Episode 84 - COVID Talks - Relentless Geekery

Overview

We have toyed with talking about COVID, so we dig in to discuss it today. It’s been around for 2 years now and doesn’t seem to be going away.

Alan tells us a bit more about the Repairman Jack series from F. Paul Wilson. A geeky good time.

Alan gives us an explanation of how the stocks are doing with Zynga being a particularly nice looking one. Stephen updates us on the problems with Codova and setting up his Ender 3d printer.

Recommendations

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles https://www.idwpublishing.com/ip/11

Trivia

When did Boba Fett make his first appearance? And it’s probably not when you are thinking. 😉

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:37] Alan: Good morning. Good morning. How are you?

[00:00:40] Stephen: Oh, you got a nice winter scene going. I got BMW today. I had a fast and the furious last week. So new exciting backgrounds.

[00:00:49] Alan: Exactly. I have enough zoom that I could probably do a year, a week by week. I don’t know that I’ll always remember to change it. I don’t know that I’ll remember to change it to something new and yet the real trouble, the world will [00:01:00] heal will display new possessions like beavers and stuff like that.

[00:01:04] Stephen: It’s interesting. Like a lot of things in the last year and a half, two years, technology has exploded in a lot of ways and people are doing a lot more zoom calls for work for everything, visiting parents and kids and whatever. So the number of companies I went, Hey, I can get, I can give them a free background.

And then everybody that watches that video sees BMW here, please. Hey, get, yeah. You know, I’ve had a thing for years. I don’t wear a lot of shirts like this one I’m wearing right now, that’s advertised as a company or. Then they put their name on it. I paid for it to advertise for.

[00:01:41] Alan: I’ve always been weird about that too.

I really don’t like being somebody else’s billboard, especially when it even goes to the under thing of the most expensive ones, the polo shirts or whatever, like that are like, wow, that it’s not that I’m no, you’re deferring my costs. You’re charging me more advertisers. But then I’ve also seen like, there’s [00:02:00] replies to that where instead of having the, I dunno, the polo, they got a little crocodile on them.

I think that was from JC penny or something like that. It’s funny. I really purposefully try to be very brand unaware so that when someone says, oh, that’s the croc, they’re very fancy. It couldn’t tell you found at the $5 bin because

[00:02:20] Stephen: that’s what I do. I I’m okay if I’m going to get some, cause I admittedly like this sweatshirt, I have literally had this for 18 years and it still wears what’s a little more, but it is a better quality made shirt.

They’re not all that way. I go to the thrift store. I’m like, I’ll look, this $50 pair of pants is $3.

[00:02:43] Alan: That’s right. Pauline. I have lots of nice clothing because Colleen dresses me better than I dress myself. So I’ve got a credible view. I got this beautiful maroon with stripes and it really is. It’s nice, but it was also, it has worn very well, but even those things act eventually wear out after awhile.

And [00:03:00] so then I’m like, this is supposed to be fancy. And now I feel like I’m committing sacrilege by wearing it where Scott go hole, right where this thing joins together or something like that. And I dunno, I tend to, I don’t tend to wear elbows, but I tend to just get it phrased on the seams or something like that.

Or, and this is, I have, I’m a big guy with big thighs and I have any number of like sweat pants. Worn out in the particular area. And then it was, how bad am I going to let these get before? I think I’m embarrassing myself in public. You get to that stage of, okay, they’re green sweats. I better wear the green underwear.

So that in case it does peak out. It’s not like Y Y Y you know what I mean? I would rather get more wear out of them then for sure. And avoid embarrassment. No I’m. And also, what do I really do nowadays? I’m on the computer. Mostly. I go brief the local shopping. I’m not going to work. I would never wear these things in public, but it is funny where I wear they’re sort of try and Eagle, and then I dropped something in the aisle and it’s oh, I got to make sure that [00:04:00] I am not, um, whole facing somebody else because that’ll be the reveal of my God that it has just destroyed

[00:04:08] Stephen: it’s Alan Ball, comedy show.

And I

[00:04:14] Alan: never let it get to that point where I’m actually. Really easy. I’m actually outside my clothing. And yet there must be times where you, you work clothing, you don’t expect to be, I’m going to have to like, like I said, bend over, run something like that. And then you put it in a different position than just walking around.

So they’re have they’re really believe it or not. America have been some clothes that a guy is willing to retire when they really become just like too dangerous, too much, a weird spectacle. And I just don’t want them. I haven’t had things where the pocket wears out. And like the first time that I lose a coin or a pen through a pocket hole, I get so pissed that I throw them away.

I just can’t stand that idea of this is usually a secure thing and I never have to worry about it. And it wasn’t my wallet. Thank God. [00:05:00] But you want to admit it that you’re getting any kind of thing like that. I put keys in there. Those keys are, can continue to wear away at that existing hole until I might lose something important.

So there are some things and having said, I, I like lounge pants. You probably have noticed that in my various stages of my life, I’ve been like Mr. BlueJeans, and then Mr. Dockers, and then I just probably, wow. Almost 20 years ago now got a pair of lounge pants. And that is of course pajamas. I call them lounge pants because what kind of a man would wear pajamas in public.

But my younger brother got me, one that has like happy faces or Dr. Seuss characters or something all over them. That really are only for the inside. And I just, I don’t think I’m a person that needs attention, but I just decided to wear the one day. And I got like compliments sometimes, maybe snide, but most of the time, like I really weren’t loud pants.

I see many people wearing them now, and I’ve never been the fashion forward guy. I’ve never been the one that was ever going to be a trendsetter. And yet, because I’m gone embarrassed. And because I like bright colors or [00:06:00] the kinds of things I wanted to wear, weren’t like Skol tobacco. Right. I don’t advertise for those kinds of things, but if it was the Simpsons or Dr.

Seuss or Marvel comics or something like. It’s another fun, little signifier of my relentless geekery that I really don’t by letting the world know that I think this is amusing and, and now I see people wearing them and I ain’t gotten also once you start wearing them than other people say, that’s a gift idea right there.

So my brother-in-law John, just for this last Christmas, I had given a list full of music, all the albums that I haven’t gotten yet, or box sets that I liked and stuff like that. And he got me some of those, but he also got me four pair of lounge pants because he likes them too. And then he’s the way I can get a cover is because Al wears them and then I’m allowed to wear them not allowed.

And you gotta be good ones. It wasn’t like, oh no. Right now I’m wearing John’s taste. Oh, he got me Marvel comics. He got me cool. I like interesting fractal patterns. I like cool color combinations. And how hardly ever does a [00:07:00] guy thinks that he might be able to pick another guy’s taste unless you just go with, I got you a t-shirt and I got you some jeans, you know what I mean?

I wear a tuxedo because every other guy is happy to be penguin number N but so a whole big spread about that. But it’s funny once that started to catch up. The way to find those, a lot of what you just talked about, find those at the high price store, you go to target and cool, and where they have them for 10, $12.

Sometimes they were better than others. I’ve had some that I really did have to get rid of. Some, I actually hurt, like where I told her steam, and then I really didn’t want to stop wearing them. One headache, Christmas trees on them. It’s like, these are like my December pants. So then what you go and you try to find like, I don’t know how to spell well enough to attempt it.

You go to a seamstress, that’ll be 10 bucks, but they cost me 10 bucks. So

fans that are in need to be fixed pile, but will I ever do it because it seems weird. The double, the price of them, [00:08:00] because

[00:08:01] Stephen: that’s the same, same thing I’ve talked about with the tech I could upgrade, but where’s where does it cross the line from upgrading to, I have a whole new computer now with the St.

Kate’s for the lounge pants. So we were Christmas shopping and I saw this pair of lounge pants that had ramen noodles. And that is like, Jason’s, go-to, he’ll eat ramen noodles four or five times a day. And I’m like, oh,

[00:08:26] Alan: this is really suits.

[00:08:29] Stephen: I go carrying them over to Gina. She pulls out the car. She goes, look what I found for Jason.

It was the ramen noodles, but they both had the same psychic. Oh, even better. She took Adam out and Adam comes walking up and goes here. Let’s get these for Jason. And it was the same, it’s all game. We know Jason.

[00:08:49] Alan: I wor I have the laughing paths. There are bright yellow, and they have smiley faces all over them. So they attract a lot of attention. You don’t expect to see us for her punk, Canary walking around. I [00:09:00] w Colleen and I were in Boston. Like she’d had a conference where I had a conference, but we were both out there and we went to a comedy club.

But what do you think? And they liked my pants well enough that they gave us free tickets to come back for another show in Boston. But what a compliment to my pants that they’re worth a free show. How cool is

[00:09:18] Stephen: that? Yeah, that’s pretty cool. That’s memorable. Okay. I’m going to bring this up. And we took, we did surround the whole COVID day, a little bit.

We’ve mentioned it in stuff, but I mentioned to you that I was listening to a podcast, uh, an author friend, and she has family in New Zealand and she went through. The family in New Zealand, her and her husband, which is one of the great things about as you’re working for yourself remotely, a contract wise, you really can go anywhere if you have the right equipment and not every job, you can do that.

But so

[00:09:50] Alan: at your laptop with the camera

[00:09:52] Stephen: and writing, and a lot of the coding, now you can just get into the servers. But anyway, she goes to New Zealand. Now she was doing her [00:10:00] podcast from a hotel room because when they got there, they were told, like, get in this hotel room, you are not allowed to come out for two weeks.

We’ll bring you food, leave it outside the door. You don’t leave for two weeks. And they’re

[00:10:15] Alan: the Zealand. Other places. They’re an island. They really can be isolated. I’ve done that the way they cut. Point oh, five COVID cases

[00:10:24] Stephen: because they, yes. And that’s the point she was inconvenience. Yes. They expected it.

Yes. But it was more important to visit her family, but then they knew they weren’t going to catch anything and they weren’t spreading the day by and people are not dying on New Zealand anyway,

[00:10:41] Alan: because of that, it’s back to normal.

[00:10:45] Stephen: Right? Yeah. So it’s that what you and I have talked about that question of, yes.

She’s inconvenience, but it’s saving lives. It’s helping the whole world. And how, if you tried to do that to people in America says, when are you got to be quarantined their [00:11:00] idea of quarantine as well? I just ran down to the gas station real quick for cigarettes.

[00:11:05] Alan: Exactly. So I’ll lead and I got it from the family gathering at Christmas week.

