present themselves as such.
Yeah, I mean, they're pushed around like this.
It's ridiculous.
They should storm the Capitol.
Where's Crocodile Dundee?
What the hell is that?
He should be going, hey, mate, don't feel dry internet.
I'm making a trip down to Australia.
I've promised my daily source code listeners.
When?
In 2009, because in the past year, a lot of seemingly exciting energy technologies are popping out of Australia.
A lot of magnet engines, a lot of stuff like that.
So I want to go and see some of this stuff.
I got the hydroxy booster.
I know that works to a degree.
So I'm going to go and look at some of this magnet stuff.
These guys are doing...
What's down there?
Sheep and kangaroos.
And opal mines.
At least if nothing else, you'll bring back some opals.
The thing though is I've been asking my listeners to send me Australian porn.
This is the funny thing.
So I'm like, hey, send me some Australian porn.
And there's only like one porn site in all of Australia.
Then why are they filtering anything?
Exactly!
They've got nothing going on there in porn.
They're obviously trying to repress the public's...
It always boils down to finding out who's voting for who and let's screw with the guys who vote against us.
And the other thing which I always say one reason you don't want the government monitoring all this stuff is let's start monitoring private conversations of all the venture capitalists and see what's up and we can make our investments appropriately.
With the money we just stole.
Yeah, with the money we just stole.
Did you see?
I posted on curry.com.
I know you don't give a shit about anything I do.
Actually, it's on my Flickr site.
I had a meeting and I had to scan the business card.
Yeah, you sent me that.
Oh, yeah.
Did you like it?
Yeah, it was okay.
Actually, to be honest, I don't know what the point of it was.
Well, it says Bear Stearns at J.P. Morgan Company on the business card.
If you're from New York Finance, that's just something you cannot believe you'd ever see.
It's surreal.
Anyone at Bear Stearns would be like, that's impossible.
Anyway, a lot of Wall Street types I spoke to are saying this is the buying opportunity.
Now is the buying opportunity of a lifetime.
Which, by the way, I do agree with to some extent.
On real companies...
That's what Buffett says.
I agree, too.
I wrote a column about this in MarketWatch.
I said, you know, it's funny that these experts are always telling you when the market starts going up, you're supposed to slowly sell off as it starts banging the top.
But nobody ever tells you to do a little bottom feeding once in a while.
There's a lot of good companies right now.
Intel at $13?
I mean, holy mackerel.
Yeah, I mean, it's going to go up because these guys make the world go wrong.
AMD is like two bucks.
Yeah.
And those are...
I mean, I'm not in the market, and you know me.
I'm tired of it, won't do it, and I'm done with it.
But yeah, I mean, that seems totally logical.
You know, Intel...
Yeah, right now it's tough because they got no orders.
I mean, that's logical.
We're going into a slowdown.
Which, by the way, I think...
In hindsight, depending of course on what the new financial system becomes, but what's really happening is people are saving money.
Good on you!
And now Walmart is doing layaways.
We talked about that a couple weeks ago.
They're doing layaways through their email marketing.
And people are keeping money in their pocket.
Sure, it's grinding the economy to a halt, but so what?
Shit's finally going to be affordable.
For a while.
So, there was a good blog post that we had of some guy, I can't remember his name, but he's like one of these fairly famous as someone who's a good prognosticator.
And he ran down a horrible scenario for the next four years under Obama, which concluded in 2012 where the best Christmas gifts are going to be...
Oh, thank you, mommy.
Thank you.
Oh, a cupcake.
Oh, a cupcake.
I got a potato.
A potato.
I got a potato for Christmas.
What did you get?
Well, listen, in the United States, we can't imagine this, right?
But my father-in-law just turned 83 today.
And guys had a quintuple bypass, pacemaker for 25 years.
But he was a 14, 15-year-old boy in the Second World War.
And he ate out of trash cans.
And we can't imagine that in the United States.
Europe certainly remembers.
It's not that long ago.
There's a very different culture.
And food, yeah, just imagine.
And it can happen.
Well, you know, people do, which still, the homeless still go to trash bins.
Here's a story that you would be amused by.
The homeless still go to trash bins and grab stuff.
And my wife actually used to go to Monterey Foods' trash bin because she had so damn many rabbits to feed, literally, that she'd get greens and she'd talk to these people.
And these homeless people would come in there and get food for their family for whatever reason.
But the big complaint was these groups of people, and there was one highlighted on TV the other day, the public broadcasting station, one of these hyper-liberal shows about how this was a good thing.
This group of people in California called freegans.
And the freegans are dumpster divers.
These are people, and this one guy bragged about it.
He was a professor, I think, at one of the colleges around here.
I can't remember exactly which one.
He seemed a little weird, but he was a college professor.
