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April 11, 2021 - No Agenda
01:49:45
1337: Adam's Storytime
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Time Text
Adam Curry, John C. Devorak.
In Sunday, April 11th, 2021, this is your award-winning Gilmore Nation Media Assassination, episode 1337.
This is No Agenda.
Feeling leet and broadcasting almost live from Opportunity Zone 33 here in the frontier of Austin, Texas, capital of the drone, Star State.
In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where we're live to tape, live to tape, I'm John C. Devorak.
We'll do it live.
We'll do it live.
Happy Leet.
Happy Leet, man.
Big number.
Big number for the show.
Yeah, big number for the show.
This is the one that everyone wants to be an executive producer of.
And I think you will be very happy with that because we have a special...
Well, John and I are still resting up and preparing for COVID-2021.
Because you know that's coming.
You don't seem to want to let up on this.
No, it's unbelievable.
So we're still on our break, and as we were getting ready to record this...
We were looking for the name of the executive producer who did this because he also did John's stories.
And that aired...
Now, is this the last time we took off?
I think so.
1201 was the show.
Episode 1201, December 22, 2019.
So we've been going nonstop for over two years?
No, no.
That's 2019, not 2018.
Yeah.
Okay, 2019.
So you go all the way for 20, so December.
Alright, okay, there you go.
Guess what you kind of guessed.
15 months, yeah, right, about 15 months.
Okay, that was right.
Well, good.
We deserve this time off.
Are you enjoying yourself on your time off?
Oh yeah, I'm having the time of my life.
I don't have to do clips.
You are sitting at home by yourself in the chaise, just hanging out.
In the chaise.
Now, it's been quite a while since I've heard this, but we had John's stories, which everyone seemed to like.
You have credit to our Sir...
Yes, Sir Rupin Waffle.
Sir Rupin Waffle.
Yes, Sir...
Yes.
He did both these shows.
I wonder if it's supposed to be syrup and waffles.
That's why it's syrup and waffles.
Oh, that could be.
Okay, that could be syrup and waffles.
Makes sense.
Syrup and waffles, exactly.
So he did these two shows together, so these are the same era of anecdotes.
Of course, we didn't tell as many stories during 2020 because it was a year of COVID. We were listening to the biggest tale ever told.
And so, yes, we don't need to do our own material.
And...
So this is your collection of stories, and that we're going to delve into, and just non-stop, I guess we'll take one break in the middle, and then we're good to go.
All right, here we go.
My legacy in the first half, the first hour.
Bear with me on this, because this is shit I've been thinking about a lot over the past couple days.
So I truly believe that in the not-too-distant future, maybe five years, let's just make it easy on ourselves, in five years there will be enough ubiquitous bandwidth around and streaming capabilities that essentially will just have digital radios.
I mean, it's what DAB already is, but it'll be two-way.
And so you'll be able to stream.
Certainly you can do that today over your mobile phone.
The price may vary depending on your plan and where you live and all that shit.
But bar the subways, I've done iChats with KJ, with Chris Jacob, while he was on the train coming down from upstate New York.
So we can get a stream out there.
What if we had a stream...
That is essentially 24 hours a day, and we just keep adding to it.
Right?
So if you drop in, you'll hear the conversation, then eventually you'll get up to a point that you've already heard, and then you're up to date.
And when you check in again...
I think this is a great idea, by the way, except that there's a complication here, which is, for example, we'll go back to the by-and-large rant.
Yeah.
We have to, to make this work right, we'd have to actually document what we're talking about in some logical way that can then be indexed.
Sounds like work.
There you have it.
There you go.
Sounds like work.
Well, clearly that's a non-starter, so we have to think this through a little bit more.
So how about the audience?
Can we get your guys Bubba like that involved?
I don't know about Bubba, but he seems to be at his wit's end already.
But I'm thinking this.
By the way, I'm not trying to poach your guys, John.
I'm just saying.
I would probably do it, but actually there's another guy that probably would do it for sure.
But I don't want them doing it, I think, because what you brought up was the fact that we like to package stuff because we're getting old, and the kids, they like to do all the stuff themselves, is to get a team of volunteer kids, you know, by our standards, kids, anyone under 48.
And have them mash up shows.
Exactly.
I think there'd be more than a few volunteers for that.
That reminds me, when I entered the Dutch schooling system, I was going to the International School of Amsterdam for three years after we moved there.
I moved there when I was seven.
And just to give you the full context of the story, we had a week off from the ISA, International School of Amsterdam, and my parents sat me and my sisters down Sunday evening.
Guess what you guys are going to do tomorrow?
We're like, wow, what are we going to do?
You're going to Dutch school.
Like, what?
And I actually really spoke just a few words of Dutch.
uh so entered dutch school fifth grade and within i think like two or three months into this into the uh into the the school year the teacher he uh says oh here's a question that uh our americans now this is a time when americans were not very loved in uh in europe texas instruments was coming over and i walk on the street they know who i was and the kids be like you crazy american shit go fluk yourself i mean that's what i would get as a fifth grader and then the teacher says all right here's one how many
uh how many states does the united states of america have and my hand goes up of course it's at 50 states it's 52 you forgot alaska and hawaii i said no No, it was 48.
And then we...
What?
No, no.
You don't even know this?
And he just was berating me.
And I was already messed up.
I remember calling the American Embassy and recording it on one of those little cassette recorders, taking it into school, and even that was, well, she was referencing an old Encyclopedia Britannica.
I could not get them to just admit that he was wrong.
Anyway, your next story.
Okay, thanks.
Now, this is like a music business story.
Do you know who Seymour Stein is?
The name rings a bell, but no.
Okay, Seymour Stein is the guy who first, he, a legend in the music business, started Sire Records.
And Sire Records had many famous artists, but Seymour Stein is really known for Madonna.
He really took Madonna into mainstream, did the first big album with her, Sire was her record label in the very beginning of her career.
And Seymour Stein is a real...
I've hung out with him back in the mid-80s in London.
And just one of these really weird guys, typical music industry guys.
like he had a fish tank in his office with 50-pound notes at the bottom of this aquarium, and there were piranha swimming in the aquarium.
It's like, you're welcome to go grab the 50-pound note if you don't mind your hand getting eaten by a piranha.
This is really one of these guys, right?
Hilarious.
And his ex-wife...
Linda Stein was also a legend in the music business.
She was a manager, famously, of the Ramones.
And she was the most abrasive woman you can imagine.
She would yell, she would scream at people, she'd tell Joey Ramones, shut the fuck up!
When they were touring in England, he was complaining about everything.
He didn't like the food.
And she just said, then get the fuck back to America, you fucking...
This is legendary.
And it's funny because, as far as I know, Seymour Stein was gay, if not at least bi.
But, you know, it was really weird, these two.
And, of course, they did break up eventually.
So she was X for a reason.
Um...
So, legendary woman.
In fact, she had cancer, and she had been operated on cancer, and this is just one of those famous stories about her, so take it with a grain of salt.
Four hours after the operation, she was already on the phone yelling at someone who would fuck something up.
Just crazy.
They found her bludgeoned to death in her apartment yesterday in New York on Fifth Avenue.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
It wasn't in the news out here.
Well, there you go.
But it's just, it's one of those, you watch, the stories will come out, I'm sure, because, you know, lots of artists dealt with her, so I'm sure people are going to be talking about this.
You watch.
It's going to be an interesting story.
I'm sure that it'll...
Well, yeah, it sounds like something that's going to develop.
That's interesting.
And, you know, who, I mean, it's like, you know, who...
Who really were her enemies?
Who would have wanted to do this?
So the answer is fucking everybody!
Everybody could have gone off on this woman at any time and bludgeoned her to death.
Of course, she's kind of been out of the business for many years, so for this to happen now is just crazy.
I think it's the late 70s, mid-80s, something like that.
Because I remember Doc McGee, he's now manager for Gene Simmons, which is kind of sad.
He's on that Family Jewels reality show.
But he, at the time, was one of the biggest managers in rock and roll.
He was managing Motley Crue and Bon Jovi and maybe even Ozzy Osbourne.
And he got caught smuggling 5,000 pounds of marijuana into Florida on his Learjet.
Which is like...
I don't know what type Learjet it was, but that must have been heavy.
And so he didn't go to jail, but instead the judge said, well, I'll let you go, but as a part of your get-out-of-jail-free ticket, you have to do a number of anti-drug, anti-alcohol concerts.
I thought you were going to say he has to do reality TV. Well, no, this is 1988.
And that's how I wound up in Russia, actually, because they had the Moscow Music Peace Festival...
Which he organized.
And this is before the wall came down.
And so we went on a plane from Newark, New Jersey with those, you know, like Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne.
We stopped in Germany to pick up the Scorpions.
And then we did this show.
It was like 10 days at Lennon Stadium in Moscow.
But the funniest thing was this plane, which was a chartered plane, you know, like a, I don't know, it was like a DC something, like a cigar tube, really long and very uncomfortable, particularly for that flight.
Everyone was hammered.
This was the anti-drug, anti-alcohol.
Ozzy Osbourne, I will never rid myself of him standing in the aisle because the laboratory was occupied.
And he's going, Sharon!
Sharon, there's someone in the loo!
And Sharon, by the way, was this fat little pudgy English chick with bad complexion.
And Ozzy couldn't get in the bathroom and he peed himself right there, right in the aisle.
You know, like a six-year-old, a huge stain in the front of his pants.
It was just unbelievable.
And that was the get-out-of-drug-free ticket that Doc McGee put together and everyone was hammered the whole way through.
And then Bon Jovi's doctor on the way back was handing out Halcyon to everybody.
It'll help you sleep.
I'm like, oh, that'll help me sleep.
I was messed up for two weeks.
I was suicidal almost.
So anyway, the point is, end users of drugs are stupid because the real game is up at the top there.
I will say it is so impressive when you see how the big broadcast personalities.
When MSNBC launched and they were over in New Jersey, this was with my previous company.
Actually, it was before Think.
It was OnRamp.
And Microsoft, who of course were one of the partners with NBC, they needed a chat to go along with some of their programming.
And I can't remember exactly how, but actually it was Denise.
What was her name?
Who was a Microsoft woman?
I'm sure you know her.
Caruso, I want to say.
Does that make sense?
Denise Caruso?
She was a journalist.
No, not Denise.
It was Denise something or other.
And she was in charge of, at the time, it was Microsoft Comic Chat.
Do you remember that?
We had these little avatars.
Yeah, right.
It's another thing that failed.
Yeah, of course.
They never stick to these things is the problem.
It couldn't scale.
This was the problem.
So they couldn't scale it, and the team within Microsoft was really worried, but they wanted some form of chat.
