Episode229

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Transcript

00:00:43.40
Alan Baltis
I’ll have the the shade slightly open. Okay.

00:00:45.55
Stephen Schneider
More like we’re we’re cloudy and rainy here.

00:00:48.83
Alan Baltis
It is very overcast, but as as compared to whatever light I have coming off, you know, my lamps and stuff. So, okay. So, hey, let’s see. What’s first for today?

00:00:59.31
Stephen Schneider
Well, you didn’t know about this object.

00:01:03.35
Alan Baltis
Tell me about the Meteor Alien Spaceship of Hammer of God.

00:01:08.34
Stephen Schneider
ah Yes.

00:01:08.82
Alan Baltis
What’s going on?

00:01:09.49
Stephen Schneider
So here’s the thing that they they’ve seen it heading into our solar system. um it’s three l slash Atlas. And they said it they haven’t quite been able to identify it yet.

00:01:24.69
Stephen Schneider
They said it’s not quite displaying all the normal signs of a comet.

00:01:30.17
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:01:30.19
Stephen Schneider
And it’s not quite displaying all the normal signs of a meteor. So they’re trying to determine what it is. And the funny… but The funny part is, you know, here’s scientists. mean Well, it could be a comet, but it’s not displaying all the comet abilities. There’s no trail. It’s not leaking gases as it approaches the sun.

00:01:49.34
Alan Baltis
Right. That’s kind of what I’ve heard it, you know a dirty snowball and it, it expels as it goes. So, okay.

00:01:53.63
Stephen Schneider
Right. They said um it could be a meteor.

00:01:54.44
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:01:57.56
Stephen Schneider
but when it’s not really displaying that either, because when it goes past objects, it doesn’t, it’s not influenced by gravity. So we’re not quite sure. He goes, or it could be something else.

00:02:09.96
Stephen Schneider
And I’m like, well, thank you for telling us it could be something else. If it’s not this or this, well, it could be something else. Like that’s the, that’s the official title. You know, it’s like an Acme road runner thing.

00:02:20.67
Stephen Schneider
We have comment meteor, something else. And it’s a block.

00:02:23.31
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:02:23.99
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:02:24.31
Alan Baltis
So those are like the questions that i would have asked is, I mean, if it’s not showing that it’s just an object going in space and that it was following a trajectory and instead it’s kind of like, like you said, not affected by gravity or actually compensating for that by steering, it’s a big assumption to make that there’s steering going on, that there’s any intelligence in life, you know, you’re right, you know.

00:02:24.66
Stephen Schneider
ah but

00:02:44.60
Stephen Schneider
and Oh, yeah. but they And they didn’t say that. They did not say it’s a spaceship or anything like that.

00:02:47.74
Alan Baltis
so yeah Right, so that’s why I’m not jumping to the something else part of, oh gosh, aliens, you know, that guy.

00:02:52.75
Stephen Schneider
Right. No, no. But, you know, it intrigues people, um especially because they we can’t say what it is, but we can say, here’s, you know, kind of what it’s not. um But the other thing is, and I couldn’t find exactly how big, but from what I heard, it was like absolutely enormous.

00:03:11.80
Stephen Schneider
I mean, we’re talking like Star Destroyer size type thing.

00:03:14.94
Alan Baltis
Okay, so is it like we enter our solar system? Is it on a trajectory to us? Because that’s, of course, what they’ve been doing like for the last 50 years is trying to put together how will we detect them early enough and how will we respond if we do so that we could, you know, pull off Project Armageddon or whatever it was where they brought something on the side and that makes it veer or they splintered into pieces.

00:03:31.69
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:03:34.32
Stephen Schneider
we We got to send up Bruce Willis.

00:03:36.33
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:03:37.72
Stephen Schneider
and So here’s the thing they said. Here’s the other thing that they can’t quite grasp is most of the comets and a lot of meteors, they they come through our solar system and they slow down and they slingshot and they end up going back out.

00:03:51.55
Alan Baltis
Right, because there are celestial bodies in our solar system that gravity would affect and that, you know, a sun, especially if they come anywhere near a sun, it captures them or it slingshots them.

00:03:51.81
Stephen Schneider
This is on. Right. Right.

00:04:00.74
Alan Baltis
It escapes falling into the gravity well.

00:04:01.75
Stephen Schneider
just Just watch Star Trek 4.

00:04:03.78
Alan Baltis
Okay, right.

00:04:04.07
Stephen Schneider
ah You’ll get that in Star Trek 4. But it doesn’t show any signs of altering its speed or trajectory to do a slingshot. It’s going straight. and the so So, I mean, it you know very well could be it’s big enough that the the and far enough away that the gravity isn’t going to really affect it. It’s just going shoot through. you know it could be A million years ago, some sun exploded in planets, and this is a chunk from one of those, ah big chunk.

00:04:32.87
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:04:33.54
Stephen Schneider
You know, but…

00:04:34.47
Alan Baltis
And it like, has it been on radar, on insight for a long time, and now it’s entering our solar system? Or did it just kind of like, what’s that?

00:04:43.36
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, it was like in August. they But, you know, ah people are like, well, you guys are scientists.

00:04:45.21
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:04:48.32
Stephen Schneider
You should know this. you said ah do you Do you truly understand the grasp of the the the space they’re looking at?

00:04:56.18
Alan Baltis
The vastness, exactly.

00:04:57.46
Stephen Schneider
Yes. And you’ve got to you got to account for not just X and Y, but the Z axis too. Things are farther away and that makes a difference depending on their size. If it’s coming right at us and it’s small, we may not see it until it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s a mile away. Oh, well, there it went.

00:05:14.64
Stephen Schneider
You what I mean?

00:05:16.50
Alan Baltis
I know. i mean, I read up a little bit about this because I’m curious. There’s been a number of things that by the time they detected it in order to be able to do something about it, it had already passed where it was going to be a danger to us.

00:05:29.05
Alan Baltis
But that’s like, well, you know, how when we talk about, wow, we’re cutting funding for various different things, like an early warning and detection system. It really is, I guess,

00:05:41.05
Alan Baltis
There’s something about people that’s like, well, if it happens, it happens. It’s just the apocalypse and there’s nothing you can do about it. And that’s, I guess, the whole point. There are things we can do about it. We just have to decide that the one in a million chance is worth this much money to make it so that it wouldn’t be a planet destroying thing or doesn’t have to destroy everything.

00:05:54.81
Stephen Schneider
what

00:06:00.71
Alan Baltis
It has to be. a little guy can still put up enough eject into the atmosphere that we get winter for a year. You know, what ah volcanoes have done that, and they’ve got the evidence via crater of like right off of Yucatan, right?

00:06:07.27
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:06:13.09
Alan Baltis
That’s where they think the Death Star hit that ended the dinosaurs.

00:06:15.23
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:06:16.92
Alan Baltis
And like, you think we’re hardier than dinosaurs because we have a little bit of hair left? I don’t think so.

00:06:22.37
Stephen Schneider
Well, we can be as hardy as we want when there’s nothing to eat and there’s no sun to make anything to eat.

00:06:28.63
Alan Baltis
That’s right. It’s not just the temperature drop, it’s the vast change. and And of course, why would I think that they would care about doing anything like that when they know about climate change and how we’re baking the planet and how we’re destroying ecosystems and not a trajectory towards demise.

00:06:43.29
Alan Baltis
And yet, but but there’s profit to be made. There’s carbons. We have to unlock our fuel.

00:06:47.45
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And it’s, you know, that’s the thing with this comment. I’m not super worried about it because obviously this is Biden and the liberals fault that they sent this at us.

00:06:52.29
Alan Baltis
Right?

00:06:56.29
Alan Baltis
no

00:06:57.95
Stephen Schneider
And ah Trump will write an executive order banning it from coming into our solar system. And so it’ll be fine. Not worried.

00:07:04.80
Alan Baltis
maybe it’s a meteor made entirely of acetaminophen, that it’s this huge, we’re all either going to die or get autistic because we’re that stupid.

00:07:08.79
Stephen Schneider
We’re all gone. oh my gosh.

00:07:14.84
Alan Baltis
ah You know, We there’s there’s no end. but We can’t stop commenting on it because every time that there’s the next press conference from the health guy that doesn’t know about health and the economics guy that doesn’t know about economics and all of these incompetence that he’s brought into his cabinet, but given vast powers to affect us.

00:07:32.39
Alan Baltis
You can’t have someone that doesn’t care and is actually hostile to education run the Department of Education. And yet we do.

00:07:38.71
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:07:38.74
Alan Baltis
And so it it’s. I guess analogous, you know, what are we going to do? We’re going to clean up in case a meteor hit. We’re getting hit by 10 meteors every single day from all the ways in which we’ve wrecked our educational and our energy and our ecological, at every policy.

00:07:53.05
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:07:55.53
Alan Baltis
And I just, the fact that we just are lemmings going over the cliff, it it boggles my mind that people could be

00:08:01.73
Stephen Schneider
The problem is it’s the the the the lemmings just going ah yeah with ah yeah their instincts have ropes tied to the rest of us and they’re dragging us along.

00:08:12.54
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:08:12.68
Alan Baltis
I made this, that, you know, I don’t want to be that I can’t get out of the pack, that I’m stuck in the middle of this.

00:08:16.45
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:08:17.36
Alan Baltis
And even if I, you know, it’s kind of funny. I’ve been at a concert where I picked my feet up and the press of the crowd carried me forward and I’m 250 pounds.

00:08:28.41
Alan Baltis
So that’s a lot. And yet that’s the madness of crowds is that you find, well, I’m going to ride it out. And I hope that I don’t go down. I hope that don’t get smooshed into a wall or a barrier because they’re not fucking stopping. Am i going to be the one that gets ground up?

