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In this episode, Stephen and Alan dive into a wide-ranging conversation about music, memories, and creativity—from seeing legends like Paul McCartney live to the evolution of sound, instruments, and recording techniques. They swap stories about concerts, classic bands, and the magic of live performance, while also exploring coding, creativity, and the surprising parallels between music and technology.
The discussion takes a nostalgic turn into holiday traditions, Christmas music, and family memories, before wrapping up with insights into self-publishing, entrepreneurship, and staying organized while juggling creative projects.
A laid-back, thoughtful episode full of stories, insights, and a few laughs along the way.
00:00:43.61
Stephen Schneider
or connections getting worn out. Um, so maybe i
00:00:48.26
Alan Baltis
got to plosives set it off so that, uh, you
00:00:52.29
Stephen Schneider
yeah, well, I was transferring, an old, uh, high eight tape over to digital, something I wanted to keep. And I unplugged this because the thing I was using was also picking up microphones. I was getting this weird echo.
00:01:07.61
Stephen Schneider
ah it
00:01:07.73
Alan Baltis
know, okay.
00:01:09.08
Stephen Schneider
so
00:01:09.83
Alan Baltis
Honestly, I, I think I mentioned, i have, I inherited from Colleen from what she had had when she had it just attached to the top of her laptop. a little camera and a little audio and it seems to give reasonable quality remember for a while i had a microphone assured that we had picked up or something maybe audio technique don’t remember but it’s kind of funny i’m thinking my thinking cartridges or microphones but they’re in the same business though and after a while it was like this seems to sound and look okay and it’s just so incredibly convenient to have it perched right in the middle of my main monitor you know what i mean
00:01:41.05
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:01:41.52
Alan Baltis
oh
00:01:41.76
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah. It may be. I mean, I’ve had this microphone only a couple of years, but you know, the connections are where they all wear out and it gets loose.
00:01:51.37
Alan Baltis
Absolutely. um You would think that they would, well, of course, that great they have designed it and they chose not to do it because the cost of having a cable that is especially strong right near the place where you bend it or roll it around your fingers or whatever like that, that would cost another 0.03 and they won’t do it.
00:02:10.91
Stephen Schneider
and
00:02:11.94
Alan Baltis
They’d rather, no, we want you to have to upgrade or replace is better with it.
00:02:15.63
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.
00:02:16.73
Alan Baltis
So, oh, yeah,
00:02:18.60
Stephen Schneider
Well, the last one, my cat ate through. So.
00:02:22.31
Alan Baltis
I, I, it’s kind of funny. I’ve never way long ago, of course, it’s the home office, I had cat and a dog and i don’t think i ever had them. where they attack the cables or anything like that. But I’ve heard many stories of that, that they’re just, I don’t know.
00:02:35.88
Alan Baltis
I don’t think that they taste good, but they do that for reasons of like, let’s keep the the teeth sharp, you know, like kind of like a boner, especially rubber, if it has a little bit of give to it.
00:02:46.29
Alan Baltis
So it’s an exercise, you know what I mean? It’s.
00:02:49.29
Stephen Schneider
Yep.
00:02:49.35
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:02:49.57
Stephen Schneider
My cats love to eat through wires. I have to make sure all the wires are tucked away and hidden and, you know, made the mistake charging my phone and then left the wire hanging down. I come in I’m like, what is that?
00:03:01.13
Stephen Schneider
Oh, crap. Time to buy a new wire.
00:03:04.27
Alan Baltis
that
00:03:04.37
Stephen Schneider
you know?
00:03:05.13
Alan Baltis
come here you adorable little pet
00:03:06.98
Stephen Schneider
Yes. I love you little fuzzball. Of course. you yeah I mean, the option is the one cat that doesn’t chew the wires.
00:03:14.61
Alan Baltis
right that’s wow that’s pretty especially for a guest that’s what um as i mentioned i have all kinds of
00:03:14.74
Stephen Schneider
He’s the one that likes to lick noses.
00:03:20.96
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, you pick them up and he’ll lick your nose. ah so anyway, all right
00:03:29.01
Alan Baltis
videos that I watch without being a cat and dog nowadays, I have to get my little you know puppy belly rub fill by seeing someone doing it virtually. And just that, but pets are like some that where they always like come underneath and they put their nose under your arm and it’s just the cutest thing in the world.
00:03:45.10
Alan Baltis
But if you’re like doing something, it’s like, well, how do I deal with, I want to let it know that I love it, but not now, not now.
00:03:51.98
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:03:52.24
Alan Baltis
I really have to get this report done.
00:03:53.58
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.
00:03:54.32
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:03:54.49
Stephen Schneider
my My biggest cat, when I’m laying in bed reading, he loves to jump on the bed. And if I don’t give him enough attention, he bats my head like a bull and my book goes flying.
00:04:04.91
Stephen Schneider
I lose my place or it’s digital. And suddenly I’m 300 pages further on. And I’m like, Onyx, I will pet you. But geez, oh man.
00:04:13.33
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:04:13.78
Stephen Schneider
and And Cisco knows, oh, you’re reading that? Let me stand in front of you so you can’t see it anymore. Now pet me. Yeah.
00:04:19.99
Alan Baltis
I That I used to have all the time that the cat loved coming up and like laying down on the keyboard and he’s his little promoter is going so he’s just totally adorable but it’s like buddy I’m oh have you seen this they actually have like a fake keyboard or another keyboard that you put off to the side so that they don’t have to be right in your way you have to pull the cat.
00:04:38.56
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right. And, and you talked about the animals and stuff. There’s some zoo that has a new baby skunk and they keep showing all these videos of And I keep sending them to Colin cause he loves skunks.
00:04:50.62
Stephen Schneider
And then, uh, so of course I keep getting more little animal videos from zoos and stuff. So I got all these cute little animals now in my feed.
00:04:58.40
Alan Baltis
yeah I have noticed that yeah on on Facebook, if you, the the algorithms track you, everything you do. I think I mentioned I have the the guy that like sits down outside of ah a zoo or an enclosed zoo.
00:05:07.96
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I’ve gotten some of him now.
00:05:10.06
Alan Baltis
Yeah, and and now that I’ve clicked on like a couple times, I get a new one every day. I didn’t know he produced them that quick, but I guess there’s a whole backlog of before I was aware of his existence kind of a thing.
00:05:21.20
Alan Baltis
And it’s like, i don’t know, elephants and and just things that are… big but to see them just kind of like weaving with the music and and kind of coming up in curiosity and being so gentle with him it’s it’s really sweet you know that whole music has charms to soothe the savage breast they in mythology they used to have it was it orpheus right that could like charm the trees charm the rocks but every animal kind of the pied piper he He didn’t have tame them.
00:05:52.16
Alan Baltis
He made music. And they were like, we love this too. And so they’d come and be his friend. that’s It’s really cool to see sometimes mythologies. I’m sure it’s not for every animal. It’s not all the time.
00:06:03.42
Alan Baltis
And yet it’s very sweet that it happens at all. And every time that I see a video, we’re like, here’s this, you know, 800 pound tiger, you know, coming up. ah Oh, they left a box out for him. And he cuddles in just like a kitten, just like a kid.
00:06:16.04
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:06:16.56
Alan Baltis
It’s the coolest thing. Yeah.
00:06:18.11
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, when I talk to people about Hunter, you know, they’re always asking, you know, I yeah get a couple of things. Oh, he’s so cute. You should bring them blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, okay, I get that. He’s a wonderful dog. He’s lovable, ah you know, and all that, but he is 75% wolf.
00:06:35.56
Stephen Schneider
He’s wild.
00:06:36.64
Alan Baltis
right
00:06:36.96
Stephen Schneider
There are times I feed him daily. I pet him. But there have been times when he has a bone or something and I walk near him and he growls and there have been times I’m cutting fur and I get a little too close. He snaps at me.
00:06:48.96
Stephen Schneider
I’m like, you know, i really don’t want to bring this around a bunch of kids and some kid grabs his fur and then we have a bloodbath like a horror movie.
00:06:50.63
Alan Baltis
right honestly you know i used to walk fenris and he looked like a big plush toy you know 55 pounds so pretty big dog but if he came like up to um ah woman with a baby carriage and I’d be like, don’t worry, he’s really gentle. And he’d put his nose in there and and like give him sniff and a lick, you know, and babies always have like lickable things on their faces.
00:07:18.02
Alan Baltis
And sometimes they’d they’d like grab his fur and really hang on him and he didn’t overreact. And of course, me and the mom are just scared to death of, is this when the thing goes wild and savages my child?
00:07:27.57
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.
00:07:30.86
Alan Baltis
And he never did. he was so totally mellow.
00:07:32.53
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:07:34.04
Alan Baltis
and And you see that all the time that, you know, mom, mom, tigers, the cats are pouncing on them. They’re like, you know, grabbing their ears or biting their tail something like that. and the mom and says And the mom is just, I’ll put up with it.
00:07:44.54
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:07:47.08
Alan Baltis
I’m training them to be hunters and they’re practicing on me, you know?
00:07:50.02
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:07:50.60
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:07:51.36
Stephen Schneider
Right. Yep. So, all right, what’s going on we got the chat about.
00:07:56.28
Alan Baltis
that’s So it’s as I mentioned, you know, I’ve had a lot of music in my life and I’m anticipating a lot of music. So i should oh you know don’t bury the lead. We saw Paul McCartney on Tuesday night and he’s a Beatle.
00:08:08.47
Alan Baltis
And he’s, he’s i I often use this phrase, he’s made of music. He like, He doesn’t just play bass, which he did mostly with the Beatles. He plays mandolin and ukulele. He steps over to the piano and and and he must have played half a dozen different things, all of them expertly. His voice is still beautiful.
00:08:26.84
Alan Baltis
just you know ah He has written so much great music that this isn’t like, oh, I didn’t hear that one song I wanted to hear. It’s like, I didn’t hear the 60 songs that I would have liked to hear as well because we got so much Beatles and so much wings and so much solo.
00:08:36.38
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:08:40.36
Alan Baltis
And yet he did a really good selection of kind of like working his way through time or at least hopping around through time and nice tributes. You you can’t be a Beatle and not have a little bit of a ah testimonial to, yeah, me and John wrote songs together. Yeah, George Horstyn was wonderful. Yeah, Ringo and I have played together. and And so it was so wonderful and sentimental without being maudlin.
