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Dec. 25, 2014 - No Agenda

02:28:21

681: The Christmas Show 2014

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Time	Text
	Last-minute Charlie works for me.
	Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
	It's Thursday, December 25th, 2014.
	Time for Gitmo Nation Media Assassination Episode 681.
	This is No Agenda.
	Celebrating another bogative holiday season from FEMA Region 6 in the capital of the Drone Star State, Austin, Texas, in the morning, everybody.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	It's the king of sales.
	It's not bogative.
	I'm John C. Devorak.
	It's crack, run, and buzzkill.
	In the morning.
	It's bogative.
	Sales.
	Sales.
	Yes.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	I have...
	Yes, it is.
	You know, it's bogative in the sense that this is another...
	Oh, you know, I had those up north and I couldn't bring them back.
	No, I brought mine.
	I brought mine.
	And I brought...
	Well, I brought my little kid.
	Merry Christmas, slave.
	Merry Christmas, slave.
	Yeah, it's Merry Christmas to you, John.
	Well, Merry Christmas to you, Adam.
	Merry Christmas to all the foods on the couch, pizza to the air, subs in the water, and the bays and bottles out there.
	This is a, although it is a regular sequentially numbered episode, this is...
	Yes, good on the math.
	Believe me, I checked three times.
	I bet you did.
	Very easy to mess this up.
	This is a special episode that we are producing for Christmas.
	Why are we doing this again?
	We're doing this so we don't have to work on Christmas, which falls on one of our show days.
	Yes.
	And the thing, and of course I promote this commonly every year.
	I bitch and moan about it, actually.
	That no one's listening?
	Nobody's there.
	There's nobody out there.
	So we might as well just do this.
	So we did this show earlier, pre-Christmas.
	Actually, we did this last Christmas.
	Yeah, we did.
	And we thought about maybe doing a clip show or a sound effects show or all these different things we could have done, but maybe just a little catch-up for people that are new listeners.
	That know about the show, they like the show, they enjoy the show, but they maybe have missed some of the memes or some of the history, and they don't really want to go back and listen to 600 shows.
	Now, do we also want to explain a bit of how the show was put together?
	Yeah, I think so.
	We can do that.
	I mean, I put together a number of...
	I just have...
	I saw you came up with clips, which is good, and of course I haven't heard any of them.
	Seminal clips, I think they're seminal.
	They're old, most of them.
	Some of them aren't that old, a couple of years.
	But some of them are...
	Some of them are seven years old.
	Six, mostly.
	And a couple of things...
	Are these clips that you have saved?
	Did you go back in the archives and listen to shows?
	All the clips, yeah.
	I save them.
	I also put together little files of little evergreen clips that I apparently had put together.
	I forgot about this until I started digging around.
	Little clips of things that annoyed me.
	Oh, okay.
	So I put them in.
	And it...
	I now have kind of a story to tell about how the show developed in a different way than our people out there who want to know about the show in the background.
	You go dig up show 200.1, and probably even better is 200.2, which has 200.1 in it.
	And it gives us the story of no agenda.
	But when you...
	When you look at it as a historian mining, data mining, some of the origins are different than are in 200.1, 200.2.
	And including a clip I have here, which I'll tease, which is, I believe, the origins of the show.
	The modern show, not the show that we first started.
	The show we started was you and I talking to...
	To develop a show, it's almost as though the early shows, which are dreadful, to be honest about it, and I would not advise anyone to listen to them.
	Someone tweeted the other day, they were listening to the Daily Source Code from, I think it was July 7th, what year did we start?
	2008?
	2007?
	It was a very old Daily Source Code, and on that Daily Source Code, I was talking about reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which was a recommendation from you, which I'd forgotten that you would recommend that I read that book, and I think that is where a lot of...
	Where our initial conversations came from before we even started the show.
	Could be.
	I do know that the economic hitman is, we do have sacred texts we mentioned to each other.
	Yes, sacred texts.
	And confessions of an economic hitman come to mind, and also we actually never put together a list, but I also think the movie or the series, TV series, 13 episodes of Rubicon is seminal.
	Legacy of Ashes.
	Legacy of Ashes and also the Family of Secrets.
	I think that's a very important book to read.
	Baker book.
	And we probably should put...
	I think the No Agenda Book Club has most of these books listed that we've talked about over the years.
	I'm currently reading a book called The Hindus, which is the one that has been banned in India.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, it's a very long book by a very famous historian, Wendy...
	I can't remember her last name.
	You can look it up while I'm talking.
	And...
	She wanted to write just a book about the history of Hinduism and the Hindu people.
	And then it became this huge book because she fell into a rabbit hole.
	Wendy Doniger.
	She's very famous.
	Now she's hated.
	She used to be considered one of the great...
	I think Westerners who really understood India.
	What she did, they got everybody pissed off.
	And by the way, this book is, I would recommend a Kindle or anything.
	This book is such a, she is such a good writer.
	She just drags you right through the text in a breezy, fast-paced manner.
	She's very modern.
	But she, apparently what she did is she decided to take a look at the Hindu people from the perspective of All the Hindus.
	Until now, only the Brahmins got to tell the story.
	And the Brahmins, they're putting up with this.
	In other words, she's talking to untouchables about their past history, how they came about, and all the rest of it.
	And this is not acceptable to the Brahmins who run India.
	So they banned the book in India.
	Of course.
	They should burn them.
	Well, actually, they're buying F-Coffees and doing probably just that.
	Whatever the case is, this is a tremendous book.
	I mean, noagendabookclub.com is pretty current.
	Here are some of the titles.
	The Next War, Wesley Clark, The Republic of Imagination, which we discussed recently.
	We have, oh, A Parent's Guide to High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder.
	I don't know what that's doing on the list.
	Sinclair Lewis, it can happen here, of course.
	Life and Death in Shanghai.
	Family of Secrets.
	How about Smedley Butler's book?
	I don't know.
	Currently I'm reading a couple.
	I'm reading, obviously, Babbitt.
	Yeah, Babbitt's good.
	I'm also reading...
	It's on Kindle.
	The Unabomber Manifesto and Other Essays by Theodore Kaczynski.
	How many times are you going to read that?
	Well, it's the other...
	You know, funny enough, this is probably my third time.
	And every single time I go through it, there's a little thing that I go, hmm.
	But it's the other essays that I was interested in.
	Oh.
	They're quite good.
	I don't think there's really any other...
	Well, that was how he got caught.
	Most writers know that your writing is fairly distinctive.
	Right, his brother recognized it.
	And his brother busted him because he said, wait a minute.
	I'm using ourselves to death is on our list.
	There's a couple of...
	I think we already covered the key ones.
	I do have a few clips to play, and we can wander off in any direction we want to, since this is kind of a show just for fun.
	We're not going to do a lot of news deconstruction in this particular show.
	When we started doing the show, it was like, I look back on these as two people trying to get used to Working together more than anything else.
	And I found that we were both quite offensive to each other most of the time throughout, I think, the first two or three years.
	It's a miracle that this show is as good as it is at this point.
	It's a miracle that we even do the show.
	As you will point out many times, at show 100, I said, eh, let's stop doing this.
	It's enough.
	100 episodes is good, man.
	It's a good run.
	You were thinking about it again in the 200 show, but that didn't get as far.
	But the 100 is when, yeah, I actually should dig that up and look for the formative clips in there.
	But it wasn't that interesting.
	Let me look at this list.
	I got these three.
	Here's one.
	Now, here's an example of...
	I wasn't...
	And I've always told people this, that people...
	And you were still European at the time.
	In London.
	You were living in London, and we were doing this show, and the pacing of the show, because there was a lag that was...
	Well, we also have to recognize the improvement of technology.
	I'd like to talk about that later, but technology, when we first started, we didn't have nearly any of this.
	I think I had barely had broadband where I was living at the time.
	So we did it.
	We had a huge delay on Skype.
	It still sounded good.
	I mean, that's not how it sounds now, but it still sounded good.
	Do you have a clip I can listen to?
	I just want to give a couple of examples of misinterpreting each other.
	I was easily offended.
	I broke out of it pretty quickly because I knew that your pacing in your speech was going to have a lot of Dutch influence.
	Which can sound rude and sarcastic when it's not.
	Correct.
	You have to deal with that, but you can't.
	You normally have a visceral response to it.
	And here's a good example.
	I want you to play Food Cutdown.
	Now, this was from about 2009.
	I'm reminded of a story.
	It says, you know, in California, a lot of us eat a lot of hot chilies, although not necessarily as much as some of us do who are really kind of addicted to the chili.
	And I'm quite...
	Comfortable with the hottest imaginable food, except some places in India have served food that is excruciating and maybe too much for me.
	So I'm in Brazil.
	Well, you're a professional, John.
	Let's just be honest.
	I mean, let's just call a spade a spade.
	Doing what?
	I need to point something else out.
	In this period, I was also smoking marijuana all the time.
	Yeah.
	And I think that...
	And you constantly reference this to Patricia, I might add.
	Oh, really?
	Yes.
	Yeah, I didn't notice it until I started going through these old bits.
	What kind of references?
	This is interesting.
	Oh, you would just bring her in as an anecdotal bounce back kind of thing.
	And Patricia does Patricia that.
	It wasn't, you know, I didn't notice it at the time, obviously, but I noticed it.
	Is it the same way I refer to Mickey?
	Yeah.
	You're always doing this, I guess.
	Now...
	And I just smacked my lips.
	But here's the thing about that clip, which was, I was, the fuck is this guy insulting me?
	Now, if you play food about the hot pepper challenge, this is the complete clip.
	And this brings us into, by playing the complete clip, this brings me into the segue as to, well, I'll play myself being more dickish.
	But the clip after this is going to introduce modern no agenda.
	Okay.
	Here's what really happened on the hot food incident.
	I'm reminded of a story.
	You know, in California, a lot of us eat a lot of hot chilies, although not necessarily as much as some of us do who are really kind of addicted to the chili.
	And I'm quite comfortable with the hottest imaginable food, except some places in India have served food that is excruciating and maybe too much for me.
	So I'm in Brazil.
	Oh, you're a professional, John.
	Let's just be honest.
	I mean, let's just call a spade a spade.
	Doing what?
	You're a professional foodie.
	Yeah.
	I'm a foodie, yeah.
	So anyway, so I'm...
	By the way, the thing about Chili's for people out there who want to say, well, what's the big kick?
	Well, I mean, besides the fact you get a little endorphin hit.
	But you can see what happened there.
	You had interrupted it to throw in this, let's call it a spade, a spade thing, and it was like about something else, but it became awkward.
	And it took me forever to get used to this.
	While that clip was playing, there's a book, and I'm trying to find it here in the bookcase.
	That is about the Dutch speaking English, specifically.
	This is well known that when Dutch people, even if they're English, it's not even the grammar.
	It's just the intonations, the pacing, it's the cadence.
	And I have to tell you, sometimes Mickey will say something, and I'd be like...
	And it still will hit me for a minute.
	Well, you can't not let it hit you.
	It does hit you.
	You just have to...
	Which is the problem with the...
	And I brought this up on the show numerous times about the Scandinavians and the Nordics and the Dutch and most of these...
	This whole area has this problem.
	And it's...
	And I try to explain it to people.
	If you're going to go travel in these areas, people are just, they're very honest.
	Everyone's honest.
	They don't have, they don't really, it's not that much sarcasm.
	They're honest, and when they say something, they mean it.
	They're not being sarcastic when they say they want to go to bed with you.
	Yeah, but that's not actually sex.
	I just mean to go to bed to sleep.
	They want sex.
	Oh, okay.
	But it's not ever received properly because it's so flat and bland.
	Blunt.
	Blunt, I think.
	Blunt.
	That you think, this is, what is she, what is she some sort of, what is she trying to tell me?
	You know, you're offended by it because it sounds like the person's being sarcastic or if you even ask them to go to bed and they say, yes, I'd like to go to bed with you.
	At this point in my 50th year, I'm not too picky.
	Well, I'm just telling people, especially the younger guys who go there, just to believe them, you know, and just don't pay any attention to the cadence.
	This brings me now, finally understanding what you were talking about when you were being sarcastic about, let's call a spade a spade.
	I don't know why you even threw that in, but you did.
	That must have been from me listening to something else.
	I get very influenced by other people sometimes.
	Whatever it was.
	I snapped out of it rather quickly.
	But now, here's an example of me, you know, the big shot trying to get...
	I don't know.
	I listened to this clip half a dozen times going...
	What is the point of this clip?
	The way I was trying to, I had, I guess, something to say.
	You had a point to make and you weren't going to let me finish and I wasn't going to let you finish.
	And it went back and forth and back and forth.
	And then you finished with a piece of information that I indeed, you knew I didn't have this information and you kept trying to stop me, but I wouldn't.
	I was relentless.
	And you threw out the piece of information.
	And this, I believe, is the genesis of the modern No Agenda show that has become so popular.
	And what we do, and the joke of it is, when you hear the beginning of the origins of No Agenda, the little comment that you make is, we don't talk about the news on No Agenda.
	Yeah.
	You know, we don't usually comment on news stories, but you know the story that's been whipping around the blogosphere about the RIAA, apparently some lawyer in a court case stated that making a copy of a CD, that that would be deemed stealing.
	By the way, this is my PC Magazine column for this week, by the way.
	Well, let me just see if we're talking about the same thing.
	Yeah, we're talking about the idea that if you rip...
	No, wait, wait, stop!
	No, stop, John!
	No, no, I'm doing my research!
	Listen to this!
	Listen to this!
	It turns out that this started in a Washington Post article...
	Written by a guy named Fisher, I believe.
	I know, I know.
	I refer to this article.
	And then Steve Weldstrom at the Business Week and a few other guys had come out and said, Ah, this is bull.
	No, wait.
	No, no, no.
	This doesn't...
	No, no, no.
	You're missing it.
	Listen to me now.
	Let me finish this sentence.
	He only cited half of the quote.
	The quote that the person from the RIAA made was, if you rip a CD, put it on your hard drive in a shared folder, that would be deemed illegal.
	And he chose not to quote that part in the article.
	That you didn't know.
	Well, okay.
	Yeah, but that's a big deal.
	They have been skirting.
	They have...
	It's a big deal for this particular episode.
	That's right there was the start of the...
	I'm concerned.
	But this is because...
