All Episodes
Nov. 23, 2017 - No Agenda
02:21:19
984: Show X
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, my voice is too fast.
Adam Curry, John C. DeVore.
It's Thursday, November 23rd, 2017.
This is your award-winning Gitmo Nation Media Assassination, Episode 984.
This is no agenda.
Appropriating the native culture of corn and broadcasting live from downtown Austin Tejas, capital of the drone, Star State, in the Cludio, in the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where it's a beautiful Thanksgiving day, the sun is shining, the turkeys are roaming around the neighborhood.
It's unbelievable.
I'm John C. Devorak.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill.
In the morning.
Ah, those Berkeley turkeys.
There's turkeys all over the place.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
We should be shooting them.
They won't let us.
Can't shoot the turkeys.
Happy Thanksgiving, John.
Happy Thanksgiving to you.
And happy Thanksgiving to everybody out there.
So this is...
And...
Yes?
We should reveal that this is a pre-recorded show.
Yeah, I knew.
I actually realized when I said broadcasting live, like...
Well, you were live to tape.
I'm live.
I'm a living.
I'm a live guy.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Because we're taking Thanksgiving and the day after off because nobody listens to the show on Thanksgiving.
Although if they do, they're going to get a good show anyway.
Yes.
And they're just not going to get a live show.
And what they will get, as is almost customary on the No Agenda show, is an explanation of the true story of Thanksgiving.
I wasn't planning on it.
Oh, you always do the story.
It's like the Night Before Christmas book.
How can we have a show on Thanksgiving without you telling us the true nature of Thanksgiving?
Well, I'll do the short version.
Okay.
Ready?
Yeah.
It's bullshit.
Oh, man.
It's all the corn and the stuffing and the turkey.
It never really happened that way.
No, there was a couple of holidays.
This is very carefully outlined on my blog.
You can look up Thanksgiving Truth, which is Thanksgiving, on the blog.
And all the stories are there.
There's two posts that discuss this.
And Thanksgiving was, you know, there was a harvest festival, these different things that took place in the 1600s and 1700s.
But Thanksgiving really became kind of an official thing during the Civil War.
And it was Thanksgiving for, you know, kind of celebrating the dead...
Soldiers more than anything.
And we give Thanksgiving for being alive, more or less.
Lincoln initiated it.
Then it became a national holiday over time.
But it all really stemmed from these Thanksgivings that were proclaimed every so often throughout American history.
And the one Lincoln did seems to be the one that stuck.
And so they worked it out.
Then they re-engineered it over time to make it seem it was something where the Indians and the And the Puritans, the people that were living around the 1700s in the United States, were having these yearly dinners together as if it was like, you know...
Yeah, kind of like on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Buffy.
This wasn't happening.
So wait a minute.
If our Thanksgiving's bullcrap, is the Canadian Thanksgiving also bullcrap?
Of course it is.
Oh, man.
It's just a different date.
Yours is the 1st of November.
So they made bullcrap out of bullcrap.
That's even worse.
You know, we didn't even celebrate the Canadian Thanksgiving on the show, which I think we missed.
Is it before ours?
How can that even be?
How can that be?
I don't get it.
It's on the 1st.
We're number one in everything.
They had to pull the rug out from under us, so they did it earlier.
Oh, okay.
All right, then.
Well, this show...
Yes, this is a special show.
We're naming it Show X because it's going to replace all the 200 episodes.
200.1 or 200.5.
Yeah.
200.6, 200.7, 200.8.
This would have been 200.9, I believe.
Yeah, but our onion was kind of rotten.
We did have a producer say, you know, I just started this show like around 500 and this onion approach you have toward the...
Show 200 is not working for me.
And I started thinking about it.
It's kind of lame.
So we're just doing one from scratch.
I do have some clips from the earlier shows.
Ah, very good.
Very good.
To help, because there's about two or three things that are better explained.
And what is the point of this show?
For people who are new who have not listened to the 200 series...
Yes, the point is that, and the point is, you know, we need an introductory show.
So why does this show exist?
What are we doing with the show?
How did it get started?
How did it get to here?
And I think this show should answer all those questions, plus answering the Thanksgiving question.
Alright, so do we want to just start with how the show started?
A lot of people don't know that.
Well, I do have a couple of things here that kind of will ease us into this.
Well, let me set the stage a little bit.
Where it was end of 2007.
I was living in Guilford in the Gitmo Nation GMT, which is south of London.
And I was traveling back and forth between London and San Francisco for...
It was probably still Podshow at the time.
I believe it was initially, yes.
And so I'd be in...
It became Mevia shortly after I got there.
Okay.
So, I would be in San Francisco for probably about two weeks at a time.
It was actually pretty rough going back and forth two weeks away from home and then, you know, then back for two, three weeks and then back again.
It was, although I did get a lot of cool gifts from Sir Richard Branson.
I got the bathrobe.
I got everything.
And, you know, and after I stopped traveling that much, it was about two months and then you are now at plastic level.
You get nothing.
F you, slave!
Well, I was like the top level of Virgin Atlantic, of the loyalty program.
Oh.
Of course, I was flying.
They'd be giving you a foot massage every time you came near the plane.
Pretty much, but then once I stopped that, that went away real quick.
Oh, I see, yeah.
Yeah, that stopped real quick.
Yeah, what good are you to me now?
Exactly.
So how did we meet?
Didn't we meet on a podcast or I was on the Skype maybe?
I don't remember.
We actually had talked about this well enough that I clipped it from the early show so we could just listen to the How Did You Meet?
And this is an enhanced version from 2010.
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 U.K.
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 Minor, hey dude, I'll do your email if you want.
You might want to have a web thing.
I think that would be more appropriate for what you're doing here, but alright.
And you were doing kind of a McLaughlin group type roundtable as the pilot for that show.
Wow, the sound quality is outrageous.
Oh, I got better ones than that.
Oh my goodness.
Now, I have to say that, of course, I know how stuff should sound, but the idea was, my idea behind, you know, podcasting was not only do we have our own little transmitter, Which is basically your podcast feed and your MP3 file, but also you should be able to do it on your laptop.
You should be able to do it on reasonably, you know, medium to higher end prosumer equipment that should be possible.
And I was always out to prove it, and this was not a good example of it.
It sounds like I have an Echo even.
I have a better example.
This is when the period, because you kept telling me over the, probably over the years, you were complaining to me that you were baked.
Oh, yeah, well, I wasn't.
And my comment back to you most recently was, well, you didn't sound it, you know, even though Mary and I have been stoned, it didn't sound like it.
That's my recollection.
Yeah.
And you never did sound it, but your attitude has changed.
I didn't realize it.
For example, and you just bitched about the sound, which leads me to a different clip.
This is a clip when Obama got elected that night.
This is a clip of the show, the beginning of the show.
And this is the clip 11-5-2007.
Obama just got elected.
We started doing a show.
This is something you would not do today.
You would not allow.
And you feel this is appropriate to rebroadcast?
It's only because it's funny.
It is November 5th all across Gitmo Nation.
It is quite a special episode of No Agenda, mainly because it's early morning here for me today and late night for John, exactly the opposite of how the show is usually done, which means it's time for No Agenda, coming to you from a very exhilarated and excited morning here in the United Kingdom, Gitmo Nation East.
I'm Adam Curry.
I'm John C. Dvorak and I, for one, welcome our new Obama overlord.
Hold on a second.
What is going on there?
What happened?
You probably didn't remember, but this was one of those...
We used to have these moments, and I forgot about them, where the sound would speed up or slow down.
I remember it speeding up a lot.
I don't remember a lot of slowing down.
That's pretty outrageous.
is horrible and but here it is this is when this is back in the day and your attitude about this is not what it is anymore it's one of the things we thematically we'll talk about today which is the how the show naturally evolved and i would listen to a lot of old shows to put this together and i realized that this show wasn't any good until show 100 for one welcome our new obama overlord Do you have a voice processor on your setup, John?
What's going on?
What are you getting, breaking up?
No, it's...
When you said...
It sounds like you have a Darth Vader voice.
Oh, yes.
Well, it's midnight, you know, so...
No, no, this is not your normal voice.
This is messed up.
I kind of like it, though.
Do this, do this.
Obama, you are my president.
Obama, you are my president.
This is great.
We'll leave this throughout the whole show.
I don't know what it is, but it sounds wacky.
Hey, John, congratulations.
We have a new president.
Well, you know, the funny thing is, you didn't get to watch all this because you were sleeping, but they were protesting.
I mean, there was a big gathering outside of the White House.
Oh?
Yeah.
And they were singing, like, you know, that song, Hey, Hey, Goodbye, da-da-da.
Na-na-na.
Na-na-na.
Yeah, okay.
And there were also signs saying, you know, Evict Bush Now.
Well, he pretty much got his notice, didn't he?
Isn't it like, this means he's out.
Well, the thing is, you know, a lot of people were saying, you know, like the last couple of days and there's some rumors going around that Bush was going to declare martial law and he was going to do this and he was going to do that.
I was cracking up every time I heard one of those concepts because the way I'm seeing it and the information that we're already hearing about, Bush wants to get out of there tomorrow.
These days, it's actually a feature when we want to sound like this.
So that would be something that shows how the quality of the sound has improved over the years because you didn't care.
You couldn't let it go.
There was nothing we could do back in the day.
Well, we could have reconnected.
We could have tried something.
We always tried to reconnect if it sounds like crap.
That's true.
There was no attempt to reconnect.
There was no attempt to do anything.
It was just like that the whole show.
If I recall...
If I recall correctly.
Now, this is a minor point.
I remember that I was in Guilford and it took like six months to get an internet connection, which I think was maybe...
Well, when you moved from Guilford, you left Guilford and you went to Amsterdam.
Yeah, but before that, I was actually using a dongle.
Well, in Amsterdam, you talked about this problem and then you...
Because I brought up the...
Apparently Virgin Net or something had some deal they were trying to do.
Yeah, but what I recall ultimately doing is I had a, what was it, HSPDI whatever dongle, which was kind of the, woo, before 3G even.
I think.
Or maybe that was 3G in the UK. And I had to position it in a certain spot so it would get the right connection.
And the whole show ran on that.
It's like an emergency situation.
If we're doing something from a hotel room, that works pretty well.
Technology has been our friend over the years.
There's no doubt about that.
It has helped extremely just to do the show.
Yes, I agree.
And so, anyway, but that had changed.
That's changed a lot.
In fact, it turns out we talk about this a little bit on show 200, where that's when I believe you got all your, you got geared up.
I don't know if you have that fancy device that you have now, but you got a whole bunch of new gear at show 200, because we talked about it.
Do you have a clip of that?
Because I have no idea what I had.
I think so, because it was just like, hey, we got a bunch of new gear.
I do have the opening of show 200 somewhere.
I don't know why.
Deuce opener.
Try that.
Okay.
Deuce opener.
Let's see.
Maybe I can tell you what gear it was just from listening to the sound.
They opened fire for public safety.
It's a friggin' deer.
Adam Curry.
John C. Dvorak.
It's May 16, 2010.
Time for your Gitmo Nation media assassination episode 200.
This is no agenda.
Yes!
Celebrating 200 episodes of Mediocrity and coming to you from the Hilltop Watchtower Crockpot Command Center in Gilmore Nation West in the People's Republic of Southern California.
In the morning to y'all, I'm Adam Curry.
I think not regarding Mediocrity.
This is number 200 from Northern Silicon Valley.
I'm John Cedar.
I just wanted to see if I could throw you off guard.
Well, you can always throw me off guard.
In the morning to you, my friend.
In the morning to everybody listening.
Yes, and congratulations, John.
Because you have new gear.
Well, yeah.
No, congratulations on 200 episodes.
Yes, I think it's pretty amazing.
I think it's a feat.
Now, again, with the echo, is that something from the clips, or is that exactly how it came off the show?
That's what it sounded like.
I remember this period because I was in Los Angeles, and I think this is when I started using everything on the laptop.
I liked the setup a lot because it had onboard processing, but there was a slight delay in my headphones when I was speaking.
Right.
That was only corrected recently, I guess.
For years I did that.
Yes, that would drive me nuts.
It was not easy.
You get used to it after a while, though.
And then when you take the headphones off, then you sound like a moron.
My voice is too fast.
Amazing.