Someone had it. Luckily, we really seem to have had the OMA Chronos that have the Delta. So we had mild cases, but we both have tested positive on a, either a drive-through set to a lab test for a home test. In fact, both of us have not done it through a lab. Luckily for Coleen, who was a persistent cough for me, it was congestion that I was snotty and stuff, but it never proceeded into the lungs.

It never stole our senses. It didn’t make us so headachy and fevery that we were like loopy. So thank God, no brain fog, no lingering effects so far as we can tell, but I have been in contact with my doctor as stupid. I come in. Is there anything that I should do besides get rid of it? Like a flu? Yeah, there’s monoclonal antibody.

There’s a new merch pill, that kind of thing. And she went through the UHS system, which is where I have my [00:12:00] general practitioner. They don’t, um, subscribe to the monoclonal antibodies thing yet there are providers around, but it wouldn’t be covered by their referral. They won’t give you a referral and it wouldn’t be covered by insurance.

So Merck bill, same thing, 700 bucks for the treatment compared to my life. Of course, I’m willing to pay 700 bucks, but they’re not, it’s not like I seem to have defeated it on my own with vitamin C and over the counter cough medication and stuff like that. But you also said after you’ve had it, you can be contagious for, we can still have it in your system and maybe we can take up to 10 weeks.

And so well, that takes care of our first quarter. We have, we, we have had game night with other members of Coleen’s family. And now even if one of them is the one that gave it to me, I don’t want to really give it to them or give it to somebody that hasn’t had it yet. So we really are facing a little bit.

You said, are we really quarantining, fully masked and careful to touch nothing? I am still going out on provision run. We’re not only getting [00:13:00] deliveries and I’m being very careful, but I am haunted by, I can’t stand the thought that I might’ve been the one that carries around. I’m getting less than one. I, I can’t, I have not been a quarantine.

I really haven’t gone out and I’ve tried to make once, make one trip, not five, let’s go to one place and get everything you need. And yet that the weird mind flip, I was totally careful and not wanting to get it. And then I got it. And now I feel bad about myself. I feel healthy. I feel I there’s a psychological studies that say that some people really have a sense of disgust more than others.

If you put a plate of food on top of a close trash can, some people can eat it because Hey, it was on top. Not in what other people, the minute it’s near the trash can. They’re like there, the reptile brain overcomes our thinking brain. And I really must have some part of that because I really don’t like to think of myself as protected guy, someone who might give it somebody else.

And, and so [00:14:00] I’m fighting that I’m not so concerned now about myself who seem to have gone through it. And I don’t want to be typhoid out. I just case. Oh,

[00:14:08] Stephen: that’s the big thing that it gets so frustrating is one, the people that say, oh, it’s not true. Oh, they’re fake. They’re fooling us. Okay. That is like the biggest damn conspiracy ever in the world.

If every doctor, every politician, every news person that we heard in the world is altogether lying. Uh, and for what reason is it benefiting every single news anchor to lie. And that’s the first thing. So then number two, they tell you things like I’m not going to wear a mask because it’s my right. It’s my God.

Or I demand to be in your store because it’s a PO no, it’s not public. It’s privately owned folks. They can tell you to get the hell out. They can choose not to serve you. And what

[00:14:52] Alan: kinds of things they say that makes no sense, but it doesn’t stop

[00:14:55] Stephen: them. And it’s my choice, my body. And yet they’re wearing [00:15:00] pro-abortion, uh, stickers on their car or something like that.

Yeah. Oh, I’ve heard so many stories of these people are like, yeah, we went to a family party. We were having a good time. My wife started feeling sick in a couple of days. She’s in ICU and then she died. Folks, get the vaccine as now. It’s a little late to be saying that because people are dying because of you.

That’s the frustrating part. And we talked about this. They just don’t care. And they’re not smart enough to listen to the rationalization and the science behind it. It’s frustrating. I, I,

[00:15:34] Alan: wow. Probably. What are we about two years in, let’s say a year and 11 months ago, I coined the term unreachable because it really was like that already.

It’s not only about this pandemic. It was about vaccination in the first place. It was about global warming. And you’ve seen a similar post where yeah, this conspiracy theory about global warming apparently includes every single scientist, every single other country than the United. You know what I mean?

Like that the amount of [00:16:00] data that you have to overcome, if you believe in. You believe in global warming, there’s just no question that it’s happening. Here’s a thousand charts in every way. And so about voting rights or about suppression of voting rights, you can name half a dozen issues where you can’t present them with enough data, enough facts, and reality that they will change their mind.

And so then what do you hope that segment of the population is the crazy 2% or the, it seems that reachable is, are they so virulent on renewables are 10% and the people that want to belong to that tribe of freedom or own the lib or whatever else it might be. That’s nowadays at 40%, the reason that there’s such, there’s such a political divide in the country is that it’s not slight differences in how we should pursue solving a problem together.

It’s is there even a problem? And if there is a problem, I want you to have. I want these other people to be [00:17:00] punished by God, to be punished by being a liberal it’s ridiculous. The amount of stuff that has happened to make it so that it’s not even worth the discussion in so many ways. And especially as a politician, it’s not worth the discussion.

It is just a matter of get the vote. We have to get this done. We have to fix our roads and our bridges. We have to put out testing and treatment for the pandemic. The reason that we’re here, the reason that I call it COVID 45 instead of COVID-19 is because we have a pandemic response team and they handled as you have Boland and SARS and whatever else was trying to get into our country.

We weren’t, we were more porous than New Zealand, but we had pretty good protocol and disbanded all of that. So our initial overreaction, who, what he kept calling the Wuhan virus was because we didn’t do any of the checking. We didn’t do any of the isolating and quarantine when we found some. It was all this information and it just shambling from non solution to non solution, [00:18:00] but never taking on the way you deal with a pandemic is quarantined.

The people that you have it and you distribute the cure and you make sure you recharge immediately. As soon as you can, you don’t wait for a hundred thousand people to dock. You don’t say things that will include the impressionable, the unreachable to give them the arm, the armament to say, I’m just not going to do it no matter how good the vaccine is, et cetera.

So we’re so much in this problem of our own meaning making. And, and I we’ve said this before to God, I don’t want anybody to die of, but if someone’s going to die, I want it to the people that brought it on themselves. Stand the fact that all of us, all the healthcare provider, all the store clerk, all the restaurant workers, you and me, we’re all at risk because of this incredible Coburn and this incredible selfishness.

And so it’s like. I get it over with, get out of the way. At least this way, you’ll be less around to infect me. You’ll be less around to vote [00:19:00] crazies in that. Won’t do anything about it. You know what I mean? You’ll be less on the school boards trying to make our kids not learn how medicine

[00:19:06] Stephen: works,

[00:19:07] Alan: ripple effects throughout society that we really have to get rid of the mad dog with a mad dog comes running down the street.

You don’t try to convince it. You shoot it and keep it from getting to your children. No, don’t go shooting anybody. Please. Don’t

[00:19:19] Stephen: go

[00:19:22] Alan: the virus to shoot the comment that’s coming into the planet.

[00:19:25] Stephen: Don’t look up. I was just going to say that don’t, don’t blow out that asteroid because we can mine it and make trillions of dollars.

[00:19:34] Alan: I talk about some of the costs of these things right now, the government is handling this quite well with. Yes. There’s about to be many billions from what I understand, COVID tests available so that everybody can get home testing and stay safe and they’ve already made it so that you can get the vaccine.

W w with, or without insurance, from what I understand, so we can all get to safety. Here’s the Shrek Kelly’s of the world that I see is right. I’m Ceccarelli I think it is that did the insulin price increase. If the [00:20:00] times, as much as it used to be where there’s war profiteers, there really are people that are going to go into that situation, not try to cure it.

They’re loving having this opportunity in the middle of chaos, how fucking pound people for money. And so I don’t want to think that the merch pill is based on how much money can we make. I think it’s because it costs a lot to develop it and that price will come down over the course of time and that capitalism will kick in and won’t be just work.

It’ll be Pfizer and Madera, and whoever else has been developing and we’ll see price, competition, bring it down, but you can learn things from these times as to what their first response to give away the polio vaccine, to make sure that everybody could get. Or was it? Well, we’re going to stockpile things and release them a little bit at a time because that’s the way to make money.

I don’t know that I have any particular company that I excused or unexcused of those kinds of things, but there has to be investigative reporting going on to see who was with us, who was against him. Right. You know what I mean? Who’s, who’s about you. Can’t talk about how you’re a right to life. [00:21:00]

[00:21:01] Stephen: But even that, and it’s so jumbled, who do you believe?

Because I know people that say, no, they reported it on Fox news. You go, are you against a news agency? Okay. But they Fox. Yes. But that’s the thing. We’ve always taught our kids to listen to the authorities and investigate the news while we’ve got the news outlets. But they’re totally biased. Now. It’s very difficult to know.

And my, my,

[00:21:29] Alan: I don’t think it’s difficult. I think it’s just, there are all kinds of studies, not studies. The immersive things that are continually monitoring the news media, you probably have seen who is it? Ad Fontus puts out the cool pyramid looking thing that says on the basis of factual illness and on the basis of bias, should you be listening

[00:21:50] Stephen: to

[00:21:52] Alan: info out here?

And it there’s wackos at the left and right. But in the middle, there really is Reuters, which is pretty much [00:22:00] vetted news and unbiased. Exactly. Yeah.

[00:22:04] Stephen: But that’s my point though, is you get the people that will find the one that is reporting what they want to hear and listen. And then they’ll say that that’s more than my point.

And like, for example, my uncle who does not, did not get the vaccine does not want the vaccine, even though his neighbor died from COVID, this is the other thing. And you mentioned the home test, his neighbor died from COVID. So they said, no, he had cancer. That’s what. And Gina works with people that said they got tested it’s on their record.

They had COVID. She said, no, I didn’t really have COVID that’s not actually it. And so they, why get the home test, if you’re just go, it’s not true.

[00:22:44] Alan: I hear ya. Before I use the term on reachable, I’ve seen the term fact resistant human, because it really is that there’s all that kind of like how I talk about this.

I believe in consumer reports, I think that the way to be able to know how good something is to have an unbiased source [00:23:00] testing out, look at all the different factors and say, here’s a good car. Here’s a good washing machine, et cetera, et cetera. That information has been out for a hundred years. It’s been available to us for a hundred years, and yet you still have.