	Well, there's a couple of factors.
	One, you...
	I'm sure you...
	But also, there was...
	I was at Podshow.
	Were you working at Podshow at the time?
	You cement your lips, yes.
	Yeah.
	You probably thought I was a bimbo.
	To some degree.
	I don't know.
	Maybe.
	It's hard to say.
	Whatever the case was, that was an awkward situation.
	You had done...
	That was where you...
	And I think it triggered a lot because I think that's where you said, you know, it's not that difficult to just get the full quote.
	It's not that difficult to go read the legislation.
	It's not that difficult.
	And you did all the stuff that nobody else was doing.
	Right.
	More than I was, that's for sure.
	And it got me doing the same.
	We co-developed, I believe, co-developed a no-agenda thought process.
	Which really, you need more than one person to pull it off.
	Right, because both of us, me more than you probably, tend to get suckered a little bit by mass media, because I'm actually watching more of the...
	You're watching junk, right?
	Or deep news.
	You either watch junk, junk, junk, which is, I'm talking reality TV, or deep news.
	I watch deep news, but I watch mainstream media, which is very, so I'm more susceptible to the messaging than you are.
	Because the messaging in junk TV is, eh, you know, it's pretty low end.
	To me, it's...
	It's like Maury Povich.
	There's messaging in there, but it's not really affecting the politics.
	I really don't watch TV. I have TV on, and it's either CNN or C-SPAN. Those are the two I just find the most valuable and really the funniest.
	C-SPAN is just funny.
	It's funny people show up, and it's all the people who are also on C-SPAN, but then they show up with Brolf, and it's just funny.
	And I'm only trying to find out who the sources are, or people say, or the numbers.
	and it was around this period when, and we were talking about on the show, when the Lisbon Treaty was being voted on.
	Voted down by the Netherlands.
	Yes, and you were all over the Lisbon Treaty and you started reading it.
	But I think this particular incident, I'm believing, especially because Yeah.
	All we talk about is now we're not we're doing deconstructions of ourselves.
	There's a deconstruction of the show.
	Yeah.
	It's just kind of what the theme of this show is.
	But we it's all we do is we deconstruct news, talk about news, look at news and we and then analyze it to get our thesis, which is that the news is manipulated and controlled by forces that aren't healthy to the public at large.
	Right.
	That's what we do all the time.
	So this clip marked the change from, we don't talk much about the news, but what?
	But meanwhile, here's something I found that was manipulated in the news.
	Yes, and that was, I believe, is the genesis of the entire show.
	And especially with me interrupting.
	With a really crappy sound.
	I'm sorry, that doesn't sound good at all.
	That sounds horrible.
	Well, it doesn't sound great.
	Oh, it sounds horrible.
	If you compare it to other podcasts at the time, and it's old.
	Yeah.
	That's 4-1-2008, or 1-4.
	Was it January 4th?
	I think it was January 4th, 2008.
	Yeah.
	It just had begun.
	That was early on, or maybe it was 4-1, I don't know.
	Whatever it was, that was, I think, a moment that was important.
	Yeah.
	It was also probably the moment that I realized that I could impress you with some knowledge that I had being a bimbo.
	Yeah.
	That's really all I do.
	John, all I really do is show up.
	I show up to make you laugh.
	I try to make you laugh or impress you with something.
	I get a laugh out of some of it.
	Yeah.
	That makes me happy.
	I'm always impressed by some of the good stuff.
	I mean, that was a good piece.
	You had to do that simple little thing.
	And we could have actually, if I wasn't so stunned, I was like stunned.
	You don't sound that stunned, actually.
	Well, I'm pretty cool.
	You know yourself.
	Well, he got me there.
	I realize what's interesting about this show the past seven years into our eighth year, your situation has pretty much been constant.
	My constant has been, my situation has been always in change.
	Yes, which is fine.
	Which is the same.
	I think it's good.
	Your situation is constant, too.
	But I think it's good.
	I think it adds, I feel.
	Well, I... Yeah.
	Now, back to that Washington Post thing.
	If the show was being done today and that would have played out differently, you would have just...
	well, I wrote about this.
	What did you find out?
	Because I know you'd have something and you'd have this little thing about the shared folders.
	Then we'd go deeper from there because at that point I would have, instead of being stunned, I would have thought about it and said, that's not make sense to me.
	And I would have explained why the quote was misquoted.
	It wasn't done.
	Looking back on it, I don't believe it was done on purpose.
	I believe that like every other piece of journalism we get today from people that don't know what they're talking about, they're just professional journalists, he didn't see the importance of that little piece.
	He was just being tight.
	So what?
	To him, to the writer, he was thinking, so what?
	Right.
	Share it folder.
	Where we, as people who are somewhat familiar with the technology, actually more than somewhat, we would have said, that's very important, as you did say, and he left it out.
	But I would argue that's because he didn't know, and he just left it out because it was convenient to do so.
	Or even an editor could have taken it out, which is very common.
	And, you know, what's this?
	It's not important.
	Boom, off it goes.
	What I'm realizing here, if you watch any podcast, too, in fact, I'd say it's probably more prevalent in podcasts where multiple people are talking, but certainly in almost every interview you see or hear in mainstream, People are listening to reply, not listening to comprehend and understand.
	And what I think I've certainly learned is to listen to understand what you're saying, not thinking of the next thing I can say, or how can I jump, or pile jump is what I call it.
	This is very hard.
	It's very, very hard to listen to what someone is trying to say, not how am I going to reply to this.
	Well, in a normal conversation, I think you program yourself for this, you have to listen mostly to reply because you're in a conversation.
	And the skill of being able to listen to comprehend and then thoughtfully reply, which takes time, you have to stop.
	You can't get into a nice back and forth.
	And you can't be a quick-witted comic by doing that.
	You have to think about what they said.
	And you might not have anything to say in return because you just have to mull it over.
	That's why I think we discover so much stuff in post.
	When I get my clip from a TV show or something and I put it on the recorder and then I bring it into the computer to edit it, now I've got nothing to do but listen to this thing carefully because I'm trying to edit it and then I'll hear things.
	And then I play it on the show and you'll hear something else.
	Right, right, right, right.
	That's why I can catch these little nuances once in a while.
	Which brings me to what we are doing is an art that I think is going away, but maybe it will have a resurgence, is purely listening.
	Everybody seems to find it incredibly important to have video along with it.
	We've talked about this before, but it's good to bring it up again.
	Yes.
	We presume our audience is not able to do anything else while they're listening to us.
	And quite honestly, three hours, it's hard to do that just sitting down doing nothing unless you're driving, commuting, exercising, housework.
	Housework, gardening.
	Yeah, stuff that you can kind of do on autopilot.
	Right.
	And it's important that it is...
	Look, I've never even seen your studio.
	There's no pictures of my studio.
	I want everyone to have their own visualization, and I think everyone has their own visuals, like a book.
	You put it together, and that is part of the art that we're both schooled in.
	I am a Connecticut School of Broadcasting graduate, I'll point out.
	Yeah.
	I am.
	Great.
	Honorary.
	The one honorary degree I got.
	Well, I did take broadcasting in college.
	That's why I went to college.
	I dropped out there for three months.
	And...
	I have, and then I went to the Paul Allen School of Broadcasting where I learned my video skills.
	That was called Tech TV. Tech TV, right.
	It's the same thing.
	And, but we have, we both knew, or know, and we appreciate, and I think a lot of other people do, even though they're doing the video side of it, the important, the greatness of audio, uh, Yes.
	And, you know, people, like you said, they're driving their car, they can listen to it, and people talk about how they're, you know, laughing.
	People think they're nuts because they're laughing at something we said in the middle of a drive.
	And with that comes, we're also very, very good at silence.
	And I love that so much.
	You can have a moment of complete silence, and it's like half a second longer than comfortable.
	And I know people are like, what?
	And of course, we use noise gates to get all sorts of part of our sound, which is design, and we've been working on that.
	We're finally at a place where I'm pretty happy.
	And so it's dead.
	I mean, it's all digital, so it's just zero.
	There's no signal coming out.
	Zero, zero, zero, zero.
	So there's not even hiss if you're listening to it.
	Yeah, I miss the hiss.
	Really?
	Well, I don't know.
	It's like during the switchover from vinyl to CD. You know, all that really changed.
	I mean, the fidelity actually went up, even though it got screechy because of some filtering issues that were a problem, it turned out.
	And the hiss was all gone.
	And the hiss was actually the problem with vinyl.
	If you played a virgin record that's never been played before, yeah, it was minimal.
	But then after you played it and played it and played it, it was all hiss.
	And it's sentimental.
	Well.
	The point is that we've chosen, and people every once in a while, you should do video.
	With that exact voice.
	Pretty much.
	You can hear it in the me-mail.
	And we've decided we're never going to do video.
	And there's things people will reiterate this for the listeners who may have only been listening for a year, let's say.
	We don't do video.
	We're never going to do video.
	There's no reason to do video.
	This is much...
	A better format for what we're trying to do.
	Get people to listen without looking at some video image, which is distracting in itself.
	And what's the point?
	You have two guys with, generally speaking, if you look at these video podcasts, there's two guys, many distractive looking, you know, like some bug-eyed women, you know, they're bug-eyed and they're looking at the thing, you're like, what the hell's wrong with her?
	It's what you're thinking instead of listening to her.
	Headphones on.
	Big cans, giant cans, and a big old mic covering your whole face.
	It's like, wow, this is not entertainment.
	If you're going to do video, I actually said this on Leo's show.
	And Leo's dropped the cans, that's for sure, but he still wears those little buds.
	And even though he stopped, he tried to go freeform for a while without the buds, I think, because I think he wasn't wearing them a few times, but...
	But he still wears them.
	Everybody used to wear cans.
	I got everyone off that because I think freeform is the way to do it.
	You don't need to be monitoring.
	The only reason you do that is if you...
	In the olden days, you could really make your voice sound really good by doing...
	Well, thank you.
	I have to monitor everything because...
	And somehow this went wrong early.
	I feel it went wrong with podcasts.
	Because of the lack of technology for real-time recording and producing, the only way you could really do that is to buy a bunch of band gear, is what I'll call it.
	There's still not really a setup, certainly not an analog setup, that is meant specifically for the way podcasts are produced.
	Then you need...
	Processing on the voice, which is compressor limiters, you know, some EQ. You need your mix minus, like a foldback if you're using Skype.
	You need an end signal processing, which again for me is another compressor limiter, to create a nice flow, fluent sound because that's how it's done.
	If you listen to radio, that's how it's done.
	But no one really ever created the right gear, and I really didn't pay attention to it.
	I always wanted to have it in the laptop, be as small as possible, gave up on that eventually, and just went, screw it.
	I got my big outboard gear, which of course became problematic for going on the road.
	But because of that, people would just record in GarageBand or Audacity or whatever, and then do everything after the fact.
	And that's, you can't, yeah.
	It's not a great way to create a product.
	And this way, all the mix is everything is done in real time, which is what I've learned to do since I was 14.
	And we don't have to edit.
	Right, you don't want to edit.
	And you don't...
	You have to do all...
	Because people are doing processing around them.
	It's horrible.
	Well, even in video, it's better if you don't add.
	I mean, that's the reason some of this gear was created, is for...
	Like the TriCaster and these things.
	They're all done.
	Right, to do it in real time.
	Yes, correct.
	Yeah, you want to do it in real time.
	You get everything set up in advance.
	You roll the credits.
	You do all this stuff in real time.
	And then when the show is done...
	It's done.
	It's done.
	It's just ready to ship out.
	You don't have to go send it to an edit booth.
	It's been hours.
	We'd end a show and someone would say, Oh, we've got to send it to post to fix this or that.
	And people would groan like, Oh, really?
	We've got to go to post with this.
	Yeah, it's tedious.
	But I think it's also...
	Liam does a lot of posts, which I just never could figure out why.
	But you just don't get a good product.
	I think the true only way to do it is to do it live.
	Someone has to have headphones on, which are good reference headphones, to be able to hear what is going to be on the show.
	Yeah, I know you have to wear your headphones.
	Because this is the way people are going to listen to it is on headphones or earbuds.
	Yeah, and there's stuff coming through your headphones that you can't be playing in the studio anyway.
	You've got all the sound effects.
	You've got the sound effects.
	But anyway, so we tell people we're never going to do video because it's just dumb.
	I think it's dumb.
	Dumb.
	Yeah, we're not going to do it together.
	You know, you're producing the news.
	And here's Bill in Cairo.
	And he's got to play some video that he's produced over the last few days.
	And you just insert it.
	Yeah, okay.
	But that's not what these guys are doing.
	They just put some cans on there.
	They had a big microphone in front of their face.
	And a lousy camera.
	You know, and they're in their bedroom.
	It's just like, come on, this is dumb.
	But people say, oh, you should do that, you can do this, you can do that.
	Bull crap.
	The other thing is we don't have guests.
	And I have a rant.
	I give the rant on the show.
	I give the rant.
	If people ask me on the street, at the grocery store, anywhere, I will give the rant.
	We don't have guests.
	We're never going to have guests.
	There's no reason to have guests.
	If we have a clip of someone, you know, or we want to interview somebody on the side, you've done this a couple of times, and pull a clip from the interview that was interesting and then refer to the interview and people go listen to that, that's different.
	That's not a guest.
	And people keep saying to me, why don't you do Cranky Geeks again?
	And I always have to tell them that the problem with any of these shows, and I think this happens at the Leo's operation and other places, is booking guests is horrible.
	They don't show up.
	They beg you to come on the show, but then they can't do that date.
	In fact, they can never do Wednesday, it turns out.
	And then, you know, people are begging you to come on.
	They're duds.
	People come on.
	They say nothing.
	They won't say anything.
	They're complete duds.
	And it's a nightmare.
	It's typically not entertaining.
	The way that is solved in mainstream, everything from Wolf Blitzer to The Tonight Show, is the pre-interview.
	Then the pre-interview is a producer who sits down with you.
	It starts on the phone first with the booker.
	They're going to find out.
	And you can pretty much tell immediately what they really want you to talk about, because they'll kind of force that issue.
	Well, actually, I've worked with a lot of these operations, and I will...
	I'm used to this.
	And you're right.
	It's the booker who calls first.
	And they go, can you do Thursday's show?
	We're going to be talking about this and that.