Well, one of the things we did in the original show 200, and we'll get, I think, back on this track, which is we took questions and we answered a bunch of questions.
Yeah.
That's where we got the, you know, where'd your two guys meet?
And when'd you start the show?
And then we discussed it in as much detail.
I would say that the 200 shows, having re-listened to them, they're terrible.
Okay.
And when you suggest that we should just do it from scratch, it'll be a new kind of terrible.
Yeah, well, at least it'll sound good.
Yeah, well, everything sounds good now.
So I will say, whenever that happened, I think it was, I guess, was it in Texas?
Yeah, it must have been in Texas when I got the Universal Audio device.
And that really changed everything.
That changed my world.
It changed your attitude.
Yeah, now I want to be perfect every time.
Sure.
Yeah, it changed your attitude.
You're more of a perfectionist.
But let's listen to...
Because this time we didn't put on the original show, 200.
Let's listen to the...
One of the things I've noticed about the early shows is there's latency to an extreme.
I don't know why anybody listened to the show.
But let's listen to the opening of the first show.
Oh, okay.
Hold on.
Opening or first show.
Do we have a date on this?
Or do I guess I mentioned it in the opening or not?
Yeah, it was the 9 or 8, 26, I think.
Yeah, 27.
Yeah.
Welcome, everybody, to a brand new program on the Podshow Network, which could be titled A Number of Things.
We chose No Agenda.
But it could be the show with no imaging, no content yet.
The only thing it is is two guys with an idea of putting together a, what should we call it, John?
Agenda-less show.
Agenda-less show, exactly.
John C. Dvorak in California, Adam Curry here in London.
Something we cooked up, what was it, like a four-minute phone call.
Hey, we should do a show together.
Okay.
Let's call it no agenda.
Okay, and here we are.
Well, of course, the basis for a show like this, and I think everybody out there who has conversations with friends, they occasionally, especially when the conversations go on and on, say, you know, that would have been an interesting thing for other people to listen to.
True, true.
And I think basically, and I've actually started doing a show with my wife because sometimes she does a news analysis over the phone sometimes.
It's pretty astonishing.
Have you ever heard the shows I do with Patricia, with my wife?
Yeah, same kind of thing.
It's great, right?
We just have a conversation, yeah.
Right, and I think to some extent Don and Drew and almost everybody who'd like to chat pretty much provides this kind of entertainment.
Wow.
This is before I figured out the wonderment of the noise gate.
Well, there's that, and I also lied, because I never heard your show, and you caught me off guard.
Oh, no, I knew that.
I almost wanted to stop the clip and say, you're so full of crap.
I was full of crap.
But that's not, you know, when you're doing this sort of thing, you have to be full of crap to keep it moving.
Just to keep it moving along, baby.
Yes.
So the show was begun as a lark.
Well, the idea was just a conversation.
Which, of course, it turns out that that's not what we do best.
What we do best is clips and analysis and stuff like that.
The conversation is, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
We have some letters.
We're just going to start reading some of these questions in a minute.
And a lot of it is like, again, it's talking about restaurants, review restaurants again, and all the stuff we used to do.
But in this first show, though, I want to get this out of the way.
This clip is called The First Discussion of Show Length, which, by the way, will amuse anyone who listened to the seven and a half hour show.
No agenda.
No agenda.
Yeah, three, four topics sounds about right.
Maybe if we do it once a week, it might work out.
Yeah, I think that's a good idea.
I don't think we can sustain this length, because sometimes, I mean, the interview you had with Dr.
Ron was worth discussing for a while.
Yeah, true.
Okay, so we'll see.
But I would say, I agree, this is maybe a little bit on the long side, but just under, you know, 40 minutes is pretty much the max, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
Alert the affiliates, we're short!
40 minutes?!
Wow, that's just a clip-off at the end of our show these days.
What you got, man?
I got 40 minutes of clips left over.
But again, I have to say, a lot of this is down to technology.
Just bandwidth alone to be able...
I remember clipping stuff from the webs.
It took forever.
You click, you wait.
It took hours longer than it does today.
Even though now I have a whole system.
We didn't do many clips.
Almost nothing.
Four clips from me, three from you, four from you, three from me.
It wasn't a lot.
I do remember when I got one of my clips, I do have this clip, which is, this is the first mention of a clip and the style in which we execute the clips.
I received in my email this morning several sound clips, which John has, apparently he's got some form of an agenda today, and has prepared something, and the note said, for the show, please don't listen.
So I did not.
Oh, yeah.
And that really started...
Well, we have a theory, which is based on broadcast experience, that if you rehearse something, or if you set something up, or if you agree, okay, we're going to talk about this, or we're going to...
Oh, worse, here's your punchline.
It always sucks.
It sucks on mainstream.
I mean, you see it in talk shows where the guest is flummoxed and then the host says, well, wasn't there something about your dog that you want to talk about?
You know, they have to coax the idiots along.
And we found that I think throughout the years we continuously try to set up something and we try a bit from time to time.
The only bits that work are the ones that we ad-lib from scratch.
Yes.
Exactly.
And all media would be so much better if it was...
Well, you can't...
Television's a little more difficult, but it would just be so much more better.
And really, from a production standpoint, once I got this piece of software called Audio Rack Suite...
Which is an open source piece of gear that a couple of radio guys put together years ago.
And they kind of stopped developing it because it was done.
There's nothing left to do.
So hopefully if a new Mac OS comes out and we're all forced to upgrade, I can use it.
But what's great about it is it's just dragged from a finder.
You just drag in these clips and through MIDI it opens up a fader.
It's much easier for me to just immediately click and go.
You say something, I look at the misspellings on your clip list, I figure out what you're talking about, I drag it in, click, go.
And that's how, because I have no idea what these clips are today even.
It's really technology that has helped.
I will, I have to say that.
Well, you're also outrageously talented at working that system that you designed for yourself.
You know what's interesting?
Because I've been looking, you know, I've been talking about transitioning to Windows, and I've been looking for a similar system.
And, you know, disc jockeys today, they don't do crap.
They don't do any work anymore.
They don't have to select anything and put it into a player or, you know, like, well, gee, back in the day we had the songs on a cart.
And, you know, big magnetic, and the cart goes in and you start the cart.
Yeah.
These days, they've got a playlist.
They're pretty much tracking ahead of time.
They record their voice bit.
They schedule it in.
They go, you know, sit on a groupie for a while.
And it's very hard to get old school technology for making radio is the way I still see what we're doing.
Yeah.
I agree.
Yeah, it's the end of an era.
It truly is.
It truly is.
So we had the, we played the original opening.
I had the opening of the first show.
I had, here's the, well, let's go into the, when I think the show really got good is when we gave up on our idealism of no jingles, no nothing.
Was it really idealism or?
I think, well, okay, you're right.
It was a format.
Yeah.
I think we were trying to figure out the format, and we started with, oh, we'll just talk and we'll have a little conversation.
And then, you know, I think both of us felt like, well, it's missing a lot.
But you have apparently some moment in time when we first started doing this?
I have, yeah, I have a number of clips that kind of relate to that.
But first I want to get to what triggered our deciding to do a mockery of radio itself and music.
Which is the weenie and the butt clips.
Yeah.
And so I have them.
This is from show 200.
I took these three clips out of that show.
And so we hear them again, this explanation.
You can start with, I got three.
This origins clip, weenie and the butt in context.
We would open the show, the show that has no jingles, no sound effects, no agenda.
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.
It's about 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 sound-alike 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 at the end.
Cool weekends in the morning with Weenie in the butt.
WQHG, 97.1.
97.1!
97.1!
We have a butt.
In the morning, cool weekends.
And the butt.
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 slammed!
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.
Oh, weekends in the morning!
Oh, weekend long.
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.
They're 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.
And on the thing.
FM. Sadly, I've done many programs for real like that.
Yes.
In fact, on the original show, you went on and actually did a number of them.
I'm sure.
Maybe in the second clip.
Let's play the second clip.
Okay.
So we kind of decided...
We didn't decide.
It just happened.
Most of the show, by the way, for people who ask all these questions, it's really an evolution.
Yeah.
We don't have meetings.
No meetings.
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.
In the morning!
And so we ended up getting a bunch of these jingles and things, which some people complain about, but it paces the show well.
It is a mockery of the other model, but it has 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 or 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 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.
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 didn't realize we had the in the morning jingles that quickly already.
I guess that was, yeah, the Jeff Smith.
Sir Jeff Smith did that.
Well, actually, I tried to find out where this stuff was first coming from, so I did a little research.
And we can play the, let's play the third clip of this particular origins clip, but then I'll give you some genesis.
It's kind of interesting.
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, yeah.
The family guy, because once we started mocking that model, we started looking at the media and 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 is 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.
I have February 8, 2009.
The first in the morning clip.
In the morning!
Yeah, that sounds about right.
And that's, by the way, one of the reasons I'm glad we're doing the show from scratch is because I listened to the original show's 200 points, the 200 point X. And there was a lot of us just ad-libbing.
You know, like, I don't know when we did that.
I think after about a year we did, you know, we got some real numbers now.
And you're right, it was 2008.
And, I mean, 2009.
And that's only really three months into the show.
I have a cover.
Here's a good example of what we're talking about.
No, that's more than three months.
It's 2009.
Maybe this is a copy then.
Oh, no, that's right.
No, it was over a year.
What am I thinking?
Yeah, 2009.
Let me just play the ones that he sent us at that time.
In the morning, we still use them.
Thank you.
Yeah, what I was thinking is only about three or four months after we started taking donations.
I have different origin periods.
We started taking donations in late 2008.
Anyway, by the show 68, here's what the show opening in February 1st, 2008, or 2009, show 68, here's what the opening used to sound like.
It's time once again for the weekly adventures of Crackpot and Buzzkill.
Live from Gitmo Nation West in Southwest...
Wait, I'm in East.
From Southwest London, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. Dvorak here in Silicon Valley North.
I guess that was John C. Dvorak, I believe so.
Yes, you did.
And that is Gitmo Nation West.
I'm in Gitmo Nation East.
Fresh back in Gitmo Nation East where things are falling apart and the Brits have finally started to grab for the pitchforks and torches.
There were riots in Geneva yesterday.
I missed the Geneva, but yesterday, the British also, not riots, but they're calling Gordon Brown on his bullshit, the workers at, what is it, Total and a few other outfits, and we had a wildcat strike.
Yeah, see, that's what I sound like when I'm baked, for sure.
Yeah.
Well, it could be.
You probably were baked.
Yeah.
Back in the day.
But it was like the leg and all the rest of it.
These shows were not good, in my opinion.
No, it sounds horrible.
Yeah, I know it does.
So, I'm surprised.
Thank you for staying with us, the few of you who have.
Yeah, and the people go back and listen from episode one and continue to listen, and all the way up to today's show.
It's like, wow.
I don't know how it's doable.
Hey, when do you want to do some questions?
You want to do those after we go through the genesis?
Yeah, I'm going to get three scripts out of the way that we'll do the questions.
So, we'll get some of the stuff we'll do.
I also have a fantastic ISO. Got it.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm fast, but not that fast.
Amy, I love that.
Fantastic.
Hold on a second.
Amy, I love that.
Fantastic.
What was that about?
She was just baked.
Baked.
Okay, now here's the February 5th, 2009, Genesis of the In the Morning, and this is the first time we do two shows a week.
This is the opening from the first Thursday show.
Just like double mint gum, we're now twice as nice with the premiere edition of the Weekday No Agenda.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill in the morning.
Coming to you from Gitmo Nation, East and Southwest London, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. Dvorak here in Silicon Valley North, also known as Gitmo Nation, period.
Ah, what do you mean?
I don't get my piece of Gitmo anymore?
No, you get to be Gitmo Nation, whatever, East, and there's Gitmo Nation, West should be China.
It's all one big Gitmo Nation, man.
So I noticed that Rush Limbaugh now has a Gitmo Nation thing going on.
Oh, you're kidding me.
He calls it Gitmo Nation, literally?
No, it's something else, but it's similar.
I'm so happy we got you to sound better on this show.
Yes, I know.
I sound like I'm in a bucket.
Really, really horrible.
This is 10 days later when we started getting the...
We got all those clips in from Jeff Smith.
But it took really about a month or two before they were organized to what they are today.
Here's an example of how we tried to use...
