episode 241

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00:00:48.51
Alan Baltis
one of the many d Dr. Peppers that I mentioned that I have fucked away in my garage fridge because I’m a wealthy, wealthy man.

00:00:52.54
Stephen Schneider
The blood

00:00:57.57
Stephen Schneider
plethora that you have.

00:01:02.06
Alan Baltis
Who knows what that is psychologically to just have like, either you know, go to Costco and you get more toilet paper than you’re going to use in months. And you’re like, that’s, that’s a really good thing. I will not run out of something as elementally important as toilet paper.

00:01:16.79
Stephen Schneider
and i read ah a study about that once or a report or something where it said If you, like okay, let’s say toilet paper. that’s ah I’m not going to use toilet paper. that could get I don’t want to discuss that. Let’s say the Dr. Pepper.

00:01:30.52
Stephen Schneider
You get Dr. Pepper. Now, you might get a 12-pack and drink one a day. And you might have been drinking one a day for months. Get a 12-pack, one a day. Stop after work Saturday. You know, whatever. Maybe you you get one every Saturday, you know, and you drink two a day. And then you get a new one Saturday. You know, whatever.

00:01:48.56
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:01:48.92
Stephen Schneider
But then you go to

00:01:49.75
Alan Baltis
But if you have a lot of it, you accelerate.

00:01:52.57
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Yeah, we we all do that with everything. yeah It’s the same with like line cutting. You know, if you’re near the front of the line, people are more gracious to let somebody cut. But if you’re near the back, somebody tries to cut, you you’ like beat the hell out of them to keep them away. You know, it’s just that psychology thing that we have.

00:02:11.83
Alan Baltis
You know, what someone mentioned when I mentioned it on on my Facebook feed was, oh, no, this is how the hoarding starts. And I’m like, you know, it’s kind of just the opposite of that. This is a ah consumable.

00:02:22.59
Alan Baltis
It will go away as I drink it up, and um I might get more. I’ll never get as much as this before because this was just such an opportunistic thing. But admittedly, I have a lot of stuff, and so it could be that I’m accused of being a hoarder. But this wasn’t the sign of it.

00:02:37.31
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?

00:02:37.56
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:02:37.79
Alan Baltis
it’s it’s it Oh, well. I…

00:02:39.64
Stephen Schneider
You know, there’s more and more people that just want to troll to argue or make people feel bad. I, you know, I’ve been noticing that.

00:02:45.87
Alan Baltis
That’s true. There’s all kinds of, like, I don’t know, I do my junior psychoanalysts all the time because some things really are like, why in the world would someone do that? And you kind of have to try to find an explanation just to think the world is not all gone mad, that you’re not, you know, the lo that all the lunatics are all around you. And yet some people are so, maybe like Dunning-Kruger, like we’ve talked about, they’re incompetent and they’re incompetent. in knowing how incompetent they are. So the supposed insight they get psychologically is like, wow, that matches none of the available facts that you just said led you to that conclusion.

00:03:21.85
Alan Baltis
what Where’s the stutter? where’s the How did you get to that? from And of course, when you ask that, like how did you come to that?

00:03:26.04
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:03:30.40
Alan Baltis
Often it’s taken as quite the attack because it’s not, can’t you see the the brilliance of my insight? It’s more like, Boy, in a Socratic dialogue, you would have had like every no, not every yes leading up to this point.

00:03:43.80
Alan Baltis
Your conclusion doesn’t hold.

00:03:45.95
Stephen Schneider
And even better are the, oh, I won’t drink Diet Dr. Pepper anymore because I drank one in July and then I got in a car wreck. And the last time I had Diet Dr. Pepper, I broke my foot.

00:03:57.71
Stephen Schneider
So I’m not drinking that.

00:03:58.100
Alan Baltis
And there is that. Kaleen and I laugh about that. There are certain places while we’re driving along that Kaleen will always slow down because at one point she like got a warning ticket or something like that. And somehow forever after, that is the place where there’s many cops just waiting to catch her again. And like you can kind of look at the current scene and say, there is not a policeman around anywhere in sight. And yet,

00:04:23.42
Alan Baltis
and it’s kind of i don’t mean to compare her to a dog but i know that Fenris one time we would go walking and he found like no lie a dead frog and wolfed it down before i could get it out of his mouth every time we went for a walk when we got close to that and whatever he saw about scenery clicked in his brain he made a beeline for that place to see more dead frogs i love that frog and and it was one time out of a thousand walks and yet his mind is now set to always go

00:04:52.73
Stephen Schneider
My father would sit at the end of the counter eating and watching TV. Well, because he had the Bell’s palsy and and other things, sometimes he wouldn’t always get all the, and he dropped a lot of food on the ground.

00:04:59.22
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:05:06.55
Stephen Schneider
Well, the dog discovered that, and the dog would literally stand under his chair, staring at the ground, waiting for manna from heaven to appear.

00:05:14.84
Alan Baltis
That to happen again. Exactly.

00:05:16.38
Stephen Schneider
And now, if anybody is sitting at the counter, the dog comes in sitting there just waiting for manna from heaven. That’s what we call it.

00:05:23.04
Alan Baltis
It’s funny.

00:05:23.66
Stephen Schneider
You know, it’s…

00:05:23.83
Alan Baltis
yeah They only got four brain cells and three of them are like food, food, food, food. food And so wherever there’s a possibility, that’s hilarious.

00:05:27.77
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:05:31.67
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. I don’t… But then we discovered that… Because we did, you know, dogs can have or not have certain things. You got to be careful a little bit. And we would like tell my dad, we don’t need to be feeding the dog all this food because we have dog food.

00:05:48.05
Stephen Schneider
You’re going to make them fat, blah, blah, you know, etc. So he would wait until nobody’s watching.

00:05:50.58
Alan Baltis
That’s right.

00:05:52.66
Stephen Schneider
And then he’d scrape some off his plate onto the floor.

00:05:55.74
Alan Baltis
Oh my God. he’s ah You know, it’s everywhere. i can’t, I have spoken up, you know, it’s kind of funny. I’m not a nag in public, but one of the ways in which I speak up often is Colleen and I love going to zoos.

00:06:08.55
Alan Baltis
We’ve been to dozens of them and they’ll have big signs saying, please do not feed the animals. They’re on a controlled diet. and Like when they’re in the veldt, they don’t get good and plenty. you You got to stop doing that.

00:06:19.63
Alan Baltis
And yet people will be right next to the sign. Obviously they didn’t read it or if they read it, they didn’t care.

00:06:24.28
Stephen Schneider
They don’t care.

00:06:24.51
Alan Baltis
And when they do that, I will speak up and say, like, if you love animals, you wouldn’t do that. You’re not helping them.

00:06:31.32
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:06:31.47
Alan Baltis
You’re not, et cetera, et cetera. So I just, that’s kind of maddening that people would think the sign is up to somehow prevent the animal from having any fun as compared to, that’s not what a penguin eats.

00:06:41.64
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:06:44.15
Stephen Schneider
i’ve I’ve told that to people.

00:06:44.35
Alan Baltis
It’s not what a lion eats.

00:06:46.12
Stephen Schneider
I’ve told that to people camping. Oh, there’s deer. Let’s go feed them. I’m like, yeah, you probably shouldn’t do that. Well, it’s, you know, we want to take care them. if the deer are alive, they’re getting food. You know what mean?

00:06:56.27
Stephen Schneider
they’re They’re okay.

00:06:56.52
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:06:57.07
Stephen Schneider
The problem is you train them to come to the campgrounds to get food from people and then someone’s go hit them with a trailer or people who are not go camp in the winter and the deer are come say, well, where’s my food?

00:07:09.57
Stephen Schneider
And then they’ll die of starvation. You’re not helping the animals.

00:07:11.90
Alan Baltis
exactly

00:07:13.09
Stephen Schneider
You’re an idiot. You know and how many times hear,

00:07:14.01
Alan Baltis
Every national parks book, every hiking book will say that, you know, you you might lose some food to a bear because you go out hiking in the deep woods and you’ll try to hang it in a tree and stuff like that. But it’s like that because every other person before them said, oh, bears love s’mores. You know what i mean? And and if anything anything, bears a horrible example.

00:07:35.47
Alan Baltis
They’re not only like coming to get food, they’re kind of dangerous in terms of if you have food and you don’t give it to them, then you’re in the way.

00:07:41.66
Stephen Schneider
Oh, but my favorite one is, oh, look at the cute two-ton bison.

00:07:42.44
Alan Baltis
no

00:07:46.61
Stephen Schneider
Let me get a selfie with it. Let me feed it a hot dog. you know, gourd to death. I mean, yeah you know, this is the headline.

00:07:54.55
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:07:54.68
Stephen Schneider
Wait, wait, off track.

00:07:54.85
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:07:55.88
Stephen Schneider
Before I forget, I got a new fun mental game I read that I’m like, oh, my gosh, this is too much fun, and it’s making me laugh hysterically. So take any story of the Bible, you know, the like take the headline of what the story is and turn it into a Florida man news story.

00:08:15.26
Alan Baltis
I shared exactly that same thing because you I might’ve been the guy exactly.

00:08:16.85
Stephen Schneider
Oh, is that you the one that shared it? okay.

00:08:19.84
Alan Baltis
Because the first time I read it, that even like the examples they had were just so perfect and pithy about, they’re they’re like, i don’t know,

00:08:19.87
Stephen Schneider
Okay.

00:08:29.60
Alan Baltis
everyone that claims the Bible is the literal truth of God, ah guess that they’re they are they’re attesting to their faith, but they’re not attesting to reality because, and they started naming all the things.

00:08:40.26
Alan Baltis
This guy’s, I mentioned, you know, 969 years old, and that’s the only thing that the Bible says about him. Not, what did he accomplish in centuries of life? did Did he have a hundred children?

00:08:50.96
Alan Baltis
did he Did he build empires? Nope, just that was his one thing. He just happened to be that old you know what i mean so

00:08:57.79
Stephen Schneider
I love that it’s literal until it doesn’t work for them. And then it’s like, well, this is just as a story.

00:09:04.84
Alan Baltis
It’s allegory. It’s a story.

00:09:06.04
Stephen Schneider
I love throwing Adam though.

00:09:06.33
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:09:07.92
Stephen Schneider
It’s like, so we’re all descended from Adam and Eve, right? Yep. And Adam and Eve had sons. Hello.

00:09:16.01
Alan Baltis
Three sons.

00:09:16.06
Stephen Schneider
and and they’re like, well, yeah.

00:09:16.85
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:09:17.66
Stephen Schneider
And then we’re all descended from them. I’m like, okay, so you’re okay with incest or, or, or those sons were like not having a good life.