And we had a bunch of these hacker boys with names like Rat Boy and Alan Louie was one.
Not that that's a cool name, but I just remember And they had basically hacked together a very, very, very basic, very freaking simple CGI script into an IRC, you know, proven technology, right?
Go figure.
And so we had this really robust chat based on IRC, which I, to this day, obviously still can't figure out.
And so they hired us to implement this.
And because of that, we were invited to the opening.
And you'll recall perhaps that the big interview they had on opening day was Tom Brokaw interviewing President Bill Clinton.
And I sat in the control room, and I was blown away by the professionalism of this guy.
So he's got his earpiece in, and he's talking.
He's having a conversation, and I believe he is listening to what the then-president was saying.
And so they're having a dialogue, and the producer is continuously talking into his ear and giving him cues.
And then it's like, okay, Tom, we have 30 seconds to commercial.
And he's counting down the seconds, and Brokaw fires off another question which he knows is only going to get a quick yes or no answer, and he pulls back away from the president and hits the commercial break right on the nose.
And I still get goosebumps when I think about that actual sequence.
It is unfrickin' real how good these guys are.
Well, so there's a couple things I'll say here.
Because I have been kind of following the Osmonds over the past couple weeks, mainly because Marie was in Dancing with the Stars.
And I like that show.
She passed out.
She passed out, right?
So that kind of got her into the news.
I know Donnie.
In fact, I raced against him in a celebrity race in Denver.
It was an Indy event, IndyCar.
When I was working for MTV. And the guy's fucking serious.
He won the race, by the way.
I was impressed.
We were all out partying and he was walking the track at 5 in the morning, finding the apex and all the fucking perfect curve.
He wanted to win.
He really wanted to win.
I've been following this, and the only thing I can say is, they had 100 Osmonds on Oprah the other day.
100.
So even though Marie's dad had just passed away a few days earlier, they still decided to come to Oprah's show, which is fine, but what was the point?
She was there plugging her dolls, which she sells on, I think, QVC or the Home Shopping Network, which is, I think, really her main source of income, and I'm sure it does huge business.
But when you step back into the limelight, it's like a fucking boomerang.
I've seen this happen.
It's happened to me many times.
It comes back at you, and positive energy comes back fucking black, and vice versa.
It's part of the beast.
It whips a lot faster than it used to.
The turnaround time is quicker, and the ups and downs are severe.
This is just what happens, I think.
Here's a trend.
Boys in Britain with increasing rate do not want a French kiss.
You're kidding.
Yeah.
And this is...
I had a whole conversation with my daughter and a couple of her friends that were here in the garden today.
And it's...
Is it because the Brits hate their French that much?
That was my question, too.
But no.
No.
Like, we hate these fucking French...
No more de tongue.
It's called a freedom kiss now instead of French kissing.
No, they're just not into it.
Believe me, they're into a whole bunch of other stuff because I did get all the details, but no, they don't like French kissing.
It's going out of vogue.
Pun intended.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
And so I've told my daughter...
What's the sociology, you think, behind that?
I really don't know.
You know, the first thing I said is, baby, maybe you need a tic-tac.
You know, she's like, no, no, no, dad.
And then, you know, her friend Liz and a couple of these girls say, yeah, more and more boys just, they don't like it.
They just don't like it.
Is it the boys?
The girls don't, one way or the other, not...
No, the boys.
It's the boys who don't want a French kiss.
That's kind of trippy, isn't it?
That's wild.
I wonder if that trend is developing here.
I have no idea.
Personally, I'm a big fan.
What, French kissing boys?
Yeah, especially the young ones.
It's just the way you set it up.
What am I supposed to say?
I know, I know.
It was an open goal.
That was around the time the Truman Show came out.
Yeah.
And we were back in Holland.
We had just moved back.
And I got a call at like 11.30 at night.
It was John the Mole of Endemol.
You know who Endemol is?
No.
Endemol, the big production company.
Most famous for Big Brother.
Okay, yeah.
Okay, worldwide success.
Sold to Telefonica for several billion dollars.
He called me around 11.30.
He says, Adam, Adam, Adam, come to my office.
I want to show you something.
I'm like, all right.
That's kind of weird.
But he was already a pretty big television producer.
I'm like, okay.
So I go and he says, I got a mood tape for you.
I said, okay, I know what a mood tape is.
He says, it's...
It's kind of Biosphere meets Truman Show.
And he showed me this tape, and it was literally, they had it, it was a mood tape, so it was all stuff cut together and voiceover to make it kind of look like it was real.
Essentially, it was called Golden Cage, and the idea was that we'd lock in ten people, five men, five women, lock them up for a full year, and then whoever would come out as the final person would be the...
Sorry about that.
We'd be the winner of like a million euros or whatever.
And that, about three months later, became Big Brother.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, and I was right there at the very, very start, and it was completely influenced.
And I bet you the pieces of real life were in that mood tape.
I'm going to see if I can find it, because I have it somewhere.
The original Big Brother mood tape.
And later, actually, Endemol went on to create Golden Cage, which is like a really harsh version of Big Brother, with people having sex and getting drunk and shit on camera.
He tried to sell that in the States.
They wouldn't even take it.
We got our standards.
Yeah, boy, we sure do.
Please.
Something funny happened the other day.
I have to say that I enjoy the show even more than I used to because these are the two moments in my life at this moment.
The two times in my life that I hear everything perfectly and in a beautifully processed, nice, full, rich sound.
Because I... Yes?
I thought you were going to say it because you can go back into the closet.
No.
So the hearing aids, I've got them completely figured out.
I've got them customized, configured, and it's fantastic.
But if you want to be able to hear things, you have to, and it's very difficult for me, you have to learn...
To live with, depending on the situation you're in, a horribly filtered sound.
An example would be in a shopping mall.
There's a good example.
We talked about the mall.
If you want to be able to hear what people are saying, then you're going to basically only crank up the mids and everything else has to go down.
Turn on the directional mics, which is one setting, by the way.
You don't have to do that all on the fly.
And then you can hear everybody.
It sounds completely like this.
And otherwise, it's just too much noise that comes in.
Anyway, so I'm wearing these things.
I'm doing pretty good.
Wait a minute.
Let's stop.
What?
Well, I mean, you're just...
You're talking in vagaries.
You are in the mall.
You've got the hearing aid right now.
It's in your ear.
No.
Oh, in the mall.
Yes.
Yeah.
In the mall.
It's not...
Not while I'm doing this show.
In the ear now?
No, no, no.
While I'm doing this show, the headphone is on 11, which is why I hear everything perfectly.
And it sounds really good.
And because there's a noise gate, there's nothing else that's being amplified when I'm not talking.
So this is the way...
I wish the world sounded like this to me all the time.
And I can go to...
I can turn on music and I can put it on the music setting and it'll sound fantastic.
Okay, that's where we're stopping.
What do you mean?
You poke yourself in the eye?
How do you make the settings change?
Oh, I thought I told you this.
So there's six settings pre-programmed, and you have a button on each unit.
So I'm actually, it's an odd thing.
Is it a big, giant button?
How do you find the button?
It has to be minuscule.
No, no, no.
So the way that modern hearing aids is not just something that's stuck in your ear canal.
You have the unit is hanging behind your ear.
Then there's a copper wire pair that goes into a really, they call it a receiver, but it's really a tiny speaker.
And that is in your ear canal.
So the unit contains the battery, the processing, and you can, one button on each one, so if the right ear volume goes up, left ear volume goes down, and either button, if you long press, it'll change to a different program, and the little lady's voice will go, music!
Or she'll go, party!
Or urban!
Or universal!
You with me?
Yeah, and I'm trying to visualize.
Okay, so you got a little thing in the back of your ear that you can push a button.
Yeah.
And you push it until you wait for the lady, because the little voices come through, which is kind of cool, and tells you what setting you're on, and you let it off.
There's other cool things.
For instance, and now this doesn't happen with me, but if you, well, I thought it wouldn't, if you lose one, then the one that's still in your ear will go, lost mate.
Yeah.
Which is an odd message to receive.
How do you lose one?
Well, funny you ask.
So we're up here on the 29th floor.
And I'm taking some garbage, some cardboard box to throw down the chute.
Are you still using your little thing you stand on?
The little thing I stand on.
You used to stand on a little thing.
A little scooter thingy.
No, I'm just walking down the hallway.
Whatever happened to that thing?
I gave it away.
It was a death trap.
I didn't want to die.
So I'm walking down the hallway.
I go to the garbage room.
We have two garbage chutes.
One for garbage, one for recycling.
And so I'm like, I got this box and it won't fit.
And so I'm crushing the box.
It clips my ear.
The hearing aid flips off.
Hits the box.
I try to grab it.
No, it goes down 29 floors.
I couldn't hear it more than five, of course.
And I'm like, okay.
Bye.
Wow, that's what I call a freak accident.
Yeah, and so I immediately jump in the elevator, go down.
I thought you jumped in the chute.
I shouldn't throw anything after it, even though I might mark where it is, I don't know what could happen.
For all I know, it got caught somewhere.
It has a wire on it.
It can get caught in anything.
So I go downstairs.
I'm running underneath the building.
I can't find anything.
One of the maintenance guys appears, and I tell him the story.
He's like, are you sure you put in the right-hand one?
He said, yeah, in the recycling.
You're really sure?
I said, yeah, okay.
And we go into where these big containers are, where all the trash dumps in from the entire building.
And I see what he was saying about the regular garbage, because it goes through a mulcher.
If you're throwing something down that tube, it's going to get mulched.
And there it is.
There's the recycle container, and it's up to my chest.
I'm looking in.
It's like, oh, I can't see anything.
Can I get in?
Before I can say anything, the maintenance guy hops in, 30 seconds, picks it up, and the wire had dislodged from the little speaker.
So I'm like, well, at least I have that part of the unit.
And then he says, oh, and there's this.
He picked it right out of the recycling.
Wow.
And you know what happened then?
First of all, when this took place, as I said, when it was going plink, plink, plink, plink, plink down the chute, my other ear goes, lost mate.
Do you understand kind of how it can be useful?
And then when I had it in my hand, when he gave it back to me, I went, mate found.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
If you're a complete idiot, you don't know you lost a mate.
That would come in very handy.
Well, I don't know what it's like to be completely deaf or very, very deaf and that these things are only marginally helping somebody.
So maybe.
I don't know.
You know, when you run out of gas in your car, and I've had this happen.
I ran out of gas once in the Lincoln Tunnel.
And that, by the way, on a Friday afternoon.
Did they ever tell you this story?
You must have had bad vibes that still exist hanging over your head.