Or you, you were the guy doing it.
How you tried to use them early.
Wait a minute.
What are we talking about here?
I'm sorry.
Original opening 21509.
Ah, okay.
I want to make sure I play the right one.
Originating from opposite corners of Gitmo Nation.
In the morning.
I screwed it up already.
This is No Agenda with Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill.
Yeah!
Coming to you from Gitmo Nation East in the southwest part of London in the Curry Terrace.
I'm Adam Curry.
Oh, that was even a pre-production example of our opening.
Yeah.
I think it was Young Paulette who put the whole thing together.
And I know it's Dave Fox.
I know that's the voice.
Dave Fox, very famous.
He's the voice of iHeartRadio.
He's got a great voice.
Although it's the music that ultimately we use for our opening.
I think it comes with Apple.
What is their program?
Logic?
Yeah, maybe.
Because from time to time people go, hey man, they stole your opening tune, man.
I'm like, no, not really.
It's like, it's free.
Yeah, well.
So we kind of evolved and I think the show really started to get better.
By show 100.
And show 100, I decided to listen to it again.
And this show is interesting because you were going to quit the show.
Oh, I remember.
We discussed it beforehand.
But, you know, it wasn't easy to talk you out of it.
But then when I listened to Show 100, I didn't realize two things.
The Show 100 was a major production with stuff I don't even remember for the life of me.
It was a long show, too.
Was it for then?
For then it was.
For now it's like...
So I don't think you're going to remember a lot of this stuff, but let's listen for people who want to reminisce or who are never going to go back and listen to the show.
Let me just set the stage.
I had left my first wife I think I was in Amsterdam with my second wife.
No, she wasn't my wife.
You were hanging out with her.
Yeah, but I was in a dark place.
Yeah, maybe.
Well, the show was pretty different.
Try it.
Armory, 99.
Adam Curry.
John C. Dvorak.
Countless stories covering the entire scope of real news and factual journalism.
From aviation to avian flu.
From tax dollars to taxonomy.
Broadcasting from every glistening corner of the earth to bring you your bi-weekly Gitmo Nation publication.
Working tirelessly to entertain and educate the righteous crowd.
Lend them your ears because Sunday, May 31st, 2009, the Crackpot and Buzzkill present to you the 100th episode of No Agenda.
Streams, drops, and forms all created and providing the citizens of Gitmo Nation the true identity of they and why the New York Times harbors ill will against pronouns.
Wine and Food, Real News, Shadow Puppet Theater, and of course, Fractals for 99 episodes strong.
Nights, producers, listeners, and your donations make it all happen.
Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak invite you to tune in to a hallmark event of Gitmo Nation.
No Agenda No.
100 on Sunday, May 31, 2009.
Ecstatic to bring you this very special announcement.
From an abandoned missile silo in Gitmo Nation South near Dallas, Texas, I'm Parker R. Snyder, and now, on with the countdown.
We'll see you Sunday, May 31st.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
Oh yeah!
It's time for episode number 100 of your Gitmo Nation publication.
It is the 31st.
This is no agenda.
This is no agenda.
Coming to you from a beautiful, I mean stunningly beautiful Amsterdam, the Netherlands, right on the canals with the sun streaming in.
It's still Gitmo though.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from an overcast northern Silicon Valley, I'm John C. Dvorak.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill.
In the morning!
Yeah, it is the morning where you are.
It's the morning.
It's always the morning on the show.
A real long foreplay and then almost premature ejaculation.
Well, at least you got the thing running an hour late.
If we really suck so bad.
Hey everybody, how you doing?
It's No Agenda episode number 100.
Good to be with you.
I'm very excited.
Can I interject?
Yes, please.
We have a bunch of people that have written in saying there was no episode 22 and this is not really episode 100.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Amy Winehouse is really important.
I'm just saying.
Yeah.
Did we not do an episode 22?
What happened?
I don't know, but it doesn't make any difference because since we had the one expurgated episode, this would still be episode 100, no matter what.
But this will be a controversial episode 100.
Oh, because of the count.
Because of the count and because of the show that we put in the can and never released.
Oh yeah, you're right.
No, we didn't put it in the can.
Oh, I did, in the trash can.
And then I emptied the trash.
It's gone.
The bits are gone.
There's no record of it anywhere.
Except for the second half.
You have the second half of episode...
The lost episode, right?
Right, lost episode.
So we'll call it 100.
Seems like a good idea.
We had the introduction.
Yeah, that was good.
We've got a new jingle, by the way, which was sent to us by our good buddy, The Jeff Smith.
You want to hear it?
Sure, go for it.
It's really for later on in the show, but that'll give me a chance to play it twice, so listen to this.
Time has come once again.
To help support No Agenda, my friends.
Help Adam and John keep the show going on.
So drop a coin in the bucket today.
Hey, at Dvorak.org slash NA. You could even be knighted, what you say?
Ah, Jess Smith, man, you slay me.
I love that.
Fantastic.
Oh, I wish I had that one.
You know, what happened to it?
I have no idea.
That whole opening, too, I don't remember that.
I don't even remember.
I mean, I heard it with Snyder, but I don't know who that is.
And since you were, you know, you complimented me very nicely.
You do that all the time about the production, but man, I got to compliment you on putting up with me.
Yeah, there's that.
Sometimes it must be difficult.
But I will say, yeah, and the funny thing is about that show, and when I listened to it, I didn't remember that opening, and I didn't remember, I kind of almost remember the Jeff Smith jingle, which he used later in that show, and I don't think it's, then it disappeared.
I have no idea what that happened.
And I would mention that after that disappeared, we haven't heard from Jeff again.
No, I hear from him.
Yeah, right.
He's saving children in Africa.
Yeah, he goes on missions to Africa now.
It's cool.
You guys like that.
So I found that to be interesting.
The last clip I have in this huge collection is a discussion that we'll probably get into a little bit here, which was...
It might stem a little bit from the clip that you have of the NPR lady.
Yeah, you want to hear that?
Yeah, let's play that first, and then we'll play our discussion about advertising.
We'll start answering questions.
Yeah, this was Vivian Schiller.
At the time, she was the CEO of NPR. And we were on her tail all the time.
I can't remember why, but we didn't like her.
And we thought NPR was full of crap, and then somehow she was doing a Q&A, and this genius clip came out of it, because I think we were always saying, you know, oh, I remember what it was.
It's like, hey, they're doing call to action, so they don't have advertising.
But then they would say, well, you know, this program is brought to you by Squarespace.
And then they would go to Squarespace.com, which they only did for a little bit because I think they got in some trouble for it.
But we were calling them out on, hey, you're just doing advertising.
You're calling it something else.
And then Vivian Schiller gave us this beautiful clip.
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.
I mean, this is the area that is most down for us, is in sponsorship, underwriting, advertising, call it whatever you want.
Oh, yeah.
And she was gone after that.
Yeah, well, she wasn't doing well there.
You can follow her on Twitter.
Didn't she go to the New York Times?
Yeah, and then she left there, though.
I think she went to Twitter, maybe.
Oh, that's right!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, bouncing around.
That's what happens when you get in certain jobs.
You bounce around.
What happens when you're no good?
When we had made this little discussion very early on about advertising from a content creator perspective, and I believe it's because I was irked Because we're still early within the first couple hundred shows, and you'd get the comment from somebody, some expert, about how, why don't you, what are you doing taking donations?
Why don't you get advertisers?
Why don't you find advertisers?
If the show's any good, you'd find advertisers, and you'd get this from people.
Why aren't you using advertising?
And advertising is not, for podcasters, with the exception of a very few people, Advertising doesn't work for crap.
You have to split the money with somebody else to add sales guy.
It creates a layer.
You have to take grief from advertisers.
You have to do meetings.
Meetings, yeah, it's one of our themes.
But here's a little discussion we had on the topic that I thought would be worth clipping and playing again.
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.
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 when the GVR 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 places, 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.
I'm glad you got that clip because that's a message to podcasters everywhere.
This is your biggest hurdle.
I'm convinced of it.
The minute you go to the value-for-value model, which I don't think we had coined yet here...
No.
The model was there, but not the...
Well, actually, I think you had coined it a little bit because I remember it being in that longer.
Even if I could make that clip longer, I think it might be in there.
But it was the beginning.
I agree.
I think you're right.
This hurdle...
There's two hurdles I saw.
One was...
Doing it.
Just doing it.
Just jumping in the pool.
And the other one is taking it so seriously that it really becomes part of your life.
You're not just goofing around.
And you mentioned in that clip, in that longer version, about tip jars and how stupid it is to be so passive.
You can't be passive.
You have to be aggressive.
Yeah, and also, I think we figured out pretty quickly that it was a mistake to limit what people wanted to give by saying, oh, chip in, chip in, $3, chip in.
Well, now that you mention it, we didn't have this in my notes, but I was thinking of a couple of examples of that.
One was the mistake podcasters make, and podcasters should, obviously, I think a few will listen to this, is that they go too cheap.
Yeah.
They're looking for a dollar.
A nickel to show!
Which is very much the NPR model, I might add.
Well, that's because you don't have to do anything more than that nowadays because they have giveaways and they have the big underwriters.
Toadbags.
Toadbags and coffee mugs.
But I was thinking about this because I noticed that once we kind of opened it up and created the executive producer and Knighthoods, two different tracks for everybody to start donating it, they would give more money into the support for supporting the show.
They would give more.
And with, you know, knowing that their note's going to be read or whatever the rationale is.
But when you had it, we had it for a while, $2 a month.
Right.
Which is how we kind of started, stupidly.
And that would, even though there's still actually one or two guys that are still on that track.
Yeah, sure.
Through the old PayPal account, too.
Yeah, the old PayPal account.
That's a loser.
Right.
And when I see people in this, like, oh, you want to do this, and we want to get this much money, and it's a dollar, you get to pay, you know, 15 cents a show.
That's kind of low-end thinking really hurts you.
And I'm going to give my favorite example of this.
Andrew Sullivan, they kind of write with gay...
Yeah, he was a blogger.
He was a very famous blogger, wasn't he?
He came up with, he's going to create an online magazine just about him.
And he did.
And he's had a yearly subscription of something like...
It was a yearly subscription, very rigid, and we are open to any amount of money, more like a church, I'd say.
But he had this, you know, $24 a year or something like that, and you get this...
Access to his thing, which of course ends up being bootleg.
But we need to just say, this only works if you produce an outstanding product.
If you don't have that, then this is not going to happen.
And quite honestly, listening to some of these old clips, I'm amazed.
Yes.
So you actually killed your own argument.
Yeah.
Now...
So, Sullivan, I don't know this story to be absolutely true, but I do know that Sullivan opened up big because he was very famous at the time, and I think he had something like 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 subscribers.
I remember the number was he was making a million a year.
That's what I remember.
Yeah, it was a million a year.
Why didn't he keep just doing that?
What did he do?
Because I believe it fell off like it does with all these other subscription models.
PayPal kicks you off.
You lose this guy.
You lose that guy.
They stop subscribing.
They fall by the wayside.
We have a lot of people overboard.
It doesn't work.
I think he probably was making a million a year and it became less and less and then nothing.
Yeah.
I just don't think that the idea of having a simple subscription as your only source, and I've seen podcasters try to do this, the model that we attempt to do, and they keep it, they limit it.
They automatically limit it.
You want to give them money?
It's 19 bucks.
You can give them 19 bucks, but you can't give them a thousand.
Which is the downside of Patreon.
Patreon is set up in the wrong way, in my home opinion.
Yeah, Patreon is very limiting.
For example, if somebody says, why don't you use Patreon?
Well, there's other reasons we don't use Patreon.
Mainly, their contract, we don't like it.
But we have, like, every couple shows, we have new offerings.
And they're just, you know, set up using PayPal.
And you can set up a new, you know, we get some special deal, and sometimes it's open donations, a random donation, a self-donation.
And seven times out of ten, it's the producers, the listeners themselves, who come up with some crazy idea that we then adopt.
Yes.
You know, like 6969.
We have the hams with 7373.
We have 8008 for boobs.
I mean, this is all stuff.
We didn't come up with this.
No.
Yeah.
We could have, but no.
Yeah, but we didn't.
Well, the boobs, I don't know how you could come up with that.
Or the little boob, 6006.
Yeah.
We had boob, but we never...