He makes like, you know, $100,000 plus a year and feels obliged to go into dumpsters and grab food because he's so much good food, and they showed him.
He says, look at this.
This is an absolutely fine apple.
If you cut off to one side, it's very edible.
And he was loading up.
Meanwhile, there are people homeless, starving to death, and these idiots who have all the money in the world for all practical purposes in terms of being able to go out and actually buy something and keep the economy going are dumpster diving because they're part of this freegan revolution.
It's pathetic.
No, what's really pathetic is I come home and Patricia says, oh, wow, it was so beautiful yesterday.
They had a big telethon.
The United Kingdom is great at telethons.
And they roll out.
You know, they've kind of got their Johnny Carsons.
You know, they've got Sir Terry Wogan.
And he'll do something funny.
And, you know, the whole country watches.
And they raise 20 million pounds for poor children.
And I said to Patricia, I said, you know, isn't it crazy, you know, like we spend an entire evening, the whole country is engaged in raising this money, people are pulling nickels and dimes and pounds and pence out of their pockets, and they're sending in this money, and they're a part of a movement, and they really want to try and achieve something and help the children.
And meanwhile, you know, 20 million pounds, that's a fraction of the $600 The billion euros that they gave to fucking banks, which was our money as well!
This just trips me out!
Let one of them fail!
Fix healthcare, feed the children, save the gay whales, we're done!
Nah, these executives, they need their bailout.
And they're taking it.
A lot of them.
These guys should be...
If you ever really see a true depression where you get to 25% unemployment, these guys have abused the privilege to such an extent.
I've talked to, by the way, some billionaire friends of mine about this, and they're well aware of this possibility, that the public could get to the point where they literally...
Storm Atherton and burn down mansions and kill people.
This happened during the French Revolution.
This is not the kind of thing that doesn't ever happen.
Where the rich people are literally attacked in mass by hordes of angry people because they essentially abuse the system, which many of them have done.
It wasn't like somebody pointed out this the other day, how when Lee Iacocca took over, I guess it was Ford or whatever, he says, my salary is going to be a dollar a year until I fix this company.
Nobody does that anymore.
Steve Jobs still works for a dollar a year.
Steve Jobs is the last one.
But the rest of these guys is, no, I'm going to make $300 million a year and I want every bonus possible and I want gold in parachutes and gold in everything.
So if I quit, you've got to give me another half a billion.
And the next thing you know, they've got three or four yachts and they've got a big mansion that's ridiculously large that they can't even use.
So this corroborates my theory about what happened with the public servants, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.
So remember Jonathan Ross who makes six million pounds a year for doing a talk show on Friday night and a couple of radio shows on the public broadcast or the BBC.
It's always been a point of discussion.
But now everyone's so fed up with all these guys taking hundreds of millions in salary and fucking everybody that they go for the lowest hanging fruit and the minute Jonathan Ross screws up and it's just not funny, forget if he insulted anyone, he just wasn't funny, the whole country goes apeshit and they're like, oh, this is ridiculous and it is the first step towards exactly what you're saying, Jonathan.
John.
Yeah, riots.
The only difference is, in the United States, the citizens have guns.
Well, it's going to be worse than the United States.
I mean, the problem with the United States, a lot of people haven't noticed this, but Obama has this citizen militia that he wants to put together.
Oh, geez.
This is huge.
Go ahead.
Talk about it.
I love this.
Yeah, and this was brought up in Colorado in July.
He first brought this up, and it's never really been denied.
And if you dig around on the website, you find something.
You can find it right there.
I'm going to BarackObama.com right now.
No, it's on the website.
He wants to put together a citizen, which I consider to be brown shirts, by the way, a citizen militia bigger than the military and better funded to protect the country internally.
In other words, national police, or whatever they're going to be called.
Yep.
I think it's listed under...
To this military.
Nobody has...
I mean, except for a few right-wing talk guys and a couple of articles.
You can look this up on Google.
Anybody out there wants to get into it.
And you can read the whole comment, the whole thing Barack said in Colorado in July.
And nobody seems to be too upset about this.
And I'm going, what are you kidding me?
We're going to put together a national police force bigger than the U.S. military, better funded?
For what?
John, uh...
Don't we have local police already?
I mean, don't they do the job for keeping us from getting robbed or whatever, pull over drug traffic tickets?
What are these guys going to do?
John, I mean, the truthers or the conspiracy theorists out there have been screaming about this.
This is the problem.
I can't even get this message to you.
We're out here, man.
We're talking about this shit.
Specifically this issue.
I don't think people care.
I don't think they, I think the problem is they haven't been told to care.
They're at the point right now that unless the major media, which is, you know, basically Barack Obama's public relations agency, decide to tell people to care, they're not going to care.
Now, I think that the thing is, is that once any of these things try, once they try to implement any of these things, I mean, talk is cheap, and the Barack Obama list of things he's going to do is huge.