00:08:42.04
Alan Baltis
You know,

00:08:43.08
Stephen Schneider
the

00:08:43.15
Alan Baltis
sadly this is a long time ago now remember when the who held a concert and like 12 people died from trampling that people just they didn’t they weren’t paying enough attention and once you went down there was no pulling you back up they didn’t care

00:08:46.50
Stephen Schneider
Oh, yeah.

00:08:55.08
Stephen Schneider
People didn’t care. only i mean, it’s it’s a good thing things have changed and people care so much more about everyone else than themselves nowadays. um I’m glad we’ve improved over those couple decades.

00:09:06.48
Alan Baltis
right every so terrible that the manager of crowds not paying attention and so forth and yet lately colleen and i’ve very nice instances where people that really didn’t have to do anything for us did you know a clerk at bronner’s really went above and beyond the call in service or a a waitress at aladdin’s or whatever else it might be and of course there’s a little bit of a motivation for you know come back you’re going spend more money we’re nicer to you and and all that kind stuff give me a good tip but there’s still It isn’t just that everybody is like um bestially tearing at each other.

00:09:43.47
Alan Baltis
There still are situations where there’s enough social lubricant left in the system and people still take delight, not in being evil and a nut, but in being kind and making the world a better place.

00:09:56.24
Alan Baltis
You know, so, and and Colleen and I do our share. We pick up trash while we’re going on our walks. We give a nice tip. Like we’ve we’ve reached that like, pleasant old people thing where we want to give a tip that they’ll be like, you know, wow, I get to get my kids a toy because it’s more than my usual for that night.

00:10:13.82
Alan Baltis
I’m hoping that it helps a little bit. You know what I mean? is

00:10:17.09
Stephen Schneider
That’s, you know, that’s, know, my mother’s big thing too. I may be more cynical. um my Here’s, I, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth, right? Kill them with kindness.

00:10:31.20
Stephen Schneider
ah You know, enough of us are being nice to each other and ah kind words and all that it’ll overcome and all that. But the problem is the bullies, You can be nice to them and they laugh at it and then they fucking destroy you. So now there’s one less person being nice, but the bullies are still here. And I’m not saying niceness in that is the weak part that, you know, how many stories have we heard? You know, the light triumphs, you know, they seem weak. They seem lesser, like the rebel alliance and they triumph in the end.

00:11:02.99
Stephen Schneider
you know That’s what we’re we’re kind of bred upon.

00:11:03.03
Alan Baltis
All right.

00:11:05.51
Stephen Schneider
But really, the you know the Empire with the Death Star, if that hadn’t you know happened and or been destroyed, they would have just kept destroying all the worlds against them. And then who’s standing up against it?

00:11:15.81
Stephen Schneider
Well, then the powerful bullies won, regardless of – it takes longer for the other way. So I’m still –

00:11:22.35
Alan Baltis
yeah The discussion I’ve been trying to have lately is, you know, people, sometimes including myself, out of, i be I’m histrionic when I want to make a point, but I know that it’s not only one end of the scale or the other.

00:11:34.74
Alan Baltis
So you talk about, it’ is there going to be a ratio? You know mean? The way that people are voting, I’m i’m

00:11:38.05
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:11:40.69
Alan Baltis
Marchegiani Distraught that we actually had so many people sit out and so many people vote ridiculously that we swept some people into office and yet you hope there’s going to be a swing back or you’d hope that just if the ah the little people wake up and.

00:11:53.05
Alan Baltis
Justin Marchegiani Claim their power from it being a democracy or at least a democratic republic. that the ratio, it yeah I used to think that it was 10% nuts. You know what I mean? That the the John Birch Society way back when I was growing up and the Ku Klux Klan and various different, they called them the fringe because they really were way out there on the outskirts.

00:12:11.48
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:12:11.88
Alan Baltis
And now it seems that that’s maybe up to 20, 30, 40, maybe but instead of 51,

00:12:16.22
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:12:17.05
Alan Baltis
as long as it’s forty nine instead of fifty one

00:12:19.49
Stephen Schneider
But they all…

00:12:19.91
Alan Baltis
I still find hope that they’re not, it’s not the whole, all of society.

00:12:20.36
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:12:23.71
Alan Baltis
I guess that’s what I get is if this person is a nice waitress or hairdresser or any kind of nice person, they’re not going to turn around and say, i want my kids to die without a vaccine. I want us to go to war for no good reason.

00:12:36.28
Alan Baltis
I want people to be thrown in jail without.

00:12:36.64
Stephen Schneider
Right. Well, we don’t have to worry about wars because Trump promised he’d cancel all the wars. So that’s, yeah.

00:12:42.21
Alan Baltis
That’s every,

00:12:43.30
Stephen Schneider
And the the problem is all those groups, maybe it’s not a growing percentage, but but like yeah again, like the Sith, there’s only two. We keep quiet. We stay in the shadows.

00:12:54.56
Stephen Schneider
You know what? Now we’ve got power. Now we’re going to speak out. And suddenly the Republic’s destroyed and the Jedi are gone. Whoa, where did that come from? Well, you know, they that might not be 50 percent.

00:13:06.85
Stephen Schneider
It still might be 10, 15 percent, but they’re very loud and very aggressive and bold.

00:13:10.05
Alan Baltis
try to be loud. Exactly. And a lot of what’s going on is the psychological warfare of you can’t do anything. It’s learned helplessness. You know we’re going to be so loud or so pushy that you’re just going to say, well, I, what can I do?

00:13:22.17
Alan Baltis
But that’s what they count on is if they’re that evil 10%, they count on the the bully factor, the bluff that says I won without having to take any damage. I won without having to lift a finger really, except bluster.

00:13:33.20
Stephen Schneider
I rolled a natural 20.

00:13:34.09
Alan Baltis
And you know the ta taco thing is is real. you know Every time that you see Trump get a conflict with a really powerful person, he backs off and and shamefully tries to cover it up.

00:13:45.76
Alan Baltis
But I’m hoping that there’s going to be that many more governors of Maine and governors of California and and companies that are going to yeah.

00:13:52.74
Stephen Schneider
We need more Stephen King’s.

00:13:55.01
Alan Baltis
and And I hope for this too. you know We kind of talk about that really the president and various other political people don’t matter because there’s people that really run the whole shooting match because they have such vast wealth.

00:14:07.33
Alan Baltis
The conspiracy theories of the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergers and that kind of stuff. And having said that, I got to think, and I kind of compare it to the mafia, They don’t want gang warfare. They don’t want the whole system focusing on how bad this is.

00:14:21.66
Alan Baltis
They want it to be nice and smooth and get their 5% from the various different things that they do with prostitution and numbers rackets and and you know ah smuggling and whatever else it might be. So somebody has to want the world to calm the heck down and go back to business as usual.

00:14:36.90
Alan Baltis
Go back to good business where everything that’s shipped everywhere, we get a cut.

00:14:37.05
Stephen Schneider
but

00:14:40.98
Alan Baltis
And that means cabalions to us. We don’t want it to be that there’s tariffs. We don’t want it to be that there’s wars that…

00:14:46.46
Stephen Schneider
But that’s the whole plague book right now is

00:14:46.83
Alan Baltis
down entire you know so But it isn’t, I don’t know, not all rich people are nuts.

00:14:51.47
Stephen Schneider
We’ve got three years to cement our power so that we don’t have to give it up and we will burn everything to the ground. So we are the most powerful and rich and fuck everything else.

00:15:04.22
Stephen Schneider
That’s the playbook. I mean, it’s, it’s simplified, but you know,

00:15:10.83
Stephen Schneider
no, oh no, no.

00:15:10.84
Alan Baltis
Some people, know what I mean?

00:15:11.87
Stephen Schneider
Just the ones right now in power are, and the ones kissing the ass are, are, are, you know, getting more power.

00:15:13.06
Alan Baltis
like

00:15:18.40
Alan Baltis
it will And we’ll see every one of those things sows the seeds of its own destruction because they become visible and people that were in the shadows kind of guiding things. Now they’re like, this is my policy and I demand it.

00:15:30.63
Alan Baltis
And all the resistances rise up of, ah you know, you’re only the president. You’re only a wealthy guy. You don’t really run the world. There’s 8 billion people that have something to say.

00:15:41.23
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:15:41.35
Alan Baltis
And, you know, so but what we just saw with Jimmy Kimmel and Disney and hopefully with Colbert maybe making comeback too, is that if you want to hurt them, hurt them in their pocketbook. Hurt them by making it very public what they’re doing and why that’s not right.

00:15:54.55
Alan Baltis
and a place that still runs a little bit on reputation, like especially a company like Disney, which has spent 100 years being the mouse, being a a cartoon company, a gentle company.

00:16:06.62
Alan Baltis
We have kids come to Disney World and Disneyland and have the greatest time in their life.

00:16:06.69
Stephen Schneider
right

00:16:10.48
Alan Baltis
they there’s been a lot of evidence that they’re also the people that keep expending copyright and keep you know they’re they’re ruthless businessmen and stuff like that but every time that that surfaces it kind of hurts the brand and so someone has to say protect the mouse we can’t have it be that they think they’re just like any other company because the goodwill that we’ve built up when they compare us to

00:16:28.17
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:16:31.31
Alan Baltis
I don’t know who who else is big, you know, the the old MGM United artists Warner Brothers. I think they’ve all been so many now devoured by others that I really don’t know what’s the biggest ones are, but I know that there’s three where there used to be 20.

00:16:41.09
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:16:43.76
Alan Baltis
And so that’s it’s own danger, but that’s what I keep hoping is that someone will care not out of altruism, but out of preserve the goodwill that’s built into their stock price.

00:16:55.97
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:16:56.40
Alan Baltis
that when you see, you know, what what am I doing nowadays? i’m I’m so much an investor and I read continually about various different things going on. And that’s when you see corporate changes. Hey, their stock price went down by 20%, whereas it’s been on a nice upward steady climb.

00:17:11.68
Alan Baltis
And now the, them running the business well of managing their assets and, and their personnel and stuff, they don’t want a wild card that is going to make it. So You probably have read, you know, there’s powerful people like the Walmarts and the Amazons that are like saying, we don’t want to raise prices and have them blame us.