Suzuki swift that flip over in a turn and someone sees it and goes, that’s a sharp looking automobile. I think I’ll buy that one. Make sure it’s in black. Cause that’s macho. And like it’s a death trap. It’s the Corvair. It’s the bento, the person, the flames. When you ran me, don’t you care about a little bit of what you hear about yourself, but you hear about your family’s going to be in that car with you care about not buying names, a product that does have some things have hazards and some things are safer and some things just more effective.

I want a laundry detergent. It’s going to clean my clothes and not look like candy to my children. So they don’t Pope a Thai pot in their mouth and too many examples of where people really do, as you’re saying hooks themselves in or out of something. And just won’t budge once they get well, Carl Sagan went into it a lot in a number of his books about [00:24:00] how getting people scam is a lot easier than to convince them they’ve been scammed.

They just won’t let. Right. Ego death. I made a mistake and they

[00:24:09] Stephen: can’t come on. We were talking about some of the same people that are disgruntled because they can’t smoke inside a building now. So they stand right outside the door. So you have no choice, but to walk through it. And even though there’s a signs that say 25 feet away, they’re like, yeah, it’s my choice.

I don’t want to smoke elsewhere, too bad for you, blah, blah, blah. This

[00:24:28] Alan: is the same type of, and the funny you’re running down, my list of what I thought were the signs of how bad drivers are, how many bad drivers are that don’t check what’s going on around them that are hyper aggressive, that blame others for their mistakes.

That’s the mindset that’s going into what we’re having problems with pandemic and global warming. And with smoking since the sixties, 60 years now, two generations of people we’ve had absolute proof that it leaves. And we still have people that can’t stop themselves because they’re addicted. We’ll argue about how bad it is for you, because I [00:25:00] had an uncle that sold for 60 years and he died of an auto accident instead of lung cancer.

But so you don’t get statistics, you don’t get numbers. And there’s just too many examples of if I can’t convince them with facts and statistics, what’s the mimetic game that I have to play so that I can penetrate in. And there’s really good people at messaging memetics that are like, let me tell you a story.

I don’t need to hit you with. The number is 88%. Let me tell you a convincing story. That’s going to hit you in your emotions in your rectal brain. If I can’t convince you that it’s about yourself, that maybe it’s about country, it’s about God. It’s about protecting your family. What are the deep things that might matter to you and sneak the truth in on you by leaking it to that?

Because they sure are good at linking terrible things to those calls. You know what I mean? When we have, you must seen them there’s ads going on in Ohio for Bernie, somebody that calls himself proudly a pro Propublican. We have to [00:26:00] build the wall. We, he, he was a illegal immigrant, so let’s keep all the illegal immigrants out.

And just the whole litany of that’s not none of that is true. They don’t cost us more in healthcare. They are more, they aren’t the rapists and criminals. All of what he says is all so fear-based and so ugly about how to hate. And yet those advertisements somebody’s happily paying for them. And if he gets in, we’re going to continue that terrible litany of like how much of a fence does Ohio need?

You mean to keep out West Virginia, keep out. You’re like, we’re not, how is Ohio caring about what, oh, the fact that he’s on now a year before the election, every time that we watch wheel of fortune and jeopardy or guilty pleasures, why are we getting. Horrible ads from this Scott, they have some standards for you’re a show about facts.

Jeopardy don’t let this well,

[00:26:53] Stephen: Ron is that the guy that was the secret service agent for Trump and he [00:27:00] went, maybe it’s a different guy. He was a secret service agent for Trump. He quit and he has a radio show. Now with 9 million, some viewers and his whole platform is they’re setting things up to get the truth out so that the Republicans are prepared to take things back in 2024.

That’s

[00:27:17] Alan: his thing. I don’t know if it’s the same guy, but the fact that there’s not only one guy that we have to worry about, but saying that kind of stuff, the election was stolen. No proof after proof that the vote counts were good, that the only people who were committing vote fraud were the bad guys.

The Republicans, not the good guys and that everywhere that there was a fair election, the right thing happened, Biden won and convincing. And now what they’re trying is what they’ve always tried not to have better policies and convince the public of those better policies. It’s how do we do voter suppression?

How do we make it? So there’s laws on the books now that say, if the electors don’t agree with the results of the popular vote, they can vacate it and vote how they want. And I used to just be called [00:28:00] a, an unfaithful elector. Now they’re making it, I use it to a wrongly. It’s not the electric, it’s like the governor or a panel of people, maybe the Congress for that state that they can overturn election results.

That’s not democracy. That’s not republicanism. That’s not

[00:28:17] Stephen: anything, but, and it’s everything that they’re accusing. Everybody has like a negative turn. Oh, those fascists. Oh. And they have no idea what it really needs and what would designate somebody as a fascist. They just throw it out because it’s evil and bad.

And then they turn around and do exactly what they’re, because they don’t know. Uh, what they’re really saying, and they don’t know what it really means.

[00:28:38] Alan: One of the things I’ve had to come to grips with, and maybe this is early on. I think I’ve talked a little bit about, I had some bad things happen in college, but thank God they happened early when the stakes were small, because that’s when I first discovered just what liars people could be shameless.

They could be in their lives and how for seemingly small reward, they were willing to really fuck [00:29:00] somebody over really like the 30 pieces of silver that they were willing to accept for a betrayal. It was so small that it was like, wow, this isn’t even climax of a book. I’ve read where there’s a huge betrayal and it changes the course of the war.

No, this is if I can just get a little more popcorn, I will fuck somebody over and I didn’t want to believe it, but after you’ve seen a couple of examples and yen, you get a little bit more attuned to. This new person is sounding a lot like the old person in terms of little sneakiness. And there was a little too much fervor in ways that it doesn’t match the gravity of the thing.

It gave me good defense mechanisms and they didn’t always work. And when I got screwed over doing my development, upgrading systems and stuff like that, people have learned to wear the suit. They had learned to talk very politely. And yet we’re getting a lot of that. What you said about, can we trust media?

You can’t trust everybody that looks handsome or pretty in a nice suit or a nice dress on to television, because [00:30:00] you’ve got people that are willing to just look you right in the eye and lie to you and recopy that they’ve got to have a glimmer that this is not true. It doesn’t match all the other available facts.

It doesn’t, it’s meant to incite instead of to explain people, get that there’s people are, I don’t know, people are willing to really do awful things. Not because they don’t care if. There’s more, um, than I ever expected there to be. You know what I mean? Whatever that thing is about. Not quite dark triad, where it’s about only narcissism and manipulation Machiavellianism that they really are.

It’s like a little monkey that will feel fruit from another monkey. You know what I mean? It’s a primate behavior. It isn’t about whether they should do it or not. It’s been, they can play with it, or they have to admit that a lot of humanity, 50% is like the level of decent and for the 50% above yay for the Desmond Tutu’s and the, and 50% are not [00:31:00] there on the make.

And sometimes they’re on the make all the way to crimes. We had to make a crime so that we would stop people from doing it again, by putting them in prison.

[00:31:10] Stephen: It just comes back. It almost reminds me a lot and I didn’t, I wasn’t really a part of this. I was too young. I’ve just seen the stuff, but this kind of reminds me of the whole.

Way of thinking of when the soldiers came back from Vietnam and people were yelling at them and spitting on them and stuff, it wasn’t their fault. They were doing their job. They were soldiers protecting their country, protecting the people.

[00:31:35] Alan: And we’ve

[00:31:36] Stephen: changed our attitude on that. And people have realized the problem and mistake, but it’s that same thing again, is people are that type of thinking.

It just keeps coming back around. And I have jokingly, the other night told Gina. I says, maybe that’s the problem that we haven’t had a good world war in too long. We’ve had several crisis Afghanistan [00:32:00] and after the towers and everything else, but it was not a war. And I don’t mean that to help the, all the warmonger profiteers either, but it’s where we, everything just keeps dividing us.

And when the towers fell, it brought us together. I don’t know what’s happened since.

[00:32:20] Alan: Together in terms of really hating the fact that it happened when some of the first things that happened, let’s get anybody in a turbine. The most peaceful people on the planet were mistaken for having been the Arabs did it, oh my

[00:32:34] Stephen: God.

And we started going after like Japanese, what was the headline that was Pearl Harbor a hundred, some years ago. But whenever

[00:32:45] Alan: it’s really tough to read current history without realizing how manipulated we have been so many times we had that back in the fifties, John Foster Dulles, we that we don’t have just bad guys.

Currently. We’ve had them all throughout history and the number of regimes that we overthrow, the number of [00:33:00] puppets that we’ve put in place, the amount of money that exchanged hands or wars that we started to CIA wise, it’s horrible and startling. And I have not been able to think well of the United States in a way.

Recently, just us talking about, Hey, we were going to go after the wrong country. That’s the country that really bombed those towers. You just mentioned. But because we just don’t like this guy and we’ve decided we need to focus for all this. Hate all this anger, all this opportunity to make money. And we comfortable it’s of all that.

You know what I mean? That how much money was spent there, that bale of money we’re like lost in the

[00:33:36] Stephen: desert. Somebody’s going on there. We can get somebody in there that is more on our side. So we get better deals on the oil and all of us politicians that are involved with making money we’ll make even more money.

Yeah.

[00:33:51] Alan: I’ll tell you, what do you think that happened? One of the things that I really hate about our current situation is if they had gone in, and this is terrible thing to say [00:34:00] done what you said, take it over the middle east to make sure that we can all have less oil prices, OPEC, cease to exist, and that we control.

That’s not what happened at all. They did not guarantee an oil supply to a country. It wasn’t a national defense thing. They,

they did enough to make it. So we got to maintain our macho posturing, but are all kinds of deals being caught in the background so that it’s still the same alternates and Emirates that own all that oil and therefore all that wealth. And they’ve heard that into influence. They get to kill it. Wasn’t a reporter by beheading him and nobody got expedited for that.

They didn’t even capture the while they were in a place where we could do that. They let them go back to their country. It, we didn’t do diplomatic relations, things that say, Hey, we don’t really cotton to you. Killing United States. The reek of corruption in so many of those situations, [00:35:00] I don’t have any solutions or any great explanations of the amount of money that’s involved nowadays is so spectacularly.

