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00:00:43.48
Alan Baltis
kind of funny you know i updated apple system software and a whole bunch of apps update themselves to go with that and so now there’s all kinds of new little windows that pop up with permissions because now instead of being assumed it has to re-verify and stuff like that so there we are
00:01:01.44
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I had a big issue at work, and they they insisted I turn 2FA back on, and which I did a couple years ago, but they had problems with it, and it was too much bother to try and get it worked out, so I turned it back off. And then they were yelling at me because it was turned off and we have no security, so I turn it back on, and they and I can’t get it, and this is taking too long. Just turn it off, and we’ll forget about it until later.
00:01:26.99
Stephen Schneider
I’m like…
00:01:29.06
Alan Baltis
I have, like um I don’t know, I guess I go to a lot of different, it doesn’t have to be different, there’s just certain source sites that I go to often that use single sign-on versus Okta, there’s various different standards for that.
00:01:41.85
Alan Baltis
And so Apple seems to have worked it out pretty well where they have a password manager that stores all those various different things and different places do it that you do it while you’re putting in a new password or afterwards.
00:01:54.40
Alan Baltis
and And so I’ve had to get used to there’s not one standard. There’s half a dozen, no lie. And once in a while, I just i just got told by my um the Smart Life provider that one of my emails is about to be like turned off because it’s been dormant.
00:02:09.71
Alan Baltis
And then in the act of trying to sign on to HostM, which I haven’t done in a long time, everything just keeps working. So you forget about it. Now it’s like, wow, that’s an old password. That’s an old security standard.
00:02:20.70
Alan Baltis
and And I don’t, I don’t think I’ve been at risk because and security by obscurity never works, but I’ve never also, they seem to have things in place that will tell you, hey, someone’s trying to penetrate, you know? um And so, but just that, like I don’t write down my passwords, so, you know, in, cause that’s a bad security practice.
00:02:39.84
Alan Baltis
And yet, even though I have a pretty good memory, give it years and and things fade or like you know the classic everybody talks about this hey about to go on vacation and that’s exactly what it demanded that i put in a new password so i did and then you come back from vacation and it’s like what did i change it to again which song lyric which uh you know your set of words and that kind of stuff which which dialogue from supernatural did i use as my lengthy password and so it’s very funny to be
00:02:45.95
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:03:00.46
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:03:06.41
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:03:10.97
Alan Baltis
If you knew all my stuff, you’d be able to have a pretty good portrait of that guy’s quirky, but I can understand why he really loves that song, that show, that color, whatever else it might be, you know?
00:03:16.76
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:03:21.03
Stephen Schneider
Right. And arguably, though, writing down your password and sitting it next to your computer is not actually the least secure you could do
00:03:29.91
Alan Baltis
ah
00:03:30.25
Stephen Schneider
I mean, you know because seriously, somebody has to break into your house with the intention of finding them to get your passwords.
00:03:31.24
Alan Baltis
true
00:03:38.54
Stephen Schneider
And it’s like, why would I bother? I can sit at my computer and I can get thousand people with my bots, you know?
00:03:43.46
Alan Baltis
i I do count on physical security not being an issue. Nobody’s breaking into our house and all that, like you just said. It might be that at work. It really could be that someone just like run through harvesting things.
00:03:51.27
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:03:53.87
Alan Baltis
And but this is so, oh it’s kind of funny. It’s important to talk about this, but so I have a number of anti like I use Mac Malwarebytes and there’s actually a PC Malwarebytes version as well that’s really good.
00:04:09.93
Alan Baltis
It stays current with antivirus definitions. It really looks for sp suspicious activity, etc. And i and i that’s not the only one that I use. I try to use the ones that do good things, but they don’t collide. Because for a while, there really was. If you had both Sophos and McAfee or something like that, they really like contended to see who was really in control of your box. And they continually give false positives about this is suspicious activity.
00:04:32.90
Alan Baltis
No, it’s the monitoring that the other anti-malware thing is using. Having said that, one of the things that they’ve started to do now is they have not just what’s on your box, but they actually have big collections of what’s bad out on the web.
00:04:48.02
Alan Baltis
They have collections of dark sites, and especially they scan those dark sites and look for as any of your logins or passwords or social security number or various different things is it out there so that you can go do some data cleansing.
00:05:01.94
Alan Baltis
And not only Malwarebytes, but I’m pleased to say, hey, everybody, in case you’re looking for as like a decent human being, I recently checked my credit ratings.
00:05:13.32
Alan Baltis
I haven’t. We haven’t had any debt for a long time. I personally haven’t had any debt in a long time. I checked recently and my credit ratings were like in the 700s. So if you don’t do anything wrong and whatever you do have, you occasionally pay off right away.
00:05:29.44
Alan Baltis
But then also Experian, TRW, one of the big three, they also have a service now where they’ll check for bad use of your personal information.
00:05:38.05
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:05:38.84
Alan Baltis
So… Boy, what an exercise it’s been. and And bear with me. Also, Apple has a thing, like I mentioned, a password manager. They’ll have a thing where they’ll say, i have, like you, multiple generations of passwords.
00:05:51.53
Alan Baltis
Back when you first were on the net, you could have a password that was just nine characters long, and it was sufficient to be secure. Well, then it became 16, and 32, and 64, and whatever the new DES standards and things like that are.
00:06:05.82
Alan Baltis
But it will check for here’s a password that’s an old one that you got. And here’s the sites you use it on. So you want to go to those sites and update it. Well, what ah it’s an incredible time sink to go to do those each individually. So far as I know, there’s not a good utility that says, be my agent.
00:06:23.19
Alan Baltis
Go to those are all those various different places.
00:06:25.21
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:06:25.58
Alan Baltis
Act as me.
00:06:26.17
Stephen Schneider
which
00:06:26.32
Alan Baltis
Prove you’re me.
00:06:26.81
Stephen Schneider
Which, if there was, would be kind of a security breach in itself.
00:06:30.05
Alan Baltis
Absolutely. it’s like in order to give it like, okay, this thing has to know what my mother’s maiden name it is and what my first car was and all those funny questions that say.
00:06:37.24
Stephen Schneider
that That sounds like an app somebody should put on the phone if they’re like, hey, we’ll take care of it all. Just put on all your information for every account and we will change them regularly for you. We got it.
00:06:47.75
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:06:47.98
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, that just sounds…
00:06:48.23
Alan Baltis
You notice that yeah yeah it’s qualifiers.ru or something like that. you know So I have put so much time into getting rid of the word. yo Of course, ah it’s kind of funny.
00:07:00.63
Alan Baltis
yeah You have an idea of, well, it’s not only a matter of which are my weakest passwords. It’s that, well, no wonder I haven’t worried about that i haven’t been to that site in 20 years so the site itself is low traffic low volume though it’s low risk it’s not like i’m going out to you name it amazon apple google where if they get you there they really have the keys to the kingdom but i have been going to all these various different places and and then
00:07:09.17
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:07:24.40
Alan Baltis
like we were talking about, everybody has a different security standard. So in some cases, it’s like, well, we’ll send you a token, and you’ll send it back to us to prove who you are, or here, answer these questions three, or, you before the other side, you’ll see. And so it’s like, I have been I can’t do it for like hours and hours. I’ll do two hours worth of work and get not bored but frustrated over, oh God, it should be easier than this.
00:07:49.70
Alan Baltis
Can’t I have the biometrics that say, give me your retina print, give me your fingerprint and and put that everywhere. I’m willing to keep a token with me. I’m willing to have my phone. As you know, there’s that.
00:08:01.63
Alan Baltis
We’ll send something to your phone and they figure if you physically have the security of you are the one that has your phone, Well, even then, all those things, it’s like, I just can’t do this all day. I have other things I want to get done and this exercise. So please, you know for all those who are listening to our podcast, but are also security bastards, don’t come at me knowing that I’m not fully done.
00:08:25.01
Alan Baltis
Because it’s just taking, if you’ve been on the net like I have for, honestly, 25 going on 30 years, I was on the internet as soon it was as it was commercially available.
00:08:35.59
Alan Baltis
That’s why I have alanbaltis at gmail.com and alanbaltis at everywhere.com because no other Alan Baltis has got a chance to sneak in and grab the Prime Logon, you know, that kind of thing.
00:08:44.49
Stephen Schneider
Right. Well, if if somebody really wants to break into my MySpace account, my AOL account, because i haven’t been there in while, they can go ahead because they’re not connected to absolutely anything at all.
00:08:57.33
Alan Baltis
Right. But what I think is if they get in there, then they’ll know, well, that’s one of my old nine character at things. I was always smart enough to have characters and numbers and special characters and all the things that early on they recommended. Here’s a good way to have a secure password. It’s not just your birthday.
00:09:13.32
Alan Baltis
It’s not your name.
00:09:14.42
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:09:14.89
Alan Baltis
And so, ah but but even then, just that nine characters, and And it’s kind of funny having said, well, we’ve extended the standard so that it’s always going to be, well, no, now in the era soon to come of quantum computing, the things that used to be the reason that this was a good encryption standard was because if we brute forced it, it would still take 34 years to figure out your password.
00:09:34.07
Alan Baltis
Quantum computing is now going, well, that was a week. What happened here?
00:09:37.67
Stephen Schneider
34 milliseconds.
00:09:39.24
Alan Baltis
Yeah, it, they’re they’re going to be, it will have to be soon biometrics and like, say your voice and the way that your voice modulates can be almost individual.
00:09:51.39
Alan Baltis
And you know, it’s like the zebra’s stripes or whatever else the various, I’ll press my snout up against the screen and then it’s got a nose for it whatever else it might be. So as as that evolves, we’re going to see that all the discipline that we both learned about how to have a good password and how to make use of it, it’s all going to dissipate many other things have where you know there’s not a secret handshake anymore.
00:10:15.24
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:10:15.71
Alan Baltis
There is you know and in the Masons or whatever else. So i I’m doing this exercise. I think it’s important now. Anytime that I see a financial irregularity, it’s like, I think that’s just because of this site, they stole my credit card number, not because i am open to the net. I really have been pretty careful about having high quality.
00:10:38.21
Alan Baltis
But it takes work. It takes like regular refreshment and discipline. and And sometimes even when you go like, boy, I hope I don’t, There are some places, maybe even my bank, that have a limit to the number of characters.
00:10:53.48
Alan Baltis
And like, well, that’s less than what I use everywhere else. I’m less secure here because you limit it to 16 instead of 32 or whatever else it might be. A bank? A bank is the one that does that? You’d think that they’d be the ones that most embraced everything they could do to make sure you were safe.