00:17:29.22
Alan Baltis
We want them to blame the appropriate person, which is Trump and the tariffs that made all those Chinese goods ridiculously expensive. And of course, not just China, but a bulk of what Amazon, I’m trying to think it was something like 40% of all the things you think you get cheap.

00:17:44.32
Alan Baltis
from Amazon, they don’t come because a shop in Idaho is producing them for you. So it really is like telling the truth shouldn’t be a revolutionary act.

00:17:49.63
Stephen Schneider
right

00:17:54.53
Alan Baltis
And yet it is when it’s ah Walmart is losing business. And i don’t agree. There’ll be a new president in three years.

00:18:01.88
Stephen Schneider
Maybe.

00:18:01.97
Alan Baltis
Why would I have my company? Well, of course it will. Of course it’s not going to be that he can actually so violate the Constitution and take over. Do you know what I mean? There’s there’s no way that we can stand for it.

00:18:10.39
Stephen Schneider
we i

00:18:12.81
Alan Baltis
but

00:18:13.11
Stephen Schneider
I’m um not 100% convinced of that.

00:18:13.63
Alan Baltis
especially for that fucker.

00:18:16.17
Stephen Schneider
I am not 100% convinced. i i I would bet money that right now they already have their speech and their plan ready for the elections so that they will pull in the the National Guard. They’ll pull in ICE because the liberals are trying to ah corrupt it and take it over. And we must protect the Constitution. We’re canceling the election and the results until we get everything settled. And and the groups will be, yeah, you do that.

00:18:45.41
Stephen Schneider
We’ll see. We got three years. We’ll see.

00:18:47.59
Alan Baltis
Yeah, that is a possibility, you you know, that that by declaring an emergency, because that’s the tactic they’ve used for all kinds of other already small level ice stuff.

00:18:56.06
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:18:56.63
Alan Baltis
and And yet it really might be that the first time it is, well, now it’s not, what would be the tipping point? They’re doing it right now to people that are kind of disenfranchised, the various different minorities, the various different immigrants, et cetera.

00:19:11.63
Alan Baltis
When it finally is, hey, Tuscaloosa, We’re going to tell you how to run your life in a way that, no, now it’s freedom. Now all of those guns that you stockpiled, that you said you were using to protect against a totalitarian government, maybe now it’s just too obvious that you know you can’t get, there’s not one official government beer.

00:19:34.10
Alan Baltis
What?

00:19:34.72
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:19:34.75
Alan Baltis
But I like the other beer. And I’m absurd because people make decisions on the most ridiculous things. They’ve canceled my stock car races. They’ve canceled my my little league that my son is in. And and then it’s a Friday night football.

00:19:47.30
Alan Baltis
As they get more and more ridiculously overreaching on trying to tell the people everything, what music they can listen to, what books they can read, what people they can watch on TV, there’s going to be some of it.

00:19:49.31
Stephen Schneider
You’re right.

00:19:57.72
Stephen Schneider
Well, most of them don’t read books, so that’s, you know, they don’t care.

00:20:00.46
Alan Baltis
But everybody loves Tom Hanks. If you’re on the wrong side of Mr. Rogers or Tom Hanks, someone has to say, wait a minute.

00:20:07.23
Stephen Schneider
Well, he already he already canceled that ceremony that Tom Hanks was getting awarded.

00:20:12.71
Alan Baltis
Well, he tried. In other words, the award still went out and and that, you know, him taking over what used to be Lincoln Center, I think, right?

00:20:17.47
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:20:21.05
Alan Baltis
And trying to rename it Trump Center. All those things, it’ll be just like Confederate monuments coming down, he might build stuff. And one of the first things that’s gonna happen is tear all that crap back down and re-put in the Rose Garden and get rid of the ridiculous ballroom.

00:20:36.93
Alan Baltis
And it might be, sadly, something’s irreplaceable. You can’t take down 200 year old trees and say, well, we’ll put a new sapling in.

00:20:43.61
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:20:43.87
Alan Baltis
to get the symbolism of to rebuild the World Trade Center after it was toppled and and all this craziness, the all the gold that he has splattered all over the White House.

00:20:44.01
Stephen Schneider
Well…

00:20:55.57
Alan Baltis
Someone’s going to come in and take all that and say, hey, back to normal, back to business as usual, back to decency. This is a crazy town.

00:21:02.47
Stephen Schneider
well the The gold stuff, people have been finding all of those gold things he has hanging around stuff.

00:21:04.35
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?

00:21:10.35
Alan Baltis
They’re not gold.

00:21:10.40
Stephen Schneider
unlike They’re not gold, though that’s hilarious.

00:21:13.38
Alan Baltis
And tell me that that’s not the analogy for him, that it looks nice, but it’s crap.

00:21:13.45
Stephen Schneider
But again, the

00:21:18.48
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, that’s that’s the analogy.

00:21:18.93
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:21:20.16
Stephen Schneider
You’re correct. But the the ballroom, and you know I’m one of those people that says, do you really think he’s putting this much effort into the ballroom so in two years he’ll be able to use it for a couple months and give it up?

00:21:34.03
Stephen Schneider
Just like the jet. Oh, this is they’re donating it for the president, and then I’m going to take it for my personal jet after that, after everybody has paid to get it upgraded.

00:21:43.19
Alan Baltis
Right. Well, that’s the that’s that thing. He tries to give the impression of continuity and solidity, but it’s just like he did it, so can other people do it back. Anything that built can be taken down. Anything that’s, you know a law that’s passed, we’ve laughed about this, and one of the first things that should happen when the next president comes in is executive orders 100 through 2100, all by Trump, negated, gone.

00:22:07.90
Alan Baltis
And then we’ll, like, you know what i mean? there’s There’s ways that just anything that can be done with the stroke of a pen can be undone by scratching that right back out.

00:22:16.89
Stephen Schneider
I agree, but I’m not as hopeful.

00:22:16.98
Alan Baltis
no know I’m hoping. yeah Well, I have to be. have to be I just can’t believe, you know, in in in honoring my parents and them not having been through this once, I’m not going through it.

00:22:30.12
Alan Baltis
The fact that i sadly say we really are it like not step two, but like step 180 of the Nazi propaganda handbook. And we can see it happening. And any number of people in Europe are really worried because they lived through it and they can’t believe that we’re voluntarily going through it.

00:22:43.34
Stephen Schneider
Right. Well, and that’s,

00:22:46.22
Alan Baltis
And that’s,

00:22:47.31
Stephen Schneider
That’s the even. So ah he has now declared that the anti-fascist group is an extremist terrorist.

00:22:57.87
Stephen Schneider
And everybody’s like, yeah, but go for it. Get rid of them. It’s like, wait a minute. You’re saying we don’t want a group that’s against fascism. So you’re saying you want fascism. No, we hate that.

00:23:09.35
Stephen Schneider
We hate socialism. All those. Can you define fascism or socialism? Yeah, they suck. We hate them.

00:23:16.20
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:23:16.32
Stephen Schneider
yeah

00:23:16.73
Alan Baltis
And also, like, so where’s the group? Let’s raid their headquarters. You mean there is no such thing, that that’s just label that people apply to whatever they like, and if it’s not going to be Entifa, it’s going to be communism or socialism, it’s going to be all the…

00:23:22.25
Stephen Schneider
Right. So…

00:23:26.54
Stephen Schneider
so

00:23:28.74
Alan Baltis
this

00:23:28.95
Stephen Schneider
So that’s what that’s why they do it, because you know they they’ll find somebody on Facebook and say, well, we don’t agree with that. They said, oh, my God, they’re Antifa. Let’s go arrest them.

00:23:39.35
Stephen Schneider
Anybody. you know that’s the California just passed the that law that ah um government and local but with the masks and ID, and I said, yeah, fuck you.

00:23:49.05
Alan Baltis
with no masks. That’s exactly right.

00:23:51.90
Stephen Schneider
We’re not doing it.

00:23:54.80
Alan Baltis
yeah Well, the first, you know, you know there’s going to be bellwether events. They avoided it in Illinois because Illinois said, don’t come in here. We, you know, we have our own troops and arms and people that care and, and you won’t get away with it. So I, unfortunately I just read they’re, they’re like,

00:24:11.63
Alan Baltis
terrorists in terms of then they don’t do it force to force. They inveigle their way into let’s go to Naperville and make sure that these roofers get, you know, they stole their ladders and trapped them on the roof.

00:24:23.47
Alan Baltis
and And every one of those things, like that’s what asymmetric warfare is, they’re the terrorists, they’re the ones that are saying we know there’s a superior force, you can’t have enough ICE or National Guard to go up against 350 million people in the United States.

00:24:36.99
Alan Baltis
We’re not all that sheepish and there already are existing police forces and you know what i mean, there’s there’s things that can stop them.

00:24:40.56
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. yeah

00:24:43.56
Alan Baltis
so They’re still trying to do stuff that they’ll get away with, but they they can’t stand an armed conflict. There’s no way that the army is going to roll the tanks in and declare the United States a martial state.

00:24:55.30
Alan Baltis
There’s no way they will. They all took an oath, even if there are very conservative or very. you know The army has its own bent in that way, but there’s a lot of other people that took the oath about and all enemies, foreign and domestic, and they won’t it’ll it’ll be like Tiananmen Square.

00:25:11.80
Alan Baltis
Who am I seeing across the parking lot? My brother. I’m not opening fire on my brother. and I’m not doing this.

00:25:17.39
Stephen Schneider
right

00:25:18.48
Alan Baltis
So we’ll see. We’ll see when that mass protest happens.

00:25:19.26
Stephen Schneider
but Yeah Yeah

00:25:21.56
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? And even the nuts that will do it, they’ll be the ones that, all right, we got to shut this craziness down.