00:09:03.19
Alan Baltis
It didn’t at all seem contrived or tear jerky or, hey, crowd, you know, I’m going to, it was sweet and he really is the cute one as you know and he’s still the cute decent one um it had like a a love song for his wife and and um i don’t know so many great songs have such history for me that you kind of get transported back in time like any songs do that any great artist does that and he had great like um for Live and Let Die and Helter Skelter, such energy and the combination of, lie, videos and big music and firepots and stuff like that, it was, Helter Skelter was like, I’m of freaking out here. if He’s really captured what made that song so much Not The Beatles, was that it’s so harsh and it’s so like, the world’s going crazy and he and they he see him and his video team captured how you could make it so that you’re just really being rocked by it.
00:09:59.38
Alan Baltis
So, a great emotional journey as they say and and he played for i think about two and a half hours i heard they played for about three but he doesn’t play with an intermission he’s got a very tight band of like 10 people everything about it was just what i wanted you know unfortunately you we saw elton john a while back and now him because you don’t know how many more chances you’re going to get to see them and even though it’s some of the most i’ve ever paid for a concert like who better
00:10:10.23
Stephen Schneider
Wow.
00:10:21.71
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:10:27.42
Alan Baltis
He’s a Beatle. He’s 80s. It’s all the things that I just, we had to see him. And we didn’t pay the thousands to get like third row because we just kind of don’t do that.
00:10:37.48
Alan Baltis
You know, we’re careful with our money.
00:10:38.12
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:10:39.24
Alan Baltis
And yet we had reasonable seats. The sound was great. The mix was great. couldn’t have asked for a better experience of i finally saw a beetle and he didn’t kind of just shamble out on stage you know what i mean we’ve laughed about this we’ve seen a couple artists maybe have lost a step and i’d like well i want them to make money so they retire safely and all that kind of stuff but but someone should have said to you you know you’re going to disappoint a lot of people because you’re not what you once were and like by a lot and luckily he was
00:10:50.98
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:11:08.18
Alan Baltis
I remember reading a quote from him where they were like, you know, why you retire and and like let the young kids get a chance? and he’s goes You know, um let them knock me off the throne.
00:11:18.58
Alan Baltis
Let them, and he said it more gently than that, but it was pretty much, I’m still making music. People will decide if they like it or not. If someone comes along, that’s great. i want I want there to be good, new, hungry musicians like we were back in Liverpool and and in the um Star Club and stuff like that.
00:11:33.44
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:11:36.56
Alan Baltis
But they’re going to have to earn it. They’re going to have to go through kind of the same crap where we lived you know we we had a van for all four of us and we carried our own our own instruments in and out and we had any number of times that we played like to four people because they didn’t know who we were yet anyway yeah great stories about like him going to see jimmy hendrix for the first time he was in london and that kind of cross-pollination that used to occur like while he’s seeing them so is
00:11:52.09
Stephen Schneider
Right. Wow.
00:11:57.47
Stephen Schneider
Wow.
00:12:03.04
Alan Baltis
um Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, all the all the guitar heroes of the time, and they were all kind of looking at each other going, maybe we should take up base because this guy does things that I don’t know.
00:12:15.78
Alan Baltis
no
00:12:15.94
Stephen Schneider
well
00:12:16.41
Alan Baltis
I don’t know how we could do that.
00:12:18.14
Stephen Schneider
So there was a thing a while back, it was Eric Clapton and i forget who was singing. um But on bass was ah Joe Perry from, or no, um um keith ah Keith Richards from the Stones and he’s playing bass.
00:12:27.88
Alan Baltis
but
00:12:33.87
Alan Baltis
It’s very true. Okay.
00:12:36.02
Stephen Schneider
And they’re like, well, why didn’t you let Woods play bass? He’s like, are you kidding me? Did you see who was on stage? I wasn’t going to give that up, but it was like all these great guitarists. So he took the bass, you know?
00:12:45.73
Alan Baltis
Exactly. Honestly, every time that they have the rock and roll induction ceremony and they often have the great jam at the end, you’ll see all kinds of people taking all kinds of other instruments because they want to be on stage with their heroes, their legends, and they don’t want to compete.
00:12:58.97
Alan Baltis
They want to like let this guy stretch out.
00:12:59.37
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:13:01.09
Alan Baltis
You know, so as you as you saw, I had a whole bunch of it’s been a very musical week. um The Last Waltz it became available in like an enhanced 4K edition or something like that.
00:13:12.34
Alan Baltis
And it’s the band, their last performance, and the band, for those of who who don’t know, because they haven’t been on the radio, or at least haven’t made new music in a long time, it’s it’s the people that like used to back up Bob Dylan as the Hawks, if I remember right, and then they got their own very successful career, like at least six you know great golden platinum albums or something like that.
00:13:34.45
Alan Baltis
And this was their farewell thing and they had all these guest stars van morrison is out there eric clapton is out there all these various different folks that um and it was a delight to be reminded of wow you know they they really were
00:13:41.87
Stephen Schneider
wow
00:13:49.97
Alan Baltis
like they could play with all these various different people on all their favorite songs. So kind of like the weird Al Yankovic band that we’ve talked about, they can play anything. They can play folk and blues and, and you know, like, and just be very much in support of instead of, hey, I got, like I’m a good guitarist, says Robbie Robertson. I think I’ll trade licks.
00:14:07.13
Alan Baltis
And maybe sometimes they did that too, because that’s what Clapton was looking for, was a little bit of companionship not just you know i’m everybody everybody thinks i’m a god and so all the guy you know sometimes people want to jam and they want people to play with them so it but that was a ah delight and it got me thinking and and then when i mentioned that i had seen paul mccartney and i’ve seen like i’ve seen paul mccartney and elton john and the who and so that i’ve never seen the whole rolling stones in concert
00:14:21.35
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:14:37.24
Alan Baltis
But I did see the Rolling Stones, like Keith and and Mick and Roddy, playing with blues legends in Chicago at a place called the c Checkerboard Lounge. I think I’ve shared this story before.
00:14:46.67
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:14:47.30
Alan Baltis
We drove out from Champaign-Urbana. It was 1981. Honestly, it was like Thanksgiving night. And I left our house, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Thanksgiving dinner early. Because I’ve got to get to Chicago. What were you talking about? If you have another dinner?
00:15:01.97
Alan Baltis
No. We got word from…
00:15:02.97
Stephen Schneider
Right. Right.
00:15:04.76
Alan Baltis
a guy that works with soundstage which was the wttw um public tv station in chicago that the stones are going to be after the show joining these blues guys and they’ve always wanted to play with muddy waters and so they’re just gonna like maybe they’re gonna be his backup band they just want to be on stage with muddy waters
00:15:22.49
Stephen Schneider
right
00:15:23.44
Alan Baltis
So we got in the place and we’re sitting in like the back corner. And I told this story many times and people would of course give me the, sure, sure you did. Pull the other leg, you know, that kind of thing.
00:15:33.96
Alan Baltis
And then finally, Colleen found a DVD at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of that. They were recording it for soundstage and can never see us. We were all the way in the back, right?
00:15:44.68
Alan Baltis
Looking out from the stage. And I think I don’t mean to, I, I,
00:15:46.100
Stephen Schneider
Thank you.
00:15:51.25
Alan Baltis
remembered so clearly certain songs and who was on stage and the order in which things played. And then I watched the DVD and they’re like, man, I was totally wrong. how ah you know I have such a weird memory that I really do kind of photographically, cinematography, retain those kinds of things.
00:16:07.01
Alan Baltis
And I was wrong multiple times on who was on stage during Got My Mojo Work or Manish Boy or whatever else it might be. And yet I also, things were like, man, that is, I’m getting incredible deja vu. Cause that’s exactly what I remember. ah Here he is. This guy is coming up on stage. Crowd goes wild.
00:16:24.60
Alan Baltis
It was, it’s very cool. If anything, just to be validated that it wasn’t like, Oh, you’re sure you flew in an FV 15, you know, sure.
00:16:31.38
Stephen Schneider
right
00:16:31.51
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:16:33.12
Stephen Schneider
Right, right. Hey, hold one second. My dog’s at the door.
00:16:37.54
Alan Baltis
okay
00:16:38.34
Stephen Schneider
All right.
00:16:42.34
Stephen Schneider
right Well, she went back. So I forgot to tell you, i went and saw Colin Hayes a couple of weeks ago.
00:16:50.20
Alan Baltis
Oh, from Men Without Hats.
00:16:51.74
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:16:51.84
Alan Baltis
think ohakland Yes.
00:16:52.85
Stephen Schneider
um
00:16:53.61
Alan Baltis
east great He great. Okay.
00:16:55.10
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:16:55.92
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:16:56.38
Stephen Schneider
He was. I mean, we were sitting there. It was. Let’s put it this way. There she is. like ksie say um he’s in his seventies and you couldn’t tell by listening to his voice.
00:17:06.86
Alan Baltis
Isn’t that wild?
00:17:09.87
Stephen Schneider
And it was just him on stage. But I told Colin, I said, think of it as if I went to play acoustic guitar for a bunch of people. And in between songs, i told all the stories I told him as he was growing up.
00:17:23.51
Stephen Schneider
And he’s like, Oh, that would be so cool. It was, i mean, it was almost half comedy, half stories, half music, um stuff I’d never heard.
00:17:31.53
Alan Baltis
that’s Rick Wakeman does a similar thing. you know He plays things and then he chats with the crowd in between. and
00:17:36.47
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:17:36.85
Alan Baltis
has lots of great stories as well.
00:17:38.49
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:17:38.52
Alan Baltis
That’s
00:17:38.77
Stephen Schneider
And it was so good. and he even joked about He’s like, you know, ah I remember the days when I used to have people like hand me my guitars ah fully tuned and they stood there and tuned these like they go out of tune a lot.
00:17:51.100
Stephen Schneider
And then goes.
00:17:54.90
Stephen Schneider
Nope, still nobody in the wings going to hand me a guitar, you know, just stuff like that. It was very fun. So he played a a couple of the hits that everybody knew, but in an acoustic slower style.
