Do you like you're ready?
I'm ready. I'm ready. I was born ready.
Let's do it. Adam curry,
John C. Dvorak.
It's Thursday, August 11 2016. This is your award winning give
donation media assassination episode 850. This is no agenda.
Sitting in a jersey fleabag motel and broadcasting almost
live from the Garden State here in FEMA Region three in the
morning, everybody. I'm Adam curry,
and from Northern Silicon Valley where I remain from John C.
Dvorak.
Hey, I'm hitting it, but it's not go.
Buzzkill.
I think we keep it don't do a thing was great.
Yeah, probably okay. It's just we're still talking. Yeah,
throwback
to the good old days when conductivity was crap. And
today's not that much better. Really? Well, you're sounding
reason,
a little better. In fact, let's explain what we're up to here.
Because you say you said you preface the show with your lead
in by saying almost live.
That's right. We are not live at this moment. For this particular
program. I am on a brief vacation. John, you were on a
brief vacation one show. That's about all we do.
Yeah, we wash it once in a while. And I think this is a
number of years ago, we did two
in a row. And we could also just do a show right now. And it
would be very simple. It would be everyone hates Donald Trump.
And that was the show. Goodbye,
everybody. Yeah, everyone hates Donald Trump.
So this is one of these shows that we'd like to put together
from time to time we've been doing it since episode 200
became 200.5. And the most recent one we did, for some
reason became 200. No, no, it was a progression. So 200.7 That
was almost a year ago, a little over a year ago.
Right. And that was after 2.6 which is about three a year
three years earlier or something like that. Yeah, we did three of
these. Yeah, and on the last one I will and you'll hear it
because you're gonna hear this this show this
we we've kind of stack them on top of each other and yeah, it
is like an onion. Exactly.
And what you're gonna hear is us promising show to never do this
again.
To do another 200.5 from scratch because what you have is a shirt
older and older progression and show 200.5 is an old that's a
long time ago that's a 600
shows ago and the quality was so different.
The quality was mediocre and I have to say this I didn't notice
this the first time or the second time we were pretty show
200.5 which is going to be reprises for a third time. You
had you had us I don't know what mic you were using but it was
crap. And compared to the road that you have now. Yeah. Also, I
was listening on a pop and like a son of a bitch. There's lots
of stuff wrong with that pop pop pop,
you know there was always my quest from now going on in my
11th year to create a very small all digital portable system that
you could pretty much run off of your laptop anywhere. And I
think after 200.5 Somewhere in the three hundreds I'd said
screw it and I just got the whole huge bunch of outboard
gear which was completely not portable, but it sounded better
and and then we were just doing trips again and we decided to
try it on all digital and at one point I because yeah, you have
to listen to the sound you have to monitor the final signal
otherwise you have to what a lot of people do is go back and they
add compression and all these things after the fact that it
never works out though that well but in order to do that back in
the day I think I explained it into 200.7 is I actually had
like a like a half second delay on my headphones when I was
doing the show
which was what you're driving me nuts Yeah, it's
well you don't use headphones at all so you know exactly
and I'm not gonna be deaf like all these other guys.
So the quality is decent today although I don't know for some
reason the dongle is is crunching a little bit here and
there. But as I was listening last night I also heard us say
hello to us from the future. That was kind of fun. I was
listening to the show in the
past I wanted to be the first to say hello hello to the US in the
next future. Yes okay. Do your Adele Hello my friend in the
future. I
came on the other day and before the song really kicks in She
sounds just like you. It's uncanny. Hello now the real the
read the reason we like to do these shows and the reason why I
think the stacking is okay in this case is there's so many
things that newcomers really don't have a grasp on things we
talk about things we say the Genesis even of in the morning
we show here coming up. Here's I wrote down a couple of things.
It has taken some people who I know a long time to understand
what an evergreen is. And we just say offhandedly. Oh it's an
evergreen Yeah, but it's not that apparent everybody
know, we make that mistake a lot. I think people if you get
if you're in some industry, you start using the kind of the
inside chatter the inside, right phrases, the inside stuff like
it when the newspapers if you write a newspaper or magazine,
there's a thing called the lead the beginning of the whatever
you're writing is the lead, right? But you don't realize 90%
of the time, you won't realize that. That's actually spelled L
e, d e, a lot of people don't know that. And that's done.
Because why would you do that? Once you call it, what it is, is
a lead le ad. Now you do everything they have like graph
as gra F, everything that you have those kinds of words are
all misspelled on purpose. So they don't end up in the copy.
Oh, is that the reason why I didn't know that? Yeah, because
you
want you want to make sure. That's why everything is
completely misspelled that this is one of these insights they
go, you got to do this, you got to do that is all everything's
always misspelled. So it draws attention to Oh, God, this good
stuff was slipped into the copy. If you put Well, this is a
pretty good lead. Somebody could see that and say, Oh, that must
be the first sentence.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
And so that's just a bit draw attention to itself.
Another word.
I'm sorry. Sorry, no, you're gonna say something.
Another term that we use is ISO. And if you just roll into that,
what the hell is an ISO? And I remember the first time I heard
the word I saw, I was 19. I just started my television career in
the Netherlands. And it was in Dutch. So what the hell is and
so as I as Oh, which is the short for isolated? And then and
you know, when you're working in the business, then you any I
didn't want to ask I mean, I remember asking what the
director did I really remember that. So what happened is the
director do except yell at everybody in the control room is
he but I saw directors that I saw was typically, well, we're
the way I learned is a camera that is switched in the main
switching system, but also has a recorder running all the time.
So you have an isolated recording from that particular
unit. And
actually, when you look at it, it means a lot of different
things, but it doesn't mean isolated or isolation. And we
use it. Yeah, I use it just for a little clips of clips. Yeah.
Yeah, standalone is
more it's more like a standalone things when we when we say I'm
gonna see maybe I have an example of one that I can pull
you probably
have other little phrases we shouldn't be using. So
here's here's an example of an ISO take them out now. Elizabeth
Warren, take them out now. So that's an ISO but comes from a
longer clip and we isolate a particular bit so I made a
mistake. That happens a truce. I'm human. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's my favorite of the moment. That is a good one
proves me human proves I'm human. doesn't prove anything.
From one year ago, there are a couple things that are
different. First of all,
your comedic timing, and I don't know if that's a matter of just
the the gear that we're using that we hear each other better.
And the timing is better. And I guess we have low latency,
pretty low latency on the Skype, your comedic timing has gotten
impeccable. With your, your little your little one liners,
and
I heard new ones that I hadn't heard the third time I heard
this show.
Oh my god, you throw things in there. They're usually pretty
off color. Yes.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
There's something there's something that I wanted to bring
up. And that is the chat room and and on the last note two
shows ago on 848. I quit the chat room and I just wanted to
explain exactly how the chat room works for me, who is pretty
much producing the technical end of the show. And you don't look
at the chat room and that that's that's good. Actually, I think
that's a good thing. That when we have
because like that way I can react with the chat room as a
third party, an outsider, right. But Chatham do this and that and
I'm actually curious going
so when I'm producing the show, I have my hands full. I got you
know, I'm looking for clips and I'm listening to you which is of
course why often don't hear your fantastic comedic zingers they
are zingers I got my foot on the on the mute switch in case Oh,
that's
right. You're still like the one man band I am from top to tail
between your legs and your thighs and you can squeeze every
so often.
So on my screen I have a number of things. I have alerts if if
certain emails come through because people do respond in
real time. I have a back channel chat room window open which is a
little bit off to the side. And that's in, you know, if we have
technical issues, that's where void zero and mountain vortex
are sitting in there. And they and so when I have that when I
say the chat room, it's pretty much just an IRC client running
in a terminal window. So it's just scrolling by, and there's
some highlights, you know, some text is highlighted, like a
person's handled, etc. And, of course, when someone also says
something directly to me in the chat room, then that highlights,
so it's integrated into everything I do. And this stems
from, I think, I was thinking about why, why am I able to do
this, you know, like, I just pick things out to see the
scrolling by all the time, and sometimes there's something
really good in there, and I'm able to pick it out. And I
realize it stems back to that must have been 10. And I was
talking to Uncle Don, who, of course, you know, famous CIA guy
went along as an ambassador, and all kinds of stuff. And we've
talked about him many times on the show. And he told me, I
remember him telling me a story about a group of guys that he
worked with. And he I don't know, even if I even knew what
he was talking about CIA at the time was so young. But I recall
very distinctly saying we had these guys who were very good at
neural network recognition, I think that's the term he used.
And what that meant was, he had there were guys who could look
at a map, an aerial map, and because of their neural ability,
they could see patterns and say, Oh, that looks like a covered up
airbase are that looks like they had that capability. And maybe
that stuck in my brain, because I have this capability to pull
things out. Sadly, I also pull the things out that are shit,
that really pissed me off, when I really don't need it. So my
point is, the chat room truly is integrated into everything we
do, at least from from my side. And if if the signal to noise is
off than then then it messes with my head, I can't do it. So
it's important for people to understand that when you're in
the chat room, and you hear everyone's chatting around and
making jokes, and sometimes these jokes are funny, we bring
up punch lines in the chat room all the time. But often, you
know, when no one says Oh, what was it the other day like? Oh,
someone better try that conversion therapy on Curry's
daughter. It's like, I didn't need it at that moment. So I
know when Yeah, what's his? What was it the other day like, Oh,
someone better try that conversion therapy on Curry's
daughter. It's like, I didn't need it at that moment. So I
gotta get
to the trigger point was when somebody says whatever it is,
he's always they're always defending Trump.
