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Aug. 11, 2016 - No Agenda

03:33:16

850: 200.8 Re-Redux

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	Do you like you're ready?
	I'm ready.
	I'm ready.
	I was born ready.
	All right, let's do it.
	Adam Curry, John C. Devorak.
	It's Thursday, August 11, 2016.
	This is your award-winning Gitmo Nation Media Assassination, episode 850.
	This is no agenda.
	Sitting in a Jersey Fleabag Motel and broadcasting almost live from the Garden State here in FEMA Region 3.
	In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, where I remain, I'm John C. Devorak.
	Hey, I'm hitting it, but it's not going.
	Ah, there it is.
	I think we keep it.
	Don't do a thing.
	It was great.
	Yeah, it's probably okay.
	It's just we're still talking.
	Yeah, throwback to the good old days when connectivity was crap, and today's not that much better, really.
	You're sounding reasonably good.
	Well, it's a little better.
	In fact, let's explain what we're up to here, because you said, you prefaced the show with your lead-in by saying, almost live.
	That's right.
	We are not live at this moment.
	For this particular program, I am on a brief vacation.
	John, you are on a brief vacation.
	One show, that's about all we do.
	Yeah, every once in a while.
	I think a number of years ago we did two in a row.
	Yeah, I mean, we could also just do a show right now and it would be very simple.
	It would be, Everyone Hates Donald Trump.
	And that was the show.
	Goodbye, everybody.
	Yeah, Everyone Hates Donald Trump.
	So this is one of these shows that we like to put together from time to time.
	We've been doing it since episode 200.
	It became 200.5.
	And the most recent one we did, for some reason, became 200, oh no, it was a progression, so 200.7.
	That was almost a year ago, a little over a year ago.
	Right, and that was after 200.6, which is about three years earlier or something like that.
	Yeah.
	We did three of these.
	yes and on the last one i will uh and you'll hear it because you're going to hear this this show this last one we kind of stack them on top of each other and it's like an onion yeah it is like an onion exactly and what you're going to hear is us promising on show 200.7 to never do this again to
	To do another 200.5 from scratch, because what you have is an older and older progression, and show 200.5 is an old, that's a long time ago, that's 600 shows ago.
	Yeah, and the quality was so different.
	The quality was mediocre.
	And I have to say this.
	I didn't notice this the first time or the second time where you reprised show 200.5, which is going to be reprised for a third time.
	You had a...
	I don't know what mic you were using, but it was crap compared to the road that you have now.
	Yeah.
	Also, I was listening...
	You were popping like a son of a bitch.
	There's lots of stuff wrong with that.
	Pop, pop, pop, pop.
	But you know, it was always my quest from now going on in my 11th year to create a very small, all-digital, portable system that you could pretty much run off of your laptop anywhere.
	And I think after 200.5, somewhere in the 300s, I said, screw it.
	And I just got a huge bunch of outboard gear, which was completely not portable.
	But it sounded better.
	And then I was doing trips again, and we decided to...
	To try it on all digital.
	And at one point I... Because you have to listen to the sound.
	You have to monitor the final signal.
	Otherwise you have to...
	What a lot of people do is go back and they add compression and all these things after the fact.
	And it never works out that well.
	But in order to do that back in the day, I think I explained it in the 200.7, is I actually had like a half-second delay on my headphones when I was doing the show.
	Which was driving me nuts.
	Well, you don't use headphones at all.
	You.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I'm not going to be deaf like all these other guys.
	So the quality is decent today, although, I don't know, for some reason the dongle is crunching a little bit here and there.
	But as I was listening last night, I also heard us say hello to us from the future.
	That was kind of fun.
	Yeah, hello in the past.
	I want to be the first to say hello to us in the next future.
	Yes, okay.
	Do your Adele.
	Hello, my friend in the future.
	That song came on the other day, and before the song really kicks in, she sounds just like you.
	It's uncanny.
	Hello, my friend.
	The reason we like to do these shows, and the reason why I think the stacking is okay in this case, Is there so many things that newcomers really don't have a grasp on, things we talk about, things we say, the genesis even of In the Morning, which you'll hear coming up.
	I wrote down a couple of things.
	It has taken some people who I know a long time to understand what an evergreen is.
	And we just say it offhandedly, like, oh, it's an evergreen.
	Yeah.
	But it's not that apparent to everybody.
	No, we make that mistake a lot.
	I think people, if you're in some industry, you start using the kind of the inside chatter, the kind of inside phrases, the inside stuff.
	Like in the newspapers, if you write a newspaper or magazine, there's a thing called a lead.
	The beginning of whatever you're writing is the lead.
	But you don't realize, 90% of the time, you won't realize that...
	That's actually spelled L-E-D-E. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that.
	And that's done because...
	Why would you do that?
	Why don't you just call it what it is?
	It's a lead, L-E-A-D. No, you do...
	Everything they have, like graph is G-R-A-F. Everything that you have, those kinds of words, are all misspelled on purpose.
	So they don't end up in the copy.
	Oh, is that the reason why?
	I didn't know that.
	Yeah, because you want to make sure, that's why everything is completely misspelled, that's one of these inside things, oh, you've got to do this, you've got to do that.
	Everything's always misspelled, so it draws attention to, oh, God, this stuff will slip into the copy if you put, well, this is a pretty good lead.
	Somebody could see that and say, oh, that must be the first sentence.
	Oh, I didn't realize that.
	Yeah, and so it's just to draw attention to itself.
	Another word...
	I'm sorry?
	Sorry?
	No, you're going to say something.
	I was going to say another term that we use is ISO. And if you just fall into the program, you're like, what the hell is an ISO? And I remember the first time I heard the word ISO, I was 19, I just started my television career in the Netherlands, and it was in Dutch, it's ISO. I'm like, what the hell is an ISO? It's ISO, which is short for isolated.
	And, you know, when you're working in the business, I didn't want to ask.
	I mean, I remember asking what the director did.
	I really remember that.
	So what exactly does the director do?
	Except yell at everybody in the control room?
	Is he...
	But ISO... A good director does that.
	ISO is typically...
	Well, the way I learned it is a camera that is switched in the main switching system, but also has a recorder running all the time.
	So you have an isolated...
	Recording from that particular unit.
	Actually, when you look at it, it means a lot of different things, but it does mean isolated or isolation.
	I use it just for little clips of clips.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, standalone.
	It's more like a standalone thing when we say an ISO. Let me see, maybe I have an example of one that I can pull up.
	We probably have other little phrases we shouldn't be using.
	So here's an example of an ISO. Take them out now.
	Elizabeth Warren.
	Take them out now.
	So that's an ISO. But it comes from a longer clip and we isolate a particular bit.
	So I made a mistake.
	That happens.
	It proves I'm human.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, that's my favorite of the moment.
	That is a good one.
	Proves I'm human.
	It doesn't prove anything.
	From one year ago, there are a couple things that are different.
	First of all, your comedic timing, and I don't know if that's a matter of just the gear that we're using, that we hear each other better, and the timing is better, and I guess we have low latency, pretty low latency on the Skype.
	Your comedic timing has gotten impeccable.
	With your little one-liners.
	And I heard new ones that I hadn't heard the third time I heard these shows.
	I was like, oh my god.
	You throw things in there.
	They're usually pretty off-color.
	Ha!
	No!
	Yes!
	Off-color.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	For sure.
	There's something that I wanted to bring up, and that is the chat room.
	And on the last, no, two shows ago on 848, I quit the chat room.
	And I just wanted to explain exactly how the chat room works for me, who is pretty much producing the technical end of the show.
	And you don't look at the chat room, and that's good, actually.
	I think that's a good thing.
	No, because that way I can react with the chatroom as a third party, an outsider.
	Right.
	If you say the chatroom, do this and that, and it makes me curious.
	Go on.
	So when I'm producing the show, I have my hands full, I'm looking for clips, I'm listening to you, which is of course why I often don't hear your fantastic comedic zingers.
	They are zingers.
	You know, I got my foot on the mute switch in case...
	Oh, that's right.
	You're like the one-man band.
	I am.
	You just need something between your legs, something between your thighs, and you can squeeze every so often.
	So on my screen, I have a number of things.
	I have alerts if certain emails come through, because people do respond in real time.
	I have a back-channel chat room window open, which is a little bit off to the side.
	And that's, you know, if we have technical issues, that's where Void Zero and Mountain Vortex are sitting in there.
	And so when I say the chatroom, it's pretty much just an IRC client running in a terminal window.
	So it's just scrolling by and there's some highlights, you know, some text is highlighted like a person's handle, etc.
	And of course, when someone also says something directed at me in the chatroom, then that highlights.
	So it's integrated into everything I do.
	And This stems from, I think, I was thinking about why am I able to do this?
	You know, like, I just pick things out.
	Scrolling by all the time, and sometimes there's something really good in there, and I'm able to pick it out.
	And I realize it stems back to, that must have been 10.
	And I was talking to Uncle Don, who, of course, you know, famous CIA guy, along as an ambassador and all kinds of stuff, and we've talked about him many times on the show.
	And I remember him telling me a story about a group of guys that he worked with.
	And I don't know if I even knew he was talking about CIA at the time.
	I was so young.
	But I recall very distinctly saying, we had these guys who were very good at neural network recognition.
	I think that's the term he used.
	And what that meant was, there were guys who could look at a map, an aerial map, and...
	Because of their neural ability, they could see patterns and say, oh, that looks like a covered-up airbase, or that looks like, you know, they had that capability.
	And maybe that stuck in my brain because I have this capability to pull things out.
	Sadly, I also pull the things out that are shit, that really piss me off when I really don't need it.
	So my point is, the chat room truly is integrated into everything we do, at least from my side.
	And if the signal to noise is off, then it messes with my head.
	I can't do it.
	So it's important for people to understand that when you're in the chat room, and everyone's chatting around and making jokes, and sometimes these jokes are funny.
	We bring up punchlines from the chat room all the time.
	But often, you know, when, you know, what was it the other day?
	Like, oh, someone better try that conversion therapy on Curry's daughter.
	He's like, I didn't need it at that moment.
	So, you know, when, you know, what was it the other day?
	Like, oh, someone better try that conversion therapy on Curry's daughter.
	He's like, I didn't need it at that moment.
	So I got to get out.
	I thought the...
	Trigger point was when somebody says, whatever it is, they're always defending Trump.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Well, there was both on the last show.
	And speaking of which, this is the main...
	You didn't bring that up.
	Yeah, go on.
	Sorry.
	The main difference between...
	We have a latency problem today.
	This is a shame.
	I'm going to fix it for the next show.
	Okay.
	The difference between the last time we did one of these shows and this one is really Donald Trump for the show.
	And the irony of what is happening is here is a presidential candidate who is now really a candidate, general candidate.
	And who continuously from day one has said the media is dishonest, mainstream media sucks, they lie, they're no good.
	We do our job at deconstructing what the media is doing, and a lot of it, I mean, I would look at the TV and say, you can play the game.
	Switch the channel, and if within 30 seconds they don't say Trump, then never watch the channel again.
	Because it doesn't happen.
	It's always, it's all Trump, everyone's talking about Trump.
	So there's a lot of work for us to do.
	We don't investigate.
	We're not necessarily journalists.
	We deconstruct media.
	It's how we open the show every single time.
	And the irony is that here's the guy saying the media is dishonest.
	We show how dishonest the media is, and we get penalized.
	We literally get financially penalized because people think we're big Trump defenders.
	And I received a note from Professor Dave King, who's one of our longtime contributors.
	And I thought I'd read it to you.
	I think it's kind of funny.
	You ready?
	Yeah, I'm there.
	Hey there, Crackbot and Buzzkill.
	I don't know why it took me so long, but now I've figured it out.
	It is so blatantly obvious what you two are doing!
	The No Agenda Podcast is a three-letter U.S. government agency production.
	Yes, it's obvious.
	Twice a week, you and John are furnished with nicely produced, pre-edited clips in order to spread misinformation to the public and keep them confused.
	This is why you can say anything you want and not get in trouble because it is already government-sanctioned propaganda or disinformation.
	I've been in the music production business for 46 years.
	I know how difficult it is to record random clips from various sources and perfectly edit them.
	Adam, this would be impossible for you to achieve twice a week by yourself.
	John would definitely be hopeless at doing it.
	You guys don't sit around meticulously cutting those clips together 24-7 in order to play them on the show.
	No, the clips are all pre-prepared and pre-edited, accompanied by text for both of you to read, period.
	Shh!
	These clips are prepared and furnished to you by the US government.
	This also helps propagate the idea that America is some kind of free country that allows anybody to say anything he or she wants.
	Definitely bullshit, and you know it after having lived in Holland for a few years.
	Now, you're all of a sudden a flag-waving American patriot.
	It's really noticeable when you're breaking down a clip.
	You're reading a breakdown that has been pre-written and prepared for you.
	After 849 shows, you do a fairly good job of making it seem spontaneous.
	But as Lincoln once said, you can fool all the people, all of the time, or you can't.
	You guys don't sit around 24-7 monitoring all the world's media.
	The U.S. government does it!
	Your silly jingles, karma, nighting, and birthday wishes are included to make the show appear more homemade.
	Adam, this is most likely the only work that you really do.
	That's why you always defend playing your stupid, repetitive jingles.
	As this is your only real contribution to the show.
	Is this the best you have to offer?
	It's really pathetic.
	Logically, nobody in their right mind would donate money to the show.
	The donation letters are obviously pre-written as well.
	Nobody can prove or disprove them.
	But the real donations and salary you guys receive certainly comes from the U.S. government.
	Of course, you will refute all of this in typical Adam Curry fourth grader fashion, but I don't care what you say, as it is so obvious that you guys are doing.
	You are just two shills working for the U.S. government.
	This is also why you have never had live interviews on the show with real people, like President Obama on Marc Maron, for example.
	You couldn't let somebody else come in and possibly gum up the works.
	Besides, they might see that you guys are what they're really up to.
	Best podcast in the universe, my ass.
	Well, you could have made that gag a little shorter.
	Yeah, I could have made it.
	This is true.
	Come on.
	I wish that would be ideal.
	That's what I was thinking.
	A government check and the whole show handed to you on a silver platter.
	We don't have to do any clips or anything.
	It'd be fantastic.
	I looked at the past year and we're at about 50 clips a show.
	Average.
	That's a lot.
	I'm trying to cut back.
	Ideally, I did it on the last show.
	I had my ideal number of clips.
	I noticed that 12.
	When I first started doing clips, I did two.
	That's right.
	You had one or two clips, I remember.
	I did a couple of clips, and I did clips probably for about a month before you started doing clips.
	Yeah.
	That was an evolution we haven't talked about, but the clips were not part of the show idea.
	And as we transferred over to...
	And if you listen to what we're going to play after we're done with a little spiel...
	Even in, I think, the original show 200.5, we talked about how we're kind of moving toward media deconstruction.
	I don't think we really hit our stride until that oil pipeline show.
	Probably in the 300s or 400s, I think we're on show 400 perhaps, we started becoming serious media deconstructors and that required more and more clips to the point where once in a while, and it's happened a couple of shows ago after these conventions, That was brutal, yeah.
	That's when we had like 50 clips.
	There's too many clips because we cannot...
	If you listen to those shows after the conventions, you hear a lot of, where's this clip?
	I don't know.
	Let me see if I can find it.
	Well, I don't see it on here.
	Well, hold on.
	Here it is.
	Here it is.
	I misspelled a word.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's not that bad.
	It's not that bad.
	It's not horrible.
	No, it's not every time.
	I'm just saying it happens too much.
	And after that convention, I mean, especially the second one, I got the biggest kick out of the second convention.
	We had just the craziest stuff.
	I think we got more out of the second one than the first one, because the first one I thought was kind of boring.
	Yeah, mediocre, not a good television event, really.
	But the second one was Dynamite for Finding Clips.
	Meanwhile, that woman who does full frontal, Samantha Bee, she's a Republican hater to an extreme.
	And she's very funny, and she structures gags very well.
	She's got this show called Full Frontal.
	I can't barely get through it because it's really laden with hate.
	And so she did the Republican convention and, you know, it all is Trump, Trump, Trump.
	And then she comes in as the Democratic convention is going on.
	She's on the...
	In the studio.
	It's not a studio.
	It's a studio at the convention itself for PBS NewsHour.
	They actually have the booth right in the convention hall.
	And she comes in and she says, oh, it was a gold mine.
	This was as this thing was wrapping up, too.
	So the Trump convention was a gold mine.
	It was hilarious.
	Everything was funny.
	She says, you know, I can't get anything from this convention.
	There's nothing.
	It's not very funny.
	How is that possible?
	And I'm listening, holy crap, how all in are you?
	As a comic, you're supposed to find humor in everything.
	Comics should not be...
	Comics or comedians?
	Is she a comedian or a comic?
	What is she?
	Actually, it's synonymous in the business.
	Oh, okay.
	But amongst themselves, they call themselves comics, generally speaking.
	And Mimi used to produce comedy.
	We know a lot of comedians.
	Yeah, that's why I asked you.
	See, I said comedian, sir, because it actually sounded better.
	I don't know why.
	But yeah, I flipped back and forth between the two terms.
	But she's a comic comedian, whatever.
	I think she's hilarious, but she's really got a lot of hate, and it hurts her show.
	And you see this with even Bill Maher.
	He has this kind of, he has hate that is kind of, I think, is a kind of a gimmick.
	In some ways.
	Because he gets all worked up about certain specific things.
	Muslims.
	He hates Muslims.
	He hates religion in general.
	Right, his religion in general.
	He's a hater.
	I don't know where I was going with that.
	I'm not sure where you were going with that, but...
	I was going there.
	We're getting too many clips from the second...
	We had it just the opposite.
	But there's something else that happened.
	In the past couple of years, and I think you're right, around that Pipeline episode, and that's four years ago?
	Almost five years ago?
	Yeah.
	My goodness.
	I thought that was a seminal presentation.
	What also has increased is just the pure availability of televised segments online, which makes it easier for me.
	You sit at the TV and you're always recording off the TV.
	I did a lot of that during the conventions, but it's much easier when possible to say, ah, okay, that's great.
	I've got to get that clip, write it down, go back, find the program, and then it's on YouTube.
	You can always find something somewhere and then clip it from that, which is so much easier.
	Then you have a link for the show notes.
	I like providing that as well.
	For your clips, we never really have a link because you're getting right off TV and they're not available online.
	So that has changed.
	And just the pure availability and our producers.
	Our producers have really hit their stride.
	They've hit their stride with making little packages and clips and really the no agenda thinking that has dramatically, I think, improved the product.
	There's a lot of...
	Yeah, the no agenda thinking is out there far enough that a lot of the clips are brought into Twitter, into the feeds, and so you can go...
	Just to follow your own Twitter feed, you can get two or three clips from...
	Did you hear this?
	A lot of it, of course, we've heard already or done on the previous show, because we are pretty up-to-date with stuff that we present, but it's very handy.
	Yeah, I can...
	Sometimes if I'm traveling...
	I have to rely on YouTube and some other things to get clips because I don't really have any way of hooking up to the TV in the hotel.
	Right.
	And there's no DVR, so it wouldn't do me any good if I did.
	Right, right.
	And I'll point out that when we're traveling like I am today, I'm in New Jersey to hang out with some friends who I haven't seen for 26 years.
	Although I have to work on the connection.
	But in general, we can do it from anywhere.
	And we do.
	We don't...
	We try not to skip anything.
	Try to stay on top of everything and bring you an outstanding product.
	Now, I have a bunch of notes that I think we can probably do after we play this 200.7, which incorporates 200.5.
	200.6 was lost in the shuffle.
	200.6 was what we did with 200.7, which I think was probably a mistake.
	Instead of incorporating 200...
	I think there's a reason for it.
	There's something in 200.6 that was not...
	It wasn't interesting or it was dated or it wasn't a good analysis.
	So we've got 200.7 coming in, and 200.7 plays 200.5, which is the original.
	And you have to remember that this was the introductory show.
	So if you wanted to get somebody into No Agenda, they'd be, well, I don't get it, there's all this noise, and they keep saying, in the morning.
	In the morning!
	200.5 was done to explain, get you up to speed.
	200.6 and then subsequently 200.7 was to correct The old material that was in 200.5 has all been kicked out of the show.
	There's a lot of stuff that's changed.
	We don't do everything that was talked about in 200.5 anymore.
	We decided for one reason or another that...
	And we explained a couple of things in 200.7, what we've dropped.
	But this show, the one we're doing now, which is 200.8...
	It's going to make another group of corrections, and we'll do that at the end of the onion that we're about to play.
	So we're going to start 200.7, which will segue into 200.5, which segues out of 200.5, twice actually, because it does it in the middle once, and then it goes back into the show.
	And then it goes, we're not going to do another middle.
	The middle's fine.
	Please, no more middle.
	And so the show comes out, and we'll make a noise, and then boom, we're going to talk about what maybe should be noted that's changed yet again within the last year.
	All right.
	All right.
	So I would say let's get ready to go into the 200.7 show.
	Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
	It's Thursday, July 5th, 2015.
	Time once again for Gitmo Nation Media Assassination, Episode 736.
	This is No Agenda.
	Analyzing ourselves once again and broadcasting live from the Crackpot Condo in FEMA Region 6, downtown Austin, Tay House.
	In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, I'm John C. Dvorak.
	It's Crack, Bob, and Buzzkill.
	In the morning.
	Immediately I notice you're different when we don't have an audience.
	Uh, that's...
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So this is episode 200.7.
	Wait a minute.
	Let's back up a minute.