00:18:04.66
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:18:08.29
Stephen Schneider
And then a lot of stuff I didn’t know that was solo, but told a little story about each one and stuff like that.
00:18:13.45
Alan Baltis
That’s great. and i I saw him long ago solo.
00:18:14.44
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:18:16.96
Alan Baltis
I didn’t see him on this time around. I’m re-inspired. Like if he ever tours again, it’s, i I really liked their music. And there’s certain bands like from the eighties that just stood out from, i don’t know, MTV play them, midnight oil. I’m trying to think who else like just, they were better. They weren’t just cashing in on, Hey, we’re pretty boys.
00:18:37.34
Alan Baltis
Like, I don’t know. I really liked Duran Duran. And even though they were pretty boys, they made great music. And so.
00:18:42.05
Stephen Schneider
They, did get to see them a couple years ago.
00:18:42.84
Alan Baltis
but wow Yeah.
00:18:45.86
Stephen Schneider
And, and as I’ve sent with a buddy of mine and he played music professionally in a smaller band for years.
00:18:45.97
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:18:53.63
Stephen Schneider
um And he goes, man, I don’t remember Duran Duran being so funky. I’m like, dude, that’s what I loved about him. That some of that bass work going on and the music, when you, the non-hits are just so good across the board for their stuff.
00:19:09.80
Alan Baltis
Honestly, they might be one of those bands that they pick the most radio, MTV-friendly songs, but there’s lots of great material. I think I bought either a box set or I just went and collected a whole bunch of stuff from them because I recognized that I really don’t have enough of them and I don’t want just the greatest hits.
00:19:24.94
Alan Baltis
I really remember liking the albums on vinyl and then I i replaced them on CD.
00:19:27.51
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:19:29.44
Alan Baltis
And and but even like, I love bands where, hey, you know, they kept making music after their heyday. And the music is still great. just doesn’t get airplay anymore. So can’t.
00:19:39.30
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:19:39.94
Alan Baltis
who
00:19:40.01
Stephen Schneider
They get thought of as a a pretty boy pop band, but there’s so much more than that.
00:19:43.75
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:19:45.27
Stephen Schneider
They’re, they’re a little undercredited sometimes for their music.
00:19:48.86
Alan Baltis
Exactly. So it, I’m trying to think, what else can we just see? we We’re going to see Thomas Dolby tonight.
00:19:54.98
Stephen Schneider
Oh, good.
00:19:54.99
Alan Baltis
Speaking of those like,
00:19:55.91
Stephen Schneider
i saw him at the Tubular Fest couple years ago.
00:19:58.85
Alan Baltis
Excellent. When we saw him before, he’s him, Todd Rundgren, there are certain guys, Robert Fripp, Adrian Ballou, they’re one-man band, and yet they really know how to handle sequencers and and tape overdubs and stuff like that, that he’ll come out and get you know some cool drum ah fill and some cool bass rhythm going and stuff like that, and then sing and play and solo over it.
00:20:20.50
Alan Baltis
and let and then it let let it all kind of fade down. It’s not. Only like pre-canned tapes, he sets all these things in motion and builds the song and then lets the song dissipate.
00:20:27.05
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:20:30.60
Stephen Schneider
he
00:20:31.60
Alan Baltis
Oh my God, he was so good and I’m hoping it’ll be similar things. He was always more… talented than the stunt videos you blinded me with science you know and i mean so i’m really looking forward to that show because i just respect him and love the fact that he isn’t just a musician thank you again for the cool book for instance you know what i mean exactly um that he he really seemed to follow his own muse and like even the things that he just dabbled in were still great they were high quality so good for him i think he’s been like ah
00:21:03.71
Alan Baltis
an associate professor or something like that at a university teaching music or music theory or synthesizers or whatever else it might be.
00:21:06.24
Stephen Schneider
Oh, wow.
00:21:12.08
Alan Baltis
It’s very cool to see people that have that kind of talent and didn’t let a fame kind of grab them and shake them around like a dog. You know?
00:21:20.08
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, he had that he had his 15 minutes, and then you know you got to really like him to have kept up with him.
00:21:20.32
Alan Baltis
Thank you.
00:21:26.53
Stephen Schneider
And he was definitely doing live loops before live loops were a thing. It’s a big thing now. I’ve seen multiple performers using it. ah The Kifnis, if you’ve checked him out, ah seen him at all, I love the Kifnis. He’s South American, I believe.
00:21:43.15
Alan Baltis
All right.
00:21:43.16
Stephen Schneider
he does He does videos on Facebook, on YouTube, but what he does is he finds videos – of somebody’s pet, usually like a cat or something that’s meowing and making noise in like some, whatever way.
00:21:53.32
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:21:57.91
Stephen Schneider
and then he puts music to it and he, it’s at, he integrates that video as part of the song.
00:21:58.14
Alan Baltis
That’s really cool.
00:22:04.76
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:22:04.77
Stephen Schneider
Um, and I really like his stuff.
00:22:05.46
Alan Baltis
um
00:22:06.60
Stephen Schneider
It’s fun.
00:22:07.55
Alan Baltis
that theres There’s a couple bands, you know when when things became available, you could digitize and and play with everything. The Orb, ah you um Pink Floyd, long ago, you know they have like fighter jets coming in and and cash registers and that kind of stuff.
00:22:21.27
Alan Baltis
and And for a while it seemed a little bit stunty, but they really were great at hearing the musicality of something and capturing it. And way long ago, Champaign-Urbana, when I got a chance to play in the music lab,
00:22:33.62
Alan Baltis
I did similar things. i went, found sounds. You know, I think I mentioned, I would go out to like the stadium and you could, they had big, uh, aluminum, I think benches on concrete and you could hit one end of the thing.
00:22:46.89
Alan Baltis
It would like, you and it would like make this cool sound where you make that up and capture that.
00:22:48.98
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:22:52.01
Alan Baltis
And I had all kinds of, back when they first had things that you could like, um, uh, take that sample and then play with gating it so you get any number of things. I really i got really good at looking at the wave pattern and like, well, I can’t cut it off here because then it sounds abrupt. You have to leave some, what is it? You know, how do I not know this by heart?
00:23:13.87
Alan Baltis
Approach, attack, decay.
00:23:15.60
Stephen Schneider
The attack decay.
00:23:17.05
Alan Baltis
ah what What’s the first thing called?
00:23:17.69
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:23:18.45
Alan Baltis
like It’s not approach. Anyway, I got real good at like, okay, I don’t want this to sound unnatural and choppy.
00:23:24.13
Stephen Schneider
Mm-hmm.
00:23:25.06
Alan Baltis
So do I fade it in? Do I just capture it at the moment when kind of like you you become aware of, your ear is not aware of things immediately. They kind of break into whatever your consciousness is based on ah certain amount of time or a certain attack.
00:23:39.91
Alan Baltis
Attack is the word, not approach.
00:23:41.10
Stephen Schneider
to
00:23:41.99
Alan Baltis
um and And so I had a lot of fun playing with that. And just by playing with it, you learn a ton about, you know, the Beatles were great to go back to them. And we want a certain sound. It’s got to sound like you’re you’re circling a mountaintop.
00:23:57.18
Alan Baltis
And George Martin did a thing where he had… like speakers hanging, rotating around, and it really captured that kind of disorienting but very interesting air sound as well.
00:24:08.64
Alan Baltis
And just the fact that they used to have to do that by playing around in analog to try to capture something that simulated that instead of, oh, no, just apply the aerolizer to it, and it’ll sound just like running, know, flying over a mountaintop.
00:24:21.91
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:24:22.58
Alan Baltis
So…
00:24:23.42
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. I know. um Rush Madrigal where they talked about recording that ah Alex walked around in this courtyard of this, like,
00:24:34.24
Stephen Schneider
Welsh a castle they were staying in like a troubadour and they followed him with a microphone and you got birds chirping and that’s live birds that were there with him just walking around like a troubadour.
00:24:37.16
Alan Baltis
that’s right
00:24:47.01
Stephen Schneider
ah You know, that but some of that’s missing nowadays.
00:24:47.10
Alan Baltis
like
00:24:50.99
Stephen Schneider
Every, you know, there’s so much digital that they don’t, a lot of just don’t ah know that and understand that. Oh, why do we have to, but sometimes there’s there’s good reasons for it, you know?
00:25:00.35
Alan Baltis
Yeah, natural acoustics, like, you know, singing in a, like, playing in a cathedral. I know, and and this can segue into the Christmas music, you know, cathedrals were designed to have, like, near-perfect acoustics, depending on where you sat. And the guy um stood at the ah pulpit underneath the sounding board. I believe that’s where I think that term comes from, right? It was like a reflective above him.
00:25:23.81
Alan Baltis
And that voice could carry through this entire 50-yard, 100-yard cathedral. And… cathedral and And just the richness of it. You know, they talked about this once you were going from analog to digital, that you eat you would get tinny, it would get clit sounding, that it wasn’t natural.
00:25:39.05
Alan Baltis
But when you get all those overtones and reflections and just whatever happens to mix in the air, the music of it, I’ve always loved that kind of stuff. One of the cool things about Mannheim Steamroller was they were great with playing with medieval instruments and in like spaces that weren’t just sounding like a synthesized capture of a mandolin or something like that, that they sounded, you could feel, hear fingers moving on frets and stuff like that.
00:26:05.22
Alan Baltis
And that’s so authentic somehow, you know, it’s warmer, it’s more human.
00:26:06.85
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:26:08.88
Alan Baltis
um And I know I have a couple because Christmas is coming up where they, you know, they didn’t just play the organ. They went to St. Paul’s Cathedral and played the big church organ with 19-foot pipes and and all the stops. And we just, having watched The Last Waltz, that thing, they showed Garth Hudson not playing a modern, like, Korg, everything is simulated, that it really, they had to carry this organ around that had, um like, five rows of things with, like, you had to know what you were doing really recreate the sound that you wanted to get the
00:26:48.38
Alan Baltis
the volume of it, the richness and the lushness and the and the size of it and stuff like that. And the fact that he could just kind of do that, you know, do this and then stand up and play saxophone or oboe for a while.
00:27:00.45
Alan Baltis
He’s not like, it just made a music.
00:27:00.57
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:27:02.13
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? So very, very cool to see that level of talent and that level of, uh, They must have just tried it at one point and then said, you know, that sounds really good.