Shall I tell you the whole story?
It's hilarious.
So these were the days.
I had a 1972, no wait, 1982 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow 2, which I bought secondhand.
Beautiful.
British racing green.
You know, great car.
I drove it in New York every single day.
I drove 80,000 miles I put on that car.
And of course, it's ridiculous.
You know, I think I paid 70 grand for it at the time when I had money.
Boy, good old days.
And so I'm coming out of New York on a Friday afternoon.
You have to understand that in New York, and this is MTV days, Friday afternoons the Lincoln Tunnel is jammed.
Because, of course, the Jewish population of New York all tries to get out around 3 o'clock in the afternoon to get home in time for the weekend.
To get out to the Hamptons out of town.
Well, the Hamptons is not through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Oh, you're right.
It's the other way.
Right.
But basically all tunnels and bridges are jammed.
And so I'm like...
They're going to Jersey to go home.
Jersey, sure.
And I know there's a gas station on the other side, on the Jersey side.
I'm like, I can make this, I can make this.
And it conks out in the Lincoln Tunnel on a Friday afternoon.
I'm wearing my MTV guy leather jacket and my big Adam Curry hair.
Let me tell you.
You're the douchebag of the day.
Did they grant a story about this?
They threw stuff at me.
People were throwing their paper cups.
Like, you a-hole!
MTV douchebag!
Because they literally have to close off one lane, and then the truck has to come through to push the car out.
Backwards, yeah.
They come out frontwards and turn around.
No, no.
They push me towards the Jersey side, so they push me all the way out.
But never again.
And that's also when I decided fancy-looking cars is not good.
You can't win.
It draws attention to you.
It never got me laid either, I'll tell you that.
I'm just remembering something.
So Kleiner Perkins always had smoking hot receptionists.
They had some beautiful women in the front.
Smoking hot receptionists.
And I forget the young woman.
I forget her name.
We'd often be waiting.
We'd have to go there every week.
You always have to wait.
Yeah, you'd have to have meetings.
Oh, it was a board meeting.
Show how we're doing.
Show the damn charts again.
We're spending your money well, huh?
And I would always hang out talking to her.
And she was kind of cool.
She was a snowboarder or whatever.
But she was good looking, fun, interesting, good jokes.
And I'd always be hanging out there anyway.
And then, you know, Kleiner Perkins had these Christmas parties and stuff.
And I got a call from Ray Lane one morning.
I said, hey, Ray, what's going on?
Well, there's a complaint for sexual harassment.
Really?
And it was this receptionist.
And she had this whole list of people who had propositioned her.
And it was clear that what became apparent is that she had a history of doing this at companies.
And she had pretty much gone to Kleiner Perkins and had sought people out.
And at one point, she had asked me, hey, you want to go get high?
I'm like, no, I got a meeting here.
No.
No.
But that came back in some complaint that I wanted to smoke illegal drugs with her.
And this was Ray Lane, senior partner, was reading this to me over the phone.
I said, this is insane, Ray.
What's going on with this?
So they were targeted.
And anyway, I guess they had...
Like as a detective.
This guy showed up.
Before this complaint came in, this guy showed up and he was like a co-receptionist.
It was very strange.
So they brought him in as people were starting to suspect something.
No one's going to notice that.
And he was there to trap her.
And she apparently had done this to other companies.
Yeah, it's a business.
Yeah, really?
You figure out what companies, especially if you're a good-looking woman, you can get jobs pretty easily in those positions.
And I was offended.
I would never ask someone to go smoking legal drugs with me.
You let the girls ask you out.
In fact, that sounds like what happened in that case.
I never heard anything else after that, but it's a weird place.
It's a weird place.
The reason why I'm sensitive about this is because I once said something in the Netherlands almost 30 years ago.
And obviously I didn't make a joke, because they sat me down.
I had to apologize, and it was a big deal.
Well, let's hear this story.
And by the way, I want to mention to everybody out there who helps this show, and they contribute to the show, and they donate to the show, and they produce the show and all the rest of it.
On any given show, I tell this to people, Adam or myself would be fired two or three times in the normal circumstance.
But since we work for ourselves and we produce this show and we have our own infrastructure and nobody can stop us, we do a lot of stuff that would get us fired.
But now we have an example that Adam's going to give us of him actually almost getting fired over something he said.
Yeah.
So this must have been in 85 or 86.
In the Netherlands, I was on the official radio in the Netherlands.
And it was...
I'm trying to think what it was in relation to.
But anyway, there was a news item, and in the news item was something about, some guy said, well, you know, you see how, it had to do with Israel and Palestine or something like that.
I don't really, I'd have to look it up to remember the specifics.
Then he said, well, you know, the reason why this gets attention is, you know, look at who's running the media in America.
And I commented and I said, well, you know, he's got a point there.
You know, the names you see on the credit rolls in Hollywood often end with Steen.
And man, especially the Netherlands, people lost their crap over there.
There was one very famous singer, and she said, when he said that, I just remembered the Nazis' jackboots walking down the hallway while I was hiding.
I mean, that's the kind of stuff that happened to me.
And it was really just an off-the-cuff comment.
I learned, obviously.
And then the, I think it's the, what's it called?
The CO, I forget the name, like an ADL of the Netherlands.
Robbie something or other.
I mean, he started making statements in the newspaper and they're calling from...
I was like, oh, hold on.
I'll come over.
Let's sit down.
Let's talk about it.
I really...
Please.
And the point was, jokes or offhanded remarks propagate the lies, the lies that the Jews run the banks, the Jews run the media, etc., So jokes like that propagate the lies even though they're a joke.
I just don't understand why a pass is given.
What are we not spoken about?
The comic book guy.
What are we going to do?
I was going to give you the back story on that.
Yeah, I don't know anything.
You said we were going to talk about it on the show.
Well, and I've got to be careful because if I say it wrong, then he'll get really upset.
Well, who is he?
Comic strip blogger.
Okay.
His name is Jasek something or other.
I don't remember his real name.
And he's a fan of yours, or what's the deal?
Well, he latched on to the Daily Source Code a couple years ago, and he started in the comments, and he would just write these outrageous things.
He really, as we would say in Holland, his heart was on his tongue, and he's also coincidentally the guy that started this whole fuck you Adam Curry business, because that's literally how he talks.
And it was just really interesting to me, and I Googled him, And I found out that he had worked at Nokia, and I guess he had a blog, and he was basically posting on the blog about shit that sucked within the company.
I'm paraphrasing, I'm sure, as to what it exactly was.
And so he got fired, and some say he got kicked out of Finland.
How do you get kicked out of Finland?
You don't want to cross Nokia's path, man.
They are Finland.
And out of anger and spite, but maybe also because he felt there was more future in the platform, he became a huge proponent of Windows Mobile.
And he started blogging and podcasting, and he'd go around to these MVP events, which I believe he's been banned from now, and he would ask really straightforward questions, actually journalistically great questions, but his approach, of course, was very brash.
I saw a piece of video done in the Apple UK store where a journalist went up to Phil Schiller and said, is this going to be a problem with anti-competitive laws in Europe where you basically have to buy something to get something else?
Are you tying the phone to the network and then immediately the PR people jump in and Schiller backs off?
It's that kind of question, straight to the point.
Right, good stuff.
And it's exactly good stuff, and it freaks him out.
Now, I think his appearance and the way he speaks, and he has his Polish-German accent, and he's just the vocabulary.
Yeah, so I got really interested in the guy, and I think Jeff Smith made a jingle for him, and then he started calling in, and he knows a lot of shit, particularly about the European Union, and so he'd give reports on that.
Give us some examples.
Is he an EU basher?
No, no, no.
He really believes in the EU, but he points out all of the things that are wrong and that are messed up.
He's another guy that gets stopped going into another country, and then he'll record it, and he'll say, Why do I have to show a passport?
Am I not EU citizen?
Which, of course, is a great way not to get through passport control.
Yeah, that works.
No, he's a beautiful guy.
One time we set up a date.
After years, we would meet at the UK office.
This video was on YouTube and I think on his site, comicstripblog.com.
He interviewed me about my mobile devices.
It was so funny because then he gave me a PowerPoint pitch.
About what he wanted to do to work for Podshow, like a consultant-type role.
And it was so funny.
It was the only pitch I've ever received in my life that literally ended with a slide that says, P.S., fuck you, Adam Curry.
Oh, man, this is so beautiful.
Well, I can kind of transition from this into two central bankers came out on the same day and essentially said the same thing.
The former chief of the Central Bank of the Netherlands, the Nederlandse Bank, Nout Velink, said, Oh, this Bitcoin!
This is nothing more than tulip mania!
Except at the end of the day, you had a tulip!
And I need to say something about that.
That's a good line.
Well, no, it's not.
I see other people do this tulip thing.
You know, it's just crazy.
What's interesting is that beanie babies is something we all remember.
But I did some research on the tulip thing, and it's a little different than the way we remember it.
There's a book, which Sir Wunderhelm had some scanned pages somehow, he gave it to me.
And this comparison, essentially whenever there's a bubble, they say, oh, that's like the Dutch tulip craze!
And I think some history is warranted about what that actually was.
I mean, the way you understand it, John, is that it?
The Dutch tulip craze was just people went crazy about a non-product and the bubble burst and that was it?
I mean, do you have any background?
Tulips were very popular and they were being bred to be certain ways and certain tools became very valuable and then there was a shortage in the market and then what happened was people began to speculate on the bulbs.
And once that happened, it was doomed.
But it was definitely a craze.
So let me tell you what actually happened.
This was not so much about the bubble as it was about the trading that was going on.
Now, this is the 1630s.
There was no CNBC. There were no newspapers.
They had pamphlets, which are kind of like flyers, and people would print something up and hand it out.
They had commodities trade, and the Netherlands kind of invented the stock market.
And this was a part of that, because what happened with these tulip trades is people were not taking possessions of the bulb or the flower, just the contract.
And that was something that was new.
And by the way, in order to understand a history like this, you have to get the Dutch texts, which I am able to read, so it's kind of unique that I can explain this to you because I read through the Dutch copy of what really went down.
So this was something that was new, is people would buy a tulip and they would only get a piece of paper that was, you know, the balls...
Yes, by the way, I want to interrupt.
Anytime you have some new technology or some new mechanism, financial mechanism, that makes it look as though you can make a lot of money, people jump on it because they see...
Bitcoin is probably, I think, is a good example now that you bring this up.
This part of it is.
Yes, this is exactly my point.
So people were in it to make money on the transaction instead of making money on the commodity itself.
This is where there was a big difference.
Now...
There was a lot of trouble with these flowers.
They were hard to identify.