We did come up with a little boob.
We could have, but we didn't.
It was somebody else.
That's a great one, too.
Yeah, I know.
And...
It's just the model that we put together I think works better than anything else I've seen out there.
We've tried to get other people to do this exact same model because I think it's a good model for anybody.
And it stems pretty much from dedicating ourselves to the model and not even thinking about advertising.
And taking a risk.
We took risk.
You think so?
I never thought as much of a risk.
Well, I gave up my job at my own company.
Yeah, you did.
Well, you took a risk because you gave up.
You quit.
But you were fed up.
But also, I couldn't sell it to myself.
Here I am at a podcast network, which you can't monetize the network.
You know, trying to make cheap content and put stickers all over it with advertising.
And meanwhile, the real fun was doing the No Agenda show.
And it was just like, this is really, I love this.
I love that when I told you, hey, I enjoyed this.
Here's how much I thought it was worth.
That is so much more fulfilling than, gee, we got all the views we promised.
There's engagement.
Boom.
Yeah.
Thanks, advertiser.
No, it sucks.
Yeah, send some bots through and have them click.
Yeah, I don't even want to talk about that.
But anyway, so that's the way the model came about, and I think it's good.
I mean, we have our ups and downs.
It's not very consistent unless there's some gimmick or something fancy going on or it's an anniversary.
You know, we struggle with...
I mean, it might as well be, this is probably, let's do this as our little donation segment.
Well, hold on.
Let me interrupt you.
I'm going to show my support by donating to No Agenda.
Imagine all the people who could do that.
Oh yeah, that'd be fab.
Yeah, on no agenda In the morning Also the Jeff Smith.
And we want to mention, we're not going to thank anybody on this show, or the next for that matter.
And so anyone who contributes to these shows, these particular shows, like if you send something in over $50 today, it will be on, let's see what show we're going to bring in.
986.
986, then it'll be the 30th, the last day of the month.
And so we'll do a big donation segment, which, believe me, we're used to.
Although it'll combine a couple of shows.
It'll actually combine three shows.
And it'll be three times longer than usual.
But people, this time of year, they're not, it's Thanksgiving, nobody's listening.
People like the donation segments.
Those who don't know how to get through it, and they miss important things.
Yeah, we have good stories.
We make the donation segment interesting.
Thank you.
And I think it's very entertaining.
Another point that needs to be made.
Since we're the granddaddies of the podcast here for the moment, you've got to make it interesting.
Yeah, so...
Just sitting there and just, you know, thank you for this, thank you for that.
No.
And somehow we roped ourselves into playing classic jingles and all kinds of stuff for people, which I think does make it interesting.
Yeah, except when they all ask for the exact same jingle one person after another.
That's random number.
Random number theory.
But anyway, Dvorak.org slash NA. We'd appreciate it if we got some help for this episode, which we are...
Yeah, and I would like to thank everybody.
For the better part of 10 years, we've successfully been able to create this with you.
Thank you so much.
And I'm not just thanking you from the bottom of my heart, from my wife's Baltimoreville.
It's not just the contributions through money.
It's everything.
It's all the stuff that you guys helped produce with.
I mean, that is the true community.
And luckily, there's an understanding that the only way we can do our job is if you support us.
And it works.
And I think, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe sometime in the future, someone will go, hey, look what those guys were doing back then.
Maybe.
Maybe.
That's a possibility, and that will bring us out of this segment into the questions.
Hold on.
I do want to just mention, since we pretty much mention on every single 200 dot whatever episode, that even with our model, and this is important, we have the most messed up donation address in the world.
Dvorak.org slash NA. You go on the street and do a Jimmy Kimmel man on the street, 9 out of 10 people can't even spell Dvorak, let alone if they get to the URL. But this is the magic of what we do.
Dvorak.org slash NA. It works.
Jingles work.
They work.
We use a lot of old tricks.
And if only the new broadcasters would understand that these old tricks still work.
They were developed over time when radio was king.
Back in the good old days.
And actually, after radio got knocked out of being king, it got even better in terms of the tricks because you had to use more tricks because you were competing with television.
Right.
So radio really got to the point.
I mean, the morning zoo model is not something that would do well in the 1930s.
And Scott Shannon still does it on CBS FM in New York.
That's where I learned how to do it.
He still does it.
The number one station in New York, believe it or not.
It still holds water.
Well, you mentioned a second ago that what will people look back on and think of this show.
I don't think they're going to think much of the first hundred of them, but after that I think we got on a roll.
And that brings us to a question from Larry Hay.
Okay.
Cop-out question he calls it.
May I please ask how do you two experts want to be remembered a hundred years from now?
Oh.
Huh?
Okay.
Well, answer.
You want me to go first so that you can have a much better answer?
No.
I would like to be remembered by what I fancy the most is when people send me an email and say, wow, you really changed my life.
Or you helped me with my kid.
Or something is going better because of the show.
That is something you rarely get in mainstream.
Coming from that world, it's throwaway product.
We give it a crap.
Throw it out.
Done.
It's just used to sell.
We use the move product.
Yes, exactly.
It's not about the show.
In mainstream, this is about the show.
And over time, I think that we discovered ourselves that we were actually helping ourselves deal with the insanity that's going on in the world, which is in no small part thanks to the internet.
You know, people are getting ill from this stuff.
And I think we kind of naturally identified it, and it was...
I always found it good for myself.
Like, oh, now that I've talked with John about this, and we're laughing about these morons and all this idiocy, instead of being afraid or scared or worried or, you know, any number of things, that is usually intentional.
So I would like to be...
If someone somewhere said...
In a hundred years from now, hey, those guys, you know, apparently they really help people out a lot with their format, with their stylings.
I think that's as good as answers I could come up with.
Oh, cop out!
Yeah.
Come on, give it a shot, John.
I kind of want to be remembered for some original thinking.
That could be documented.
I like the idea of helping people, and I think that people get it, whatever they get out of the current version of the show, and the show, I think, is versioned.
I think you have your original show, and then the show we talked about restaurants and That, by the way, the show is also a bit about our lives, because we did that.
I wouldn't see you for several weeks or whatever, and then I'd be in San Francisco, and we'd go to a...
It was kind of cool, because I had the Mevio credit card, and we'd go to a restaurant, and I'd be like, big spender.
That was very good.
We have to have a meeting and some research, and we have to discuss stuff.
We were totally just raping the company.
We weren't totally raping them.
We could have done better.
Exactly.
We're nice guys.
We didn't want to make it too crazy.
And people did like that.
In fact, I want to move to a question from the Twitters.
We talked about all kinds of stuff that bothers us.
The food stuff was always good.
I think we still do that to a degree.
Here's a question from Adam Pert.
Why the vinegar fascination?
This has just become a running gag, I guess.
Well, I have this vinegar book I'm supposed to do, but I have a problem with some of these little books.
Stop, stop.
You have a problem with any book.
Since I've known you since we've done this show, you have not published one book.
So one of the things that I've had a fascination with is people who think that what's called a mother of vinegar, which is a big gob of cellulose that actually produces vinegar because it's a form of a cedarbacter, not the normal ones.
Xilinx, I think, is the name of it.
It produces a toxic vinegar.
You have stomach aches or nausea or heartburn for a long time trying to get that out of your system.
And people still make vinegar from it.
I keep wanting to do this book as a public service.
There you go.
Helping people once again.
Sorry?
Helping people once again.
Yeah, helping people once again.
And so I keep reminding myself to finish this book.
Here's what my problem tends to be with this sort of book, non-fiction.
Is that I do all the research, I got all the research done, and then I find out what I need to find out, I know what I need to know, then I might as well go do something else, because I'm satisfied with my own curiosities.
I'm done.
Now I know what it is, I forget about it.
Yeah, I understand.
I know you a little bit, so I understand how that works.
Do you have anything on the email?
I got an email from Andrew Scrediff.
I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name.
John, would you consider indexing specifying clips you'd like to run on a show by number?
Telling Adam simply something like, play clip three.
Oh, how incredibly boring.
You might as well call yourself Robin.
Well, it's what it is.
That comes from, this guy obviously listens to Mark Levin!
Ah, okay.
Mark Levin and some of these other guys, and so does, I think, to an extent, Savage does this.
Yeah.
They say, clip three, go.
Oh.
And the guy will play clip three, because that's what he does, he's just playing clips.
There's no, Adam doesn't obviously remember this, because he would have said something already.
Hmm.
I tried.
Oh, you did try a numbering system.
Yes, you're right.
I recall.
Right.
He basically told me to pound salt.
He refuses to do that because he feels like a monkey.
Oh, that's not why.
Well.
No, that's not why.
There's got to be an element.
No, I find it actually much easier.
Of course, now I know you pretty well.
Yeah, you can pre-guess the clip.
Yeah, when you're talking.
So that's what I do.
And there's a video out there on YouTube called How the Sausage is Made.
You can see it and you hear John talking.
You hear you talking about, okay, blah, blah, blah, whatever the topic is.
And you can see my mouse.
Like, oh, is it this one?
Is it that one?
Oh, okay.
Ah, I know what he's talking about.
Drag it in.
Maybe there's two different things.
I mean, two clips of the same topic.
I'll drag them both in.
Get ready to start.
I like being able to start a clip without you saying anything at all.
No cue.
Yeah, that does happen on a really great show.
And this is how I actually determine the show is good.
It's smooth as silk.
I'll be yakking about something and he will see what I'm talking about as a clip.
You see the clip?
And then I will just...
Stop talking.
Do that pause, a cue, and he'll nail it.
And when you listen to one of those shows, and they're not every show, but there's more than you'd expect, it's dynamite.
Yeah, and that's why many people, professionals, say, do you guys edit that show?
How do you, gee, how much work do you put into that?
No, we do it live.
We do it live!
So, that's the real reason...
And it is, I think it's annoying.
No, it's not necessary.
We don't have an engineer.
We're working on the show together.
The engineer's not part of the show on the Rush Limbaugh show.
I mean, Snurly comes in once in a while through his headphones, but we don't get to hear him.
No.
It's the old-fashioned one-guy yakking.
And, yeah, it's because of our combined talents that the show actually works and is cost effective.
Because, you know, you're a professional.
You're a broadcast professional.
I hear when you're ready for the clip.
I often misguess it.
Three, four times I'll start the clip and, you know, you usually have a little bit of pad in the beginning of your clips.
And I'm sure people have heard that.
You know, the clip will start, you'll hear it, and you're talking, oops, oops, stop, rewind, stop, rewind, stop, rewind.
But yeah, someone even suggested, yeah, you should get a red light.
No!
Red.
Yeah, like you press a button, you press a button, I go, oh, okay.
No.
Now, there is, of course, a way to do it, where you could be starting your own clips, but what's the fun of that?
Well...
Yes, and I could actually change my rig and have a...
I could actually do the clips from here.
I just need to change everything.
I could put a mixer in here and I could run my own clips.
But the way it works now, it's so interesting and I think it kind of works a little better.
It's a little more honest because there's a clumsiness sometimes that's charming, I think.
I agree.
Dean Reiner.
It says, I'm aware of the lack of consequence to this question, but to whom or what does Adam announce the nightings?
And then he has K-what?
Huh?
To who or what do I announce the nightings?
Yeah, I'm not sure what this means.
Does he mean the music?
No, he's saying to whom.
Who's the audience?
I don't know.
People are the audience.
I asked the dames and knights to be.
I asked them up on the podium next to the lectern.
And obviously, down in the...
In the hall is the round table with the existing knights and dames.
They're all sitting there watching.
I don't understand what the question is.
Yeah.
I think you answered it.
Connor Jarrett, your thoughts on the future of podcasting.
Do you see it being value for value model or a hell of shilling tongue brushes and razor blades?
Yeah, I think that's what it's going to be.
I mean...
Tongue brushes?
Yeah, and razor blades.
Sure.
Not a lot of people will do this model.
So if you think...
I'm just saying, what it will be in the future, just look at it.
Everyone's doing advertising.
I don't think they're going to be very successful.
In 100% agreement, nobody wants to do this model.
I mean, we do have Jen Briney.
She does this model.
She does quite well for herself.
And you mentor her.
And I think...
Yeah.
And it was helped.
But...
There's other people that could do this model, and they just won't pull it.
I don't want to say who it is, but there's somebody that's a version of this model, but they use Patreon almost exclusively, which we believe to be a mistake.
