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RG 234

[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.

It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.

Stephen: Roll.

Alan: Turn up my sound.

Stephen: Alright. What’s prime on our minds today?

Alan: What’s prime? We had several things. Here we are, October, it’s Halloween week, it’s finally gotten cold, and we’re getting into the Thanksgiving, Christmas season. It, I start watching my [00:01:00] Halloween movies and TV shows in August and here it is three months later, and I, it’s end of that season for me into the rest of the

Stephen: the culmination of all the spooky stuff.

Alan: Yeah. And it’s, for me, definitely a different year because No kids at all. No, Colin, none of his friends around so it’s.

Stephen: the house is quieter and their taste is not fake. Figuring into what you choose to watch and stuff like that.

Alan: Yeah. And also, coming up for the holiday, what things I wanna do because a lot of running around doing holiday things was going out with Colin and doing them with him, so it changes it. So then it’s is there anyone else that’s doing something or wanna do something?

Or are there things that I didn’t do before that maybe I wanna do,

Stephen: colleen and I are having some of that same discussion. We have, we’re a couple, but we have a lot of single or couple or whatever friends, and it used to be, there’s a couple groups we’d get together with to like play games or go catch a movie together. And somehow those groups have disbanded, people’s lives move on and they get married and change, and then they do everything with the spouse. But one friend in [00:02:00] particular that we throw a whole bunch of ideas out to him, Hey, we’re going to these comedy shows. We have a whole bunch lined up. There’s, you can join us at the table, come and see Kelsey Cook is coming up, and Josh Sneed and whoever else.

And so I hope that we can get him out of the house sometimes. There I, this is funny, A long time ago I had a phrase quirky alone. Whereas people that they like their own company. They, if they’re introverted, if they like their music and books and computer and games and whatever else it might be.

Asking ’em to go out is kinda nah, they’re not sure that, that is a better experience than them having the big screen TV with exactly what they wanna watch. We’ll, I think that he does want company though, so we’re trying to throw things like music, like comedy that we think that they’ll we’re, I don’t know, Colleen and I are getting to be where we’re a pretty good set.

And so when we go to a museum, for instance, we walk at the same pace, halt the same amount to read the placards or to enjoy and stuff like that. And [00:03:00] a lot of times if you bump that up to 3, 4, 6 people it isn’t the same. And there’s people that are much slower than others or that are impatient with others.

And I, so we’re going to let’s see. Bear with me Cincinnati and we’re like, okay, we could invite people to do other things. Having breakfast with ’em is obviously easy, but like that, going to see the Mad Magazine exhibit, which is now down in Cincinnati instead of Massachusetts, I wouldn’t mind going again ’cause it’s so good.

And I’m like, does anybody else out there like Mad Magazine as much as I do that they really wanna admire and really drink it in? And so for our own enjoyment protection, we’re not being that social about certain things. You know what I mean? It’s weird, but I think everybody has their same levels of how much they like what they like and there’s nothing wrong with giving that to themselves instead of always having to be the organizer of a group or something like

Alan: I have a family member that we did a lot of things with at one time them and their family. And, the one example was the civil [00:04:00] War reenactment over at Hail Farm. They had tents set up, like it was a pioneer village and they had characters and dress and they did all sorts of activities and you could talk to the people there and stuff, and they had blacksmith and blah, blah, blah.

It was just a cool, fun thing. And then at certain time, they were going to do a reenactment of a battle between the north and the south. And, we were right there and there were like, people dying in front of us. The one guy, it was hot, it was like 102 in or something with no shade.

And the one kid. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. And so this guy like died in front of us. We’re standing there going and when we start doing the, wow, I bet he’s really hot, man, that must suck to bake in the sun like that. Yeah. He’s sweating. I don’t think he’s completely dead. And the guy goes, yeah, this kind of sucks today.

It was, no, he’s not supposed to. But, it was fun. But the point is there was one family one family member and their family that was, oh yeah, let’s go to it, blah, blah, blah. [00:05:00] They had to take over and we’ll meet here and we’ll do this for breakfast and then we’ll all go to this at this time.

It’s okay, that’s fine. I’m gonna where I want, we’ll just meet up. Have fun. Then it was like. We stop at one booth talking to the blacksmith, what do you do to do this? Talking to the gunsmith? What are you doing with the guns? And, another family member was really interested or all that.

And finally it’s like this other part of the family comes back and says, what are you guys doing? We’re like we’re, talking and looking and stuff. We’re almost done. We’re about ready to go. We’re like, we’ve been here for eight minutes. We were planning to be here for four hours or something, and they’re like, oh no, we’re not staying that long.

We looked at stuff, we’re ready to go. And I started noticing that happened a lot. And we were like, yeah, that’s, we’re we’ll meet you there on our time. And, we’ll leave when we’re ready to go. We might not go afterwards to eat because we’re still gonna be looking around,

Stephen: hear you. Yeah. It’s that we have had good success with that, that we have loose plans and people get together for whatever part of them they [00:06:00] want. And then it’s I don’t know. Not don’t expect us ’cause we will be there, but we’re not perfectly synchronized with you.

And the people that really do want that synchronization, it matters a lot to them. And so it’s I’m not doing this to wreck your day, but just don’t include us in everything. You know what I mean? Let’s get together for this hour or whatever.

Alan: We don’t need to be on a time schedule and do five things instead of the one.

Stephen: exactly. And we’ve talked about this a little bit before.

We have friends that like to go to Florida. And they jump in the car and they drive 18 hours. And that is so much not Colleen’s and my style, we make a loose plan, we have a place to stay. We don’t get down there in one night. We know we wanna stop just out of not why get to the place you wanna be and be so exhausted that you sleep the first day there.

You know what I mean? So we tend to, and we don’t just drive. Hey, here’s a cool mini golf course. Here’s a cool ice cream place. Here’s most that over there. It’s a brown sign. Let’s go check it out. I never heard of the Musky bucket and whatever else it might be. So I got a feeling we’ve given our travel spreadsheets to people a [00:07:00] couple times after.

We’ve talked about what a nice time we had on a trip like the Dakotas trip. And a lot of times they’re like, did you really do all this? No, but we had all that available to us so that while we’re driving along, you decide, is today the day that we’re gonna wander out and see a lot of dinosaurs?

Or is today the day we want to get to this thing at the end? So much that we want to drive, a lot to get to and be able to spend as much time as we want at the lower Ingles wilder thing. You know what I mean? So it, I don’t know it finding a couple that you can actually travel with. We were just on a cruise, the Alaska cruise with Dave and Shirley, and it really worked well with.

Getting together for dinners or some excursions during the day, but not joined at the hip all the time. And even like you, you go to a town and it’s okay you guys wanna go, we’re gonna go. We like, we went to the lumberjack show together. But otherwise we shop differently a little bit. We have different what kind of food do you want find and not force someone to get poutine when what they want is maple syrup.