	Why would I be different when there's an audience?
	I don't know.
	I'm just...
	I'm just presuming.
	I'm just presuming that.
	That's funny.
	No, you were like, I'm John C. Newark, everybody.
	Episode 200.7, a.k.a.
	736.
	And we do these periodically.
	We've done it once before, twice before.
	We did a show called 200.5, which was kind of an introduction to people to the show that don't get a lot of the memes and the noises and the things that we do and some of the history of the show.
	Then we reduxed the show.
	We did it again two years later.
	Which was around 435, I think.
	Yes, right.
	In the 400s.
	And we didn't do it since.
	And we're almost into the 800s now.
	Do one more look at the history of No Agenda as we...
	Apparently, I listened to the show again last night.
	Apparently, we don't even know the history of the show.
	We don't know the answers to any...
	We had people ask us questions.
	We couldn't really answer many of them.
	We had a lot of theories.
	And we never discussed much about the show being performance art, which it has that element.
	And I don't think we talked about that at all, which is odd since it has always been that way.
	And we wanted to do this one more time with maybe some more explanatory stuff.
	Play that one old show again.
	But I want to mention that this will be the last time we do this.
	We are going to, at some point in the next year or two, do another show.
	Deconstruction of our own show.
	But we're going to do it from scratch.
	We'll have to.
	We'll start over.
	We'll probably have to bring the weenie and the butt back in.
	Which was one of my favorite parts of listening to 200.5 again.
	I was like, oh yes.
	That was actually the highlight of the show.
	The whole show.
	I noticed a number of things, though.
	Let me ask you.
	What did you notice listening to?
	Well, we listened to 200.6, which included 200.5.
	Well, what I heard was a lot of fact of the matter.
	Oh, exactly!
	Yeah, no, essentially...
	Actually...
	All the crap that we've moan and groan about, we had not really...
	We had not caught on to it.
	In 2012, when this was done, we had not caught on to it.
	And so you hear it, and you just cringe.
	Cringe, cringeworthy.
	I know.
	But seriously, yeah, no, all over the place, essentially, actually...
	What did I write down here?
	Whatever the case.
	Whatever the case.
	End of the day.
	Oh, man.
	A fact of the matter.
	So does this mean we've gotten better or are we just anal?
	I think we're more cognizant.
	I think it's self-awareness.
	I think that's what's important.
	But I think it's...
	I also think that the listeners and the producers that follow us, since we've been bitching and moaning about this, and we just got a letter in from somebody saying, well, yeah, no is fine.
	You should be able to say that.
	And he had all these rationales.
	We don't want to say it.
	That's the key.
	But we've made everybody else aware of these little picadillos.
	And I know that this is the same thing that we're going through when you watch a TV show or you listen to somebody on the radio and they keep saying, the fact of the matter.
	At the end of the day.
	I know, it's horrible.
	At the end of the day.
	Well, you know, change your words, change your world.
	What?
	That's a book I once read, Change Your Words, Change Your World.
	Well, I think that's probably true.
	Yeah.
	You can speak in another language.
	And, of course, the other thing I noticed, well, I'll tell you, I'll say what I noticed, another thing is audio quality.
	Big difference.
	Two forms of it.
	The 2010 audio quality was terrible.
	Yeah.
	And you were bitching about it, in fact.
	You were saying, hey, my mic sounds like crap.
	And it wasn't something I could necessarily do anything about at the time.
	Well, I apparently did something about it because in the 2012 presentation, I've sounded great.
	And now, if you...
	Except for...
	Wait, wait.
	Except for the...
	The middle bit.
	The middle bit.
	No, the cutouts.
	The cutouts.
	I would commonly say something like, well, one of the reasons that I've done that is because...
	And so that's the way it works.
	It'd be this long...
	Oh, right, right, right, right, right.
	Lots of dropouts.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, that is Skype that has just improved, and we have much higher bandwidth now.
	But the main thing that's changed, and I've been on my...
	And you even say in 200.5, you say, you know, we're anal about audio.
	We really like audio quality has to be good.
	And we were just struggling with what we had.
	I think at one point during that time, I wanted everything to be as digital as possible or as contained as possible because of going on trips and traveling abroad and not wanting to schlep along an entire studio.
	A lot of it was external gear.
	I remember at one point I was actually doing the show probably for a year and a half with a very slight delay on my headphone so I could monitor in real time what was happening.
	Because we record pretty much direct-to-tape, as you call it.
	I need to know what the end product is so we don't have to go back and do things after the fact.
	Not that that's necessarily all that noticeable in our performance, but anyway, wow, big difference to what we have now, and that is purely because of this universal audio, real-time, zero-latency plug-in system that we're using.
	Right, which makes a difference in the sound.
	And also, that's another reason we have to do the show again from scratch next time.
	Because the information that we gave out about the technical aspects of the show is all, except for my still talking free air, which you were fascinated with both shows.
	And it doesn't come up on the show much.
	I don't use headphones.
	The reason why I was...
	Well, first of all, I'm still fascinated by it because it's just not a typical radio thing, I don't think.
	Although, again, I'll use the anecdote.
	A guy in Vancouver used to do that on the air.
	Vancouver, enough said.
	Well, it was a big market.
	Vancouver's not a slouch town.
	We had a long period where, because I didn't have proper noise gating and other effects, where I would hear myself come back from your speakers into your microphone.
	Yeah, and then you'd play the clip.
	Turn down your speakers.
	Oh, wow.
	Do I even have that clip anymore?
	We never talked about that on the show.
	I don't know if I have that.
	Let me see.
	Turn down your speakers, which was annoying and jarring, and I banned it.
	Here it is.
	Turn down your speakers!
	I always thought that was you.
	No, that's Michael Butler.
	Yeah, Butler.
	When you say Butler.
	That was good.
	That was good.
	But that was a function of my not using headphones.
	Yeah.
	Well, the audio equipment has drastically changed the show because we can pretty much do the same show no matter where I am.
	And you also are able to do it almost from anywhere because you pretty much just have to have your microphone in.
	Are you still using your M-Audio breakout box?
	Is that what you're using?
	Well, I'm using the newer one that has two channels.
	Right.
	Because the other one blew up.
	When I'm in Washington North, I do use the old M-Audio boxes.
	I had two of them.
	One of them blew up.
	And I use it up there.
	But this one is really a nice box.
	This new one.
	I can't remember.
	It just says M-Audio on it.
	Let's see if it's got a model number.
	It's the M-Track something or other.
	The other one's Amtrak too, but this is a two-channel black.
	It's really pretty.
	I don't know that it works perfectly, but it does work, I think.
	Oh, no, it's fantastic.
	You're the mic man.
	You have found the microphone that is perfect for your voice for our setup is outstanding.
	Yeah, I've got a good mic here, and I've got a...
	I use the PR-40 up north.
	It's just that I don't want to deal with the 48 volts and all the rest of it, because the old M-Audio, I don't believe, has a phantom power.
	Right, right, right.
	Anything else we need to talk about?
	I took a lot of notes.
	We can talk about it at the mid-break.
	You had a bunch of stories that we talked about.
	Let me give the design of what we're up to.
	We've cut out the original 2000.6 opening because it makes no sense.
	It was mostly about Adam getting married.
	Right, and that's the reason we did that.
	It has nothing to do with the show.
	Right, right, right.
	So we're just pulling that, and then the mid-break, which answers questions, unfortunately, the questions and the answers are dated.
	Yeah.
	Agreed.
	There's a couple things in there that are okay, and I may drop them in when I edit this thing, but we're pulling that out, and we're going to do a new one.
	And that's what we're going to do halfway through the show.
	And then at the end, we're going to have the original ending, which is the 200.5 ending, and then as we go to music week, they interrupt those two guys.
	Yeah, those dudes.
	John and Adam of...
	2012.
	They come in from the past, and they interrupt the ending, and they're going to yak about something, and then we, the John and Adam from 2015, are going to interrupt them and finish the whole thing, and you're going to have a nice piece of entertainment and realize that this is being retired.
	But just in case...
	Just in case, for whatever reason, in a year or two we decide to still use something from this 200.7 show.
	I know we agree we won't.
	I just want to say hi to Adam and John from the future.
	I just want to make sure that they're all happy.
	Yeah, well, they may or may not be.
	You don't know.
	One more thing, and that partially has to do with the setup, and we really...
	We've improved a lot of the technical pieces.
	A lot of that is just Moore's Law.
	Computers have become better, and just the whole setup is much easier to handle for me.
	I notice that I am able to listen to you.
	I have better listening skills now than I had in both of those eras, let's call them that.
	And I still have, to this day, after the show was posted, and we're done, we always do a post-mortem, we gossip about stuff, nothing really show-related, just old wives gossip, you know, whatever.
	Well, we also discussed if this show had some issues, we talked about that.
	Always, always.
	Which is what we're supposed to do, but we end up gossiping.
	Yeah, we end up gossiping.
	I always listen to the show.
	And to this day, still, there are moments where I'm like, I didn't hear what he was saying.
	I didn't understand it.
	And that's mainly because I'm doing things.
	I'm getting clips ready or I'm trying to anticipate what clip you're talking about.
	In case it wasn't clear...
	And maybe this needs to be reiterated.
	We don't talk outside of the show, rarely.
	I have no idea what stories John's working on.
	He has no idea what I'm working on.
	Of course, we kind of now, throughout the years, know what we may or may not pick up on, and I can actually say, I don't have to worry about that.
	I think John will cover that.
	And sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't.
	I think I missed one thing recently, and you groused at me.
	Yeah, it was the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
	Right, I missed it.
	I just missed it.
	You're right, I should have had a couple of good clips from one-liners and something funny.
	And I missed the whole thing.
	I didn't even get to watch.
	I like to watch the red carpet thing.
	Well, one of these days, we're going to do live commentary.
	We're never going to do this.
	Probably not.
	But I think that I've gotten better at listening to what you have to say.
	And when I listen to these, to me, it's cringeworthy.
	Oh, man, you didn't understand at all what he was talking about.
	And that's probably one of the biggest problems in life, but certainly in media, where most people, if they're interviewing somebody, we're not interviewing each other, but we're having a conversation.
	Well, we make clips from people that botch, you know, somebody says something crazy and then the guy just ignores them.
	So I'm completely guilty of that.
	But it's mainly because I'm doing a whole bunch of other things the same.
	I also keep my eye on the chat room, which is well known you don't do.
	And there's more benefit than not to, for me, looking at the chat room.
	I'd get benefit out of it, but...
	I said, I think in one of these shows, I think in 200.5, that it's so distracting to me because I just end up reading what they have to say instead of doing the show.
	Right, right.
	Well, and so, yeah, it is distracting.
	And I read something and then, you know, and then I just didn't, sometimes you just don't hear stuff.
	So I've gotten better.
	I'm happy with that personal improvement goal.
	Yeah, I think I've personally improved on some things too.
	I should have, but probably not as much as I'd like.
	I haven't been replaying clips that were played on previous shows as much.
	I don't think I've done it maybe once every two or three months, maybe.
	I don't understand what you're saying.
	You play a clip, like on show 250 and then 252, I play the clip as though it's new.
	Yeah.
	Remember that?
	Yeah.
	Once in a while.
	Yeah.
	No, the buzzer.
	Which for some reason is one channel only.
	No, no.
	It wasn't the buzzer.
	You used to use that submarine dive sound.
	I don't know if I have that anymore.
	I don't think it was the buzzer for that.
	I think we've also banned that one.
	We've lost a lot of clips.
	No, we haven't really lost a lot of them.
	Well, they're not technically lost.
	They're like stuff in my archives.
	I have no idea what that sound effect was.
	Well, it's not important.
	It was something.
	It was a whoop whoop or something.
	It was one of those military sounding things.
	I don't know what it was.
	All right, fine.
	All right, well, let's just start with the show 200.5, which is the introduction show for people who don't know the history of the show.
	We try to discuss the history, and then there's a break, and when we get to the break point, we'll come back in.
	Okay, here we go.
	Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
	It's May 16th, 2010.
	Time for your Gitmo Nation media assassination episode 200.5.
	This is No Agenda.
	Welcome to a special backstage tour of the No Agenda show coming to you from the Hilltop Watchtower Crackpot Command Center in Gitmo Nation West in the People's Republic of Southern California.
	In the morning, I'm Adam Curry.
	And it's not really a media assassination today.
	It's a No Agenda assassination.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.
	We still get to say in the morning.
	Yeah, definitely.
	In the morning never goes away.
	You know, the thing is, we should tell people, since this is really a show where we're just essentially going to talk about the show and we're going to answer a lot of questions and probably ask some.
	But, you know, one of the things...
	You should immediately note, we actually had the debate as to whether we're going to play the opening jingle.
	It's kind of sad that we didn't put the debate on the backstage show.
	This is kind of where we...
	Yeah, I think on this show, which is driven by support from our producers slash donors, supporters...
	Where we kind of bear it all.
	Not that we have any secrets, I don't think, but people just want to know a lot of stuff that we don't put into the show because, little known facts, we make it look easy.
	And also, a lot of this personal stuff that they're asking, because I sent out a message on Twitter to get some questions, and we also got a couple of emails, and you worked up some questions yourself.
	To be honest about it, a lot of it is just plain boring.
	Yes, indeed.
	You know, John and I have been in, in fact, you said this on episode 200, we've been in media, in all forms of media, from print, you've probably been around typesetting, Actually, I used to be a typesetter part-time when I was in college.
	See, it doesn't surprise me.
	All the way through to today's reality-based television programming and everything in between on mainstream media.
	And I would say, well, I certainly gave up a number of years ago and I am patently unhirable by mainstream media.
	In fact, the last gig...
	Especially after you did that CNBC thing.
	Well, yeah, that's right.
	Yeah.
	When I said Michael Jackson was probably killed, and they cut me off, and of course now it turns out he probably was.
	But yeah, the last radio station I was on, which was around the time we started this show, actually.
	In fact...
	No, you were doing that show while we were doing this show.
	Yeah, but I think we started this show...
	Yeah, but I'd only done a couple, like a week or two, and then we started doing this show, right?
	I was doing that first, wasn't I? No, I think you were fired during...
	I was fired during...
	We were doing No Agenda when I was fired, but I'd only just started that show.
	Yeah, no, I think we did it for about a month.
	So, I was trying to think back, because that was, I think, 26 of either October or November 2007.
	The first episode was like 35 minutes.
	The good old days.
	I was living in London, which did give the show a very different flavor, I have to say.
	I was also baked out of my mind.
	Right.
	Although, you know, to be honest about it, I don't think that was apparent.
	And I actually argue with you, I don't think your personality has changed that much since you stopped smoking.
	Right.
	Well, there's a couple of episodes there where I remember one time I actually went off on some tangent and I said, dude, I'm so baked.
	Yeah.
	I do remember that.
	But the personality.
	Well, I'm happy to hear that.
	I'm just more awake, and I can do more, and I'm more focused.
	Yeah, and you finally got a rig that makes me sound decent.
	Yeah, but that's...
	Well, you know, at the end there...
	At the end there, we had a pretty good setup.
	It sounded okay.
	But this is the best one, I have to say.
	This is definitely the best one.
	Now, we met...
	At, I guess, where did we meet, John?
	Well, tangents.com on Twitter asked the question.
	The real Dvorak and Curry have a unique relationship.
	How did you guys meet?
	And did you hit it off right away?
	I'll tell you something I found in my crap that arrived from the UK. I found a videotape.
	Of the CNET pilots where we actually first met for the very first time.
	I think that was in 1993.
	Three or four, maybe.
	I think it was three.
	And I'm going to get one of those VHS to DVR thingies to transcode all of this stuff.
	But this was when CNET did not have a website.
	In fact, I registered CNET.com.
	And said to Halsey Miner, Which was nice.
	And you were doing kind of a McLaughlin group type roundtable as the pilot for that show.
	Yeah, that's kind of interesting because with CNET, they actually went through a whole bunch of people before they decided they wanted me to do it.
	And I didn't really want to do it.
	Actually, to be honest with you, I never wanted to work for CNET. But I did like the idea of watching Kevin Wendell at work.
	Once they brought him on, I was a little more...
	He was the guy from Fox.
	Yeah, he's a guy from somewhere.
	He's a Hollywood guy.
	He had set up the Fox network.
	He was one of the driving programming forces behind Fox.
	Well, I don't remember that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Whatever the case was, he was a slick operator, and it was fun to watch him work.
	But they first wanted Leo Laporte to be the McLaughlin guy, and Leo wanted to do it badly.
	He always wanted that sort of gig.
	But it's because it's very serious, and it's this and that.
	But they had me do it, but that never got off the ground.
	It just wasn't going to work.
	And so then they gave me some other job, being kind of a clownish co-host.
	With Gina St.
	John.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, they offered me to move out to San Francisco and be there full-time, and they offered, like, really low salary but two million shares of stock, and I declined.
	Yeah, well, that was an error.
	Well, who knows what, you know, I was like, well, how many...
	Yeah, I know it's a crapshoot.
	I did the same thing.
	I screwed up.
	I said, how many shares outstanding?
	Well, it was vague, right?
	I was like, you know what?
	I got a pretty good thing here at MTV. I'm good.
	So anyway, so we met in 93 casually.
	Very casually.
	Very casually.
	But, you know, we followed each other's careers a little bit, but then I was kind of triggered by that when you had your moment of richness.
	And I was floating around Europe, and I ran into a newspaper with one of these papers.
	I think it was a Dutch story somewhere.
	And it had a picture of you, and you're some superstar in Holland, and this is unbelievable.
	So this guy makes so much money.
	And so then you showed up in town again, and so then we just kind of forced myself onto this.
	But wasn't it a...
	Yes, and that was nice.
	But wasn't it a...
	Wasn't I on Cranky Geeks when we connected?
	No, I think we met up first and then I put you on Cranky Geeks.
	Well, where the hell was it, John?
	Because...
	Well, we did an email exchange and I said, let's go have lunch or something.
	We had our lunch, our initial re-meeting lunch at Fringal.
	And we talked about getting a daily news show, the Tech 5 thing, ideas like that.
	And then we went and had a big meeting with Ron in the office.
	Yeah, Ron Bloom.
	You were on Cranky Geeks after that.
	I'm trying to look now in my email if I have something from you.
	That must have been 2007, right?
	Probably.
	How do you do that in Gmail?
	Do you do date 2007?
	I don't know.
	Hmm.
	Anyway, that's basically the story.
	And then we, I don't know, we just kind of naturally got along.
	We really don't know.
	That's the answer.
	We really don't know how that happened.
	We actually get along just in some funny way.
	It's not really explainable.
	It's like, you know, you meet somebody and you've known them for a long time, so you know that they're obviously not assassins.
	Of course, that may not be true.
	But whatever the case is, you've always had an acquaintance and then you decide that now you're working together.
	It's almost like where people meet on a Hollywood set and they're hanging out a lot and then they go off their separate ways.
	But instead of going off our separate ways, since we were both at Mevio, we decided to start doing a show.
	And now it's debatable how it got named when we started.
	I think I came up with the name.
	I don't know if that's true.
	I think you're the one that approved the name.
	Are you going to tell me it was your brain fart?
	I think it was.
	I say, well, we got no agenda.
	And then you said, let's call it no agenda.
	Yeah, that sounds about right, actually.
	That sounds good.
	Something like that.
	And then as it evolved, we got into other things which are kind of the same kind of like we don't know who came up with the idea.
	I mean, the donation thing.
	Well, before we get to that, because the show started off with a very different format.
	It was, in fact, I think our first show was on a Friday and like a Friday afternoon, Friday morning for you.
	And we would just talk about stuff.
	And I would grab the Financial Times, but we would also just talk about stuff.
	You know, the difference between America and Europe.
	And it was just like a casual...
	Conversation.
	Yeah, just like a conversation.
	And this was, in my opinion...
	I've always felt that an interesting conversation between two people is interesting to everybody.
	And I've always believed I could sell conversations I had with my wife, and I always felt that a good conversational show where there's not a lot of...
	Rehearsal or preparation, but just guys who are just talking about stuff that they know a lot about.
	And coincidentally, because the two of us are so extremely well traveled, I mean, pretty much been everywhere and observant because, you know, we're generally floating around looking at stuff.
	It turns out that we have enough life experience to have an interesting conversation.
	And we're both from slightly different backgrounds, so we could complement each other in ways that I thought was interesting for people to listen in on.
	Yeah, and from my perspective, I was looking to do a show with total honesty.
	Not in the regard of, oh, let's all hold hands and tell each other a secret.
	But more like, you know, why don't we just say what it is and not be fake and just talk about stuff and we can contradict and we can have an argument and we don't have to...
	In fact, we had no...
	No thoughts even, I think, about making money doing...
	No agenda.
	Yeah, we had absolutely no agenda.
	And I was just happy that someone would listen to my bullshit.
	Like, hey, here's a guy who actually knows more than me, because he's been around longer, for sure.
	And we'll listen to some of the...
	Because I think I was maybe a late bloomer.
	I was saying, oh, wait a minute, the world kind of works a little bit differently.
	Because I was so embedded in the hits.
	That's all I did.
	I played hits on radio, on television.
	I knew what all the celebrities were doing, and all of a sudden I'm like, hey, there's something else going on here.
	I think I corrupted you more than you corrupted me when it comes to this show.
	Correct.
	I would agree.
	Mainly because of my natural cynicism.
	You know, I took a test.
	There was a computer software program some years ago.
	I've always found it fascinating.
	That was a career guidance.
	It was almost like it was a very elaborate computer test.
	You'd answer a million questions.