	And I will say, when I was doing a lot of CNBC stuff, I will say, what side do you want me to take?
	And they'll tell you.
	Yes.
	Yeah, I want you to be against it.
	Yeah, can you be against it?
	Yeah.
	Creating false controversy.
	I have, so people don't think I'm just a wishy-washy chameleon.
	You flipped off.
	I've often said, no, I can't do that.
	I can't take that side because that side is so wrong.
	I can't do it.
	And they say, oh, okay.
	And they either will bump me, they'll drop me completely because I already have somebody that wants to be the pro side and go find somebody else.
	They'll do that.
	That has happened a number of times.
	And if you're watching or listening to any type of interview, you can often hear the interviewer or the host prompting the guest about a question that the pre-interviewer told the host or the interviewer.
	There's a funny story or this is the one you want to hit.
	You want to talk about this.
	And you'll hear someone say, yeah, talk about that trip you made.
	Like they talked about it before, and of course it never comes out fresh, which is, might as well reiterate, we, people sometimes don't, still don't believe it when I say this, we do not talk outside of the show.
	Right.
	Yeah, we always do a post-mortem of the show.
	We'll say, because we have stuff to do.
	We have art to choose.
	We have a title to come up with.
	We have to check credits.
	We talk about crap.
	Mostly gossip.
	Totally gossip.
	Yeah, just gossip.
	No one knows what we're coming up.
	Like this show, I have no idea what your clips are.
	I want to hear you get to it.
	I'm not interested in knowing everything.
	Which I think is a good book.
	Well, I will tell another boring anecdote about my life.
	When I had my big telecom book, which is a huge book that's so light.
	It was an instant bestseller.
	It was an instant bestseller.
	They put me on a radio book tour.
	Mostly radio stations.
	I did some TV too, but not much.
	Mostly radio.
	And so I went from radio, and I learned a lot.
	I knew enough about radio, and I'd been doing it on and off.
	But I didn't realize...
	I learned a lot this time because I went from station to station to station and never fully comprehended how variant these places are.
	There are no two rigs the same.
	Everybody's got different mics, different setups, different size studios, different gear in the control room, different ways of doing it.
	It was just everything.
	And that's when I was doing this, by the way, that's when I decided to work on going freeform, which is no...
	No headphones at all.
	And just try to work the mic from experience because of a show I did in Vancouver, Canada, which was the Bill Goods show.
	And he was a talk show guy.
	And he sat you down.
	And I'm looking around for the headphones because I've been using them all along.
	So I could modulate my voice a little bit.
	And there was none.
	And I looked, Bill didn't have any on.
	And he was just, the mic was there, and he was there, and I was there, and we did the show, and it was fine.
	And I thought that was kind of a freedom thing without being, you know, just without being tied down to this stuff on your ears.
	Which turns out, by the way, to be bad for your ears.
	What, headphones?
	Yeah.
	Hell yeah.
	And those little buds are worse.
	So here's an experience.
	Here's something I want to do.
	You won't be able to notice much of this because the reason we started with noise gates was because you didn't wear headphones and I would hear my voice coming back.
	Even though it was soft, it would come back through the microphone.
	And when you have a noise gate, you can set a level.
	Then you have to really be modulating loudly enough so that stuff will just not come through.
	So I'm turning off the noise gates for a moment here.
	So now I hear all kinds of hiss.
	Well, you hear the background.
	My studio's noisy, and here's the reason.
	So is mine.
	I have a computer that has a fan.
	I can hear it.
	And the fan starts up about halfway through the podcast because the computer starts to warm up.
	I have a giant window, a big window overlooking the San Francisco Bay that...
	It's double insulated, but it is still noise comes through.
	And you can maybe hear the train siren.
	And you can hear me actually breathing, and you can hear me smacking because I'm chomping on a licorice because I have a little tickle in my throat.
	And I can also occasionally, I do like to open the window because it gets hot in here.
	Because we're in California, we don't have air conditioning.
	We should just make more noise.
	And that would come through.
	You know, I bet you people are going to say, I liked it a lot better with that noise gate.
	Leave that off.
	Well, it has more atmosphere.
	Now, that's another thing to consider.
	We talk about this, and this is maybe a little too inside baseball for a lot of people, but there's certain kinds of sounds that different people enjoy.
	Now, Adam is the engineer of this podcast.
	He is responsible for the sound, in quotes...
	Of the show, because he uses all kinds of fancy filters and gear and preamp software versions of preamps like the Nev and all these other things.
	He makes a very distinctive sounding podcast.
	NPR has a very interesting sound.
	To be on NPR, you have to produce a dead sound, which is a...
	Generally, I've gotten through a condenser mic in a dead room.
	The room has no ambience at all.
	These are expensive rooms to build.
	Yeah.
	I was always thinking, I could turn this into a room like that by putting panels over the windows that are full.
	Slanted panels.
	There's a lot of work involved.
	And it gives a dead, ambient-free sound that you can...
	Go from show to show to show and they'll have this sound because they've all...
	It's kind of deemed the NPR sound.
	It's the sound dead.
	I never liked that sound.
	I always thought the sound...
	It's distinctive.
	It's very distinctive when it's really dead.
	But the ambient, more natural sound to me is more modern.
	Much like the modern announcers or announcing voices or voices like ours.
	Mine more than yours in this case.
	It's not...
	It's not a trained voice.
	Right.
	So you don't have a guy talking like this all the time.
	And, well, Adam, what are you doing now?
	Well, John, let me tell you exactly what I'm doing right now as I puke into the microphone.
	And that, to me, is a much more modern sound.
	And...
	Now, what Adam's done is he's taken the modernness of that, and then he's given it a kind of 50s, 60s, big radio station sound.
	A little grungy.
	Slightly grungy, yes.
	Slightly grungy.
	Actually, very grungy.
	But that is our sound.
	And that's the sound.
	It's the sound.
	It's distinctive.
	It's almost like writing styles.
	It's noticeable.
	Yeah, it's like Phil Spector had his style.
	This is our style.
	I'm the Phil Spector of podcasts.
	So it's not as though there's not a lot of thought that goes into this.
	There's in fact a lot of thought that goes into this.
	There's one other thing that I need to mention about the processing.
	When you have clips, when you have jingles, when you have things that are various levels and ambient, just sound by itself, when you have certainly a compressor, but the combination compressor limiter, you can make it more an overall...
	Kind of an equal sound, even though I can still ride everything.
	So I start the sleigh bells, and I can ride it down if I want, but you can talk over this, and you'll be able to punch through just because of the way everything is set up, no matter how loud I have it.
	So you're never going to have a situation where something's really too loud, blows people's eardrums out, which was a big complaint in the beginning of podcasting.
	Where people couldn't hear it, or they'd turn up the volume, and then someone would blow their eardrums out.
	So it's, anyway, maybe enough about this app.
	I think that is enough.
	I have one clip that I brought.
	One clip.
	Well, then you better save it, because I've got a bunch of clips.
	But now you want to save it.
	You're going to blow your clip.
	Okay.
	You want to blow your clip now?
	Can I blow my clip on you?
	Yeah, blow it.
	It's a clip we've talked about.
	Let me see when this clip was created.
	This clip is...
	Okay, this is from 2010.
	Okay, we had a lot of clips in 2010.
	And we have talked about this clip many times, and we always say, you know, one of these days I'm going to dig that clip up and play it.
	Do you know what clip I'm talking about?
	Is it the Feinstein clip?
	That's the one.
	What is the likelihood of another terrorist attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months?
	High or low?
	Director Blair?
	An attempted attack, the priority is certain, I would say.
	Mr.
	Panetta?
	I would agree with that.
	Mr.
	Mueller?
	Agree.
	General Burgess?
	Yes, ma'am.
	Agree.
	How's that coming?
	And her head is gone.
	Attempted attack or attack on the homeland in the next six months.
	Everyone agreed.
	How come nobody except us even mentions stuff like this?
	Well, the conspiracy...
	I've changed over time.
	Oh, yeah.
	I got clips to prove it.
	So I'll tell you how I've changed.
	The conspiracy theorist is in me, which I still have.
	This is a plot.
	They're all in.
	And really, I have enough knowledge of how it works and how certainly broadcast networks and things that happen at the top and how policy is set and how people go along and we don't do that here.
	This is just not what they do.
	It's just not what they do anymore.
	They don't care.
	What do you mean, they?
	People who work at broadcast networks and news.
	Oh, no, they don't care.
	They're just trying to get their thing out, move on to the next thing, trying to get...
	It's a job.
	Yeah, it's a gig.
	Yeah, it's a gig.
	Precisely.
	You don't need to make waves.
	You don't need to do a lot.
	Now, that doesn't mean that we're the greatest thing in the world.
	There's a couple of things.
	I just grabbed a few random clips of stories that we never followed up on.
	Okay.
	Well, there's a lot.
	They're just kind of like, I don't even, I get to, oh my God, I forgot all about that.
	And I could have, by the way, put together a 10-hour show of that.
	We do a lot, I think, and much better than anybody else, trying to stay on the story until the story is expired.
	Which usually happens when one of us will say to the other, yeah, we're done.
	I'm pretty tired of that stuff.
	Although we've said that and it wasn't true often.
	But this one, play the Mary Kennedy ganged clip.
	Remember this?
	Oh, yeah.
	Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s estranged wife, Mary, has been found dead at her home in New York State.
	The cause of her death is unknown.
	Her former husband is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated in the 1960s.
	Our Washington correspondent Jonathan Blake explains what's known about the death.
	Well, police in Bedford, New York, which is a few hours' drive north of New York City, have said that a body was found at a home belonging to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
	and his former wife, Mary, earlier this afternoon.
	They have not confirmed reports that it was Mary Kennedy, and they have not confirmed or denied reports that the body was found in an apparent suicide.
	And one news organization, ABC News, here in the United States, reporting that Mary Kennedy was found hanged.
	And I recall that this...
	Well, we go after a lot of murder-slash-death-slash-suicides because it's interesting if someone of interest dies.
	The thing that you rarely hear or never really in any mainstream because of the money involved is the pharmaceuticals that are involved in these types of cases.
	Never.
	Which I think she was on like Ambien or something like a combination of things.
	I do recall us talking about that.
	Yeah, I just kind of died on the vine at the end, you know, eventually.
	Yeah.
	Now there's other stuff that we used to do that, and we dropped the ball, I don't know, we dropped the ball, we just got sick of it, or we didn't want to really go any further with it, or we just didn't want to take advantage of it.
	We've lost a lot of clips that were always hilarious to begin with, and then they never get played again.
	And so I run into this one, I say, ah, an oldie but a goodie, play this clip, it's Obama ignorant.
	Okay.
	There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, come on.
	Classic.
	I don't think we play that a lot.
	Oh, man.
	No, but it's one of those clips that you could add to the end of a clip if you wanted to produce it a little bit.
	Yeah, which we also rarely do, pre-production.
	Very rarely do we do pre-production.
	And a lot of our stuff, and this is maybe a moment to talk about the producers, which early on we started calling our listeners producers, as we noticed that really they were kind of producing.
	They were, and I think a lot of people don't realize that that's probably true for all shows.
	Well, the catch is, or the trick is, you have to be able to manage the information that is incoming.
	That's sometimes very difficult.
	Yeah, because you get a lot of bad information.
	We've had a couple of plants, I would call them, that came in and gave us bad dope.
	And we kind of fell for it for a while.
	It tends to fall out eventually, and then we could...
	We have good sense.
	I think the two of us, which is I think a huge part of the show, the two of us have good common sense.
	When to believe something and not to believe.
	It's a news for no's.
	No's for no's.
	It's a news for no's.
	I've come a long way towards being rational.
	I hear people say this a lot.
	John has moved towards your side.
	You've moved towards John's side.
	I guess crackpot, buzzkill is kind of the dichotomy.
	We never really intended to be controversial all the time.
	It's just not cross-talk or Counterpoint or whatever it's called.
	No, it wasn't the idea.
	Red, blue, Republican, Democrat.
	It's never been the idea.
	It was two guys presenting.
	To each other.
	To each other.
	Yeah, here you go.
	What do you think of this?
	Oh, it's a conversation.
	What do you think of this?
	Oh, that's interesting.
	But did you notice it was this?
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I didn't notice that.
	I noticed that.
	And often, because we're on the news cycle and it's a news show, Even though we never talk about the news.
	We tend to hit a lot on the same thing.
	Sometimes knowing the other guy.
	You comment on this more than I do.
	Oh, I knew you were going to get that.
	I saw that on there, but I figured John would go get the clips.
	Because we kind of know what our common interests are and what one person likes more than that.
	I will do the beauty shows.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You do a lot more than just the beauty shows, but yeah.
	I do the beauty shows, and occasionally some things that are...
	What I would call the kind of dead money material, like certain Obama speeches, I might actually pick up and start recording segments of it.
	With you thinking that I'm going to do that.
	And then I'm thinking, well, he's going to expect me to do that and I'll do it.
	But if I don't do it, it won't be any loss to the show.
	Right.
	Generally speaking, whatever either one of us does, rarely is it semi...
	The show itself is a whole pile of stuff that makes the show good.
	Not a single item.
	Although there's usually at least two items in each show that are revelationary.
	Yeah, and I've learned...
	Well, it's funny, because...
	Well, maybe...
	I'd like to hear your process, because I really don't know your process, how you prepare for the show.
	Maybe it's...
	Actually, I have no idea.
	I mean, do you take notes?
	Do you write stuff down?
	I've changed.
	I used to write a lot down to make...
	Prepared commentary on annoyances, generally.
	I would be taking, but the notes always would end up me complaining about, and I'll do it now.
	You go to the line, and there's a woman with all her bags, these dirty old bags from Trader Joe's, and she's hanging everything up because she won't pay 10 cents for a paper bag, which is a scam, by the way.
	The bags used to be free.
	You know where that 10 cents goes?
	It goes right to the store.
	It doesn't go to any fund.
	So it's bullcrap.
	You can't have plastic bags.
	You can't do this.
	And you have these people that are...
	They're not even as old as they act in the lines, moving slow and taking up a lot of time and bandwidth and everything in between.
	It was a dig for a penny or they can't...
	Most credit card machines...
	I'm sorry, I'm going off...
	Tangent.
	Most credit card machines say, you can slide the card once the first transaction is put in the cash register.