00:27:13.16
Alan Baltis
Can we do that on road?
00:27:13.94
Stephen Schneider
Well, well, even, you know, the stones we’ve mentioned and Led Zeppelin go listen to those albums and all the variety of instruments used on some of that, you know, it,
00:27:14.68
Alan Baltis
Because you can’t always do things on the road that you can do in the studio.
00:27:27.05
Alan Baltis
Absolutely. Dental Giant is one of the ones I carry a torch for these guys because they never had radio airplay, but they have like, you know, great albums, a big disco discography, and they were one of the bands that they really did.
00:27:40.100
Alan Baltis
Everybody in the band played multiple instruments, and so it was like, well, the drummer stepped up and played oboe or something you that I make fun of with that, and like, especially oboe or something, it’s not an easy instrument. You know, it’s a double reed instead of just playing, any number of people can wail on a clarinet or saxophone
00:27:51.06
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:27:56.36
Alan Baltis
It’s not that it’s easy. You have to really know what you’re doing to not have it sound like squawking. And yet the oboe is even more particular in what kinds of sounds, what kind of range, but then nothing else sounds like it either.
00:28:08.24
Alan Baltis
And here’s one fact to know and tell, yeah maybe you’ve heard this, That’s the instrument that the orchestra tunes to because it can’t adjust its um tone to match. If it’s a little bit flat or sharp, it can’t do it.
00:28:24.10
Alan Baltis
It doesn’t have the, by being the double reed and, and, and, However it’s set up, I wish I could tell you exactly why, but it doesn’t have the ability to like tighten a little screw and then now it’s in tune.
00:28:31.09
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I didn’t know that. but
00:28:37.16
Alan Baltis
It really is what it is and everybody else has to adjust to a perfectly tuned oboe instead of it being able to capture up to other things. fuck
00:28:45.70
Stephen Schneider
Interesting. I didn’t know that.
00:28:47.32
Alan Baltis
Yeah, it’s a, like, usually the lead orchestra leader is, like, the violinist, right? Because he can give you a pure G or something like that.
00:28:54.56
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:28:55.20
Alan Baltis
But it’s the oboe that everybody everybody has to sync with, maybe is a good term, tune to, that kind of thing. So, yeah.
00:29:00.37
Stephen Schneider
Interesting. I’m surprised I didn’t know that. yeah I’ve played in band for years.
00:29:06.23
Alan Baltis
But probably not, like, oboe band.
00:29:09.37
Stephen Schneider
but no but We did have oboe. We did have some kids that played oboe was in band.
00:29:13.92
Alan Baltis
Yeah, yeah.
00:29:14.29
Stephen Schneider
no
00:29:15.53
Alan Baltis
So and I’m looking forward, you know, and Christmas radio is not that great because they kind of play the same 25 songs. And I have such over the course of the years, I’ve really accumulated like any number of rockers.
00:29:29.67
Alan Baltis
They’ve done a Christmas album. So I know I have a Keith Emerson Christmas album.
00:29:32.66
Stephen Schneider
yeah father christmas
00:29:32.74
Alan Baltis
And I might imagine he’s a virtual. So keyboardist. Yeah. and and And actually, that Greg Lake, of all the… There are certain songs that, you know, you go all the way back to Silent Night, which has been around for 500 years, probably more. I wish I had exact provenance on that.
00:29:47.35
Alan Baltis
But, like, you know, Mariah Carey has a song that became a Christmas staple, and so does Greg Lake. And how cool is that? And actually, i think it’s one of the most beautiful Christmas songs, you know what mean? that That it’s really…
00:29:59.62
Alan Baltis
perfect for what it is and the lyrics are great and all that kind of stuff so i’m I’m glad that some people have a legacy that kind of lives beyond them you know Mel Torme has you know of the great Christmas song and stuff like maybe nobody knows him for all the work that he did besides that but everybody knows him because that song comes on the radio every year you know okay yeah exactly
00:30:00.95
Stephen Schneider
now
00:30:14.100
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:30:18.68
Stephen Schneider
ah And I’ve got a lot of good jazz Christmas albums. over the last couple years. Wynton Marsalis has a wonderful album. I love listen to, or, um, um, the name is escaping me, a solo guy, in you know, in the vein of Barry Manilow, but he was also an actor. He was in Independence Day and Hope Floats.
00:30:43.19
Stephen Schneider
Um, but he’s got a couple of good albums, um, here.
00:30:43.20
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:30:46.25
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:30:47.91
Stephen Schneider
I’ll IMDB it real quick.
00:30:49.51
Alan Baltis
I really love um vocals too. So when you hear like pentatonics, you know, they’re they’re all an acapella group and you hear them have a whole album of Christmas standards, but their own variations on it and stuff like that.
00:31:02.12
Alan Baltis
And like, I know to hear the 12 days of Christmas done wittily, you know, and and that kind of stuff.
00:31:07.21
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:31:08.11
Alan Baltis
And ah there’s a couple other bands that are like that, that it’s,
00:31:09.52
Stephen Schneider
um ah Straight Note Chaser did a really good a Christmas Can Can.
00:31:12.54
Alan Baltis
again Thank you. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, exactly.
00:31:16.60
Stephen Schneider
yeah Harry Connick Jr., that’s a wonderful album. um
00:31:20.97
Alan Baltis
I’ve never seen him live.
00:31:21.15
Stephen Schneider
um
00:31:21.83
Alan Baltis
I should see him. Okay.
00:31:23.14
Stephen Schneider
ah McFarland, Seth McFarland has a wonderful Christmas album. He has a wonderful voice. Yeah.
00:31:28.49
Alan Baltis
Very good.
00:31:29.45
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:31:30.39
Alan Baltis
I’m looking forward to, you know, I don’t tend to bring those out during the year. i kind of save them for November, December. And then I can go until like Epiphany, January 6th, where I still feel legitimate, kind of like the Halloween lounge pants that I have.
00:31:43.89
Alan Baltis
You can wear them in October. And then after a while, they’re like, oh, maybe should put those away. but
00:31:48.91
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:31:49.86
Alan Baltis
but I really love that variety of music and growing up, maybe you had this too, my parents had like a Reader’s Digest box set of vinyl, you know, going all the way back to that. And they had four great albums and one was the standards, one the acoustics, one was the orchestrated and that kind of stuff.
00:32:07.40
Alan Baltis
And I listened to every one of those four because I really liked every one of those styles and it’s in its great Christmas music. So to hear like a great bass vocal singing, go tell it on the mountain, it’s just, it fills the room.
00:32:19.80
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:32:22.53
Alan Baltis
It’s really, and i i of all the Christmassy things, I don’t know that I’m like, oh, I can’t wait to go shopping. What I really love are all those lead-ups, like we do Advent calendars every year and it’s just so tool childlike wonder a little silly you know it’s you got your days one to 24 at least in the european style with the dusting of silver that we like that goes to 24 because that’s when the christkind was born whereas the united states often goes to 25 but you know what i mean it’s um
00:32:51.84
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:32:54.62
Alan Baltis
There’s this, it’s like a wonderful anticipation. And Colleen and I alternate so that depending on what year it is based on whether it’s an odd or even year, we take turns as to who gets to be the one to open number 24 and stuff like that.
00:33:07.80
Alan Baltis
And it just it’s just such a nice thing to meet in the kitchen, While we’re getting our breakfast together and she’s got the coffee brewing and I got my my toast toasting. And then, oh, whose turn is it today? And you open up, oh, it’s a little wagon.
00:33:20.17
Alan Baltis
I don’t know why, but it’s really a nice connection to my parents having done that. And my mom used to go to a uh um an import store like international imports in arlington heights to get a good one because that they they started to have like american versions and kind of knock off but we really wanted the one that had the glitter on it and it was often a street scene with there’s kids and dogs and the sleigh is coming through and you know what i mean so i just love it i just love that um tradition i guess it’s been going on for how long and yet it’s sweet
00:33:44.21
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:33:53.78
Alan Baltis
And nowadays, I think, you know, there’s variations where every day you get a little cheese. Every day you get a little rum or something like that.
00:34:00.01
Stephen Schneider
right ah Last year for
00:34:01.20
Alan Baltis
That is a big one.
00:34:02.96
Stephen Schneider
Last year I got Colin a ah Godzilla advent calendar. So every day was a small little figure or a Christmas ornament. This year I got him a cryptid one. So it’s got Bigfoot and Mothman and stuff in it.
00:34:14.56
Alan Baltis
So where’d you find that? Because do we we go to the Christmas stores and I’ve not seen the cool cryptid one. I guess at the cryptid convention, they had them.
00:34:19.88
Stephen Schneider
it It popped up online ah probably because I got the Godzilla one last year and this year I got an ad and there it was.
00:34:22.17
Alan Baltis
Yeah. Okay.
00:34:28.56
Stephen Schneider
I’m like, okay, there we go.
00:34:30.12
Alan Baltis
And they know you’re a prospect. You know what I mean?
00:34:31.69
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Yeah.
00:34:33.68
Alan Baltis
That’s funny. i’ve never I’ve never seen that one. I’ve done Marvel. You know what i mean Again, i guess to each of us, our interests. And once they know, then they start to say, you want an origami Christmas calendar?
00:34:43.44
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:34:44.25
Alan Baltis
That’s not fun.
00:34:45.59
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:34:46.58
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:34:46.87
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, my mother always for the kids did ah and not an advent calendar, but every day was a little gift and they got to open it. It was a stocking. and And some of them were stupid.
00:34:57.40
Stephen Schneider
I mean, it was chapstick or ah Kleenex, a little thing of Kleenex to take.
00:35:02.27
Alan Baltis
Very necessary for winter though.
00:35:02.38
Stephen Schneider
And yeah, yeah I mean, yeah the kids are like, oh, okay.
00:35:03.87
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:35:06.95
Stephen Schneider
you know But yeah.
00:35:07.57
Alan Baltis
Right. Getting socks.
00:35:08.27
Stephen Schneider
but She tried to yeah mix it up with like a crazy pair of socks or a little new ornament to give them.
00:35:12.59
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:35:14.68
Stephen Schneider
you know It was a combination of things. But but they as they got older, they appreciated it and really enjoy it. And and Collins, even now, like, oh, nanny’s stockings, you know that type of thing.