And they once said they can't totally get into the model because this person once said, I don't think I'd feel comfortable taking checks.
Ah.
And Adam and I discuss this every once in a while.
We know who it is.
And we discuss it, and you shake your head.
Why wouldn't you take money?
I don't understand.
Oh, I don't know.
I wouldn't feel comfortable.
I'm taking money from...
I mean, I can take the check that comes in the mail from Patreon, but I won't take a check from a listener.
Why?
And, in fact, you've kind of made a hobby of looking into all these alternative forms, like pop money and...
Yes, and there will probably be more.
My money right now through a credit union does work.
Checks work great.
Everybody wins with checks.
Everybody wins.
There's no cost.
It's fantastic.
No cost.
And the bank has to pick up a...
It helps the mail.
It keeps the U.S. Postal Service in business.
This is a very good thing, these checks.
Yeah, and we like the checks.
Yeah, and sometimes they're pretty, you know, there's nice things on the checks.
Some people send their own check from their personal account through the mail with their own handwritten check.
You know what it is, John?
It's not a check.
It's content.
Yeah, it's content.
That's what it is.
Exactly.
Alan Bradley.
Why do you interrupt Adam's professional well-written show opens with duck calls and sound effects?
I don't do that that often.
I think you don't do it often enough.
You started doing that a couple years ago.
Nah, it's more than that.
Five years ago, I'll say.
Yeah, and it began with a slide whistle.
You started with a slide whistle.
Slide whistle.
And the harmonicas.
Yeah, harmonicas and slide whistles.
And I think it was like a Spike Jonze thing.
Just, you know, once the module...
Just throw something in there.
Holy spike, Jones.
Yeah, another, you know, jingle-like thing for a transition or an accent or, you know, and we also have the bells, of course.
I think I stole both of those.
You started with a slide whistle.
I got a slide whistle.
That's true.
You got a bell?
I got a digital bell.
I have a real bell.
Well, I have a real bell.
There's the real bell and here's the digital bell.
Ah, okay.
Well, you got two bells then.
I have a gong.
Anyway.
Here's my question to you.
Just right near your chaise lounge where you are now.
Yeah.
What noisemakers do you have?
Just give them to us one by one.
Okay, I've got the recorder, the off-key recorder.
I'm going to come to your house, I'm going to play that thing, and you're going to be like, wow, I had no idea it actually wasn't broken.
No, there's no way.
Look, there's no way.
This thing is broken.
It's not broken.
You're not doing it right.
I'm doing it wrong.
I got chimes.
I got the gong.
Well, come on.
Give us some sounds.
What chimes?
These chimes.
I don't play them that much because they're kind of set over here and you can barely hear them.
And so I had to pick them up and take them near the mic.
So I just stay there.
I never really use them much.
I got the two sound makers, electronic sound makers, like this one.
And...
And this, the other one, this one's got four by five.
This has got 20 buttons on it, and the other one has four.
I have a bunch of harmonicas with different keys.
I have a, right at hand's length, I've always got this ready.
I have that horrible sounding, this thing.
Oh, no, no, that's a bad one.
People get very triggered by that thing.
Yeah, I don't like it, and it hurts.
I hit it with a piece of plastic this time, so you couldn't really hear it, but oh my god.
Yeah, that's what the teacher, we got that because the teacher was using that in class to get the children's attention to make them sit down.
I bet it did.
I got this.
I have the duck call, I have the moose call, or deer call.
These are all right at my fingertips.
Well, give them to us.
Oh, okay.
Well, they're at my fingertips, but I'll push them aside.
Here's the...
I got this.
This is a good one.
I forget about this all the time.
I need to...
I got this thing.
This.
Yep.
Got that.
Which also sounds like this.
I got this.
And this.
Forget about that.
I don't use it that much.
much.
I got this.
I got this.
*laughter* And your family gives you these things as gifts for birthdays and Christmas, don't they?
Yes.
Where's your Hillary pen?
The Hillary pen.
Yeah, that's not right on my fingertips.
That's on the table.
Let me take a spin around here on this.
Chair should be one.
There it is.
And a pile.
A pile of paper.
It's a classic.
Yeah, it is a classic.
And then I got this guy.
Yep, I got this guy.
I got that one.
I love that one.
I only have three noisemakers.
Actually, this is not a noisemaker.
This is my instrument.
I've gotten pretty good on the slide whistle.
Yeah, they're actually good on it.
Well, that's not by day.
And we both have kazoos.
I don't know where mine is.
That's my kazoo.
You don't need as many noisemakers because you have the soundboard.
Yes, but I do have this.
I got that.
Yeah, I have one of those.
I lost it.
And the most important one is this.
Okay, everybody.
I use this for many.
We can make a lot of racket.
Yeah, so that's what we have.
Alex B. writes, will you continue the show for the rest of Trump's first term like you promised right after he was elected?
I don't remember this.
I keep hearing jokes about exit strategies and hints about quitting.
I know it's selfish, but I would hate it if you quit too soon since I only started listening right after Trump was elected.
I don't know.
And he's asked for my recommended suite of antivirus software and other tools.
I use Avast.
AVG. Don't you use AVG? No, no.
I switched to Avast a long time ago.
I use Avast free and I also use Spy Hunter.
Yes, I have Spy Hunter.
Spy Hunter.
Spy Hunter.
It does the trick.
Adam, when did singing along to the ride of the Valkyries, when did that begin?
What makes rituals like that so important?
I'll tell you, but let me answer it for him before he answers, which is he's superstitious.
Yes, correct.
Do you notice you hold any other superstition outside of the show?
Oh, tons of superstitions.
Yeah.
It's all part of the Tourette's, obviously.
I don't remember exactly when it started.
I do know that we were talking about, or I'm sure it was something that came up on the show, that Hitler's guy, Goebbels, The PR guy.
He would always play the Ride of the Valkyrie before Hitler did an important big speech.
I thought, well, you know, that's a good idea.
They'll get everybody kind of...
And we have a very good version of it, too, with the fat lady.
Even though we've never seen her, we just...
You know, you imagine it's like she's a nice, plump lady who's singing that.
There's no other ladies look like...
You can do that unless they look like that.
That kind of operatic...
I think so.
It's perfect.
And...
Gee, I don't know.
Then somehow Sanco de Mayo came in and that became a thing.
I don't know where that came in.
I couldn't find it.
I don't know.
Yes, I'm very superstitious.
For one thing, that song is not kept on the recordings.
No, it's not.
It's impossible to track down when that happened because we don't record that part of the show.
Well, I do on the backup recorder, but I always delete that.
Yeah, you can't keep all that stuff.
So we'd have to go through show after show where you first did it, where you first did Sanco de Mayo, and then you did it and did it.
It is my recollection.
You did it and did it and did it.
And one time you didn't do it and there was some foul up with the show.
And so you made the assumption that That it was the missing Sanco de Mayo.
And to this day, if you miss Sanco de Mayo, you're very upset.
Yes, and since a lot of people listening to the show have no idea what this is because it's always on the live stream and it's never in the show itself, someone came up with an abbreviated version in...
Which is kind of like break glass in case of an emergency.
If I miss saying Sanco de Mayo at the right point, it makes no sense to start the whole thing over again.
Instead, we have this version.
ORCHESTRA PLAYS
ORCHESTRA PLAYS Jeez.
Yes, and what we also have is the Fat lady!
We got a couple of shouts like that.
Yeah, it is superstition.
But it's kind of like getting ready for the big game.
I take this seriously.
It's three hours.
We've been up for hours getting everything ready.
I'm getting psyched.
That's what it is.
Getting psyched.
Yeah, it's like a football game.
Honky Tonk Willie writes, your show is immensely educational.
As such, without certain background information, much of your discussion lacks the necessary context for new audience members.
This is one of the reasons we do this particular show every so often.
Here's a few items I think would be good to address.
We're not going to address any of them probably, but I'll list them.
An exposition on pipelines would be good.
Nord Stream, Sud Stream, Qatar, Iraq, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
Is he saying that would be good to have that?
Well, we've done it before.
There's a show dedicated to it.
Yes, that's exactly why I'm so surprised.
I don't know that he knows what show it is.
Two.
You can look it up while I read this list.
It's a long list, by the way.
We're not obviously going to be able to address it on this show.
TTIP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, said that and other huge trade agreements that are not opaque.
A roadmap of liberals and conservatives, classic and modern, laid out on top of current Republican and Democrat ideologies, hawks and doves, and where the neocons fit into the mix.
Globalism versus nationalism, what they really are versus what people think they are.
Like people on the street Bit with people thinking socialism sounded pretty good.
People think globalism.
One big groovy global village.
Five, or one, two, three, four, five.
The economic hitman style of exploitation.
You explained it fully several years ago, and now just refer to it by name.
Expound on this.
Ukraine, number six, Ukraine hits at least four of the above, so that's a rich subject for a recap.
Seven.
Seven countries in five years.
We do that a lot.
Yeah.
In fact, now it's really in play again.
He says he gets a lot of play on the show, but I can hardly remember the thinking behind it.
We are spreading democracy, giving the finger to Russia.
There was no thinking behind it when it first showed up.
No.
There was no thinking behind it.
It was just something that was told to Wes Clark.
He'll want to go to episode 426 of July 15, 2012, that was the Pipeline Report, and that is the episode where we discuss all of that, all of those pipelines and everything behind it.
And that still is an ongoing thesis.
We don't talk about it that much anymore.
A lot of these projects have been stalled, and the focus is a bit off of Ukraine now.
And that was also thanks to one of our characters on the show back in the day, Mr.
Oil, if you remember him.
Mr.
Oil was a commodities trader, traded oil, a Russian guy living in the UK, and he explained to me how everything really revolves around oil and its transport, and not just oil, but also gas.
And so then we understood the gas part, and once we got that, then you understand all the problems with Russia, you understand the tension with the EU. 426 is a good episode, 426.nashownotes.com.
There is also, we have to, we are, the two of us are accepting of the fact that we are in a petroleum economy.
Yes.
Which a lot of people are just in denial about.
And it's not just what you put in your motorized vehicle either.
It's, look around you, everything.
It's the paint, it's your belts, it's the paint, it's your rayon shirts.
It's your Crocs.
It's everything.
Crocs.
The Crocs.
Crocs.
It's all petroleum products.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Okay, onward.
He says, seven countries in five years.
Okay, democracy versus republic forms of government.
We talk about that every so often.
You know, this is one of the things that should be taught in high school.
Thank you.
And we can't really pick up that much slack without boring people to death.
That's also not what we do.
We're not here to educate you.
We're here to deconstruct news.
Yeah, we're trying to help you understand what the bullcrap is, how it's made, why it's made, and what's ultimately behind it.
And to some degree, on a grand scale, what the moves are meant to be in the world.
It's kind of a small world when you look at the map, but for us, it's like, okay, this is why this is happening.
And he says, episode 200X is a perfect place for a rundown on the best port wines of the last 100 years, as well as notable vintages of French reds and any interesting California wines.
Yeah, it is a good idea.
We're not going to do it, though.
For the regular show, restaurant reviews are always welcome because they visit the Bay Area.
But anyway, we do what we can.
I know there's a lot of back references that really hurts new listeners because we do reference a lot.
Yeah, I think what is often difficult is our nomenclature.
In off-show life and in show life, I have a hard time remembering people by their actual name.
And so I give them names.
And people around me usually figure out who I'm talking about.
And, I don't know, it just kind of stuck.
We do a lot of that on the show, and we have nicknames for everybody.
Usually disparaging.
Yeah, they tend to be.
That's hard.
That's hard for people to catch up.
It's just one of those things.
Now, finally, as a PSC, this is kind of interesting, he says, I'm a loudspeaker guy, and only twice in 10 years have you said anything about your home speakers.
Okay, my speaker setup currently is a combination of speakers that I have rigged together, but my favorite normal speakers are Dahlquist DQ10s, which can be had for about $600 if you shop around.
But you do need subwoofers.
Now, he says you need at least 12-inch woofers, or I made that opinion, but I... I said I have 15-inch woofers.
I actually have two sets of 15-inch woofers.
They're not JBLs.
They're two very large boxes of Sirwin Vega 15-inch woofers.
I had a friend of mine.
Here's this back story.