Candy or something like that, so it worked out really well. And now we’re talking about, that [00:08:00] was our 49th state capital and now we’re talking about the 50th finally doing Honolulu, and we’re thinking that we’re gonna do it together. You know what I mean? That they’ll be there for the last year state capitals, but just for, I hope that Honolulu will be, not Honolulu, Hawaii itself.

Everybody wants to go see the volcanoes, right? And it might be that you don’t wanna spend four hours like we do, but we’ll talk. One of the cool things is you don’t just get going and then have. Unpleasant surprises. You talk it out beforehand and you make the schedules, where they, it coincide and then they split apart again.

Alan: And even if it’s oh yeah, we wanna see the volcanoes, but we also wanna go to this other thing that starts at 10 30. So if we could be at the volcanoes at nine, then we could leave and go instead of being at the volcanoes at 10. And it’s that compromise thing. And it’s being an adult, it’s not personal.

I don’t hate you, I’m here because I enjoy you. But we do have different likes and interests.

Stephen: it’s funny, I would even, it’s not being an adult, it’s going back to kids where it’s take turns if you both don’t want, you want the same thing, but [00:09:00] then each of you gets to play with the ball for half an hour instead of somebody gets the ball and then someone goes and sits over there.

No

Alan: and they’re, and there’s, sometimes when you do that it even sometimes is like a I’m interested in this thing over here, and so is Alan. So me and Alan are going over here and the girls are something else. If they want to come, great. If not, they’ve got something else to do. Or, they, one of ’em might say, you know what, I’m just gonna go sit on the deck for a bit.

Come and find me when you’re done.

Stephen: Exactly all those things I, what do I wanna do today is read a book in the shade and everybody else goes hiking or something like that. So we’ve done, and if it’s, it isn’t only, it doesn’t matter so much the things that you are doing, it matters that attitude, if someone has to have their way after a while, it’s I just don’t wanna spend as much time with someone that always has to be in charge.

And as much as I might be a good trip organizer, I’m not a whip cracker, so it’s, it hasn’t been easy to find people whose schedule’s exactly. Not only not, they don’t have to match, they just have to be that the attitude towards how you do a schedule is similar. Neither of my brothers are necessarily [00:10:00] like that.

And again, there’s nothing wrong with them or with me, it just is that, especially a family that has kids, boy, I’ll say this. When we were first the whole thing, we would go out to California to visit with mom and dad and. The kids were on a schedule because they had to have their naps, or they had to eat at certain times, or they get cranky or whatever else.

It like might be and Collina and I would often look at each other and say, do the adults get a say in this? You know what I mean? And then we might have to split up plans. So we want to take the kids to Legoland, but not everything while you’re out there should be that We wanna go to the Moog Museum.

Moog Museum and the kids won’t have any interest in that maybe, but we don’t wanna miss it either. So we had to do some of those same things today. We’re on our own and we’ll be back at the house by four o’clock. See you then. So it especially and we mising segue time. Colleen and I are curious about a lot of things.

We don’t even know if we’re gonna like it necessarily, but if you’re right there and you’re curious, you wanna go get a taste, so we just had to. [00:11:00] I went to see Malcolm Gladwell speak last night at the Malt Performing Arts Center, and he’s a fascinating author. I really like. There’s a couple modern intellectuals, if you will.

You know what I mean? Stephen Pink or him, no matter what they’re writing about, I wanna read it because they have big thoughts and they’re well thought out. It’s not I had a thought and then I fluffed it out to 300 pages. They really build a case through essays and data, and their analysis of it is sound and stuff like that.

So one of the things he said was that in order to have curiosity, you have to have self-confidence. And by that meaning you have to be able to say, if I find something out through my curiosity that doesn’t match how I already think or feel. I gotta be ready to handle that. It can’t be that you’ve already made big decisions, and Colleen and I have this all the time.

There’s some people that really like to say, I’m gonna say one big yes. And then everything after that follows that. Yes. So it’s if you join the military and then for two or three years you’re not on your schedule, you’re on the rules of the engagement. [00:12:00] And if you’re in a hierarchical situation, you have to play that game.

If you’re gonna voluntarily put yourself into it. Or if you say a big yes to religion, it it’s really frowned upon to become a heretic and say not all of that makes sense. So and we have that about a lot of things and there’s big quotes about this, some part of being about science, about being a geek is I go where my curiosity takes me and I take in the new information and I might change my opinion, my take on the facts.

And it’s not only. What I know or doesn’t, it’s that the future comes, science moves on, we discover more things. And if you’re still determined to hold a fifties opinion when it’s the 2020s, that’s ridiculous to me. We know better now for sure. Vaccines work for sure. All, we just name ’em all, the world, the future is here and I love that quote, but it’s not evenly distributed. And some people actually have put up barriers to keep the future from getting in. That’s classic capital C, [00:13:00] conservative. And I just find that like ridiculous and dangerous. And when they insist on their way, it’s like you, you just, you can’t be so scared of change of new that you actually and it also leads to hypocrisy.

You talk about how you don’t want the future live on your cell phone. You know what I mean?

Alan: right. You your Dick Tracy device.

Stephen: We have curiosity about lots of things, and there’s any number of, and once in a while we get out and say that was an hour wasted. You know what I mean? We didn’t know, and it wasn’t as interesting as we thought, but once in a while it’s wow, we didn’t, we’d have no more time. We gotta come back now because there’s so much to see at the Mustard Museum.

I make fun, but there really some things that are like, we, this is much cooler than we expected. That kind of thing where someone has a collection that they were passionate about and you didn’t realize that seeing that many. Like we’re looking, we’re doing a Route 66 trip and a lot of the we, I actually tried doing it [00:14:00] with ai, Hey, take me to Chicago, to Santa Monica Pier.

And average maybe 300 miles a day. And it really, for instance, one of the first things it did was, here’s all the places to eat and stay. A lot of that stuff doesn’t matter to us. We want to have a sampling of Route 66 diners, but we don’t want anything fancy and even where we wanna stay, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy.

So we had to really work back and forth with the ai and then I discovered this, there’s some AI lay law or something like that, that you can give it three queries and keep trying to try to refine your search, if you will. Your question, and it says, Nope, now you gotta pay.

It’s I guess I’ll go find another one because I’m not working with someone that I had three chances and now you, you put the hook in, so it we’ll see what we do with that one. I think it’s gonna be another one where we just have a huge spreadsheet and we’re gonna make a point of staying in small towns and look for all the cool odd car henges nearby.

Just wing it, have a place to stay each night, but otherwise tole along in anything that captures our [00:15:00] fancy and want to be, have done enough research beforehand that we don’t go a hundred miles down the road and then read, oh, we missed the the artesian, that’s the best one in Kansas.

Or something like that, so we’ll see.

Alan: Yeah. And that’s a good example of using ai, but you have to really work the prompt. You can’t just give it a prompt of saying, Hey, I want to drive to California. Give a route with a lot of cool things to see, because it won’t necessarily do what you’re thinking by saying that it’ll take you down to Florida ’cause it’s got something cool down there.