	It says, please slide card.
	You can read it.
	It says slide card.
	Yeah, you can do it while before they're done reading it.
	So you slide the card, you punch in all the numbers, you put in everything you need to put in, and it's ready to go.
	So when she, she, he, whoever it is, rings up the last thing on the item and pushes the button, you just, you're done!
	But no, you see somebody standing there, gape-jawed, looking at them running through the groceries, and everything's out, and then they stand for another 10 seconds in awe of the whole process, and then they put their card in, and you have to wait.
	And then they won't get it in right.
	And then they can't see.
	There's always the blind person.
	They've got their glasses and they're looking and they're up and down with the glasses, up and down, up and down.
	And then they slide again.
	No, no, no.
	Surgery just slide once.
	And they're sliding and sliding and glasses up and down and then they're pushing.
	And then they push the wrong thing.
	It's unbelievable.
	Okay.
	And so how do you...
	I'd be writing notes on this.
	Okay.
	So I stopped writing notes.
	What I do now...
	Paper?
	Paper notes?
	They keep a notebook with me.
	Mm-hmm.
	And I would do this while watching TV. Oh, this is idiotic.
	And I'd write something down.
	You know, I gave up on that.
	I tried to keep the show, on my side of the show, to be even more performance ad-lib improv, as it were, than ever.
	And what I do is I watch, if I don't have enough clips, I will get a clip immediately if I see something interesting.
	Which you do how?
	I use a recorder.
	I use hardware.
	I have a DVR. I do a two-step process.
	I have a DVR. I'm watching some television of some sort, and I see something I think is a cool clip.
	So I back up the DVR, hit the record button, record that segment, turn it off, and I keep these clips on the DVR. And then on the night before the show, and you have to do this early to the show, because otherwise, like this pile of clips I sent today, I don't know what half these clips are.
	I can't remember.
	Right.
	So what I do is the night before the show, I go through all those pre-clips and put them on an H2. I have a jack out of the back of the DVR. It goes right into a real digital recorder, and I record the pieces of that as...
	Is it audio to digital or digital to digital?
	It's audio...
	By analog.
	It's analog to digital.
	It's analog.
	It's analog to...
	Okay.
	It's analog to a digital recorder.
	Mm-hmm.
	It goes out analog.
	It's an analog process, mostly.
	And then I record them all that night.
	And then in the morning, I get up two hours before the show, and I go through the clips in Audacity and edit them down.
	And then name them and save them, because now it's immediate.
	Because I have a lot of clips, say 15 clips.
	If I had done this like a week ago, and I see the name of the clip, I won't know what that clip's about.
	Right, right.
	Because it's impossible to, you know, that's why a lot of the clips are very long names.
	So I say, I'm not going to remember what this is about, sorry.
	So I try to keep it immediate.
	So the show, when we do the show, again, like the, we were talking about pre-interviews.
	The fresher things are, I think the audience likes it better.
	So I try to keep it as fresh as possible by moving everything right toward the show and do everything on my last minute basis, which is, I'm natural to, as you know.
	Lifo, lifo.
	I'm a LIFO guy.
	Last minute Charlie works for me.
	And it also stays fresh.
	I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the term last minute Charlie.
	Yeah, last minute Charlie.
	That's what my mom used to call me.
	LIFO! There you go.
	Last minute Charlie.
	Now, when I'm talking about going around doing...
	Write that down.
	What the hell does that even mean?
	When I was talking about taking the radio book tour, there were people that did pre-interviews and there were people that didn't.
	The fresher shows all didn't.
	I worked on Larry King's show when he was doing radio three or four times, and he refused to talk to anybody before the show.
	And he didn't want any pre-interviews.
	He felt that the audience wasn't pre-interviewing you.
	Why should he?
	And if he can't get you to talk, then he's not doing his job.
	Which is my, I feel exactly the same way about it, because I noticed that when I did the pre-interviews with a number of these hot shots, they had somebody pre-interviewing, subjects when it came up, you don't know if you said it or not.
	I think I talked about that already, didn't I? And so I thought it was this terrible idea.
	And I always think, and that's why I think Craig Ferguson on the late night show that he does, and he takes the blue cards and tears them up.
	Right at the beginning of every interview, he doesn't look at the cards, which I think are just props now.
	Well, this is definitely something that we agreed on early on, which I think is really why we don't talk to each other.
	Unless it's just gossip about one topic that we stick on for sometimes months or years, just as like our own continuing soap opera, whatever it is, just nothing important to the audience or the show.
	If we talk about anything else, it will not come up in the show.
	No, we've done dinner.
	Even the newsletter.
	The stuff you write in the newsletter, you write the newsletter, you send it to me, I say, oh, how about this?
	Usually I say, which I know you hate, good to go.
	It must irk you.
	It's a little like you didn't read it.
	No, I read it very carefully.
	Every single one.
	But then, you know, I've read it, and then it goes out, and when it comes in, I read it again, because I want to see what pictures you put in.
	And then we rarely talk about what was in the newsletter because we've talked about it or it's been discussed or it was on the radar.
	I don't know.
	It's very strange.
	Sometimes it comes up.
	Sometimes, but not often.
	Most of the time the newsletter is pretty standalone.
	And there's a couple items in there that we...
	Or I'll maybe say we're going to talk about something and then it's just vague and that's okay.
	But yeah, no, that's one of the problems that I think a lot of people have when they over-rehearse.
	It's over-rehearsing and we're not putting it on a play.
	I mean, it seems to me that it's just acting at the point where you do a lot of pre-interviews.
	Okay, here's what you're going to talk about.
	A lot of reality TV is produced this way.
	Here's what you're going to do.
	They tell you what to do.
	And then, you know, you're supposed to ad lib.
	All reality TV is...
	Here's how it works.
	Could you come in the door again?
	Could you just do that one more time?
	Do that walk again.
	So that's your reality TV. Yeah.
	Burnett, the guy who perfected it with Survivor, and he did a lot of other shows, he said he never liked the name reality TV because it's not real.
	He says it properly should be called unscripted drama.
	Exactly.
	And when he said that, I realized what it was really all about.
	Unscripted drama.
	Cheap actors that don't get any money.
	No writers.
	That guy.
	Perfect.
	Perfect.
	Yeah, unscripted drama.
	In other words, I get all the money.
	Before we move into that, I want to stick with the process for a moment.
	What you don't seem to do, or you don't really seem to save stories or webpages that you want to discuss, or...
	I don't really recall you bringing that up very much.
	Sometimes you'll send me a link, but that's very rare.
	Yeah, this is true.
	Which is pretty much the opposite of what I do.
	Yeah, what do you do?
	I don't know what you do.
	I know you're not doing what I do, that's for sure.
	There's no chance.
	Not at all.
	I wouldn't think so.
	Well, I'll tell you how I do it now, because over the course of four years, a system has been built that I use.
	Dave Jones and I, well, Dave Jones had all the programming, and he has a job.
	Just over the course of four years, we've perfected it, called the Freedom Controller.
	Which is a name that I always liked, and it was some product I had 15 years ago, and the domain name came free again after, I don't know, I think the IRS had it or something.
	I have no idea what happened.
	I've always liked the name, but it is a system that has an RSS aggregator.
	That's a big part of it, a really good aggregator.
	That has functionality to immediately tag and save a story from the aggregator itself and save it in an outline format.
	Actually, it's the OPML format without all the crap.
	So it's kind of like, what's that plugin for browsers?
	What was that called?
	Readability or something was it called?
	Yeah.
	Something like that.
	But it's our own version.
	And because it's stored in an XML format, you can do all kinds of things with it, like search, but you can also collapse it into just the title of the story and move it around in an outline.
	If anyone's used an outline, you should look into it.
	It's a very interesting way to manage information.
	And I'm really bad because My handwriting is horrible.
	I can't read.
	I've tried it.
	I've tried carrying notebooks.
	I lose the papers.
	It sucks.
	It's just no good.
	And this forces me into a format.
	So I'm just looking at the aggregator and I think I have 780 feeds and as a way to make some of them sticky so they're always at the top so I don't miss them.
	And in that are particular feeds from C-SPAM. There's a lot of video stuff that people are collecting that I subscribe to their feeds.
	There's even a way to get some YouTube stuff.
	And that's a very good source of just, you know, stuff that's out there because I can't watch everything.
	Meanwhile, I am watching whatever's on the TV here.
	And I have a DVR, so if I see something, I'll roll it back.
	I'll record it directly right onto MP3. I have it direct into the computer.
	I don't like that as much because I'd rather have a source that people can go to.
	In the show notes, there's always the original video clips.
	Sometimes I'll see something on C-SPAN, but I'll actually pull it from the C-SPAN website.
	I've been doing this all day long.
	All day.
	And it's a bookmark that I'll see a story.
	I get all these emails, and I prefer if someone's just sending me a link, send it on Twitter.
	It's much faster for me to open it unless you have some story you need to add to it.
	And I just click on it.
	The story opens.
	If I like it, there's a bookmarklet.
	I click on that and it immediately tags it and saves it.
	Then the night before the show, we're really pretty much...
	So Saturday is an example.
	It'll happen...
	I'll start around before dinner.
	And I'll start to look at all of the videos that I've tagged.
	And then I'm going to start recording those.
	I use Fission, which is a Mac product.
	Very simple, just for editing, like you do.
	And I have to transform all of them into 96 kilobits.
	There's a lot of stuff that I do there.
	And then I start to look at all the stories.
	And I'll realize that in the past four days or three days or whatever cycle we're on, there will be things that I've been alerted to or that I've found or that I find interesting.
	And I really dive down as deep as I can.
	And I've saved PDFs and all kinds of things.
	And I spend hours, usually until 1 in the morning on Saturday night, as an example, Marking up stuff and creating a little rundown or story of how I want to get to a point or something that I found.
	I love looking at the Form 990s of non-profits and making connections and seeing who's on where.
	Whatever it is, I love doing that.
	And that's really all done the evening before.
	And then in the morning, when I get up, I get up 7.
	So that's 8, 9, 10, 4 hours before the show?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No.
	What time is it?
	I start at 11.
	The show starts at 11?
	Here, yeah.
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah, four hours.
	And I'll do another look at what stories have come in, what people have tweeted.
	Anything else in the aggregator?
	Sometimes there's something big.
	And then after breakfast, I'll definitely have CNN on if anything's changed because you don't want to put something out there that has changed overnight.
	Well, yeah, it's embarrassing to talk about some of this changing as we talk about it.
	And then I have to categorize everything.
	And I put it in a rundown of what I want to talk about.
	And I usually have, I don't know, 14 different categories, some of which we never get to.
	And these are all based typically on web pages that I've saved or things that I've put together.
	And here's the cool thing about the Freedom Controller.
	After the show, I really add the art, I change the links.
	Usually I do that right.
	We add our credits, and then I publish that, and that becomes the show notes.
	Yeah, that's actually one of the coolest things about the show, is the show notes.
	Very well organized, which is, again, you're a neat freak.
	I said you were from the beginning.
	And that, I think, is very beneficial.
	I don't do that, any of that.
	No, you don't have to.
	I tend to use, and I think it's valid, and it's good as a contrast.
	We both did that.
	I don't know if it would work as well.
	I use a random walk theory, which is well known.
	And I expect, through serendipity and my being connected to mainstream media and also working for a living, actually this show is my living, but it's beside the point, and being out and about and doing what I do, to expect that these things will come to me through either...
	By either accident or overtly through somebody telling me about it, or my discovering it, or I look at daily news rundowns to see what's cropping up.
	And I do use Google because Google is a computerized system that will bring certain kinds of stories up.
	The better stories are buried and you pick those up elsewhere.
	And I listen to a lot of C-SPAN and hope they can hit something there.
	That's actually like going to Reno or Vegas.
	Spin the wheel.
	Put it on a number.
	C-SPAN is a gamble.
	And it's the biggest waste of time that I have.
	I watch it a lot.
	And I do much better if I go on the C-SPAN website and look at things overtly.
	But I will run into stuff.
	In fact, I think one of the greatest clips I ever found was the clip I accidentally stumbled upon while watching C-SPAN, while they were talking about wildfires, when Harry Reid, I should dig that clip up again.
	There's a clip we should dig up.
	Where Harry Reid drops into the middle of an empty chamber where they're talking about wildfires, interrupts a Republican who gladly turns the floor over to him, to the Senate floor to him, and he passes the NDA or the National Defense Authorization Bill in the dark.
	Behind, essentially, yeah, he passes it right there.
	We looked it up.
	That was the bill.
	Oh, yeah!
	Without objection.
	Remember that?
	Yes, I do.
	Without objection, and it was slam, slam, slam with a hammer, without objection, and he reads a bunch of craps so the bill can't be reintroduced or nobody can say no to what happened.
	And then he walks off the floor, turns it back over to the wildfire guy.
	Holy crap!
	And then the Congress, we have clips of this, too, where people come out, I don't know how it got passed!
	Well, I do!
	I saw it past!
	If you were to name that clip today, what would you name it?
	Oh, it'd be Harry Reid, or NDAA, or Wildfire, or...
	I have a tendency to...
	Weird, you know, something like weird happening, or I sometimes will misname things because I'll put WTF, you know, which is idiotic, and I have to break myself into the habit, but I apparently cannot do it.
	I'm just, the only reason I asked, I'm just trying to see if I can find it.
	Yeah, I'd be nice if you could find it, because that was just like, wow.
	And that is the lucky, that is the rolling, you know, getting the roulette wheel to hit the number you put your dollar on.
	Now, is that the, which NDAA was that, 2012?
	I think it was the 12, yeah.
	So then we get to use one of the cool things.
	If it wasn't show notes anywhere, we have search.nashownotes.com, which takes advantage of the XML format of the show notes.
	And let's take a look.
	Read NDAA. You never know.
	I might get lucky.
	Oh, well I have the show 580.
	That popped up.
	House and Senate quietly passed bigger and badder NDAA. Hmm.
	That's 580?
	No, that's 2014.
	That can't be right.
	That might be.
	I mean, no, it can't be.
	It was definitely a couple years ago.
	And that's also referring to the House and Senate both.
	This was a Senate action.
	Sorry.
	No joy.
	I'll dig it up myself someday.
	Because it's worth playing again.
	There's a lot of stuff worth playing again.
