Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Blubrry | Email | RSS | More
Overview
Stephen attended the Supernatural con in Chicago and tells all about it, including the awesome concert with Louden Swain.
Alan has been virtually attending the Apple WorldWide Develop Conference and has updates on the coolest new stuff.
Recommendations
https://www.creationent.com/cal/supernatural_denver.htm
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/Kings_of_Con
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/
YouTube
Transcript
[00:00:31] Alan: Good morning,
Alan. How are you,
[00:00:41] Stephen: sir? Good
[00:00:42] Alan: morning, Steven. Doing fine. Thank you. Let’s see. Big news is you went to a very cool convention in Chicago. I believe
[00:00:50] Stephen: absolutely the supernatural conference. And for me it was a little weird. Because I’m used to the crypto zoology and, you know, [00:01:00] cryptic conferences that I’ve always gone to with call it.
This was similar to that, but also different, honestly, I’m not sure if a whole weekend is needed, unless you’re definitely getting autographs and pictures because those lines are long and take a while
[00:01:17] Alan: it’s. So it was more about the people than the, were there, was there programming, were there things about, Hey, here’s the themes of the shows and that kind
[00:01:24] Stephen: of stuff.
Okay. Yeah. Very little. Programming, mostly consisted a couple actors or one of the actors on stage answering Q and a. That was really the biggest programming and the vendors. There was only like a dozen vendors. They were all vetted. So it wasn’t a lot of junk and garbage. It was all approved, licensed supernatural vendors with some good quality stuff, which you gotta fandom with.
Good quality stuff. Take your credit cards. you know how that goes, right?
[00:01:53] Alan: Yeah. See, but I, I don’t mind there being, not a dozen, but a hundred supernatural by itself is not as [00:02:00] big as any ComicCon any science fiction convention. World co is amazing with how much stuff is available anyway.
[00:02:06] Stephen: It’s okay. Yeah, it was a, a good time.
We did not want to pay for the autographs and signature. It was like $300 just to get an autograph with Jensen or Jared, a single
[00:02:20] Alan: that bothers me. You know what I mean? I know that this is a big thing now that there’s a lot of celebrity love and there’s a lot of actor, people can make a whole career out of attending these conventions.
Yes. Long the show is gone yet 300. You know what I mean? You’re like a teenager. You’re a young adult and, and.
[00:02:40] Stephen: So it’s funny, you mentioned the whole career, the guy that played Chuck and the guy that God and the guy that played Gabriel did a parody comedy, uh, series called Kings of Khan about them going around to conventions.
And some of the other actors were in it making fun of themselves, making fun of conventions and all that. But the funniest thing [00:03:00] was Alan TUD did the same thing like a year earlier. And Nathan Fillon was in that a little bit, making, making fun of himself on the convention, but there was probably 4,000 people there, 3,500, I would say, pretty packed at the Donald Stevenson in Chicago.
Everything was pretty well attended and lots of good stuff, but they had an auction and yes, I agree. I’ve talked to some celebrities and that without having to pay $300, so to say, Hey, let me pay $300 just to get a photo standing next to you that you never remember. That was in your orbits.
[00:03:43] Alan: That whole idea of that somehow you’re somebody, because you got to stand next to somebody for a minute.
What? Honestly, I, I, I get nothing out of that. Yeah. They, they won’t remember it, but I get to like when someone photo bombs me or there’s anything going on like that, I. When [00:04:00] we’re in nature, I hardly ever take a selfie. I take a picture of look at these incredible mountains in forests, not here I am in them.
Mm. I just don’t have whatever that thing is about. Proving that I was there or the ego, the narcissism that goes with it. I, yes, know little of that.
[00:04:15] Stephen: I will say this about the supernatural. They call it a family. They say it’s a family that they really feel the actors and the fans are a family and they, the whole 15 years, they really were responsive to the fans and listening to the fans.
And so they built that fan. So people feel like it’s family. So it’s almost easier to spend the money, but I will also say the actors give everybody a couple moments. I’ve been to a few words, snap. Thank you. Right. We were going through looking at some of these pictures and they weren’t just somebody, uh, standing there.
They, each picture was something unique with. That the, the person that I’d like us to do this and the actors [00:05:00] goofed around and did it making faces or whatever. Like the one lady tweeted that cast was the angel and he lost his grace and he got it back. There was a vendor that was selling a little charm that like had glowy stuff in it.
And they said it was cast. Yeah. Great. Right. So in the picture, Castillo is sitting there like he’s, uh, getting the grace back. Yeah. I said, oh, you need to Photoshop that and put glowing stuff in between. Wow. The crazy thing was, and this is you and I both, oh, this is really good art. I’ll buy, oh, a great book.
I’ll give it a try. That type thing. Sure. They had vinyl banners printed out with just like a screen, grab high quality pictures, some promotional pictures of the actors and stuff. Printed out on the banner. And they had an auction, the auctions for charity and, you know, they had the, but people like the Jensen, Jared one, it went for $1,600 for a vinyl banner of a picture [00:06:00] of them, you know,
[00:06:01] Alan: put that up in their rec room in their garage.
That’s it’s a cool,
[00:06:05] Stephen: yeah, I know. I’ll admit the one with the Impala was I’m like, oh, but it went for like 1200 so, okay. I just that’s like man, and I’ve bought cars that cost less than that. That’s another thing that always
[00:06:20] Alan: clicks over to me is so that’s 1600 bucks. What would I do with $1,600? Instead of that, one thing I could have.
How many books, how many CDs? Yeah. All the video collection I could give the collection to all of my friends.
[00:06:32] Stephen: You know what I mean? If it was like an actual model using a. Star wars movie that I was bidding for at auction. I might think about that, but just a banner of a picture. Honestly, if I could get the picture, I could print out the damn banner for a hundred
[00:06:46] Alan: bucks.
Yeah. You know, I don’t know. I’m not, we don’t have much art in the house, but what I have, like it’s not originals, it’s usually prints or lithographs or something, and maybe there’s like a lithograph is one out of a hundred, one out of a [00:07:00] thousand, whatever it might be. There’s still something weird. I’m a comic book collector and there’s hardly anything unique about comics except old ones have had most of the copies, the hundred thousand copies that were produced.
They’ve been destroyed. They were used up in paper drives during the war, whatever else it might be. So scarcity matters. And I, I guess maybe that’s what they’re still counting on is that even in this world of digits and NFTs going for $1,600 and nons the do fake unique things. Yeah. It’s still that people really like to be able to say.
I’m the only one that has a copy of this, or I’m the only one from this convention, the next convention, they have another one and someone
[00:07:38] Stephen: sold it. Well, that’s not even true 20. These are the same picture banners they’ve used for multiple conventions. They, they have multiple, so it’s not unique.
[00:07:47] Alan: Okay. So then what you get out of it is the story.
You know what I mean? You get, Hey, if I, I bid it up and if that’s something that Alina has often said, what kind of artwork do we want in our house? Something that if I looked out the window every day, I’d love to [00:08:00] see it. So when we see people that have ugly art up, because it’s a distinguished artist, or I don’t know, of course everybody’s taste varies, not everybody’s idea of beautiful is the same.
And yet I, I don’t want something that’s so it’s the wrong colors. It’s disquieting, it’s actively ugly, but it’s Eddie Warhol or something like the only, my guess is if you looked at that print every time you looked at it, you smiled and you felt good. That’s not that bad. I guess for $1,600
[00:08:31] Stephen: a little, there was a couple kids in the same row that were bidding and they were excited.
They were like super excited and they were one of them that bid like 1500 on one of these banners. And these kids are like 20 years old and I’m like, holy crap. The girl goes, yeah, I just paid down my credit card. So I guess I’m gonna have to pay these off now. And the tickets for the convention for general admission were like $330.
So it’s not a cheap convention. Right? The hotel was like [00:09:00] 200 a night. So it was some serious coinage being dropped here. Yeah. The best part of the weekend was the concert Saturday night. That was what I was looking forward to the most. The guy that played God, Richard, Ben. He’s the singer and the rhythm guitar in the band.