There were a lot of mistakes being made and a lot of fraud.
But in 1936...
One of these pamphlets, again, very few newspapers, if any, floated rumors that the state was considering taxing the Tulip.
This was in 1636.
1636, I'm sorry.
What did I say?
You said 1936.
And by the way, if you notice, what you said was 1936, which is exactly...
Exactly 400 or 300 years later.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting.
So 1636, one of these pamphlets floated rumors the state was considering taxing this trade because they weren't really trading or buying commodities.
It was kind of like a transaction tax is what they were looking at.
So on February 3rd, 1637 is when the first bad auction took place in Harlem and there were essentially no buyers.
On February 24th in Amsterdam, there was a big meeting.
All the traders got together and they said, okay, you know what?
We've got to unwind all this.
Every trade after November 30th, 1636, can be unwound for a 10% fee on the actual transaction.
Of course, the big guys didn't really get hurt.
Some of the little guys got through.
It was kind of like a bailout, one of the early bailouts.
But why did this happen?
And all the texts say that there is a very clear parallel of the plague.
The plague, of course, in the 1600s was like, you know, it happened.
But the peak of the tulip mania trade coincided with the peak of the Black Plague, where 30% of cities were literally dying.
And in 1636, before this bad auction...
Twelve or fourteen of the big tulip traders died of the plague, and their kids or their family or other people within their organization took over the trade.
So it's not that crazy to think that when you have, like, the backup guy running the trade or someone who doesn't know anything about this trading at all come into this and there's plague and people are dying and people, you know, it's a weird time, that that was really the impetus for this to fall apart.
Not so much that all of a sudden people realized that TULIP wasn't worth anything, which to this day is not true.
A tulip is definitely worth money, just it wasn't worth the kind of money they were paying for it at the time.
So the crash really coincided with the new people coming in after the plague wiped out the original traders.
And that's the part that is iffy at best to say that there's a bubble, it always pops, it always goes this way, it's overvalued.
And it's not.
The only comparison that's fair, I think you're right, It's a trade based upon the value of the trade and what you can make in selling the ownership paper on instead of the actual commodity.
Yeah, speculation always causes these issues.
Exactly.
They're going to hate me for saying this, but I don't care.
I remember being invited and accepting the invite on Ray Lane's G5 jet to fly from San Francisco to, I think it was, Burbank.
It was Burbank or...
No, it was Long Beach.
And they had the Teslas.
It was like a huge elitist thing.
It was lined up.
There was the eBay guy's plane.
Everyone's plane was there.
Seriously, and they had Teslas, and you would wait in line, and they had drinks and everything, and then you'd get in...
Had a few drinks.
Yeah, like a carnival ride, and you get in line, and you step off a little podium into the car, and you wait for the next one to come along, and it was your turn, and then you'd ride around the tarmac.
They had a, you know, like Top Gear.
They had a whole part of the track.
Yeah, and this was the investor scam, and, you know, this also got them the money.
The huge latest thing.
Did you go?
I told you, of course I went!
You crazy?
Oh, so you drove the Tesla?
No, no.
Did you even get in one?
No, I did not.
I did not get in one.
Why?
I don't stand in line for anything.
I did, however, fly...
So you're telling me there's a bunch of guys flying with their private jets standing in line?
Yeah, to ride a Tesla.
And then they were putting up on the board who had bought one.
Oh, brother.
On the big LED board.
That's like something you find out in Alabama.
Yeah.
Yeah, we got a pig for sale.
We got a pig right here.
Big, fat pig.
Now, anybody wants to buy this pig?
Put your name on the list.
It's like the Necham's Auto Auction.
They do that, too.
We got a buyer over here!
We got a buyer!
So who was there that bought one?
Oh, everyone was there.
Bezos.
Everybody bought one?
Yeah.
But I don't think you could fit in one of these things.
No, I don't fit in the Lotus body.
It's a little Lotus body.
The thing's dinky.
Yeah, but I wasn't interested.
The reason I went is...
I just wanted a free ride.
You're just more interested in the G5. I sat up front in the G5, and it was just so hilarious.
And it was with Bloom and Marta.
So it was like four people in a G5, which holds 20 people.
That's how disgusting it is.
But I like Ray Lane, by the way.
He's a good guy.
I'll ride in your jet.
So I flew jump seat in the cockpit.
This is brand new.
And these pilots are all cocky.
And Ray Lane's in the back.
So I didn't see this.
But they're drinking scotch and stuff.
And he's like, I don't need to wear my seatbelt on my own plane.
And they land, and for some reason, the brakes were on lock when they landed, so the rear wheels hit the tarmac, and boom!
The nose wheel slams down.
Apparently, Ray Lang went flying through the entire cabin with a scotch all over himself.
Rolling down the aisle.
Yeah, yeah.
The whole thing was embarrassing.
They were showing off.
I got my license.
You propeller boy.
You helicopter boy.
Watch us.
Boom!
I almost broke the nose gear off.
That was a funny little bit.
Let me see what I have here.
Now we're going to stop.
You're going to tell us about podcasting.
We had a request from one of our executive producers.
The part of podcasting that is poorly told Because by the history books, it started in 2004.
But it actually started in 2000.
And I went to New York.
I had to go beat somebody up over some money I was owed.
Which is a true story.
Another story for another time.
And Dave Weiner was in New York at the time.
I think he was just for some conference.
And I knew Dave Weiner from Radio Userland and the blogging stuff and RSS. And I had written this blog post, which you can still find on archive.org, which is the final yard, I think it is.
Oh, no, the last yard.
Instead of the last mile, the last yard.
And I had this concept in my head, which was, since at the time we only had...
There were cable modems, but they were always on.
It wasn't broadband.
It was more broadband than dial-up, but it really wasn't all that great.
The cable infrastructure really sucked.
But you didn't have to dial in, so it was always on.
And I had this idea that in order to create a good multimedia experience, which we didn't have, it wasn't click and play.
It was click, wait for 10 minutes, and then all of a sudden it would play.
If it was video, it might take a little less long with an MP3 file.
Hard for people to imagine, but that's the world we were in.
I said, why not, since the computer is always on, it's always connected to the internet, why not create a little thing, a little program that runs in the background, and when a new video or piece of content is available, it downloads it without telling the user, but when it has it on its hard drive, it pops up a message and says, hey, I've got something new for you here.
And then you click on it and it plays immediately, which would give you a great...
A great experience.
Like, oh, I clicked on something, it said it was new, and it played immediately, which would have been sorcery and magic at the time.
And I presented this to Weiner, who scoffed at me, and didn't kick me out, but he was like, whatever, you know, I think he thought it was MTV Boy, shut up.
But then I took his software, his radio userland, pro-scripting application, and I created what I was talking about.
And he looked at it and he said, I now understand what you're saying.
You have to promise me one thing.
I said, what's that?
That you never, ever touch my software again.
I promise that.
And that's when he came up with the way to implement this, which was the enclosure tag in the RSS feed format.
And we were actually using this for three years before podcasting came to be.
But it wasn't until the iPod happened that, in my head, it clicked.
Like, wait a minute, we can use this in conjunction with the iPod?
Because I looked at the iPod and didn't say jukebox, as everyone was saying.
I said radio receiver.
All we need to do is...
Have a way for people to subscribe, and we had that.
The RSS mechanism was subscribe, and I built a little script and popped it over to the iPod, and that was the birth of podcasting.
Ta-da!
Ta-da!
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.
Yeah, on No Agenda.
Wow.
Well, it's leet.
Good stories, by the way.
Well, of course, I've had a rich life.
What do you expect?
A lot of show business stories.
More than I have, that's for sure.
And so many still to tell, John.
So many I have not told on the show.
We have another hour to go.
Oh, this is true.
This is true.
This is true.
In the meantime, of course, we're on LEET, the show 1337, which is LEET, L-E-E-T, and Hexor, and we promised everyone a special executive producer for the LEET show, and we're going to have to put together a list on 1338 of special LEET... Elite producers.
Yes, yes.
For the elites that produce this show today.
Now, will we also have, like, more options, like 133.7?
Is that the idea, or is it just, is it gotta be?
If you want to be truly elite.
There'll be three options.
Three options as usual.
Good.
I mean, I want an elite keychain.
I want a challenge coin for this episode.
Well, I'm sure you want a lot.
But it'll be in the newsletter I did yesterday.
Nice.
Well done.
Well done, John.
So it's already done.
It's in the can.
Again, thanks to Syrup and Waffles or Syrup and Waffles for producing this episode.
And there's quite a lot of work you put into it, so that's highly appreciated.
This is why we have the best producers in the universe.
And let's get right into it.
Second part of my stories here on No Agenda, the Elite Edition.
Yeah.
Uh-oh.
OTG on OTG.
Tell me about it.
I'm an OTG kind of guy.
OTG going OTG.
Off the Grid for a moment here with the No Agenda show.
Off the Grid where we break up with big tech and we're happy about it.
Very happy.
I do have a couple of stories that were sent in, a couple of things to mention and a review.
Do you recall on the previous show, we were talking about the manager of devices at Google saying, yeah, you should probably disclose to guests that come over if you're using a Google speaker or Amazon Alexa, you should probably disclose to them that these systems are listening all the time.
Yeah, because they didn't sign the document, the EULA. Right.
And do you remember what we made a recommendation of how you could shame people into not having these devices?
Yeah, it was extreme, but it was a good idea.
You might want to repeat it.
Well, producer Brad reports, Adam, the butt porn search worked.
That was my suggestion.
Say, hey Google, search for butt porn.
And Brad writes in, Adam, no freaking joke, man.
You just made my phone look up butt porn.
I was playing you through a Bluetooth speaker and you hey-googled my phone into looking it up.
I couldn't believe it worked.
So after 15 minutes of browsing butt porn, I decided to email you.
So it does work.
Excellent.
Thank you very much, Brad, for that report.
Well, we almost didn't have a show, John.
What happened?
Did you get protested by the kids?
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
I had a full-on, overnight, point-of-no-return test drive in a battery car.
It crapped out?
No, no, no.
It didn't crap out, but the former New York banker, he needed to go to Galveston, and I've always said, hey, anytime you need my truck, you take the truck, leave the Tesla with me.
So he calls me up and says, I've got to take my kid to Galveston.
Then the Tesla can't make it.
I said, well, this weekend I happen to be going to Bryan College Station.
Which is 110 miles from Austin.
Oh yeah, no problem.
You can go round trip on the Tesla.
No, no sir.
No.
No, no, no.
The Tesla will do really real road performance about 180 miles.
No, no, that's not true.
Okay, I just did this.
I'm just telling you, I've seen the specs.
