And Sunday, March 18, 2018, this is your award-winning Gitmo Nation Media Assassination, Episode 1017.
This is no agenda.
Asking the age-old question.
Any collusion?
And broadcasting live from the capital of the drone, Star State, downtown Austin, Tejas, in the Cludio, in the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where there's no collusion, I'm John C. Devorak.
It's crackpot and buzzkill.
In the morning.
But it's just so fun to ask the question.
Any collusion?
I just can't get enough of it.
Yes, it's a question that needs to be asked over and over and over.
That is the question.
Over and over.
All right.
It's a show day.
What has happened?
It seems something is happening every day now.
We're all going crazy.
Coming unglued.
Well, might as well start off with this then.
Can you find that clip?
It's from a couple shows ago.
Last show.
I think it's last show.
Putin kicking the bucket?
Yeah, I think I can.
No, it was...
No, it's what it's called.
Kick the Bucket?
Putin.
Putin kick.
Let me see.
Yes.
Okay.
You need the clip.
It's only 14 seconds.
Yeah.
Scrippal was arrested in Moscow in 2006, then sent to Britain in 2010 in a spy swap.
At the time, Vladimir Putin issued a chilling threat.
Traders will kick the bucket.
Trust me, he said.
Right.
Okay.
Yes.
So we get a note from one of our producers that appears to be in Switzerland.
Small-time producer here.
My wife is Russian and speaks English fluently.
I played the Putin clip from the most recent show for her.
The journalist's translation claiming Putin threatened that traders will kick the bucket is bullshit.
Putin said it's the business of the Secret Service.
That is all.
Wow.
Who would launch that obvious fake news clip into the ether?
I believe it was one of the networks, but unfortunately I didn't tag it.
I usually tag it with ABC or CBS or whatever.
But it was one of the networks, and it was like a bogus report.
And I asked the question, how do they think they're going to get away with this crap?
They got away with it a little bit, but I did ask for the translation, got it, within a day.
And it turns out there was...
It was nonsense.
They were just making it up.
Kick the bucket?
We thought it was a little fishy to begin with.
Does the Russians have a phrase?
Kick the bucket?
I'm a little concerned that you had to specifically send it to someone and ask.
We have numerous Russian agents, I mean producers, who listen to the show and no one has mentioned anything.
I'm a little worried about that part.
Well...
I don't know why that would be.
It's possible they weren't paying attention.
You do have to take the clip and listen to it carefully because this guy's yelling over it.
Well, let's play it again so that other Russian natives who are listening can just get it one more time.
And if they hear anything, then they're different.
Or if there's some other opinion, they'll let us know.
Skripal was arrested in Moscow in 2006, then sent to Britain in 2010 in a spy swap.
At the time, Vladimir Putin issued a chilling threat.
Traders will kick the bucket.
Trust me, he said.
Okay.
Traders will kick the bucket.
You can trust me.
I like it.
He didn't have enough words in there to fill all that out.
Well, we got another note from one of our producers.
Sir Knight of Christmas, I'll just leave it at that.
Dear John and Adam, I'm a dude named Ben who works at the OPCW. This is the organization that oversees the chemical weapons.
Yes, we have that note.
I think I'm the only one who listens to the show who works here.
So yeah, hey, guys, that's me.
I'm listening to the show.
I'm not a douchebag.
I'm on a 30-month payment plan and a night.
I wear my silver ring with pride every...
He put silver in parentheses.
Very cute.
I wear my silver...
It should be in quotes.
Don't rub it.
And it's not silver.
It's white gold.
Oh, yeah.
In quotes.
In quotes.
I wear my, in quotes, silver, quote, and close.
Wearing with pride every day.
I talk about you guys a lot.
This week we had a meeting of all delegates, which we have about four times a year.
According to our linguists, the atmosphere was terrible during the meetings because of the incident in England.
I'll keep you up to date on all of the crazy stuff going on there.
But just so you know, we laugh at the meme that North Korea has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons.
We're not allowed in the country, but trust me, we would know.
Keep up the great work.
And we appreciate this kind of information.
This is why we have the best audience of all podcasts.
Our audience is really half of the show.
Yeah.
More than half, actually.
Probably.
It's kind of all of it.
Well, you know, there's...
There's a lot of analysis being done on what's going on here.
But, I mean, here's what I got from the UK, from our own sources.
Between you and I, what do we know?
These two were poisoned.
There may have been hundreds of other people who could be dying.
Okay, the one guy was choked to death.
The businessman.
The guy who used to run Aeroflot.
Yeah.
That guy was found dead about a week or a week and a half ago.
And now they've determined, went through an autopsy, that he was choked to death.
Hmm.
Thank you.
So that's a little different than a guy being poisoned by it.
I guess I'm talking more about the actual agent itself, the Novichok, which was immediately identified even though no one really knows what's in it.
Right.
And the Russians, another tidbit, the Russians have asked for a sample because they're incredulous.
They don't believe this.
They think this is correct.
Oh yeah, they won't get it.
They're not giving them a sample.
They're not giving them a sample.
Why not?
Well, here's some other data points.
We had the cop, who apparently had also fallen dangerously ill after being first on the scene.
He somehow has recovered fully, and he's out doing interviews, so I'm not sure what happened or didn't happen to him.
So we still have no actual understanding of what this Novichok is.
The UK is not, or Porton Down scientists say they don't know what it is.
That's where it goes to be analyzed.
Yeah, I have no other stories of any people who would be dangerously ill.
You know what this reminds me of?
Remember David Kelly?
The TV producer?
No, no, no, no.
He was the scientist who had proof that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and he killed himself with a butter knife.
Oh, I think you're talking about the British guy.
Yeah, he killed himself with a butter knife in the woods.
In a ditch, killed himself with a machine gun, apparently.
Whatever it was.
You know, there's just, I don't know, for some reason we need to wage war with Russia.
That's what's obvious.
And everyone's getting in on it.
And I guess Trump is in on it too.
I mean, he's saying, well, it sure seems like something happened there.
Russians, but it must have been the Russians.
It's a little too convenient.
I mean, the Russians are irked about this.
Here, play this clip.
Russia versus the UK, PBS. Okay.
The diplomatic divide between London and Moscow deepened today, with British police saying that a Russian businessman may have been murdered.
Nikolai Glushkov was found dead Monday in London, where he had won political asylum in 2010.
Investigators say they think he was strangled.
His death followed a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England.
Emma Murphy of Independent Television News reports from Moscow.
The imagery couldn't have been lost on the president.
In the middle of an international crisis about where a lethal chemical agent was produced, he appeared in a white coat in a Russian laboratory.
And it seems imagery wasn't lost on the Foreign Secretary either, Boris Johnson appearing in a military bunker to point the finger of blame directly at the Russian leader.
Our quarrel is with Putin's Kremlin and with his decision, and we think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the Second World War.
The response from the Kremlin was immediate.
Though what action will be taken against British interests hasn't yet been announced, the Foreign Secretary's accusations were described as shocking and unforgivable.
The Russian Foreign Minister was in no mood for discussion.
I don't want to comment on what's happening anymore, Sergei Lavrov said, and let it stay on the consciousness of those who started this shameless, unjustified, Russia-phobic game.
Now, let's just say maybe it's not at all about warfare between countries and we have to go get Russia.
Because the Telegraph, how much do we trust the Telegraph in the UK? Are they a decent outfit?
Yeah, they're okay.
Headline.
Poisoned Russian spy Sergei Skripal was close to consultant, here it is, Christopher Steele.
Nice catch.
How about that?
Maybe we had to clean something up.
It's quite a way to go to clean up some loose ends, but alright, maybe get a twofer.
Yes, this whole thing is quite suspicious, and of course the mainstream media is just going with the Russia stuff.
You know, ah, Russia, those bastards.
Well, it's because, once again, they've got too much going on.
They've got too many stories.
Now we have the New York Times going crazy about an old story, as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, the Russians can shut off our power at any minute.
In fact, they probably shut off my server earlier.
It's just shutting your stuff off.
If you're going to go there, I do have a clip for that.
Well, I think we're kind of done with the...
We have nothing on the binary work.
Well, we do have speculation.
I mean, it could have been the Ukrainian could do this, but now that you brought in Christopher Steele...
Gets kind of annoying.
Now I'm not going to say anything because it's like...
I got a couple of clips on this cyber...
More of the hysteria than anything, but what do you have on the cyber...
I got some PBS stuff that's quite funny.
I'll play the funny part first.
Okay.
Okay.
Which would actually normally be the kicker, but since we've got more than one clip, I'll just skip it.
Punchline first.
It's a daring attempt here.
Yeah.
Hackers everywhere.
We don't get discovered.
They're hoping they don't get discovered.
It's a military fight right now for cyber warfare.
So cyber warfare is going on?
All the time, every day, you know, as we speak, as we're talking right now, there's active hacks that are happening as we're going on right now talking.
We're hacking into Russia, Russia's hacking into us, Iran's hacking into us, North Korea's hacking into us, we're hacking into them.
It's a massive battle that's occurring right now.
Oh my god!
What happened to Pew Pew Pew?
They didn't have any good sound effects there.
Oh, it could be happening as we speak.
Anything could be going on.
Yes, they're here to kill us.
The original clip that should have been played first is the next one, which is Hackers PBS. Now the threat to the U.S. power grid and other vital infrastructure.
John Yang has more on newly revealed hacking attacks by Russia here at home.
Judy, the Trump administration has accused Russia of a series of cyber attacks on American and European power plants, water facilities, and electrical grids.
Officials say the intrusions began in 2015 and continued through last year.
While the hackers had their fingers on the switches, so to speak, they apparently did not actually shut off power.
The FBI and other agencies tracked the hackers and alleged that Russian intelligence is responsible.
For more on these attacks and the wider cyber battlefield, I'm joined by David Kennedy, the founder of TrustedSec, a tech security firm.
David, thanks so much for joining us.
Now, does this mean that they still have their fingers on those switches and can sort of wreak havoc at will?
Well, the energy grid and the water treatment facilities aren't like one interconnected system.
So throughout the United States, there's a number of companies and it's a disjointed system.
So the FBI is working with all of these different companies trying to find out what level of access they had to try to boot them out.
So there still could be access into the systems.
We don't know how widespread this was.
The Department of Homeland Security didn't really give all of the details.
We don't know if they're still in the systems, but we just know that they were specifically targeting a large amount of our infrastructure so that possibly in the event that there was a military conflict, they could shut us down a large percentage of our infrastructure.
Bullcrap.
Yeah, let me do the...
Yeah, go ahead.
But I just want to say that there's little tidbits in there that are kind of interesting because if you remember, our show has bitched and moaned about these attempts to make one giant grid.
Yeah, which seems so smart.
It seems like the dumbest thing you can imagine because...
And this guy even says, well, you know, they're all little separate little operations and it's kind of hard to do anything with one fell swoop.
Which is true.
And whether you can do anything at all, some of these systems are antiques.
And they don't have the only thing going on with the computers.
Maybe some system or two has got some control and may not be hooked to the internet, which would be wise.
It's very flaky reporting.
Rachel Maddow, she's the one really pushing this, and it's all based on a New York Times article, and you heard the meme there.
The title of the article is, Cyberattacks put Russian fingers on the switch at power plants.
So you'll hear everybody with finger on the switch.
If it wasn't Trump with his finger on the button, it's finger on the switch.
Finger on the switch, ready to just turn us off.
At a moment's notice, be very afraid.
And that's exactly what Manow did.
And she, of course, as she does these days, has brought on one of the journalists who wrote the story.
You know, has to even be out of breath.
I just made it to the studio.
My article just dropped.
Ah!
Or they get them on the phone, and the woman who wrote this is a...
is a Hummer!
First, we'll listen to Rachel.
This is the first time today that the U.S. government has come out publicly and named...
This is actually her.
No, that's the Hummer.
I thought this was the intro.
Wait, is this the intro?
Yeah, this is the intro where she's explaining it.
Yes, the Hummer.
Russia is the perpetrator behind some of these pretty serious attacks on our critical infrastructure.
Last year, as you mentioned, it covered the attack on the Wolf Creek nuclear plant.
That was one of about a dozen nuclear power plants that Russians had targeted.
Targeted?
What's different in the announcement today is it actually included a screenshot that showed Russian hackers have their buttons.
Sorry, their fingers on the buttons.
Oh, yeah.
She's one of those DT people.
Buttons.
They're figured out the buttons.
They got a button.
They got a button.
In the announcement today is it actually included a screenshot that showed Russian hackers have their buttons.
Sorry, their fingers on the buttons here.
They...
If they wanted to, could have shut down some of these power plants or sabotaged them in some way.
Now, there's no evidence that they have done that yet.
But for the first time, we've put out publicly that they certainly have that capability.
Why was the previous warning to power plant operators secret?
The one that you reported on last summer, that was not a public warning.
It did ultimately make it into public discussion in part because of your reporting on it.
But this one is public today.
Does it necessarily follow that the increased severity of these cyber attacks would result in it being more important for this warning to be public?
Or would some of the same caution apply that led them to keep the previous warning under wraps?
I think when they first came out with it last year, it had been about three months into a series of attacks on power plants and nuclear facilities.
And as we reported last year, basically they'd only gotten into To the business and administrative computer networks back then.
They hadn't been able to make the leap from those networks into the control systems themselves.
What's different now and what they came out with today is basically that's changed.
We're now in a very serious situation where Russian hackers are no longer just in the administrative networks.
They actually are in the computers that have access to the machinery themselves.
They're stealing screenshots and they were taking- Whoa!
No, they're stealing screenshots.
The Department of Homeland Security published today, which shows that they were there.
They can turn off some of those power plant systems if they want to.
They can manipulate them.
They can sabotage them.
And they're there.
And I think we've gotten to a point where these attacks have gotten so serious that we were left with no choice but to come out and say, hey, we know you're there.
Now, so the entire article...
You're not turning off the internet, you dummy.
The entire article is based on one screenshot which somehow proves they're there.
Really, I read the article twice just to make sure I understood what it was saying.
And this is Nicole Perlroth, who co-wrote the article.
That's all.
They sent a screenshot, which strangely is not available in the New York Times article.
But, yeah, a screenshot that proves that.
Must be a top-secret screenshot at the power plant.
Now, luckily, Rachel did ask some follow-up questions.
Is this the sort of thing where identifying it, pointing out what they've done, naming, in some cases, the specific technical ways that these hacks were achieved, the specific type of malware that was used and all these other things, strings of computer code that are in this technical alert, is this the sort of thing where naming it and identifying it will allow power plant operators to stop hackers from potentially doing this?
Or are these power plant operators essentially helpless and tonight, if Russian hackers wanted to, they could shut these things down?
I mean, it's a great question.
You need to stop talking during the trip.
I know.
I stepped over my own line.
I wanted to.
They could shut these things down.
I mean, it's a great question.
That's not a great question.
That's not a great question.
I think at this point, part of the reason they came out with this is to tell power plant operators, hey, look for this on your systems because it's happening and it's real.
In some cases, when you talk to some of the targets, they don't even know that they've been compromised.
Hopefully, we hope that in many cases when the government sees evidence or picks up evidence that Russians are inside their systems, they tip off these companies as soon as possible.
But there's definitely some instances out there where you have a situation where a power plant It's real.
It's just real, man.
It's real.
I wonder what – you know, the New York Times is pretty – or used to be very picky about people going on the air left and right.
But I think this is a very poor representative of the reporting class in this country in general.
Well, there are...
She says button.
Button.
Button.
And she stretches her words out like a hammer and she sounds like a dummy.
Yeah, and what's...
Did she report on what the operating system was we're dealing with here?
No, not even in the article doesn't really report it.
We know what it is, but it's NT3. Isn't that what runs this stuff?
But we got an interesting announcement yesterday.
Today, that would be...
Not yet, not today.
That was...
No, it was more than a month ago.
CrowdStrike issued a joint press release with Dragos to finally announce the partnership they've developed over the course of the past year.
The partnership allows our customers the benefits of CrowdStrike's experience with the enterprise network to be combined with the Dragos expertise of the industrial control system environments.
Everybody's vying now.
So these guys have got a JV going, oh, we can protect you.
Symantec is everywhere.
Yes, yes, it's very dangerous.
You should use our services.
It's very dangerous.
Buy our stuff.
And Rachel was very afraid.
I thought the scariest thing in cyber attack news today was going to be the other story that Nicole Perlroth had in the New York Times today, which is about a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia being hit by a cyber attack that was designed to not just shut it down, but to make it explode and kill people.
And then we got her follow-up story, which is about what's happening here.
That's right, baby.
It was designed to explode the plant.
And kill people.
Yeah.
Specifically.
I remember the last time we went through this.
This was just last year.
The hackers were in.
It turned out it was completely untrue.
Well, we do know from my discussions with people at Cloudflare, this is that same period of time when I discussed this with them, is that the Iranians are big into this stuff.
Especially after they got attacked.