00:11:08.93
Alan Baltis
But… but
00:11:10.17
Stephen Schneider
Right. So.
00:11:11.96
Alan Baltis
Oh, well, so that there, that’s that’s today’s opening screen is the amount of time that I’ve been putting into it.
00:11:15.95
Stephen Schneider
but but
00:11:18.60
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?
00:11:18.87
Stephen Schneider
Tech corner.
00:11:21.12
Alan Baltis
And it can’t be perfect. Something will if I get to that. I know I’m more than 50. I’m at 70 or 80 or 90 percent. And you just hope that you’re not going to get bitten by. Well, one of the 10 percent that I didn’t get to is exactly where.
00:11:33.82
Alan Baltis
the East European hackers decided to focus and and I’m hoping that also when they announce big breaches like hey, they got into social security, they got into Google or whatever else it might be that it’s like well if they stole a million of those I guess if they’re going after alphabetically Baltus will be soon hit but then I’ll see it happening I do have things that monitor like activity and they let me know if something if my stuff has appeared on the dark web And having said that, another reason that I’m really working on it hard now is because some of these things will have this monitoring going on, but there’s a monthly fee.
00:12:04.10
Stephen Schneider
Yep.
00:12:12.79
Alan Baltis
And I don’t know that $10 doesn’t seem like a lot compared to identity theft, but how many other subscriptions am I going to have to make sure that this, I don’t know, one in a hundred thousand million chance thing.
00:12:25.25
Alan Baltis
then I look at why i spent 120 bucks for like peace of mind. And I think security, but after you’ve had something and just never had a positive, it’s like, I hope it’s working. And I hope that it was worth my getting it.
00:12:37.38
Alan Baltis
I’m trying not to be penny wise and pound foolish, but how do I need four of those?
00:12:37.50
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:12:41.51
Alan Baltis
Do I need to have,
00:12:42.03
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:12:42.44
Alan Baltis
u And malware bytes and you know what i mean?
00:12:42.80
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:12:44.68
Alan Baltis
I use I use Sophos and I use I’ll try to think, you also boy, rant, rant, rant. You there’s file sharing sites that I regularly make use of because with my still doing.
00:12:58.37
Alan Baltis
presentations when I’m out of town, I really have always done redundancy. I have it on my laptop, but I also have it on a thumb drive, and I also have it out on that. So in the case things totally went wrong and you I couldn’t get to power whatever like that.
00:13:06.66
Stephen Schneider
right
00:13:09.63
Alan Baltis
But every place like that, it’s not only can they get to it, but what I’ve put out there, if it’s a presentation that I’m going to do about our vacation for Mensa, that’s nothing. If what I stored out there was, here’s my list of…
00:13:23.22
Alan Baltis
Social Security numbers and credit card numbers and our financials.
00:13:26.85
Stephen Schneider
right
00:13:27.100
Alan Baltis
I kind of make a point of not doing that or I don’t put it out there in plain text. Everything is encrypted. If I have anything out there that I was when we were my parents having passed, the brothers had to exchange information back and forth occasionally about, you know what’s coming from mom and dad. What are we doing?
00:13:45.91
Alan Baltis
And so then you’re very careful about obviously financials. Well, I’m just hoping that, like i said, that the encryption standard that I use doesn’t become one of the easy ones and and all that kind of stuff. So anywhere that I share things on the net in that wonderful cloud way, cloud’s very convenient, but then you’re like a fish waiting to be caught in some ways.
00:14:08.08
Alan Baltis
And I’m just, I’m always trying to maintain the What’s the trade off here? It isn’t all or nothing because you can’t be perfect. But to even to get to excellence, sometimes it really is a cost in dollar time, you know,
00:14:19.29
Stephen Schneider
so the other strategy that you could employ is just be completely broke with too much credit card debt, a huge car loan. And then they’ll but if they do break in, they’re like, oh, yeah, screw this.
00:14:31.79
Alan Baltis
yeah You know, that is a strategy that I employed in the early 2000s when I went out to California to my dot com things. I had just come off of Gambit not working out and I i had a lot of debt and I really I really was not a good prospect.
00:14:46.19
Alan Baltis
There’s been jokes about, you know, hey, somebody stole ah you know my wife’s credit cards. And I’m like, I’m not saying anything about it because he’s spending less than my wife did. And I know that’s a misogynistic joke. You know what I mean?
00:14:56.20
Alan Baltis
But it’s just that that’s the kind of thing they would have found there. There was no blood they could get from this particular stone whole bunch of time while I was rebuilding my life.
00:15:02.36
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:15:06.13
Alan Baltis
After having kind of got I got really screwed over, but I also lived high on the hog, not expecting to get screwed, but expecting this to be my next big thing.
00:15:14.92
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:15:15.59
Alan Baltis
Well, heck.
00:15:17.12
Stephen Schneider
There you go.
00:15:18.21
Alan Baltis
funny You know, bear with me. um I always talk about I’m doing investing nowadays and I’m doing pretty well. I’m a pattern finding mammal and so that kind of stuff. But I’m also aware that I have things at multiple places. I like Tradesmith, I like Investor Place, like Motley Fool.
00:15:32.22
Alan Baltis
And if you’re going to do things where you sync your broker information with their analysis, Well, there’s a big exposure. And I’m always looking for, don’t just tell me about like what next stock I should buy. Tell me about how you’re putting in the latest and greatest security stuff.
00:15:49.38
Alan Baltis
Because you sure have, if you’ve got 10,000, 100,000 users, and it’s that sensitive data, I don’t want to go on one day and say, hey, how come my accounts are drained?
00:15:49.87
Stephen Schneider
Thank you.
00:15:59.63
Alan Baltis
You know, what happened to my money? Nothing like that has ever happened. And they seem to, most of them, All of them that I have, there’s it’s not only their homegrown, home-baked solution.
00:16:12.38
Alan Baltis
They use the equivalent of the financial system’s secure socket layer. Before it will download that data, it makes use of the industry standard, and and they they tout it as that. This is the thing that, you know, Warren Buffett uses, or whatever else it might be.
00:16:24.44
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:16:25.67
Alan Baltis
And so I’m hoping, as long as that remains intact, that they can’t get to me. But that I’m also aware of, well, it’s not only point to point everything travels on the net you got to make sure that they know enough about they encrypt at each end you know all the classic bruce schneier taught me that there’s man in the middle attacks and everybody’s just put a sniffer on and all that kind of stuff and whenever i’m sitting here i have direct uh wired connections to get my fastest stuff but when i’m sitting elsewhere in the house i’m doing it via wi-fi and all i need is to not be careful and in my house is not the thing i we’re just on a cruise
00:17:01.55
Alan Baltis
And you’re having to use their setup, and they do it very much out of convenience to them, not out of security for you. So I was really, I didn’t check my stuff.
00:17:13.01
Alan Baltis
I was very careful about now not checking my bank balances or anything like that. He just said, I set it up because I knew I wouldn’t want to do it, not only while I was on the boat, but like, hey, I think I’ll hop on in Paris. nobody There’s no bad people in Paris. They’ll leave me alone, right?
00:17:27.26
Alan Baltis
Here I am enjoying my baguette. While back home, they’re rating things.
00:17:28.100
Stephen Schneider
yeah what but We have definitely been watching different movies, if you think that.
00:17:34.05
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:17:34.41
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:17:35.81
Alan Baltis
So, just, you know, that consciousness, I guess, of treat, like, what is it? Trust and verify. You know what I mean? yeah You think that they’ve set things up so it’ll be convenient for you to go shopping. Hey, while I’m here, I’ll order something on Amazon. It’ll be there when I get home.
00:17:49.82
Alan Baltis
Well, maybe wait. Maybe wait a couple days and just not expose yourself. so Whenever we’re out of town, you know, Colleen and I still do our share of hiking travels and stuff like that.
00:18:01.23
Alan Baltis
And that’s always kind of what I assume if I’m at the Great Bear Lodge, it’s really wonderful and homey and you’re relaxed, but you know that they’re not a state of the art. You know, they they’re 10 years behind probably in terms of they got one IT guy in the city of Banff that comes around and does everybody’s things and he might not be the best guy.
00:18:10.58
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:18:18.21
Stephen Schneider
They still post passwords on the wall for the while.
00:18:21.35
Alan Baltis
Like that.
00:18:21.65
Stephen Schneider
you know Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:22.63
Alan Baltis
Exactly. So, and I got to think, were an enterprising criminal, you know, where would I go? Go to the places where there’s rich people relaxing and their guard is down.
00:18:33.82
Alan Baltis
And then all the things that they do at home to be really an edge at work. You know what I mean? Yeah.
00:18:37.71
Stephen Schneider
My cousin, my cousin figured out what to do with that and how to protect yourself in those situations at McDonald’s at Kalahari, you know, whatever. ah Make sure you’re in the furthest corner and put on a tinfoil hat. I am not joking.
00:18:53.58
Stephen Schneider
I was literally told this and I laughed and they asked why I was laughing. I’m like, you were joking, right?
00:18:58.46
Alan Baltis
Oh,
00:18:59.34
Stephen Schneider
And they’re like, no, that’ll stop it. And I’m like,
00:19:01.78
Alan Baltis
the signal’s too weak for them to, yeah, right. Right. Yeah.
00:19:06.38
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, that was a real situation.
00:19:06.84
Alan Baltis
well
00:19:08.29
Stephen Schneider
i had to stop laughing because they were serious. and And then I tried to explain why that was not right. And they got mad at me.
00:19:15.95
Alan Baltis
like
00:19:17.60
Stephen Schneider
Like, you know, what are you telling me? So, yeah.
00:19:21.34
Alan Baltis
Another thing, I think I use a VPN whenever I’m out in public. you know That’s the way that I gain security is not only counting on web browser and stuff like that. i’m If I’m sitting around anywhere here in Lakewood, and especially when we were were out of town and I had to do something, I use ExpressVPN. There’s a shout out.
00:19:36.81
Alan Baltis
From what I could see, there’s like three really good ones. They keep themselves current. They have multiple points of presence. So ExpressVPN has, in various different cities, that’s where their servers are. And then as I traveled around Europe, I was able to say, well, give me the Paris.
00:19:50.50
Alan Baltis
node and whatever else it might be. And and um so having said that, that often gets in the way of doing various different things.
00:20:00.72
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:20:01.06
Alan Baltis
And then what Exactly.