Yes.
I've heard.
I've heard what Elon said.
Oh, Elon!
Specschmech.
Who am I supposed to believe, you or Elon?
I got it.
I just got it.
Do you mind if I just run through my experience so we can just have a final, a final, final on the battery car known as the Tesla?
Go.
Okay.
So he's all worried.
He's like, oh, you won't make it.
So now I'm staying overnight.
Don't worry about it.
I'll find a place.
Hold on a second.
He owns the car?
Yes.
And he says you won't make it when it's a known fact they do 350 miles?
350 miles?
Which Tesla is that?
It's all of them.
I don't know which one he has.
The S90. I don't know which model.
I think that's the hot rod.
It's the hot rod.
Oh, it's a hot rod.
We already discussed this.
So I'd driven this before, but never done an overnight.
And he was like, well, you know, you got to charge it and it takes, you know, eight hours.
Dude, don't tell me anything.
This would be great for the show or we won't have a show.
So let me try it out.
He says, okay, that's funny.
Do that.
Okay, great.
So I get in the car and I'd driven it before.
I'm sitting there and he drives off in the truck.
I'm like, shit, I forgot how to start this thing.
That's how stupid it was.
Like, oh, you don't have to start it.
You just got to put it into drive.
I was looking for a button, you know?
Like, my truck has a button.
You press the button, the car starts.
So that's how disoriented I was.
But anyway, I remember how it works.
I started driving, and he left me with about, it said, 200 miles on the range, the range meter.
So I started driving.
Now, this is multiple roads.
It's 290, 71, 21.
So the roads aren't really great highways all the way.
And some surface issues, which, man, you're driving a Tesla on a poorly surfaced road.
It's noisy.
It's very noisy.
And I'd also forgot.
Yeah.
I think the tires or something.
It's low-profile tires.
Low-profile tires are the worst.
Very, very noisy.
And I'd forgotten that you actually have to keep your hand on the steering wheel when you do the auto steer.
And it says after, it says, oh, put your hands on the wheel.
Like, oh, okay.
And I kept forgetting this because it's just plugging along 65 miles an hour.
It's steering itself.
I'm like, ah, I love this thing.
Can't you get some clip-on hands?
Well, I'll tell you a couple of things.
You don't want that because these roads, you know, sometimes there's a little construction that splits off.
At least twice I had to really grab the wheel and disengage because it would have taken me off into the side of the railing.
Into the drink.
Yes.
Dukes of hazard style.
It's not that great.
You really don't want to take...
But I did keep my hands off three times and then it goes, bing, bing, bing, bing.
Auto steer no longer available for this trip, you stupid slave.
You get put in jail.
You get put in auto steering jail.
You have to pull over, you got to put it in park, and then you can use the auto steer again.
But I'm telling you, John, no one should rely on this auto steer.
Unless you're on a proper highway with at least three lanes, you really don't want to do this.
I'm telling you, two times, really, I would have gone off, yeah, Dukes of Hazzard style.
Anyway, so I get there.
Remember, I started out with a little under 200.
I get there, I've got 35 miles left.
It's a 110-mile trip.
It's like your phone.
It tells you you've got a couple hours, but then when you get right down to it, you really don't.
Yeah, you've got 15 minutes.
Yeah.
And I had to find a charger.
Just a hotel.
Well, you already met.
Well, hold on.
But you had already mapped it out, so this was not a problem.
No.
I had downloaded...
You've got to get a million apps.
You've got to get ChargeStation.
You've got to get EVGo.
You have to understand what the different charging options are.
Level 1, Level 2, and then the big honker, which is the supercharger, which pretty much only exists at Tesla stores, I think.
I'm out here in California.
I'm sure in California, but not in Texas.
Luckily, this is Aggieland.
This is Texas A&M. They've got a big campus.
Sure enough, there's a whole bunch of Chargers, but they're all three miles away.
It's College Station.
Everything's three miles away.
So I'm driving around and, you know, have you ever been on a campus on the weekend and all the gates are up and down?
That thing's like a penitentiary.
Texas A&M is a fucking jail.
Everything is a gate.
There's cameras looking at your license plate, scanning you before you can go in.
I finally find the garage after trying to pull into one that had a charging station but was only for students.
And now I'm down to like 15 miles.
You know, it's...
So you're getting white knuckle.
I'm getting low battery warnings.
This is great because this is the worst part of it.
I tested all these electric cars and the white knuckle thing is the worst.
Yeah.
You know you can't go get a can of gas.
Mm-hmm.
So, and it's giving me these warnings, which flash on and off.
They go away before you can really read them properly.
It's like, we're going to shut down stuff.
I'm like, what?
What are you going to shut down?
You know, it's shut down the heated seats, shuts down the air conditioning.
It's getting a little, okay, finally I'm in the garage.
There it is, the charger.
And now I really start to realize what all of this entails, because you have to be a member of the charger network.
So it says, hold your card.
I don't have a card.
I just want to charge.
I need some power.
And this is a level two, so there's really no more than 220 volts.
And you jam that in, and it'll take, I think it gives you 18 miles per hour that you sit there charging.
So let me get this straight.
Instead of accepting a normal credit card for American Express...
Yep.
It requires you actually be a member.
Yes.
Oh wait, let me guess why.
Because it serves alcohol?
I think it would be for tracking purposes.
You really don't feel very free in this ecosystem.
So, now, luckily, you can download their app, and we know what that means.
They get all your information.
And then you can sign up with your credit card, with your name, so now they have everything on me.
I can't just anonymously tap up, or tank up, or top up.
I have to tell them who I am.
Then you can use your phone as the NFC, Near Field Communication.
Click, okay.
And then you can finally start.
And you put it in.
And, you know, I walked away and, of course, I had to drop a pin, tell Tina where I was so she'd come and pick me up in her car.
Her gas car?
Her gas car.
Her gas guzzler.
Her horrible climate change causing vehicle.
So, you know, and I'm like, how do I know that, you know, it's still charging?
Yeah, what happens if it craps out in the middle of the charge and decides to stop?
Well, wait, wait, wait.
You're a member of the club and you've got this app and all this.
So if that happens, you are immediately alerted.
Possibly.
Look, so I got enough charge.
We still had to leave last night at 10 o'clock.
It's a good two-hour drive, certainly at night.
So it really only charged for six hours.
So when we left, I had 155 miles to go.
I got in on like a pen light battery charge pretty much into the, into the garage that are placed in downtown Austin.
But you know, this car and also after two hours of driving, you don't want to drive this more than it can do.
You're tired.
It's, it's, you know, it's, it's a sports car.
It's, it's, it's rough.
You know, it's not a, it's not a smooth ride.
This is this product.
I can't speak for all electric vehicles, but this product, the Tesla has got to be one of the stupidest things ever invented and And people who buy one are either virtue signaling, have too much money, or both.
It's stupid.
It's stupid for in the city.
This is not the same report you gave us the last time.
I don't even...
No, it's not.
You're right.
Maybe it's because the car's been on the road for a couple of years.
I don't know.
Maybe they did an upgrade.
Maybe it was the sophomore experience.
No, this really was not a great product in my mind.
It's not great.
I would like somebody to find the old clip.
I've had them going on and on about the greatest thing ever and how the hands-free is fantastic or whatever it was, auto drive.
Yeah.
None of these complaints.
None.
Zip.
So we're going to go down Route 35, and we left around 4, 3.30, 4 o'clock, so traffic is building up, and I-35 can get pretty gnarly.
Let me tell you something, John.
This car blew my mind with the autopilot.
I did not drive to New Braunfels.
The car drove itself.
Oh, that's nice.
And from stop-and-go traffic, we were on the web browser, we're connecting phones, and the car is just driving by.
In fact, at a certain point, we have to get off I-35, and I'm thinking, I wonder if it'll actually just do that too.
That's how comfortable it felt.
Lane change, just click on it.
Yeah, I never drove one with that feature.
Oh my god, no.
I'm very familiar with adaptive cruise control and with systems that keep you in your lane that'll kind of bop you back into the lane.
But this was an absolute mind-boggling experience.
Any car I have in the future, I want this technology in it.
You know what?
I did a reality show of our family called Adam's Family in 2002, I think.
2002, 2003.
And we produced it all ourselves.
So we had, like, one camera guy living with us.
I did a camera.
And I had one editor.
Everything done on Final Cut Pro.
And it was broadcast every Saturday night, primetime.
On SBS broadcasting in the Netherlands.
You know, I have the rights to that.
You know what we could do?
First of all, I want you to see it because I think you get a kick out of it because even though it was completely unscripted and everything happened, everything you saw was chronological order, you'll see that just by editing, we really made it into something entertaining and particularly editing to hit records, you know, like soundtrack to your life type hit records.
I should put that up online because I have the rights to that.
Yeah, you should.
Yeah, you should.
I want to make money off of it.
Good luck.
So I'm shopping in the street.
I'm looking for some shoes.
And so I found some, you know, there's some...
I went into a really cool-looking pair of shoes.
I figured I'd buy.
They didn't quite fit right.
But the guy gave me a lecture.
He said, well, you know, this is one of the last two shoe companies left in Holland that made these shoes.
And he went on and on with a lament about how many shoe companies are used to be.
I guess this goes back to the wooden shoe days.
He said, I guess there were hundreds at one point.
And they've all consolidated down to like one or two, and they're about to go broke.
Well, and that's also part of a larger gripe in the Netherlands is that they've been saying for maybe 15 or 20 years, you know, the government has basically put Holland into the storefront window.
Everything has been sold.
They don't make anything.
We were complaining about America.
They don't make anything.
There is nothing being produced in Holland anymore.
Nothing.
Zero.
Zero.
You know, except, well, banking, and that just got sold.
AB and Amro.
You know, sold to, what was that, Barclays?
I don't know.
I didn't follow that.
Yeah, you know, so that was kind of like the last thing the Netherlands has, and there's just no more industry there.
And it used to be a very industrious trading-based nation.
No longer.
I don't know what to tell you.
Nothing.
I don't really care.
It's kind of pathetic.
I mean, I don't know why these countries believe, I guess, you know, they're all locked into this internationalism, globalism, and they, I guess, believe that they can get all their products elsewhere cheaper in such a way that they never have to worry about ever making them again.
But you have some, you know, Hitler cropped up in this day and age.
It would be easy.
These countries would be a walkover.
They wouldn't have to have a blitzkrieg.
Oh, no, it would be very easy.
The Netherlands, of course, in the Second World War capitulated within, like, five days, and they gave up their three rifles and two bicycles.
Well, more than two bicycles, according to the Dutch, that's all they do is they still bitch about the fact that the bicycles were never returned.
