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STephen: Alan, good morning.
Alan: Okay, let me get my volume up a little bit here so that I can
STephen: double check mine. Hear our
Alan: conversation. There we go.
STephen: All right.
Alan: Morning. Good morning. How are you? Once again, I’m all about the fall colors. Helene and I have a trip to Kinswell Bridge planned for later this week. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out there or not, but yeah, old place, a former trestle bridge that Lieutenant Prenado came through and Broke it, but some of it still jumps out into this valley.
And this valley is an amazing display of fall colors. It’s like a bowl of tricks. It’s so colorful. So we’re doing that.
STephen: You have to go camping in the Kinsu dam area with my grandparents. Ah,
Alan: very cool. It’s it’s probably three hours away. Over by Pennsylvania, it’s right on the Pennsylvania, New York border and it’s it isn’t just getting there.
The entire drive is going to be beautiful. Once you get into the foothills of the Poconos and the Adirondacks, I guess that’s still a bit further east, but it’s very hilly all through that area and just around every corner. There’s a new Vista and wow, I love it there.
STephen: Yeah. All right. So we have a list.
Where do we want to start? You want to pick a topic first, or we just want to jump into something?
Alan: Let’s see. I’ll, biggest on my mind is we just saw a fantastic comedy show, Colleen and I really see a lot of comedy. And so it’s not like we’re the total experts, but after a while, you develop a taste and one of our top 10 of all time.
And that’s out of, Hundreds of shows, Jimmy Carr. He’s a rich comedian and has been maybe more known in the United States over the last 10 years, probably has a 30 year career. He’s like Emo Phillips in terms of not the odd delivery, the perfectly written jokes. They’re just gems. Each one of them so well written.
The perfect parapro, IANS, that’s what’s a fancy term for where you take like a left hand turn, it’s a walk down the garden path. He has the perfect setup line, and then the next line is not only funny, but wonderfully surprising, and he does it again and again. And it just, it’s such a mental workout to keep up with him,
And
STephen: It’s not the typical, yeah, not the sound disparaging, the more lowbrow or, the easier to access comedy, exactly. You gotta really stop a minute and think about. Yeah. And he’s
Alan: He’s uses all the language was not that he’s only clean. He’s actually has some great vulgarity, but it’s not just another guy saying motherfucker.
It’s I especially love the fact that. He like one of our common complaints about comedians nowadays is they repeat themselves a lot. They keep talking to the audience about how maybe they’re not getting it enough that joke should have gotten a bigger laugh. And if I was like earn my laughter I am so ready to laugh.
And if you suck. If you take your time too much, if you are continually. Rating me like what I want. And he like Steven, right? Every single joke is good. And so you get a ton of comedy in a two hour show as compared to someone who takes their time, and like his Jimmy Carr’s interactions with the audience were so quick and so perfect.
And everything about the show, this is funny thing to say about comedy was like efficient. It wasn’t yeah. Hey, I got to be here contractually for an hour and a half. And so I’m going to drag it out and do the least that I can. He really seems like the guy in the front row that always has his hand up with a funny answer.
You know what I mean? So I just can’t tell you how we it’s such a pleasure to come out of a show. Face hurting sides hurting because you’ve laughed so much and just know this will never miss it when he comes to town again. One of those guys you want to recommend to all your friends because it’s not even like a particular style of humor.
It’s like he’s just so witty. Everybody should find something to laugh at in this show. So hats off to Jimmy Carr. And it’s funny again, not to be rude, To compare and contrast, we saw Ryan Hamilton later that week. And we still find him very funny, but he wasn’t as good. And I think that this is a sad thing to say.
Sorry, Ryan, because we really like you. Some people get to a point in their career where you go. Wow. If he hasn’t broken big now, will he ever? And he knows that. He knows that. He’s he’s into a Playhouse Square theater, but he didn’t sell it out. And he just, whatever the pain is of being a comedian, he’s letting it show through enough.
Not just an entertainer, but a little bit of a confessor. And admittedly he’s been through some terrible stuff. He got hit by a bus, oh my gosh. On a bus and broke 10 of his 12 ribs. And really wrecked him up for three months. And and those things that comedians do is well, this is a lot of great material.
I can make a lot out of this. And he did. And yet something seems to have slowed down in him when we saw him very young in Vegas, like 25 years ago, he was like, hungry and young and just like nothing we’d ever seen. If you don’t know, he’s the guy that looks a little bit like Howdy Doody. He’s got a very distinctive face and even comes out and opens his act with, okay, here’s the face.
Let’s talk about it. You know what I mean? I think even his special starts that way. So I hope that he reignites, that he catches fire, that he gets the break. Like maybe he just never made it onto Johnny Carson and got called over to the couch kind of a thing that makes or breaks people career.
If you get on nowadays, who it is, Fallon or Kimmel, whoever else it is that are. still the people that are purveyors of comedy. So it’s like we
STephen: talk about with music a lot, comedy’s got the same thing. You can tell the same joke, but from different people, it comes across different. And it’s not necessarily even there were, it’s a combination of so many things, the inflection, the energy in their voice.
It’s, very subjective, but something you cannot define. And we’ve talked about that with music, you can get two artists playing the exact same song, and one of them will just fire you up. And the other one’s yeah, okay. It’s that mystical energy. And I know people will have, but it’s true.
Alan: What’s funny is it’s not like sometimes it’s the artist on a particular night, we’ve seen I love Black Crowes. We saw one performance in there where they were totally phoning it in, and it’s you guys are such a great bar band. You really have the ability to get that, get into that groove and get the whole crowd.
And instead it was. Low key, just bad the entire night and it’s funny because I did the Prague Rock Festival realized Prague stock. People were talking a little bit about, so what’s some of the worst and best shows you’ve ever seen. And I’ve ever seen sticks, who I really like and it was like, after maybe three albums in a row Grand Illusion and Cornerstone and what and like they can tell you right in there.
Pieces of eight. And they did an hour and 10 minutes and did you have somewhere else you needed to be? Are you late for your plane? What is it when you got 10 albums to draw on and you’re giving us an hour and 10? Maybe somebody in the band was sick, you can share that and say, we’re going to give you the best show that we can until JY vomits.
You know what I mean?
STephen: I know there’s a lot of people that follow like biorhythms and stuff and the moon phases and that. I’ve never really looked into it and I’ll be like yeah, whatever. But, a lot of people, we talked about this, the Myers Briggs thing. I know a lot of people are very dismissive Oh, get stupid.
That’s hocus. They made that up. It’s great. They may have, but I’ve seen it in my life, how much it really has mattered and sometimes hit right on, not sometimes like almost every time, if I look at. What I am on Myers Briggs. I’m like, yep, right there. That’s why I just did what I did, said what I said, you know what I’m saying?