A friend of mine still is a major speaker designer.
While he was working for Sirwin Vega, he sent me these two boxes of giant woofers.
And I've been using them ever since they're dynamite.
And so I don't know if they're even available to the public.
Turn down your speakers!
Another classic.
Another classic.
Remember that?
Oh, this is something that needs to be mentioned since it is in all the other 200.foo episodes.
John does not use headphones.
He listens to everything on speakers in his studio, which was a problem for a while there for a number of reasons.
That's actually how we started using noise gates.
Because I could hear my voice coming back through your microphone with a delay, of course, thanks to Skype.
Yes, it was horrible.
I had to turn the speakers way down.
It worked in some environments where the speakers were a mile away.
There's some magic distance you can put the speakers, and I had them way out there.
But ever since he got his thing perfected, I got the speakers anywhere.
It just doesn't bounce back on him.
Don't have any issue at all.
But it is a style of radio.
Just call it radio.
Not using headphones that is, you know, I can't do it.
You can.
You like it.
You prefer it.
I can't.
I need to hear exactly what's going on.
And you just, no.
For some reason, you don't, yeah.
You don't need them.
I really like it a lot better free air.
And I got this first time I ever saw anyone professionally use it was when I was floating around promoting a book and I got to go to a lot of radio stations around the country.
And the one thing I noticed is that no two radio stations are the same, which is anything but standardized.
And I was up in Vancouver, Canada.
There's a talk guy up there named Bill Goode.
And Bill Good was free form.
He wouldn't even let me put, you know, two of us had a microphone and we yacked away and it came out fine.
And then I started very, over time, I developed the ability to do it.
Because you do have to be a little conscientious about how you're miking yourself.
Exactly.
And every once in a while, I kind of go off axis like this.
But generally speaking, I'm where I'm supposed to be.
Ah, you're a professional.
Ah, I'm a professional.
Professional pronunciator.
Here's a question from Jeff J2H. John, what other jobs do you currently have besides the show?
Right now I'm just writing a column for PC Magazine and I'm trying to finish some books.
I also do the DHM plug.
Yeah, I was going to say.
I also do DHM plug.
Absolutely.
Yeah, DHM plug with Andrew Horowitz.
We run it on Tuesday, and he runs a chatroom live stream, too.
And I like that because I used to always have a job working for some financial publication, and this keeps me in the game.
I get to hear what's going on because Horowitz is in the business.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't have any other job.
This is my job.
This is what I do.
Brian Edelin writes, has anyone ever contacted either of you two guys after they've been featured negatively in a clip deconstruction?
Maybe a PR person or an angry fan base of that person.
Do we remember anybody getting irked by our presentation?
No, I can't remember.
I mean, lots of people get irked about stuff we say.
No.
No.
You know, why would they?
You mean like a politician or a celebrity?
I guess, or PR person that doesn't want us talking about something like Monsanto.
I mean, our older shows would concentrate a lot on Monsanto.
We even had a jingle that we haven't played for a long time.
Monsanto.
You'd think they would be the ones that would hold us.
Honestly, I think people just think, it's a podcast that gives a crap.
I honestly believe you're right.
Yeah, and they're wrong.
They're absolutely wrong.
It's like, you know, it's like even people always say, you should, you know, get some press, get a P.O. We've done this from time to time.
We've tried to do interviews.
That never really works.
You know, if we could get on Joe Rogan's show, and I'd like to let everybody know, I'd love to go on Joe Rogan.
John would love to go on Joe Rogan.
That's never worked out.
I've never been officially invited.
I don't know.
So that kind of stuff works very well.
Yeah, because he's got a good audience, a big one.
Yeah.
Does Adam still have his bar of gold in all of his Bitcoin?
Asked Dr.
Chris.
Well, the bar of gold, no.
No, he lost that in divorce one.
I do not have all my Bitcoin.
I still have some.
But I'm not really going to sell it.
I got it for nothing.
I got it from listeners, from the daily source code.
You know, it was just like, yeah, when it was, you know, you could, you bought a pizza for a thousand Bitcoin.
And I don't know.
I think I live true to our standard of what Bitcoin is.
I don't care.
Maybe one day it'll be a million.
Yay!
Not that you can sell it all.
That's a little secret about Bitcoin.
Even through the exchanges.
You can sell, I think, $2,000 worth a day.
That's really going to work.
Okay, here's a beauty.
We have these listeners, Jeremy being one of them.
In Canada.
In the morning, please, please, please, please take a good look at the Flat Earth Movement.
It's real, and you would not want to miss the opportunity you have now to be on the cutting edge of the discussion.
Either way, I will always be your lifetime supporter.
Stay flat, Jeremy.
Well, we did a couple of Flat Earth episodes.
Yeah.
Actually.
And it was very difficult because John, of course, would just scoff at every 30 seconds.
I don't remember what episode it was.
It was not that long ago.
Maybe it was...
About a year, at least a year ago.
Yeah, I mean, we're always on the cutting edge of that kind of stuff.
Now, is there anything more we can say about it?
No.
There's nothing else to say unless there's some revolutionary breakthrough.
But that's also not what we do.
We deconstruct news stories.
Yeah, if it's in the news, then yeah, then it'd be fun to talk about it.
But it really isn't.
Nor do I expect it to ever be.
No.
It's interesting no one's asked about our climate change skepticism.
Not yet.
I mean, it might be in these notes because we're going to get through some of these, getting on with the show here.
Okay.
It's from Dean Wormel.
He says, when Adam Knight's producers, he uses the phrase, I am very proud to announce the Knights of the KB. What does KB stand for or mean?
I've never said that.
I don't remember it either.
I think what he's hearing is, I pronounce the K-D. That's what I say.
I hereby pronounce the K-D. So maybe he's hearing K-D. I pronounce the K-D, K-B. Yes, pronounce the K-D. Yes.
Pronounce the K-D, I don't think is a real word.
It's something I picked up in the 80s, in the late 80s, from Scott Shannon.
Because he would say, he would talk about, I'm your pronouncicator on duty.
And it just kind of stuck, and I don't know, I'd like pronouncicate.
It's a stupid word.
But it's for our official ceremony.
So it is, let it be so written.
Pronouncicate thee.
Now some people have taken advantage of this show questions moment.
I'm going to read one of them.
I'm going to ask you the question.
Why won't seagulls fly over bays?
What question is this?
Because they would be bagels.
Ah, okay!
In the morning!
Are there any more legitimate questions?
There's plenty.
Is there any on the Twitters?
No, actually I just retweeted to see if I can get some more.
That's really not that much.
Maybe I have to look at your account.
It should go to you as well as me.
Okay, what Brian Walsh What are the night levels and what do they mean?
An EG night can assign name but no territory.
What are the in-show donation levels?
50-100 gets names and locations only.
This is a good question.
What are the best ways to send money and a note if you want to avoid PayPal fees?
Would this method also apply for donations by check?
So the best way is to just drop a check in the mail with a note.
Box 339, El Cerrito, California, 94530.
I'll repeat it.
Box 339, El Cerrito, California, 94530.
And then you can put it, you know, send some bottle of wine.
Don't do that.
Well, you can if you know how you do it, but most people get caught.
The night levels.
Well, go to dvorak.org slash peerage dot htm.
Which amuses Adam to no end.
To no end, it does, yes.
Except it needs to be CAPS HTM. No, it doesn't.
It's not.
In fact, the way I have it done, the CAPS may actually destroy it.
It might not work.
Oh, here's a good one.
This one I sent you earlier.
You want to explain it, or is it all evident on that one page?
It's all on that one page.
It's just got all the levels.
The executive producers, associate executive producers, and the below 50s?
I don't think that's Dvorak.org slash NA explains a little bit of the executive, associate executive producer stuff.
But what we have is at $200, you get an associate executive producer at $300 or $333 is what it's supposed to be.
You get an executive producership, and then you can write a note, and we read the note.
And you get to use that on your LinkedIn.
That's the most important part.
And elsewhere.
I mean, it's real.
The nighthood thing is a little more symbolic.
But you can call yourself Sir.
No less symbolic than the British Queen gives out knighthood.
That's my thinking.
That's my thinking.
It's no less symbolic than a knighthood from the British Empire.
Right.
Except with our knighthood, you get a cool ring and ceiling wax.
Yeah, they don't give you nothing.
Oh, they give you something to hang around your neck.
Like you're going to wear that anywhere.
The ring, now that's a usable object.
Yeah.
Here's a question.
Who is that dude Void Zero you guys keep talking about?
Ah, dude Void Zero.
Good question.
It became very...
When I was in Los Angeles, so now we're talking 2013, I think, it became very expensive and very tedious to manage the amount of downloads that were being performed on our shows.
And I would say expense was really the number one thing.
I'm like, holy crap.
And Gitmoslave and Mr.
Oil set up an infrastructure for us, and they found this, I think it's called OVH, a really cost-effective way to set up kind of your own content distribution network.
And they were using that for their own stuff, and they were hosting us.
And over time, they went on to do some other things.
And then Void Zero, Mark, who lives in Groningen in the Netherlands, he was already kind of a part of the crew.
And he said, well, you know, I'd really like to take this over and I'd really like to set it up properly and get all the right things and all the right redundancy.
And here's what it'll cost.
And we looked at it and we're like, holy crap, that's very cool you want to do that.
And it fit within the budget of the show.
And he's been doing that.
And now he's had a couple other people come in and out and help him throughout the years.
Sir Ben Rose is helping.
Aaron Err is helping.
This is a lot of professionals.
These are weapons-grade IT professionals.
Real dudes named Ben.
Right.
I'm going to say this.
We have to remember that when we started this show, we were doing it on the Mevio infrastructure.
And so it wasn't costing us anything.
But that didn't last forever.
The company's not even there anymore.
And that's when we had to start making these changes.
Adam took care of most of it.
His suave, debonair way of moving these things around.
Good work, Adam.
Thanks, John.
And I should point out that John does everything else when it comes to administration of the show.
And Eric, the shill, and Mimi, we need to mention these good folks.
Well, I said Buzzkill Jr.
working for us for a while.
That's right.
Until he said, screw this.
I can make real money coding JavaScript.
What am I doing?
So we have a question that applies to Adam.
I think it's an interesting one.
This is from David.
Bush.
Why does Adam say he has Tourette's?
I've never heard any evidence of it.
Ah.
Tourette's comes in many forms, my friend.
Now, I do have a mute pedal, specifically for this reason, which I acquired only in the last two years, I think.
And that was during a sniffing episode.
Where I just had this incessant need.
Just talking about it makes me want to do it, so I'm going to try and not do that.
I can assure you it has Tourette's.
Yeah, but it's mainly tics.
It's tics.
Most people who have tics have Tourette's.
But often, it manifests itself in very interesting ways.
Thank God for the mute pedal, let me just tell you that.
But I can control it to some degree.
Certainly the guttural stuff.
I got that.
That's why I never wanted to do television.
I hate television because I can't do it anymore.
I can't even keep my head still.
It's horrible.
He asked the second question, what is M5M? Well, I think this stems from, it may stem from a conversation about the boob donation being 8008 and Haxor, where you use a 1 instead of an I, and a 3 instead of an E, and you use a 5 instead of an S. So it's mainstream media.
Yes, MSM or M5M, which has now become our thing.
And that really caught on, surprisingly.
Yes, people use it constantly.
Why can't you guys say sysadmin?
Isn't that dude named Ben thing played out?
Wow.
I have no idea what he's trying to get at there.
Well, maybe...
Let's see.
Do I have that clip, dude named Ben?
Because it came from the Senate, didn't it?
Yes, it came from the Senate with, I think it was Chaffee.
Yeah, I think this is it.
No, that's not it.
It's a jingle.
It was Chaffee grilling somebody, and she couldn't come up with an answer, and she said, it's some dude named, or a guy named Ben, and he said...
No, he actually said it.
It was somebody named Ben, and then he said, what, did some dude name Ben?
Yes, that's right.
That's exactly what he did.
What was her...
It was Lerner.
And that's where it came from.
It was Lerner.
Wasn't it Lois Lerner?
Yeah, I think she's the one that said it, wasn't it?
Maybe.
It could have been.
That's when all the...
All the data, tax data disappeared or something.
She should be in jail.
Why does Adam shout through the opening of the show?
Oh, well that's all part of it.