00:09:19.90
Alan Baltis
etc

00:09:26.07
Alan Baltis
Exactly. And I think, isn’t it supposed to be that they found people from like the land of Nod or something like that? You know what mean? Like conveniently they were indeed able to like go find women that they could have children with and get married, but that, oh,

00:09:37.23
Stephen Schneider
Well, you know, i I guess if they, you know, went down the rabbit hole into Wonderland or if they went into the closet to go to Narnia, I guess it was okay. that You know, I love all those mythologies.

00:09:48.43
Alan Baltis
The Florida man thing is what’s funny is because there’s so many things that are already like, wow, that’s an amazingly stupid thing for someone to do. And then there it is, the Bible, very believably as the, oh, well, I just.

00:10:00.19
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. I told Colin that last night. and We were giggling over like several stories. yeah They’re just all funny when you put

00:10:07.55
Alan Baltis
Exactly. Man changes life because Bernie Bush talked to him, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

00:10:14.46
Stephen Schneider
it It fits so well. And now i now I just have one more weapon to irritate the Bible thumpers that want to quote stuff because they hardly ever know the act they they know the quotes they read. and it’s like, well, you know, the whole quote is this.

00:10:28.63
Stephen Schneider
And they look at you like blank stare. Could you actually read the damn Bible that you’re you’re talking about instead of just the the Facebook quotes that you see?

00:10:37.53
Alan Baltis
it is you know it’s kind of it is the Christmas season, and so I try not to have this be the season that I’m like weird and confrontational, but because it brings out more something of the Bible sometimes, I’m happy to volunteer.

00:10:50.04
Alan Baltis
you know i really have read it, and I think i my my reading retention is but good, probably better than yours for what you’ve quoted so far. And in fact, and and honestly, if there’s real…

00:10:59.11
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.

00:11:01.18
Alan Baltis
Sometimes it’s arguments. Sometimes people get really testy really quickly. And it’s like, you know, I suspect I’m a better Christian than you are. I suspect that I’m better about the Beatitudes, the whole mercy, the whole love, the whole, you know what I mean?

00:11:14.63
Alan Baltis
Like whatever version of Christianity you have in you, it isn’t what the Bible says. You can’t wear the what would Jesus do bracelet because you never do what Jesus would do.

00:11:27.09
Alan Baltis
etc etc and that you know of course that’s i guess that’s the devil in me talking to a fool them and but like no i i just it’s the weirdest thing to be like i’m a pretty decent person i live a good life and and i’m sure that some of it is because you heard those things when you were growing up from the bible and you said well that makes sense you know that it should be things are fair things are but

00:11:27.99
Stephen Schneider
right

00:11:32.76
Stephen Schneider
It’s that shoulder, not the other shoulder.

00:11:49.79
Alan Baltis
But so much of what they seem to embrace are the wackiest things from the Old Testament that are a nice prohibition that they can wield like a club against somebody else. Instead of, and you I don’t know, we could go on about this forever, but there’s wonderful lists of the one you pick out is, you know, something about abomination.

00:12:01.02
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:12:07.25
Alan Baltis
And then right before and right after it is something about tattoos, and you’ve got one. And it’s about not having the wrong food, and you’re eating that. And it just is… Honestly, there’s such a lack of proportion for if you really believed like that.

00:12:16.37
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.

00:12:19.82
Alan Baltis
In fact, here to be geeky about it, there’s a wonderful book called The Year of Living Biblically. I think we’ve talked about Jacobs before, right?

00:12:26.49
Stephen Schneider
yeah yeah

00:12:27.66
Alan Baltis
i think it’s A.J. um That he does kind of like George Plimpton stuff in this next couple generations later. He takes a premise and lives it. So it’ The Year of Living Constitutionally or The Year of Living Biblically.

00:12:39.77
Alan Baltis
And when he really tries to to do that, to say there are prohibit prohibitions against getting your hair cut. Like, well, I guess only the Hasidic Jews or whoever does that, you know, maybe I think who is it the the Sikhs that, you know, have their hair and they wind it a turban. I don’t think that’s biblical, but you know what I mean? It’s kind of a religious-based thing.

00:12:58.53
Alan Baltis
I don’t see anybody else kowtowing to all the other things that are supposed to be the goods and bads and how you show your your love of God, your fealty to God, whatever else it might be.

00:13:09.85
Alan Baltis
Even just the Ten Commandments, they don’t even try to keep those. And that’s always so… You know what I mean? You know that false witness one? I’ve seen you lie like a fucking rug again and again. and it doesn’t occur to you that that’s what that’s all about is don’t be a liar.

00:13:25.81
Stephen Schneider
it’s It’s the pick and choose Bible.

00:13:27.83
Alan Baltis
Yeah, yeah. But anyway, Merry Christmas, because it’s coming up, and the spirit of the season is really wonderful.

00:13:30.78
Stephen Schneider
So we’re… Right.

00:13:35.30
Alan Baltis
There’s smiles on lots of people’s faces, and we we do the thing. we give We send out our cards. We give bigger tips. We get gifties for lots of people. That kind stuff. It’s now getting being the sixteenth So much of my things were like, last chance to send it to make sure the post office gets it through.

00:13:50.79
Alan Baltis
It’s like nine days to go, and they’re not sure it’s going to make it.

00:13:50.78
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:13:53.39
Alan Baltis
But I guess really, there’s such an incredible flood of gift giving and Amazon. like Any number of things that I would, that maybe you do this too, when you start shopping, sometimes it’s, well, one for them and one for me. You know, while you’re shopping, you’re finding, wouldn’t mind having this book and I’m not gonna get something that I think somebody else might get me, because you don’t want to double it, you don’t want to hurt their the joy of gift giving and so forth.

00:14:16.60
Alan Baltis
But having said that, there’s a couple of things Amazon has been offering for like a week now. Hey, you know, you can get it this right the next day. And out we’re an Amazon Prime member, so you get it for free.

00:14:26.75
Alan Baltis
But also, if you you do it, then we haven’t don’t have to deliver it until the 26th. We’ll give you $3 digital credit. It is worth like fake money, digital credit for Amazon Prime TV shows or something.

00:14:33.50
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Right.

00:14:39.01
Alan Baltis
to just remove some of the pressure of how much they’re expected to deliver in these next 10 days. It’s amazing. So i I did indeed like, well, I don’t need those postal books right now. I’ll be happy to have them arrive on 26th and it’ll be like a post-Christmas, you know, so the mailman will be like, well, I’m sorry, these are late. No, it was it was okay. It was calculated to be this way.

00:15:00.15
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. and And even then, sometimes I get there earlier. And there are times things that I say, ah oh, they’re going to be there in the 12th. And then suddenly it shows up on the 8th.

00:15:10.79
Stephen Schneider
And the opposite happens, too. It’s supposed to be there on the 8th. Oh, it’s delayed. Oh, it’s delayed. Oh, it’s delayed. So…

00:15:16.12
Alan Baltis
i I just had this happen for the first time. A couple of things got canceled. Like after I bought them, they were supposed to be an inventory and so forth. But apparently, and and they really were things that I’m pretty sure come from China. You know, so much of Amazon, Walmart, other big, big vendors. Well, the way they’ve been able to maintain such low prices because think goods coming out of China used to be very inexpensive. Whoops, tariffs.

00:15:38.11
Alan Baltis
And now it’s not only does it cost more, but can we even get it? And so I was like buying underwear. And the underwear got canceled because from that particular vendor, that brand, they were out and they weren’t getting any more for the foreseeable future. So that’s whatever confidence I once had about, you know, they wouldn’t lift it in inventory unless they really had projected how many people might want to buy it. Nope. it All that’s kind of, it’s not working out that way any anymore. There’s surprises to them just like there are to me.

00:16:08.41
Alan Baltis
And I know we’ve mentioned this before, but I just have to.

00:16:08.73
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:16:10.65
Alan Baltis
i used to buy a whole bunch of things used because the used book or CD market was relatively reasonable. And CD still, there’s only so much damage you can do, like maybe you can make it not play. But otherwise, the case, all that kind of stuff I’m getting so many books now. I never buy anything without being like new and very good.

00:16:27.26
Alan Baltis
And it arrives like someone threw it to their dog under the chair. to chew on for a while.

00:16:32.22
Stephen Schneider
right

00:16:32.33
Alan Baltis
And like no one and knowing that there is a ah fair, poor, you know that there’s there’s other gradations below this. No one would listen to this book and say, this is second from the top.

00:16:42.91
Alan Baltis
Because it’s not. The cover is creased and the spine is broken in multiple places where the person flexed it all the way back while they were reading it. So I’m turning them. I don’t want to have like if i have a series of 10 books i don’t want to have one stand out like wow did you get that like at the worst used bookstore in the world and you never found it so that’s why you had to buy the crappy copy i i just don’t want to put up it started during covid maybe this is the first time that i mentioned it the people they needed to have money coming in and they weren’t doing as well in their regular bookstore so everything seemed to drop down a grade you know i’m

00:16:59.77
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:17:16.83
Stephen Schneider
I think it’s like the drive-thru at McDonald’s. They figure once you get it, you’re not going mess with it. You don’t care, you know, or maybe they send out 10 them like that and nine people don’t say anything and just accept it.

00:17:32.35
Stephen Schneider
So they they’re willing to deal with one, you know, it’s that.

00:17:34.38
Alan Baltis
They’re playing the odds. It’s the pinpo defense.

00:17:35.42
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:17:36.38
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? that In an extrapolated way. so

00:17:40.28
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:17:40.99
Alan Baltis
So we we talked about maybe today’s theme could be what’s up for Christmas? Have you found any things that you’re like really pleased to get for other people? Anything you think yeah you’re speaking as the relentless geeks that we are, what’s the cool stuff for this year?

00:17:54.07
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. um So the one interesting thing is because Eli’s Jewish, so it doesn’t really celebrate Christmas, but for the last couple of years has, you know, joined our Christmas celebration.

00:18:05.41
Stephen Schneider
And I usually get something Jewish related. That’s kind of Christmas. So like Jewish Christmas tree ornaments, um you know, this year I got him a ah Santa hat, but it’s blue with on it and said, Oh, um and he takes it in stride and not a problem, but, you know i also wished him happy Hanukkah the other day.

00:18:12.93
Alan Baltis
OK.

00:18:18.62
Alan Baltis
That’s hilarious. OK.

00:18:26.15
Stephen Schneider
His birthday is on the 20th, so you know he’s got that right in the middle of Hanukkah and Christmas this year. um

00:18:32.63
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:18:33.63
Stephen Schneider
So, and my, my, and I hope Colin’s not listening to this. I don’t think he usually does, but ah I always get him classic rock albums for Christmas.

00:18:42.49
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:18:43.14
Stephen Schneider
And I started to like run out of really good classic rock albums. So a couple of years ago, i got a whole bunch of the blues legends type music. And yeah.

00:18:52.99
Alan Baltis
All the way back to the roots. That’s good. Okay.