And he says, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we're going to fix this, we're going to fix that, we're going to get Bosma.
And, uh...
The list is long.
And once they start to implement one of these things, there may be some evidence that the media is going to think twice about it, their situation, because they're the biggest targets.
The first thing you do is you wipe out the reporters or you make sure they're on your side.
Are you kidding me?
That's not how the show...
If you're going to broadcast the show...
That's a better way of saying it.
But no, I look at it from the entertainment standpoint.
They're not going to get rid of their transmitter.
They need the broadcast to keep the show going.
That's how it works.
Television...
Actually, that's a big part of what...
We had this discussion in New York.
So we're about to switch to digital television.
And no one ever talks about why or what the significance of that is.
But the radio industry at least has figured out one part of that.
You'll notice that radio is not transitioning to digital audio broadcasts.
It's already available, but it's essentially failed.
And I'll tell you why.
Because television, of course, is used for indoctrination and there's other money flowing in those circles.
But in radio, it pretty much comes from selling shit to your audience during drive time.
When you go to DAB, you've just diluted the entire offering.
The whole reason why radio stations were able to make money until alternate forms of media came along is because they had control over a limited resource.
The FM band goes from 88 to 107.
You know, that's it!
And you have to have some spread in there so there can only be so many radio stations.
That's why there was so much money to be made.
And when you go to digital, it dilutes that.
So the radio guy said, no way!
So what's going to happen with digital television?
No one ever talks about why this was so necessary.
Why do we have to all switch to digital?
John C. Dvorak, you certainly would be an expert in this.
Yeah, you'd think.
Well, the purported reason is they free up some bandwidth that they can auction off so the government can get more money.
Really?
Yeah, that's the purported reason.
It's a drop in the bucket.
Through your paranoid analysis, you're going to tell us the absolute fact which has something to do with crowd control.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe.
What do you think?
What's the purported reason?
Why are we making this switch?
The only thing I can imagine is that...
Well, it can't be...
Here's what I know.
It doesn't make sense if you're going to have more...
Basically, there's going to be more channels available.
That does not behoove the media in any way.
So that's what I know it can't be for.
It can't be for the media.
They can't be liking it.
So it has to be some government idea.
And I'm not saying I know what it is, but it just doesn't make sense.
Well, you're right.
It's not bad enough that there's 500 channels and you can't find anything on that's good.
But now there's going to be even more, because in fact, the local public broadcasting station here, KQED, on their digital thing, they've got four channels.
They've got the regular channel, the public broadcasting channel, then they have a version of a bunch of old used stuff, and they have a kids thing, and they have a world version, and a lifestyle.
And a lot of these channels, one of the stations, I think it's...
I don't know if it's four or five or one of...
I think maybe it's four or two.
Anyway, they have their main channel, and then they have a weather channel that's the sub-channel, and then they have a channel that just has cameras around the bay.
It's like, you know, okay, well, that's a good use of it, I guess.
I could do that on the Internet.
So the other end of it, John, is that they free up the so-called white space, Which now can be turned into some kind of super Wi-Fi.
Maybe that's the plan there, is we turn that into the super Wi-Fi, the all-encompassing network, i.e.
Internet version 2, which of course is maybe not quite as open and uncontrolled as what we have today.
It's a long-term project, but hey, it's possible.
Digital also makes it a little easier, I think, to control content with usage flags and DRM and things like that.
Tracking, know who's watching what.
Yeah, that could be possible.
Okay, it's from an Obama speech that he gave on July 2nd.
The quote from the speech, We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set.
We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.
People of all ages, stations, and skills will be asked to serve.
Yeah, and nobody's like...
Outraged.
Nobody's outraged.
And where was McCain?
He's running against this guy.
You know, there's another example of why this election was probably rigged with him not, you know, let's bring in, let's do everything we can to lose.
And, oh, by the way, don't bring up anything like that.
That might get you some...
You know, if McCain brought stuff like that up and also had voted against the bailout, he'd be the guy elected.
Meanwhile, in the National Enquirer, there are some fuzzy yet very obvious pictures of Cindy McCain making out with some other guy, clearly younger.
That's hot.
That was in the Inquirer?
Yeah.
I've got to start buying this magazine, man.
This is good.
There's some good shit there.
You know, the other ones are both the John Edwards thing nobody was going to touch.
It's another thing the media wasn't going to touch.
This guy's having babies while running for president with strange women who are crackpots, and nobody's going to cover it because, well, you know, we couldn't do it.
Meanwhile, the Inquirer puts a few private detectives on the case, and they get pictures of him with the Yeah, we talked about this last week right after the show.
Barney Frank, I'm sure you've seen this guy.
He was one of the, he was on the, I think he's the chairman of the finance committee or whatever it was.