Into the exploding stuff?
No, into hacking and getting, you know, they're causing trouble everywhere and they would be the ones that would be attacking Saudi Arabia with some code.
Right.
Whether it could make anything, do anything other than turn off a system or make one of the processes go wrong.
Berserk.
But here's what I don't understand.
I'm looking at articles from 2017, June.
Russia has developed a cyber weapon that can disrupt power grids, according to new research.
Here we go, Daily Mail.
Russia tried to hack Britain's national grid, tried to penetrate telecoms companies.
Ugh!
It's just recycling.
I don't think there's anything new except some flaky screenshot, which I haven't seen.
Maybe it's been made available since the article first came out.
That's the only new information.
I know why it's not being shown.
Because it's bullcrap?
No, because there probably is a screenshot floating around for some reason.
And it's probably so mundane, it might just say, hello.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
I don't even think it would be that good.
It would be just something so boring and mundane.
People would go, what's the big deal?
It doesn't seem to be much of a deal.
Well, these guys just want to keep this pot boiling and keep rushing the news.
If the Russian intelligence services were this slipshod, I think that's a good thing.
But I don't think it's true.
I don't think they're that slipshod.
Where they get caught because they're using their IP addresses from Russia when they could use any in the world through various techniques.
It's interesting how the experts are always able to claim that it's not just Russians.
No, no, it's coming directly from the Kremlin.
That is in every article.
This is now coming from Kremlin-directed government hackers.
Yeah, there's a little, you know, a small office right outside Putin's office.
Yeah, just off to the side.
You know where those big giant, one of the offices is in one of those giant gold doors.
It's in the door.
It's in the door itself.
Yeah.
I'm not too worried, personally.
I am worried about my own building here, who can't seem to keep the power on when it gets too hot or too cold, but Russians, no, not so much.
Your building has these issues?
Yeah.
The Russians, man.
The Russians, I'm telling you.
Know where you are.
Well.
Okay, I guess we got the hacker stuff out of the way.
Yeah, we do.
But we haven't answered the question.
Any collusion?
That's what we still need to know.
Not yet.
We need to know if there was any collusion at all.
So I put in the newsletter a very funny clip from another podcast.
Yeah.
Yes.
I don't know if you ever...
Did you listen to it?
No.
No?
No.
Yes, I did.
I listened to the whole thing.
I didn't listen to it from the newsletter, but I presume it was the same one.
About the...
SES. SES, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I listened to it after the last show, and I recall that we have discussed this But maybe eight or nine years ago, a long time ago.
I don't remember that.
Well, I tried to Bing it, couldn't find any references.
Our own bingit.io doesn't go back past episode 492 when we were doing structured show notes.
I know, sucks.
But yes, I do recall this, and it's very interesting, and I've been looking forward to your reporting on it.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
Well, I got turned off immediately by their bull crap.
I think this bull report was just a crock.
And I'm sorry I put it in there.
But I'm also...
Sorry that we got this information from our own people, which is like, can't you read between the lines?
Here's the clip that really got to me.
Do you want to explain what it is?
Okay, SES is Senior Executive Services, which is an operation that was started in 1979.
That was, the way I see it, even though I have a couple of people that worked there or worked under them who sent notes in which I'll read.
But I see it as just a giant executive temp service.
And it reminds me of venture capitalists who have the in-house, the go-to CEO. They have some guy who always have a CEO at the VC firm that is used as the designated CEO. If something falls apart and they have to fire somebody, they put this guy in.
And he takes over the place.
And he's just a generalist.
He knows how to be an executive.
And that's what he does.
And that's what this operation is.
And it turns out this operation was formed right after the Gerald Ford administration because Ford had gone through a number of firings similar to the way Trump is doing it.
Because once he took over, and it caused a vacuum in leadership, and the government just didn't have enough people to fill these slots.
And so they were very conservative about who they would put on the cabinet.
In fact, Jimmy Carter, when he got in office, and this was passed, and this actually went into play, and the SES was put into play on July 13th, 1979.
Carter, on July 19th, Once these guys were in play, in other words, they had these professional executives who could take over slots throughout the government and especially take over those undersecretary in some of these lesser slots where they could teach the new guy who's coming in how to do his job.
Because in the past, they would...
And Carter suffered from this.
In the past, they would just keep passing it on.
Oh, here's the guy who worked in Lyndon Johnson.
He was secretary of state for...
That's why this guy Schlesinger...
He worked for both parties.
He got fired every time somebody would come in to get rid of him because he wasn't that good, but he knew the job.
It was a huge problem.
So six days after the SES was in play was when Jimmy Carter went nuts.
And I'm going to read from a Time magazine article from that period.
Carter fired like five cabinet members and 34 assistants.
It was outrageous.
In four days, Jimmy Carter dismantled the leadership of his government by demanding the resignations of his top 34 cabinet and staff aides, which, as you recall, I suspected something like this was going on because they wouldn't mention Carter when comparing him to Trump.
Yes, because they, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so he asked for the resignations of top 34 cabinet and aides, and then the chairs of power, theoretically empty, he said about firing those he, and this is interesting, too, in light of what you hear from some of the clips I have.
In fact, let's play this one.
I'm going to go aside and play this one Shields clip that I have here.
Shields and Brooks on firings.
And so he's decided, I'm happy here.
And I'm going to get rid of the people who are making me feel uncomfortable.
Mark, should we be wringing our hands over this or just say, as the White House does, that he's just having people around him who make him comfortable?
It's a new standard for hiring people for jobs.
Does he or she make me comfortable?
Not whether they can contribute to the public wheel and make the country better or anything of the sort.
Yeah, he's stumbling a lot, but he says it's a new standard, really, because that's exactly why Carter did it.
So it's not a new standard.
Except Carter, he really did a bloody Saturday or whatever they keep calling it.
Oh yeah, but he knew the SES was in place, and so he could get rid of all these people, because normally it would make all the departments inoperable.
They wouldn't work at all.
Right.
So once that happened, it was six days later that Carter took this move.
He didn't do it earlier.
And this is all part of the, this is all part of a civil service reform.
I think it was of 1978.
There was this huge reform that took place because of this problem they had, because of these guys that kept getting passed around, because they were the only guys that could do these jobs out of the blue.
Anyways, let me just read from this Time Magazine article.
And then the chairs of power, theoretically empty, he said about firing those he deemed Ineffective, disloyal, sounds like Trump.
Political liability, sounds like Trump.
And annoyances to his closest associates.
And so, meanwhile, Shields is saying, oh, this is a new standard.
New normal, new normal.
And Shields knows about this.
He's just disingenuous.
That whole PBS discussion between those two boneheads has got to go.
And I've got to ask you, yeah, he knows because he was there, but I have a feeling his memory, his judgment, everything's been clouded.
Well, he's definitely in dimension B. So let's play what really set me off on these guys who did this podcast.
And I do want to read one note first, which is this from one of our producers.
It is run by this NSA guy.
Oh, yeah.
Well, years ago, Thomas Paine, a.k.a. Douglas Gabriel, Ph.D., is retired from a full career in education as a headmaster, administrator and teacher at various Waldorf schools, which are based on the work of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
Prior to this, he was a Trappist monk and a Jesuit priest.
And prior to that, he was drafted into the army where he worked as a cryptographer and systems analyst and signals intelligence at NSA. He is an admitted Luciferian following the Rudolf Steiner school of thought, which is essentially New Age Gnosticism slash Satanism.
All right.
Nice.
So that's in the NSA. Or was.
Well, that guy sounds like a good character.
But here's the clip they got me.
They got me all irked.
This is S.E.S. Tillerson.
Okay.
We're going to pay you the big bucks more than the United States.
We're going to pay you taxpayer dollars.
The amount that you demand to be paid.
What do you think we are paying Rex Tillerson?
I'm wondering if he was SES. When it comes down to it, the head of these agencies are all SES from the list that you gave, or many of the agencies, and the other ones are so hidden as you say, who knows?
So who's being paid those bigger rates, those bigger numbers?
Those would be the true insiders who are staying forever, like Arad Rosenstein, who probably is SES. There was a lot of this about all these names on the list.
Wait a minute, let's go back to the Tillerson thing.
Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon making millions and millions of dollars.
He needs to go for $157,000 a year.
That's motivation right there.
And this guy says, oh, Tilson's probably SES. Oh, really?
So he's working for the government as an SES executive for whatever the GS-15 pay.
157.
So he's doing a double dip.
Really?
Well, he's making millions at Exxon.
You even think that?
You got really angry about this.
Anybody out there listening to this thing and didn't notice this screwball discrepancy?
And didn't stop right there and say, why are you playing this?
We did have a couple of people that wrote me, including the guy with the Satanist stuff.
What I'm a little unclear on is, are you debunking the podcast, debunking the idea of the SES? I'm not quite sure where you're going.
Both.
Okay.
The SES is what it is.
And here's a guy who writes in, one of our producers, after looking at the, oh, he also went to the executive order and looked at, which the guys bring this executive order of Obama that they claim stuffed the SES with 90% of them.
It turns out, you can go to the SES website, which is under the, I think it's the OPW, OPM. It's under, yes, it's under OPM. And they tell, there's all these documents that are in there.
You can read how they operate.
They have these little mini contracts.
Yes, they do pay 120% premium over GS-15 in certain positions.
But it's mostly 240-day deals.
They bring these guys in, and they're supposed to fill all these slots, and they're able to do it.
And our producer, Brendan, says, wow, as someone who has worked for SES appointees under multiple administrations as a government, these guys sound...
You know what they should do?
They should make podcasters SES members.
That's what you need to do.
Think about it.
We'd be perfect.
Under multiple administrations, these guys sound completely clueless.
These appointees are absolutely accountable to department heads, and when the administration shifts, every single one of them who wants to stay employed ends up shifting to do the bidding of the current administration, at least in my experience.
Right.
Anyway, he wrote, actually, we went back and forth and he went and looked at a bunch of different things.
And it turns out that these characters...
This is our dark net.
Deep state.
Deep state.
And it's nonsense.
Here's another clip from them.
SES saboteurs.
I'm still curious why you're so irked about all this.
people have even heard of, is that it appears to be put in place specifically to stop any kind of effectiveness within the elected group of people that the people put in place.
And it's apparent with our current president that these people are pulling in another direction.
And so from the standpoint of organizational development, as far as I can see, this group needs to go away because there's no way our elected president can do his job with these people.
They're all saboteurs.
It's obvious they're all saboteurs.
Why are you so upset about this?
Has the SES been a big thing recently?
Is people talking about it?
I heard it from you.
I learned it by listening to you, okay?
The reason I'm irked about it is because the mainstream media...
Well, this brought it to my attention and I'm irked that it was presented poorly.
And it's also representative of the podcasting class, and it's kind of annoying.
But the thing that gets me, let's play, I'm going to go back to mainstream media.
If you start listening between the lines, let's see, Shutdown Investigation, Shields and Brooks is one of these clips.
Okay, now this is Martha Raddatz, and I want you to listen between the lines with it in mind that This chaos and all the bull crap they keep promoting that the mainstream media is pushing is really resolved by the SES. And people want to get rid of the SES or nuts because these are the guys that when...
When a new administration comes in, especially when it changes parties, not so much when it stays in the same party, but when it changes parties, they've got to get rid of a lot of people.
Oh, these guys, these positions aren't filled.
Oh, the guy's an idiot and Trump can't get anyone filled.
The government's falling apart.
It's all chaos.
If you read between the lines, they know that They know that this is not true.
They know that the SES is in there with their people to keep things on an even keel.
But yet they still report as if they don't know.
Play this Raditz clip and listen to it carefully.
There is no confirmed assistant secretary for East Asia, no ambassador to South Korea, and no special representative for North Korea policy.
He left just before the meeting was announced.
All of the key people at State responsible for the region are in acting or interim positions, but maybe Mike Pompeo can change all of that, David.
Speaking of Mike Pompeo...
Right, so the acting people would be SES. Yeah, they'd be SES, and they'd be very good at their jobs.
I mean, that's what they do, and they get paid a bonus, and they get paid more than a normal guy.
So this whole chaos theory, which these guys promote, but the fact that she said that in that clip, that she knows, that means they all know.
And so they're giving the public a crock of crap with all this nonsense about the chaos when it's covered by the SES folks.
Wait!
I'm shocked there's no chaos going on in there.
Oh, no.
So that's the reason I worked up.
I gotcha.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
And I'm also a little annoyed by any of our listeners who listened to this and actually bought any of it.
Well, we got one more clip.
Yeah, this is where they're claiming that they basically have an open checkbook and they're just spending like crazy on hookers and blow.
So that there are actually 10 different categories of being an SES member and you get paid.
Starting pay is the highest pay that somebody makes in the government who's gone all the way through the GS, the general schedule, up to 15, 1 through 15.
They start at 15 and above in most cases because they are considered to be professional executives.
Who have come to save the day in the government, who the government bends over backwards for so that they can pay them whatever, so that they don't have to even report whether they have a criminal record.
They automatically get a top-secret security clearance because they're going to work in all these agencies.
They rotate around.
There may not be, and usually are not, even executives in the area that they are now in control of.
Most of them are appointed, especially now since Obama's time, because as you pointed out from 2000 on, Obama's executive order expanded the senior executive service so they couldn't even be fired, so that they were almost all independent.
They all get yearly raises from a review board of their subordinates.
Okay.
Okay.
You could have made the point without...
I'm not complaining too much.
I thought there was going to be some...
I actually thought, wow, this SES, they're killing people.
They're doing everything.
And as it turns out, it's all bullcrap.
It was a misdirection.
I'm sorry.
But the point is, I think that...
And by the way, 10% by their own statutes is the most that can be appointed at any given time.
Not 90.
But I just found the whole thing to be an annoyance.
I'm sorry that it was probably...
Could have been...
Easier to do with just, hey, it's bullcrap, and let's go on to the next topic.
It kind of works out with just showing...
Well, I think the Raditz clip is what really makes it...
That brings it home.
It's like, yeah, they know about it.
They know about the SES. It's been going on for a long time.
But yet, there's chaos everywhere.
Chaos.
Just chaos.
Fired Andrew McCabe.
It's just horrible.
You know, people are...
Let me just say something about this.
So, McCabe is fired three days before he gets his pension.
It's seen as a very incredibly mean move, horrible.
I don't know exactly what the rules are.
If you're fired, you don't get any pension.
It's all over.
I think it's the wrong question.
Do you know how much he's getting in pension?
We're talking $1.8 million.
What?
Yeah.
$1.8 million.
That's his total pension package.
That's his total.
Yeah.
Well, how much is your pension?
That's not a year.
No, of course not.
But how much is your total pension package?
Do you have one?
Sip?
Yeah.
I don't have one.
So everyone...
We've got Andrea Mitchell suggesting on Twitter, like, well, you know, if some congressman would hire him for a few days, then he could hit his pension.
By the way, that's happening.
I know.
Of course it's happening.
He has 18 million job offers in Congress now.
Yeah, by a bunch of Democrats' douchebags.
Yeah, I should have said gajillion.
That would have sounded more credible.
Gajillion.
He's got a gajillion of offers.
I want to play another disingenuous clip of this one here.
This is McEntee.
You know, this guy was kind of a gopher for Trump that was always following him around carrying loads of books.
He got fired.
Play this clip.
McEntee fired.
I'm not sure who McEntee is.
Oh, McEntee.
Yeah, he got fired.
He's one of the gophers.
You look him up.
He got fired after Hope got fired.
It got less news because it was less scandalous, I guess.
But they still drop a little bomb in here that's nonsense.
He sees Peter Alexander explains.
He was literally the man closest to the president, Johnny McEntee, President Trump's personal assistant, his body man, abruptly forced out of his post and escorted off the White House.
You should have just said Trump's Huma, then I would have understand.
Once you hear body man, you understand it.
If you said Trump's Reggie Love, I would have understood.
...assistant, his body man, abruptly forced out of his post and escorted off the White House grounds Monday.
NBC News confirming McEntee is under investigation by the Secret Service for serious financial crimes, according to two federal law enforcement officials.
His security clearance in limbo for some time, according to one of the officials.
The White House refusing to comment on what a senior aide calls a personnel issue.
The 27-year-old former college quarterback's oustered.
The biggest thing with quarterbacks is if they can make all the throws.
Just one month after the dismissal of top aide Rob Porter, accused of domestic violence, allegations Porter denies, raising new questions about White House vetting.
A process tonight slammed as deficient by the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.
Oh, I see.
This is Team Javanka still going after Kelly.
Yeah, that's what this is.
Oh, he hired another loser.
You've got to get rid of him.
You know, this stuff is so strong.
Well, Kelly's the one who probably got rid of this guy.
Of course.
The thing that bothered me about the report is this financial crimes insinuation.
Severe.
Severe financial crimes.
Yeah.
You know what that was?
I can't wait.
Gambling problem.
Ah.
It is a problem, but to categorize it as severe financial crime.
Did they say crimes?