00:25:27.35
Stephen Schneider
Well that’s Agreed We hope and that that’s So that’s the other thing he keeps messing with their minds Because like those protesters at the restaurant couple weeks ago The one was a woman that yelled at him So he says well I’m invoking Rico And we need to arrest her

00:25:27.85
Alan Baltis
because we are not at war with our neighbors. We are not at war with, and we hope.

00:25:38.49
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:25:46.10
Stephen Schneider
ah you Are you a freaking four-year-old on the playground?

00:25:46.18
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:25:49.01
Alan Baltis
It’s because he read the term Rico once and because it’s been used against him because of his racketeering and evil and, and just, you know,

00:25:55.06
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:25:58.77
Alan Baltis
I really don’t think that America is totally that stupid. There’s been a lot of evidence about how far religious craziness can take you and how far conservative craziness can take you, but it really will not be.

00:26:10.63
Alan Baltis
You’re accusing my mom of this. My mom is not that. You’re accusing like me. I am not what you’re labeling me as.

00:26:17.34
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:26:17.66
Alan Baltis
So I speak up or I at least passive resistance wise exactly.

00:26:20.30
Stephen Schneider
Which I’m supposed to be allowed to do.

00:26:23.39
Alan Baltis
So maybe it’ll just be that passive resistance is still a mighty thing. you know, there’s there’s ways you can do things like then. They have a phenomenon over the last couple of years called quiet quitting.

00:26:33.88
Alan Baltis
where a lot of people that really thought they were being abused by their corporations, they went in, they they they did all the things they asked. I returned to the office, I’m there from eight to five, but I’m doing the absolute least based on what your job description is.

00:26:46.99
Alan Baltis
And the carrot that they used to dangle of, hey, if you work harder, you’ll get ahead. I know that’s not true. I know that you’ve faked that all along. And so you’re you making this a better situation or you’re going to get the least from us you can and we’re not going to win any productivity awards, are we?

00:27:02.65
Alan Baltis
And of course, what are they saying now? Well, don’t worry about it. We got AI coming. We don’t need anyway. So that’s it. um And hey, but you well so here’s a great thing. The latest issue of Time Magazine actually won back. because it’s got it is They have various different, not just the time most, the man of the year, and then time issue where it has like most influential.

00:27:22.42
Alan Baltis
Now they’re doing it on various different topics, sectors, if you will. And the latest one is the top 100 people in AI.

00:27:26.55
Stephen Schneider
Oh, cool.

00:27:29.55
Stephen Schneider
Wow.

00:27:30.17
Alan Baltis
And whenever I read the top 100, I’m always heartened with there really are good people that are trying to cure this disease, trying to get water in places that it hasn’t been before.

00:27:40.80
Alan Baltis
And one of the things that’s going on with AI is not how can we get rid of all human beings and replace them with robots? It’s more I can use AI to figure out how to have reading teaching reading be more effective.

00:27:54.87
Alan Baltis
I can cure this disease. I can make it so that once this disease is cured, here’s how to best disseminate it everywhere so that it’s not, you know, I don’t know, ah Myers Squibb owns it, but that a lot of these things that are being discovered by open AI, open being one of the key terms, that there’s there’s an obligation then to share it for the good of humanity, kind of like open source software was first done.

00:28:18.94
Alan Baltis
And there’s a number of places that try to pervert that. But Honestly, the variety of all the cool things that are being done, it’s not just to take over the world. It’s not just to make more money.

00:28:29.72
Alan Baltis
Some people are really saying we never had access to this data before. We never had the computing power that would let us look at 100,000 trials and narrow down to the 10 that have a chance of succeeding.

00:28:40.93
Alan Baltis
So all those, remember, We used to have the various different um share of computing resources so that we can look for signs of intelligent life. The SETI initiative, we had it where we’re doing protein folding to try to get a really tricky chemical problem solved.

00:28:56.65
Alan Baltis
And now they’re doing so many of those cool things in real time so that diseases really are being cured. And if you have this much distributed so you do the max, you know what I mean?

00:29:04.17
Stephen Schneider
But so ah the problem is all the the computing being used for the AI is making the greenhouse stuff even worse. So we should just stop it all because um RFK and Dr. Oz have solved all of our health issues and we’re going to be set for life. Why are we even wasting time?

00:29:22.73
Alan Baltis
It’s,

00:29:22.74
Stephen Schneider
Oh man, I keep forgetting my sarcasm tags. Yeah.

00:29:26.79
Alan Baltis
I, again, you know, I’m not Warren Buffett. I am so much not the guy that runs the world with investing. But where I put my money is not only into where can I make money, but it’s like if nuclear power great alternative to fossil fuels and the resistance that was shown against wind, against geothermal, solar, et cetera, somehow nuclear power is okay again.

00:29:39.55
Stephen Schneider
What would help?

00:29:50.23
Alan Baltis
So invest in OKLO, everybody, OKLO. They’re really one of those places that they seem to have solved the problems of. it’s It’s always controlled and small. It will not have a three-mile island meltdown, not a Fukushima.

00:30:03.99
Alan Baltis
um I’m hoping that so many of those things that I’m investing in like med tech is not miraculous, but every time that there’s ISRG is an interesting company, the intuitive surgical, they have the surgical robots.

00:30:18.14
Alan Baltis
And so you’ve taken, you know, a doctor’s expertise and built it into an expert system, sometimes assisted still, but sometimes It just knows what to do. And then you get, well, I can get a kidney transplant in the middle of South Dakota where they really don’t have the facilities do to do it, except I bought one of these robots.

00:30:34.78
Alan Baltis
And now this hospital can handle all kinds of things that were not at all available within that geographic area before. So I, you know what I mean? I talked about this since the first time we talked about it.

00:30:45.66
Alan Baltis
I invest to make a better future.

00:30:47.42
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:30:47.55
Alan Baltis
I don’t make it so that I can, hey, how about more tobacco, everybody? you know, God, yeah it isn’t about that. You really can vote with your dollars. And even if my dollars is a penny into the pot compared to the many dollars, it still is that at least I’m not encouraging evil and I’m not helping the bad guys to accumulate resources.

00:31:06.85
Alan Baltis
it’s It’s worth, if everybody, hey, that you overall, folks, if you want to gain hope, Get into the market because that’s where money is being made and you need to be ready to ah assess the risk and get out if it goes south when we have more tariffs or whatever else it might be. But don’t keep your money in a mattress don’t under the mattress.

00:31:26.91
Alan Baltis
It really is that find out what the rich people are doing and ride their coattails. Find out what the the high technologists are doing and enable that cool thing to happen with treatment of water.

00:31:37.64
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? and And we’re taking all the things that were happening. I know I’m going on and on, but it’s like exciting. You know, we we heard about the Pacific Gyre, where we started to have so much plastic in our oceans that it was creating islands.

00:31:51.27
Alan Baltis
Like, no, no, quite a continent, but this big debris pile. And some smart people have found out, well, you can introduce this kind of algae and it eats that kind of plastic.

00:32:01.72
Alan Baltis
Or you can have a little vacuum robot that goes and collects it and then it goes to a recycling facility. And what seemed like an insurmountable problem. Oh, my God, the ocean is filled with trash. What are we going to do?

00:32:13.05
Alan Baltis
Smart people apply themselves.

00:32:14.60
Stephen Schneider
Well, why don’t people quit throwing their trash out their car windows? That would be immense help.

00:32:21.03
Alan Baltis
Well, it there was a time, as you know, when there was a whole anti-littering campaign and people cared about the beauty of our cities and of our roads and that they didn’t want phosphates in the water.

00:32:31.60
Alan Baltis
And as we moved away from that, from propaganda campaigns that said, don’t worry about it, there really are people that even if nobody worries about it, they created a solution that says, We can collect this, we can burn it safely, we can convert it into new tires.

00:32:46.58
Alan Baltis
You know what i mean? We can make it into fertilizer, like so much of the use of plastics has been that all the carbon that’s locked in them.

00:32:50.25
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:32:53.32
Alan Baltis
Well, if we just find a way that it doesn’t further unlock carbon, but compress it or turn it into something else that’s useful. How about more dots for beanbag chairs? How about more, you know what I mean? its Sometimes it’s kind of ridiculous.

00:33:05.25
Alan Baltis
Do we need more plastic bags? Well, if they’re like 10 times removed from virgin plastic that we just keep creating new things out of existing things, that kind of um reduce, reuse, recycle in a smart way, it doesn’t have to just that we all get a ah feel good about, hey, I put my things in the bin, it’s the blue bin, it’s the important one, that they really are making use of it instead of being

00:33:20.84
Stephen Schneider
Okay.

00:33:28.08
Alan Baltis
I know I’ve read some stat statistics that until they found out how to do some of these things, 10% of the stuff was really recycled and the rest of the stuff was gone through to find things of value. And then everything else just went into a landfill that nobody be heard about.

00:33:40.52
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And that’s the other problem, especially like around here is the recycling.

00:33:41.13
Alan Baltis
Oh my God.

00:33:46.15
Stephen Schneider
ah They really only, they they don’t have a lot of funding for it. So they only run it ah occasionally and you get it backed up. And so most of the recycling actually ends up not getting recycled.

00:33:58.15
Stephen Schneider
They just dump it and think, so, you know, again, it’s not really helping, but, we’ve talked about that too. Look at what’s causing the most problems.

00:34:08.78
Stephen Schneider
The normal, you know, all the households with their normal recycled garbage is such a small percentage of what’s helping cause the problem that if that we’re like, oh, look, look, look we did this. Great. We’re good.

00:34:20.50
Stephen Schneider
Well, great. We’re still 98% of the rest of it’s still causing problems. We need to take the the things that are 50% causing the problem and and look at that a little more.

00:34:24.65
Alan Baltis
That’s right.

00:34:29.84
Alan Baltis
yeah right

00:34:30.22
Stephen Schneider
But that then affects the the billionaires and their companies and they don’t make as much money. So they pay the politicians. No, we’re not going to look into that one. Get people recycling.