00:18:54.83
Stephen Schneider
And this year I’m getting some of my favorite musicals CDs.

00:18:58.14
Alan Baltis
okay

00:18:58.95
Stephen Schneider
So he’s getting a lot of that.

00:18:59.83
Alan Baltis
To expand his collection, to expand his horizons for what he might like, you know what I mean?

00:19:03.93
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.

00:19:04.60
Alan Baltis
Colleen used to talk about that Tim really liked musicals in a way that she never would have expected of him. He listened to all kinds of like death metal and thrash metal and stuff, but then he also liked Newsboys.

00:19:14.93
Alan Baltis
You know what i mean?

00:19:15.07
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:19:15.85
Alan Baltis
Newsies.

00:19:16.16
Stephen Schneider
Right. And last year was a lot of like classic crooners and stuff.

00:19:17.56
Alan Baltis
these

00:19:20.12
Stephen Schneider
And ah Colin got his 2025 wrapped and his listening age is 92 because he was listening to so much Sinatra this year.

00:19:29.73
Alan Baltis
That’s hilarious. I have some Sinatra, some Leonard Cohen, never saw either of them live. And as you listen to more of them, as you get older, you’re like, boy, I wish I wouldn’t have been so arrogant, so blinkered in my youth.

00:19:42.30
Alan Baltis
Well, those were the old guys. you know what mean? There’s all kinds of great voices, great showmen.

00:19:44.12
Stephen Schneider
I

00:19:46.35
Alan Baltis
I have seen Tony Bennett, but just that, you know, other i all kinds. I never saw Mel Torme live. I saw him on TV. um Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, you know, that there’s there’s like that kind of stuff.

00:19:54.94
Stephen Schneider
i saw Neil Diamond.

00:19:58.01
Alan Baltis
I… I sometimes, when I get ah a bug about that, I’ll go in and fill in my collection. So I got a whole bunch of Neil Diamonds that I didn’t have because I really like his voice. And they, another one of those situations where they must have put a whole bunch them out at five or seven bucks instead of 15.

00:20:12.29
Alan Baltis
And it’s like, well I’ll backfill the collection. You know, that kind thing.

00:20:15.39
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:20:16.42
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:20:17.23
Stephen Schneider
Let’s see. One other gift I got him was. um So when he was younger, he really loved Steve Irwin because he liked animals and Steve Irwin was like a hero.

00:20:26.06
Alan Baltis
Sure.

00:20:26.67
Stephen Schneider
You know, Colin cried when found out that he had died.

00:20:27.10
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:20:30.20
Alan Baltis
from the stingray in the chest, exactly.

00:20:31.13
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, yeah. But his daughter Bindi and the mother continue with the sanctuary in Australia and she just wrote a book.

00:20:32.95
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:20:38.61
Alan Baltis
Oh,

00:20:40.29
Stephen Schneider
So I got i jumped on it and got a signed copy of her book.

00:20:44.25
Alan Baltis
that’s nice.

00:20:45.28
Stephen Schneider
It’s a kid’s picture book for him.

00:20:46.97
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:20:47.60
Stephen Schneider
So, you know, he’s beyond kid picture books, but it’ll be a nice little thing. Oh, I i you know appreciate it.

00:20:53.07
Alan Baltis
A little heart tug.

00:20:53.89
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, yeah.

00:20:53.97
Alan Baltis
Yeah, that’s very sweet, very good.

00:20:56.03
Stephen Schneider
So I got my mother, I got her sunglasses because she bought like the cheapest damn pair of sunglasses for her car. And I borrowed them once and I’m like, these are not doing anything.

00:21:08.40
Stephen Schneider
So I got her some good sunglasses and a whole bunch of books and stuff.

00:21:12.76
Alan Baltis
Very good. and As you might imagine, you know, i’m I’m a pretty good gift giver because I have a good memory.

00:21:13.99
Stephen Schneider
So.

00:21:18.43
Alan Baltis
And so any number of things that Colleen has mentioned over the course of the year, i might have gotten some things for her. It’s funny, i don’t know that she listens to the podcast all the time either. So I could do the big reveal, but I’m going to hold off for 10 more days.

00:21:29.95
Alan Baltis
um But also, it’s it’s just nice once you know someone’s taste a little bit, it’s fun to get them little surprises. you know what I mean? So depending on whether it’s a book or music or clothing or or games or whatever else it might be so we we tend to you know we don’t have any kids to give to even though we’re part of a big family they do it so that there’s a single person that you give to so our christmas table and under the christmas tree tends to be really groaning with gifts and yet who who better and all those lot we’ve laughed about this before sometimes you get things just like you’re done with that i’d like to borrow it you know what i mean you’re getting something so i really kind of said that to her this year aunt we have our new kitchen i’m getting all kinds of things for the kitchen maybe cookbooks maybe whatever that we will both find equally useful and if it turns out we often talk

00:22:19.13
Alan Baltis
a little bit about what we’re doing so that we kind of match up and if the number isn’t even then that stack of could be for either one then the person that’s just to go to those and if it turns out exactly that it matches up well that was a good idea you know so and i cookbook wise since we should not just talk in platitudes i love atk america’s test kitchen cookbooks you know i love the show and these things are it’s this place that they took a recipe and they said Let’s do it a hundred different ways and find out the one that really, really perfectly works.

00:22:32.31
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.

00:22:50.70
Alan Baltis
And that way you know how to make a meatloaf, you know how to make crepe Suzette or whatever else it might be. And sometimes they’re ridiculous because they’re all about garlic and butter and like, there’s no diet recipes in the books, but if you’re really trying to make the best grilled cheese sandwich anywhere, it’s not pasteurized processed cheese food slices, it’s Gruyere or something like that.

00:23:01.21
Stephen Schneider
right

00:23:10.59
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:23:10.85
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? So that’s, I, I, Anybody, if you’re looking to get a cookbook, there’s the classics like Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker’s and stuff. But if you’re looking for kind of modern stuff, and they even just had a little review maybe in Consumer Reports about who’s, there’s all kinds of celebrity chefs. That’s one of those things that baffles me a little bit, the people that has become a whole thing about celebrity chef, and yet there’s dozens of them, and they all have different brands and they of cookware or whatever like that, and Consumer Reports did a little bit of, this is worth buying. It really is that this person knows what they’re talking about, Stanley Tucci, but maybe Martha Stewart, this is a really good one, but they put her name on so many things that avoid these, you know what I mean?

00:23:51.67
Alan Baltis
And so, same kind of thing, we’ve had really like the the um a couple people that have been on cooking shows, and I should have their names at my fingertips, there’s a really cool book called like um Salt, Fat, Acid, Sugar.

00:24:08.63
Alan Baltis
It’s like those four words, maybe not exactly that order, but this woman talks about these are like the four basic ingredients that when you’re not just talking about making a hunk of meat, these are the ways to make it so that it has A little lemon juice will brighten it.

00:24:22.55
Alan Baltis
A little bit of you know this kind of crustiness will get it just the right burntness so that it tastes better. And so those kinds of books where they talk about not only here’s recipes, but here’s how to take any existing recipe and and make it a little bit better.

00:24:37.03
Alan Baltis
I love those things. There used to one called the the couple called The Cake Doctor.

00:24:38.90
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:24:42.07
Alan Baltis
where this lady took all the different like Duncan Hines, you know, all the different cake mixes and said, well, if you do this, but you use dark chocolate chips instead of the milk chocolate, oh, and so, you know, it’s, it’s an and, and I, I probably did dozens of those over the years for add a little vanilla, put a little cinnamon in, add whole banana into your banana bread. And some of those things I normally tried, I adopted because they turned out so good. so I don’t know how current they are, but folks, if you’re looking for a cool cookbook, find these books called The Cake Doctor, and you can take a box mix and make it as if, wow, I’m really the best baker in the world.

00:25:18.86
Alan Baltis
This is all handmade, kind of.

00:25:20.47
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.

00:25:21.10
Alan Baltis
ah You know? Hmm.

00:25:23.07
Stephen Schneider
yeah You mentioned celebrity chefs. And I was thinking, I’m like, you know, you want a celebrity chef that has experience with something, you know? So I’m not going to trust Martha Stewart’s Mexican recipes over George Lopez’s Mexican recipes, you know, something like that.

00:25:38.91
Alan Baltis
put it

00:25:40.54
Stephen Schneider
But I was thinking, I’m like, so what we really need is the classic rock and roller mixed drink book. I mean, those guys are super experienced with with alcohol.

00:25:50.63
Stephen Schneider
So we should get some great mixed drinks.

00:25:51.10
Alan Baltis
Exactly. You know, i know i used i have a lot of these and i they’re not out currently, so they must have gone into a box and never come back out.

00:26:02.14
Alan Baltis
Various different groups used to do a thing for a fundraiser that they’d say the League of Women Voters in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, would do a cookbook. And it was all the ladies in the neighborhood’s favorite recipes. And so it was like, this was hand down from Nana. This was, you know, I’ve perfected this and my family really loves it. And and it’s not…

00:26:21.53
Alan Baltis
um complete. you You don’t have, here’s how to do meat and all all the various different kinds of things. But I’ve gotten so many things like these really are the perfect Toll House cookies. This really is the perfect meatloaf or something like that. And I i think that those are li You said someone who’s like cooked with Hungarian style all their life because their family is, I kind of trust their goulash and their borscht and whatever else.

00:26:47.07
Alan Baltis
I hope know, whatever things might be associated with the various different ethnic cuisines, we’ll find the family that has been doing that for generations and do what they do. You know, that kind of thing.

00:26:57.24
Stephen Schneider
When I lived out in San Diego, one of my friends out there was Mexican.

00:26:57.93
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:27:03.03
Stephen Schneider
He was the only person in his house that spoke English. His grandmother, his parents, they they spoke Spanish, Mexican, directly from Mexico. So I went over there a couple of times.

00:27:15.55
Stephen Schneider
And they made food and yeah, Taco Bell does not measure up. I mean, they, they can’t, you know they put all this food out on the plate and then they come with this steaming platter of tortillas it’s just grab a tortilla and you, you scoop it all up and eat it.

00:27:29.79
Alan Baltis
Exactly. Wrap things up in it and and everything is. And also, it’s kind of funny. Like, I love things where um we made this with peppers that we grew in our own garden.

00:27:40.89
Alan Baltis
You know what i mean? That, you know, they’re like that fresh day picked and stuff like that.