00:35:25.67
Alan Baltis
That’s very cool. One of the joyful conversations is having that. What were the different Christmas traditions in various different households? You know what I mean? So we we always had the Christmas stockings hung. We didn’t have a fireplace when I was growing up in Elk Grove, but they were on the louver doors that like separated the living room from the rest of the house or something like that. and And just was you’d you’d see things.
00:35:46.70
Alan Baltis
We didn’t open them, as you said, during each day leading up, but you’d see the the stock stocking getting bulgy. And it was like, oh, that might be the tangerine. That’s a very is a very German or European thing.
00:35:58.34
Alan Baltis
Tangerine in the toe, you know?
00:36:00.23
Stephen Schneider
Did I ever tell you when Bobby and I were married and the kids were very little, four-ish, she always waited.
00:36:07.32
Alan Baltis
OK.
00:36:09.29
Stephen Schneider
Hey, why don’t we write presents? Hey, yeah always waited until night of the 24th. It’s like, are you kidding me?
00:36:13.71
Alan Baltis
Oh, boy.
00:36:14.86
Stephen Schneider
I want to go to bed so I can get up and enjoy Christmas. and She made no sense.
00:36:17.61
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:36:19.25
Stephen Schneider
But we’re putting the stockings together. she goes, we didn’t get any oranges for the stocking. I’m like, well… It is 10 o’clock on new on Christmas Eve. We don’t have oranges.
00:36:29.93
Stephen Schneider
No, we’ve got to have oranges. I’m like, are you kidding me? And this was pre, before we had cell phones even.
00:36:35.62
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:36:35.81
Stephen Schneider
And we’re calling, we pull out the phone book. We’re calling places.
00:36:39.50
Alan Baltis
Are you still open? Do you have…
00:36:41.01
Stephen Schneider
We found one CVS in Cuyahoga Falls that was open until they said they were going to be open until 1 And we said, do you have oranges? They said, well, we don’t have any fruit. We’re like, ah anything with an orange?
00:36:54.03
Stephen Schneider
is like, well, we have that orange candy, the chocolate-covered orange candy.
00:36:57.94
Alan Baltis
Yeah, exactly.
00:36:59.27
Stephen Schneider
Put two aside. We’ll be there in a half hour.
00:37:01.47
Alan Baltis
you develop
00:37:02.05
Stephen Schneider
Freaking drove out at midnight in the cold in December 24th to get these stews. And then the kids didn’t like them and nobody nobody ate them they anyway. I’m like, are you kidding me? I’m never doing that again.
00:37:14.28
Alan Baltis
You know, doesn’t that make for a great story though? Like, it won’t be Christmas unless we have candy canes.
00:37:16.78
Stephen Schneider
it does, but…
00:37:20.39
Alan Baltis
And you were like, oh no, did you not pick them up? I didn’t pick them up.
00:37:23.18
Stephen Schneider
right
00:37:23.60
Alan Baltis
And then you gotta go. and And as you know, there’s many stories about, well, little Billy really wants a Beanie Baby this year. And they’re like sold out since October. And yet, ah what are we gonna do? Are we gonna go like haunting stores? Are we gonna, how how are we gonna satisfy this if possible?
00:37:39.55
Alan Baltis
All the fad toys, isn’t there even like, you know with with Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? Where him and Sinbad are competing? Maybe, you know,
00:37:47.88
Stephen Schneider
um ah Jingle all the way
00:37:50.11
Alan Baltis
single all the way. Thank you very much. We’re, you know, it it’s, and I don’t think that our family was very faddish in that way, but we definitely, my parents were very good at listening over the course of the year, or they actually, after while requested, how about a little list, help us out here.
00:38:05.52
Alan Baltis
And so the puzzle that I wanted for that year or the book or the music or whatever, they were wonderful about getting, and and we had a limit, you know, we had like a $25 limit because we were, you know, at that stage.
00:38:17.79
Alan Baltis
I think actually birthdays were 25 and Christmas was 50. And so based on the child, sometimes it’d be like, I don’t want any other gifts, but can you get me a bike? And maybe it was more than 50, but then the bike would be there with a bow on it and stuff like that.
00:38:31.79
Alan Baltis
And and that was so much the best Christmas ever because they’d always wanted a new bike instead of a hand-me-down, instead of a rickety whatever.
00:38:39.60
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:38:40.67
Alan Baltis
And so one one year my brother got a camera. And also it wasn’t cheap back then. And yet, no that that’s what he wanted that one thing i always seem to have that little list of well like i said i’d like one puzzle and i’d like one but it wasn’t cds back then i’d like this album and i like this book and this game and i kind of had a smorgasbord that but and i hope i didn’t drive him crazy with like oh i got to run to five different stores to find these five different things because they don’t necessarily have all that at jewel or walgreens i i betray my chicago growing up so
00:39:13.93
Alan Baltis
We always had a wonderful Christmas. My parents were really good at, I don’t know, we had bowls of nuts with a nutcracker and you could crack, you know, the walnuts and the Brazil nuts and Brazil nuts.
00:39:24.74
Alan Baltis
Remember that? It’s like like opening a brick. It’s really, really tough.
00:39:29.78
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:39:30.41
Alan Baltis
so that’s how we got all this great wrist strength that they we had to be able to open our Brazil nuts.
00:39:36.100
Stephen Schneider
So we, cause my, I probably said this before my mother was a nurse, so she worked every other Christmas. So on Christmas Eve, we always went down to my grandmother’s and then the days she had to work Christmas day, we’d come home from my grandmother’s and open our Christmas presents.
00:39:51.89
Stephen Schneider
And then she’d be at work and we’d wake up the next day and, you know, play already have our stuff open.
00:39:55.94
Alan Baltis
exactly
00:39:57.32
Stephen Schneider
I remember when I got my Commodore 64 that I had been just dying for. And it was one of those nights, it was Christmas Eve late. And I stayed up because I had a magazine.
00:40:09.83
Stephen Schneider
Here you go. Here’s how old we are. i had a magazine with code and I typed in a game and I had to save it on the cassette drive because didn’t have a disc drive, floppy disc drive.
00:40:14.57
Alan Baltis
exactly
00:40:21.88
Stephen Schneider
And then I went to run it and it got narrow and it didn’t run. And it’s like three in the morning and I’m so upset. So, you know, and then worse, I had been like marking off ah with a pencil.
00:40:27.96
Alan Baltis
right. yeah
00:40:33.80
Stephen Schneider
We had this shag rug and my foot jammed to the pencil in the shag rug.
00:40:35.39
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:40:38.25
Stephen Schneider
And I got a pencil jammed in my toe and it broke off.
00:40:40.99
Alan Baltis
No.
00:40:41.35
Stephen Schneider
So at three in the morning, my mother’s having to like remove this lead from my toe. I still have a mark on my toe from it Um, but you know, and then i woke up and I had to like figure out how to debug and fix this code to get this stupid game to run.
00:40:48.08
Alan Baltis
That’s
00:40:56.78
Alan Baltis
the run for the next, exit you know, i Apple Cider, Apple Insider, I think it was Apple Cider, had the same thing where you type in the code and some of that, the earliest thing, it was, I didn’t type perfectly.
00:41:07.30
Alan Baltis
So you’d get errors and be like, oh, i it’s not the keyword that it has to be here. I have to make sure that, ah so that was actually a very interesting, yes, it was frustrating to not have it work, but it was so satisfying when you’re like,
00:41:13.62
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:41:19.94
Alan Baltis
got it in and it really did run. It’s like, that’s magic. You know, did I didn’t get it on a floppy, didn’t get on the cassette drive.
00:41:25.79
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:41:26.21
Alan Baltis
I did it. I made this. but
00:41:27.79
Stephen Schneider
And I enjoyed it when it was the basic stuff, but they very quickly in the magazines went to machine code because they ran faster, ran smoother.
00:41:34.36
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:41:37.65
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:41:37.75
Stephen Schneider
ah And you couldn’t learn as much. it was, you know, because it was compiled machine code you were entering. so it was just strings of numbers.
00:41:45.49
Alan Baltis
Right. Yeah. It’s like, you know, even back when so we did ourselves again, you know, I could type in things in Octal and I got to know all kinds of what that meant, if you will, what the code was, what the moving things in and out of the memory.
00:41:56.73
Stephen Schneider
Memory and crap, yeah.
00:41:57.17
Alan Baltis
Right. like Yeah. And yet it’s different when you don’t have like a human readable language. So and there’s an interesting segue. So I’ve been um experimenting with AI in lots of different ways, much as you have.
00:42:10.22
Alan Baltis
And one of the things that is now in in Vogue is called Vibe coding. you know You really can have the AI create code for you. And it really does really like make me an app that plays checkers or something like that, and it does it.
00:42:22.52
Alan Baltis
What I’m hearing is it’s write only code. Like you can’t read what it did to debug it or to alter it. Well, I want it to be, you know, green and blue instead of red and black checkers.
00:42:34.23
Alan Baltis
Nope. It’s really um the next step towards the machines are impenetrable and opaque. And that I like, I’ve always made code where I either…
00:42:48.16
Alan Baltis
spelled things out my variable and names were all like understandable when you only had eight characters to do it it was really weird to write something complex and say i hope i abbreviated this consistently and memorably because when i come back to look at this in six months it really might be i can’t figure out my own stuff i really tried to do a good job yeah so but i i
00:43:06.14
Stephen Schneider
Been there, done that.
00:43:10.08
Alan Baltis
Way long ago when I worked with Pete Marwick, we had any number of software tools that actually fixed, you know there’s longstanding code out there, especially in banks and insurance companies, things that had to go computerized early because they just had such transaction volume. You know what I mean? All the various different things.
00:43:27.59
Alan Baltis
And you’d find out that depending on who had coded it, they really had a good sensibility about making it that other people could understand their code so that somebody else could maintain it in case they got killed in a fiery bus crash or just that they could return to their own code.
00:43:41.12
Alan Baltis
And so I’ve always been very careful and commenting and all the kind of stuff to do that. And I was amazed at how many people hadn’t. And I know that there was always, of course, time and money pressure to get something working.
