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Overview
We jump around topics more than usual today. This could mean there are just so many things to talk about or it could mean lots of things are happening. It could also mean that our regular jumbled ADD brains are in high gear.
How about talking sports? We don’t do that much, but this is different. Ohio high school has just accepted eSports as an official lettered sport.
Did you letter in a sport or would you have liked to be a part of an eSports team and get a varsity letter?
Oh, and today’s job market uses tech – especially online job boards, with Indeed being one of the biggest. Recently, more and more jobs are appearing that don’t require college degrees.
Do you have a degree and does your job require one?
We talk about making decisions and how facts and science should win out. Too often, people make a decision based on emotion or limited knowledge.
Are you diabetic and looking for a good snack? Popcorn is a great choice and Kernel Seasons can make it better.
Recommendations
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/jobs-without-a-degree
42 up-and-coming careers without college (and 10 to avoid) (greatschools.org)
No degree? No problem. Tech firms move away from college requirement for new hires | Computerworld
College Degrees: The Job Requirement Companies Seek, but Don’t Really Need – HBS Working Knowledge
KernelSeasons – Sauer Brands (sauers.com)
YouTube
Transcript
Alan: All right. Good morning. I had to swap out my U USB cable for my little camera. Lemme see if I can get a better background. Not sure why this seems to happen. Every time that I update Zoom, even like a tiny little, there we go. Let’s give you a London so that it’s Dr. Who, I don’t have a Star Wars image, but there we go.
Okay. Nice. All. Yeah, sorry that we had that little bit of blank screen there for a moment. I only have so many ports. It’s funny. One of the reasons that I still have to do anything physically is because I have on the back of my Mac mini certain ports that you like. When I use the camera, I need to have a no lag as fast as possible.
And also when I use my D V D cd, et cetera, drive it, I’ve noticed that even though I have a dongle, it has eight extended ports. Some things work well with it and some things don’t, right? And everything should work. Be powered device and it should pass right through. And yet, What, whatever they’ve got the chats in there and stuff like that.
It has expectations and I got, you get spoiled by having so many devices nowadays be auto registering, auto, like declaring themselves and doing the hands shaking and making sure that it works. That when it doesn’t, it’s. You’re gonna really make me get up from my desk and swap things in a port. I guess you
Stephen: are.
Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yeah. The more things change, the more they stay the same. U S B was supposed to be the end all, be all, solve all our problems, one type of connector, and then we came out with 200 million versions of connectors for u SB and it changes every couple years. And, oh, let’s try something new.
Let’s do lightning connectors, let’s do FireWire, let’s do let’s do something completely different. So whatever .
Alan: Yeah. And you it’s funny, it’s built into the name Universal Serial bus and, you know what I mean? It’s I, and the first time that I had, oh, so now this is for cameras and this is for phones and this is know, they had all the various different things and just seeming.
only based on how much real estate was there on the device, instead of couldn’t you just build a port in that followed everything else. And even then we’ve always, I don’t know whatever the odds are, if you’re plugging that in getting it correct, it should be 50 50. No. I must be 75 20 with how often I put it in without looking at it first to see which is the top or the bottom side, however you wanna term So at least now with, U S B C, I don’t know that it’s exactly the equivalent of a lightning connector, but it’s, it looks very similar. Yes. So U S C at least is high bandwidth that is it. And it works without worrying about top and bottom orientation. And hopefully this will be there’ll always be a need for more speed.
So they always will be developing a next standard. And then as Android and Apple and I should say Samsung, apple, wherever the biggest providers are, whatever they do on their phones becomes the defacto standard. Because there’s just so many skillion over out there. I’ve got 500 million micro SB connectors roaming around for charging and everything else.
Stephen: And now most of my stuff’s on u s bbc, so I pull a cord, I’m like, Nope, not that one. Nope, not that one. Nope, not that one. And worse, this microphone that I’m talking on has an older mini USB connector, which is the slightly thicker on the end, and my cat ate it. That one. Oh, . Yeah. And I don’t have anymore.
I had the Accord I’m like, oh my gosh. Yeah. Everyt person. Every person actually has this, that, that box. old power supplies or old cables or whatever like that. And I actually have mine relatively arranged and it’s chronological so that when I’m looking at, oh, this is I, if ever I have to connect Acui device, I really can have that available.
Alan: But it’s like, how far do I have to go back? And luckily, I don’t know, they haven’t had a cat chew on it. They haven’t been in the suns that they’ll get brittle and cracked. And yet there’s a certain amount of just things, who knows why wear out. They’re designed for 10,000 plugins and outs, depending on how many times I used that.
Eventually it’ll fray the cable. Colleen and I just had to think, she’s in a conference this week and we had to make sure that she had a good charger. We both have iPhone thirteens, if I remember right. For whatever reason, her stopped working and there’s no noticeable fraying or or anything that look make but it just doesn’t work.
So I gave her mine and then the one that I had extra was my travel cable. And it has indeed been, In a hurry wound up too many times so that it does have a little kink at the end. It’s I don’t know about you. Whenever I try to wrap something with electricians tape, it doesn’t make a nice, neat black circle.
It almost, it just goes, it’s wronged . And so now I have this every I will be doing what you just said. I’ll be going out to Amazon Basics and getting a for u s BBC and hopefully, I don’t know, I don’t one that has braided instead of only sheath cable so that it really can withstand the fact that I often have to roll it in a circle.
know, I can it The slight difference in five, 10, $15 to make it so that it won’t wear out, especially when you really need it. I’m, I don’t need the fake premium gold cable they used to sell you for stereos because that had the best three. But I noticed there really is a difference in the quality of things.
And shout out to Amazon Basics. They really seem to be one of those places if they survey the market and they say, what’s the one that everybody wants best value for the money? And let’s make a billion of those, right? And for a reasonable price. So I probably for cables and for batteries and for all kinds of other things, I’ve gotten Amazon Basics now for years because I the advertising that all the others are willing to do to try to convince you.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon did that research for me and made something. That’s exactly what I want. There’s hardly ever a view of, Hey, I bought the cheap cable and it wore out. No, this isn’t the cheap one. This is the good cable for a good price. They’re the Costco of cables. They’re the Costco of as I look around it doesn’t matter going to Amazon’s basic, Amazon basic has become a default for if I need something for the kitchen, do they have, I love Oxo things.
Yes. But if Amazon has what looks exactly like an Oxo whisk, but for half the price, it’s oh, okay, . I’m hoping I’m not falling into where do they source from from the worst, sweatshop evil, pillaging the land with all the waste they produce. I don’t think so, but I don’t, I know that Apple has done a lot with making sure that kind of from cradle to grave, it really is that they’re waste pro.
They don’t produce a lot of waste when they produce it, and they don’t let a lot of it go into landfills. I don’t know that I see those same guarantees from other manufacturers, like Apple’s a very green company in that way, and I
Stephen: support that. That’s nice. Yeah. And for the cables, I’ve been getting more.
Oh, I’m sorry. I’m saying for the cables I’ve been getting more of, like you said, the braided outer core because my cat doesn’t chew those. So that’s what I use more of just because I really shouldn’t be strangling my cat.
Alan: e Exactly. . That’s very funny though. For no matter high tech, we get, there really are still rats in the walls and cats in the house and that can do damage.
So what’s on our list? So you had exciting news
Stephen: about your talk and it is so geeky, so this fits right in my, my talk at its core is very geeky anyway, because it’s talking about how the future’s changing and our kids aren’t getting prepared for it. We’ve talked about that a couple times.