00:20:01.25
Stephen Schneider
VPNs are great and unless they’re not and not for the security. They’re great for the security, which screws a lot of other things up and people, and then you get people going, oh, that’s too much bother.
00:20:12.58
Alan Baltis
Well, I’m pretty sure, I don’t know, what’s the convenience of having your ticket be virtual instead of printed if your VPN at that airport won’t let you look at your ticket?
00:20:23.57
Alan Baltis
And so i’ve i’ve yeah I don’t remember, but place by place I said, oh I need to keep a list of if I’m traveling to New Jersey, then whatever for whatever reason, their airport has a different standard than O’Hare than does san Francisco and whatever else it might be. And I don’t really try to keep track. I just get, well, here I am and it broke.
00:20:41.97
Alan Baltis
And now how, like, is it, can I get on for just two seconds? No, because they’re monitoring. You know, I think I mentioned at one point, I not really had, now my Mac has all of the, um,
00:20:56.48
Alan Baltis
I use Parallels to give me Windows simulation and it works perfectly. But for a long time, that wasn’t the case. I used to test various different things, find out what would break. I actually bought a Windows box to be able to compare between those kinds of things.
00:21:10.20
Alan Baltis
I hooked my Windows box up to the net And before I could turn anything on, the first thing I turned on was um a monitor that for my my router had it on the Mac.
00:21:20.81
Alan Baltis
And it was showing how immediately, immediately I was being probed and attacked. Like I attached my box and it was in seconds. And so that was really a good… wake up call, a very sobering thing of like, there’s never a time that that’s not being done, that that no matter who where you are, and what who you attach to, there are things that are continually spidering the web, and looking to collect either data or really secure data from you.
00:21:36.41
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:21:47.47
Alan Baltis
So I’m very careful about that kind of stuff.
00:21:47.85
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, the the the cybersecurity talk I did at the Church for Reese’s group, um the the one thing I told them, which mystified them, and I had to try and explain it in detail.
00:21:54.49
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:21:59.21
Stephen Schneider
I’m like, I can’t go into like too much detail. This is a whole two hour class by itself. But, you know, you all have your spectrum or Xfinity or whatever your box is.
00:22:04.22
Alan Baltis
Absolutely.
00:22:09.15
Stephen Schneider
You should have a router of your own on, you know on top of that and do all your connections to that router because those spectrum boxes are like mass produced and they’re all known passwords and and stuff.
00:22:21.93
Alan Baltis
absolutely
00:22:22.13
Stephen Schneider
And the minute you connect to it, you’re, you’re exposing yourself. So you get your own router and, And then you have, I said, and you could look it up. I’m not going to tell you because I don’t want anyone in trouble if Spectrum cracks down or something. But you can look it up and find the passwords and get into your Spectrum box. And I did.
00:22:37.97
Stephen Schneider
And I changed the password on there.
00:22:40.02
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:22:40.10
Stephen Schneider
So when the tech comes out, he’s like, oh, it’s not working. I’m like, oh, I changed the password. You did? How’d you do that? I’m like, I logged in
00:22:45.43
Alan Baltis
like Yeah, I think that, and actually just that, it took me 10 seconds of a web search to find out what it is for the AT&T U-verse box or the Spectrum, you know, and all that.
00:22:54.53
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:22:55.74
Alan Baltis
And so i I’ve had to, I am tech support for the house. And so oftentimes I’ll say to Colleen, so we’re gonna have to bring things down and maybe redo things because what we just got from AT&T is steps backwards from what I had set up after I had tuned everything, if you will.
00:23:12.48
Alan Baltis
And there’s there’s always like, well, I didn’t catch everything. i this um This really is i hope like this is as geeky as we get. That’s what geeky is all about.
00:23:20.38
Stephen Schneider
but
00:23:22.08
Alan Baltis
So there I am on um the Norwegian boat. And like I said, they had to turn off my VPN and things were still not working correctly with my phone and my laptop, both being able to log in. And and one of the things was that really you pay for one connection and they monitor.
00:23:39.65
Alan Baltis
So you really have to log fully out of either of the things instead of just being aware of activity. But one of the things so ah people this is black magic that most people don’t know or care about. um your Usually your provider has a DNS server like AT&T does in this area that is specific to how it handles you know in the real world.
00:24:00.34
Alan Baltis
Things are not Google.com. It is 198.161. whatever the four three-digit characters are that are the um Internet 5 standard. tc know and And now we’re going to 6, and so there’s expanding that, but I don’t think it’s everywhere.
00:24:15.54
Alan Baltis
And having said that, the DNS servers I had started to make use of because I had read OpenDNS and Google DNS are better, faster. They cover more and they have more better monitoring without affecting your performance.
00:24:28.79
Alan Baltis
And so I regularly use 4.4.4.4. four out four out four out four you know There’s like There’s four different ones that are those guys After the tech support, and and this was, if you will, a classic, so he’s going through um what he tries. Did you try this? Yes. Did you try this? I really was 80% of the way along to, I’ve tried everything and I still can’t get it to work. What’s up?
00:24:54.16
Alan Baltis
It turned out that their DNS server it wouldn’t let me use my um faster, better ones on the boat, or and as compared to Norwegian, that they really do compare it. They must have had, i can’t say must, what I suspect is…
00:25:10.95
Alan Baltis
They’ve had people, like I said, if you want to make security breaches, go to a place where there are wealthy people relaxing. So they must have had people that while they’re sitting there fat, dumb, and happy and still checking all their stuff on the boat, they don’t realize how exposed they are because they had to turn various different things off to make use of
00:25:27.20
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:25:27.59
Alan Baltis
Norwegian’s configuration, but then they don’t necessarily make their configuration as strong as what I had. So as I had to peel layers back and not only of of strong security, but fast, it was like, wow, you’re really making me worse than what I regularly have.
00:25:46.56
Alan Baltis
What, what, you know you can’t give me any guarantee that I i know it’ll work for you but I don’t know that I want to do this. Well, that’s our standard. And so I really did for those two weeks.
00:25:58.22
Alan Baltis
like and and And I’ve remembered to change back to my various different DNS servers and reinstitute all my very i have proxy servers and things that I make use of on my laptop.
00:26:10.27
Alan Baltis
And yet I really like while he was, he was a classic of, you know, instead of helping me and letting me watch what he was doing. but but but but Okay, here you go. It’s like, well, no, i need to know what you undid so that I can redo it.
00:26:24.24
Alan Baltis
And i need to make a list. I’m not going to remember. I’m relaxing for two weeks. I need to make a list of what I have to fucking fix when I get home.
00:26:29.70
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:26:30.79
Alan Baltis
And so. That was an unsatisfying part of the Norwegian cruise. The guy really was quick about getting everybody else’s. The Dowager Queen’s phone worked just right so they could check her Etsy stuff while she was on the boat.
00:26:43.19
Alan Baltis
But I’m not that. needed to be.
00:26:44.62
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:26:45.77
Alan Baltis
So that was, ah I hadn’t had to deal with a tech support person. that really was running roughshod over me and and i was like well this this this doesn’t feel right and before i sent colleen to him i tried to do all the things that i thought i saw him doing and i still quite couldn’t quite get it to work so then we still had to be i don’t know when we are off the boat in our various different cities let’s turn on our vpns again and be careful and and also
00:27:00.20
Stephen Schneider
Okay.
00:27:14.82
Alan Baltis
Again, geekery, you know, I luckily for Verizon previous and AT&T Now, which was our wireless carrier as well as our, have home AT&T, but for a while, a long time i had wireless, for Verizon for wireless.
00:27:29.15
Alan Baltis
They have a roaming plan where when you go out of country, you know, if you do it like minute by minute on other carriers, it really gouges you as opposed to they have an international plan where for five or $10 a day, we will give you trying think what they call it, a compatible, a a brother, a federated um server that’s going on there.
00:27:51.81
Alan Baltis
And so um while we’re on the boat, we’re paying for MCL type stuff. When we were in Belfast and in Paris and stuff like that, I’m thinking, don’t need to check my phone.
00:28:02.46
Alan Baltis
Well, you know you do if you’re going to use mapping software, for instance. If you’re like somewhere on the seine and you need to get back to where your bus is parked.
00:28:05.50
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:28:10.04
Alan Baltis
ah So every we ended up spending like $60, more than our usual AT&T bill, And and like if the 18th people is $140, wow, I spent half again as much, if you will, for just those six days that I was doing $10 a day.
00:28:26.36
Alan Baltis
But really, that’s a very small price to pay to be in the middle of a whole different city with whole different… And like nowadays, they’ve worked it out that it’s not a matter of… It used to be that there were different standards as to whether it was collision avoidant versus…
00:28:38.04
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:28:38.74
Alan Baltis
Collision Negotiating, and and I know you know all this, you do this kind of stuff all the time because you’re international, but most of the people that I talk to about this give me the big blank look. I have a whole bunch of experience from doing Toronto and Banff and Montreal. So just going into Canada gives you an idea of, well, it is a foreign country.
00:28:57.44
Alan Baltis
And so it has to treat it like that. When I’m on my Prague rock cruise, the same kind of thing. And so it really has proven to be, wow, that really seems like a price college. And yet I am so thankful that they’ve set it up so you can be in a faraway land and still be able to maintain your connectivity and a lot of your security with For $10 bucks.
00:29:17.76
Alan Baltis
That’s like, sure, here, $10 bucks versus a breach, $10 bucks versus I can’t find my way back out of Berlin because I don’t have a map that I can read on my phone, et cetera, et cetera. So hats off to the places that have decided to do that, that they actually cooperated and had the various different standards come together and they negotiated for…
00:29:37.18
Alan Baltis
while you’re here it’s you know blimey uh i don’t know blow it it’s it’s whatever their different providers are that interact very very nicely with at&t for instance so there got it for those who are planning on doing that academy international travel it is worth doing the solution beforehand and picking out what you want instead of being in the airport and it coming up and saying you know um it’s never a good idea to negotiate when you’re under pressure or under duress.
00:30:05.82
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:30:06.35
Alan Baltis
no
00:30:06.73
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Yes.
00:30:07.98
Alan Baltis
So that, that worked out well. I, I, and I, I don’t always mention all the, I, I, I kind of like, being an accomplished geek because it has always mattered to me that I’m not in somebody else’s hands, that I can actually, and even if you aren’t the one that’s going to be able to do it, to ask the questions that let them know that you’re not just yeah you know foolish, but they think that you know enough of what’s going on that they’re not going to try to just shine you on, that they’re going to do the right thing.
00:30:36.11
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.