	It was like an MMPI or Minnesota multi-phase personality inventory that people take in some companies.
	It's actually an illegal test.
	You shouldn't be forced to take it.
	But it can tell whether you're a psycho and all these other things.
	And this was to determine what your career path should be.
	And I took the test a couple of times and it was the weirdest thing to get back at the top of a career path.
	This is telling you, this is what you should go be doing.
	Critic.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	That's awesome.
	That's really good.
	I like that.
	So anyway, so yeah, we've got that thing.
	When we started, there's a couple...
	I got like hand worker on all my tests.
	You should be shoveling shit, boy.
	You shouldn't be in any kind of business.
	You might be surprised.
	That test was pretty amazing.
	I had other people take it.
	It was just like nailing people left and right.
	I wish I could...
	If I could find it in my archives...
	I'll take it.
	If you can find it, I'll take it.
	If they can reproduce it in a modern format, it would be nice.
	So anyway, we started the show just casually, and it really started picking up a following quickly, and people were feeding back into the mechanism, encouraging the continuation of the show.
	And then somewhere along the line, this was your idea, I'm sure of it, because it could have been mine.
	You decided to do two shows a week.
	Yeah.
	I don't remember why.
	There was some reason, because I think the show was starting to get long.
	It was getting long, yeah.
	We said, well, why don't we do two shows?
	Actually, that's when we made a real commitment, though.
	No, that was much later in the game.
	We made a real commitment to do two shows after we said, hey, this is real.
	We're building an audience.
	But I think we were going for a good year there just on one show.
	We probably went a year building an audience, and we had kind of a weird audience because there were really your fans separate from my fans, and my fans would say, you should do the show by yourself.
	You should get rid of Curry.
	Yeah, give that motherfucking two to the head, man.
	And I can't believe that you get the same kind of commentary.
	And it's always made me laugh, because it's like, oh yeah, that's what you want, just some guy fucking solid.
	By the way, I have never...
	No conversation, no pace and flow.
	I have never received, never received an email of someone saying, get rid of Dvorak, ever.
	I have seen the Get Rid of Dvorak meme on Twitter, and I've seen it here and there.
	I've never seen it.
	No, I'm kidding.
	I've never seen it.
	Nice, then.
	Well, then your fans are less crazy.
	Hostile, yeah.
	Hostile.
	Okay, so...
	At a certain point, though, I think that what really drew us together is we're both radio guys.
	At heart, I think we're...
	And I know I am.
	And I grew up in radio.
	Television was more like a sidetrack for me.
	I never felt I... I'm too tall.
	I'm too lanky.
	I'm too geeky.
	I have Tourette's.
	There's a whole bunch of stuff that would make me not ideal for television.
	My head isn't big enough.
	To be really successful.
	I know about that.
	Yeah, you've got to have a huge, not metaphorically speaking, but physically a huge head that makes you successful on TV. We've already established that.
	But it was, I think, really our mutual love of radio.
	I love radio, and there's a lot of reasons I think it should be explored.
	One is the fact that you don't have to...
	It's different.
	I mean, radio is...
	And this is basically what we're doing, is radio, and it's a modern form of radio podcasting.
	You don't have to get dressed.
	You don't have to...
	It's more than that.
	It's theater of the mind is what I like about it.
	Right.
	Well, the theater of the mind part, which is extremely valuable.
	I don't know.
	I mean, my first broadcasting training was in radio.
	I went to Foothill College for a while, and I was on the radio station.
	And I just loved it.
	I produced a radio play, and I did a lot of radio.
	I got a third-class license, which you had to have at one time.
	Oh, yeah.
	FCC license.
	I still have mine.
	Nobody needs them anymore.
	And I've always liked...
	And I'm very...
	It's kind of a sound nut.
	I like good quality sound, which is why I was always carping on the quality of this broadcast.
	Even when I was doing...
	Silicon Spin at Tech TV. Sound is always forgotten on television.
	Yes, but I made a big stink about it because it sounded so bad.
	And two of the sound engineers that were working there, I was their hero.
	Yeah, I know.
	Hero of the sound engineers!
	Because the sound engineers couldn't get anybody to listen to the fact that they were using cheap mics and they weren't doing notching or anything.
	Right.
	And so the sound, it sounded like a cheap-ass production.
	Now, the thing that's interesting is that MIT, during the Negroponte era when they had the media lab, they had studied this to death and they had done double-blind studies over and over again and it kept coming up.
	If you take a group of people and have them watch a TV show with shitty sound, And then have them compare and then show another TV show with really great sound, like Dolby 5 Channel.
	They watch longer.
	No, it's not just that.
	When they do an analysis, they claim the pictures better.
	Oh, that's fantastic.
	Yeah, it makes sense.
	And I'm a sound nut, although I've had a lot of trouble, you know, just because of the technology we've been using, but now, okay, so now it's where it should be.
	I am way into creating a custom sound that gives you something that affects the listener in other ways.
	By the way, do you have the record button pushed?
	Oh, yes, I do.
	So, you know, we have compression.
	I put noise gates on.
	Because I don't want to hear...
	When either I'm talking or there's...
	By the way, I love silence.
	When neither of us say anything, the noise gates kick in.
	It's completely silent.
	If I didn't have those on, then I'd hear your room.
	I'd hear stuff, rustling of papers.
	And that's, to me, an important part of our sound.
	And I love it because in the beginning...
	Certainly when we had a huge Skype delay, people would be like, oh, you know, I keep grabbing my iPod or my MP3 player because I think that the thing is stopped or it's crapped out, but then you guys talk again, and it gets people's attention.
	Silence is beautiful.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It does work.
	And we have a moment of silence every so often.
	But anyway, so the two of us are kind of have a...
	We have amenable personalities.
	Yeah.
	So we're complimentary.
	We're not, you know, people say, well, you work because you're the opposite.
	No, we're hardly the opposite.
	No, not at all.
	We're just complementary.
	We have different kind of needs, issues, perspectives, but they're not opposite.
	They're just different.
	And so it worked out.
	So we have a show that works.
	Very rare to do these kind of partnerships.
	Somebody else asks a question.
	Let me go to this one.
	Who's the star of the show?
	And, of course, that would be me.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Right on.
	I thought I'd get that in before you gave the same line.
	I was wondering if we could actually say it at the same time.
	Like, nah, it'll never work on Skype.
	We'll never hit that at the same moment.
	No, but that would have been funny on stage.
	So, yeah, in a Smothers Brothers kind of humor way.
	There's no star of the show because...
	And there's no, like, sidekick.
	I mean, it's not like there's a dominant character.
	I mean, Adam produces the show, so he picks up the dominant side of the production, because he's the one who hits the buttons, it says, in the morning, and he's the one who opens the show, because he's got all that gear.
	But it just happens to be what you have to do if you're producing, because if I was producing...
	You'd be starting the clips on my cue.
	I'd be starting the thing myself.
	And somebody has to produce.
	You can't have two producers.
	No.
	That would suck.
	But...
	But what happened, and a lot of people talk about this, at least I've seen it around, like, well, you know, it used to be, in fact, we used to say the show that has, we would open the show, the show that has no jingles, no sound effects, no agenda, and then I think you, because...
	People need to know that John is the kind of guy, and I really appreciate this, by the way, who will see something on television or find a crazy documentary or something that you're generally interested in.
	And often, I think, it's stuff that you don't even...
	Believe in or care about yourself, but he'll burn you a DVD and make a nice label on it.
	And I'm always amazed by the labels.
	It's always nice art, and it's labeled beautifully.
	That way if the feds bust in, they look at it, they say, oh, this isn't a bootleg.
	This has got to be the real thing.
	It's got to be the real deal.
	But that's not like movies.
	It's documentaries.
	It's different shows that he's seen.
	And you handed me a copy of The Family Guy.
	With the episode Weenie and the Butt.
	And that really got the...
	Because, again, we're both radio freaks.
	And we figured this would just be funny to do, and it kind of stuck.
	And I think that it would be fun.
	That's also where In the Morning came from, by the way.
	And it's such a takeoff on the morning zoo format, which we both, I would say, love and hate at the same time.
	Loathe, of course.
	Now it's just so old-fashioned.
	But when you listen to this, you can understand why radio guys get off on Weenie and the Butt.
	Two minutes, this.
	Oh, that's the Hulu.
	The Hulu pre-roll.
	Watch your favorites anytime for free.
	Hulu.
	Hey, everybody.
	It's Weenie and the Butt here live at the Quahog Air Show.
	We're all ready for the Weenie Soundalike Contest.
	I don't know, Butt.
	I don't think they can say my catchphrase because they no funny.
	Oh, there it is.
	And if you think you can say that just like Weenie here, you could win $97.1 for the cool weekend ahead.
	Weenie have a butt.
	Weenie have a butt.
	Cool weekends in the morning.
	97.1 FM. Cool weekends in the morning with Weenie in the butt.
	WQHG 97.1.
	97.1!
	We have a butt.
	In the morning, cool weekends.
	And welcome back.
	Excuse me, I gotta find a lost kid.
	Can I use your mic?
	That's what she said.
	Whoa, you got butt slam!
	Listen, I could really use a hand here.
	That's what he said.
	Butt slam!
	That's Manic Monkey on 97.1.
	Manic Monkey, 97.1.
	Cool weekends in the morning.
	Oh, weekend long.
	Weenie and the butt.
	In the morning.
	In the morning.
	On the radio.
	Give me that.
	Stewie Griffin, will you please report to the radio booth?
	Stewie Griffin.
	Hey, that's quite a voice you've got there.
	You ever think about doing radio?
	Well, uh, I listen to a lot of radio.
	Peter and Lois leave the radio on when they go out, so I feel like somebody's home.
	Well, here's my card.
	Call me if you're interested.
	Hey, okay, we've got our first contestant.
	Let's hear Weenie's catchphrase.
	De no funny.
	I think we have a wiener!
	And that's Dickie the Punchline Donkey on 97.1.
	Dickie the Punchline Donkey on Cool 97.1.
	Cool weekend.
	On the radio.
	In the morning.
	FM. Cool.
	WQHG. Cool weekend.
	In the morning.
	On 97.1.
	97.1.
	It's one of the greatest moments in Family Guy history.
	It really is.
	And you know they produced all of that stuff and they must have had a ball because it really was like that in the 90s, in the 80s and the 90s.
	The radio was absolutely in the morning.
	No content.
	Zero content.
	All filler.
	And I used to hate it.
	We'd have to do liner cards.
	Here, read this, hit the jingle.
	Alright, $100.1 in cash for you on Z100. Z100 serving the universe.
	So, we kind of decided...
	We didn't decide.
	It just happened.
	Most of the show, by the way, for people who are asked all these questions, it's really an evolution.
	Yeah.
	There's no meetings.
	We don't have meetings.
	We don't really talk about...
	No.
	In fact, if there's a rule, we generally agree not to talk about what we're going to talk about.
	Because we know that what will happen is we'll start talking about it, and then we bring it up on the show, and then it'll always suck.
	In the morning!
	And so we ended up getting a bunch of these jingles and things, which some people complain about, but the fact of the matter is it paces the show well.
	It is a mockery of the other model, but it adds kind of a nice...
	I don't know what it is.
	The atmosphere is improved by it.
	The in-the-morning thing is used as a rim shot, generally, or should be, and it is often.
	So I say something funny, which is very common on the show, and then he hits the rim shot.
	Or if you go off on a tangent...
	So we have a bunch of these things which we use.
	And now we have a couple of questions.
	By the way, that's an old radio trick for a segue.
	It's really, it helps transition the listener's brain from one segment to the next.
	It jars you for a moment there.
	And if you listen to our last show, show 200, Adam was going off the deep end.
	On some topic.
	It was way at least two, three minutes overdue to stop it.
	And I told him to play the Adam Curry's Pet Peeve of the Day jingle, which I knew would transition.
	It would, you know, stop him in his tracks.
	That's right.
	It also stops me.
	You're right.
	Yeah, it works perfectly that way.
	So the show, here's from one of our listeners.
	The show you do today is very different from the show when you first started, e.g.
	personal anecdotes are gone.
	No, they're not.
	Audio clips and jingles are now prevalent.
	Originally, less than an hour a week is now four hours a week.
	And listeners are now asked to contribute cash.
	Is the show where you want it to be or you're planning more changes?
	The show just evolved, so we don't plan anything, although we do things individually that may or may not stick.
	In fact, if anything, we're always trying...
	It's more like...
	When I find something, and by the way, we'll get into this, but a lot of people send me stuff.
	That's how I get a lot of good information, and either that's good or I'll find something else that is good that relates to it.
	I'm thinking, oh man, I'm going to blow John away with this.
	Oh, he's going to love this when I play this.
	I can just hear what he's going to say.
	That's what I'm thinking.
	Yeah, there's that, and there's the other time, curiously, though, we both tend to be on the same stories, which is kind of interesting, but we had a show, I can't remember, it was about six or seven shows ago, where you had actually collected the clips that were all complimentary to my discussion, and it was like, because I didn't get some of these clips that I wanted, you had them, and I actually thought that was the most unbelievable show we've ever done, because it looked rigged.
	Yeah, it really flowed very nicely, and that happens from time to time.
	But yeah, I'm on board with the evolution.
	Absolutely nothing is planned.
	I have my own things.
	John has his things.
	We might send each other a link from time to time, and even then, usually the link doesn't get discussed, because we saw, well, whatever, it's over.
	But we have a couple of common interests of things that are funny, that we think are funny.
	Usually, they have to do with mainstream media.
	I think that's the most fun, is when we rag on mainstream media and pull it apart and simultaneously open people's eyes as to what's really going on on television.
	You know, that may have been triggered by the weenie in the butt episode.
	Probably.
	Probably.
	Of the family guy, because once we started mocking that model, we started looking at the media bitching about it, generally, on a higher plane, I believe, than the people at Fox have ever thought of.
	And we realized that we were entertaining ourselves, and we knew it was very valuable information, and we had the time.
	It's not like anyone can't do this, but most people work for a living.
	If you're to have a job at Goldman Sachs and you're there until 7 at night and you have to get in early, whatever, and then you have to drink all day, which seems to be what the job's about.
	And watch strippers.
	You don't watch strippers.
	You don't have time to go and start digging around these stories to find the missing element or the crazy connection.
	You just haven't got time to do it.
	And then, you know, the fact that the mainstream media doesn't do it, and they don't, just makes you wonder.
	So, I will say that there were two seminal moments when we had our equivalent of a meeting.
	And the one is when we spoke on the phone and said, you know what?
	This thing is real.
	This is really catching on.
	Let's do two shows a week.
	That I do remember.
	And that was like, oh, you know, something's happening here.
	This is really special.
	We should just do it.
	And then...
	I even recall you saying, okay, I've got to switch this around.
	I've got Cranky Geeks on Wednesday.
	I mean, this is when we started to really integrate this show into our daily schedule, into our lives, because actual work does go into it.
	I don't know about you, but every single day...
	Here's my system.
	I have labels set up in my email, like Gmail labels, and whenever I come across something that I think is interesting, or that someone sends me, or that I find, I'll email it and tag it with that label.
	So I have a label now for show 201.
	And then the night before the show, that is if I haven't found anything that showed up that I really needed to dig into, which of course can take hours of extra work and investigation, then I sit down and I start to assemble everything into a huge outline of stuff.
	And then I have to read everything, look at all the YouTube clips.
	And in the meantime, whenever I can, without...
	I'm destroying my relationship.
	I'm watching C-SPAN. C-SPAN 1, 2, and 3.
	I'll skim by HLN, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC just to see what they're doing, see if I find anything funny.
	I find myself watching less of Fox these days.
	It's just too annoying for me.
	But C-SPAN I find to be...
	Just, I love it so much.
	To me, that is, it is actual entertainment.
	And of course, C-SPAN has done a great job with their video library, because all you have to do is remember a line that someone said, which is typically what I'm looking for.
	You go to the archive, you type it in, search transcripts, it'll search the transcripts and come up with that actual piece of video and cue the video to the spot where the line is.
	I mean, it's amazing what they've done there.
	It's a very valuable resource.
	And you know, the thing is, on the weekend, they have this, what I really like, I mean, I like the regular C-SPAN, but on the weekend, they have this book TV. Yeah.
	They bring these various writers in, and many of them have written crazy books, one way or the other, right wing, left wing, everything.
	And they sit them down with a guy who really is a good conversationalist, or sometimes somebody that's in their same field of study.
	And they talk to them for an hour or more, Usually an hour, and it's a whole hour, and basically it's like books on tape.
	I mean, you get pretty much the perspective you're looking for.
	You find everything out from this person.
	It's just amazing.
	It's much better than any talk show, Charlie Rose or any of these commercial things.
	Yeah, and what's nice about that is I kind of know what you're watching.
	So I know that I don't have to.
	And I must say, from time to time, it happens every other week, probably.
	Either you'll send me, sometimes I send you an SMS, a text message saying, dude, C-SPAN 3, now.
	Right?
	And then we'll both sit down and watch something at the same time.
	This has happened to me that I've been in the car And I get like, C-SPAN 2 now!
	I'm like, oh crap, but I luckily have the C-SPAN iPhone app and I'll listen to the audio.
	It's like, it's sickening.
	We're like the guys from the Muppets.
	It's a little crazy.
	Yeah, it is.
	But it's not as though, you know, and the funny thing is I don't think when we first began the show that we're going to get so heavily embedded into current events to this extreme.
	And like somebody says, you know, your show was about you guys going out to dinner and, you know, and yeah, it was a lot of moments and we still discuss wine and food occasion when it comes up.
	But instead of sitting around talking about our meal, that people can live vicariously through our steaks and Cabernet, that pretty much kind of just went by the wayside, because it wasn't...
	Well, the audience also drove that.
	And the only way to measure that is by feedback that you get and the growth of the audience.
	And it was pretty clear what people were interested in.
	And they were interested on our take of current events, were interested in our unveiling, if you will, and this is purely because of our experience, our unveiling of the bullshit and the, I would say, the deception of mainstream media And I think it's helped a lot of people see things in a different light, and that's what the audience wants.
	John, you and I are both in the audience business at the end of the day.
	Yeah, and in fact, you can tell by the way people send you notes.
	I mean, yeah, every once in a while, somebody that was there from the original show, and they kind of like the fact that we have a wine tip once in a while, which I can still do, or there's some observation we made about the trends in food, that's fine, which is now different than me complaining on the earlier show, the show 200, about the raw milk issues.
	That's kind of a foodie thing.
	But the point is that the people that really got jacked up, and the ones that are pretty much financing the show, because they send in big contributions and say, wow, we like the way you deconstruct these stories, the way you tear them apart, the way you show us, me, as it were, the way you show me that I'm being led astray.
	It's very valuable for people to have some sense of understanding of what they're being bombarded with.
	So, when did we start asking for donations?
	That began sometime in 2009.
	I believe we semi-seriously may have done something in late 2008.
	And the only reason I can say this is because I can look at the PayPal account since we did it as a PayPal thing.
	And we did it at the beginning, I think, with trepidation.
	Not complete trepidation, but I think you may have had a little more than I did, because I've always felt there was a model of direct support.
	And I was thinking about this.
	I have to keep thinking of different arguments, because the ones that do it the best are public broadcasting and...
	You're right.
	That's what it was.
	We were talking about that, and then we were talking about PBS, and I said, why do those dickheads, who are clearly shills, not all and all the time, but bleh, why do they get away with this, and why do people support that?
	It appears that we have a large number of people who like us the same way they either currently do or used to like public broadcasting.
	Right, and public broadcasting also has the issue with the fact that they have commercials, and we really played up a couple of clips that we developed, we found, about admitting that they're underwriters.
	Let's play that one, because we can't play that enough.
	This was the president of PBS? NPR. Was it NPR? Yeah.
	Yes, NPR. Being asked about...
	Underwriters.
	Yeah, about their underwriters and the state of affairs, and here was her answer.
	Okay, moving on to money.
	How are NPR's corporate underwriting revenues holding up in the recession, and what about foundation grants?
	Two different stories.
	Underwriting is down.
	It's down for everybody.
	This is the area that is most down for us, is in sponsorship, underwriting, advertising, call it whatever you want.
	Right, call it whatever you want, and then I think we started to open people's eyes.
	This is kind of the way it went.
	We started to open people's eyes about how it really worked, and people were like, wow, you know, Monsanto sponsors this, Archer Daniel Midland sponsors that, and we're like, well, okay, so how about the objective reporting about those companies?
	Well, there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot of it, and I think a lot of people, this is maybe how it really started, John, and I'm just vague on it, but Is people start to send us like $100 and say, well, this is what I would have normally spent on PBS, the National Treasure.
	I want to spend it on you.
	And I think that's where we said, oh, wait a minute.
	There's something here.
	It's an evolutionary show, and like with anything in evolution, just a model, it's very difficult to put your finger on a spot.
	I mean, we can do the weenie and the butt spot, and that has some influence, and we can point right to it.
	But the rest of it is always vague because it just kind of evolved.
	We were actually very, you know, being an open source show, which is another idea that we decided to go with.
	In other words, we don't care if you steal the show.
	I actually do remember I was in New York with Mickey and it was winter, it must have been winter 2009.
	And I remember I called you and I said, you know, hey, this model that we've been kind of, well, not really working on, but that has evolved, it seems to be working.
	We should really go for this.
	We should really try.
	And I think at that point I said, boy, I would love to do this full time.
	I would love to do nothing else but this.
	I enjoy it so much.
	Well, the model, as I remember, I was always for it from the get-go because I've always admired the model itself.
	I always admired the fact that you can get...