It was so good. I had such a fun time. They are a classic sounding garage, rock band, just guitars and bass and drums. So it was, I had a great time. The, the music’s a little tongue in cheek lyrics and fun and stuff.
[00:09:39] Alan: Is it rock songs? Is it F songs about the show? If you will, is it Kansas recreations? Because they sure used a bunch of good Kansas in the show.
Yeah, it shows were they counted enough to do a Kansas song. You know what I mean?
[00:09:52] Stephen: It is mostly originals. The band started before the show, but now they’ve become the supernatural house band. [00:10:00] And they’s cool. Do have a few songs with lyrics. Are coincide with conventions or like the one, because they say, when they’re going around, they stay in an Airbnb and they always do rock paper scissors to see who gets the worst room.
And the lead guy got in this like dungeon room, no windows, no lights in a dark basement, you know? And so he wrote a song about it. It’s that type of thing. But again, it’s all grungy guitar rock, which I love. The cool thing is during the shows run, they worked with and convinced several of the actors to sing with them.
These actors are not singers. They never thought they would, but they come on stage and they have their one song they sing and it’s usually a cover. Yeah. So there are covers and I, I heard that it wasn’t just actors going, oh, I wanna sing a song. It really was the band saying, we’d love to have you let’s work with you.
And they helped almost train the actors to do [00:11:00] that. Very cool. You can look it up online. There’s a lot of videos from conventions. People have, I was hoping Jensen Les’s Dean would get on stage and saying, but he did not a lot of the other actors did, but it was still a great concert. Had a great, wonderful time.
[00:11:15] Alan: So that sounds good. I’ve been surprised. So first that’s for, what’s the name of the band
[00:11:19] Stephen: again, please? It Louden Swain, which the, I guess the name is taken from the lead character from the vision quest movie, the old quest movie. And I think the last name of the lead guitarist. Yeah.
[00:11:34] Alan: Okay. Actually it’s time for digressions.
I, one of the ways that, so Colleen and I had any number of conversations in just general Mensa company before we really fell for each other and got together. But one of the things that Colleen said was where she was amused by me and really wanted to like, get to know me better was. I made a [00:12:00] reference to that movie where it was like, so how did you decide what to do with your career?
I had a vision quest and the coyote spoke to me and told me, and she just was so amused by that she didn’t know the vision quest reference. She just, that I threw this into casual conversation, if you will. And like straight-faced Lee, not even. So that’s a very interesting movie was him versus not the Hulk.
What’s the, uh, the big wrestler’s name, the anyway. And let’s see Elizabeth Mons, Antonio. I think that
[00:12:28] Stephen: is who it was. I don’t remember.
[00:12:30] Alan: That’s that’s yeah. Cause and she was like, I remember thinking, wow, when you’re young, you find everybody kind of pretty interesting, beautiful and so forth. And she was one of the first ones that really had me like mouth open.
like, wow. so anyway it, but back to this. So that’s, I have loved going to conventions and oftentimes I don’t expect there to be great music. I think it’s gonna be like, when I go to a, a pinball convention they’ll. Video game [00:13:00] music, pinball music, and so forth. But some of them, they have really captured video game music, which is really composed well and energetic.
It’s, it’s a big part of the game. And then to hear that in a stage thing where they can actually stretch out a little bit and make it into a jam, it’s much better than I expected. I’m almost like, well, I’ll just sit here and sit my Sodi pop. And oh, these guys are really jamming and, and the keyboard is always, the synthesis has to really know what’s going on in order to be able to capture, but do variations on those things.
Yeah. And it’s often been much better where I like wanna, you know, call somebody on the phone and say, listen to this. I, I don’t want somebody else to hear this besides me to prove this was really good
[00:13:41] Stephen: anyway. Right. Yeah. And I did go to a, a restaurant that was supposedly haunted. We even asked. So is, is there spirits around?
And the waitress goes yes. In anywhere. They don’t show up very often, but every now and thenj is flat out and a couple different places around [00:14:00] town. So do you know anybody in the mob? Um, and everybody, no, they were all like, no, but then went to the green mill room, which was a small little jazz club, uh, that Capone used to frequent and asked the bartenders, anybody in the mob.
And he looked at me straight face and goes, the mob doesn’t exist any longer. Okay. That’s uh, most, okay. We got you there. Like
[00:14:27] Alan: exactly. So that was fun. Nostra you don’t speak of it, you know? Right, exactly. Yeah. I used to call Mensa this smart thing of ours in direct relation to this thing of ours, which is what you don’t talk about.
Right. You know what I mean?
[00:14:42] Stephen: For all the traffic and God two in the morning on a Sunday, and they’re still backed up traffic. I’m like, how the hell would
[00:14:49] Alan: megalopolis man?
[00:14:50] Stephen: Exactly. It’s yep. But I will say Chicago drivers are fairly courteous. They let people in and when they get in front of you, they move, they don’t block it.
They don’t try and cut and [00:15:00] push too much. People are coming up to stop waves and letting people out and stuff I’m like, wow. In, in, you know, Northeast Ohio people pull right in front of you, look over you and flip you off. So I will say courteous drivers for the most part.
[00:15:14] Alan: I think Chicago driving is far worse by reputation than in reality.
I grew up in Chicago and then grew, grew up driving in Chicago. So I don’t really have that characteristic of Chicago. I think it really is sometimes when it’s really. Crowded dense, difficult people. Actually, they don’t get worse. They get better. They know that everybody’s in the same crap. And like, why not get somebody to smile instead of to be growling on the way into world?
Absolutely. You know what I mean? Cause favor someday. There’s a lot of paying it forward or whatever like that, you
[00:15:46] Stephen: know? Yep. So all in all, a good time,
[00:15:49] Alan: any revelations from the Q and A’s anything that you didn’t know about the show or the stars? Nothing
[00:15:55] Stephen: stuck. Didn’t sit in on all of those because some people did have some really good [00:16:00] questions.
I, I will give them that they know that the show’s been on for 15 years, with 10 years of conventions and a dozen conventions a year in different cities. And I talked to people that, oh yeah, this is my third one in the last year. And it’s holy crap. But
[00:16:14] Alan: they actually follow it around. That’s interesting.
Kind of deadish you know, like
[00:16:18] Stephen: deadhead, groupy. That’s what I thought. But people were asking some interesting questions, something a little offbeat. If you were a pasta, what pasta would you be? That was, it was good. It was fun. It was nice. I got to see Castilla. He was really, and, and Chuck and Gabriel, didn’t see a salmon Dean.
I did get a, a cool Winchester flannel with the protection SI on it. I got a little matchbox of the Impala and then I got a slightly bigger model of the Impala. Uh, okay. Couple years ago I got call in a really nice 64th scale Impala. They didn’t have one of those there, but it was nice. Yeah. Yeah. I, oh, I, I got some [00:17:00] temporary tattoos of the Sid, so like if that goes on, sometimes I play around with that.
[00:17:05] Alan: exactly. Did, did, did they have a, a class in, in Nokian or anything like that? That
[00:17:09] Stephen: would’ve been great. Uh, it would’ve been great. They did have. Richard did a directing and filming class. They had a music and photography class. They had a jewelry making class and oh man, some of the, the jewelry and charms and stuff, all supernatural based, but they were handmade limited one of a kind type things.
That’s kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. They looked really nice. There was some really nice, I don’t wear, I wear a watch. That’s as much as I got, I don’t have earrings on his necklaces, but this is a crazy thing. So the convention was 300 bucks, which I’ve never spent that much on a convention.
[00:17:48] Alan: Like usually there were a hundred or
[00:17:49] Stephen: something like that or less.
Yeah. Yeah. Or the hotel was fairly pricey even with the discount. Nice hotel though. but walking around, looking around, I’m like, I, I look like a go pile, Gar. It’s [00:18:00] lovely
[00:18:00] Alan: here. Exactly. This lobby is like a spaceship,
[00:18:03] Stephen: you know? Yeah. The merchandise. Was not outrageous was not crazy. Hoodies thick, flannel, soft hoodies with the some whatever on ’em 40 bucks.