That was the right that was the Well, that was both on the last
show. And speaking of which, and this is the main versus is the
main you
didn't bring that up as you go on. Sorry.
The main difference was we
along with we have a latency problem today? Yeah, it's a
shame. Yeah, I'm going to fix it
for the next show. The difference between the last time
we did one of these shows and this one is really, Donald Trump
for the show. And the irony of what is happening is here is a
presidential candidate who is now really a candidate general
candidate. And who continuously from day one has said the media
is dishonest, mainstream media sucks. They lie. They're no
good. We do our job at deconstructing what the media is
doing. And a lot of it I look at the TV's like, you can play the
game, switch the channel. And if within 30 seconds, they don't
say Trump then never watch the channel again. Because if it
doesn't happen, it's always it's all Trump all that everyone's
talking about Trump. So there's a lot of work for us to do. We
don't we don't investigate. We're not necessarily
journalist. we deconstruct media. It's how we open the show
every single time. And the irony is that here's the guy saying
the media is dishonest. We show how dishonest the media is, and
we get penalized. We literally get financially penalized
because people think we're big Trump defenders. And I received
a note from Professor Dave kings, one of our longtime
contributors, and I thought I'd read it to you I think it's kind
of funny. You're ready. Yeah, I'm there. Hey there crackpot
and buzzkill I don't know why it took me so long but now I
figured it out. It is so blatantly obvious what you two
are doing. The no agenda podcast is a three letter US government
agency production. Yes, it's obvious. Twice a week view and
John are furnished with nicely produced pre edited clips in
order to spread misinformation to the public and keep them
confused. This is why you can say anything you want and not
get in trouble because it is already government sanctioned
propaganda or disinformation. I've been in the music
production business for 46 years. I know how difficult
difficult it is to record random clips from various sources and
perfectly edit them. Adam, this would be impossible for you to
achieve twice a week by yourself. John would definitely
be hopeless at doing it. You guys don't Sit around
meticulously cutting those clips together 24/7 In order to play
them on the show. Now the clips are all pre prepared and pre
edited, accompanied by text for both of you to read period.
These clips are prepared and furnished to you by the US
government. This also helps propagate the idea that America
is some kind of free country that allows anybody to say
anything he or she wants. Definitely bullshit. And you
know what, after having lived in Holland for a few years now,
you're all of a sudden a flag waving American patriot. It's
really noticeable when you're breaking down the clip, you're
reading a breakdown that has pre has been pre written and
prepared for you. After 849 shows you do a fairly good job
of making it seem spontaneous. But as Lincoln once said, You
can fool all the people all of the time. Well, you can't you
guys don't sit around 24/7 monitoring all the world's media
the US government does it. Your silly jingles karma knighting
and birthday wishes are included to make the show appear more
homemade. Adam, this is most likely the only work that you
really do. That's why you always defend playing your stupid
repetitive jingles. As this is your only real contribution to
the show. Is this the best you have to offer. It's really
pathetic. Logically, nobody in the right mind would donate
money to the show. The donation letters are obviously pre
written and pre written as well. Nobody can prove or disprove
them. But the real donations and salary you guys receive
certainly comes from the US government. Of course, you will
refute all of this and typical Adam curry fourth grader
fashion, but I don't care what you say. As it is so obvious
that you guys are doing you are just two shields working for the
US government. This is also why you have never had live
interviews on the show with real people like President Obama and
Marc Maron, for example. You couldn't let somebody else come
in and possibly gum up the works besides they might see that you
guys are the really up to best podcast in the universe my ass.
They could have made that gag a little shorter. Yeah, I could
have come on. But that's the way i i wish that would be ideal.
Yeah, right. That's what I was thinking.
Yeah, government check and the whole show handed to you on a
silver platter. We have to do any clips or anything. It'd be
fantastic.
We have about I looked at the past year. And we're at about 50
clips a show average.
That's I'm trying to I'm trying to cut back I really ideally, I
did on the last show. I had my ideal number of electors I
noticed that 12 back I thought it was when I when I first
started doing clips. I did too.
That's right. That's right. You had one or two clips. I remember
I did a couple of clips and I did I did clips probably for
about a month before you started doing clips. Yeah, it that it
was an evolution we haven't talked about but the clips were
not part of the show idea. And but we as we transferred over to
and if you listen to the boat you're gonna we're gonna play
after we're done with a little spiel even in I think show in
the original show 200.5 We talked about how we're kind of
moving toward media deconstruction, I don't think we
really hit our stride until that oil pipeline show. Yeah, and it
probably in the three hundreds of four hundreds I think we're
on the show 400 Perhaps we started becoming serious media
deconstructors And that required more and more clips and to the
point where where every once in a while. And it's happened a
couple of shows ago after these conventions these conventions
were brutal how were we hit? That's when we had like 50 clips
50 clips, it's not pot this too many clips because we cannot if
you listen to those those shows after the convention you hear a
lot of words this clip. I don't know. I don't know. I'm gonna
see if I can find it. Well, I don't see it on here. I don't
see well. Oh, I Oh, here it is. Here it is. Here it is. I
misspelled a word. Oh, yeah. Well, it's not
bad. It's not that Oh, yes. It's not horrible.
You think? Oh, no, it was not every time. I'm just saying it
happens too much. And after that convention, I mean, especially
the second one. Yeah, I get a biggest kick out of the second
convention. We've had just the craziest stuff. I think we got
more out of the second one than the first one because its first
one was kind of I thought was kind of boring. mediocre. Not a
good television event, really. But the second one was dynamite
for finding clips. Meanwhile, that woman who does full frontal
Samantha Bee Yeah, she's a she's a Republican hater to an
extreme. And she's very funny. And she's she's structures gags
very well. She's got this show called Full Frontal. I can't
barely get through it because it's really laden with hate. And
so she did the Republican convention. And you know, it's
all is Trump, Trump, Trump. And then she comes in as the
Democratic Convention is going on. She's on the, in the studios
that as soon as the studio are at the convention, it's Now for
PBS NewsHour, they actually have the booth right in the
convention hall. And she comes in and she says, Oh is a gold
mine. This was as this thing was wrapping up to the Trump
convention was a gold mine is hilarious. Everything was funny.
Just you know, I can't get anything from this convention
has nothing. Very funny. How's that possible? That's an
analyst. Holy crap. How all in Are you? Yeah, usually there's a
comic you're supposed to is finding humor and everything is,
comics should not be.
Comics are comedians. She's a comedian or comic is she? What
is she?
Okay, she is sort of synonymous in business now. Okay. But most
of themselves, they call themselves comics, generally
speaking. And Mimi used to produce comedy. We know a lot of
comedians. That's why I asked you, as the acid comedians
there, because it actually sounded better. I don't know
why. But yeah, I just flipped back and forth between the two
terms. But she's a common comedian, whatever. I think
she's I think she's hilarious. But she's really got a lot of
hate. And it's very It hurts her show. Yeah. And you see this
with even Bill Maher. He has this kind of he has hate that is
kind of I think it's a kind of a gimmick, in some ways, because
he gets all worked up about certain specific things. And
Muslims is he hates Muslims.
Yeah. Why he hates religion in general.
A right his religion in general, he's a hater. I don't know where
it's going.
I'm not sure where you were going with that. But
that was gone that we're getting too many clips from the SEC.
There's just the opposite.
But there's something else that happened is throughout the past
couple of years. And I think you're right around that
pipeline episode. And that is true. That's four years ago,
almost five years ago. Yeah. Oh, my goodness.
That was a seminal presentation.
What also has increased is just the pure availability of
televised segments online, which makes it easier for me, say that
the TV and you're always recording off the TV, I did a
lot of that during the conventions. But it's much
easier when it when possible to say Ah, okay, that's great, I
gotta get that clip, write it down, go back, find the program.
And then it's, you know, it's on YouTube. Or it's, you can always
find something somewhere and then clip it from that, which is
so much easier, then you have a link for the show notes. I like
providing that as well, instead of like for your clips, we never
really have a link because you're getting right off TV and
they're not available online. And so that has changed and just
the pure availability. And our producers, our producers have
really hit their stride they've hit their stride with making
little packages and clips and and and really the no agenda
thinking that has dramatically improved the the product.
There's a lot of, you know, agenda thinking is out there far
enough that a lot of the clips are brought in to your Twitter
and to the feeds. And so you can go just to follow your own
Twitter feed, you can get a bunch, you can get two or three
clips from the digital read here. This is a lot, of course,
heard already done on the previous show. Because we are
pretty up to date with stuff that we present. But it's very
handy. Very Yeah, I can when I'm just sometimes if I'm traveling,
I have to rely on YouTube and some other things to get clips
because I don't really have any way of hooking up to the TV in
the hotel, right. And there's no DVR so it wouldn't do me any
good if I did right, right. So
and I'll point out, I'll point out that when we're traveling
like I am today, I'm in New Jersey to hang out with some
friends who I haven't seen for 26 years. It's although I have
to work on the connection, but in general, we can do it from
anywhere. And we do we don't
we try not to skip anything. Try to stay on top of everything and
bring you an outstanding product.