	If you give people what...
	It's like the Max Headroom thing where they had the direct numbers.
	The show was going downhill, the numbers would go down, and you could see it in real time.
	You can see if we're doing the right thing, if we're doing a good job.
	Directly.
	It's value for value.
	You can't go off the deep end.
	We can't turn the show into an analysis of 60s music and that's all we talk about for two hours and expect to get any money from anyone.
	So we're only doing it.
	At the same time, we obviously don't want to be pushed around by the audience.
	We have to lead them as opposed to just doing whatever they want.
	So you have to have some leadership.
	This is like a company that you don't focus group everything.
	Focus grouping shows you what they used to like.
	But if you want to move the show in new directions or try different things, you actually have to experiment with it.
	But you will get that feedback.
	You're going to get a pushback saying, no, this sucks.
	Don't do that again.
	And then the donations go way down.
	So it's an interesting tightrope walk, but it's direct support from the listeners.
	And people have come up with all kinds of different complaints about it.
	Well, you know, why do I have to spend $100?
	Because I can go see a movie for $50, and they put a lot of money into making those movies, and you guys don't put any money into making this show.
	There's this kind of weird kind of complaints about production costs I've been getting every once in a while.
	And I never had a real good retort for it, except, well, it's different.
	It's like you're paying for books on tape.
	It's like we're really competing with books on tape.
	We're not competing with Avatar.
	And...
	We're also competing with radio, but radio, you get 22 minutes an hour of action.
	Well, less.
	Radio is terrible.
	17 minutes of programming and 13 minutes of commercials.
	Make your choice.
	Right, and how much is your time worth?
	So I've used that argument, but then I also found another one, which I really haven't exploited on the show, because people in this production, well, it costs a lot of money to make a movie.
	What about a novel?
	Novels are one of the first businesses that are directly user-supported.
	Good point.
	You buy a book.
	Good point.
	And you read the book and you've already paid your money.
	Of course, unlike our show, the book, you pay in advance for the book.
	And you pay in advance for the Avatar movie.
	You pay in advance for a lot of these things.
	We don't do that.
	We're more of the church model where if you don't like the sermon, you don't have to put anything in the coffers.
	But it's the same thing.
	Books are user-supported.
	There's no ads in a book?
	No.
	And once you get over the personal hurdle coming from mainstream...
	Where, by the way, we hate commercials.
	I've always hated commercials.
	I hate them.
	That's why the DVR is such a godsend.
	No, but I mean, just even as a creator of content, I'm like, oh, I've got to hit the commercial break.
	I've got to wait for the commercials.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, they're terrible.
	You've got to interrupt your flow.
	Watch one of these shows, anyone listening to this, on Fox or any place.
	And they get somebody in a really heated debate, but they're on a hard break.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	I've seen this with Tom Brokaw and the president.
	And they've got some guy screaming in his ear, counting down the commercial, and the president's actually just saying something really interesting.
	It's annoying.
	It's very, very annoying as a creator to go through that.
	But then it was kind of weird, at least for me it was, you feel embarrassed to ask people for money.
	And there is a psychological hurdle.
	But once you're over that...
	You got over it pretty quickly.
	Yeah, it's easy sailing.
	It's like, hey, value for value.
	I had some pushback from the family.
	And I won't say who, but they know who they are.
	How can you bring yourself to begging for money for this?
	How can you do that?
	Can't you get some advertisers?
	I don't want any advertisers if I can get money directly from the listeners.
	I mean, why would I want that?
	Yeah, it screws up the product.
	It just ruins the product.
	I mean, there's nobody...
	And the thing is, most of the people have not...
	We've taken it...
	One of the reasons we do this show and we do this, the money, asking for money and support, donations, is because...
	Whatever you want to call it.
	It's because...
	It gets us closer to the audience.
	It's actually a good close connection.
	You know what you're getting for your money.
	It just makes you feel more honest.
	And there's another thing we did, which I know was my initiative, and I think it helped us in a number of ways, is we decided to stream it live when we do the show.
	And that did a number of things.
	One, it gave, at least me, I appreciate the instant feedback loop of the chat room.
	I can't watch it all the time, but sometimes a punchline will come through, and they're always on a 25-second delay, so it's interesting how that works.
	But a punchline will come through or someone might drop a link in there.
	But I personally, even if I didn't have the chat room, just knowing that people are listening live at that moment gives me an energy that I've always loved doing things live.
	I'm not a big fan of recording.
	If I have to record something, it's got to be live to tape, like I do Daily Source Code, like you do Cranky Geeks, although that's streamed live as well now.
	I just want it live, live, live because then you can leave all the warts in there and all the crazy shit.
	And that actually makes it more interesting when it's not highly produced.
	And it also forces us to kind...
	I think before we were doing it live, it's like, hey, what time should we do the show?
	Well, I got this, I got that.
	Now it's like...
	My schedule is Thursday morning, I get up at 6.30, I get up, and from then on out, it's no agenda.
	Sunday morning, 6.30, I get up, from then on out, it's no agenda.
	Yeah, I know I had the same thing.
	Occasionally we've had to move the show to Wednesday night.
	We haven't had that in a long time.
	No, but we're going to have it next month because I have a travel thing that's interrupting both shows.
	Which brings me to...
	Let me finish one more thing about the donations.
	One of the things that when we went into the donation thing, we started asking for money, direct support from the listeners.
	This has never really been...
	I've been figuring this out because it's a form of marketing that interests me.
	But one of the things that people say, well, you can't make it.
	I'm sure you're starving to death and you can't do it.
	Why don't you get an advertiser, they always say.
	No one except us.
	And believe me, I haven't seen anything close.
	And there may be some religious programming that I'm not aware of.
	But nobody doing podcasting, professional level, good quality podcasting as we're doing, has taken it serious.
	Yeah.
	We are seriously...
	You know, we have programs.
	We came up with the night thing.
	We've got different kinds of...
	We also don't call it a tip jar.
	We don't work for tips.
	We're seriously doing this, and it's like, take it or leave it.
	This is the model we're working with.
	It's going to be a lot better.
	The product you're going to get is a lot better.
	If you get anything out of it, you get something out of it, you know...
	Do you feel the show serves as more than just a source of entertainment?
	If yes, what do you hope to accomplish?
	Well, first of all, let me say, from my perspective, I absolutely see this as a form of entertainment.
	I hope everyone is entertained by our show.
	They have to be.
	If you're not entertained, we have blown it.
	There has to be a moment where...
	And entertainment comes in different ways.
	It can be funny.
	It can be dramatic.
	It can be sad.
	It can be frightening.
	Whatever emotion button we're hitting, it has to be entertainment.
	Otherwise, why listen?
	That would just be boring.
	I remember somebody sent us a link, said, well, there's a couple people that do a show like yours, and they sent us a link to somebody's show that was very much like ours.
	They deconstructed the news a bit.
	They tended not to have our perspectives, but they did a fairly decent job, and it was so dull.
	It was just like this academic...
	You can't get...
	It's just that the modern audience is the modern audience.
	And no matter how intellectual you might think you are, you will be better served by someone who feeds you information in a way that keeps your attention.
	And to keep your attention, you have to have an element of entertainment.
	Our personalities, generally speaking, I think, are the entertainment.
	Well, also, and I've only had this one...
	Well, in my humor, of course.
	Yes, obviously.
	I've only had this one other time in my career.
	Sometimes you just find these magical combinations, and it's not by design.
	You can't train for it.
	You can't go to school for it.
	It just happens, and you have these combos that just work.
	And this is one of those that just work.
	In fact, my biggest fear now, and I know what yours is, John, but my biggest fear is you're going to roll over and die one day, and the show will be over.
	And I know you're...
	And you're afraid that I'm going to go crazy and leave Mickey and go off the deep end.
	I mean, I know what you're afraid of.
	That's my thinking, yeah.
	I think that can happen any minute.
	Our pledge asks on Twitter, Mr.
	DeVorek, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train.
	Hey!
	There's the meme.
	Why are you so popular?
	I think we answered that question just now.
	Also, the No Agenda chat folks, one of the moderators, should be invited.
	They've donated a lot of their time.
	Well, they're invited to listen to the show when we're done with it.
	Next time, maybe we can do something more for them.
	This show is the first one a long time that we're not streaming live, but also this is a different type of show.
	We're just kind of...
	So let's answer the second part of that question, though.
	What do you hope to accomplish?
	What do you hope to accomplish, John, with this show?
	I think, and this is going to be, this sounds really, this is not going to sound good.
	Because it makes you sound, there's a kind of a, well you'll see.
	Let them eat cake.
	No, no, I think that we, I think, honestly believe that we're doing a serious public service.
	To bring people, generally people that are listening to the show.
	I've always believed this, even when I'm a writer.
	People always say, well, when I'm writing like in PC Magazine, when I was writing all those years in Inside Track, I always had a vision of what was I trying to accomplish and what I was trying to accomplish because I knew it would get me more readers.
	It's a selfish reason, by the way.
	I knew it would get me more readers.
	My concept was if somebody read my column And they're working in a cubicle.
	And my column was designed to give them an edge over the guy in the other cubicle who wasn't reading my column.
	And I've always believed that this is the value proposition, a phrase I hate.
	But it's always in the back of my mind.
	I'm trying to give people some edge over the people who aren't paying attention to me.
	Oh, no.
	This is basically, we want you, the audience, to be able to get laid because you sound smarter listening to us.
	Exactly.
	I mean, at the end of the day, isn't that it?
	Or a job, or a promotion.
	Or anything.
	It can enrich your life because you had that one little bit of information that someone went, oh, that guy said something interesting.
	Oh, she has an interesting take on stuff.
	And for me, it's that.
	Maybe it's just that.
	For you.
	I'll tell you what it is.
	I think I was born to do this.
	I think everyone is born to do something, and it took me a long time with a lot of detours, and I've been counting down the hits, and I've pretended to run companies with varying degrees of success, but basically riding off of fame and fortune, which in itself is interesting.
	To have a perspective from that angle.
	But I love this.
	I so love it.
	People say, man, you work really hard.
	We have house guests.
	And they'll be like, my God, Adam's always on that thing, and he's editing, and he's recording stuff.
	I love it.
	And it doesn't even feel like work.
	I love this.
	I love what we do.
	I love what I do.
	And that's also completely selfish, but if it gets you laid, hey.
	No, no, good, actually good works generally are selfish at some level because you, uh...
	You know, if you think you're helping somebody, sometimes it's selfish because you get a good feeling from it, and that's a selfish thing.
	Although it wouldn't be defined as such by anybody in their right mind.
	So let's talk about the open source model for just a second.
	Well, wait, before we do that, since you kind of brought it up, I want to bring in Simon Smith's question from Twitter, which says, When you offer relationship advice on no agenda, my wife doesn't react well to the hookers and blow angle.
	Really?
	She should try it.
	What does that mean?
	I don't know.
	I hear two things I hear.
	One is people don't like the hookers and blow because it puts some people off.
	Okay.
	That's just who we are, I guess.
	And we find it amusing.
	You know, I don't think, John, I've never done blow, and I certainly have never done the combination of hookers and blow at the same time.
	So you admit to doing hookers?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Like, you've never done hookers.
	I don't discuss these things in public.
	By the way, the hooker situation is a cycle.
	And the 30s, the 70s, lots of hookers.
	And so we're going into a new cycle of hookers.
	Probably starting around 2012.
	Let me put it this way.
	I am not against hookers.
	I think that there's a lot of bad stuff that happens in the sex industry, but there's a lot of women who support their children and themselves, and if that's what they want to do and it can be done in a safe manner, power to you.
	I grew up in Amsterdam.
	I saw it working quite well, thank you.
	The problem is when it gets driven underground.
	That's a whole separate show.
	The second one...
	People say, well, I try to help people listen to this show, but then they hear the opening and the whole in the morning thing and they think it's some BS top 40 weenie in the butt show and then they don't listen.
	I don't know what we can do about that.
	Nothing, but I actually like it because once you get over that hump...
	Then you can get kind of sucked in.
	So, no, that's also a mask.
	That's probably important.
	Can you imagine, like, some meeting going on at the NSA or the CIA and they're like, yeah, we've got to get rid of these guys.
	I hear bad things about that Korean Dvorak.
	Let's listen to the show.
	And they hear this whole in the morning bit.
	I'm like, no, that can't be anything.
	It definitely puts people off.
	Or maybe Echelon.
	You know, Echelon is sniffing our show and they're like, oh, this can't be interesting.
	Just what you said, the guy goes into a meeting and says, these guys, they're subversive, these two guys.
	And the guy says, really?
	Well, let me hear the show.
	show and then they start playing it with that opening.
	Crackpot and Buzzkill.
	In the morning, in the morning.
	The guy says, get the hell out of my office, you crackpot.
	Get out of here!
	By the way, that is, now that you mention it, I purposely love, and I don't know who came up with the moniker, but I love being called the crackpot because it is the ultimate shield.
	The ultimate.
	Because some of the stuff we say, and I think we get pretty close to the truth on a lot of issues, I would rather people say, ah, he's just a conspiracy theorist, he's just a crackpot, because that will save me from getting killed.
	We've talked about it.
	Yeah, I know, and I think it's a good theory.
	And it's a likable theory.
	But, you know, we have to track down the guy who coined Crackpot and Buzzkill.
	It was an email I got.
	We mentioned on the next show, we mentioned it, and you thought it was great to be called the Crackpot.
	Yeah, I love it.
	And so then our artwork started to have Crackpot and Buzzkill put on it so we just reiterated the whole thing.
	We should now move into that open source nature of the show.
	So two amazing things which are a part of the model, a part of the openness and the freedom and the support through donations is we don't own anything.
	I guess technically, if you really looked at it, we do.
	But the show is whatever it is.
	And we have people cutting this up, splicing it, putting it into all kinds of, you know, making ringtones, making trance music out of it.
	But we also have people who create things.
	So a lot of our jingles, by the way, we could use a lot more.
	We love them, but we are very critical.
	We don't just use everything people send in.
	A lot of people send in stuff that we just feel is not good enough.
	We have artwork, and we have two main artists, Sir Randy Asher and Sir Paul T. These guys have jobs.
	Who knows what they do?
	And they spend their time.
	They create...
	Art work for us for almost every single show.
	Now there's no agendaart.com where people can drop art and we've used the art from different artists.
	If anything, after every show, people should know we have a discussion.
	So the first thing we say is, what do we think of the show?
	And there's been a couple times where we've said, well, that sucked.
	And we're pretty brutal with each other, although John never agrees with my criticism of him.
	If I say, well, you sucked on that, it's like, no, that was really good.
	And if you criticize me, you're usually right, and I just take it like a man.
	Ha!
	So we talk about that, and then we talk about...
	Yeah, essentially it's a post-mortem that most publications do.
	Yeah, then we'll say, what do we call the show?
	So we think about what will get the best SEO results, what will people be searching?
	We want all those accidental hits.
	And then we have to choose from the artwork.
	And that is sometimes the hardest part because it's so good we don't want to have one guy put off over the other guy because they both sent in something great.
	That's a hard choice sometimes.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	And there's other artists waiting in the wings that contribute on an occasional basis.
	We have some tremendous support.
	From these guys.
	And then, you know, Asher set up his own t-shirt shop through, I don't know what mechanism, and, you know, we helped him out.
	Noagendastuff.com.
	Stuff.
	Yeah.
	And we have, you know, all these guys, and we've encouraged it, and we don't have our name trademarked.
	Somebody came up with an email the other day that said, I think I got a good promotional idea.
	Why don't you trademark in the morning, and then every time you hear anybody saying it on any show whatsoever, send them a cease and desist order, and then they'll promote you, and you'll We get free publicity.
	It's actually a funny idea, but it's not our model at all.
	It sounds like work, and that's one thing we hate.
	We don't want to do any work.
	We actually don't want to do anything.
	We just want to do this show.
	We don't want to have any extra work.
	We don't want to do any extra promotion stuff that involves leaving a computer.
	We're going to interrupt right there and talk about some of the things that we talked about on that show, and then also we're going to maybe do a little bit of a reiteration of what our comment was two years later, where we corrected ourselves, because after two years, from 2010 to 2012...
	A lot changed.
	A lot changed, and we're going to discuss a little bit of that, and then we'll get back to the show.
	But let's talk about a couple of things.
	I wrote down some notes on this.
	Can I say something first?
	Sure.
	I want to thank you for putting up with my shit.
	We cut the whole middle part.
	We're not in the same state.
	No, you know what I mean.
	You were insulting in some spots.
	Yes, and I apologize for that.
	But at one point you said, we're talking about, what is our greatest fear?
	I'm like, oh, I'm afraid that you're going to drop dead one day and won't have a show.
	And you were afraid of, I would leave Mickey and go crazy.
	So you had part of it, right?
	Yeah, you let him make you think she went crazy.
	Wow, who knew?
	Who knew?
	No, but I listen, I'm like, wow, man.
	You certainly, certainly in the earlier part of the sequence of shows that is no agenda, you put up a lot of my crap, and I appreciate it.
	You stuck with me.
	You hung in there.
	Well, I knew we had something going.
	And then you had this...
	Episode 100, where I wanted to quit.
	Yeah, you actually wanted to quit a couple of times.
	How stupid was that?
	No, not a couple of times.
	Hunter, by the way, was the Deuce Club show.
	We did very well.
	We had a lot of support.
	And we're changing our club structure so the Deuce Club members will be part of the club.
	I'll figure out some way to put that together shortly.
	Let's talk about a few of the things that we discussed in the interim that have changed.
	And one of them was show prep.
	Okay.
	You had a different way of doing show prep in 2010.
	You changed it a little bit in 2012, which was then you talked about it.
	Now your show prep is completely different to an extreme, I'd say.
	And what is it now?
	Oh, okay.
	Yes, that's a good question.
	Dave Jones, who is one of our producers who lives in Alabama, he's a dude named Ben for, I think, a tax preparation firm, a smallish firm, and he and I were kind of working on...
	Dave Weiner was a big outliner guy, besides working together on podcasting, but he's always been about organizing information and outline.
	I'm naturally drawn to the idea of...
	But organizing information in Outliner with expanding trees and you can see what's underneath it.
	And Dave Jones, just on his own time, and this has been going on for, I think we're now in our fifth year, have been building this system, which we call the Freedom Controller, which is open source.
	You can download it, run it on your own server.
	You can do anything.
	You can replicate everything we're doing.
	It has documentation, too.
	I have this template for each show that has a lot of the initial things that are in there, but also there's an entire system.
	Whenever I see an article that I think is interesting, or if you send me a link that is an article that's interesting, I have a bookmarklet on my phone, any browser I have, and it will place that article into an outline format and also save an offline copy A stripped-down, kind of like a...
	What is that?
	An abstract.
	Well, it's just without formatting.
	Oh, okay.
	Unformatted.
	Yeah.
	But it has everything in there, including the images.
	It'll save all of that.
	And what's cool about it...
	I set up all of that.
	And what's cool about it is I set up all these topics and then I can drag and drop all the sound files in that we use after the fact.
	And pretty much the show prep is already the show notes.
	So when we're done, often we're still doing our post-show post-mortem and our gossip.
	And then pretty much I hit publish.
	And it turns the show notes, all these topics, and then I can drag and drop all the sound files in that we use after the fact.
	And pretty much the show prep is already the show notes.
	So when we're done, often we're still doing our post-show, post-mortem, and our gossip.
	And then pretty much I hit publish.
	And it turns the show notes, all the stuff that we used, or the show prep, into the show notes.
	It's a dynamite system.
	It is one, for me at least, on the production side, it really...
	Really completes the whole product that we're making.
	And because it's all structured data, we've had these great developers who have been able to create apps, but also the search, search.nashownotes.com.
	All of that flows very easily, very automatically into anything because of the format that it's in.
	That's the main difference.
	It also saves me hours and hours of time.
	I can even...
	If you send me an email, and I did want to talk about that for a minute, if you send me an email, I put it into a folder on my IMAP email system, and then when I'm doing my show prep, usually the evening before the show, I can hit import, and it'll import all of the emails that I've saved, which just have text or something interesting that someone said, and I can go in and edit out any email address or anything I want to.
	So everything flows into this one system.
	And it's really dynamite.
	I think that every podcast should be using it, quite honestly.
	Well, on the night before, what do you do?
	You say show prep.
	This is kind of show prep.
	Right.
	So the night before, I... Well, the night before and the morning before, and I don't have to get up as early as you do, but I get up at 7, and the show starts at 11 for me, so I have all this time.
	The night before, that's really when I go crazy, just getting as many clips, recording clips, doing as much as I can.
	Which will also be intermingled with if I have an analysis of something.
	So if there's a document, if there's legislation, if there's something else, I'll really spend a lot of time the evening before.
	I typically don't go to bed before 1 or 2 a.m., so it's a short night.
	I get up in the morning, so the clips are kind of all ready to go, and then I start organizing all of the topics into the familiar, if you look at the show notes, into all the familiar subheadings of different topics that we discuss.
	Yeah.
	And then, just before the show, you know, I organized the clips into little folders.
	You send your clips.
	I don't listen to them.
	I just drop them right in.
	I don't even really look at them at all.
	You've decided not to listen to my clips.
	I've never listened to your clips.
	For the purposes of extemporaneous discussion.
	Surprise!
	I mean, yeah.
	That's the way our whole theory...
	I think we talk about it.
	We do.
	Our whole theory is, and this is based on a lot of different things we both experience, is the pre-interview and the rehearsal.
	If you do that, you kill it.
	Life is drained from a show like this if we rehearsed.
	So it's done as a performance...