Yeah, they get...
Oh, God.
That is a joke we don't make anymore in Holland, John.
That is no longer valid, culturally speaking.
Not politically correct.
Why?
When did that change?
Well, as we all got older.
I've dealt with lots of Germans my age, and this is great.
The new Germans, I'll just call them, the generation that has now grown up, whose parents were born during the Second World War, They're very reliable in general, I'd have to say, in business dealings.
They're pretty reliable.
They're friendly.
I like doing business with them.
And culturally, they're quite rich.
So we just don't mess with them anymore because now they're just our good neighbors.
And by the way, what an economy.
When Germany sneezes, the Netherlands catches the cold.
So the bicycle issue is off the table.
Yeah, we do not.
No, we do not say that anymore.
No.
Yesterday we went over to the Netherlands just to have dinner basically with my sister, both my sisters, their significant others, and the kids.
So we just got back and I'm ready to get this New Year's thing over with already.
So where did you eat?
This place called Veranda, which actually, I have a better dinner story, although this was fun, but this was kind of a place where the kids could run around.
Yeah, they're like between ages 7 and 10, so it's like we didn't go to an overly posh place.
I did, however, with Christina and Patricia and Christina's boyfriend, Dujour Jacques, we went to Clibden House.
Are you familiar with Clibden?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, so we went there and we had...
Because Patricia and I have stayed there before and we went to have dinner.
And I was all ready.
I was like, okay, I'm going to order a really awesome bottle of wine because I know Patricia will be into it.
And, you know, I was sure I could...
Between the two of us, I could probably do a bottle of wine.
I was really going to get a good one.
And I'm looking at the...
What do you call it?
The wine menu?
The wine list?
Yeah.
It's the wine list, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, that place has one that looks like the Manhattan phone directory.
It's amazing, and I saw it, and it was 1953 Latour.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go for this, baby.
Can I guess the price?
Can I get the price?
Yeah, you can guess it, sure.
Now, I know the pound price, so your currency may be a different value.
In pounds?
I guess it impounds.
Now, England, in the United States, I think we would probably, that wine would be around $53 Latour, probably around $7,500.
Now, I would think that in England, because they're closer to the source and they collect those wines broadly across those kinds of restaurants, I'm thinking that wine might be priced as low as...
3,000 pounds?
Actually, there were a couple of Latours.
There were two different ones from 53, and one of them was 3,400, and one of them was 2,400.
So you were awfully close.
In fact, right in the middle.
Oh, I was right in the middle.
Yeah, right in the middle.
But needless to say, Patricia was like, I don't feel like wine tonight.
Yeah.
And then what do you do?
It's like, I'm not going to drink a whole bottle of wine.
I would.
I know.
No problem.
I know, but it's like, give me a doggy bag and I'll take it home with me.
And I don't want to just drink it by myself.
So I didn't do it.
And I know it sounds incredibly bourgeois or...
What is the word I'm looking for?
We're talking about a 7,000...
Decadent.
Decadent.
Ah, yes, thank you.
We're talking about a $7,000 bottle of wine.
But it really was going to be my gift to myself.
And it didn't happen.
It's kind of high.
Yeah.
You could probably track that wine down in the open market for $1,000 maybe.
Really?
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, let's do that.
Fuck it.
When I come to San Francisco, let's track one down, Johnny boy.
Did I tell you that Lori Turner contacted me?
Did I tell you about this story?
No.
Lori Turner, better known as LT, in West Virginia, when I went to school, we had a radio station.
It was WITB, which officially stood for We're in the Basement.
But of course, we all knew it really meant We're into Bong Hits.
And it was a low-power FM station.
I was running the station within like three months.
But there was a DJ there, and she was a...
I think she was a sophomore or junior.
I can't remember.
Lori Turner, and she was kind of this, you know, exactly the kind of girl I kind of like, a little tomboyish, and she had, you know, this of course was early 80s, so she had a little bit of a streak of pink in her hair, and she was a good jock.
And it was, you know, so we wound up having sex once, and the next day she said, you know what, I think I'm lesbian.
Ha ha ha ha!
A story that very few guys would relate to anyone, but go ahead.
My daughter loves this story, by the way.
The only time I had sex in college is the next day.
You know, hey man, I'm really digging chicks.
And she dropped me a note the other day.
She said, hey man, remember me?
It's...
Her name is different now, but she's still in radio and she's managing bands and she's still lesbian.
It was great.
I'm like, hey, LT, how are you doing?
My 18-year-old daughter really likes that story.
So what happens is, you know, you take your passport, you want to fly to a different country, and let's say you want to go to the United Kingdom, not a part of the Schengen Agreement, so it's not really Europe, you have to show your passport when you enter, a note will pop up and say, come with me.
So you'll have to go.
And there's some language here about what it actually is.
So, seriously delinquent tax debt, so first of all, it has to be $50,000 or more, for which a notice of lien has been filed in public records pursuant to Section 6323, or a notice of levy has been filed, which is basically a wage garnishment.
Which I've had.
So this happens, let's say.
I've had this happen to me.
Happens to everybody.
Yeah.
So it happens, and so they pull the passport, so the State Department has to go through a rigmarole, and then the guy pays, because, you know, you pay, and then what choice do you have?
Then it takes forever.
Remember I went through this?
You didn't lose your passport.
No, I would have, had this been in play.
But I remember they said...
Do we know it takes forever?
We don't know that it takes forever.
I do.
I do.
Because this happened to me.
They said, well, we can't...
When my name started showing up on the payroll at Mevio, or then Podshow in 2005, I was living in the UK. And they say, well, where have you been since 1999?
I said, well, I left the country.
Oh, yeah?
We can't find any filings.
You didn't file any...
You don't have to pay taxes twice, but we can't find any filings from you.
So we're putting a lien, and we think that's about $2.4 million, Mr.
Curry.
And the IRS came into our...
That would get your attention.
It did.
The IRS came into our building with their guns.
Remember that?
I wasn't there.
Yeah, they came in with their hands on their guns.
That would have jumped under the table.
So we can't find you.
Ever hear of Google?
Google.
You idiot.
Curry.com, ever think of looking for me online?
And, you know, so then I had to go through all that.
Well, that reminds me of the time, there's a number of John Dvorak's that are writers.
Yeah.
Believe it or not.
And so I get a call from the IRS. Some guy's grousing at me.
He says, okay, just John Dvorak?
Yeah.
He says, well, you're going to give us our $70,000?
I mean, when are you going to pay?
And I said, what are you talking about?
And they're like, me, me!
You know, kind of thing.
He says, yeah, you're blah, blah, blah.
And I said, I don't know anything about what you're talking about.
I said, you're John DeVore, right?
I said, yeah.
And I said, and then I just, I guess I got lucky.
I said, where am I supposed to be?
I said, you're in Kansas, Kansas City.
I said, no.
I'm in Port Angeles, Washington, which is where I was when I got the call.
He says, uh...
I said, what's the Social Security number?
I started grilling him.
What's the Social Security number you got there?
He said, well, what's yours?
And I told him.
He says, oh.
Oh, that's interesting.
Really?
Yeah.
Do you happen to know where another...
Do you know where John Dvorak in Kansas is, Manny Chanda?
Why don't you go look to Kansas?
Why don't you call the Kansas guy?
Yeah.
You know, they're not the only John Dvorak in the world.
I don't know how they got my name or why.
They called me, but then it was, oh, sorry, and they...
I don't know if you said he's sorry, just hung up.
But my point is, it took me almost half a year to get my wage garnishment removed I had to prove, of course, that I had been overseas, and I had to go through quite a bit of crap.
And meanwhile, you know...
How did they come up with this number, this multi-million dollar figure?
You weren't making that kind of money at Mevio?
No, but they look at 10 years.
They say, you haven't filed taxes in 10 years.
Oh, so they figured in 10 years, plus all the penalties and everything gets cranked, cranked.
Exactly.
This is like people who make $100,000 a year and end up having to pay a $2 million tax bill.
Because you didn't pay for 10 years.
And so then finally, they said, okay, we agree.
And then it still took six weeks for them to actually...
Because, you know, the media couldn't just say, okay, we believe you.
No, they have to wait for official notice.
It goes through the payroll system and all that.
No, it's hosed.
It's hosed.
I'm not a fan of Kennedy.
On Fox, because I worked with her, and she was douchey at MTV. She broke my ass.
I should probably tell the story.
She broke your ass?
Yeah, it was the MTV Beach House, which was the first year of that was fantastic.
It was a great idea.
Everyone was out in the Hamptons in a huge mansion, and we were doing our shows from there.
And I think I was doing a segment with Kennedy on Wave Runners, which are now mistakenly called Jet Skis.
And I was doing my segment, standstill, in the water, and she thought it would be funny to ram her wave runner into me.
When, of course, I'm not expecting it from behind.
And what happens, I fall off, and I fall on the edge of the wave runner with my ass.
And it actually ruptured the muscle.
And so to this day, I have a little dent in my butt.
Thank you, Kennedy.
You know, Christina's on her way to Jordan right now.
Why?
She signed up for this show.
Oh, no.
Yeah, I know.
Reality show.
They have to go rescue her.
And the way it works is they tell you on the day you're going to leave where you're going.
She's been doing this before.
Yeah, that was not a good experience.
This is...
No, that's where she went to Africa.
Yeah, and it was all actors.
Yeah, it was all...
She thought she was living with a tribe.
That is the funniest, most humiliating story.
So the idea was...
She's not listening to the show.
No, no, no.
No, she'll be fine.
It was like a celebrity big brother type, you know, get out of the jungle type thing, except the idea was these celebrities would go to Africa and live with an African tribe for a week or ten days.
And, you know, Christina called me about it.
I felt really bad, the most bad.
She said, what do you think?
I said, look, I've traveled the world on someone else's dime.
Grab the opportunity.
Go, go, go.
How great is that?
So she's in there for a week, and she's completely into it.
Because this is my daughter.
She's like, this is so stupid, but I'll just get into it no matter what.
And she even had her boobs out, like all the other women in the camp, and just hauling firewood.
And then near the end, all of a sudden, they say, hey, surprise, we speak Dutch.
And it was all a big joke.
And she was devastated.
Yeah, it wasn't a lot of anything.
It was a bunch of actors with a bunch of bullcrap customs and rituals.
Yeah, that she completely got in.
That's so sad.
I think that's a great idea for a show.
I think it should have been done in the United States.
No, no, no.
It failed miserably.
The audience did not like it.
Oh, because it was over the top?
Well, you can't make fun of poor African slaves.
Something like that.
Something like that.
That would never fly.