00:43:54.43
Alan Baltis
But like, wow, if this is the Banco de Puerto Rico and the whole country kind of runs on this code and yet it’s in ridiculously fragile and impenetrable,
00:44:05.68
Alan Baltis
it It was, we we fixed a lot of stuff with structured retrofit and path view and stuff like that at Pete Marwick that people, would when they’d get it, they would say, this is the first time I’ve ever really understood all of what’s going on in this program.
00:44:20.12
Alan Baltis
A big utility company that handled the gas and the electric and all the various different things, the trash pickup. And they were like, well, everything kind of funnels into this subroutine and it does something and it funnels back out.
00:44:32.15
Alan Baltis
And now I know that the reason it does that is because billing is similar, no matter whether it’s kilowatt hours versus gallons or whatever else it might be. So I just, it was very cool to be the guy that revealed things hidden in code, kind of like hieroglyphics.
00:44:47.47
Alan Baltis
I got the Rosetta Stone app here. That’s going to let you know what your code does because the guy who wrote it 40 years ago, he’s gone.
00:44:51.89
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:44:54.88
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:44:54.100
Alan Baltis
That kind thing.
00:44:55.83
Stephen Schneider
I remember I hadn’t been coding much for a while and i started to learn visual basic and I had, you know, done Commodore basic back in the day.
00:44:55.94
Alan Baltis
So yeah,
00:45:02.46
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:45:06.14
Stephen Schneider
And I was like, my God, where are the line numbers? How do you program without line numbers? It took a while.
00:45:13.25
Alan Baltis
One of the things I learned early on, to geek it out for a moment, is you know I worked in a lot of basic too, and it’s all flow code. It just drops into the next thing, and I learned to structure my stuff so that it was a mainline that sent you to various different modules or subroutines, functions, and then it would return so you could really tell, here’s the five big things that are going on, and I don’t just have it one thing.
00:45:35.100
Alan Baltis
carpet, it’s that it goes to do these things and comes back. And that would how you put when you have variables, that you just, as you know, with a function, you just have to call the function by name and with the right parameters, and then it returns the value of that.
00:45:51.59
Alan Baltis
But there’s other things. There’s more going on. And in within the function, it’s also creating another record that it updates, the little file storage that you have, the database or whatever. And all of that, whether you declared it as a local or a system variable, it really mattered.
00:46:07.50
Alan Baltis
It really mattered that you didn’t name things the same thing so that without you knowing it, you could clobber things. And only when you actually did a step-by-step run-through of it’d be why was that? where Where did that number come from? Oh, because it’s inherited from something else.
00:46:22.11
Alan Baltis
Anyway, it used to be very hard.
00:46:22.95
Stephen Schneider
yeah Who the hell programmed this? Oh, wait, I did.
00:46:26.73
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:46:27.16
Stephen Schneider
i don’t recognize this code.
00:46:29.07
Alan Baltis
And what’s funny is, you know, so there I am doing these things as a kid and I’m going to get my Star Trek program to work, my Star Wars thing. And then you go to the corporation you find out, wow, this is throwing SOC 7, SOC 8, all various different things. Like it’s got…
00:46:44.18
Alan Baltis
character data in numeric field and you can’t add the word well it was the number eight and like did did nobody ever like you learn about testing that you don’t just test it to make sure it works you test it to make sure that all the things that could go wrong are also handled and a lot of what I did at BeatMari. I was really good at that. I was really good at looking at data dumps and looking at, well, this this doesn’t look right.
00:47:07.78
Alan Baltis
And like just by ah kind of eyeballing it. and then But you have that sense of, this this isn’t right. How did it get um a put here? And then trace that back. And so it’s very it’s kind of cool to be able to do that.
00:47:21.16
Alan Baltis
But it’s very interesting when it’s like, nobody else learns how to do it because they can go to Al. They can go Al and he’ll figure it out. And it’s like, well, why I don’t want to be trapped as… the guy that’s down here in you know next to machine code yeah that that has to figure these things out and especially when we’re doing it for a client it was very weird sometimes to go to the client and say i’m not sure if you guys know this but this has never worked like you think it does you know what i mean and it’s only from luck that you haven’t had ah like an overrun in this variable or something like that
00:47:53.83
Stephen Schneider
Or or the the things that are hard-coded in that shouldn’t be. And then something changes with inventory and and companies with products and stuff, and suddenly it doesn’t work.
00:48:04.78
Stephen Schneider
And nobody knows why. Well, it’s because they hard-coded this because you were using the same products from the same company, and now you’re not.
00:48:11.67
Alan Baltis
No, you’re not.
00:48:11.73
Stephen Schneider
You know, no flexibility in code.
00:48:12.08
Alan Baltis
Exactly. Yeah. yeah
00:48:14.07
Stephen Schneider
And the crazy thing is, you know, we’re talking about this from 30 years ago. You know how often I’m on a website or an a service or an app and I’m like, oh my God, I can’t, can’t you program this better? It it shouldn’t do this.
00:48:26.46
Stephen Schneider
And it’s just like, this is horrible.
00:48:29.55
Alan Baltis
that’s As you know, Y2K crisis revealed all kinds of things where they had made fields that they’ll not be able to grow from two to four digits like they have to. And um just all kinds of things like, hey, we we now have more than 10,000 employees.
00:48:45.20
Alan Baltis
An employee number is only leave five digits. What are we going to do? Are we going to start putting A’s and B’s? No, it was… It was interesting. It was interesting to see the many assumptions.
00:48:56.71
Alan Baltis
this This value can never go negative. It just can’t. Well, it just did. We broke the dollar. And now in your big insurance investment company, you’ve got, it throws an error instead of being able to say, this is temporarily 99 cents instead of a dollar.
00:49:13.29
Alan Baltis
And there’s negative value.
00:49:13.72
Stephen Schneider
N-A-N. Oh. Hmm.
00:49:15.15
Alan Baltis
I don’t like that. um So it’s very fun to be the guy that first reveals that. And then very interesting to see the um circle, the wagons, like, they no, no, I wrote that. It can’t be wrong.
00:49:27.40
Alan Baltis
Well, well, I’m sorry to be the guy that bring the bad news, but let’s run this little test. Boom, it breaks. and and And sometimes they go like, oh, and you’d hear that little revelation, that little pain of they really, really did think it was impervious and it wasn’t, you know, that kind of thing.
00:49:43.93
Stephen Schneider
I love the, we’ve been using this code for 20 years as is. We got an error. ah Can you take a look at it? Yeah, I’ll go take a look at. Well, how long to go take the fix? I don’t even know what’s wrong with it right now.
00:49:57.17
Stephen Schneider
I can’t tell you.
00:49:57.40
Alan Baltis
exactly
00:49:58.09
Stephen Schneider
There’s not, I hate that so bad.
00:49:58.56
Alan Baltis
and
00:50:00.94
Stephen Schneider
No matter what it is, the first, well how long to go take the fix?
00:50:03.97
Alan Baltis
but
00:50:04.44
Stephen Schneider
It’ll probably take five minutes to fix. Oh, good. But it’s going to take anywhere up from one to five days to figure out what that five minutes needs to be.
00:50:12.32
Alan Baltis
i know exactly yeah
00:50:14.38
Stephen Schneider
And then they look at you like, well, I thought you knew what you were doing. i do. That’s why I told you it’s going to take one to five days. i know what I’m doing.
00:50:20.69
Alan Baltis
Right. just but I’ll give you a real one. naie I’m a magician. And I’m going to, you know, there’s any heard this story before? There’s a great one where Campbell’s Soup had like you know a guy that had retired and they something was wrong with the recipe for chicken noodle or something like that.
00:50:35.58
Alan Baltis
And they bring them in and and they had they like kind of, you know, what will it take to have you come back to work? Ten thousand dollars. So, and they had to because it was, you know, however many cans of Campbell’s soup.
00:50:47.67
Alan Baltis
So the guy comes in, kind looks around, adjusts one dial and everything’s fine again. And so they say, we’re not but paying you $10,000 for it. Like, give us an itemized bill.
00:50:59.21
Alan Baltis
And he was like, okay, a dollar for turning the dial, $99.99 for knowing which dial to turn, how much to turn and all that kind of stuff.
00:51:05.70
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Yep. That’s…
00:51:08.63
Alan Baltis
And that’s just, isn’t that encapsulate When you deal with an expert, you’re getting all of who they are and what they have done. and And that it might seem like they got it done really quickly, but that’s because you don’t have another expert that could take all that in and out pops the answer because they got all that.
00:51:20.57
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:51:23.31
Stephen Schneider
Well… or the the that tech support anecdote, which may or may not be true. It probably is true. you know, big systems, those, those, you know, complete room type systems from back in the day with their own water coolers and, you know, and it’s not turning on, they need it to run and it’s not turning on.
00:51:43.59
Stephen Schneider
And so they got to hire this company and pay all that money. And the tech guy comes in with his bag. He walks into the room, looks around, plugs it in, hits the on button and walks out here.
00:51:54.47
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:51:54.88
Stephen Schneider
the The cleaning lady had unplugged something to plug in the vacuum, you know?
00:51:58.58
Alan Baltis
you’re Like a vacuum cleaner, exactly.
00:52:00.30
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. It’s like, well, you know, you, you guys could have looked around the room and seen something unplugged, but you didn’t.
00:52:05.57
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:52:06.02
Stephen Schneider
So here’s my bill.
00:52:07.31
Alan Baltis
when When IT first started to penetrate into sitcoms and stuff like that, and it was really often said, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on? And the reason that’s there is because that fixed 80% of the problem.
00:52:19.80
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:52:19.98
Alan Baltis
How about 50? But you know what I mean?
00:52:21.53
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:52:22.20
Alan Baltis
It just had such…
00:52:22.57
Stephen Schneider
right
00:52:24.24
Alan Baltis
an understanding of how this thing works and sometimes it really is i can’t tell you why memory has become followed up from this program running for six days now but the best thing you can do is not figure out how it happened it’s just to return it to its known good state and start again you know what i mean yeah
00:52:41.91
Stephen Schneider
I mentioned our hot water heater is broke. It was leaking. and I had to turn all the the flip the switch for the breaker, turn the water off and all that.
00:52:51.90
Alan Baltis
right
00:52:52.38
Stephen Schneider
Jason ah looks at me says, well, did you try and flip it back on then to see if it fixed it? I’m like, shut up.