Finance?
Yeah, financial crime.
That's not a crime.
Well, if he's working with bookies in the D.C. area.
I think he said he had a gambling problem.
Yeah, he had a gambling problem.
Oh.
Well, and then he's working with bookies, obviously.
That makes it a crime.
It's not a good look, that's for sure.
But it's not exactly like that.
You don't want some guy who's had to do football, ex-football jock.
I mean, these guys all have a gambling problem.
Not necessarily.
Nice generalization.
A little bit of a generalization, but a lot of them do.
Because they like to gamble.
And so this is it.
But this financial crisis makes him sound like some wheelie dealer on Wall Street.
Yeah, exactly.
He's a go-to gopher that bets on football.
Well done.
Yeah, it's just framing.
Everything is framing.
It's always framed in some way that just misleads people.
People are being misled.
I made the mistake of going to the No Agenda subreddit yesterday because I hadn't looked at it in a couple weeks.
And here's what I noticed.
There's pretty much...
I mean, it's dead.
I mean, there's not much going on there, but there's pretty much three or four people, and they claim that they were huge fans of the show before Trump got elected, and that apparently we completely changed everything we do.
And when I hear a clip like this, which, yeah, you could hear this as...
We're defending Trump or his people or whatever.
I think we're still...
I really...
I had a chat with myself.
I said, self, have you changed?
No, we're still deconstructing media.
It's just the media is batting for another side.
The media's changed.
It certainly has.
Yeah, the media's gone nuts.
And it's all anti...
All we do is pick apart their reporting, which is piss poor in most situations.
And it just turns out that most of the piss-poor reporting is something to do with Trump.
You know, Tina got schnookered the other day.
She's busy.
She works all day.
She's running all of Ronald McDonald House globally.
That's what the Dutch press reports, so you've got to trust it.
And then she sends me a text.
She said, wait, oh no, McMaster fired?
We really do.
I think we might have a clown in the White House.
I'm like, wow.
First of all, not McMaster, Kelly.
I said, Kelly fired?
So I go look and I said, I can't find anything.
Well, she had seen a tweet that insinuated that, I guess.
And she admitted herself.
She said, oh my God, there's so much coming in.
And I think her environment may be dementia B. There's so much coming in that she slips and she uses the clown reference.
It was quite a moment.
Oh, you can't get away from it.
No, you can't.
And she's smart.
Yeah, no, you can't get away with it.
Mimi does the same thing.
She falls prey to these things.
I remember on Twitter somebody sent Because the libs that are, I don't know if they actually like that term, but the libs who are my friends, they're all in.
This was weeks ago, I think.
This is your journalist friends and you have text messages.
Journal libs.
They were going on and on about McMaster.
Oh, McMaster's gone.
I said, wait, what?
He's still there.
And then I said something on this show about it, but that time period.
And then somebody on Twitter sends a screenshot of a newspaper headline, McMaster Fired.
Right.
Two weeks ago.
Right.
I'm looking at this thing, I'm saying, this is not, somebody, what?
Somebody, like, went to Photoshop to create this thing and then pass it on to Twitter and then floats around and comes back and this guy's mocking me because McMaster's been fired.
McMaster's not fired.
He might get fired someday.
Yeah.
But he's not fired now.
In fact, there's a...
But they keep pushing this.
In fact, the thing...
I have a couple of clips.
Here, play the McMaster Kelly updates.
Okay.
Now, is he gone or not?
I've lost track.
Is McMaster still there?
No, he's not gone.
The White House played down talk today of another impending shakeup, namely that President Trump plans to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster.
It was widely reported that the President has complained of McMaster lecturing him and that the two clashed over Iran and North Korea.
But at today's briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said it's much ado about nothing.
The president said that it was not accurate and he had no intention of changing, that they had a great working relationship, and he looked forward to continue working with them.
The chief of staff actually spoke to a number of staff this morning, reassuring them that there were personnel changes, no immediate personnel changes at this time, and that people shouldn't be concerned.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mr.
Trump and his chief of staff, John Kelly, have reached a truce of their own after months of tensions.
Oh, has he given him the Trump kiss of death yet?
No, here's the thing about it.
They make this stuff up.
You know, they used to have good sources in the White House.
Now they're having, you know, it's pretty sketchy.
So they're making this stuff up, and it doesn't come to be.
So they make up another story that is a truce.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, this is where we could do the same thing.
Well, now we understand there's a truce.
I just found the whole thing that's like, Kelly's out.
He's going.
He's going to get fired any minute.
We've got it on good authority from people in the know.
And then it doesn't happen.
You go, ah, turns out they made a truce.
The whole thing is bullcrap.
There's no truce.
Why do you make a truce with your chief of staff?
Are you having a fistfight or are you bombing each other?
I mean, that's a truce.
I had a crazy clip that had one of those outrageous...
Oh yeah, hold on a second.
Here it is.
Listen to this from the Don Lemon Show.
He is the overnight sensation, you know.
McCabe's counsel, the former DOJ inspector, is called Michael Bromwich.
And here's what he says.
He blasted the process that led to McCabe's firing in a statement saying, This distortion of the process begins at the very top with the president repeated offensive drive-by Twitter attacks on Mr.
McCabe.
I can't let that pass.
Drive-by Twitter attacks.
I mean, that's pretty good.
That's really giving...
Well, that's stolen from Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, I don't listen to him.
But he didn't use it for Twitter.
He used it for the media.
They called it the drive-by media.
Right, but to say drive-by...
I mean, what is this?
He's driving by in his limo and like...
No, it's very thuggish the way it sounds.
There's some extra hate going on.
We have some more hate on religion.
Well, before you go there, I want to get the McMaster thing out of the way.
There's one more curiosity here.
Play this Peculiar Clips both ways, McMaster.
Stay in!
Want to go back to the Army?
With the President now actively discussing possible replacements, according to sources familiar with the matter, including former Ambassador...
According to sources familiar with the matter.
Yeah.
Yeah, they know what they're talking about.
Any collusion?
The source is familiar with the matter, including former ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton.
The White House insisting McMaster's job is safe.
I spoke directly to the president last night.
He asked me to pass that message along to General McMaster.
Yeah, you're right there.
Now, if Trump's in the White House, I guess he's down in Florida.
He would have a meeting with McMaster every day, and he'd probably talk to him at least daily.
So why would he be passing that message along to McMaster that he's not fired?
I don't know.
Makes no sense.
This little thing that he'd be passing that message along is kind of taken out of context.
All I ever hear is just this part, he asked me to pass that message along.
Oh, now it's passing it on to him?
That's what they're saying?
To McMaster.
Hmm.
This is very poorly done.
I mean, I know that these guys are in a bind because they got everyone getting fired, including Ben Carson.
I think a lot of these guys are just, you know...
Ben Carson never made sense to me at all.
Ben Carson makes...
And Ben Carson is like, he's got other things.
I think he's...
One of these things he goes in and looks around and says, what am I doing here?
I've been mainly watching MSNBC. CNN is very unwatchable.
I'll watch Jake and I'll watch Aaron Burnett.
But it reminds me of MH17. When MH17 went down, I think it was 18 months that every single second of CNN, certainly, and MSNBC was about the plane.
I remember we marked a year, and we were already like, geez, it's been a year since that thing disappeared?
And, you know, all they do is just repeat, rinse, repeat, go over and over, come up with something new, hate on stuff.
Have you ever seen this Stephanie Rule on MSNBC? I don't think so.
Stephanie Rule and Ali Velshi.
Oh, yes, Ali.
Yeah, they do mid-mornings.
Mid-mornings.
Yeah, I see.
I've seen this show, yeah.
Everything in MSNBC is really poor.
Larry Kudlow did...
Eamon Javers pointed it out on Twitter just a few moments ago.
If you noticed, when Larry Kudlow spoke on CNBC yesterday, he ended by saying, however things work out, it will be God's will.
That's an interesting way to...
Talk about being the national economic advisor to the president.
God's will.
We're going to talk to you all about this guy, Larry Kudlow, President Trump's new pick to be the top economic advisor.
This will be the challenge for Larry Kudlow, because in the position that he's in now, he has to stand there and represent real data.
Right, but the fear is he may stand there and represent the president in the face of real data.
Well, as Larry Kudlow says, it's God's will.
Why does she think it's okay to do that?
It just doesn't seem smart to me.
There's got to be people who are believers who watch her show.
It's just mocking faith.
I don't know.
I don't get it.
And I don't know why they turn on Kudlow.
He's one of their own.
He's NBC. They even call him one of our own.
One of our own.
He is one of their own.
Yeah.
But why would they turn on him?
Because he's working for Trump.
Ultimate sin.
Go work for Trump.
Exactly.
It seems like a really good choice to me.
If you want some guy to just say everything's great, I mean, that's the guy you want.
What else is he for?
We never heard from Gary Cohn.
I think the logic is this.
These guys are badgered.
And most of these jobs are glorified bullcrap jobs.
The staff does most of the work.
Most of the SES people do.
And so this is a glorified...
You're a front man.
It's like a lot of magazines have an editor-in-chief who doesn't do anything but represent the company.
And the editor does all the work.
The editor-in-chief just goes out there and manages the editor and some other people.
But generally speaking, they're out there.
They're the face of the company.
And so Trump's thinking or somebody's thinking, Kelly's obviously involved in this.
Let's get some front people who actually can speak on television and know what they're doing because they've been on television.
They're used to it.
They understand how they can read from a prompter even better than Trump can.
And let's just – there's got to be a few of them because many of them were in government service before.
And then they couldn't find another job because they can't get back in the government with a new administration.
So they go work on TV and they get pretty good at talking.
Yeah.
Funny how we went exactly the opposite direction.
After our career was over, we went to podcasting.
Couldn't even get on cable.
No.
Well, we can't get on cable with this material.
I think the best that I heard this past week about the firings and chaos and everything going on came from Malcolm Nance.
He's a contributor on MSNBC. He really just perfectly put it all into perspective for dementia B. They had a four-point plan for how KGB operations, propaganda, and agents were to operate against both the CIA and United States law enforcement.
The first one was to use activities that would demoralize, discredit, or disinform about their operations.
Then they would go after individual agents.
Then they would go after their leadership.
Donald Trump is literally playing by the Russian playbook on this.
You know, I've joked from time to time that it appears that there's like some Russian advisory team in the White House.
He's learned this on his own.
He understands that there's value in doing this.
But what he's doing is he's completely dismantling law enforcement.
But he plays that little trick where he says, but I'm not talking about the I'm just talking about your corrupt leadership.
This is the corrupt leadership that took us through 9-11.
This is the quote-unquote corrupt leadership that caught spies and other agents in this country that helps us capture terrorists every day.
If there's a terrorist attack tomorrow, they will all be leaning on those same FBI officers and trying to use them to protect this nation.
This is a disgusting disgrace that Donald Trump would allow this to happen, but he's engineering it.
He literally, literally is working off the Russian playbook.
Makes nothing but sense.
This reminds me of the George Bush era, where either George Bush was this Unbelievable, deceitful, conniving, evil genius.
Now, you mean Walker, the original, or the W? No, no, no, the second Bush.
Oh, W Bush, yeah.
The kid.
The moron.
W Bush.
He was either, right, he was either a moron, or a conniving, evil genius.
Because they couldn't make him into a real person, so they had these stereotype opposites.
And he was either a moron or this evil genius.
And they never could make up their minds.
And we did it during the show.
We were just hearing one thing or the other that had to do with Bush being portrayed as something he's not.
With Trump, you're going to have to make up your mind.
He's either a big dummy, an oaf clown, as Tina would have it, or he is a Russian spy, a sneaky bastard.
A Manchurian candidate.
Manchurian candidate, all these other things.
We have a great mix today from, I think GX2 put it together, of the list that you read the other day.
Oh, the list, good.
Yeah, it's good.
It's good for end-of-show mix.
Yeah.
All right, so I have the one, we could transition.
Well, I'd like to take a break.
I do have one last clip regarding Tillerson, and this was actually spurred on by Horowitz of the DH Unplugged show.
He tweeted, no, he sent us an email, which you probably didn't see, because I'm sure you don't read emails from either of us.
Like, oh, Jesus, podcast, guys.
I'll read that later.
Podcast.
Podcast guys.
Well, whatever.
This is from Tillerson's goodbye speech.
Safety and security of our State Department of Personnel.
Oh, yeah.
Accountability.
Hey, stop.
Hold on a second.
This was Horowitz's pet peewee, because he...
It was telling me about this in the last show when I had the Tillerson clip.
I was digging through it to get this.
And I couldn't find it and I just gave up on it.
And I'm glad you brought it back.
Accountability, which means treating each other with honesty and integrity and respect for one another.
Most recently, in particular, to address challenges of sexual harassment within the department.
So, I found some information on this.
Holy crap!
Okay.
This is, so there's an article on CNN.com, and it's an interview with Ambassador Leslie Bassett, and she was, let me see...
Foreign Service Officer in Nicaragua.
But the whole article is just...
And I think a lot of it also comes from the cover story for Foreign Service Journal, which is a publication from the American Foreign Service Association.
I mean, there's ambassadors, there's orgies, all kinds of nutty stuff going on.
And...
Forgive me if I'm wrong.
Just because of Trump?
No, I would think that a lot of these people are still Obama people because I know we have a lot of open spots in the State Department.
Remember that a number of years back during the Obama administration with the scandals about the Secret Service partying?
Yes, partying with hookers and all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, with hookers.
Yeah.
Okay, go on.
Well, you really have to read the article.
I mean, she just has story after story about harassment in the workplace.
Again, sticking tongues in mouths is my favorite.
I mean, whoever, does that work for anybody?
I mean, if I went up to Tina and went, hey, baby, what are you doing?
It's not a good approach.
It just doesn't work.
For fiscal year 2017, 483 reports of harassment in the State Department, 225 of which included claims of sexual or gender-based harassment, so that's just being mean.
But there's some real physical stuff.
And I'd like to know more about it.
What the heck is going on in our State Department?
And was there anything...
Maybe not, but does Tillerson's firing have anything to do with it?
Why does he bring this up?
Is this just to say, oh, you know, we've got a lot of work to do?
Yeah, this is what Horowitz's thing was.
Because he says this was just dropped on.
It was.
It was.
No one followed up.
Dropped into the speech as a toss-away.
I mean, we know about the nutty ambassador in Brussels.
There was all kinds of shenanigans going on with him, and Hillary protected him when she was running the joint.
I was just like, wow, that was kind of unexpected.
And I, of course, I didn't hear any of it.
This all stems from the Hillary and the Kerry administration, and maybe before then.
You know, those guys, and this will be my absolute last clip before we take a break.
The author of Clinton Cash is coming out with a new book.
And I think we were talking at the time of the Ukraine issues with the Maidan and, you know, FDU and Victoria Nuland was over there and everyone's, you know, setting up the government to make it as anti-Russian as possible, putting the people in there.
The secretary of the treasury or finance, whatever they call it in Ukraine, became a citizen overnight.
Give her a passport.
Now you can be in the government.
You're good.
And she's one of ours.
We knew that Joe Biden's kid was doing something with oil in Ukraine.
You remember that?
Oh yeah, of course I remember that.
That's a big deal.
Seems like it's a little deeper than that.
The story is, as you said, the stepson of John Kerry, the son of Joseph Biden, when they were cabinet members of the Obama administration, created a new investment fund called Seneca.
They inked a How about this?
What if Tillerson wanted to get out?
I mean, remember, he was hyperventilating.
I watched the speech again.
I think you're right.
I think he was hyperventilating.
He probably, if he was fired, I think he would have been more defiant.
I think he found something out.
I think he found out something going on in the State Department he wants no part of.
And he wanted out.
And he wanted out quick.
And you hear this kind of stuff?
Who knows what else is going on inside of the State Department?
Well, he did drop that little bombshell in there, and it was done on purpose.
Yeah.
And only Horowitz picked it up.
Which is...
The news media sure did.
Nobody in the news...
I don't see any of these reports that you're talking about.
No.
And he was hyperventilating, and when you're hyperventilating, there's always a reason for it.
Yeah.
I don't know what the specific reason was, but he was very upset that...
I wouldn't mention Trump.
Everyone called him out on that.
That was the main focus.
Oh, he never mentioned Trump!
He never mentioned Trump!
As though he's, you know, I don't know what...
He didn't mention Trump, okay.
Not for a second.
And he goes off and he...
You might be right.
He was fired, though.
Maybe he didn't want to do it.
I don't know.
There is a missing piece.
I agree.
We're missing some piece of information.
And then he dropped that little bombshell in there for a reason.
There's breadcrumbs.
Yes, that's why they call me the crackpot.
And that is why I would like to thank you for your courage and say in the morning to you, John C. USC stands for collusion.
Any?
Dvorak.
Dvorak.
In the morning to you, Mr.
Adam Curry.
In the morning to all ships at sea.
In the morning, all boots on the ground, feet in the air, subs in the water, all the dames and all the knights out there.