You’ve sat in on it. And the general gist of it is our future in technology has changed. The job market has changed. What’s available has changed what our kids should be learning and getting ready for.
Alan: Yeah, the ABCs of today are not, yeah, really writing in rhythm. They’re okay. The
Stephen: last two weeks I have seen two news articles that completely back up and support and skyrocket everything I’ve been talking about.
So all those naysayers that always wanna push back during my talk and say this, that your thing, they don’t have anything really to say anymore. Two things. So number one, there is a news article about the large number, and I don’t have the exact number off the top of my head, large number of indeed jobs being posted that are no longer looking for college degrees.
They want experience and they will take any other type of education you have. So a certificate, which used to be not as big, important as the college degree. Sometimes now it’s a bigger deal. Online education, bigger deal because, hey look, I got educated and here’s my experience. , that’s what they want.
You say, I have a college degree. They’re find the news articles talked about how they’re finding that, oh back in the seventies or ish, give or take, that people were being pushed on. The idea is college graduates are better trained, more prepared for the workforce, and things were changing from being an interpreter and lots of people running their own business to working for other companies and, oh, get a college grad.
That’s changing back now. There’s more people working again for themselves and smaller companies and they want people with experience because they’re finding, they have to teach the college graduates as much as they do people who don’t have college degrees. So it’s less of a requirement nowadays.
Alan: Interesting. I just, it’s kind, I’m trying to think of who we were talking with. I just heard that it referred to as the paper ceiling, that having a degree used to be a real block. Like you wouldn’t even make it past the first set of qualifications to even get an interview if you didn’t have the degree that they were looking for.
And that has, it’s funny, I have no, had no problem with that because I did indeed yet a CS degree at an MBA from a good school. And so it was never blockage for me. But Colleen has tons of experience but doesn’t have the sheep skin. And how sad that it’s like kinda like too late for her.
You know what I mean? She’s had a great career and has had to prove it through her, the quality of her work and her service and so forth, but it definitely would’ve helped her a lot if that wasn’t a stumbling block for being able to get into very, you name it, a bank, a law firm, a, an insurance company where that was the first line of defense, I’m glad to hear that. What I’m hoping is what you just said about having to have a certificate or some kind of proof. I also know I’ve been in the tech field as you have for a long time. I have all kinds of people that declare themselves to be a consultant or a developer, or you named the title that really didn’t have the chops, didn’t have the discipline, they didn’t have the knowledge, they didn’t have the broad knowledge to be able to make choices correctly.
And so some part of my selling myself as a consultant or an entrepreneur was always here’s how though I have a college degree. I didn’t stop there. I kept my skills current and that I any number of places that I’ve been in, they often just use me as the general tech guy, not just the specific language or platform that I’m working on.
And so I would often say, one of the reasons that I’m a really good database guy is cuz I don’t just know one database. Back in the mainframe days, I knew both I M S D B, BDC and I’m dms and then into Oracle and that kind of thing. And the people that came out, for instance, I came out of University of Illinois where they taught you about the various different kinds of data that is relational database versus hierarchical and that kind of thing.
And if you went to Northern Illinois University to defame them just a little bit, it was much more a trade school where you learned, here’s how you’re gonna be working in Oracle SQL L on SQL L server. And that was it. And when they went into a place that had u SB or any other kind of database, they had to do a certain amount of.
and I wouldn’t even call it translation. They had to flounder a lot. Yeah. To find out that S SQL L is the same, but everything else about how to set up a server, all kinds of stuff was different. So I hope that there’s still gonna be some way of how do you prove yourself when you go into a job, like with a tech interview, should be able to say, I don’t know, write me a snippet of code or describe to me what inheritance is.
Tell me how c plus works and Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. a, What a i, I hope that there’s still gonna be something like that instead of it now being the opening for all kinds of people. Hey, I wrote a basic program once, or, and obviously that was how I mocked it back then. Let’s modernize that.
I worked with some Python and I there’s new technologies that are very web-based or very app-based, but there’s app languages that are, some are better than the others. And so if you’ve only. . I work a lot in Sharp for Apple, but I know that isn’t on any other platform. I work in it because it’s so much better about faster, tighter code.
We, I think we’ve geeked up a little bit of this before about garbage collection and error management and all the kinds of things that writing something to work is easy. Writing something to work like without fail in case of a, any number of different errors, different platforms, different versions of things as you go.
I’ve really liked how Apple has set things up to be, you can test it on multiple platforms. You can put in alternate code based on how you throw an error so that it doesn’t if your net connection drops, your program doesn’t break spectacularly, it just kinda says, Hey, connection failed, reconnect.
I hope you know what I’m trying to say. Yeah. It’s there, there’s I like the fact that they’re opening up the field. I hope that doesn’t go open to charlatan’s and that there’s all kinds of. I must say I did back in the day get a job with some basic computer knowledge, which was more than the people that were hiring me and a weekend of reading Networking for Dummies.
Stephen: So I got all the right buzzwords and could talk just enough, but the fact, the point is I proved myself and I worked for that company in that position for four and a half years. So it wasn’t like they suddenly discovered
Alan: well, you weren’t repealed to be Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Stephen: And what you said about the databases and c plus and all that perfect example of why this is happening and this is partly my own thoughts and opinions, but I think others agree because Seventies, eighties, getting a database management degree.
Database training wasn’t as big as in college. It wasn’t as big a part of it because it was just of getting on the forefront of general business and all that. Into the eighties, nineties, it definitely became a big part of it. That was part of the training, SQL and all of that. And now we’re getting to the point where it’s the exact same training they had in the eighties.
It hasn’t updated, it hasn’t changed. And things, like you said, with the program language, things change so fast. The colleges aren’t keeping up, so who cares if I went to school and got a four year college degree and they taught me c plus when nobody uses c plus in the general work field.
That’s not completely true. But pointing out, there’s other languages, there’s other programming, there’s other databases and this has moved on, but college doesn’t keep up. So that’s why if I get a Microsoft certified degree or certification which I did get at one point, that keeps me much more updated than a college degree would, and I’ve been doing it for 10 years.
And and that’s a big part of my talk. Kids in middle school can start learning these skills, which there are many, but I focus on writing storytelling and video game storytelling, and they could start doing these skills now. If they’re in fifth grade, start doing it now and in the time they graduate in eight years from high school, they’ll have the experience and knowledge needed to get a job without a college degree and a good career and enjoy it.
That’s the point I try and make. .
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. It. I very much agree with what you’re saying. I think one of the things that would be good for people as a test would be to just show them snippets of languages and say, what is this? Because I think the broader base that you have of, you’ve seen html, like raw H T M L, not with a web building utility.
You’ve seen SQL L you should be able to say and maybe going all the way back to, I don’t know, cobalt or basic or I was really good at Pascal before Pascal faded into Egyptian CU forum
Stephen: and stuff like that. There was a Pascal net that you could use with Microsoft. So there’s still availability.
Alan: Yeah. Just the ability. So what I’m thinking is, , like if people know multiple languages, they have an idea of what are standard language constructs. You have your not all back way back when things were flow through languages and then they became perform based where you had sub functions and subsections that you could call.
And then you started to have every language has to have a loop structure, a decision, structure a, that kind of thing. And for you to be able to say I know enough of them that I’m able to, no matter what language I’m in, know what’s going on here. if and I think that would be useful for people to demonstrate, to say that they have a little bit of experience, especially broad experience, and that no matter what realm they find themselves in, they’ll be able to do what they have to do.
That it’s not going to be every single time going into the manual and having to like part. Part of learning languages is a skill in it of itself. And in the same way I wish to God that I had more languages when I was five years old. If you real world languages. The fact that I didn’t start German until I was in high school, I learned a ton of German, but I know that there’s proof about how your brain gets mapped correctly.