00:34:41.26
Stephen Schneider
You know, it goes back to it.

00:34:43.07
Alan Baltis
Yeah. Right. Over the course of time, that situation changes. that It might have been that it wasn’t worth doing anything with corrugated cardboard for a long time. But then as you start to find out, well, the cost has gone up of being able to use new trees for that.

00:34:56.27
Alan Baltis
So you you find out how do we recycle cellulose or whatever else it might be. um And absolutely what you said, don’t deal with the little tiny things. If we had, like I don’t know, oh heavy metals are one of the things that really can cause horrible pollution or billions.

00:35:10.25
Stephen Schneider
Like like ah Iron Maiden and Metallica.

00:35:13.25
Alan Baltis
Like that exactly. got good Turn that down kids you goddamn polluters anyway.

00:35:17.77
Stephen Schneider
yeah It’s the goth kids. We must we must get rid of them.

00:35:22.17
Alan Baltis
Well, like the high tech industry has discovered not only that they can that you can take apart an old PC and save all the various different components, but that it’s economically correct that they make more money.

00:35:33.79
Alan Baltis
if they collect all the old PCs and iPhones and tablets and scavenge them, instead of letting it go to a landfill in Kamchatka or India, where it just, oh God, it’s leaking into the environment and people, you know.

00:35:44.30
Stephen Schneider
Well…

00:35:45.25
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:35:45.56
Stephen Schneider
so So some of those places over in those countries, that so you know it’s like third world countries. They accept it because they’re they’re pretty depressed. The people don’t make money. they’re They’re living in slums, essentially.

00:35:57.58
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:35:57.60
Stephen Schneider
But now they have these big landfills and they’re actually these people like, you know what? They’ll pay me money if I recycle this back to them. And they’re pulling out the components. They’re pulling out the electronics.

00:36:07.100
Stephen Schneider
not I mean, it’s not changing everything, but it’s it actually is helping other countries with giving them a job and money.

00:36:13.97
Alan Baltis
Exactly. From what I understand, that they do that and that’s like kind of like emerald mining. It’s a really hazardous way to make a living.

00:36:21.10
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:36:21.66
Alan Baltis
You know i mean? One of those things you’re crawling around on it a mountain of like cutty tetanus-y edges and that you really can, you know in order to find a few things, it’s ah it’s hard work.

00:36:29.29
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:36:33.48
Alan Baltis
And yet you’re right. There is an opportunity that people said, look at all this, like there’s gold in them, our hills types.

00:36:39.45
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:36:40.16
Alan Baltis
And I’m sorry if it’s the untouchables or, and I really don’t know enough about this to say that, you know, there’s a caste system in India. And I suspect that the people that are doing it in those countries are the ones that that’s the job they can find.

00:36:52.65
Alan Baltis
But at least there is that opportunity of this isn’t like I grew subsistence farming and I tried to sell turnips and I make no money doing that.

00:36:52.67
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:37:00.06
Alan Baltis
If they discover the um power supply that actually has all those things that can be taken out of it, that’s like finding a nugget of gold in some ways. And so I hope that that can be done less hazardously and more financially profitable to the people who are taking all the risk.

00:37:13.88
Stephen Schneider
And and

00:37:16.84
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?

00:37:17.10
Stephen Schneider
And before anyone starts yelling and screaming about that’s horrible to be glad that they have all that and that.

00:37:17.70
Alan Baltis
So,

00:37:23.61
Stephen Schneider
Well, then why don’t we stop the coal mining in our country? If you’re that concerned about it, let’s let’s look at that also. so

00:37:31.55
Alan Baltis
Yeah, yeah. but So much, again, to the AI thing, a lot of what they’re doing is that they’re not allowing people to just silo, I have this problem, I’m going to solve it in this way and not care about how it impacts the rest of the world.

00:37:46.22
Alan Baltis
That almost all of them are aware of all the like interlocking bits that go together with how pollution works and how you know production works and all that kind of stuff. And it really is,

00:37:57.50
Alan Baltis
If we couldn’t get a carbon credits law passed because there was such resistance, companies are getting data that says the most efficient, the best way to do this is to account for upstream and downstream of effects and avoid the lawsuit cost, avoid the possible death cost.

00:38:14.18
Alan Baltis
you know, it’s not just money, of course, it’s you’re hurting people. And they’re finding out that it really is that being humane is economically good. That it’s not that all you do is continue to be the reaper, the raper of the environment and then leave tailings and debris behind you.

00:38:30.45
Alan Baltis
That really is good to think of whole cycle lifestyle of these things. So it all the people that are putting trust into AI, it might be that the first time they read the report that says we know everything and what our AI tells you is you have to stop just discarding things.

00:38:35.42
Stephen Schneider
Well,

00:38:48.39
Alan Baltis
You have to collect them and recycle it like, well, that’s not policy.

00:38:52.43
Stephen Schneider
well

00:38:53.02
Alan Baltis
maybe the numbers will be that the board will say.

00:38:56.63
Stephen Schneider
Or and unfortunately, you get things like Musk’s Grok that if they get answers they don’t like, they just change the algorithm so it’s biased to only what they agree with.

00:38:56.74
Alan Baltis
Don’t do it.

00:39:07.43
Alan Baltis
And people will, you know as you know, there’s not one AI. There’s a hundred different providers of various different general and specific areas. And eventually people will say, wow, the right way to make a movie is this because the multiplicity of AIs agree about it.

00:39:23.19
Alan Baltis
The right way to produce my my you know plastic cup that I that i get from Arby’s or McDonald’s. There really will be… oh as much as people might try to perturb a particular thing, it’s not only that that thing there will not be one ascendant ai that everybody believes as if as if worshipful they’ll see that there’s various different results and then they’ll compare between them you got to hope that you got to hope that just like there’s research institutes that the results don’t always agree so where’s the truth somewhere in the middle or it’s not in the middle you throw out the outlier crazy and then you get to well the consensus has been here all along but these guys had an agenda that they kept trying to pull in the other direction and they

00:40:05.29
Alan Baltis
faked being a legitimate research concern. You know what I mean?

00:40:08.15
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:40:08.75
Alan Baltis
So that’s one of the things that AI is good at is looking for plagiarism and looking for like falsification of results.

00:40:09.99
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:40:15.68
Alan Baltis
We have exactly the same data as you did, but we came to this. Show us again the work about how you got to them. And then, you know, the the pants are down. they They can’t keep lying when there’s other places that are really rigorous in getting to the truth.

00:40:28.73
Stephen Schneider
the The one thing about the AI, I mean, there’s, believe me, in the author world, there’s a lot of positive, negative, and debate, and people getting really upset about it, which, okay, I get and all that. I’m not going there at the moment.

00:40:42.12
Stephen Schneider
But I just think about the kids that were born this year. That just like when the internet came about, they will grow up never knowing the world without AI. So it’s just a normal thing for them.

00:40:55.11
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:40:55.12
Stephen Schneider
So when they hit 25, when it’s 2050, what are they going to be doing with AI that we can’t even think about at the moment?

00:41:03.41
Alan Baltis
Right. of One of the heartening things about this AI issue is this isn’t like 50 year olds trying to make as much fortune as they can by the time they’re 65. It’s kids in college.

00:41:14.43
Alan Baltis
It’s 22 year olds.

00:41:15.57
Stephen Schneider
It’s yangwithyahoo.com.

00:41:15.67
Alan Baltis
get Yes. It’s really young people that have their entire life and the entire view of the world ahead of them and You know, there’s there’s various different truisms.

00:41:26.86
Alan Baltis
A lot of the ways you defeat an existing oh seemingly locked in technology is not do what it does and compete more. It’s more build a technology that makes them obsolete, that that just is so disruptive.

00:41:39.39
Alan Baltis
So Google has an empire based on search. And there’s a lot of interesting articles being written out, as you said, that the youth, they’re not ever going to Google. They’re going to one of the AIs and they’re saying, give me the answer to this question.

00:41:51.90
Alan Baltis
And they don’t have to look at a list of possible places to go further. They’re using so that they they go directly to an answer. And so what’s can happen with if if Google and its AI things and same with Facebook and same with Tesla and Amazon and Apple, they all have their entries to this.

00:42:10.32
Alan Baltis
It’s going to be very interesting to see like. Is it cultural? You know, do if you live in different parts of the country, do you use different things kind of out ah as if you’re their sports team fans? You know what I mean? People have kind of ridiculous regard for things as something as simple as what city I live in. There’s no guarantee that’s the best technology or the best sports team.

00:42:30.32
Alan Baltis
And yet there’s tribalism like that.

00:42:30.58
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:42:32.69
Alan Baltis
We will see when we and I know even not like. Will I only use American AIs if something is good in Europe or China or Australia or Israel or whatever else it might be?

00:42:43.19
Alan Baltis
I got to, there’s always going to be the accusations as as like, if I use Chinese AI, is it secretly watching me? Is it giving me Chinese favoring results? Well, I don’t know. I can do five queries in five minutes and quickly see, well, this seems fanatic and this seems fanatic, but here’s one that seems reasonable in the middle.

00:43:01.63
Alan Baltis
And you’ll learn, i don’t know, just who do you talk to? When I’m going for movie recommendations, I talk to the people that seem to have kind of my same taste, but especially the same people that have like knowledge of it.

00:43:13.80
Alan Baltis
I want to get and a movie advice from people who watch 10,000 movies, not 100. Not 100 over and over again. And I don’t think the analogy is too veiled for read one book and now you know all about it.

00:43:25.25
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? There’s something to be gained from becoming an information consumer. And you’ll learn which AI really is the most reasonable, the most knowledgeable, that’s going to get out of the the bias trap.

00:43:35.25
Stephen Schneider
ah

00:43:39.14
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?