In the morning to the troll room, noagendastream.com.
Hello, trolls.
Good to have you here.
We have some Satanists in the room, apparently, as well.
Stream in after you start talking about them.
Also, thank you to Trent Wabbis.
He brought us the artwork from episode 1016, titled, That is Bong Rip!
This was a funny one and could only be used for this episode.
It was the Alka-Seltzer fast death.
Specially made for double agents in pain.
33 effervescent tablets.
This was part of our binary discussion about the Novichok's death powder.
The death powder.
We want to thank Trent, of course, and all of the artists who contribute their artwork, their talents to the show at noagendaartgenerator.com.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
I want to thank a few people, starting with our buddy, Parts unknown, totally anonymous, won't write anything down, uses gloves to write his letters, doesn't use a return address on the envelope.
Sironymous, and JCD has note, which is stapled.
Is this Sironymous of Dogpatch?
Of Dogpatch in Lower Slovoda?
We do know where he's from.
Yeah, he's from Dogpatch.
Yeah.
Loris Lobovia.
With two B's, by the way.
Thank you to and all the producers for continuing to provide insightful and a balanced view of the news.
By the way, this is a $1,000 donation, which is fantastic.
To listeners that are a little slow in donating, consider how your views would be formed without this show.
Even people who don't like it.
Even people who don't like it.
It's important.
People don't like our show.
It's important.
Your views will be formed by listening to our show.
If you didn't have it, you'd be completely off the radar.
Off the scale.
No, off the...
Deep end.
Off the table.
Off the light bulb.
Spend five minutes of your time and send something every month.
Or subscribe with monthly payments in exchange for six hours of weekly reality.
ABOG or Air Opinion.
Four domestic flights last month of three to six hours included two different golden retrievers, a large boxer with a diaper, which he flies a lot.
Did he send a photo of that?
The boxer with a diaper.
The problem, he wouldn't send the photo because it would bust us.
Of course, it breaks all protocol.
Exactly.
It breaks all protocol.
Okay, so he's flying around.
He says four domestic flights last month of three to six hours, meaning that's coast to coast, included two different golden retrievers, a large boxer with a diaper, which I imagine would stink if used, And a husky.
The latter sat at the foot of its owner in the bulkhead row, and an unrelated passenger sat next to the owner.
The husky was wearing a fake service animal attire.
After wishing I had brought one of my goats with me to make a point, although it would probably eat my seat...
And a bun bag is pretty unsanitary.
I considered what was going on.
It was a Siberian Husker and its attire was red.
Was this the work of the Russian Siberian Husky hackers?
Are they testing our airport security just as they probe all security systems everywhere?
Large trained dog is extremely dangerous.
A large dog is also much larger than a laptop to bring some pretty nasty things on board.
People that put bombs on children or women would have no problem putting things in dogs that they would extract on board.
I know some fanatics view dogs as haram, but they can be convinced, and not all fanatics are Muslim.
After this troubling thought, I'm in favor of the FAA banning all large and unconfirmed animals on aircraft.
It certainly makes more sense than a ban on fishing rods as a carry-on.
Hey, NJNK. Then we thank Sir Onimus of Dogpatch for his contribution to the show.
In more ways than one, I'm thinking now, do these dogs get scanned?
Do they go through the body scanner?
I have no idea, probably.
I don't know.
You could load a dog up with C4. That's what I'm thinking.
Yeah.
We have a little fuse sticking out of his butt.
There you go.
Yeah, that happened.
I agree.
I think it's a flight risk.
I think it's a security risk.
And all we need is one of these dogs to explode and it's all over, people.
Onward, Baron Hey Idiot.
$432.10.
Please credit Baron Hey Idiot.
ITM, fellas.
In my town, the police use code 1017 for getting fuel, which you appear to need at this time.
Yes, indeed.
So I'm throwing some gasoline on the media deconstruction fire.
NJNK, and thank you for your courage.
No jingles, no karma.
Thank you for your courage, Baron Hey Idiot.
Sir Jamie, the dude who named Ben.
Sir Jamie, dude named Ben.
33333.
Sir Jamie, dude named Ben from Massachusetts, that's here.
I need triple karma.
I recently quit my job in Boston, got an offer for a new job in Louisville, Kentucky.
I'm working on buying a house and moving across the country.
Okay.
Boston to Louisville is not to me, across the country.
I need job moving and house buying karma to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Please play the Zika song and provide the essential karma.
I'll change my title when I successfully execute the move.
Thanks, guys.
Keep protecting our reality.
All right.
We have the short version for you.
Zika, Zika, Zika, Zika, Zika.
Yeah.
Where's the money?
$1.9 billion.
Zika, Zika, Zika, Zika, Zika.
Yeah.
Where's the money?
Small heads are coming.
You're going to do it.
You watch.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs.
You've got karma.
All right.
Thank you.
Those were the good old days.
That's what those guys in the chat room were talking about.
The good old days when we talked about Zika.
Zika.
Well, Ebola's making that comeback for the CDC. John Fitzpatrick, Heber Springs, Arkansas.
3-17-18 is a beautiful area of Arkansas.
Love the show.
The donation takes me over the edge of knighthood, counting below.
Please knight me Sir John, Knight of St.
Patrick, patron saint of engineers.
Is that true?
Don't know.
It is not my pleasure to call out my son, who rightfully hit me in the mouth so many moons ago, and who is now gainfully employed as a dude named Ben, as a douchebag.
Douchebag!
Thank you for your work, NJNK. If possible, I'd like to have an onion rings and ice cream at the Feast of the Roundtable.
Okay, interesting combo.
Is there a story behind that?
Do we just need to try it?
Sure.
I can imagine it's pretty tasty.
Okay.
It's on the list.
Thank you.
I'm sure the Knights and Danes of the Roundtable will enjoy trying it.
And we try all food at the Roundtable.
Sir Jeremy Johnson at Port Angeles, Washington.
One of our Port Angelenos.
226-69.
And I hope he can make it to the Seattle Meetup.
ITM from Port Angeles.
We are local number two?
Yes?
No?
I guess.
It has been too long and I'm humbly in need of a de-douche.
I'm not sure where a local number two would be.
I'm humbly in need of a de-douche.
You've been de-douched.
My fault.
Calling out other knights and dames who haven't donated in a while.
Douchebags.
No, no, no.
We don't douchebag knights and dames just because they haven't donated in a while.
They're not douchebags.
I'm sorry.
I agree.
I vetoed.
But we understand what you're saying, Sir Jeremy, and appreciate that because it is part of the duty.
Yeah.
How on some of the locals, by the way.
Yes.
Request jobs, jobs, jobs, and hot pockets.
Do we still have hot pockets?
Hot pockets!
Wait, I can do it.
Hot pockets!
No, I think mine is better.
Hot pockets!
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
You've got karma.
So he's our first associate executive producer.
Onward with Gary Blair, $222.22 from Bristol, Tennessee.
In the morning, gents, I found this show a little over a year ago, and up to now was a douche.
Thanks for the bi-weekly doses of media analysis and sanity.
Can I get an F cancer for some much-needed help with a recent bit of bad news?
Thanks, Gary.
Yeah, screw that.
First a de-douching, sir.
You've been de-douched.
You've got Carmen.
You've got it, man.
Fight it.
Derek Smith in Carmel, Indiana.
200.
This is a donation that's long overdue.
Please give me a dedouching.
Of course.
You've been dedouched.
I've been trying to find a website for the lavender guy to find a CBD cream for my mother who has arthritis in her hands.
This stuff would work, yeah.
I searched at work for longer than anyone should have, but I couldn't find it.
Even though I thought about emailing you guys but didn't want to bother you, then on my commute home, I was listening to last Thursday's episode and donated to the show.
Adam then gave out the website.
If it isn't a sign, I don't know what is.
Thanks for everything you guys do.
What was the website again?
Lavenderblossoms.org.
Yes, very simple.
And I want to thank our producer over there.
I needed more lip balm, and he got it.
He got it for us.
It's great.
Another care package.
Adam then gave out his website.
That isn't a sign I don't know what is.
Thanks for everything you guys do, and keep up the good work.
Can I get a mac and cheese, chemtrails, and WTC7? Also, karma for one of my kids who is three and a half and hasn't decided to talk yet.
It might be Einstein.
Yeah, who knows?
And I want to say, a really outstanding product from Lavender Blossom, Blossom or Blossoms.org, one of the two, is the Night Nurse.
You might want to try this.
What is it?
A Night Nurse.
You do ten drops under your tongue before you go to sleep.
You sleep like a baby.
Oh, I don't have that.
Oh, you need it.
I do know that the hand cream is approved by Mimi, who also has arthritis.
Yeah.
And the main thing she's concerned about with dents, the only ones she likes is Marys and Lavender Blossoms.
The other ones have the same, apparently a similar problem.
They stink.
Oh, these smell really nice.
Yes.
I like their smell, yeah.
Yeah, most of them, though, and if you've lived in Washington, a place where they sell these things...
You would notice they stink.
And not just a little.
No, these smell good.
They smell like lavender blossoms.
That is...
Oh, now I understand the branding.
Hello!
Oh, boy!
Living the mac and cheese life.
Mac and cheese by Ayn Rand.
Entrails.
WTC7 won't go away.
You've got karma now.
And last on our list with 200 bucks is Timothy Cato, Parts Unknown.
Forgive me, podfathers, for I have sinned.
It's been six months since my last donation, so I humbly request a de-douching.
Yes.
You've been de-douched.
Here's something that I hope help keeps the lights on at the best podcast in the universe.
Goat karma for all.
Everybody!
You've got...
If that doesn't help, nothing will.
You got your night nurse, you got your goat karma, you're ready to attack the new world order, my friend.
So we got everything, uh...
Pretty much.
There is a good group of people for show 2017.
Oh, that's it?
We're done?
All right.
Well, we want to thank everybody, especially these executive and associate executive producers.
They come in and they really support the show with the big numbers, which keeps it going.
And we'll be thanking more people, $50 and above, in the second donation segment.
These people get the credits just like Hollywood.
Executive producer.
Associate executive producer.
They can be used wherever credits are recognized.
We highly suggest you do that.
People seem to get jobs with it, so that was with Jobs Karma.
And we'll do some of that later on, too.
But first, remember this other show that we're doing, the next episode.
It's on Thursday.
Go to...
And just keep using all the deconstruction you can to propagate our formula.
Our formula is this.
We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
Water! Water!
Shut up, play!
Shut up, slave!
You know, if a goat can scream like that, you'd think they'd be able to talk.
Maybe he is talking when he does that.
No, I mean, like, hello, I'm a goat talk.
Well, I gotta tell you, the amount of people I see talking to their dogs like their kids, like their human beings, is becoming very concerning.
We have 70 million dogs in the United States.
That's a lot of dogs.
And people just talk to them like they're babies.
Yes, this is a huge problem.
Oh, the diaper.
Oh, jeez.
Yeah, that's really bad.
I'm sure the dog doesn't appreciate it.
We just had...
No, I'm sure the dog doesn't.
He's like, just give me a cookie, man.
Wait a minute, I just took a poop and all I feel is poop on my ass.
Give me a cookie.
We just had South by Southwest, or as the hip kids call it, South by.
South by here in Austin, Texas.
I would like to, before we get even into that, we had the South by Bomber, which is what I'm calling it.
And with good reason, for now, this was very surprising to me and completely incorrect.
This is from the Statesman, Austin Statesman, seen as a very prestigious newspaper reporting on the bombings here.
You've heard about them.
For investigators, a race to decode hidden message in Austin bombings.
And here's what they came up with.
I hate to say it even.
If the package bombs that have killed two Austin residents and seriously injured a third in recent weeks turn out to be the work of a single person, he or she will join a tiny but grim fraternity, serial killers whose weapon of choice was an incendiary device.
The group is so small that police and psychologists' effort to draw meaningful conclusions about its members has been met with uneven success.
An FBI profile of the Unabomber identified him as an uneducated man in his 30s or 40s who probably worked menial jobs, but Ted Kaczynski was a 53-year-old hermit who held several advanced college degrees.
So they go through this article insinuating that this is very much like the Unabomber.
The thing you're missing is the manifesto that he said he wanted published in the New York Times and the Washington Post and he would blow people up until they did, which they ultimately did.
Did you miss that, Statesman?
I'm a little worried.
Probably a hammer wrote that.
I'm a little worried.
I talk about Professor Ted all the time.
Maybe they want to check on me.
They probably already have.
Anyway...
At South By is where you can get informed on all things hip, cool, new, trendy, and what's really going to blow up.
It's going to explode.
What will be dropping?
It's all here at South By.
What will be dropping?
Well, Generation Z is what's dropping, baby.
Generation Z! Generation Z! Yes.
And MSNBC did a nice sit-down interview with Tiffany Zong.
She is the CEO of Zebra Intelligence.
Oh, God.
It reminds me a lot of when the internet just started and we go to Reebok.
Zero intelligence.
And we say, you need a website.
I'm like, yeah, yeah, I guess we do.
All the hip kids are doing it.
Yes, you do.
You need a website and that's going to be $150,000 to build it and then $50,000 a month maintenance.
Yeah, it's one of these consultant types.
Yeah, that's a good business to be in, if you can find enough suckers.
Well, she found them at South By, no doubt, but I thought we would listen in to understand a little bit about what it means.
And in this context, or maybe all contexts, it's only about advertising, because that's what South By is about.
How can we make money with ads?
How can we monetize?
I hate to interrupt you again, but...
We have probably half of our audience can throw together a much better website than any of these consultants can.
Did you look at Zebra Intelligence?
Is that what you're looking at?
No.
I'm going to, though, not as you mentioned.
But I'm reminded of the fact that the DH Unplugged website, which is a nice website, was actually done by Nick the Rat.
Anything's possible.
Anything's possible.
So, Generation Z. Now, our ad girl, who has to go unnamed, I think I forwarded you this really long analysis, which came from deep inside, from the deep advertising state.
Yes, she's the one who got us to discuss this in the first place.
Yeah.
And, you know, we learned a couple of things.
And I did read it.
Yeah.
Well, what did you think?
Were there any takeaways for you?
Well, yeah, I think so.
She does have a – well, the takeaway to me is that the advertising business, which she's an executive, I believe, is really on to the Generation Z operation.
And I have some thoughts on that because I've realized – and I talked about this at the dinner table the other night.
Of course, this makes nothing but sense, but it's a spectrum.
From Z to Millennial.
Because it turns out that Jay, who was born in 94...
Doesn't like being called Millennial.
She doesn't seem to care one way or the other, to be honest about it.
But she has more characteristics of the Zs, and I have lists here, which I printed out, of different characteristics that these two groups have.
Well, as it pertains to making money off of them, because that's what South By is about.
How do we make money off of these schlubs?
How can we make money off of the children?
And do we have an age range definition for Generation Z? Because it's certainly not the born in 95.
It changes, by the way.
Different people define it differently, but born in 95 is generally the accepted definition.
Definition.
Born in 95 or later.
So is Generation Z really defined by age or by something else?
I'm just asking because I don't know.
Well, there's a theory going around that everybody defines their generations.
This came up at the table because JC, of course, Buzzkill Jr., thinks the whole thing is bullcrap and there's no such thing as any of these generations in modern terms.
And then he refers back to somebody in the 1910s.
Who wrote something about this.
And so that kind of derailed the conversation.
Well, let's try this for a second.
Hold on.
Go ahead.
Yes?
So he...
Anyway, so there's defining moments in each generation.
And JC claims that his defining moment was...
I forgot what it was.
I think it was...
Columbine was his defining moment.
And he's 30.
So the people who said in that clip we played a couple of shows ago that said that...
Our parents' defining moment was World War II and ours was Columbine.
She wasn't even born when Columbine took place.
Right.
So that was somebody planted that bullcrap into the...
Here we go.
This will be worth it.
Generation Z or Gen Z, also known as I-Generation, Post-Millennials or the Homeland Generation, which I like a lot.
Is the demographic cohort after millennials.
Currently, there are numerous additional competing names using connection with them in the media, which is why I bring it up.
We deconstruct it.
There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends, but demographers and researchers typically use the mid-1990s to mid-2000s as starting birth years.
At the present time, there's little consensus regarding ending birth years.
Most of Generation Z have used the Internet Web since a young age and are generally comfortable with technology and with interacting on social media.
Wow!
Great skills!
I can't operate an iPhone and Twitter!
I would dispute that as being even important.
I'm just, you know, it's the book of knowledge.
How can you dispute it?
Going by...
I'm sorry, go on.
No, go ahead.
I was going to say, going by some marketing newsletters, and our advertising person is in this category, being concerned about how to sell stuff.
Here is a short list, some of the lists of Generation Z, some of their characteristics from a newsletter that I think stole all this material.
They borrowed it.
34% want brands to reach out to them on social media, followed by 33% by email and 28% by online ads.
27% want advertising to include celebrities or athletes.