Why correctly to be able to be a polyglot if you have multiple languages spoken in the household when you’re first learning languages, right? You trade back and forth more easily. And I think that’s true for computer languages as well. The kids that are now taken on. To use your example of not only I read stories, but how does this story work?
How does the act telling a story work successfully? And there’s not only one way to do it, but having the 10 different ways in which stories like you need to have an idea of first and second and third person perspective and all those kinds of things. The more you expose them to that and the more that they can demonstrate, they got it by explaining it to you.
I think that’s a really good thing to start to shoot for, yeah. So it absolutely kids, these kids nowadays, I love the fact that they don’t have to worry about all the crap that we went through and that they have new technologies, but I also don’t want them to think that because it’s new, it’s better because things have been through various different generations and just knowing why things work as they do, not just that this one works.
Do you know what I mean? There’s a layer underneath. A big thing about computing, about any language is abstraction. That it’s what the thing says and then what it means and how does it and especially if you look at the seven layer security model and various other things like that, you have to know where you are in the layer as to how specific you have to get or what’s gonna be interpreting your language.
Are you writing it for people? Are you writing it for the machine are, et cetera, et cetera. And that, that being able to understand not just a language, but how language works. Boy, that I think that’s a huge benefit. That what’s the guy’s name? Doesn’t matter. There’s any number like Steven Pinker, norm Can’t think.
Nom Chomsky. There it is. Oh yeah. He has written a ton about. What is knowledge? How does knowledge transfer? Are there, is there an U language underneath all the other languages that get us back to the basic things that human beings and not humans, any intelligence species would need to communicate?
And the more that you get an understanding of what that might be, it really helps you to appreciate the quality of various different languages. If you’re looking, boy, we’re, I know I’m feeling and I’ll, I wanted to launch into a big thing, but I’m trying not to be the over talker.
You know what I mean? I just read a little article about that, that some part of getting our thing is so much about, we have a lot to share. What do we go off on? Yes. All the things we. . And yet I need to discipline myself to be I like to listen to other people. I like to learn from them. So what do you think about some of those things and multiple languages, and have you gotten some of the same benefits as I have?
Stephen: The what you just said about the overdoing. I think that’s a trait of Mensa. Higher iq. I think it’s just common. Very common, at least but the languages I struggled with real life, foreign languages very much I’ve got English fairly well as far as grammar, writing, spelling I rarely mess up spelling.
I get my punctuation correcting grammar for the most part. Unless, yeah not thinking, but real life ones got to me. And learning a foreign language speaking, it just, it never computed, but. Oh, look, here’s Python. Got it. Okay. No problem. I could, I, I learned p h p training myself. Yeah.
Going through a book, writing things, learning so yeah. I don’t know where that crossover is. And the, and how to get that. But some people get it, some don’t. Yeah, absolutely.
Alan: I think that, that skill of learning, like how computing works how to be in control of a computer, and like I said those constructs of you need to have a way of being able to make a decision.
And depending on whether it’s an if then else or if it’s a case statement or whatever else, it might be people don’t need to know exactly the syntax, but they just need to know, there has to be something like that in this language. Let’s go look for it. And then it’ll tell you how many parameters it takes and you know the exact form that you have to use there.
And I have. You
Stephen: anyway. That what you’re saying right there, that’s the exact difference between learning how to learn and memorizing the facts and things. Because I don’t have to know everything about Python. I know what they call it when we are in school, the pseudo programming English, where you would write out if my, yeah, if pseudo code if my, there was this and I could write that out.
And then it doesn’t matter what language I actually program it in, I’ve got that pseudo code so I can look up and if then statement in Python as opposed to a s p or something and get the difference that, you know, but it’s the ex, the experience of being able to program that feeds it into that and su suits me very well again.
Exactly. In school they teach you how to program c plus. And maybe do pseudo code for a project, but I, they don’t go into how to learn other languages, how they’re similar that’s the difference of maybe what we need and that’s where this experience comes in, more so than the college degrees.
And that’s what’s driving some of this change, I think.
Alan: Yeah. It’s one thing I’ve noticed people tend to, there’s the old hack about with all you have is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail . I’ve met all kinds of people that, whatever, they’ve learned certain things when they were young and they like apply them to everything.
And for instance, flow charting, very valuable, a series of binary decisions as to which way do you go? Yes, no, or a higher, lower. And then you get to a conclusion at the bottom. Whenever I try to explain what I, always laughing, we call the cator that some things aren’t a series of binary decisions or litmus tests, that it really is a messy thing that has 30 different variables involved.
And they’re not yeses or nos, they’re like weighted as to how important it is to the overall decision. So how do you cut that up? So you say how much of this does this have and how important is it to the overall process? And then you add up all of that those products to get to a final score out of a hundred and how to structure that.
So it really will be out of a nice a hundred instead of, oh, it’s out of 112, and then you don’t when I have explained the value of that I’ve seen so much resistance and a lot of can’t we just make it that you just say this and this and this, and if you get it, then you like it.
It’s in what order would you ask those questions so that you’re getting to the most important things first and how would you judge that? And the way you’re talking about there, it’s kinda like assigning the weights that I’m talking about Anne. I’ve had big discussions about, there are all kinds of decisions about how there isn’t a binary yes or no.
That ought a binary search that says, okay, you wanna make a choice early on, that’s gonna exclude half of them. So you don’t have to worry about that part of the solution set anymore. You automatically know you’re in the other half. Some things aren’t like that. When I’m choosing a car, it really is I wanted to have a certain gas mileage and a certain color and a certain set of instruments.
Is there anything that I wouldn’t even buy the car. Like every car comes with a steering wheel and wheels and stuff like that, right? People will talk about my car has to have air conditioning. It’s so if everything else about the car was perfect, but it didn’t have air conditioning, you really wouldn’t buy that car.
You would not buy it as an aftermarket thing or whatever. And so just talking about that, some people will have a. A pretty small thing that they would make a big decision based on. I had a friend that when we were looking at what hotel to choose to have an event in, and she was all about I need to feel safe in the parking lot, so it has to have lights and so really the room rate doesn’t matter.
The the quality of the meeting space doesn’t matter, but it matters nothing more to you than lights in the parking lot. And she really, yep, that’s, some people have that quirk and you have then it’s not about how do I convince that person It is, everyone should be able to look at this and say, yep, all of my considerations were included and they really did think about.
Does it have a pool compared to what’s the room rate? And that they would Weighed that out and said I’m not making a
decision. Everything else is shitty, but it has a really nice pool. You know what I mean? It, when you say the absurd case, that’s when people can sometimes get it of it can’t be that’s the most important thing.
It of can’t, especially not for you, but for everyone. Not everybody’s gonna share your thing and worse, I don’t care about it. We have vending machines that are open 24 hours, oh,
Stephen: anyway. and and the thing, this is a little side tangent, , but that thing with the lights in the parking lot.
Okay, so let’s exclude that for a moment. Which of these hotels. Excluding the lights in the parking lot, which is the best choice because of pool, because of vending machines, meeting rooms, all of that. Now does it or doesn’t have lights in the parking lot? If it doesn’t, what other solution do we have?
Everything’s perfect about this hotel except that can we, you know what? If we’re not doing any meetings past six o’clock at night, then it doesn’t matter What if we go out, we know we’re doing this meetings ending at nine, and we all go out in a group and you know it. So we’ve solved that problem. Now we’ve got the good meetings place, but people don’t always Yeah, you’re right.