00:43:39.17
Stephen Schneider
And bias is a negative word and we use it negatively, but it’s not necessarily a negative word because there are different AIs that are biased towards certain things more than others and are more helpful because of how they were trained.

00:43:39.82
Alan Baltis
so

00:43:54.80
Stephen Schneider
Like Claude, everybody says Claude’s really good at writing more natural sounding human than And

00:44:01.19
Alan Baltis
Right. And good for coding, they’re really great for me not having to figure out what’s my syntactic error in this statement ever again.

00:44:01.39
Stephen Schneider
and

00:44:07.46
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:44:08.82
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

00:44:09.08
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:44:09.50
Alan Baltis
yeah

00:44:09.77
Stephen Schneider
So, you know, the bias can also be a good word and and saying, look, we we don’t have, and we’re not trying to be the general purpose, answer everything for absolutely every question, for everything you think about.

00:44:22.79
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:44:23.09
Stephen Schneider
We are good at these things. These are the focus of what we have. And that’s not a bad thing. And I think that’s probably going to happen way more. We’re going to have an AI that’s just for certain things.

00:44:33.71
Stephen Schneider
We’re probably going to get medical AIs. It makes sense. Why do you care to be asking medical questions of an AI if it also has history and law and movie reviews? that You don’t care.

00:44:44.33
Stephen Schneider
So you get all the medical journals from the last 75 years, every paper, every prognosis from patients that gave that gave consent and and put it all into one big medical AI.

00:44:44.49
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:44:57.39
Alan Baltis
yeah

00:44:57.52
Stephen Schneider
you know that makes a And it’s biased then, but that’s ah that’s a good bias.

00:45:01.05
Alan Baltis
Yeah, that ah that’s interesting. That’s kind of a ah reappropriation of the word bias because it has such negative connotation. I would say, like, I like expert systems. For a long time, that’s the term they used for something that was kind of an idiot savant about a specific thing.

00:45:15.61
Alan Baltis
It didn’t have to know everything about other businesses, but about building rockets, it was great. And maybe we’ll start to see that, that there’s different things that have been specifically trained and that maybe the human element is going to be How do we make sure that the data that we’re feeding in is not crackpot stuff, but it is, like you just said, not every medical journal, I’m pretty sure that I can get rid of this 10% that are the most controversial, the least researched, the ones that everybody else says, well, that’s where crackpottery lives, the mainstream and the most knowledgeable.

00:45:48.91
Alan Baltis
And I’ll say mainstream is not always most knowledgeable, but you know what I’m trying to say, i would hope that they’ll be able to say, here’s how we trained this, and you can see by our results that it really doesn’t have

00:45:52.39
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.

00:45:59.23
Alan Baltis
What’s the ratio of whatever result it puts out is reasonable and useful as compared to, it just told me Nazis are good. you know what I mean? Like we’ve heard from Grog.

00:46:11.03
Alan Baltis
So you have to suspect that people are feeding it data to get a biased result as compared to trying to feed it to give it a knowledgeable and expert result.

00:46:19.48
Stephen Schneider
right

00:46:20.99
Alan Baltis
And i think that people are going to be learning to consume in that way.

00:46:24.59
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:46:24.63
Alan Baltis
that you know good cooking ai and they’ll be up for every one of these asks every one of the guys that oh a good

00:46:27.64
Stephen Schneider
Right. And, and that’s what I think a lot of people don’t understand is it’s not thinking like a human thinks it’s taking what it was trained on. And right now it’s trained on whatever’s out there available on the net. So you’re getting true and false and good things and bad things and opinions all mixed together and it gets evaluated based on however their algorithm is working. So, you know, it’s maybe a little better than just going to Google and says, hey, I have these symptoms. What but dread disease may I have?

00:47:00.52
Stephen Schneider
You know, we joke about that.

00:47:00.57
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:47:01.60
Stephen Schneider
Oh, Dr. Google told me I’m dying tomorrow. You know, but if it was an AI trained on only the and So the stuff that medical students are being trained on and used and ignoring the the false stuff, ignoring the stuff that’s been disproven, you know, and so you then you could go to Dr. AI and get much better results.

00:47:21.30
Alan Baltis
Right.

00:47:22.12
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:47:22.50
Alan Baltis
So it’s kind of funny, you know, I, I do my life as experiments. I don’t usually just believe what I read or do. I want to see for myself. I’m of that personality type that if I can be convinced, then I’m happy to become an evangelist for it because it went through the rigor that I do.

00:47:39.49
Alan Baltis
So for instance, I, just I’m, I’m, uh, I got my blood work done for my yearly physical. And I have my A1C is well under control, 6.1. Yay, far, far from 7. And it actually went down from 6.2 last time.

00:47:52.28
Alan Baltis
So what I’m doing with losing weight and taking my drugs is all working. I have a thing with my hematocrites and my hemoglobin are high. So I have like thicker blood. And then it’s a matter of, well, it could be multiple things. I need to be hydrated more, even though I drink a lot of stuff.

00:48:06.53
Alan Baltis
It could be that I’m drinking so much caffeine that it takes the liquids out of me and it’s letting my blood get lumpy, get thick. What I wanted to mention in particular was, my doctor just mentioned to me that I might want to stop taking turmeric because it’s been shown to have effects.

00:48:23.98
Alan Baltis
It’s a supplement, not a drug, but it has effects on this thing is more or less effective that you are taking, and so we can’t accurately dose you if you keep on throwing in pineapple or grapefruit or now turmeric as things that exacerbate or or deaden various different things.

00:48:39.56
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:48:40.40
Alan Baltis
So then I was like, well, thank you, doctor, but I kind of want to go see for myself. And I went out and I looked at all kinds of search results about turmeric, and it says here’s the benefits of it and here’s the possible side effects.

00:48:53.37
Alan Baltis
And I must admit that it sure seems to me like the benefits still outweigh the possible side effects. And if my numbers are good and I have been taking turmeric, then I guess it’s already in my system, and therefore I’m not being skewed in the way of, oh, my Manjaro is not effective, because it has been.

00:49:10.73
Alan Baltis
And so i I kind of want to now, having done a whole bunch of search, and I’m good at Google Foo, I knew like what what to put in and where to look and what looks like quackery.com and what looks like mayoclinic.com, etc.

00:49:24.47
Alan Baltis
But only want to go to the various different AIs and say, tell me about turmeric and the benefits and the side effects and whether, and you can even very specifically say, I take this set of things. I got my atorvastatin and my monjaro and stuff.

00:49:40.55
Alan Baltis
Do I have to worry about turmeric interactions? And I’m looking forward to learning, is it trained on all those various different pharmaceutical interaction type things and find out.

00:49:52.88
Alan Baltis
And i’m I’m so much not looking to tell my doctor that maybe she’s a step too cautious or that she’s a step behind in terms of if it really is helping me with heart things and inflammation and stuff like that.

00:50:04.35
Alan Baltis
And the possibility is that my A1C would be 6.2 instead of 6.1.

00:50:09.69
Alan Baltis
I’ve always been like that. You know, when I was getting scintigraphy done and they were saying, well, we discovered someone, so it all has to come out. It’s like, well, actually, I don’t want to have the possibility of lymphedema because I have no lymph nodes, no your waste removal system in that arm.

00:50:26.73
Alan Baltis
I’m going to be going through my interferon anyway, and that’s going to affect my entire body. What are the real odds of doing this or not doing this? Well, it like lowers it from 2% to 1%. Well, I’m already 98% to the good.

00:50:39.81
Alan Baltis
im I’m kind of okay with that.

00:50:41.86
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:50:41.89
Alan Baltis
It isn’t yeses or nos. It’s all on a spectrum and relative ratios and stuff like that. And so that’s what I’m trying to find out now specific to turmeric. But the way that I started to take some of my supplements was having had melanoma,

00:50:55.85
Alan Baltis
I read a whole bunch of different stuff and it said, these are the ones that might have some cancer preventative things and they don’t have any side effects that you you can avoid cancer, but you’re going to get more liver disease or whatever else it might be.

00:51:07.11
Alan Baltis
And I tried to be really careful about know not going into the Steve McQueen getting coffee, enema, woo woo. You know what I mean? that All the pitch pit, et cetera, et cetera.

00:51:17.96
Alan Baltis
I’ve never taken anything that was trust me, it’s good for you. was like, is there science? How about science?

00:51:22.95
Stephen Schneider
the the the The best thing I got from a family member once was they said, well, of course it’s good for you. It’s all natural.

00:51:30.53
Alan Baltis
Oh, see? Like that.

00:51:31.58
Stephen Schneider
So is poison ivy and cobra venom. And I’m not sucking either one of those.

00:51:36.51
Alan Baltis
ah

00:51:37.08
Stephen Schneider
And it doesn’t matter if it’s all natural. It could still have interactions with the medicine you’re taking. And it doesn’t make it better necessarily. We do have some good medicines. There’s some questionable.

00:51:48.60
Stephen Schneider
And and yeah some of the science stuff is always changing. The one I always look at because of my health is the the eggs. Are eggs good or bad? It depends on the year. Yeah. They’re bad because they have so much cholesterol.

00:52:02.05
Stephen Schneider
Well, they’re good because it has more good cholesterol. What the hell is good cholesterol? Oh, they’re bad because they they they are that, and the other thing.

00:52:07.31
Alan Baltis
OBLHTL is not okay.

00:52:09.31
Stephen Schneider
Oh, they’re good because… Yeah.

00:52:11.52
Alan Baltis
So, and that even to me, that changing every year, it’s like, I like the advance of science. I like that they’ve done even more specific studies and that they’re parsing it finer and finer. It really doesn’t seem to be any more big pendulum swings.

00:52:23.95
Alan Baltis
Once in a while, there’s a breakthrough, but most of the time it’s like, okay, then I don’t have eggs five times a week.

00:52:25.07
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:52:29.57
Alan Baltis
I have three and that’s the right level. They work they did a study that said, if you have eggs every day, how does that affect you?