Take it out of Africa and move it into the ghetto.
Yeah, that would work.
The Deep South, Appalachia, because that might be offensive, too.
It's hard to make it not offensive, but it is funny.
You're going to tell us the Madonna story.
Oh, the Madonna story.
Geez, I'm glad you reminded me.
Yeah, well, you were wandering off.
Like you were trying to avoid it.
Anyway, go on.
Now it's not all that big a deal.
The way it works is you sit down in the press office in their little cubby corner couch so they can all listen in on the speakerphone, make sure you're not saying something horrible.
And I said, oh, so you knew the new VJ, it's great.
So this was not a live in studio interview?
This was with the, well, no, TV Guide.
TV Guide's a magazine.
So it was, yeah, they were interviewing me about being the new VJ on the scene.
Oh, okay.
All right, go on.
And so, you know, you've been doing this because I'd been working in Holland and I'd met lots of celebrities.
And so what did you think of Madonna?
I said, nah, she's not really that nice.
Well, hold on a second.
Why would they ask that question out of the blue?
Because MTV... No, it wasn't out of the blue.
It's like, okay, you've been working in television, you've been working in music television, you've met lots of people, you've done lots of interviews.
So what are you thinking of Madonna?
Yeah, she's not that nice.
I thought they were going to shit a brick.
And they, like, hit the mute button.
You can't say that!
If you say that, you better perform on the Video Music Awards!
Oh.
You know, those deals they would do?
Yeah, you were being too honest.
Yeah, exactly.
You don't want honesty.
Nope, nope.
You weren't hired to be honest.
It's not your job.
Wrong thing, wrong thinking.
You're hired to be a talking head and I smile a lot.
Shut up and smile a lot, boy.
Exactly.
That's exactly what it was.
So yeah, and they hated me.
They never got press for me again after that.
I was not to be trusted with press.
Well, it was a screw-up.
No, it was honest.
Yeah.
It was such a double standard.
I don't want to get into it.
So, funny thing about the game...
Tony Henry is, I guess he's an opera singer, an English opera singer.
And he was tasked with singing the national anthems.
The game was here in, I think, Wembley.
And so he sang the Croatian...
Is it the Croatian or Croat?
Croatian?
Croatian anthem.
Croat.
Well, anyway.
No, it'd be the Croatian anthem, it would have to be.
So he made a mistake in the lyrics...
In front of 80,000 people.
So, here it is from a BBC report.
He should have sung, which roughly means, you know, my dear, how we love your mountains.
But instead, he sang, which can be interpreted as, my dear, my penis is a mountain.
Wow, that's great.
The funny thing is that the giraffe has no natural enemies.
Did you know this?
Except, of course, man, a hunter.
The giraffe can slice you in two, and it can actually rotate its legs 360 degrees, and it literally will knock you in two pieces.
The giraffe has no natural enemy.
Not the tiger, not the leopard, not none of that.
They can kick the crap out of anything.
Well, they got a lot of leverage.
And you know how I found this out?
Did I ever tell you that story?
From the top half of a friend of yours?
I will give you an in the morning for that.
In the morning!
There was a giraffe named after me at the Amsterdam Zoo.
Adam the Giraffe.
Adam the Giraffe.
Yes, sir.
And so, you know, it was like a press thing.
And I was doing the radio show in Holland at the time.
And they're like, you know, there's a press thing for the zoo.
And like, we'll name it Adam and you come and take a look and take some pictures for them.
I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool, you know.
But there's Adam's mom, and I go right into it, because we're hanging out in the cages and everything.
It's outside of zoo hours.
Oh, and you were going to go pet the little guy?
No, no.
Dude, I'm in the cage, and my producer's taking a picture of me, and I'm standing right underneath the baby giraffe's mother, which of course is two stories high.
Like, maybe a foot away from its front legs.
And I look, and I see the producer taking the picture, and I see the zookeepers petrified.
They're like, walk very slowly towards us now.
And I'm like, what?
They said, you are about to die.
It's a giraffe!
And then they told me the whole story.
It's like, you do not get in with a giraffe.
As cute as they are.
They will kill you.
Apparently, the douchebag elitist TED Talk, TED Conference, not the TEDx, no, no.
The real one.
The real one that you pay ten grand for is just filled with douchebags so bad that women don't even want to go anymore.
I mean, we're talking about jump pouncing on women, cornering them, pushing them up against the wall, you know, and senior tech people, you know, rubbing their, mashing their hard-ons against women.
Ugh!
It's disgusting.
It's totally disgusting.
And you know that that's exactly the people who are doing this stuff, because they've lost all control of reality.
I've seen this.
I've seen it.
You've seen it.
I've seen tons of it.
Douchebags.
Unbelievable.
The funny one, though, is Gene Simmons.
That one kind of surprises me.
Isn't Gene Simmons married to Shannon Tweed, the former playboy of the year?
Yeah, but you see, he's not...
Being accused of anything other than being incredibly douchey.
And I have my own story about that.
Because, you know, he basically is just rude.
And I guess he was in the Fox Business News studios or whatever.
That was news to me.
And he offended members of the team.
And so he ups it by saying, hey, chicks, sue me.
But here's the thing.
H. I'll tell you, this is Gene Simmons.
Anyone who has met Gene Simmons for five minutes knows that this guy is like this.
And it's funny.
He used to come into the weekly music meetings at MTV. What was he producing?
I was producing somebody.
It wasn't a Kiss record.
And at the time, I was the only VJ in the music meeting.
This is where the payola occurred.
Although I didn't see any.
And he comes in with knee pads on.
Jumps up on the table.
Says, who do I have to blow to get this thing on the air?
And I was like, that was Gene.
You know, I was like, alright man.
And you know what?
You know they put it in rotation.
That's how it works, baby.
You know it.
So we were talking about tea before you started the recording, and I was wondering, the public might be interested in some of our thoughts, since you said that ever since you moved to England, you've become kind of addicted to the product.
Yeah, well, you know, there's the Dutch, when I grew up in Holland, they drink a lot of tea, but they drink it differently than the UK. Here, you know, it's really milk and sugar, whereas I never would have ever considered putting milk in my tea ever before living here.
But I found out that culturally, it really works for me.
Essentially, if someone walks in the house and they've got a bullet wound to the shoulder, the first thing everyone says is, let's put a kettle on, let's have some tea, and everything will be okay.
And I just kind of fell into that, and I love it.
Now I must drink at least during the day, if I can make it myself, easily six to ten cups a day.
And what's your preferred brand?
PG Tips, of course.
The NHS is such an expensive program.
Granted, you only pay $5 for no matter...
That is your co-pay for everything, no matter what it is, for medication.
Because I was in the system.
But I also remember Christina dislocated her knee.
And she was a developing woman at the time.
She was in high school.
And it actually happened again.
And so we said, shoot, let's go get a scan.
And they said, sure.
Come back in eight weeks.
And I'm like, well, it seems kind of like, no, there's a waiting list.
It's not priority.
And don't run in the meantime.
Thanks.
So I took her private.
I paid for it.
And we walked into the same place.
There was no one there.
They were just sitting around.
They took my $5,000 and did the scan the next day.
So, it's not a very efficient system, it doesn't seem to me.
Sounds like a crock of crap to me.
Yeah.
Now, we had multiple experiences with NHS. An emergency appendectomy did get taken care of pretty quickly.
Well, that's a plus.
But, you know...
Otherwise, I don't know.
When you socialize the medicine, the healthcare, to that degree, you can get waiting lists and prioritization.
It's the only way it can work.
Anyways, I do have one print story, if you're interested.
I think we'd share one with the No Agenda audience.
One.
And this relates to...
I think it was 90...
1991.
And I was in Minneapolis.
And I sent you the link for this earlier, John.
I was...
It was probably one of the...
I've only done three commercials for real products back in the heyday when I was Mr.
MTV guy.
And one of them was for Sam Goody Musicland.
Which...
No longer exists.
It doesn't exist anymore.
No, it's gone, right?
I'm pretty sure it's gone.
And the biggest store is at Mall of America, which of course is in Minneapolis.
Oh, I didn't know.
That was not the biggest stores in Manhattan.
At the time, and that's where it was going to be done.
The store was huge.
And so put together, kind of like a spinal tap where I'm pretending to be on a tour, some fantastic tour, and then you know how all these commercials, they always have to have a slide so you can put the current offers on it.
And so with almost like a completely different voice in the commercial, you hear, blank, that Like the Bengals!
Milli Vanilli!
You know, like all these great people I'm on tour with, but it's really the Sam Goody Musicland tour.
And, you know, I'm going around, running around backstage, and kind of like Spinal Tap, like, this is the best concert I've ever been on!
And then I go to the stage, open the doors, and then, of course, I open into the store.
And that's the stage or something.
How creative.
It's in the show notes and it's one of the lamest things you've ever seen.
It fits perfectly.
It paid.
Not very much, but it was, I think it was maybe, it was a buyout, maybe $5,000, maybe.
It was, you know, not a good deal, but back in the day, anyway.
Nor are there movies, by the way.
I love fashion.
I love fashion shows.
I told you I went to the fashion show with my wife in Amsterdam on Sunday.
Ah, nice.
I had my suit on.
Who did you...
Yeah, that suit.
Yeah.
Who was the designer you saw?
Or was it just a bunch of them?
No, no.
It's one designer, Paul Schulte.
And Patricia works with him every season on the show and what the model should look like.
And, of course, I'm highly interested...
Because what I get to do is I get to hang around everywhere and it's just naked models walking around.
It's awesome.
I'm not kidding.
It's not like they're posing, but they're all really tall.
And so I say, you know, excuse me, I just got to hug you for a second.
I know you're feeling the same way because, you know, when tall people hug each other.
And I always get it.
You know, I always get hugged.
It's great.
But I really screwed up this time because my favorite, favorite model of all time, who always walks the Paul Schulte show, because all the mega superstars or big buyers or celebrities, and of course we're none of the above, they sit right in the middle of the front row on the runway.
And so we're actually in an even better spot that's like two spots to the right.
That's where the models make their turn, so they make their turn right in front of us.
And she always gives me, John, I'm not kidding, she gives me the most wicked look.
I mean, just like, you know, it's like a fantasy.
And, you know, it's a game because, you know, my wife and I laugh about it all the time.
Let's see if she gives you the look.
So anyway, after the show, she's upstairs and she's, you know, she's just taking everything off, essentially, all of her model stuff.
And I said, oh, you know, when's the divorce?
Because my dream has to finally come through.
And she says, March 13th, how did you know?
I'm like, oops.
Oops.
I felt so shitty.
I felt horrible.
So we took her out to dinner.