	Performance art.
	It's done like improv.
	And a lot of people are surprised by it because we're so good working together, which is the reason I think you like working with me, is that I am fairly good.
	I'm not as good as I could be at cueing you.
	So I'd be saying something and it's a cue for a clip.
	You'll be looking for the clip.
	And then I say, and then you can't believe what he said.
	Boom!
	The clip starts playing.
	Yep.
	And that's all this engineering talent that you have and your ability to do that is why it surprises people.
	We talked about this off the air, about how we do have a lot of radio people that listen to the show.
	Oh, they think we have a whole staff and we have messaging lights and your starting clips.
	People have no idea.
	I want my morning show to sound like that.
	I said, well, good luck with that, buddy.
	That's not going to happen.
	So it's all single-handed and slick.
	We do drop the ball occasionally.
	I just have to stop the clip because I didn't set it up completely and Adam's jumping the gun.
	Yeah.
	And sometimes you've heard a cue when there wasn't one there.
	Or you'll be talking about a clip and I'm like, what is it?
	But then instead of digital, it'll be digital.
	We play the wrong clip on occasion.
	You just misspell clips sometimes.
	Well, no, not sometimes.
	Often.
	I have a tendency to, when I'm doing the clips, I just type something in that I think I'm hitting the right keys, and off it goes, and I never edit it, so it goes into something.
	Because I have your clips alphabetically.
	The story about Jordan could be Y, J, P, Jadon.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Exactly.
	S-T-Y. It's okay.
	I've learned to work.
	G-S-O-R-Y. I've learned to work around it.
	But...
	I know, that's why.
	In fact, if you hadn't learned to work around it, I'd probably put more effort into making the spelling correct.
	There's something else that has changed in the interim since our last, since 200.6.
	Podcasting has seen a resurgence.
	Yeah, the mainstream media.
	I think about this, and I'm sure you do too, but it's almost as if the mainstream media and the broadcast media, the radio people for sure, have said, somebody finally came into a meeting and said, you think that these guys could actually replace us because they don't have really the overhead we have?
	Right.
	Well, we can do podcasting too.
	That's right.
	The union said, oh no, oh no.
	So they start doing podcasting, and all of a sudden they're interested, and so they write articles about it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Of course, we're generally, even though we're, I'd say, pioneers going on our eighth year, we never get mentioned in these articles.
	No.
	Rarely.
	It's just they don't get mentioned to each other.
	Oh, PBS has got a podcast about gemstones.
	Yeah.
	Well, but the big difference, and this is something that we just naturally understood and have done from day one, Radio or any type of linear media, they always do 59 minutes and 58 seconds.
	It's going to be exactly an hour.
	Everything is back-timed.
	In fact, if you look at scripts, even for podcasts that NPR does, It's the script that has the seconds next to it.
	So each line is a second.
	Right.
	You know what I mean?
	And we don't have to worry about the next show.
	We don't have to worry about hitting a sponsor break.
	No hard breaks.
	No hard breaks.
	No news.
	We can go as long as we can.
	We can start whenever we want.
	No traffic on the 8s.
	Yes, or the 3s.
	Or the 6s.
	And we take it.
	We have from the get-go...
	Seeing that, I think, is completely liberating.
	Like, oh, I can just talk until either we both know that it's time or it's boring when we call each other.
	You call me out more often than I call you out, but it's good.
	And I like the raw nature of it.
	I feel that people are, we've always felt this, that people are so tired of the formulaic way that programming is put together.
	We mock it.
	Every once in a while we catch a democracy now where the guy says, well, the worst thing about this is that they're going to have a meeting tomorrow and we've got to get, sorry, we're done for today.
	We'll talk to you later.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, got to go.
	Just when it's getting interesting.
	Exactly.
	This happened in writing media, too, as a columnist.
	When you're writing for print, generally speaking, you write to a number.
	So they want 650 words.
	You try to get 635, just 650, 60 maybe.
	And they cut out stuff, put something in.
	Or they just pad.
	Because there's a spot there.
	The thing is going to appear in it.
	It's only so much...
	Right.
	And so you have to write through numbers.
	And there's different styles.
	You can do 500-word essays, 650-word essays, 750s, 1,200.
	They're all pretty standard.
	After years and years of doing it, in your brain, it's astonishing to do.
	You can go right to 650 and stop, and then you do a word count, boom, 650.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Well, with the internet, that ended.
	And again, it's liberating because now you maybe want to ramble a little bit.
	So it goes to 752.
	It has these different numbers.
	It could be anything you wanted to because there's no real page layout that you have to worry about.
	I was amused by one of my editors.
	I think it was at PC Computing for a number of years.
	John Zilber, who became a PR guy later.
	But he used to be one of these guys.
	And I think this is the drawback.
	He would start writing, and because there was no end, he would just go crazy.
	He'd write 7,000 words on something.
	Well, but this is also a problem.
	And so if you look at The Intercept, which is the $250 million WordPress blog from Pierre Drive My Car Home and Meteor, They don't have editors, and it goes on so long that your eyes glaze over like, I can't read anymore, I'm so tired of it.
	And we don't allow that to happen because we stop each other, either naturally, just subtly, we go into another topic.
	We are editing either at the same time, in real time.
	That said, when we did show 200.5, which people have heard, or heard half of so far, We do discuss, oh, the show an hour and a half, you know, our own.
	I think we ended it with saying something like, oh, I knew it, we couldn't go under an hour and a half or two hours or something that's like a joke now.
	Why is that?
	Well, I think we do deeper digs.
	I think that's part of it.
	The digs are deeper on the material.
	I think there's a shallowness to some of those earlier shows.
	We would come up with stuff and it wasn't as interesting.
	And that's also just the amount of material available on the internet.
	That has helped us tremendously.
	People publishing stuff everywhere.
	It's great.
	Each of us have our little list of things we want to talk about on each show.
	And many times complimentary, sometimes not.
	And it drags on and it goes...
	Too long.
	We're shooting for 245.
	That's what we try, yeah.
	But I can imagine five years from now, making tons of money.
	We're going to go to sleep for a moment.
	We'll be right back.
	Producers, in five hours.
	No, it's not going to happen.
	I think we've decided...
	Although I say we may have decided before, we were going over three hours of a lot of shows.
	And I felt that people weren't going to listen that long, and it was dragging on, and sometimes the material could have been cut down.
	There were certain things we didn't need to talk about.
	So here is the challenge in a way, but also it's a benefit.
	We are episodic.
	And this is why, even though we, I think, discourage it mainly, people want to hear all of what we've said in a previous episode, because we do reference things.
	And I'm getting better at saying, hold on a second, let's just explain what this is.
	Also for ourselves.
	Right, I do that too.
	Yep.
	I've gotten better at it.
	Just to stop and say, okay, this is where this comes from.
	We're talking about something from a year ago.
	I mean, we've had to re-discuss the Benghazi thesis, which was a failed kidnapping attempt.
	Right.
	Other things that we've come up with over the years.
	In fact, there was something in the show 200.5 where we mentioned the Hill and Knowlton was behind the farming thing, and I forgot all about that connection.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, let's go over some more stuff on the list here.
	You made a big deal about me handing you DVDs that were highly produced and very pretty.
	And we don't do that.
	With labels.
	No, we don't do that.
	Well, we also don't see each other anymore.
	Right.
	We don't see each other anymore.
	Even though I'm going to head down there.
	Oh, don't threaten me.
	We used to talk about three shows a week, and we actually, I think it was last year, we did a third show for the purposes of another vacation.
	And so we did a show, if you remember.
	And we were so tired from doing that third show that there's no way.
	Now, when we were doing an hour and a half, we thought it might be a good way to divide it up.
	It would give us three, four and a half hours a week of material over three shows.
	But it turns out that when we're talking about something, we can't keep it down to an hour and a half.
	It's just not possible.
	No, it isn't.
	So the three show things fell by the wayside.
	It was never...
	It's just not a good idea because you just don't have enough...
	Even the Friday-Saturday before we do the Sunday show, it's tight, but that was chosen specifically because Friday is when the throwaway news is put out there that you're really not supposed to know, but it's put out there because they need to publish something.
	And that's where I personally, I catch a lot of stuff on the Friday afternoon news cycle, if you will.
	And then I thought it was funny.
	We had a discussion of the artists who at the time were Randy Asher and Paul T., the dominant artists.
	This is during the era when we actually would allow our pictures of the two of us to be on the artwork, which we know is banned.
	Yeah.
	And because it was just, it just wasn't good.
	Right.
	No, we don't need that.
	The art has really become conceptual.
	It's much more advanced than it is.
	So good.
	Well, beside that, or in addition to that, the productions that people are making, and again, I'm going to say this is also Moore's Law, just better computers and editing, etc., We now have entire songs, mashups, stuff put in the right key, really top-notch stuff.
	When I was working in Top 40 Hit Radio, we would contract with people who would do that for a living, and typically they'd make something or a spoof song, and they'd send it to 20 stations because they're all on the payroll.
	We have people doing such, our producers, doing such high-quality work.
	It's really astounding, some of the stuff that we receive and use on the show.
	Right, I think that's a function of our open source nature and the volunteer nature of the show, which is unique.
	We did discuss a little bit about how the funding works.
	There was one part of the conversation I thought was interesting and wasn't really explored, but I like a brightly lit room, and Adam, do you still like a dark, dingy kind of cave-like atmosphere when you do the podcast?
	Yes, I do.
	Why is this?
	I don't know.
	I think I explained it previously.
	I can't read in the dark.
	You're reading stuff all the time.
	Yeah, but I'm reading the screens.
	You read off paper.
	I read off screens.
	For me, it's a romantic...
	It's part of our...
	Okay, for me, it's part of the theater of the mind.
	I like to be closed off.
	The dark room.
	Yes!
	Arch Obler.
	Back when I was smoking, and I smoked continuously during the show...
	I only needed a green visor, and then I would have been set.
	I'm sitting here with a single light bulb somewhere.
	So now I actually...
	The second bedroom is the studio, and I have one of those big, heavy, moving blankets.
	You know, the kind.
	Yeah.
	That you accumulate after many moves.
	Then it's on two...
	It's on a wall?
	No, because I'm facing the window.
	The shades are drawn on the window, and then this big black moving blanket is in front of it, mainly for noise, of course, so I don't have an echoey sound to make it a little deader in the room.
	Yeah, but it also really brings down the ambient light.
	I like it.
	It's just what I've always...
	I've always romanticized.
	I've always wanted to be the night disc jockey, even though that's where the shit...
	The close-up of you announcing to your mouth, a close-up of your mouth, and a close-up of the microphone.
	Your lips come close to it.
	Yeah, and it's a, hey, baby, hey, baby.
	And it's raining outside.
	Somebody's driving in a car with a windshield wiper.
	It's going back and forth listening to you on the radio.
	This is the night owl.
	I'm telling you what's going on.
	We play another set of Led Zeppelin from beginning to end.
	Yeah, that's my romantic nature.
	Well, you know, whatever works.
	I, on the other hand, have thought about deadening up the room, because I know that when you have a dead room, you have a nice sound.
	But I don't.
	I let the ambience do its thing, and I don't know that it hurts that much.
	I play the mic pretty close, so I'm not, like, too concerned about it, even though it's not as directional as the Heil PR-40.
	And what are you using now?
	I'm using a CAD 3000 from China.
	China.
	Yeah, I know.
	I know.
	Nice.
	I'm using my...
	I've changed.
	I'm using the Rota Procaster.
	I'm a close-miker.
	I like to spit in the mic.
	Well, I use this mic because I was doing research on mods, and I do have a mod mic, which I used for quite a while, the Jolie mic, which has modded everything.
	The whole thing is just a completely remake of a Chinese mic, which these modders love to do.
	And so I ran into this one guy who was a major, major modder, and he likes to fix mics and do crazy things, but he claims that a lot of things people do, especially removing the capsule, is just a waste of time.
	You just want to deal with the electronics.
	And so I asked him specifically, well, you do a lot of mods.
	What is the best mic?
	Made in China, period.
	Do you have any idea?
	And he named this Mike.
	Huh.
	He says this is the best Mike he's ever seen coming out of China.
	It's an American company, but it's a Chinese Mike.
	Is that the one in California?
	CAD? No, CAD is in the Midwest, I believe.
	Oh, okay.
	Something audio devices.
	And I think they're in Indiana.
	I don't remember.
	But the mic is a Chinese mic.
	And it looks like a Chinese mic.
	And we listen to all these mics.
	And you have to have final approval on the mic.
	And you said that mic sounds terrific.
	And so I've kept this mic, and I've been using it with a spit screen.
	And I'm very happy with the sound of it.
	And it's a good mic.
	It's got three.
	It's got a figure-eight pattern.
	It's got capsules in front and back.
	It's got a nice overall.
	I think the build is nice.
	And it was $100.
	Nice.
	Well, here's a little thing I'll just point, just show everyone how it works.
	I'm big on noise gates.
	I believe if you can't afford the NPR-like studio, which is really dead, and I wrote an article recently about the sound.
	There's a whole philosophy behind it.
	So you need to have a very fast-acting noise gate so that when you're talking, you can hear the...
	And when I'm talking, when you're talking, you can hear this ambient noise, especially if you have your window open or if you have a fan on or anything like that.
	So I'll just turn yours off right now and return mine off.
	And people who are listening to the show...
	I even have a low rumble coming from somewhere.
	It's so different.
	We sculpt the sound to what we want it to be.
	Yeah, curiously, Horowitz has a noise kit that he uses when we do the Horowitz show, DH Unplugged.
	Is that recent?
	It's pretty recent.
	He actually took over.
	He called me and he said, I want to set this up.
	And I walked for like two hours.
	I walked him through what he needed.
	And it was kind of like helping the stewardess land the 747 in a way on the phone.
	I'm going to turn the noise gates back on.
	Hold on.
	Yes.
	And I said, you want a noise gate, man.
	You really want this because it just enhances the closeness and the personal nature of the sound.
	And I like it when it's completely dead, and I love the fact that we have silence from time.
	We talked about that on 200.5.
	I like it.
	I like it.
	Yeah, I like it.
	It draws people awake.
	I actually like the dead room sound.
	I mean, I don't mind the NPR sound.
	But it's as good as a noise gate.
	The NPR sound is dead.
	It's totally dead, and I know how to do that sound.
	We had the Cranky Geek show, and it was being produced in San Francisco.
	We had the black, because I wanted the Abyss look.
	It's a look I like on TV, because it's cheap, and it works, and I don't know why it's not used more than a busy set.
	So Charlie Rose is the best user of the Abyss.
	So you're in a big black room.
	It's actually a form of black velvet.
	Yep.
	That the camera can't pick up where it is.
	It's like magicians use it constantly, so you can't figure out where the mirrors are.
	Where the rabbit's coming from.
	And where the rabbit's coming from.
	And it also deadens the room, if it's in far enough.
	So you can get a very...
	Nice sound.
	You can use the cheapest microphone and you sound pretty good.
	What was interesting is before I disclosed what had happened with my personal life, I was in this apartment...
	And I didn't have any stuff.
	I had nothing.
	I didn't have the moving blankets.
	And a number of people said, hey, what's going on?
	I hear something.
	Something is different about the sound.
	Wow.
	You know, it was Steck.
	Steck noticed it.
	Huh.
	Yeah.
	Well, anyway, back to the question, especially the list.
	Cost of producing, somebody brought that up, and there was no real answer.
	I mean, we do have to pay for bandwidth now, and it's not cheap.
	And again, we have Void Zero, sort of a 19-inch rack.
	Yeah, and he does to do all of the heavy lifting for...
	He's the sys-op that's super talented.
	Dude named Ben.
	Yeah, he runs the infrastructure.
	Of course, we do have to pay for it, but he's come up with...
	This is a legacy from the No Agenda Stream folks, Mr.
	Oil.
	When they set all of that up, they were thinking of starting a business, and that didn't really pan out.
	But we were very happy to assume what they had created, and Mark does that for us out of love for the show, and we love him for it.
	And his...
	His partner, Iris, when he was in the hospital, she was running.
	He had given her instructions.
	She was making sure everything was working, making sure the stream was up and changing stuff.
	Cool.
	Now, on my list here, I have an anomaly that I spotted.
	I don't know why.
	I don't know that I noticed this in 2006, but the 2006 200.6 show.
	You said something about how we promote or something, and then you said, I said something about why I tell people to go to the No Agenda wiki page.
	And then you went kind of like, why?
	Why are you sending people to that?
	With that voice even, I remember.
	It could have been.
	And it was like I was befuddled by this because it's always been a good page.
	It has a rundown of some of the basics of the show.
	And one time when they edited it down to next to nothing, I bitched and somebody put all the good stuff back up there, which is the meaning of the jingles and the memes and the rest.
	But I was kind of befuddled by your response to that.
	And then you...
	I think it was because that was the era when you were irked about somebody messing with your personal homepage or something.
	It had nothing to do with anything I was talking about.
	Remember that?
	Yeah.
	I also remember that luckily they put our height on the wiki page.
	Yeah, you were talking about that.
	I don't know if that's still up there.
	I know.
	It was humorous height.
	It was like...
	I don't know.
	Four feet and 500 inches or something.
	Five foot 17.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I just want people to listen to our show.
	And as witnessed by our great websites, we really don't care much.
	Other than get the show, and if you want to go to the show notes, they're detailed and you can get to them.
	Then they're indexed.
	I just like it when still you type in no agenda into a search engine, the first couple of pages are ours.
	Seven.
	Is it seven now?
	That's great.
	Been seven for a while.
	Right.
	And there's somebody every once in a while something sneaks in.
	It's always galling when you see that something.
	It's been a while since I've searched for our...
	Manny Pacquiao says he has no agenda in the fight.
	Oh, okay.
	I got you.
	I got you.
	Yeah, that kind of thing.
	Um...
	I don't really have anything.
	I do have a couple questions myself.
	Do you still use that Soundbyte software?
	I do.
	Yes, I do.
	So it runs on my original iPad 1, Wi-Fi only, and you run a little program on the computer.
	One of these days, I will publish the whole setup.
	It's just I want to do it.
	But you've been saying that for years.
	It's because I need someone to come.
	It's like a vinegar book.
	I'll put it over here on the list.
	Yeah.
	Okay, yeah, we'll see who releases it first, the Vinegar book or the sound setup.
	But it's really, it's nice to have a number of go-to things, and let's see, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four.
	There's 50 clips that we use regularly, which includes, for instance, the, you know, this may be for some people interesting, so we do the birthday song.
	All right.
	So that's pretty much one bed and it goes on and on and on.
	And then when it's time for me to end that, I start the second one and then I just stop the first one.
	So, you know, you can make it as long as you want.
	I'm not really that talented that I can fit everything into these pre-produced beds all the time.
	But I do time this to say, you know, this is episode 7, 3, 6.
	This is no agenda.
	And then that ends.
	And then there's a second one that I start here, which is this.
	And that just goes on, and then you come in, and whenever you're done and you say, I'm John C. Dvorak, then I hit...
	It's Crackpot and Buzzkill!
	So that's all.
	The second part was an extension of the first.
	That's interesting.
	I didn't know that.
	It's funny.
	Things you don't need to know.
	I don't need to know and I don't want to know.
	You don't want to know.
	What other questions did you have?
	Well, now that we're here in this segment, before we go back to the show, I think you should place...
	One of the things that we've done only recently, but Adam, I encourage him to do these medley of clips at the end of the show.
	So it makes the show kind of, you know, it's like the dessert the way I see it.
	And people, you know, if they listen to the whole show, they might as well get a kick out of some of the clips.
	Why don't you play us a shot, not long ones, but a shot of all the short clips you can quickly get to.
	Say, you got your little push-button device there.
	Yeah, but those clips, you mean short clips or the longer clips?
	No, the short ones.
	Oh, okay.
	I want you to just play what's right on the thing right there.
	Go.
	Okay.
	Here we go.
	That's the newsflash sound effect.
	We have this, of course, when we always tell people to go out and hit people in the mouth, which is also two clips.
	Our formula is this.
	We've got that one.
	We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
	And then the second part of that clip is this one.
	It's the New World Order stuff.
	And then I might add this in.
	That's all separate.
	The Hey Citizen.
	We have the...
	I have a ding.
	You have a bell.
	I have a digital bell.
	See, my bell is this.
	And then we have our phone call.
	Whenever we do a little phone call bit, we have that.
	We have...
	If you see something, say something.
	We have this one.
	Just take your next time.
	We have your favorite.
	By Ayn Rand.
	And then we have the two to the head, of course.
	We have this one.
	That's one mother I liked of.
	Then I have three science clips.
	So the longer one is...
	The science is in!
	So we have the science ISO'd.
	Science!
	Or we have...
	And then, of course, we have our standard...
	We've got the Spanish.
	We've got Chinese.
	We've got French.
	We've got German.
	We've got, of course...
	A new entry.
	Of course...
	Not to forget...
	We have...
	You've been de-douched.
	And of course we have the karma jingle there as well.
	You've got karma.
	And then there's a few small ones like, what do we have?
	We have this one.
	You can take that to the bank.
	We've got that.
	Not often used, but when used it's always appropriate.
	And that's probably about half of them.
	Who did the de-douching one?
	I have no idea.
	We should give her him as a female voice.
	She may have produced it or somebody else may have produced it.
	We need to give whoever it is credit someday.
	We do.
	I forgot who that was and when it came in.
	Many of these things we should...
	And we've talked about this, I think, in the 2045, but not emphasized it.
	Most of the show's direction has been...
	From the producer-listener.