So could moon phases, could biorhythms affect us maybe?
Alan: Honestly, we know that we’re like human machines. And so it can be like, did you have the right food for dinner? And that gave you, you need it. Do you have other things on your mind? And so it’s a distraction or even like what, one of the things to me that separates the great from the good is.
Having said, Oh, maybe he had an off night, but I’ve seen we just saw Jay Leno a couple of months back and Jay Leno just caught himself on fire, working in his garage on one of his many cool vintage cars. And he came out and did a fantastic set. Michael Jordan has done this where he was like playing with the flu where most people, especially guys would be like, get me some water.
That kind of, some people have the ability to just out of mind body connections, say. I still have to do my job. I’m going to go out there and for two hours, give my all. And then after that, I give myself permission to collapse, I’ll crash on the bus or whatever else it might be. But some people don’t seem to be able to do that.
They are captive to whatever their mood is or whatever their body energy is and stuff like that. Like I said, that’s what separates the great from the good. When you see, we saw Jon Panett one night. Where he talked about he had just finished doing a big run of hairspray, if I remember right, where they were doing, long shows every night and he did it for six months.
And he could have been coming out there and just said, I’m exhausted. I’m going to give you the best I can. Instead he was on fire. Maybe it was the freedom of now I don’t need to worry about being up until one o’clock getting my makeup off or something like that, that people that Especially, if you’re a comedian, somebody paid to see you, how about giving them their money’s worth, no matter what your personal circumstances are, you gotta go and do your
STephen: job.
You know what I mean? There’s a definite mindset with any creative. The endeavor and creative work, magician magicians. Yeah. Musicians and comedians and authors. We, we’ve in the author communities. You hear it all the time. People talk. It’s oh, I just haven’t been able to get into writing.
I haven’t been able to that muse that spark, I just haven’t felt it. And then you get, Stephen King, Dean Koontz Vonnegut. And those guys are like yeah. I’m a professional writer. So I sit down every day and I do my job and I write and that’s the difference. And
Alan: It’s funny, we’ve talked a little bit before about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote a great book called Flow like 30 years ago.
He’s now gone, but many follow up books and many, it’s very much one of those things that like, like you said, when I see myself doing something a certain way, it’s that’s because I really love that flow state. I seek it out. I do it in multiple things, whether I’m coding or whether I’m playing music or whatever else it might be.
And. And one of the things that, that comes from that is you have to learn how to set yourself into that. If things that don’t work, don’t put you in a place full of distractions. Don’t like you have to clear the decks. Some of those great writers you talked about, they have a favorite writing place.
They even built themselves a little cab cabin in the backyard or something like that. And they go out there and they put in there. I don’t know how 100 pages, no 10 pages, one good page, but they Think of it as a job and they don’t give themselves a break. They know that the only way they’re going to be a better writer is if they write and write, and you can see their craft develop.
I know that I love reading authors like from first book to last book, not only because there’s usually a chronology and the characters they develop and stuff, but because I see them grow as an artist, you can really see them getting better. And that’s a really cool thing. I know that I’ve gotten better as a coder from the many years that I did it as a speaker.
All that kind of stuff. My high school debate or whatever talks I gave as part of extemporaneous speaking are nothing compared to when I now do a really cool talk for a comic con or for the Mensa gatherings and stuff like that, that I’m, I’ve gotten used to. This is I don’t mean to be talking too much, I apologize.
You’re good. There’s a great phrase, and I need to learn to say it in the French, but it’s The hour between dog and wolf. That when you need to get up for something, get up for the game, get up for the performance, whatever. You have to go from being that tame kind of domesticated pleasing others animal to where you’re hungry and alpha and you’re on top of your game.
And, that’s the kind of thing. If I have to do anything before I talk, it’s always. do a little pacing, go to the bathroom, make sure I have my diet Dr. Pepper, whatever my little rituals are, but it very much isn’t. Hey, I’ll just stroll in and do what I usually do. I really get myself up for it.
There’s everybody has their favorite music that they might play to before. I used to listen to the love to love ending guitar solo by UFO by Michael Shanker before I play. intramural football in college, because it just got my blood boiling. It just was like, I’m just so fucking ready now. And I I’m gonna go bite someone. But anyway,
STephen: it was, that’s rugby. That’s not. Yeah, you’re
Alan: right. And I played rugby too. So guess that you learn what music what environment? How was the persona that you want to put on? Because I don’t know that I’m Always one L. There’s multiple L’s as to when I’m concentrating and playing a game or when I’m, being a spectator versus a participant or whatever else.
And you’ll learn what summons those things so that you can go through the hour between dog and wolf and be ready to be your best when it’s necessary that you be your best. Oh, one of the things maybe Jeopardy that I didn’t do was listen to your music. I didn’t have that chance. It was this wonderful, crowded, distracting, chaotic type environment.
And then you pop out like a watermelon scene. It’s Oh, no, I’m going to be at my best. No, I wish I would’ve had a chance to do my usual and then it would be better. You
STephen: would add much more time if you didn’t need head shellac. As
Alan: there is that, actually someone. That I, there was a time when I think it might have been my second game instead of my first, that usually you listen to the questions and you have to wait for the Alex to finish speaking before you can buzz in.
If you read well and fast, you can always read the question, then be ready to buzz in. And I was like three questions in before I went, Oh no, I can’t quite see this one. Oh, I forgot to put my glasses on. And So sadly, what a attestation to I’m a little older, I really do need the glasses to see a certain distance and stuff like that.
But people said that I just realized that. And I reached over and took my glasses out of my pocket. And I wasn’t like, fumble. And that I panicked. It was just like, oh, that’s what’s funny. That’s a little fuzzy. A little bit more. They said that I looked so totally calm, they couldn’t believe it.
So Hopefully, sometimes that even if you go into a situation where you’re like, maybe you’ve done this when you were a musician, you might have started off a little tentative, a little off, but then when the music itself, yeah, and you’re and your compatriots are like, they’re doing well.
So it’s I got to step up and be part of the band here. And I like that too. I, you play a good game of hearts where there’s a whole bunch of banter. And you get up for the game just by you have to rise to the occasion. The challenge is there and stuff like that.
STephen: Yeah, you definitely, you mentioned the music.
I talked about that Gran Turismo movie and the main character John Jan, when he would go to race in the movie. He started playing Enya and Kenny G and people were like laughing and a little bit making fun of him. But at the end of the movie, they did the, the little he continues blah, blah, blah.
He says, and he still listens to Kenny G and Enya before every race. That’s pretty cool.