00:30:38.77
Alan Baltis
Kind of like going to the doctor. you know You’ll learn enough medical terms so they don’t just say, take this pill and go away.
00:30:43.68
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. But then there’s the Dunning Kruger where they think they know a whole lot more than the doctor does.
00:30:49.57
Alan Baltis
And i had we deal with those people all the time. They learn one new phrase and all of a sudden, they’re the guy that understands encryption.
00:30:55.21
Stephen Schneider
It’s Yeah. Right.
00:30:57.72
Alan Baltis
No.
00:30:57.86
Stephen Schneider
Right. So, so how did people really survive on a two week cruise 30 years ago before we had cell phones in the internet? I mean, they, they, they must’ve. that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:31:08.44
Alan Baltis
you know they They have that like as the plot in various different books that you were out of touch for two months and that maybe your family’s fortunes have changed.
00:31:13.04
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:31:17.59
Alan Baltis
And until you got to New York, you didn’t know that your empire had collapsed.
00:31:21.73
Stephen Schneider
or or
00:31:21.94
Alan Baltis
Or they had hit a wire that could go through. And remember, it was like a dollar a word.
00:31:26.49
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:31:27.17
Alan Baltis
Dollar was a lot of money. And so they had, you know, empire collapsed. Stop. ah Come back immediately. They were very terse in how they would try to communicate.
00:31:36.81
Stephen Schneider
Right. Or, or you get the, uh, the sci-fi story where, you know, everybody’s on this two week cruise and they come back, find out civilization has been destroyed and you’re the only ones left.
00:31:47.47
Alan Baltis
Exactly. We better get to breeding because we got to repopulate the world.
00:31:50.47
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:31:51.33
Alan Baltis
but It’s kind of funny. Did I mention, like a geekery-wise, we were in St. John’s, Newfoundland. and um We went to the top of the hill where Marconi did his first transatlantic signal experiments.
00:32:10.48
Stephen Schneider
Oh, cool.
00:32:11.18
Alan Baltis
Up until then, it had been the Atlantic cables. They really put cables along the bottom of the ocean. And that’s how Europe and and the United States talk to each other and various other places. But that was the big breakthrough.
00:32:21.65
Alan Baltis
And honestly, that’s mind boggling in and of itself. You built a cable that you could drop. hundreds of meters down into the ocean and that no matter what rocks and coral and volcanic vents it found, it survived.
00:32:34.95
Alan Baltis
Well, and at first they thought, you know, Marconi was a big thing because they thought, well, if radio things go in a straight line, it’s not going to follow the curvature of the earth. It’s just going to go off into space, right? Well, he thought, no, it’s going to bounce off the clouds. And there’s there’s reasons for, because of atmospheric disturbance, that even if it arrives um weaker or garbled,
00:32:53.97
Alan Baltis
you can get a signal. And when they did those first things of sending from the very tip of England to the very tip of the North American continent, and it made it, it was like an amazing, you know, some of those things.
00:33:06.86
Alan Baltis
And honestly, it’s just a little monument. It’s like, here’s the lighthouse and here’s the instrument panel. and And I like, this This is like the Magna Carta. This is a huge historic.
00:33:16.80
Stephen Schneider
what And unfortunately with Americans, how many Americans can even know about that, know that it exists as opposed to who won the Heisman last year and where those rings and trophies are, you know?
00:33:17.20
Alan Baltis
So we saw an object of power, since we’ve laughed about that from our tours, that we didn’t realize we were going to see until you’re like, this is it. This is where it happened. How cool is that? but but
00:33:38.03
Alan Baltis
Right. You know, it’s and i people know Marconi for having invented radio, but they didn’t realize that it was, hey, I win. And then he relaxed. He actually contributed again and again to various different things about all that strength of signal and how those things could work.
00:33:51.95
Alan Baltis
and And actually, exactly to what you said, this was so heartening. When on a previous cruise, when we were getting, i think, our cab from London to the airport, and we mentioned that we were from Cleveland.
00:34:03.97
Alan Baltis
and And the our cab driver said not, oh, LeBron James, he’s wonderful. He said, Thomas Alva Edison did his experiments in Norwalk right near Cleveland.
00:34:16.32
Alan Baltis
And it’s like, oh you say you thank God that somebody on the planet cares about the the inventors and the smart people and the breakthrough things, not the latest Heisman Trophy winner.
00:34:26.95
Alan Baltis
You know what We were just, we were so heartened.
00:34:27.53
Stephen Schneider
well
00:34:29.20
Alan Baltis
Oh, it was wonderful.
00:34:30.07
Stephen Schneider
so So Colin, being in Baltimore, I joked and said I would get him a lot of Browns gear for Christmas to wear because he doesn’t care.
00:34:32.89
Alan Baltis
no
00:34:38.46
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:34:38.52
Stephen Schneider
And he said, you know what? After being here for a while, the only people that are concerned about the Baltimore Ravens that used to be the Browns are the Cleveland Browns people.
00:34:46.16
Alan Baltis
All right.
00:34:48.99
Stephen Schneider
Baltimore doesn’t even care or know. Most people I talk to and don’t even remember that they used to be the Browns. They don’t care.
00:34:54.87
Alan Baltis
That’s where they came from. That’s right.
00:34:56.37
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:34:56.51
Alan Baltis
That’s that’s funny.
00:34:56.75
Stephen Schneider
but So he always gets people at the library, you know, they want chit chat. So like, so, you know, you go watch the the game on a Monday. He’s like and usually football, you know, the Ravens, ah you go watch the Ravens on Sunday.
00:35:09.97
Stephen Schneider
and he’s like, I don’t really follow baseball, but I do like when they do a three point shot, those are cool.
00:35:13.81
Alan Baltis
ah like great right
00:35:16.49
Stephen Schneider
I never did it myself because I was afraid I’d fall on the ice.
00:35:17.08
Alan Baltis
so
00:35:19.74
Stephen Schneider
And he says they that people look at him like what?
00:35:22.43
Alan Baltis
yeah ah to
00:35:23.70
Stephen Schneider
And they just like, leave him alone and walk away.
00:35:25.94
Alan Baltis
Right. Well, honestly, if what you where you hang out is game stores and comic book stores, they don’t necessarily care about sports.
00:35:32.83
Stephen Schneider
Oh, you’d be surprised the amount of people that go into the comic book store and want to talk.
00:35:33.43
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:35:36.67
Stephen Schneider
But the funnier thing is because Adam has all those like figures, you know, all the superhero figures and stuff. He also had a lot of the wrestling figures, which for some reason, wrestling figures and now wrestlers at comic cons and stuff, you know, it’s odd, but
00:35:49.86
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:35:52.20
Stephen Schneider
Literally guys would come in looking for these wrestler figures.
00:35:56.38
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:35:56.45
Stephen Schneider
They dig through it. They get these wrestling dolls and then they go, do people do adults really collect this stuff? And they’re looking at all the comics and the superheroes. And I mean, these are toys for kids as they’re holding wrestling dolls.
00:36:08.35
Alan Baltis
Right. Exactly. That’s so much different than making sure they have their Hulk Hogan in mint condition.
00:36:14.52
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:36:14.81
Alan Baltis
Exactly. That was a…
00:36:16.77
Stephen Schneider
So, okay, whatever. But it just always gives you a laugh.
00:36:18.56
Alan Baltis
was a Yeah, we we I think I mentioned, you know, one of the early bad signs when I used to go to Comic Cons in Chicago was when it stopped being just about comic books when it started to be movies.
00:36:29.93
Alan Baltis
And there’s a big crossover with Lando Calrissian being there and stuff like that. But when they started to have the wrestling figures and and of course, my disenchantment over, you know, but like like.
00:36:42.10
Alan Baltis
Ree Bradbury is sitting right here and you’re going over to talk to The Undertaker. Like, oh my God, please, please have some taste. Please have some idea of relative importance in the world.
00:36:51.16
Stephen Schneider
oh Or worse, the line for the wrestlers cover up, you know, Bradbury’s table.
00:36:52.93
Alan Baltis
You know what i mean? Yeah.
00:36:57.74
Stephen Schneider
And they’re looking at like, who’s this guy?
00:36:57.79
Alan Baltis
And you can be like that, too. Right.
00:36:59.98
Stephen Schneider
You know?
00:37:00.11
Alan Baltis
like I think I mentioned I had wonderful conversation. And always how I try to follow up that story is, well, in exchange for everybody going to see the celebrity of the movie or especially the professional wrestlers, I got a chance to have with Marty Nodell, who was invented the first Green Lantern, and with Ray Bradbury, and with Stan Lee, and with Jack Kirby, and all the…
00:37:19.78
Alan Baltis
with um Why am I not? Gene Colan. You know what I mean? Like all these guys that I was totally an admirer of and it wasn’t shake hands, say thank you and move along that I could talk to Jim Steranko for a long time because nobody else was pushing me out of the way.
00:37:35.49
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:37:35.53
Alan Baltis
So there’s a cool thing to be in the, the, in the know guy that can say, and like, honestly, sometimes I would say, Hey everybody, why aren’t you coming to talk to Mike Krell?
00:37:47.86
Alan Baltis
You know what mean? Everybody should be worshiping this guy.
00:37:50.47
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:37:50.97
Alan Baltis
well, No.
00:37:51.77
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:37:52.13
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:37:52.100
Stephen Schneider
So tech stuff, let’s shift. So YouTube just settled ah lawsuit that Trump had against them for the January 6th insurrection.
00:38:03.45
Stephen Schneider
They banned Trump from YouTube saying that it hit what he is posting is going to incite more riots. It’s going incite more stuff.
00:38:11.93
Alan Baltis
right
00:38:12.49
Stephen Schneider
And Trump sued them. Get this. Trump sued them because that’s against his free speech amendment. Right. And didn’t they just say that we got to arrest Newsom because he called somebody a fascist.
00:38:24.38
Alan Baltis
I’m sorry.
00:38:25.10
Stephen Schneider
That’s not free speech. What we did. well Okay.
00:38:27.90
Alan Baltis
ah
00:38:28.04
Stephen Schneider
So, so. My thing, I was like, okay, they banned him, whatever. But he sued. Well, they finally settled. Now, I’m not saying that there was a judgment from what I read, but YouTube finally said, fine, here’s money, go away.
00:38:41.44
Stephen Schneider
But it was like 24 million. And Twitter and Meta did the same thing. So I’m like, you’re you’re teaching the bully to just do it again. That they will just, yeah.
00:38:50.94
Alan Baltis
Absolutely. Hostage taking that works. Fucking stop that. You know?