00:52:32.60
Stephen Schneider
right

00:52:36.14
Alan Baltis
And they said, just like alcohol, just like any number of things, You know, it’s all dose. It isn’t all good or all bad.

00:52:41.50
Stephen Schneider
Yes. ah

00:52:43.33
Alan Baltis
It’s that somewhere that like two, 10 milligrams good, but 20 bad. And then watch it monitoring yourself.

00:52:48.65
Stephen Schneider
and And some of the, you know, we’ve gotten better, but some of the studies and surveys and stuff they do, they’re like, well, we found out that you shouldn’t eat eggs.

00:52:50.05
Alan Baltis
with

00:52:57.08
Stephen Schneider
They will kill you. Really? Yes. We did a study that after 10 years of eating 22 eggs a day, you you had high cholesterol. Oh, I’m not eating 22 eggs a day for 10 years. Yeah.

00:53:09.01
Alan Baltis
From the very start, that’s why I still drink diet of soda is because the studies were like, hey, if I drank 210 cans of diet soda, that’s the ratio of body mass to lab rat that they pushed all this aspartame or the various acrobatics and all that kind of stuff.

00:53:17.40
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.

00:53:24.46
Stephen Schneider
right

00:53:26.35
Alan Baltis
And so I, I, I, my own little test case, I’ve been drinking since college. So 45 years and I haven’t grown horns. I haven’t damaged my liver. I haven’t, you know all those things.

00:53:37.25
Alan Baltis
And compared to what I would be if that was all the sugar calories that I took in, I’m, as compared to what you said about, hey, it’s all natural. I’ve also had people say, well, don’t don’t have that. It’s got chemicals in it.

00:53:50.22
Alan Baltis
So you kind of know that everything’s made of chemicals, right?

00:53:52.60
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:53:53.18
Alan Baltis
And i you don’t want to have the, you know, trisodium malware eight.

00:53:53.45
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:53:58.55
Alan Baltis
You don’t want to willingly take in things that you know are only a preservative or they’re actually harmful, but you’re not watching it.

00:54:00.16
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:54:04.62
Stephen Schneider
I’ve determined those people, what they, it’s usually, they mean the industrial created chemicals as opposed to natural chemicals.

00:54:05.35
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

00:54:12.06
Stephen Schneider
They don’t just understand that there’s a difference.

00:54:14.44
Alan Baltis
yeah

00:54:14.61
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:54:15.18
Alan Baltis
And I, you know, like, I don’t know, Michael Pollan has a great book that we’re like, he has, you know, how to be healthy, eat real food, not a lot. Well, in six words, I’ve got like, how to stop killing yourself.

00:54:23.73
Stephen Schneider
that How much did you pay for that book?

00:54:26.91
Alan Baltis
Exactly. You know, but again, I, we have, Colleen and I, we really do. The big salads and the fruits and the vegetables are always in the house. And you got to worry about, well, it doesn’t have any agar sprayed on it or whatever the various different.

00:54:37.77
Alan Baltis
That’s like a 50 year old scare now, right? They don’t do that anymore. But having said that, you know, whenever there’s recalls of various different things, I don’t want to have the botulism one or the listeria or that kind of stuff.

00:54:49.21
Alan Baltis
And that’s the whole point of. Another government agency that we need to have instead of disband is to watch to make sure that your spinach and your ah chicken and all stuff doesn’t come. Oh, no. Ten thousand people got sick because we didn’t have the monitoring at the plant that stopped it before it got out into all but packaging, you know, so.

00:55:05.13
Stephen Schneider
Well, see, but the the way you handle that you just get rid of the department that reports it. So then nobody hears about it. And obviously then it doesn’t exist.

00:55:14.95
Alan Baltis
It’s only anecdote. Exactly that.

00:55:16.16
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

00:55:16.51
Alan Baltis
Yeah. That yeah could have been anything that made you sick, even though the under 10,000 people in your community, funny how they ate that particular brand of sausage and et cetera, et cetera.

00:55:18.100
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:55:25.25
Alan Baltis
You know, so yes.

00:55:25.30
Stephen Schneider
Right. So before we go, how is your Weird Al concert?

00:55:30.13
Alan Baltis
Steven, it was so good.

00:55:31.66
Stephen Schneider
Isn’t it?

00:55:31.89
Alan Baltis
yeah i You were very kind to not kind of run through it, and and if you will be a spoiler. He is such a showman, and as you know, he does costume changes within it, and instead of it being, hey, the stage is dark for a while while everybody wonders what’s coming up next, he’s got all the interstitial videos and and all different things that he’s accumulated, a body of work over the course of him doing his UHF movie and his Weird Al shows and stuff like that, and the The graphics were as good as anything I’ve ever seen. you know, like all the the swirly things and and the videos that he had that accompany various different videos.

00:56:05.30
Alan Baltis
He did a really good selection of, everybody everybody wants to hear Amish Paradise nowadays. Everybody wants to you I mean? There’s certain songs that has to do, but he does them really well.

00:56:11.12
Stephen Schneider
And yeah, yes.

00:56:14.01
Alan Baltis
It’s not like I’m going to go through the motions and sing American Pie one more time.

00:56:17.27
Stephen Schneider
And he, he, that he did a lot of compilation and medleys and and only parts of songs so they could fit more in instead of a whole song, which I thought was perfect.

00:56:17.68
Alan Baltis
It’s a celebration with how good it was, you know?

00:56:24.42
Alan Baltis
Yes.

00:56:29.22
Stephen Schneider
Cause I got just enough to be like, Oh, I love it. Next thing. Oh, I love it. You know, definitely kept the, you know, the fun rising.

00:56:32.75
Alan Baltis
that’s right exactly

00:56:36.67
Alan Baltis
i continue like one of the so important is like his voice his vocals are so important because his lyrics are so witty you don’t want it to be blasted and garbled and stuff there was never a time that i couldn’t understand exactly what he was saying and singing and that’s so wonderful like during the polka and and there’s there’s some songs that are so dense with how funny they are all the everything the historic and current references they make and you could pick up on everything so the polka number was great the the and as know for anybody who hasn’t seen it yet i think it’s like only three shows to go so my god wherever it is go see it because it’s fantastic florida last shows the thing they ended with was the scat vocals where it was like you know 10 minutes of the it’s like 10 people on stage it’s a synchronization of word but and like

00:57:11.74
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:57:20.80
Stephen Schneider
that that ah but but but but Yeah. yeah

00:57:25.13
Alan Baltis
how nobody else does anything anywhere close to that and a little bit of choreography and a little bit of just vocal like like like fireworks with what they’re capable of doing and and then it really was to people staying in sync the entire thing really witty and and uh the um

00:57:25.78
Stephen Schneider
um a david

00:57:46.47
Stephen Schneider
Really amazing drum solos too.

00:57:49.49
Alan Baltis
That’s true. Oh my God. yeah Colleen is one of those people that when the drum solo starts up at any other band, she was like, oh God. And instead making fun of like he he’s so aware of the culture that he’s in, the business that he’s in, and he teases in all the right ways, the various different artists and the various different conventions of how to do a concert and stuff like that. you know it and He had the fat suit for fat.

00:58:13.85
Alan Baltis
He had just somebody, he came out on the segue for the start of a white and nerdy. Just, I was as like face hurting, smiling as I’ve ever been from a concert or a comedy show because he’s just so good, so accomplished. he He teased himself about, remember that guy that almost like, you know, got kicked out of the business in the eighties because his records weren’t selling.

00:58:36.52
Alan Baltis
And that’s when he had his renaissance and then the world rediscovered weird out and and then had the next 40 years of his career.

00:58:42.84
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:58:43.29
Alan Baltis
So wonderful. People were dressed up. There were people dressed as Dr. Demento, as various different characters from the various, you know, driving my truck with my high heels on. You know, every every reference in the song, I’m like, I’m so Easter egg proud that I can kind of say that’s from that and that’s from that and that’s from that.

00:58:54.18
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

00:58:59.90
Alan Baltis
That’s something I didn’t get. You know, they’re so obscure. i think Weird Al fans really try to push that of like, this is one line out of a song from 30 years ago, and yet they captured it perfectly.

00:59:10.64
Alan Baltis
Okay.

00:59:10.71
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:59:11.74
Alan Baltis
Colleen and I both had the most wonderful time. And it being a college crowd, it’s also very heartening to be like, I go to so many shows nowadays that, wow, it’s dinosaurs.

00:59:14.53
Stephen Schneider
but

00:59:21.27
Alan Baltis
you know Colleen and I are the youngins at the next Chicago show or whatever else it might be.

00:59:25.29
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:59:25.96
Alan Baltis
But to see how many kids have discovered Weird Al and that he really has reached the generations. and And fathers were there with daughter like daughters or granddaughters. Like we saw all kinds of multi-generational people at ending.

00:59:38.15
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Always been that way.

00:59:39.92
Alan Baltis
Has there exactly but but anybody else do i know anybody else that does that maybe a Paul McCartney or an Elton John where it has the Beatles have transcended generation, but not many. There’s some things when you go to a hair band concert, it’s survey everybody that loved those hair bands, but they haven’t like necessarily ended that off to their kids.

00:59:49.71
Stephen Schneider
Right.

00:59:56.25
Alan Baltis
if They tried the kids said no thanks.

00:59:56.42
Stephen Schneider
right

00:59:59.01
Alan Baltis
So. So it was

01:00:02.02
Stephen Schneider
Proof that the younger generations are not as smart as us.

01:00:05.62
Alan Baltis
You know, i yeah when I’ve been to shows, like, i still, I don’t know that I get, if you will, being an old person, some of the language, some of the joy that people take, I find certain things very repetitious. I’ve always liked more interesting things.

01:00:19.96
Alan Baltis
And yet, to see people having a good time, that that really is their anthem. This is kind of funny. on The cruise that we were on, they though they regularly ended shows with um Shut Up and Dance With Me.