That it explains why we had the Panama papers and then the Pandora papers, all the proof of all the despots and rulers. And it’s not just third country, we’re country people. It’s all kinds of people in the first world that are hiding money in the grand Caymans and the Iowa man and whatever else it might be.

But there’s so much money that they can just splash around, to pay off everyone, to buy silence, kill those who won’t give in. How many reporters have you read about that? Got car Bob, because they were in how many people and how many there’s this such incredible influence. Now that comes from money and fanaticism.

That all I, as a little tiny citizen can do is steer clear my saying this in a recorded podcast. It’s like, what am I doing? That’s true. God, we don’t have 7 million

[00:35:55] Stephen: listeners because thinking mostly I’ve got a [00:36:00] friend who’s very politically involved. He tries to keep up. He tries to. Good. He tries to go to whatever, to support what he believes in and all that.

I think that’s great and wonderful. But I also think personally that it’s mostly a waste of his time, because anything he does is not really influencing any of those politicians. Nothing he does is going to make them change any of their policies or anything. If it’s going to benefit them in some other way, because there’s other companies, there’s other groups that are like, Hey, you know that bill for the space program, we want this war plane added on to it.

So we can get that to go either, get that or stop the space thing. So they added on it has nothing to do with it, but it gets added on. So then it gets killed by everybody. Oh good. We won. Or some lobbyist or some group says, Hey, we really want this bill. Here’s [00:37:00] an extra $500 million. Me going to a lobby in Columbus, a rally in Columbus.

It doesn’t affect anything. I don’t care who stops. I don’t care who stops and says, yay. Good for you guys. We love you. We’re voting for the people we’re listening to you. So you’re not, it just so happens at that rally coincided with this company that gave him $500 million. Yay. Look, we did what you wanted and the people around me, there’s nothing I’m going to do or say, that’s going to make them go, oh man.

You’re right. I see that. They either already think that or they don’t. And that’s the end of it. I forgot a friend. He’s fine. Not a friend anymore. Really? A friend’s father. He is flying the American flag upside down because he doesn’t feel he’s in America. I’m like, then. Get on a plane go somewhere else and you have that choice, but you seem to be staying here.

You seem to be enjoying the house you purchase with the job you have. It’s such a [00:38:00] contradictory thinking on that. It’s,

[00:38:03] Alan: you know what, let’s keep it up a little bit. And honestly, because it’s a good segue. One of the series that I really have come to enjoy is called repairman. Jack

[00:38:13] Stephen: mentioned it a bit

[00:38:14] Alan: last week.

Exactly. And they, the reason I first followed them was because there was a great pull quote on one of the books that Stephen King says, one of my favorite summer reads or something like that. They’re deeper than just a beach book where it’s meant to be. But the premise is that there’s a guy that is people’s last resort.

When somebody has really been screwed over by the system by a criminal, by dark forces, if you will, you can call repairman Jack and he’ll equalize. Somehow he’ll steal back what was stolen from you. He’ll make them feel pain so that there’s, it’s either justice or revenge based on what has happened. If you will, you’ll find kidnap people, et cetera.

And there’s wow. 15 or 20 books that are a series of those adventures mystical, because it does have influence of the Russia. You know, demons out of India are [00:39:00] somehow involved. They tie into what he calls the adversary cycle, where it’s also there’s been vampires. And if you will forces of light and darkness that had been on the planet for a long time and they involve human beings and somebody turtle beings in this internal war.

So he really has what’s called like the secret world. That goes into all of this. Everything of course applies to this is we need a repairman, Jack. Maybe there really are people that are like, I got screwed over in my job by a bad boss. He harassed me in a, because I said something, they didn’t listen to the whistleblower, they got rid of me.

There’s gotta be someone you can call and say, why not the real information and make sure that the whole entire public knows about it. And what if the public doesn’t do anything about it and make sure that this guy, you name it gets hurt somehow to make up for how he wrecks someone’s life, very willingly, very easily.

And so the books while they love their big adventures are going on, there’s all kinds of those little come up. You know what I mean? And [00:40:00] I know I’ve read another series and I’m not sure it doesn’t come to mind. It’s a military mindset that you know, that you have to stay within your mission parameters, that you’re given a job and you do that job and you really can’t fight the entire war, but it’s also, there are certain things that, that was.

You know what I mean? You have principles. We have ways you have to be, and you can’t turn away once you see a crime. No, your duty know that something has to be fixed. So there’s, I’ve read about that. That people will put themselves at great risk because instead of putting their head in the sand, they will stand up and we need a little bit more of that.

Do you know what I mean? I know that I speak up and put myself at risk more often than I should when something’s going wrong in a situation. You know what I mean? Because sometimes I’m not speaking for myself. I’m like, everybody’s going to let themselves get out into silence by this monster. No fricking way.

I not, not beating fight, but the 10 of us can fight. I’ll just be the one to speak up. [00:41:00] And sometimes because of my size, I am the guy that steps up. So I’m hardly that I’m not Mac bowl in the execution with my war against the mafia, but there’s also things about your think globally act locally. We don’t want the world to slide into crime, into corruption.

And so at least you can do pure in my little patch. I am going to grow flowers and I am going to stop this guy from running them over with his, car’s gotta be things that we can do just to maintain our sense of I’m a good person. I’m a good human being. And don’t let those things that you become aware of just to say, I’m healthy.

No, don’t learn. Uh, you have to stand up. If you don’t stand up, you don’t stand a chance as Genesis said. So it’s gotta be true. The Genesis, the band, not the book. I more often quote, Genesis the bad.

[00:41:51] Stephen: So there’s, it really is high. I can’t think of it, but there’s other characters similar to that, that I just, I can’t let that go.

I [00:42:00] got in people like that because it’s the fantasy. I wish Nike

[00:42:04] Alan: it’s the lone wolfs. Jack Reacher is one of them. You know what I mean? There’s I orphan books by Greg Hurwitz really loved them. Like guy that really was like, used to be an assassin and finally got out because he was asked to do one thing too far.

That’s what’s wow. How do you get redemption when you’ve already done 30, 40, 50, but then he’s a perfect weapon, right? He knows how to do all this stuff. And now the fact that he’s being turned not. People for whom a profit can be made from, but on people that are doing the ordering, the killing in the first place, you start to clear out the corruption using the weapon that might’ve allowed it to exist in the first place.

And that’s a good American feeling.

[00:42:44] Stephen: Yeah. And it’s actually, those are popular for the same reason Harry Potter is because we can empathize and relate to them. And it gives us that fantasy of boy. I really need somebody that could go stop my neighbor from revving their engine at 3:00 [00:43:00] AM and take care of it.

It’s that type of thing.

[00:43:03] Alan: Vigilantes have been for a long time, whatever that uneasy, detente that they have, that man wasn’t always cooperated with by the police. He was pursued by because you know what I mean? He’s taken the law into his own hands. You start to see that kind of, why do I agree or disagree with some of the things that we see going on?

I don’t want riots. I don’t want people breaking stuff up and stuff like that. But what, I don’t want even more, if someone putting themselves into the riot situation and acting as if the he’s then only defending himself when he’s the one that put himself at risk and it wasn’t vigilante justice, because justice doesn’t enter into it.

It’s you’re seems to be, nobody has a gun that doesn’t want to use it. And he found his term. So I’ll written house fully acquitted. And yet that’s not just the, what happened. There is a terrible tragedy. And I know I’ve read legal opinions. Say once you put yourself in harm’s way, you will lose self-defense.

You put [00:44:00] yourself there, you didn’t find yourself in a bad situation. You sought out the situation. Then you can’t claim the way to do self-defense stay the hell out. He traveled across state lines with a borrowed. I don’t see how that fits for poor boy being caught in

[00:44:15] Stephen: that path. That’s vigilante, revenge that, like you said, that’s been Batman back and forth and people, I know people would say that back in the seventies.

Oh, Dungeons and dragons is introducing kids to the occult and teaching them magic and all this and Batman, but people go back and forth. He’s evil because he’s vigilantes teaching our people to take their take. What they think is right into their own hands. Oh, you let that shopping cart go to dinged my car.

Well, I’m Joe bash your brains. That’s but that’s what they’re missing. Really? The point they’re just taking what they want out of what that man was. He always had. Honor to stand still in a corrupted society. And that’s controlled by the criminals and the idea

[00:44:56] Alan: of proportionate justice. You don’t go to a jaywalker and [00:45:00] blew them away.

They’ve actually had characters, one called the fool killer. That was like that for next to nothing, little crimes. He went maniac and was shooting people and saying justice is served. And so it’s wow. That holds that mirror up really well to how, what are we buying into when we say that lone Wolf vigilante justice is okay, no, there has to be a sense of proportion.

Let the punishment fit the crime. You don’t heal someone because they feel a little bit of money or whatever else it might be. And the real courts have to contend with that. Someone now lemons are robbed is based on who stole a loaf of bread to feed your family. And then you went to prison for a decade or whatever it was it’s.

We are always contending with that. And in fact, boy, this is such a huge. Cancel culture often says it’s yes or no, it’s right or wrong. It’s right. Or zero, if you do anything, the only way to do it is the nuclear option or whatever term you want to use for this. But our whole system of justice is based on, there are different size crime.

There are different numbers of years you go away or [00:46:00] fines, you have to pay based on what you did. And it really is that a robbery or burglary is private property. But when you harm a person it’s worse than rape a person, or when you do harm from your a hundred people at once, it’s worst. And so you can’t take one standard and apply it across everything, because there really has to be proportion and new ones, and there’s mitigating factors, but people rushed to judgment or so much have revenge instead of justice in mind or whatever the reasons are, this is happening.

But it maybe it’s that feeling of helplessness. Then when they finally can do something about it, boy, they got a whole bunch of shit. Built up anger.

[00:46:42] Stephen: People forget you’re innocent till you’re proven guilty. We’re going too much to the guilty, unless you’re proven innocent and right. Social media not tried in the court, I’ve brought this up and said it, and we’ve seen it with Johnny Depp being probably the big prominent example.

He was [00:47:00] kicked out of jobs. He lost acting jobs. He was just ripped apart, online, all these news articles, because Amber heard said how abusive he was, how now I am not, I haven’t been around him to know maybe he is, maybe he has anger. Maybe he does some of this, but it came out that she basically lied and everyone condemned him, but he really hadn’t done anything to her.