00:27:44.67
Stephen Schneider
right

00:27:44.73
Alan Baltis
And it might be of the various different veggies or but they just had a guy on one of my baking shows. It’s like, you know, where’d you get this cheese from? Well, I made it. I don’t know that many people that know enough about the chemistry and the you know the particular bacteria right that causes things, and and it doesn’t like, oh, you made it go wrong, and it turned pink and killed you. So I i love when people have that, that they actually have a little bit of the the gardening gene and handed down from their parents and stuff like that, and that they really make…

00:28:13.69
Alan Baltis
fantastic tomatoes where a store-bought tomato just does not compare to plucked off the vine that day you know that kind of thing i don’t even like tomatoes and yet i can tell the difference so

00:28:18.23
Stephen Schneider
Right. Yeah,

00:28:24.63
Stephen Schneider
yeah you know, I grew up with a lot of that, though, as I… experienced it more, I realized that some of the things my father did helped degrade the quality and taste of a lot of his vegetables, especially his corn and his tomatoes, because he would grow everything in the same spots every year.

00:28:43.95
Stephen Schneider
And that depletes the soil ah quite a bit.

00:28:47.71
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:28:47.95
Stephen Schneider
And he would do things to push it to grow faster because to him, it was super important to be able to go to the neighbor say, oh, well, I’m already picking tomatoes. ah How’s your garden doing?

00:28:58.59
Stephen Schneider
Because mine’s already got to, you know, that that bragging rights and I’m better, but it made them grow so fast.

00:29:01.72
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:29:04.69
Stephen Schneider
They they didn’t have time to mature and they lost flavor and especially corn.

00:29:07.66
Alan Baltis
OK.

00:29:08.89
Stephen Schneider
I mean, you know, I was like with corn, i was like, eh, I don’t care if I have any because it was pretty tasteless. But he would literally, we’d have corn on the cob. He would eat nothing for dinner, but like 15 ears of corn on the cob. Right.

00:29:22.68
Alan Baltis
yeah Because when it comes to like to to ripeness, you kind of have to pick it when it’s ripe. And if it comes all at the same time, i think we’ve talked before, you know, we know Nick and Kelly Georgia Fondas and they have their wonderful farm out in Norwalk and they’re really smart gentlemen farmers, if you will.

00:29:28.79
Stephen Schneider
right

00:29:39.12
Alan Baltis
They pace things so that corn arrives like every two weeks for four months in a row. And so instead of being one big corn, you know cornapalooza and then it’s all gone they have people coming to their stand all the way into like november because they had later plantings that were still producing and they don’t pick it early they wait until it’s that perfect you know kernels popping off the cob type of corn really really good um

00:29:53.13
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:30:00.79
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right. And I remember I got, oh man, green giant or whatever, frozen corn once, you know, and he was like, oh, frozen corn.

00:30:09.60
Alan Baltis
yeah

00:30:11.09
Stephen Schneider
um but but but but I’m like, you know what? I’m using this. And then I ate it. I’m like, oh my God, this tastes so good. and he did not like me saying that, but I was like, and then I started realizing, wait a minute.

00:30:23.23
Stephen Schneider
I went and got some tomatoes and even cans of tomatoes and real tomatoes. I’m like, Oh my God, these taste really good. And I realized his, yeah, great. You picked them early. Yeah. Great. They were big, but they don’t taste good.

00:30:34.43
Stephen Schneider
Who cares?

00:30:35.32
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:30:35.39
Stephen Schneider
You know?

00:30:35.72
Alan Baltis
ye

00:30:35.87
Stephen Schneider
And a lot of stuff went in the freezer. And I was like, if I was cooking something, I’d go get cans or even a ah local farmer’s market sometimes. And that did not go over well with the family, but I’m like, You know, I realize that there’s flavor now and we didn’t have flavor before.

00:30:45.63
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:30:53.47
Alan Baltis
Exactly. and Nick and Kelly have really educated us about, you know, of course, it isn’t corn is corn. There’s all different kinds of strains, and they are actually one of those test farms for various different places.

00:31:01.02
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:31:04.79
Alan Baltis
So I know I i sometimes repeat myself. They’ve talked about, you know, they’ve had probably half a dozen different things over the years, and each time they are making it so that it’s like,

00:31:14.100
Alan Baltis
naturally a little bit more like bold weevil resistant or it’s a little bit sweeter or it lasts longer on the on the stalk so you can pick it and like they have names like ecstasy and nirvana and it’s like that’s not a misnomer they really taste that much better than regular corn and melons they have perfect big melons perfect little um ice cube melons and stuff like that and just um cucumbers okra zucchini whatever we’ve gotten from them it really is they’re not only wise about what to choose, but they’re not like, you know, maybe American Indians have that thing.

00:31:46.98
Alan Baltis
Remember, there’s like a ah trinity of things. If you grow beans and corn and but yeah that they ah they help to fight off the various different bugs and parasites that can affect the others and they replenish the soil while they’re taking some ingredients out, they’re also redoing it, like and especially when you when you plow it back under.

00:31:51.25
Stephen Schneider
The potatoes, I think.

00:32:07.87
Alan Baltis
And so that’s why they always had Those things in combination, not nothing but corn, nothing but soybeans, that kind of thing.

00:32:13.41
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:32:14.94
Alan Baltis
And there’s some wisdom to be learned from that, that you let nature do it instead of let’s get out there with the bug spray and and kill everything. But then, you know, in concentration, maybe I went blind or something like that.

00:32:27.06
Alan Baltis
So.

00:32:27.29
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:32:28.06
Alan Baltis
Anyway, so that I, as we’ve got, it’s kind of funny, you get a new computer and you’re inspired to do things you hadn’t done before. You get a new kitchen, so you get the same thing.

00:32:39.55
Alan Baltis
So Colleen really are, we’re doing a little bit more cooking. We’re looking into more recipes. We have some of our trusty stand fights, like the, and it gets cold. Time for a big soup, time for the perfect crock pot meal, that kind of stuff.

00:32:50.35
Alan Baltis
But also just trying new things because we can get to everything in the kitchen. It’s all like more nicely laid out and and all the tools are on the wall of utensils and it’s so easy to reach for.

00:33:02.35
Alan Baltis
the right micro planer to zest something. Whereas before you had to go into the utensil drawer, rattle around, hope you find it before you poke yourself with something. you know what mean?

00:33:13.35
Alan Baltis
it

00:33:13.59
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:33:14.11
Alan Baltis
So i’ll maybe that’ll be, you’ll have a recipe corner occasionally when we discover that we’ve made something. Colleen just made This will be, what, the eighth time I’ve said meatloaf? She just made the best meatloaf ever. And one of the reasons I think it turned out well is we used to do this. You get a ah box of Lipton’s onion soup mix.

00:33:35.77
Alan Baltis
And it used to be you could put that in a sour cream and make a really good onion dip. But also, if you put that into the meatloaf, it’s got all different kinds of other spices in it that that really add to the umami, the hardiness of it. And a little bit of what’s this here sauce, a little bit of Worcestershire sauce.

00:33:51.16
Alan Baltis
and that like Is there anything that that doesn’t improve? Maybe ice cream. You know what But otherwise, just just a dot or two of that just has…

00:33:57.08
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, that I agree with that. Right. Yeah.

00:34:02.32
Alan Baltis
It’s got a wonderful… I don’t even know. it Whatever goes into it, I think it’s a little bit of peppers and a little bit of umami. I don’t think it’s MSG necessarily, but you know what i mean? We’re just, um we’re getting like, what’s today’s mystery spice?

00:34:15.77
Alan Baltis
You know, we haven’t tried anything with anise before. Make sure you say that, right? You know what I mean?

00:34:20.63
Stephen Schneider
right

00:34:20.81
Alan Baltis
And and fun stuff like that.

00:34:22.65
Stephen Schneider
but So, well you know, my mother made a lot of things that didn’t have a lot of spice in that because my father didn’t like spice.

00:34:33.13
Stephen Schneider
He didn’t actually like a lot of any seasonings. He he really liked stuff bland. And now.

00:34:38.97
Alan Baltis
Yeah. There are people are like that, that you know the perfect meat and potatoes meal is no sauces, no maybe butter, but not anything else, you know, green onion.

00:34:45.34
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.

00:34:47.35
Alan Baltis
and What are you talking about? You know,

00:34:49.95
Stephen Schneider
So when when I make stuff, ah you know, I i put spices and I do it differently. And ah my mother does not like spicy stuff. So we compromise like with chili, whichever one of us is making chili.

00:35:04.76
Stephen Schneider
We don’t spice it as much, but I’ll always pull out the chipotle and the paprika, know, stuff. I’ll spice a little more for mine. Well, she’s now gotten a habit when she makes something like she has this homemade um noodle dish, kind of like hamburger helper, but it’s homemade.

00:35:11.28
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:35:20.84
Stephen Schneider
And she makes that, but she’ll pull out the chili powder for me to, you know, to to be nice.

00:35:21.06
Alan Baltis
OK.

00:35:26.24
Stephen Schneider
And so it’s there and I can bring it on.

00:35:26.86
Alan Baltis
That’s coming, yeah.

00:35:27.96
Stephen Schneider
like, I don’t put chili powder on my hamburger helper. And like, well, I don’t know what you put it on. I’m like, it’s not a hamburger helper.

00:35:36.50
Alan Baltis
My dad used to, he loved a thing called tiger sauce. It was one of the early extra hot things that they had out there commercially. And like if they say it about Dave’s red hot sauce here in Cleveland, they put that shit on everything.

00:35:49.40
Alan Baltis
well I think it was because when Dave was a smoker, it really kills your taste buds. And he really had to do that to get any kind of taste. So he’d put it like on his eggs and stuff like that. And I think I noticed him using it less as he stopped smoking and regained pepily or whatever you know whatever the things that are on your taste buds. um i I can’t believe we never, you know whenever we get to a milestone on the podcast, have I ever talked about this?

00:36:12.63
Alan Baltis
I often, in the middle sun, I would help to cook and set the table for meals. That’s why I have a little bit of knowledge in the kitchen. Always what I would try to do is put out the inappropriate condiment. You know what mean? Like you’d have pot roast and I’d put out like mint jelly or something. know what i mean? Like, and not inedible. I didn’t put out garbage, but Bruce, my younger brother was almost always the one to notice the first thing.

00:36:37.24
Alan Baltis
What’s this? Why is this out here? And it has, I think that they started to do it. You know, sometimes when it’s only a family thing, but it’s funny. And then when people adopt it’s like, well, maybe that’s an early meme that made it into the stream, the inappropriate condiment.

00:36:52.44
Stephen Schneider
right Yeah, we usually don’t put tartar sauce on our lasagna.

00:36:57.34
Alan Baltis
Like ah tartar sauce, even a better example. Exactly. A non-fish thing with tartar sauce? What are you talking about? So that’s a fun thing that we used to do, especially on a big crowded table where there’s six side dishes and stuff like that.

00:37:03.20
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:37:09.90
Alan Baltis
There’s salad dressings and everything else. And it’s kind of lurking. And people have to realize, why why is there horseradish at dessert? You know, like

00:37:17.45
Stephen Schneider
Here’s the horseradish for your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

00:37:19.90
Alan Baltis
like that. Exactly.

00:37:21.05
Stephen Schneider
but My grandfather always put the red hot on his eggs.