Then it’ll take you to Alabama and then back up to pa.

Stephen: That, this is a very interesting example to do a direct comparison because I really have gotten to be a pretty good trip planner. I really do discover these things. My, my how I look for things and find happy accidents. It’s like it 25, maybe 50 years worth of how to do that kind of research and when it doesn’t, even from my queries, it doesn’t learn to be like me.

[00:16:00] It has all of the other world’s queries that are how it learns to predict what people might ask for. And it really might be that what people are always looking for is, I don’t know, to eat nicer. Even though the first thing about seeing Route 66, doesn’t that shout diner to you? And you would think that the first thing it would do is tune itself down from, you’re not gonna go to a gastronomic pub along Route 66, you’re gonna go for a burger.

Alan: And that’s, right there. The thing with the ais, most of them you can tell it the persona of person you want it to be and talk about. And that helps filter and limit, if you say, we’re really rich and we don’t wanna make a lot of stops, that type of thing, you’ll get different stuff than if you say, we wanna be casual, laid back, enjoy the Sunday drive, feel and visit the old times.

So we feel like we’re back in the, you give it that parameters for the persona and it will change the results and give you different results from

Stephen: I, yeah, I did try that a little bit. Like I was [00:17:00] putting in, I’m, we’re very touristy and, whatever that word might mean to it and that kind of stuff. So I tried to imbue it with my parameters, my considerations, the me part of it so that it would think like me, not just everybody else in the world, because that is something that I’ve discovered again and again.

My taste is not like everybody else’s, and it’s not right or wrong. It just is different. And so I, in only three tries, I didn’t succeed. If I find one and this was a specific trip planning thing, I probably need to pop out to just general ai chat GPT and keep working it until I get interesting results.

And even then we’ll see. You know what I mean? I don’t want it to be, now that you’ve got the trip land, that they’re happy to do the, picking a place to stay for us, because even that is something like, you look at, here’s a little town and how far off the road might it be and is it like a modern thing?

If you will, when we’re doing Route 66 and it’s very much a nostalgia trip, I don’t know that I wanna stay in a very modern place. I wanna stay in the older motel when they first came up with that term. ’cause [00:18:00] because, the Eisenhower Expressway system made that people were taking road trips and motels instead of hotels.

Alan: Sam and Dean Motel, that’s what we always

Stephen: exactly like that,

Alan: and the other thing with the AI now is it remembers better and it works off the older information. You don’t have to constantly remind it of stuff so much. And now chat, GPT has projects and I think the others have similar, you make a project with multiple chats within that and they reference each other because I will be asking about something in a project and about marketing or something, and it will come back with answers based on cryptids, based on fantasy, kids fantasy and stuff because it knows all my other questions have been about writing kids fantasy books and it already knows that.

So it’s come a long way in two, three years.

Stephen: I haven’t worked with anyone in particular enough. I’ve always been just dipping a toe and experimenting that it hasn’t really got to know me and maybe and I don’t turn it off. In other words, I do want it to get to know me so that it is more, more [00:19:00] personalized to me.

And having said that, apple does, they’ve had AI working on their phones for a long time without. Bally hooing it, but like very much how they do things is in line with what I’ve already done. And that if you really, if there’s a certain kind of thing that you reject, it stops suggesting that to you.

And if you like them more, then it starts suggesting more like that. So we’re gonna be in Chicago for Halloween, and we’re gonna go to the second city on Sunday night. And then I’m like, hey, how at a restaurant nearby? And it like, suspiciously goes there’s pizza. You know what I mean?

So I’m able to do that, but it’s very fun that it knows, I’m not looking for LA say that I’m looking for a nice place that Colleen and I in casual clothes can go to this thing. You know what I mean?

Alan: So what else we got on the list? Oh, Malcolm Gladwell you mentioned. I was gonna say he one of the authors that has a masterclass on ma masterclass com.

Stephen: I, from how I heard him speak last night, I’d be very interested in that because he was a really good combination of no glib [00:20:00] answers. Didn’t sound like it was all I’ve been answered this question and now I have a pre-programmed response. He really seemed thoughtful but also not pedantic and too long, he was playful with the interviewer and they got a very good interviewer.

A guy that’s like from Case Western University, very knowledgeable engineer. And so I really I, some people you get to know him and you like him more or less, and I like him more ’cause he really seemed like he has a lot of information at his fingertips, but he’s aware of the limits of information and how much he has learned, but also has to learn.

And so just a fascinating guy. And long ago I discovered him, like many people did with the tipping point. And his latest book is called The Revenge of the Tipping Point. And what that’s about is, he reread a book that he wrote 25, I think it’s 25 years ago, and was like. I have changed as an author how I write and what I write about and what interests me.

You don’t put your foot in the same river twice, you know what I mean? So he wrote this to talk about some of those big ideas. And as you might, if you note the book, it’s an early book about [00:21:00] mimetics. It’s about how certain factors combine to make ideas go through society like a virus.

And that it starts with a couple super spreaders or influential people. And the more they talk about it, and the more that the idea has stickiness and the more that the environment is ripe for that to spread. So you you don’t stand on a street corner on a box, you go on a podcast and talk about, and then you have, 10,000 readers and stuff like that.

Millions, millions of people. And so that, and he didn’t. We didn’t stay and revisit or really talk deeply about any of the books, but he was also good about a question was asked, Hey, go through your eight books and give like a one word description of that. And he goes, that’s not what the books are about.

And it’s like a stunt, but it’s insulting. There isn’t one word that describes something that I put a year of my life into. Would you ask anybody else to do that? You know what I mean? So he gave little descriptions of each of the things and a lot of who he was and why he [00:22:00] wrote it and what it turned out to cover and stuff like that.

But even talked about this one book he wrote because he was curious about could he do an intellectual work that kind of referenced the Bible because for so many people, Bible references are very interesting and powerful and they know it. And so if you hook interesting ideas onto that you can have it not be, this is a book frozen in time from 2000 years ago, but here’s the modern.

Analogs to that. So fascinating. You know what I mean? It’s cool to have people not I might be unfortunately a little too dismissive of such things. I think it’s a work of fiction and people take it too seriously, but it such a cultural reference point. It’s got real wisdom in it.

It’s got great characters, people to be admired or to be reviled. And so I should be able to talk about that, not in a way that I’m immediately a little mocking of it, but that it really is. I get it. But you don’t only have that from 2000 years ago. Here’s, like I said, the [00:23:00] modern equivalent of it, if you will.

Here’s how the world has learned to take that good bit of wisdom about how to be in a family and what it is to be good to, to be a moral person. And that boy, the world has had a lot of chances to try that. And where do we succeed and where did we fail and what can we learn that it’s not just the literal word of the Bible, but all of what we now know.