Alan: And actually it’s funny. A little bit in defiance of what I had just said, some part of what I’ve thought about what was going on is that I was a little bit over excited, almost rattled, and that if I would have been able to get to that calmer place of like, when you’re sitting with your friends playing trivia, you don’t always know where things pop out, but if your mind is running nice and efficient, cool blue green, as they go on the scans, I wish I would have been able to go to that place, some part of.
What I needed the most training. It was not memorizing or Nobel prize winners and Shakespeare quotes. It was how do I, in the middle of all this chaos of television and lights, and just take a couple of deep breaths and go to your secure place that, your brain will be efficient at.
And I think that might’ve been not getting up for the game, but giving it the requisite. disrespect so that you can say, Oh, I’ve done this before. I know a lot of stuff. There we go. Let’s go.
STephen: It’s interesting. You say that because I mentioned Myers Briggs. I read things about Myers Briggs every now and then, cause I click on an article.
So of course I’m going to get those articles in those Facebook posts forever. Yeah, exactly. Most of it, I’m like, I go away, but I just saw one. That was how you would survive on a deserted island based on your Myers Briggs type. And I was like, Oh, this is actually a cool little article because it does fit how the brain for me works, and it was very funny. It’s so I N T J. Wouldn’t freak out, wouldn’t get nervous that within two weeks, they, if you found them, they’d be laying in a hammock with a coffee maker that they devised so they could get their own coffee and have discovered their new brand of Coke of coffee. And, they’d be like, the mad science are the mad scientists taking over the world is.
It was just, I laughed and I shared it with another friend who is an INTJ and he laughed. He said, Oh my God, that’s like dead on, if what you, what would happen. So it’s interesting because you do talk, you talk about doing talks and being on Jeopardy and stuff for me.
And I don’t know if it’s just all INTJ, it’s just me, but I am much more relaxed. And ready to go. If you put me in front of a podium with 20, 000 people in an audience, then I am sitting down at a table with five or six people. It’s actually much more stressful and nerve wracking for me to be in small groups than in front of a large group talking.
And even, a debate thing. It’s okay, here’s your topic. You have two minutes to prepare. Go talk. I’d be like, sure. No problem. Let’s go. But if you’re like, hey, Go sit at that table and get to know all those five people. It’s oh, dear God, are you serious?
Alan: Actually, many people say this, I’m sure, I count on my adrenaline to work for me.
There’s any number of things that I. I don’t know that I chip away at it. I let it get to where it has to be done. And then I do it. So you like time box things. I’m going to write this article for the Mensa newsletter. I don’t want to spend six hours playing with it. I want to get it done. So I wait until I have an hour and then I say, Put everything else away and knock this out.
And a lot of times you’re already in the background of your mind, been working on what you want to say. So sometimes it just flows out because you’ve been thinking about it in your subconscious. But I think that creating sometimes that artificial time pressure really does work for certain people.
And I think sometimes it does for me once in a while, you get yourself in trouble where, okay, I gave myself four hours to get this done. And then all the things I needed weren’t. there. People hadn’t gotten back to me with information, whatever else it might be. Colleen had to deal with this all the time that, and she’s not, I think as a good, a time boxer or doesn’t seek out that situation, but she was perpetually having to follow up more than she was just to get her work done.
She’s really good at doing her job, but she had so many dependencies on other people. And that’s. A formula for stress I read in some article is where you have the responsibility for something, but you don’t have the control over every aspect of it. And every single stressor who doesn’t get back to you on time, doesn’t give you full information, doesn’t know what they’re talking about when they said, I’ll take care of that for you, et cetera, et cetera.
She had to deal with that all her career. So she’s in much better disposition now that she’s retired, because we talk every day about when the phone rings, it isn’t, Oh God, what now? Oh, what do I owe somebody something who’s going to come in and talk to me? It was like I got to disappoint you because I wasn’t able to get this.
And even though you’re not really needed, just it was. It’s really good that she doesn’t have that exact combination of lots of responsibility and not the ability from to to shelter herself from others on lack of quality.
STephen: Anyway. Okay I. Here’s something we didn’t talk about last week. A side new endeavor of mine that involves some chemistry.
My buddy Casey and I have started doing soaps to sell handmade goat milk soap. And we’ve…
Alan: Because you have goats on your property. What have I missed here?
STephen: No. Okay. So we’ve been doing the pallet thing where you buy pallets and you resell them and we’ve tweaked that formula. We’ve worked on it and we like, okay, here’s where we, did the, where are we making the most money and how are we making the most money?
How can we maximize that and focus on that? And here’s the other stuff that doesn’t make us as much money. We’re not doing that as much. So what we came down to is. Okay, we’ve got a couple avenues of the pallet stuff to go, but this isn’t going to be like a full time replace your job thing unless we start buying and selling a whole pallets to other people, moving up the next level or.
Or we talked about getting like a, an indoor flea market and selling spaces to other people, or even my thought was a traveling roadshow, a traveling flea market where every all through summer. Every county fair, we get the buildings the following week. It’s always the week after your county fair, and then we get all of these flea markets, if people selling up flea markets to come in and but those are very large endeavors.
We have to work up to that or get an influx in cash. And we didn’t want to do alone. We, we didn’t want to owe that money. If things didn’t work out, so we’re building and we’re like, okay, we know we can. For every 100 we spend, we know we’re going to make about 150 to 175, but the timeframe for that is small.
Each in the early summer is a great time and then just a little bit the rest of the year. So we need something to fill in. Now. We need something to take the time replace. So we were at a flea market with a lady who does. Handmade soap, goat’s milk soap. And without doing hardly anything, people were buying it.
And we’re like, huh. And we talked about it and said, we can do that better. Yeah. And so we’ve been going down that rabbit hole. It is not hard, but it’s not easy.
Alan: Okay. So what does it consist of? You’re picking different sense, different combinations of sense and saying we want to make sure we cover the lavender and the yes.
STephen: So here’s the thing, it’s such a popular thing that literally there are places out there that you can go and order like this kit and then you get the kit and you melt it all down and you put your scent in, pour it in the molds and let it set for a day and you’re done and you have soap and it’s, and we’re like, yeah, our problem was.
The, it had goat’s milk soap in it or, goat’s milk to make the soap in it. But it was like the last ingredient. There were all the same chemicals, all the other ingredients that normal soap in the store has. Interesting.
Alan: If do anything to differentiate yourself from the market, if you will, you might do what people think are the favorites, but it’s not going to be anything that says I need to find Schneider soap.
Got stuff that nobody else
STephen: has. Okay. So we were like, yeah, cause we were going to distribute for her. And just resell her soap sales work. Cause we said, okay, the product isn’t, we know the product’s good. Now it’s all down to marketing and, like that. So we said, we can do that part better.