It's a weenie in the butt moment.
I'm not really shouting.
I'm jacked up.
Jacked up.
And I'm also timing it.
I'm back timing what I'm saying so that it fits in the jingle and I want to have a good cue for John so that he knows that he can come in and do his Zephyr thing or whatever it is.
The Zephyr went by.
Yeah.
If it bothers you, fast forward.
John Tucker asks, you say the word ISO quite a bit.
What is an ISO? Another great question.
Good question.
Not a great question.
A good question.
ISO. ISO. We explained it once before, but yeah, it means isolated.
Isolated.
Yeah, typically an ISO in broadcast is either a microphone or a camera, which is recording separately from the main signal, from the main program, so that you can later take bits out of that and use that separately.
And ISO, ISO, just an abbreviation of isolated.
Yeah.
This is from Charles, Charles Couch.
How many hours a day or week do you guys spend watching news or other M5M, there you go, M5M broadcasts?
All right, you go first.
Well, I'm going to add this to it so we can answer both at the same time.
Other than M5M, what sources do you guys use most frequently for research, including public commentary or public sentiment?
All right, I'll go first.
Um...
I watch television mostly to get content, which annoys everybody in the family when they want to watch something else.
Luckily, nobody likes TV. Probably, I don't know, three or four hours a day, every day at least.
Sometimes longer if I get caught up in something on C-SPAN, which is where you can get caught up in something.
Yeah.
I'm guessing it's about right, three or four hours a day.
Then I'll pick up stuff from the internet too, because there's a lot of places that just play, for all practical purposes, play clips.
Right.
I watch much less television than you do, I think.
But I have all day, the entire day, I'm either listening to, I'm switching between CNBC, CNN, Fox, Fox Business, MSNBC. Rarely do I listen, and that's just listening.
I'm just listening to it, and I'll pick stuff up, and I know that I can then go back later and find it online, which is where I have the whole system for recording clips, which is pretty easy.
I subscribe to, I think, last count, probably 4,200 RSS feeds, which I've built up throughout the years, and it's all in a proprietary...
Well, it's an open source, but it's a proprietary system, the Freedom Controller, and that's all part of the show notes, which really, it flows very nicely, so stories are not only aggregated, but if I want to keep that story and put it into the show notes or use it for the show...
Then it creates an offline version.
There's a whole bunch of cool things about it.
Then on show days, I subscribe to a number of YouTube channels and I'll look at those and see if there's anything there that I like or something that I made a note about.
I'm continuously sending notes to myself in email that I've tried many other ways but just works best for me.
I just send a note to myself in email because I can do it anywhere I am, any device, I can do it.
And then, you know, so the morning of the show, I'm up probably, yeah, quarter to six, my time.
And I'll start collecting all those, seeing what those stories were about.
Maybe I've already written some stuff down.
But also, I get so much from the producers.
I mean, there's a lot that comes in.
And a lot of it is unusable.
But still, someone sends me something, I'm going to go take a look at it.
So it's a lot that I get from there.
So I'm really consumed by it all the time.
And then Tina, the keeper, she comes home and she's got things that I haven't even heard of.
She's got a whole different source of stuff.
It's just she's feeding me articles.
It's a lifestyle.
To me, it's not like number of hours.
It's what I do.
It's all the time.
So Charles finishes up with this last question.
He has a group of them here.
What should I buy my wife for Christmas?
Damehood, of course.
That's obvious.
Yes, of course.
Buy her a damehood.
There you go.
I got another question.
A lot of people wondered about the M5M thing.
Interesting.
And yet it's so well adopted.
They're just doing it.
Eh, whatever.
Those guys are doing it.
And you got, what does double nickels on the dime mean?
And what's its origin?
My impression is that it's an amount of money, but I could never come up with the actual value it represents.
All right.
Well, that was, again, one of our producers.
I know who it was.
I believe this to be Sergeant Fred Castaneda.
Okay.
Sergeant Fred, who I emailed with just the other day because I hadn't heard from him on the show, and he was sick for a real long time.
He was a Vietnam vet and all kinds of Agent Orange-related issues, and his mom wasn't doing it.
It's all kinds of crap going on in his life.
But I think he started off, in fact, he often would show up if I was somewhere in Texas even, not just Austin, but I think we were in Dallas and he showed up and he would have double nickels on the dime.
And that's $55.10.
And he would have $55 in paper and then $0.10 taped to it, scotch-taped.
And, I mean, other than that, and some other ones.
Aren't there some other ones?
There's Double Nickels on the Dime.
Well, besides boobs and small boobs, there was a couple of other things.
But none of them really caught on like Double Nickels on the Dime.
I mean, yeah, there's probably about 20 of them, but that's the only one that really caught on.
No, but I mean, there was something that was comparable to like Double Nickels.
Yeah, I know.
And again, this is stuff...
To me, it's magical.
When people come up with these ideas, numerology is...
In my later life, I've become somewhat obsessed with numerology and mathematics.
And the stuff that catches on with people, it's something profound.
I don't know exactly how it works, but people really like certain numbers.
It feels good.
They're drawn to them.
Yeah, we had a long streak with 69-69.
And we stopped.
We stopped when we didn't have one.
Yeah, no, the idea was we're going to go as long as we can.
And then, funny thing, the woman who came up with the idea, Carrie Schoen in Deutschland.
She went overboard.
She went overboard, and we haven't heard from her.
But she's the one who came up with the idea.
Because she was sending us pictures of her butt.
Yeah, she was doing a marathon.
Yeah, she had no agenda stitched to her ass.
Good times.
I miss her.
Come back.
Good shape, too.
She was perfect.
Yes.
And she came up with this idea, and then we said, well, let's just keep doing it.
We played a jingle, a little intro.
It was like a segment.
Yeah.
Until nobody gave.
And one day...
About a year into it.
It took about a year.
Nobody gave 69-69.
They tried to restart it, but we refused.
Yeah, we wouldn't do it.
Won't even play it now.
Now it's done.
It's dead.
It's over.
It's gone.
Yeah.
Not to be resurrected.
Dale asks, he just wants to know what mic you're using and headphones.
Well, we know your headphones.
How about your mic?
I'm using a, right now, I use a bunch of mics.
I've changed mics.
I like the, uh, The Heil PR40, generally speaking, but right now I'm using a condenser mic that is a, I think it's a CAD, a CAD, and I think the model is the 9000 or the 3000, which is the Chinese mic.
Yeah, people don't know, but you're really into microphones and building your own microphones and getting elements from China and doing stuff.
Yeah, well, I'm not that nuts, but Yeah, I have a collection, and it's not a big collection.
I know a friend of mine used to work at Tech TV as a real mic collector, and he's got everything imaginable.
It's just like, he's got Neumanns and all the Sennheiser old ones from the 40s, that kind of thing.
Oh, nice.
Ribbon mics.
So I'm using the Electro Voice RE320, which I like very much.
I thought you were using the Rode.
I was using the Rode Procaster.
Yeah.
Until Gene, Sir Gene, the Duke of Texas, he said, you know, try this mic out.
And I never gave it back to him.
I said, screw that.
I bought a new one and sent it.
I didn't even want to risk buying the same model and sounding different.
What is Gene's, was it an EV what?
It's the, it's Electro Voice, isn't it?
Yeah.
Electro Voice.
Yeah.
But it's the RE, Romeo Echo 320.
Now, headphones, I'm very particular about my headphones.
Because I've been wearing headphones, I think I've been wearing headphones since I was 14.
And looking at my volume knob, I have about half a notch left.
This is not a good thing, by the way.
No.
No, it's not a good thing.
I used to be real...
I want over the ear.
I want them to close.
I want them to fit snugly.
You can't have anything leaking because, see, I can put my...
Big cans.
These aren't that big, actually.
This is the Sony MDR7506 Professional.
And from time to time, you can get a deal through Amazon.
It'll sell them for like 90 bucks or something.
And I have three pairs of them.
I do wear them out after a while.
What, your sweat?
No, the cables get all frayed and, yeah.
They get a lot of use.
They're on, they're off, they're hanging, they're falling.
Eventually they do break after a while.
But you want them to get the, it's the 75 or 6 professional.
Anything else is not a good reference.
They have too much low end and you can get fooled by that.
If you really care.
Tim Kilkenny.
He says, I'm familiar with Mike Singletary's legendary rant about hitting people in the mouth, but never figured out how it became the official formula for the show.
I've been listening since 2013.
I've never heard the original of this phrase mentioned.
Thanks for all you do.
I'll play this just so you can hear it.
Our formula is this.
We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
I'm pretty sure someone sent that to me, pre-mixed, like that, and I had no idea what it was.
No, I sent it to you.
Are you sure you sent it to me?
Oh yeah, because it was one of my favorite, because they played it, it's a local commercial.
I remember you telling me what it was about, I didn't realize you had sent it to me.
There's a lot of stuff we don't remember.
Well, this is a local commercial they played here to get fans for the 49ers to go to the games during Singletary's era when he was the coach.
And what had happened is I sent it to you, and then we played it once, and that's kind of what evolved, I think, the hitting in the mouth.
And then for some reason, I'm not sure why, but you adopted it.
You took it and started playing it every show at that one moment, like I was...
One of your superstitious moments.
And then you added, out of the blue, you added the kicker.
There's a kicker on that thing now.
New.
World.
Order.
Shut up.
And here's the nutty thing.
So these are two clips, and I always play them the same way.
And logic would dictate that I kind of mix that into one clip.
But I've just been doing that for so long.
I start one, and then I start the second.
Yeah.
And usually I play in between the little dip there at the end.
Well, this particular combination of another thing you did and just stayed with it, I never said anything one way or the other.
I like it.
But the...
It just...
Those two clips together was actually a moment of genius because they really sound like a clip.
Like a whole thing.
It's not like two things that you've combined.
Because it's got the same tone to it.
And it just stuck.
And it was...
I can tell you approximately when this came to be because it was the last season of Mike Singletary in San Francisco.
And by doing a quick search...
Mike Singletary.
Mike Singletary.
I have no idea who Mike Singletary...
Oh, he's the coach?
Yeah, he's the coach.
And he's a tough guy.
Tough guy.
And he was with the Niners from...
Let's see, I'm looking at his wiki page.
Career history.
San Francisco 49ers from 2009...
He's the head coach from 9 to 10.
He was there for two seasons.
Or three.
No, just 9 and 10.
So this had to be done probably in that era of show 100.
Really?
That long ago?
It's a long time ago.
That's why you don't remember any of it.
Because it was really just too long ago.
I was baked.
Well, you were baked, too.
That's the other thing.
That's what was going on.
So he was...
He was a lousy coach, but he was a great recruiter.
They put together this fabulous team that when the next coach came along, they had all these great players, so it didn't take much.
And then, of course, I've noticed this in football and sports and business.
but you can't manage it well but the next guy that comes along because you're such a lousy manager everyone looks up to the new guy right and but he's got all the stuff in front of him he's gonna just kick ass and when the new guy starts putting his guys in the team falls apart again i've seen this over and over and over again this is what happened to the 49ers right anyway yeah so that's been around uh here's a question uh
Have you ever had any interesting theories regarding space over the years?
Asks Smile4Camera on Twitter.
Space?
Yeah.
Like what?
Well, there's moon bases, Israeli ones to be exact.
Oh, outer space.
Wow, okay.
And I'm a big fan of the space elevator.
Yeah, that's a good one.
We don't do that too much anymore.
No.
We don't have time for it.
It's jokey.
We don't have time for it.
Even though I truly know about the Israeli moon bases.
Yeah.
To the point that you were denying that they were Israeli for a while until somebody finally found the clip.
I'd forgotten.
Yes.
But they are Israeli.
Yeah.
Here's another question about FM5M. John, where's your keyboard?
Great question.
I think I figured out my own already.
This says Dave Duncan.
But you've been saying NJNK a lot after donation notes.
And I had no idea.
This is one of the reasons you probably should listen to the donation segment.
Yes.
Because there's a lot of stuff that shows up in there that becomes litany.
Based on the hours of contact, I think I figured out what it means.
No jingles, no karma.
Yes, yes.
Maybe I missed the introduction of that abbreviation.
He says maybe we should put a glossary together.
What's interesting is no one has asked about the origin of karma.
They haven't.
I'm going to ask you right now.
When did we start doing that?