01:00:33.09
Alan Baltis
And that I just think that’s a hilariously good song. And like, don that’s not my generation, but that is, um’m I’m getting out there to dance. Of course I am. and And various others like Uptown Funk.

01:00:44.52
Alan Baltis
That, and it is along with Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood or, you know, C&C Music Factory that I can start naming. These are the songs that make me get up and dance. I’m glad that there still are those songs that have that magic that just, you got to get out there.

01:00:58.45
Alan Baltis
You got to get, you got move.

01:00:58.89
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:00:59.77
Alan Baltis
It’s really, really cool.

01:00:59.93
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:01:00.81
Alan Baltis
So, yeah.

01:01:01.02
Stephen Schneider
Shut up and dance as a fun video. If you’ve never seen it sometime, look it up. It’s fun.

01:01:05.61
Alan Baltis
i I don’t think I, in fact, I just saw the Uptown Funk. I’ve seen the many times where they cut in all of the old hoofers, you know, the Sinatras and the Cowboys.

01:01:15.60
Stephen Schneider
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

01:01:16.94
Alan Baltis
But then I finally saw, no lie, the i maybe I saw it long ago, the Bruno Mars and Ralston, right? that That itself is a very amusing video.

01:01:27.14
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:01:27.16
Alan Baltis
And that’s the original version of it. So once in while, things like, maybe maybe that’s kind of what happened with Elton John does a version of Pinball Wizard. And then people like lost sight of the fact that the Who did that first.

01:01:38.71
Alan Baltis
There have been covers that were so successful that they kind of pushed out the original, you know what I mean?

01:01:42.02
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:01:43.42
Alan Baltis
So it’s it was, I love it.

01:01:44.01
Stephen Schneider
Right. Well, I was talking when I went and saw forever Seeger, uh, they did turn the page and I’m like, that’s one of the few songs I believe i could be wrong in like the history of the billboard charts or whatever, where the released version kind of flopped on the charts, but the live version like sword up the charts. And that’s the only one you pretty much ever hear on the radio.

01:02:05.09
Alan Baltis
I think that’s true. Freebird, I much more often hear Freebird, the live version, the extended, great, never-ending version as compared to the album version, which is just still good, but tame in comparison.

01:02:07.97
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:02:11.32
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:02:17.37
Stephen Schneider
Yes.

01:02:17.60
Alan Baltis
You have that build, that crescendoing. Anyway.

01:02:21.50
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Seven live guitars all battling and competing. Yeah.

01:02:24.76
Alan Baltis
ah

01:02:25.04
Stephen Schneider
There’s some energy there.

01:02:26.09
Alan Baltis
Exactly. Live versions of Hotel California. I really love the version on the album, but I’ve heard a live version that was just Man, they they had multiple great guitars from the Eagles, and they were all at the top of their game when they recorded this thing. It’s just fantastic.

01:02:39.75
Stephen Schneider
The other fun one is Clapton with Layla, the original bluesy version with the whole band as opposed to the ballad version of the Yay.

01:02:45.45
Alan Baltis
Right?

01:02:47.06
Stephen Schneider
Nice.

01:02:47.36
Alan Baltis
Yeah, and exactly. where It’s much more mournful. Exactly that. You know what i mean? So but I… No wonder music still fascinates me. We, Colleen and I just had our anniversary, 23 years.

01:02:58.21
Alan Baltis
Yeah, we’re doing pretty well.

01:02:58.47
Stephen Schneider
yay

01:02:59.28
Alan Baltis
Exactly. And she got me, like it’s kind of what we only, we only ah shill once in a while. but She got me the Simon and Garfunkel box set.

01:03:06.80
Stephen Schneider
nice

01:03:07.11
Alan Baltis
And like, I think I have a number of these, but to have, now that I know I have them all. And like, that’s one of those things that you listen to the album and you’re like, wow, like I know a couple cuts off of this got a lot of airplay.

01:03:18.90
Alan Baltis
But the whole album is great. and And they just, they’re Paul Simon, um Billy Joel, certain people, Randy Newman, they’re just such great songsmiths. They make a perfect three-minute song in multiple genres. and And he had, in his course of the career, not only with Simon and Garfunkel, but then took on African music and and and that kind of stuff. so But it’s nice to go back to when you’d hear, like, from the get-go, like from the needle drop on the very first album, it’s like, my God, they were so accomplished.

01:03:47.60
Alan Baltis
And they were like, I think that they were Tom and Jerry, right, before they became Simon and

01:03:51.86
Stephen Schneider
Something like that. Yeah, yeah.

01:03:53.22
Alan Baltis
like that. And then from the start, it was, um, hello, lampposts, what you know, what you know what i mean? Like, they’re, they’re, the production was crisp. Anyway, I just, I love the fact that i think i’ve talked about this before you can get these kind of box sets now where the average price is like three bucks a cd and this is fantastic music for so little money that like i know everybody streams nowadays but once in a while that’s what i want is to open the box and look at the album and sometimes it has you know the lighter notes you can read and stuff like that maybe on a cd quite small but the kind of old music that you get from

01:04:28.12
Alan Baltis
Old Simon and Garfunkel, old bread, old blood, sweat and tears. You know, I’ve been rediscovering and and often that’s wow, there’s so much good stuff on this besides what made it on the radio.

01:04:38.90
Alan Baltis
They just didn’t have enough room to have every Chicago song make it on the radio, but they were made great albums.

01:04:43.44
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:04:44.70
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?

01:04:45.26
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

01:04:46.20
Alan Baltis
Anyway.

01:04:47.22
Stephen Schneider
all right.

01:04:47.76
Alan Baltis
Okay. As always, such a pleasure. and And I’m glad we’re back in the group.

01:04:50.52
Stephen Schneider
Fun time.

01:04:52.57
Alan Baltis
We have very little travel planned through the end of the year. So there will be very few Tuesdays. There might be the occasional like, nope, we have to be going exactly to, you know, down to Cincinnati because we have a concert that night.

01:05:01.87
Stephen Schneider
Doctors. Right.

01:05:04.08
Alan Baltis
We’re already leaving. Whatever. We’ll see.

01:05:05.92
Stephen Schneider
Well, we were talking about AI and stuff.

01:05:06.42
Alan Baltis
Okay.

01:05:07.100
Stephen Schneider
I got a topic for next week I’ll tell you about. It’s a project Colin is working on that he got back into.

01:05:12.72
Alan Baltis
Excellent.

01:05:13.24
Stephen Schneider
So it involves AI and stuff.

01:05:13.77
Alan Baltis
Okay. Very good.

01:05:16.24
Stephen Schneider
So.

01:05:16.34
Alan Baltis
That’s, you know, to geek it up, it really is not only our personal taste. There really are. I think we were good at today that so much our geekery is how the world is changing. It’s how to make a good decision. It’s how to run a government. It’s how to do all these things.

01:05:28.69
Alan Baltis
It’s so easy to take the smart, geeky take on this because it’s so important that it not be drowned out by an idiot telling me that Tylenol causes autism. Two idiots.

01:05:39.85
Alan Baltis
You can’t have enough idiots.

01:05:40.03
Stephen Schneider
but But that’s got to be true. i asked Grok and that’s what Grok told me.

01:05:44.43
Alan Baltis
Ugh.

01:05:44.74
Stephen Schneider
but

01:05:44.93
Alan Baltis
i i will We will see how much the world fights back from don’t piss on my foot and tell me.

01:05:51.41
Stephen Schneider
I hope Bear is, i hope Bear’s lawyers are getting that lawsuit ready for, because them to mention Tylenol brand name, as opposed to just acetaminophen.

01:05:51.79
Alan Baltis
There’s such lies being told nowadays. It’s sickening. so but

01:06:03.81
Alan Baltis
Exactly.

01:06:03.86
Stephen Schneider
i hope they’re doing that.

01:06:05.21
Alan Baltis
I remember having a conversation with a conservative friend of mine that was really concerned about solar power and that the government shouldn’t be um sponsoring or unsponsoring various different things. Let the free market do it.

01:06:17.23
Alan Baltis
And then you get nuts like this that they’re happy to elevate or denigrate just based on a whim. They’ve done no study. They really aren’t. They don’t have any better information than you do. But somehow I just don’t like green. And so kill this company whose logo is green.

01:06:32.94
Alan Baltis
I hope that we get past believing stupid people.

01:06:35.98
Stephen Schneider
Well, and, and, and just for everybody listening, if you’re the copyright owner of green, Alan was just using as an example.

01:06:37.11
Alan Baltis
for

01:06:44.61
Alan Baltis
Exactly. You know, having you seen people try to copyright a term like windows, you mean like in every house windows?

01:06:50.16
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:06:50.80
Alan Baltis
Yeah, yeah, yeah. ah some Some lawyer that said that thing, somebody in the meeting room didn’t say, shut up and sit down.

01:06:58.40
Stephen Schneider
Well, do you remember this was back around 2005?

01:06:59.48
Alan Baltis
Yeah.

01:07:03.99
Stephen Schneider
AT&T actually copyrighted the layout of having um a menu on the left-hand side of ah a webpage. So and they were starting to sue everybody that had men.

01:07:15.82
Stephen Schneider
Cause at that time that was the common thing, the menu on the and they copyrighted it.

01:07:17.04
Alan Baltis
Right.

01:07:20.80
Stephen Schneider
So yeah, whatever.

01:07:22.67
Alan Baltis
ah the The market does take care of some things just based on it can’t be that that’s such a restriction on trade. You know I mean?

01:07:28.69
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.

01:07:28.92
Alan Baltis
we can We can’t let that be. There’s got to be a balance.

01:07:31.40
Stephen Schneider
Right.

01:07:31.65
Alan Baltis
yeah

01:07:31.72
Stephen Schneider
All right, man.

01:07:32.96
Alan Baltis
Take care.

01:07:33.08
Stephen Schneider
Later.

01:07:33.34
Alan Baltis
Bye-bye.