Then we’re looking at it. We’re like, yeah, this has the same crap ingredients. And we, so we said, we’re going to make. The best goat’s milk soap we can with all natural ingredients. So we’ve been experimenting and figuring that out. So we’ve got our formula close. We keep making different batches.
We’re like, okay, this one’s too hard and flaky. This one is like bad cheese. It’s too soft. And, just experimenting and figuring it out. And we’re down four ingredients. That’s all we’ve got is four ingredients. But it takes a month to set up, which is why a lot of people don’t do this method. Okay.
Alan: Not overnight, not let it set and it’s ready to go. Yeah.
STephen: But that’s going to be our big selling point is we guarantee this is all natural. Here’s the ingredients we used and no GMO. We’re, we’re spending a little more. To get the non GMO and the non additive, this, that, and the other thing.
So we can tell people, Hey, this is as natural as you can get from us. And that’s going to be our selling point. So it’s
Alan: interesting. One of the things that we often enjoy when we watch our great British baking show is where people, they, the judges will often ding somebody for saying you didn’t really use natural almonds, you used almond extract, and many of those things have a distinctive chemical taste, if you will, not everything, some things like banana or whatever else it might be, at least to my unrefined palate, things taste a lot the same. And yet, what you’re saying about, if it’s the perfect ingredients naturally, someone who’s taken the shortcut and saying I bought, trisodium lavendate.
And that’s not gonna, if people will, but it’s not just really the plant rendered down into something or other. Another, we’ll come back, of course, when I do my pretentious drinking stuff, I try to find places that it’s not, hey, we made a brandy and then we added something to it, that no, it really is lavender distilled, it really is pineapple distilled, if there is one like that, because pineapple is really Weirdly enzymic.
Yeah, doesn’t do things correctly. Like it’ll
STephen: curdle it
Alan: like that. Or maybe cause pineapple is not really a fruit. It’s a berry or it’s on, there’s different classifications and how they sell it in the grocery store is not always an indication of what it is in nature. So when you were experimenting, it’s like America’s test kitchen.
You keep doing we’re going to make 10 bars this way and 10 bars this way. And then you do. Comparison, as how flaky how does it feel in your hand? How’s it smell on your skin? So do you have testers? Like you have ladies testing it because they
STephen: care more about that. So we’re working on that.
We’ve got several batches over the last couple of weeks. We’ve made that are in different stages. They had different formulas and we’re, trying to try. So we’re going to try them all out to make sure, it’s good first. And then, of course we got family and all that. Casey. Is more like we need to remelt this down and reformulate.
I’m like, just this is all a wash. Just forget about this. We’ll make once we figure it out. We’ll knew we’ll just give this stuff away or better yet. We’ll just break it up into pieces and sell it as oops. Bars, like they do the
Alan: bread, the sweet slips that they have candy stores. Right?
STephen: And we’re also trying to make our bars a little bigger. So most of the bars in the store are like 3. 7 to 4 ounces. We’re doing 5 to 6 ounces and trying to make them bigger. And we’re not doing any sense at the moment till we figure out the formula. And then there’s different things like the lady we were talking to, she just gets a fragrance that she puts in and we’re like, okay, but that fragrance adds chemicals and it doesn’t always, it smells chemically, if you, so we are getting essential oils.
The problem is essential oils are very expensive. So everything’s all natural. So it keeps raising the price. So if it’s costing us. 4 a bar. We can’t sell it for 4, it just doesn’t make sense.
Alan: Are you almost like pioneer style? From what I read in my books, that soap is like ash plus, you know what I mean? It’s four basic ingredients and then you churn it the right way. And so you give away any trade secrets. I’m just like,
STephen: you got a fat and an oil. Essentially but to get those to mix together, you have to write the right combo, but that’s what you put the lie in for.
And soaps have lie people like, Oh, I don’t use soap without lie. Really? Because the soap you’re using from the store, they used lie or other harsh chemicals. The thing is, that’s why it’s sitting for a month because that leeches all the layout. So it’s like baking bread, there’s no alcohol in bread once it’s done.
That’s what happens with the yeast. And that’s what happens with the lye and the oil and the fat. It helps them combine and then the lye is gone and all you got left is a mixture of the oil and fat. Yeah.
Alan: One of the things, this is funny, there’s all kinds of foolishness out there about Hey, what’s in that vaccine?
If it’s got any of this, then it’s bad for you. And it’s if you do any soap making any baking, any cooking at all, that It’s not a matter of is it in there or not. It’s the dose. It’s the how much a quarter of a teaspoon is a whole different thing than half the recipe is right.
And you want to mean and so there’s all kinds of things you use as a catalyst as a whatever are the Chemical needs that you put in there that the amount of scent. And again, from the baking show, you’ll be like, wow, there are certain things that are so strong, like rose, that just the tiniest three quarters of a tablespoon instead of a half tablespoon, right?
Oh, it reeks of rose. And it’s no good. It tastes bad, right? Body is not used to something that strong in that family of chemicals, if you will. So I love of as I have done hundreds of breads now, I often will say, last time I remember this being like sunflower seeds have a very distinctive taste, and I might want to go with a little bit less than what the recipe calls for because etc.
You know what I mean? I have little mental notes to myself or that, hey, I really like garlic. I’ll put a lot of garlic in my cooking, but not as much for Colleen because she likes it, but she’s very sensitive to when it’s too much. That kind of thing.
STephen: And the funny thing about these people like, Oh, I don’t want those vaccines.
First of all, I almost guarantee you’ve had a vaccine when you were a kid. And you
Alan: didn’t know what was in it then.
STephen: Exactly. So maybe you’re right. Maybe vaccines do make you stupid. This is proof, but these same people have no problem. Eating hamburger helper and eating McDonald’s, right?
Stop a minute or drinking, drinking, a two liter of Coke while they’re watching a football game and eating nachos and melted plastic cheese. Stop a minute folks.
Alan: So A bunch of friends used to go over to Troy’s house where he had what was called the not luck party. That is a potluck, but it was everybody bringing ingredients and he had been like a road chef for rock band.
So he was just being able to make great food out of virtually anything. And that’s what he would do. And we got challenged him more and more with the otter and otter ingredients. So it wasn’t just Pork and beef and chicken. It was like, how about some turtle? How about some, how about somebody kidnapped? Whatever. I don’t want to name any. In case that’s an endangered species. We never had a kidnap. Yeah. Okay. But the reason for saying that was, and bear with me, let me get back on track. It was that. I derailed myself. Sorry. Yeah, talking about proportion and
STephen: darn it. I said the vaccines with the hamburger helper and McDonald’s.
Alan: Exactly. That I was very game to try virtually anything and like trying a lot of things for the 1st time. It was like. I have, so for instance, we had durian, which is the, that’s the fruit that you’re not allowed to bring on public trend in India, because if you break it open, it smells like rotting bodies.