Now I have a bunch of note that I think we can probably do after
we play this 200 points seven which incorporates 200.5 and
2.6. A's last Rice's gone. 26 was lost in the shuffle. To
enterprise six was what we did with 20.7, which I think was
probably a mistake, instead of incorporating to 200 point I
think there's a reason for there's something in 2.6 That
was not it wasn't interesting, or it was dated or wasn't,
wasn't a good analysis. So we've got 2.7 coming in. And 20.7
Plays 2.5 which is the original and use after remember that this
was the introductory show. So if we if you wanted to get somebody
into no agenda, they don't get it. There's all this noise and
they keep saying in the morning
and the
2.5 was done to explain get you up to speed Need to enter point
six and then and then subsequently to enter point
seven was to correct. The eight the old material that was in
2.5. This all been it's been kicked out of the show, there's
a lot of stuff that's changed. We don't do everything that we
that was talked about in 2.5 anymore, we decided for one
reason or another that, you know, the, we explained a couple
of things that 2.7 What we've dropped. But this show that what
we're doing now is just doing a point eight is going to make
another group of corrections that we will do that at the end
of the onion that we're about to play. So we're going to start to
enter point seven, which will segue into tuner point five,
which segues out a tuner point five, twice, actually, because
it does it in the middle once and it goes back into the show.
And then because we're not going to do another middle, middle,
it's fine. We count more middle. So the show comes out. And we'll
make a noise and then boom, we're going to talk about what
maybe should be noted. That's changed yet again. It was in the
last year.
All right. All right. So I would say let's get ready to go into
the 200.7 show.
Adam curry, John C. Dvorak.
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.
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. 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.
We're done at once, before or twice before, we did a show
called 2.5, which was kind of an introduction to people to the
show. I had that don't get a lot of the memes and the noises and
the things that we do and some of the history of the show. Then
we Redux the show we did it again. Two years
later, which was around 435. I think you're
in the four hundreds and, and we didn't do it since and we're
almost in the 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 any we had people ask us questions, we
couldn't really answer many of them. We had a lot of theories.
And we never discussed much about the show being performance
art, which 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
really 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 into the cup,
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 Morning things that that?
Well, what I heard was a lot of fact of the matter. Exactly.
Yeah. No essential, 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, yeah. No all over the
place, essentially, actually, what I write down here, whatever
the case,
whatever the case, end of the day,
oh, man, the fact of the matter. So does this mean we've gotten
better or are we just anal?
I think we're more cognizant, I think it's self awareness. I
think that's what's important. But I think 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, it's 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 and 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 know, well, I'll tell you, I'll
say what I noticed. Another thing is audio quality,
be a different form as of 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,
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, know that cutouts,
the cutouts, I will recon commonly had 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.
Oh, right. Right. Right. Right. And lots of dropouts. Yep. 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 of 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
headphones. So I could monitor in real time what was happening,
because we record 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 had 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
show up on the show, but I don't use headphones.
The reason why I was well first of all I'm still fascinated by
it because it's just not a typical radio thing. I don't
think
that again, I'll use the anecdote a guy in Vancouver used
to do that on the air. Vancouver. Nuff said. 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 in the show. I don't
know if I have that let me see
turned turned down your speakers which was annoying yeah jarring
and it was I banned it here it is down your speaker that was
you
know, that's Michael Butler. Yeah.
But you so 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 MRT o boxes 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 box. This new one I can't remember that doesn't
just says MIT I want to see if it's got a model number. It's
the m track something or other. The other ones M track two but
there's a two channel black is really pretty. And I don't know
that it works perfectly but it does work, I think. And
it's fantastic. It sounds good. But you're also you're the
you're the mic man you Have 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. Anyway, 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? That's exactly what the show. Right. Right. So
he's just pulling that. And then the mid break, which answers
questions. Unfortunately, the questions and the answers are
dated. Yeah, agreed. There's a couple of things in there that
are okay. But I and I may drop them in when I edit this thing.
But 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 going to have the the original ending, which is
the tuner point five 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, they may or may not be, you know,
one more thing that that. And that partially has to do with
the setup. And, you know, we've really, we've improved a lot of
the technical pieces, a lot of that is just Moore's law, you
know, computers will 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 him 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
why old wives gossip, you know, whatever.
This show had some issues. We talk about that always, which is
what we're supposed to do. But we ended up gossip
and we end up gossiping. I always listen to the show. And
and to this day still 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 ideas 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 they don't I think I
missed one thing recently we're in New grouse that
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 line good clips from one liners in
something funny. And I missed the whole thing. I didn't even
get to why I like to watch the red carpet thing. It's very
one of these days, we're going to do live commentaries.
We're never going to we never know. Probably not.
But 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, where most
people if they're interviewing somebody, we're not interviewing
each other, but we're having a conversation.
Well, we make clips from people that 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 say 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 under point five that AI is so
distracting to me because I just end up reading what they have to
say instead of doing the show,
right? Well, yeah, it is distracting and I read something
and then Yeah, that I just didn't 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 then 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 the buzzer used to use that. That submarine
dive sound. Wah wah wah, wah.
I don't know if I have that.
I don't think you I don't think was the buzzer for that.
I think we've also we banded lost a lot of clips. No, we
haven't really lost a lot of them. Well, they're
a lot. They're not technically lost. They're like stuff in my
archives.
I have no idea what that sound effect was. Well, it's not
important. It was
something it was a whoop or something. It was one of those
military sounding things.
I don't know what it was. All right, fine. All right. Well,
let's just start with the show. 200.5, which is the introduction
show for people who don't know the history of the show. We try
to discuss the history and then there's a break and when we
would get to the break point, we'll come back and 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 crackpot command center and get my 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 wish to 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 should
immediately note, we actually had the debate as to whether
we're going to play the opening.
We it's kind of sad that we didn't put the debate on the
backstage show. This is kind of where we Yeah, I think on this
show, which is driven by support from our producers, slash donors
supporters, where we kind of bear 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
facts, we make it look easy.
And also a lot of this personal stuff that they're asking,
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 NBC 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 that show while we're doing this
show,
here, but I think we started this show. Yeah. But I'd only
done a couple like a week or two. And then we started doing
this show, right? I was doing that first was No, no, I think
you were fired during fire during 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, because 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've personally 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'm actually went off on some tangent and I
said, Dude, I'm so baked.
Yeah. But yeah, I do remember that the
personality. Yeah. 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, 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 we met at, I guess, what did we
meet John was on crack 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 think was three? Yeah, and I and I'm
gonna get one of those VHS to DVR things to transcode all 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 all right. 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 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 some ways Hollywood,
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 torque 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 of being a kind of a
clownish co host with a Gina St. John. Oh,
yeah. Well, they offered me to move out to San Francisco and be
there full time. And they offered like really low salary,
but 2 million shares of stock and I declined.
Yeah, well, that was an error.
Well, who knows what, you know, I
was like, Well, yeah, no, it's a crapshoot. I did the same thing.
I said, 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
wasn't wasn't it a yes. And that was nice. But wasn't it a wasn't
a 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 Well, we I we did some
an email exchange. And I said let's go have lunch or
something. We had 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. 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 not. 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. But anyway, 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 him 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 were 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 gotta tell 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 like a casual conversation, just like a
conversation.
Yeah, and this was, in my opinion, I've always felt that a
two guys is an interesting conversation between two people
is interesting to everybody. And I've always believed I could
sell conversations I have with my wife. And I always felt that
a good conversational show where there's not a lot of rehearsal
or for preparation, but just guys, we're 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
it's 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 I think about
making money doing no agenda. Yeah, we had absolutely no
agenda. And I was just happy that someone would listen to my
bullshit. Like, hey, here's a guy who actually knows more than
me, because he's been around longer for sure. And, and, and
will listen to some of the things 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. Now, 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, this,
this is 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 to computer test you to
either answer a million questions, it was like an MMPI,
or Minnesota multi phase Personality Inventory that
people take in some companies. It's actually illegal tests, you
shouldn't be forced to take it. But it can tell whether you're a
psycho and all these other things. And this was to
determine what your what your career path should be. And I
took the test a couple of times, and it was the weirdest thing to
get back at the top of a career path. This is telling you, this
is what you should go be doing. Critic.
Really? Yeah. That's awesome. That's really good. I like that.
So anyway, so yeah, we've got that thing. We when we started,
there's a couple, 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, you can find
that 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.
There were some reason because I think we're starting to show
we're starting to get blogs get long 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 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 fancy say, You should do the show by
yourself. You should get rid of curry and get to the head man.
And I can begin 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. Either way, I have never no conversation, no
pace and flow.
I've never received never received an email of someone
saying your bit of divorce, like ever.
I've seen I have seen to get rid of divorce. I mean, on Twitter,
on Twitter, and I've seen it here and
I've never seen I've never seen it and
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 radio guys at heart. I think we're you
know, and I know I am. And I grew up and Radio Television was
more like a sidetrack for me. I never felt like, too tall. I'm
too lanky. I'm too geeky. I have Tourette's there's a whole bunch
of stuff that would make me not ideal for television. My head
isn't big enough to be really successful. No about that. You
gotta you gotta 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 and
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 in Ray, 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 where 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 done double blind studies over and over again, and
it kept coming up. If you take a group of people and have them
watch a TV show with shitty sound, and then have them
compare, and then show another TV show with really great sound
like Dolby 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 nut,
although I've had a lot of trouble 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. Oh, yes, I
do. So you know, we have compression. I put noise gates
on because I don't want to hit when I when either I'm talking
or 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 you might
hear stuff. You've run 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, I know 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 have 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. So 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 rare to do these
kinds of partnerships. Somebody else who asked a question, let
me go to this one. Who is 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 will never hit that at
the same moment,
though. But that would have been funny on stage. So
yeah, 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 starting the clips,
I'm starting to think myself but so it's not that somebody has to
produce you can't have two producers no socket
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, 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 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 is always nice art and it's you know, 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 guy. It's gonna 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'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. Two
minutes this oh that's the Hulu the Hulu preroll What's your
favorites anytime for free Hulu everybody it's
rainy 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 morning 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 winnings. catchphrase.
Day No, fine.
I think we have a wiener and that's Dickey the punch line
down Do 97.1 to key the
punch line on. On 97 point
97
It's one of the greatest moments in Family Guy history, it really
is.
And you know, they produced all of that stuff and they must have
had a ball because it really was like that in the 90s in the 80s.
And the 90s 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 serving 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 said 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 in the
morning thing is used as a as a rimshot. Generally, or should be
and it is often so I say something funny, which is very
common on the show, and then he hits the
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 it
jars you for a moment there
and if you listen to our last show, show 200 Adam was going
off the deep end on some topic a good kept tie was way at least
two three minutes overdue to stop it and I told him to play
the Adam Curry's pet peeve of the day jingle which I knew what
transition it would do it 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 hears 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 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
the 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 and there's the other time today 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 is 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 there are 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 and on television.
You know, that may have been triggered by the weenie in the
bud episode. Probably the Family Guy because once we start once
we can start mocking that model we still are looking at the
media bitching about it generally, on a higher plane I
believe than the 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 gonna
have a job at Goldman Sachs, and you're there till, you know,
seven at night, and you have to get in early or whatever. And
then you have to drink all day, which seems to be what the job
is about. strippers, you know, what 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 even
recall you saying, Okay, I've got to switch this around. I've
got cranky geeks on Wednesday. I mean, this is when we started to
really integrate 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. And 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.
It's a very valuable resource. And you know, the thing is on
the weekend, they have this what I really like, and I like the
regular C span, but on the weekend of 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 them down with a guy who really
is a good conversationalist, or sometimes somebody that's in
their same field of study. And they talk to him for an hour or
more, usually an hour, and it's 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. And 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
wait, 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, a text message saying dude, C span three now.
Right? And then we'll both sit down and watch something at the
same time. Does that happen to me that I've been in the car,
and I get like a C span to now like, oh crap, but I'd love to
have 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
this show that we're gonna get so heavily embedded into current
events to this extremely 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 did 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 in 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.
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 wind tip once in a while, which I can
still do. Or there's some observations we made about the
trends in food. That's Firewatch, which is now
different than me complaining in 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 him 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 always, 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
could 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 did
those dickheads who are clearly shills not all and all the time,
but why did they get away with this? And why did 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 they ban public broadcasting also has the the
issue with the fact that they have commercials and we played
you know, we really played up a couple of clips that we
developed, we found about, you know, the admitting that they're
under right, 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 difference 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 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 when we
start 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 as 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 a model. It's very difficult to put your finger on
a spot. I mean, I could 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. And 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, 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 know, 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 back to 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 directs 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. It's 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 as 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
though, 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 the sermon, you don't have 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, where by the way, we hate commercials, I've
always hated commercials. I hate
that's where the DVR is such a godsend. No,
but I mean, just even as a creative as a creator of
content, or like, you know, I got it. I got to hit the
commercial break. I gotta wait for the commercial. Yeah.
Terribly. You got us interrupt your flow. Watch one of these
shows anyone listening to this on Fox or in places 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. And 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, it's got
over it pretty quickly. It's easy sailing, you know, it's
like hey,
I had some pushback from the family like and I won't say who
but they know who they are. How can you bring yourself to
begging for money for this? How can you do that 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? The 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, it's
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 this.
So don't 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 get anything out of it, you get something out of it, you
know, contribute. I mean, just the way he was just 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, them just be boring.
I remember somebody sent us a link. So well, there's a couple
of 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 to 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.
Well, so 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 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 minutes. Our pledge
asks on Twitter, Mr. Dvorak, 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 wanted to moderate 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 the 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 they
take. 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 was 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. My concept was if I could if
somebody read my column, and they're, and they're working in
a cubicle, and my cut, my column was designed to give them an
edge over the guy in the other cubicle who wasn't reading my
column. And I've always believed that this is 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 that and for me, it's that maybe it
just that this is for, you know, I'll tell you what it is. This
is I think I was born to do this. I think everyone is born
to do something. And it took me a long time with a lot of
detours. And I've been counting down the hits. And I've you
know, I've pretended to run companies with varying degrees
of success but but basically riding 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. 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 our thing. And
he's editing and he's recording stuff. And 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 no way before we
do that, since you brought kinda brought it up. I want to bring
in Simon Smith's question from Twitter, which is 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,
so 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 though 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
I mean, well, that's why 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. The 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 to 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, Oculus, listen to the show, and they hear this
hole in the morning bit. And like, wow, that can't be
anything.
Definitely puts 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 guys is
really well let me hear what let me hear the show and then they
start playing it with that opening. That Greg Levin
Buzzkill. Guy says, Get the hell out of my office you crack
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 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 an
unlikable theory. But that, you know, we shot to track down the
guy who coined crackpot and buzzkill it was an email I got
we mentioned on the next show, he mentioned it and you thought
it was great to be called the crackpot love and so then we our
artwork started to have a crackpot and buzzkill put on it.
So we did just reiterated the whole thing, we
should not 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 guess
technically, if you really looked at it, we do have 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. What, who knows what they do. And they they spend their
time they 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 add. 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 essentially 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 this 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. It's that's a hard choice sometimes.
Yeah, it's amazing. We have and there's other artists waiting in
the wings to contribute on an occasional basis. We have some
tremendous support from these guys. And then, you know, I
asked her set up his own t shirt shop and through I don't know
what mechanism and you know, we you know, 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, you know, extra promotion stuff that involves
leaving a computer.
Or we're gonna 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
common buys 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 let him make it? He went crazy. Wow.
No, no, but I listened. I'm like, Wow, man, you know, you
certainly certainly into in the in the earlier part of the, of
the sequence of shows that he's 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 did a couple of times
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, we'll figure out some how
to wait to put that together shortly. Let's talk talk about a
few of the things that we discussed in the interim that
have changed and one of them was show prep. Okay. You 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 it 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 that is an article
that's interesting, I have a bookmarklet on my phone, and 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 will save
all of that. And what's cool about it is, you know, I set up
all the 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 and our gossip. And
then I'll pretty much I hit publish. And it turns the show
notes of 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 up 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. Are 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 iMac but
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 no text or
something interesting that someone said, and I can go in
and edit out, you know, 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 of that gap 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 organize
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.
Surprise.
I mean, yeah, that's the way
our whole theory. I think we talked about it on 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 this, 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 I think you'd like
working with me is that I am fairly good, 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 wireless. It surprises
people. We we talked about this off the air, about how we do
have a lot of radio people that was
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 drop the
ball occasionally. And something I have to stop the clip because
I didn't set it up completely. And Adams jumped into God. 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 like what
is it but then instead of digital, it'll 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. Never edited 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 S or y So 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 two 200.6 podcasting has seen a resurgence. And so
the mainstream media picks Well, 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 they
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. Just barely mentioned each
other. Oh, PBS has got early, a podcast about about gemstones.
Yeah,
well But the big difference. And this is something that we just
naturally understood and have done from day one, radio or
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 timed. You know, Bo, we're going to talk
this light. 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. You
don't have to worry about hitting a sponsor break. No hard
break, no heartbreaks, no news. If we can go as long as when we
could 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 bored. 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 liked 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 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're done for today.
Your I will talk to you later.
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? So you have to write the
numbers. So you do and there's different styles, you can do 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 add, it's astonishing to do, you can 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 now 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 something well
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 either at the same time
in real time. That said
when we did show 200.5 which people have heard or heard half
of so far we do discuss all 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 a part of
it that digs deeper on the material. The shadow, I think
there's a shallowness to some of those earlier shows and 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 then 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
we were going to 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,
again, about something from a year ago. I mean, we've had to
read discuss the Benghazi thesis, which is it was a
kidnapper 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 in show 200.5, where we mentioned the
Hill and Knowlton was behind the Oh, yeah, farming thing, and I
forgot all about my bad connection. Yeah. Well, let's
lower 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, well, 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 were just
talking 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 to 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, 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
them. 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 know is banned. Yeah. And because it was just, it's just
wasn't good. Right? Now, we don't really become conceptual,
it's much more advanced and
so good. Beside that, or 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 put in the right
key, I mean, really top notch stuff that when I was working in
top 40 hit radio B, we 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 there'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 that
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 previously
and breed in the dark here, but I'm reading stuff all the time.
Yeah, but I'm reading the screens that you read on 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 didn't Well back in that old boiler back when I was smoking
and I smoke 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
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 set 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
echo we sound to make a little debtor in the room. Yeah, but it
also really brings down the ambient light. I like it. It's
just what I've always I've always romanticize I've always
wanted to be the night disc jockey even though that's where
the Shit.
Denouncing your mouth close over your mouth and a close up of the
microphone. Your lips come close to it. Yeah, and it's uh, Hey,
Ben, it's raining outside. He's driving and going back and forth
to you on the radio. This is the night owl. I'm
telling you what's going on. We play another set of Led Zeppelin
from beginning to end. Yeah, that's my romantic nature.
Whatever works. Yeah. I in the other hand, I've 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. So I'm not like too
concerned about it, even though it's not as directional as the
Heil pr 40.
And what are you using now?
I'm using a cat 3000 from China. China. I know.
I know. Nice. I'm using my I'm using the road. I've changed I'm
using the road Procaster I'm a 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 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 monitor, and he likes to fix mics and do crazy
things. But he claims a lot of things people do especially 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 no 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 have final approval on the mic. And
you said that mic sounds terrific. And so I've kept this
mic. And I've been using it with 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 there's a whole philosophy behind it. But yeah, so 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 the fan on or
anything like that. So I'll just turn yours off right now and
return mine off. And you'll end people who are listening to the
show, and I even have a low rumble coming from somewhere.
It's so different. You know this we sculpt the sound to what we
want it to be.
Yeah, curiously, Horowitz has a noise gate that he uses when we
do his the Horowitz show. DHL unplugged is that
recent.
It's pretty recently he actually took over 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 home. Yes. And,
and I said, No, you want to noise gate. Man, you really want
this because it just enhances the closeness and the personal
nature of the sound. And I like it when it's completely dead.
And I love the fact that we have silence from time we talked
about that. Um, yeah.
Yeah, you harped on it. I
like it. I like it. Yeah, like if people
did die. I actually liked the dead room sound. I mean, I don't
mind that NPR sound.
But it's as good as a noise gate. The NPR sound is is dead.
It's totally dead. And I know how to do that sound. And we had
the cranky geek show. And it was being produced in San Francisco.
We had the black because I wanted to 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 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 pick up where it is. It's like magicians
use it constantly. So you can't figure out where the mirrors
are, where the rabbits 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 sound 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. You have a stick? Stick notice that. Yeah.
Well, anyway, go 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.
Yeah. And he doesn't do all the heavy heavy lifting for he's 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 noticed this in 2006. But the
2006 200.6 show i You 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 kinda like why why you're sending people to that.
With 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. It has a rundown of
some of the basics of the show. And one time when they edited it
down to next to nothing. I bitched and somebody put it all
the good stuff back up there, right as meaning of the jingles
and the rest. But I was kind of befuddled by your response to
that. And then 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 don't know if that's
still up. I know it's humorous height. He was like, I don't
know, four feet and 500 inches or some five foot 17. Yeah,
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 they just like it, we'd still be typing no
agenda into a search engine. You the first couple of pages are
seven, seven now. That's great.
Ben seven for a while. Right. And there's somebody everyone's
wants something sneaks in. It's 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 gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, that kind of
thing. I don't really have anything. I do have a couple of
questions myself. Do you still use that sound byte software?
I do? Yes, I do. So it runs on my original iPad, one Wi Fi
only. And 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 someone's 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 beds.
This is a stunning thing. And then I do time this to say no,
this is episode 736. This is no agenda and then that ends. And
then there's a second one that I start here, which is this. And
that just goes on and then you come in and whenever you're done
you say I'm John C. Dvorak. Then I hit raglan. Buzzkill. So
that's all
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 don't want
to know what other questions that you
had. Well, now that we're here in this segment segment before
we go back to the show, I think you should playset 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 give you
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 it 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 rundowns on 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 two clips formula is
this
one we go out we had people in the mountain and the second part
of that clip is this one was the New World Order stuff and then I
might add this in
that's all separate Hey citizen 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 did we have that we have this one your favorite by iron
Rand. And then we have the to 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 we have the science
Isodyne. Or we have the sciences. And then of course we
have our standard. Got the Spanish, Chinese, French,
German. We got of course. A new entry. Hey, man, first of all,
of course. Not to forget. We have 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. You got that? Not often used but
when used it's always it's always appropriate
John Cena for x.
And that's probably about half of them.
Who did the deed 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 made it
producer we need to give whoever it is credit someday because 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
2014, but not emphasized it. Most of the show's direction has
been from the producer listener, they have pushed the show in a
certain direction, the douchebag thing we never called anybody
and no spat. No, no, they call each other douchebag. And then
somebody came up with the damn jingle. Yeah. And and then the
day 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, or 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 of 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 it 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 since it needs to be mentioned. I
think it was really mentioned that much in 2000 to two I know
I keep saying 2,002.5 or six that we'd still need donations
even though we're doing the show so if you go to na
devore.org/and A Yeah, I think it would be appreciated. We will
have people who have given producer and executive producer
amounts to the shows mentioned when we were done on our little
vacation moment.
There's of course one jingle I didn't play which is also on the
soundboard
devora.org/n
A also don't know who made that.
And let's go back to show 200.5
A couple of questions from Are 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 I could
probably probably the name of a knighthood is probably what is
my contribution?
Well the knighthood thing and one of the one day and I've said
this, I've done this with everybody who knows me will have
heard this probably at one time or another. And I know I took
random paths to 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 work at
Ford Motor Company? Grant knighthoods what there is
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 for 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'd like a bad signal. I still want a bad signal. We're going
to 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,
do we have a lawyer? Oh, you know, we need a lawyer. 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 a marketing guy. But 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, it 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 the direct payment for a novel is a different kind of a
thing? Why are these the only two groups that are using this
model? A? And does anyone notice that they're actually pretty
successful with this model? Thank you. There's some churches
out there that have, you know, not counting the 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 to 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. Well, anyway, so I do the
promotions, I, I come up with them. You know, every once in a
while, we one comes forward and say 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 used to be in direct
marketing. And I say
that, you know, when people ask me about this, I say looking and
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 and the live stream during the football season. Oh,
interesting.
Yeah, well, that well and by the way, we do look
at that, that we look at all the numbers we keep track of stuff.
Eric likes to dream up weird reports and Uh, 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 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. Does it 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. He'll 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 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 ours.
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? And yeah, I agree. A lot of people
don't get through the whole show. Which by the way, it's
okay. It's okay. And for people who listen to who'd like oh,
that was this. This is what I love this fast forward, you can
fast forward through something you think is boring. I guarantee
you'll be backing up. I think so too. For me. Wow, this is 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 tougher. Yeah. And so I won't
give you the kudos. And
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 Father is something doesn't work that way. Because father
and son would be it's be more patronizing and 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. 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 guessed 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 in the 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 Two 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.
suits the scars. Oh, no, I know. I knew I knew Australia had to
be really high. Oh, I
shouldn't have given you the tea's No, no, I
knew it. I knew this because I mean, we've had I tried I tried
to kind of in my head I'm like, Man, I get stories. The Aussies
are. They're really into us and you 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 oppressed? So of course America wins. And then Australia
and I think the Netherlands has got to be third or fourth on the
list
for now actually, 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 that Netherlands would come in a
little higher but no. And the guys who the reason is because
the Netherlands The guys who do contribute to the show from from
Belgium are very they're they're aggressive. Right? Pels, mockers
oh he's in Belgium Belgium Yeah, yeah, well Belgian comes in they
did it comes Germany, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland,
Switzerland. Mexico and then we have an anomaly with Japan which
has very few people listening but they give a lot of money and
same with Hong Kong that's where all the money is. Then we got
Spain Italy France Denmark is actually hire but they don't
give any money. They're like they're
cheap. Cheap
damn Danes,
the Danish or girl but she cheap and then polish Poland which is
like that doesn't count they don't use this the the non
English speaking countries it doesn't bother me.
Very interesting for the amount of that's really interesting.
For the amount of time we spend on or have spent on stories
about Poland. They're way down on the list. Oh, they're way
down the amount of time we spend on the UK and Australia that's
about right. Yeah, so and and Canada we probably should do
more on Canada.
Yeah, the Canadians are completely starting to complain
about it. And they're why and you know, it's easy enough to do
I mean it's kind of hard to beat this hour has 22 minutes or
whatever the name of the show is that nails and constantly we got
some support in Singapore I mean almost every country's is
Estonia, Dominican Republic, Malaysia, Qatar Israel one
person 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 could and Portugal with
me got much. You didn't get have more from Brazil, since I'm a
writer. They're fairly well known. But it's again, it's in
translation.
They may be writing all kinds of crap. You don't know what
they're translating it to
know the 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 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 listen 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'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 had you know, in terms of pure subscribers that
are paying the $5 we only have about 1500 of those people. We
have not pushed very, very hard to do the $5 thing. Some people
have 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. That'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've 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 everything 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 gonna bring up a topic that gets interesting in
the conversation itself. So I show I'm probably underprepared
in terms of pure preparation, not in terms of the work that
goes into getting the clips and all that 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. Or 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
find 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, 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 it's a story or something and I'll work on that.
And I cannot go to bed on a Wednesday night or a Saturday
night without knowing I have something and I sometimes will
try out my my rap on Mickey. I'll say how does this sound?
And usually I get shot down.
Yeah, I refuse to do that. I think that's overdoing it.
I get shut down. Good.
So here's a quiz 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? Number 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, this vote from Monday. Okay. Why do we not that was
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 break
bring anything apart 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 of the no
agenda stream donated their money for and we'll have to do
another drive. And you know, what is the actual cost? 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 money, value
for value. That's the way it works. Time is definitely money.
So is there 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 We'll thing now you're 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 use for the jingles sound bank,
I use a program called sound bite b y t, 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 call her an ecard as a cartridge just as the old school
way of putting Jean 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 Me You I 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 key 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. anymore
from the chat
room, Twitter and Twitter. Let me see it. There's one more
here. There was one hold on one second,
just good to see who's texting me.
Oh, my cute guy says the shows gone from a show with no jingles
and no talent to a glut of both. That that was kind of unique.
It's gone to a what? We have a glut of talent apparently on the
show. It's just the same two guys. Somebody else asks, the
show 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 we wouldn't be doing it. And the
audience does more than 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, it was much better than Oh, it
was better than 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,
I suppose in the nostalgia or you know, people at some point
people either like you more in time, because they hear you more
or 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 then on the webpage, 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
is getting worse. Yeah, they're laying everybody off. After 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, you
know, we're doomed, that that's going to go through because you
can't stop Hill and Knowlton. I don't know, are you?
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. Yep. And that's another reason I think the
direct support is the way to go. It's open source, we don't care.
One of the things that's great about 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, 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 know. So
all our numbers from Arbitron came in and we got to three,
three, and this is a hero 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 when you'd 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 at 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 maybe we'll 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, we've done it again. Before we finish, you
know, the people say, Well, can I be a guest on your show? Do
you how can we don't do this? Second, we don't do that. We may
do some separate interview show 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 you when you're in a coffee
shop, you know, it's a man coming in to 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 gonna 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 promoting us. It is also your show. So I
can 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
you don't use headphones?
It's it's a typical for for radio guys. And
a typical but, but I've managed it because I use this the 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 it?
Weird. That's, you know, it reminds me of like, I tell
people this when you give them try 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 where 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 that 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 with
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, that's
something that doesn't sound good at cocktail parties. When
you say an 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 of I'm still flipped, floundering in
some of this
stuff. Because I disagree. Because you're doing something
interesting. You, especially the last couple of shows, you've
been tuning into a lot of foreign media sources as 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 him, which proves
my point, that the stories are not getting out there yet. Some
of the stories are interesting, like the Cambodian child,
it hits CNN now actually. Yeah,
we that's another thing we've done over we sent 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, as we were 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 opinion
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,
but 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 that
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 Ling. I
don't have to open an email don't have to go to a 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 sending it to 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, you
know, blow the blow your cover, but there's going to be copies
and there's just stuff you know, 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 know a lot
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 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 at 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 I get 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 if I look at my
email page right now, like from several essays 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 mail, I
use 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 probably
looked at or read you these. Now you say why? 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 why 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. Flagging and all that stuff never works?
No, it doesn't work. I never get back to because I can't find it.
I said who sent that? Who sent that? What was the title and I
tried 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 will
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 at 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 finished 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 All 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, like close
that I send all this stuff, I also have to type in all the
checks that came in over $50. So that's like a little, just extra
work, which is fine. 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 they 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 tried 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
organize the clips into little folders, my clips, your clips
are always in one folder. And that's the only way I can
remember them. Otherwise, if it's done too far in advance
now, they won't remember either. What the hell was that?
Yeah, like sometimes I'll carry a clip over for a week. In the
next show, and I won't know what it was.
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 Nene. 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. I don't think
well, the producers, of course, be our supporters.
Our grand dukes, we got time. Yep. 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, your age
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
couldn't even sell this to an advertiser. Demo is all over the
map. We don't know what the anonymous cell Mars bars or
geriatric underwear, we're not sure what we're supposed to sell
on your show
pablum. Exactly. I have no idea. And I think it's great to have a
wide variety because that way our input we get a lot of input.
The input is from a wide variety of people. We have people in the
government, we have people in the intelligence we have people
in the military, we have steel workers, we have data we talked
about on the on the 200.5 show, which I wanted to mention is
that we mentioned 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 talking 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 of them. Yeah, we have a knight who's a
butcher, we have a knight who is 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 it's not we wouldn't be the show would be over
yes and that could happen if you no 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. I've heard a no agenda but not dumb agenda.
All dumb agenda so much better. Much better listed. There's no
way 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's
actually a twice weekly basis. And it depends on your help your
donations and your support to divorce.org/na. It'd be my last
plug for that and
the newsletter, I will say is of extreme important importance to
the show. Once 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. And then make sure that if you're on Gmail, maybe
it's probably in the promotions tab. Yeah, always
shows up in the promotions tab, it will show up and 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. That's 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 the 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, and I like
everyone's
a part of it. And they 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
Moscow, Moscow, you need
a few of 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, a fixture 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 lot
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. Nice, great, everybody gets on the
train, chugging through 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 whether
anyone wants to do I think it'd be fantastic.
Planes ban.
We pick up everyone from from San Jose up through the
peninsula through San Francisco ng on
nice. Well, I think I think we I think we did it.
I think so plus 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 had 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 the 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. Yeah, to get all 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, 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
All right. Yay.
You heard Okay, so what we did, and we're back now this is 2.8
You're hearing us? It's not like we're not in and out and in and
out. Yeah, this is the this is us before the next Sunday show.
And what do you have for notes? I have some notes that I'd love
to hear him. Let's hear your notes. I noticed that there was
the word there's something about punch the donkey. That was in
the Winnie in the bud show. Ah, yeah. And I when I heard it the
second time, or the third time the fourth time, I realized it
was the sexual innuendo the donkey punch and
that that came up one time on the show actually, maybe back in
the two hundreds there. Were you I recall you mentioning the
donkey punch or something then I just remember getting a lot of
email explaining what it is. It's not good.
No, no, no, no, no, it's not good. But that would be just
Seth MacFarlane is kind of humor. I also know Okay, let's
go over these things from the beginning to the end. I got,
like we said a lot of en knows, ya know, there's some bow radio
stations. I put a note here, but I put it early when I listen to
this thing. So I forgot what that means. Comments on time,
some overall style but box French fresh roll. Yeah, you
were talking about or somebody was talking about working at
with the Kindle, Kevin Wendell. And you saw He's a producer, a
fox some of
our lives actually. Now he, and I want to restate that because I
heard that too. He started not Fox News. But what he called the
coat hanger network. He was intimately involved in putting
together all that because Fox wasn't a network, per se. It
started they bought, why they buy it over like UHF stations
and all these crazy stations, they were buying up. And that's
why it was called the coat hanger network when it was was a
part of that as
well as his main thing was he was the producer of Fresh Prince
of Bel Air.
Right? What wasn't a Quincy Jones?
window was was the the cycle. He was like a producer actually
worked like the show runner. He may have been the showrunner. I
don't know that he was but he was one of the guys that was
actually working on like Quincy Jones, who was like the
executive producer, like we, you know, that just you know, has
financial, that importance.
What was harder for me it was that we both realize that we had
done the pilot for CNET. And we both had declined the millions
of the stock.
And that was a mistake. John said that was
you took stock. I took stock. I didn't get that kind of stock.
But I took stock and I sold it rather quickly. I was and I was
like you I didn't have any confidence in this. Right? All
right. That was a mistake.
Yes. It was a mistake. We might bite us. But we might not have
been doing
this show I can give you. We've read No. In half of these deals
that we dropped. We didn't do or you didn't do it right. Or lost
money doing something else. We wouldn't be doing this show.
Yeah, you're right. Import sound silence. East Asia, this thesis
about sound going dead. This is good sound.
Oh, yeah. No, that that's the thesis of the noise gate, which
we only started using the past couple of 100 shows. And I like
it. So when we don't when we both are quiet, and it's all in
digital, then there is zero signal. There's not a single bit
of anything being recorded. It's just zero, nothing. No. And I
like it. Because I know that when we end we're very good at
it. But it's natural. We don't set out to do it. When we don't
talk for like that half a second too long. It gets everyone's
attention like oh, did something like? So I like that I decided I
learned that from Scott Shannon. He said silence is one of the
best things. Let's let the room breathe for a minute. You'll
have to look up Scott Shannon, if you don't know who he is.
Look him up. He's my radio mentor.
amenable personality distinguish good? That is more important
than people like to think and we don't. And we don't see each
other. And I think it's good. I think we'd get if we were
actually we this show would have not gone towards show 900 If we
had been in the same studio,
it certainly wouldn't have been the same show. I agree.
No, wouldn't be the same show. And I wouldn't be I don't even
know we could get that far. Because I believe that this
won't happen Martin and Lewis, you can do get pretty far with a
long distance relationship. If it's if it's paying the bills
and doing all these things, but if it's a short distance
relationship, it's so you're seeing the guy all the time.
Yeah, yeah, we'd get on your nerves because people have, you
know, especially older guys, you have certain habits and it just
would get on your nerves, go drive me nuts. And we made a
point or actually, you made the bigger point about it. We don't
even want to even see each other. We can't do the show in
the same room. Because when you work with somebody for a long
time, and this is fully understood by anyone doesn't do
stuff like this, is that you cue off each other. And you see that
oh, okay. I think I think okay, and you're cueing off the guy's
you know, he's making a face or he's always is maybe pauses are,
I mean, the greatest thing you can do if you want to cue off
each other radio, you can be talking and then the guy picks
it up and he starts talking a little bit and he instead of
cueing you with a kind of the right kind of a lead into you
playing a clip, for example. You just make a hand signal. Right?
Right. We don't have that luxury and that we don't have that
luxury. So we have to work on these other ways of cueing it
only works about it works a lot but it works 70 I think he's
maybe 30% of the time they fail. Yeah, but nobody cares. So,
to this day, I get people saying, Wow, how many people do
you have running the show? Because your clip is so tight
and it's right on top of each other and the clips are really
tight. It's not always always tight. It's not that I know a
little bit more critical but yeah.
started the show gag was funny. For producer went on because
Frank wrote to stamp producer not elaborate not not elaborated
or something. I'm not sure what that means. I don't know what
that is. Producer lenient, but I got a star thing here draw back
to benefits. I don't even know what that means. This is
terrible. Yeah, this is like me going. Remember the early shows
used to read my notes? And
yeah, lasted about 10 episodes. Because I couldn't read it. I
can't read my notes.
People complained. Oh, yeah, the fact of the matter
way, way, a lot of a lot of fact of the matter.
We talked about that 207 is even something immediate origins of
mediate deconstruction, I don't know the
overs going back to what you were talking about the hand
signals. So we force ourselves really to listen to each other.
In order to get the subtle cues, or,
well, you know, this is really,
this is really, you know, no, it goes because I don't need a cue.
I
mean, I can just jump in, I'll just step behind you. I mean, I
don't need to hit a button on it. With a clip I've got coming
up, you're the one that has to really pick up on the cues more
than I do. I don't I don't think I'm under that much pressure.
It's, well, maybe not. But when either one of us has a thing we
want to set up and discuss. I think in the past couple of
years, we've gotten much better at understanding Okay, he's got
to think because we don't discuss any of this i You don't
tell me hey, I got a package or I got a couple clips in a row or
yourself I want to do and sometimes we we misunderstand
but to me, really. And this is brought up in the in those
previous point shows. It is all theater of the mind. It is all
Yeah, it is all encompassing. And I think it's what would
podcast when we're in someone's head, typically on the on the
earbuds although I don't know if that's if that's the typical way
people listen to anymore things, a lot of Bluetooth in the car
and stuff like that, but it is but if you're listening on
headphones or earbuds, it's important. It all matters and
listening is a skill that is diminishing in our world
today. I would think so. Yeah. Well, because people are always
on their phone.
Exactly. And you still haven't learned a song on your
harmonica. Hey, shows.
I haven't played the harmonica for more than 400 shows. I'm
still trying to what I'm trying to do with the harmonica is I'm
trying to understand completely the harmonic and the different I
have a bunch of different ones in different keys. And I want to
be able to do little harmonica hits. Ah yes and so I get the
feel for it. And then I get I got up I've already got got the
definitive book on how to play songs on a harmonica. How one of
these days I'm gonna surprise
okay. We had the one. We didn't discuss this properly. On the
end of the show so far. The hookers and blow anecdote and
the people who say hookers and blow it says rude. I didn't
mention this. But one of the people that objected to was one
of our first and earliest dame's. They said she was an
older woman. And still is I guess. And she didn't know that
blow meant cocaine. Oh, she
thought it was blow job. Yeah, that's what she saw was rude.
Oh, well, like hookers like cocaine and hookers isn't rude.
But okay.
Well, not compared to blow jobs.
And that's and that's it. I wonder how many people think
that that's a good question. Yeah, but it's, for me. It's a
music industry term. It's like a joke that we've been going
around for 100 years. Yeah, lots ogres and blow though. I mean,
it's just it's been around.
Yeah, it's a music industry term because that's, you know, and
limos.
limos who has a limo anymore? Well, they used to fools used to
be a big deal. Now it's the Escalade. Oh, they used to
fools. Used to be a big deal. This limo. Now it's the
Escalade.
Now, here's a couple of things you interrupt when you're
talking about the open source model but you did come back to
it but I wanted to discuss something they actually came up
with that joke letter that you've gotten read about us
being you know supposed to do something The Iron Tux I've
explained before on various shows I'm going to sit explain
again why we developed the model we have for for this show. I
think I forgot to point out this really kind of we present an
eavesdropping shows two guys talking to each other you get to
listen in to Goddess listens in and then they say get anything
out of it, they hopefully donate and contribute to the show. It's
just a number of things I've noticed going through, I don't
know decade or more of doing television, cable stuff and, and
other blogs are the end than cable internet stuff is that
when you have a have to have people on the show, this is why
we refuse to have people on the show, we do not interview
anybody. Or if we did interview somebody I would do for example,
and it standalone interview that would be used as a filler show,
we've done this a couple of times. And we would run it just
as a straight interview. Or I could take a clip from it from
it. But nobody's coming on the show to tell us anything. And
the reason is that over the years, I've determined that the
only good show is the show without guests. Hmm. Which is
pointed out in that letter. And the reason for this is a number
of reasons. And they're all good reasons. One, you don't have to
deal with a dud, which happens a lot. It happens way more than
you'd think most people are, are not good guests. They can not
talk they freeze up or they don't have anything to say. Or
they you know, or they're only only there to promote something,
or they're only there to promote stuff. And the second thing
about not having guest is really great is that you make it a
policy. And then you don't get pestered by every PR woman in
the world. Oh, my CEOs would be a great guest on your show. Or,
by the way you do get them to stuff that still happens. And
then you can say to them, so you've never listened to the
show. I take it. Yeah. Because if they're asking if they can
put their CEO on the show, they've never heard the show
ever.
You know, honestly, for me, I find your more interesting. Then
when most
guests I mean that I want to talk to some guest. I mean, we
have done
1000s We have an agenda and a show that guests have an agenda
the show is no agenda. Yes. They always have an agenda. And
another thing that's a problem besides the DIS guessing the
guest not showing up I know the problem doesn't show up. Yeah.
Or he forgets or he can't we cancelled at the very last
minute. Michael Arrington failed to show up at a cranky geek
show. He's booked everything time and everything. He was in
stayed in bed. And he wouldn't apologize. Wow, there's a guy
for you. Yeah. So that it all these and these. This is a
nightmare and and
of the timing of it. It's like, well, we can't do Thursday. Can
you do Saturday? Can you do Tuesday and it was all this. But
to me? I'm not really interested in them. Just I like hearing
other people the ask them questions. And I can use their
answers the same questions probably
clip, a one minute clip, which is the kind of the nut which is
another journalism term, which kind of the nut of somebody's
interviewed that one thing that's really interesting, we
can pull that out and just run it as a carry use little one
minute. Exactly. As opposed to having the guy on the show for
30 minutes. And if you listen to these guys, we watch all this
stuff through C span and Charlie Rose and all these other guys.
It's mostly blather, bad lab, lab, lab labs, nothing and then
there's maybe something good and we can pull that it's a much
better approach. It is.
It's kind of peeve of mine. Yeah, it's kind of the maybe
not, it's a little bit like The Daily Show. But I think we were
doing this a lot earlier. And because it's audio clips, we can
do so much more. We're not limited. We're not limited in
general by a whole bunch of things that television does. But
just to you know, just tube and we look we deconstruct media
with it. It says it right there on the packaging, that is what
we do. So we look at media, we don't have to necessarily
deconstruct people, although that's also fun, and deconstruct
words and things people say you know, like
that a lot. Actually, that's a good point. We don't deconstruct
people we deconstruct media and interviews are people. So we
also should mention that we won the podcasting awards so that
running gag that we're never going to win an award is over
and we didn't mention that because it wasn't done by show
200.7
And let me go polish up my award. Oh, I'm sorry. There is
no award it's just it says the title there's no actual trophy.