So it. I really liked him and one of the, this is you got a copy of the latest book along with your ticket. I can’t wait to read it. You know what I mean? I’m like really re enthused. Some people I realize he’s got eight books out, but I think I’ve read five. How did I miss one? I really have always thought that he’s a bright guy and that I admire him and stuff like that.

And yet, you know how it is, life gets messy and you find yourself reading the latest John Sanford book instead of the latest intellectual treaties. You know what I mean?

Alan: I haven’t listened to his masterclass. I listened to RL Stein and Baldacci’s on there, and Joyce Carroll Oates is on there, and there’s just so many good ones. But, masterclass is [00:24:00] it’s a little expensive but there’s a lot on there. They have everything from learning to play instruments, to cooking, to the writing and stuff.

They have Scorsese with scripts screenwriting and stuff.

Stephen: I just don’t, you want to hear what’s in those guys’ heads, those gal, there’s so much and it is, that’s always the classic of it might be a little bit expensive, but it’s value not cost. And if you get a hundred great ideas out of something to cost a couple hundred bucks, wow.

An idea per a dollar, that sounds great.

Alan: Like David Lynch is on there and it’s I never plan on making a movie in the style of David Lynch, but talk about, just wanna listen to the guy talk about his

Stephen: What’s going on in his head while he’s doing these things. Exactly. And so I, another thing that I haven’t looked into enough, but there, I’m sure that if I looked down the list it’d be like, there’s half a dozen people here without a doubt that I wanna do. And then where do I put that into my life time-wise and money-wise to make sure I get through it, mean So, and in fact, podcasts in general, I really am not a big podcast [00:25:00] listener ’cause it’s the glut, there’s so many out there. I started off doing it when it was way back. Who’s the MTV dj? That was one of the earliest podcasters. And because it was such a novelty and he was an interesting speaker, I really listened to him a lot early on. And same with Bill Burr, and same with, I could start naming some of things and then just, it was.

All the things I’m doing with my, let’s see, 24 times seven, a hundred and sixty eight hours am I really gonna dedicate 16 10% of that to podcasts? That’s a little bit of why I stopped playing online Scrabble and stop all kinds of things that just, I don’t think my proportion is good there, and honestly, I should do that all the time when I drop into my civilization game. ’cause I find myself going into flow and playing it for four hours. Boy, I don’t think I would’ve made that choice if I knew it was gonna take four hours. So I gotta set a timer or I gotta know that this is an addictive thing.

So you walk on the other side of the street, not where the bars are,

Alan: with the ho October here [00:26:00] Xbox had a bunch of sales on games and stuff, which is super dangerous. And so I’ve had and played most of the resident evil games throughout the time when they’ve been coming out. Most of them in the nineties and early two thousands when they came out.

But I don’t have those systems and, stuff anymore, whatever. Now Xbox has pretty much all the Resonate evils, even ones on Dreamcast and the ones on the three DX and stuff like that. They’re on sale.

Stephen: they redid graphics so that they’re all for the modern systems now. Pretty cool.

Alan: some of them just are, on there. And they play horribly and look the same, but they were like three to $5 and I only needed a couple of them.

So I’m like, no, look at this. I guess I’m getting some resident evil games. So I’ve been replaying and it, man, you can tell a difference between game making in 2025 and game making in 1995. The first resident evil is a puzzle game with some [00:27:00] zombie horror elements, essentially, but the puzzles aren’t. Super elaborate.

Most of the puzzles are like there’s a sword on the door handle. Okay. I have to find the key with a sword. So then it’s like wandering this huge mansion and okay, I need to get into that room, but I have to move this and this is blocking it, so I just gotta go flip, hit this switch to move this thing so I can move that, get in now I got the key.

Whoa. It’s for the shield. Now I can open the shield door, and that gives me

Stephen: notes on the side because you have to keep track of what are the things that each of these things is. And I got, there’s a big spreadsheet of project management to do this, you have to do this and this first anyway. I

Alan: so it, it’s, the puzzles aren’t difficult. It’s more you spend more time walking back and forth between the two sides of this mansion, because that’s how they extended the game back then,

Stephen: remember mist and ribbon and the island that was so much that I really didn’t get as much out of it as I wanted to because though it was a beautiful game, [00:28:00] it sure felt wow I’m just having to search and having to walk all the time. The intermittent payoffs that are a good design to make an addictive game.

There’s none of very little of that here. And maybe you get the big haha when you finally get something to work, but it wasn’t enough to keep me playing, so I don’t think,

Alan: Same here with Mist.

Stephen: Yeah. So anyway, that I had a, I did Terry PRTs books came out as a humble bundle, like all of it, and I bought

Alan: it’s Cobo ebook

Stephen: Okay, there you go. And I’m like, now I can read the series and in order and all kinda stuff and I’ve not done it. Now I have ’em that I could sit down on my computer screen or on my iPad or whatever like that and instead, I have my habits, right? I lay down in bed for the last hour with my paper back in hand.

It’s the perfect form factor. There’s no flicker. It’s just what I want. And staying at the screen for an extra hour before going to bed, like I just, I don’t do it as often as I could, even though I got 50 books waiting for me or whatever else it might be. And [00:29:00] books I really love and want to read, but that’s not the factor that’s making me do it or not do it.

I subscribe to Comicology and they have not all the comic books ever, but they have, a good aort of new and old and stuff like that. And I find that every time that I dive into something, I, I enjoy them. And then there’s a little bit of inventory management problem because for no reason they have a 50 limit.

And as much as that 50 should be enough. Not if you’re trying to do the entire, I don’t know, Avengers versus Defenders series or whatever. They’ve collected ’em into individual issues or into compilations. And I end up doing too much inventory management and too much of I’m done, not because I’m not enjoying the story, but because my eyes are done when you’re reading handwritten, typography like they have in comic books.

It’s just a little bit too shimmery and eye trading and I wear out, I wear down humble, I got great monitors, I got great high resolution stuff, and not good enough as a solid thing on a book page.[00:30:00]

Alan: Unlike the Kindle eBooks, the comics, you can’t adjust. They don’t flow and stuff. They’re set reading a.

Stephen: Exactly that. I, and I, it’s funny, I don’t want to give into age and say I have to blow everything up ’cause I don’t, but I just noticed that just seems to be, maybe I’m not sure how I have the ambient light in my room set so that it would be less eye strain. But there’s something about it that I pay attention more than when you read, pardon me?

You don’t really read each word. You know how it is. They’ve discovered that people read in clumps and that, so I don’t seem to get eye strain from reading a whole bunch of text. So it’s not like an ebook that does it to me. Comic books are the thing maybe ’cause there’s color and you’re working both your rods and your cones and they feel a certain level of strain.

I’ll have to look if there’s a study that says, here’s how we’ve discovered that indeed. And even motion pictures, you don’t notice it because it’s like real life as you look around or as you look at it, it keeps moving. And then how your mind processes it is not having to [00:31:00] do the same kind of work as reading a STA image.

