When Brock Willett and I started this show in March of 2020, I don’t think we had any idea what we wanted it to be, or what it would eventually become.
The title was born from a random joke that my dad would use when I was a kid. Anytime he was frustrated with opening a bag of plumbing parts or anything else that was tough to get into, he would say that it had been “hermetically sealed by the Armenian Medical Association”.
Some of you boomers might make the connection to The Firesign Theatre, a surreal comedy troupe which did wild radio broadcasts throughout the late ‘60s, but when I co-opted the phrase, and turned it into a smart-ass response to Facebook commenters, who called out my satirical stories on Farmington Tribune for being fake news, my only frame of reference was my father.
After a year and a half of lampooning the media, and making the public spin with our ACTJ verified bull crap, I felt it would only be right for our team to make an honest effort at understanding the country which had become so integral to what we were doing.
I filed the paperwork and started Tribune Media International LLC with an ambitious goal of creating a satirical documentary in Armenia.
The basic idea was a bit of a reverse Borat approach, where we would lampoon the stupidity of Americans whilst highlighting Armenian culture.
With this goal in mind, Mr. Willett, Vladimir Koshevoy and I went to Armenia in October 2019. We went to “seek the Council”.
That trip turned into everything it should have been, and nothing we expected. Perhaps I’ll give a detailed account one of these days, but for now I will just say it was both terrifying and beautiful. The few of you who already know the details, are fully aware. The rest of you will have to wait for the book.
But I digress.
We were asked often what we were doing in Armenia. As I would begin to explain how our fake news stories were “independently verified by the Armenian Council for Truth in Journalism, I was consistently unsure of how the joke would be received.
Time and again, those in the Caucasus region immediately understood the humor. It was then that I realized the joke was much older than my father’s quips, born from The Firesign Theatre.
“Radio Yerevan” jokes had been used in the USSR as a way of speaking truth, in an atmosphere of extreme censorship, and totalitarian thought policing. If you’ve never heard one, I highly recommend that you Google it.
The point here is that in going to the other side of the world, the joke had come full circle. We had truly found The Armenian Council for Truth in Journalism.
This new found understanding inspired Brock and I to push harder at the idea of documenting the realities of places that remain misunderstood in America. 3 months later, we went to England, Ireland, and Scotland to further perfect our abilities as satirical documentarians. We were preparing for a trip to Ukraine, but life had other plans, and the world was shut down for coronavirus.
With little other option, I somewhat begrudgingly allowed Brock to push me into starting a podcast. I will forever be thankful for his insistence.
As the year went on, and the BLM protests began, it seemed only proper for us to take a more concerted approach to being “proper journalists”. We recognized the world was changing, and it was obvious that we would need to change with it.
Between June and August, the number of guests we had was unreal. The workload consumed me, as we moved from 3 shows per week to broadcasting every day. We were blessed with regular contributors, such as Blake Heckler, Travis Thorpe, Brian Battle, and Dan “The Manager” Sledzinski.
With Jae Shin killing it as our producer, the show began to find it’s sea legs. In between our inebriated rants, and our rapidly changing understanding of the world, some amazing discussions were had. We broke down racial division, coronavirus lies, and the political propaganda. This absurd pace was kept until Brock went to Ireland in August, intent on immigration to the Emerald Isle.
No longer in the same time zone, his ability to co-host was essentially gone.
The show would have surely died, were it not for Thaddeus Preston. His intelligence and analytical perspective of the world was the perfect counter to my anarchist nihilism.
He hopped right into the firing line, and has remained dedicated and steadfast for the last 9 months.
As we approached the November election, we were all excited to to temporarily wrap, and take a vacation from daily broadcasting. The election special was an absolute mess of old contributors, random miscreants, intelligent debate, and drunken bullshit. When we ended the broadcast, Trump had won the election, and we were all ready to take a break, but much like how the pandemic had derailed my plans to go to Ukraine, the universe had other plans.
The next three months compelled me to travel to various places around the country, docu