Think like that and it, yeah from the logical thinking equipment, from the logical mind, it drives you crazy. Stop using your damn emotions.
Alan: Some part of how I try to like, it doesn’t it, so things don’t have to always be complex. It really is okay to say we talked about 20 different criteria, but there really are these four that matter in every other way.
And so if you’re trying to get to a good solution, that is a satisfying solution, not perfect, but that most people will be satisfied. If all I did was in every one of these 40 hotels, look at these four things, I’ll get to it relatively quickly. There might be glitches where, oh, because we, because it was about room rate and meetings space and, but it wasn’t about a big lobby.
Some people really would walk into a hotel and say, oh, this place is a dump. This lobby is terrible. And yet , you have to say the reason we got to this place is because lobby wasn’t one of the. Important ones. Then you have out of those four criteria that you use, you have maybe half a dozen that are vying for the top, and that’s when you try to apply the other factors.
They’ve already got the most important things satisfied, and so you’re not gonna run into the big bad decision of it had all these little tiny factors, but roommates were twice as high as anywhere else. I couldn’t care less about ice machines and pools and so forth if my room costs twice as much.
So I’ve tried to talk people through that situation, like in each of those scenarios of if I had to make a decision, I’d care about these four things. because most people would agree, and you can even say, is everybody here in this room? Would you say, if I covered these four things, we’re on a solid basis for further investigation.
Because some part of it is just throwing away the ones you don’t wanna deal with anymore. You know what I mean? It
Stephen: And it’s a great example. The Dayton rg the hotel that they used to be at good prices on the rooms. They had a wonderful open area that you could play games and make announcements and gather everybody, and it was perfect for that.
But it was falling apart. And people would go into their rooms and their tubs would back up with brown water and they wouldn’t have cows or the, I had a couple dirty . Yeah. And some of the rooms leaked when it rained and then you were in the area plane and it was freezing. You had to get a winter jacket cuz it was so suddenly the things that were so important without looking at everything else changed.
Alan: So That’s right too. And I also get sometimes when people have. Those considerations. It isn’t only rational, it’s cuz they had some trauma associated with it. I had a nice weekend spoil because my bathtub backed up and then forever after they’re sensitive to, I gotta make sure that the plumbing in the hotel is good and I get that.
I get that. You never wanna experience that bad thing again. But then you also have to just think, this was a really good, bad example of a hotel. How do you know? Going in from looking at a pretty website and talking to a reasonable person on the phone that the place is falling apart. So you have to always play the odds of just assumptions you can make about the reality of the world.
How does this hotel even stay open? With terrible conditions like that, actually all the word of mouth, all the negative reviews posted online have to catch up with it. So then that’s what you do is you don’t just trust the pretty part. You read a couple reviews and say, wow, that bad experience was just within the last like month or two.
And unless I see lots of stuff for management and that they’ve now fixed it or that I call ’em and say, Hey, I just read that half the air conditioning in your place isn’t working. Oh yes, we just got that fixed. Really? Tell me you kinda, you do a little bit of due diligence, but just that, that, I guess it’s also the difference between course and fine.
You know what I mean? Like when I’m looking back, before we had GPSs, it used to be you had to be able to go to another city and find a hotel and it’s if I know how to just take the expressways to get to near the area, can’t tell you how many times it was like if I get to the exit, Look around and look for, where’s the Ramada sign?
That must be my hotel. You didn’t really have to have exact directions to it because you knew you could get close. And then if you didn’t see the sign, honestly, you could just pull up to the 7-Eleven and say, Hey, is there a ramada around here? Oh yeah. Three blocks there. You know what I mean? I used that all the time of get close and then don’t worry about having end-to-end perfection cuz there’s a different solution once you get close.
Stephen: Oh yeah. Okay, so another part of the talk that has been validated, that was literally my jaw was dropping and I was the one proclaiming this was what is coming and happening. But when it did even I was like, holy crap, are you serious? So high school, all has always had there’s an organization, whatever that controls the sports in the high schools.
They have like tennis. Our school never had tennis they in, they brought soccer into our school. After I left, I would’ve loved to have played soccer not football, not baseball at that level, but soccer, I would’ve had a good time with. eSports are now recognized by Ohio high schools for official varsity letter jackets and tournaments and psalm of steel
Absolutely. The reason they did this is because there are already 200 high schools in Ohio that are part of the Ohio eSports League, competing in national tournaments and champion. And colleges are visiting the schools to see the players to offer them full scholarships to come to their college and play on their model.
Yeah. Their varsity eSports teams for letters for full scholarships. So the parents and folks that argued that against me we just talked about not going to college. Now we’re talking about getting a full ride because you’re playing video games. Kevin, this is the crazy ass world, lemme tell you.
But it, every parent that argued with me about, we, our kids play baseball and football because they might get a scholarship and it teaches ’em teamwork. Guess what? That wasn’t diversity and inclusion. Cuz there are too many kids that could not do that. Now it’s opened up.
Everybody can do that. They can do this. Okay. Arguably there are some people, muscular dystrophy and some Parkinson’s. There’s, someone may have a partial arm amputated. I get that. , but I will give Microsoft kudos for this. They have an accessibility controller that’s modular, that you put the pieces together to fit your disabilities and what works for you.
So you can play games. And now you don’t have to be . This is horrible. You don’t have to be in shape. You don’t have to be the fastest runner. You don’t have to be the big shrunken . And I think every kid should be in shape. I think the kids are not in good shape. That’s a whole nother topic we could go on one day.
But the point is . Yeah. The point is you don’t have to be the big jock at football, basketball, baseball, skiing, whatever. Now the kids playing video games can be just as big a deals. And that to me is huge. I think. So here we go. Yeah. Everything about my talk, you won’t believe in the last week, the scrambling I’ve started to do to up this talk, to get the word out, get in front of more people, get I’m working on my book, which I’ve been toying with all that.
This is a big, huge change adding eSports as officially recognized sports programs in our high schools. That’s
Alan: I hadn’t heard about the first one. I hadn’t heard about the second one. What someone hadn’t mentioned was that there were it’s eSports are getting more and more, there’s money in it, and so the world is heading towards it and so forth.
And one of the things that I volunteered was I thought that same way too. So I invented it and I invest. In a company called Skills that specializes in setting up those tournaments and so forth. And they’re one of my worst investments really. That is not well that one of, that, that field might have growth going on and maybe these guys haven’t captured how to do that well, but it does seem to be that there’s gonna be one or two or three iterations of how do we really do this?
Is it gonna be on the basis of geographic locality? Cuz so much of what sports is Hey, go Cleveland. Go St. Louis, go what do we and eSports it almost by definition it’s virtual. It doesn’t have to be, is it gonna be on the basis of what’s your spirit animal? Is your ethnicity, is what your hair color is?
How are they gonna choose those various different things? And it could be that there’s gonna be teams that are gonna be like, I don’t. That broke down when you started to import players. Manchester United is not only the people that lived in Manchester nowadays, they go and get the best from Argentina and Germany and wherever else, and hire them up. But having said that, I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. And it’s gonna be is it the name of the animal? And animals have different connotation instead of denotation. So you won’t have an animal that’s sleek or powerful or aggressive or intelligent, and, that’s how we’re
Stephen: gonna choose teams and that kinda stuff.
Alan: Or
Stephen: we’ll see how it, it’s going to be gung and robots not it’s going okay. And what you just said really think about it. You could, maybe this is projecting a little too hopeful rose colored glasses vision you in the local high school, The diversity inclusion, which I mentioned.