	They have pushed the show in a certain direction.
	The douchebag thing, we never called anybody a douchebag.
	They called each other a douchebag, and then somebody came up with a damn jingle.
	Yeah.
	And then the dedouching jingle came after that.
	We had nothing.
	That was not an invention by us.
	Most of the stuff...
	We invented the producership idea, the club now coming up, but this is kind of meta.
	The way the show flows is largely...
	Promulgated I would say or pushed along by the People who listen to the show and produce it and come up with stuff.
	They come up with all kinds of things.
	And good things.
	And there's a lot of stuff that isn't all that...
	Well, I want to say, when we do our final segment, I have a couple things about how you can best interact with us and how you can help us when you want to...
	As a producer, if you want to add something, obviously not just the financial part, but there are some things that would be very helpful for me, certainly.
	I'm trying to find this one producer...
	Who was in a lot of these jingles, and this is the problem.
	Well, I will mention here, since it needs to be mentioned, I don't think it was really mentioned that much in 2002, I don't know why I keep saying 2200.5 or 6, that We'd still need donations even though we're doing this show.
	So if you would go to Dvorak.org slash NA, I think it would be appreciated.
	And we will have people who have given producer and executive producer amounts to the show mentioned when we were done on our little vacation moment.
	There is, of course, one jingle I didn't play, which is also on the soundboard.
	Dvorak.org slash NA. Also don't know who made that.
	And let's go back to show 200.5.
	A couple of questions from Sir Troy Walters.
	I just want to go down the list and make sure we didn't miss anything.
	How did you come up with promotions like the Nighthoods?
	The Nighthood thing, by the way, I will take credit for that and I'll tell you why.
	Although I think we discussed it, and I think you're the one that probably pushed the idea.
	Probably the name of a knighthood is probably my contribution.
	Well, the knighthood thing, and I'll tell you, one day, and I've said this, I've done this with everybody who knows me who will have heard this probably at one time or another, and I know I ran it past Adam.
	Every time some American, and I think it's supposed to be illegal to receive a knighthood from the queen, but they do.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, every time somebody says, what's so special about England that they're granting knighthoods?
	Why don't we grant knighthoods?
	Why can't we just grant knighthoods?
	Why can't anybody, why can't Ford Motor Company grant knighthoods?
	What difference does it make?
	Yeah, that's good.
	So ours are just as good as the Queen's.
	I think so, and I think we have a better group, that's for sure.
	The Knights that have been on our list, they're fantastic people, every one of them.
	I have a plan by the way of making a night iPhone app that will only be for nights.
	reasons but it'll only be for nights and uh and it'll be like our uh our communication model like a network a night network no that's a good idea yeah i think it'd be kind of fun and and we like a bat signal i still want a bat signal we're going to need it one of these days well we've got a lot of professional people in the night hoods we don't have a doctor we have a dentist do we have a lawyer oh you know that's a good question we need a lawyer We need a lawyer.
	That's what you need, right?
	You need a doctor.
	We need a butcher.
	Yes.
	Hell yeah.
	A farmer.
	We need someone to get a farm.
	What drives the new promotions?
	That's a good question.
	It depends on how you interpret it, of course.
	And I will say, all the emails, promotion ideas, John does all of that.
	I do the production of the show.
	John does all of that stuff.
	Yeah, I'm the marketing guy.
	Mainly because I've always admired certain forms of marketing that are very rarely executed by the general public, or by general companies or little operations like ours.
	And by that I mean PBS... And religion.
	Churches.
	Because the model is so interesting that you get people that like you so much because you're doing something for them.
	And that's what PBS and churches are perceived as doing.
	One's helping you spiritually and the other one's educating you out of mainstream media, supposedly.
	And...
	And their model for getting money, and by the way, I have a background in public radio.
	I had a couple of shows, two different shows that were on public radio for over almost 10 years about computers.
	And I saw the mechanism, how it works and how much money they get and all the rest of it.
	And I always said, you know, why does it just have to be those two groups?
	And then, of course, the publishing, you know, the direct payment for a novel is a different kind of a thing.
	Why are these the only two groups that are using this model, A? And does anyone notice that they're actually pretty successful with this model?
	Thank you.
	There's some churches out there that have, you know, not counting the megachurches, but some decent-sized churches with maybe 2,000 to 3,000 parishioners.
	And they got the guy with a Cadillac and a big house and they got plenty of money.
	And there's only like 2,000 people that are supporting the entire parish.
	And it's like, does anybody notice that this looks like, you know, of course the tax-free thing doesn't hurt the guy.
	But it's like, obviously it's a model that works and people don't mind the model.
	I mean, we're not getting knighthood donations because people think this is a dumb idea.
	So I do the promotions.
	I come up with them every once in a while.
	One comes forward and says, well, here's an idea.
	This people would like.
	It's kind of like selling the dream kind of thing.
	I'm not sure.
	I used to be in direct marketing.
	I say that when people ask me about this, I say, look, we have a church and our religion is the truth or as close as we can get to it.
	There's that element.
	I think we seem to offend a few people if we go off the deep end with the church angle, but the fact of the matter is we do the thing on Sunday morning, and I'm sure a lot of people don't go to church and listen to us instead, or football.
	It'll be interesting to see what, since we're in full tilt here trying to maximize our incomes, it'll be interesting to see what the drop-off is on listenership on the live stream during the football season.
	Oh, interesting.
	And by the way, we do look at that kind of stuff.
	We look at all the numbers.
	We keep track of stuff.
	Eric likes to dream up weird reports.
	And we look at them and we know where we're headed.
	We're doing fine.
	We're not doing well enough that we can quit and do this full time, which is okay.
	Being in a struggling situation is not a bad thing.
	And the show, I think, is sound, if I can say it.
	Is it harder to be excited for the next show if donations are down on the previous show?
	It is for Adam.
	That's not true.
	It's not like I'm less excited.
	You said so once.
	No.
	Then you misinterpreted what I said.
	What I meant was, first of all, it bums me out because I take that as a direct result of the program, of the product that we produced.
	It bums me out.
	Yeah, it bums me out.
	Does it make me less excited?
	No, it motivates me.
	It gets me motivated to do a better show.
	And we deconstructed.
	And John, by the way, you've got to know this.
	He's like the horrible uncle you never wanted.
	He'll send you notes like, well, that thing you did that made donations drop through the floor.
	That's horrible.
	And it took me like two months to figure out that this is...
	Just writing that just to piss me off?
	No, I was writing it for a good reason because I believed it to be true.
	Yeah.
	It's the way you write it.
	It's the way email is.
	Sorry, Grandpa.
	Sorry, don't be such a dick.
	I suppose I should put a bunch of smiley faces and that would make you happy.
	Yeah, good.
	This is what I love about you.
	What is the single most enjoyable element of the show for each of you?
	That's a great question, and I don't like saying the term a great question.
	But it's a thoughtful question, if you think.
	I think when the show ends.
	I think...
	Hours.
	First of all, there is no element in the show.
	I think that's...
	We have no fixed elements.
	That's true.
	The only thing that's fixed is donations.
	And we do that about an hour in.
	45 minutes to an hour, yeah.
	And we've talked about that because we notice the donations fall off if we push the thing off to near the end because a lot of people, to be honest about it, do not listen to the entire show.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Yeah.
	I agree.
	I get a lot of emails from people.
	I'm like, we just did that two weeks ago.
	How can you send me this email?
	And yeah, I agree.
	A lot of people don't get through the whole show.
	Which, by the way, is okay.
	It's okay.
	And for people who listen, who are like, oh, this is what I love, is fast forward.
	You can fast forward through something you think is boring.
	I guarantee you'll be backing up.
	I think so, too.
	For me...
	Wow, this is going to sound kind of weird.
	Most enjoyable?
	Personally enjoyable?
	I like it when I have either an article or a clip and I get praise from you.
	Yeah, I'll do that because I actually keep a running score, but it's just for me, but I know you're paying attention to it.
	And I'll score a goal for you when you hit one that completely catches me flat-footed.
	I got nothing on it.
	Maybe my take is even wrong because your take is better.
	And it's interesting.
	So I give you a kudo right on the spot, and it's sincere, by the way, and you usually only do it when I know I can't top you.
	You can actually come up with something that's better than where you got the kudo, something really stunning, but I know I've got a topper.
	Yeah.
	And so I won't give you the kudos then.
	So that's kind of interesting.
	Do we have a weird father-son relationship?
	No, no.
	It's a teammate relationship where you're trying to compete for that position of dominance.
	Okay.
	I think it's a team orientation where two guys are working to win, but you want to be the guy that did the best.
	But it's okay if you score the goal.
	Yeah, you scored the goal.
	Okay, you scored the goal.
	Next time I'll score the goal, you prick.
	Yeah, that's a good analysis.
	The father and son thing doesn't work that way because father and son would be more patronizing.
	I'm not patronizing.
	I'm straightforward about it.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	I'll give you that.
	I know how much you'd like that to be the case.
	No.
	Not going to happen.
	I don't think so.
	So I got a little thing here, a little aside.
	I had Eric run the numbers on which country listens to us and where we get most of our support from.
	That is a question.
	And here's the answer.
	Okay, but I'm going to do it because I have the numbers and you don't, so this is my rare opportunity to make you do what we do on the show quite a bit, which is make the other person guess, knowing full well that they'll never guess it correctly, and it's just kind of a stalling tactic, but guess who's number one.
	Now, is this in total amount of donations?
	This will be both donors in the amount, but it's going to go by the total amount, but it turns out the numbers match pretty well with the...
	It's one-to-one pretty much with the donors and totals.
	I will say that the Netherlands is very high on the list.
	Who's number one?
	Oh, please.
	Well, number one's got to be America.
	Of course, by a factor of nine.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So now it gets interesting.
	Number two.
	And before you answer, I'm going to tell you right now, you're not going to get it.
	Australia?
	Oh, jeez, you got it!
	Yes!
	He shoots, he scores!
	Oh, man.
	No, I knew Australia had to be really high.
	No, I shouldn't have given you the tease.
	No, no, I knew it.
	I knew this because...
	I mean, I track it kind of in my head.
	I'm like, man, I get stories.
	The Aussies are really into us.
	But don't mess with them, man.
	These guys will mess you up.
	And they don't like what's going on.
	And I can almost guess, you know, by which country is the most suppressed.
	So, of course, America wins.
	And then Australia.
	And I think the Netherlands has got to be third or fourth on the list.
	No, actually.
	Netherlands actually comes in sixth.
	It goes like this.
	United States, Australia, Canada.
	Canada, right.
	United Kingdom and Netherlands.
	UK as well, of course.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	I actually thought the Netherlands would come in a little higher.
	Yeah, so did I. But no.
	And Belgium?
	The reason is because the Netherlands, the guys who do contribute to the show are from Belgium.
	They're aggressive.
	Right.
	You know, Pelsmacher, he's in Belgium.
	He's in Belgium, yeah.
	Yeah, well, Belgium comes in, then it comes Germany, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Mexico, and then we have an anomaly with Japan, which has very few people listening, but they give a lot of money, and same with Hong Kong, that's where all the money is.
	Then we've got Spain, Italy, France, Denmark is actually higher, but they don't give any money.
	They're like, they're...
	Cheap.
	Cheap.
	The damn Danes.
	The Danish are obviously cheap.
	And then Poland, which is like, that doesn't count.
	The non-English speaking countries, it doesn't bother me.
	So this is very interesting.
	For the amount of time we spend on, or have spent on stories about Poland...
	They're way down on the list.
	Oh, they're way down.
	The amount of time we spend on the UK and Australia, that's about right, I would say.
	And Canada.
	We probably should do more on Canada.
	Yeah, the Canadians are starting to complain about it.
	And they're right.
	And, you know, it's easy enough to do.
	I mean, it's kind of hard to beat this.
	Ari has...
	22 Minutes or whatever the name of the show is that nails them constantly.
	We've got some support in Singapore.
	I mean, almost every country is Estonia, Dominican Republic, Malaysia, Qatar, Israel, one person.
	Yay!
	That actually is the one that really surprises me the most.
	That we'd have one listener in Israel.
	We may be blocked there for all I know.
	Could be.
	Yeah, could be.
	And Portugal, we haven't got much...
	You'd think I'd have more from Brazil since I'm a writer there and fairly well known, but again, it's in translation.
	They may be writing all kinds of crap.
	You don't know what they're translating it to.
	No, I know what they're translating it to.
	I've had a lot of people, I know a lot of Brazilians, and one guy said to me once, and I know the translator, he's a great guy.
	I've sat down with him and...
	On a PowerPoint, like in ten minutes, the guy's fantastic.
	Let me, uh, uh, what was the...
	Oh, here's one that I can't answer.
	What are the current subscriber numbers?
	So first of all, subscriber numbers, the word subscriber is a misnomer because we really don't know how many people listen to this show by downloading.
	We absolutely just don't know.
	John, how often, and by the way, I don't think anyone knows in podcasting what their actual real numbers are.
	There is so much smoke about numbers.
	You have to guess.
	What would you guess?
	Well, based on normal direct marketing returns and the kind of money we get...
	It's hard to say.
	I mean, it could be anywhere from 50,000 to 400,000.
	Yeah, that's about the same range I'm in.
	And it's impossible to tell from the downloads and the proxies.
	And of course, I'm sure there's a small percentage that is maybe not downloading at all, listening only to the stream.
	There's people who get it on BitTorrent.
	In terms of pure subscribers that are paying the $5, we only have about 1,500 of those people.
	We have not pushed everybody very hard to do the $5 thing.
	Some people have done the $30.
	Some people say, I'm not going to do it until you make it $10, and I haven't put that up.
	So, I mean, that's, you know, and then every time they change their credit card or some number, they get bounced by PayPal so they don't have the subscription anymore.
	I get letters saying, well, I'm sorry, but I didn't realize I haven't had a subscription for six months because PayPal bounced it and I got to resubscribe.
	Sorry, you know, they apologize.
	And some people get bounced for no good reason.
	It's, you know, we're not that stable.
	We need more subscribers for sure.
	We'll be pushing that probably on the show more.
	Okay, I have two more things.
	One is, I actually would like to know how you prep for the show.
	I think I already explained what I do.
	I don't do, I don't generally, what I do is I typically take the articles and things that I found and I print them out and pile them up.
	As they come, because I get most of my stuff online.
	And then I'm always making clips, because I have an H2 recorder by my side at all times.
	And I'm constantly jumping up, even when the full family could be watching a movie or something.
	I'm jumping up and stopping the movie, backing it up, and then getting a clip.
	So I collect a lot of...
	I spend most of my time collecting clips and articles.
	And I don't organize them very well.
	Because of the nature of the show, I'm always assuming that it's going to go anywhere because you never know who's going to bring up a topic that gets interesting in the conversation itself.
	So I'm probably underprepared.
	In terms of pure preparation, not in terms of the work that goes into getting the clips and reading a lot, but in terms of thinking about what I'm going to do.
	Occasionally, we'll take a bunch of notes.
	If you listen to the show maybe a year ago, I would have these notes.
	I used to ridicule myself for having...
	Taking terrible notes.
	I can't read.
	And that was a little more preparation, but I found that it really hasn't, that didn't do anything to improve the show.
	And it also kind of puts, if I prepare too much, I'll try to dominate the show, which kind of ruins the pace and flow.
	For me, I do collect everything because if you look at the show notes versus what we talk about in the show, the show notes are often four times as much information.
	And I think that is a valuable part of the show for people to be able to go and research stuff and look at things.
	And there is a reasonable segment of the audience that really uses that and appreciates it and looks at it.
	Some of the iPhone apps give you good access to it and searchability.
	But I'm typically always hoping, just hoping, that I can find...
	From a radio production perspective, here it is.
	I'm hoping that there's one or two zingers that I have.
	Either it's a clip or it's a story or something.
	And I'll work on that.
	And I cannot go to bed on a Wednesday night or a Saturday night without knowing I have something.
	And I sometimes will try out my rap on Mickey.
	I'll say, how does this sound?
	And usually I get shot down.
	Yeah, I refuse to do that.
	I think that's overdoing it.
	Yeah, I get shot down.
	Good.
	So here's a question that somebody has for you.
	What happened to the global blank fund?
	Adam was supposed to have a big report on it.
	The what?
	Remember that fund you were talking about, that money that was hidden during the Reagan administration or something?
	Oh, you know, it was a French name.
	Yeah, this is from Brian Monday.
	Now there's your answer, Brian.
	Yeah, well I hit so many dead ends and I just don't have the time to spend my life Yeah, and it's not going to bring anything to the party.
	I guess the answer is, no one has done enough reporting, at least that I could find, that makes it believable or credible enough, and the only way to really get into it is I'd have to do the investigative work myself, and that's obviously not going to happen.
	Okay, Hugsalot asks, what's the actual cost of producing the show?
	Most podcasts have zero budgets and still produce shows.
	DSC is done free.
	No?
	No, it's not.
	That's not true.
	DSC is a part of what the founding and sustaining producers of the No Agenda stream donated their money for, and we'll have to do another drive.
	And, you know, what is the actual cost?
	I mean, what does it cost you to go to work?
	There's actual cost.
	This is actual time.
	There's preparation.
	Time is money.
	Value for value.
	That's the way it works.
	Time is definitely money.
	So is there actual...
	Would you like me to charge by the hour the amount of time it took me to set up the studio?
	That's just one little thing.
	Actually, the question to me is vague.
	I don't know what it means.
	DZPix asks, What iPhone iPad app does Adam use for the Jingles Sound Bank?
	I use a program called Soundbyte, B-Y-T-E, one word, Soundbyte, on the Mac.
	It is made by Black Cat Software.
	And I've just kind of been...
	They essentially replicated a cart machine.
	They look like carts.
	You can color them like you would color.
	And a cart is a cartridge.
	That's the old school way of putting Jing Jingle Machine.
	And it's pretty customizable.
	And what's nice about it is they released an iPhone app, which I can run on the iPad, although it kind of sucks because it runs in iPhone mode and you kind of enlarge it and it doesn't work very well.
	In fact, today I didn't use it at all.
	But normally I do.
	And it brings up the screen of your cart deck the way it looks on the computer screen.
	I would prefer to have an extra monitor instead of having the iPad run that.
	Because I use two monitors.
	Because I have a lot of stuff that I have to monitor.
	And really what I need is I need to be able to connect a third screen to my laptop.
	I don't think that's an easy thing to do though.
	Okay, here's an interesting question.
	I should be able to answer, but I'm going to have you do it if you can.
	I bought a Nokia E71 because you said you like it.
	How do I get the stream to work on it?
	Can we do that?
	There is actually in the Nokia OV store, which is their version of the app store, there is a, it's just released, if you go there and it's like create your own Nokia app, I think they're actually calling them apps, you can enter the RSS feed for no agenda and it will create an app for your phone.
	And then you can put that on your phone.
	It does not do the streaming bit, but you can get streaming programs all over the place for the Nokia.
	But I think it's more interesting just to be able to make your own app for the episodes.
	So that's how you do that.
	And Blackberry, by the way, also was coming out.
	They called me, like, yeah, we're going to do podcasting on the Blackberry.
	Can you log in and put in your shows for your company?
	And I put in no agenda, daily source code, tech five, top five, cranky geeks, and then I got bored.
	So apparently there's some podcasting thing on Blackberry.
	So, yeah.
	Any more from the chat room?
	This is actually from Twitter.
	Let me see if there's one more here.
	Hold on one second.
	I'm just going to see who's texting me.
	The guy says, the show's gone from a show with no jingles and no talent to a glut of both.
	I thought that was kind of unique.
	It's gone to a what?
	We have a glut of talent, apparently, on the show.
	It's just the same two guys.
	Somebody else asks, the show's changed a lot since its inception.
	It's the same guy, actually, Opera Now.
	Do you prefer the new format?
	And, you know, obviously we do.
	Or we wouldn't be doing it.
	And the audience does, more importantly.
	The audience does, too.
	I mean, you know, this show is, you know, it's a...
	You know, I've been broadcasting long enough.
	You always have people who say, oh, it was much better then.
	Oh, it was better then.
	Oh, no, I have the same thing as a writer.
	You get this.
	I have people that still say, when you were writing that column for Info World, it was much better.
	And I looked at those.
	I can go back and look at that old crap.
	And it wasn't.
	Generally speaking, things improve.
	Yeah, I guess it's just the nature of the beast.
	That's the nostalgia or, you know, people.
	At some point, people either like you more in time, because they hear you more, they read you more, or they like you less in time, and then they associate that with maybe you were doing something different before.
	Generally speaking, you weren't.
	All right, so wrapping this up, what's the future?
	Well, we've got another 200 shows to do.
	At least?
	No, we have at least until episode 333.
	Well, before we do another promotion like the Deuce Club.
	Well, we've got to thank all the Deuce Club members profusely.
	We'll do that over time and on the webpage.
	And I think, you know, we're not showing any indication of slower growth.
	People still like the show.
	I think the great thing, and we've talked about this off the air a lot, There is so much material for us.
	Yeah, I think the show, there's only growth because it just comes automatically.
	The media is getting worse.
	They're laying everybody off.
	The Obama administration is getting worse.
	They're lying to the public just straight out.
	You know, there's these crazy things that Hill and Knowlton are doing.
	I mean, now that I find that they're behind all the global warming stuff, you know, we're doomed that that's going to go through because you can't stop Hill and Knowlton.
	I don't know.
	Are you worried that the show will ever get taken off the air?
	Not seriously, but it could be.
	It could be taken off the air.
	I don't think...
	This, by the way, is a huge benefit of our model because if you have advertisers, that's the attack mechanism.