	A good example of that is the never-ending saga with North Korea.
	I have a clip here which is one of my favorites.
	I think it's from three years ago, four years ago.
	This is the Hawaii clip.
	Also tonight, American warships are tracking a North Korean vessel off the coast of China that may be carrying illegal weapons.
	Meantime, the Pentagon is beefing up our missile defense system to protect Hawaii from a North Korean missile attack.
	The Japanese newspaper reports the North may be planning to test fire another missile, this one aimed at Hawaii on the 4th of July.
	Most analysts doubt that it could reach the islands, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates isn't taking any chances, deploying a giant radar and missile interceptors to the Hawaiian Islands.
	Passengers aboard a transatlantic flight from West.
	I didn't cut that out.
	You can stop it.
	This is a fine example of one of the things that we'll pick up on, and it's just flabbergasting.
	It is flabbergasting what passes off as news and what people will dare to put on the air.
	And then it forces the public to be scared.
	You know, the North Koreans aren't attacking Hawaii.
	Oh yeah, let's bomb Hawaii.
	I mean, what nutcases would believe this story in a million years, but yet there it goes, right on mainstream media, right through the local news, but you know they played it all over the country.
	And it was just like, it's just a head shaker, and it's the thing that really makes it nice to do this show, so we can keep pointing this out, even though I don't know how good, I mean, it does, our listeners enjoy it.
	It really shows, okay, this is what it really is about.
	If you want to If you want media to be something that people talk about, it has to hit some of the core, core emotional issues with people.
	Fear is, I think, top of the list.
	Your children is close, if not above.
	It's a very close second at best.
	Then maybe sex.
	But fear, it's so easy.
	Everybody experiences fear.
	Everybody knows it.
	It's relatively easy to trigger.
	And you hear alternative podcasts, you hear alternative shows use fear as a way to grow or as a way to keep people engaged.
	Democracy now.
	Tom Hartman.
	Really?
	Everything.
	Because when you're in a ratings game, which means you can charge more for your advertising, it doesn't matter.
	You just have to get more ratings.
	It does not matter how you do it.
	I don't think there's anyone who is...
	The guy who sells seeds!
	Glenn Beck!
	Yeah.
	Who also sells seeds.
	And gold.
	And gold.
	As the market collapses, it's great.
	Even financial shows at CNBC, they're always selling fear.
	Either fear that you're going to lose out because you didn't sell on time, you're going to ride it down to the bottom, or fear that you didn't buy it in time because it's going to go up.
	It's all based on fear.
	Fear of loss of life, of liberty, whatever, or of just losing out and not being part of the crowd.
	All based on fear.
	We pretty much don't do that, which keeps us nice and small.
	This cozy little show.
	But it's also really nice.
	I am extremely happy.
	I'm not rich.
	But I was not happy then.
	And which reminds me, we should mention here, take a short break, that this show still does need support, even though we do not, since the show is pre-recorded, we did not have the chance to bring in the, and we will do the people who contributed for the Christmas show on the following Sunday.
	and so they will all be thanked profusely for helping do the Christmas show and produce it.
	But we want to remind people you do have to help us by going to Dvorak.org slash NA and the support page, which is the support page where you can then take out a program of some sort like a subscription or just donate straight up.
	There will be a newsletter asking for some additional support.
	Now, there's a couple of things we also do in the show, which I think this is done by a, We're not the only guys who do this.
	I think we get stuff that is unique necessarily, but I don't check on all the other shows that get humorous clips necessarily to see how they're handling them because I don't want to look derivative when I do one.
	But we get stuff like this, and this is an old Ed Schultz.
	This is the What's Wrong With Ed Schultz horndog clip where he's trying to say something, but it comes off...
	It's a horndog, this guy.
	And find workers in the workplace who are basically getting screwed.
	O'Reilly, the next time you get on an airplane, as I got one on this morning from New York to Washington, I thought about the flight attendants.
	As I got one on this morning, I thought about the flight attendants.
	I don't recall this clip.
	Oh yeah, you cracked it.
	I'm sure I liked it.
	Yeah, it was a funny clip when we played it the first time.
	As I got one on.
	Yeah, that's good.
	That's good.
	So we do stuff like that, which I think a lot of people...
	It's a big part of the show, because when you're getting a lot of clips, you find these gaffes.
	I mean, there's one here.
	I have a Sharpton gaffe that we probably haven't played for a long time, but it's not the first gaffe that we ever played from Sharpton.
	I believe the first gaffe is the one I discovered with the much...
	Resist we much?
	We much.
	No, this isn't it.
	You know what I have, John?
	This is a good opportunity to play this because this is new.
	Get ready for a Catch the Gaff.
	Catch the Gaff.
	Catch the Gaff.
	That is good.
	Well, here's a gaff that is a Sharpton again, and this was one of the, I think this may have been the second time we caught him before it became obvious that this guy was just a goldmine for these things.
	The board watch captain says he shot the teen in self-defense.
	But the young man was not armed.
	He was going back home after buying an iced tea and skillets candy.
	No name calling.
	No incendiary language.
	Just the facts.
	A young man dead.
	The assailant says self-defense.
	What is found on the young man, skillets and iced tea.
	Probable cause for an arrest.
	I wonder what the gaffe was.
	Skillets and iced tea.
	Then we find trends that are obvious to us and apparently to nobody else, which includes the global warming propaganda.
	And the six-week cycle.
	And the six-week cycle, which seems to have changed somewhat.
	We don't have that anymore.
	We did play that.
	It was good for a couple of years of shows.
	But there was this, I ran into this clip just casually, and this was from about four years ago or maybe five years ago, and it was an early economic report on California as it was trying to pick up steam.
	And I guess nobody in the venture capital community noticed this, but it was interesting to me.
	This is the clip, No Green Jobs.
	Hold on, I messed that up.
	Sorry, what happened here?
	Yeah, just so people know, when John's doing the lead-up to a clip, I am scanning his list thinking, what could it be?
	What could it be?
	He tries to outguess me, and normally he doesn't.
	Sometimes I tease it in such a way that he can find it with a quick search.
	Right.
	But often, because it's like today, there's too many clips.
	That's not the problem.
	This is just, you said California, venture capital.
	Yeah, no green jobs.
	I wouldn't have guessed that one.
	The forecast says that California's unemployment rate will not drop back to single digits for another year, fueled by a growth in manufacturing, agriculture, and shipping and warehousing.
	Notice something missing?
	NBC Bay Area's Garvin Thomas is here with what much hyped industry is not on that list and who says it should be.
	Garvin.
	Tom, green technology is what is not on the list.
	The author of the Anderson Forecast says there just doesn't seem to be enough demand for jobs like solar panel installers or wind turbine workers to make a dent in the state's unemployment rate.
	He says that all the hype that green is going to drive the economy, well, it's just not true.
	Until we brought in the subsidies.
	Well, and still it did nothing.
	Now, while we're doing clips like that, which is pretty common for the show to have a clip like that, we used to have more of this sort of clip, which is the chainsaw guy clip.
	This was from a report about some creepy murderer.
	We don't do this that much.
	But few could have guessed the real truth.
	Far from being a war hero, Robert Cleason was actually a former mental patient on the run from the police.
	A compulsive hoarder of firearms, he'd been sectioned for shooting up a hospital and jumped bail in Buffalo, New York, after shooting a man in the foot.
	His conflict resolution method is to be violent or to threaten violence.
	He's in love with guns.
	He's just infatuated with guns.
	Unbeknownst to the Mormon community, Cleason's past was littered with firearms offenses and odd behavior.
	Three wives had left him, the last when she found him taking a bath with a disemboweled deer.
	Alright, so here's the genesis of the show.
	As we heard in the beginning, we said we don't talk about news.
	And also, technology is a part of this.
	We didn't have DVRs.
	It was not that easy eight years ago, seven years ago, just to record stuff.
	We didn't have a lot of the things we have today.
	Then we started to ridicule media, funny things.
	And then we started to pick up on things about, although I don't have a clip of it, big disclaimers on pharmaceutical products where 15 seconds is what it is and then 45 seconds of disclaimers of all the things that will go wrong with you.
	Yeah, I think I have one example here.
	Let's see if I move it over.
	I mean, yeah, we don't do that as much as we used to because it got to be...
	Let's see, is there any pharmaceutical names?
	I'm sure I have one somewhere.
	No, they're all over the place, actually.
	Scare, I'm looking for it.
	I don't see it.
	I don't see anything on your list either.
	Well, I've got a bunch of them here.
	I can just pull one.
	What do we have?
	This one.
	one i'm not sure when this is from but we'll take it imagine the possibilities with stellara for adults stellara helps control moderate or severe plaque psoriasis with four doses a year after two starter doses in a medical study seven out of ten stellara patients saw at least 75 clearer skin at 12 weeks and here we go six out of ten patients had their plaque psoriasis rated as cleared or That's 22 seconds.
	There you go.
	These may be signs of a rare, potentially fatal brain condition.
	Serious allergic reactions can occur.
	Tell your doctor if you or anyone in your house needs or has recently received a vaccine.
	With four doses a year after two starter doses, it's Stellara.
	22 seconds of information and all the rest is disclaimer.
	We would ridicule a lot of that.
	I think from my perspective...
	At a certain point, it became so easy for me to look at something that was news and even just looking at a map and say, oh, hold on a second.
	This either makes no sense or now I see what's really going on.
	And it's just a little bit of research, which I'm not schooled as a researcher.
	I have no college degree.
	It's not that hard.
	You just have to do the work and be prepared to hit a dead end.
	Yeah, which is most of the time.
	A lot of the time, yeah, a lot.
	And then we have a lot of really good people who do research and send stories and ideas.
	We have two guys from the Netherlands, actually, who posted to the No Agenda News Network, another...
	I think all of my feeds are in there.
	All 700 feeds that I'm subscribed to flow through there.
	And a lot of those are from producers who create RSS feeds.
	And you can add your own RSS feed automatically.
	You don't need any permission to do that.
	Those guys sometimes will do 20, 30 different links a day.
	All quality.
	All great stuff.
	And then I get things sent through email with explanations and viewpoints.
	A lot of times it's nothing or no good.
	But a lot of times it's really spectacular.
	Well, like the instance, the reasonable commentary by the Canadian producer who mentioned that Warren Buffett is the trained guy and he's making money off the oil coming in from the Alberta tar stands.
	Along with Bill Gates.
	And Bill Gates owns a Canadian.
	You know, he's the biggest investor in Canadian rail.
	Yeah.
	Did you know that?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So he's got the Canadian rail, and Buffett's got the other one, and so heck with the Keystone Pipeline.
	Who needs that?
	It's going to cost them money.
	Now, I have a clip on here that says, are you fucking kidding me?
	And you don't know what it's about.
	I don't remember it.
	Hit it.
	Also, believe it or not, there's an app for apes, an outreach group for orangutans, sent iPads to zoos all over the country.
	The primates are using them to paint and to color, and scientists hope that they'll eventually Skype with apes at other zoos.
	Yeah.
	Now, this was four years ago.
	What has come of this story?
	Are the apes communicating?
	No, you know what happens?
	They grab this thing, they do something on it, they get mad at it and smash it.
	So this was a stupid idea from the beginning, and the mainstream news people, the corporate news people, whatever you want to call them, advertising, they...
	Tell the story straight without any thought whatsoever.
	The first thing I would say, why aren't the apes just busting these things up?
	Because that's what apes like to do.
	Wasn't that at the time, and this is another thing we catch on to, wasn't that around the time of the Planet of the Apes movie?
	I remember we deconstructed that.
	Actually, this week, we're probably the only podcast or news analyst ever that connect the dots on these movies.
	I'd say 99% of the time.
	We miss him.
	Every once in a while we do a whole story on something.
	Did you notice that there's a movie?
	It's like I was doing a thing on selfies and then all of a sudden there's a TV show.
	Selfies and Kardashian's got a book coming out on it.
	Just her own selfies.
	This is probably...
	This is where we need to just briefly discuss for people who haven't heard this from us before.
	This is how the news is put together.
	There really aren't people...
	Just look at the headlines.
	The New York Times is trying to fire...
	Well, pay off 100 people.
	Everybody's cutting staff.
	There's just almost...
	They are only trying to either...
	In fact, before you go on, the New York Times, you just mentioned it, you opened the door.
	Five years ago, there's the Times reporter clip.
	Hold on a second.
	Got it.
	Mark Hawthorne, on the streets for more than 30 years, was once a reporter for the New York Times.
	You know, I was normal for 35 years and then I got bored.
	For Hawthorne and others who live outdoors with all their possessions, being in the calendar was a point of pride.
	This is a guy, a homeless man, New York Times reporter, that got on the homeless calendar.
	Somebody put a bunch of guys on the calendar.
	And so I forgot all about that clip.
	But that, to me, is your New York Times, the future of the New York Times.
	Anyway...
	So before we get to the native advertising part, what really is going on is stories are generated either, and you can see this in tech press, which I think is one of our big pet peeves, it really is the PR company placing messaging, creating controversy, creating stories like apes and iPads, anything to connect it either directly or indirectly or subtly.
	Some of them are very, very good at it, and some campaigns are really extraordinary.
	And they have all the right elements.
	You throw it into the machine and it just goes and it's usually it has something funny or something interesting, but it is connected to some product or something that is being sold.
	And that is 90%.
	I'd say 90% of your news is based on that because how are news stories chosen?
	Who does that?
	Who chooses it?
	I ask you.
	Well, the way it depends, if it's a newspaper or a broadcast outlet, in the smallest market broadcasters, the news stories and everything is chosen by one of the broadcasting talkers, one of the talking heads.
	He just picks stories, usually from the New York Times, and there's kind of an unwritten rule in radio that if it's not in the New York Times, you don't really report it unless it's very special local news that is in a local paper.
	You don't do anything outside the box at all.
	Do you think that's still an unwritten rule?
	I have my guess.
	Oh, yeah.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Except on the Fox channels.
	Well, any morning zoo does so-called news, and they're scanning it.
	Yeah, but I'm talking about news.
	I'm not talking about show.
	I'm not talking about performances.
	In the newspaper, they have a big meeting.
	I'm sorry to just interrupt.
	It is exactly those performances, though, that creates the virality of a lot of these news stories, I think.
	I believe they're part of the virality.
	I'm not sure what creates it initially.