00:38:54.70
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, but the worst part is i thought these were private companies. So if they decide to ban somebody, so what? You got banned. Why is that a lawsuit?
00:39:04.15
Alan Baltis
It’s not censorship because that’s a government term as opposed to an industry.
00:39:06.82
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:39:08.46
Alan Baltis
Well, it’s because Trump gets away with whatever he can and people keep enabling him instead of saying, you can fuck right off.
00:39:15.44
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:39:15.48
Alan Baltis
There is no way that if this case goes to court, you’re going to win. Of course, what they’re counting on is what’s the expense of going to court? what what You know what I mean? like They’re counting on that all the intimidation and the hassle factor instead of the truth, instead of being who would win that suit.
00:39:23.95
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:39:28.50
Stephen Schneider
Right. And, and, you know, the, the, that 24 million number, it may be like, look with our lawyers, with the amount of times they keep pushing it, it’s going cost us 30 million to keep fighting this.
00:39:31.04
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:39:40.48
Stephen Schneider
We’ll give them 24. It’s cheaper. We’re done, you know?
00:39:43.42
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:39:43.71
Stephen Schneider
And that’s, I think,
00:39:44.11
Alan Baltis
We can understand the corporation making a monetary decision, and yet they’re not making a decision just for themselves. there’s There’s that chilling effect of how many of those things get passed, ah and after a while, all he has to do is rattle his little saber in his little hand, and people fall over instead of, no.
00:40:01.27
Alan Baltis
and And when you read about it, there’s certain people that he has threatened, and the judge left that case out of court, or the governor of Maine, or the New York Times, where they’re They’re not only monetary decision makers, they understand that their role in society as the fifth estate is to make sure that there is a free press and free speech, real free speech, not free speech for the guy that’s yelling the loudest.
00:40:18.69
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.
00:40:23.15
Stephen Schneider
Right. And I did just see that they put tariffs on movies now. And I like, well, is this?
00:40:27.46
Alan Baltis
I just. Foreign movies, right?
00:40:29.77
Stephen Schneider
i
00:40:30.57
Alan Baltis
oh oh no, coming from a place other than the United States.
00:40:31.17
Stephen Schneider
well Well, that’s what I was wondering what the exact thing is. Foreign movies coming in and because it’ll make um Hollywood in California because California has been devastated by this.
00:40:44.44
Stephen Schneider
No.
00:40:45.31
Alan Baltis
no
00:40:45.39
Stephen Schneider
and And I was very confused because I’m like, if I go to any store that still carries Blu-rays or DVDs, which there aren’t many, ah those aren’t, I mean, were they produced? and so Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m confusing it. Not the movie making, not that it’s the produced over there and shipped you know here. Maybe that’s what’s getting tariffs.
00:41:05.98
Alan Baltis
ah e north
00:41:06.12
Stephen Schneider
And they want them to make them here. ah You know, the companies are already saying, well, we we we have to make a billion dollars or we won’t make money. And now we’ve got tariffs. How’s that?
00:41:16.65
Stephen Schneider
I’m like, don’t make billion dollar movies, but, you know, whatever.
00:41:20.35
Alan Baltis
There’s a great quote about along lines of the power to tax is the power to destroy.
00:41:25.14
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:41:25.16
Alan Baltis
And that’s what he keeps using is that it’s not um what’s the negotiation. It’s it’s all or nothing. It’s that or unless I get my cut and and you know what.
00:41:37.44
Alan Baltis
So the cycle seems to be, hey, put a tariff on, put into this big slush fund, and then he gets to apply that in whatever way he wants to have the budget, not passed by Congress, not by any other thing is, then it’s his fucking piggy bank.
00:41:49.79
Stephen Schneider
I wondered that. He said, we’ve made trillions. Well, where is that money? Where did it go?
00:41:55.39
Alan Baltis
Right. Send me my check cut down on the cost of everything else.
00:41:57.35
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:41:59.48
Alan Baltis
And and as you you know, this is… Everybody said this would happen, and it is, that getting a tariff and then having the things hurt, that you give money back to them to get them through it, how is that not like the protection scheme?
00:42:14.69
Alan Baltis
How is that not, you know, and of course, everyone that you said, this is exactly what’s gonna happen.
00:42:15.94
Stephen Schneider
Mob. Chicago mob. You should know about that.
00:42:18.75
Alan Baltis
Hey, American farmers, you you know, yeah that this is exactly what’s gonna happen. And then it does, and yet they haven’t all said, well, what a liar he was.
00:42:26.89
Stephen Schneider
Well, here here here’s what
00:42:27.13
Alan Baltis
know I mean? We’re gonna keep the factories open, we’re gonna keep our farms protected. farmers protected What you’re negative.
00:42:34.50
Stephen Schneider
here’s what he does. He said, oh well, the tariff money, we’re going to send every American a $1,500 check. All right. I could use that money. But hold on.
00:42:45.32
Stephen Schneider
Did you calculate that because of the tariffs that you’re actually spending $2,000 more this year?
00:42:50.80
Alan Baltis
but you’re
00:42:50.94
Stephen Schneider
so
00:42:51.66
Alan Baltis
thank you
00:42:51.90
Stephen Schneider
You get a $1,500 check and it still doesn’t cover the extra cost of the tariffs. And people don’t think that they’re the ones he wants to get behind it are like, well, yeah, $1,500 check. I can get those lift kits and go get drunk on Friday night with a new gun.
00:43:07.18
Stephen Schneider
And I’m not joking. i would have a shop I went to. I’m not going mention what it is. I do some business there. And that’s what this guy was bragging about. He’s like, I’m going get me a new gun and a case of bud. And I’m going spend my weekend shooting up thousands of rounds of bullets.
00:43:21.46
Alan Baltis
Right. In fact, I know I saw the last time that we did that, there were places that had little signs up that said, here’s where to spend your, annet did they call it a rebate?
00:43:22.04
Stephen Schneider
Wow.
00:43:31.44
Alan Baltis
Did they call it a bribe?
00:43:31.72
Stephen Schneider
ah
00:43:32.64
Alan Baltis
They had a nice term for it.
00:43:33.65
Stephen Schneider
No, yeah it was a relief fund or something.
00:43:33.80
Alan Baltis
you’ built It was a relief fund or something, but it was like not, hey, maybe put that into an investment and have it grow money for you. No, it was, how can you have a great weekend by pissing it away?
00:43:46.33
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:43:46.42
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:43:46.89
Alan Baltis
So, ugh.
00:43:49.02
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. So, but, but it makes you think too. I’m like, wow. So they just threw 24 million away to hush things up. How much money do they have?
00:43:59.44
Alan Baltis
How much money are they making?
00:43:59.49
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:44:00.80
Alan Baltis
Well, a long time, obviously, and and maybe this will become one of those cases that will now be an illustrative.
00:44:01.16
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:44:08.67
Alan Baltis
Here’s how to really screw yourself. You know, when, when, um, Ford had the Pinto case that they said, you know, we know there’s a defect about getting rammed from behind that cars can burst into flames, but we did a little calculation that said the number of lawsuits that we’ll have to pay for people dying in flaming agony is less than if we retool all the cars that are out there because Pinto is a very popular car.
00:44:32.42
Alan Baltis
And when all that came out in one of the court cases, it wasn’t only the amount of money lost. It was you absolute rat bastards to say, here’s the price for people dying that we knew better. We knew how to fix it.
00:44:45.15
Alan Baltis
But we said, you know, net net, we’re going to let everyone take the risk of this, not tell them that they’re taking the risk. And so you get the BP damaged reputation and the four damaged reputation and company by company.
00:44:58.49
Alan Baltis
And eventually that’s where we’ll get with this, that YouTube is going to be, you know, I used to go to them, but then I found out that they were mercenary, like ah weak, cowardly.
00:45:08.95
Alan Baltis
ah Where’s it another video site that I can go to? I’m not going to there anymore.
00:45:12.88
Stephen Schneider
And here’s here’s the thing. So like the Ford Pinto, you know they made that decision because their investors are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. If you fix that, we’re going to each be down an extra $5 million dollars this year.
00:45:25.13
Stephen Schneider
We can’t do that. It’s like, well, if we let it go, we’ll get sued, but it’ll only be this much. Okay. I’m not losing as much money. So that’s what you do. So I’m not condoning it.
00:45:32.68
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:45:34.49
Stephen Schneider
But that’s what our situation is with the world in general, with all our corporations, that they’re run like this.
00:45:39.47
Alan Baltis
but
00:45:40.67
Stephen Schneider
Oh, what makes the most money for us, regardless of anything else? But in my personal opinion, I would have thought much more highly of Ford if they had said, hey, look, everybody with a pinot.
00:45:52.92
Stephen Schneider
Don’t get hit in the rear because you might explode. And we don’t want that. We want to keep you as Ford buyers for decades.
00:46:00.05
Alan Baltis
exactly
00:46:00.07
Stephen Schneider
So we’re going to fix it now. It’s going to mean we aren’t earning money this year because we believe it’s more important to save lives and fix it. um But we’re not raising prices and you go get the same quality you always had ah because we really believe though blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:46:18.20
Stephen Schneider
In the long run, i think that would have been much more beneficial for them, but that’s not how it’s too short term thinking nowadays.
00:46:26.20
Alan Baltis
Right. ah You know, that that thing of they could have, every problem can be turned into an opportunity. They could have done that. It’s like take the high road.
00:46:33.26
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:46:34.43
Alan Baltis
you know, Volvo was the inventor of the cross seat belt. And, you know, all those residuals they’re getting for having sold to all those kind other companies, it’s zero. They said, we’ll release this standard to the industry because what do we want to do?
00:46:47.60
Alan Baltis
Save lives. And so honestly, forever since then, that’s got to be 60, 70 years ago, they have the standard for they’re the safe car. do you know what I mean? So you really can do something that whatever it is on the balance sheet, goodwill or reputation or whatever they call it, it has benefited them forever in being thought to be the good car.
00:46:57.59
Stephen Schneider
Yep.
00:47:02.83
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:47:07.20
Stephen Schneider
They’re a foreign company.
00:47:07.55
Alan Baltis
So.
00:47:09.07
Stephen Schneider
but I mean, that’s how they think, you know, perfectly well, when that was done, that there was some American company board meeting that says, Hey, they’re giving us all this for free. So how can we make money off of it now?
00:47:20.90
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:47:21.11
Stephen Schneider
You, you know, that’s what happened.