Look, I could get the same price of Walmart so hopefully, yeah, I was very impressed that the prices weren’t outrageous for any of it. The jewelry was 25 bucks, $40, but I’ve gone to cryptic conventions where it’s a rock with a wire wrapped around it and a leather strap. Oh yeah. That’ll be 75 bucks, 75 bucks.
Did your kid make it? So
[00:18:38] Alan: like you said, everything was vetted, meaning authorized, but they must not be like what it, what drives the price up? It seems is the licensing, right? They, somebody gets a cut out of everything. That’s supernatural approved, right? These were mostly independent vendors and they were able to do well.
It seemed by, but it’s not a direct rip off of here’s the staff that they held in. The one show. [00:19:00] Something that could be licensed.
[00:19:01] Stephen: Okay. Yeah. And like the, the little model car I got that was only 25 buck. Honestly, I would’ve expected double that. Okay. So good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Good time. Fun. Loved it. So
[00:19:14] Alan: were any of the directors or writers?
There was crikey, there was Ory and Kurtzman. I’m I’m trying to think of cause so much, obviously the tone of the show is not only the portrayals of the characters. It’s the mythos, it’s the, the writing of the show that created
[00:19:29] Stephen: this. I would’ve loved that if they had done a class or a, a specialty vet with the writers or something, I would’ve paid and gotten in on that, but they did not.
I did say for the auction, I gave the creation entertainment, a suggestion. I’m like, look, you have all these banners and stuff. And you could also, they were auctioning off special sessions with Jenen and Jared and autographs and pictures that it was a little more meet and greet and they were auctioning those off and stuff.
I’m like, I, I would, the, the one thing [00:20:00] I would bid on at the auction is like, during the band’s warm, To sit in for a song with the band, not during the concert necessarily, but just jam with the band during warm. Yeah. Or, or sound check I’d bid on that. I don’t know if there’s too many others interested in it.
Mm-hmm but I, I would pay some money just to sit in with the band and jam a little bit. That that’d be sweet.
[00:20:20] Alan: That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so any talk about the spinoffs, the new shows that are coming up that are pre supernatural tangential, et cetera, et cetera,
[00:20:30] Stephen: though. Like I said, I didn’t go to the talk that jar and Jensen ran just because it was like at four o’clock on Sunday and I’m like, oh, I’m not gonna get back till midnight.
And I gotta work. So I, I that’s
[00:20:40] Alan: interesting today would have programming that late. Usually they cut it off at noonish or twoish. It doesn’t go
[00:20:45] Stephen: late on the Sunday. It was all day, all day, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That’s cool. Okay. Um, I think they might have done it because obviously everybody there would go see Jared and Jensen, but if it’s late [00:21:00] Sunday, you got people like me that are traveling home, flying out.
So it cuts the, and then they’re not there for three hours with Q and a , but, but we didn’t see a lot of Jensen. I think they even changed some of his times. He just, the boys season three just came out and he’s in that. And he’s working on the Winchester prequel. So he’s a busy man at the moment and Jared’s on Walker and he just was in a car accident a couple weeks ago.
So it was a
[00:21:26] Alan: bad. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The fact that he was there, watch the boys and did see he’s playing soldier, boys. I recall. Right. You know, was it good? Yeah. Yes. The boys is another one of those things that I refuse to really binge it. I really wanna watch like one a day. Well, I wanna watch one a week, but I can’t.
It’s really good, but I don’t want just be, oh my God. I was waiting for so long and now it’s gone in a, in a day. I can’t do that. So right. What I’ve seen of him in soldier boy is really good. So it’s parody a little bit of captain America and maybe will [00:22:00] have the boys does variations on every single thing.
So the heroes are never quite as heroic as you expect, or they’re more heroic than you expect, but they all have human failings and foibles. Right. And that makes things interesting. You know what I mean? Yeah. I love they give people superhuman abilities and have them be a little crazy and not expect weird things to happen.
right.
[00:22:20] Stephen: I’ve gotta watch the boys season three, I’ve gotta watch stranger things. Part one, season four, OB wine is still coming out and we got Seahawk coming soon and everything.
[00:22:33] Alan: It’s amazing. There’s so much good stuff coming down the pike. You know what I mean? I’m trying not to be Mr. Eight hours a day of television.
I just won’t do that. And yet then you’re having to be selective and say, okay, what do I most need to watch? And everything, not everything that I like. Does Colleen necessarily like anything at the time that veers don’t too much to guns and explosions movies, then it’s not her cup of tea. So we, we are still working our way through castle.
We’re still, we are watching any number of good new comedy specials are out [00:23:00] like bill Mar has one. Bill Burr has one. Ricky VE. There’s like they seem to come in SPS like that, where a good comedian working at the height of his powers. Really our favorite thing, our favorite night out. Nice. We just went to see a guy named, uh, Harry, um, Bollo who we knew nothing of going in, but we’ve learned to trust that hill is our local comedy club, the Booker, the owner.
They really have good comedy tastes a lot of the new people that we’ve never heard of. We just learned to trust them and see, let’s see what this is about. And I went out as usual face hurting sides hurting because I left straight for an hour and 15 minute. You know what I mean? It’s good. So,
[00:23:36] Stephen: yeah, it’s so hard cuz now all these great shows are coming out and it’s summer and that I go camping.
I, I go do all sorts of fun events that are out and about. And then I got so much yard work and stuff. I’m still working on here to clean things up that it’s TV. Isn’t the thing for me to sit down when the sun shining and it’s that’s right.
[00:23:58] Alan: That’s we do it. I [00:24:00] watch like maybe we watch a little bit when we’re eating dinner together and.
Most of the time I’ll be okay, that’s enough TV for me today and I’ll break away and go do other things. And sometimes maybe like at 11 o’clock at night between 11 and one, I’ll do my I’m gonna go surf to see where we’re going on our next vacation. I’ll always do something on the computer while watching two shows or a movie from 11 to one or something like that.
Right. But that’s otherwise when I fit things in maybe three to four hours, if that, and on weekends, we just, we still, we don’t sit down until the evening. Some people they take Saturday as being, well, I’m gonna start at nine and if I could wear astronaut pants, I wouldn’t have to get up. They really are like binge committed and we just don’t do
[00:24:41] Stephen: that.
We’re still, yeah, neither do I. And even in the spoil
[00:24:44] Alan: hollow, you
[00:24:45] Stephen: know what I mean? So even in the summer on the weekends, I’ll get up and I’ll read, uh, while drinking some coffee for an hour, hour and a half, instead of turning on a TV show. First thing I sit and read and you this last year or two [00:25:00] with, uh, all the work and everything, I haven’t gotten to read half as much as I’ve been wanting to.
And then I’ll pick up, like, I’m still trying to work my way through foundation. ASMO that is not something that I can just sit and zoom through. That’s a, a slower read for me. I gotta digest.
[00:25:16] Alan: There’s more to it. Exactly. It’s not just the little throwaway. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:25:21] Stephen: Other big news. It’s WDC time. Again,
[00:25:24] Alan: exactly.
Worldwide developer convention from apple is going on this week and, and I love it. You know what I mean? One of the, the. Apple is a force for good, in so many ways. I know that some of its business practices, there’s all kinds of objections to apple, but in the overall man, it’s bringing so many good things into the world.
It’s enabling so many good behaviors. It’s so much about everybody gets like per 500 to a thousand dollars. You have an amazing miracle machine in your hand, the iPhone or for the laptops and the Mac minis and whatever else it might be. And they continually just [00:26:00] make incredible breakthroughs as to, it keeps getting faster, better, better displays neural engines, security, enclaves, so that it really is as much security as you can give to help the individual fight off against the degradations of the punks from the, uh, Eastern European and that kind of stuff.
So it’s like, uh,
[00:26:19] Stephen: the $6 million man.
[00:26:21] Alan: Yeah. That’s okay. Yeah. Okay. but like the fact that they have. The people they come out to do. This is a wonderful choreographed performance, but the people that they have do these presentations really know what they’re talking about. They’re usually the heads of operating systems, the heads of the graphic displays and stuff like that.