	Something does.
	The morning zoo guys listen to each other.
	No, I don't think they'll listen to each other.
	They probably hear from people that listen to all of them.
	We know what our producers want to hear.
	We pick stories that we think they'll like, and we're picking, we're choosing.
	Well, that's essentially what is done in broadcasting on kind of what you call it, alternative outlets.
	They tend to pick stories.
	But it's interesting to us, you and me, also.
	It's not as though we're just, what do you think these folks would like to hear?
	That never works out.
	You have to kind of entertain yourself.
	But anyway, back to the newspaper.
	The newspapers have meetings, and they have an editor-in-chief who's at the front of the whole thing.
	Ah, they pitch.
	And they bring in the chiefs, the head of the city department, the city desk, and all the rest of them.
	They're all in.
	There's about maybe eight, nine people.
	And then they start pitching stories.
	They want to run on their section or if they want to put it on the front page.
	And the editor, the editor-in-chief, makes the final decision.
	And if it's a bad decision, the argument will ensue.
	And they may or may not relent, generally not.
	But they can, and they will occasionally.
	and then they decide on what's going to be in the paper that day.
	and the right-wingers that have been critical of the mainstream media Excuse me.
	They have always said that it's not the lack of objectivity by the reporters, because the reporters are objective, as best they can.
	Let me get some water.
	This spiel.
	Anyway, so the right-wingers have always said, if you listen to their theories about what's wrong with the media, it's the selection of the news that slants it to the left.
	There are always certain kinds of stories.
	The Republicans are always bad, and the Democrats are always good stories.
	And you end up with a kind of a...
	Structure that you have today.
	In the olden days, when the papers are all owned by right-wingers and then managed by Democrats, at least the newspaper owner would come in and kill stuff.
	Influence, yeah.
	You don't think that still happens?
	I'm sure that still happens.
	No, the papers are owned by large left-leaning corporations.
	And the corporations, they don't do that anymore.
	These large corporations, as far as they're concerned, it's a product that either makes money or it doesn't.
	If it doesn't make money, why not?
	What do we have to change?
	Native advertising.
	That's why native advertising is making a headway in places like the New York Times.
	Right.
	The General Electric definitely doesn't give a crap.
	They actually promote the left-wing agenda with their shows and their networks.
	I don't know how long this is going to go on because I don't believe the Comcast people that took over the NBC network are going to continue to put up with this unless they're a bunch of Crazy liberals.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	But you mean put up with what?
	With MSNBC, NBC, all this left-leaning, it's a very slanted network.
	It's left.
	It's a leftist network.
	I mean, MSNBC is a perfect example.
	They just slam Republicans for whatever they do.
	It's actually pro-Democrat more than even left.
	It's not even progressive.
	It's just Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.
	Hooray for the Democrats.
	That's very boring to most people, including Democrats.
	Nobody, no Democrat listens to that.
	If you're a Democrat, you don't need to be told that you're great.
	If you're a Republican, you don't need to be told that you're great.
	But they keep telling you you're great as though, I don't know what the point of it is.
	It's boring.
	It's very boring programming to just be cheerleading.
	Cheerleading is bad journalism.
	Right.
	Well, there's a lot of that.
	Yes, it happens, and you're dead on.
	Technology right now is almost all cheerleading.
	And we had some guy that wrote us a letter, the Russian guy.
	He says, I'd give you some money.
	But I guess the best I can do for Russians.
	I'd give you some money if you, you know, because you guys have seen that the anti-Russian propaganda is, you know, is what it is.
	He wanted to donate for specific segments.
	And he said, if you did a segment on Russia, we don't do segments.
	That's another thing.
	We don't, the show doesn't, it's an unstructured show.
	Kind of.
	No, it's very unstructured.
	We have...
	An opening?
	We have an opening.
	We have a closing.
	And a closing.
	We have two...
	We have weather and news on the 8s.
	We have asked people to go to devark.org slash NA. And we thank everyone who contributed a certain amount of money to the show to keep it going.
	And I don't see any other structure.
	There's no structure to the actual content.
	It's headless.
	It's headless Drupal.
	Oh, man.
	Way ahead of me on this.
	And her head is gone.
	Headless Drupal.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I'm...
	Well, for me, I always have...
	So when we do our schtick, you know, we go back and forth.
	Yeah, there's structure to that because we've been working together, but it's still a comedy act that is...
	You know, there's structure within it only based on experience.
	I mean, we create structure on the fly.
	Right.
	But I think the show, if anyone examined it, show after show after show, it has no structure.
	Which is...
	Segments, in other words.
	Which is another thing I believe is part of the success of having done very low-budget work with radio and television.
	It seems like there always had to be a producer, a producer who was either collecting or aggregating or feeding, whatever it is, and also making decisions about when to cut something, when to move.
	We are both, and we're each other's producer, which I think is, that to me is really key.
	And it may not always happen on the show, it may happen afterwards, but That was no good.
	That was too long.
	Or this was outstanding, whatever it is.
	Not having that another element in there.
	And people offer all the time, hey, we can produce this for you.
	We can do this.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	We'll do it all ourselves.
	Please let us just do it ourselves.
	Yeah, I'm always baffled by these podcasts that have staffs.
	I mean, this is 2014, 2015 we're coming up on.
	This model, especially the audio model, has changed since 1905 or 1910 when the first radio started being produced and coming out and it was a huge hobby and then it became commercial and then the big networks formed.
	I'm reading a book right now written in 1935 on advertising and radio and it discusses all the formation of NBC and the NBC Blue and the Red.
	What's the book called?
	It's called Advertising and Radio.
	It's available.
	I think I found it on archive.org.
	I'll send you the file if you have a Kindle you want to read it on.
	It's a Kindle.
	I'm reading it, and it talks about all the, like, the gold network it used to be in California.
	Tell us about all the networks, how they formed, and how they, you know, why CBS became so successful.
	It's because at one time, NBC was, when you joined the NBC network, either the blue or the red, and it was, I think, the colors related to what part of the country they were in.
	And I think in some areas they ran simultaneously, but there were two networks separate.
	Yeah.
	The NBC, when networking first came out, or the network idea first came out, you joined the network, and then NBC would pay you like $50 to air a show, a half-hour show, a mystery show at such and such a time.
	And this became a huge, as things progressed, this became a huge problem, as CBS realized when they watched what NBC was doing, and they did it differently.
	NBC, they had a flat rate.
	So a guy in Omaha with a 500 watt station would make the same amount as some guy with 50,000 watts and the 50,000 watt guy couldn't afford to put the show on for 50 bucks because he had a big It was expensive.
	The gear was not cheap.
	The fuel to power of 50,000 watts, the energy to power that transmitter is the biggest cost.
	It's a huge amount of cost.
	And the overhead of the whole operation.
	So NBC couldn't figure this out, so these guys weren't running the programming.
	And they had the biggest outlets with 50,000 watts that hit a lot of people.
	And so they weren't giving them money per person.
	They were just giving them to them per station.
	CBS did it differently.
	They did it on a per person basis.
	And so the guys made out and a lot of people defected.
	A lot of NBC affiliates said, screw you.
	I'm going to go with CBS. And I think that actually, to this day, CBS has been smarter than NBC. And I think this all started back then because the guys apparently were boneheads.
	And I think they still are.
	I think it's just a bonehead network.
	Take that into the staff?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Anyway, so it's a good book to read.
	It's kind of, just because it's got a bunch of old radio info in there, and it's how they, the early days of how it all, how it coalesced into, eventually morphed into television, but they don't have that part since the book was written in 35.
	The future was bright!
	Well, we don't really have staff per se.
	We do have a lot of people who help us out with a lot of important things, besides producers who are part of the Global Intelligence Network, who are sending stories.
	We're low-budget, and we use volunteers.
	People like to volunteer.
	And a lot of people, and we give praise to people.
	We don't have any trouble giving credit where credit is due to all the people that help us.
	Void Zero running the whole infrastructure, which changed, actually, when Mr.
	Oil came in and Gitmo Slave, they started to run the infrastructure, and now that is pretty much all run.
	It is 100% run by Void Zero in the Netherlands.
	Right, and we actually pay for the bandwidth now.
	Well, we pay, yeah, we have monthly bills for servers and bandwidth.
	VoidZero does not receive a salary.
	Of course, when things are running, then you don't have to do a lot, but he's always improving and continuously making things better and just trying to up the ante, which is really important.
	And sometimes it's a shitty job when stuff doesn't work right.
	And chat rooms and streams and all that stuff running.
	Then we have Paul Couture who has set up the art generator for us, which is, you know, he just did a revamp of that and that thing's been running for a long time, which is critical for our album art.
	And again, we like to credit him.
	We like to credit the artists who do that.
	All things that...
	I don't know why other people don't really do stuff like that.
	I'm always surprised.
	It seems like such a no-brainer.
	Get some new artwork every single time.
	Why not?
	Yeah, we have artists that like to do...
	I mean, most artists who are into anything, they like to produce art.
	They're...
	I was watching...
	I went to the Adobe thing and they had a bunch of different artists and this one guy giving large speeches about their stuff and how they do it and what they like to do and how they use the products.
	And this one guy says...
	And I talked to my friend up the hill here, Bert Monroy, who's a very famous Photoshop guy.
	And the guy says, you know, he was in school.
	This kid was in school, and he was drawing all the time when he was in the third, fourth grade.
	And he drew a caricature, a very nice one, apparently, of his teacher, who caught him doing it and sent him to the principal's office.
	Of course, yeah.
	And so the principal takes a look at this drawing, and he hires the kid to do all the teachers.
	Ha ha ha!
	So the kid ends up with an early gig.
	And Monroy says to me, yeah, when I was a kid, I was the same way in class.
	I wasn't listening.
	I was just drawing 24-7.
	Artists like to produce art.
	And they need outlets.
	They need as many as they can.
	Sure, they like paying gigs, but this is stuff you knock out.
	And the same goes for jingles.
	Sir Jeff Smith, who has done an enormous amount of jingles for us over the years.
	Yes, and I want to mention something about creativity.
	If you're a writer, an artist, or a jingle maker, whatever, and I was told this actually a couple of times in my career, you don't hold on to anything.
	You cannot hold back.
	You have to get every creative thought or idea.
	If you want to write, you've got to get it out of your system.
	I know it sounds corny.
	You get clogged up.
	And you will not, you know, all of a sudden you're going to just be clogged up.
	You just can't do it.
	You've got constipation.
	You won't be able to draw.
	You won't be able to write.
	You won't be able to do that.
	So these guys, most creative people know this.
	And so they come up with a no agenda jingle and they can't keep it in their brain because it'll just start clogging them seriously.
	So they do the jingle and send it to us.
	Yeah.
	We have John Fletcher who's doing all those shouts for us.
	Oh, Fletcher's.
	But he didn't think he knew he had that skill.
	I mean, that skill is astonishing.
	It really is.
	It really is quite good.
	I mean, play a couple of them.
	Nobody else can do this.
	Let me just get into the folder here.
	But we have a lot.
	So the classic, of course, is this one.
	Booter!
	And we have another one we like.
	Sorry, I meant this one.
	And another favorite.
	stems from my suggestion that somebody out there do a Hogan using Putin.
	I don't think many people know Hogan's heroes anymore.
	I know, but there's a few.
	And it is mocked.
	I mean, the Simpsons mock it.
	And so they do that Hogan, you know, Samson, they've done all these.
	It's not completely unknown to people who watch TV.
	And I think we've got a number of Putins, But Fletcher stuff is just so above and beyond anybody else's.
	And we don't thank secret agent Paul enough.
	Let me give you the list of jingles he's done for us.
	Adam's Pet Peeve, Clip of the Day, F Cancer, Words Matter, Open Up Mr.
	Curry, Open Up Mr.
	Dvorak, Diane Sawyer Drunk Again, Just a Dude Named Ben, Grand Duke Pelsmocker's Jingle, Rubblization, Schill Alert, Donation for Grand Duke David Foley.
	That guy does a lot.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, they're all good, too.
	Yeah, no, there's a lot of talent out there.
	There it is.
	You said, yeah, no.
	Got it.
	Now I knew you were going to do it.
	Oh, I think I'm trying to, I'm rewinding to see you catch myself.
	Yeah, no.
	Yeah, no.
	Yeah, I think I can catch it now.
	That was good.
	You caught it early enough where it was still in the memory banks.
	It was fading.
	And why are we policing each other again?
	We police each other because we're susceptible to memes that are in play in the society at large that are used not to really communicate, but to kind of either pad or at some point annoy.
	I'm not even sure why we're doing it now that you mention it, except that we both know it's healthier not to be using these phrases and terms that are in common use.
	And then they won't be in common use sometime in the future, and we're going to sound like two guys talking in the 1930s.
	Hey, you mug!
	Hey!
	You know, that kind of thing.
	Well, this kind of comes down to what I think the real benefit of the No Agenda show is, besides getting a good laugh, which I always hope, if you're not laughing at least once during an episode, then I feel we've failed.
	If you wake up with the blues, trying to feel your game, For a healthy, balanced news diet, try NoAgendaShow.com This is really what we leave for society.
	I hope.
	It's bad for you, what you're seeing on television, reading in the newspaper, reading online.
	It's not healthy to be continuously provoked into fear or whatever other motions are being played upon you.
	And hopefully, I see evidence of it, people are not only enjoying our take on things, which is often a lot less scary, When you know that, hey, these guys may not really be beheading people, or they're not really going to have these floating Toyotas that can fly, or like a ship, or anything like that.
	They're going to get you.
	But also people...
	I got a clip for the next show that's one of these, where they come on with this, and it's our government.
	Oh, the American soldiers have to be careful with social news, or this story, with social networking, because...
	The ISIS people are going to kill him in the street.
	They're going to knock on the door.
	And kill him.
	And kill him.
	And they didn't even use the word kill.
	It was like annihilate.
	There's some specific word.
	I have the clip too.
	Slaughter.
	Where did you get the clip from?
	I got it from, I don't know, France 24.
	We should both clip it because I have a different source.
	I never watch France 24.
	Yeah, that's another thing.
	We do have different sources for news.
	My sources tend to be RT, France 24, and Al Jazeera, along with, sometimes I'll go to Fox and Beck.
	The blaze.
	That's because it's right in between a couple of stations I saw.
	It's right there.