00:53:00.35
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:53:00.39
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:53:01.90
Alan Baltis
That is funny. So trying to think what else we wanted to get. Anything, you know, it’s it sounds it might be a little bit that we’re now guilty of. Oh, my God, we already talked about Christmas. It’s only November or something like that.
00:53:12.69
Stephen Schneider
Well, 105.7 is playing all Christmas already.
00:53:16.12
Alan Baltis
Oh, no, already.
00:53:16.93
Stephen Schneider
ah
00:53:17.08
Alan Baltis
I didn’t know that. So.
00:53:18.21
Stephen Schneider
i did something last night that I hadn’t done before and I didn’t think I would do.
00:53:22.44
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:53:23.19
Stephen Schneider
I taught a class, did a talk ah ah for authors, for writers ah called Unraveling Self-Publishing. um
00:53:31.62
Alan Baltis
Very cool. Okay.
00:53:32.66
Stephen Schneider
i I’ve never ah at Kathy’s bookstore in Ravenna.
00:53:33.29
Alan Baltis
and At a library? but what What was the…
00:53:38.39
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:53:38.73
Stephen Schneider
i I just was like, you know what?
00:53:39.55
Alan Baltis
Cool.
00:53:40.77
Stephen Schneider
There’s plenty of people that do the talks to other authors.
00:53:44.35
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:53:44.49
Stephen Schneider
I don’t need to jump in that crowd.
00:53:46.54
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:53:46.91
Stephen Schneider
But as I’ve been out more and gotten known more, I’ve gotten people coming up like, oh I tried to do this. And oh, I want to know this. And and there’s just all sorts of people ah that have asked questions and said things.
00:54:00.65
Stephen Schneider
So like, you know what?
00:54:00.74
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:54:01.47
Stephen Schneider
I’m going to teach a class. And Kathy at her bookstore, she was nice enough to say, hey ah you know we can do it here. and I was afraid I was going get two people. You know, we had like 14 sign up and I think 10 showed up.
00:54:14.78
Alan Baltis
That’s very cool.
00:54:14.100
Stephen Schneider
Uh, so yeah, uh, it was fun. and it was only one part. It was just the, self-publishing part. And I thought, oh man, ah it’s going to be like 45 minutes and I’ll take some questions. We’ll be done.
00:54:27.30
Stephen Schneider
No, an hour and a half of talking. And I was going fast and that didn’t even cover ah the the marketing, which is something totally different.
00:54:30.56
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:54:35.60
Stephen Schneider
Did not cover writing or anything.
00:54:36.18
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:54:37.16
Stephen Schneider
It was just getting published first. So I’m like, okay, this went pretty well.
00:54:40.40
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:54:42.61
Stephen Schneider
People seem happy. Maybe I’ll do it again. Maybe I’ll add a marketing one to it and see.
00:54:46.98
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:54:47.36
Stephen Schneider
But I don’t want to, I don’t want, I know a lot of authors whose main thing they do is talk to other authors about how to write and publish.
00:54:56.49
Alan Baltis
Oh, yeah. Those who can’t do teach is the.
00:54:58.58
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, I don’t want to do that If I’m going do it, I want to do it with kids and I’ve got ideas for that kids and parents and all that, but it was, it was different.
00:54:58.80
Alan Baltis
OK, yeah. it
00:55:03.80
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:55:06.64
Stephen Schneider
It was fun. Um, uh,
00:55:08.40
Alan Baltis
That’s a perfect example of you don’t really know how good you are at it until you try to teach it to somebody else. And you walking through the direct experiences you’ve had and all the frustration and all the what’s going on here.
00:55:19.93
Alan Baltis
And I got five places I could choose from.
00:55:20.70
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:55:22.08
Alan Baltis
How do i make that choice? What are the criteria and the parameters that I put into this? And that is worth its weight in gold, Stephen. You know, a lot of other people that are, I wrote a book.
00:55:32.39
Alan Baltis
Now what do I do? They kind of don’t want to be The businessman. You know what i mean? There’s a whole book called The E-Myth, if I remember right, about how many entrepreneurs fail because they got a great idea for like the code that they want to write, but then they have to become their own legal department and they have to become their own billing department and all that kind of stuff.
00:55:51.69
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:55:52.16
Alan Baltis
and It’s really important to… where’s my time best spent and hire out the rest of the stuff you know what i mean and so maybe it if you’re an independent author you kind of have to do a certain amount of that for yourself anyway and yet and yet it’s very cool that you um captured that without uh it i’m sure it didn’t seem obvious like really what i’ve been shooting for is always to be this teacher and to be know what i mean it’s it’s to to share
00:56:20.06
Stephen Schneider
right
00:56:22.78
Alan Baltis
Buddies, a little bit what you said earlier about, you know, you’re the guy that’s sitting around and strumming the guitar and in between you tell stories. You’re the guy that had the cool stories to tell about, here’s what you’re going to be feeling while this is going on.
00:56:34.41
Stephen Schneider
And that’s,
00:56:36.62
Alan Baltis
You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to get, yeah, that really worked. Look at the numbers. The numbers are rolling in. Okay.
00:56:41.65
Stephen Schneider
I got, I got to watch that.
00:56:41.98
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:56:42.69
Stephen Schneider
I tend to to ramble with stories and I told some stories as we were talking and then I’m like, oh man, this went for an hour and a half. I thought it was going to go for 45 minutes, but maybe cut back the stories just a little bit.
00:56:52.63
Alan Baltis
but
00:56:55.29
Stephen Schneider
But, but sometimes I think it it also lets people know I’m not the only one that’s had this problem or I’m not the only one thinking that, or know,
00:57:02.70
Alan Baltis
Absolutely. That is a great thing is just to to know you’re not alone.
00:57:03.59
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:57:06.42
Alan Baltis
You’re not the first. In fact, any number of the first time that I hit this and nowadays it is you can go online. I can’t be the only one that’s had this error. I can’t be the only one that’s had this frustration.
00:57:17.26
Alan Baltis
Maybe I can tap into a YouTube video about how to adjust my garage door because they’re and not only that they’ve done it before. Sometimes it’s I do garage door for a living and I’ve seen it all.
00:57:27.57
Alan Baltis
And this is it’s that easy.
00:57:28.32
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:57:28.89
Alan Baltis
You pull this cord, you put some juice on here, you know,
00:57:30.19
Stephen Schneider
and And the funny thing is that’s what they’ve discovered more and more is, you know, like with the recording of concerts, they’re like, Oh, don’t record that.
00:57:39.51
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:57:40.53
Stephen Schneider
Cause we’ll lose money. Well, they found out that you make more money when you let people record at your concert and take pictures.
00:57:45.92
Alan Baltis
Could they build the network effect? Exactly.
00:57:47.65
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And the same with a lot of the self-help stuff. You know, I know people that do a self-help book and they literally have videos and articles that pretty much tell everything in the book and they sell more books because of it.
00:58:01.79
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:58:01.87
Stephen Schneider
You know, that’s why movie trailers.
00:58:02.82
Alan Baltis
You get seen as the expert, or at least as the the acquainted person.
00:58:06.36
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:58:07.06
Alan Baltis
And if you’re if you’re if you’re good and you’re believable, you know, I don’t want Mr. like Smooth Marketer telling me about garage doors. I want Zeke, who’s worked on garage doors all of his life, and he’ll he’ll give you the real deal kind of thing.
00:58:19.63
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And that,
00:58:20.44
Alan Baltis
I’d rather about man who works with his hands, to quote Genesis. So…
00:58:24.13
Stephen Schneider
that’s why movie trailers give away so much because they found that ah more people go see the movie with a movie trailer like that than some esoteric movie trailer that doesn’t give away the information.
00:58:27.44
Alan Baltis
oh
00:58:36.65
Alan Baltis
I hear it because there’s value to being surprised, but there’s also value to anticipating, oh, I can’t wait for this thing to happen.
00:58:36.89
Stephen Schneider
I personally don’t like it, but.
00:58:43.97
Alan Baltis
Did you see the way the car went over the, you know, San Francisco and with, you know, that’s, I hear you.
00:58:45.65
Stephen Schneider
Right, right.
00:58:50.85
Stephen Schneider
yeah The anticipation.
00:58:51.10
Alan Baltis
A lot of, I know I’ve read books about that, that like happiness, some of the keys to happiness are, it’s not only like, hey, honey, surprise, we’re going to Paris.
00:59:02.30
Alan Baltis
jump You’ll put something into a suitcase and jump in the plane with me. Then a lot of it is we’re going to Paris two months before. Let’s read some of where want to go and let’s buy the clothes that you want to wear on the Champs-Elysées.
00:59:09.88
Stephen Schneider
anticipation.
00:59:15.14
Alan Baltis
And it’s that anticipation and it’s a little bit of the um the reminiscing and the aftermath that all of that works into a much better happiness experience than some things really are great as a surprise.
00:59:28.04
Alan Baltis
Many things are not.
00:59:29.63
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:59:30.22
Alan Baltis
I mean, you’re going to enjoy it more if you’re like, I’m, I’m, we’re going to take the Route 66 trip next year. And, and already I’m like, I think this is kind of our route, but like, please read this book. And then you point out, well, you don’t care about the Wigwam Hotel. You care about seeing the biggest gopher statue.
00:59:45.94
Alan Baltis
and whatever else it might be. and then we both get satisfied. We both get like, wow, there’s really a bunch of cool stuff here. I don’t want to travel 300 miles that day. Let’s plan on staying overnight another night to make sure that we can do all of this. And our our oh Our trips have been really successful because I’m a pretty good trip planner about anticipating time and expense and what’s close enough off the road and stuff like that.
01:00:10.08
Alan Baltis
But also because Colleen is really good at, um you know, hey, I like Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Are there any sites as long as we’re going to the Dakotas? Why, yes. this book was written about Dismet.
01:00:22.05
Alan Baltis
This book was written about, you and so we’ve done a really good combination for the two of us and for, let’s just see, I didn’t realize that the biggest ball of twine was going to be that close to I-90 and stuff like that.
01:00:33.19
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:00:33.82
Alan Baltis
You know? Anyway.
01:00:36.04
Stephen Schneider
Right. all right. Well, it’s getting up there. I got to get rolling. Got plenty to do.