Yeah, banking.
The banking committee, right.
He's the guy, the big, heavy, fat guy going, talk like this!
And he got into a big fight with O'Reilly on Fox, which was pretty funny.
So this guy, he's a congressman, right?
Yeah.
So he's been in government for almost three decades at least.
But in the 80s, He had male prostitutes in public buildings blowing him.
A prostitution ring was being run out of his apartment in the Beltway area.
It's like the guy's totally blackmailable for his crazy ass behavior.
It's not like he's hiding anything.
No, he's not hiding it.
There was all kinds of inquiries.
He's a total sleazeball.
Yeah, thank you.
Nothing against gay sex and nothing against prostitutes, but come on.
These are the things that make you blackmailable when you're into fucked up shit and weird circles.
And no one ever brings that up.
No one ever says, oh, by the way, guy's kind of interesting.
It's worth a little background human interest story on him.
Well, maybe the Inquirer, you know, the problem with these papers is that they only delve into politics once in a while to test the waters to see if they're going to get any more newsstand sales, because that's a newsstand sales vehicle.
It's very European in that regard.
A lot of people don't realize that most magazines in Europe are sold at the newsstands, not by subscription.
And a lot of it, a lot of the headlines are based on, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.
But man, if you can get a politician having weird sex in like the garage or somewhere else, I mean, that's the stuff people love.
And it seems to me that, you know, if the National Enquirer in particular, since they do have the resources and they're very aggressive about pursuing stories, would do a little more politically, and maybe it's a good sign that they're going into this Oprah versus Michelle thing.
They maybe should bump around some other stuff, because the regular media...
I'm not covering any of this as proven by the John Edwards thing.
Oh, by the way, when that finally broke in the National Enquirer, you should have heard all the apologists on all these talk shows on TV representing the real media.
Well, you know, they paid for that.
We knew about it, but we didn't know what to do about it, and we decided to cover Sarah Palin's kid.
Yeah, yeah.
No, you're so right.
And by the way...
Go ahead.
I'm just saying, if the National Enquirer would just step up, because they do mostly celebrity gossip, if they step it up a notch and just at least once an issue bust into something, I think it would be kind of interesting to see what would come of it.
Well, it's clear that the tabloids are going to do it, and that's a good moment to wrap up, actually, because that's kind of how I started the show, by saying...
I like this.
I like the fact that this cult of personality is now going into perhaps the real true print media.
And you know what?
It's okay to buy these things because they're entertaining as well.
The one thing they really do well is they go out of their way to get the perfect picture for the headline.
You know, Michelle Obama looks like she has, you know, they almost could draw horns out of her forehead.
You know, they got her in a really, really mean-looking pose.
And there's a lot of fluff.
You just got to pass over the fluff, the coke up Paula Abdul's nose, which, by the way, looks pretty true.
You know, there's a lot of stuff that is just lame.
But then you get to the Obama and, or the Michelle Obama and Oprah pictures, and it's funny.
I mean, you have to laugh out loud when you see it.
And it's got Greg Norman kissing Chris Everett and he's sticking his tongue out like a little fucking lizard.
Yeah, that's humorous.
That's really humorous.
That's where the bread and butter is.
That's a great picture.
He's like going to French kiss her, but they catch you in like mouth half open, tongue just coming out and looks really sleazy.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, well, there you go.
We come full circle.
I guess we just have to keep our eye on alternative media.
Yeah, including blogs and whatever.
Yeah.
Alright.
Yep, I'm rolling the theme music, John.
Alright, so maybe not next weekend at the latest Monday, but it'll be early Monday because we're going to both be in Europe.
Or are you going to be back in San Francisco then?
I'll be back in San Francisco.
So when do you come back?
Do you come back Monday or Sunday?
Yeah, I come back Monday.
Early?
No, it can't be early.
It'll be afternoon, so it will be too late maybe.
If you're not back until 3 in the afternoon, it's going to be midnight.
I'll have to stay up.
Well, I'll stay up for you.
I'll try to do something.
I'll bring gear with me, and I'll try to do the show.
It won't sound as good as it does with this little system here, but I think we can manage something.
Well, if only you used the Mac, I could set you up with a really good setup.
See, the machine I carry on the road is two pounds.
You know, it's two pounds.
And it's like, I can't find anything that's this light.
And when you travel, especially internationally, everything is weight.
They weigh everything.
So I travel light.
So no, not going to happen.
And not even with an Airbook, huh?
Or a Mac Air or whatever, no?
No, that thing's useless.
It doesn't have enough connectivity.
I agree.
All right, John, good talking to you as always.
Um...
And coming to you from the affluent suburb of Surrey in the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm up here in northern Silicon Valley, northern California, I'm John C. Dvorak.
And we will talk to you again in about seven or eight days right here on No Agenda.