00:37:24.41
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:37:24.53
Stephen Schneider
And I was like, I’m going to have to try that. And it’s like, i I don’t like to eat eggs without it now. It’s just needed. But I like like the ranchos, haveros with the salsa and the eggs.

00:37:31.47
Alan Baltis
interesting

00:37:35.90
Stephen Schneider
And I love that too.

00:37:36.07
Alan Baltis
yeah i i liked it enough when i was out in california that i would often get it that way and then i coming back to the midwest and what they think of salsa it’s a different thing it’s not the right both sweet and hot it’s it’s just it’s like

00:37:49.37
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:37:49.74
Alan Baltis
The ketchup with chunks in it, it’s just not the same.

00:37:51.51
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:37:52.26
Alan Baltis
And so i’ve I’ve pulled back from doing that. you know it And know, I grew up German and Lithuanian, which is a lot of gravies, a lot of root vegetables. It really wasn’t known for spices, but at least they had garlic and horseradish.

00:38:04.98
Alan Baltis
And so when I used to hear like spicy, it was always that… That horse baddish thing where you take it and it like clears the sinuses. That’s the kind of spice that I would remember.

00:38:11.90
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:38:13.62
Alan Baltis
And garlic. We always had yeah you know garlic and maybe garlic powder, celery salt, various certain things, relatively mild compared to any kind of jalapeno, habanero, all that stuff.

00:38:14.91
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:38:23.10
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:38:23.79
Alan Baltis
We just didn’t have that in the house. you know But we didn’t have Worcestershire sauce.

00:38:25.85
Stephen Schneider
Right. I like a tradition I’ve started in recent years is Aztec hot cocoa at Thanksgiving. It’s just spicy hot cocoa, essentially. Yeah.

00:38:35.90
Alan Baltis
Interesting. I know I’ve heard of that. I’ve never tried that. Kind of because I like chocolate so much that I’d be afraid, oh, no, I spoiled the whole cup.

00:38:38.55
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:38:43.23
Alan Baltis
yeah What spice do you put in? is

00:38:45.35
Stephen Schneider
It’s got chili powder, but I saw a new recipe that infuses actual cut up jalapenos.

00:38:46.65
Alan Baltis
Chili powder. Okay.

00:38:52.31
Stephen Schneider
You you put it in there and warm up the the milk with the jalapenos in it and let it sit and it infuses.

00:38:53.49
Alan Baltis
Oh, my.

00:38:58.11
Stephen Schneider
Then you pull them out. You you know, you’re not eating those.

00:38:59.87
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:39:00.43
Stephen Schneider
And it has ah dark chocolate because it’s supposed to be a little bitter and thick. Um, and then like you can, but it depends on the recipe.

00:39:04.77
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:39:09.28
Stephen Schneider
I I’ve seen, you know, many different recipes I’ve tried, but a little chili powder, a little cinnamon, uh, the dark chocolate, um, and, uh, some milk and you warm it up. And I, I, I really do enjoy it

00:39:21.67
Alan Baltis
That’s interesting. ah you know when i like It’s kind of funny. I really will try anything. And it might be that I won’t bring those things into the house. Like now I have 12 cups worth. And if you don’t like it, then 11 cups go undone. But I’m curious about it because very much that in my lifetime, that sure seems to have become a thing where you don’t just make it it’s salty or it’s sweet or it’s sour.

00:39:43.04
Alan Baltis
You combine things so that you activate different parts of your tongue and you get a little bit of like salted caramel.

00:39:45.95
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:39:48.60
Alan Baltis
Like… Why in the world would you put salt on a candy? And then you try it. It’s like, that is interesting, actually.

00:39:54.84
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:39:55.23
Alan Baltis
And there’s all kinds of combinations out of the introduction of various different ethnic cuisines, out of fusion. You know mean? Where it’s like, this is going to be French and Vietnamese. And they they do different things and stuff like that.

00:40:05.87
Alan Baltis
So i I sometimes experiment just out of, this is kind of funny, Khali will tell you this.

00:40:05.91
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:40:12.02
Alan Baltis
I can’t, like I often make what I call like adulterated mac and cheese. You want mean? a Mac and cheese and I’ll cut up like hot dog pieces or I’ll put some mushrooms in there and I’ll cut up an onion. And then like out of the s spice cabinet, it’s kind of like, what spices do I know are good for me? And I’ll put it in some garlic and some cinnamon and and like, and no one stands out. And if anything, by having that many spices, I’m not sure if,

00:40:35.51
Alan Baltis
It just kind of tastes like a spice blend, but it amuses me.

00:40:38.01
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:40:39.100
Alan Baltis
I do that on pizza and I do that on various other things where i don’t just stop with one spice. i like I’ve discovered I like dill weed. like i’m just Not until the last two years when we start we’ve been making big salads for a long time.

00:40:47.53
Stephen Schneider
Oh, yeah.

00:40:50.27
Stephen Schneider
Good with dumplings.

00:40:51.80
Alan Baltis
And now I’m like, I put that stuff on everything. It just seems to, and maybe, as you know, palates change over the course of time.

00:40:58.51
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:40:58.79
Alan Baltis
And so it’s also been that I’m i’m now 66 and ready for dill weed. I finally grew up enough to like dill weed.

00:41:05.24
Stephen Schneider
We, oh, we grew up with it all the time with dumplings.

00:41:05.55
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:41:07.60
Stephen Schneider
That was traditional in our house. Uh, we, we do have something like, uh, it was out of the newspaper. It’s like 25 different variations of Mac and cheese. So we’ve gone through all 25, picked out the ones we liked and we make those,

00:41:21.38
Alan Baltis
I got to look for that article because I really would, you know, like I said, I just kind of, at one point, remember the frugal gourmet?

00:41:27.87
Stephen Schneider
Oh, yeah. Right.

00:41:28.47
Alan Baltis
He had a thing where you could send in a recipe and if he liked it enough, he put it like in his next book. And that’s what I did was I sent in like college adulterated Mac and cheese where this whole thing costs like a dollar. You you start with generic Mac and cheese and you add a little extra cheese and and butter and all that kind of stuff to it. And I don’t, it didn’t get included, but it really was, i like this enough that I think other people would like it too. It’s not just, oh, I was weird. You know what I

00:41:52.54
Stephen Schneider
yeah Another thing I liked that I didn’t think I’d like, and yeah I turned my kids on to it, was malted vinegar on French fries. like I got that at Hamburger Station.

00:42:00.92
Alan Baltis
Boy.

00:42:02.86
Stephen Schneider
My grandmother took us once when we were little, and you know they gave you these overflowing things at Hamburger Station of French fries.

00:42:03.19
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:42:09.54
Stephen Schneider
We sat down, I grabbed ketchup. She’s like, no, no, no no use this. Well, you don’t argue with my grandmother. You did it what she said or else. So, okay. So I didn’t know if I’d like it.

00:42:20.37
Stephen Schneider
I mean, I’ve always had ketchup and now you’re pouring vinegar on it. ah And she just generously puts vinegar all over my beautiful French fries.

00:42:28.25
Alan Baltis
yeah and Now what are you going to

00:42:28.58
Stephen Schneider
And I taste them like, oh my God, this is awesome. Give me more. You know, and Colin, we had some malt vinegar in the fridge. And, ah you know, a while later, i after he moved, I went, made French fries, and I’m like, where’s the malt vinegar?

00:42:41.63
Stephen Schneider
Oh, yeah, Colin took the malt vinegar with him.

00:42:44.29
Alan Baltis
Exactly. That’s one of the things they couldn’t live without in the new place.

00:42:47.27
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.

00:42:47.76
Alan Baltis
That’s funny. I’ve tried that. Maybe like in England for the first time, you know, when you have fish and chips there or or chips, it’s it they it isn’t the things that I was used to in the United States.

00:42:53.41
Stephen Schneider
viit

00:42:58.68
Alan Baltis
And I i didn’t take to it, but that was also 30 years ago, maybe. So I haven’t tried it. you know, I should try that again because I know… the only reason that people like ketchup is because it’s like 80 sugar you know what mean and i honestly my my palate is changing where and everything’s sweet it isn’t only that that’s enough for me now as a kid i’m sure that i was happy to have ketchup on ketchup but nowadays i really am liking something more interesting and maybe a little bit more towards the sour the bitter you know exercise my tongue a little bit more so what vinegar it is i know i think we talked we discovered malt like

00:43:27.98
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:43:32.70
Alan Baltis
between shakes and malts. I remember growing up and like shake shake much more. And then in college was when I first started to be like, we had like real malt from the farm in the middle of Illinois.

00:43:41.47
Stephen Schneider
Real malts, man. Oh.

00:43:43.23
Alan Baltis
a real malt was just a dusty taste, a very interesting, like a thick malt shake. that was And so we discovered a place, Hundles, that has, we’ve laughed about this before, it a flavor called Spouse Like a House, which kind of tells you, don’t eat ice cream all the time, Al.

00:44:00.17
Alan Baltis
But it’s got malt in it. And and when i when I saw that it was on the thing, I’m going to try that because I remember how much and it now it’s some places when you go, you always get the same thing because you go there to get that thing.

00:44:09.72
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:44:11.64
Alan Baltis
Every time that we go to Handel’s, I get maybe like a mint chocolate chip because I love that. And I always get this Spouse Like a House, which I think is like… you chocolate covered pretzels with a little caramel ribbon and malt flavor and it’s just ecstasy so it’s really weird to discover that late i or discover that rediscover it you know what i mean so

00:44:24.95
Stephen Schneider
Nice. Nice.

00:44:31.07
Stephen Schneider
Right. Yeah, we we were talking um Christmas cookies. And, you know, when the kids were a little, we made a whole bunch. My mother always made a million and we gave them to everybody and stuff, you know.

00:44:40.60
Alan Baltis
yeah did you decorate them did you put like so sparkly dust on them and stuff or how did how did you do it

00:44:41.27
Stephen Schneider
and

00:44:45.47
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, well, because we don’t do just like cut out cookies and shapes and stuff. We have like date balls. We have the snowballs, which are Mexican wedding cakes.

00:44:51.48
Alan Baltis
Oh,

00:44:53.67
Stephen Schneider
Also, we have this chocolate one that has Rolos in the center of it.

00:44:54.81
Alan Baltis
interesting.

00:44:58.51
Stephen Schneider
um

00:44:58.65
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:44:59.48
Stephen Schneider
So cowboy cookies, which are like um chocolate chip cookies, but with like oatmeal and pretzels in it. So.

00:45:08.100
Alan Baltis
It’s very funny if I could pause for a minute. We just saw a reference to that on one of our baking shows and I had never heard that term before. And now here it is two days later and I hear the term. Isn’t that funny?

00:45:17.98
Stephen Schneider
How often does that happen?

00:45:19.20
Alan Baltis
The universe does that all the time.