At least not to the degree. She said, I’ll give it that much, but everyone he’s guilty. Oh my gosh. I’d never watched Johnny Depp. Okay, but you’re wrong. That’s the, I say this because that’s what I lived through. I lived through this. I ha I could have been completely pariah from boy Scouts from the girl Scouts, from martial arts, from my friends, because of what my accident.

And I don’t think people, I think what it was enough people understood. She wasn’t quite right in the head and they believe me and trusted me. So that helped. And I got ahead of it. That helped, but it was the [00:48:00] same situation I was like at first, what am I going to do? I’m done. My life is over right now.

[00:48:07] Alan: It’s funny. I don’t really talk that much nowadays about shield must not be named because it’s 20 years ago,

[00:48:13] Stephen: not mine. That’s

[00:48:14] Alan: right. Exactly. What am I saying? It’s not 20 it’s 30 years split in 92, but while things were. And I was seeing what happened now, how she talk about it with her mother and that it wasn’t at all the facts.

It wasn’t the truth. When I saw you say that she did all kinds of terrible stuff. So a little bit, once again, we find parallels, the things that she accused others of doing was what she was doing. And yet, by being the one to say at first, by being vehement about it, that was her smokescreen for what was going on.

So the accusations of what a bad guy I was it’s like, who do I have to talk to collect evidence for? Make sure that [00:49:00] my, the image I had of my divorce proceeding was going to be, here’s a little blonde, a shoe must not be named in her Pinafore dress and big football player Hawking Al. And he’s going to be like, why don’t we just throw this guy under the jet?

I believe everything that she says, fuck. And only because I have a pretty good. Reputation for not being like that. Did my friends believe me and listened to what I was saying about what’s really going on. He’s throwing things at me. He’s I, boy, I don’t want to say anything about it. I’m so happy that chapter of my life is over, but I sure had that taste of what you’re talking about.

I really don’t know that I can get to proving the truth here. I need to get out of this situation because it’s only going to get worse and I don’t want to be the person that have my trailer trash. Am I really a person that we’re going to have our neighbors hearing us yelling at each other? I am not trailer trash teams assisting me in getting to that.

So [00:50:00]

[00:50:02] Stephen: in my personal life, I took care of that. There was. But court was completely different because around here they totally believed everything she said, and I basically had to prove, oh, and it caused me. We went to court eight different times. We’d I’d have to refile go to court several times, go to mediation several times, do this, that and that.

Okay. It’s final. Add it. Our divorce paperwork is so thick because of all the adjustments and stuff, and they still don’t

[00:50:34] Alan: get an opportunistic lawyer. Who’s more than happy to throw you on the

[00:50:39] Stephen: grill. She totally knows, knew how to work the system. If she didn’t follow what was in the divorce decree. But if she yelled and screamed, if I wasn’t following what she thought and she was wrong, many times.

Then I would be in trouble and basically told you better do it. If she didn’t do something, they say we’re gonna have to go back to court and talk about it. The [00:51:00] first thing they’d say is you’re not agreeing on this. So go to mediation. I’m like, wait a second. It says right here she has to do a, B and C.

She has not done a, B and C. Okay. We’ll go back to mediation and talk about it. Wait a minute. She’s not doing what we already went to mediate. What am I missing here? So, so that’s where, like you said, we need somebody that could step in and help the common person. And that’s the fantasy book.

[00:51:26] Alan: I’ll tell you all that terrible stuff.

Luckily, happily in our path. I am so happy nowadays. I funny I once was in a party where people were talking about you’re looking for in a man or a woman, and many things were physical characteristics. One guy said serenity stability and a whole bunch of women bristled about that because that’s a pretty loaded bird stability.

If you will. But I came to understand what he was talking about. Colleen and our life is so pleasant. It’s so even keeled, we both think and [00:52:00] feel the same level of things. There’s no hiding anything. There’s no getting angry about anything. There’s just, we’re really well-suited for the temperaments that we have.

And I didn’t always have that I’ve had in the past, some people that rush to judgment or that were revengeful or whatever else it might be. And man, when you can’t go home, when your home is not a Haven your life, and I just didn’t have that for a while. And now I have it in space. Plus getting through all this COVID stuff, being around each other all the time, we don’t wear on each other.

When we go on our road trips and we’re like one foot away from each other for 8, 6, 8 hours in the car, hiking, all the things we do, we just don’t get tired of each other. We love that. And I think you might’ve found that was cheap, right? I’m hoping that you have that same joy. You have enough that you both like it enough different, but you just have that even keel and that space for each other and regard, trust, all the things that they talk about in relationship book.

So you got to know each other and I, [00:53:00] he is just such, she’s so brilliant. She’s so beautiful. She’s diligent. There’s not like the top 20 characteristics you want to have in a person. She’s got them. And I try to be worthy of that. So I hope that she sees those things in me as well. And I just, it must be terrible to be like, wow.

I was two years into the marriage and I decided I loved her, but I didn’t live like that. You know what I mean? You just

[00:53:22] Stephen: constellation after we were done with everything, she was engaged, not just dating, but engaged to three different men in one year. Got married. And nine months later was filing for divorce.

And when I actually knew the guy goes, we graduated together. And so after it was all done, I asked him what went on and he’s like, she just changed. It was like, she was trying to get me mad to, uh, argue with her. And she like was pushing me, trying to get me to actually get physical against her and stuff.

And he said all the same things she used to do to me. And I’m like, okay, so justification. [00:54:00] She got away with next to murder. Yeah. And then she’s, we’ll

[00:54:03] Alan: run three round five. We’ve known people that are like married and divorced three times. And it’s only how did she convince three different guys because the guys didn’t consult beforehand because one of the warning flags came out early enough.

You know what I mean? It really is. It’s amazing. The serial barriers that it’s dependent, the ending is very similar,

[00:54:22] Stephen: right? Yes,

[00:54:24] Alan: they did the same crap. They’ve learned. Whoa, every time I do this, I got a house. Every time I do this, I, and it’s, I don’t think it’s mercenary. I think it’s much more deep seated than that.

[00:54:34] Stephen: Yeah. There’s psychologically things that we could go on about. So let me ask you though, we’re getting so ungainly today. People are like,

repairman Jack. There’s 50 bucks, uh, 15

[00:54:50] Alan: to 20, I think there’s another one of those things that I came in late to the series. There was already like 10 of them out. And then I went back and read and of course I had to read [00:55:00] them in order because he really does great work, including what has gone before and moving things forward and things, creatures incidents, they matter, they reappear, they impact the future.

And in fact, I think even he would often in the back say, here’s what I have planned for the future. The last two or three books were what was called a river. I don’t know that I intend to come to a conclusion in the books so much has just stopped. And you know what page one of the next book is going to be right after the last thing here.

And it was the big rush to night world to where the bad guys get the upper hand and are they really going to be able to come through? So they they’re really high quality. And he also has a new series out. Now, sometimes we’ve talked about this. It isn’t only you like that series. You come to trust the author that they’re producing.

Good thing. So Paul Wilson is now writing the panacea books where they’re not a medical mystery, but there’s a cure, all that figures into it. And he’s using [00:56:00] a little bit much like Michael Craig. He looks at what are current technological issues that we’re going through. Can we cure anything? Species on the planet are intelligent or not, maybe even more so than human beings.

And how would we respond to that? And so they’re just, well-written, they’re a great combination of big issues and little things that make people. And so I’m just devouring them. You know what I mean? I was very happy to pick those up and I love what you, when you find out that out and I’m always happy when it’s a new book out in that series, you might even stop reading what I’m currently reading.

When John Sanford book comes out, I really like his Lucas Davenport books, but he’s got multiple series. Another one of those that’s a great summer read. And another one where it might’ve been Stephen King that said, if you’re not reading John Sanford, you should be. I trust you. It’s Stephen King. I started reading.

[00:56:48] Stephen: So you, you don’t want to know how many books he receives for people wanting to get a little blurbs, very coveted to get that. And he [00:57:00] doesn’t do it just because they’re big and famous or because they’re high or because they paid money or anything. He honestly, if it looks interesting, he’s read things that he just ran across, literally saw it.

And so that looks good. Picked it up, read it. And so

[00:57:15] Alan: column for entertainment weekly, if I remember correctly for at least a year, maybe even a little bit more, and it was a great column because much of what you’re talking about, he wasn’t doing it because his publicist said, Hey, this guy could use it. He has wonderful, very tastes have just talked about here’s movies that I like and here’s books and et cetera, et cetera.

It was that category that I love. Where if I didn’t tell you about this, you might not find out about it. It’s obscure, but you should seek out blood simple, the first Coen brothers movie, because it’s excellent. You know what I mean? And he, and out of his 50 columns, 40 of them were maybe, let me make a note to make sure that I listen to Steven because I worked out just fine.

[00:57:57] Stephen: I like, and he doesn’t do is [00:58:00] say, oh, I saw that. And it sucked, oh, I read that. And it sucks. He just doesn’t. He just says, these are the ones I like. He could have read 50 other books before he came across that one. He just doesn’t say this sucked. I didn’t like it. This is what I like.

[00:58:13] Alan: I really mean that’s something we’ve, we’ve talked about doing this a little bit on the show.

We really should have book of the week music of the week, whatever else it might be, because I think that we have enough knowledge of the field and reasonable enough taste, good taste that we really could have. People have talked about how they take notes off of our podcasts things. And that’s, I don’t know that I want to talk down why something isn’t good.

The whole world is such an amazing drinking from the fire hose experience. Nowadays, there are so many things to choose from that it’s important to steer people towards the good stuff. Maybe a little away from the bad, but much more towards the good, because there’s so much stuff that unless you, you might not discover it on your own.

So if there really are, I’m just finished reading like fantastic. Four has a new series. They went away for 10 years at Marvel [00:59:00] because there was, it doesn’t matter. They finally found the author and the artists that could do the fantastic four justice don’t judge them by the movies. The comic book series was often great.

And. With Comixology. Now I get to read more current stuff than I have for a long time. You had to wait for it to be a graphic novel in the library. You know what I mean? Once I stopped buying regularly, I really fell out of knowing what was going on and now I get to be more current. So I really, when we were talking with Collin the other day, it was, I really do Tom king.