That is what leads for me to eye strain. So that particular set of combination and the fact that I love comic books is not enough to overcome. It. Isn’t that weird? But I also don’t want it to be like, what am I getting? My eyes are tearing. They’re a little bit hurting. I don’t want that to be associated with comic books.

’cause after a while in your mind you’re gonna say, comic books hurt. Ooh, I don’t want that.

So

Alan: Yeah. All right. So what else We got that Gladwell, we.

Stephen: I’ll say this and maybe I always try to do, is if you’re looking, if you have any kind of friend who really likes intellectual stuff, you can’t go wrong. It’s six out of his eight books. You want to get the tipping point. You want to get blink, you want to get outliers. Every one of his books had really good meat to it.

And it’ll spark conversations. And so and I mentioned I really like Stephen Pinker. I really like AJ Jacobs, who is the George Plimpton of today. He gets an idea and he like lives that idea for a year and is witty [00:32:00] enough, but thoughtful enough to give you good insights into what he has a one to call, like the year of living biblically, where he really tried to follow all the tenets of the Bible and you find out, wow, if you can’t mix fabric and clothing, there’s nothing you can wear, i, I like I said, certain authors, I just, not only fiction authors where you kinda like their style. There are certain guys that just seem to be so smart, so intellectual that you want to hear what they have to say. Mary Roach. Who has a whole bunch of single word books like Stiff, which is all about how we deal with death and what death is and stuff like that.

And and I’ve, Colleen really likes those too. So that’s one of those, like every year we look for is the new Christopher Moore book out. ’cause one of the other of us will get it for Christmas and yes, at least once, we’ve both gotten it for the other. Oops. But also Peter Roach,

Alan: she really could describe her books in one word.

Stephen: I Exactly, yeah. Also Bill Bryson, a guy who did great travel books and then broke out of that and started to like, like here’s, he has a, like one called the History of the World. And they’re [00:33:00] like, that’s a conceit. And yet he really did a. David Attenborough version of Here’s the world and here’s the significant events and places and whatever.

So it really feels balanced and that nothing important was left out, even though, how could you do that without a 10 encyclopedia set? You know what I mean? So I, there’s that. If you we talked about doing this, we’re coming into the holidays. Hey, everybody, buy some Bill Bryson for your smart friend, for your geeky friend.

Buy some Merry Roach.

Alan: So it took him a whole book. Billy Joel did that in three minutes and 50 seconds.

Stephen: And you know what, also you get I’m trying to think, isn’t there one go the fuck to sleep where it’s it’s a great book, like 30 pages, but it’s perfect for that frustration of the parent trying to get the child and go down.

Alan: right. Yeah, some you mentioned the eye strain in that. I put out my Halloween story for the year. I try and do a short story each year. I’m doing, I got two this year. I’ve got getting out, but [00:34:00] I’m, I put out the regular. Story. So you can get a PDF, you can get a ebook, whatever you like. And the great thing like, eBooks, you can adjust the size.

It’s great for people that have trouble reading, but some people still like to print it out or whatever. And the fonts still don’t work for people, like with dyslexia. So I put out versions for people with dyslexia and large print for people that want a print version, but need something more to read.

Stephen: That’s very considerate. Good for you. Very cool.

Alan: It’s because Colin he’s one he had trouble reading sometimes because of his eyes and still doesn’t read everything electronically. He does some, but he prefers it printed out, and my father could not read the small stuff. He had to have the large print, even though my father couldn’t read when he did try he needed large and, he had problems with his eyes.

So I know there’s kids out there, and even though I know people that are blind can use audio books I think if I was blind I’d still wanna read it, even if it’s braille and still [00:35:00] reading. So I’m looking into how to get my stuff translated into braille.

Stephen: Into braille. Fantastic. Into, okay. Oh yeah.

Alan: and I wanna get stuff translated in other languages.

’cause I’m getting audio books done of all of the stuff too. Plethora, however you like to enjoy it. There you go.

Stephen: Exactly. You know that’s, I love that. Good. That you’re doing it and it just, it’s such a good sign that you’re aware of. There are different conditions that people have, some limitations, some I don’t know if, when they have things that you can watch things at a certain pace.

I have people that voluntarily speed movies up like by 10%, 20%, because they really are like a fast watcher. They don’t mind it being that the voices are a little shrill in order to get through an hour movie in 40 minutes or whatever else it might be. You know what I mean? So everybody has a different, people have different things.

It’s not one size fits all. And being aware of that, that the world is big and that there’s all kinds of things, it makes you, it [00:36:00] does, it speaks very well to you. Saying, I want as many people as possible to read this. Why would I restrict it to, the only way to read it is this,

Alan: Yeah. I would hate to watch a horror movie sped up because a lot of times you need that buildup. You need the feel of it and

Stephen: There’s craft that goes into the pace. They’ve really done it to make it a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. So it, I I don’t know that it applies to everything. Maybe they want to go into dialogue heavy movies or battle heavy movies and they don’t mind speeding that up. And it might, I don’t think you can do this necessarily.

Can you speed it up and slow it down so that you fast forward through too much marching in one of the Lord of the Rings movies, but the good battle sequences you want to, you know what I mean? You pick instead of having to be only one way or the other,

Alan: I could definitely see it more for movies I’d seen once or twice already

Stephen: Exactly. Yeah.

Alan: Yeah, definitely with that. But still part of it’s enjoying it. It’s kinda like the, I don’t understand the people that will read a book, but they will like skip paragraphs and pages [00:37:00] like, oh, that just looks like description.

And they skip past it and it’s but that adds to the whole world, the whole feel and stuff, there are some that get long. I get that,

Stephen: I honestly, this is weird. Probably the guy that I’ve done that the most for is, I think I mentioned before, I like John Norman, even though he’s really on the alt with society because his Gore books are really good about, what it is to be a warrior to, to, and to have combat and so forth.

But it’s also the world where women are slaves and that’s terrible that there’s no there’s no defending that except I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of it, wade through it in order to get to the good sequences because he really writes those well clash of cultures and stuff like that.

So I did find myself often when he got into the description of here’s, what clothes they’re allowed to wear, slaves. It’s and I just, where’s the next? Is there a place that has three little asterisk that let me know it’s time to change the scene? You know what [00:38:00] I mean? So it just wasn’t as much of interest to me.

And he took a lot of time to talk about it. And so I cut sections out of some of his books and maybe out of, it’s funny, is it out of a sense of guilt? I don’t wanna have that in me, I know there’s movies that I always name this one, there’s movie called Requiem for a Dream, I think, where people are involved with drugs and they end up doing like terrible debasing things in order to get the drugs that they need.

And one of the characters is Jennifer Connolly plays this actress, and I just think she’s a sweetie and I don’t want to see her hurt. You know what I mean? I don’t want to see her degraded. And so I’ve never watched that movie. ’cause I know that about that. And it’s ah, I’ll do without,

Alan: Yeah.

Stephen: I just, and the other, and I was worried about watching Schindler’s List for a long time because I knew would put images in my head.