00:45:20.44
Stephen Schneider
yeah I’ve had that a couple times lately. so So we always have these non-traditional cookie. We have another one, which I think is more traditional with like the apricot jelly in the center and it’s a folded dough over top of it with whatever.

00:45:33.32
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:45:34.33
Stephen Schneider
But you we we didn’t make too many this year because there’s nobody in the house to eat them. I try not to eat too many. you know If I’m going to eat them, my I got to watch it. One now, maybe one later.

00:45:45.63
Stephen Schneider
you know But I was like, you know what? I looked it up. There’s multiple sites out there with the best diabetic Christmas cookies. And they’re not all traditional.

00:45:54.83
Alan Baltis
There you go.

00:45:56.81
Stephen Schneider
They’re made differently. They, ah you know, whatever. But I’m like, okay, if we’re going to make cookies that I want to eat, let’s try some of these next time. So I’ve got a whole bunch of recipes for next year to do diabetic Christmas cookies.

00:46:08.46
Alan Baltis
that’s a great honestly there are so many good substitutes now that really are safe in comparison to a sugar bomb it’s kind of funny i send things out to all my my family brothers and sisters and their various my nieces and nephews and stuff like that and a couple of them uh they’re better off if they have that sugar-free cookies and stuff like that my older brother still eats like full sugar marzipan you know that kind of thing so i’ve discovered amazon has everything you discover those various different things and i made a point to sending them out this year so they’d arrive before christmas and you can kind of nibble away at them instead of them after christmas because of the delays or whatever else it might be and everybody just had the sugar-free ones they like they’re really just what you want them to be they do not taste well this is kind of cardboardy you can tell there’s no sugar whatever they use xylitol or whatever the little stereo isomers of sugar that taste sweet but they don’t get processed by your body in that same way

00:46:12.44
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:46:57.40
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yes.

00:47:02.46
Alan Baltis
I think as I’ll tell you, you have to worry about that if you get the wrong gummy bears that it can give you terrible abdominal distress.

00:47:08.09
Stephen Schneider
yes

00:47:08.62
Alan Baltis
and stuff like that

00:47:09.66
Stephen Schneider
and And besides the the the the quote unquote sugars, the alternate sugars, there’s a ton of alternate ways to do it. I see a lot of these and these are the ones I look for.

00:47:20.79
Stephen Schneider
My mother makes an apple pie that uses absolutely no sugar in it. it It uses apples, ah sauce, apple juice and the apples and some other stuff.

00:47:31.59
Alan Baltis
The apples have natural fructose, if you will, but you have to add to that.

00:47:31.78
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Yes.

00:47:35.01
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:47:35.26
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:47:35.49
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:47:35.66
Stephen Schneider
So there’s no sugar in it. It’s fairly healthy and it’s the best apple pie. People love it.

00:47:42.39
Alan Baltis
Excellent.

00:47:42.68
Stephen Schneider
So when I get like a store-bought apple pie, I can’t eat it. They taste horrible to me nowadays. But there’s a lot of cookies that have the same thing, you know, you you know ah substituting applesauce for some of the the crap and things.

00:47:57.11
Alan Baltis
Right. I do that in my breads all the time, applesauce instead of oil, and they don’t stick any worse to the pan.

00:48:00.86
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:48:02.87
Alan Baltis
And I’m sure it’s healthier than, you know, oil is one of those incredibly calorie dense things. And if you can avoid it, you do. And so I have my little applesauce, that’s exactly what I do.

00:48:11.19
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.

00:48:11.71
Alan Baltis
And I get rave reviews. You know, in fact, Colleen was just with um her best friend, Linda.

00:48:13.21
Stephen Schneider
yeah

00:48:16.11
Alan Baltis
and we had gone to her husband’s birthday party and I had, I think I mentioned this, I had brought some sausages that the sausage party boys had made. we had They had a big charcuterie board that everybody contributed to and I made a banana bread that like I adulterated with a whole banana and some cinnamon, some vanilla and that kind they were still like they talked again to Khalid like we we’re going to have they have Christmas Adam a party on eve before Christmas Eve and like when people start requesting that you make specific things that’s kind of cool that it was so memorably good that they want it again you know what I mean so i’ I’ll be making the banana bread you know so

00:48:50.15
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And man, I, somebody was just a Steve and Linda guys were here for Thanksgiving and they left some banana bread.

00:49:01.87
Stephen Schneider
And now the banana bread we usually make is very moist. um And there’s wasn’t dry, but it was very dense. It was like almost a molasses cookie type density to it.

00:49:13.27
Alan Baltis
Interesting, yeah.

00:49:13.79
Stephen Schneider
And it had a little bit of that flavor.

00:49:13.98
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:49:15.51
Stephen Schneider
And I was like, wow, this is, Interesting. It’s different, but it was good, you know, good in a different way. So sometimes i like having that variety, but there’s so often you get our neighbor gives us cookies every year.

00:49:30.17
Alan Baltis
okay

00:49:30.46
Stephen Schneider
We don’t even open the box anymore. we just we’ll put them in for the mailman. um so No wonder we get bad mail sometimes. But you know sometimes you know when the kids were all here, their friends would visit and, oh, you like those?

00:49:44.79
Stephen Schneider
Go ahead, take them. They’re just, they are so bad. I mean, it’s ah it’s a it’s it’s a Hallmark Christmas movie waiting to happen.

00:49:49.83
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:49:52.98
Stephen Schneider
They’re so…

00:49:53.65
Alan Baltis
Don’t they taste their own stuff and go like, wow, this is not the best cookie I’ve ever had.

00:49:56.67
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, but some of the other things they that they do for food, i you look i’m like, you you made it how and ate that? and And everybody’s tastes are different, I guess.

00:50:05.82
Alan Baltis
It’s fun with love, Steven. It’s with love. It’s got love baked right in.

00:50:09.24
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I spit in it. I got love in it. But, you know, I just can’t eat them. that the The flavor, it’s not that it’s sugar. It’s not that it’s just whatever.

00:50:19.44
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:50:20.92
Stephen Schneider
But the flavors are just horrid. And they’re all like super hard and dry.

00:50:24.16
Alan Baltis
Wow.

00:50:26.87
Stephen Schneider
You know, it’s like.

00:50:28.22
Alan Baltis
It’s like the black licorice cookie with raisins oatmeal. I’m trying to think what other people, some people really hate certain ingredients. I like oatmeal raisin and cookies.

00:50:34.79
Stephen Schneider
yeah.

00:50:36.46
Alan Baltis
When people get that instead of chocolate chips, they’re like, does he hate me? What’s wrong with this?

00:50:41.05
Stephen Schneider
oatmeal raisin’s fine as long as you know it’s got the raisin in If you think it’s a chocolate chip and you’re eating it, you know, it’s…

00:50:44.09
Alan Baltis
That’s right. The expectation can like make it worse. Exactly.

00:50:49.27
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Way worse.

00:50:52.28
Alan Baltis
I have multiple chips. I have peanut butter and chocolate and and mint and all that kind of stuff. And I’ll tend to make chocolate chip cookies, but with each of those various different things. And they’re distinct enough in color that you don’t get fooled.

00:51:04.31
Alan Baltis
You know what i mean? So um I might do that this year for the big Christmas party that we’ll go to for the Fitzgerald clan.

00:51:05.08
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:51:09.67
Alan Baltis
I’ll make like a dozen, two dozen of each of these flavors and have it be, okay, you could whichever one you think you might like, give this a try. Peanut butter, for instance, lot of people don’t realize how much they like it until they have it.

00:51:20.47
Alan Baltis
And it’s like, oh, do you have more of those? And they, i almost always leave all those things behind because if I bring them home, really need work my way through the dozens of cookies that were left over.

00:51:30.53
Alan Baltis
Whereas if I let everybody take things, they think I’m doing them a favor by letting them take them home. No, no, you are saving me from turning into Jabba the Hutt with how many of these things I would eat if I had them in the house.

00:51:40.64
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Well, you know how hard it is to sit here and not think about the chocolate Rolo cookies?

00:51:41.96
Alan Baltis
All

00:51:47.55
Stephen Schneider
It’s like, don’t think of a red rose. What happened? I sit here and I’m like, wow, one of those Rolo cookies.

00:51:50.43
Alan Baltis
right.

00:51:52.71
Stephen Schneider
be Wow. one that Oh, I got to stop. I got to stop. Oh, Rolo cookie. Yeah. And then I go in and I’m like, well, I don’t want to come in again. So I’ll just take 10.

00:52:00.44
Alan Baltis
Right, yeah I’ll have to get provision for my long journey.

00:52:00.51
Stephen Schneider
You know, I shouldn’t be eating 10 cookies. yeah but But honestly, i don’t need a lot of the sugar and stuff.

00:52:04.51
Alan Baltis
my My older brother

00:52:08.89
Stephen Schneider
So honestly, if I do eat that many afterwards, I’m like, oh, I feel like crap. I mean, it just does not agree with me.

00:52:14.88
Alan Baltis
You have to pace yourself because my system can’t handle eating a dozen cookies anymore. Exactly.

00:52:19.26
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:52:19.72
Alan Baltis
I noticed that. We we just had, we ate a big but Christmas party and all rich food, really wonderful, but like perfect prime rib, perfect, everything rich. And the next day I really had abdominal distress because my system doesn’t handle all of that fat, all of that at gu lusciousness any anymore, you know?

00:52:36.76
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Oh, the way some people salt and stuff, especially for us.

00:52:40.67
Alan Baltis
yeah

00:52:41.90
Stephen Schneider
and It’s not just even that, you know, you literally, I can feel like my energy and my, I’m just like, Oh, I, I just, ah

00:52:44.35
Alan Baltis
me

00:52:49.69
Alan Baltis
Food coma, exactly. that My older brother sent me, we sent out advent calendars to the family. And then he in reply this year, he said, hey, do you still like frango mints?

00:53:00.21
Alan Baltis
It’s like, why? I don’t know if you ever had them.

00:53:02.07
Stephen Schneider
no,

00:53:02.16
Alan Baltis
They’re like a Marshall Fields in Chicago type thing. And they’ve been through multiple hands and the recipe might not be exactly the same, but they’re still pretty darn good. And so he sent us some Frango mints this year.

00:53:13.75
Alan Baltis
And i really, i have them up here because Colleen really doesn’t like them as much as I do. And I’m having to ration them out because it used to be like, you know, I used to go to Play-Doh at University of Illinois and play all night my wonderful computer games, Dungeon Exploring.

00:53:30.38
Alan Baltis
And I’d work my way through like a pound bag of peanut M&Ms. ah ah a big a fucking pound bag like you know how how did i not like got die from a sugar coma how did my eyeballs not start vibrating with all the sugar i was inflicting on them because when you’re young you can handle that stuff i can’t do that anymore okay

00:53:37.90
Stephen Schneider
So

00:53:47.58
Stephen Schneider
Right. so I know insulin resistance is very genetic. You know, people like, oh, you’re going to give yourself diabetes.