I really uncertain authors that I really have come to care for. And it’s because I’m acknowledging, let’s be read, oh, we can profane. I read one graphic novel, but then there, they didn’t have all of them, but now I can get to them. So all that is in short saying you and I would be really good sources of, Hey folks, don’t miss it.

You might not have heard of it. But this series on Netflix really good, this paperback novels. And I tend to be. Reader more than individuals, you know what I mean? But all kinds of re really good for the [01:00:00] world with don’t miss this. It’s really good. We can try iron Druid books. Oh my God. You have not read those.

The Benedict jock, Alex Barris books. Oh my God.

[01:00:09] Stephen: We’ve been trying on the show notes. If people are listening and they don’t go to the website, they should because just about every show has links to books, to movies, playlists. So we’ve been putting stuff like that up there, but that’s, we should go back. Not all of our episodes have great extensive show notes.

Not all of them are transcript. But we’ve got programs to do all that. That’s what we should do. Compile the great big relentless geekery book of recommendations.

[01:00:39] Alan: That’s really a good, how many are we at? And I’ve lost track 80

[01:00:43] Stephen: episodes or something, 80 something, 84. So,

[01:00:47] Alan: you know, when we, when we hit a hundred, that’s officially like when a show used to get syndicated and that now it exists forever.

So they really start to put together these kinds of things. But we really, a lot of what we’ve talked about has [01:01:00] not only been popular and everybody watches game of Thrones, but if you don’t know that George Martin did an anthology series called wildcards before there was actually very good, the great and powerful turtle, it really would be worth hurting people on to some of our favorites that as I go through the vault right now, it’s been mostly kind of books, but I’m going to, I’ve just been going through this last year’s book to get them off the stairs and box them up and bring them because they were getting, the stacks were getting too tight.

It’s wonderful to go back and say, wow, this really was going to, so I need to start taking notes for myself and we could do those little compilations of links and stuff like that. And if we get all those sales for Amazon, I think we’ll get like what a buck 50 a year. That’s the way it is right

[01:01:41] Stephen: there.

Comic book recommendation. I haven’t read them, but Colin who’s been much more current on comics than we have. He just went through the whole IDW, teenage mutant ninja turtle stuff. He said, it’s some of the best reading he’s done in a long time of new stuff. [01:02:00] And he’s just absolutely loved it. He every, he kept running out of his room to tell me about this.

And every morning when he’d wake up solid, let me tell you what I read last night. So that’s his comic recommendation,

[01:02:12] Alan: not just the early issues where it was silly and parody. They really have been, they created a whole cool universe that started. Aspects of marble and grew into its own thing. And that’s a good recommendation.

[01:02:23] Stephen: Okay. The new, the newest one by E IDW. They’ve rebooted it several years ago. So you mentioned getting our investing update. You mentioned you got flat. So that’s something that we’ve been hearing everything’s up. Things are up and you’re doing good, but you started with this much money. Now you got this much, I think, but then things went back.

So when you say they were flat, what happened?

[01:02:47] Alan: That really is pretty much what happened. The first two years I was up 170% after two years, like the market was doing maybe not only eight, which is the usual actuarial number, [01:03:00] not 18 or 28. Like they’ll do, if it’s market’s doing well. I was well up on the.

Because I had invested lots of tech, lots of bed tech, lots of communications, things that were doing very well for a number of years while the market was doing well. My high volatility growth stocks were doing even better. And then this last year with the transition from Trump to buy and all the uncertainty that the craziness of Trump followers are trying to inject into the system so that they can retake power.

And I don’t mean to overly politicize it, but that really is a lot of what’s happening is the market likes stability. The market likes thinking if we just do our job and roads stay open and your deliveries happen, supply chains are available, all will be well. But what have we been reading about? Supply chains are disrupted.

The pandemic is affecting not just us, but the entire world, the great resignation with people stopping all different kinds of jobs. And [01:04:00] it isn’t only the minimum wage jobs. There’s all kinds of people in tech that the big idea runs on the backstop where they’re still getting relatively well rewarded, but not anywhere near what kinds of rewards the investors were getting, which is a terrible thing.

But to read what the take that I took when I started this off was think like a rich person, think what insider information do they have? What big bets are they making? Be less only about holding onto your money, but taking on risks to get a reward. And that worked for two years in the face of a lot of this uncertainty and big caveat.

Wow. This is just all armchair quarterback. Isn’t it. There are so many levers, so many factors that go into all of this, that what I am mostly is frustrated and determined to hold out of the stuff I have, because I think that every single one of the companies that I have is a good company with good ideas, good management will do things in the future, but this year was just, I ended up a percent [01:05:00] down for this year after having been up a hundred.

But I didn’t give it all back. I’m still well up compared to what I started off with. And yet I wasted a year, if you will. You know what I mean? When I’m trying to get to, um, five X in the course of five years, you take a year off it’s. Now my things have to explore. They have to go like gang busters to make up for this straight line across instead of this nice, steady, upward slope.

So I did light, I bought some new things. I did slight changes to existing things based on my reading, a lot about the market and what Motley fool was telling me about our confidence ratings for various different. I got entirely out of certain things, because for instance, big real estate company made a not only were they handling information about things, but they actually started to buy houses and they thought that their algorithms would be able to say, we can buy these houses, flip them if you will, on a national level and in various different [01:06:00] markets, because we think that the things are going to go up.

No one, their algorithms proved not to be true. And they got, or at least not as effective as they thought they were going to be. And so they got back out of that business, but took billions of dollars of law. And that of course affects the, um, price. And so I’m into Zillow and Redfin and open door because the real estate market is ripe for disruption.

It really is that all the things you know about Remax and century and all those kinds of things. So much money that goes into the withholding of information, not pure capitalism, not anywhere near good capitalism, it’s much more guilt with only an information. And the more that these guys get in and say, we’re in service to the customer as a home buyer and to the seller to get you a fair price, but we’re going to move all of those points of friction, all those points of tension, we’re going to make it as easy as possible.

And it shouldn’t be, you can just like, Hey, I found my phone and bought a house today, [01:07:00] but it sure should be that you don’t want to have to spend 10% when you should be able to do it for half a percent, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a number of at another C, there was a, an Arabian country that had great prospects, but the more that it became obvious that they couldn’t trust the accounting tab that is generally accepted accounting principles.

They’re not everywhere much of us and Europe and Australia, if you will, the first. That you really can’t cross the books and there’s penalties. We’re being fraudulent before he is start to get into China, for instance. And there’s so much government intervention and perhaps illusion that it isn’t this trustworthy.

A lot of people are still pouring money into China because good Lord, the market is huge and the opportunity is there, but it’s not, you can’t compare apples to apples in terms of, do I really know what the respect, what the T is? Okay. So I got out of at least the one Arabian country that looked to me, there’s actually no lawsuits being filed.

You [01:08:00] know what I mean? That people are saying, maybe you cook the books on your sales. That how much really, and at least one Chinese company see limited where it, a lot of the expectations for the future. They did seem to be in line with what they were really capable of other vendors entering the market.

And the combination of both kind of Hong Kong based, still very influenced by China because China now does own Hong Kong. And as much as. I think as if it’s an independent colony, they’ve also had terrible, okay. Writers were jailing all 10,000 of you because we’re not going to cotton to that. And hopefully nothing happens bad was Taiwan, which they won’t even call Taiwan, not quite for most of it, but it’s the public.

I live Republic of China. I wish I didn’t want to use whatever term they have come up. I think I’m out of all the a hundred different companies in my portfolio. And I’ve pulled back from six based on that kind of news officer that a big change in officers. And we don’t trust the new management as much, but officers that we find out we really couldn’t trust [01:09:00] cause they did shenanigans competitors entering the market, et cetera.

But having said that I am still in. And for instance, med tech, I really, I am heavily into who’s winning the game. Biointech Pfizer. Moderna certain, I don’t know that I’m betting on how we’re going to solve the Corona virus, but I went to full Git genetics with those, the genetic testing. That’s going to help us think about all of those different.

And things about diabetes, things about field treatment for cancer. That at first was like, man, that’s me like, we’re a magnet to soccer, self. I’m getting sea sickness. That’s bullshit. No, they’re actually proving efficacy are closed systems like brain cancers, you, the operating on a brain cancer. It isn’t the best way to go because it’s such a traumatic, horrible infection possible.

The person has never the same way to go if you will. But if you can use fields electric fields to get the cancer to shrink because you disrupt at the point of [01:10:00] mytosis how it can grow more cancer cells. It’s out of wonderful science fiction, but they’re showing it works. Those are some of the bad side will that happen.

Next year might take a while for everybody to adopt the DaVinci robots that intuitive surgical makes you so to do remote. And yet that’s the way to go this robot in this hospital, it gives you access to all different kinds of things that you might not have. The staff that is skilled enough, specialized enough to do these various different things.

But from remote, you can call in the world’s experts and be able to do exactly that pancreatic operation that you couldn’t do otherwise. So I go dropping a whole bunch of names in here, but like Tesla I’m into Tesla and they are a huge success story. I’m like 400% up with them because they’re doing everything right.

It’s not only that they have the car thing going. They have better battery tech that they, as they get their cars out into the market, it’s not, [01:11:00] that was all, um, nice stories, but not reality. It’s actually that the cars are proving to be amazingly good quality. And that there’s still a lot of pushback against automated driving that is driver not involved driving, and there have been some accidents, but I guess the whole point is really more accidents.

Um, distracted by your phone drivers, drunk drivers, teenagers that take too much risk drivers, please. T there’s not enough to fame you, but the statistics support that your brain is not fully formed about how to take risks until you’re like 25. And your parents’ insurance company raised her rates so much is because now you’re on the policy and you’re a much worse risk than your mom and dad.

But haven’t said that,

[01:11:42] Stephen: you know what I mean? I, yeah, we should do a whole thing on automated driving a bit more about that, that

[01:11:51] Alan: I just, that there’s so much tech that goes into I really, Nope. Nope. There might be a few mistakes. We have to figure out how to handle that. The [01:12:00] tragedy of it appropriately and legally and stuff like that.

But the cure that it’s going to make for all of that, I’m getting too tired, but I won’t stop by. There’s not enough people in horrible, bad traffic situations are paying attention to. People want perfect. And that’s impossibly expensive, but we’ve already gotten excellent and we have to get to where the money and the law and everything else aligns with.