So you not only get the information, you get the pride and the enthusiasm and the look, what we’re bringing into the, there’s always, there’s a new version of the OS coming out for Mac for, uh, the iPad and your iPhone for your Mac TV, all that kind of stuff. And without going into it, like [00:27:00] all those features like their watch and their, the integration into your health becomes better and better.
They really have it. Now that they’re about to get their method of detecting atrial fibrillation is gonna be like FDA approved, right. That this will actually be considered medically viable and correct. For and how it tracks your blood sugar and how it, uh, does all like the way it judges your sleep states and helps and helps coach you about here’s ways in which you could get better, more restorative sleep and that, uh, how you’re doing your workouts and that it helps you encouraging with, Hey, close your rings, get your standups and your exercise and your, and just your movement going.
It, it has helped me a ton just that little bit. And boy, they sure seem to be hitting the sweet spot of not being nag wear, but being like encouragement wear
[00:27:51] Stephen: control over that, what notifications you get and how often and when. So yeah, that’s exactly what more people’s smart products should do. [00:28:00] Give you the control.
[00:28:01] Alan: That’s in fact, some of the big announcements that they made. They’ve got a thing now where you really can get, um, notifications of virtually anything. You know what I mean? Not only of your appointments, but just things that you can say. Tell me about this, but you also have all the control over boy. I’m getting more spam email and spam texting and spam phone calls than I ever have before.
And they’ve made it very easy to manage that. So you don’t have to hear from too many political operatives, too many people trying to sell you aluminum siding or an extended car warranty or whatever else it might be. And that little bit of time that you take manage that day to day over the course of time, you create a very personalized stream.
So that it really is. I want to hear when Ticketmaster makes an announcement about various different bands so that I get in early on tickets, but I don’t need to hear about every kind of ticket and I don’t need to, you know what I. They really are getting great about not only you personalize it, but using their artificial intelligence, their neural engine type stuff, they, they are [00:29:00] getting their device, gets to know you.
And then it’s predictive about, Hey, this thing coming up, you’ve mentioned before that you like pinball, there’s going to be an actual video game thing, and maybe it’s tangentially related. And I am continually pleased and surprised by the Groupons that I’m getting are less and less generic and more and more, huh?
I really might be interested in that. And, and just getting away from spam and just mass marketing, the, the day lose of crap that you have to deal with every day, it’s worth that little bit of an investment to get it, getting to know me and making it much more tuned to me. I love that. I really do nice. Um, when they talk about how they’re coding, it is fascinating.
You know what I mean? That so much, this is not, it took geniuses to figure out how to set up the APIs and the. Capabilities that they have the frameworks, but then there’s all kinds of different apps that are saying about health, about food, about activities, about family. It there’s, I, I am not so much interested in this, but they are [00:30:00] very good about how to have different members of the family have different access to different things so that parents really can help their kids stay in contact, be exposed to the right things, but not things that they’re not ready for yet.
Keep them safe. It’s they’re just, they’re so good anticipating what the better world should be, and then creating the ability to be in that better world. And that’s how I vote with my stocks is what’s the world that I want to create. I want there to be better health, better security, better financial things put in the hands of the little people, not just the Ola GARS and apple is helping to create that world.
It might be that it’s not the cheapest solution, but you know what, for the value that you get out of it, it is an incredible bargain what I have going on with my integrated sets of things. And
[00:30:47] Stephen: wasn’t it. Last year they came out with, uh, was it the M two? And you were like, oh, I want to get the new one, blah, blah, blah.
So is there any big hardware type announcements or is it all just iterations and little things?
[00:30:58] Alan: So actually it was last year was the M one. [00:31:00] It was the first time apple, Silicon. They moved away from Intel, which they had been in the last 20 years. Right. And they had made a big change from when they, they had a combination of them in Motorola and IB.
Then they did Intel for a long time. And now this is another fascinating topic, as you can do things in emulation. So where they run in software, the capabilities of older chip sets, older machines. So that’s why you can still have the multiple versions of windows running on a current windows box. As you can say, make me look like windows 95, cuz your app requires that or make me look like, uh, A whole different platform.
Mm-hmm give me the gaming console. Give me the right. So they have done not only, they start changing to apple Silicon, but the transition is seamless in terms of all the different vendors can make their apps work directly on apple, Silicon, or they’ll go through, what would you call it kind of a translator that makes it so that all the Intel stuff.
Appropriately run on apple Silicon without them having to change a, a word [00:32:00] of code, or if they want to tune it, then they can, by using various different things that are more directly writing to hardware. So the M one was last year and indeed my Mac mini is an M one and it’s bigger, better, faster, stronger than anything I’ve ever had before.
Graphics wise, processor speed, memory throughput, et cetera. Now there’s the M two and indeed it does improve on the M one N its uh, you know, 15% faster, overall 40% faster in graphics. It has new capabilities in its neural engine and, and it’s how it handles memory. And especially what they’re really good at showing is.
Power efficiency. The amount of capability you get per power is four to five times better than anything Intel has going. You know what I mean? Like at its peak, it really is using a fourth of the power or the how fast it can go is back at 60%, it’s it’s 60% plus compared to what the best that Intel can do.
[00:33:00] Wow. So at, at Intel and AMD in that, that there’s a whole ship set family nowadays of which are Intel compatibles if you will. So it’s very cool.
[00:33:09] Stephen: and, and for years, like with work, people are saying, Hey, I need a new laptop or desktop, mostly laptops. Will this handle what I, what I need to do, man, for the last 15 years there isn’t a laptop out there.
Even Chromebooks can handle almost everything that we do. We do email, we do spreadsheets, we do web surfing and sometimes zoom meetings and stuff. Everything can handle that. But now with all the AI stuff, being built into the tools, you ha you do have more processing, but even though some of it gets offloaded to cloud functions, there fi there is a little bit more power needed for some of these big capabilities that are starting to come out.
[00:33:51] Alan: Yeah. And actually you have to get into processing theory to understand just what cool things and how powerful they are. Now. It’s not a single core. It’s usually eight, eight to [00:34:00] 10. So there’s a whole bunch of parallelism going on. And the smarts that say. It isn’t just brute force, try things. It’s more, they learn over the course of time, what operations, from what apps, apps, big graphic processing apps, the Adobe Photoshops of the world and stuff like that.
They’ve embraced parallelism. So that things that used to take like a rendering farm to do for Disney. Now you can do ’em on your home machine and in 15 minutes, instead of let it run overnight. So man, they’ve really made incredible advances in terms of those things. And again, the fact that the, the product announcements that they made were both the MacBook air and the MacBook pro are not gonna be M two related.
And the MacBook air. It really is. I, if I remember right point it’s where you can fit it into a Manila envelope. Geez. You know what I mean? A computer you can just like, and it has no fans. It runs so efficiently that despite all that power, it’s not like. Holding a waffle iron in your hands. It has [00:35:00] no fans.
The MacBook pro wow. Is more powerful and does more things. So it does have, and their whole fan systems itself brilliant. In terms of, they show you the air pattern that they have of going over the face of the motherboard and exiting and stuff. And that it’s the be the most efficient way you can do that kind of cooling so that you’re like guaranteed that you can’t overwhelm what the system is capable of.
It will not let itself have any kind of heat, frustration. you know what I mean? When they, and they talk about the AI stuff, like you said, the kinds of things that they’re now able to do, here’s a fascinating to. Pass key is the next thing they’re going to work with instead of passwords, instead of all the problems that people have with passwords of, I have too many, and I can’t remember them all, or I use one everywhere and that creates a security, a huge exposure, or we have exposures at the server level.
We’re up 500,000 passwords are now in the bad guys’ hands. They’ve done it now where you’re gonna be able to [00:36:00] have biometrics that is usually your, the touch of a fingertip or your face. And for every single site, you’ll go to, you’ll create a pass key that is on your machine, not going to a server it’s one time encryption, so that it’s based on your biometrics.
And you’ll be able to always have security at every website, every application with only biometrics and that quick of that, you don’t have to buy a dedicated dongle that you put your finger into. That’s gonna read et cetera. So have to steer in with your, your retina, like you do in the old science fiction movies.