Of Nazi terrible stuff that I didn’t know I’d be able to ever get outta my head. And you really shouldn’t. You should be aware of the terrible stuff, especially now. You should be aware of that n terrible stuff. [00:39:00] But I resisted that for a long time, even though it was award-winning Steven Spielberg excellent movie.

It knew for me it was gonna have a big impact that I had to be ready for it.

Alan: And you say, and you say that, and we chuckle about, oh, the world today. I would not be surprised if at some point that movie would be banned or, trying to pull it down from all the streaming because it depicts the this, and we don’t wanna depict that. But like we’ve said before, it’s what happened, not, let’s not cover it up for our own nefarious means, but if it’s not for you or your family, then don’t watch it.

That doesn’t mean you choose that other people can’t watch it. You know that, that’s a sticky point, but it shouldn’t be.

Stephen: I agree. I mean that’s so much, that’s the big battle about freedom of speech is anybody can read whatever they want. You don’t get to tell other people what they wanna want. And there might be some things, as they always say, fire in a crowded theater that is so damaging that it’s automatically, that’s too far.

But there’s all kinds of people [00:40:00] that are continually pushing the envelope of what you can get away with. And it really is damaging society. And I don’t know that I have a solution except make sure that there’s enough free speech from the opposite side. The good viewpoint represented so that you don’t.

Normalize it and get people numb to terrible things. And that’s so much what we see going on now with the control of certain segments of the mass media, that they’re absolutely propaganda machines. They’re not trying to present things truthfully or without bias at all. There’s continually agenda behind what they’re doing and a bad one.

You know what I mean? Oh it yeah I we’ll see, one of the things that we’re going into with the holidays is we will be home inside because it’s colder and stuff like that. And so Colleen and I are talking about what are we gonna watch? What’s the next artist, the artist that we wanna a director that we really like, or a particular movie series that we might wanna revisit?

Sometimes things you saw when you were young, just seeing with adult eyes, and it’s different. It’s differently funny, or differently, tragic or whatever. So it’s. It’s nice [00:41:00] to have those lists to work off of, the A FI, not just the A FI top hundred, but the top maybe comedies or the top thrillers or the, OR whatever.

Especially something that she and I can both watch. So it would be like the top comedies or the top historic dramas or something like that. We’ll find out. Maybe IAFI, that kind of thing.

Alan: Colin does that. He makes, he loves to make lists and he is been going through cartoons. He’s been going through the top 1000 movies and, doing stuff like that.

Stephen: In fact, that might be a way to go. I mean we watched the top a hundred and maybe really it’s like the top 123 because of the revisions, but going to the top thousand list is even a better filmic education. ’cause there’s so much good stuff out there that what didn’t make the list, the next a hundred beyond that top hundred are still fantastic.

And so it might be that you want to go. Let’s expand that to make it the top 200, 300. Then how far will we get before we can’t, okay. We died at number 6 87. You know what I mean? Stuff

Alan: alright, what else we got, ma’am?

Stephen: Yeah. Let’s see. What [00:42:00] was

Alan: got a list? What do you feel like.

Stephen: Let’s see. I will say, actually to spend more and more minutes here, we, by talking about the a FI aficionados thing a couple times, multiple people have started doing it, and one, a couple actually just inquired from me.

Birth of the Nation is on the list, and do we really wanna watch that? It really is, it’s about the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s about a terrible thing happening in the United States and that the United States was actually. That once is a very disheartening thing. You know what I mean?

That there was, to go back to the tipping point, the fertile ground that allowed that to be created and so many people join up. I don’t want to think of the United States that way, but it absolutely is true. So that’s what I said was, it’s worth doing it because then you’ll know. You’ll know what propaganda tech techniques were used.

It might be uncomfortable to watch how terrible people can be, who wants to see a lynching, no fucking healthy person. And yet the fact that was some people’s solution to a problem, it lets you know what [00:43:00] sick minds you’re dealing with if you get into that kind of terrible situation. So Colleen and I often say there’s hardly anything we, we don’t wanna know.

Our curiosity is high and we have that self-confidence that we’ll be able to take it into our scaffolding of what we think and. I don’t know that I self-censor that much, except in the ways I described that there’s a certain like belly level repugnant, I know that there’s things that like, actually that’s enough about that.

I just felt for, that was a very specific thing of people saying, am I actually, should I not watch this? Even though it’s kinda like we know that, let’s go to Mark Twain. We went to see Mark Twain tonight and now it’s not Hal Holbrooke, who’s the guy that kind of originated this and did it for decades now it’s Richard Thomas and he did a excerpt from Huckleberry Finn that sure used like the language of the time.

And wow, please don’t censor us. He said, nigger on stage in a way that you could feel the entire audience pucker up a little bit because that’s [00:44:00] just not done nowadays. Everyone, whoever listens to this, I’m not the guy that says that in. In any of the evil ways. I’m not angry in that way.

I’m not dismissive of entire cultures in that way, but of the time, mark Twain wrote it because that’s what the parlance that people use. And he, the particular scene is though that word is used, it’s about him Jim is his friend and he protects him, and he regards him as an equal and as a human being and all the things that are important to learn from that book so that anybody in a library that is censoring that book because of the use of that word, instead of what about the content?

What about what Twain wrote about? That’s why that book should be widely read. Because even though that word really might zing and really hurt, it’s important to know that even back then, people were aware bad things were going on and somebody has to speak out and write a persuasive enough book.

I dunno, uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet, Beecher Doe. There wasn’t as much awareness of what was going on in the South until that book came out. You know what I mean? That really [00:45:00] was a bellwether thing and. It sure helped people up north say this is terrible. We can’t have this thing happening.

Slavery and so I, I don’t want censorship, like we don’t want it to be revealed that we were bad people, but I also don’t want censorship that’s based on we’re so sensitive that we can’t cover it at all, because neither one of those is the full story. They’re not the truth. They’re not reality.

Alan: I don’t agree with going back to something like that and changing it or banning it because of what it was at the time. Take it for what it is and no, leave it. Now, if I wrote a modern story about a young boy going on a trip and used all those words and treated somebody that same way, that would be something that people could get upset about and ban and, ’cause it’s a modern book, modern telling, blah, blah, blah.

But something from 150, 60 years ago it’s history now. And, it’s kinda saying [00:46:00] I don’t agree that we started our revolution in in 76. ’cause even numbers are bad. We should change that to nine or 1775 and we’ll just learn it as a no, you don’t change that. It’s just what it is,

Stephen: just is what it’s, and you don’t like. You don’t quote from it. T he as a way of getting away with it. You like read the book. Read the book and you’ll get what was all going on. I will, this was an observation. I’ll say this, so even before the N word was used, he had a scene where he walks out on stage and he pulls out a cigar and gets ready to light it.

And really, from what I understand, twain smoke constantly. And so it was gonna be authentic to the character and he didn’t, because that’s so unacceptable in today’s society. I think you can do it as part of a performance, but you sure can’t do it in any public space. They stopped him from lighting up a cigar, but they allowed the use of the N word.