50% would look on their phone to look for a better price while shopping at a retail store.
Now, I think, in my experience, everybody's doing that.
Yeah, that doesn't seem like just a Generation Z thing.
63% are concerned when it comes to protecting their identity.
This is good news.
When paying with a credit card or online at a retail store, 92% of Gen Z own or plan to own a vehicle.
And 97% have or plan to get a license.
This is different than the millennials who have eschewed autos and licenses.
It's also not exactly what this consultant says of Generation Z. In fact, quite the opposite.
38% try to use rewards every time they shop.
46% value special offers.
61% researchers, well the car one came from, this could be bogus because the source for it is Kelly Blue Book.
61% researchers products on a mobile phone at least weekly.
93% of parents say their Gen Z kids influence family spending decisions.
Hmm.
Yes.
Okay.
There's some of that.
Oh, here's one.
Here's one.
No, no, no.
Stop.
Some of that correlates, but now let's just listen to the clips.
Then you can look at it and see if it correlates with what is in AdGirls documentation.
We start off with a little background.
And again, this is only about making money off the kids.
You are Gen Z. You dropped out of college.
You started your own company.
And your company talks to brands about how to reach people just like you in Generation Z. So tell me, what are some of the big things you tell brands who want to get to sell to someone like you?
The biggest thing is that Gen Z grew up on their smartphones and on social media so they can see through the BS very quickly.
They will immediately skip through ads.
They are just in tune with identifying what's an ad and what's not.
And that's why brands have to have more native ads and UGC. More native ads, i.e.
trick them.
Because they're onto the bull crap, they can see it's an ad, but if you trick them with a native ad where you don't tell them, then it works.
Nice.
I'm sure it does.
I'm very nice.
Influence.
That works for everybody.
Sure.
Influence.
By the way, the millennials had to have an air against...
Similar style about ads.
We can see through them.
We're not bullcrap like those dummies before us.
Those dummies who came before us that believe every advertisement they see.
It's just an ad, man.
Why are you even looking at that story?
If it was native, then you would have not known.
How about those influencers?
What about influencers, right, who get paid?
Does the BS button go up for that or no?
Gen Z can easily identify if it's like a product placement or even a sponsorship and FTC is cracking down on making sure that the influencers are showing that it's a sponsored post.
Right.
And so kids obviously can see through that.
Some influencers who don't have the right partnerships and just try to make as much money as possible We'll build a very poor brand over the years because the fans are going to see that they're just selling out.
But you feel like if a brand partners with the right influencer, even if they're paying them, that that might get through?
Yes, 100%.
But a lot of brands don't know how to find the right influencers, like what Pepsi did with Kendall Jenner and how that had a lot of controversy because it was out of the Pepsi mission As well as Kendall's.
And so it just didn't work.
Right.
So you have to really be careful that whatever you're doing is sort of true, is authentic.
I hate to use that word.
It has to be authentic.
Yes.
So somehow if you pay someone, this is really interesting to me, if you pay someone like wear my clothes in your Instagram and don't say anything, then when you get found out, you're dead and the brand is dead.
You'll never sell another thing ever.
But if you have the right influencer, who would probably be some vapid douche woman, you know, with the same old selfie over and over again, hey guys, look at what's so fantastic, look at this great thing I got, then it's okay.
Which is, it is new.
But you have to have the right influencer with the right message, with the right brand at the right time.
I'm pretty sure you can hire those guys to get exactly that.
Well, you know, this wasn't, this should not be unexpected.
This is, if you look at all the bold crop that we were fed 15 years ago as the tech cycle was going around, this was all predicted.
It was all predicted that we're going to be looking at, you know, besides the fake ads and people...
Remember there was all this interactive TV moment where they said, well, you're watching a TV show and you see a really nice sweater.
You just look at the sweater, click on it.
Well, you look at her, click on it.
She had eyeball tracking.
You could look at it.
That was the promise at some point.
Yeah, it was the promise.
You look at it and boom, the price shows up.
Or you get an email about it.
On Instagram, it actually works that way.
You know, you'll see a picture and then you can swipe up and then it'll take you right to the page to buy that product.
So yeah, it's working that way.
Yeah.
But you have to have the right influencer.
Now, this is...
You know, that's another thing.
I wonder about that because it seems to me if somebody's not the quote-unquote right influencer but they're wearing something cool, that would be more important.
Because it's just something cool that you'd want.
And who cares about who's wearing it?
Well, but she also offered a very...
I question this right influencer notion.
Well, she offered a very sketchy example.
You know, Kendall Jenner was not on her Instagram promoting Pepsi.
It was a lame-ass protest video where she gave the cop a Pepsi.
It was an ad.
It was a proper ad.
It was a big budget.
It was a TV ad.
It had nothing to do with her being an influencer.
It was just her doing a dumb ad, which, you know, was...
Uncomfortable to watch.
The creative was a piece of crap from the beginning.
But more importantly, aesthetics, John.
This is really the meat of what's going on with Generation Z and how you can get them to come to your establishment or your product, etc.
It's all about aesthetics.
Is that also then about always having something that is worth a photo?
If they're going to come to something, you better make sure you have something fun because they will put that out to the world for you.
Exactly.
So another thing I tell brands is that Gen Z optimizes for going to things that are aesthetic first.
That's how they think.
Any restaurants they go to, cafes they go to, even destinations for vacation or travel.
It's all optimized around how is this going to look on my gram, on my Instagram or Snapchat.
is it going to be amazing?
And they think in terms of optimizing for photos that their fans and followers will like versus for personal experiences.
And that's also tied to the fact that Gen Z cares more about experiences than products and cars and stuff like that.
Hold on a second.
Stop, stop, stop.
Back it up.
Yeah.
Because she says it's more about the places than the experience, and then she says they care about experiences.
Yeah, total horse crap.
No, no, I don't care about the horse crap part.
Make up your mind.
Is it one or the other?
She says two contradictory things.
That's what I'm saying.
That is horse crap.
She said she contradicted herself.
Yeah, well, playback is very amusing.
Because she does it right after one bang-bang.
So, two things.
I completely believe this to be 100% true.
100 emoji.
I want to go to that place because it'll look good on my gram.
Nice.
It'll look good on my gram to show everybody that I'm here.
And then she contradicts herself and says something else.
Versus for personal experiences.
And that's also tied to the fact that...
Gen Z cares more about experiences than products and cars and stuff like that.
And so that's a huge shift in these luxury brands and how they're going to market to this younger generation when they care more about experiences and renting stuff instead of owning stuff.
Okay, so that contradicts AdGirls' report.
They're saying, we want experiences and renting stuff.
Which is why, you know, you got Uber and you got Airbnb and all these things.
They like to rent something for an experience.
I think that's true.
I don't see any, certainly not automobiles.
There's less kids driving than ever.
He said without any data to back it up.
But I like the aesthetics.
It has to look good on your gram.
Otherwise, why the hell go?
So you've got to have a moment, some backdrop or something that's going to look good on the gram.
Are you still with me, John?
Are you falling asleep?
I'm just thinking of some of this.
This is a lot of contradictory information here.
I'm not sure that they're really pinning it down very well.
Well, she's the expert.
She was at South By.
What are you talking about?
Are you crazy?
So this is the final clip is about influencing purchasing.
And this was really all telling about Generation Z. Every week, every month, you have to keep iterating.
And a big problem with a lot of the brands is that they think that they want to understand millennials have purchasing power and they want to target millennials right now and they care less about Gen Z. But Gen Z is growing really fast and it's tail end of college.
Kids are about to graduate from college.
They have their own purchasing power because they have side hustles and learn how to make money very quickly on the internet.
Okay, what side hustles are the kids doing these days to make money on the internet besides the obvious?
Webcam girls?
I mean, really?
Patreon?
Oh, donate to my Patreon.
I did a nice crochet.
Where are these side hustles on the internet that kids know how to make money quickly with these days?
Well, I mean, there's Etsy.
Okay.
Which is a side hustle, but there's nobody making much money off of it.
Well, apparently the kids know how to side hustle.
I don't think so.
I have kids in this group, more or less, and I'm not seeing them.
We'll finish it up.
And it's tail end of college.
Kids are about to graduate from college.
They have their own purchasing power because they have side hustles and learn how to make money very quickly on the internet.
As well as the fact is that they have influence over their family and parents' purchasing power.
So that's also a fallacy where people, brands, think that Gen Z doesn't have money.
It sounds to me like they don't have money.
They don't have money, but they do save.
That's a fallacy, she says.
It's a fallacy.
They have money.
And the parents do whatever they tell them to.
They just do a side hustle.
I think it's time for South by Southwest to end.
It has jumped the shark with this.
But I do have one last analysis of Gen Z slash young people from Mike Rowe.
I'd never heard him talk about this, but it kind of dovetails in with the book that we were talking about a couple shows ago, Lost Connections, how important it is for people to have satisfaction in their life, satisfaction at their job, being around other people, all important things that we're not doing anymore.
And I was...
Maybe not surprised, but when you hear him, and this is the dirty jobs guy, he's the guy who goes around and looks at blue-collar jobs, I guess would be appropriate.
That used to be his main show.
I don't know what he does now.
Well, he appears on Tucker and talks about it.
Do you think that we value work as an inherent virtue as a society?
No.
No, I don't.
I think that we have identified work as the proximate cause of our dissatisfaction.
And I think you don't have to look far to find endless examples.
Look, the best-selling books right now in the self-help section and in general claim to have the solution for how you can work less.
Most of the commercials on TV ask a tacit question.
You know, how could you be happier?
And the answer, of course, is retire a little sooner or work 35 instead of 40 hours.
You know, the TV shows that are typically valued tend to embrace notions of shortcuts.
In a thousand different ways, I believe, as a society, we've made the case that the enemy of your happiness is your damn job.
And if you can only have less of that, all these other things in some perverse zero-sum game would equal out, and you would smile more.
Look, I know it's hackneyed, and I know we've talked about it before, but this is Horatio Alger stuff.
This is being suspicious of immediate gratification.
It's taking the long view.
And most importantly, in my view, we can control how we define a good job.
There's a lot of stuff we can't control, but our culture has made it very, very clear that some kinds of work are less desirable than others.
And once we set the table that way, then we start to look at some kinds of education as being more important than others.
Next thing you know, you've got $1.5 trillion in student loans.
You've got 6 million jobs available right now that involve training and not a four-year degree.
And you've got a whole generation of kids who are nicely educated for jobs that don't exist anymore.
With a big, fat pile of debt, they can't pay back because we lent them a bunch of money we didn't have in the first place.
Nice wrap-up, Mike.
Yeah, kind of wrapped it up.
That was good.
Very good.
But when I was listening to this, I thought to myself, you know, Whenever there's kids protesting and getting pissed off and mad, it's never the kids from the trade school.
Well, that's a good one.
That's a good observation, a good catch.
And what is the only difference?
Well, the trade school kids probably have a reasonably good job.
These other kids don't.
But also, the kids who are at the trade school are taught different things.
They're not taught equality, victimhood, etc.
Maybe, but I would say they're probably being taught a trade.
You come in, you learn your trade.
It really points more towards the education system.
Yes, which is what I think one of the themes of our show.
And the millennial who sent this to me, who self-identified, he said, yeah, this is really great what Mike Rose says here.
You should check it out.
But, you know, if I could make any money in a blue-collar job, I would not consider it.
Did you hear the show we talked about what you can make as a trained construction worker?
I mean, you can make real money with blue-collar jobs, mainly because of supply and demand of workforce.
Well, there's a lot of $150 an hour jobs I can cite that are around here.
Such as?
Well, any of those guys who work on that giant crane at the wharf that picks up the cargo containers and moves it over to a truck and drops it on there.
That's $150 minimum an hour.
I'm just looking at the troll room.
$40 an hour as a house painter.
I'm a blue-collar job.
I earn a six-figure income.
Hey, you guys should be donating more.
What's wrong with you?
Yeah, really, cheap bastards.
$320 a day cash.
There's tons of...
I have an effing BA degree and I'm a house painter.
Okay.
All right, troll dog.
Well, you saved yourself.
This is good news.
Yeah.
25 an hour is a grain accountant.
Podcasters, though, massive fail.
Well, there's no salaries.
There's no blue collar.
I'm wearing my wife beater.
I don't have a blue collar on.
But we have a new name for them, John.
New name for these kids.
And if your child is off from school today, also a reminder about something called tech.
Apparently, it's turning millennials into a bunch of hunchbacks.
It's all in today's Family Matters.
New studies show that people in their 20s now have back problems as bad as people double their age.
Smartphones, tablets, and other personal devices are likely responsible, so if you are home from work or school today planning to spend some time on your phone or device, You'll definitely want to hear this.
Dr.
Brian Wallace, a chiropractor based in Bernersville, says he is witnessing this epidemic at his practice, and he says it could get worse because children are getting cell phones at a younger age.
Experts recommend limiting scream time and also a variety of yoga and back stretches to alleviate some of the pain.
I like the term tech-neck.
I like it a lot.
Ugh, tech-necker.
Yeah, well, you call someone a redneck, well, you're a tech-neck.
Tech-neck.
I like it.
We'll just call them tech-knickers from now on.
Well, the guy who wrote you that note with the clip, it's disconcerting that he said what he said because...
It's programming, I'm sure.
I brought myself up through school.
I didn't have debts or nothing.
I was always doing well because I worked at assembly lines.
I worked at steel mills.
I worked at sheet metal shops.
It was all...
Union jobs generally.
And all paid very well as opposed to the summer jobs that you normal college kid in high school.
And I was also working in high school.
You could do that in the summer in high school too.
Because it was easier to get jobs, generally speaking.
But when the opportunity gives itself or shows itself, I don't see why anyone would just say, no, no, no, no.
I'm not going to take that job.
It's beneath me.
Which I think is what that kid was saying.
That blue-collar work for a lot of people is beneath them because they've been given all the self-esteem and all the bullcrap in the schools, and they won't take these jobs.
For some reason, even though they pay well, I mean, $40 an hour is a lot better than $10.
Or nothing.
Or nothing.
Or a side hustle on the Internet, which I still got to figure out.
Yeah.
Side hustle.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I think we'd beat that.
Yeah, we have.
I want to make mention that the Backpage Bill, this is the...
Something of deep concern, especially now that we're dealing with these, what are they called?
The inclines?
What is that word for these dorks?
Dorks, sorry.
These dorks that can't get laid.
They're young and they're called...
Podcasters?
No, besides the podcasters.
Can't get laid.
It's the kids who are...
What is it?
Oh, man.
It's called incline, in-kind.
It's something that...
It's a term.
It's a phrase.
It means involuntary...
Oh, incels.
Incels.
Incels.
Thank you, Troll Room.
Incels.
Yeah, involuntary celibate.
Involuntarily celibate.
Yes.
There's a little movie going around that's quite entertaining.
I haven't got any clips from it, but it's quite funny.
Oh, send it to me.
These kids are...
It's on Vimeo, too.
It's like they're bitching and moaning.
You know, I can't get laid because I'm ugly.
The kid's not really that bad looking.
It's just that he's got a bad attitude.
Right, yeah.
I can't believe any of these dumb chicks won't fuck me because I'm ugly.
That's the reason.
No, no, it's not the reason.
Wow, a rare F-bomb.
Well, the Senate is now...
That wasn't actually an F-bomb.
That was the usage.
That was a quote.
That was a quote.
That was an actual act.
It was a quote.
You should have done air quotes.
The Senate is likely to pass this bill, which is now known as quoting, quote, limiting websites immunity in sex trafficking cases.
Hear me now, believe me later.
This is the beginning of the real net neutrality, which means illegal or unlawful content.
That's what it will be called.
We'll do the unlawful network traffic next, but this is the start.
Unlawful content.
That's the exact wordage.
Unlawful content.
Hey, you Tor users, get ready for this.
Yeah.
Tor is going to be banned.
It's just going to be banned as a protocol.
Well, when they get to the unlawful traffic.
This deep packet sniffing can spot Tor.
Yeah, but that's only when they get to the...
This bill does not contain the unlawful traffic.
That's the part they really need to get in, but they start with unlawful content.
Yeah.
And without this, and there are all kinds of laws that prohibit this already, but no, we have to have an extra law.
And this is the one thing, as we've been deconstructing this over the past couple of episodes, where it came from, the one thing that really helped the internet to grow to where it is today.
And sadly, it also gave us this false belief that the only place to be social is Facebook or Twitter or Insta on your gram.
You can't do that anywhere else.
Can't have your own server.
Can't do your own thing.
It's impossible.
Insta.
I like the way you saved it.
What?
Insta?
You said Insta.
And you said to your brain, you said, ah, shit, it's not Insta, it's Gram.
And you slipped it right in.
It was smooth as silk.
Thank you.
But I have to mention that in the black community...
They say Insta.
The hip-hoppers say Insta, and this woman was Asian from South By, and she says Gram.
I think it should be The Gram.
The Gram.