And you can steal somebody’s eyeball, but I digress and what, you know what I mean? It. Pass keys are going to change the world in terms of how much more secure they’re going to make everything based on you. Can’t steal someone’s device, you have to steal the person, right? And you, and, and all the hassles of passwords are going to be over the course of time.
As people convert to this and start using it, I need to, I have too many passwords or too many repeated passwords. I know I’ve done a bad thing, right. And yet [00:37:00] I am enough all over the web. And I want the convenience of being able to save my, some information for all the flights. I’ve been doing payment information, which especially is a bad exposure.
And then no matter how careful you are, oh my God. Experie Experian has an exposure. That’s like the heart of your credit rating. One of the three. And then what do you do? Right? You were careful. And then someone still screwed up at a governmental or big company or level. And now I’m gonna go change my passwords everywhere.
That’s a week’s word. It well, Pasky, it’s really because of the speed with which it can do
[00:37:34] Stephen: these things. Now. I, I love that and I know I, I use a password manager, so when I’m on my computer, it pops up, fills things in it’s great. And it gives me passwords. So every time I fill it’s, it’s a. 16 character, random everything.
I, I have no idea what any of my passwords are, which in apple keep those the same thing. Yeah. But in itself is a bad thing, but you got two factor authentication and you got multiple things, so you can [00:38:00] recover. And I guess that’s the best we can do, but I love my phone because I’ve got my fingerprints in there and it, most of the apps just connect to that.
So once I log in the first time I connect my fingerprints and almost everything on my phone, I just use fingerprints or my face now. So I love that. And I can see this PAs key stuff. One of the things we just mentioned that cloud computing, AI processing, that they’ve got the power to do these things. So yeah, I’m sure we’re gonna see things we haven’t even thought of yet.
[00:38:30] Alan: Another thing that’s wonderful about not only with Ky. It’s a, not apples, it’s a standard. They decided between Google, Android and, and, um, multiple other vendors. Right? So that instead it being, oh, great standards are great. Everybody gets one. It really is going to be that this will be useful across multiple laptops and phones and tablets and everywhere.
So that eventually it’ll be this huge United wall against the bad guys. Right. You know what I mean? That everybody will be using this technology. They also talked about [00:39:00] poor home stuff. Home kid is growing, you know, automated homes, all the benefits you get from having a smart thermostat, smart lighting, a smart security, that kind of stuff that now there really seems to be.
They’ve announced this multiple times before, so I have to see about adoption, but the world continues to say it’s really not a good idea to have five different standards out there. Can we all get together and really work out what we want this to be proprietary has some benefit, but it really is. Um, Not the way to go, if you’re gonna try to get widespread adoption.
Right? So there’s a, a standard now called matter for home kit type stuff where everybody’s gonna have the same way of talking to your light bulbs and talking to your washing machine and and all that kind of stuff. So I, I love the fact that they are not only trying to do things for their own aggrandizement, but they’re really seemingly trying to like, Hey, everybody let’s work on this together.
And then it’ll be in the execution and the sales and the quality of what they produce. It won’t be that we start from the start [00:40:00] of Nope. You can only use our light bulbs with our
[00:40:04] Stephen: proprietary
[00:40:05] Alan: sockets. Exactly. Exactly. So I’m digging on. They, I think that’s
[00:40:10] Stephen: cool because 25 years ago, telling Microsoft and apple to come up with one thing that would’ve been been like, oh my God, why would we ever do that?
We must have ours. And how things have changed in the world and getting Google in on it and stuff. I
[00:40:27] Alan: love that. The reason that I specifically said what I, how I tried to say, what I did was that it doesn’t seem to be, oh, great. Now we’ve got role of all the corporations have decided that they’re having one standard and now they’ve put a straight jacket on everybody.
It doesn’t seem to be like that. They’ve learned about standards to say here’s the low lowest level, just like security pro protocol has seven layers. You don’t have to. The reason the internet works as it does is because they’ve made it so that you can have an absolute rock, solid likeness at the base levels, the first three, [00:41:00] the fiscal and digital and so forth.
And then you can vary without wrecking the standard so that you still can get. Um, who does a better file transfer system who writes a better browser and, and who embraces the standards so fully so that no matter what device of theirs, you’re on it all always work instead of, oh, that’s not quite perfect CSS.
That’s not perfect. HTML five, whatever else it might be. So they seem to be finding the combination of the standard will make everything interoperate well enough, but there’s still room for competition and variation and betterment. People adopt. And some it’s funny there, one of the phrases that I heard about Microsoft let’s say 30 years ago, was embrace, extend, and extinguish that they would adopt a standard in a way of being able to say, yes, we’re compatible, but then they’d start to introduce little incompatibility.
And then, because they’re the big dog, they ad hoc leader with 80% of the market. Other things would just fall away because whatever Microsoft done became the ad hoc standard, even though it [00:42:00] wasn’t the best. Right. And there was a big war often, especially on the internet when Microsoft started to get involved in that of how many times they attempted to do things that weren’t internet H standard HTTP standard internet protocols for browsing for file transfer for everything.
And luckily there really were big enough competitors in terms of what Mozilla became and, and Google and apple having their own browsers and stuff like that, that they haven’t let the standard become. Uh, Medicals, the chains that make you only have the one standard and stuff like that. Right. So we’ll see it’s our laptops are, um, agent enough.
And in fact, Colleen is currently having, I’ve been spending times troubleshooting. Boy, it looks like her hard drive, and that is an SSD drive. Really has difficulties. I had to reboot from a bootable drive that I created on a thumb drive using apple tools and still it can’t fix the hard drive there’s irrecoverable errors.
So now I have to go in with a file recovery tool and get off of [00:43:00] it, whatever data I can and then try reforming her machine to see if it can, when it does the reform. It usually, um, routes around bad sectors. And I it’s funny, bad sectors is very much a hard drive of a physical hard drive, a real physical movement, armature type thing.
I don’t know what the equivalent of that is for SSD. Does it do testing that detects. This particular part of memory is now UN dependable and it’ll route around that. So my 512 drive will actually be 4 88 or something like that. Right. But what I want is I want 4 88. It’s all perfectly dependable, not catches catch can amongst five 12, and that’s suddenly my file is not readable.
So it’s been interesting to see some of the tools I expected to be able to do more tech tool pro and drive genius. As the operating system has changed over the course of time, they were unable to create the E drive that I needed to be able to do this boot. And so luckily Apple’s disc utility allowed me to do it, but then I can’t put onto that [00:44:00] drive all the tools that I want, cuz it boots for the ability to install system software.
Not so it can run as a standalone operating system so that I can’t go into drive genius or tech tool to do other of those things. So I’m in an interesting place now, max, for a long time, I’ve had the ability to do what they call target disk mode. You can actually use a USB cable or, or maybe volt as well and attach a, a laptop or any apple device to an existing computer and have it created just as a hard drive, not as another, uh, operating machine.
And that’s what we’re gonna have to do now is attach it as a hard drive. Hope I can. Hard drive salvage utilities are usually brilliant. They really don’t have to have an operating directory. They really can from boundaries and their knowledge of exactly what a file looks like and file types and stuff.
They can salvage all kinds of stuff off of that used to be that’s one of the things you had to take to one of the salvage places and pay a hundred dollars an hour to get what files you off. And it really is worth $500 to not [00:45:00] lose my files my time. And my love is in those things. I can’t lose that stuff, but 500, I might be able to do it
[00:45:07] Stephen: myself.
Right. And that’s another thing that’s changed that. Makes working with computers really nice for most common people. My phone, my laptop, my desktop, the browsers, a lot of the apps, Xbox it’s, all cloud saved and backed up and whatever your profile, your account is out there. So when you, when I get a new desktop and I connect my account, it’s like, and all the, the apps come back and the setting back.
Exactly. Yeah. And my phone, especially. Yeah. Google does that with, and the Xbox, I got the new Xbox X and all I did was put in my account and it set up the desktop the same or the home screen, the same, it put. I all the apps are accessible to, you know, download again. I, so that makes life what people just don’t realize.