And so we are, we’re, what is society doing with what is really taboo? What is really harmful? I thought that was a very interesting telling thing. We know what’s really [00:47:00] harmful and it’s breathing in death, not hearing a bad word. You know what I mean?

Alan: You got things like in the movies where they give little warnings, Hey, there’s some graphic violence, there’s nudity, now you know what’s coming if you don’t like it. But they’ve gotten now where beginnings of books, and even more so than that, they’re like in this movie we depict this.

That doesn’t mean we agree with it, or it’s just we’re depicting a street gang. And that’s how they act. They put that stuff as a disclaimer because, and I’ve always said that, look, me and Colin went and saw Bike Riders from last year, and it had what’s his name that played Bain in it?

Tom Hardy was in it. And a couple other people recognized and it had some despicable type stuff. These bike riders or Sons of Anarchy too, is another one.

Stephen: Oh boy.

Alan: If I’m going to depict these guys, show ’em smoking, show ’em, drinking, show ’em with ladies and stuff like that because

Stephen: angry, they don’t say blue bells. They say language.

Alan: Oh, [00:48:00] fudge.

Leather clad biker on a Harley Oh, fudge.

Stephen: The heck.

Alan: yeah. I want. I’m not saying that whoever’s writing, because as writing it now I can write things that I’m not necessarily how I act or what I agree with, but that’s what the character does. And with what I got, most of it’s kids stuff, it, it doesn’t mean I am, I do what I’m writing my characters to do, but this is what the character does in this situation.

That’s how they are. And I always feel that’s more important to be a realistic like that, even in fantasy, as long as the character’s consistent and realistic. It’s funny, we talk about fantasy and sci-fi can get around sensors. If we show a scene of somebody getting mad and kicking a dog to death, that’s oh my gosh, ban that.

Stephen: You like kicking, all of a sudden it’s the author that, no, of course I don’t like kicking dogs.

Alan: but nobody has a problem with someone taking a sword and lopping the head off a [00:49:00] dragon. Because it’s fantasy, it’s not real. Okay. But the character is being violent toward animals. It’s like you are right. We pick and choose sometimes and different places are pick and choose differently,

Stephen: I hear you. In fact, hope you don’t mind. This wasn’t on the list that we talked about, but a quick segue. My latest, like I can’t stop watching them. Video thing is there’s a guy that sits on a stool with his guitar and sings near animals, like at the zoo or at

Alan: Yes.

Stephen: And the animals come up and they’re fascinated by the music.

They do, the birds do a little dance and the horses are all like sniffing the guitar. And so for just so gentle a rhino coming up and like putting its head on the fence and closing his eyes to the music, it’s just the sweetest thing in the world. The one that really struck me a lot was an O Capi comes up and like O capi are, they didn’t even know they existed or proved they existed until 1947.

They’re very shy and very secretive and they [00:50:00] live in the jungle and they got the perfect camouflage. But the thing is they’re still totally shy, and yet the OC Capi came up and put his little sout and sniffed the guy and there’s just such. Peace and to know that animals get music, that their savage breasts are soothed to divide the music, to quote Shakespeare, I believe.

And I, I just, they’re so heartening. I just love that this guy tried this and it worked. And then as he goes to, here’s the elephants, here’s the camels, here’s all different kinds of barnyard creatures. Lemurs come up and like start strumming the guitar with him. They put their hand on his, and they like, they want to do it too.

There was one with a maybe a howler monkey, but it was white, so I’m not sure. But he started singing along How beautiful, how, like I know that there’s, we’re, of course we’re learning now that there’s, it isn’t animals and man as separate things, that there’s a whole spectrum of which ones are intelligent, which ones feel emotions and which ones have emotions and stuff like that.

[00:51:00] And so everybody who sees that, who sees an elephant like putting his trunk out and gently. It’s just so much. Be kind to the animals, beware that the world is filled with a spectrum of things that have very human traits. Very like how, I don’t know, maybe like someone said they became a vegetarian after watching this and I’m like, I don’t know that I wanna eat anything that has love, that has emotions and stuff like that.

So it’s, they’re so sweet. And of course the algorithm. After you watch one, then it feeds you more, and it’s whoa. Here’s one with zebras. Or, i’m like I’m, and he sings in both English and French. And so I’m like, I guess I’m the sucker now that’s gonna watch every one of these videos, but I don’t feel like a sucker.

I feel like I’ve discovered a wonderful treasure trove and every door open, there’s more treasure in the next room. You know what I mean? It’s just Hey [00:52:00] everybody, I don’t remember the guy’s name. What a fool I’m for. Not being able to recommend, but if you like, I’m sure, type into YouTube or somewhere guitar and guitarists singing to the animals, boop, many will pop up and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Alan: The one I’ve had recently, I’ve watched a few of, and now I see a lot of them, it’s this young guy with his young son still in diapers, but they eat different foods. He gets like Kentucky Fried Chicken or something, or they’re at a restaurant and then, and he talks a little kid, and he’s so much funny with them that he’s okay what’s our pose?

And, and this little, and he, and they get this steak at this restaurant. And the little kid, like maybe a year and a half, two years old, little kid’s looking over and he leans over, grabs the whole steak and goes, and the dude’s okay.

Stephen: Just slows you down, get right.

Alan: Yeah, that’s pretty funny.

They had chicken and the kid was dipping the bread and he’s no. That’s for the like, okay. That good? Okay.

Stephen: Honestly, I like [00:53:00] art. Linkletter used to have the whole out of the mouths of babes type thing that sometimes when you don’t have all of what society has told you is right and wrong and you try everything, it’s like maybe that’s a whole new discovery. You know what I mean? Maybe that song does go on, that other thing.

Maybe that’s I, and especially to see. Kids that they’re such amazing sponges. They absorb everything. They absorb the pose. They, you can hear them. The first words are like what they hear or when they try new things, the first time you hear a little tiny kid, my niece like said the word pendulum way too young to have known that word.

And yet how cool to see that they’re that absorbing everything. They’re that smart and she used it appropriately. You know what I mean? So it’s I, first time I played games with my nephew of this pair and like when they first time you play game with them and it’s not a naive candy land type game, but it’s a strategy game and you see him like lay a trap and it’s oh, you’re so smart.

I love that you’re smart, thank God. Because some people are just so blunt and [00:54:00] he you could and especially, and this is an, I dunno if I can say, like he did it and then he looks up at you like that. Where he’s like singing if you get it.

Alan: give it away. Yeah.

Stephen: Oh man, it, but I was just so fucking proud.

Yeah,

Alan: Yeah. I remember playing cards with Colin, various card games and designed for younger kids and how often he would kick my butt and I’m like, dude, you’re five years old. Stop. But.