The Grams, with plural, may be even better.
Yeah, that sounds like a drug reference.
Which it is!
Yes, exactly.
Have you been following this, speaking of Facebag, this bogus reporting that started off with, Facebook failed millions of users' data stolen, harvested by Trump campaign.
Do you follow any of that?
No, I didn't even hear about it until now.
This is fantastic.
And of course, now it's recycled news again.
We have to come back to Cambridge Analytica.
Because somehow they cheated and had better analyticas than the Democrats and the...
Yeah, that's the reason Hillary lost.
Yes, because Cambridge Analytica stole 30 million users' data from FaceBag.
And as it turns out...
Even FaceBag is disputing the stolen things.
No, no, no, no.
The guy made an app.
He did it according to all the guidelines.
But then there was one thing that he did which wasn't in accordance with the FaceBag external app developer guidelines.
And so he had this data that he sucked out.
So, yeah, in a way they did fail.
But it's a little different than they stole this and, you know, they covertly put all the data into Cambridge Analytica.
And that's how Trump won!
And I guess they gave this information to the Russians who then thought, ah, yes, this is very good.
I will use this after the election.
You know, which is where most of the money went from the Russians.
After the election, they spent all the money on telling people to vote for Donald Trump.
I don't know.
But it's, once again, they're contradicting themselves, and this is the latest.
The face bag latest privacy debacle stirs up more regulatory interest from lawmakers, yes.
They really want to regulate Facebook.
And I think Facebook should be regulated.
I think if you have to sign in, if you have to sign in to something, you cannot access this information without signing in, I think different rules should apply.
Because, you know, data is the new bacon.
How about just shutting it down?
Well, that would be a good idea.
Shutter it.
See what happens.
That would be very interesting.
Yes.
Okay.
Just some updates.
You missed my slogan, though.
Data is the new bacon.
Data is the new bacon.
What is this clip I have here that it dates?
Let me write that down.
Thank you.
It took him a moment.
Data is the new bacon.
You sounded the way Tina looked at me when I tried it on her.
She went, huh?
What?
Yeah, data's the new bacon.
I like when you're proud of yourself.
Yes.
When I'm beaming, it's the best.
Shutdown investigation, ABC. Okay, let's do it.
The president's top attorney today calling for special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to be shut down.
This just hours after Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired just two days from retiring.
The president taking to Twitter where he has taunted McCabe in recent months.
Mr.
Trump's ally saying McCabe tried to undermine the president.
And details now emerging that similar to his old boss James Comey, McCabe kept detailed memos of all of his interactions with the president, a source telling ABC News those documents are now in the hands of the special counsel.
ABC's Tara Palmieri at the White House tonight, starting us off.
Tonight, an aggressive switch in strategy from President Trump's legal team.
Lead attorney John Dowd calling for an end to the Russia investigation.
Tara Palmieri, if you ever get to see her, she is, you look at her and you go, ah.
She has to be hired by Fox.
She must be super hot then.
Hold on, let me take a look then.
What's her name?
Well, when you take a look...
What's her name?
What's her name?
I forgot her name already.
Tara.
T-A-R-A-P-A-L-M-A-R-Y-A-M-I-E-R-I, I think.
Look up Tara Pall Mary bikini.
John, is this what you do during shows?
In between show days?
You do first name, last name, plus bikini?
I did it when I was taking this clip last night.
I saw her and I said, she looks like a Guilfoyle replacement.
Wait a minute.
I'm still a little disturbed.
Oh, boy.
I see what you mean.
Okay, I'll tell you how I got to the bikini thing.
I see what you mean, though.
Because I... You take those glasses off, man.
The whole new world opens up.
No, the reason...
I'll give you the genesis of this.
Because I'm now using Bing!
Bing!
So when you use Bing, they give you this variety of photos with different categories, and it turns out that she has a huge bikini collection of photos, photo collection of her in a bikini.
So you click on it just to see.
But she's more telegenic than she is photogenic, so you should know that.
And she's a perfect Fox contributor.
And she also suffers from a...
I've noticed it by listening to her report, because I'm used to listening to ABC Cadence.
Mm-hmm.
Her cadence is Fox.
It's too fast.
She talks too fast.
She will not be at ABC for long because she talks too fast and she looks like a Fox girl and she sounds like one.
Okay, we can look forward to that.
In the meantime, remember John's search tip, Bing It Plus Bikini.
I say Bing It!
Bring it good I say bring it Bring it good Woooo Bing it plus bing it plus bikini.
Very nice.
Okay, go back to the clip.
Pressing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller, case closed.
Dowd's motivation?
He says Rosenstein should follow the, quote, brilliant and courageous example of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who hours earlier fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
He's one of the first top-level officials at the FBI to start looking into the allegations that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians during the election.
There's been no collusion between us and the Russians.
There was absolutely no collusion.
There is absolutely no collusion.
Any collusion?
I knew you'd do that.
How can I help myself?
I was going to do it on the clip.
Any collusion?
I just got it right here.
And I said, you know, I wonder if Adam will just do it after he keeps hearing this over and over.
Good one.
I'm giving you a kudos for that.
Okay.
Any collusion?
So, anyway, she talks too fast.
She's no good for this.
I understand.
Well, we should, you know, in our Curry Dvorak executive search firm function.
We should get a finder's fee for pointing some of this stuff out.
Well, we should get a finder's fee for finding Guyenne Chichikhan.
Yes, who wrote us a tweet saying that she's had a baby and she's fine.
And did I not call it?
Did I not say she was probably having a baby?
I did.
Yeah, you called it.
Of course you did.
But of course, so she says, hey, I'm okay.
I just had a baby.
Everything's fine.
You tweet back in an obvious drive-by tweet attack.
You tweet to, oh yeah, oh yeah, but how is she doing?
I don't know what I did.
I said something.
She sent me a tweet when I was supposed to do.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
You know, Comey's coming out with this book.
Yeah, Comey's promoting his book, too.
Yeah, it's already on Amazon.
What is it called again?
It's called something stupid.
No, it's called something else.
No.
Oh, A Higher Loyalty, Truth, Lies, and Leadership.
Oh, yeah.
How boring is that?
It can't be any exact.
Truth, lies, and leadership.
I assume that you support the president's decision then to fire his FBI director.
No, I do not.
Comey.
Comey Well, he's got a book to push.
He has to hang around.
So I got another clip.
This is about the firings again.
But this was just a short clip.
An exchange between a couple of congresspeople.
A guy and a woman.
And they're talking about...
She's asking about Japanese internment legislation.
I don't know what she's talking about.
And he says something in Japanese and she corrects him.
The news network never tells us what they said.
I want one of our listeners...
Who speaks Japanese to tell me what's going on here.
And in limbo, HUD Secretary Ben Carson and the Head of Interior Ryan Zinke yesterday testing his Japanese when asked about funding related to World War II internment camps.
We see him funded again in 2018.
Oh, konnichiwa.
I think it's still ohayo gozaimasu, but that's okay.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
What did he answer?
Konnichiwa.
All I heard was konnichiwa.
It sounded like konnichiwa, but I'm not sure.
And then she said something else.
And then said that's okay.
In other words, she's insulting him in a Japanese manner.
But why don't they tell us what was the back and forth here?
I don't know.
This I really don't know.
Play it again so the Japanese listener can tell us.
Oh, konnichiwa.
I think it's still ohayou gozaimasu, but that's okay.
That's all we got.
Oh, konnichiwa.
Okay, well, what was the other thing she said?
What did she say?
I have no idea.
I think...
Yeah, well, that's what I said.
I was just curious.
No idea.
Just the way the reporting is on the TV, it's just terrible.
Did you see Nancy Pelosi about the border wall?
She's still alive?
Yes, and she still is receiving the meds.
Kind of.
We didn't report on it because, God, why do it?
The president went to the wall sections to see which piece of the wall.
Build a wall!
Build them all.
See the pieces he liked.
And Pelosi was asked a question about, really about the funding of it.
I guess the idea is, well, since the DACA deadline has passed, we don't hear anything about those kids anymore.
What happened to all the DACA talk?
DACA talk.
I don't know.
It's not even a category in the show notes anymore.
We've got nothing on DACA. I think the question was, well, are you going to give the president his wall without asking for anything in return?
I guess the question is then, should Democrats give border wall funding, for example, right now when there isn't a hard deadline on the table like there was last month?
What do you think?
I mean, should we give a border wall for nothing?
No, I don't think so.
First of all, I think the border, did you see it?
How high it is, and the rest of the presidents think the wall?
I mean, really?
A civilized society would do something like that?
As obnoxious as it is?
You know, that's a community there, with a border running through it.
Okay, we have a different opinion on that.
But a wall that big, separating people?
I mean, really?
I guess maybe I've seen too many walls.
I saw the wall in Northern Ireland years ago before the agreement, and it was strange to see.
And that was like a tin fence.
This is a big wall.
But let me say this, and let me be very clear.
If the Dreamers never existed, and thank God that they do, our inspiration, our pride, thank God that they do.
If they never existed, we still have a problem with what the President wants to do.
In the bill.
You know, they want to have enhanced internal enforcement that really goes against the values of our country, in my view.
Okay.
A couple of things about this.
One, of course, you know, this is not about security of the country.
It's about politics.
So we're not going to give them the wall without getting something in return.
Second, Oh my god, it's so tall.
It may actually be effective.
This is nuts.
A little fence is nice.
That's where they had an island where they're civilized, I guess.
But no, it's way too tall.
This is just crazy to have a tall wall.
Tall wall is not good.
Can't have it.
And then, what did she say at the end there?
I don't know.
She's like an idiot.
I can't stand it.
There was something important that I wanted to say about that.
What did she say?
I know.
Can you believe it?
In the bill.
You know, they want to have...
Oh, yeah.
About enhanced internal something or other.
Hey, you know what?
We already have this and it pisses me off as is.
So I don't know what the idea is behind enhanced internal something or other.
But in Texas, we have border patrol, and by law, they're allowed to be within 100 miles of the actual border, stopping people and asking them for their papers, please, which is illegal.
Because they're Customs of Border Protection, and there's this rule, I don't know if it's a law or the rule on the books, is they can do this within a 100-mile radius of the border.
This has to stop.
That drives me nuts.
I really despise it.
But we've talked about it a lot.
And what I suggest is go to the YouTubes and just say, type in, am I free to go border?
And you'll see a lot of smart people who just say, am I free to go?
Because you don't have to give them anything.
You don't have to answer their questions.
And they will let you go.
They will let you go.
It's kind of fun.
You can get on YouTube.
But if that...
I had not heard this, but if that isn't the plans, and it's...
I just want it gone.
I want that...
Build a wall as high as you want, mofo.
Do not harass citizens or anybody else inside the borders with your bullcrap.
I hate it.
Have you been harassed?
Yes!
Yes!
When?
Don't you remember when we moved from California to Austin?
We got pulled apart at one of these hundred...
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It was very annoying.
Very annoying.
Of course, I had an alien in the car, also known as my ex-wife.
And I'm not just talking an immigrant alien.
You know what I mean?
The other story that's kind of bubbling around for some reason...
I don't like the story.
I don't like talking about it.
You reject the idea.
But I'm getting a kick out of it, mainly because we have the, was there any collusion type of thing going on where somebody just throws the question out?
And I made a clip of this.
This is a small, short clip.
It's four seconds.
NBC, this is a gaggle of reporters.
Trump's walking on the lawn to the helicopter and they're all yelling at him.
I'm always reminded of the reporters that used to chase Hillary around in a horde of reporters running after her truck.
This is a gaggle of reporters and at the very end you hear the theme of the day.
I didn't hear anything.
Let me listen.
Let me listen again.
Stormy Daniels.
I heard Stormy Daniels?
Yeah, and if you hear it, play it a third time.
There's only four seconds.
You'll hear a whole sentence.
Okay.
Do you have a relationship with a woman named Stormy Daniels?
Is that what she's asking?
Yeah.
Yeah, she's screaming that.
Any collusion?
Well, John, we'll consider this to be the big tease.
I'm going to show myself old by donating to No Agenda.
Imagine all the people who could do that.
Oh yeah, that'd be fab.
Well executed.
And we're going to start by thanking a few people, starting with Timothy Cato.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Timothy Cato is a $200 donor.
We already thanked him.
Luca Asberto.
One, two, three, four, six.
Thanks for the sanity.
Thank you.
From rainy Switzerland.
Die Schweiz.
Schweiz.
Micah.
Galford, Jasper, Indiana.
$102, and Micah's going to be a night.
And he also says, certainly first to remember...
Hold on a second.
Let me just...
I got this thing set up now so I can scroll over.
Oh, it's working.
I think I'm the first Micah donor.
Certainly first I remember hearing in any donation segment in the last couple of years.
And he goes on...
Turn 35.
I don't know if he's got...
Yeah, he's on the list.
He's on the list.
Donation.
He's got a call out here.
Let me know it as Sir Mike of Modern Day...
Douchebag!
Call out to Dexter.
Douchebag!
He also wants a birthday call out to Dexter.
I don't know if Dexter's a little bit.
Okay.
Troy Sprague in Lapeer, Michigan.
Is Dexter on the list too for birthday?
Yep.
Troy Sprague in Lapeer, Michigan, $99.99.
Niner, niner, niner, niner.
Mark Tanner, $75, Dunn and Whittier.
Sir Rick in Arlington, Washington, $69.96.
Brian Richardson in Aurora, Illinois.
Or Israel.
No, Illinois.
6969.
This was actually interesting, because I forwarded his note to you, because it bounced back from him, and he's suspicious that maybe you're rejecting email from AOL.com.
Hmm.
Hmm.
It could have been caught up in something.
Yeah, it's possible.
I'm not saying it's true or not true.
Okay.
Just a heads up.
Please don't stop the show until the apocalypse.
Just a nice little note.
Well, that could be next year.
Dean Roker, 5510.
Kayla Wood in Manchester, New Hampshire, 5510.
Ian Bussman, 5420.
Guilty as charged, he says.
Okay.
Sir Michael, black knight of the dude's name, Ben, in Bothell, Washington, 5319.
Surrounded by slaves.
That's a good one.
Sir Ben of Oakland.
Hold on, you're missing some good stuff here.
Sir Michael, black knight of the dude's name, Ben, registered the following domain names, redirecting them to noagendashow.com.
Bong hits in bourbon.
CurryDevorakConsulting.com and ServiceGoatKarma.com.
I didn't know about the BongHitsAndBourbon.com.
That's a nice one.
Yeah, it is a good one.
All right, there we go.
Surrounded by Slaves, yes.
Surrounded by Slaves, $51.80.
Sir Ben of Oakland comes in with $51.35.
And then the rest of the people here, I'm going to name a location, are $50 donors, $1.80.
Andrew Benz in Imperial, Missouri.
Andy Nowley, parts unknown.
John Camp in Antlers, Oklahoma.
Again, Micah Miller in Bethel, Pennsylvania, 50.
Eric Mackey in Lawrenceville, Georgia, spelled M-A-K-I. Dalit Zanguzin, I think, in Bellevue, Washington.
Joel Darun in Savannah, Georgia.
Israel Cazaris.
And last but not least, Sir Jerry Wingenroth in Sagas, California.
Those are all our people that came in and...
Above 50 and below 200, I want to thank each and every one of them for contributing to the production of this show, 1017.
Yes, and I did want to mention something about Kayla Wood from Manchester, New Hampshire.
I wanted to read her note.
In the morning, gents, I humbly request a de-douching.
I'll give that to her.
You've been de-douched.
My dad, Sir Kevin, hit me in the mouth while I was in college.
Now I'm graduated, have a job, and can finally donate!
Thank you.
Thank you for making my Boston commute much more tolerable.
If I can, I'd love to continue job karma and millennials stay well.
We got the job karma for you lined up.
Thanks again and glad to be finally on my journey to damehood.
That's a family.
That is the nuclear family right there.
It's a perfect example.
It is.
A perfect example of the family about to go nuclear.
We appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
About to go nuclear.
It could happen.
Just keep listening.
Maintain your sanity.
Maintain your sanity.
Of craziness.
Exactly.
Of chaos.
Thank you to everyone who came in under $50, either for reasons of anonymity or your one on one of our programs, our night layaways.
We've got different kinds of subscriptions, all of these sustaining donations.
We appreciate it.
Check them out at...
The Karmas.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
You've got...
Karma.
And we've got the Micas here as well.
Micah Gifford.
Happy birthday to Douchebag Dexter, who has now been, well, he has been douchebag.
His birthday was on the 16th.
Micah himself also celebrated on March 16th.
And Sir Michael Black Knight of the Douche Name Ben turned 34.
He turns 34 tomorrow.
And Sir Rounded by Slaves also celebrating his birthday tomorrow, March 19th.
Happy birthday from all the staff and management here at the Best Podcast in the Universe.
It's your birthday, yeah.
Okay, one, two.
We got two knightings, so you can give me your blade.
There it comes.