Well, there is if somebody's does what they said they were
going to do. Mainstream by the way,
let's take a listen. On the open source model for a moment,
because I can't reiterate that enough and right here by see
questions coming in, the whole idea is, and we started off very
early by please copy the show, put it anywhere you want, you
know, we'd like for you to put the whole show in one place, not
cut it up, but reblog it, reblog it, retweet it. But also, you
know, and I think this was early days when bandwidth to Australia
was particularly problematic. We'd have people create low,
very low bandwidth version. So it wouldn't kill people's data
caps in other parts of the world, right? I forgot about
Yeah, we had we had anyway, the Lo Fi stream, all kinds of stuff
like that. And anything you want to use, it's okay. The same goes
for the branding for the logo, you want to create the
merchandise sell again, we hope would be nice. If you gave us a
piece of it, that'd be great. It's not a prerequisite. And the
only thing that I stopped doing is putting, publishing the
jingles that we have. Because I got really sick of hearing our
jingles on every other podcast with no attribution. And hi,
it's not funny Alec now that's not cool. So I didn't want to
make that too easy. But there's lots of people who who cut stuff
out of the show and collect them like phone boy, he does that. So
we feel that everything except for our likeness, our own Adam
and John likeness, everything is pretty much fair game. And we'd
like you, we encourage people to do that because it is a part of
our distribution. And then there's it's, there's a YouTube
version made every show and there's all kinds of things that
are that are then sometimes they go away they fail. There's tons
of of I mean, seriously tons of extra sites and websites and
initiatives that people start sometimes they've they peter
out, but often they they keep going like no agenda book club
is still they're still going strong. And in return. I'm
sorry,
say with the movie club is defunct, it's a riot.
And in return, since we realize that there's no way we could
ever, I think probably started like no one's going to advertise
on the show. And I think we had our doubts about advertising on
podcasts in general. But I said no one will advertise on this
that'll that'll never work for us. And we decided to introduce
the value for value model, which Hey, did you get some value from
listening to us, which we continuously hear it helps
people deal with the bull crap of being particularly these days
inundated with making them ill physically ill mentally
and a lot of people get sick listening to the news. They get
confused. They get this the cognitive dissonance and they
have this horrible look on their face develops. I was watching a
democracy now and they had Chris Hedges that kind of communist is
very interesting guy to listen to most of the time and against
this guy that Paul rule was that Reuben was that short read a
very short Department of Labor guy that used to be in the
Clinton administration is now teaching a cow and his name is
eluding me but he was on and he was so he was a Bernie supporter
but he's Oh, he's all in for Clinton and and hedges doesn't
he says it's all bull crap hedges actually. I'm trying to
get a quote for future show. But hedges says what doesn't make
any difference if Hillary wins or if Trump wins is the system
is the system is they can't do anything about it. And there's
not going to be any change in this and that and he listed all
these things it's I don't see why anyone would get worked to
be look a lot more relaxed than this poor character from Cal.
Oh, yes. Looks like he's wearing it on his face. Yeah. It's just
and I think a lot of people end up wearing on their face as with
immediate immediate does does a pre a pre at ages, you it causes
your can cause you to be confused, you can't think
straight. So terrible business. In fact, that came up while
listening to the shows. I came up with another new little
phrase that we can use once in a while, which is the mainstream
media is not your friend. I like it. They're not Yeah, they're
not they're evil. Yes, totally evil. It's like Evil Corp.
And the then I cannot reiterate enough, again, that we truly
consider people who are listening in because that's what
it is you're listening in. There are producers, you are producing
the show. And I think that is the big secret and I can't
really explain how it happened or why it happened or, or you
know how that came to be. But I feel that the majority of our
listeners do feel like they're producers and that's not
necessarily financial support. That's all kinds of support
that's going out and promoting us as a million different ways
people can help and they find new and interesting and
innovative ways to do that. So you are deemed a producer. And
you're that's the NPR should have figured that out decades
ago. But instead, they're still doing the Hey, send us 10 bucks,
we'll give you a tote bag which it's just not it doesn't give
you the same vibe, you're not really a part of the
programming.
It's like send a guess and that loser a tote bag and a coffee
mug. Now the we didn't mention our original artists was Paul T.
And Randy Asher was pulled on tour who came in later right and
did the website
which has no agenda Art Generator dot and he did he
designed the arrange the original ring and a couple of
other things he did before he kind of quit everything but the
website. And we now we have probably, I think a core cache
of about six artists, perhaps more. You know, led by a series
of wins by J, Martin J, J and Nick to rat and then we have
some more professional
guys like Mark G who have come out of work artists and
other guys that do just tremendous, tremendous work,
there was a list somewhere of the number of accepted artwork
for the covers. And it's interesting because everybody
kind of gets in every so often. If this they try hard enough.
But there's still a few guys would kind of dominate the scene
because of the the gist of some of these artworks is like
exactly what we're looking for. It's hard to explain. And I want
to remind anyone, some budding artists, and Martin JJ was
probably one of the most is he submitted probably more than
anyone, historically. And I think he went for years without
anything getting picked up, right. And then all of a sudden,
he caught some change. And this happens when this happens in
everything that's happened as a neural network of the brain.
This happens if you're a bowler, this happens if you're a
pitcher, it just happens in sports a lot. All of a sudden,
something changes in you now you're good, because you've
practiced a lot. And he's essentially practice like, then
he's just on a streak. It was it was he had to actually retire
for a short time because we couldn't find any art better.
There's too much, too much money. I'm kicking everyone's
ass, I'm gonna take time off. And then everybody, but everyone
brought their game of his very interesting phenomenon that art
because that art is
very unique in that the extensions or namespace was set
up specifically to allow that, interestingly, the Apple podcast
app doesn't do that very well or at all? Probably some do. But
the larger beauty of this is, we would not be able to do the show
without all of this without all of the cloud all of the content.
If even if we had to hire one producer, we wouldn't be able to
make enough money to make it work. And that we have no
producers No. Well, we have we have we have 1000s of producers,
but we haven't have
any in house people twiddling dials and that is that I don't
think it would be nearly as good as show you that because you're
better at talking and twiddling dials at the same time. Then
most dedicated dial Twizzlers
not just the dialing but the you know the links, we get the
stories the of course, a lot of the InMail we got guys in Rio
right now dudes named Ben, I'd be talking about that. The
upcoming show and you know, they have real insight. And for me,
the real boots on the ground, real boots on the ground who are
in these situations who are in these places. To get that now
you need a whole staff. So this, somehow we've come across a
model that that AI is Futuristic, it's
evolved, and it evolved largely due to the and we've said this
on the other two shows. It evolved largely by the producers
themselves. In other words, our audience pushed the show alone.
And the example I used it was used in the other show is the
douchebag thing we never had, or even karma. But the douchebag
thing was the real classic that we had nothing to do with this.
And I remember in the early days when when the douchebag thing
started to appear, and then we had to douchebag jangle people
saying, Oh, these guys they suck and they're calling their
audience douchebags. What kind of professionals? Are they
calling their audience names? And I want to remind anyone who
thinks that's off? Kind of crazy to do. Listen to the Jim Rome
show someday and see what he calls his audience. It's quite
amusing. But, but that wasn't even our idea.
No, no. Nor was it our jingle. Same for karma. All of this has
been produced in handed to us. And it's highly, highly
appreciated.
So there you have it. I think that's an honor. Do you have any
notes that you want to wrap? No, I
died? No, I did my notes in the beginning. Let me just check.
The ISOs. No, no,
no, I mean, the obvious things, it's just the obvious changes
that we've seen in the past year. The increase of clips,
which actually makes it much easier for for deconstructing
think that, you know, the half promise of getting out on the
road more is starting to kind of work, you know, to have the
stream of consciousness and it's nice to go out and meet people
why You sound very, what does that mean?
Well, we make big big talkers when it comes to going out on
the road.
I actually go on the road buddy talking about,
hey, I was on the road once. Yeah.
Well, let's make a solemn pledge that we got on the road more
often. I was just
in New York, and we had a big meet up. Yeah. Let's Let's do
more of that. Yeah. Well, I'd
like to, then the viewers we have in San Francisco, I should
go to one of these meetups, they happen once in a while. And now
that guy was putting them together, bail out and shut it
down. Now,
though, that is the downside of having producers you don't have
on the payroll? Well, I'll take our system any day. Yeah,
I'm sure we can get I still have to do the beat up at the train
museum. That's going to be great.
I gotta get on the stick for that. All right. Well, I know
it's been three years I've been talking about it. But we have
paid when
we have patients. It's okay.
All right, I guess that should wrap it up to them for a show
200.8 I think 8.78 to 1.5.
And we'll never do it again.
We'll never do it again. And you can don't forget the
board.org/in. A. Yes. Or get us through this episode.
Yeah, for Sunday show. And I'll be returning from Europe on
Saturday. And we'll be all good to go to bring you another show
on Sunday. And we'll be deconstructing whatever has come
our way in the meantime, and I'll probably have a little
report from Europe since I will be in France near Nice. So boots
on the ground?
Yeah, see what's going on?
Is this part of what I do? Alright, everybody. So now
you're up to speed on how we put it together while you put it
together and a historical smorgasbord of audio that you've
listened to thank you very much. We're all yours make
sure and also use this as a as a show to refer people to have you
tried to get him into the show at all. Excellent. But if they
come back, it usually can get them in and listen to an episode
they say that's still confusing, is saying in the morning all day
is not the morning. And so just say hey, go listen to this show.
Nick explains all the stuff we do kind of mostly. So there.
And with that coming to you from the Garden State and FEMA Region
three in the morning, everybody. I'm Adam curry and from
Northern Silicon Valley, which is it's kind of the brown state
in more ways than one. Um, John C. Dvorak will talk to you right
here on Sunday on no agenda. Adios mofos
Hey man.org/n A