Now these kids, every kid can be in a sport and recognize varsity letter and a chance for a scholarship, but they’re not just competing against the local big wigs in your area. We’re competing against China. We’re compet against Mexico. And the world is becoming smaller because our high school is against Canada, China, Mexico India, and we’re competing against kids from all over the world.
And suddenly the world’s not so big a place. It’s not so scary. And Gene Roddenberry’s vision is one step closer because of this. I could I’ll stand that ground all day.
Alan: I like a lot of that. I agree. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. I funny, I never am on Twitch or any other the services where you can watch somebody play a video game, somehow that doesn’t do it for me. I still get, I love watching the Olympics. I like watching some football. There’s a. An approachability or like I can put myself into their situation and say, wow, if I was just a little bit faster, jump higher. You know what I mean? Throw a jab in better. I could be out there doing that.
I don’t get that same ability to put myself in the place, even for a first person shooter, whether it is perspective of you doing it somehow I don’t find myself getting as involved in that. I admire the craft of someone who’s really good at it, where it’s wow, they just cleared that room of zombies faster than I could ever have.
How did they learn to do that? But I just, that I’m not sure. Maybe if I watch more or watch the right ones, I’ll get a better feel for now. I can appreciate that and I wanna see the best of the world at it. I wanna be in that audience. You know
Stephen: I, What I mean? And that’s a large.
Because it’s new and because you’re 60 something just think if you were the same age now, but back in like 1890 and going to watch a baseball game. Yeah. This is a joke. Yeah. It’s a fun afternoon. It’s not a big deal. These guys don’t make much money. They are, they’re still farmers and blah, blah, blah.
Pass forward a hundred years and people are making millions of dollars playing baseball so things changed. It’s the beginning. In that same way the first football players weren’t getting scholarships because the colleges didn’t necessarily have ’em. You know what I’m saying? So it I say this in my talk also.
People get mad while computers ruin this and they’ve taken away jobs. And I’m like, you know what folks? I’m like, number one, there were people that used to sew and put buttons on and then the zipper came about and put them out of work. And when was the last time you called the operator to connect you to a long distance call?
They put technology, put operators outta work. Has anybody wanted to be a caboose engineer lately? Nope. I don’t think so. Has anybody going to give up their car? So for horses so that blacksmiths could still have jobs? No, that’s laughable. So don’t get mad and upset that the technology is taking away the Taco Bell jobs, the Walmart cashier jobs.
It’s inevitable. That’s what always happens. It’s happened for all of humanity. It’s just, we’re in the middle of this version of it. So I’ve always been of the proponent I know somebody who refused to vote for Hillary if she ran o only on the basis, and this goes back to your ator, only on the basis that she wanted to promote more clean energy and wanted to shut down the coal mines.
They had friends in coal mines that worked in coal mines. That was their life, their business. We can’t put them outta the job, so we’ll vote for whoever else runs against her cuz we don’t want that. And I’m like, but there are less people working in coal mines than work at Sears. And Sears company is going bankrupt.
So what, why don’t we retrain these people to make in factories the windmills, make the solar panels, to install the solar panels, to repair the solar panels, teach ’em those jobs, then they’re not out of a job and we can close, but, and they argued with me on that. This is the same thing.
The world’s changing. Yeah. It roll with it.
Alan: Exactly. I’ll tell you it some part of me I’ve had that discussion, try to convince people of maybe a better way to make a decision, or at least that kind of stuff many times. And after a while it gets to be, you know what, I’ll use it, I’ll make a better decision when you buy a car, just because it has white walls and it doesn’t last as well and doesn’t get as good a gas mileage.
And it it breaks down then you get what you get. I’m sorry that you’ve voluntarily given me this huge advantage. I make Site consumer reports is so good for doing this kind of thinking about everything. You want a good vacuum cleaner, you want a good laundry detergent, all of it. And whenever I see somebody that they just bought something based on, hey, somebody advertised at me.
And so that’s why I. The laundry detert that I do don’t know. Your clothes look shabby compared to mine. I never say that. But there’s something about that. I, if you wanna get advantage, cuz you won’t learn how to do this better, you get
Stephen: what you get. But but you touch on a very important topic.
And what, I think we’ve discussed this a little bit in the past. They’re not necessarily choosing it just because of the marketing, but that marketing has made them believe this is the absolute truth and that’s the reason. And they follow that because the marketing fit them without thinking anymore about it.
And I think we’ve, I’ve given the example in the Gorilla Marketing book, Jay Conrad talks about him and some marketing execs were in a cab and they were going to a convention, and the cabby is chatty. What do you guys do? Oh, I don’t, I think marketing sucks. I don’t believe in marketing. They’re like, oh, really?
What toothpaste do you use? He says, oh, I use such and such, but it’s because I don’t have time to brush in between clients and I can only need to do it. He basically repeated the marketing, paid outta. The
Alan: spiel. Exactly, yes. .
Stephen: I think some people truly are, oh, I’m making the best decision because this ex is better because of this.
No, that’s just the marketing. And a great example of that was my ex father-in-law. He was asking me, Hey, I’m thinking of getting a new computer. Now, this man only played te the slot machines on his computer. He could have used okay any computer to do that. But he goes, so I’m not sure what to get.
So I’ve been looking at the best out there. So should I get an Intel or Adele? And I’m like, okay, Intel makes chips and Dell is computers that have Intel chips. I’m like, you know what? Either one will work so you’re good. He didn’t even have the knowledge to know that what he was saying made no sense.
But the marketing made him believe I’m getting the best.
Alan: I hear you. It I, boy, I think that we have to acknowledge that’s gonna always be happening. There’s gonna be people that are gonna make a decision based on one issue, whether they’re voters or consumers or whatever, all it might be, and some part of, I just wanna be like if there’s a way that I can penetrate that, that I can say there’s a lot more to it than that.
And especially there really are big issues like climate change, where it’s not one lever, it’s not one thing that matters. It’s a whole bunch of different stuff. And if you can at least acknowledge that it’s messy and that you don’t wanna do all the research, then at least listen to the experts, the people that do this for a living and really can understand what’s going on, can explain it to you, have a better chance of.
To a good conclusion than you instead of being, I know that I’m ignorant, but I trust my ignorance to have me luck into a good decision. That’s a particular, that arrogance of ignorance is in a certain part of our population. I just read some stats that said 33% of the United States believes in angels.
27% believe in the Earth is flat. And like I I honestly I want to go immediately into mocking mode, but some part of it is just how you look. Magellan said, I’ve seen the shadow of on the moon. I know Galileo said, and yet it moves. We know that the earth is not the center of the universe, that the sun is the center of our solar system.
There’s. Blatant obvious proof that to turn away from it, you automatically have to put yourself at an incredible disadvantage. And so at least I want to be able to say, if you don’t know, then don’t say and wing it. At least go to an expert. And of course then there’s immediate arguments about experts, they’re paid by certain people and they have A vested
Interest in doing this.
Is that the fact that you think that knowledgeable people somehow have it in for you? Who taught you that? What did you read or how who hurt you that you really think that someone being smart and dedicated and wanting to describe to you how they came to that conclusion that you want to push them out of your life?
I. I can’t believe that’s the way people get through life. That if you go to a mechanic and give ’em your car, you are automatically saying, this guy knows more than me to
Stephen: fix this. And saying, with any other repair, man,
Alan: any other financial person when someone tells you what bank account you should get, it shouldn’t be that.
You’re just expecting to get I’m gonna reject them. I’m gonna keep my money under the mattress. But there are a certain number of people that
Stephen: think that way. What you just
Alan: And just one more quick thing, I often hear Hey, there’s really some bad things for us. And so we should limit their use.