Excellent. Because right now we’re ready to do all the trucking via that’s. If you will make city driver with all the various different things going on around you, it’s a much different problem. Then I’m on an interstate and I’ve got 2, 3, 4 lanes and it’s even divided from oncoming traffic. And I only have so many things to look for on the sides, rails, white lines, et cetera.

It’s we could be automating all kinds of things. Partially just like segways. Didn’t make it into the. Uh, population, but in big warehouses, like I post offices and stuff like that, they’re fantastic. Letting people be able to move that [01:13:00] much farther and safely. And it’s like, we have to find the right uses

[01:13:04] Stephen: for these things.

I love that. So looking ahead to this year with things COVID are once again, completely up in the air, it seems my company’s conference that goes on at the end of January for the second year in a row, it’s been postponed and they just literally canceled it days ago. It was supposed to go on in three weeks.

[01:13:25] Alan: with all these, the same boat, they’re still talking about doing it, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

[01:13:30] Stephen: And, and with all the supply problems and stuff, I’ve got some Kickstarters that were supposed to be delivered a year ago. And I’m just starting to hear that they’re coming. So what’s the outlook for this year, your investing

[01:13:43] Alan: stubborn.

And I think that the fundamentals behind these companies are there and it might be that instead of my getting my. In five years, it’ll take seven, but there’s nothing that I want to bail out of, except all the ones where the fundamentals. Weren’t good. Having said that the Motley [01:14:00] fool just announced its second ETF, an exchange traded fund where it’s the equivalent of a mutual fund, but not in every way, but what it is for the things that I have most concentrated on small and mid-cap stuff that have all the right fundamentals that have high confidence levels that is going to have there’s more risk involved, but it has a really good chance of paying off.

Now they have a fund that covers 150 of those. And so I’m contemplating, why am I paying attention personally to a hundred on my own when I could just point at this thing and pull all my money into it or half my money or whatever else it might be and let them do all the work of still maintaining what stocks to pick, what confidence levels they have, how much money they’re in.

And my not having to be, oh, uh, that’s not a goal instead of a silver or bronze. I should sell a little bit off of these guys to go more into the gold fund. I would have to prove to myself that my active management of my stocks is going to give you a better return than a mutual fund [01:15:00] or ETF. I like doing it, like learning about all these things.

It has pretty much more connected me with current markets, current technology, that kind of stuff. I like being knowledgeable about this, but I am aware that being able to reclaim that time back to wartime at the volt more time with Colleen, more time reading, maybe that’s an okay way to go to.

[01:15:22] Stephen: It’s getting your oil changes at Walmart, as opposed to doing it in your driveway.

Again,

[01:15:27] Alan: that kind of thing. Exactly. But, um, the big question, as you said, what’s my outlook is I’m very much holding on to everything and waiting for the market to recover. And I think as we get out of COVID, there’s going to be an amazing. As we get people back to work back to being able to travel supply chains, ease, all of those are going to benefit by stuff.

And more so than like right now, what we’ve seen is a pull back to value fund and it’s financial funds oil. There’s [01:16:00] pretty much 17 different market segments, if you will. And they go up and down like a big mixing board based on what the world thinks of the relative risk versus reward and people retreat to the blue chips.

The, and even if it’s a tech company, they’re now much more into the Microsoft and the Oracle and the Amazon than they are by more volatile things. But when the market returns, Microsoft will make as nice. Eight to 20% a year, whereas my may make a hundred and I’m still willing to take that bet because I don’t have any losses.

I have a downturn, but I haven’t, I don’t have any paper loss. It’s not that I’m selling it off and tucking my tail between my legs. I’m just impatient to be like, I got to plan for that money when Colleen and I are retired and we want to travel over to Europe, I was going to sell some of that Redfin. You know what I mean?

It’s I really have the desire to have this story have a good ending. And right now it’s okay. The [01:17:00] heroes are going to have to March across this wasteland to get to the next thing, but they’re not going to March. They’re going to make it or that is, they’re not going to stop marching. They’re going to make it.

I have to be, I haven’t seen any indications that I wow. So much information that’s out there that he is like the yes, no. Be in the market or get out of the market entire, the market’s going to crash, get into gold, get into Bitcoin. And I actually have that quite an Ethereum because there’s value to those things, having a currency, that’s not only a Fiat currency for various different countries, but there’s no way that civilization real, let that happen.

There’s no way that the world is going to so call out even with a pandemic, even with raises in power in certain countries, like it’s, the world is always moving forward and it’s always going to need better medicine, better technology, better communications, more efficient energy. Many of the things [01:18:00] that I’m betting.

So a little bit of how we talked about this before. I not only invested in things that I think could make money. I want to create the future. I want to contribute to a better future that if that’s better ways of curing diseases and better ways of being able to cure. So that we can skip all the steps in Africa, south America, Asia, that we had to go through as first world countries to create a currency, establish a banking, then check it then credit cards, then phone apps.

If we can, don’t pass all that with Mercado Libra. Hey, I really believe in giving everybody the ability to have. If you have a phone, you have a bank, you have the ability to transact in the world. Instead of it being, I got to go to a currency exchange and give them 20% of my check to get it or whatever the current rates I know they’re not good.

I know that they shouldn’t even

[01:18:55] Stephen: be there

[01:18:57] Alan: making money off the fact that they provide this service [01:19:00] in a uterus. So I want to create that better future. I’m not giving up on, Hey, it’s dependent. Back in your caves, everyone back into being scared. Everyone know, I think this is a better future.

[01:19:13] Stephen: It’s the Roddenberry dream is a world.

Again. We’ve said this, I truly believe this. That once we find a planet, once we can get to another planet, once we find a planet that has other people no longer is an American or Israeli or a south American Brazil, it’s no you’re from earth plain and simple, that’s it. We

[01:19:35] Alan: have to get there. Don’t you know what I mean?

The fact that so much of this increased tribalism and hatred and prejudice is not that the world is shifting back to that. It’s the dying guests with the people that don’t want that better world. They want this terrible world in those terrible ways, at least to stay just where it is. And so it’ll be a generational change, but there’s already all kinds of.[01:20:00]

Younger than me that are saying, wow, I just can’t believe that’s how you want steady. That’s so inefficient that it gives so much power to people that don’t deserve that power, right? The rent takers out of the way, and have there be more real capitalism. And so the Carl Sagan future all the science fiction and science fact that we’ve read, I want it to be that it really is MRN.

A technology is going to enable us to cure a whole host of different disease. And I want those people to be given the funding of the government assistance, mandate, at least acceptance. I want the FDA to still be very careful at what they approve, but not to have the approval to be based on keep that back.

Cause we got to get bit the lifestyle and the lifespan of this drug from this much lobbying interest, they’re trying to make it so you can’t do a generic version of that yet. You know what I mean? The corruption pre. Is high [01:21:00] currently. And these forces are one of those things that’s leveling. And I really believe it a lot until they get bought out and become corrupt.

And who knows that will start the cycle over

[01:21:09] Stephen: again in some different new way. It’s just a different level.

[01:21:15] Alan: What could I, what were final thing like Zynga? They make gate during the pandemic? Lots of games did very well because people had time on their hands. They has, the pandemic started to ease. They worked on it a little bit, but they still had this tablets really good brands.

Both for Zynga just was announced that it’s going to be acquired by take to another. And by saying the stock went up 40% in a day because they really take to gives them new markets, new funding, new, et cetera, et cetera. They might not have. Take two went down 14%. If I remember correctly, because often the acquirer takes on also all the debt to the hassle of the whatever.

But my Zynga was always a very inexpensively priced [01:22:00] stock, like six bucks, whatever I do a whole bunch of stock things often I’d have 20 bucks left. I would have just 20 bucks sitting there by three shares as they go. So I had accumulated quite a nice, nice Zynga. And now I just got this wonderful premium for them.

So by no at all special intelligence on my part, but a very nice I believed in them. They were a good company and now somebody else believes in them enough to pay the extra money.

[01:22:28] Stephen: I’m going to add that to our list, to talk about the changing world of the video games and. Things are looking for the future because I’ve been getting involved with that a lot more.

I get

[01:22:41] Alan: centered the ability to do that and how I just read about flutter. If I remember correctly that it’s now one of those places where you used to be, if you could develop for both Mac and windows, you were golden. Now, of course, it’s Android and iOS and for X-Box and stuff like that. Then flutter seems to be the latest entry that says you can develop one place.

And then just with [01:23:00] small tweaks compile for every single major platform. That’s a very powerful place to be in. If you’re trying to put together the next thing and it’s available everywhere.

[01:23:10] Stephen: That’s funny, you mentioned that because that was going to be my update for the programming and raspberry PI and all that.

So one of the things I’ve been working on, I’ve got a couple of things with wanting to create hybrid cross platform, mobile app. And I say hybrid because I was using Cordova or wanting to use Cordova because it fit with the twine program, which exports everything into HTML CSS, which I can import into Cordova.

But I also have this idea for a story, a GPS triggered story-based app. It’s not new and original it’s. We talked about the tours. Other companies do it, but I wanted to write and build my own. So I’ve been working with Cordova, which is the open source of what used to be phone gap. It’s starting to get to be abandoned.

I have tried it on [01:24:00] several different systems and I cannot get everything set up to just work. There’s it’s been way too much. Uh, time, effort, hassle struggle, trying to figure out the problem

[01:24:11] Alan: foundation classes to just like work with current stuff and B when it stops working, but not by you.

[01:24:19] Stephen: And it’s always this little problems, like the latest thing.

If you have the latest Google API APIs or droid, you do Cordova, you have to manually go in and change several file extensions, or the thing’s not going to work. It is why do I have to do that? Why it’s it detects everything else detected and fixed pre

[01:24:39] Alan: compiler. There should be an installer. There should be a preparation for,

[01:24:44] Stephen: so it’s falling behind, but I hear a lot that, uh, the progressive web apps, PWA apps are taking over.

So I think that might be why it’s starting to false. I’m not abandoning Cordova, but I’m like, I have wasted way too much [01:25:00] time going to look elsewhere for some, yeah.

[01:25:02] Alan: I would want to spend your time on your ideas and you know, things not like it’s correcting typos or making sure it’s in the right column.

Like I used to have to do in Fortran. I date myself, but man, every time that one of those things stop, but there was not, you didn’t have to have a strong typing of every variable to stop the character in a numeric field type stuff. I, if a

[01:25:23] Stephen: computer should fix this for me, right? This is not a

[01:25:26] Alan: problem.