01:00:40.16
Alan Baltis
Okay. yeah Honestly, like we’ve talked about a little bit in the past, we’ve got like six weeks to go until Christmas. Let’s see if we can come up with cool gift ideas or cool, all of it, the music and the food and the whatever else is kind of leading into Christmas.
01:00:55.13
Alan Baltis
I think that I… People that listen to the podcast have said they sit there with pen and paper or the tablet open so that they can take notes as to what we stumbled across, what we recommend from 30 years experience and all that kind of stuff.
01:01:08.91
Alan Baltis
And I really would like to let’s do that this year. Let’s do it.
01:01:11.31
Stephen Schneider
yeah
01:01:12.63
Alan Baltis
Anticipate that. There, see, we’ll anticipate.
01:01:13.34
Stephen Schneider
ah
01:01:14.47
Alan Baltis
We’ll get the satisfaction.
01:01:16.71
Stephen Schneider
I’ve got a couple of cool things I’m getting for Colin and Nanny. i
01:01:20.22
Alan Baltis
Wonderful.
01:01:20.74
Stephen Schneider
I always try and get off the beaten path a little bit.
01:01:23.74
Alan Baltis
Yes, I already have things kind of hidden away for Colleen. You know what i mean? but And just if you just listen, you can like she mentioned this in February. And I don’t think that she realizes that I really was going to make a little note and see if I can find it and in her size and color and all that kind of stuff.
01:01:39.68
Stephen Schneider
well
01:01:39.91
Alan Baltis
Like we both we do this a lot, right? You get a book that you kind of want to read, too, and you give it to them. And it’s like, hey, when you’re done, just put it over on my nightstand.
01:01:47.37
Stephen Schneider
Right. Well, it’s easy to hide from Colleen. You just put it up one shelf.
01:01:52.17
Alan Baltis
oh Oh, I’m telling her that. Actually, I bring it up to Skynet because she’s kind of scared of coming up here because yeah yeah if this clutter doesn’t stop in camera sight.
01:01:59.59
Stephen Schneider
She doesn’t. I was going to say, she’s probably afraid for her life. Yeah.
01:02:07.19
Alan Baltis
i I really don’t know how I got to this place, but I really have stacks. Yeah.
01:02:12.46
Stephen Schneider
You know what? I’ve been better. I’ve really made an effort this year to be more organized because I got tired of the looking around for 10 minutes for something that I put down.
01:02:23.78
Alan Baltis
Right.
01:02:23.80
Stephen Schneider
you know And I’ve really, really, really been trying this year. I’m not perfect, but I’m better. In the office, I had gotten a horrible… like like I felt like I was back in my childhood ah bedroom stepping over stuff. And I’m like…
01:02:36.76
Stephen Schneider
this has got to stop, put things away.
01:02:37.97
Alan Baltis
Don’t live like that.
01:02:38.83
Stephen Schneider
i yeah I was just busy and I’m like, I’ll set it here and I’ll worry about it later. I’ll set it here and I’ll put it away. Well, this is like three months of things being set there and I’ll worry about it. So I’ve really worked on organizing, putting things away, but then it becomes a thing like, okay, well tonight,
01:02:47.89
Alan Baltis
I’m going to get that.
01:02:54.05
Stephen Schneider
I’m going to relax and read some of the new comics. So I pull out and I read half of a stack. Well, i don’t want to put them all away because I want remember to read them. So they’re sitting here. Well, tonight I’m going to play this video game.
01:03:04.55
Stephen Schneider
And well, now I pull these out. Now the video games are sitting there because those are other games I want to play. And I’m like, ah, so,
01:03:10.60
Alan Baltis
but
01:03:11.80
Stephen Schneider
What I really got to do is i try and like Colin, he makes lists and he checks things off lists. So if I keep things in a list, you know, with Simple Note or Joplin, then I can remember to cross them off and then I don’t have to like pull everything out.
01:03:17.91
Alan Baltis
Yeah. Yeah.
01:03:26.56
Stephen Schneider
But then it’s a matter of making the list, keeping the list and updating it.
01:03:30.05
Alan Baltis
yeah I have been a list maker for a long time and it’s really handy in that way that you get to like, once you think about it, you jot it on the list and then it doesn’t take up mindshare. You can always return to the list. And if you see how many things you want to work on, it helps with a little bit of keeping that like prioritized or something like that.
01:03:46.48
Alan Baltis
And maybe something for urgent versus important or whatever else.
01:03:46.80
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:03:49.13
Alan Baltis
And if there’s a big satisfaction if you scroll down the list. I tend to like work on things, put an X next to them and move them down the list. And then when you look at what did I get done this year? Wow, a lot, actually.
01:03:59.100
Alan Baltis
you know what I mean?
01:04:00.49
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:04:01.24
Alan Baltis
So it’s it’s it’s a good habit that’s worth the 5, 15, 30 minutes once in a while to just be, oh, I forgot about my orthotic appointment.
01:04:11.70
Alan Baltis
how How? How that’s important? Well, because once you start using a list, it really needs to get on the list to get handled, kind of.
01:04:17.55
Stephen Schneider
ah Right.
01:04:18.56
Alan Baltis
You what I mean? So…
01:04:19.55
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And I’ve really tried to do that too, because ah well, for example, uh, one of the new things I’ve got with my books, check this out. How’s this for entrepreneur thinking?
01:04:31.07
Stephen Schneider
I’m going to start selling my free stories to people for three bucks
01:04:36.13
Alan Baltis
which honestly a nominal price who wouldn’t throw three bucks
01:04:39.79
Stephen Schneider
because I’m printing them out on smaller little sizes. So they’re going to be stocking stuffers.
01:04:47.20
Alan Baltis
that’s a great idea little books remember that they used to have big little books that had so that you know me too
01:04:48.17
Stephen Schneider
Isn’t that great?
01:04:50.88
Stephen Schneider
Yes. I still have some of those by the way. but yeah, I, so, you know, I, I have all these things I want to do with my books. I just, the, the Halloween stories I just released in dyslexic font, uh, and large print,
01:05:00.31
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
01:05:05.96
Alan Baltis
going to do that. Very cool.
01:05:06.91
Stephen Schneider
along with regular, along with audio book, you know, and I’d like to do that with all my books.
01:05:07.08
Alan Baltis
OK. OK.
01:05:11.91
Stephen Schneider
So I, but that’s a project. That’s a ah work on this for several days type projects, you know, in between ah other stuff. And then I’m like, Oh, but these stocking stuffers are a great idea. And Oh, I could do this. So the first project isn’t getting done, but I worked on this second one. And So I got to put these things in a list.
01:05:30.81
Stephen Schneider
So I focus on one at a time. And then I, I do get more of them done instead of having 10 things partway done. I’ve got three things partway done, but two things all the way done, you know? No.
01:05:41.90
Alan Baltis
I hear you. I’ve also read that, that multitasking doesn’t really work.
01:05:46.16
Stephen Schneider
no
01:05:46.35
Alan Baltis
You try to juggle amongst too many things. the the The thing you do to shuttle things out in and out of your mind and to gather around you all the things that are necessary to get that done, the overhead is greater than the savings of moving multiple things forward.
01:05:58.32
Alan Baltis
And and’s it’s not true for everything.
01:05:59.05
Stephen Schneider
um
01:05:59.48
Alan Baltis
You know, it’s okay to… When i clean house, I don’t just do one thing. I like this goes here. and then while I’m here, I’ll take this down. And then i try to save the number of times I’m walking up and down the stairs. That’s its own thing.
01:06:10.37
Alan Baltis
But in business, for instance, it really is stick with it and get it done and kind of clear the decks. And so, and a quick other thing, now that we’ve got our new kitchen, which I love to talk about, it really is easier to keep a wonderfully arranged thing in good shape than a thing where there’s a bunch of different stacks or cookbooks or like this isn’t in its right place. And I got to remember that I couldn’t fit this into the spice area, that it’s over here with the flowers.
01:06:38.84
Alan Baltis
And if I ever need to look for dill weed, all that stuff, Now that it’s relatively well organized and we’re still adjusting, it wasn’t perfect, but boy, it’s great to be at 90% of the way and keep it there instead of letting it deteriorate.
01:06:51.17
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:06:51.30
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? So.
01:06:52.08
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:06:52.68
Alan Baltis
All
01:06:53.15
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. i’m I’m learning that more. It’s hard and with the book stuff.
01:06:56.32
Alan Baltis
right.
01:06:56.87
Stephen Schneider
It’s really hard because i have all these ideas and I think they’d all be great, but I keep like, Oh, I got to work on this. Oh, I got to work on this, but I just got to get something done.
01:07:04.06
Alan Baltis
Okay. I got to sleep too.
01:07:06.81
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.
01:07:08.28
Alan Baltis
at Maybe in in closing and brief, I love going to places where, Hey, I went there to get the t-shirt, but then I found out that they also have it as a poster and as a mug. And as a, and that’s like, I hadn’t thought about it, but that would be pretty cool to have a little desk thing because I like that saying so much that I wouldn’t mind being reminded of that by having it be,
01:07:26.93
Alan Baltis
a little desk thing where they capture 365 of those. And now it’s a a calendar, a page a day calendar or whatever. And so sometimes just throwing out all those possible ideas, you hit more people that showed up to buy the t-shirt and they said, well, I, I, I, maybe I’ll expand this and get three things of this.
01:07:46.32
Alan Baltis
Anyway, it’s kind of cool to, let people’s muse carry them where they will, and that you just did a little bit of brainstorming, and then they will give you feedback. Hey, I’d love to have that also on a ah a motorcycle bag.
01:07:58.91
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? So I don’t know how i’m going to um how many I’ll sell of that. But then you find out that you can do custom printing. It’s like, well, these things are 10, but that’s going to be 20 because I have to only do it one at a time instead of ordering it in bulk.
01:08:11.11
Alan Baltis
And some people will say, I’ll pay 20 bucks. And you kind of let the market find what it wants. You know what mean?
01:08:16.13
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:08:16.55
Alan Baltis
So that’s cool.
01:08:17.92
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. All right.
01:08:18.99
Alan Baltis
All right.
01:08:19.23
Stephen Schneider
Later.
01:08:19.76
Alan Baltis
Take care, Stephen. oh
01:08:20.59
Stephen Schneider
Later.