00:47:22.90
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:47:23.24
Stephen Schneider
yeah You know, we, we can, we can, we can improve the buckle and then copyright that.
00:47:23.31
Alan Baltis
And,
00:47:28.35
Stephen Schneider
And, and then everybody has to pay us to use it. We’ll proclaim how much safer we made things and blah, blah, blah.
00:47:33.66
Alan Baltis
Exactly. You know, it’s one of the big things that’s happened in the last, I think it’s now 15 years, actually, it’s a long time. So same thing. Sock and Sabine came up with various different vaccines to prevent polio.
00:47:45.80
Alan Baltis
And, and also, let’s see, whoever whoever invented insulin, I think it might have still been, yeah, well, you know, like that’s another one where they said, this is too important to monetize it, keep it to ourselves.
00:47:52.100
Stephen Schneider
Pigs.
00:48:02.75
Alan Baltis
We’re gonna make sure that everybody can get insulin if they need it, because there wasn’t a cure for diabetes way back then. And then you find out, so that was that was how it was for 60 years, that everybody could make insulin and make a little profit off of it, but there wasn’t any reason to do otherwise.
00:48:18.27
Alan Baltis
And then Shrekly, remember this guy? like he was He was the poster child.
00:48:21.46
Stephen Schneider
Vaguely.
00:48:23.02
Alan Baltis
they could be If you looked up, unscrupulous, evil, asshole businessman. Now maybe he’s been replaced by Stephen Miller. But having said that, this was the the smirking… evil guy that found a way to take the past patents that were or like they did what you said will make slightly better insulin that is better tolerated or whatever else it might be and then instead of being the free insulin now we’re going to be charging because we kind of kind of like what disney does when they create mulan or pocahontas or whatever that that used to be a hans christian anderson open source thing now it’s for sale and they own it
00:48:59.85
Alan Baltis
So having said that, that’s the kind of thing that when that guy does it, once in a while, the world all says, so wait a minute, this guy gave it away for free. He was the decent goodness of his heart guy.
00:49:12.26
Alan Baltis
And you’re saying, nah, that doesn’t work. I’m going to find a way to corner the market. And once while, the market just says, no, we’re not accepting that. We’re not accepting that one guy can fuck over 100 million people because he is such a mercenary, satanically evil guy.
00:49:28.40
Alan Baltis
And maybe that’ll start happening with the worst of these things. You know, patenting a movie, if you will, trademarking, don’t mean use the wrong terms, copywriting, that is its own thing.
00:49:38.80
Alan Baltis
But something that actually is like ah life affecting, quality of life affecting, you would think that there would be very particular hurdles that you have to get over so that you can’t make the world a worse place.
00:49:42.41
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:49:50.95
Alan Baltis
Whatever they talked about having done, you what people are doing.
00:49:51.85
Stephen Schneider
So you just demonize, vilify ah whatever the hurdle is, and then you don’t have to worry about it.
00:49:54.88
Alan Baltis
you
00:49:57.85
Alan Baltis
Yeah, yeah we we don’t need any more regulation, Stephen. Regulation does nothing except add cost and slow things down. No, actually what it does is prevent exactly these kind of evil things from happening.
00:50:06.40
Stephen Schneider
yeah It regulates. so
00:50:09.79
Alan Baltis
And and regulate like let’s we don’t want to have any more oh food monitoring because it slows the process down. Well, suddenly we’re going to have a listeria outbreak, 30,000 people every once in a while.
00:50:20.95
Alan Baltis
And like and ah that whole thing of
00:50:22.64
Stephen Schneider
But but you cannot you counter that by reducing the number of people in the CDC so they don’t send out the alerts so nobody in Maine knows there’s a listeria outbreak in Texas.
00:50:33.39
Stephen Schneider
So now it doesn’t exist to most people.
00:50:33.41
Alan Baltis
your
00:50:36.07
Alan Baltis
And that is the next tactic. I just read that the number of anti-corruption, ah like either, um, lawyers in the department of justice or accountants at the IRS has been reduced from like 36 to two.
00:50:47.80
Alan Baltis
So yeah, if you’re looking for how people are getting away with murder financially and literally, it’s because these people just can’t do it. You need to have that staff that’s looking at all these various different.
00:50:58.54
Alan Baltis
And then
00:51:01.81
Alan Baltis
it, it All those signs of how bad it’s getting are but whatever it is that we’re all getting. i They just had, you know, people, up there’s wonderful little whistling through the graveyard cartoons of like there’s people standing around at a party and going, remember when we had parties and we all just didn’t stand around in horrified disgust?
00:51:24.75
Alan Baltis
But like,
00:51:24.78
Stephen Schneider
and And didn’t it have like all their eyes were like, yeah.
00:51:27.42
Alan Baltis
all the goggle eyes and the handshaking holding the drink and stuff like that. And like, when do we have a chance to talk about encryption standards and not have the conversation turned to someone’s trying to take away the smart, capable, correct thing that’s been built over the course of the last 10, 20, 50 years, that there’s money to be made, there’s chaos to be engendered, because in chaos, that’s when people
00:51:44.17
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:51:52.18
Alan Baltis
you know, move into these various different things and out of intimidation, out of having a lesser but forced standard, we’re seeing that all the freaking time now. and And so…
00:52:01.92
Stephen Schneider
It’s like everybody keeps saying becoming normalized.
00:52:05.22
Alan Baltis
Exactly. we know Free speech wise, we haven’t talked enough about Kimmel and Colbert and various different others, but there we i every time I go to a comedy club, I’m still very happy that that seems to be a place that we can still go and have Emo Phillips say whatever he wants.
00:52:07.40
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:52:22.32
Alan Baltis
But you know, there was a time when that wasn’t the case. We also went to the National Comedy Center. and got to learn all about Lenny Bruce again, and how he was regularly arrested and thrown in jail overnight because they had those blue laws, especially in the South, that said, you really can’t say certain words. It’s Everybody in there is there to hear what you have to say.
00:52:43.17
Alan Baltis
Everyone there is a willing participant, but no, the community knows better. Not, you know what I mean? and And so the fact that we were once like that and and got better, fixed that in the 60s, the fact that the pendulum is trying to swing back to, you you can’t say things about people in power, you can’t say certain words, you can’t, your and and unfortunately, this is one of those, you’d think that everybody would band together because both the right and the left are ridiculous about this.
00:52:48.39
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:53:07.28
Alan Baltis
The fact that they just have different words that they want banned doesn’t really matter compared to, no, free speech important. Everyone should have it. And we just have to deal with the fact that if you don’t care about free speech from people that you don’t like, you don’t care about free speech at all.
00:53:23.91
Stephen Schneider
Well, yeah, i was going to say you got you got to really think, and that’s part of the the liberal Democrats’ side problem is they say, well, we do believe in free speech.
00:53:34.79
Stephen Schneider
And the Republican Magans are like, well, we believe in it too. And Democrats are like, great, good. we ah and But the problem is what it looks like when the Maga Republicans say is, yeah, we believe in free speech, as long as it agrees with us and what we think is free speech.
00:53:49.60
Alan Baltis
And then whoever’s in charge gets to install their thing.
00:53:49.89
Stephen Schneider
That’s
00:53:51.68
Alan Baltis
And then the next time it’ll be that taken out and all, then all the, you know, whatever the, the woke words will be put in place and people can’t stand that. So that I, that’s it That’s such an impossible discussion.
00:54:03.77
Alan Baltis
and i want My sweeping statement would be anybody who volunteers to be the censor are exactly the people that shouldn’t be. They have ah an extra grind that has nothing to do with really what society wants and needs.
00:54:10.23
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:54:15.53
Alan Baltis
They just have a problem that they can’t stand, you name it, whether it’s a profanity or vulgarity or insult or whatever else it might be.
00:54:27.65
Alan Baltis
and And I think we might have talked about this a little bit before because I’ve been talking about it for 30 years. When I did my genetic algorithm stuff and one of the adjunct things I learned was about memes, that early idea of a meme is not a photo with writing on it. And hey, that’s catchy.
00:54:46.01
Alan Baltis
A meme is any idea that transfers through society like a virus. And that what you need to know about that is it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not, that they’re good or not. it matters how catchy they are.
00:54:54.36
Stephen Schneider
Right. But they become true.
00:54:55.84
Alan Baltis
That’s even what they use. and And so I have a my my. Fraying of my being a free speech absolutist is seeing that for people who know how to harness that kind of virality, that mimetic pressure that they can put on, it really can be that bad things happen to society if you have absolute free speech. The old things about can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, that’s so much bullshit compared to we now have 49% of the United States thinking that white Christian nationalism and Trump as its supposed
00:55:32.33
Alan Baltis
holy man, that that’s right. And it’s clearly not. But how did they win? From repetition, from catchphrases, from making it so that it the whole memeplex worked together?
00:55:43.07
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:55:43.55
Alan Baltis
You know, if you love your children, you’ll do this.
00:55:43.72
Stephen Schneider
Got catch them all.
00:55:45.91
Alan Baltis
No, there’s no logical progression from loving your children to the evil thing you’re asking. If you’re a Christian, you’ll do this. There’s no way that what would Jesus do bracelets agree with, let’s round up immigrants.
00:55:57.19
Alan Baltis
Let’s all all of it. And yet, mimetically, it sure has worked. They learned early on that if you have your terrible right wing radio stations and television stations, Fox News is exhibit A, the testament to you can lie and lie and lie and oh but right say awful stuff and it becomes acceptable, normalized, you were saying.
00:56:13.67
Stephen Schneider
Or you could say awful shit.
00:56:19.74
Alan Baltis
and And honestly, The Nazi playbook of how to do propaganda is what we’re seeing again now. And they, before far before Fox News, they learned early on, get a big lie, repeat it, and it becomes true.
00:56:32.05
Alan Baltis
And so, like, that we don’t have a Jewish menace.
00:56:32.27
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:56:34.99
Alan Baltis
We don’t have foreigners are bad. none of None of those things are true. And yet there are certain… weak-willed, weak-minded, whatever that segment of the population is that don’t get inoculated.
00:56:46.70
Alan Baltis
you know the This is kind of terrible, but it all makes sense to me. The whole idea of being vaccinated has been tossed aside by various different people that there are things that can prevent you from getting diseases.
00:56:57.67
Alan Baltis
And in the same way that you can prevent from getting memes, The more you read, the more you don’t just read one book, the more that you interact with people not like yourself, all those things are vaccines. They’re inoculations against getting that disease of crazy false pride, of crazy xenophobia, of crazy misogynism and racism.