It’s a terrible smell. And so when he did it. He like cracked it open and the whole house was like, get that outside. And he was already ready to do that. He knew that it was going to be that kind of thing, but he was one of the guys that had a real good feel for, he had bought some balsamic vinegar that was really expensive.
And in order to have that taste in whatever food you’re making, you didn’t glop it in, you put like a drop in and it really. Inhabited the thing because it was so concentrated or so, however, it is chemically active. It did that kind of stuff. So when we used to go do those kinds of things, I was always up for, man, I not only do I want to try everything, but I hope that I remember what I’ve tried, say, maybe I do want to have do they have goat meat anywhere here in, in the Cleveland
STephen: area?
I would think so. I, Colin said that Arby’s has a new burger that has like. Moose in it or elk or something. Canadian coming down from I guess, a thing. I know it’s venison, but I thought, yeah, you’re right. Venison and maybe something else. I thought he said, I was like, okay.
Alan: We, when we did aficionados our movie group, the AFI top hundred, we often tried to make theme food that went with the movies.
And so we tried various different ethnicities, Christine’s. And sometimes it was like, if we’re going to have German food, let’s make Hassan Pfeffer. Let’s. have some rabbit. And there really are places you can find those kinds of things. Some places have Snake meat and rabbit meat and emu and all that kind of stuff.
For some, it was quite distinctive. And others were like what everybody else says. Tastes like chicken. Any, ostrich, emu, etc. And even we had a, somebody brought a big ostrich egg. And it was like, it tastes like egg. It doesn’t taste like gamey wild running around the veldt egg. It was just egg.
You know what I mean? So some things you raise your anticipation a little bit and then it doesn’t come true. But I have I know I’m all over the place today. One thing I love to do with making cookies is I don’t just make standard chocolate chips. I go and get the cool different bits. I get mint and I get peanut butter and I get that kind of stuff.
And then, and I try to keep the batches separate because there’s nothing worse than somebody biting into what they expect to be a nice chocolate chip. And then it’s like a Skittle. You know what I mean? They thought it was going to be an M& M and it was going to be a Skittle. So I don’t want to fool anybody, but I really like.
That interesting variety, it touches different parts of your palate and stuff like that. So I don’t know. I’m always been about variety, and that’s one of these kinds of things. I’ll try anything as long as I take, it isn’t worth going into that discussion, but I won’t try everything.
Cause I don’t want to like, I don’t know. I don’t want to have, there was a movie with Matthew Broderick and Marlon Brando about group that got together to eat like endangered species. I’m like. That doesn’t appeal to me at all. I don’t have to conquer something. I just want to taste it. So when we were up in Canada, I did make a point of having moose or bison or things that were particular to there.
And seal. I think I had some seal. But they also had, at the place, they did have like ostriches. I’m going to wait till I’m in Africa to have ostrich because it doesn’t seem right to come to Canada and get something that isn’t native to Canada. Oh I don’t even know where I got that standard from, but somehow it really mattered to me.
Like what do they know about cooking ostrich in Canada? This isn’t, like I know they know how to do bacon. I know they know how to do moose.
STephen: Canadian, real Canadian bacon in Canada.
Alan: Exactly. Pmeal bacon. We, I made a point every time we’ve been up for our comedy festival to have pmeal bacon, because it’s just I don’t think you get that down here in the States.
So whatever it is that’s a different way of curing it or flavoring it or something like that. I get some of that because I’m in Canada and that’s what you do.
STephen: You’re going to Halloween next weekend, which I have to miss this year. But you mentioned Halloween. So what are you dressing up as?
So
Alan: it, this year’s theme is a silver screen. It’s Halloween, like 47. And I think that’s the chemical number, the atomic number for silver, argent, hence. silver screen. And so Colleen and I came up with the idea and hope that people
STephen: if you’re on Halloween, don’t listen,
Alan: be right, exactly. We what goes with movies, naturally, the Oscars.
And so we came up with a couple of good Oscar costumes. Oh, good. So and it’s funny because it, Colleen and I have this determination to spend Five bucks. You know what I mean? We don’t want to go and rent a costume. We don’t want to spend months developing it. It’s what’s the caricature that I can make that’s going to say, Oh, funny big glasses.
That must be Elton John. What did it cost me? Big glasses, so we think we’ve developed ways and Okay. We thought of these ideas a while back, but we haven’t started on them yet, and it’s only two weeks to go. So here’s hoping that we’re not doing this Wednesday night before. Two weeks?
STephen: Yeah, less than two weeks, man. It’s next
Alan: week. It is next week, exactly. I’m already 10 days away, right? Yeah. The joy of that event. One of the big things is the costume parade and maybe we talk about this probably every year because you have to, but I just love seeing that level of creativity where every year people like they bring things out of the news.
They embrace the theme. And so I know that we’re going to see all kinds of. Who are the movie stars that people are going to imitate, but with a punny aspect to it, here’s my guesses. Like we’re going to see someone that comes out dressed all suave in a suit, but have a blood on them.
And it’s going to be Cary Grant or something like that. You know what I mean? And it honestly, now that I’ve said that I should do that. I like that one. One of my experiences, I went one year as pie a la mode by that meaning I had a big pie symbol on me and I had, I was dressed in. Buckskin and had blood all over me, cause I’d been at the Alamo and unfortunately, man, whatever I got for the quality of the makeup that I got, that blood took forever off of me, out of my hair, out of my ear crevices, all that kind of stuff.
It gelled. And like it looked, I looked very much like a walking zombie because it wasn’t nice and neat. It had gooked everywhere. So I got to be careful about one year I went as a. Dr. No, by that meaning I was dressed up doing no theater, white face, big robe, and stuff like that. It was the James Bond theme, if I remember right, that year.
And same thing, however I apply makeup, maybe I don’t put the layer down that’s supposed to make it easy to come off. Or maybe I, something in my body chemistry says, Hey, let’s not just wear this. Let’s bond with it. You need
STephen: more Hedgelak. Exactly. Not cowbell, Hedgelak.
Alan: I got to step into the mister and get all sealed and then I can put the stuff on and it won’t affect me.
Especially also facial hair, man, if you put anything in your beard and mustache, it not only does it take a while to clear it up, but it’s like you start rubbing enough that you’re abrading yourself. Don’t do this again. Whatever you don’t do the
STephen: face makeup. When my kids were younger, I always pushed for them to make up a costume and it’s actually, harder and more time consuming.
And I never. I never was it. I never enjoyed. Let’s just go to the store and buy a plastic costume. You put it on. They don’t look that good, but the kids used to make some great stuff and they loved it. They had some pride in it and they enjoyed it. Colin still enjoys getting dressed up. The now it’s cosplay.