Okay, that's good.
I'll take it.
Micah Gafford, come on up, sir.
Up on stage, John Fitzpatrick, we'd like you to join us as well.
Both of you have supported your best podcast in the universe in the amount of $1,000 or more.
Therefore, I'm very proud to pronounce the KB, Sir John, Knight of St.
St. Patrick, patron saint of engineers, and Sir Micah for both of you.
Hookers and blow, rent boys, and chardonnay.
We have the new entry of onion rings and ice cream.
We've got English muffins with butter and honey, Captain Morgans and women with questionable reputations.
Fish pie and fellatio, Polish potato, vodka, pepperoni rolls and pale ales, redheads and ryes, Rubin's women and rosé, breast milk and pablum.
We've got ginger ale and gerbils, sparkling cider and escorts, bong hits and bourbon and mutton and mead.
To obtain your quote.
White gold ring.
Head over to noagendanation.com slash rings and proudly display that with your certificate, with your sealing wax.
We've got people using that stuff for all kinds of things, invitations, you name it.
Very, very classy.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it is.
A couple of waxes with a stamp in it like this.
It's like a secret decoder ring.
You hang out somewhere and talk about, what's up, get my ring.
What is this?
What is this doing?
What does this happen here?
So thank you again.
NoAgendaShow.com, Dvorak.org slash NA. Remember us for our show coming up on Thursday.
A rare moment of journos making a mistake and admitting to it, but of course it has a follow-on effect.
Because everybody who reads ProPublica, I read it.
I believe it's usually pretty accurate.
I think they're pretty good over there.
But here's where sources...
Multiple sources, three sources, failed them horribly.
We even reported that it would be interesting to watch the confirmation hearings of Gina Haspel as the first woman, as director of CIA, because the way it read kind of was, she waterboarded everybody and then destroyed the evidence.
That's kind of what it sounded like.
That's not what it sounded like.
That's what they told us.
Now, a correction to a story we aired Wednesday about Gina Haspel, the woman President Trump plans to nominate for director of the CIA. We spoke with a reporter for ProPublica who'd investigated Haspel's role at a secret CIA prison where terrorism suspects were interrogated.
Last night, ProPublica retracted key details of that report.
To correct the record, we spoke today with ProPublica's editor-in-chief, Steven Engelberg.
Any suggestion that she had a direct or personal involvement in the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, which is quite an infamous thing in the history of intelligence, you know, he was waterboarded some 83 times, that would not be correct.
The chief of base turns out to have been a different person, and so any suggestion that she was directly and personally involved in that is incorrect.
The ProPublica journalist Raymond Bonner based his incorrect account on three sources he believed were knowledgeable.
This week, people who worked with Haspel began to defend her, including James Mitchell, a psychologist and CIA contractor involved in the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.
Some of the ProPublica reporting was based on his book, Enhanced Interrogation.
Today, Mitchell spoke to me about the retracted ProPublica report saying Haspel mocked Abu Zubaydah's physical reaction to the interrogations.
That's completely untrue.
I mean, it's 100% untrue.
They mischaracterized the event.
They misattributed who I was referring to.
I know who I was writing about.
And I know the incident that I was writing about.
And she wasn't involved in it.
Mitchell explained why, on this occasion, he felt the need to speak out.
I'm doing it in this particular case because they were using something that I wrote to smear a woman who is the best choice that this nation could have for that position.
Sounds like they really fell down on the job there.
Well, something's up with the whole thing.
It's as though they decided to smear her.
Oh, yeah.
She's a woman.
A white woman.
A white woman who probably didn't vote for Hillary.
That's right.
Listened to her husband, her brother, her dad.
And so they decided to smear her.
It was the left, the Dimension B folks, too.
And then...
A couple guys came out of the woodwork to shame ProPublica, and then they had to pull the plug on the whole thing, and it's one of those deals where it's in the public mind.
Oh, yeah.
She's a horrible person.
Later in the support.
And that's going to stay that way.
Oh, yeah.
There's still questions.
She was there when some other guy got waterboarded.
Jeez.
Oh, that's so tiring.
I'll tell you the funny thing about it.
The idea, I think, was to bring to mind, because it brought to my mind, that woman holding the chain, that little short sergeant in the army in that horrible prison.
Oh, yes, yes.
From the pictures with the guys in the orange jumpsuits.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, she's holding a chain around the guy's neck or something.
There's a dog attacking him.
All these images come together.
And she's laughing or smoking a cigarette or whatever she's doing.
Yes, it's coming back now.
It's coming back.
And it's like all these things.
And then the big ghost guy with the black hood on, standing on top of a table with these wires hooked.
It was all Abu Ghraib.
Albuquerque.
So the Albuquerque imagery comes to mind when you bring up this woman.
So obviously it's a slander.
But she wasn't.
And it's designed to create these images.
It does in my mind.
All these images come back from Albuquerque.
You know, they actually need to bring the imaging back.
Because just that silhouette alone with the guy's hands out and he's standing on a bucket, that was quite the image.
That was literally iconic.
It was totally iconic.
It's a beauty.
Yeah.
So they need to bring that back during her confirmation.
But she wasn't at Abu Ghraib, but still.
No, it's not the point.
It's the imagery, yes.
It's just the image, just to make us think about this.
You're right.
She's terrible, and they're putting her in charge of the CIA. You're right.
So, based on all this, she must be the right person for the job, because they went after her.
Yeah.
Well, also, she'll be in charge of...
Who went after her?
Was it NSA? Well, the question is...
FBI? Yeah, the question...
Well, it would be FBI, you know...
I don't know.
The question is, will the messaging change?
The CIA does a lot of psychological warfare.
That's probably what they do most of.
Will they have new messaging?
Well, the only way to find out is I think the number one messenger for the agency is the New York Times.
I think Washington Post is number two.
And then NBC would be number three.
And ABC number four.
Even though number one should be CBS, but CBS has decided to go completely neutral.
Oh, this is new.
Well, I've been noticing it.
That's why I don't use CBS clips anymore.
Well, hold on.
That makes sense.
They've always been the central intelligence broadcasting system.
New blood coming in.
Sources, quote, dry up.
They got nothing left to report.
Well, it's probably the communications network dries up, or they just decide that we have to wait to put themselves in a holding pattern to see which way to go.
Right.
The other guys, they're just rudderless ships.
They're just going nuts to hate Trump, and that's that.
Yep.
Have you noticed how Fox has the audacity to continuously talk about the mainstream media?
Someone ought to put a compendium together of that, a compilage.
They're always, well, you know, the mainstream media says this, the mainstream media, they are pulling themselves out of the mainstream media, which is...
Well, they're trying to, but no one's buying it.
They just, but they all talk about it that way.
They have like three times the numbers of CNN and MSNBC, but they called them the mainstream media somehow.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's pretty disgusting.
Oh, you know, we're not mainstream.
Come on.
We know the Democrats run you guys, too.
We've known this.
This is not a secret.
It's a left-right paradigm.
You need it.
But don't.
Don't do that.
You're a part of the same system.
I think the best example of that sort of thing was during the golden age of talk radio in the Bay Area where they had these individuals.
KSFO, which has all the right-wing talkers on, it's got Michael Savage, it's got Rush Limbaugh, it's got everybody.
Except for, I think, Hannity someplace else.
And there's a few other stragglers here and there.
But KGO, at the time the KSFO was formed, was all Democrats.
The Democrat line was there.
It was borderline Air America.
But it was all the more Democrat side.
Both stations were run by the same guy.
The same programming.
One guy, programming for the Democrats or programming for the Republicans.
And why not?
Yeah.
It's perfect.
You can balance out the ratings.
It's fantastic.
Yeah.
You know, as I said, I dove into that Tommy Davis.
No, Tommy Davis.
The...
What?
What was it about?
The guy that our Israeli producers, our knights there, are always tweeting about.
Tommy.
I don't know.
Yeah, the guy who's seen as a Hitler.
Hitler, he ran the English Defense League.
Tommy Robinson.
Oh, right.
The guy got beat up in jail.
Tommy Robinson.
That's the guy.
Yeah, Tommy Robinson.
He got pounded.
He had a very good talk at Oxford.
I don't know.
What would they throw him in jail for in the first place?
Well, you have to kind of hear his story.
But, you know, he lives in Luton, which is – there's an airport there.
I think that's the main business of Luton.
And, you know, one mosque came in, and before you knew it, I know it, 10 years later, there's 30 mosques, and there's all kinds of stuff happening.
And then, you know, the young dudes – this is his story – said, well, this can't be – Like, whenever something happens, we go and say, hey, stop that, and then we get arrested.
That's pretty much it.
It sounds right, yeah.
And his whole talk is based on, hey, please hear my side of the story.
And when you speak there at Oxford, it's nice.
Yeah, there were people outside protesting, but inside there's very strict rules.
You don't mess around when you...
What's the Oxford?
Just a name for it.
It's that one place.
It's the wooden interior building.
They're all wooden, pretty much.
You know what I mean, though.
They're traditional talks.
Have you spoken there?
No.
God, no.
So that led me to something that's happening right now, which I didn't realize.
Have we...
We know the Rotherham Report.
We talked about that with the girls being groomed by Muslim men.
Yes.
And raped and all kinds of horrible things.
Well, now this is happening, or has been happening for a long time, in Telford.
T-E-L-F-O-R-D. And this has not been on our radar at all.
It got to the point where I tried to commit suicide.
This is one of the girls talking about what happened to her.
It did.
And still nobody asked me any questions about what was going on in my life and why I was reacting the way I was reacting.
The way I got out of it was by actually leaving Telford and isolating myself.
From my friends and family and everybody else that I knew.
The men were blackmailing me and saying that they were going to, sorry, rape my family members or burn my house down.
And that was a real threat in Telford following the Lucy Loeb case.
Yeah, so it's a famous case that kind of kicked this off.
But it's still, I mean, it's, you just don't hear about it that much.
Of course you don't want to have this put out too broadly.
I mean, gee, we wouldn't want to have a bad migrant story.
Except for Member of Parliament, Lucy Allen, I think her name is.
She had this to say.
Yes, Lucy.
Yeah, Lucy.
Why are you laughing?
Well, I mean, I have a clip I have yet to produce, but it's pretty funny.
I've had many young girls come to me and tell me about their experiences, and certainly in the light of the recent revelations, I have been literally inundated with emails from people saying, this happened to me.
Only yesterday I had a consultant psychiatrist telling me that he had had many patients where this had been an issue that they had consulted him on in terms of the mental health consequences of this terrible crime happening to them.
So it is clear that it has been going on.
Where's the police?
And that a significant number of young girls have been affected.
Well, that's where you want to go back and listen to Tommy Robinson, because he says there's a two-tier system with the police.
And for a number of reasons, the main one I would argue was political correctness, which we've...
Which is really what happened.
I saw it myself when I moved back to Europe at the end of 1999.
You just couldn't say anything.
This is not okay, what's happening here.
And the police have the same thing.
You can't go around arresting migrants, certainly not if they're Muslims, if they're around their mosque.
You can't do that.
That's wrong.
Whatever the problem was.
And that goes back to Heath.
I mean, you can go on forever.
Why this?
A Calurgi plan.
It's all over the place.
But what's going on with this raping women, girls, keeping them hostage, you know, threatening them that their families will die, grooming them for sex services.
I mean, forget about who's doing it.
Just go stop all of it, whoever's involved.
But no, it seems to be a problem.
And I'm just going to stay in Gitmo Nation East for a moment because Nick Clegg, Said something very interesting, and I looked into it, and it's true.
Absolute, it was a very, very...
This is about Brexit.
It's a photo finish.
There was only 650,000 votes in it, and how can I put this politely?
Actuarily, I suspect that the high point of the Brexit vote has already passed.
Crucially, young people who have to live with the consequences of that referendum vote and these botched negotiations overwhelmingly want something different.
And by the way, the young people here...
Just be clear about that.
You're saying Brexit voters are dying off.
If you look at the demography, the oldest voters voted for Brexit in the largest numbers, the youngest voters did the opposite.
And the youngest voters are now flocking to Jeremy Corbyn.
And the question I hope you will ask Jeremy Corbyn in a few moments' time is simply this.
He wants to become Prime Minister of this country principally to end austerity.
You cannot end austerity if you don't end Brexit.
Ending austerity and proceeding with Brexit are incompatible with each other because it means, and all the objective assessments show this, it means you have less money to spend on the public services that he wanted.
So here's the statistics, and it's a mystery.
120,000 old Britons have died.
A 12% rise in fatalities over this period.
In fact, 10,000 more died in the first seven weeks of 2018 than in 2017.
And in every article you find, it comes right back to, well, about 120,000 Brexit Leave voters have died since Brexit.
And because of that, as you heard Nick Clegg just saying, well, these were the old people.
They're dying off.
Hey, they're dying off a little quickly.
I don't know why.
I don't know.
They're dying off.
Maybe some of that Novichok stuff.
I don't know.
So we might consider voting again now that we have a fresh...
This is distressing.
Yes.
It's very distressing.
And it's just like, well, we don't know.
It's very odd.
But these Leave people are dying.
And they'll say it in the articles.
Which really gets me.
It's almost like messaging.
Almost.
We mean almost.
It's messaging.
Get ready for another vote, people.
This time, we're not going to let these guys get in the way of what we need to do, which is to become part of this giant, horrible operation.
Listen to this.
This is a pretty good article.
The German Republic.
We're going to become part of the German Republic.
Empire.
The German Empire.
Sorry.
While you were sharing think pieces and Brexit memes of no consequence, Twitter user Steve Lawrence has been doing the Lord's work.
Piecing together data from Eurostat, the British election study, and data journalism carried out by Financial Times and The Independent, Steve has made a model that predicts The Remain would win by 52.08% if a snap referendum was called today.
And if that weren't interesting enough, one of the most fun aspects of Steve's data, like that, those Brits, is the bluntness of which he's labeled voters now dead.
Just look at the stats.
123,411 of them all estimated to have died since taking to the voting booths.
Comparatively, his data suggests that less than 30,000 of those who voted remain have now bitten the dust, working out to almost a 100,000-person difference.
And so I guess the strategy would be...
They're like bragging about this?
Look, we killed these people off so we can do another vote?
It's a fun fact.
It's a fun fact?
That's what it seems like.
Yes.
It's very disturbing.
I mean, they're not even hiding it.
We're just killing off these people so we can do the vote over and then it'll be a fair vote because we're just killing off the people who wanted to stay.
They were old, crudgy, didn't need them anymore.
They're really just a burden on society.
You can call me a crackpot all you want.
Now, of course, they can't blame this one on Russia.
They already had the Russia element.
I mean, you put the Russia element.
Oh, Russia will help push Brexit through.
And so maybe that's why we need to do it again, because this time we'll be on the lookout for Russia.
Yeah.
Oh, and by the way, wouldn't it be interesting if Russia, for some reason, you know, I don't know, maybe because they're accused of killing people.
I'm sorry.
Chemical warfare.
On British soil.
Wouldn't it be fun if, because of that, FIFA said, you know, that planned World Cup in your country, yeah, we're not going to do that.
Because you know which stadium is the backup stadium?
I'm guessing it's in the UK. That would be Wembley.
Yeah, of course it is.
Think about that.
That would really irk Putin.
Well, they're already not a country.
Because they built that damn stadium.
They built a new stadium.
They're not even a country at the Olympics.
You know, they're the oars.
Right, the oars.
The oars.
The hot Olympians from Russia.
Olympic athletes from Russia.
The oars.
These guys are just apologizing for Putin.
That's right, baby.
Totally apologizing for him.
Oh, my goodness.
I got something that's interesting that you can use.
So, I want you to listen to this.
This is the Omar Mateen rewrite of history.
And remember when they had the Orlando shootout?
Yeah, this is Pulse nightclub.
Pulse nightclub.
We traced it.
It took like eight hours before anything happened.
And they gunned down everybody.
Most were killed by the cops, we think.
That's what our theory was, based on the way they presented it at the time.
Because the cops weren't doing anything.
They weren't going in.
Well, they have finally, after a year or whenever, how long ago it was, released some videos.
Oh.
Showing that the police response was actually within six minutes.
Huh?
Listen to the latest.
Here's the rewrite of history and here's how it went down.
Showing jurors how casually her husband, Omar Mateen, entered the Pulse nightclub.
Casing it for 11 minutes.
Through that doorway, a packed dance floor.
Mateen then leaving the club.
Moving his car to a closer spot before coming back in, this time with his assault rifle.
Opening fire on that dance floor.
Then moving to another part of the club.
Within six minutes, police entering through the lobby, their guns drawn.
As they see the full horror inside, officers yelling to the wounded to get out if they can.
You can walk.
No.
Shot fired.
Mateen holing up in the restrooms for the next three hours.
Outside, SWAT teams busting through an exterior wall.
Well, that's odd.
Yeah.
Not the way we remember it.
Huh.
It's not the way it was told the first time.