00:57:18.86
Alan Baltis
And yet they voluntarily keep putting themselves into the situations where they hear it again and again. hear it on the radio, read it in their book, go to the websites. Their family is rife with it.
00:57:30.04
Alan Baltis
And they they don’t try to break outside of that because part of the meme is, well, that’s evil. that you if you you yeah Anybody that you would listen to, light they’re just trying to subvert you. And so I don’t know how we’re going to come out of it.
00:57:42.80
Alan Baltis
Is it going to be trucks rolling down the streets with louder and louder megaphones that are just trying to drown out each other? Is it going to be that all of our media get bought by the bad guys and what they say becomes true, that there’s not the pursuit of truth?
00:57:57.55
Alan Baltis
We’re dismantling our scientific organizations and our media watchdogs and all that stuff.
00:57:58.74
Stephen Schneider
Let’s.
00:58:02.28
Alan Baltis
It sure seems like they really know what they’re doing in this evil way and that we are fighting a a retreating, we are not on the offensive, we being… People who care about truth, people who care about reality.
00:58:13.91
Stephen Schneider
Because cause I see a lot of the liberal Democrats are like, but what we’re saying is the right thing.
00:58:17.47
Alan Baltis
don’t know.
00:58:21.95
Stephen Schneider
What we’re doing is what’s good for the American public. And we’re even willing to discuss it a bit. So, you know, why is that so bad? And then they kind of just sit there. and and But the the the other side is being extremely aggressive in a very negative way that only supports themselves.
00:58:39.24
Stephen Schneider
And the Democrats, well, but that’s not true. well But you’re missing the point that there needs to be a bit more aggressiveness like Newsom and a few others I’ve seen, you know.
00:58:42.08
Alan Baltis
right
00:58:49.83
Alan Baltis
I agree. That’s exactly what we need is people that are wonderfully aggressive and that are just as good as catchy phrases and if anything, are good at using those tactics, turning them around and using them against the others because mockery works, make them fun.
00:58:59.88
Stephen Schneider
Right. That’s what they understand.
00:59:03.10
Alan Baltis
Exactly. You know, so it… I just, and this, so you might’ve seen this one where the guy is, hey, I think you should take a bleach for this thing. It’s like, well, no, you shouldn’t.
00:59:14.06
Alan Baltis
And I’m a scientist. And so here’s why not. Well, I also understand that you can take this thing for another disease. No, i’m I’m actually an epidemiologist. and I understand exactly like that.
00:59:24.62
Alan Baltis
And the response was, I suppose you have your own pronouns too.
00:59:28.40
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:59:28.100
Alan Baltis
And so that thing of associating like wokeness, which they hate to make sure that they can dismiss science, expertise, people that really know what they’re talking about, that that’s their way of just waving it off instead of being, maybe I should listen to like, if you had a father figure and you listened to him, maybe these guys could be the other father figure that they should have had all along that teaches you the truth instead of teaches you be exactly as I am with all of my flaws and all of my
00:59:43.76
Stephen Schneider
Well,
00:59:54.90
Stephen Schneider
but but you know as well as I do in America through our lifetime and and more that we we We worship and admire that really strong sports athlete and we’ll throw billions at them.
01:00:09.81
Stephen Schneider
But if you’re smart, we kind of don’t like you and don’t trust you by default because obviously you you aren’t going to help us and obviously you think you’re better than us.
01:00:18.52
Alan Baltis
Right. The idea of evil genius or idea of lording it over instead of, I, I, you know,
01:00:21.94
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, it’s been that way forever.
01:00:25.94
Alan Baltis
It’s kind of funny. We are all products of Nature and Nurture. It’s not versus, it’s a combination. um ah Colleen and i have I got a bunch of stuff for our late Christmas and anniversary and stuff over the last couple of years.
01:00:39.09
Alan Baltis
We have like the Delve decks. Here’s a shout out to those. They’re just good conversation starters. And some of them are for a party. Some of them are for a couple. I actually got one that was like long distance relationship.
01:00:51.19
Alan Baltis
And right ge if we would have had these when we were first talking on the phone all the time, these would have been useful. But even now, even though we are like a floor away in the house, two floors away, we like having that thing that starts with well how do you really think and feel about this how did you come to be who you are it we’re both rich people and it’s fascinating to find out that those things about each other and to share those things well one of one of the things that’s that’s um I guess great about those is when you talk about, for instance, your parents, she had relatively difficult parents, and I’m being very kind there. They were pretty assholey.
01:01:27.63
Alan Baltis
Mine were pretty high quality. And just in comparing how have we come to be who we are, I’m very much a product of my parents, that they were thoughtful. They were slow to anger.
01:01:39.05
Alan Baltis
They continually took in new information. They were not at all violent or abusive or hyper emotional. and And all those things might not be true for her parents. So the fact that Colleen turned out as good as she did is an amazing monument to overcoming. You will turn into your parents unless you make very active choices otherwise.
01:01:57.93
Alan Baltis
And she very much did. Instead of being, well, I should do exactly what my parents did. They knew how to run a life. She saw early on, no lie, like as a four or five-year-old, how full of shit her parents were in some ways.
01:02:10.38
Alan Baltis
And she started to read and look for other role models to make a better life. Whereas I i don’t, ah my parents had, um, limitations. You know, they they’re very unsocial people.
01:02:23.70
Alan Baltis
And so one of the things that I learned from I had my very good friend, Stu, that I grew up with. But when he moved away, i had to like, am I going to find another best friend and still cocoon myself? Am I going to join groups and learn how to be social?
01:02:35.99
Alan Baltis
And luckily, because I was not only quick witted, quick thinking, but quick witted jokes, good jokes can can can be that wonderful social lubricant.
01:02:41.33
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:02:44.71
Alan Baltis
And so i I can see how I am very much a product of my parents. You know, why do i do consumer reports for every purchase that I’m going to make beyond a certain amount was because they were very thoughtful about that. They didn’t go to the car lot and say, give me the red one.
01:02:58.79
Alan Baltis
They really researched what’s high value for the money and safe and lasts a long time and all that kind of stuff. and And so I do those kinds of things. And how do I plan travel? They don’t just get in the car and drive and hope you find a motel.
01:03:11.63
Alan Baltis
You do a little bit of things so you can totally enjoy yourself during the day. No, you’ve got a safe place to stay at night. So like I can kind of like make a whole list of these are good behaviors that I learned from my parents. Being slow to anger, like hardly ever angering.
01:03:24.32
Alan Baltis
They were, if not joyful people, they were very even keeled. And that’s a very good way to not let… well everybody has a lot things that come into their life that are difficult.
01:03:35.57
Alan Baltis
and And if you’re, there’s another great quote about, if you if you’re like, ah if you respond, over respond to all those things emotionally, you’re kind of like a wagon with no shock absorbers. Every rut in the road is just going to jar you and make you crazy.
01:03:49.67
Alan Baltis
So you’ll learn how to, be not only slow to anger, but slow to have any emotion, you kind of think things through. You decide what emotion you’re going to feel. And we’re not robots.
01:04:00.97
Alan Baltis
Of course, I immediately have certain reactions, like just when we talk now, it’s like is my immediate reaction to that is disgust, because that’s a disgusting thing that the guy did. But you don’t immediately say, and then I’m going to give up the rest of my life to make sure that the disgusting guy pays.
01:04:14.98
Alan Baltis
you You find a balance. There’s there’s this keel that you’ve got to maintain in order to keep moving forward.
01:04:19.19
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:04:21.25
Alan Baltis
And so I recommend those kinds of things that it’s wonderful to have those discussions. And maybe it’s when you’re first getting to know someone and maybe it’s after you’ve known someone for 25 years, but you’re like, I didn’t know you were in the circus.
01:04:34.07
Alan Baltis
I never knew that you always wanted to crochet or whatever the things are that come out because unprompted, they kind of don’t, you know what I mean?
01:04:39.04
Stephen Schneider
yeah
01:04:42.18
Alan Baltis
You just kind of keep going on with your life and you make nice discoveries once in a while, but it’s okay to, to take the crowbar and open things up a little bit too. You know what I mean?
01:04:51.56
Stephen Schneider
I remember several times because, you know, when I married Bobby, she was new, our family and knew all my friends and stuff from school. We knew each other in younger years and all that.
01:05:02.75
Stephen Schneider
So Gina, you know, was suddenly new for everybody, all my friends, all my family and everything. And I remember multiple times just casually chatting, talking, you know, with her kids around her, you know, and all this and saying something like, Oh yeah, you know, ah we had to do that when I sold perfume and everybody’s like, what, you, what you sold perfume.
01:05:24.58
Alan Baltis
of
01:05:24.87
Stephen Schneider
What? Yeah. So, ah you know, it’s just you forget, you know, you don’t talk about that stuff all the time. And then when it comes up, ah what a surprise it can be for some people, which gives you things to talk about.
01:05:32.78
Alan Baltis
that’s what
01:05:36.26
Alan Baltis
yeah I agree you know another thing like uh my mom and dad were pretty open and about, you name it, house finances or their past or whatever else it might be, but not open about everything.
01:05:50.26
Alan Baltis
And so when Colleen and my mom used to have really nice talks, mike Colleen would be, she had to travel for business. And so sometimes on the way back, she’d have like an hour phone call with my mom.
01:05:59.51
Stephen Schneider
well
01:05:59.96
Alan Baltis
And then you find out like, because they got along quite well, it was very nice to see that the mother-in-law was not the ogre, but actually a very nice addition. and She was really happy to have a better quality parent, if you will.
01:06:11.54
Alan Baltis
Well, moms talk about things with daughters-in-laws that they don’t talk about with their sons. And so like about romance, about like, how was it again that you were engaged, but then you fell in love with dad and broke off your engagement and you get like more detail.
01:06:25.18
Alan Baltis
And it’s like, Wow, mom wasn’t just a mom. She actually was like a full odd person.
01:06:29.24
Stephen Schneider
person.
01:06:30.77
Alan Baltis
And that she had a childhood and went away to England to be a nanny.
01:06:31.72
Stephen Schneider
ah
01:06:35.73
Alan Baltis
What an amazing, bold thing for someone one to do. And then in the romance thing and the work thing and and whatever else it might be, you know, when she talks about going back for like to her 50th reunion she actually went to germany to her 50th gymnasium high school reunion and it’s like wow my mom really was a teen and she must have been like what a bobby soxer or a you know what what kind of teen things did she do do she all giggly painting toenails you know you don’t picture your mom but but everybody has those things so it was very cool when colleen would come in and not share everything because it’s not to be shared women have a whole
01:07:03.66
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:07:11.99
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:07:12.55
Alan Baltis
amazing thing that, you know, that’s that’s private. And yet she would just say things like, I never knew that my mom had whimsy, that my mom had, you know, like that she was like, he she loved my dad.
01:07:26.89
Alan Baltis
They loved each other forever. And so then, but then to find out that there might’ve been a time when her, she was goofy in romance too. You know what I mean? everybody Everybody gets like guy crazy or girl crazy at different times in their life. Not everybody, but many people.
01:07:41.54
Alan Baltis
And to hear about some of those things, it was just, it’s, that’s a little bit of what Colleen and I are enjoying now is, and, and, on and which is also, we don’t have kids. And so there’s no family gatherings where we tell our kids, so how’d you meet mom and dad? Well,
01:07:55.67
Alan Baltis
It was like this. And then, and sometimes you give them the sanitized version. And sometimes you say, you know, we kind of knew each other for five years before we got together because we had people, other people in our lives, or because we only met at these Mensa gatherings that were out of town. But like, if I’m in Chicago and she’s in Cleveland, it’s not like, Hey, let’s go on a date.
01:08:15.43
Alan Baltis
You kind of have to decide that you’re going to see each other and then count on three hour, sorry, 300 mile, six hour drive, et cetera.
01:08:17.68
Stephen Schneider
right indiana becomes very popular indianapolis
01:08:25.61
Alan Baltis
I think what’s funny, I think I told you this, you know, we never did that. I had just moved to California to do my dot-com things with Topica when we started to go out. So it could have been an inconvenient but doable drive.
01:08:36.88
Alan Baltis
Instead, it was kind of like talking every night, but seeing each other only every couple of months because airfares and schedules and work and all that kind of stuff, they they don’t allow you to just say every weekend we’re getting together.
01:08:46.89
Alan Baltis
No, you’re not.
01:08:47.11
Stephen Schneider
right
01:08:47.83
Alan Baltis
Yeah. So, and maybe that was a good thing because you talk and you get to know each other instead of it only being the heat of passion. And nothing wrong with the heat of passion, but that’s not necessarily the long-term way to think of a relationship, you know.
01:09:01.71
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:09:01.90
Alan Baltis
and pet
01:09:02.28
Stephen Schneider
Unless you’re a vampire.
01:09:03.52
Alan Baltis
but I guess that’s true.
01:09:05.86
Stephen Schneider
so
01:09:06.50
Alan Baltis
All right. I know we’ve gone long.
01:09:07.45
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.
01:09:07.91
Alan Baltis
right Okay.
01:09:08.13
Stephen Schneider
Cool, man.
01:09:09.64
Alan Baltis
All right. and I love the shirt. I just have boring, but nice but boring purple.
01:09:12.84
Stephen Schneider
Oh, yeah.
01:09:13.46
Alan Baltis
Whereas you have ah Mothman.
01:09:14.92
Stephen Schneider
Mothman.
01:09:16.13
Alan Baltis
There you go.
01:09:16.74
Stephen Schneider
Done by,
01:09:16.85
Alan Baltis
Okay.
01:09:19.25
Stephen Schneider
ah i forget his first name, Coghill, an artist friend in Kent. He goes to a lot of these type of things selling art.
01:09:26.72
Alan Baltis
Very cool.
01:09:27.57
Stephen Schneider
So.
01:09:27.76
Alan Baltis
So um we had a big list. We’ll get to some of those next week. what Let’s see, what what do we what’s the thing you want to tell me before we go?
01:09:30.97
Stephen Schneider
Or,
01:09:34.28
Alan Baltis
I would say, everybody, go see the Spinal Tap movie.
01:09:34.47
Stephen Schneider
ah
01:09:36.36
Alan Baltis
It’s really good.
01:09:37.20
Stephen Schneider
Oh, I haven’t, I didn’t realize it was out.
01:09:37.84
Alan Baltis
good
01:09:39.24
Stephen Schneider
You know what? Since Colin moved, I’ve so lost touch with what movies. Cause it’s like, eh, I don’t know if I feel like going to $5 a day by myself. Now I got, you know, we did it for years together.
01:09:50.02
Stephen Schneider
So I’m thinking of getting back into that habit here this fall.
01:09:54.15
Alan Baltis
that’ We’re thinking of that $5 movie at at either Cedar Lee or the Capitol. I mean, Mondays is always their low attendance day. So we don’t mind going and getting popcorn and getting the cheap movie.
01:10:01.22
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:10:02.80
Alan Baltis
so
01:10:03.34
Stephen Schneider
Yep, yep. So we’ll see. I don’t even know what’s out. But there’s so many good movies on streaming that I’ve never seen. You know, it’s like I can watch three movies without leaving my living room. so
01:10:14.72
Alan Baltis
Exactly. In fact, this is worth two minutes. Scarecrow is the last video store. Blockbusters are all gone, et cetera, et cetera. But Scarecrow out of Seattle still has an enormous collection and they will send you things through the mail.
01:10:28.40
Alan Baltis
And I’ve been, I only want to get things from them that I can’t get anywhere else. So I just did a big exercise lately of, actually went to like a list of what are the best um underrated or unseen movies. And I figured that’s what won’t be on streaming, but maybe I’ll get it through Scarecrow.
01:10:42.68
Alan Baltis
and i i really want to see a movie called the drifter there’s movie called brain donors that i just made reference to other people that i want to see but then as i was going through all these other movies that i thought i could see this david mamet movie again etc it really is amazing how there’s all kinds of movies that are available by streaming and there might not be free at various different services but they’re 3.99 so like if i really want to see that um brain owners is not available anywhere except for 12.99 so then i’m going to get through scarecrow but all kinds of others
01:11:02.46
Stephen Schneider
right
01:11:12.18
Alan Baltis
it just that my list that I had put together at Scarecrow shrank quickly when I found out, well, I could watch it on Amazon or on Netflix or whatever else it might be. So it actually engendered a cool list of, here’s all the things that I think I liked, but Colleen might not have seen and vice versa.
01:11:28.54
Alan Baltis
And now we have, as it gets colder, well, there’s all the movies. and Now, instead of only being… The same thing that was like, I only buy $7 CDs or less, but now I have a little bit of extra money so I can go to 10 and be happy to have it to listen to.
01:11:41.96
Alan Baltis
Now it’s like that for movies too. Then instead of having this big prejudice about, unless it’s free, I’m already paying for the free service, so I don’t want to pay for it. But you know, it’s really a high quality movie and I really want to share it with Colleen and stuff like that, and $3.99 is like, well, that’s less than going to the movies for the two of us. That’s that’s nothing really in comparison.
01:12:00.71
Alan Baltis
And so we’ll start to have a little list of what I’m willing to pay for. And that’s kind of interesting way to put it. a movie that I won’t i go i ah can’t be free, I’m willing to pay for it.
01:12:11.01
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:12:11.24
Alan Baltis
Oh my God, that’s a breakthrough for me.
01:12:12.16
Stephen Schneider
well how do Do you ah check out Tubi when you’re looking for movies?
01:12:17.47
Alan Baltis
that’s one of the sources where occasionally they’re free and unfortunately to be there’s what that and maybe roku they’re littered with commercials it’s really tough to watch things on comedy central or tubi or others and maybe there’s a no commercial version but i don’t have a subscription to those things and i don’t know that i want to pay actually what i should do is on the list put together where they’re available and then say okay if i get a to be subscription for a month i’ll knock these four off and then let that go
01:12:18.28
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:12:24.71
Stephen Schneider
Oh, yeah.
01:12:42.90
Alan Baltis
And that’s kind of what I’m doing nowadays, as you know, is turn things on and off so that when Ted Lasso comes out, I’ll turn Apple back on.
01:12:45.92
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:12:49.36
Alan Baltis
When the Olympics come out, I’ll turn Paramount back on. But otherwise, I don’t need them 12 months out of the year. I wash the hell out of that particular channel and then let it go because I filled up.
01:12:57.68
Stephen Schneider
right Yeah. My mother just discovered her, her women’s group. She meets for lunch once a month. Someone told her about these Marlowe mystery, something show, but it’s BBC.
01:13:10.40
Stephen Schneider
So she founded on one of the sub channels for prime. And she’s like, Oh, but I don’t know. And I’m like, Oh my God, nanny, just it’s $6. Cause it’s my account. You know, it’s on my account. She didn’t want to spend the money. Well, I’ll watch them all. And we’ll cancel it in after the, you know, before the trial is done in a week. And I’m like,
01:13:27.75
Stephen Schneider
it’s $6. not that concerned. Go ahead.
01:13:31.13
Alan Baltis
Right.
01:13:31.20
Stephen Schneider
You know, and, and
01:13:31.57
Alan Baltis
The problem is when you have 10 $6 channels and you’re not watching them all as compared to…
01:13:35.20
Stephen Schneider
yes, yes.
01:13:35.93
Alan Baltis
rights Right, right.
01:13:36.65
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Which, you know, every time i I go to turn something off, she’s just discovered something on that streaming channel and is watching it. And you know what? I could push a little bit and say, look, pick two or three channels. We’ll turn the rest off and then we’ll start rotating them.
01:13:53.01
Stephen Schneider
But it’s my mother and all she’s done for me through the years. And I want to get bitchy about a $10 subscription for something she’s enjoying.
01:14:01.80
Alan Baltis
I understand exactly.
01:14:02.70
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:14:03.53
Alan Baltis
You know, we have the Criterion channel that a friend gave us ah the initial subscription for free. And Colleen is much better at watching good things, quality older things than I am. And so it’s like, I’ll never turn that off. I love that she keeps on exploring it. And not only watching the movies, but watching the commentary by really good movie critics and stuff like that.
01:14:22.18
Alan Baltis
It’s, I think that I don’t want to take that wonderful experience from her. You know what I mean? it I understand.
01:14:27.56
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:14:28.23
Alan Baltis
you know what I mean? I don’t have a mom and dad anymore, but I would have been exactly that same thing of, hey, mom and dad, can I can i give you the Ford movie channel for a year? Because I know you love those and that you gave me so much, I’m happy to give you a little bit back.
01:14:41.54
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:14:41.97
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?
01:14:42.29
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:14:42.57
Alan Baltis
That kind of thing. So, all right.
01:14:43.54
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. So, all right, man, I’ll talk to you later.
01:14:45.82
Alan Baltis
Okay. Take care, Stephen. Okay.