You’re not you’re an adult. So you’re not just. But not a costume. It’s cosplay.
Alan: Yeah, I have dressed up besides Halloween and stuff like that. I remember any number of the early Marvel movies when I was just so happy that they existed, they were going on. I would dress up as Thor and go to the movie, because I’m built like a Viking.
And so you put a horned helmet on. It’s Wow, he’s really into this.
STephen: Colin did that too for Thor. There you go, exactly. So we’ll see. I,
Alan: Where my mom is at Arden Court they’re having a Halloween thing and so I intend to dress up and they already, they’ve gotten to know me because I’ve been there three days a week for nine months now and I’m hoping that it won’t be, like, too Look, I don’t know that I want to walk in there with either a hammer or an ax because I got a feeling I shouldn’t.
Do you know what I mean? I don’t want to be spooky. I just want to be funny. So we’ll see about that. But it Colleen and I have a ton of like often on the drive back from Halloween. Sometimes we don’t already know the theme, but we’re already thinking of it’s in the news. What can we do for next year?
And there’s been maybe two or three times where the germ of an idea that started the day after the event is what we then there’s nowadays, there’s gotta be, how many people are going to be dressed like Trump or Biden? How many people are going to be, like there are certain people that are much in the news.
Is anybody going to be like Lady Gaga? Is anybody going to be, there’s always a certain number of sports figures. I, there are memorably great costumes. Because it’s the wonderful mentor group and relentless geekery wise, there’s always like a couple of cyborgs, a couple of Klingons, a couple,
STephen: I will say that group for the most part doesn’t go down the easy or, the route that other people may normally choose. A lot of times they’re trying to get something to make you think about it. And that’s, that the
Alan: key is to have such a great costume that people can’t easily guess it while you’re walking up on stage.
And then the minute you say it, you get this wonderful explosion of, yes, that’s great. One year, I had a guy dressed as a Klingon with a tackle box and a rod and reel. And he came out and had the great B voice. I am Fisherman’s Wharf. And everyone I sit there I try to always get pictures of everything, but also in the days where I sit more towards the back, I would take notes.
And then when I go to work on Monday, I’d be like, here’s the great jokes. I heard the joke off and here’s the great costumes that I saw. You can’t believe how cool an event this is. You know what I mean? So it was furry with a syringe on top. And it was a paradox and I, I should. Of course, talk about the costume, let people guess, but just the amount of work that went into it, or just the wit of they came up with something and bam had they had a couple where a group of four ladies came out dressed as witches and they.
Stood up there and they started to brush each other off. And so that was a self cleaning coven. And then they came back the next year and they all got up and they did a little thing like this and now there was a microwave coven. I love where people Exhaust a theme where they really, one guy came as death each year gr reaper with a sickle and everything like thats, I should say, right?
And one year it was, he had a microwave on and he was death warmed over . And one year he had, how I insured on it was death takes a holiday, . So I just love where people are witty and sustainably. So that’s a really cool thing. And ly, I don’t even know. That I remember who was these various different things.
So hey, everybody that I’ve named your costume. Remember that though I saw it like 25 years ago. It was so memorably good. Greatest hits list of what things I’ve seen at Halloween. I just loved some of those things. All right.
STephen: So what else we got? Let’s see you mentioned Hulu that streaming is definitely changing with the strike going on with movies not making money and with Just the way streaming is like we’re losing money and things getting canceled and moved and what things are changing once again in our entertainment world
Alan: Exactly.
So one of the things that i’ve realized is It isn’t only that I like certain genres and themes, it’s that I really like certain actors and actresses, and I follow them to whatever project they’re going on. So I really like, Colleen and I both like Nathan Fillion, and we have seen like the very short lived Firefly, but then we saw many seasons of Castle, and now he’s gotten that now.
I think it’s the rookie. And so we’ve been catching up on all those because we’re like five, six, seven seasons, and we’re only into season one and loving it. And it’s not only him, a great supporting cast, it’s him trying to be a rookie as a policeman, but he’s older. And so all the attendance chaos of that.
But One of the reasons for mentioning that was we regularly watch Amazon, Netflix, and so forth, and for a long time, the whole point of cable TV was you buy it to avoid the commercials that are over there on network TV. And then you started to get, they broke the covenant, Comedy Central was the one I first remembered, that it wasn’t just Comedy Central anymore, they had tons of ads.
And I’m like, I can’t watch a movie on Comedy Central because it was as bad or worse. You know what I mean? Than anything I’d ever seen on a Sunday night at the movies, where not only were they injecting ads, but they were actually cutting some parts of the movie out to fit in the ads. And that’s, so we have by watching mostly Amazon and Netflix, which are still pretty good.
I think they’re going to start to have an ad supported tier as well as a regular tier. And I’m hoping we won’t, we will pay whatever’s necessary to not watch them. We don’t get Hulu plus, and I think I’m going to have to go to it because nowadays when we watch the rookie. It’s just larded with ads, and especially with elections coming up.
There’s all kinds of political stuff. And just one of the reasons that it’s worth doing it is because you get an idea by watching network TV like we watch for the Olympics, or even jeopardy or something like that, or this. Here’s what America gets splashed on it all the time that I don’t know I get most of my news and most of my I don’t seek out any kind of advertising.
It’s occasionally sneaks in through my filters online and stuff like that. But is every ad for, Hey, get yourself a new car, try this new drug. They’re like, like America must really think everybody is sick because there’s so many drugs out there. And maybe I think we’ve talked about this a little bit before when you find out by looking up at a little bit about it online, that condition only applies to 50, 000 people out of 300 million.
STephen: And they want that being advertised everybody to think they have it and that’s, yeah, never
Alan: ask your doctor about this, that kind of stuff. And I guess I really, it’s odd to me to have, especially not only do you have the ad for the drug or whatever else it might be, it’s two thirds is the ad and the last third is.
Here’s all the terrible side effects. And I know everybody talks about this, but it really boggles my mind. I just can’t believe that you’re going to be like, Hey, this is good for clearing up your toenail fungus, but you might like die of, like anaphylactic shock. You might get like depressed so much that you would kill
STephen: yourself, right?
Alan: Sign up unless you. There are, of course, life threatening conditions. If you really are, you need something to do with your heart’s not right, your metabolism’s not right, whatever else it might be. You have depression, and so they try various different things to try to get you past that. But man, it used to be, hey, take an aspirin, and maybe you might get, hopefully, a little bit of upset stomach.
Apparently, the days of those miracle drugs are Long gone. And now everything that’s being developed has all kinds of follow on and not benefits, but possible side effects that just scare me to death. You know what I mean? I I, we are both doing diabetes type stuff. And as as they had weight loss drugs that came from diabetes, like we go V and mom, Jaro and Ozempic.
