geekyMore, I say! I was wrong. I'd thought Rick's speech was impromptu; it's not. The real story's actually better. Fatboy Roberts, co-host of The Cort and Fatboy Show and a friend and colleague of Rick's, set me straight:
There’s a story behind it. It’s not an impromptu speech, actually.
When [Rick] first got back to CBS, there was much rejoicing. His show started back up where it left off and people were happy.
At one point, our show and his show, which shared similar sensibilities, began to form like Voltron on promotional things: The Snakes on a Plane premiere, for instance, and a couple other things, some that fell through, some that didn’t. the shows were friendly, there were off-air discussions and some small talk, and things were going well.
One day, they did a bit about a web application they were e-mailed that showed you how many pedophiles lived in a square mile from your house. They talked about it for a bit, and asked Susan Reynolds about the feasibility of making a contest out of it.
The next day, Cort and I, reading from a completely different e-mail, without knowing what had happened on the Emerson show the day before, found the same site, and just made up a game on the spot to give away T-shirts or something based on who had the most pedophiles in their area.
A listener of BOTH shows, knowing how often the Emerson show had been ripped off in their history, emailed Rick and told him that we had stolen his show material. The next day, Emerson went on air and called us out for stealing his shit. We, not knowing what the hell he was talking about, figured he was goofing on us in an over-the-top, “radio warz” sort of way, so we took it over the top and went right back at him. We also had the comfort of knowing this was odd coincidence, and we hadn’t stolen from him.
The next day he was LIVID. He spent 45 minutes taking apart our show, our lives, everything, in a furious geek rage at the FM DJs who, as far as he knew, had just blatantly stolen from him and then had the nerve to lie about it on their 100,000 watt blowtorch while crapping all over his show. We realized, slowly, that he wasn’t joking, and he honestly believed we had stolen from him. So we called him to ask why, if he thought we had legitimately jacked a bit from him, why he wouldn’t have just emailed us. The air was sorta cleared, and we were asked to come into the studio to explain our side.
In anticipation of the reconciliation between the two flavors of geek on the radio, he and Aaron Duran worked on “What a Geek Believes” the night before, a sort of commencement speech to signify the signing of a deal between our two shows that we would combine only to further the geek cause, and not to rend each other asunder. There were photographs of the shows signing this paper, and Rick ended the apologies/ reconciliations by reading the speech aloud.
Geek In the City has T-Shirts of the speech for sale at their store. If you listen to the video you have, the “yeahs,” “Right-Ons,” “That’s my girl right there,” and geek Greek chorus you hear are Cort and I in studio.
Since then, the shows have lived in geek harmony, as we should.