And whether it’s, and it’s like it’s obvious stuff let’s stop having a lead in our gasoline . Okay. Everybody can of get into that because they can see that’s bad. Now we’re finding out, hey, our gas stoves are harming us. That they really are giving enough benzene and methane. and somehow there’s that stubborn idiot nowadays that’ll say, you’re not kicking my guest.
Oh. It’s please just listen. Please listen that you’re harming your children. Please listen that it hasn’t been huge harm. So we haven’t noticed it until now, but if you look at the stats, it’s pretty, it’s almost certainly true. And there are valid alternatives. Why is this a hill you’re gonna die on?
Why is this something that you, because now it’s nanny state. Now it’s any scientist telling me anything that they’re trying to fool me, harm me instead of No. We really did determine that this is gonna kill people, that vaccines are helpful and that automatic rejection of, and rationality. I am, I really don’t think that we’re going to ever get to, we’re gonna take a dictator that’s gonna make, get vaccines.
We’ll never do that. , but there has to be something that those people that automatically reject that kind of stuff, every smart person, every other thinking person has to say. Oh my God. Don’t be stupid about that. Don’t you love your children? Don’t you love your community? Don’t you love your planet? Maybe not love, don’t you care about the future at all?
Stephen: We kinda had that for a couple years and I think now a lot of people are going, wow that guy’s kind of an idiot. Wow. I can’t believe what he’s saying. And the rest of us are going, we said that six years ago. We told you that. Nobody listened. But that kind of hints back. Let me be the, a-hole devil’s advocate, that what you were saying about listen to the scientist experts, but didn’t we just say earlier that we need ways of determining these experts because it’s too easy to fool people.
So I think too many people think everybody’s fooling us. And that’s everybody except the person that really is, that’s the problem, .
Alan: And he is not that’s just that the fact that you’d listen to an advertiser more than you listen to a scientist. How did that happen? Because it’s a pretty thing on TV instead of, oh no, you have to read a paper in order to understand why this is true.
I
Stephen: guess. Here’s a new example that affects us. Very much so there’s a new thing you’ll see on the food advertising the bags of stuff. It says net carbs, essentially it takes the carbs, subtracts out the fiber, and that’s the net carbs. You don’t have to worry about carbs, just net carbs because the fiber balances it out.
So Atkins pushes this a lot and everything I’ve read from every doctor and scientist says it is a marketing ploy that was created by the marketing people because they want you to buy their product. It makes it look better that their double chocolate, peanut butter energy bar only has two grams of net carbs.
Ignore the fact that it’s 38 carbs in there and in that it has 640 calories. That’s what the doctors and scientists look at. But the marketing says, oh, the only thing you gotta worry about is these net carbs. And look how low that is. You could eat a box of these a day and you could lose weight. And so you’re frozen up.
Alan: Oh wait, still there? You’re back. Okay. I didn’t do that part what you
Stephen: said. I, but they you could eat a whole box of these on the Atkins diet and lose weight because the neck curbs are the only thing you have to worry about and not true. But I’ve had a member of my family argue that with me and I’m like you know what?
I care about my health because of diabetes and I’m not falling for that. You go ahead and surprisingly, this person has not lost weight.
Alan: If there’s anything that people, like you said, whatever scientists claim to be scientists in terms of nutrition and diet, there’s been so much bad information for so long that I could see how that could have been, why the public has learned to distrust that because it’s said with such authority.
Dr. Oz. Yes. Charan Supreme almost got elected to the Senate because he wrote a couple books. With not nothing, half truths, some truths, but a whole bunch of other BS. And people, it, it’s very difficult to be able to differentiate between those things when you’re getting a thousand different messages about net carbs and things like that.
So it, I, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the entry point, is that because everybody eats every day and everybody’s being told what they, when we had hey, these are sugar free they loaded ’em up with fat in order to still have the mouth feel that you need, Hey, these are fat free. When they did the opposite, they put it’s easy to see how this has gone over the course of time. And the fact that we have an obesity epidemic is maybe we really need to be listening to the Michael Polands of the world where they don’t claim necessarily to be like, let me think how to say this. They’ve taken a big survey of what’s out there and they say you really can’t trust any manufactured product on the overall, and the more processed something is, the more that it’s had.
Trickery applied to it to make it palatable, but be loaded with salt, fat, sugar so that you won’t be able to resist it, that it’ll fit all your addiction points. And so his like, I don’t know his philosophy, I remember it. It’s six words, eat real food. Not a lot. You know what? , I guess if that, and that’s not American.
You know what I mean? It’s like, oh oh no, I’m gonna go to the produce section instead of the snack section. Oh no, I’m gonna not go to the buffet, but I’m actually gonna make my portion size reasonable and eat at home more. Yeah. And having said that, isn’t that the you for anybody is the
Stephen: Thanksgiving vegetables
Right? Thanksgiving, Christmas you go to parties with friends and family especially, they’re like, oh, there’s still more Eat more, go get more. I’m like, no, I’m good. No, please have more. Are you sure? They’re like, can’t believe that you’re not eating more. And I also, but you love me cuz this food is love.
Yes. I made this, there’s we made enough for 20 people. Why aren’t you eating more? And, so we. You probably looked at the same thing. Popcorn’s a very good snack when you’re diabetic. It’s a whole grain kernel. It’s doesn’t spike your blood sugar. They have these kernel seasonings that I like, but I get hesitant using them cuz I’m like it’s whatever.
Not supposedly, probably not good for me, but I really like ’em, and then I said, wait a minute, right? Why do I think they’re bad for me? I never even looked at the nutrition information on it, . So I looked, have you ever looked at the nutrition information on those seasonings for popcorn?
Alan: Are they terrible or are they good?
I’m thinking terrible that they’re gonna be like cheese dusts with as many categories compressed to everyone.
Stephen: That’s exactly what I assumed. And then I looked at it, almost every single one is like no calories, no sodium, no carbs is, it’s just whatever. And I’m like, seriously? I can put this on. It’s not gonna spike my blood sugar or swell my hands up with excess water from sodium.
It’s not gonna hurt my heart. Popcorn,
Alan: how to simulate cheese taste or how to simulate butter, taste or chocolate taste or whatever.
Stephen: Yes. So try chocolate taste. But
I look, there’s not a lot of chemicals either. That was the other thing I thought. Oh, it’s probably like all these chemicals, like the chocolate one has cocoa powder, but just enough to give it that flavor and then the other stuff enhances it.
So it fools your brain in the thinking. So like the chocolate only cocoa, chocolate. Almost
Alan: fat.
Stephen: Okay. Yes. Alright. Yeah, so like the chocolate one I think has three grams of carbs, maybe two calories. The ranch one has 30 grams of sodium, something like that. So they do have a little bit, but for the most part it’s like you could eat the whole bottle straight
It’s probably better than diet spoon soda or something. Ah, why are we freezing? Oh, there we go. Yeah I’m okay. Yeah. Weird.
Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so yeah, that just made me think of that when we were talking okay, so we’re freezing. Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Alan: No, just Colleen and I have popcorn as a snack often without anything on it, and I think there’s also something to be said for you can train your palate.
Yeah. You know what I mean? I loved flavored chips for a long time until I’ve realized I can’t even have the chip, much less, whether it’s barbecued or nacho or anything like that. So after you had popcorn for a while, it’s boy, that perfect crunch plus a little bit of salt, like we get smart pop or whatever.
And it’s just perfect in all the right ways that not only do we really like the taste of it, look forward to it, it’s also perfect fiber and locale and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So we’ve found something that is safe for us that we both really enjoy instead of being, oh, I really like loaded baked potatoes.