And they’re finding out now that, the dose matters. Yeah. A little bit or a lot of it, it changes and it matters to different people. And I just don’t want it like, Hey, I got rid of the diabetes, but then my femur snapped because it hollowed out my bones, osteoporosis or something. And I don’t think that’s one of the things that goes with that one in particular, but I know I’ve heard about that for others is that we’re going to take care of everything about it seems to lower your natural immune system.
Many drugs have that. And I don’t want to go autoimmune. And I also don’t want to be. Hey, I got this great drug, but now I can’t go outside because somebody sneezes on me. I’m going to get for sure whatever flu or cold or COVID or anything like that. It’s really weird. The level of risk that you’re taking on to try to cure one thing and then another thing pops up.
STephen: It’s like playing whack a mole. But that’s our society in this regard is so screwed up because a lot of these diseases are exacerbated by our cultural lifestyle and the choices and a lot of it could be avoided with changing that. But people really don’t. Understand or even want to do that. So now we’re on this track and then you get the thing of everything can only be fixed by taking a pill.
And then finally people are like, you know what? That’s stupid. I need to get healthier. But on that side of it, you got all these charlatans going, Oh yeah, this is how you get healthy. I had a family member. Oh my God. There’s this one family member that we avoid that she was drinking vinegar and egg.
Raw egg every single night. Cause she said, oh yeah this will make you lose weight around your belly and it’ll keep you from getting this, that, and the other thing. And that was all she had to do was just drink a glass of vinegar with a raw egg. And I’m like, yeah, good for that. And she doesn’t do it anymore.
I’m like, so what happened? Oh, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Of course. She’s also the same one recently that said that test we had like last month where everybody got the national emergency test on that Wednesday on your phone. She said, yeah, make sure you’re nowhere around your phone when that goes off because they’re using it to trigger the vaccine that they implanted in you.
And we’re like, what? Yeah, that’s why they’re doing it. So they could, track us and control us through the emergency signal. It activates the vaccine. Wow. Go back to your crazy hole,
Alan: honestly, that this is a sad thing to say. I really am. It used to be, Hey, I want to lose some weight.
Good diet and exercise. That’s the way to go. I don’t want to. Is there a pill? Is there a pill I can take? And for a long time, it was, of course, there’s not, you really have to learn a little bit of discipline and a little bit, just that I always love where it’s not only you want to lose weight, right?
Like everything you’re going to do while you’re doing diet and exercise is going to make all of you better, lower your blood pressure, it’ll get increase your mental concentration. There’s all these side benefits. So just like, why did we why do we want to fight climate change? And I’m going to go there just a minute.
We’ll come right back. Because it’s not only fighting climate change. All the things we do to fight climate change to have cleaner air and cleaner water and control pollution in general, it’s all incredibly beneficial. Even if it only lowers what we’ve already done the damage by half a degree, but all these things are still worth doing.
And instead that weird silver bullet. It has to be all or nothing, whatever else it might be. It really has made people crazy. And my biggest sad fear about the onset of these weight loss drugs. Is that all the people did nothing to make themselves healthier, better are not going to say I want I outlasted them.
Now there is a pill I can take. And then they’re going to find out will you get Olympic face, and you lose weight differently in different parts of your body depending on whether it’s brown fat or white fat and what’s stubborn and what’s not. And you might, it’s always going to be good to drop weight, if that’s your issue because it’ll put less strain on your heart and everything else.
But. It’s not going to be like suddenly you’ll look like Brad Pitt and Chris Evans, you’re going to be all that extra skin. It’s going to be still there. I’m hoping that and the fact that the now are miracle shots or pills that opens the door for all the charlatans to say, Oh, Don’t use that Ozepic stuff.
We’ve got an all natural regimen. And all natural means nothing except the BS that we’re about to hand you. So it’s if you eat a foxglove extract and, they’ll come up with the most ridiculous things. Vinegar and egg. And then somehow there’s going to be a certain percent of the population.
It’s going to be. I knew they were hiding that from us. I that someone revealed to me the secret so that now we all can lose weight together because I’m going to drink bleach or something terrible. And just that sometimes it’s not just, it’s innocuous and it will pass through your system with no benefit.
Sometimes it’s actually going to hook you up. You know what I mean? If you put too much, name it. Vitamin D is one of those things from what I, no vitamin a, you really can overdose on it. It isn’t a matter of power blasting various different vitamins and minerals. You really got to be careful that in your body, expelling magnesium or something that also takes your iron out iron for healthy blood.
You need iron to build your bones. Got to get your calcium, right? The thing, the RDA, those required, like they all exist because yeah. They did America’s Test Kitchen for the populace in general, and they said, one of the ways in which we’re going to put enough vitamin A, B, C, D, E, all the way to K, or whatever else it might be, and hey, maybe some fish oil and some CoQ10 and some garlic, but it’s still a matter of dose.
And you don’t just pound stuff into you and not like upset body’s natural equilibrium. And especially you got to be a little bit wise because some things are water soluble and you really will pee them out. So then it’s just like waste. I have bright yellow urine because I did too much vitamin B.
If it’s fat soluble. It stays in your system. It goes into those abundant fat cells that some people have. And then what’s going to happen when they have like overdoses as they lose weight, all the vitamin E comes out and all of a sudden they’re growing a horn. I’m just being silly, but
STephen: that same,
Alan: you have to learn enough, not just say, give me a pill. You got to know what does the pill
STephen: do and what, oh that same family member. Will argue all the time. This is fine to take because it’s all natural. It’s like Why you know that’s the I can say it’s all natural and people’s brains just shut off it must be fine and i’m like, okay, but you know what?
Poison ivy is all natural. Also, you know what cobra venom is all natural also And they’re like that’s just silly i’m like no like you literally said that The reason this is okay for you is because it’s all natural. Do you know if any of this affects the medicine you are taking? For example, I take whatever brain shut off.
But I can’t. I have grapefruit because it blocks the absorption of the medicine. Grapefruit’s all natural, but it interacts with this medicine I have. So you got a
Alan: certain number of pills, but I always read the little thing that says. Here are the other things that can interfere with it, or sometimes even worse, maximize the dose.
It makes it so that it’s even more effective. And then, if you’re taking a blood thinner, which I was for a while after my atrial fibrillation, you don’t want warfarin, and I think it is grapefruit, because then it’s like, You’re, it thins it even more than you want. And now you’re almost like hemophiliac level.
Get you close to that range you want, drop you out of the range, and now if you get cut, you really will bleed a lot because you have no anticoagulants. Pounds of vitamin K they say, Make sure you always have some kale or spinach to eat. I was like, cause I’m going to carry that around with me.