Man, I learned in the day don’t save stuff [00:46:00] to C drive, know how to get the files to reinstall apps. And you had to have a whole setup plan for when your C drive blew up now. It’s yeah.
[00:46:09] Alan: Yeah. I’m a little bit worried about that when I really do reformat Colleen’s machine, how much will I be able to? It’s not just a matter.
Putting the files back on it. When installers run, they do all kinds of things to put files into various different profile and preference directories in the system. So it might be, I have to do a whole bunch of reinstalls. And so we’ll see how much that’s involved. She does runs more leanly than me. She usually does have, you know, the Microsoft office suite and, and browsers and things from work and stuff like that.
Whereas I have tons of . I have lots of stuff on my machine that she does not. So I’m hoping because it’s less complex. And actually I have a, a, a tool called Mac updater that keeps track of what I have on each of my different machines. And I’m counting on that being what would be useful for re oh four re template this machine, like the old machine.
Yeah. With all the guys that I had installed and [00:47:00] hopefully it’ll just be hit one button and come back in an hour and it’s downloaded tons of stuff. Right.
[00:47:04] Stephen: You know, we’ll see. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s definitely a, uh, New newer features. So it’d be nice to see with the new 5g, with all the cloud computing, if that changes that you really could, that it’s all the operating systems, you know, this would be the ideal that you have certain settings and programs and whatever.
So I sit down on my computer and log in and I get. Settings and my bookmarks or whatever, but then if I like came to your apple and I logged in it, it’s a profile. It’s a, that covers everything, my phone. So they travel with you into a platform. Yeah. Yeah. They’ve got some of that. Like I’ve noticed with my phone, I can actually send messages from my desktop.
I, and when I copy something on the desktop, if I go to, uh, the phone, it shows up that I could paste it down on my phone. So they connect it that way. Uh, I know the, [00:48:00] if I look something up on Chrome, I can send it to my desktop. And when I come home, it’s then open. So, you know, those things are coming, but it’d be nice to have this universal profile.
[00:48:10] Alan: Right. And it’s, I don’t have much experience of going from apple to other platforms, but in apple they have a thing called continuity. It really is no matter what you create, your bookmarks are continually thinking. You could be like watching a TV show on your phone. And then if it detects that you’re now in the same place for long enough, and there’s a better display, it’ll say, Hey, would you like to watch that on your bigger monitor it?
And maybe, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that it really is smart. You can use, uh, a tablet as an extended monitor for your yeah. You know, thing. It, it, that it does all that kind of automatically. Right. And I love that. Self-awareness and I love that. It’s it offers you options instead of forcing it to be a certain way.
Whenever something goes funny of like, why did my, why does it think this is my main monitor now here’s where I menu is now it’s on the other monitor. Cause I run multiple monitor things. It’s I don’t think I did [00:49:00] anything to initiate that it’s actually shocking to have it. Not only do it for you, but to do it wrongly, it knows this is my main thing.
It knows that this is where no, it doesn’t. It makes guesses sometimes still. I, oh, here’s a cool thing that I saw. Most laptops have a little built in camera and the fidelity is good enough to have zoom sessions. Whereas not every monitor mine don’t have a little camera on top of them, big TV’s Mike. So I have a dedicated camera and microphone that that’s how we do our zoom sessions and it’s got good enough fidelity that I look pretty good and picks up my voice pretty well.
They will now have it that there’s a little clamp you can get for your iPhone and you put that on top of your monitor. Wow. And it is that ongoing, uh, FaceTime zoom camera and sound pickup. That’s cool. You won’t even have to have a dedicated, that can be your always your conduit and, and I, I, this is amazing.
It has now the smarts in image process. [00:50:00] I’ve been to a couple things where I’m learning about how to cook, especially cook more healthily because I’m fighting diabetes and they usually have here’s the lady, uh, she got a zoom camera looking at her and then she’s got another camera positioned above.
That’s showing the, the stove on which she’s cooking and here’s how she’s stirring her posture, whatever else it might be. Your camera, your iPhone on top of your monitor is going to be able to take at that steep angle down onto your desktop as if it’s that overhead camera that’s, it will automatically go back and forth between your face and hand movements so that you can have that one device for, let me show you what I’m drawing on my tablet.
Let me show you what I’m cooking on my stove. Like the fact that it, it, I, I’m not trying to think whatever that steep angle is, you know, the is Americ projection that it’s all wrong in an angle and it’s all it’s skewed. It’s gonna correct for that to make it into as if you have an overhead camera. Wow.
[00:50:56] Stephen: How cool is this? That that’s a feature that [00:51:00] is totally reflective of the society with people doing YouTube and TikTok videos. And that’s something people, average, normal people sharing like that.
[00:51:08] Alan: Yeah, exactly. Not the computer geeks. That’s right. Yeah. Like just that, Hey, I, there’s a silly Facebook group called my house, not my cat about how people get adopted by a cat coming outta their property.
And almost, almost they wanna post a little video where, how you doing buddy script and the cat’s purring and, and like it, this makes it so that pretty soon, we’ve talked a little bit about this many episodes ago when they have apple glasses, Google gases that actually give you augmented reality. And you’re able to like use these and has a little monitor over here that says that’s Mount Whitney over there.
And Hey, you could find this at a better price because this is too much for green onions. I’m looking forward to having that, not in the intrusive way, but in that continual. Add to my knowledge way. Right? And once you have those, then pretty much everywhere you look, you’ve got a camera, you’ve got the ability to pick up video and it’ll have to see how it does it with [00:52:00] storage on the device versus always being connected to the cloud.
But they’re gonna work that out nowadays that you’ve got this grain of sand has as much storage as, as the iliac did under the corner deal.
[00:52:11] Stephen: Oh my God. It’s I was thinking about that over the weekend when I was at that green mill jazz club and it still looked like something from the twenties, it’s the wallpaper and the decoration still had that.
And I’m like, how cool would it be to have the glasses? And you get the overlay? So it does look like it’s 1920s club. And when you look at somebody they’re dressed in the, the old, tiny. And for that place to say, Hey, you can rent these glasses for an hour to have that experience. Yeah. I would do that. I’d I’d be like, heck yeah.
You know, that’d be awesome. I hear you. That’s
[00:52:48] Alan: as you know, nowadays, we still ourselves have to costume up segue time. we, we. Remember last year we had, we were, uh, gonna do clue up the, um, [00:53:00] overall clue game that takes place in various different cities. But downtown Cleveland, especially there’s an Allison Wonderland adventure that’s been put together for nine 17.
I took last year’s that we didn’t go to because it was thunderstorm city. They let me trade by. So I know I have it for us. So if you and someone, or we have, I have six total tickets. Okay. So I’m putting together our, our problem solving team, you know? Okay. And Colin along, or, or we’ll try to put together.
So we have a total of six. I’m probably gonna invite like Robert and Andrew. If you’re watching the podcast, I’ll be calling you soon. different partners in crime that have joined us on all these various different things. And so I’ll go ding them first and we’ll see who wants to do this, but that in the past, we’ve just done it.
I wouldn’t mind dressing up as the mad Hatter as oh God. Yes. You mean the Cheshire cat? I’ll dress as Alice and freak everybody. She, Colleen would look great at a pin four. You know what I mean? She ,
[00:53:56] Stephen: Colleen would look good in a really cool mad Hatter setup [00:54:00] actually
[00:54:00] Alan: wants to go as the queen of hearts. She, oh, I’ll put his
[00:54:04] Stephen: Yeah, that would be awesome. So we’ll see
[00:54:06] Alan: about that. So keep that dates up. I I’ll send you a little, uh, email or invitation or something like that, but nine 17, I think it’s a third
[00:54:13] Stephen: Saturday of September. Perfect. Is there a good Jabber walkie costume? Maybe
[00:54:18] Alan: oh, I see. You have to be whatever, 10 feet tall in to go lump.
You have to be able to go lump
[00:54:23] Stephen: through the, our dog Cassy the boxer, the way when she was younger, mostly the way she would run. I’m like, she’s not a, a boxer. She’s ALU. And we called her theum
[00:54:35] Alan: also verbally. You have to do verbally. I think it’s verbaled as it came. Right. And I, I memorized that once in college, for some reason, like.