	That's where you're weakest.
	The minute someone doesn't like what you say, look at Imus, and that's just one example.
	The minute you go somewhere that they don't like you, then the audience...
	For us, it's easy.
	The audience like what we do, we get no money.
	It's like, okay, we can turn that around in one episode.
	We can go, oh, okay, we went off the track there.
	We can get it back on.
	But when your advertisers pull out, then the network goes nuts, and then you're out of a job.
	You're dead.
	You're gone.
	You're history.
	You're out.
	In other words, you don't have control from the get-go.
	And that's another reason I think the direct support is the way to go.
	It's open source.
	We don't care.
	One of the things that's great about it, I always say, well, if somebody bootlegs the show, puts it on their own website, takes credit for it, say they produce it, I don't care.
	The fact is our messages are embedded in the show.
	And it goes with us.
	We don't need to prove numbers.
	We don't say, oh, our numbers from Arbitron came in and we got a 3-3 and this is, here, look, Mr.
	Advertiser, give us some more money.
	We have a better CPM. We have a certain demo.
	They have to prove our demo and we have to prove the CPM and this and that and the other thing.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	Remember those days when you'd wait for the Arbitrons to come out and the whole station was like tiptoeing around?
	Well, we know the trends are down, so how bad will it be?
	Yeah, we don't deal with any of that.
	We don't want to.
	It's ridiculous.
	And we're completely independent.
	We don't have anybody telling us what to do.
	We don't have advertisers telling us what to do, which is the real danger here, without exception.
	The only way we would be taken off the air is if the government or somebody sued us or the government decided to pull the plug.
	Who knows?
	But that's not going to happen.
	We're below the radar.
	We're crackpots.
	We believe we're conspiracy theory people.
	And maybe we'll get taxed for being conspiracy theory guys.
	Yeah, that's the worst thing that could happen.
	Well, I can live with that.
	It seems to me that Alex Jones will get taken out before we do, and that would be a nice warning shot.
	He's the canary in the cage, as far as I'm concerned, even though I don't think he does half the work we do.
	I think he has good guests, but that's a different format.
	No, we can't.
	That's another thing.
	That's the one question we should, at least before we finish.
	We cannot do two hours.
	Yeah, we've done it again.
	Before we finish, you know, people say, well, can I be a guest on your show?
	How come we don't do this?
	How come we don't do that?
	We may do some separate interview shows separately that will be on the stream that will be part of some other initiative.
	This show is what it is.
	It's two guys talking to each other about the current events, just like you do in the coffee shop with your buddies.
	There's no guest.
	When you're in the coffee shop, you don't say, man, coming in to have a guest donut.
	Here's a guest.
	You know, so-and-so who just finished a book.
	So what was your book about?
	This is not the Larry King show.
	Right.
	Well, anyway, so yeah, we were going to do an hour.
	We're moving up now on, what are we at?
	I have the exact recording here.
	We are at 145.
	Good job.
	Thank you again to everyone who supports No Agenda, who supported this show, The Deuce Club.
	Thanks to everyone who's out there making websites and crazy ideas and promoting us.
	It is also your show.
	So I could just say thank you.
	John, thank you.
	Thank you.
	It's the highlight of my week.
	And it happens twice a week.
	And we'll try to do these special third shows every so often.
	Yeah, what are we going to talk about?
	Well, I think we talked out.
	The funny thing is, I'll bet you we could do another two hours.
	You know, I was just about to say, not a problem.
	And our spouse...
	Why do you think it's so weird that they don't use headphones?
	It's atypical for radio.
	Totally atypical.
	But I've managed, because I use the pop screen as my point of departure.
	And so if I keep my lips within a quarter inch of the pop screen, I'm within the range of this microphone.
	We're back, by the way, with the last bit of this special episode.
	You can tell that we speak exactly the same way off air as we do on air.
	Why do you think that's so weird?
	That's, you know, it reminds me of, like, I tell people this when you try to give people teleprompter training.
	And the funny thing is, I remember years and years ago, I was doing some audio radio thing of some sort, and I was reading an advertising copy, and there was just a moment where the read became my actual voice.
	Oh, and that's when you get the gig, obviously.
	And you go, oh my god, that sounds so cool.
	Yeah, it sounds good.
	I'm actually natural.
	Hmm.
	Now, by the way, there's one thing I did want to mention in the first half is the stammering I do all the time.
	I think it's annoying.
	Thank God people don't bitch about it.
	I don't notice it at all.
	Yeah, well, I do when I hear myself.
	Well, you know, everyone has...
	There's a lot of stuff I don't like about how I talk.
	You know, you sound a lot better than I do.
	Anyway, so I think this pretty much wraps this show up.
	Well, I just wanted to say there, the format, well not the format, if anything, the show has kind of developed the format.
	For me, there is a change which was driven more by the world around us.
	And when I say the world, I mean the media world.
	Now that there's less and less news actually being presented in the mainstream media, I think that both of us have taken it upon ourselves to work much harder...
	Had actually finding, you know, new doors.
	I mean, we're doing more uncovering.
	I mean, I jokingly call myself a government legislation analyst.
	Did you get the email from the guy that says that was redundant?
	No, I don't.
	Or I haven't seen it yet.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, a guy says, why could you call yourself that?
	All legislation is government legislation or it can't be called legislation.
	So you're being redundant.
	You should be calling yourself an independent legislation analyst or something.
	That doesn't sound good at cocktail parties.
	When you say government legislation analyst, yeah, no.
	I'm just telling you, you need to realize it's redundant.
	Yeah, I think that, well, you've done a lot more reading, deep reading, and gotten into reading legislation.
	I have not gone that way.
	I have...
	I'm more, I'm still floundering in some of this stuff.
	Well, no, I disagree because you're doing something interesting, especially the last couple of shows, you've been tuning in to a lot of foreign media sources, still English spoken in general.
	Yeah, I have gone to the foreign sources and then...
	Because that's the only thing I've been able to do where I'll bring these stories up and you haven't heard them, which proves my point that these stories are not getting out there.
	And some of these stories are interesting, like the Cambodian child.
	Yeah, it hits CNN now, actually.
	Finally.
	Yeah.
	That's another thing we've done since the Red Book began and actually even before that.
	People are finally realizing that we're way ahead of the curve on some of these stories.
	Way ahead of the curve.
	Well, yeah.
	Just look at drones.
	I don't think it was in 205 that I can remember, but I know we were talking about drones as far back as 2010.
	It kind of creeps up on you.
	Sometimes I've just got to remind myself, man, we've been talking about this for so long.
	And we were joking about drones overhead.
	Now it's mainstream conversation.
	Just mainstream conversation.
	So let's wrap this one up, give people a heads up on the next show, and then we hope they'll keep helping us here.
	Yes.
	With the donations, even though we're not live.
	Well, we are live to tape, but it's kind of a...
	And we're going to be back...
	Ah, let's interrupt these guys once again.
	This is what we were talking about earlier in the show.
	Now, this is the end.
	We've interrupted ourselves twice here.
	And is there anything else?
	There's a couple of things that I suppose we should wrap with.
	I'd like to talk about how best to interact with the show, with stories and ideas.
	And this is really from my end.
	Yeah, this hasn't been discussed yet.
	Discuss it occasionally on the regular show.
	Right.
	So when you have a lot of email, as an example, and I've tried to do this before, you know, please be descriptive in your subject line, etc., and please be as short as possible.
	And sometimes it's just not possible.
	People have a story.
	If you have a story to tell, if there's something important, if you have new information...
	New shit has come to light.
	All of that, of course, is fine.
	But again, subject lines are very important.
	When you think about going through 200 or 300 emails, 10 seconds makes a difference in my life.
	It really does.
	So for me, please, if you have a link or something that's just funny or something you feel is relevant, Tweet it to me.
	I read every single tweet.
	I probably will not retweet if you send something that I'm going to use on the show.
	I will always favorite it so you know that I've read it.
	The reason why is I go down a list and it's link, link, link, link, link.
	I don't have to open an e-mail.
	I don't have to...
	Go to a next email.
	Don't have to read a whole thing.
	You're limited to 140 characters.
	It's beautiful if you send it that way.
	And for John, the same thing.
	And also, don't send the same great idea to both of us.
	That sucks.
	Send it to John or to me.
	Sending it to both is generally not a good idea.
	Sometimes I think, oh, well, John will have that, or you may think I'm doing it, and sometimes you wind up not even covering it.
	These are very important things.
	And encryption, if you really, truly are sending something...
	You're a government guy.
	You need to encrypt, because I can promise you anonymity, because my system is set up so I'll know that I won't blow your cover, but there's going to be copies, and it's just stuff.
	If you really want to be protected, then learn how to do encryption.
	It's not all that hard.
	Yeah, and send the encrypted stuff to Adam because I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it.
	Many people will send me clips.
	Oh, here's four clips I made.
	Please don't do that.
	I appreciate it, but typically I'm just winding up clipping your clips.
	If you want to send me a sound file of something, that's highly appreciated because that saves me a lot of time in recording something or encoding it or taking it off the web or whatever.
	Let me see.
	So, yeah, those are really the only thing.
	I actually don't have so much of a problem with the clips.
	So you can send them to me.
	But if you have a long clip or a reference clip where it says, oh, look at this YouTube video, do put the time.
	Oh, yes, please.
	Yeah, please tell me where it's relevant.
	And some kind of descriptor, like, you'll love this.
	It's 54 minutes 20.
	No, I won't.
	I don't love that.
	Yeah, that sort of thing is not good.
	No, it's not helpful.
	Or listen to this, or these kind of...
	You won't believe this!
	And I don't mind getting the email, but you have to realize I get more email than Adam, I'm betting.
	I don't think so.
	I get over 450 pieces a day.
	Oh, well...
	No, I'm probably...
	I get about 40 an hour is what I get.
	I get...
	Well, that would be 800 and...
	Well, but it does slow down during a certain hour.
	So we're probably close.
	Not far from it.
	I go through my email and pretty much...
	If I look at my email page right now, like from...
	Let's say it's from yesterday.
	There'll be a page of...
	I think there's like 35 on the page, the way Squirrel Mail delivers it.
	Squirrel Mail.
	I use Squirrel Mail.
	Yeah.
	There's 35 entries, and I'd say three were opened.
	Huh.
	I do it based on subject lines and person.
	If it's somebody I know that I commonly converse with, yeah, I'll check theirs out.
	But if I looked at or read you these now, you say, why am I opening this?
	Or the worst thing that happens to the email, which is the FIFO problem that we've discussed on the show, I'll say, oh, this is good.
	We didn't discuss this in 200.5 or 6.
	No, we didn't.
	We've discussed it on the regular show.
	Which is the last thing that comes in is the first thing that goes out.
	And here's how it works.
	I get an email.
	Oh, this is great.
	I'm going to have to do this for the show.
	Now, if I don't print the email out, which is though I use a printer, Adam doesn't.
	Because he uses the Freedom Controller.
	If I don't print it out right there, And I say to myself, which I know I shouldn't do, but I'll do it anyway, I'll get back to this.
	Yeah, it doesn't happen.
	Yeah, flagging and all that stuff never works.
	No, it doesn't work.
	I never get back to it because I can't find it.
	I say, who sent that?
	Who sent that?
	What was the title?
	And I try to dream up.
	I do searches on subject lines.
	No, that wasn't it.
	And it's gone.
	Right.
	Oh, another thing.
	It is not helpful if you have a great...
	Like, oh, this document or this legislation, people send that to me on show day morning.
	And what happens is, of course, I don't have time to dive into it.
	Oh, this would be great for today's show.
	No, it won't, because I'm already way, way down the path.
	There's always room for things, but certainly something I have to read and parse, and I like marking up PDFs.
	No, send it to me after the show or a day before.
	Not show morning.
	It's sad because there's a lot of good stuff and then I have the same problem.
	By the time I'm back around, it's like, I don't remember it.
	Or, you know, I didn't put it in the right place.
	If you get stuff between, on Pacific time anyway, between noon and...
	I'd say five on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
	That's helpful, yeah.
	It has a better shot.
	It does.
	But then, I have this problem, because we talked about how we finished the show, and on show night, so I call show night, which is the night before the show.
	That's the night with no sex?
	Is that what you call it?
	Well, sex would be better, but it would be kind of distracting.
	Show night would be, you have, you're getting your clips, you're organizing the thing.
	I get to, I have to go to bed at, right after, I close the books at midnight.
	Right.
	At midnight Pacific time.
	So if you get a donation after that, it doesn't get, it goes to the next show.
	It doesn't go on.
	And we're pretty strict with that.
	Yeah.
	And so I close that.
	I send all this stuff.
	I also have to type in all the checks that came in over $50, so that's like a little just extra work, which is fine, because some of the checks are, you know, nice, and they got notes, and it's interesting.
	So I have to send it all to Eric, and then that's about, I'm done with all that, around 12.20, and I have to go to bed, because I've got to get up at 7.00.
	To move the clips from, and I produce my clips in the morning before the show, because the clips themselves, even though I've tried, I'll put very descriptive stuff, and I'll put the democracy now, and I'll put the name of who's saying something, and what they're talking about.
	I try to put it all in there, but 90% of the time, I can't get it all in there.
	And because it'd be too long of a file name.
	And so I do the clips in the morning before the show.
	I produce them so I can remember them.
	So when I look at the clips, there'll be 20 clips, and I just produced them like an hour earlier.
	I can look at the clip and say, I know that.
	I just heard it.
	Yeah, I have the same thing.
	That's the last thing I do before we start the show is I organize the clips into little folders.
	My clips, your clips are always in one folder.
	And that's the only way I can remember them.
	Otherwise, if it's done too far in advance, no, I won't remember either.
	I'm like, what the hell was that?
	Yeah, sometimes I'll carry a clip over for a week.
	Yeah, it never gets played.
	I gotta put this in the next show.
	And I won't know what it was.
	I look at it, it says berries.
	What is that?
	It's just something that I really knew what that meant, you know, three days ago.
	But now I don't know what it means.
	Hey, I want to thank Eric, the shill.
	Okay.
	I'll thank him, too.
	Thanks, Eric.
	Yeah, he does all the rings and stuff, and customer support, I guess, would be what we'd call it.
	He's good at that.
	He's really good.
	And I want to thank Mimi.
	Who makes sure that we're all on the straight and narrow.
	Yeah, she does that.
	And that's it.
	That's the whole no agenda.
	Well, the producers, of course.
	The people who support us, obviously.
	Our grand dukes, we've got two of them.
	It's a big deal.
	Pelsmacher and Foley.
	Foley.
	No, I'm not going to do that.
	But everyone, all the people, students, there's people on fixed income, social security.
	There's a wide range of producers and listeners, I have to say.
	It astonishes me.
	That's the most interesting thing, is the number of...
	The range that we have of listeners, the demo is out of control.
	There's no way you can isolate the demo.
	We couldn't even sell this to an advertiser.
	No, because the demo is all over the map.
	We don't know what to do.
	We don't know whether to sell Mars bars or geriatric underwear.
	We're not sure what we're supposed to sell on your show.
	We're not a problem.
	Exactly.
	We have no idea.
	It's really not important.
	I mean, I think it's great to have a wide variety, because that way our input, we get a lot of input.
	The input is from a wide variety of people.
	We have people in the government.
	We have people in the intelligence.
	We have people in the military.
	We have steel workers.
	We have dentists, doctors.
	One of the things we talked about on the 200.5 show, which I wanted to mention, is that we were lamenting some of the people that we had You know, the oldest show was Knighthood's Rundown, and we're talking, well, we need lawyers, and we need butchers.
	We'd like to have a butcher listening.
	At this point, years later, five years later in that show, we have all those people.
	All of them, yeah.
	We have a knight who's a butcher.
	We have a knight who's a dentist.
	We have plenty of doctors who are a knight.
	We have plenty of lawyers who are a dentist.
	We have professors.
	We have professors.
	We have, again, military men.
	We have entrepreneurs.
	So everybody's on board, and we try to do the best we can to keep everybody entertained as best we can.
	I think we do a good job.
	I think so.
	If not, the show would be over.
	Yes, and that could happen if we lose our way.
	It would be our fault.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Something would change, or everyone would rush to, oh, this new show these guys are doing, Dumb Agenda.
	Dumb Agenda?
	I've never heard of Dumb Agenda.
	I've heard of No Agenda, but not Dumb Agenda.
	Oh, Dumb Agenda is so much better.
	It's much better.
	It's not listed in No Agenda.
	Yeah, really.
	It happened.
	Yes.
	I'm cognizant of it.
	Every single show, I'm always happy if we get to do another one.
	Right, and that is determined on a weekly basis, and it's actually a twice-weekly basis, and it depends on your help, your donations, and your support to dvorak.org.
	And it would be my last plug for that.
	And the newsletter, I will say, is of extreme importance to the show, which you do all that, and that is your science.
	You really work very hard on getting people to open the newsletter.
	Right.
	Yeah, that's a challenge.
	And I encourage everyone, I've started moving the sign-up link to the top of the show notes right on the homepage.
	Sign up for the newsletter.
	And then make sure that if you're on Gmail, it's probably in the promotions tab.
	Yeah, it always shows up in the promotions tab.
	It will show up in spam once in a while because these guys don't care about you.
	No.
	At all.
	And that is the bottom line.
	This is your show.
	Yeah.
	You produce it.
	That's how it works.
	I can't say it any other way.
	People are producing.
	Yeah, we have the final production.
	We put it all together.
	We try to lead you into places where we think it'll be interesting.
	That's what we do.
	But it really is...
	I hate the word, but it's a community.
	You don't hate the word.
	You're full of it.
	Nah.
	It's like one of those words.
	It's a good word.
	Okay.
	It's a community.
	And everyone's a part of it.
	Yeah.
	Yes, everyone's a part of it.
	Over the next year or so, we're going to try to create more meet-ups so people can have their little get-togethers.
	Because it turns out, and we've both witnessed this, is that if you're out with the No Agenda community anywhere from Michigan to Tennessee to wherever, and there's a...
	To Moscow!
	To Moscow!
	You name it!
	A few of them gather.
	A few of them gather together, and they all like each other.
	It's like a social thing.
	Because anyone who listens to No Agenda will have a certain take on the world, and that take on the world affects your personality in just the way that other people who listen to No Agenda, you end up liking each other.
	So we could create a lot of long-lasting friendships if we put a little more effort into that part of it.
	And I think we're going to attempt to do more.
	Well, certainly I plan to be on the road.
	In the coming fall?
	I plan.
	I still want to do my trip to the Sacramento Train Museum on the Amtrak meet-up.
	Nice.
	It'll be great.
	Everybody gets on the train.
	They chug it up to Sacramento.
	And we all go to the train museum, look around, meet up, have a lunch in Sacramento, and then jump on the train and go back or stay there.
	I don't know what anyone wants to do.
	I think it'd be fantastic.
	All aboard!
	Train's good, plane's bad.
	Woo-hoo!
	We pick up everyone from San Jose up through the peninsula through San Francisco and on.
	Nice.
	Well, I think we did it.
	I think so.
	Play us out, maestro.
	Yes, this is another one of those things on the board.
	Oh yes, of course, for those of you who have the opportunity, listening to the show live has its own merit and is interesting, certainly if you're in the chat room.
	And not everybody knows that probably half an hour before we start live, there's a pre-stream, and I play songs, and sometimes even things we'll be playing in the show itself.
	We've got some longer jingles.
	Or things that have been sent in.
	It's kind of a, for me personally, I like it.
	You know, you get all kind of hyped up.
	Yeah, hyped up.
	Pumped up, that's right.
	Pumped up and ready for the show.
	Okay, so on the next program, that'll be your two interviews with Scully and Heil.
	Did you say Hail Apple to John Scully?
	I didn't dream up Hail Apple until after I did that interview.
	Oh, that's too bad.
	That's too bad.
	I went to the Apple store locally here, though, and I got recognized by two or three of these Apple guys, and I brought up the Hail Apple.
	Did they like it?
	They didn't get it.
	Well, I'll say, Hail Apple, John.
	I've raised my arm.
	Yeah, Hail Apple to you.
	Coming to you from the Crackpot Condo here in FEMA Region 6 in downtown Austin, Texas.
	In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, where I remain, I'm John C. Dvorak.
	We'll be back with our interview show next week on 737.
	Adios, mofos.
	All right.
	Yay!
	You heard, okay, so what we did, and we're back now.
	This is 200.8, you're hearing us.
	It's not like we're not going in and out and in and out.
	This is us before the next Sunday show.
	And what do you have for notes?
	I have some notes that...
	All right, I'd love to hear them.
	Let's hear your notes.
	I noticed that there was the word, there was something about Punch the Donkey that was in the Weenie and the Butt show.
	Huh, yeah.
	And when I heard it the second time, or the third time or the fourth time, I realized it was a sexual innuendo, the Donkey Punch.
	Yeah, and that came up one time on the show, actually, maybe back in the 200s.
	I recall you mentioning the Donkey Punch or something, and I just remember getting a lot of email explaining what it is.
	It's not good.
	No, no, no.
	No, it's not good.
	But that would be just Seth MacFarlane's kind of humor.
	I also know...
	Okay, let's go over these things from the beginning to the end.
	I got...
	We said a lot of yen no's.
	Yeah, no.
	There's something about radio stations.
	I put a note here, but I put it early when I listened to this thing, so I forgot what that means.
	Oh, my God.
	Comments on time, some overall style, but Fox, French, Fresh...
	Oh yeah, you were talking about...
	Or somebody was talking about working at...
	With Kevin Wendell.