Stephen: We, the family, our hearts was always our family game. And to see that when the kids catch on, that if they watch what’s being played and they have an idea of what’s safe to play and the suit is all gone or whatever like that. And another one of those times was where you track spades and you realize that, you’ve got the queen.

Somebody else has the ace or the king and they have to play it. It’s such a triumph to see them play that car, which is usually a landmine. Totally dangerous. And yet they know what the result is gonna be. And that that’s how you learn is because you got that big [00:55:00] feedback, that big payoff of, I did a thing very uncharacteristic, but I knew it was exactly what I could do at the right time.

So I, I love those little revelations. That’s just such a cool thing to see people pick up on it, very cool.

Alan: Yep. Alright. Anything else before we get going?

Stephen: Let’s see. I’m trying to think what else I had put on the list.

Alan: Proxy band,

Stephen: we another thing I’ll that again, I’m not sure this is on the list, but these are things that are coming to me. I’ve had friends and family go through operations lately that I thought used to be like, what’s the hospital room number?

So I can send you something ’cause you’re gonna be there for a week and now it’s outpatient surgery. Going in to get a hip replacement. Like you’re home that day instead of they monitor you and they make sure you got your walker. And he has those things. But I think some part of this is like hospitals are dangerous places.

That’s where you get your mers and your sars and all those other, like floating around evil diseases that they haven’t found antibiotics to fully take care of ’em yet and they, and [00:56:00] whatever, maybe the expense, maybe it’s only a monetary concern, not a hippocratic concern, but to have it be, and that really does seem also once you get back into your wonderful home environment, you do heal better.

You’re not in this foreign machines beeping environment. And so hats off to people going through some really serious stuff, but between. Laparoscopic surgery and getting ’em out of the hospital and all the other things that, like medicine continues to march on. And Colleen and I say this all the time, the best way to get old is just to stay alive because they keep coming up with the next cure.

So when I, that should have been like the lead story they have they’re finding out that the mRNA vaccines they designed against COVID are now having other effects that they might actually be cancer preventative. And like a lot of times you’ll find out, oh, there’s a side effect and now we gotta worry about if you have a particular thing, you might get taste sacs or something terrible.

But to find out that they might actually be more useful than we thought. And that there’s another, there’s a [00:57:00] whole company, and I really should know this ’cause I wanna invest they’re looking at, there’s already a pharmacopia as they say of say 10,000 different drugs. And they’re saying if we go and look at this drug and what if it could also be good against.

Brain bleeds. What if it could also be good again? And they’re experimenting now and they’re finding out that any number of these drugs might have multiple beneficial effects. And so the big, inspiration, perhaps breakthrough was things that were designed for anti diabetes, that one of them, things they did was really help you lose weight.

It sure has worked for me. My manjaro, by the way, I’m at my lowest weight in the last 25 years. I just ducked under 250 pounds of a 2 48 0.8. Wow. You look at this jawline. Look at this. Amazing. So look at this belly I got notches in the belt because I am, my pants fall out. Anyway, it’s very cool that people are taking that and saying, it isn’t only having to keep experimenting or go to the jungle and try to find the miracle things the natives have had, but we’re gonna find a way to distill it that they’re actually [00:58:00] looking at, we already did these things for specific reasons.

And besides that thing of now that we can do computer simulations, that’s how mRNA stuff is developed. Usually it’s not. Try 10,000 different things in egg yolks and see which ones worked. And it takes this long. You can run simulations that say, this really does seem to work against the particular COVID, virus or this bacteria or this, and so are they gonna have those pills?

Are like we thought it was only good for gonorrhea, but now we’re finding out that it’s good for all these things. So I, and I guess my own personal thing is, when I had my shingles, how you get rid of that because it’s a related thing. The Zoro astro herpes is a related thing to other kinds of herpes.

And so they like give you what’s generically called Valtrex. And it used to be like, man, I don’t know that I wanna go and pick that up. They’re gonna think I have herpes. And yet it’s, if they found out that, of course it’s good for other things. And it’s if this is going to get rid of this spike in my head from the pain that I’m feeling, I will happily take Valtrex, [00:59:00] I got and maybe we’re gonna find out that some things are like Yeah, the old thing that we used to do it like, the classic, really classic example of botulism, you get the can and that’s terrible poison. But then they realize, it’s all about the dose, not just the absence or presence of things.

And so as they do botin things that smooth wrinkles and are now face treatments and stuff. And whoever was first bold enough to say, trust me on this, it used to be you would just die from this, but I think it’s gonna help you with your crow’s feet. It’s I don’t know that I care enough about my crow’s feet to like maybe die.

And yet they must have done those studies that said in the right dose. And so I love that medical science. Maybe that’s one of those places where. There’s always a little bit of uncertainty, a little bit of risk versus reward. And like in order to get rid of cancer, you might be willing to put up with a certain amount of stomach upset.

You know what I mean? And so when you see, when you, oftentimes they have the ads that like, here’s this thing for toenail fungus, but then all the possible side effects are like, [01:00:00] man, I don’t want a heart attack because I was getting to hip fungus. And so that whatever that balance is, it seems to be tipping towards, maybe it really is, that there’s good drugs that are almost like panaceas that cure a lot of different stuff and.

I’m very happy. I’m so sad. We didn’t do stem cell research. We cut it off at a certain point when we could have learned a lot more from it. But now when we’ve got mRNA and other computer assisted technology, and maybe one of the things they’ve talked about for ai, super AI gener generative AI is, it’s gonna help to do drug discovery and protein folding and all different kinds of things in a thousandth of the time that we used to.

And it really might be that we’re gonna, while we stay alive, keep on fighting the MRN disease that’s good against cancer. It’s particularly good against skin cancers, which would be the one that I had. Hey, I maybe now even if I ever terribly, I just had a check and I didn’t have any evidence of melanoma and I’m 20 years clear, so yay, I got to survive 20 extra years.

And I [01:01:00] sure have piled good stuff into there. But now I have a certain amount of. Not confidence, but hope that even if I ever had a recurrence, here take this pill, take this shot. And we’ve figured that one out and we cure it now. Boy would I love to have the security blanket. Would I love to have that in my back pocket?

Alan: who would’ve thought science works?

Stephen: Exactly.

Alan: That’s crazy.

Stephen: Give ’em a chance. Get rid of the crazy Kennedy. Science is not drinking bleach. Science is real science that, oh,

Alan: Ban. Relentless geek. They say science works. That’s crazy.

Stephen: exactly. Yeah. Is that the way where most rebels? Trust reality. Trust science. Shut off. Shut them off.

Alan: Red pill blue.

Stephen: Alright. Alright. Thanks again. We’ll see you in a week. We got Halloween coming up, so I’ll have a big report on all the cool costumes and all the Halloween, so

Alan: a really big show that I’ve been trying to get into for a couple [01:02:00] years this weekend. We’ll see how that goes. So it’ll be a fun talk

Stephen: Very cool. Take care, Steven. Lot of books, a lot of soap. Best of luck. Very cool. Okay.

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