Well, that wasn't us.
Again, this was a suggestion by...
I think somebody suggested it.
I have to research again.
This will be in the next show, I guess.
Not the next show we're doing in this linear fashion, but the next version of 200.x.
I do remember this.
It didn't really catch on until someone sent us the Karma jingle.
Which is this.
You've got Karma jingle.
And there's a question about who's the voice in that thing.
And I think it's been revealed a couple of times and we keep forgetting.
I don't even know if she listens to the show.
I don't think so.
I've forgotten too.
I really don't remember.
That's horrible.
And that jingle seems to have some magical effect, imagined or otherwise.
And once it started, we started using it, we started getting feedback.
Oh, I got a job just after you played the jingle.
And the next thing you know, we're doing it all the time.
Yeah, no, and then it was, I need jobs karma.
And again, I don't know where this showed up.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs.
I don't know where it showed up.
Well, I started...
Yeah, go ahead.
I developed that clip because we had played...
We had been ridiculing Pelosi with this jobs, jobs, jobs thing, and I found a clip with a little kid screaming, yay, and I put it together.
Perfect.
You thought it was hilarious.
I still think it's hilarious.
It is funny because it's just weird.
And so that began the jobs...
Then you attached it to jobs karma because somebody...
We were giving karma away for all kinds of stuff, but then...
You decided to make that special karma with the jingle, and now we've got like three or four versions of it that we're testing.
So that's a tough one.
That's a tough one to get to the bottom of.
But it does, as you said, imagined or not, it does seem to do something for people.
How many times do we get a note saying, oh, I asked for jobs, karma got a job?
And then we got the F-cancer karma, all this stuff.
Now, I don't think we've cured cancer, but it certainly makes people feel better.
And I think there is something of the power of people hearing something, and I don't know.
There's something to it, as you said, imagined or not.
I tend to err on the side of there's something to it, for real.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not going to argue the point.
Let's see what else we got.
You know, how much time?
We're probably out of time, so we're not going to get to a lot of this stuff.
Well, let's just do a couple more.
Yeah, we are getting up there.
We're done.
A couple more.
Okay, let me try Chris Cochran and see if he's got anything.
Um...
Just all, he's got a, actually it's more of an interesting point about, the opens, yes.
Does MailChimp count opens on an iPhone?
They better, and they do.
Because most, I think it's like 70% of the people that nowadays.
You know, that's something we didn't really talk about.
We didn't really talk about the newsletter, which is, I think, an important part of our model.
No one really asked about the newsletter.
I'm asking about the newsletter.
It's something you do twice a week.
It takes a lot of effort.
You don't just whip up a newsletter.
Sometimes I do.
No, you don't.
But the newsletter came about because...
Well, it's important.
We need to remind people what's coming up.
We've got a show.
Let me mention something that other podcasters don't ever think about.
This is for you guys.
You're invested in your podcast, you're doing it daily, you're doing it weekly, whatever you're doing occasionally.
Nobody else but you is thinking about this podcast.
They may enjoy the podcast.
They may think it's fabulous.
They may send you money.
They may buy products.
They may use your codes.
But they're not thinking about it.
They're not like when Tuesday morning comes around, your podcast is not on their mind.
So they really do need to be reminded that you exist.
And not just once in a while.
They have to be routinely reminded that you exist.
Now, I knew this.
But I didn't do the newsletter until, I don't know, two or three or four years into the donations thing, and I started doing a once-a-week newsletter, and I knew it did jack up donations.
Not always, but it did enough so that you had to do the newsletter because once you see the difference between your income with the newsletter and without the newsletter, it's obvious you should have to do this damn newsletter because people just don't.
They're not thinking about you.
You're not the most important thing in most people's lives.
And then at the point where I felt I could do twice a week.
And I know if I did a third newsletter a week, it would probably help too.
But that's the reason.
It's to keep people, to keep you in their thoughts.
It has to be done.
But like everything we do, it's entertaining.
You try to put some of the nice spin to it.
Oh, I try to make it funny.
And you do things that I don't think any other broadcast organization would put together a product like you do.
No, because you get fired.
Yeah, why is that?
Why do people get fired over things that are clearly successful?
It's very puzzling to me.
It's a fact.
It's the puritanical nature of broadcast.
No, it's the incompetent nature of broadcasting executives.
There you go.
Ah, yes, the execs.
They're hired.
They're suits.
They're hired for a job, and everything reflects them.
So if something went south with some bad version of the newsletter, you put the wrong cuss word in there, or something was offensive, or somebody came back, they don't come back on the newsletter.
Or worse, the advertisers start complaining.
Yeah, well, that's what it always boils down to.
That's what it is.
We don't want to piss off the advertisers who are God in mainstream and in all commercial broadcasts.
A couple more quick questions.
James Buell, what are the dudes named Ben?
We thought everyone knew, but it's a computer sysop, sysadmin.
Here, I got it.
I think this is the clip.
It is the closest the Treasury Department Inspector General has come to acknowledging potential criminal wrongdoing in the Lois Lerner affair.
Are you investigating any potential criminal activity?
The entire matter continues to be under active investigation, yes sir.
For potential criminal activity?
Yes.
That revelation during a rare late-night hearing in which the IG disclosed his office has obtained 32,000 Lois Lerner emails from backup tapes stored at the IRS's Martinsburg, West Virginia facility.
IRS officials have maintained that the emails were gone, destroyed in a hard drive crash.
I'm advised the actual hard drive after it was determined that it was dysfunctional and that with experts no emails could be retrieved was recycled and destroyed in the normal process.
Last night's testimony suggests the IRS made a less than vigorous attempt to track down the emails.
And then when you go talk to the IT people who are there in charge of them, they told you that they were never even asked for them?
Is that correct?
That's correct.
Oh, crap.
It's not on that clip.
Oh, shit.
No, that's a totally different clip I never heard before.
Oh, man.
I can't believe it.
It's got Lerner.
It's got something to do with Lerner.
She's the one who said it.
Yeah, but that's what they had in the beginning of that clip about Lerner.
Yeah, they mentioned her.
Well, now it's a missing clip.
Yeah, it's there.
You got it somewhere.
Let me get to Rebecca Shirky's question.
What is the email situation?
What is the proper address to send emails to?
The No Agenda show for donation notes.
Well, if it's a donation, your note should be in the PayPal box, which is offered to you after you click on the button.
You go to a second page and there's a box there that says, or even on the first page, it says note to vendor or something like that.
Important that you, this is best done on a computer because I think there's different experiences that pop up on mobile phones.
Maybe.
Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Maybe.
But there's a box.
But she also asked, and did you just send it to noagendashowatdvorak.org?
Or anything else.
But you could get lost.
That's the problem.
Now, where do you send top secret information?
As far as I know, it's sent to Adam using his PGP key.
That's right.
Pubkey.curry.com.
And that works.
And I'm very careful with what people send me.
My own email server and anonymity is assured if you send it to me and specify that.
She says the email situation is a confusing mess and needs a formal guide.
We need a formal guide for a lot of stuff.
I think the glossary would be another good example so people get a clue.
I'll tell you this.
I've been working on a FAQ for about a year and I keep forgetting I'm working on it.
Okay.
Do you want me to put it on the list and remind you from time to time?
It might not be a bad idea.
Okay.
Jason writes, I switched over to my own email server for your mailings and haven't had an issue received since then.
Oh, good.
Yeah, well, that means it's not working at all.
You're using some sort of blocking or blacklist and we're on the list, I guess.
I wonder what he set up.
Yeah.
It's not working.
Yeah, because MailChimp, they're pretty good.
They have all the authority, and they've paid all the shysters there, Vig, to get delivered.
So, yeah, usually it should come in.
Jim Buell says, is there any reason you attach so much significance to the number 33?
Oh, good question.
Yes.
This goes back to...
What was the name of the series?
Rubicon?
I think...
Oh, that's a good point.
Yeah, maybe Rubicon was part of this.
Yeah, Rubicon.
Go ahead.
Which you can get, by the way, I think they put it back up on Amazon.com.
Oh, good.
I would watch this series.
But what it does is it expresses these codes...
That people use in the intelligence community is not to just communicate, but to signal.
It's mostly signaling.
And we believe 33, we've believed this for a long time.
In fact, we had a segment on the show for a while where Adam would read from a Google search almost on every show for about, I don't know, about six months he'd do this.
All the 33 references that are in the news, which is still probably not a bad idea once in a while.
That is a good idea.
Yeah, well, it's your idea.
And one of the things that we've noticed is that 33 crops up in very strange places for very strange reasons.
At least 33 killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo freight train.
Justice League, number 33.
Let's see.
It goes on and on.
Yes, 33s everywhere.
And so we've decided that it's signaling, but we don't know what it's signaling.
We have ideas.
What it might be signaling.
We don't know what, but we do mention it, and we're preoccupied with trying to figure this out.
It may be coincidental that the 33-level Mason has got something to do with it, but I think that's mostly they just took that number for that reason.
It might be a nod to the Masons.
I don't know.
We don't know.
But if you see it in a news report, you just start noticing it.
And it may also be just cop-out on journo's part.
Just like, eh, a third, 33, something like that.
But it pops up in all these official notices and stuff that often already smells like bullcrap to us.
Like, oh, okay, there's a 33.
Just pay attention to it.
That's all.
Just pay attention.
It's a little signal, and you never know.
I think we have time for two more.
Okay, two more.
We'll do two more.
And sorry for everyone else who wrote in, but I think you've got your money's worth anyway.
Well, here's one.
This is kind of inside baseball by Miguel Gonzalez, Mexican.
Do you really have two sword sounds for the knightings?
I always find it surprising that John can find his keyboard.
No, he should say can't find his keyboard, but finds his sword sound.
There it is.
Explain the producership.
It's not really the same as Hollywood because producers never get the economic returns from the show.
If you know Hollywood, neither are those guys.
The only thing we can't give you is, you know, hookers and blow.
Although those are, if you're a knight, that's what you get.
But with producerships, no.
Yeah.
You said it.
You said it best.
If you know how Hollywood works...
But you are doing this because you get value out of it.
The value you receive is what you put into it.
Emilio Hernandez, what is the process for selecting jingles worthy for show debut?
Can both of you talk briefly about your backgrounds?
We did that already.
And how they helped you become the best podcasters for the best podcast in the universe.
I think we discussed a little bit of that.
But what about the process for selecting jingles?
I'm not sure what he's asking.
Well, like if he had a jingly that he put together.
Oh, here's how it works.
You send it, and I listen to it.
If it's shit, I'll say thanks.
It might use it, might not.
If I think it can be fixed, I'll give you feedback.
That's pretty much it.
Yeah.
You probably use about half the jingles we're sent.
Do you think that's a good number?
No more than that.
I'd say more.
Okay.
He wants to do some jingles.
That's my guess.
But do a few, because it's like the art.
Okay, well...
It takes a while to get the hang of it.
Clip of the day.
If you see something, say something.
Fact check false.
Bullshit.
That's one mother I'd like to fuck.
Shadow Puppet Theater.
To the gate, to the gate, to the climate gate.
For humanity.
It's the gold agenda.
Swine, blue, mini.
Don't be a denier.
The science is in.
Science.
Boo-tied.
There's just a little smorgasbord of variety that you could pursue.
I have one last question.
I'll just read this one.
Where in the world is Victoria Noodleman Kagan?
Wait, we have that one.
We don't know where she is.
I think she's retired.
She's doing something.
Look, she's up to no good.
Where in the world is Victoria Kagan Noodleman?
All right.
I think that'll do it.
Well, that was time-worthy.
Walk down memory lane.
Yeah, it's kind of odd.
It's kind of odd.
Yeah.
Well, we will be back to deconstructing very soon.
We have another special show, which will not be like this one, coming up.
And then we blast off until the end of the year.
God knows what's going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, a reminder, dvorak.org slash NA. Yes.
Continue your support, please.
And have a happy Thanksgiving, what's left of it.
And I know you're celebrating because you're certainly not listening to this.
That's what this podcast is for.
Listen later.
All right, coming to you with the special Show X here in downtown Austin, Tejas, capital of the drone Star State.
Still FEMA Region 6 on the governmental maps in the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, even though I'm not really here, I'm John C. Dvorak.
We will return in just a few days right here on No Agenda.
Export Selection