	And you said, oh, he's a producer.
	Somebody Foxed something about Fox.
	He was actually a producer.
	And I want to restate that, because I heard that too.
	He started, not Fox News, but what we called the Coat Hanger Network.
	He was...
	Intimately involved in putting together all the...
	Because Fox wasn't a network per se.
	It started...
	They bought...
	They bought all the UHF stations and all these crazy stations they were buying up.
	And that's why it was called the Code Hanger Network.
	Wendell was a part of that.
	Well, his main thing was he was the producer of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
	Ah, right!
	Wait, wasn't that Quincy Jones?
	Yeah.
	Wendell was the producer.
	He was like a producer who actually worked.
	Like the showrunner.
	He may have been the showrunner.
	I don't know that he was, but he was one of the guys that was actually working.
	Quincy Jones was the executive producer.
	What was harder for me was that we both realized that we had done the pilot for CNET and we both had declined the millions of stock.
	I took stock.
	That was a mistake, John said.
	You took stock.
	I took stock.
	I didn't get that kind of stock, but I took stock and I sold it rather quickly.
	I was like you.
	I didn't have any confidence in this thing.
	Right, right, right.
	That was a mistake.
	Yes, it was a mistake.
	But we might not have been doing this show.
	I can give you...
	No.
	In half of these deals that we dropped that we didn't do or you didn't do it right or lost money doing something else...
	We wouldn't be doing this show.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Import sound silence thesis.
	You have this thesis about sound going dead.
	This is good sound.
	Oh, yeah.
	That's the thesis of the noise gate, which we only started using in the past couple of hundred shows.
	And I like, so when we don't, when we both are quiet and it's all digital, then there is zero signal.
	There's not a single bit of anything being recorded.
	It's just zero.
	Nothing.
	Null.
	And I like it because I know that when we, and we're very good at it, but it's natural.
	We don't set out to do it.
	When we don't talk for like that half a second too long, it gets everyone's attention.
	Like, oh, did something stop?
	Oh, well, you did get air.
	So I like that.
	I learned that from Scott Shannon.
	He said, silence is one of the best things.
	Let the room breathe for a minute.
	You'll have to look up Scott Shannon if you don't know who he is.
	I'll look him up.
	He's my radio mentor.
	Amenable personalities thing was good.
	That is more important than people like to think.
	And we don't see each other.
	And I think it's good.
	I think we'd get...
	If we were actually...
	This show would have not gone toward show 900 if we had been in the same studio.
	It certainly wouldn't have been the same show, I agree.
	No, it wouldn't be the same show.
	And I don't even know if we could get that far because I believe that.
	This is what happened to Martin and Lewis.
	You can get pretty far with a long-distance relationship If it's paying the bills and doing all these things.
	But if it's a short distance relationship, so you're seeing the guy all the time, it would get on your nerves because people have, especially older guys, you have certain habits and it just would get on your nerves.
	It would drive you nuts.
	And we made a point.
	Actually, you made the bigger point about it.
	We don't want to even see each other.
	We can't do the show in the same room because when you work with somebody for a long time, and this isn't fully understood by anyone who doesn't do stuff like this, is that you cue off each other.
	Yeah.
	And you see, oh, okay, I think, okay.
	And you're cueing off the guy's, you know, he's making a face, or he maybe pauses it.
	I mean, the greatest thing you can do, if you want to cue off each other on the radio, you can be talking, and then the guy picks it up, and he starts talking a little bit, and he, instead of cueing you with kind of the right, you know, kind of a lead-in to you playing a clip, for example, you just make a hand signal.
	Right, right.
	We don't have that luxury.
	And that...
	And we don't have that luxury, so we have to work on these other ways of queuing.
	It only works about...
	It works a lot, but it works 70...
	I think maybe 30% of the time they fail.
	Yeah.
	But nobody cares.
	To this day, I get people saying, wow, how many people do you have running the show?
	Because everything's so tight, and it's right on top of each other, and the clips start...
	It's not always tight.
	To us, it's not that tight.
	We're a little bit more critical, but yeah.
	The star of the show gag was funny.
	I wrote this down.
	Producer not elaborated or something.
	I'm not sure what that means.
	I don't know what that is.
	Weenie in the butt.
	I got a star thing here.
	Drawback to benefits.
	I don't even know what that means.
	See, this is terrible.
	Remember the early shows used to read my notes?
	It lasted about 10 episodes.
	I can't read my notes.
	People complain.
	Oh yeah, fact of the matter.
	Way, way more than that.
	A lot of fact of the matter.
	We talked about that in 207.
	Is the origins of media deconstruction?
	I don't know.
	Going back to what you were talking about, the hand signals.
	So we force ourselves really to listen to each other.
	You know, in order to get the subtle cues or, you know...
	Well, you know, this is really you.
	No, no, it goes both...
	Because I don't need a cue.
	I mean, I can jump in.
	I'll just step on you.
	I mean, I don't need to hit a button with a clip I've got coming up.
	You're the one that has to really pick up on the cues more than I do.
	I don't think I'm under that much pressure.
	It's, well, maybe not, but when either one of us has a thing we want to set up and discuss, I think in the past couple of years, we've gotten much better understanding, oh, okay, he's got a thing, because we don't discuss any of this.
	You don't tell me, hey, I got a package, or I got a couple clips in a row, or there's something I want to do, and sometimes we misunderstand, but To me, really, and this is brought up in those previous point shows, it is all theater of the mind.
	It is all...
	Yeah.
	It is all-encompassing.
	And I think it's...
	Podcast, when you're in someone's head, typically, on the earbuds, although I don't know if that's the typical way people listen anymore.
	There's a lot of Bluetooth in the car and...
	Stuff like that.
	But if you're listening on headphones or earbuds, it's important.
	It all matters.
	And listening is a skill that is diminishing in our world today.
	I would think so.
	Yeah, well, because people are always on their phone.
	Exactly.
	And you still haven't learned a song on your harmonica.
	850 shows.
	I haven't been playing the harmonica for more than 400 shows.
	I'm still trying to...
	What I'm trying to do with the harmonica is I want to understand completely the harmonica and the different...
	I have a bunch of different ones in different keys.
	And I want to be able to do little harmonica hits.
	Ah, yes.
	And so I get to feel for it.
	I've got the definitive book on how to play songs on a harmonica.
	One of these days I'm going to surprise you with a couple of things.
	Okay.
	Can't wait for that.
	We had the one...
	We didn't discuss this properly on any of the shows so far.
	The hookers and blow anecdote and the people...
	Oh, I say hookers and blow.
	It's rude.
	I didn't mention this, but one of the people that objected to it was one of our first and earliest dames.
	She's an older woman.
	And she still is, I guess.
	And she didn't know that blow meant cocaine.
	Oh, she thought it was blowjob?
	Yeah, that's what she thought was rude.
	Oh, well, like cocaine in hookers isn't rude, but okay.
	Well, not compared to blowjobs.
	I wonder how many people think that.
	That's a good question.
	For me, it's a music industry term.
	It's like a joke that's been going around for a hundred years.
	Yeah, lots of hookers and blow, though.
	I mean, it's just it's been around.
	Yeah, it's a music industry term because that's, you know, in limos.
	Limos.
	Who has a limo anymore?
	Well, they used to.
	Fools.
	Yeah, used to be a big deal.
	The limo.
	Now it's the escalade.
	Now, here's a couple of things.
	I interrupted when you were talking about the open source model, but you did come back to it, right?
	I wanted to discuss something that actually came up in that joke letter that you got and read about us being, you know, spooks or something.
	I've explained it before on various shows, but I'm going to explain it again why we developed the model we have for this show.
	I think...
	I forgot to point out, this is really kind of, we present an eavesdropping show, it's two guys talking to each other, you get to listen in, the audience listens in, and then if they get anything out of it, they hopefully donate and contribute to the show.
	There's a number of things I've noticed going through, I don't know, a decade or more of doing television cable stuff and other lower end than cable internet stuff is that when you have to have people on the show.
	This is why we refuse to have people on the show.
	We do not interview anybody.
	Or if we did interview somebody, I would do, for example, a standalone interview that would be used as a filler show.
	We've done this a couple of times.
	And we would run it just as a straight interview.
	Or I could take a clip from it.
	But nobody's coming on the show to tell us anything.
	And the reason is that over the years I've determined that the only good show is a show without guests.
	Huh.
	Which is pointed out in that letter.
	And the reason for that is there's a number of reasons.
	And they're all good reasons.
	One, you don't have to deal with a dud.
	Which happens a lot.
	It happens way more than you'd think.
	Most people are not good guests.
	They cannot talk.
	They freeze up or they don't have anything to say.
	Or they're only there to promote something.
	Or they're only there to promote stuff.
	And the second thing about not having guests is really great is that you make it a policy and then you don't get pestered by every PR woman in the world.
	Oh, my CEO would be a great guest on your show.
	Or, by the way, you do get them, that still happens, and then you can say to them, so you've never listened to the show, I take it.
	Yeah.
	Because if they're asking if they can put their CEO on the show, they've never heard the show ever.
	You know, honestly, for me, you're more interesting than Than most guests I could think of.
	I mean that.
	I don't want to talk to some guests.
	I mean, I've done thousands of interviews.
	The guests have an agenda, and the show is no agenda.
	Yes.
	They always have an agenda.
	Another thing that's a problem, besides the guest being a dud, the guest not showing up.
	Another problem.
	Doesn't show up.
	Yeah.
	Or he forgets, or he cancels at the very last minute.
	Michael Arrington failed to show up at a Cranky Geek show.
	He was booked, everything, timing everything.
	He stayed in bed, and he wouldn't apologize.
	Wow.
	There's a guy for you.
	Yeah.
	So all these, and this is a nightmare.
	And the timing of it, it's like, well, we can't do Thursday.
	Can you do Saturday?
	Can you do Tuesday?
	You know, it's all...
	But to me...
	I'm not really interested in...
	I like hearing other people ask them questions and I can use their answers.
	The same questions, probably.
	Yeah.
	Clip.
	A one-minute clip, which is kind of the nut, which is another journalism term, but it's kind of the nut of somebody's interview.
	The one thing that's really interesting.
	We can pull that out and just run it as a very useful one minute.
	Exactly.
	As opposed to having the guy in the show for 30 minutes.
	And if you listen to these guys, we watch all this stuff.
	There was C-SPAN and Charlie Rose and all these other guys.
	It's mostly blather.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	It's nothing.
	And then there's maybe something good and we can pull that.
	It's a much better approach.
	It's kind of the...
	It's a pet peeve of mine.
	It's kind of the...
	Maybe not.
	It's a little bit like The Daily Show, but I think we were doing this a lot earlier.
	And because it's audio clips, we can do so much more.
	We're not limited.
	We're not limited in general by a whole bunch of things that television does.
	But just to, you know, just to, look, we deconstruct media.
	It says it right there on the packaging.
	That is what we do.
	So we look at media.
	We don't have to necessarily deconstruct people, although that's also fun, and deconstruct words and things people say, you know, like that a lot.
	Actually, that's a good point.
	We don't deconstruct people, we deconstruct media, and interviews are people.
	We also should mention that we won the podcasting award, so that running gag that we're never going to win an award is over, and we didn't mention that because it wasn't done by show 200.7.
	And let me go polish up my award.
	Oh, I'm sorry, there is no award.
	It's just a title.
	There's no actual trophy.
	Well, there is if somebody does what they said they were going to do.
	Hmm.
	Mainstream...
	Let's stick on the open source model for a moment, because I can't reiterate that enough, and I see questions coming in.
	The whole idea is, and we started off very early by, please, copy the show, put it anywhere you want.
	We'd like for you to put the whole show in one place, not cut it up, but...
	Reblog it.
	Reblog it.
	Retweet it.
	But also, you know, and I think this was early days when bandwidth to Australia was particularly problematic.
	We'd have people create low, very low bandwidth versions so it wouldn't kill people's data caps in other parts of the world.
	I forgot about that.
	Yeah, we had the lo-fi stream, all kinds of stuff like that.
	Anything you want to use, it's okay.
	The same goes for the branding, for the logo.
	You want to create merchandise, sell it?
	It would be nice if you gave us a piece of it.
	That would be great.
	It's not a prerequisite.
	The only thing that I stop doing is putting...
	Publishing the jingles that we have.
	Because I got really sick of hearing our jingles on every other podcast with no attribution.
	And haha, he's not funny.
	No, that's not cool.
	So I didn't want to make that too easy.
	But there's lots of people who cut stuff out of the show and collect them like phone boy.
	He does that.
	So we feel that everything except for our likeness, our own Adam and John likeness, everything is pretty much fair game.
	And we'd like you.
	We encourage people to do that because it is a part of our distribution.
	And there's a YouTube version made every show, and there's all kinds of things that are out there.
	And sometimes they go away, they fail.
	You know, there's tons of, I mean, seriously, tons of extra sites and websites and initiatives that people start.
	And sometimes they peter out, but, you know, often they keep going.
	Like, No Agenda Book Club is still there, still going strong.
	And in return...
	I'm sorry?
	I was saying that the movie club is defunct, it seems.
	Right.
	And in return, since we realized that there's no way we could ever...
	I think it probably started like, no one's going to advertise on this show.
	I think we had our doubts about advertising on podcasts in general.
	But I said, no one will advertise on this.
	That'll never work for us.
	And we decided to introduce the value-for-value model.
	Which, hey, did you get some value from listening to us?
	Which we continuously hear.
	It helps people deal with the bull crap that they're being, particularly these days, inundated with, making them ill, physically ill, mentally ill.
	Yeah, a lot of people get sick listening to the news.
	Yeah.
	They get confused, so they get this cognitive dissonance, and they have this horrible look on their face that develops.
	I was watching Democracy Now!, and they had Chris Hedges, that kind of communist, a very interesting guy to listen to most of the time, against this guy, Paul Rubin, it's not Rubin, but it's that short, very short Department of Labor guy that used to be in the Clinton administration, who's now teaching at Cal.
	And his name is eluding me, but he was on, and he was so, he was a Bernie supporter, but he's all in for Clinton, and Hedges doesn't, he says it's all bullcrap.
	Hedges, actually, I'm trying to get a quote for a future show, but Hedges says, it doesn't make any difference if Hillary wins or if Trump wins.
	The system is the system.
	They can't do anything about it.
	And there's not going to be any change in this and that.
	And he listed all these things.
	He said, I don't see why anyone would get worked up.
	He looked a lot more relaxed than this poor character from Cal who just looks like he's wearing it on his face.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's just, and I think a lot of people end up wearing on their face this, what the media does this, it ages you, it causes you to be confused, you can't think straight.
	So terrible business.
	In fact, I came up while listening to the shows, I came up with another new little phrase that we can use once in a while, which is the mainstream media is not your friend.
	I like it.
	Yeah, they are evil.
	Yeah, it's totally evil.
	It's like evil corp.
	Then I cannot reiterate enough, again, that we truly consider people who are listening in, because that's what it is, you're listening in, they're our producers.
	You are producing the show.
	I think that is the big secret.
	I can't really explain how it happened or why it happened or how that came to be.
	But I feel that the majority of our listeners do feel like they're producers.
	And that's not necessarily financial support.
	That's all kinds of support that's going out and promoting us.
	There's a million different ways people can help, and they find new and interesting and innovative ways to do that.
	So you are deemed a producer.
	And NPR should have figured that out decades ago.
	But instead, they're still doing the, hey, send us $10, we'll give you a tote bag.
	It doesn't give you the same vibe.
	You're not really a part of the programming.
	Yeah, it's like, send that loser a tote bag.
	And a coffee mug.
	Now, we did mention our original artist was Paul T and Randy Asher.
	It was Paul Couture who came in later and did the website.
	Which is noagendaartgenerator.com.
	And he designed the original ring and a couple of other things he did before he kind of quit everything but the website.
	And now we have probably, I think, a core cache of about six artists, perhaps more.
	You know, led by a series of wins by Martin J.J. and Nick Duratt.
	And then we have some more professional...
	Yeah, we've got guys like Mark G. who have come in.
	Yeah, out-of-work artists.
	Yeah.
	Other guys that do just tremendous work.
	There was a list somewhere of the number of accepted artworks for the covers.
	And it's interesting.
	Everybody kind of gets in every so often if they try hard enough.
	But there's still a few guys who kind of dominate the scene because of the The gist of some of these artworks is like exactly what we're looking for.
	It's hard to explain.
	And I want to remind anyone who's a budding artist that Martin J.J. was probably one of the most...
	He submitted probably more than anyone historically.
	And I think he went for years without anything getting picked.
	That's right.
	And then all of a sudden, he caught something change.
	And this happens in everything.
	This is a neural network of the brain.
	This happens if you're a bowler.
	This happens if you're a pitcher.
	This happens in sports a lot.
	All of a sudden, something changes and now you're good because you've practiced a lot.
	And he essentially practiced a lot.
	Then he was just on a streak.
	He had to actually retire for a short time because we couldn't find any art better than this.
	Just too much.
	Too much Martin J. And so he says, I'm kicking everyone's ass, I'm going to take time off.
	But everyone brought their game up.
	It's a very interesting phenomenon, that art, because that art is a big deal to us.
	We're very unique in that.
	The extensions or namespace was set up specifically to allow that.
	Interestingly, the Apple podcast app doesn't do that very well, or at all, probably.
	Some do.
	But the larger beauty of this is we would not be able to do the show without all of this.
	Without all of the content.
	Even if we had to hire one producer, we wouldn't be able to make enough money to make it work.
	We have no producers.
	We have thousands of producers, but we have no in-house people twiddling dials.
	I don't think it would be nearly as good a show either, because you're better at talking and twiddling dials at the same time Than most dedicated dial twiddlers.
	Well, not just the dialing, but the links we get, the stories, of course, a lot of the...
	We've got guys in Rio right now, dudes named Ben.
	I'll be talking about that upcoming show, and they have real inside information.
	They're real boots on the ground, real boots on the ground, who are in these situations, who are in these places.
	To get that, you need a whole staff.
	So somehow we've come across some model that is futuristic.
	Actually, it evolved and it evolved largely due to the...
	And we've said this on the other two shows.
	It evolved largely by the producers themselves.
	In other words, our audience pushed the show along.
	And the example that I used and it was used in the other show is the douchebag thing.
	We never had, or even karma, but the douchebag thing was the real classic that we had nothing to do with this.
	And I remember in the early days when the douchebag thing started to appear and then we had the douchebag jingle, People saying, oh, these guys, they suck and they're calling their audience douchebags.
	What kind of professionals are they calling their audience names?
	And I want to remind anyone who thinks that's kind of crazy to do, listen to the Jim Rohn show someday and see what he calls his audience.
	It's quite amusing.
	But that wasn't even our idea.
	No.
	Nor was it our jingle.
	Same for karma.
	All of this has been produced and handed to us, and it's highly, highly appreciated.
	So there you have it.
	I think that's...
	I don't know.
	Do you have any notes that you want to wrap up?
	No, I did my notes in the beginning.
	Let me just check.
	We got the ISOs thing.
	No.
	I mean, you know, the obvious things.
	It's just the obvious changes that we've seen in the past year.
	The increase of clips, which actually makes it much easier for deconstructing.
	I think that the half promise of getting out on the road more is starting to kind of work.
	I have the stream of consciousness and it's nice to go out and meet people.
	You sound very...
	What does that mean?
	Well, we make big talkers when it comes to going out on the road.
	That would be you.
	I actually go on the road.
	What are you talking about?
	Hey, I was on the road once.
	Yeah.
	Well, let's make a solemn pledge that we go out on the road more often.
	I was just in New York and we had a big meet-up.
	Yeah.
	My birthday.
	Let's do more of that.
	Yeah.
	Well, I'd like to.
	And if you're here in San Francisco, I should go to one of these meet-ups and have them once in a while.
	And now the guy who is putting them together bailed out and shut it down.
	Well, that is the downside of having producers you don't have on a payroll.
	Well...
	I'll take our system any day.
	Yeah, I'm sure we can get...
	I still have to do the meet-up at the train museum.
	That's going to be great.
	I've got to get on the stick for that.
	I know it's been three years I've been talking about it, but...
	We have patience.
	We have patience.
	It's okay.
	Alright, I guess that should wrap it up then for a show 200.8.
	I think it does.
	Nay, 200.7.
	Nay, 200.5.
	And we'll never do it again.
	We'll never do it again.
	And you can don't forget thevork.org slash NA. Yes.
	Or get us through this episode.
	Yeah, for a Sunday show.
	And I'll be returning from Europe on Saturday.
	And we'll be all good to go to bring you another show on Sunday.
	And we'll be deconstructing whatever has come our way in the meantime.
	And I'll probably have a little report from Europe since I will be in France near Nice.
	Boots on the ground.
	Yeah, see what's going on.
	That's part of what I do.
	All right, everybody.
	So now you're up to speed on how we put it together, why we put it together in a historical smorgasbord of audio that you've listened to.
	Thank you very much for all your support.
	And also use this as a show to refer people to if you try to get them into the show at all.
	Excellent.
	Or if they come back, usually you can get them to listen to an episode and they say, that's too confusing.
	They're saying in the morning all day.
	It's not the morning.
	And so just say, hey, go listen to this show and it explains all the stuff we do, kind of, mostly.
	So, there.
	And with that, coming to you from the Garden State in FEMA Region 3 in the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from Northern Silicon Valley, which is kind of the brown state.
	In more ways than one, I'm John C. Dvorak.
	We'll talk to you right here on Sunday on No Agenda.
	Adios, mofos!
	Amen.

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