There’s nothing about a loaded baked potato that’s gonna work for you. .
Stephen: But the seasonings, they have all sorts of flavors. They had Christmas ones that I picked up after Christmas like sugar plum cookie. Peppermint, cocoa yeah. Weird Christmas stuff. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Alright. We’re freezing.
don’t know who it happens as tech, but you mentioned VPNs. And I find that interesting because I’ve been using a VPN n at times at home. I put a VPN n on my phone and I bet, and traveling, you gotta think about it. I’m gonna be in an airport coming up. So
Alan: I have found it as we talked about this a little bit before, again, I was out of town.
I had a VPN on both my laptop and that, and I really seems to help in terms of there’s hardly any slowdown. Some things just won’t work entirely. Like I could get to my investment website, but I can’t get to I think my, not my bank, some other thing that was financially related that if they really don’t see your IP address being what matches what they have for your user log on.
Because that’s what a VPN does, is it goes to an another server. In my case it was like Los Angeles while I’m out there, or here it’s Washington. There’s not one, there’s not a service for this in Cleveland. It does some kind of security check for that. And so it’s do I drop the VPN long enough to do, there’s one thing I need to do and then turn it right back on?
Or do I wait a week until I get home? And so I’m, now, I’m making some of those choices as to I have habits. How much do I really need to execute every one of those habits if I know that it’s just a little bit less secure? Or do I even know how less secure it is right now that I got the PPN is my shield.
Like I wanna wear that guy all the time, . You know what I mean? So I’m learning and I actually did a little bit of reading to try to find out why that stuff is happening and I haven’t been able to get patterns yet enough as to that I understand it or that I can predict it. That I just have that choice of this isn’t working and I think it’s the vpn, so what am I gonna do?
So it’s useful, it really is stopping all the other, when I shop on Amazon, I don’t want the people in the hotel sniffing that I’m on Amazon not that traffic or, I’m pretty sure that I also have HT T B s, the secure version of that. And yet, . I’m not sure that everything, I don’t always check every single u r URL that I go to for that.
So am I getting a tunneled connection or not? I know it’s the VPN n I am, I guess it’s another thing. I’m just trying to discipline myself to this is worth a little bit of hassle. If it was a ton of hassle, I don’t know that I would’ve continued to use. I’m sitting in the airport for a three hour layover and I can do nothing because airport security is such, they have to detect the vpn.
It doesn’t let you do anything. Then it would be like, wow. Maybe I’ll do it on my phone where it’s the least hassle that I know that there’s not as many bad things on the phone and that I don’t know that, I think that’s the case I,
Stephen: oh I was gonna say, because your bank’s a great example because you can get your bank via the web browser, and that’s probably how a lot of people do.
But my bank, I’ve got an app right on my phone and that, does that app go through and use the VPN N or does it bypass it? Does it tunnel directly to someplace? I don’t know, honestly. So is the, then that means I’m totally dependent on the bank’s app building nerds to put the security in, which we all know how but then again, does that mean the VPN’s really any better?
It, we the security’s tough nowadays.
Alan: What I’ve noticed is everything that I can on my iPhone, I use Face id, that it’s not only that I’ve given ’em my password and so forth, but now that I’ve linked it so that it really needs to see me, I don’t enter my name and password. And so it’s the biometrics are pretty good.
There are luckily not that many people that look like me on the planet lucky for them as well as for me. And I, whenever that works for my investment or my banking, I’m pretty satisfied with that. On the laptop, I now have a little fingerprint reader. The power button actually has a sense for a fingerprint reader, and I miss it when I’m home that it’s like the more that I can embrace biometrics, I like that.
Not only out of not having to remember passwords, not having to realize how many of my passwords have over the course of time been exposed in the world. I’ve always been really good with whatever the largest number of characters you can use, but faster and faster. Computers mean that less than 32 characters is now breakable.
Wow, how am I gonna remember that song lyric enough to be able to get to, that’s my new password. I’m, I think I’m gonna go to the biometrics thing and just hope that I’m never gonna be Oh, they tore his face off so they could use the reader , to get to it. You know what I mean? I’m realistic about, I don’t think I’m the guy.
They’re gonna cut my finger off so they can get into the secret vault, that kinda thing. Right? And your bank vault probably isn’t as big a deal as your other vaults. So that’s that’s what that’s true too. Oh can’t believe I, this wasn’t topic number one. Oh man.
I got a comic book collection.
You do? A friend of mine, a big one, so no, another one, additional one. Oh my God. That’s what’s startling about this. A friend of mine in California is doing a whole bunch of clearing out his life. He’s moving from one house to the other and he’s taking advantage of that. and he’s a wonderful, generous guy.
This isn’t just some little lats, it’s a whole bunch of good stuff that he collected over time. But his, I’m not sure exactly the motivation, but from what we’ve talked a little bit, the passion is not in anymore. He knows how much I love them. All of that combined into, he gave me his collection, and so I drove up from Oceanside to LA and it wasn’t like, here’s a box.
It was 15 short boxes of comics and just like pulling out a few things. It was wonderful stuff like tales to astonished and tales of suspense, which means you’re automatically back in the sixties, right? Not the two thousands in the nineties. So I think he gave me, I don’t know about condition. They don’t appear bad.
They don’t smell musty. They’re not like that. That many of them are, I think maybe all of them are in Mylar and I’m gonna find out as I do an inventory of this, like I’ve been doing with my collection, just what he gave me and some part of me and hey if he’s listening, it’s a, i, it’s a gift.
It isn’t that I’m supposed to sell these for him, but it’ll give me doubles in my collection. And so I will be disposing, like I’ve been talking about getting Bri on my collection to get ready for retirement. I don’t know, what if I sell something and it’s nice and valued, be like, Hey buddy, can I like take you to dinner?
Can I invite you on a cruise or something? If some of these are really valuable, there’s I don’t feel that I’m his agent in doing this, but I feel a certain obligation just out of the incredible of genre generosity of what he might have given me. So I probably will like feature they’re out there.
People really do have fantastic four, like number 48, the start of the Galactus trilogy. It’s wait, what? ? Yeah, I just. Hats off to my, and he’s relatively, he’s not anonymous, but he’s
He, I don’t know. I’m not saying his name because I don’t want to make anything out of this other than thank you to my incredible friend who has given me’s pretty freaking collector.
Boy. He gave me a vault. He gave me treasure. Yeah. An amazing treasure. So I got things to talk about
next
Stephen: couple weeks. . Colin is going with Adam up to this lady on Thursday. And her husband was a big collector. And then he died and she’s held onto this for five years, but now she’s retiring.
She sold some of the things he had original. And she sold it through heritage Auctions, so it wasn’t know, just eBay. She was big money type stuff. And they went up and it was like 35 long boxes of everything. And then she took them to another room that was hundreds of carded figures and stuff.
That is like rare. Colin said she had a figure that you could only get in Europe, and that is like the rarest uhoh froze up again. Oh. Like the rarest legends figure you could find. And there’s very few of them in the world and she has a carded one in mint condition so he’s going on Thursday to look at this and he is like, he’s he’s like jittery.
He’s we’ve already pulled out some big name books out
Alan: for anybody who’s like in this field is there really still are people like him, people like her me that like, when this collection comes back on the market, It’s amazing that this has been held onto for yeah. 63 years and now all of a sudden there’s this tsunami of incredible rare quality stuff.