00:53:52.22
Alan Baltis
okay

00:53:54.38
Stephen Schneider
Yes, that that definitely eating bad contributes to it. Overweight contributes to it. But let’s just say my father was pretty bad diabetic early.

00:54:05.11
Stephen Schneider
ah He had most of most of my life. I’ve known him as a diabetic and he didn’t always eat so well. My mother kept him alive for way longer than they thought he was going to be.

00:54:15.52
Stephen Schneider
um

00:54:16.06
Alan Baltis
Wow.

00:54:16.70
Stephen Schneider
But he would brag about he used to work. So he lived here on Rock Spring Road and he used to work at this quarry and it was six miles away or so.

00:54:27.55
Stephen Schneider
But he would walk to work and walk home when he was younger.

00:54:31.31
Alan Baltis
That’s really good to keep up that level of exercise.

00:54:32.09
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:54:33.87
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:54:34.36
Stephen Schneider
You would think.

00:54:34.86
Alan Baltis
Besides working in a quarry all day, but anyway.

00:54:36.54
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, you would think so.

00:54:36.97
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:54:38.75
Stephen Schneider
But he would brag about buying a one pound thing of chocolate to eat every day on the way home at the the chocolate store.

00:54:45.75
Alan Baltis
keep his energy up. Exactly.

00:54:47.15
Stephen Schneider
Yes. So he was big.

00:54:48.36
Alan Baltis
man. Hiding them.

00:54:49.71
Stephen Schneider
Even when he was diabetic, it was the joke around the house. It’s like, so where’d Papa hide the candy now? When he would drive, when he could drive, he’d go after Christmas and fill up a freaking shopping cart of candy and then he’d hide it everywhere.

00:55:04.11
Stephen Schneider
We found candy bags hidden in like 10 places in the basement after we cleaned it up

00:55:08.73
Alan Baltis
ah room

00:55:09.53
Stephen Schneider
The cupboards, his garden shed, when I was cleaning some stuff out there, I’m like, oh, look, some of Papa’s candy. And he’d forget some of it. And it’s like, oh my God, I wouldn’t eat that.

00:55:19.05
Alan Baltis
Right, expiration date in Roman numerals.

00:55:21.18
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:55:21.27
Alan Baltis
That’s how old it is, you know?

00:55:21.49
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:55:22.45
Alan Baltis
That’s funny.

00:55:22.81
Stephen Schneider
But there were so many times it would be the joke. You know, you’d come walking out of the house and he’d be at, you’re in the cupboard and he can move. It was like, oh, Papa’s eating candy again, but he’s trying to hide it, you know?

00:55:36.12
Alan Baltis
body

00:55:36.67
Stephen Schneider
But he lived to 84. So, I mean, whatever.

00:55:41.66
Alan Baltis
Right. You know, some of those things are just a testament to how en incredibly resilient human beings are, how their bodies. Colleen’s father was like early on. He had various different cancers. He had damaged his lizr liver, almost cirrhosis, because he drank quite a bit.

00:55:57.59
Alan Baltis
And yet he lived 10, 12 years beyond when the doctor said, you’re going to be dead in six months if you don’t. And he didn’t stop all the things he was told to stop. And yet his body just kept, I’m going to, if you’re going to keep going, I’m going to, it just kept him alive.

00:56:14.33
Alan Baltis
Amazing, actually.

00:56:15.47
Stephen Schneider
Gina’s father was in the military. What ended up killing him was he had been at Camp Lejeune with the bad tainted water and that ended up like killing him. But in his 30s, he was on the the ER r table.

00:56:29.97
Stephen Schneider
they were struggling to keep them alive because his system had basically shut down and they said, you’re alive, but we’re not going to be able to keep you this way because your system’s horrible.

00:56:41.70
Stephen Schneider
You know, if you keep in your current lifestyle, you’ll be dead in days, if not, you know, something else.

00:56:45.61
Alan Baltis
You’ll be dead.

00:56:48.91
Stephen Schneider
So he changed his lifestyle, started running like, you know, five months.

00:56:49.14
Alan Baltis
God.

00:56:53.83
Stephen Schneider
He went in marathons. He lived to like 78.

00:56:57.24
Alan Baltis
You know, sometimes you need that that wake up, that moment of clarity that says whatever you’ve been able to get away with up till now, it’s not that it’s healthy.

00:57:01.21
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Right.

00:57:05.68
Alan Baltis
It’s that you’ve been able to survive it and that’s no longer the case.

00:57:10.04
Stephen Schneider
right

00:57:10.43
Alan Baltis
Wow. Okay.

00:57:11.03
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. So, and I know another friend who had symptoms of gout and the doctor gave him medicine for it And he said, well, how long do I got to take this? He’s like the rest of your life. My friend said, oh no, no, I’m not doing that.

00:57:22.87
Stephen Schneider
So he, he changed his whole eating lifestyle and he started running like five miles a day, five, six days a week. And he takes no medicine for any of the the things he has.

00:57:34.63
Stephen Schneider
So, and any he lost a hundred pounds or something.

00:57:35.35
Alan Baltis
you know,

00:57:38.62
Alan Baltis
Yeah, I honestly, you know, not too secret. I got pretty big and I’ve been getting smaller and already I see the results in terms of how my joints feel and how my blood work is.

00:57:50.35
Alan Baltis
And the the overall goal is not just to get 232 because that’s the birth weight of the baby elephant. You know, that’s the amusing thing I say, but I would love to get to where I wasn’t taking any of my drugs anymore, that my body was back in homeostasis that wasn’t,

00:58:02.84
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:58:06.30
Alan Baltis
pre-diabetic always with the possibility of tipping into diabetic, if I really got it, then I got rid of even more fat, even more like our whatever I’ve done to do 60 years accumulated damage of liking pizza too much, liking peanut M&Ms. I think that i’m already we’ve made lots of changes. When we started doing Weight Watchers 25 years ago, we cut out so many things that are bad for you, but still about quantity, still about timing. There’s any number of things I could still do better. And when you see progress, it really helps you to say, I could keep going here. So though I’m about 250, I’d love to make it not only to my 232, but I stopped taking, I think I mentioned I was taking lisinopril because they were they’ve always been worried about my having blood pressure.

00:58:51.03
Alan Baltis
Though despite my size, I never did. And then lately, it had been that it was actually too much. It was making me dizzy. i was giving you know cold extremities and stuff like that. So but the first bill I ever got put on that I stopped taking, and I’m doing just fine without it. And I could be like, I’d love to have that list drop down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.

00:59:10.93
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:59:11.02
Alan Baltis
I’d love it. I’d just love to be like my my, whatever insults I’ve done to my body, it’d be able to every morning say, thanks again for stop being such a jerk about what you ate and what you did.

00:59:24.31
Alan Baltis
And and we’re going to be a survival engine like a human body really can be.

00:59:28.74
Stephen Schneider
Right. Well,

00:59:30.20
Alan Baltis
We’ll see.

00:59:31.96
Stephen Schneider
I mean, my last time I got my blood work checked, it was up just a ah little bit.

00:59:32.31
Alan Baltis
me

00:59:37.04
Stephen Schneider
And I’m like, okay, um I need to back watch what I’m doing even more. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe I need not exercising enough. Maybe I’ve ate too much junk, whatever. I don’t want that. But I forget the exact amount of metformin I take, but I was just talking with a friend of mine who also takes metformin.

00:59:54.51
Stephen Schneider
And he was like, oh, yeah, I take blah, whatever it is. And I’m like, dude, that’s three times as much as what I’m taking. He’s like, oh, is that bad?

01:00:01.76
Alan Baltis
Right.

01:00:02.55
Stephen Schneider
And I’m like, that’s a hell of a lot of metformin, dude.

01:00:02.81
Alan Baltis
no

01:00:05.59
Stephen Schneider
So I felt a little better about myself. But still, for me personally, you know, I don’t want to go up.

01:00:12.31
Alan Baltis
It is good to know that on that scale, you’re not at that like, wow, this guy can’t live without it. I mean, that level, et cetera.

01:00:17.98
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:00:18.94
Alan Baltis
And I don’t know. I haven’t I’ve never really had interesting conversation about dosages with various different people. Like I know because of my size, I went all the way up to as high as you can go with the dose of Monjaro, like 15 milligrams maybe.

01:00:32.19
Alan Baltis
And other people have to back off because it starts to. give you constipation or affect your your digestive system. But I’ve been able to do so far just fine. And it really, boy, like I said, that’s the miracle worker for me.

01:00:45.45
Alan Baltis
Everybody else has talked about, you know, Zepix and there’s probably four, five, six out on the market now The Monjara was the combination of two of them that were really good if you had the combination of being too big and being pre-diabetic.

01:00:56.69
Alan Baltis
And hats off to science, hats off to whatever they’ve been able to do to say not only is it a miracle, but you don’t have to like sell yourself thousands of dollars a month in order to have it.

01:01:09.67
Alan Baltis
It’s it’s not inexpensive. I think it’s $200 plus. dollars And yet, $2,400 a year to to be miraculously better than I had been.

01:01:19.97
Alan Baltis
i couldn’t buy a better insurance policy. I couldn’t buy a better, you know, that’s my gym membership. That’s my, and I’ll do more.

01:01:24.86
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.

01:01:26.43
Alan Baltis
I’ll do other things. But thank God in my lifetime that that came to be. And it’s really kind of one of those, what’s our plan for staying alive? Stay alive because medical science keeps on coming up with cataracts. Never mind. Here’s a pill. You what I mean? Liver damage. Never mind. Here’s a shot.

01:01:42.91
Alan Baltis
I just keep hoping that despite some of the craziness we’ve seen lately about reverting to where there’s measles again, there’s also lots of good people, lots of smart scientists that are still working on things. And we’re finding out, I think we talked about this a couple episodes ago,

01:01:57.57
Alan Baltis
There’s all kinds of vaccines, and now when you take them, they’re saying, by the way, that really helps not only with your diabetes, but it takes care of all these other comorbidities that you get less Alzheimer’s. You get less, honestly, they’re like miraculously cool.

01:02:14.14
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Right.

01:02:14.36
Alan Baltis
And the more that they keep doing that, do those studies that say it’s not an off prescription drug. um they’re not giving it to you in a way that it wasn’t intended but if you’re going to be taking it anyway by the way it takes care of your glaucoma good lord that’s just so wonderful to find out that there might be a couple small panaceas out there that are like a miracle cure or a miracle preventative at least oh my god that’s wonderful

01:02:40.99
Stephen Schneider
Well, but, you know, as a last resort, we could always just pull your initial pattern buffer out of the transporter and integrate it India and you’ll be fine.