But that’s fine. A very big source of natural vitamin K. And that really will help in case you ever had a tragedy like that. So people just, I don’t know. I, it never occurs to me to try something like that and not learn about it. Like I’m putting this into my body. I should
STephen: actually
Alan: learn about busy. You know what I mean?
Why am I getting that? I don’t think that I wasn’t getting dizzy before. Do I need to stop this? Do I need to lower the dose? Do I need to not have that plus my diet? Dr. Pepper goes, Oh, no, it interacts with the,
STephen: And you know what I told her that is also all natural eating right and good foods and exercising.
That’s all natural.
Alan: By the way, it is worth like when you talked about which kind of things you want to do with your soap in that case, like all natural ingredients is like a marketing ploy as much as it is a purity thing. Yes, look for that, even if it. Because Kali and I have had discussions about, because I don’t notice the difference between almond extract and regular almond.
I can use it, but maybe other people do, that it tastes somehow metallic or wrong. It isn’t to me that all chemicals are bad, because there’s all kinds of things you do chemically that are just like what the natural thing is. They learned what the natural taste of banana was, and they said this is exactly the ester.
They can show you the little diagram of the carbon atoms with the H’s and O’s hanging off of it. And if they can recreate that in the lab, it’s actually very cool that they don’t have to. Use up bananas, render bananas down and waste all the fiber of a banana to get to, you know what I mean?
Chemically, I’ve been able to conquer nature in that way of, I really know what salt is made of. It’s NACL. And it might be that people start saying you want to get your Himalayan salt because it’s pink. It’s If it’s not, if it’s nothing besides NACL with the tiniest little trace element to make it pink, it still isn’t better for you, right?
You
STephen: have non salt. It’s all marketing.
Alan: Chloride or the other non salt things, but a Himalayan salt or a ocean floor salt or whatever. It’s it’s still salt. It still has that same impact on your.
STephen: And it’s funny you say that because all the things we’re doing with the soap, we very much are trying to.
Get all the keywords that we can use because it is a marketing thing So the soap we’ve been distributing we can say handmade in ohio very true And it has natural ingredients very true, but it doesn’t have all natural ingredients. That’s two different things and so ours is And these keywords, spark people.
It’s handmade in Ohio, hand cut by us. We sweat on it when we’re doing it. And it’s all natural ingredients. And we can say that everything in here is all natural and those types of things. People are like, Oh yeah, great. And we really are trying to offer the right good product, but there’s so many people.
If we just say, oh, yeah, it’s got natural ingredients in it. Yeah, on top of the other chemicals,
Alan: I’ll tell you, I know, the not FCC, FDA has rules about when you use certain terms, they really are not just terms of art. They’re terms of law. And that if you say, Okay. Like low fat or no fat, or you try to think, which ones in particular natural is one of those things that it means nothing in a marketing word.
And even if you are true to it, that you sourced it from natural means and stuff like that when you see it on a package, it doesn’t mean. Anything about it’s healthier or has different impact or whatever like that. So it’s worth. I’m reading the article that says, what are the terms that the FDA will really go after places for using it wrongly because the minute we got past drugs and went into all the different.
Nutraceuticals or pseudo pharmacological, like psychological. I didn’t mean to butcher that. There really are things like when I go to Costco and you see which places they have an underwriter’s laboratory label, and so you know that the essay is good, but some places really embrace the WOOWOO labels.
And some people are more exactly what the FDA says you can use to show this is real, this is according to law what you can expect. So right. I love the chemistry thing because that’s that way long ago. Did you do this? When I was in school, I didn’t want to just do the chem labs. I really was like so how’d you make glue?
What makes glue? You know what I mean? There’s and after I learned how to do it, then I glued somebody’s locker shut. It wasn’t, I wanted to learn how to do it, but then I thought, now I have a purpose for this. What makes,
STephen: we make chloride gas. That cleared out the chemistry room really quick.
I
Alan: had any number of experiments where I had to do it under a hood because the gas that it was emitting was like, don’t lean into that. Yeah. Clear that out. I remember like you had to get it to a certain viscosity. And so you did it on a magnetic hot plate and had a little guy, a little magnet in there that was rotating and the number of rotations per minute or whatever was how you measured that it was getting gloopy enough to be done.
You know what I mean? And that’s why I really loved. Watching that process of you put these things together and then add heat or add light or whatever the various different or some kind of catalyst and remember the titrating of it goes from hey, University of Illinois, it would go hail to the orange hail to the blue, and it would change from one to the other because that was the chemical reaction and isn’t this all part of being a geek understanding how things work when you see fireworks and it’s that’s red, I think, because of strontium, and that’s green because of copper.
And sometimes people give you the look like, why do you know that? Why would you want to know that? Because
STephen: it’s cool. Why wouldn’t you want to know that? Yeah, like,
Alan: why wouldn’t you? You know what I mean? It’s not like I took any of the… The artistry and the magic and wonder of how it works by understanding a little bit about it.
It’s not just gunpowder and a rocket. How do they get those different colors? It’s such a natural thing to say, how do you make red, white, and blue? You know what I mean?
STephen: When you see that, we used to take like cinnamon and various things that would spark up different colors in the fire. And we do a campfire story that involved.
These colors and we sprinkle the stuff at the right time. So it, the kids like, Oh, especially when the younger ones, the ones that were older is yeah, I’ve seen this 20 times already. But
Alan: the first time that things have different, I don’t know. I remember the first time that I learned about, let’s see, is it a potassium and.
The next one on the periodic chart, like they burst into flame in the air, you have to keep and when you check it out from the lab, you as a student, you’re the my teacher, Mr. Pumphrey or Mr. Sparacino, we’re like, we’re now getting to the place that I need to tell you that this is in dangerous and don’t do the wrong thing with this.
And I know that you are like the AP chemistry student. But I also know that people just don’t are sometimes forgetful, or sometimes they’re a little bit of a daredevil, and you have to follow these procedures or you’re going to get in trouble. We’re not burning the school down because I gave you some potassium.
You know what I mean?
STephen: I was just going to say, my buddy’s brother went to MIT as a chemistry engineer. And that’s what they would do on a Friday night. They’re nerds, so they’re not going to the clubs, they’re taking chunks of potassium and sitting on the riverbank tossing it in the river
That was Friday night. . Alright, I gotta get rolling.
Alan: So we had Okay. A lot of geek this time, yes, very good. Thank you all for your pleasure. Have a great fall. We’re, like I said, we’re doing the Kinsa. Have a great meeting at 11 and we’ll
STephen: go from there. Will do. Alright, you have a good week, man.
Talk to you later.