I that’s a fantasy, like I said, getting things from my friend was, I never would’ve expected it. And yet now I’m like, there’s a, there’s like a duty. If he held onto it and collected and loved these things, so must I, and I do anyway. But that’s one of the things you’re, if you’re a collector, you think of, I want these to go to a good home.
I don’t want them just to be set up on the auction dissipated. Eventually when I sell things, maybe it’ll be not only selling themself, but I’ll go to Heritage Auctions and they’ll be like, oh, the the Lithuanian collection. The Bice collection I’ll get a named collection cause I’ve got a whole bunch of good stuff.
And we’ll see if now it’s gonna be the I’ll combine our names or something like that or I’ll sell. Separately, I am gonna track them differently. There’s ways in my collector’s software, right? You can have a whole bunch of sorry, customized fields and stuff like that.
And so I do intend to keep track of where things came from com and I don’t know, long ago when I was young, I bought a collection where I worked all summer to get all my lawn mowing and pet sitting and all that money. And that collection has very nicely for me in value. But a lot of it mostly has been because I bought ’em, because I kept getting haunting the newsstand, going to the little 12 cent machines, joining the comic book club in college.
All of those things. I had a buying service for so much. And in fact, I’ll say this getting ready to be retired and it looks like I’m gonna be okay on money. What do I want to spend my money on more than anything else is reentering, getting comics, . And it’s, and unfortunately it’s with me if I, cause I like to read everything.
I like to know all the stories. It’s hundreds of dollars a month to keep current numbers. You know what I mean? Comic books are not inexpensive, and if you get everything just from Marvel in DC but let’s say from the top 10 publishers, it could easily be hundreds of dollars. And yet I so much, man, remember Thursday used to be new comic book day and I’d come home with a stack and I’d be like, oh my God, I gotta read.
And I have my top 10 and then the next 10. And just, I was so happy every time that I brought my new Kai folks home. And in order to be a responsible adult, I gave that up like 15 years ago. But now we’ve got our house paid off, we’ve got no debt. We’re looking like we’re gonna be barring medical emergency, we’re gonna be okay.
And maybe that’s where I want some of my money to go to. Yeah. If I project out, be around another 40 years, if I spent $500 a month, an idiot amount of money, but that’s still only $6,000
Stephen: a year. And if I’m around for 40 more years,
Alan: That’s only, let’s see, $240,000. Do I have any better use for quarter million?
I don’t want a fancy car. I don’t, maybe and saying it that way that’s a lot of money. And yet every week being so happy I people that I’m, please do a little bit of it and that what’s gonna happen is I’m gonna order like the Marvels and dcs that I always liked, and then the first time there’s a reference to a story and another it’s oh, I gotta have Daredevil now.
And actually Dare will be one of those first ones that I’d get. But anyway there apparently all the X-Men stuff going on now with, and I can’t help but be on Facebook and read the little things of Hey, big reveal. It’s I don’t want to read it because I wanna read it for real when I finally start collecting it.
But then, Here’s what’s going on with Secret Wars three, or here’s what’s going on with the X 27. I’m like, oh man, I wanna, I want to read those stories.
Stephen: Yeah. Oh don’t feel too guilty. Cause there are people that spend how much for cigarettes every week. There’s people that spend, oh, I bought the sports package for cable and Oh, I bought the Sunday ticket so I could sit for six hours and watch sports.
Or, oh, we went to Vegas. Yeah. No and considering that eSports are huge now, hey you’re right there. .
Alan: And I don’t know, some part of it is I was worried for a while. The comic books were gonna go away because sales were down. But now comic book movies are continuing to spur them.
And from what I have read about it in the industry, they really have become, the reason they keep doing them is because they don’t know which comic books are gonna turn into movies. So they keep on putting them out there so that they have. The ever increasing mythology, and it will be, who knew that Guardians of the Galaxy moon night, she Hulk that they would do well because they were never main titles.
They were peripheral titles and some like Batman did well, but none of the Superman movies, that’s not true. Some of them have done well but it’s it’s not predictable as to which things will become valuable. And part of what has made me have nice, valuable comics is because by buying everything, I really do have the first appearance of Moon Night.
I really do have and who would’ve thought that would care about buying werewolf by night number 34, whatever it was, right? That’s worth me I’m hoping that if I get back into it, and it’s funny a little bit, we talked about we got, I got skills and going all the way back to the start, we have various different skills that now some of those things are changing, but those skills of getting in physical things and keeping track of them in alphabetical order and putting ’em into my little database.
I not only am good at it, I love doing it. And so it’s not gonna be, oh no, this crap is all piling up. It’s more Hey, I got election version 3.0 started, and I think I really, I think I might, yeah, I think you are America hearing that, Al’s gonna turn the tap back on. And yet we’ll see we’ll, every week you’ll be, oh, have you read?
I’ll be gushing about it. Quite
Stephen: well. . Me and Colin he gets me to read comics and we talk about it a lot. And so next week I’m not gonna be available at all. I’m in Florida for the conference, so we’re gonna skip next week. So hopefully two weeks. We’ll have a lot to talk about.
But before we go, I have a trivia question for you. Yes. Okay. And we’ll see. You might know this one. What was the first number one single from Motown?
I heard this on Case Casem the other day. Yeah.
Alan: So I’m thinking something obvious my Girl by the Temptations or something from the Diana Ross smokey Robinson. He Tears of a clown were long after they were established. How about, oh, first is tough. None of the ones I said. Not my girl. Not let’s see, cuz there, there’s, okay. I don’t know. I first from Motown. Okay,
Stephen: please, Mr. Postman. By the Marvelettes. The Marvelettes.
Alan: That’s that. Okay. I could see that.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: Because catchy. Perfect. From the start. Okay. That’s very much a Motown tune.
Yeah.
Stephen: Very good. So there you go. I heard it on Casey Kaso. .
Alan: That’s, and actually, so th this is too obscure. I know you won’t get it. There’s a great, I love a band named SP Beard. I think I might have talked about him. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them. Yeah, I, I know of them. Okay. They have an album called Beware of Darkness that I really love.
And I just found out that the title song from that album, they didn’t write it. It’s from George Harrison on all they Must Pass. , like someone quoted those lyrics and I was like, oh my God, somebody else knows whose sp beard is. I can’t believe there’s another Spock beard fan. And then when they said, those are really great lyrics, where’d you get that from?
And when he said George Harrison on that album, it’s what? Wow. I never like like I’m usually Mr. Read the liner notes, flip the album back in the days when it was vinyl that I usually am aware that it’s a cover instead of the original. I never clued into that in all this time. Wow.
So just not quite trivia, but Thunderbolt obscurity man I, you knocked me over to be like I really love that song and it’s not what I thought it was.
Stephen: Isn’t that cool ? And don’t you love those moments? Learn?
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. The little thunderbolt, right? So there I gotta work on, it’s kinda funny. I’m not a great quizmaster.
I usually don’t like collect interesting things and say, Can I ask Steven that to see if I can see if he knows it? I they’re just like little things that, little fireflies that are fun. And once in a while hope I capture one that I’ll be able to share with you okay. It’s always fun. All right, ma’am.
Stephen: All right. Take care Steven. Take care. Have a good one. Vacation.
Alan: Alright. Yeah. Have a great
Stephen: conference. Really? I hope so. I hope so.
Alan: You’re like an author and everything. That’s so cool. You are immortal, man. That’s so cool.
Stephen: That’s cool. Don’t say that cuz that means it might be short time and then we’ll, that’ll go into effect now.
I’ll be immortal later.
Alan: Okay. And happy Star Wars month again. Yes.
Stephen: There. It’s almost over. Thank you.
Alan: Okay, we on.