You're going to feel worse when she starts calling.
Oh, dude.
Not a problem.
I said it right there.
I said, it's okay.
My wife is okay with it.
We can have an affair.
It's not a problem.
Patricia's sitting right next to her.
It was funny.
Boris Johnson, our new mayor, is banning open containers of alcohol on public transport.
Good fucking luck.
I can just see the poor train conductor trying to take it.
You can do a lot of things, but taking a beer away from an inebriated Brit is just not one of the things you want to have high on your list to do.
Right, especially if he's Irish.
Thank you.
Because I sit in first class on the train home, like at 5.30 or 6 o'clock, and man, some people are toasted, toasted.
In first class?
Yeah, well, they don't have first class tickets, but they just come in, you know, barge in.
And everyone just ignores them, right?
No one says anything, and they're burping and shouting and farting all over the place.
And the conductor comes by, and he takes one look at them and goes, I'm going to fucking deal with these bozos.
Hey, you shouldn't be here, gentlemen.
Yeah, right.
No, man.
Wait until we get some Liverpool fans on the train.
That'll be fun.
Put your beard on, son.
Did I ever tell you the story when I flew to L.A. with Sean Penn?
No.
We're open for anecdotes on this show.
Yes.
This is back in the MTV days, probably 88, 89, and there was a fabulous, fabulous flight between New York and Los Angeles, and Los Angeles and New York, that's all it did twice a day, called MGM Grand Air.
Oh, yes.
That was an interesting plane.
MGM Grand Air was a 727 or a 737?
I want to say 27.
No, no.
It was a longer plane.
It was either a 27.
It was 27.
And you could only, I think it was like 50 passengers.
Of course, MTV paid for this because they needed to get me out there.
It wasn't that much more expensive than a regular ticket, actually.
And so it had a bar.
It was all captain's chairs.
And then staterooms.
There were like four or five staterooms where you could sit three people on each side.
A table could come up so you could eat.
The doors could close.
Now, I had been in those once before.
Like a train.
Like a train.
I'd been in those once before by myself, and it was fantastic.
Because you can move the two benches together.
You'd have a huge double bed.
It was great.
But this one time, I'm in there with Sean Penn.
In a stateroom with his brother, the one who died, and it's Sean Penn's mom.
And it was weird.
First of all, what was his brother's name?
I don't remember.
He was drinking beer out of the can, taking his shirt off in the plane.
He was just bare-chested there.
The mom was just very quiet.
It was really odd.
I'm like, hey, how you doing?
Hey, you're that guy from VH1, aren't you?
I'm like, oh, Jesus.
VH1. That must have been the greatest insult of your life.
Yeah, so I said, yeah, that's me.
Hey, what was it like being married to Madonna, if you don't mind me asking?
And he said, hell hath no fury.
And then we pretty much just looked at each other for the rest of the flight.
Very, very bizarre.
I went to the North Pole once.
Have you ever been to the North Pole?
You're kidding me.
You went to the North Pole?
Yes.
Would you like to hear the story?
Wow.
Yeah.
That's impressive.
No, I have not been to the North Pole.
Oh, this was with OnRamp.
Before we took it public and changed the name to Think New Ideas, Ron and I were running the company, and we had a client, Molson Ice, and there was a promotion.
We did it with another agency we came up with called the Molson Ice Polar Beach Party.
It was a contest and it was 100 winners.
It was a cool MTV-like contest, actually.
100 winners would go to the North Pole for a concert with Metallica.
Actually, it was Metallica, Hole, so Courtney Love, and one other band.
I can't remember.
And we did a cybercast from the North Pole.
It was pretty interesting because the only way to do it is we took a multiplexer so we could take 24 phone lines and basically convert that into like 150 kilobits per second or whatever.
And we had that linked all the way down from Tuk to Yoktuk.
Which is Northwestern Territory.
Literally, a couple miles inside the Arctic Circle there.
Well, let's get back to the, how did you get to the North Pole?
Well, it's a combination of many flights, and the last one is basically an Otter.
So an Otter is one of those airplanes with the huge inflated tires, and it's a real workhorse.
You can sit in it in kind of like jump seats, but it's really meant for taking cargo.
And, yeah, so you basically land up on the ice near a drilling platform up there.
And so it not being the dark period, it was light for 24 hours straight, which was really, really weird.
And, of course, you're up there, you know, we had our crew, and we're sleeping in the oil barracks, if you will.
And, you know, as is Metallica, as is everybody.
And so, you know, we're looking...
There's nothing to do, obviously.
And it's dry, right?
There's no alcohol.
It's forbidden.
But, you know, we figure...
We can probably figure something out.
So we go outside, and it's midnight, but, you know, kids are riding around on their bikes, and it's as if it were midday.
And some of the kids come over and say, hey...
Wait, wait, wait.
Let's back up a minute.
There's a bunch of people at the North Pole?
Well, it's not exactly on the North Pole, North Pole, but within, I don't know, what is it?
50 miles?
75 miles?
Yeah.
There's all kinds of villages.
I thought it was pretty barren up there.
It was pretty barren up there.
Oh, okay.
No kidding.
You know, the next town was several hundred miles, and that was Inuvik, I think is what it was called.
Anyway.
I need to give a little background, my own personal background.
In 2005, we started Podshow.
This was with Venture Capital Money, something I'll never do again, but it was fun, with Kleiner Perkins.
And Kleiner Perkins, they had a CEO weekend.
And we all went to Pebble Beach, which was really, really a horrible weekend for me.
Because, of course, what everyone does at Pebble Beach is, let's go golfing!
Of course.
Yeah.
Well, guess what?
You don't golf.
I don't golf.
And Ray Lane, one of the general partners, said, hey, I got you some shoes.
You're coming with us.
And that evening, during the final dinner...
By the way, you don't really need Spike's shoes to golf.
Well, I still have them, though.
I have golfing shoes.
Yeah, okay.
So, you know, they were wrapping this all.
And this is CEOs from every big Kleiner Perkins company you can imagine, right up to the Google boys.
And then all of a sudden, and we have a special award for Adam Curry.
And I'm getting up out of my seat.
I'm like, wow, I got an award for the most strokes ever at this golf course.
It was the meanest thing anyone had ever done to me.
Oh, that's cute.
All of Silicon Valley was laughing at me.
Thanks.
Thanks, douchebag.
But at this get-together...
You got humiliated.
Yes, yes, I did.
You were the butt of a joke.
You got butt slammed.
All I did is I got super butt slammed.
Whoa, you got butt slammed!
But it was fun.
You make fun of the MTV guy.
Make fun of the guy with Tourette's, okay?
Thanks.
I can't play golf because I have Tourette's.
Alright, the cat is out of the bag.
I should have had my t-shirt on.
I have a new t-shirt I'm working on.
Tourette's.
It's what makes us tick.
That's very cute.
I think somebody else wrote that line.
Of course.
You think I wrote that?
No.
That's the one thing that bothered me.
You know, I did this, and it's still not on...
What's the TV? I'm blanking out.
I did Swamp Thing.
I did an episode of Swamp Thing.
Hulu.
Right.
And so that episode is still not...
It's a series previous to the series that they have on there.
Now, it's still not on Hulu.
It's like one YouTube clip of one brief little scene.
But it was a half-hour show.
And it was great.
You know who also was in it?
Rick...
Manetti, Moretti, Manetti, who played Rick on Magnum P.I. I mean, this is the level of acting talent that was on this episode.
I mean, just powerhouse stuff.
And I'll never get over that in the script, and of course, I wanted to change it, but, you know, I had no say in the matter.
That this rock and roll guy, Nathan, this rock star who's strung out on drugs, actually uses the word blotto.
I'm like, dude, this is so wrong.
And you can see me.
Nobody uses the word blotto.
I'm like, how about baked, wasted?
No, no, no.
I don't know.
I couldn't get him to change it.
Blotto.
I was blotto, man.
I'm like, no!
No one would ever say that in their right mind.
It totally ruins the whole episode.
Huh.
But anyway...
So you played that character and you had to say it?
Yeah, and I did, and I think I made it work.
I made it my own.
So you've actually used the word blotto?
In an acting piece of art.
Huh.
Mm-hmm.
It's worth it.
Hulu!
Hulu, go make that happen.
Put that shit up.
I raced in a GEO. Did you now?
Yes.
MTV, we followed the indie circuit one year, and it was one year they had the race in Denver, the street race in Denver.
And they had the celebrity race.
So that wasn't a Grand Prix or IndyCar Grand Prix style thing?
If it was on the streets, it would be Grand Prix more than Indy.
Well, it was the cars.
It was the same cars.
Yeah.
Except for you.
You had a Geo.
Yeah.
So it was like the drummer from White Lion, Johnny Gill.
I'm sure one of the Motley Crue guys was there.
And I had the in-car camera.
I've got to find that footage.
Of course, I went around the corner and crashed into the wall and kept going.
You did?
Yeah, yeah.
The stick shift had come up about two feet, but otherwise it still drove.
But the commentary, because when you're in the car and you're skidding around and you hit the wall and you bounce off, it feels like, wow, man, this is spectacular.
Then you see the footage on TV and the commentator, it's literally like, because of Geo.
They go, you know how slow it looks then.
It looks like I'm a grandma who's lost control.
Ha ha ha.
And the guys who were going to call the official race were like, oh, there's Adam Curry from MTV! Oh, okay.
I was like, dude, can't even hold on to the wheel.
My geo story.
There you go.
Wow.
Yeah, now I know why Tina married me.
He's fascinating.
You know why she married you?
Because she hasn't heard these stories until now?
Is that why?
Believe me, I'm taking her on vacation so she never has to hear these.
That's the whole point.
Oh, good move.
Play those stories when we're not connected.
That's much better.
Don't worry, baby.
It's just old stuff.
You don't need to hear it.
You've heard it all.
Yeah, it's already been on the show once.
Syrup and Waffles, thank you very much for producing this episode.
Really enjoyed that.
A lot of work went into it, and it's highly appreciated.
And I'm looking forward to coming back.
I'm already, how sick is this?
I'm ready.
I'm ready to come back and kick some ass and get going with 1338.
Alright, well, I'm ready too, so we'll be back for 1338.
I'll step aside for the enthusiasm.
Sorry.
That's okay.
It's been a long day.
It's been a long 15 months is what it's been.
Thank you all everybody for producing this show.
1,337 episodes long.
I look forward to the next one.
We will see you then.
Until then, remember us at Dvorak.org slash NA. In the morning everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from Northern Silicon Valley, I'm John C. Dvorak.
We return for the next show right here on No Agenda.
Until then, adios mofos!
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