#1679 - Adam Curry

You are the podfather.

There can be only one Joe Rogan. Since you recertified me as the podfather, my life has been so enriched since March of 2020, you have given me just an incredible new lease on professional life.

That's awesome.

Fantastic.

Well, I didn't have to recertify you. Everybody knows you're the original. Without you, there are no podcasts, but.

There are a lot of podcast listeners who are on the scene now, and they're too young to have even. This is 18 years ago when podcasting was first developed.

18 years ago.

So they know it may be from serial 2016 or so.

Wow. We are eleven years. This shows in the neighborhood. It's getting close to eleven years old. It's like ten and a half years old, but you like 18 years. That's crazy.

Yeah. And the way it's evolved has been pretty interesting.

It is interesting, right? The way it's evolving on YouTube is very bizarre because there's folks that up until fairly recently, only did their show on YouTube. And now I think some of those folks are starting to branch out and they're doing them on other platforms as well.

Well, you know why?

With a censorship, of course. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, people think that, well, you have to do something to combat. Know. We were talking the other day about Yuval Noah Harati, the author who wrote sapiens. He had a segment on his instagram where he's talking about misinformation on the Internet and about how when books first came out, the most popular books weren't books on Galileo.

No, it was gossip. Gossip crap.

Well, he was saying that it was about witches and how to spot witches.

Right.

And then countless people were killed because people were convinced that these how to spot witches books were good, and so they were going around trying to spot witches and kill them. And so this was at the invention of the printing press. This was like one of the first early uses of it. I had not heard that. But when he said it, it was like, bing. Oh, of course.

Have you seen the great, the Catherine the great series? No. And I think a lot of it may actually be historically true, although it's completely a comedy. Like, she apparently had sex with her horse and there's some historical evidence of that. Yeah.

She posed, right. Did she die having sex with the horse, the horse falling, or.

Know that's possible. Well, there's another series coming out, so it hasn't happened yet. Series two is coming.

Did I spoil.

You know, according to the Netflix series, she brought the printing press into the country and then they started printing gossip stuff, which people like a lot more than anything else.

Oh, yeah. For.

You know, I think that still holds true.

Oh, for sure.

Absolutely. Now, do you consider YouTube? You don't consider a podcast, do you?

I mean, it's kind of a podcast. It's the same thing, right? I mean, this podcast for the longest time was on YouTube and it's still on YouTube in clip form. But I mean, what is the difference between what we do and maybe, what, like Tim Poole, does he have what? Sorry, what history says this is all misinformation people like talking shit about. And it got printed and then they ran with it.

And what source is telling me I'm full of shit? History.

Oh, well, of course, no history. You're not full of shit. I'm full of shit because I said that she died fucking. That's just people talking trash about the vilifieder.

There it is. There's the words on the screen. It must be true.

She had become a vilified representative of the. How do you say that word, Ainson? Ancient.

I can't even read without my glasses.

A-N-C-I-E. Ancient. I just forgot the t. Oh, maybe.

So that kind of discredits the authenticity.

Unless that's a word. Maybe ancient is a word, like a name. Yeah. The same kind of pornographic libels that had been used against Marie Antoinette were ready to be deployed against her revolutionary presses happily poured out. The same kind of polemic prose that depicted Catherine as prey to her voracious sexual appetite.

Woo.

British presses. You know what? I had heard that. That was the same with. Someone sent me something about Elizabeth Bathory. Do you know who she was?

No.

Elizabeth Bathory was. She was supposedly this very evil woman who murdered a lot of young women. And she was a royal and that she. Yeah, see, it says serial killer. But what this guy said to me, because apparently. Well, the story was that she would find these young peasant women and murder them and she would bathe in their blood in an attempt to try to regain her youth and to get the adrenochrome. Yeah, something like that.

Right.

So they found out that she had done this, and then because she was a royal, she wasn't killed. She was just sort of locked in a tower for the rest of her life. And she died under house arrest. But someone sent me a link to a story because we were talking about on the podcast, I forget which friend of mine sent it to me, where it was disputing that and saying that she was framed thus to steal her land because she was a woman, and this woman owned large swaths of land as a royal, and they wanted to take over her land. And the way they could take over her land was to say that she was a murderer and that she had been murdering young peasants, and they framed her with this crime.

The older I get, the more I realize how much history that I've learned or have read could likely be completely full of shit. There's always multiple ways of viewing a situation. Historically, I think it's kind of in our brain, the idea that you can see something, I can see the same thing, and we interpret that differently. And I think that's truth, and you think that's something else's truth, for sure. And whoever writes the history literally writes the history so that you can look at. After World War II, we got to write the history. It's a little more complex. All the things that happened in Europe and with Russia, and there's lots of ways of looking at.

Okay, let's think about the history of, first of all, before I want to get into the history of Julian Assange, but is that true? Digging through the Wikipedia honor, it's around the time of Hungary, Transylvania.

So this sounds like vampire time period.

She's been credited with somewhere in the range of 650 deaths. There was a lot of witnesses in the trial, but there was a theory.

About what you're saying, and then someone's trying to counter it, and that's what I was reading through right now.

Yeah. I don't know if this guy. What the guy sent me. The other thing is, people love. Even if a story is true, people love stories that point that it might not be true. That's even more exciting than the.

It's human nature.

Like, oh, you think that's the true story? But I know the true, true story.

This is what fuels Twitter and most of social media. Totally. By the way, I've noticed. I was just thinking this morning, Twitter is actually incredibly racist. Twitter, the machine.

How.

So? I'm a bitcoin maximalist, so I get bitcoin Twitter. I get it in my feed, but I do a show with mofax. I follow different black Americans, but I don't get black Twitter. It doesn't give me all the stuff. I mean, I get all the bitcoin stuff just by following a few people. I don't get it. And I never see different languages. I never see anything from Asia. So it's making decisions there that I think are inherently bigoted.

But don't you have to follow people to get.

I know, so I follow a couple people that I would consider in black Twitter and I just don't get the stuff in my feed and from them a little bit, but they're not really giving me the full fire hose. It's like no matter what I try to do to train the algo, it's very difficult. I get a pretty decent feed of it. I see it. I follow you. So how come I don't, I don't.

Read stuff and do like, I'm just looking sort of, I don't really actively participate.

I don't want to add into the algorithm, kind of. That's almost why. Yeah, well, that's the game. It's like I want to add to the algorithm to find out some stuff, but I just don't get it. It won't come to me.

Twitter is a problem. It's great in many ways. There's many good things about it. It's a great way to get information. It's a great way to find out about revolutions that are happening all around the world and disasters and all kinds of other things, but it's also a very poor way to communicate. And when you trying to get out complex, nuanced thoughts in 240 characters or 280 characters, whatever it is, it's just not an effective way to do that. Maybe it's a good writing exercise. It's good for comics who just want to tweet out a quick one line or a joke and would be comics.

Which apparently everybody is.

Well, there's some pretty funny people, but.

A lot of it is. I'm going to see if I can say something funny.

Yes, there's some funny people that you just don't happen to be professional comedians, but they're very smart and very funny and it works for them. But it's just as a method of communication. It's so much poorer, so much shittier.

Than this than talking, which is why even the New York Times had to admit you are too big to cancel.

I didn't read that.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Weird title.

But of course it is a weird title, but that just shows you because it all comes from the same places. All the stuff is heated up everywhere on Twitter, Facebook to some degree. But Twitter, I think, really is where it all stems, you know, then you've got blue checks who are