	I get it.
	I want to see what Dane is talking about.
	Channel placement is very important.
	And I do see...
	CNN and I don't know what.
	But I see evidence of people developing no agenda thinking, which in some cases is extremely advanced.
	Certainly when connecting movies.
	A lot of people are getting very good at that.
	But just understanding that what is being said is bullcrap or manipulative and a part of just an unhealthy diet.
	And when people start, they tweet it, they email it, oh, you know, I've had my no agenda producer thinking cap on and I realize that this is bullcrap.
	And if you don't do that, and I think one of the reasons we get so much support is that everyone knows how healthy it is.
	And if you don't do that, you could end up, I have a clip, you could end up like this poor bastard, the guy who did the Coney movie.
	Yeah.
	And you hit it.
	Yes!
	The man behind the popular online video calling for the arrest of Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony has been detained and taken to hospital in the U.S. Jason Russell and his charity Invisible Children made the film Kony 2012.
	Witnesses say he was seen naked and screaming at drivers in San Diego in California.
	His group says the controversy surrounding the video has taken an emotional toll on Russell.
	Several residents in the neighborhood were very concerned about a male that they described as a white male in his late 20s that was acting strangely.
	There were various stages of undress that were described, you know, that he was wearing underwear, that he was naked, that kind of thing, that he was running into the roadway, that he was interfering with traffic, screaming, and that kind of thing.
	Officers responded to the welfare check, did contact the man, and he was no problem for the police department.
	However, during the evaluation with him, we did learn that we Probably needed to take care of him, so the officers detained him and transported him to a local medical facility for further evaluation and treatment.
	Yeah.
	The Lord's Resistance Army.
	This could happen to people.
	Do you know that we have Osprey now looking for him, so-called looking for him?
	No, I didn't know this.
	Yeah, in March.
	I think we talked about it.
	How long is this?
	2012.
	The video was Coney 2012.
	And we still haven't found him.
	We've got hundreds and hundreds of troops looking for him.
	Osprey villains, yeah.
	With a tilt rotor aircraft.
	Uh-huh.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Can't find him.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Let's see what else we got.
	There's a number of things we seem to lose track of.
	This was, I think this began in 2009, so this is a 2009 clip.
	And this clip is the SF Foodie event clip, and I'm going to set it up with I heard this and I said, I don't quite remember.
	Maybe we didn't even play this clip.
	But then I looked at this event is still going on even though it sounds like some sort of a yuppie fest.
	Not yuppie, I'm sorry, hipster fest.
	And dreadful in many ways.
	But it's something that, you know, a lot of things we do start, we try to track.
	Give up on it because it's a dud or dead end or shouldn't have been brought up in the first place.
	This may actually be one of those types of clips.
	It shouldn't have been brought up in the first place, but play it anyway.
	That's right.
	This new event is taking over the Bay Area's foodie underground, where both home and seasoned professional chefs compete for the title of San Francisco Food Wars Champion.
	And joining us in the studio is SF Food Wars creator and founder, Jeannie Che, along with our own Bay Area Bites blogger, Stephanie Rosenbaum, whose cookie baking skills were put to the test in the...
	I really don't remember this.
	Really?
	Food Wars latest competition.
	Now Jeannie, how did you get the Food Wars concept off the ground?
	This is the sixth event you've had?
	This was the fifth event.
	We're working on our sixth now.
	So basically San Francisco is such a wonderful city for food in general.
	But when it comes to the events, they tend to either be free and...
	Anyway, they talk about it's a food event where they're going to have a competition of who makes the best cupcakes is the punchline.
	Which is like cupcakes were like the hipster's idea of what kind of store to start.
	You know, follow the cupcake thing.
	We have a lot of cupcakes.
	A lot of the cupcake stores in the country failed.
	Most of the cupcake trucks, a bunch of food trucks were selling cupcakes.
	We have them here, yeah.
	Cupcakes?
	Who wants to eat a cupcake?
	It's a starch bomb.
	But how does this fit into deconstruction?
	This is something that, oh yeah, we didn't talk about it or we did and it went away and probably for good reason.
	That's what I'm thinking.
	Alright, well that was a dud.
	So let's see.
	Oh, here's one, here's one.
	This is another thing that we kind of talked about.
	It kind of came and went.
	It's like every other bullcrap thing we've seen in this country from Hands Across America, which by the way was going to end homelessness back in 2002.
	I don't know when that was, but it was a while ago.
	2000?
	Remember Hands Across America?
	Yeah, I remember, yeah.
	Oh yeah, it was going to end homelessness.
	Well, then there's this one, which is just as stupid.
	And I think this is still in play, but we don't talk about it much anymore.
	Earth Hour.
	Oh, yes.
	A couple years this went on.
	On March 27th, 8.30pm, millions around the world will turn off their lights.
	For one whole hour.
	All over the world.
	No.
	Earth Hour.
	It's time for America to lead.
	On clean technologies and clean jobs.
	Because we care about our planet and our country.
	Let the world know you want action on climate change.
	Turn out for Earth Hour.
	It's simple.
	Earth Hour.
	March 27th, 830 p.m.
	To the gate, to the gate, to the climate gate.
	An oldie but goodie.
	I think we've correctly identified that this is an initiative that no longer works.
	Focus and communication skills have had to shift to pull this one over on people now that there's no longer just a few outlets.
	And we are, of course, very critical of the man-made global warming, man-made climate change, 400 parts per million, carbon pollution, poison gas.
	And maybe this is why we...
	Words matter.
	It does matter.
	This is probably why we're so anal about our own use of words.
	They matter.
	They really, really matter.
	And to go from...
	Carbon dioxide is creating greenhouse gas to it is poison gas is an unbelievable leap.
	It's astonishing.
	Yes.
	And also we do the worst thing.
	I really was happy when the public speaker sent us this email saying, you know, you guys are always hung up on saying this or using the word essentially or basically.
	Yeah.
	It started with basically.
	It started with basically, yeah.
	And then the yeah, no thing, which maybe I can now catch, which is good.
	And some of these other...
	Well, it was awesome, amazing.
	Well, yeah, amazing is pretty easy to stop.
	But when you start noticing it, or fact of the matter, which is now truth of the matter...
	You start hearing it when you're listening to the other, when you're watching news.
	The fact of the matter, the fact of the matter.
	And it is a programmatic word.
	Fact of the matter.
	Fact, just the use of the word fact, which I believe really, if we trace it, really started with the Obama administration, really, really pushed that through.
	Fact.
	It's a fact.
	This is the fact.
	This is the fact.
	The facts are fact.
	Everything was fact.
	That and listen.
	Look.
	Look.
	Listen.
	Look.
	Yeah, look.
	Look more than listen.
	Wow, we could do a whole show on just those things that we've noticed.
	And the public speaker, producer, he says he likes this because he's, as someone who speaks a lot, I guess he does a lot of these types of kind of popular speeches that are given.
	He needs to be aware of this too because he can't be up there saying, you know, these commonplace, you know, these commonisms or whatever you want to call them constantly sounding like an idiot.
	It's amazing, it's amazing, it's amazing.
	Now, if we go back far enough, we used to also attack, now we just kind of, it's like a, I think it's just a running punchline now, Taylor Swift.
	Yes.
	You were on the Taylor Swift very early on.
	Yes, that's when I discovered her father was an investment banker for Merrill Lynch, and he moves to Memphis, and he did personally, he was a personal, one of the guys who did the big accounts.
	In other words, he'd have like a Rockefeller or someone, and he would handle the guy with the big money, the big money accounts.
	And so when he moved to Memphis, my belief was that he took over some big money accounts in the music industry and could get his daughter on the fast track, which he did.
	Is this the...
	Is it the clip of her talking about noodling?
	Yes.
	Interesting.
	So she got on some specials.
	She's like 817.
	You're right.
	ABC special.
	And she's on these specials as the whole show.
	And I'm thinking this is some sort of public relations thing that is outrageous.
	And it's just a...
	In the...
	Print media, they call these blowjobs.
	But Taylor's strive for perfection only makes the people who work with this young star respect her that much more.
	Let's go!
	There's been times where I've played a solo, and then she'll say, well, can you kind of do this?
	And she'll sing me a melody, and I'll incorporate that.
	And that's very impressive for someone her age.
	The problem that I was having with the solo is that it's getting a little noodley.
	Like it's a little noodley.
	I'd rather it be like...
	Less notes.
	That would be great.
	Let's try it again.
	I remember ridiculing this.
	And I think I was wrong to ridicule.
	Well, we were transitionary.
	We still ridicule to an extreme.
	But I actually felt she sucked.
	I actually felt it was bad.
	I had an antithope against her.
	Now that I hear that...
	I admire her as a business genius.
	And a marketing freak.
	I like her poppy songs.
	I like that.
	I don't like her songs.
	I like the outfits.
	I like the dresses.
	No, that's all marketing.
	That's fine.
	I think she dresses well.
	I like that.
	She takes advantage of her height.
	She's very model-ish.
	She changes her face, look, and hair all the time.
	So she's got a low-end version of Gaga in terms of changing her look.
	She doesn't go crazy.
	She doesn't wear meat.
	But, yeah, no, I think she's something.
	Yeah, no, they did it again.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	I'm trying to think of some way.
	You're catching it earlier, and I can almost catch myself.
	I'm trying to understand why.
	What is the thought process behind doing it?
	I just smacked my lips.
	I think I know what it is.
	We're going to be so paralyzed.
	I can't talk.
	It's transition.
	Yeah, it is.
	It's grabbing attention.
	It's transitioning in the conversation.
	It's saying it's agreeing.
	Yes.
	And then it's stupid.
	Let me back it up and say this.
	It's a very stupid thing to ever use.
	Yes, no.
	Yeah, no.
	Yeah, no.
	Or whatever it is.
	So I've been teaching my...
	I would say a lot of no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	Then I heard that in the very first clip where I'm trying to tell you something.
	I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I'm the no, no guy.
	Yeah, you're the no-no guy.
	I try not to do no-no.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's a way of transitioning, and there's all kinds of different ways, and apparently that one I got stuck on recently, and I'm not sure where it came from.
	But okay, you can stop me the next few times.
	I will eventually be able to hear it as I say it.
	Yes, you will.
	Remember when I was doing, yeah, that's pretty amazing.
	That moment will happen with Yeah No.
	These things are important.
	She is a genius of some sort and really is a true talent in that regard.
	I don't like her songs.
	I think they're boring.
	I can't even think of one.
	I can't even think of a melody to one.
	She does not create memorable music.
	She's no Green Day, that's for sure.
	I can think of like a half dozen Green Day songs, right?
	Alright, six?
	Start.
	You said I can think of half a dozen?
	I can.
	I think American Idiot comes right to mind.
	Yeah, that's one.
	And five others.
	Very good.
	Well, I think I was probably irked just by the whole rich dad thing and moving to Nashville.
	But then, well, damn, it worked.
	Well, it was bound to work.
	And once you got that special at that early age, the ABC gave it up all that time to her, you knew it was done.
	It was over.
	It was a done deal.
	She's going to be like a big hit.
	But it doesn't mean...
	I don't think she's done...
	You know, she could have been a big hit and actually made some decent songs, but she didn't.
	I don't think.
	I don't know of any.
	How long do you think we can continue to create this show and continue to do it?
	Well, since it writes itself, insofar as the media is concerned, and it keeps coming at us, and it's...
	You never saw the Larry David show.
	I tried.
	I couldn't get into it, didn't I? No, you can't get into it.
	It takes...
	You have to...
	You can't.
	I hated that show.
	Until, like, the last two seasons, when you could get into it, you could finally...
	It was finally approachable, and you could get into the show, deeply into the show.
	And then you could go back, and it was all good.
	Very strange phenomenon in that regard.
	But this guy, he's the one who created Seinfeld, and he is essentially a neurotic guy who gets irked by stuff.
	He's irked.
	He's just like an irked guy.
	Little things bother him.
	And then he takes it out, you know, he puts it on paper and mocks it in various ways.
	And he stopped doing the show.
	He's done a couple of movies.
	The show hasn't been on for two or three years.
	But it was after Seinfeld that he had to do this show, his Larry Davis show, because you get built up.
	It's the clogged effect I talked about earlier.
	He's going to be so clogged up.
	He has done nothing on social media, Facebook, selfies.
	All these new things have happened since he stopped doing the show.
	And so the show will return.
	This is the same thing with us.
	There's so much material that is created by the mass media and the public and the society itself that we probably could do the show forever.
	Because it never ends.
	It's just we're deluged.
	Is there ever a moment that you got up and thought, ugh, gotta do the show?
	Yeah.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	I've never had that.
	I've had a couple times, ugh, gotta do the show.
	It was mainly because I didn't get enough sleep.
	Right.
	I've thought about...
	Killing me?
	No, I haven't thought about that.
	I figured that Nicky will do that.
	Nicky will take care of that.
	I've thought about the benefits of doing the show, which is that I get a lot out of the show.
	I find myself thinking more clearly.
	As far as I'm concerned, as long as that continues, I wouldn't want to stop doing the show because I know that I would start to fall back into old ways.
	It wouldn't happen as much, but I'd be suckered into something or other.
	Oh, you believe that?
	Like the woman in...
	That went to Oregon to kill herself.
	And we discovered it was all...
	Yeah, Brittany.
	Brittany.
	Kaiser Permanente.
	And then we deconstructed it.
	I probably would have just ignored the story.
	You're the one that actually brought it up.
	I brought up the fact that Kaiser likes to...
	Yeah, you related that to your mom.
	Yeah, my mom.
	To try to get her out of there.
	Just to make me pay what they are legally obligated to pay.
	That doesn't happen without the show.
	Now, is it important?
	Do I really give a shit that, you know, Brittany's up there and not up there?
	Kaiser gets a little better deal because he talks people into killing themselves instead of them having to care for them?
	Or the death panels that happen?
	I don't know.
	Maybe it's who gives a shit.
	I got other things to worry about.
	But...
	I feel better knowing that.
	Yes.
	I feel better knowing that this scam, that these creeps are doing this.
	I think it just makes me a better citizen.
	And that's maybe my, maybe the real question.
	Why does it work?
	Well, I think it makes you feel like a better citizen.
	I think it's important that people feel that way.
	I remember a long time ago that you went to see Uncle Don, and it was Meg, right?