Talent show or something like that. And so 1, 2, 1, 2 went through and through his BL went snicker neck. Honestly, I, I, I could probably still do it. I think, I think that,
[00:54:52] Stephen: that, that was such a weird book. That was such a weird story. yeah. I, that in wizard of Oz, if you ever read the actual wizard of [00:55:00] Oz book, it’s way different than the movie.
There’s a lot of similarities, but a lot of weird different things.
[00:55:05] Alan: Yeah. Yeah. I, this is funny. I read recently, uh, within the last two years, the annotated Alice, and it’s, there’s a number of people that are incredible scholars of Alice and Wonderland. And that Louis carro was actually, he loaded those things with political references and scientific and, and parody of various different public figures and that kind of stuff.
And it really adds to the story. But after a while, it was exhausting because the annotation was four times as much as the actual work. Who the, I don’t know who Tweedle them and TLE are supposed to be. And I wanted to say, boy, I need to go back, get a copy of the regular book and just read it for the enjoyment of the oddness of it, the silliness of it and not how deep it is.
I don’t, in some cases, it’s okay to step out of the depth and just enjoy something.
[00:55:52] Stephen: You know what I mean? So I can imagine Colin’s been reading the Sandman again, the graphic novels, but the, uh, Neo [00:56:00] Gaman annotated version, which has notes in the side and, you know, stuff interesting. And he’s loving it, but he’s oh my God.
It’s just taking so long for everything.
[00:56:10] Alan: Yeah. You can tell how much work that he put into it, how much thought he put into it in combining the various different folklores and something, but it’s different than just letting your, I remember all kinds of revelations of. Is that who that character is and then saying, yes, I really picked up on I, that is an amazingly good series.
Yeah. They’re finally bringing it to movies or television.
[00:56:31] Stephen: I’m trying to in September, I think it drops on prime or AMC.
[00:56:37] Alan: Another one of those series that they had to wait for special effects to really catch up and be able to do what, what is going on in the dream world, what Morpheus does, what there’s so much stuff.
And it’s got really whimsical and really dark elements to it and stuff. So they’re gonna have a lot of man and. Expectations for this because it isn’t kids’ stories. No, it’s, it’s [00:57:00] really adult and really good, but really unsettling in lots of ways
[00:57:03] Stephen: too. So I really hope, and, and this is the fear with something like this that they really spend time in detail and they get it good.
And they have eight episodes, which is the first 25. Books or whatever. Right. And you’re really into it, but not enough people get it. And they’re like, eh, we’re go cancel it cuz nobody’s watching it. And then you’re like, ah, or, or worse that they go. We don’t know if we’re go get anymore. So let’s cram as much as we can in there.
And then it loses something and it’s not as enjoyable. So I don’t know. It’s, it’s gonna be a touchy thing
[00:57:33] Alan: when I see Thor occasionally called him Mr. Shouty, because of the Sandman yeah, because he portrayed him in Sandman was as just this buffoon, this arrogant muscle bound buffoon. And that’s a lot closer to the overly proud ass that he is in north mythology about not as much about nobility and beauty.
He’s really no bully
[00:57:55] Stephen: Mr. Shouty. all right. So before we go, um, [00:58:00] you, you were talking about, uh, the 100 book as opposed to the 1000 book. So yes, we talked about that a little bit. So what’s this one a little more. So it’s
[00:58:10] Alan: funny. I really need to start with. Bring in props. Here’s the book it’s by a guy named show Intel, exactly Michael Hart.
And the way in which it differs is it’s really his scholarly work, but it’s his opinion instead of a committee of five that had done the thousand years, thousand people, right. And that the Olympic style judging kind of rounds correctly. So that it’s not one person’s opinion that pushes someone way up or way down, everybody has to agree to it.
So he has some interesting things because it’s only his opinion, even though it’s a very alerted good one, that his order is quite different. Who’s the most influential person of all time Muhammad, because the amount of staying power of his ideas, the size of his empire, the, um, codification that he did by having the, you know, capturing his sayings into the Quran and it wasn’t written after his death, it was really attributable to him, all [00:59:00] kinds of things about not only science and there’s, if you will, science and religion almost go lockstep for who is the more influential over the course of.
That a whole bunch of interesting Jesus Christ by the way is number three, because Isaac Newton is number two. And so immediately let’s have a fight, but it’s not about a fight. It really is that how he talks about it, about how does he judge influence. And I’m not so much caring about the exact order.
I’m caring about what a great book this is for. If I really wanna consider myself a alerted person, I for sure should know the hundred, most influential people of all time. And yet number eight is like the guy who invented paper. Can you name him? I could not. And so it’s something there’s and I should, there it
[00:59:46] Stephen: is now.
So when was it? When, what, give me the era
[00:59:50] Alan: like 1100 BC, China, if I remember correctly. Wow. And that the reason like he even outranks Gutenberg, because as you might imagine, [01:00:00] moveable type doesn’t matter if you don’t have paper right. Previous to paper and it’s. The combination that it has of weight and durability and ease of production is so much better than velum or app parchment or anything else that they had done before.
When you had to make it out of tanned animal HS, when you had to make it out of bamboo or Papyrus, it didn’t have the same should scrolls at Alexandria. They it’s no wonder that they didn’t survive till today or that they burnt or whatever like that and paper burn, of course. But I remember right, it’s a guy like LA say not LASU in China and was so they, he really, he is very good about saying, I’m gonna surprise you with this one because you won’t have heard of him.
But as far as I can tell, this is the guy that really created the kind of paper that we would say is. Has enough of the modern characteristics that this was the birth of paper. Wow. And, and so it’s fascinating,
[01:00:51] Stephen: that’s in the timeline game, you ever play that timeline where you speak the
[01:00:55] Alan: yes, exactly. In fact would be that this book will hopefully give me [01:01:00] enough confidence.
So that can almost be like authoritative in terms of what that was before. Remember you think that faxes were invented in the 1970s? No, they’re around since 1850. They just weren’t et cetera, et C right here. Another one that I was surprised by John Dalton, John Dalton is a scientist. Okay. And his big contribution is he, wasn’t the first one to talk about.
Atoms that everything reduces down to discreet elementary particles. That was actually, and I don’t know how to say democratic Democrat that they had if philosophically, they had that idea of moan ads and so forth back in Greek and, um, Roman times. But he was the first one to be able to say, we’re gonna measure everything very carefully.
We’re gonna do chemical reactions. We’re gonna show not only down to elemental atoms, but here’s the chemical compounds that nitrous oxide is always N two O it’s always two nitrogens to one oxygen, and we can prove it because we measured exactly things and then did the reaction or how you break things down.
So for all the other [01:02:00] scientists, I could start naming who did the like Newton, he Stewart leaving hook first periodic chart for all that kind of stuff. This is a name that I wasn’t familiar enough with compared to fair day and Maxwell the fathers of electricity and electromagnetism that also revel side, the world.
He just doesn’t get enough talk up about, he was the guy that created the idea of chemical constancy. That things really weren’t, there’s no magic. There’s no flow just on. And actually it’s a previous guy that had gotten rest out of the idea of combustion is not a mystical element flow just on getting out of things that actually is oxygen interacting at various different speeds.
So like that, now I’m an insufferable conversationalist because I wanna be like, actually, you know how that works and yet it’s very cool. Learned a lot of this stuff when I was like in junior high and high school to return to it now and have it recapitulated and have it here. This fills in the gaps that I really didn’t.
I don’t know that I [01:03:00] got it all back then. And that it’s not only about the thing it’s about the, who thought of the thing it’s really fascinating. And some guys were like, he had all the time because he was, you know, wealthy, landed. Gentry parents sent him to the best schools and that kind of thing.
Others were like born to nothing, but were incredibly inventive and creative and, and they had them sometimes patrons, like for instance, William Shakespeare, he does a very convincing case that William Shakespeare is actually Edward Lavi and not the guy that most people think of as William Shakespeare from Stratford on Ava on so forth, because all kinds of facts.