01:02:50.64
Alan Baltis
That’s true. Revert me back to my 30 years ago self.

01:02:53.85
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:02:54.08
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

01:02:54.46
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I love when Star Trek always did that. It’s like you did something, well, wait a minute. Why don’t you do that more often if you can?

01:03:01.21
Alan Baltis
but Yeah. Every year going for a tune-up every year, go back can revert to your.

01:03:01.62
Stephen Schneider
mean, come on. Yeah. Yeah.

01:03:05.04
Alan Baltis
Okay.

01:03:05.75
Stephen Schneider
yeah Yeah, we had a conversation just recently about ah canon and how many books and stories. and It was Star Wars because it split, you know, and and Star Trek was brought up.

01:03:16.31
Stephen Schneider
And I’m like, you know what? Don’t even bother with Star Trek. There’s way too many shows and way too many books and way too many comic books and video games and stuff that have they don’t care what anyone else did.

01:03:28.98
Stephen Schneider
They’re just going to do something.

01:03:29.98
Alan Baltis
they went off in their alternative timeline is now the term right you know what i some of still have the spirit of the show but a lot of them are like that’s not directly in in opposition to what we know from what i thought was the main line you know star trek then then enter you know anyway anyway i know what you’re saying

01:03:30.18
Stephen Schneider
Don’t even bother. Yeah, we’re up to like, you know, 1200 alternative timelines in Star Trek or something, you know, just don’t worry about it.

01:03:42.33
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

01:03:48.50
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:03:51.64
Stephen Schneider
And speaking of I’ve been watching, oh my gosh, to end up here today real quick. I’ve been watching finished up Peacemaker with Colin and we loved the second season.

01:04:00.35
Alan Baltis
Okay.

01:04:01.32
Stephen Schneider
It was great.

01:04:02.23
Alan Baltis
it

01:04:02.24
Stephen Schneider
ah So much fun. I’ve been watching. I finished welcome to dairy. It’s like, oh my God, if you love it, this is the show.

01:04:10.09
Alan Baltis
I haven’t even started it yet.

01:04:11.58
Stephen Schneider
Oh, it, it,

01:04:11.63
Alan Baltis
that’s i will I’ll do that in new new year. I still got things I want to get done through the end of the year. Then I’ll fall into a cool series. Okay.

01:04:17.72
Stephen Schneider
it is tied into the two part it movie. Just saying, if you haven’t seen that, you really should watch that first.

01:04:22.10
Alan Baltis
Interesting.

01:04:24.63
Alan Baltis
Thank you for that, because I really i like I like continuity and I like getting surprises in the right order kind of a thing. But also when it retricons and it says now that makes sense.

01:04:34.67
Alan Baltis
I didn’t know what was going on. Now it makes sense.

01:04:35.84
Stephen Schneider
Right now.

01:04:36.70
Alan Baltis
OK.

01:04:37.02
Stephen Schneider
Now, chronologically, the series comes before the movie, but they did things in the series because of what happened in the movie.

01:04:40.38
Alan Baltis
You mentioned.

01:04:44.34
Stephen Schneider
So think,

01:04:44.80
Alan Baltis
Setting it up to happen, if you will.

01:04:46.55
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I think the best way to watch it is movie and then series.

01:04:46.61
Alan Baltis
OK.

01:04:49.87
Stephen Schneider
um

01:04:50.14
Alan Baltis
Very good.

01:04:50.100
Stephen Schneider
And I watched ah um what was the other one? Stranger Things. I got two more episodes and then they’re dropped. Oh my God, it broke ah Netflix earlier and now they’re going drop the last four on Christmas Day.

01:05:03.63
Stephen Schneider
Are they idiots? I mean, everyone’s going to be screaming on Christmas Day because they can’t watch Stranger Things. um

01:05:10.19
Alan Baltis
What’s cool though, it reminds everybody that that’s how popular it is.

01:05:14.86
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:05:15.12
Alan Baltis
It’s nice with, there’s nowhere near the Nielsen ratings and all those things that used to come out about what was the high and the most important shows.

01:05:20.38
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:05:21.76
Alan Baltis
Once a while, it’s nice to say, this is so popular that it breaks the internet.

01:05:25.88
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

01:05:25.97
Alan Baltis
That’s, wow, well oh that’s a really big benediction to how good it is.

01:05:27.13
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:05:29.28
Alan Baltis
So, yeah.

01:05:29.98
Stephen Schneider
And then speaking of star Trek real quick, there’s a new series coming out in January that I’m a little iffy on. I don’t know you’ve seen the previews for it. Starfleet Academy.

01:05:40.06
Alan Baltis
Okay, no, I have not.

01:05:40.06
Stephen Schneider
ah As Brian, my my friend, Brian, he’s, he’s a curmudgeon. He’s over opinionated, but he said, Oh yeah, I saw that. Basically it’s Beverly Hills, 90210 in space.

01:05:52.07
Stephen Schneider
And I’m like, actually, that’s pretty accurate.

01:05:53.36
Alan Baltis
All

01:05:55.03
Stephen Schneider
That’s exactly what it looks like.

01:05:56.15
Alan Baltis
right, they’re not like interstellar travelers.

01:05:56.67
Stephen Schneider
I’m like,

01:05:58.99
Alan Baltis
They’re loaded with hormones.

01:06:00.57
Stephen Schneider
yes, they are not targeting us at all.

01:06:00.60
Alan Baltis
That’s what’s gonna be okay.

01:06:04.35
Stephen Schneider
They are targeting the 20 year olds. They, they need a new generation to get interested

01:06:07.74
Alan Baltis
Bring a next ten generation in. Okay.

01:06:09.53
Stephen Schneider
You know, so I don’t blame them for it, but you know, of course you’ll hear a lot of r age bitching about it. Oh, that’s stupid. about but but I’m done with Star Trek. but but It’s like, Hey, you know what? If you were in that situation, you know, we could do this and get new audience and then go for another 30 years.

01:06:25.12
Alan Baltis
the franchise. Exactly. That makes sense.

01:06:27.13
Stephen Schneider
You know, it’d make my, I love that when they say, Oh, blah, blah, blah.

01:06:27.76
Alan Baltis
It really does. you know Okay.

01:06:31.51
Stephen Schneider
I’m not going watch it. And so, okay, well, did you watch these other shows? No, I haven’t watched any of those. Well then shut up. You haven’t been supporting them anyway.

01:06:37.56
Alan Baltis
You have no opinion worth listening to. Exactly.

01:06:40.25
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, watching your videotapes of the OG series does not help the franchise nowadays.

01:06:46.49
Alan Baltis
That’s funny. My closing thing, remember I mentioned I can’t fall into a series with because I have other things to get done. What I did notice is Netflix nowadays has Leaving Soon for one of the little indications, and Arrow was one of the things listed.

01:06:57.21
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

01:07:00.57
Stephen Schneider
Oh.

01:07:01.24
Alan Baltis
And I had not seen many. I mean, I probably stopped after two seasons. So I went back into it and hats off to how clever they were with using that as the way of introducing and cross pollinating between Flash and Supergirl and whatever else is still to come.

01:07:16.79
Alan Baltis
lots of you know character introductions villains all that kind of stuff but especially where they like kind of steal things from wasn’t that really a batman villain raz al ghul well no i really yeah and so they i i really admire the fact that they have kept found a way to keep it going and it’s a little bit histrionic they’re always falling in and out of love over well you know if now you wouldn’t you wouldn’t be on off, like turning on switch as opposed to, but anyway, I’m really, I, I i have it on that kind of the side monitor while I’m doing other important things.

01:07:43.39
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:07:51.03
Alan Baltis
And it’s interesting enough that once a while I’ll be like, okay, I really got to pay attention because they just, what, what’s going on with, ah you know, The Atom.

01:07:52.59
Stephen Schneider
Fooled you in.

01:07:56.31
Stephen Schneider
Now, know. you you know

01:07:59.15
Alan Baltis
Ray Palmer is not revealed to be the Atom yet. And in fact, they’re making it out that he just wants a super suit instead of a shrinking suit. But it’s powered by white dwarf star material. So is it going to be that that whole Atom thing is a big mistake?

01:08:11.80
Alan Baltis
And that he finds out that he can shrink, but maybe he shrinks too far? I’m waiting to see how that plays out.

01:08:16.57
Stephen Schneider
you You know that this was highly integrated with Supergirl and Flash and DC’s Legends, that those shows, ah ah there’s later seasons where they have crossover events, where they have four shows that you have to watch all of them to get the whole story.

01:08:34.53
Stephen Schneider
So I’m just…

01:08:34.100
Alan Baltis
that’s i’m i’m i’m gonna I’m hoping that they don’t all go leaping soon on me. And then it’s like, well, now I got to, how am I going to find them?

01:08:42.33
Stephen Schneider
Well, i think I think they’re all on HBO Max regardless, I think.

01:08:43.29
Alan Baltis
you

01:08:46.46
Alan Baltis
Interesting, because right now I think I’m either watching Netflix or Prime, and that’s where they’re leaving from. So it’s good.

01:08:52.35
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:08:52.79
Alan Baltis
I’m sure that if i nowadays you can go and like, in fact, one of the things we just had as a frustration was we like our British baking show. We just had Canadian. There’s an Australian baking show. And you look for it on streaming, and it really isn’t available.

01:09:05.07
Alan Baltis
Individual things are available on YouTube, but like, how how could that go away? You think that it’s got to be available, you know like instead of BritBox, it’s OzBox or something.

01:09:13.82
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:09:14.12
Alan Baltis
Nope, some things just go away. Oh, no.

01:09:16.28
Stephen Schneider
now Now, you may get in luck. It says it’s going away, but if Netflix buys WB, then it’ll be back.

01:09:24.15
Alan Baltis
they’ll revive the entire library. and And actually, as you know, what they do is they don’t put it all out there.

01:09:25.82
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

01:09:29.03
Alan Baltis
They kind of make events out of it. They parse it out there so that different things come on and they do a little bit of splash.

01:09:34.14
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:09:34.33
Alan Baltis
Okay. I see what you’re saying.

01:09:35.74
Stephen Schneider
So, all right.

01:09:35.76
Alan Baltis
All right. Take care. Thanks. Thanks again for for handling my ophthalmology. I didn’t ever really lean into the camera to show everybody.

01:09:42.78
Stephen Schneider
year

01:09:43.23
Alan Baltis
These are the big pupils.

01:09:43.99
Stephen Schneider
You look like you’re possessed.

01:09:44.35
Alan Baltis
you yeah when they put The dilation drops in. So if if I’ve looked like a an animation character today that’s why because i just been to the ophthalmologist exactly all black pupils take care steven okay bye

01:09:50.41
Stephen Schneider
Supernatural demon.

01:09:54.62
Stephen Schneider
Al is a supernatural demon today.

01:09:58.65
Stephen Schneider
All right, man. Talk you later.