	Donna Meg, yeah.
	She listened to the show, I guess, once in a while.
	Yeah, that was the first Hot Pockets tour, and we did the show from their driveway with the RV from Baroness Maggie.
	She said to you, you know, you guys are patriots.
	Yeah, she had taken notes, and she had a notepad.
	She said, yeah, patriots is exactly what she said.
	And I think what it is, I mean, we're not patriots in any sense of, you know, John Payne or Thomas Jefferson, but I think in terms of, like, getting people to think the way the two of us, in a combinatorial way, in other words, the way we think together, I think is such a healthy thing.
	I think that's patriotic.
	I think it's healthy to see things as they really are.
	And is that why it's working?
	Is that why we are able to sustain doing this?
	Because people feel healthier because of this?
	They feel better.
	They have some enlightenment, because every show we've got some crazy thing we say that goes, or they think to themselves, wow, I would have never thought of that.
	Now, a lot of the things that, you know, as a writer, when I'm writing a lot of stuff which is contrarian, a lot of people will say, ah, you know, I was thinking that, but I couldn't put it in those words.
	I'm complimented for saying what people or writing what people think.
	In words that make a lot of sense, we do a little of that.
	Not as much as revelation, which is beyond that.
	It's like, I would have never thought of that.
	And I have some stuff you bring up.
	I will say, I would have never thought...
	It's not like, oh, he really...
	That's what I'm thinking, but...
	He's putting it in words that I couldn't put it in.
	So that's what you've done.
	No.
	It's complete revelation.
	And revelatory material is uplifting.
	I think that's why people like the show so much.
	Because you get uplifted by it.
	It's like a door has been opened that you didn't even know was there.
	Okay.
	I'll take that.
	It's a little preachy, but I think it's what it is.
	And that's what I think is important, and that's what's kind of cool about it, as opposed to just stating the obvious.
	One of the things I always thought the show was mostly about was that people were kind of, they're scratching their heads, you know, this doesn't sound right.
	And then we explain that it doesn't sound right because it's not right, here's what it is.
	And they, ah, yeah, that's exactly it.
	That's different than opening a door.
	Right.
	We also really have, we really truly, we really don't have an agenda.
	People accuse us, me certainly.
	I really don't give a shit.
	I like it.
	I just like doing it.
	No, I don't think we have.
	No, our agenda is to, you know...
	Revelations!
	Revelations.
	It's a revelatory thing.
	But that's not an agenda.
	It's just like a happenstance.
	So I don't know.
	We don't have an agenda.
	We're not Republicans.
	We're not Democrats.
	I am an independent.
	And I consider myself a libertarian.
	And...
	I got these clips from a show or two ago where it turns out that Charles Koch, who was an early member of the John Birch Society, got kicked out of the Birch Society because he ran into a libertarian thinker and became not only a staunch libertarian, but one of the biggest supporters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
	Hmm.
	Now, which puts him on the camp of the left, and he should be appreciated as such, but instead, he's reviled by the left, when he's really of them.
	Is that the same guy who...
	There's something very suspicious about these guys.
	Is that the same guy who pumps $25 million a year into PBS? Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, maybe that whole job is to look evil.
	I have no idea what the...
	I think it's just because they have an oil company.
	That's all it is.
	These guys hate oil, and they want green, green, green, and they're going to shove it down your throat with any technique they can, and it's going nowhere, as we heard in even the clip from years ago.
	And they're super rich.
	It's always fun to bang against the bridge.
	Super rich or bad.
	I mean, one of the brothers built an entire ghost town.
	In the middle of nowhere.
	Somewhere in Colorado.
	It's still there.
	You can't go there.
	It's all fenced off.
	I'm actually working on this.
	Try to get an invite to go in there and take some photos.
	But you can look it up.
	Put Koch Brothers Ghost Town in Google and you'll find it.
	Well, as we start to kind of Wind things down.
	I am a little concerned about my own future as it appears that there will come a day, which you have consistently predicted, when certain things will just not be able to be said on a podcast that is received in the traditional manner through the internet, through ISPs that may or may not have to deem something lawful or legal.
	I do worry about that.
	I think it's premature to worry about it, but it's something you should worry about eventually.
	I think they're going to crack down on the cussing.
	They're going to crack down on porn.
	They're going to crack down on content.
	And you will need a license.
	Luckily, my background, I think, allows me to get most of these things because I have enough credibility as a real journalist that I can pass the test for a lot of these things that are going to eventually appear.
	And yeah, I think this is what net neutrality is going to lead to.
	The FCC, the government, is going to end up with controlling what they feel they should control, which is the information streams.
	You can do the thing from...
	I don't know where you could do it from.
	Actually, there's no place left in the world.
	I mean, Snowden has to hide himself in Russia, which has obviously caused all these issues.
	So there's no place you can go.
	You can't go offshore.
	Canada, maybe.
	It won't make any difference because the blockage or whatever they'll call it, blockage, blocking, will be done at a local level.
	It doesn't matter where you're doing it from.
	I just worry about it.
	I mean, what is my future?
	I probably need to get something going.
	Okay, 15 more years.
	You have to start early.
	15 more years of this show and I'm 65 and then I stop and then what?
	Then dog food.
	Well, Mickey will have probably murdered you by then.
	So I'm not concerned.
	Or one of us croaks.
	Well, that could happen too.
	That would suck.
	Yeah, that would limit the opportunities for the show.
	Well, I think you should do a product.
	Anyway, okay.
	I have fears, that's all I'm just saying.
	I have fears.
	It's fine.
	I have fears.
	Easy for you to say.
	Do you have real estate?
	I do have real estate.
	I can always fall back on real estate.
	I tell everyone to get real estate.
	I might as well get a little depressing clip here, which I think, no, let's don't do that.
	Let's play...
	That idiot Geraldo Rivera, who makes more money than we do, and is on the marijuana clip number two.
	How are you feeling now?
	You know, the opposition will build.
	However, they felt about it a year ago.
	That was before a year of some pretty seedy experience with pot shops opening close to schools and, you know, some rowdiness outside.
	I mean, you know, maybe the boom is off the bud.
	Bloom is off the butt.
	This is still baffling to me why California can't pass the marijuana initiative.
	I've always liked that we have a couple of skills that we can always really talk about with authority.
	Aviation being one.
	That's one I can cover pretty well.
	Marijuana being the other one.
	You can talk about that pretty well.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You know, you have your background as a scientist and an air pollution controller.
	Refining?
	Oil refining?
	Which is real bad.
	Just to throw all the way back.
	And I worked at a lot of factories when I was a kid.
	Lots of factories.
	I've worked for Ford Motor Company.
	I've worked for Trailmobile.
	I was an inspector.
	Done a lot.
	Because I could do a lot back in the day.
	Now they don't have any opportunities.
	Kids are all noodle boys.
	There's nothing for them to do except work in a noodle factory.
	Horrible.
	Exactly.
	Now I do have one clip I'd like to get out of the way.
	This is Charlie Rose.
	This is when we realized that Charlie Rose was kind of a creepy guy in some ways when it came to sex.
	This is the clip that made us realize he's obviously having an affair with somebody.
	Instead of having the chance to appreciate their father.
	This is Elizabeth.
	Hold on.
	This was Edwards' wife, the guy who ran for vice president.
	Oh, yes.
	The guy who had the haircut?
	Yes.
	The guy with the hair, yeah.
	Instead of having the chance to appreciate their father, as I had for so long.
	Why is sexual affairs so a big deal?
	It's about sex.
	He didn't love another person.
	Everybody knows that.
	He knows that.
	And you know that.
	So why is this a big deal?
	Or this gem.
	Tell me about the sexuality.
	It's in your DNA. Yeah, he's got issues.
	Now, I had an old Gordon Brown clip, and I put it here for a reason, but this is before Cameron.
	This is how far back the show goes.
	It's before Cameron and then before, you know, Blair.
	And so next to Obama Beach, we join President Obama in paying particular tribute to the spectacularly bravery of American soldiers who gave their lives on Omaha Beach.
	He said Obama Beach, didn't he?
	Yeah, he said Obama Beach, and he got so far when he was going to say it again, he realized that he was almost going to say Obama Beach again.
	Play it one more time so people will appreciate this gaffe.
	Yeah, this is a very good gaffe.
	And so next to Obama Beach, we join President Obama in paying particular tribute to the spectacularly bravery of American soldiers who gave their lives on Omaha Beach.
	Oops.
	Alright.
	I have my phone going off.
	What else do we need to discuss, John?
	What else do we need to...
	Let me take a look at it.
	I made a little list, and then we'll just get these out of the way.
	About the creation of the show.
	I know she talked about that.
	Bat signal.
	Oh, bat signal.
	If this goes back a long time, we have a number of apps, certainly that were produced when smartphones really started coming out.
	This show was evolving during the smartphone, certainly the iPhone and the whole birth of the smartphone phenomenon, which is now, of course, known as tech news.
	And...
	People who are able to, they were interested in making apps that would help you listen to the show, have different, and I don't really know how super successful they are, but there's a number of them that are meant specifically to listen to the live stream.
	We have, it depends, but probably about, on average, a thousand people who listen live to the show, And a number of them are also in the chat at the same time while we're doing the show, which I find to be very helpful.
	I like seeing some people.
	I just like knowing there's an audience out there.
	Often people will shout something in the chat room or email, and sometimes it's handy.
	And sometimes corrections take place in real time.
	Absolutely.
	And as a part of that, you have the push notification, which was kind of a new deal on the iPhone when it first came out.
	So you have this app installed on your iPhone.
	I believe it also works on one or maybe a couple of the Android apps.
	When I send a tweet, I'll tell you exactly what it is.
	Anytime I send a tweet that includes the following, hashtag, at sign, pocket no agenda, Then whatever the tweet is, the notification goes off.
	And I believe the sound is the in-the-morning sound.
	In the morning!
	Notification pops up with, you know, probably we're live now at noagendastream.com.
	And that is known as the bad signal.
	And there's different variations.
	There's a growl, notification.
	It all kind of works on the same system.
	It would be interesting to know how many people still use it, but surprisingly, a lot of people have forgotten to fire off the bat signal, which is obviously a throwback to Batman, the bat signal.
	Sometimes I've forgotten to do it, or I forget to tweet with that keyword, and people are like, oh, I missed the start of the show!
	And they come into the chat room 45 minutes after we start, and they're all angry.
	Ha ha ha.
	If you look at noagendastream.com right now, actually, I've added something.
	There's a countdown timer.
	Hold on.
	Noagendastream.com.
	And the countdown timer is number of days, hours, etc., until the next show, next live show.
	So right now I have, as of this moment, one day, 21 hours, 26 minutes, 52 seconds.
	Oops, that's me, I think.
	Hold on, shut up.
	People like to be reminded.
	You've got to remind people of things all the time.
	It's a busy world.
	That's why we have to remind people to help us out.
	Dvorak.org slash NA Which is another one of our little secrets.
	Jingles work.
	It's not much of a secret.
	Yeah, it is.
	Yeah, it is.
	Apparently it is because nobody does them right.
	I mean, there are still people using them, but it's a well-known...
	In fact, the guy that was...
	We talked about this on one of the older shows.
	A guy who was in Canada and we listened to a Canadian station and some guy who invented the modern jingle in the 20s, I guess, was on.
	And he...
	Radio jingles.
	And he was talking about their effectiveness and...
	Kind of lamenting the...
	It couldn't have been from the 20s, whatever.
	That was some genius.
	I will assert...
	He was lamenting the fact that they're not appreciated.
	I will assert that some of our jingles are actually healing for the mind.
	Healing when you're being terrorized by your government.
	If you see something, see!
	A number of times people have tweeted and said, oh, I heard the jingle when I saw this, therefore not being terrorized about ISIS about to chop your head off.
	I think it's beneficial.
	Yeah, it probably is.
	It probably is.
	We do a lot, I think, that's beneficial.
	I hope people appreciate it and do go to the Dvorak.org slash NA and take out a program of some sort as a Christmas gift.
	And this is the Christmas show.
	It is indeed.
	For 2014.
	And I would like to ask you where you actually are at this moment.
	My office.
	No, I mean really on Christmas.
	Oh, I don't know yet.
	I may be in Port Angeles.
	I may be in California.
	I'm not sure.
	Okay.
	I'm in Mexico.
	Oh, you're going to be in Mexico.
	We are doing it.
	Oh, man, I didn't get there.
	I had an old clip about Mexico saying, don't go to Mexico, whatever you do.
	I wanted to play that.
	Put a little fear in you.
	Okay.
	I don't have it.
	WTF Mexico?
	Is that it?
	Yeah.
	That might be it.
	Let's take a look.
	Around 100 officers cordoned off the area after authorities discovered fresh mass graves on Saturday.
	Okay, Mickey might be listening.
	Let's not do this right now.
	Yeah, we're doing a non-traditional no Christmas tree, no Christmas Christmas for a change.
	Well, I did non-turkey Thanksgiving myself.
	Everyone else had turkey.
	I didn't have anything, but I had shawarma for Thanksgiving.
	Yes, you said that.
	I'm giving up on everything, I think.
	I'm just giving up on everything.
	Play the jingle bells as we go out.
	Yes, I shall.
	Play the jingle bells.
	Anyway, John, Merry Christmas.
	Merry Christmas.
	We will speak on Sunday.
	Yes, live.
	Live, and I will be...
	In Mexico.
	All things willing, all things being equal, all things working the same.
	If you're not in Mexico, you'll be somewhere else.
	No, I'll be there.
	Hopefully I'll be able to connect.
	Oh, yeah, you'll be able to if you're in a good spot.
	And I look forward to bringing you local news.
	Good.
	It's tough to talk about ourselves.
	I don't know if I like it that much.
	Eh, we went too long.
	Yes, we...
	Probably give some people some insight they didn't have.
	I think it was for new listeners.
	A lot of people probably just turned it off.
	Well, yes, maybe.
	The way I see it...
	It was worth it.
	It was worth it.
	That's it!
	Coming to you from FEMA Region 6 here in the capital of the Drone Star State.
	In the morning, everybody.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, this is the kind of show that a lot of you hoped we kept doing since the early shows.
	Now you know why we don't.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.
	We'll be back on Sunday right here on No Agenda.
	Merry Christmas, slave.
	The best podcast in the universe.

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