Why are they busting in through an exterior wall when apparently the other cops just walked in the front door?
They were in there.
I don't know.
You know, it's like Vegas.
We'll never know.
We're just not going to know anymore.
They're just not going to tell us.
I think for everything.
Well, let's stay in Florida for a second.
They're not going to tell us anything.
No, they won't.
And, you know, what we need is we need an arm of our production team to be filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
Yeah.
That's really what we need.
I mean, that's what Tom Fitton and his group do.
That's what they do all day long.
Surely we have enough out-of-work Generation Z law grads who can do this for us.
We only need a template.
It's true.
I know it's a good idea, too.
Judicial Watch does a fantastic job of digging crap up.
Of course, nobody cares.
Not really.
Why would we?
But it makes a difference to our show because we care.
We do.
I'm going to stay in Florida.
Social justice needs to be...
Justice must be done here.
Angel Morales shares a love for Harry Potter with her daughters.
They bought annual passes to Universal last year and couldn't wait to check out the Wizarding World.
Angel spent a lot of money on souvenirs that first trip, but for her, the thrills fell short.
Couldn't fit on any of the Harry Potter rides because of my weight.
Did a lot of bag holding and Diagon Alley and that kind of thing.
She's overweight, but she's a size 16 if she's an ounce, you know.
Maybe a little bigger than that.
She hoped to ride Universal's King Kong attraction because the seat is a bench without a safety bar.
But when they got to the front, she told her daughter she didn't think they would fit without making others uncomfortable.
A man in line overheard the conversation and offered to wait for the next ride, allowing Angel to go with her daughters.
So on their second trip back to the park, Angel tried to avoid more embarrassment by asking the Skull Island crew if one less person could ride in her row.
She says they wouldn't allow it because they had to push for capacity.
It's somewhat humiliating to have to ask for an accommodation because of one's weight.
You know that you have to put yourself out there and kind of beg to be able to ride and embarrass yourself because of weight.
Angel filed a discrimination complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations and says she feels people Their interest is getting bodies and getting money and not accommodating paying customers.
That's how I felt.
And Angel says Universal did offer her a $100 gift card plus dinner and a movie, but she does not plan to return to the park.
And she's suing.
She's going all the way with this.
She has to be a protected class.
Protected class.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, if this stuff works, we're doomed.
We're doomed.
Here's the premier of Ontario, Scandinavia, Kathleen Wynne, and she's talking to students, you know, hey, look, we got some elections, you kids got to vote.
And you know why?
You tell me why, John.
Why do the kids have to get out there and vote?
To stop Trump.
Close.
This spring, I hope you'll join me.
Most importantly for me is that you take part in the democratic process.
Now, probably everyone who's here is interested enough that you will all vote.
You will take part.
But what we need you to do is we need you to talk to everyone who is in your circle.
The reality is that young people vote at a much, much lower rate than older people.
And I always say when I Knock on a door and I meet a young person who comes and says, you know, I'm not going to vote.
It doesn't make a difference.
You know, if you don't vote, then somebody who looks like me is going to vote.
Some senior person, older than me, some white person.
You know, the reality is that that's the demographic that's going to get out and vote.
So we need you.
We need you to be engaged.
Of course, I would love you to be supporting us.
But quite frankly, I'd rather that you just come out and make your voice heard, whatever your political stripe is.
My millennials, stay woke!
Just, you gotta be afraid of the old white person.
Yeah, those whiteys are girls.
The old white person is nothing but trouble.
By the way, we haven't used one today, but we were looking for a name for the old guy things.
Like saying, chief, hey chief.
Yeah.
What other examples did we have?
Well, my wife decided that this was a good idea, so she pretty much ruined it for the whole, because she's got everything.
She has a number of these good examples.
Her mom gave her this.
Her mom would say stuff like, I'll give you something to cry about.
Ha!
Ha!
Okay.
I have a name for this segment now.
We already had Phrase from the Shays.
Right, which is still good.
It's still valid.
Why not Phrase from the Age?
Well, maybe.
Oh, jeez.
Come on.
I wasn't that...
Well, let me think about it.
How about Kill Whitey, then?
Maybe that's better.
Kill Whitey.
He got it.
Nailed it.
I'll give you something to cry about.
That's a good one.
I'll give you something to cry.
Get over here.
I'll give you something to cry about.
Hey, hey, money doesn't grow on trees.
Another oldie but goodie.
Why, Mommy?
Because I said so.
Make sure you have clean underwear on in case you get into a car accident.
Ha!
Hey, don't run around with that stick.
You're going to poke an eye out.
Hey, don't run around with scissors.
Hey, if you make that face, it's going to freeze.
Oh, man.
Oh, I recognize them all.
This horrible...
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Eat your food.
There are people starving in Africa.
I can hear hundreds, maybe tens of people...
Voicing these along with us because they know them too.
The women would always be, yeah, well no one's gonna want you as a wife.
Oh, I've never heard that.
Well, you're not a woman.
Oh, there you go.
How about...
Wait until your father gets home.
Oh, nice.
You're cruising for a bruising.
This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.
Hey, hey, hey, hold your horses.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Wow.
That's good.
The one that everybody wrote in about was, hey, close the door or you're born in a barn.
Yeah, I got that one.
Are you trying to cool down all of Austin?
But these other ones are, you know, Wreck of the Hesperus is another one that I remember.
I don't know that one.
Yeah, your room looks like the Wreck of the Hesperus.
I'll give you something to cry about.
No, my mom would always say your room looks like a war zone or disaster area.
I'd get that kind of stuff.
Yeah, the Wreck of the Hesperus is what I got.
Maybe that sort of thing.
I think that's pretty much it, by the way.
Yeah, I'm kind of done.
Charles Ortel.
I'm in second-hand contact with him.
Could do the interview whenever we want, but I want it to make sense when we know that we're going to have a day off, so it'll be current.
And he's heating up his reporting.
Oh, okay, good.
Yeah, and it's really more about the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
And, I mean, there's all kinds of things wrong with this one.
In fact, their 1090 was rejected by the IRS, their most recent one.
They sent it in late, it was rejected, and then when you look at it, they really only claim $65 million worth of income, yet on other documents, you know, like the annual report, they're talking about over $140 million, and it's untraceable where the rest went, and they can't even be operating anyway.
You know, they do not have official status, and even with that non-official status, it's actually the RRF-1 report, I'm sorry.
So they finally got it in 105 days late.
Yeah, it's $143 million in revenue in California.
However, it doesn't match with this IRS document where they only declare $66 million.
Hmm.
And Ortel, you know, it's what he does.
He rips this stuff apart based upon, really, the information that's publicly available.
And at this point, the Clinton Health Access Initiative is not legal, in fact, in many violations of operating in both California and New York.
And he's now kind of blogging, saying, excuse me, is anyone in New York going to do anything about this?
Anybody in California going to do anything about this?
Answer no.
Answer no, but still.
You know, he's working it.
I appreciate what he does.
He has a podcast on YouTube.
Every Sunday.
I got some clips from Jeff Flake, who's just one of the world's worst public speakers, was at the National Press Club giving his bitching and moaning about Trump.
Now, this is the guy who resigned.
He's the guy who's not running again.
Okay, yes, not running.
He's the Arizona guy, because he couldn't win like he's in there at all.
He's, you know...
Looks like a male model type guy.
He's a dipshit.
But he uses a word.
This is a very short clip.
This clip is longer than it should be, but it's 46 seconds.
I want you to...
This is an Ask Adam.
I want you to spot the word that kind of made me cringe.
Hmm.
I wonder.
We should know by now that there is no strategic brilliance to marvel at here.
No, by now we know that this is chaos for its own sake projected onto the world.
But the norming of this behavior by my party proceeds apace.
In my recent book, I wrote about Richard Nixon's Madman theory, in which the strategic projection of the appearance of stability can force the desired outcome from a fearful foe.
But for that theory to have coherence, you must first actually think strategically.
And if you don't, once that theory is taken away, all that remains is the madman.
I would say the, I think, non-existent verb norming, Yes.
Norming.
Now, so I'm looking it up.
What is the meaning of norming?
Apparently other people say it.
Oh, norming, yeah.
That's when you sit in one place all your life, like Norm from Cheers.
That's norming.
Well, there's norming a test, a norming stage.
What is the...
What is the...
Yeah, well, that norming...
I actually was looking for a norm clip to use.
Yeah.
Brilliant minds.
Brilliant minds.
Norm!
When he walks in, it would be good.
Team formation usually follows recognizable stages known as forming, storming, norming, and performing.
So it's one of those things that's bull crap.
It's one of those things they use in a focus group or something.
Yeah.
Forming.
Okay, here's what we're going to do, folks.
We're going to get together having a meeting.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
I want you all to know that here at the Courage of Art Consulting Group, we do black box, white box studies with double-blind encoded stuff.
So, John?
We're going to do forming, storming, norming, and performing.
Yes, sirree!
So we form an idea, we brainstorm how to make it work, we make it normal, and then we perform it and make it happen.
Boom!
Count one.
I'm guessing.
Nice.
Norming.
Norming.
In the context that he was speaking, the word should have been normalization, I believe.
Normalize.
Normalize.
Who the hell says norming in a public setting?
Well, I'm glad you're so upset about this.
And I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Because we teased.
You promised Normie Stormy.
I got Stormy.
Yeah, you promised.
We teased her, remember?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, this will be our wrap-up.
Wait, wait.
This is how it works.
You turn on the news, the lead, the headline, the breaking news is Stormy Daniels.
Here on the best podcast in the universe, it's a throwaway segment so we can fill up time to end the show.
Yes.
Here we go.
Exactly.
Here we go.
I've got three to choose from, but I'm just going to pay the...
The best one, which is the NBC clip of Stormy Daniels, and they're going to give us a little clip from the Morning Joe show to make it really important.
Today, an attorney for the adult film actress who was allegedly paid hush money to keep quiet about an affair with Mr.
Trump days before the 2016 election said she was also physically threatened to stay silent, and he claims more women are coming forward.
NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker has the story.
The bombshell came from Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti telling Morning Joe Daniels was physically threatened to stay silent about her alleged 2006 affair with then-citizen Donald Trump.
Was she threatened in any way?
Yes.
Was she threatened physical harm?
Yes.
What do you mean by that?
Was her life threatened?
Again, I'm not going to answer that.
Avenatti making the media rounds, refusing to say today whether the threats came before or after Daniel signed a non-disclosure agreement, accepting $130,000 right before Election Day, not to talk about her alleged relationship with Mr.
Trump.
Daniels is now suing, saying the deal isn't valid because she says the president never signed the paperwork.
Michael Cohen, President Trump's outside attorney, who says he paid Daniels out of his own pocket as a part of that agreement, didn't respond to requests for comment today.
Adding to the growing controversy...
We have been approached by six separate women who claim to have similar stories to those or to that of my client.
The White House has denied any relationship between the president and the porn star and is now on defense yet again.
The question we want answered is...
Any collusion?
That's all we need to know.
Now, I want to run this other clip because at least PBS, when they did their report, they call her by her real name.
There is nobody named Daniels.
Right.
So this is the...
And this is the best...
This is a better story.
I like the other one because it had some...
Juice in it, but this one here is a little more straightforward.
The lawyer for porn film star Stephanie Clifford says that she has been threatened with bodily harm if she did not remain silent about an alleged sexual affair with President Trump.
He gave no details and would not say if someone tied to Mr.
Trump made the threat against Clifford, who is known as Stormy Daniels.
The White House said the president condemns anyone who threatens any individual.
Why is this news?
Seriously?
Because it's crap.
None of this happened during the campaign or the election.
Is there some illegality that could tank the president?
Is that the idea?
I'm just trying to understand.
No, no.
It's just to keep the pot boiling.
You sure about that?
You sure?
There's no other strategy behind it than...
Well, there's a counter-strategy.
If you play the third clip, this is kind of interesting.
Ah, okay.
All right.
Oh, just play.
Tonight, the president versus the porn star.
Donald Trump and his personal legal team firing back his...
By the way, that was the title I suggested like eight shows ago and he didn't like it.
I said the president versus the porn star.
He didn't think it was good.
It's too long.
Okay, but now they're stealing our material.
Tonight, the president versus the porn star.
Donald Trump and his personal legal team firing back at Stormy Daniels, seeking more than $20 million in damages.
Daniels is fighting to speak out about her alleged 2006 affair with Trump.
Do you have a non-disclosure agreement?
Do I? Dales, who was paid $130,000 by longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen just before the 2016 election, is accused of breaching the confidential settlement at least 20 times.
Trump publicly hands off the court battle until now.
He and Cohen filed paperwork to move the case from state to federal court.
This could end up in a very big, very nasty, contentious court battle where Donald Trump would be forced to give testimony under oath in a deposition.
The president retained high-profile Beverly Hills attorney Charles Harder, who represented Hulk Hogan in his legal battle against Gawker.
Harder saying Mr.
Trump intends to pursue his rights to the fullest extent permitted by law.
Daniel's attorney, Michael Lemonade, calling the move a bullying tactic, saying how can President Donald Trump seek $20 million in damages against my client based on an agreement that he and Mr.
Cohen claim Mr.
Trump never was a party to and knew nothing about.
Hashtag checkmate.
Avenatti says Daniels has been physically threatened to stay quiet about her alleged sexual relationship with Trump.
When the American people are permitted to hear from my client, and hopefully they will hear from my client shortly, they will learn the details relating to these threats.
All right, Kenneth also joins us now from the White House.
And Kenneth, attorneys for Daniels offering no evidence so far or further details about those alleged threats?
That's right, Tom.
No evidence, no details.
But Stormy Daniels' attorney says when she's allowed to talk, and he hopes that will happen soon, the American people will be able to judge on whether she's telling the truth about those alleged threats.
Tom?
Oh, brother.
You know, let me just say, I think when it comes to...
I believe your analysis is correct.
Oh, brother.
When you think about porn stars, I think officially she's a sex worker.
Probably.
No, she doesn't visit home.
She has sex on camera for money, so she's a sex worker.
I know the profile of this person a little bit, and just now people like to give money back.
I fried.
But to think that maybe someone else is offering a better deal for her to do all this is not beyond...
Well, I think they did the countersuit for $20 million because no one's going to offer a better deal than that.
Right.
So you keep your $130, shut up, or we're suing you.
And so if somebody offered $250 or $500 to break the other deal...
Right, right.
So, that's what I think is going on with that.
You know what we need?
No more clips.
You can't play any more clips.
I got one shorty.
It's only seven seconds.
Okay, wait.
I know we have people in our producer community who are sex workers or know people who are sex workers.
What's the buzz in the community?
Yes, send us an email.
I mean, we're uniquely positioned to find this kind of stuff out.
And of course, and an immediate issue.
You can send it encrypted to me.
No worries.
I'd like to know, what is the buzz?
Is everyone like, man, she's so smart, she's cleaning house, which I think she's doing.
She seems like a big dummy to me.
Alright, your last clue.
Last thing, there was a bridge collapse.
Don't bitch when I tell you the show's long.
I take full responsibility for running overtime.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
All right.
But it's one of the few times I can actually clean off my clip list.
Okay.
Okay.
But this is where the bridge collapsed at Florida International University, some overhead bridge made with this special construction method called ABC, which is where you build a bridge nearby and then you drop it on top.
Yeah, and it also needs guide wires, which it didn't have, and it was made of new space-age self-cleaning cement.
And they had all this stuff going on, right?
Right.
So I found that one of the networks actually played an ironic...
A tidbit about this school which financed and put this thing up.
And here's the bridge irony.
In a tragic irony, Florida International University has long been a leader in ABC engineering research.
So there one has just invented the process.
It's pretty bad.
Very sad.
Well, it's very sad.
Super day wrecker is what it is.
Imagine.
All right, everybody.
Show day.
Keep your eyes peeled.
You never know what might happen.
Something.
Yeah, something always does.
We'll be sure to deconstruct it for you on Thursday's show.
I will be here in downtown Austin, Texas.
It's known as the capital of the drone star state.
In addition to that, you can find it on any government map.
Just do a search or bing it.
FEMA Region 6.
We're right smack dab in the middle of it.
Without any news from the South by Southwest Conference or the South by Bomber, but still in the 5x9 Cludio in the Commonwealth Condo.
In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley.
I don't know what to tell you.
Whether people don't like that.
Nobody likes my little reports at the end, so I'm just going to sign off.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
Well, we'll be back on Thursday.
Remember us at dvorak.org slash na.
Click on the No Agenda stickers link for extra fun.
And as always, adios, mofos.
I need a cab.
Get it.
Cab.
Thank you.
Space Force.
and stay supportive.
Very soon we're going to Mars.
Space Force.
Not really serious.
In space, the United States is going to do Colonel Glenn proud.
We are finally going to lead again.
You see what's happening?
Very soon we're going to Mars.
We wouldn't have been going to Mars if my opponent won.
Space Force.
Space Force.
My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea.