Oh. How long does it last? Well, as long as there's mold, there's
always mold, right, but it's Adam curry, John C. Dvorak. It's
Thursday, July
5 2015. Time once again forget my nation media assassination
episode 736. This is no agenda, analyzing ourselves once again
and broadcasting live from the crackpot condo and FEMA Region
six downtown Austin J house in the morning, everybody. I'm Adam
curry,
and from Northern Silicon Valley. I'm John C. Dvorak. Drag
Levin books kill.
Immediately I noticed you're different when we don't have an
audience. That's yeah. So this is episode 200.7.
AKA minute, let's back up a minute. Why would I be different
when there's an audience? I don't know. I'm a ham.
I'm just, I'm just Yes. I'm just presuming I'm just presuming
that.
That's funny.
Now you were like, Hey, I'm John C. Dvorak. But Episode 200.7,
aka 736. And we do rise periodically.
Were done at once, before or twice before, we did a show
called to enter point five, which was kind of an
introduction to people to the show ahead that don't get a lot
of memes and the noises and the things that we do and some of
the history of the show. Then we Redux the show we did it again.
Two years later,
which was around 435. I think it was
in the four hundreds and, and we didn't do it since and we're
almost into into the eight hundreds now. So we felt that we
should do one more look at the history of no agenda as we
apparently I'd listened to the show again last night.
Apparently, we don't even know the history of the show. I don't
know the answers to it. We had people ask us questions, we
couldn't really answer many of them. We had a lot of theories.
And we never discussed much about the show being performance
art, which has that element. And I don't think we talked about
that at all, which is odd, since it was always been that way. And
we wanted to do this one more time with maybe some more
explanatory stuff, play that one old show again. But I want to
mention that this will be the last time we do this. We are
going to at some point in the next year or two, do a another
deconstruction of our own show, but we're going to do it from
scratch. Right? We'll have to we'll start over, we probably
have to bring the weenie and the butt back in and
which was one of my favorite parts of listening to 200.5.
Again, it's like Oh, yes.
Yeah, that was actually the highlight of the whole show.
I noticed a number of things, though. Well, let me ask you,
what did you notice listening to? Well, we listened to 200.6,
which included 200.5. Brian, things that that? Well,
what I heard was a lot of fact of the matter.
Exactly. Yeah. No, essentially, actually,
all the crap that we moan and groan about we had not really we
had not caught on to it. In 2012, and this was done. We
hadn't caught on to it. And so you hear it, and you just cringe
cringe worthy I know. But seriously, ya know, all over the
place, essentially, actually, what I write down here, whatever
the case,
whatever the case, end of the day, oh, man,
a fact of the matter. So does this mean we've gotten better?
Or are we just anal?
I think we're more cognition. I think it's self awareness. I
think that's what's important. But I think, also think that the
listeners are in the producers that follow us, since we've been
bitching and moaning about this. And we just got a letter in from
somebody saying, Well, yeah, no, is fine. You should be able to
say that he had all these rationales. We don't want to say
it. That's the key. Yeah. But we've broken we've made
everybody else aware of these little peccadilloes. Yeah. And,
and I know that this the same thing like that we're going
through when you watch a TV show, or you listen to somebody
on the radio, and they keep saying, and the fact of the
matter, and at the end of the day, I know it's horrible day,
well, you know, change your words, change your world. What?
That's a book I once read, change your words, change your
world, but
I think that's probably true. Yeah. Thanks for speaking
another language.
And of course, the other thing I noted, well, I'll tell you, I'll
say what I noticed. Another thing is audio quality,
be a different form as if it did 2010 audio quality was terrible.
Yeah. And you were
bitching about it. In fact, you were saying, hey, my mic sounds
like crap. And it wasn't something I could necessarily do
anything about at the time. I
apparently did something about it. Because in the 2012
presentation, it sounded great. And now if you step away, right,
except for the middle of it, the middle bit, no, that cutouts,
the cut out. I will recon in common, they'd say something
like, well, one of the reasons that I've done that is because
and so that's the way it works be this long. Yeah.
Oh, right. Right. Right. Right. Lots of dropouts. Yeah. Yeah,
well, that is Skype that has just improved, and we have much
higher bandwidth now. But the main thing that's changed and
I've been on my end, have you even say in in, in 200.5, you'd
be saying, you know, how good you were anal about audio,
really, like audio quality has to be good. And we were just
struggling with what we had. I think at one point, during that
time, I was because I wanted everything to be as digital as
possible or as contained as possible because of, you know,
going on trips and traveling abroad and not wanting to schlep
along an entire studio. And a lot of it was external gear. I
remember at one point, I was actually doing the show probably
for a year and a half, with a very slight delay on my
headphone, so I could monitor in real time what was happening,
because we recorded pretty much Direct to Tape as you as you
call it, you know, direct directors, I just need to know
what the the end product is. So we don't have to go back and do
things after the fact. And not that that's necessarily all that
noticeable in, in our performance. But anyway, Wow,
big difference what we have now. And that is purely because of
this Universal Audio, real time zero latency plugin system that
we're using,
right, which makes a difference in the sound. And also, that's
another reason we have to do the show again from scratch sometime
next time. Because the information that we gave out
about the technical aspects of the show is all stemmed from my
still talking free free air with us. You are fascinated with both
shows. It doesn't come up on the show, but I don't use
headphones.
The reason why it was well first of all, I'm still fascinated by
it, because it's just not a typical radio thing. I don't
think
that again, I'll use the anecdote a guy in Vancouver used
to do that on the air. Vancouver. Nuff said. Wow, this
big market Vancouver is not a slouch town.
We had a we had a long period where because I didn't have
proper noise gating and other effects where I would hear
myself come back through from your speakers into your
microphone.
Yeah, and then you play the clip turned down your speaker
Oh wow. I don't even have talked about that on the show. I don't
know if I have that. Let me say
turn turn down your speakers which was annoying. Yeah,
jarring and it was I banned it here it is. down your speakers.
That was you know, that's Michael Butler. Yeah. But you
saw Butler as good as good but that was a function of my not
using headphones and
yeah, well it is it has dropped the audio equipment has
drastically changed the show. Because we can pretty much do
the same show no matter where I am. And you also are able to do
it almost from anywhere because you pretty much just have to
have your own microphone here is you are you still using your M
audio breakout box is that what you're using?
Well I'm using the newer one that has two channels. Right and
because the other one blew up I'm when I'm in Washington.
North I do use the old M audio box and I have to I had two of
them one of them blew up and I use it up there. But this one is
really a nice boxes new one I can't remember that doesn't just
says m audio on it. See if it's got a model number. It's the m
track something or other. The other ones Amtrak to but there's
a two channel Black is a really pretty. And I don't know that it
works perfectly. But it does work, I think. And
oh no, it's fantastic. It sounds good. But you're also you're the
you're the mic, man, you know, you have found the microphone
that is perfect for your voice for our setup is outstanding.
Yeah, I've got a good mic here. And I've got to I used a PR 40
up north. It's just dead I don't want to deal with with the 48
volts and all the rest of it because the whole demo audio I
don't believe has a phantom power hour. Right,
right. Anything else we need to talk about?
I took a lot of notes we can talk about at the mid break. You
had a bunch of stories that we talked about we were gonna be
here's where he let me give the design of what we're up to.
We've cut out the original 2000 points six opening because it
makes no sense. It was most mostly about Adam getting
married. Right? And that's exactly what this show. Right.
Right. So he's just pulling that and then the mid break was
answers questions. Unfortunately, the questions and
the answers are dated. Yeah. Agreed. There's a couple of
things in there that are okay. But I and I may drop them in
when I edit this thing. But if we're pulling that out, we're
going to do a new one. And that's we're going to do halfway
through the show. And then at the end we're We're going to
have the the original ending, which is the 200.5 ending. And
then as we go to Music Week, they interrupt those two guys,
those dudes, John and Adam have chosen 12 from from the past,
and they interrupt the ending, and they're going to yak about
something. And then we, the John and Adam from 2015, are going to
interrupt them and finish the whole thing. And you're going to
have a nice piece of entertainment and realize that
this will be the this is being retired. So
just but just in case, just in case, for whatever reason, in a
year or two, we decide to still use something from this 200.7
show. I know, we agree we won't. I just want to say hi to Adam
and John from the future. Just want to make sure that they're
all
happy. Yeah, well, they may or may not be you don't know.
One more thing that that. And that partially has to do with
the setup. And, yeah, we've really, we've improved a lot of
the technical pieces, a lot of that is just Moore's law, you
know, computers, we've got become better and, and just the
whole setup is much easier to handle for me, I noticed that I
am able to listen to you. I can have better listening skills now
than I had in both of those eras. Let's call them that. And
I still have to this day after this is maybe a little known
fact, after the show was posted. And we're done. We always do a
post mortem. We gossip about stuff, nothing really show
related. Just the old why old wives gossip, whatever.
Gossip this show had some issues. We talked about that
always, which is what we're supposed to do. But we ended up
gossip and
we ended up gossiping. I always listen to the show. And and to
this day still there there moments. I'm like, Oh, I didn't
hear what he was saying I didn't I didn't understand. And that's
mainly because I'm doing things, getting clips ready, or I'm
listening, trying to anticipate what clip you're talking about.
Because if in case it wasn't clear, and maybe this needs to
be reiterated, we don't talk outside of the show rarely. I
have no idea what stories John's working on. He has no idea what
I'm working on. Of course we kind of now throughout the years
know what we may or may not pick up on and I can actually say, I
don't have to worry about that. I think John will cover that.
But
and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't I think I missed one
thing recently we're in new
ground step. Yeah. It was the White House Correspondents
Dinner.
Right. I missed it. I missed it. It was my night. You're right. I
should have had a couple of one live good clips from one liners.
It's something funny. And I missed the whole thing. I didn't
even get to what I liked to watch the red carpet thing. It's
one of
these days, we're going to do live commentaries.
We're never going to we never know.
Probably not. But I'm I think that I've gotten better at
listening to what you have to say. And when I listened to Oh,
it's to me, it's cringe worthy. Man you had no you didn't you
didn't understand at all what he was talking about. And that's
probably one of the biggest problems in life. But certainly
in media, we're most people if they're interviewing somebody,
we're not interviewing each other, but we're having a
conversation.
Well, we make clips from people that that botch, you know,
something crazy, and then the guy just ignores them.
Yep. So I'm completely guilty of that. And but it's mainly
because I'm doing a whole bunch of other things to St. I also
keep my eye on the chat room, which is well known you don't
do. And and there's more benefit than not to, for me, looking at
the chat room,
I'd get benefit out of it. But I said I think in one of these
shows, I think in 2000 to 200.5 that AI is so distracting to me
because I just end up reading what they have to say instead of
doing the show.
Right, right. Well, and so yeah, it is distracting, and I read
something and then beyond that I just didn't you know, sometimes
you just don't hear stuff. So I've gotten better. I'm happy
with that personal improvement goal.
Yeah, I think I've personally improved on some things too. I
should have I probably not as much as I'd like. I haven't been
read replaying clips that were played on previous shows as
much. I don't think I've done it. Maybe once every two or
three months. Maybe what
do you I don't know. I don't understand what you're saying.
You play a clip.
Like on show 250 and 252. I play the clip as though it's new.
Remember that? Yeah. The horn Yeah.
Yeah, now the buzzer which for some reason is one channel. Oh,
no, no,
that wasn't a buzzer used to use that that submarine dive sound.
Wah wah wah wah.
I don't know if I have that. And I don't think
you I don't think was the buzzer for that.
I think we've also we banded last a lot of clips. No, we
haven't really lost a lot of them. Well, they're
lost. They're not technically lost. They're like stuff in my
archives.
I have no idea what that sound effect was. No, it's not
important. It
was something it was one person I think it was one of those
military sounding things.
I don't know what it was. All right, fine. All right. Well,
let's just start with this show. 200.5 which is the introduction
show for people who don't know the history of the show. We try
to discuss the history and then there's a break and we'll when
we would get to the breakpoint, we'll come back in.
Okay, here we go. Adam curry, John C. Dvorak. It's May
16 2010. times your gizmo nation media assassination, Episode
200.5. This is no agenda. Welcome to a special backstage
tour of the no agenda Show coming to you from the hilltop
Watchtower crock pot command center and get more nation West
in the People's Republic of Southern California. Yay. In the
morning, I'm Adam curry.
And it's not really a media assassination today. It's a no
agenda assassination. I'm John C. Dvorak. Vaughn Buzzkill.
We still get to say in the morning,
yeah, definitely, in the morning never goes away. You know, the
thing is, we should tell people since this is really a show
where we're just essentially going to talk about the show.
And we're going to ask answer a lot of questions, and probably
ask some. But you know, the one of the things you immediately
note, we actually had to debate as to whether we're going to
play the opening jingle,
it's kind of sad that we didn't put the debate on the backstage
show. This is kind of where we, yeah, I think on this show,
which is driven by support from our producers slash donors
supporters. Were we kind of bare at all, not that we have any
secrets, I don't think but people just want to know a lot
of stuff that we don't put into the show. Because little known
fact, we make it look easy.
And also a lot of this personal stuff that they're asking it
because we I sent out a message on Twitter to get some
questions. And we also got a couple of emails and you've
worked up some questions yourself. To be honest about it.
A lot of it is just plain boring.
Yes, indeed. You know, John and I have been in. In fact, you
said this on episode 200. We've been in media in all forms of
media from print, you've probably been around
typesetting.
Actually, I used to be a typesetter part time when I was
in college. So
it doesn't surprise me all the way through to today's reality
based television programming and everything in between on
mainstream media. And I would say, Well, I certainly gave up a
number of years ago and, and I am patently unhireable by
mainstream media. In fact, the last,
especially after you did the SEC thing. Well,
yeah, that's right. When I said Michael Jackson was probably
killed, and they cut me off. And of course, now it turns out, he
probably was. But the last radio station I was on, which was
around the time we started the show, actually, in fact,
no, you were doing this debt show while we're doing this show
here, but I think we started this show. Yeah, but I've only
done a couple like a week or two. And then we started doing
this show, right? I was doing that first was No, no, I think
you were fired during I was fired during it. We were doing
no agenda when I was fired. But it only just started that show.
Yeah, no, I think we did it for about a month.
So I was trying to think back cuz that was I think 26 of
either October or November 2007. The first episode was like 35
minutes. The good old days. Yeah, I was living in London,
which did give the show a very different flavor. I have to say
I was also baked out of my mind.
Right. Although, you know, to be honest about it. I don't think
that was apparent. And I actually argue with you. I don't
think you your personality has changed that much from stop
since you stopped smoking.
Right. But I Well, there's a couple of episodes there where I
remember one time I actually went off on some tangent and I
said, Dude, I'm so baked.
Yeah. But yeah, I do remember that.
The personality that Well, I'm happy to hear that. I'm just
more awake. And I can do more and I'm more focused.
Yeah. And you finally got a rig that makes me sound decent.
Yeah, but
that's, well, you know, the end there. We had we had a pretty
good setup. It sounded okay. But this is the best one. I have to
say. This is definitely the best one. So now we met at, I guess,
what did we meet John was on cranky
hands. Gents. Dan gents.com on Twitter asked the question. The
real Devorah can curry have a unique relationship? How did you
guys meet? So when did you hit it off right away?
I'll tell you something I found in my crap that arrived from
from the UK I found a videotape of the CNET pilots, where we
actually first met for the very first time although that was in
1993 Three or four maybe? I think was three. Yeah. And I and
I'm gonna get one of those A VHS to DVR things to transcode all
of this stuff. But this was when CNET did not have a website. In
fact, I registered cnet.com and said to Halsey minor Hey, dude,
you know, I'll do your email if you want, you know, you might
want to have a web thing that I think that would be more
appropriate for what you're doing here. But alright, they
paid me like 20 grand to do that pilot, which was nice. And you
were doing kind of a McLaughlin Group Type roundtable as the
pilot for that show.
Yeah, they that's kind of interesting, because we've seen
that they actually went through a whole bunch of people before
they decided they wanted me to do it. And I didn't really want
to do it. I actually, to be honest, I never wanted to work
for CNET. But I did like the idea of watching Kevin Wendell
at work once they brought him he was he was the guy from Fox.
Yeah, he's a guy from somewhere. He's a Hollywood guy.
You'd set up the Fox network. He was one of the driving
programming forces behind Fox
early. I don't remember that. Whatever the case was, he was a
slick operator. And it was fun to watch him work. And but they
first wanted Leo Laporte to be that McLaughlin guy. And Leo
wanted to do it. Badly. He was always wanted that tort that
sort of gig. And because but it's because very serious, and
it's, you know, this and that. And but they had me do it. But
that never got off the ground. It just wasn't going to work.
And so then they gave me some other job being a kind of a
clownish co host with a genius ain't John. Oh, yeah.
Well, they offered me to move out to San Francisco and be
there full time. And they offered like really low salary,
but 2 million shares of stock and I declined.
Yeah, well, that was an error. Well, who
knows what, you know, I was like, Well, I
know it's a crapshoot. I did the same thing.
How many? How many shares outstanding? Wow, it's vague,
right? I was like, Yeah, I got a pretty good thing here at MTV.
I'm good.
So anyway, so we met 93. Casually, casually, very
casually. But you know, we followed each other's careers a
little bit. But then I was kind of triggered by that when you
had your moment of richness. And I was floating around Europe,
and I ran into a newspaper with one of these, one of these
papers. I think it was a Dutch story somewhere. And it had a
picture of you and your Euro, some superstar in Holland. And
this is unbelievable. So this guy makes so much money. Yeah.
And so then you showed up in town again. And so then we just
kind of forced myself I
was it wasn't a yes. And that was nice. But wasn't it a wasn't
like cranky geeks when we connected?
No, I think we met up first and then I put you on cranky geeks.
But where the hell was it, John? Because when we I we did some an
email exchange. And I said, Let's go have lunch or
something. We added our first or lunch our initial the remeeting
lunch at differing guile. And we talked about you know, getting
some getting a daily news show the tech five thing ideas like
that. And then I then we went and had a big meeting with Ron
in the office. Yeah. You aren't cranky geeks. After that.
I'm trying to look now in my email, if I have something from
you from that must have been 2007. Right.
Probably,
how do you do that? Gmail? Do you do date? 2007?
I don't know. Anyway, that's the basically the story and then we?
We, I don't know, then we I just say we just kind of naturally
got I really don't know, that's the answer. We really don't know
how that happened. We actually get along
just in some funny way. It's not really explainable. It's like,
you know, you meet somebody, and you've all you've known them for
a long time. So you know, that they're obviously not assassins.
Of course, that may not be true. But whatever the case is, you
you've always had, you know, you had an acquaintance. And then
you decide that, you know, now you're working together. It's
almost like, you know, where people meet on a Hollywood set,
and they're hanging out a lot. And then they go off their
separate ways. But instead of going off our separate ways,
since we're both looking at me, VO We decided to start doing a
show. And that now it's debatable is that you know, how
it got named when we started?
I think I came up with a name.
I don't know if that's true. I think you're the one that
approved the name. But you kind of told me it was your brain
fart?
I think it was I say, well, we got you know why we got no
agenda? And then you said let's call it no agenda. That sounds
about right, actually. And it sounds good. Something like
that. And then, and then as it evolved, we got into other
things, which are kind of the same kind of like, we don't know
who came up with the idea. I mean, the donation thing. Well,
before we get to that, because the show started off with a very
different format. It was in fact, I think our first show was
on a Friday, and like a Friday afternoon, Friday morning for
you. And we would just talk about stuff and I would grab the
Financial Times but we would also just talk about stuff, you
know the difference between America and Europe. Right and it
was just took like a casual
conversation, just like a conversation. Yeah. And this
was, in my opinion, I've always felt that a two guys interesting
conversation between two people is interesting to everybody. And
I've always believed I could sell conversations I had with my
wife. And I always felt that a good conversational show where
there's not a lot of rehearsal or preparation, but just guys
were just talking about stuff that they know a lot about. And
coincidentally, because the two of us are so extremely well
traveled, and I mean, pretty much been everywhere, and
observant, because, you know, we're generally floating around
looking at stuff. It turns out that we have enough life
experience to, to have an interesting conversation. And
we're both from slightly different backgrounds. So we
could complement each other in ways that I thought was
interesting for those people to listen in on.
Yeah. And from my perspective, I was looking to do a show with
total honesty. Not in the regard of, oh, let's all hold hands and
tell each other a secret. But more like, why don't we just say
what it is and not be fake and just talk about stuff. And we
can contradict and we can have an argument and we don't have
to. In fact, we had no no thoughts even think about making
money doing no agenda? Yeah, we had absolutely no agenda. And
and I was just happy that someone would listen to my
bullshit. Like, hey, here's a guy who actually knows more than
me, because he's been around longer for sure. And, and we'll
listen to some of the because I think I was, I was maybe a late
bloomer, I was like, saying, oh, wait a minute, the world kind of
works a little bit differently. Because I was so embedded in the
hits. You know, that's all I did. I played hits on radio on
television, like, you know, I knew what, what all the
celebrities were doing. And all of a sudden, like, there's
something else going on here.
I think I corrupted you more than you corrupted me when it
comes to this show. Correct? I would agree. Mainly because of
my natural cynicism. I you know, I took a test one, there's a it
was a computer software program. Some years ago, I've always
found it fascinating. That was a career guidance. It was almost
like it was a very elaborate take computer test you to answer
a million questions. It was like an MMPI, or Minnesota multi
phase Personality Inventory that people take in some companies.
It's actually an illegal test, you shouldn't be forced to take
it. But it can tell whether you're a psycho and all these
other things. And this was the determine what your what your
career path should be. And I took the test a couple of times,
and it was the weirdest thing to get back at the top of a career
path. This is telling you, this is what you should go be doing.
Pro critic.
Really? Yeah. That's awesome. That's really good.
I like that. So anyway, so yeah, we've got that thing. We when we
started, there's a couple of, you know,
I got like hand worker on all my tests, shoveling shit, boy, you
shouldn't be in any kind of business,
you might be surprised that test was pretty amazing. I had other
people taking it was just like nailing people left and right. I
wish I could, if I could find it in my archives. If you can find
it, I'll be producing a modern format. It'd be nice. So anyway,
we started the show with just casually and it had a it really
started picking up a following quickly. And people were feeding
back into the mechanism, encouraging the continuation of
the show. And then somewhere along the line, this was your
idea. I'm sure of it. Because it could have been mine. You
decided to do two shows a week? Yeah.
I don't remember why.
And there were some reason because I think we're starting
to show we're starting to get along and
get along. Yeah. And we said, Well, why don't we Why don't we
do to show actually, that's when we made a real commitment,
though. And for now that was that was much later in the game.
We made a real commitment to do two shows. After we we said hey,
you know, this is real. We're building an audience. But I
think we were going for a good year there just on one show,
probably one a year building an audience. And we had a kind of a
weird audience because there were really your fans separate
from my fans and my fans who say huge, you should do the show by
yourself. You should get rid of curry and get to the head man
when I can get the same kind of commentary and it's always made
me laugh because it's like, oh, yeah, that's what you want. Just
some guys. Solid. By the way, I have never Oh conversation, no
pace and flow.
I've never received never received an email of someone
saying you're a bit of a divorce duck ever.
I've seen I have seen the get rid of divorce meme on Twitter,
on Twitter, and I've seen it here and now. I've never
seen it.
I've never seen it nice then. Well, then your fans are less.
Less crazy. Oh, yeah. Hostile. Okay. So,
at a certain point, though, I think that what what really drew
us together is we're both With radio guys at heart, I think
we're and I know I am. And I grew up in Radio Television was
more like a sidetrack for me. I never felt like, too tall. I'm
too lanky and too geeky. I have Tourette's there's a whole bunch
of stuff that would make me not ideal for television my head
isn't big enough to be really successful know about that you
got you got to have a huge not not metaphorically speaking but
physically a huge head that makes you successful on TV.
We've already established that well, but it was our it was our
I think I really our mutual love of radio in the I love radio.
And the reason there's a lot of reasons I think it should be
explored. One is that fact that you don't have to. It's, it's a
different, it's different. I mean, radio is, and this is
basically what we're doing is radio, and it's a modern form of
radio, podcasting. You don't have to get dressed, you don't
have to scrimp.
More than that. It's theater of the mind is what I like about
it,
right. And you can also write well, the theater of the mind
part, which is extremely valuable. I don't know. I mean,
my first broadcasting training was an array, I went to Foothill
College for a while and went on that was on the radio station.
And I just loved it, I produced a radio play. And I did a lot of
radio was I got a third class license, which you had to have
at one time, FCC license, I still have mine. Nobody needs
them anymore. And I've always liked. And I'm very kind of a
sound not I like good quality sound, which is why I was always
carping on the quality of this podcast. Even when I was doing
when I was doing silicon spin at Tech TV.
Sound is always forgotten on television. Oh,
yes. And so but as but I made a big stink about it, because it
sounded so bad. And to have the sound engineers that were
working there were I was their hero.
I know, the hero of the sound engineers,
because the sound engineers couldn't get anybody to listen
to the fact that they were using cheap mics and they weren't
doing notching or anything, right. And so the sound, it
sounded like a cheap ass production. Now, the thing
that's interesting is that MIT did during the Negroponte era,
when they had a media lab, they had studied this to death, and
they had double blind studies over and over again, and it kept
coming up. If you take a group of people and have them watch a
TV show with shitty sound, and then have them compare, and then
show another TV show with really great sound like Dolby five
channel much longer. No, it's not just that if when they do an
analysis, they claim the pictures better.
That's fantastic. That makes sense. And I'm a sound not
although I've had a lot of trouble, you know, just because
of the technology we've been using. But now. Okay, so now
it's where it should be. I am way into creating a custom sound
that gives you something that affects the listener in other
ways. By the way, you
have their record button pushed. Ooh, yes, I
do. So you know, we have compression. I put noise gates
on because I don't want to hit when I would either. I'm talking
over this, by the way, I love silence. When neither of us say
anything, the noise gates kick in, it's completely silent. If I
didn't have those on, then I'd hear your room and I'd hear
stuff. You wrote rustling of papers. And that's, to me an
important part of our sound. And I love it. Because in the
beginning, certainly when we had a huge Skype delay, people would
be like, Oh, no, I keep grabbing my my iPod or my mp3 player,
because I think that the thing is stopped or it's crapped out,
but then you guys talk again, and it gets people's attention.
Silence is beautiful.
Yeah, yeah, it does work. And we do have a moment of silence
every so often. But anyway, so the two of us are kind of have a
we have amenable personalities. So we were complimentary. We're
not you know, people say, oh, there's your work, because
you're the opposite is no, we're hardly the opposite. Not at all.
We're just complementary. We have different kinds of needs
and issues, perspectives, but they're not opposite. They're
just different. And it's all worked out. So we have a show
that works. Very rarely do you know, these kinds of
partnerships. Somebody else who asked a question, let me go to
this one. Who's the star of the show? And of course, that's
would be me.
Yeah, exactly. So right on.
I thought I'd get that in before you gave the same line. I was
wondering if we could actually say it at the same time, like
now, it'll never work on Skype. We'll never hit that at the same
moment,
though. But that would have been funny on stage. So
yeah, in a Smothers Brothers kind of humor way.
There's no star of the show because and there's no like
sidekick. I mean, it's not like there's a dominant character. I
mean, they've right Adam produces the show. So he picks
up the dominant side of the production because he's the one
that hits the buttons it says in the morning, and he's the one
who opens the show, because he's got all that gear. But it's,
it's just happens to be what you have to do if you're producing
because if I was producing it, you know, I started the clips on
like, he's starting to think myself, but so so and somebody
has to produce you can't have two producers. No, sorry. But
with what happened and a lot of a lot of people talk about this,
at least I've seen it around like, well, you know, it used to
be in fact, we used to say the show that has reopened we would
open the show the show that has no jingles, no sound effects, no
agenda. And then I think you because people need to know that
John is a is the kind of guy and this is I really appreciate
this, by the way, who will see something on television or find
a crazy documentary or something that you're generally interested
in. And it's often I think it's stuff that you don't even
believe in or care about yourself, but he'll burn you a
DVD and make a nice label on it. And you know, and I'm always
amazed by the labels it's always nice art and it's labeled
beautifully that we
have the expense bustin they look at it they say I'll just
bust this isn't a bootleg, this got to be
the real deal. But that's not like movies. It's you know, it's
documentaries, it's different shows that he's seen and you
handed me a copy of the Family Guy with the episode weenie and
the but and that really got the because again, we're both radio
freaks. And we figured this would just be funny to do and it
kind of stuck and I think that it'll be fun. That's also where
in the morning came from, by the way. And it's such a take off on
the morning zoo format and which we both I would say love and
hate at the same time. Low Of course now it's just so old
fashioned. But when you listen to this, you can understand why
radio guys get off on weenie in the butt to about two minutes
this oh that's the Hulu the Hulu pre roll. What's your favorites
anytime for free Hulu,
everybody it's really in the bud here live at the go hog Air
Show. We're all ready for the weenies sound alike contest. I
don't know but I don't think they can say my catchphrase
because they know funny. Oh, there it is. And if you think
you can say that just like weenie here. You could win 97.1
dollars for the cool weekend ahead.
97.1 weekends and welcome back. Excuse me. I gotta find a lost
kid. Can I use your mic? That's what she said.
Whoa, you got butt slam?
Listen, I could really use a hand here.
That's what he said. That's manic monkey on 97.1 Monkey.
Weekends in the morning, all weekend long. In the morning,
radio.
Give me Stewie Griffin, will you please report to the radio
booth. Stewie Griffin. Hey, that's quite a voice you've got
there. You ever think about doing radio? Well, I've listened
to a lot of radio. Peter and Lois leave the radio on when
they go out. So I feel like somebody's home. Well, here's my
card. Call me if you're interested. Hey, okay, we've got
our first contestant. Let's see your weenies catchphrase, Dan
No, fine. I think we have a wiener. And that's Dickey, the
punch line donkey on 97.17 97.1 97.1
of the greatest moments in Family Guy history.
It really is. And you know, they produced all of that stuff. And
they must have had a ball because it really was like that
in the 90s in the 80s. And the 90s. Radio was absolutely in the
morning
on the context of point one, zero content, all filler
and I used to hate it. We got to do liner cards. Here. Read this
hit the jingle. All right. 100.1 dollars in cash for you on Z 100
G 100 Surfing the universe.
So we kind of decided we didn't decide it just happened most of
the show by the way for people knowing what we're asking all
these questions is really an evolution. Yeah, there's no we
don't have meetings. We don't
know. We we in fact, that's If there's a rule, we generally
agree not to talk about what we're going to talk about.
Because we know that what'll happen is we'll start talking
about it. And then we bring it up on the show. And then it
always suck. There's like, it's like it's been rehearsed.
There's no tension there.
Right? And, you know, so. So anyway, so this evolved, but
what happened with that, then, of course, you ran into Jeff
Smith. And so we ended up getting a bunch of these jingles
and things which some people complain about. But the fact of
the matter is, it paces the show. Well, it is a mockery of
the of the other model, and it but it adds kind of a nice kind
of know what it is the atmosphere is improved by it,
the end of mourning thing is used as a as a rim shot,
generally, or it should be and it is often. So I say something
funny, which is very common on the show. And then he hits the
bar if
you go off on a tangent for x.
So we have a bunch of these things, which we use. And now we
had a couple of questions.
That's an old radio trick for a segue. It's really it helps
transition the listeners brain from one segment to the next
jars you for a moment there.
And if you listened to our last show, show 200 Adam was going
off the deep end on some topic and he kept talking was way
these two three minutes overdue to stop it. And I told him to
play the Adam Curry's pet peeve of the day jingle. Which I knew
what transition it would do, you know, stop him in his tracks.
That's right. It also stops me. You're right. Yeah, it works
perfectly that way.
So the show here's it from one of our listeners, the show you
do today is very different from the show when you first started
eg personal anecdotes are gone. No, they're not. Audio clips and
jingles are now prevalent. Originally less than an hour
week is now four hours a week and listeners are now asked to
contribute cash is the show where you want it to be or
you're planning more changes we did show it just evolved. So we
don't plan anything all although we do things individually that
may or may not stick.
In fact, if anything. We're always trying and it's more like
that when I when I find something and by the way, we'll
get into this but a lot of people send me stuff that's
that's how I get a lot of good information. And either that's
good, or I'll find something else that is good that that
relates to it. I'm thinking Oh man, I'm gonna blow John away
with this. He's gonna love this when I play this I can just hear
what he's gonna say. That's what I'm thinking.
Yeah, there's that in his the other time they curiously
though, we both tend to be on the same stories, which is kind
of interesting. But we had a show I camera was about six or
seven shows ago where you had actually collected the clips
that were all complimentary to my Yeah, yeah, discussion. And
it was like, because I didn't get some of these clips that I
wanted. You had them. And I actually thought that was the
most unbelievable show we've ever done. Because it it was it
looked rigged.
Yeah, it really flowed very nicely. And that happens from
time to time. But yeah, I'm I'm on board with the evolution we
there's nothing there's absolutely nothing is planned. I
have my own things. John has his things. Sometimes we might send
each other a link from time to time and even then usually the
link doesn't get discussed, because we saw Well, whatever
you know, it's over. But we have a couple of common interests of
things that are funny, that we think are funny, usually they
have to do with mainstream media. I think that's that's the
most fun is when we when we rag on mainstream media and pull it
apart and simultaneously open people's eyes as to what's
really going on in on television,
you know, that may have been triggered by the weenie in the
bud episode, probably the family got because once we start once
we can start mocking that model, we started looking at the media
bitching about it generally, on a higher plane I believe than
the people at Fox have ever thought of. And we started we
realized that it was actually interested we were entertaining
ourselves. And we knew it was very valuable information. And
we had the time. It's not like anyone can't do this. But most
people work for a living. If you're to have a job at Goldman
Sachs, and you're there till, you know, seven at night, and
you have to get in early, whatever. And then you have to
drink all day, which seems to be what the job is about drippers
you don't want strippers. You don't have time to go and start
digging around these stories to find the one you know the
missing element or the the kind of the crazy connection. You
just haven't got time to do it. And then you know, the fact that
the mainstream media doesn't do it and they don't is just makes
you wonder.
So I will say that there were two seminal moments when we had
our equivalent of a meeting and the one is when we spoke on the
phone said you know what? This thing is real. This is really
catching on. Let's do two shows a week. that I do remember, and
that was like, Well, you know, something's happening here, this
is really special, we should just do it. And then I am going
to call you saying, Okay, I've got a switch this around, we've
got cranky geeks on Wednesday. I mean, this is when we started to
really integrate the show into our daily schedule into our
lives, because actual work does go into it. I don't know about
you, but I every single day, here's my system, I have labels
set up in my email like Gmail labels, and whenever I come
across something that I think is interesting, or that someone
sends me, or that I find, I'll email it, and tag it with that
label. So I have a label now for show 201. And then, the night
before the show. That is, if I haven't found anything that that
showed up that I really needed to dig into, which of course,
can take hours of extra work and investigation, then, you know, I
sit down and I start to start to assemble everything into a huge
outline of stuff. And then I have to read everything, you
know, look at all the YouTube clips. And in the meantime,
whenever I can, without destroying my relationship, I'm
I'm watching C span C span, one, two and three. I'll skim by HLN,
CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, just to see what they're doing. See, if I
find anything funny, I find myself watching less of Fox
these days. It's just too annoying for me. But C span I
find to be just, I love it so much it to me that is it is
actual entertainment. And of course, C span has done a great
job with their video library. Because all you have to do is
remember a line that someone said, which is typically what
I'm looking for, you go to the archive, you type it in search
transcripts, it'll search the transcripts and come up with
that actual piece of video and cue the video to the spot where
the line is it I mean, it's amazing what they've done. There
is
a very valuable resource. And you know, the thing is on the
weekend, they have this what I really like, I mean, I liked the
regular C span, but on the weekend read this book TV. Yeah,
they bring these various our writers in and many of them have
written crazy books in one way or the other right wing, left
wing everything. And they sit him down with a guy who really
is a good conversationalist, or sometimes somebody that's in
their same field of study. And they talk to him for an hour or
more, usually an hour, and it's like a whole hour and it's
extremely basically it's like books on tape. I mean, you get
the whole pretty much the perspective you're looking for
you find everything out from this person. They it's just
amazing. It's a it's much better than any talk show, Charlie Rose
or any of these commercials. Yeah,
what's nice. What's nice about that is I know, I kind of know
what you're watching. So I know that I don't have to, we I must
say from time to time it happens every other week, probably
you'll either you'll send me sometimes I send you an SMS or a
text message saying dude, C span three now. Right? And then we'll
both sit down and watch something at the same time. This
has happened to me that I've been in the car, and I get like
a C span to now like, Oh, crap, but I looked at the C span
iPhone app, and I'll listen to the audio. It's like It's
sickening. We're like, we're like the guys from the Muppets.
It's
a little crazy. Yeah, it is. But it's not as though you know. And
the funny thing is, I don't think when we first began to
show that we're going to get so heavily embedded into current
events to this extreme, like somebody says, you know, your
show was about you guys going out to dinner. And you know, and
it just Yeah, it was a lot of moments, it was still discussed
wine and food occasion when it comes up. And but we don't
instead of sitting around talking about our meal, that
people can live vicariously through our, you know, steaks
and, and Cabernet, it pretty much kind of just went by the
wayside because it wasn't. I don't know if
the audience also drove that. And the only way to measure that
is by feedback that you get and the growth of the audience. And
it was pretty clear what people were interested in. And they
were interested on our take of current events. We're interested
in our unveiling, if you will, and this is purely because of
our experience our unveiling of the bullshit and the, I would
say the deception of mainstream media. And it's n. And I think
it's helped a lot of people see things in a different light. And
that's what the audience wants. And you know, John, you and I
are both in the audience business at the end of the day.
And yeah, and in fact, it is we you can tell by the way people
send you notes. I mean, yeah, every once in a while some buddy
that was there from the original show, and they kind of liked the
fact that we have a wine tip once in a while, which I can
still do. Or there's some observation we made about the
trends and food. That's fine, which which is now different
than me complaining on the earlier show that show 200 about
the raw milk issues. That's kind of a foodie thing. But the point
is, is that the people that really got jacked up and the
ones are pretty much financing the show because they send in
big contributions and say, Wow, we like the way you deconstruct
these stories, the way you tear them apart the way you show us.
Me, is it where we where you show me that this that I'm being
led astray people, it's very valuable for people to have some
sense of understanding of what they're being bombarded with.
So when did we start asking for donations?
That began sometime in 2009. I believe we semi seriously may
have done something in late 2008. And as long as I can say
this, because I can look at the Pay Pal accounts since we did it
as a Pay Pal thing and we did it. At the beginning, I think
with trepidation, not complete trepidation. But I think you may
have had a little more night because I've always felt there
was a model of direct support. And I was thinking about this, I
have to keep thinking of different arguments, because you
know, the ones that do it the best are public broadcasting.
And
you're right. That's what it was. We were talking about that.
And then we were talking about PBS. And I said, Why Why do
those dickheads who are clearly shills, not all and all the
time, but why do they get away with this? And why do people
support that? It appears that we have a large number of people
who like us the same way they either currently do or used to
like Public Broadcasting?
Right. And Nate Van public broadcasting also has the the
issue with the fact that they have commercials and we pick you
know, he really played up a couple of clips that we
developed. We found about, you know, the admitting that there's
the
let's play that one because we can't play that enough. This was
the president of PBS NPR, was the NPR Yes. NPR, being asked
about underwriters. Yeah, about their underwriters and how the
state of affairs and here was our answer. Okay,
moving on to money. How are NPRs corporate underwriting revenues
holding up in the recession? And what about foundation grants
to different stories? Underwriting is underwriting is
is down, it's down for everybody. I mean, this is this
is this is the area that is most down for us is in is in
sponsorship, underwriting, advertising, call it whatever
you want.
Right, call it whatever you want. And then I think we
started to open people's eyes. This is kind of the way it went,
we started to open people's eyes about how it really worked. And
people like wow, you know, Monsanto sponsors, this Archer
Daniels Midland sponsors that and we're like, Well, okay, so
how about the objective reporting about those companies?
Well, that doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot of it. And I think
a lot of people, this is maybe how it really started, John, and
I'm just vague on it. But is people start to send us like
$100 and say, Well, this is what I would have normally spent on
PBS, the national treasure, I want to spend it on you. And I
think that's where we said, oh, wait a minute. There's something
here,
this an evolutionary show. And like with anything in evolution,
just the model, it's very difficult to put your finger on
a spot. I mean, I can we can do the weenie in the bend, but spot
and then that has some influence. And we can point
right to it. But the rest of it is always vague because it just
kind of evolved. It we were actually very, you know, being
an open source show, which is another idea that we decided to
go with. In other words, we don't care if you steal the
show.
I actually do remember I was in New York with Mickey and it was
winter, it must have been winter 2009. And I remember I called
you and I said, you know, hey, this this model that we've been
kind of, well, not really working on, but that has
evolved. It seems to be working, we should really go for this, we
should really try. And I think at that point, I said, Boy, I
would love to do this full time. I would love to do nothing else.
But this I enjoy it so much.
Well, well, the model that I was I remember, I was always for it
from the get go because I've always admired the model itself.
I always admire the fact that you can get if you get give
people what, you know, essentially you're doing it's
like the Max Headroom thing where they had the direct
numbers, you know, the guy was the show was going downhill, the
numbers would go down, and you can see it in real time. You can
see if we're doing the right thing, if we're doing a good job
it directly it's not value for value. You can't go off the deep
end and we can't turn the show into like an analysis of the 60s
music. And that's all we talk about for two hours and expect
to get any money from anyone. So we're only doing it now at the
same time. We don't obviously don't want to be pushed around
by the audience. We have to lead them as as opposed to just doing
whatever they want. So you have to have some leadership. This is
like a company that you No, you, you don't focus group
everything. Focus grouping takes you, it shows you what they used
to like. But if you want to move the show in new directions or
tried different things, you actually have to experiment with
it, but you will get that feedback, you're gonna get a
push backs. And now you know, this sucks. Don't do that again.
And you know, and then the donations go way down. So it's
an interesting tightrope walk, but it's direct support from the
listeners. And, and people have come up with all kinds of
different complaints about it. You know, you know, why do we
Why do I have to spend $100, because I go see a movie for 50
bucks, and they put a lot of money into making those movies
and you guys don't put any money into making this show. And they,
this is kind of weird kind of complaints about production
costs I've been getting every once in a while on, and I might,
I'd never had a real good retort for it. Except Well, it's you
know, it's difference like you're paying for books on tape
is like a book, we're really competing with books on tape,
we're not competing with avatar. And then I started thinking,
we're also competing with radio, but you know, radio, you get 22
minutes an hour of action? Well, less radio is terrible. 17
minutes of programming and 13 minutes of commercials, you
know, make your choice.
Right? And then how much is your time worth? So I've used that
argument. But then I also find another one, which I really
haven't exploited on the show. But, you know, because people
didn't, it's production. Well, it costs a lot of money to make
a movie. What about a novel, novels are one of the first in
that one of the first businesses that are directly user
supported? Good point, you buy a book, good point. And you read
the book, and you've you know, you've already paid your money.
Although, of course, unlike our show, the book you pay in
advance for the book, and you pay in advance for the for the
avatar movie, you pay in advance for a lot of these things. We
don't do that we're more of the church model where you, you
know, if you don't like to serve, and you don't want to put
anything in the coffers, but it's the same thing. Your books
are user supported. And when there's no ads in a book,
no and what and once you get over the personal hurdle coming
from mainstream, whereby the way we hate commercials, I've always
hated commercials. I hate
that's where the DVR is such a godsend. Oh, but I
mean, just even as a creative as a creator of content, or like,
you know, I gotta I gotta hit the commercial break. I gotta
wait for the commercial. Yeah.
Terribly. You got to interrupt your flow. Watch one of these
shows anyone listening to this on Fox, or anyplace else, and
they get somebody in a really heated debate. But they're on a
hard break.
Yeah. I've seen this with Tom Brokaw and the president. And
they got some some guy screaming in his ear counting down to
commercial. And the President's actually just saying something
really interesting. It's annoying. It's very, very
annoying as a creator to go through that. But then it was
kind of weird. At least for me, it was, you know, you feel
embarrassed to ask people for money. And there is a
psychological hurdle. And but once you're over that, some got
over
it pretty quickly. Yeah, it's
easy sailing. You know, it's like, Hey,
I had I had some pushback from the family. Like, and I won't
say who, but they know who they are. Yeah. Oh, Holly, can you
bring yourself to begging for money for this? How can you do
that? It's beneath you? Can't you get some advertisers? I
don't want any advertisers. If I can get money directly from the
listeners? I mean, why would I want that? product, it just
ruins the product. I mean, there's nobody and the thing is
the most of the people have not, we've taken it to one of the
reasons that we do this show. And we do this the money asking
for money and support donations, is because whatever you want to
call it, is because it gets us closer to the audience was
actually a good close connection, you know, you know,
you know what you're getting for your money. It just, it just
makes you feel more honest.
And then there's another thing we did, which I know was my
initiative, and I think it helped us in a number of ways is
we decided to stream it live when we do the show. And that
did a number of things. One it gave at least me, I appreciate
the instant feedback loop of the chat room. Now. I can't watch it
all the time. But sometimes a punch line will come through and
they're always on a 25 second delay. So it's interesting how
that works. But a punch line will come through or someone
might drop a link in there. But I personally, even even if I
didn't have the chat room, just knowing that people are
listening live at that moment gives me an energy that I've
always loved doing things live I'm not a big fan of recording.
If I'm if I have to record something, it's got to be live
to tape like I do daily source code like you do cranky geeks,
all of that stream live as well now, I just want to live live
live because then you can leave all the warts in there and all
the all the crazy shit and actually makes it more
interesting when it's not highly produced. And it also forces us
to kind of you know, I think before we're doing it live I was
like, hey, what time should we do the show? Well, I got this. I
got that now. It's like, there's my schedule is Thursday morning.
I get up, I get up same 630. I get up. And from then on out,
it's no agenda Sunday morning, 630. I get up from then on. It's
no agenda. I
know, I had the same thing he said, but occasionally we've had
to move the show to Wednesday night. It hasn't. We haven't had
that in a long time. But we're gonna have it next month,
because I have a travel thing that's interrupting both shows.
Which brings me to a wait, let me finish one more thing about
the donations. One of the things that when we went into the
donation thing we started asking for, for money, direct support
from the listeners. This has never really been, I've been
figuring this out. Because it's a form of marketing. It's that
interests me but one of the things that I that people say
wow, you can't me yeah, how are you? I'm sure you're starving to
death. And you can't do it. Once you get an advertiser, they
always say, no one except us. And I believe me, I haven't seen
anything close. And I there may be some religious programming
that I'm not aware of. But nobody doing podcasting,
professional level, good quality podcasting, as we're doing has
taken it serious. Yeah, we are seriously you know, we have
programs, we can't wait the night thing, we've got a
different kinds of,
don't call it a tip jar. We don't work for tips,
do this, we're seriously doing this. And it's like, take it or
leave it, this is the model we're working with. It's gonna
be a lot better the product, you're gonna get a lot better.
If you ever get anything out of it, you get something out of it,
you know, contribute? I mean, just the way you would this is
new,
do you feel the show serves as more than just a source of
entertainment? If yes, what do you hope to accomplish? Well,
first of all, let me say, from my perspective, I absolutely see
this as a form of entertainment. I hope everyone is entertained
by our show, they have to if you're not entertained, we have
blown it. You have there has to be a moment where an
entertainment comes in, in different ways. It can be funny,
it can be dramatic, it can be sad, it can be frightening,
whatever emotion button we're hitting, it has to be
entertainment. Otherwise, why Listen, number just be boring.
I remember somebody sent us a link. So well, there's a couple
people that do a show like yours. And they send us a link
to somebody show that was very much like ours, they
deconstructed the news a bit. They tended not to have our
perspectives, but they you know, they did a fairly decent job.
And it was so dull. They had no it was just like this academic
Drew, you can't get you know, it's just the modern audience is
the modern audience. And and no matter how intellectual you
might think you are, you will be better served by someone who
feed you information in a way that keeps your attention. And
to keep your attention. You have to have an element of
entertainment. Our personalities, generally
speaking, I think are are are the entertainment.
Also, and I've only had this one I humor? Of course, yes.
Obviously. I've only had this one other time in my career, the
sometimes you just find these magical combinations. And it's
not by design, you can't train for it, you can't go to school
for it. It just happens. And you have these combos that just
work. And this is one of those that just work. In fact, my
biggest fear now. And I know what yours is, John, but my
biggest fear is you're going to roll over and die one day and
the show will be over. And I know you're in use at least
you're afraid
I'm gonna go crazy and leave Mickey and go off the deep end.
I mean, I know what you're
thinking. Yeah, I think that can happen any minute. Our pledge
asks on Twitter, Mr. Devaraj, your campaign seems to have the
momentum of a runaway freight train.
Hey, there's the
meme. Why are you so popular? I think we answered that question
just now. Also, the no agenda chat folks, one of the
moderators should be invited. They've donated a lot of their
time when they're invited to listen to the show and we're
done with it. We next time, maybe we can do something more
for them.
This show is the first one a long time that we're not
streaming live but also this is a different type of show. We're
just kind of so let's answer the second part of that question
though. What do you hope to accomplish what do you hope to
accomplish John with this show?
I think at Sutton and this is going to be this sounds really
this is not going to sound good. Because that because it makes
you sad there's a kind of a you'll you'll see what I eat
cake. No, no, I think that we I think honestly believe that
we're doing a serious public service to bring people
generally peep people that are listening to the show. I've
always believed this would be even when I'm a writer, people
always say well what do you what? When I'm writing like in
PC Magazine when I was writing all those years and inside
track, I always had a vision of what what was I trying to
accomplish and what I was trying to accomplish because I knew it
would get me more readers a bit busy for selfish reason. By the
way, I knew it to get me more readers Mike concept was if I
could if somebody read my column, and they're working in a
cubicle, and my, my column was designed to give them an edge
over the guy in the other cubicle who wasn't reading my
column. And I've always believed that that this is your, you
know, the value proposition. It's a phrase I hate. But it was
one of the things I've always it's always in the back of my
mind. I'm trying to give people some edge over the people who
aren't paying attention to me,
oh, no, this is basically we want you the audience to be able
to get laid because you sound smarter listening to us.
Exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, isn't that it? Or a job
or a promotion or
anything? It can enrich your life? Because you had that one
little bit of information that someone went, Oh, like I said,
something interesting. She has an interesting take on stuff.
And for me, it's that maybe it just that this is for you. No,
I'll tell you what it is. This is I think I was born to do
this. I think everyone was born to do something. And it took me
a long time with a lot of detours. And I've been counting
down the hits. And I've you know, I've pretended to run
companies with varying degrees of success but but basically
writing off of fame and fortune, which in itself is interesting.
To have a perspective from from that angle. But this I love
this. I so love it. And you know, people say, Man, you work
really hard. You do a lot. We have house guests, and they'll
be like, Oh, my God, Adams always on my thing. And he's
editing and he's recording stuff. I love it. And it's not
it doesn't even feel like work. I love this. I love what we do.
I love what I do. But and that's also completely selfish. But to
get you laid,
hey, no, no good, actually good. works generally are selfish at
some level. Because you you know, if you think you're
helping somebody, sometimes it's selfish because you get a good
feeling from it. And that's a selfish thing. Although it
wouldn't be defined as such by anybody in their right mind.
So let's talk about the open source model for just well wait,
before we do
that, since you brought kind of brought it up. I want to bring
in Simon Smith's question from Twitter, which says when we
offer relationship advice on no agenda, my wife doesn't react
well to the hookers and blow angle.
Really? She should try it.
What does that mean? I don't know. Some people just you know,
we
do get i Here's a certain thing. Two things I hear. One is people
don't like the hookers and blow because they it puts some people
off. Okay. That's just who we are. I guess. And we find it
amusing. You know, I don't think, John, I've never done
blow. And I certainly have never done the combination of hookers
and blow at the same time.
So sure, you admit to doing hookers? Yeah, absolutely.
You'd like you've never done hookers.
And I don't discuss these things in public. Or was this odd? By
the way the hookers situation is a cycle and the 30s of the 70s
Big Lots of hookers. And so we're gonna get we're going into
a new cycle of hookers in probably starting around 2012
This way,
I am not against hookers. I think that there's a lot of bad
stuff that happens in the sex industry. But if you know
there's a lot of women who support their children and and
themselves and if that's what they want to do, and it can be
done in a safe manner power to you. I grew up in Amsterdam. I
saw it working quite well. Thank you. What's the problem is when
it gets driven underground. That's a whole separate show.
So now what was your right now? What was your
the second one? People say? Well, I tried to help people
listen to the show. But then they hear the opening and the
hole in the morning thing. I think it's some BS, top 40 You
know, weenie in the butt show. And then they don't listen.
And I don't know what we can do about that nothing.
But I actually like it because you have to once you get over
that hump, then then you can get kind of sucked in. So no, that's
also a mask that's probably important. Can you imagine like
some meeting going on at the NSA or the CIA and they're like,
we've got to get rid of these guys. I hear bad things about
that Korean War analysts listen to the show. And they hear this
whole in the morning bit. And like, wow, that can't be
anything.
Definitely puts like puts people or
maybe echelon. You know, Echelon is sniffing a show. And they're
like, Oh, this is
just what you said. The guy goes into a meeting says these guys
are they're subversive, these two guys. And the guy says
really? Well, let me hear what let me hear the show. And then
they start playing it with that opening. That Greg Vaughn
buzzkill, the guy says, Get the hell out of my office you
practice
by the way that is now that you mentioned it. I purposely love
and I don't know who came up with the moniker but I love
being called the crackpot because it is the ultimate
shield. The ultimate because some of the stuff We say and I
think we get pretty close to the truth and a lot of issues. I
would rather people say, Oh, he's just a conspiracy theorist.
He's just a crackpot. Because that will save me from getting
killed. We've talked about
Yeah, excellent. I think it's a good theory. And it's it's a
likeable theory. But that, you know, we shot to track down the
guy who coined crackpot and buzzkill it was an email I got
and we mentioned on the next show, we mentioned it and you
thought it was great to be called the crackpot. Yeah, I
love and so then we our artwork started to have a crackpot and
buzzkill put on it. So we just reiterated the whole thing we
should.
So now please, let's move into that open source nature of the
show. So two amazing things which are a part of the model, a
part of the openness and the freedom and the and the support
of through donations is we don't own anything. We don't well, I
mean, I guess technically, if you really looked at it, we do a
microphone. Yeah. But the show is whatever it is. And we have
people cutting this up, splicing it, putting it into all kinds of
making rants, ringtones, making trans music out of it. But we
also have people who who create things. So a lot of our jingles
by the way, we could use a lot more and we'd love them. But we
are very critical. We don't just use everything people send in a
lot of people send in stuff that we just feel is not good enough.
We have artwork, and we have two main artists, sir Randy Asher
and Sir Paul T. And they, you know, these guys have jobs, they
do stuff, who knows what they do. And they they spend their
time they create artwork for us for almost every single show.
Now there's no agenda art.com where people can drop art. And
we've used the art from different artists, if anything,
we so after every show, people should know we have a
discussion. So the first thing we say is what do we think of
the show? And there's been a couple of times we said, Well,
that sucked. And we're pretty brutal with each other. Although
John never agrees with my criticism of him. If I say,
Well, you sucked on that. It's like, No, that was really good.
And if you criticize me, you're usually right. And I just take
it like a man. Hi. So we we talk about that. And then we talk
about
what's actually it's important post mortem that most
publications do.
Yeah. Then we'll say what, what do we call the show? So we think
about what will get the best SEO results? What will people be
searching, we want all those accidental hits. And then we
have to choose from the artwork. And that is sometimes the
hardest part because it's so good. We don't want to have one
guy put off over the other guy because they both sent them
something great is that's a hard choice sometimes.
Yeah, it's amazing. We have, and there's other artists waiting in
the wings that contribute on an occasional basis. We have some
tremendous support from these guys. And then you know, Asher
set up his own t shirt shop and through I don't know what
mechanism and you know, we
Genda stuff that calm stuff. Yeah.
And we have, you know, all these guys, and we've encouraged it,
and we don't we don't have our name, trademark. Somebody came
up with an email the other day that said, Senator, I think I
got a good promotional idea. Why don't you trademark in the
morning. And then every time you hear anybody saying it on any
show whatsoever, send them a cease and desist order, and then
they'll promote you. And you'll get free publicity, although
it's actually a funny idea. But it's not our model at all.
It sounds like work. And that's one thing we hate to do any
work, we actually don't want to do anything. We just want to do
this show. We don't want to have any extra work. We don't want to
do any extra promotion stuff that involves leaving a
computer.
How are we going to interrupt right there and talk about some
of the things that we talked about on that show. And then
also, we're going to maybe do a little bit of a reiteration of
what our commentary was two years later, where we corrected
ourselves because after two years from 2010 to 2012, a lot
changed. A lot change. And we're going to discuss a little bit of
that and we'll get back to the show. But let's talk about a
couple of things. I wrote down some notes on this. Can I say
something
first? Sure. I want to thank you for putting up with my shit. We
cut the whole middle part the same state
I didn't know you know what I mean? You get the viewer
insulting in some
Yes. And I apologize for that. But it one point you said that
we're talking about, you know, what is our greatest fear? I'm
like, Oh, I'm afraid that you know you're gonna drop dead one
day won't have a show. And then you and you were afraid of I
would leave Mickey and go crazy. So you had part of it right?
You love Mickey? He went crazy. Wow. No, no.
No, but I listen, I'm like, Wow, man. You know, you certainly
certainly into in the in the earlier part of the Have the
sequence of shows that he has no agenda. You put up a lot of a
lot of my crap, and I appreciate it. You start out with me, you
hung in there.
Well, I knew we had something going. And then you
had this episode 100 where I wanted to quit.
Yeah, you actually wanted to quit. Full time. How
stupid was that? No, I got a couple of
100. By the way, it was the deuce club show we did very
well, we had a lot of support. And we're changing our club
structure. So we can so people can all be deduced club members
will be part of the the club. Yeah. I'll figure out some how
to wait to put that together shortly. But let's start talking
about a few of the things that we discussed in the interim that
have changed and one of them was show prep. Okay. You made a wish
you'd had a different way of doing show prep in 2010. You
changed it a little bit in 2012, which was then you talked about
it. Now your show prep is completely different. to an
extreme, I'd say, and what is it now?
Okay. Yes, that's a good question. Dave Jones, who was
one of our producers, who lives in Alabama, he's a dude named
Ben for, I think a tax preparation firm, as small or
smallish firm. And he and I were we were kind of working on Dave
Winer, was a big outliner guy, besides, you know, working
together at podcasting, but he's always been about organizing
information and outline, I've naturally drawn to the idea of
the organizing information and outliner with expanding you
know, trees, and you can see what's underneath it. And Dave
Jones just on his own time, and this has been going on for I
think we're now in our fifth year have been building the
system, which we call the freedom controller, which is
open source, you can download it run on your own server, you can
do anything you can you can replicate everything we're
doing. It's you know, it has documentation to and updates,
where we have this template for each show that has a lot of the
initial things that are in there. But also there's an
entire system whenever I see an article that I think is
interesting, or if you send me a link that to that is an article
that's interesting, I have a bookmarklet on my phone and bet
any any browser I have, and it will not only it will place that
article into an outline into an outline format, and also save an
offline copy. A stripped down kind of like a What does that
mean abstract? Well, it's just without it's just without
formatting. It's without the format it Yeah, but it says it
has everything in there, including the images, it will
save all of that. And what's cool about it is, you know, I
set up all these topics, and then I can drag and drop all the
sound files in that we use after the fact. And pretty much the
show prep is already the show notes. So when we're done, often
we're still doing our post show post mortem on our gossip. And
then I'll pretty much I hit publish. And it turns the show
notes, all the stuff that we use into the show prep into the show
notes. It's a it's a dynamite system, it is one for me, at
least on the production side, it is it really, really completes
the whole product that we're making. And because it's all
structured data, we've had these great developers who have been
able to create apps, but also the search
search.na shownotes.com. All of that flows very easily, very
automatically into anything because of the format that it's
in. That's the main, the main difference, it also saves me
hours and hours of time I can even if you send me an email,
and I did want to talk about that from it, if you send me an
email that I put it into a folder on my on my IMAP email
system. And then when I'm doing my show prep, usually the
evening before the show, I can hit import, and it'll import all
of the emails that I've saved, which just have you know, text
or something interesting that someone said, and I can go in
and edit out any, any email address or anything I want to.
So it everything flows into this one system. And it's really
dynamite. It's I think that every podcast should be using it
when honestly.
Well the night before, what do you do that you say show prep,
this is kind of show prep, right?
So the night before I well it does the night before in the
morning before and I don't have to get up as early as you do.
But I get up at seven and the show starts at 11 for me so I
have all this time. The night before, that's really when I go
crazy, just getting as many clips recording clips, doing as
much as I can, which will also be intermingled with if I have
an analysis of something. So if there's a document if there's
legislation if there's something else, I'll really spend a lot of
time the evening before I typically don't go to bed before
one or 2am So it's a short night, but that gets in the
morning and then I hit so the clips are kind of all ready to
go. And then I start organizing all of the topics into the
familiar if you'd look at the show notes into all the familiar
sub headings of of different of different topics that we
discuss. And then just before the show, you know, I organized
the clips into little folders, you send your clips. I don't
listen to him. I just drop them right in. I don't even really
look at him at all. If you say you've
decided not to listen to my clip, I've never listened to it
for the purposes of extemporaneous discussion,
surprised. I mean, yeah, that's the way our whole theory. I
think we talked about it. And we do we do. Yeah, our whole theory
is, and this is based on a lot of different things we both
experience is the pre interview and the rehearsal. Yeah. If you
do, like, yeah, life is drained from a show like this, if we
rehearsed. So it's done as a performance. Performance Art,
it's done like, like improv. And a lot of people are surprised by
it, because we are so good working together, which is the
reason that you like working with me is that I am fairly good
and not as good as I could be at cueing you to. So I'd be saying
something and it's a cue for a clip, you'll be looking for the
clip. And then I say, and then you can't believe what he said,
boom, the clip starts playing. Yeah. And that's all this
engineering talent that you have. And your ability to do.
That is why it was It surprises people. We talked about this off
the air, about how we do have a lot of radio people that listen,
they think
we have a whole staff and we have messaging lights, and
you're starting clips or no idea. I want my morning show to
sound like that. I said, well, good luck with that, buddy.
That's not gonna happen.
So it's all single handed, which is, and slick. We do have
dropped the ball occasionally. And something I have to stop the
clip because I didn't set it up completely. And Adams jumped in
the guy. And sometimes you're in a queue and there wasn't one
there, or you'll be cute,
or you'll be you'll be talking about a clip and like, what is
it but then instead of digital, it'll be
play the wrong clip on occasion.
You just misspell clips sometimes? No, and
that's sometimes often I have a tendency to want to wreck doing
the clips out here. Just type something in that I think I'm
hitting the right keys. If it goes and I never edit it, so it
goes in this you know something,
because it might have your clips alphabetically.
The story about Jordan could be ended up as y j, p, Jad n. S T
Y.
I've learned I've learned to vote yes or why some learn to
work around it.
But I know that's why, in fact, if you hadn't learned to work
around it, I'd probably put more effort into making this spelling
correct.
There's something else that has changed in the interim since our
last since to 200.6. Podcasting has seen a resurgence. And as
the
mainstream media picks what I think I think about this, I'm
sure you do too, but it's almost as if the mainstream media and
the broadcast media, the radio people for sure, have said it
finally came into a meeting and said, you think that these guys
could actually, you know, replace us because they don't
have really the overhead we have right? Well, we can do
podcasting, too.
That's right. The union said Oh, no. Oh, no.
So you so they start doing podcasting and all of a sudden
they're interested and so they write articles about it. Yeah.
Yeah, of course. We're generally even though we're I'd say
pioneers having going on our eighth year. We never get
mentioned in these articles. No, just barely mentioned each
other. Oh, PBS has got early a podcast about about gemstones.
Yeah, well, the big difference. And this is something that we
just naturally understood and have done from day one, radio or
television, any type of linear media. They always do 59 minutes
and 58 seconds it's going to be exactly an hour that you know
everything is back times. You know, Bo, we're going to talk
this lot in fact, if you look at scripts even for podcasts that
NPR does, it's the it's the script that has the seconds next
to it so each line is a second right. You know what I mean to
Chris and we don't have to worry about the next show we don't
have to worry about hitting a sponsor break no heartbreak no
heartbreaks no news if we can go as long as when we can start
with the hour now we can start whenever we want a graphic on
the eighth or the yes or the threes or the sixes and we take
it we have from the get go seeing that I think is
completely liberating like Oh, I could you know I can just talk
until the either faces Oh yeah, well until we both know that
it's time or bore you know yours boring when we call each other
you call me out more often than I call you out but you know,
it's good. And I like the raw nature of it. I feel that people
are mad we've always felt as if people are so tired of the pro
formulaic way that programming is put together
we mock it we every once a while we catch a democracy now the guy
said one of the worst thing about this is that they're gonna
have a meeting tomorrow. And we got to hit sorry, we were done
for today. Your talk to you later.
The guy sorry, yeah, got to go just when it's getting
interesting Exactly.
This happened in Media Writing media too. And as a columnist,
when you're writing for print, you write to the, generally
speaking, you write to a number. So you they want 650 words, you
try to get 635, just 656 760, maybe, and they cut out stuff,
put something in, right, or they just pad but you try you because
there's a spot there that you think is going to appear in it.
It's only so much area, right? And so you have to write two
numbers. So you do and there's different styles you 500 word
essay, 650 word essay, 750s 1200 they're all pretty standard. You
can after years and years of doing it, you can in your brain.
You can It's astonishing to do you go right to 650 and stop and
you do a word count boom, six. Right, right. Right, right. Well
with the internet that ended and that, again, is liberating,
because you maybe want to ramble a little bit. So it goes to 752,
which has these different numbers, it could be anything
you wanted to because there's no real page layout that you have
to worry about. I was amused by one of my editors, I think it
was at PC computing for a number of years. John Zilber, who
became a PR guy later, but he used to be one of these guys.
And I think this is the drawback he would start writing and that
because it was no end, he would just go crazy. He writes 7000
words on some row but
this is also a problem. And so if you look at the intercept,
which is the $250 million WordPress blog from PR Dr. Mike
calm and he media, they don't have editors and it goes on so
long. They just your eyes glaze over. Like, I can't read
anymore. I'm so tired of it. And we don't allow that to happen.
Because we we stopped each other either. Naturally, just suddenly
we go into another topic, we are editing each other at the same
time in real time.
That said, when we did show 200 at point five which people have
heard or heard half of so far, we do discuss on the show an
hour and a half you know are all right we we can't I think we
ended it was saying something like to do it. We couldn't go
under an hour and a half or two hours or something that's like a
joke. Now.
Why is that?
Well, I think we do deeper digs. I think that's part of it the
digs deeper on the material. The show, I think there's a
shallowness to some of those earlier shows when we came up
with stuff and it wasn't as interesting. And that's
also just what the amount of material available on the
internet that has helped us tremendously. People publishing
stuff everywhere, it's great.
We have each of us have our little list of things we want to
talk about on each show. And that many times complimentary,
sometimes not. And it drags on and it goes
too long. The shooting for 245 that's what we try. Yeah, but
I can imagine five years from now. Tons money, we're gonna
go to sleep for a moment, we'll be right back
reducers in five hours. Now, it's not gonna happen. I think
we've decided, although I say we may have decided before, we were
going over three hours on a lot of shows. That was I felt that
people were gonna listen that long and it was dragging on. And
sometimes the material could have been cut down. And just
certain things we didn't need to talk about. So here
is the the challenge in a way, but also it's a benefit. We are
episodic. And this is why even though we I think discourage it,
mainly, people want to hear all of what we've said in a previous
episode. So that because we do reference things, and I'm
getting better at saying Hold on a second, let's just explain
what this is also for ourselves, right? I do that too. Yeah. I've
gotten this question. I've gotten better at it. Just to
stop and say, Okay, this is where this comes from. I'm
going about something from a year ago. I mean, we've had to
read discuss the Benghazi thesis which is it was a kidnap I
failed kidnapping attempt, right? We've just other things
that we've come up with over the years. In fact, there was
something in the show 200.5 where we mentioned the Hill and
Knowlton was behind the Oh yeah, alarming thing and I forgot all
about my bad connection. Yeah. Well, let's go over some more
stuff on the list here. You made a big deal about me handing you
DVDs that were highly produced and very pretty. We don't do
that with labels now. We don't do that. That's that's that we
also don't see each other anymore.
Right. We don't see each other anymore even though I'm gonna
head down there. Oh, don't threaten me. We do. We just
talked about three Shows a week. And we actually I think it was
last year we did a third show for for the purposes of another
vacation. And so we did a show. If you remember And we were so
tired from doing that third show that we there's no way now when
we're doing an hour and a half, we thought it might be a good
way to divide it up. And it would give us three, four and a
half hours a week, right of material over three shows. But
it turns out that when we're talking about something, we
can't keep it down to an hour and a half. It's just not
possible it isn't. So the three show things fell by the wayside.
It was never, it's just not
a good idea, because you just don't have even the Friday,
Saturday before we do the Sunday show. It's tight. But that was
chosen specifically, because Friday is when the throwaway
news is put out there that you're really not supposed to
know. But it's is put out there because they need to publish
something. And that's where I personally, I catch a lot of
stuff on the Friday afternoon news cycle, if you will.
And then I thought it was funny, we had a discussion of the
artists who at the time were Randy Asher and Paul T, the
dominant artists, this is during the era when we actually would
allow our pictures of the two of us to be on the artwork, which
we have now is banned. Yeah. And because it was just, it's just
wasn't good. Right? Now we don't art is really become conceptual
is much more advanced and
so good. Well, beside that we're in addition to that, the
productions that people are making, and again, I'm gonna say
this is also Moore's law, just better computers and editing,
etc. We now have entire songs mash up stuff, putting the right
key, I mean, really top notch stuff that when I was working in
top 40 hit radio, you would contract with people who would
do that for a living and then typically they'd make something
or a spoof song and they'd send it to 20 stations and get
because they're all on the payroll. We have people doing
such our producers doing such high quality work. It's really
astounding some of the stuff that we receive and use on the
show.
Right, I think that's a function of our open source nature and
the volunteer nature of the show, which is unique. We did
discuss a little bit about the how the how the funding works.
We had there was one part of the conversation I thought was
interesting, and wasn't really explored but I like a brightly
lit room and Adam Do you still like a dark? dingy kind of cave
like atmosphere when you do the podcast? Yes, I do. Why is this?
I don't know. It's I think I explained it previous and
breed in the dark. But I'm eating stuff all the time. Yeah,
but
I'm reading the screens that you read off paper I read off
screens. For me it's a romantic it's part of our Okay, for me
it's part of the theater of the mind. I like to be closed off
the dark room Yes, I did back in my old boiler back when I was
smoking and I smoked continuously during the show.
You know I only needed a green visor and then I would have been
set you know I am sitting here with the single light bulb
somewhere and so now I actually it's in the second bedroom is
the studio and I have one of those big heavy moving blankets.
You know the kind that ya accumulate after many moves,
then it's on to it's on a wall no because I'm facing the window
the shades are drawn on the window and then this big black
moving blankets in front of mainly for noise of course for
the you know, so I don't have an echoey sound to make it a little
better in the room. But it also really brings down the ambient
light. I like it it's just what I've always I've always
romanticize I've always wanted to be the night disc jockey even
though that's where the shit
though the closer you did announcing two miles closer to
your mouth and a close up of the microphone. Your lips come close
to it. Yeah, and it's uh Hey baby. Hey Ben. It's raining
outside. He's driving and going back and forth. To you under
radius
is the night owl. I'm telling you what's going on. We play
another set of Led Zeppelin from beginning to end. Yeah, that's
my romantic nature.
Whatever works yeah. I in the other hand, have thought about
getting dead dinning up the room because I know that when you
have a dead room you have a nice sound but I don't I let the
ambience do its thing and I don't know that it hurts that
much. I play the mic pretty close. I'm not like too
concerned about it, even though it's not as directional as the
high LPR 40
And what are you using now?
I'm using a cat 3000 from China. China No,
no, no nice. I'm using my I'm using the road. I want I've
changed I'm using the road Procaster I'm gonna close mic or
I like to spit in the mic.
Well, I use this mic because I was doing research on mods. And
I do have a mod mic which I use for quite a while the the Joli
mic and it which has modded everything. The whole thing is
just a completely remake of of a Chinese mic, which is these
monitors love to do. And so I ran into this one guy who is a
major, major Mater and he likes to fix mics and do crazy things
but he claims a lot of things people do Whew, especially the
move, removing the capsule is just a waste of time. You just
want to deal with the electronics. And so I asked him
specifically, well, you do a lot of mods. What is the best mic?
Made in China? Period? You didn't have any idea? He said
any name this mic. He says this is the best mic he's ever seen
coming out of China. It's an American company. But it's
Chinese mic
is the one in California. Cat
Cat. No cat is in the Midwest, I believe. Okay. Something audio
devices. And I think they're in Indiana. I'm not I don't
remember. But the mic is Chinese mic, and it looks like a Chinese
mic. And, and it's as I we listen to all these mics. And
you you do when you have to final approval on the mic. And
you said that mic sounds terrific. And so I've kept this
mic. And I've been using it with this with a split screen. And
I'm very happy with the sound of it. And it's a good mic. It's
got three it's got like, it's got to figure eight pattern.
It's gotten capsules in front and back. It's got a nice,
overall, I think the build is nice. And it was 200 bucks.
Nice. Well, here's the here's a little thing. I'll just point
just show everyone how it works. I'm big on noise gates, I
believe if you can't afford the NPR like studio, that which is
really dead. And I wrote an article recently about the sound
is noon. So there's a whole philosophy behind it. But it's a
you need to have a very fast acting noise gate. So that when
you're talking you can hear the brain and when you're when I'm
talking when you're talking you can hear there's ambient noise,
you know, especially if you have your window open or if the give
a fan on or anything like that. So I'll just turn yours off
right now and return mine off. And you and people who are
listening to the show, and I even have a low rumble coming
from somewhere. It's so different. You know this that we
sculpt the sound to what we want it to be.
Yeah, curiously Horowitz has a noise gate that he uses when we
do hitch the Horowitz show. DHL unplugged
is that recent.
It's pretty recently, he actually took over the he
called, he called me and he said, I want to set this up and
I walked in for like two hours. I walked him through what he
needed. And those kinds of like, helping the stewardess land the
747 in a way on the phone. Turn the noise gates back on, hold
on. Yes. And, and I said, No, you want to noise gate man, you
really want this because it just enhances the closeness and the
the personal nature of the sound. And I like it when it's
completely dead. And I love the fact that we have silence from
time we talked about that. Um, yeah.
Yeah, you harped on it. I like it. I
like it. Yeah, like if people did die, people awake.
I actually liked the dead room sound. I mean, I don't mind that
NPR sound.
But it's as good as the noise gate. The NPR sound is dead.
It's totally dead. And I know how to do that sound on we had
the cranky geek show. And it was being produced in San Francisco.
We had the black because I wanted the abyss. Look at this
look, I like on TV because it's cheap. And it works. And it's I
don't know why this not used more than a busy set. So you
Charlie Rose is the is the best user of the Abyss, right? So
you're in a big black room, it's actually a form of black velvet
that you can't the camera can't pick up where it is. It's like
magicians use it constantly. So you can't figure out where the
mirrors are, where the rabbit is coming from and where the rabbit
is coming from. And it also deadens the room and if it's in
far enough, so you can get a very nice, you can use the
cheapest microphone and you sound pretty good.
What was interesting is when I before I disclosed what had
happened with my personal life, I was in this apartment. And I
didn't have any stuff. I had nothing. I didn't have the
moving blankets. And the number of people said hey, what's going
on? I hear something Something's different about the sound. Wow.
So you have a stick? Stick notice that Yeah.
Well, anyway, get back to the question, especially the list
cost of producing somebody brought that up and there was no
real answer. I mean, we do have to pay for bandwidth now and
it's not cheap.
And again, we have void zero sort of 19 inch rack
and he doesn't do all of the heavy heavy lifting for us the
sysop that super talented dude named
Ben Yeah, he runs the infrastructure of course we do
have to pay for but he's come up with this is a legacy from the
no agenda stream folks, Mr. Oil. When they set all of that up,
they were thinking of starting a business and that didn't really
pan out but we were very happy to assume what they had created.
And and Mark does that for us out of love for the show. We
love him for it and his his partner, Iris who when he was in
the hospital, she was running. He'd given her instructions. She
was making sure everything was working, make sure the stream
was up and changing stuff and cool.
Now on my list here I have an anomaly that I spotted. I don't
know why I don't know that I know. NOTICE This in 2006, but
the 2006 200.6 show I said something about how we promote
or something and and then you said, I said something about why
tell people to go to the no agenda wiki page. And then you
went kind of like why why you're sending people to
that was that noise even I remember, it could
have been, and I and it was like I was befuddled by this because
it was, it's always been a good page that has a rundown of some
of the basics of the show. And one time when they edited it
down to next to nothing. I bitched and somebody put it all
the good stuff back up there. Meaning of the jingles and rest.
But I was kind of befuddled by your response to that. And then
I then you I think it was because that was the era when
you were irked about somebody messing with your your personal
homepage or something that had nothing to do with anything I
was talking about. Remember that?
Yeah. I also remember that, luckily, they put our height on
the wiki page.
Yeah, you were talking about that. I know it's humorous
height. It was like, I don't know, four feet and 500 inches
or some five foot 17.
I don't know I like I just want people to listen to our show.
And as witnessed by our great websites, we really don't care
much other than get the show. And if you want to go to the
show notes, they're detailed and you can get to them. Then
they're indexed and by just like it we'd still be typing no
agenda into a search engine. You the first couple of pages are
our seven, seven now. That's great.
Ben seven for a while. Right. And there's somebody everyone's
was something sneaks in is always galling when you see
that. So
it's been a while since I've searched for our
Manny Pacquiao says he has no agenda and a fight you know, so.
Okay. All right. I got you. I
got you. Yeah, that kind of thing. I don't really have any
there. I do have a couple of questions myself. Do you still
use that soundbite software?
I do? Yes, I do. So it runs on my original iPad, one Wi Fi
only. And if you run a little program on the computer, but one
of these days, I will publish the whole setup. It's just I
want to do it. But you've been
saying that for years because I need some vinegar book. I'll put
it over here.
Okay, yeah, we'll see who releases it. First you the
vinegar book or the the sound setup. But it's really it's nice
to have a number of go to things and let's see 12345123 There's
50 clips that we use regularly, which includes for instance, the
this may be for some people interesting, so we do the
birthday song. So that's, that's pretty much one bed and it goes
on and on and on. And then when it's time for me to end that I
start the second one, and then I just stopped the first one. So
you can make it as long as you want. I'm not really that
talented. I can fit everything into these pre produced bones.
This is the way you do it. You're doing it. Yeah. Well,
that's all Pro.
Yeah, exactly. So I do still use that. And I like it a lot
because I can have
things like that you do that with anything. The opening of
the show. The show is the
same. Yep, did actually that's three elements.
Did you know that? No, I didn't I was always to
know. So it's the first one is that one curry, John C. Dvorak.
And then that goes on. I do my opening thing. And then I do
time this to say, you know, this is episode 736. This is no
agenda and then that hands and then there's a second one that I
start here, which is this. And that just goes on. And then you
come in and whenever you're done and you say I'm John C. Dvorak,
then I hit raglan. Buzzkill. So that's all standard radio second
pro was an extension of the first. That's interesting. So I
didn't know that it's funny. Things you don't need to know. I
don't need to know and I don't I don't want
to know what other questions that you
had. Well, now that we're here in the segment segment, before
we go back to the show, I think you should play us one of the
things that we've done only recently but Adam I've
encouraged him to do these medley of clips at the end of
the show. So as it makes the show kind of you know, it's like
the desert the way I see it and people you know they gave the
list of the whole show they might as well get a kick out of
some of the clips. Why don't you play as like about like you just
play us a shot and not long ones but shot of all the short clips
you can you can quickly get to say you got your little push
button device there
Yeah, but those you mean short clips or the longer clips or the
short ones okay?
Just I want you to just run down what's right on the thing right
there go
Okay, here we go. That's the news flash sound effects we have
the this of course when we always tell people to go out and
hit people in the mouth, which is also to eclipse formula is
this one. We go out? Well yet people in the mountain and the
second part of that clip is this one is the new world order
stuff. And then I might add this in that's all set bread Hey
citizens, we have the I have a ding Do you have a bell I have a
digital Bell. See my bell is, is this and then we have our phone
call whenever we do a little phone call, we have that we have
this one
you have your favorite by iron Rand. And then we have the two
to the head. Of course we have this. That's one mother, I liked
that I have three science clips. So the longer one is the
sciences. So we have the science ISOs.
Or we have the sciences.
And then of course we have our standard. Got the Spanish?
Chinese, French, German. And we got of course, a new entry. Hey,
man, first of all, of course. Not to forget. We have you've
been de Deus. And of course we have the karma jingle there as
well. You've got karma. And then there's a few small ones like
what do we have? We have this one take that to the bank got
that? Not often used but when used it's always you. It's
always appropriate John Cena for X pet peeve of the day. And
that's probably about half of them.
Who did the D douching? One have
no idea.
We have to We should give her cry her him as a gauge.
Obviously, with female voice. She may have produced it or
somebody else may have produced it. We need to give whoever it
is credit someday. Because yeah, I forgot who that was. And when
it came in, I really want many of these things we should. And
we've talked about this, I think in 2,000.5, but not emphasized
it. Most of the shows direction has been from the producer
listener, they have pushed the show in a certain direction. The
douchebag thing we never called anybody, no shebang, no, no,
they call each other douchebag. And then somebody came up with
the damn jingle. Yeah. And and then the douching jingle came
after that we had nothing that was not an invention by us most
of the stuff. I mean, we invented the producer ship idea.
The club now coming up in the night was a these are but this
is kind of meta. This day. This way the show flows is largely
promulgated, I would say or pushed along by the people who
listen to the show and produce it and come up with stuff. They
come up with all kinds of things,
and good things. And there's a lot of stuff that isn't all that
well, I want to say when we do our final segment, I have a
couple things about how you can best interact with us and how
you can help us when you want to win as a producer, if you want
to add something, obviously not just the financial part. But
there are some things that would be very helpful for me.
Certainly, I'm trying to find this one producer who has made a
who's done a lot of these jingles. And this is the
problem.
Well, I will mention here says it needs to be mentioned I think
it was really mentioned that much in 2000 to two I know I
keep saying 2002 and 2.5 or six that we'd still need donations
even though we're doing the show. So if you go to na
divorce.org/and A Yeah, I think it would be appreciated and we
will have people who have given producer and executive producer
amounts to the show was mentioned when we were done on
our little vacation moment, which will be only I think two
shows and the next show will be a inner couple interviews
including a really fascinating interview with John Sculley. Oh,
guy, the Apple guy, Apple guy who's kind of merged in the
Apple community. We talked about that a little bit. It's a very
interesting thing. We also have Bob Heil, the microphone.
Excellent x very inventive. He invented a modern stage music
loud. He's a power trio. You can thank him. Yeah. And he was just
into clear, clear and loud sound. And so that'll be I think
we will find that interesting.
There is of course one jingle I didn't play which is also on the
soundboard devorah.org/and A also don't know who made that.
And let's go back to show 200.5 A
couple of questions from Sir Troy Walters I just want to go
down the list make sure we didn't miss anything. How did
you come up with promotions like the knighthoods
and although the knighthood thing by the way I will take
credit for that and I'll tell you why. I although I think we
discussed and I think you're the one that probably pushed the
idea
like probably the probably the name of a knighthood is Probably
what would I make a contribution?
Well the knighthood thing and one of the one day and I've said
this, I've done this, but everybody who knows me will have
heard this right at one time or another. And I know I took
random past Adam, every time some American, I think it's
supposed to be illegal to receive a knighthood from the
Queen, but they do. Anyway, every time somebody said, Why is
what's the query? What's so special about England? That
they're granting? knighthoods? Why don't we grant knighthoods,
right? Why can't we just grant and what can anybody why can't
Ford Motor Company grant knighthoods? What differences?
Yeah, that's good. So So ours are just as good as the Queen's
I think so. And I think we have a better group, that's for sure
that nights that have been on our list or they're fantastic
people, every one of them,
I have a plan by the way of making a night iPhone app. That
will only be for nights. And it'll be limited for a number of
reasons, but only be four nights. And, and it'll be like
our, our communication model, like a network a night network.
Now, that's a good idea.
Yeah, I think it'd be kind of fun. And we like a bad signal. I
still want a bad signal. We're gonna need it one of these days.
We've got a lot of professional people in the knighthoods. We
don't have a doctor, we have a dentist, we have a lawyer? Oh,
you know,
that's what you need. Right? You need a lawyer?
Or we need a butcher?
Yes, hell yeah. A farmer? Farm? What drives the new promotions?
That's a good question. Depends on how you interpreted Of
course.
And I will say, all the emails, promotion ideas, John does all
of that I do the production of the show, John does all of that
stuff.
Yeah, I haven't the marketing guy. Mainly because I've always
admired certain forms of marketing that are very rarely
executed by the general public. And by that I mean, or by
General companies, or little operations like ours. And by
that, I mean PBS, and, and religion, churches, because the
model is so interesting that you get people that like you so
much, because you're doing something for them. And that's
what PBS and churches are perceived as doing. They one's
giving you you're helping, you're spiritually and the other
ones educating you, out of mainstream media supposedly,
and, and I their model for getting money. And by the way, I
have a background in public radio, I had a couple of shows
two different shows, that were on public radio for over almost
10 years, about computers. And I saw the mechanism, how it works,
and how much money they get, and all the rest of it. And I always
said, you know why, you know, why does it just have to be
those two groups? And then, of course, the publishing, you
know, the direct payment for a novel is a different kind of a
thing. Why are these the only two groups that are using this
model? A? And does anyone noticed that they're actually
pretty successful with this model of work? Thank you.
There's some churches out there that have, you know, not
counting the mega churches, but but decent sized churches with
maybe 2000, to 3000 parishioners, and they got the
guy with a Cadillac and a big house, and they got plenty of
money. And it's only like 2000 people that are supporting this
entire parish. And it's like, does anybody notice that this
looks like, you know, these courts, the tax free thing
doesn't hurt the guy. But it's like, obvious it's a model that
works and people don't mind the model. I mean, we're not getting
knighthood, donations, because people think this is a dumb
idea. So anyway, so I do the promotions, I, I come up with
them. You know, every once in a while we one comes forward. So
well, here's an idea. We this is this people would like so you
know, it's kind of like selling the dream kind of thing. I'm not
sure that I do. I used to be in direct marketing. And I say
that, you know, when people ask me about this, I say, Look, you
know, we have a church and our religion is the truth, or as
close as we can get to it.
There's that element. I think we you know, we seem to offend a
few people if we go over the the off the deep end with the church
angle, but the fact of the matter is, we do the thing on
Sunday morning, and I'm sure a lot of people don't go to church
and listen to us instead. Or football. It'd be interesting to
see what since we're in Full Tilt here trying to maximize our
incomes. It'll be interesting to see what the drop off is on
listenership on the live stream during the football season. Oh,
interesting.
Yeah, well, well, and by the way, we do look at that, that
kind of you look at all the
numbers, we keep track of stuff, Eric likes to dream up weird
reports. And we look at them and we know where we're headed and
we're doing fine. We're not doing well enough that we can
quit and do this full time and and you know, that's which is
okay being in a struggling situation is not a bad thing.
And the show I think is sound. If I can say is it harder
to be excited for the next show if donations are down on the
previous show,
it is for Adam.
That's not true. It's not like I'm less excited who said so
once No. And even then you misinterpreted what I said what
I what I meant was, first of all, it bums me out because I
take that as a, as a direct result of the program of the
product that we produced. It bums me out. Yeah, it bums me
out. It doesn't make me less excited. No, it motivates me. It
gets me motivated to do a better show that we've deconstructed
and John, by the way, you got to know this. He's like, like the
horrible uncle. You never wanted to send you notes like, well,
that thing you did that made donations dropped through the
floor as horrible. And I know and it took me like two months
to figure out that this is bullshit that he's just writing
that just to piss me off.
No, I was writing it for a good reason. Because I believed it to
be true.
It's the way you write it is like the way email, grandpa.
Yeah, sorry. Don't be such a dick.
I suppose I should put a bunch of smiley faces and that would
make you happy.
Yeah. Good. This is what I love about you. What is the single
most enjoyable element of the show for each of you?
Hmm, that's a great question. And I don't like saying the term
a great question. But it's a thoughtful question makes you
think what do we like to think when the show ends? I think
hours
that, first of all, there is no element in the show. I think
that's that's that we have no fixed elements. That's true. The
only thing that's fixed is donations.
And we do that about an hour and 45 minutes to an hour. Yeah. So
we've talked about that. Because we noticed the donations fall
off if we push that thing off to near the end, because a lot of
people to be honest about do not listen to the entire show.
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I get a lot of emails from people. I'm
like, can we just we just did that two weeks ago? Like how can
you send me this email? Yeah, I agree. A lot of people don't get
through the whole show. Which by the way, is okay. It's okay. And
for people who listen to who'd like oh, that was theirs. This
is what I love this fast forward. You can fast forward
through something you think is boring. I guarantee you will be
backing up. I think so too. For me. Wow, this is gonna sound
kind of weird. most enjoyable, personally enjoyable. I like it
when I have either an article or a clip. And I get praise from
you.
Yeah, I'll do that because I actually keep a running score.
But it's just for me but you I know you're paying attention to
it. And I'll and I'll score a goal for you when you hit one
that is like completely catches me flat footed. I got nothing on
it. I got maybe my take is even wrong, because your take is
better. And it's and it's interesting. And so you get I
saw I'll give you a Kudo right on the spot. And it's very
insincere, by the way and you usually only do it when I know I
can't top you. You can actually come up with something that's
better than that where you got the kudos something really
stunning, but I know I've got a topper. Yeah. And so I won't
give you the Kudo then.
So that's kind of interesting. Do we have a weird father son
relationship? No,
no, no, it says a teammate relationship where you're trying
to compete for that position of dominance. Okay. Yeah. I think
as a team, it's a team orientation where the two guys
are working to to win, but you know, but you want to be the guy
that hey, if you score the goal, yeah, you scored the goal. Okay,
you scored the goal. Next time, I'll score the goal, you prick.
Yeah. That's a good analysis.
So knowing that father is something doesn't work that way
because father and son would be it's be more patronizing. I'm
not patronizing. I'm straightforward. That's true.
That's true. I'll give you that I know how much you'd like that
to be the case but no, not gonna happen.
I don't think so.
I got a little thing here a little aside. I had Eric run the
numbers on which country listens to us and where we get most of
our support from
that's actually that is a question so and here's
the answer what Okay, now I'm gonna I'm gonna do it too
because I have the numbers and you don't so this is my rare
opportunity to make you do what we do on the show quite a bit
which is make one the other person guests knowing full well
that they'll never guess it correctly and it's just kind of
a stalling tactic. But guess who's number one
now is this in total amount of donation this
will be both donors and amount but it's gonna go by the total
amount but it's this but turns out the numbers match pretty
well with the one to one pretty much with the donors versus and
totals
I will say that the Netherlands is very high on the list.
Who's number one? Oh, please. Well, number one's got to be
America, of course by a factor of nine. Yeah. All right, so now
it gets interesting. Number two, and I before you answer I'm
going to tell you right now you're not going to get it.
Australia. Oh geez, you got it. See you soon see scores. Oh, no,
I know. I knew I knew Australia had to be really high. Oh, I
shouldn't have given you the T's. Oh
no, I knew it. I knew this because I mean we've had I
trained I tried to kind of in my head I'm like, Man, I get
stories. The Aussies are. They're really into us you know,
but don't mess with them man. These guys will mess you up. And
they don't like what's going on and I can almost guess you know
by which country is is the most depressed so of course America
wins. And then Australia and I think the Netherlands has got to
be third or fourth on the list
through now actually add Netherlands actually comes in
six. It goes like this United States, Australia, Canada,
Canada, right. Yeah, I forgot United Kingdom and Netherlands
UK as well. Of course. Yeah. Yeah.
I actually thought the Netherlands would come in a
little higher. But no. And a couple of the guys the reason is
because the Netherlands The guys who do contribute to the show
from from the from Belgium, are very, they're they're
aggressive. Right. You know, Pels, mockers? Oh, he's in
Belgium, Belgium. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Belgium comes in then it
comes Germany, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland,
ah, Mexico. And then we have an anomaly with Japan, which has
very few people listening, but they give a lot of money. And
same with Hong Kong. That's where all the money is. There we
got Spain, Italy, France, Denmark is actually higher, but
they don't give any money. They're like, they're cheap,
cheap. But damn Danes. They're the Danish or GrapeCity cheap.
And then Poland, Poland, which is like, that doesn't count.
They don't use this the non English speaking countries, it
doesn't bother me.
Very interesting for the amount of Well, that's really
interesting. For the amount of time we spend on our have spent
on stories about Poland. They're way down on the list. Oh,
they're way down the amount of time we spend on the UK and
Australia. That's about right. Yeah. So and and Canada. We
probably should do more on Canada.
Yeah, no, the Canadians are completely starting to complain
about it. And their why and you know, it's easy enough to do I
mean, it's kind of hard to beat this hour has 22 minutes,
whatever the name of the show is that nails them constantly. We
got some support in Singapore. I mean, almost every countries,
Estonia, Dominican Republic, Malaysia, Qatar, Israel one
person for raw which is that actually is the one that really
surprises me the most that we'd have one listener in Israel, you
may be blocked there for all I know could be me, I could and
Portugal with me got much. You didn't get to have more from
Brazil, since I'm a writer there and fairly well known. But it's
again, it's in translation.
They may be right and all kinds of crap. You don't know what
they're translating it to?
No, they I know what they're trying to say. I've had a lot of
people I know a lot of Brazilians. And they one guy
said to me, once I know the translator, he's a great guy.
I've sat down with him and powerful PowerPoint, like in 10
minutes. The guy's fantastic. Let me
what was the PA? Oh, here's one that I can't answer. What are
the current subscriber numbers? So first of all, subscriber
numbers, since the word subscriber is a misnomer?
Because we really don't know how many people listened to the show
by downloading. We absolutely just don't know that. John, how
often? And by the way, I don't think anyone knows in
podcasting, what their actual real numbers are. There is so
much smoke, about numbers,
you'd have to guess. And would you guess? Well, based on normal
direct marketing returns and the kind of money we get it, it's
hard to say I mean, it could be anywhere from 50,000 to 400,000.
Yeah, that's about the same range. And it's impossible to
tell from the downloads. And you know, the proxies. And of
course, I'm sure there's a small percentage that is maybe not
downloading at all, listening only to the stream, there's
people getting a bit torrent
because we only have you know, in terms of pure subscribers
that are paying the $5 we only have about 1500 of those people.
We have not pushed There you go. That's very hard to do the $5
thing some people done the 30 Some people say I'm not going to
do it till you make it 10 And I haven't put that up. So I mean,
that's you know, and then they every time they change their
credit card or some number they get bounced by Pay Pal so they
don't have the subscription anymore. I get letters saying,
Well, I sorry, but I didn't realize I haven't had a
subscription for six months because Pay Pal bounced it. And
I gotta re subscribe. Sorry, you know, they apologize. And some
people get bounced for no good reason. It's, you know, we were
not that stable that we need more subscribers for sure. We'll
push that we'll be pushing that, probably on the show more.
Okay, I've two more things. One more. One is I actually would
like to know, how you prep for the show. I think I already
explained what I do,
I don't do, I don't, generally what I do is I typically take
the articles and things that I found, and I print them out and
pile them up as they as they come because I get most of my
stuff online. And then I'm always making clips because they
have an h2 recorder by the by my side at all times. And I'm
constantly jumping up even with the full family could be
watching a movie or something I'm jumping up and stopping the
movie, backing it up and then getting a clip. And then you
know, so I collect a lot of I spent most of my time collecting
clips and articles, and I don't organize them very well is
because of the nature of the show, I've always assuming that
it's going to go anywhere, because you never know what you
know who's going to bring up a topic that gets interesting in
the conversation itself. So I shall I'm probably underprepared
in terms of pure preparation, not in terms of the work that
goes into getting the clips and all and reading a lot. But in
terms of like thinking about what I'm going to do, I do
occasionally will take a bunch of notes early, if you watch the
or listen to the show, maybe a year ago, I would have these
notes, I used to ridicule myself for having taken terrible notes
I can't read. And that was a little more preparation. But I
found that it really hasn't, that didn't do anything to
improve the show. And it also kind of puts you if I if I
prepare too much out, I'll try to dominate the show. And which
Ryan who kind of was the patient flow.
In the for me, the only I do collect everything, because I
find if you look at the show notes versus what we talked
about in the show, I mean, the show notes are often four times
as much information. And I think that is a valuable part of the
show, for people to be able to go and research stuff and look
at things and there is a reasonable segment of the
audience that really uses that and appreciates it and looks at
it. Some of the iPhone apps give you good access to it and search
ability. But I'm all I'm typically always hoping, just
hoping that I can find from a radio production perspective.
Here it is. I'm hoping that there's one or two zingers that
I have either it's a clip or its story or something and I'll work
on that. And I cannot go to bed on a Wednesday night or a
Saturday night without knowing I have something and I sometimes
will try out my my rap on Mickey. I'll say how does this
sound? And usually I get shut down. Yeah,
I refuse to do that. I think that's overdoing it.
I get shot down. Good.
So here's a quick question that somebody has for you. What
happened to the global blank fund? Adam was supposed to have
a big report on it. The what? Remember that fun. You were
talking about that? That money that was hidden during the
Reagan administration or something? Oh,
you know? Yeah, the was a French name.
Yeah, was brought from Monday. Okay. Well, you know, there's
your answer, Brian.
Yeah, no, well, I hit so many dead ends, and I just don't have
the time to spend my life.
Yeah. And it's not going to bring bring anything. It is
there's
there's, I guess the answer is, no one has done enough reporting
that at least that I could find that makes it believable,
believable or credible enough. And the only way to really get
into it is I'd have to do the investigative work myself. And
that's obviously not going to happen.
Okay. Hugs a lot asks, what's the actual cost of producing the
show? Most podcasts have zero budgets and still produce shows.
DSC is done free?
No, no, it's not. That's not true. DSC is a part of what
these founding and sustain sustaining producers have the no
agenda stream donated their money for and we'll have to do
another drive. And you know, what is the actual cost? And
what does it cost you to go to work? You know, there's actual
cost this is actual time it's there's preparation. Value for
value. That's the way it works. Time is definitely money. So is
their actual, you know, would you like me to charge by the
hour the amount of time it took me to set up the studio? That's
just one little thing. No, you
don't not sure what I actually the question to me is vague. I
don't know what it means. dz picks asks what iPhone iPad app
does Adam used for the jingles sound bank?
I use a program called sound bite. Be one I T E, one word
sound bite on the Mac. It is created made by black cat
software. And I've just kind of been, they essentially
replicated a cart machine, they look like cards, you can color
them like you would color a an A card is a cartridge just as the
old school way of putting jingles into a jingle machine.
And it's pretty customizable. And what's nice about it is they
released an iPhone app, which I can run on the iPad, although it
kind of sucks because it's it runs in iPhone mode, and you
kind of enlarge it and it doesn't work very well. In fact,
today, I didn't use it at all. But normally, I do. And it
brings up the screen of your cart deck the way it looks on
the computer screen. And the only way if I had, I would
prefer to have an extra monitor instead of having the the iPad
run that because I use two monitors because I have a lot of
stuff that I have to monitor. And really what I need is I need
to be able to connect a third screen to my laptop. I don't
think that's an easy thing to do, though.
Okay. Here's an interesting question you should be able to
answer I'm gonna have you do it if you can. I bought Nokia 71.
Because you said you like and how do I get the stream to work
on it? Can we do that?
There is actually in the Nokia Ovi Store, which is their
version of the app store. There is a just released if you go
there. And it's like create your own Nokia app, I think they're
actually calling them apps, you can enter the RSS feed for no
agenda. And it will create an app for your phone. And then you
can put that on your phone. It does not do the streaming bit
but you can get streaming programs all over the place for
for the Nokia. But I think it's more interesting just to be able
to, to make your own app for the for the for the episodes.
So that's how you do that. And Blackberry, by the way, also was
coming out they called me like yeah,
we're gonna do podcasting on the Blackberry. Can you log in and
put in your shows for your company and I put it in? No
agenda, daily source code, tech, five top five cranky geeks and
then I got bored. So apparently there's some podcasting thing on
BlackBerry. So yeah. Any more from the chat room?
Twitter, Twitter. Let me see if there's one more here. There was
111. Second, just got to see who's texting me. Oh, my cute
guy says the show's gone from a show with no jingles and no
talent to a glut of both. Thought that was kind of unique.
It's gone to a what? At? We have a glut of talent. And apparently
on the show. It's just the same two guys. Somebody else asks,
the show has changed a lot since its inception is the same guy
actually opera now? Do you prefer the new format? And uh,
you know, obviously we do, or wouldn't be doing it. And the
audience does more? The audience does, too. I mean, you know, the
show is, you know, has its, you know,
you know, I've been broadcasting long enough, you always have
people who say, Oh, was much better than Oh, it was better,
though. Oh,
no, I have the same thing. As a writer, you get this. I have
people that still say when you are writing that column for
InfoWorld, it was much better. Yeah. And I looked at those I
can go back and look at that old crap. And it wasn't. Generally
speaking, things improve. Yeah,
I guess it's just, it's just the nature of the beast
is that it's in the nostalgia or you know, people at some point
people either like you more in time, because they hear you
more, they read you more, or they like you less in time, and
then they associate that with maybe you were doing something
different before. Generally speaking, you weren't.
Alright, so wrapping this up? What's the future?
Well, we got another 200 shows to do.
At least now we have what we have at least until episode 333.
Well, before we
do another promotion like the deuce Club. Well, we got to
thank all the dues club members profusely, we'll do that over
time and in the on the web page. And I think, you know, we not
showing any indication of slower growth, but people still like to
show I think the great thing and we've talked about this off off
off the air a lot. There's a there's so much material for us.
Yeah, I think the show there's only there's only growth because
it just comes automatically
it's getting worse. Yeah, they're laying everybody off the
the the Obama administration is getting worse. They're lying to
the public just straight out. You know, there's these crazy
things that Hill and Knowlton are doing. I mean, now that I
find that they're the behind all the global warming stuff that
you know, we're doomed, that that's going to go through
because you can't stop The Hill and Knowlton, I don't know, are
you?
Are you worried that the show will ever get like taken off the
air?
Not seriously, but it could be it could take be taken off the
air. I don't think
this, by the way is a huge benefit of, of our model.
Because if you have advertisers, that's the attack mechanism,
that's where your weakest when the minute someone doesn't like
what you say, Look at look at Imus, you know, and that's just
one example. The minute you go somewhere that they don't like
you then then the audience. For us, it's easy. The audience like
what we do, we get no money. It's like, okay, we can turn
that around around in one episode, we can go, Okay, we
went off the track there, we can get back on. But when your
advertisers pull out, then the network goes nuts. And then
you're then you're out of a job, you're dead. You're gone your
history.
And you lost it. You know, there was you don't have control from
the get go. Yeah. And that's another reason I think the
direct support is the way to go is open source. We don't care.
One of the things that's great about our say, well, one of the,
you know, if somebody's bootlegs, the show puts on their
own website takes credit for say they produce it, I don't care.
The fact is, our messages are embedded in the show. And they
it goes with us, we don't need to prove numbers. We don't say
all our numbers from Arbitron came in and we got to three,
three, and this is due here. Look, Mr. advertiser, give us
some more money. We have a better CPM, we have a certain
demo, they have to prove our demo. And we have to prove the
CPM and this and that. And the other thing, I mean, it's
ridiculous
for those days when you when you wait for the arbitrage to come
out and the whole station was like tiptoeing around. Well, we
know the trends are down. So we're, How bad will it be? Or?
Yeah, we don't deal with any of that. We don't want to it's
ridiculous. And we completely independent. We don't have
anybody telling us what to do. We don't have advertisers
telling us what to do, which is the real danger here. And I did
without exception. The only way we would be taken off the air is
if the government or somebody sued us or the government
decided to pull the plug or they who knows I mean that but that's
not going to happen. We're gonna look we're below the radar.
We're crackpots. We believe it. We're conspiracy theory people
who know. And they will get taxed for being conspiracy
theory, guys. Yeah, that's the worst thing that could happen.
Well, I can live well, it seems to me that Alex Jones will get
taken out before we do. And that would be a nice warning shot.
We'd he's the he's the canary in the cage. As far as I'm
concerned, even though I don't think he does have to do work we
do.
I think he has good guests. But that's a different format.
But no, we can't. That's another thing. That's the one question
we should at least before we finish that we cannot do two
hours. Yeah. Well, we've done it again. Before we finish it, you
know, the people say, Well, can I be a guest on your show? Do
you how can we don't do this? How can we don't do that? We may
do some separate interview shows separately that will be on the
stream that will be part of some other initiative. This show is
what it is. It's two guys talking to each other about the
current events just like you do in a coffee shop with your
buddies is no guests. We don't do when you're in a coffee shop.
You don't say man coming in to just have a guest you know, so
and so just finished the book. So what was your book about?
This is not the Larry King show,
right? Well, anyway, so yeah, we were going to do an hour we're
moving up now.
What are we had to have the exact recording here we are at
145. Good job. Thank you again, to everyone who supports no
agenda, who supported this show. The deuce club thanks to
everyone who's out there and making websites and crazy ideas
and and promoting us. It is also your show. So I could just say
thank you, John. Thank you. I thank you I really it's the
highlight of my week twin that happens twice a week
and we'll try to do these special third shows every so
often. And
what are we gonna talk about?
Well I think we talked out I'll bet we could do another two hour
I you know I was just about to say not a problem and in our in
our spouse what do you think it's so weird that I don't use
headphones
it's it's a typical for for radio guys in
a typical but but I managed because I use this the the pop
screen yeah as my point of departure. And so if I keep my
lips within a quarter inch of the pop screen I'm within range
of this microphone. We're back
by the way with the last bit of this special episode. And this
is you can tell that we speak exactly the same way off air as
we do. Why do you think that's a weird?
That's you know, it reminds me of like I tell people this when
you give them trying to give people teleprompter training
that and then the funny thing is when I remember years and years
ago is doing some some body or radio thing of some sort and I
was reading advertising copy. And there was just a moment
where The Read became my actual voice.
Oh, that's when you get the gig, obviously. And you go, Oh
my God, that sounds so cool. Yeah, sounds actually natural.
Now, by the way, there's one thing I did want to mention that
in the first half is this does stammering I do all the time, I
think is annoying. Thank God, people don't bitch about it.
I don't notice that at all.
Yeah, well, I do when I hear myself.
Well, you know, everyone has, there's a lot of stuff I don't
like about how I talk.
Now, you sound a lot better than I do. Anyway. So I think this is
pretty much wraps this show up?
Well, I just wanted to say they're the format. We're not
the format. If anything, the show has kind of developed a
format. That for me, you know, there there there is a change,
which was driven more by the world around us. And when I say
the world, I mean, the media world, is that now that there's
less and less news, actually being presented in our in our in
the mainstream media, I think that both of us have have taken
it upon ourselves to work much harder, had actually finding,
you know, knew the words. I mean, we're doing more
uncovering and I mean, I jokingly call myself government
legislation analyst.
Did you get the email from the guest says that was redundant.
No, I
don't or I haven't seen it yet. Oh, yeah. Well, a guy says,
well, could you call yourself that all legislation is
government legislation or can't be called legislation? So you're
being redundant. You shouldn't be calling yourself an
independent legislation analyst.
No, or something that doesn't sound good at cocktail parties.
When you say, government legislation analyst? Yeah, no,
I'm just telling you, you need to realize it's redundant. Now,
yeah, I think that will you've done a lot more reading of deep
reading and gotten into reading legislation. I had not gone that
way I have. I'm more. I'm still flipped, floundering in some of
this stuff.
No, I disagree. Because you're doing something interesting.
You're especially the last couple of shows you've been
tuning in to a lot of foreign media sources. Still English
spoken in general?
Yeah, I have gone to the foreign sources. And then, because
that's the only thing I've been able to do where I'll bring
these stories up. And you haven't heard in, which proves
my point, that these stories are not getting out there yet. Some
of these stories were interesting, like the Cambodian
child, but yeah,
it hits CNN. No, actually, me. Yeah, we
that's another thing we we've done over we since the Red Book
began. And actually even before that, people are finally
realizing that we're way ahead of the curve on some of these
stories are way ahead of the curve.
Well, yeah, just look at drones. I mean, I think I don't think it
was in 205 that I can remember, but I know we were talking about
drones as far back as 2010. And it kind of creeps up on you. And
sometimes just gotta remind myself like, man, we've been
talking about this for so long. And we were joking about drones
overhead. Now it's mainstream conversation, just mainstream
conversation.
So let's wrap this one up, give people a heads up on the next
show. And then we hope they'll keep helping us here. Yes, with
the donations to even though we're not live. We are live to
tape, but it's kind of a and we're gonna be back. Let's
interrupt these guys once again, is what we're talking about
earlier in the show. Yeah. Now, this is the end. We've
interrupted ourselves twice here. And anything else? So
there's a couple of things that I suppose we should wrap with.
I'd like to I'd like to talk about how best to interact with
the show with with stories and ideas. And this is this is
really from my end. I don't know you. Yeah, this
hasn't been discussed yet. Yeah. Discuss it occasionally on the
regular show, right.
So when you're when you have a lot of email as an example, I've
tried to do this before, you know, please be descriptive in
your subject line, etc. And please be as short as possible.
And sometimes it's just not possible people have a story, if
you have a story to tell if there's something important if
you have new information, new shit has come to light. All of
that, of course is fine. But again, subject lines are very
important. We think about going through two or 300 emails, you
know, 10 seconds makes a difference in my life. It really
does. So for me, please if you have a link or something that's
just funny, or something you feel is relevant. Tweet it to me
I read every single tweet I probably will not retweet if you
send some something that I'm going to use on the show I will
always favorite it so you know that I've read it. And the
reason why is it's I go down a list and it's Ling Ling Ling
Ling like I don't have to open an email, don't have to go to
the next email don't have to read a whole thing. Just you're
limited to 140 characters is beautiful. If you send it that
way. And the same for John the same thing and also, don't send
the same great idea to both of us. That sucks. Send that to
John or to me. Don't say sending it Both is generally not a good
idea. Because sometimes I think, Oh, well, John will have that.
Or you may think I'm doing it and sometimes you wind up not
even covering it. These are very, very important things and
encryption, if you really, truly
are sending some government guy, you need
to encrypt, because I can promise you anonymity because my
system is set up. So I will know that I won't blow the blow your
cover, but there's going to be copies and there's just stuff
you if you really want to be protected, then learn how to do
encryption. It's not all that hard.
Yeah, and send the encrypted stuff down. Because I, you know,
I more lacks about I don't, and then a lot of time worrying
about it,
many people will send me clips. So they'll have oh, here's four
clips I made. Please don't do that. I appreciate it. But
typically, I'm just winding up, you know, clipping your clips,
if you want to send me a sound file of something that's highly
appreciated, because that saves me a lot of time in recording
something or encoding it or taking it off the web, whatever.
Let me see. So that's yeah, those are probably the only
thing I actually
don't have so much of a problem with the clips to send them to
me. But if you have a long clip, or a reference clip where it
says, Oh, look at this YouTube video do put the time.
Oh, yes, please. Yeah, please tell me where it's real. And
some kind of descriptor like, you'll love this and 54 minutes
20 No, I won't. I don't love that.
Yeah, that sort of thing is not good. Now. It's not helpful.
That's our listen to this. Are
we? You won't believe this. Yeah. And I
don't mind getting the email. But you have to realize I get
more email than Adam. I'm betting I don't think so. I get
over 450 pieces a day? Oh, no, I'm probably about 40 an hour is
what I get. Well, that would be 800. And well, but it does slow
down during certain hours. So we're probably close, not far
from it.
I go through my email. And pretty much I if I look at my
email page right now, like from Zillow says from yesterday, and
there'll be a page of I think there's like 35 on the page, the
way squirrel mail delivers it. Squirrel value squirrel mail,
these 35 entries, and I'd say three, were opened. I do it
based on on subject lines. And person if it's somebody I know
that I have, you know, commonly converse with Yeah, I'll check
theirs out. But I find looked at or read through these. Now you
say why am I why am I opening this or the worst thing that
happens to the email, which is the FIFO problem that we've
discussed on the show? I'll say, Oh, this
is good. We didn't discuss this in 200.5 or six.
We've discussed it on the regular show, which is the last
thing that comes in as the first thing that goes out. And here's
how it works. I get an email. Oh, this is great. I'm gonna
have to do this for the show. Now, if I don't print the email
out, which is do I use a printer? Adam doesn't? If I
don't, because he uses the freedom controller. If I don't
print it out right there. And I say to myself, which I know I
shouldn't do, but I'll do it anyway. I'll get back
to that doesn't happen. Yeah, flagging and all that stuff
never works.
No, it doesn't work. I never get back to because I can't find it.
I saw who sent that. Who sent that? What was the title and now
try to dream up that do searches on subject lines. I can now I
was in it. And it's gone.
Right? Oh, another thing. It is not helpful to if you have a
great like, oh, this document or this legislation. People send
that to me on show day morning. And what happens is of course I
don't have time to dive into it. The Oh, this would be great for
today's show. No it won't because I'm already way way down
the path. There's always room for things but certainly
something I have to read and parse and I like marking up PDFs
no send it to me after the show or a day before not not show
morning. And that's it sad because there's a lot of good
stuff and then I have the same problem. By the time I'm back
around. It's like I don't remember it or you know, I
didn't put it in the right place or just the stuff you get his
stuff
between pacific time anyway. between noon and I'd say five on
Wednesdays and Saturday. That's helpful. Yeah, it has a better
shot. But then I have this Trump because we talked about how we
finish the show. And on show nights where I call show night
which is the night before the show. That's where you
with no sex is that what you call Well,
sex would be better but distracting show night would be
you have your getting your clips organized and thing I get to I
have to go to bed at right after I closed the books at midnight,
right at midnight Pacific time. So if you'd get a donation and
after that doesn't get it goes to the next show. It doesn't go
on and we're pretty strict. Yeah. And so So I closed that I
send all this stuff, I also have to type in all the checks that
came in over $50. So that's like a little, just extra work, which
is fine. Cuz some of the checks are, you know, nice, they got
notes. And it's interesting. So I had to send it all at Eric.
And then that's about done with all that about 1220. And I have
to go to bed because I gotta get up at seven to do the to move
the clips from. And I produced my clips in the morning before
the show, because the clips themselves even though I've
tried, I will put very descriptive stuff and this is
the job put the democracy now and I'll put the name of the
wood who's saying something and what were they're talking about,
I try to put it all in there. But 90% of the time, I can't get
it all in there. And because it's too long of a file name.
And so what I do I do the clips in the morning before the show,
I produce them, so I can remember them. So when I look at
the clips, right 20 clips, and I just I just produced them like
an hour earlier. Yeah, I can look at the clip and say, I know
that I just heard it.
I have the same thing. I that's the last thing I do. Before we
start the show is I organized the clips into little folders,
my clips, your clips are always in one folder. And that's the
only way I can remember them. Otherwise, if it's done too far
in advance now that I won't remember either one. What the
hell was that?
Yeah, like sometimes I'll carry a clip over for a week. On the
next show, and I won't know what it was. It says bear is that
what is that? Something that I really knew what that meant?
Three days ago, but now I don't know what it means. Hey, I want
to thank Eric
the shill. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Sorry.
Yeah, he he does all the rings and stuff. And he's customer
support, I guess would be what we'd call he's good at that.
He's really good. And I want to thank Mimi, who makes sure that
that we're all on the straight and narrow. Yeah, she does that.
And that's it. That's that's the whole no agenda. Things. Well,
the producers of course, the PL supporters
are grand dukes, we got time.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
Pals. mocker and holy holy moly, yeah. No, I'm not going to do
that. And but everyone, all the people who are students of this
people on you know, fixed income social wider range
of producers or listeners I have to say it's astonishes me that's
the most interesting thing is the number of the range that we
have of listeners, the demo is out of control. There's no way
you can isolate the demo. We could
we couldn't even sell this to an advertiser. Demos all over the
map. We don't know what they're gonna sell Mars bars or
geriatric underwear. We're not sure what we're supposed to sell
on your show
pablum. Exactly. You have no idea. I mean, I think it's great
to have a wide variety because that way our input we get a lot
of input. The input is from a wide variety of people. We have
people in the government we have people in intelligence, we have
people in the military, we have steel workers, we have dance,
things we talked about on the on the 200.5 show, which I wanted
to mention is that we were lamenting some of the people
that we had, you know who was the was the oldest show is
knighthoods random a rundown and we're trying well we need
lawyers and we need to put yours we'd like to have a butcher
listening we have at this point years later, five years later
that show we have all those all of them. Yeah, we have a knight
who's a butcher, we have a knight who's a dentist we have
plenty of doctors who are nice we have plenty of lawyers, we
have professors, we have professors we have again
military men, we have entrepreneurs, so everybody's on
board and we try to do the best we can to keep everybody
entertained as best we can I think we do a good job
I think so. If not we wouldn't be the show would be over
yes and that could happen if you know support if we lose our way
or we lose our it would be our fault Yeah, I agree. Something
would change and everyone rushed all this new show these guys are
doing dumb agenda dump agenda I've never heard a dumb agenda
heard of no agenda but not dumb agenda all dumb agenda so much
bad much bad listed as no. Yeah, really? It happened?
Yes, I'm cognizant of it every single every single show I'm
always happy that we get to do another one.
Right. And that just determined on a weekly basis and it
actually a twice weekly basis. And it depends on your help your
donations and your support to direct.org/and Eight It'd be my
last plug for that. And
the newsletter, I will say is of extreme important importance to
the show which you do all that and that is your science. Your
you really work very hard on getting people to open the
newsletter. Yeah, that was a challenge. And I encourage
everyone I've started moving the signup link to the top of the
show notes right on the homepage, sign up for the
newsletter there and then make sure that if you're on Gmail
they'll make the probably in the promotions tab or yeah always
shows
up in the promotions tab will show up in spam once in a while
because these guys don't care about
you know, at all. And that is the bottom line. This is your
show. You produce it. This how it works. I can't say now the
way people are producing weed. Yeah, we have the the final
production, we put it all together, we try to lead you
into places where we think it'll be interesting. That's what we
do. But it really is. It's, I hate the word, but it's a
community.
Yeah, you don't hate that word, you're full of it.
It's like one of those words as a good word. Okay, it's a
community. And everyone's a part of it. And I'm like, everyone's
a part of it. And they, we this next, over the next year or so
we're going to try to create the more meetups so people can have
their little get togethers because it turns out, and we've
both witnessed this is that if you're out with the no agenda
community in anywhere from Michigan, to Tennessee, to
wherever, and there's an AI of Moscow, Moscow, you, if you have
them gather, a few of them gather together, and they all
like each other. Yeah, it's like it's like a social thing.
Because anyone who listens to no agenda will have a certain take
on the world. And that take on the world affects your
personality, and just the way that other people who listen to
no agenda usually end up liking each other. So it's a, we could
create a lot of long lasting friendships, if we put a little
more effort into that part of it. And I think we're going to
attempt to do more. And
certainly I plan to be on the road. In the in the coming fall.
I plan I still want to do my trip to the Sacramento train
museum on the Amtrak
beat up nice, great, everybody gets
on the train, they chunk it up to Sacramento. And we all go to
the train museum, look around, meet up having lunch in
Sacramento and then jump on the train and go back or stay there
where anyone wants to do I think it'd be fantastic. trains,
planes ban. We think of everyone from from San Jose, up through
the peninsula through San Francisco and on
nice. Well, I think I think we I think we did it.
I think so play us out my stroke. Yes.
I said this is another one of those things on the board. For
the Oh, yes, of course. For those of you who have the
opportunity to listen to the show live has its own merit and
is interesting, certainly if you're in the chat room, and not
not everybody knows that probably half an hour before we
start live. There's a pre stream and you know, play songs and
some of those sometimes even things we'll be playing in the
show itself, we've got some longer jingles or things that
have been sent in and it's a it's kind of a for me,
personally, I like it to get all kind of hyped up and pumped up.
That's right, pumped up and ready for the show. Okay, so the
next program that'll be your two interviews with Scully and how
did you say hail apples and John Sculley?
I didn't dream up hail Apple until after I did that
interview. It's too bad. It's too I went to the Apple store
locally here though. And I got recognized by two or three of
these Apple guys, and I brought up the hail apple. Did they like
it? They didn't get it?
Well, I'll say hail apple. John. I've
raised my arm. Hail Apple to you. Coming to you from the
crackpot condo here in FEMA Region six in downtown Austin,
Texas in the morning, everybody. I'm Adam curry
and from Northern Silicon Valley, where I remain I'm John
C. Dvorak. We'll be
back with the interview show next week on 737 Adios mofos