When he worked in London, what, how he produced his stuff, the first fol, all that kind of stuff. They don’t match. Biograph biographically correctly with William Shakespeare. The most often attributed one. They much more match this Edward lave guy and that it was a pseudonym. And he was actually like given money by the queen to just like, we have patrons of the arts, the Meese [01:04:00] and, and whoever over the course of time has done that in MacArthur grants nowadays.
So it was, he spends a lot of time defending his theory that it’s this guy, but like you have to be who has had more of an input on. Literature on, right on popular culture than William Shakespeare. You know what I mean? So, well
[01:04:21] Stephen: maybe Shakespeare was kinda like Batman or the dread pirate, Robert, that it changes over time
[01:04:27] Alan: and, and they, they did, he discusses death.
It wasn’t actually a series of people who wrote pseudonymously under that and know that it really was, he thinks almost all this guy’s work, the sonnets and the plays and all that kind of stuff, but just that there’s others where he often says I’m gonna combine marks and angles into marks because they really did most of their great work together.
And marks really was the leader of those two same with, or, and Wilbur Wright. They’re inseparable. You might want to give ’em two entries. If you’re really going, man, by man, they were, they invented flight [01:05:00] together and took turns making the flight. So it wasn’t like one was the ground guy and one was the air.
It’s very interesting. And I guess idiosyncratic, because it’s him and him talking about how he combines these things or why he does it, or he’ll talk about the relative rankings of George Washington really is a more important general than Napoleon bona part or Alexander. The great, because even though his empire wasn’t as great, the kinds of things he did to bring America into existence, and it like that the United States of America has more longstanding impact even in the last 200 years than Alexander the great conquering, the Persian empire.
It was a big blossom and then it collapsed because he died at 33, I think, right? 31 or 33. Yeah. Immediately his general started carving things up. I love that. That history lesson of he has all kinds of maps of, again, here’s the Mediterranean and here’s how much of it Alexander the grain Concord. Here’s how much Tamerlan conquered.
Here’s how much Napoleon [01:06:00] conquered and how they came to their ends. You know what I mean? So I’m loving being reacquainted by it. I’m loving getting the, the relative. Wow. There’s more time separating Aristotle from, from Plato, from let’s to get to more modern philosophers than there is between like the dinosaurs boy, I take all back what I said, finding out how early, but how brilliant Aristotle.
Is really a cool thing that he contributed in so many different ways to modern realms of thought thousand years before anybody else. Right. Really was able to explain that better than he had. You know what I mean? The Telian school of like how you use logic to come to conclusions that it’s not individual facts that you actually reason and you make it, that it all hangs together well, and that if it doesn’t hang together, you keep working on it until it does.
You don’t just say, oh, we must accept the mystery. in today’s
[01:06:57] Stephen: world of Google medical [01:07:00] experts telling you how to live your life. We could use Aristotle again. We need to reincarnate him.
[01:07:04] Alan: like that. You know? And I, I don’t know, for instance, they talk, I just, what an interesting contrast, I just saw, I’m watching the latest Dr.
Who as well, and they had an episode about Tesla and Edison, and they really portrayed Tesla as this brilliant Crusader and Edison as only a businessman and kind of rapacious, but. In this book, Edison has rated much higher than Tesla because he really did have a thousand patents to his name. And, and if you anything about him, he like, he didn’t just let’s do electricity.
He was, I made the incandescent light bulb. I made the phonograph, I made the dictation machine. I made like he had amazingly broad intelligence and the, the tinkering that he did and the perfection that he did, he was the first one to do know that you can get in a vacuum current to go from wire to wire, without the wires touching.
That’s the, that that’s the whole vacuum tubes and incandescence [01:08:00] and fluorescence a lot of things that are absolutely modern society. He was the guy that electrified New York city and showed that you could table electricity and put it in people’s homes and not have it be lightning bolts coming down to kites train.
So it sometimes it’s that the people that were able to take a previous body of work and codify, this is how gases work. This is how electromagnetism works, make it into a series of equations that not only give it explanatory, but predictive power that’s the, the, the heart of the scientific method is that you understand it so well that you can say, this is how it should work.
If we try this next experiment and behold it does, or, huh, it doesn’t work exactly. What are we missing? Right. What are we missing? There’s still something wrong here. I it’s very heartening about how ideas transfer through society, how science transfers, how religion transfers. It’s a, I’m only on number 36 and.
Fascinating. and
[01:08:59] Stephen: I [01:09:00] love books like that because you can read one or two and stop for the day. It, yeah, I’ve been trying
[01:09:05] Alan: to do that. Get 2, 3, 4, 5 in, and then say, I don’t wanna overwhelm myself. I don’t wanna let those rest and let ’em sink in. And then when I go back, say so do I remember the right things about Washington, about Bon Napoleon and et cetera, et cetera.
And what an interesting contract there, contrast there that we remember, George Washington is Washington, but Napoleon Bo apart is Napoleon. Why first name versus last name. But anyway,
[01:09:28] Stephen: it’s usually, uh, castle, not Rick, so that’s
[01:09:32] Alan: right. But how do we choose unique too? There’s lots of Georges, but there was only that one Washington or something.
Okay. So a pleasure.
[01:09:42] Stephen: Next week, cuz it is getting close. You brought it up the AGS coming up. So are you going, are you talking? So
[01:09:49] Alan: I’m talking about the comic book multiverse, nice from today’s comic book headlines. I’m gonna talk about Dr. Strange and Spider-Man and the last stuff. And one of the things I wanted to mention was the ag session schedule just came [01:10:00] out and without going into it too much, the reason, the best thing that I love about the annual gathering really about any regional gathering is the programs.
Yeah. That it’s just so cool to go to a place where you get brilliant, passionate people talking about what they want to talk about. Kinda like Ted talks, the whole, there are there’s hundreds of different things going on at the ag and it’s about every topic you can imagine. I’m a publicity guy. So a little thing.
Hey, every topic under the sun and we’re out in the desert. So that’s a lot it’s we have, there’s a debate room where they have, they’re gonna have hopefully, uh, uh, gentle. Guided discussion about little issues like global warming back. Oh
[01:10:40] Stephen: no. If I wanna go to that,
[01:10:43] Alan: I never go. And I’m very happy that that room exists because to me that’s like the fanatic magnet.
And if I sit out of there, then I won’t have to hear all the crazies about their issues and stuff like that. And it’s not all that mentions are brilliant. Lots of people really [01:11:00] have good things to say, and I probably should hear them, but it does attract the fanatics
[01:11:04] Stephen: sometimes. Yeah. Next week, we, we should talk about the program and the variety and what the topics are because it’s always so interesting.
How much things you get. And I don’t think a lot of people know and understand that it’s not, no, we don’t just get together and sit and talk about rocket science. it’s really not. It
[01:11:22] Alan: let’s do some cube roots together.
[01:11:24] Stephen: Woohoo. Yeah, no, it’s not at
[01:11:25] Alan: all. I will prep better for next week. The, the incredible depths and breadth of what we got going on there.
It’s perfect.
[01:11:31] Stephen: Yeah, we’ll do that. Okay. All right, man. Have a good week.
[01:11:34] Alan: Take care. By the way, seeing a meatloaf. This weekend, really in Marietta, it it’s the band that meatloaf used on tour, but was a different singer named Caleb Johnson. And to me, that was like, man, if the vocalist can’t pull it off. And then I watched a couple videos and he really can nice that’s jetting down.
She has a client in Marietta and we, that gave us the excuse to say, you’re gonna be in Marietta. I could come with some
[01:11:58] Stephen: Melo music with gas [01:12:00] prices. You gotta combine all of this. Well, it was almost $6 a gallon. I’m like, oh my
[01:12:05] Alan: God, I didn’t, man. We’re still at four and change here, California is over six.
Every time I go out there. Yeah. I still love my dad’s car for
[01:12:13] Stephen: $80. Yeah, it’s terrible. It was horrible. Wow.
[01:12:18] Alan: Okay. All right, man. Later, take care, Steven. All right. Bye.
