Scanning Podcast debuted this week — on U.S. midterm election night, hence the episode’s title, “Erection Day” — from Rob Dew and Dana Brunetti, two names No Agenda listeners already know well as guest and fill-in hosts over the years. Dana’s resume extends well past podcasting: he produced House of Cards and Fifty Shades of Grey, and he was close enough with John C. Dvorak personally that he got JCD’s obituary placed in the Hollywood trades himself, pitching it as his “uncle’s” passing to a PR contact who didn’t initially see the Hollywood angle.
The show came together fast, in the same spirit as Party Line Show’s own origin story: Rob and Dana had actually registered the domain scanningpodcast.com back in 2016 with vague plans for a clip show, let it lapse, and Rob only picked it back up again the week before this episode aired. From there, it was two phone calls and a handful of text messages before they were live — including an all-night session the night before sorting out audio gear. Producer Michael Zimmerman pulled together the show’s donation system and website in that same compressed timeline, and did it well enough that a stranger on X, apparently trying to clown the “vibe-coded” site, ended up backhandedly complimenting it instead (“wouldn’t call it a mess… it’s clean, very clean”). Zimmerman built it using OpenAI’s Codex — “I use Codex for just about everything… for websites and building things, it’s pretty good” — and the donation flow it produced got an unprompted compare-and-beat verdict against GoFundMe from a listener in the chat.
The hosts were upfront that they’re not trying to be a replacement for No Agenda, borrowing the same framing Party Line Show used days earlier: this isn’t a clone, it’s something built by people who were shaped by the original rather than a tribute act to it. Dana’s own comparison, drawing on his Hollywood background: when House of Cards came out, people kept comparing it to The West Wing, until it became clear House of Cards was going to kill off half its cast in the first act. Scanning is making a similar bet that leaning into its own identity — heavier on live call-in energy, real-time clip reaction, and a donation-reading segment that runs long on purpose — will earn it a place of its own rather than a seat at someone else’s table.
Listener support for a show that hadn’t even aired an episode yet was, by the hosts’ own count, enough to make it arguably the highest-grossing podcast per episode in podcast history before a single episode existed — around 70 donations read out live, name by name, in the value-for-value tradition the hosts trace directly back to Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak. If the show keeps building in public the way its first episode did, there’s a real chance a dedicated tips submission system ends up living right on scanningpodcast.com itself — the hosts floated the idea of a tips inbox on air, though nothing’s built yet. Worth watching as the site matures.
Scanning Podcast airs live, with episode and call-in details at scanningpodcast.com/live. It’s also slated to join the Void Zero Community Radio rotation with a Wednesday replay.