Garbage collection routines. It should manage memory

[01:25:29] Stephen: for me. Uh, thank God we don’t have to go sub anymore.

So that’s the update for the program. He I’m still playing around and that’s why I wanted to talk games maybe next week or two we’ll do games. Cause I’ve been looking at a lot of things, but I did get the 3d. Reality ender three version two. It’s definitely the home market. It’s a kit. I looked at the process.

You’re right. Those are very nice machines. Big. There are a lot bigger than that for the most [01:26:00]

[01:26:00] Alan: desktop for it. Is that okay?

[01:26:02] Stephen: Yeah. And I’m not sure do those come pre-assembled you buy it or do you put it together? Do both

[01:26:09] Alan: 500 bucks or something by having, right.

[01:26:14] Stephen: Okay. So the end there, it’s a kit you put together and okay.

We know this is not a top of the line machine. I paid 150 bucks, so I’m not getting a Cadillac. I get that. Exactly. I will say if you get a creativity, ender, don’t even bother looking at the manual, do not go to their website and use their video to put it together. They all suck horribly. It’s terrible.

[01:26:40] Alan: There’s another resource

[01:26:41] Stephen: out there that, oh God, there’s 3 million. The community. I has so much, I just went and looked at a couple and I like this looks good. I liked that the way this guy is explaining it and I followed and I got it put together without lots of problems. How many times, if you put tech together, back in the day, [01:27:00] building a computer, you flip it on there’s no power, nothing.

[01:27:04] Alan: You got to go back and reread,

[01:27:05] Stephen: oh, here you go out. You get the post beeps and you have to look up to shorten along. What’s that post. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Right, right. So I finally got it together. It took a couple hours. I was taking my time watching the video. Um, and it’s mostly working except I ran into a little issue with feeding the filament.

Where they have the motor and the gears to feed the filament. It has a spring release. So when you grab that, it turns the filament just so slightly, but it doesn’t line up with the hole. And then when you let go, you can’t keep pushing it. It’s not lined up. And

[01:27:44] Alan: oh, interesting. Is that because it’s precise, it has to be

[01:27:47] Stephen: precise, but it’s just getting it into the tube to go to the nozzle.

Once you get it through that next little bit, pulls it with the

[01:27:55] Alan: little tracker, wherever

[01:27:56] Stephen: it takes care of all of it. So the problem is [01:28:00] when I, and I’ve said this around here and genus, I’ve just put it on the diamond table and set it up. I’m like, we can’t leave it there. She’s why not. And I think that’s the problem.

A lot of people don’t get is these 3d printers are not like dot matrix or inkjets where you just set it up. Yeah, you don’t just plug it in. And it works because my cousin Branson, the great grandma got him a 3d printer for Christmas and he’s seven and I’m like, Gary, this isn’t a seven year old thing.

It’s going to take you hours to put together and then tweaking futsing with it. And then when it doesn’t print right after eight and a half, cause I told Gina, I said, Gina, we can’t put it on the table because it will take eight and a half hours to print. You jiggle it when somebody walking by and it’s ruined, oh, I had said that, but I don’t think people understand unless they are really thinking and seeing it.

So. I, I still have a little work to do to get the [01:29:00] final bit, but other than that, I’m loving the printer. It’s feels very solid and not,

[01:29:05] Alan: that’s really cool. You’ll have to do regular reports. Cause I just have you hold up your first little player, your little piece, your little

[01:29:13] Stephen: troll or whatever. That’s the other thing I don’t think people realize is, again, it’s not like opening a word document, hitting print and getting your papers.

Every printer’s a little different, so you might get a file, but you might have to adjust it for your printer and your profile and that, uh, I’m learning all these terms. But for example, the one, this guy said like Darth Vader, you have Darth Vader holding his arm with the lightsaber out. The printer cannot print without the support.

So you have to sometimes go into the CAD program, essentially an add a support market as a support. So when it comes just to hold it up while it’s printing and then you just break it off and there’s lots of, and the other thing you gotta worry about is if [01:30:00] their head is sticking over underneath here, this is all open.

You can’t just leave it over here. It just falls off. So you have to maybe slice it and do it in more than one person. Or you have to put the support there and there’s structures internally, but things hang with printing. It’s just got it. Things. How much do you have

[01:30:19] Alan: either make it solid or honey Colbert or what different kinds of hunters use to give you the right amount of structural strength?

Her I’ve read a lot about this without having gotten one, because I really wanted to have a better way of what am I going to buy based on what I want to do, handle the things that I care about the most. If I was just. Square pieces for Soma. There’s a different printer that if you’re creating a realistically yes,

[01:30:47] Stephen: exactly.

And the results I saw when things are adjusted and it looked really good and good filament. The other thing is the slicing is how it goes through and does each line. And each printer is different. They’re [01:31:00] two different nozzle sizes, different size of what you’re printing a different thickness of each layer.

So you could have your Presa and have totally different number of layers than I have with my end there. So my, I have to compile the image to work with my printer, but people don’t realize all of these types of things. It’s a little fuzzy. Again, it feels more like I’m back in. The early nineties, I’m buying parts to build a computer, and then I’m installing Linux and typing install make for everything,

[01:31:33] Alan: all the drivers that you need based on your drive, your bus, your, if you had to make sure the drivers mastered that they were current in it.

Very interesting. Yeah. I kind of love doing that, but really I always thought about it. It’s like man, thousands of one things that could go wrong and I conquered them all and got it to work just, okay. Machine turn on. You really had to take care of, you had to take your time, learn a lot about how to [01:32:00] troubleshoot it.

You know what I mean? If this doesn’t work, I can’t just take it apart and try again. There’s gotta be a biter thing I can do. You know

[01:32:07] Stephen: what I mean? It’s the same thing when we were talking, computers are great and I love it because you got your Mac, we got windows, you buy a system, all done with the OS installed.

You, turn it on and you, you. That’s great, but you and I both grew up in the days when that, wasn’t the thing. That’s why I love my raspberry pie. That’s why I love this 3d printer because it’s that whole DIY maker mindset that people are into. And I get that really.

[01:32:36] Alan: I think I got away from that a lot because I really want it to be about what was I writing?

What was I working on? But then after a while I realized that was missing. It’s cool activity to figure it all out, to make something like it really could have gone wrong. And I didn’t let it, I’ve made this work. There’s pride in that. There’s that understanding of what’s going on in it. That helps me in every other aspect of my using.

And as the more than I’ve become like cars nowadays, right. [01:33:00] You don’t listen to it and then go tweak something, you plug in the diagnostic thing and yeah. And so all those good old. They’re like be ref because they don’t have a car to tinker with anymore. It’s all computer. Okay.

[01:33:13] Stephen: So I’ll keep you updated.

Hopefully I’ll get something printed by next week. I’m going to mess with the fulfillment. The thing is I got to move it just to mess with it and then put it back because I don’t want to leave it in the dining room. It’s

[01:33:25] Alan: very important that it all be level perfectly. I knew that when I committed to getting one, I was going to have to cheat.

That’s the dedicated, heavy, stable table. Put it on. And indeed it isn’t where I could bump it with my hip three

[01:33:39] Stephen: hours of free. Yeah. And that’s, that’s what we’ll come across. But again, it was 150 bucks. It’s fun to play with. So if I get a couple cool little prints and I get the bug and one upgrade, I need to get a desktop.

I need to get a new laptop. And we really are talking about getting an Oculus 3d cause my cousin’s got one and [01:34:00] because we could play star Trek bridge. So if that’s, if there’s no other reason to get an Oculus, it’s the play star Trek bridge crew. Everybody gets their own assigned on the bridge. That’s exactly awesome.

All right. Oh, wait. Before we go. One last thing I got trivia for you and then we’ll be okay. You ready? Okay. What was sent to the new Boba Fett shows on which you haven’t watched? What was Boba feds? First appearance.

[01:34:36] Alan: So it wasn’t like those second movie number

[01:34:40] Stephen: five empire strikes back.

Oh,

[01:34:49] Alan: in a comic book

[01:34:50] Stephen: instead of a movie. Oh no, actually I thought you’d know this one. That’s. Okay,

[01:34:56] Alan: so the bar scene, but not speaking [01:35:00] with

[01:35:01] Stephen: distinctive element, I’m going to say this because the answer has actually recently changed. And that’s why I was saying the trivia. So his first appearance has been the holiday special.

There was a little cartoon in it that introduced Boba Fett in the holiday special. Okay. There’s a new documentary on Disney about w when they came out with the show that actually, um, him before the holiday special came out during the summer, Marin county was doing a parade. And since Lucas is there, they said, Hey, could we get some star wars people?

So they actually used costumes from the movie. There were actors walking in the parade in the actual. And they sent the Boba Fett costume,

[01:35:52] Alan: new star Trek and star wars.

[01:35:55] Stephen: That was it. They talk about that, that nobody knew who this character was walking. [01:36:00] They want a great teaser on Lucas’s

[01:36:02] Alan: part. Oh, that’s funny.

Oh, what a great piece of trivia too. I have never read that reference that he actually was first in live action in a parade. If you will

[01:36:13] Stephen: show a cartoon, et cetera, et cetera. Well, the cart, the cartoon is on Disney plus it’s in the legends, a Stripe. You see that

[01:36:22] Alan: I have looked into, I’ve not watched all the legends because I didn’t know I had just happened.

Boy, there’s too many things to watch and wipe out is, oh my God, I’m not watching all these important. They

[01:36:32] Stephen: got the old, he walks and joins cartoons, which are for kids. They’ve got that one from the holiday special. They do have the original Gandy Tarkovsky, a star wars when they did it on cartoon network for three minute episodes, they have that on.

Yeah,

[01:36:49] Alan: it’s cool. None of that goes away. It’s all digital out there forever. And I love what they do with that kind of repackaging reintroduction that night. I think I mentioned I get all kinds of [01:37:00] CD box sets that are like the first three, the first five albums from a band. And if I like them, I really do, but I just got the stray cats one and that’s one of the things I made an illusion to men when you’re in the mood for rockabilly, it’s just the right thing.

I know that there are simple songs. I know that’s a particular genre of music, but I’m getting a whole bunch of street cats, strut songs that a row it’s just like, oh, just ready to go outside.

[01:37:23] Stephen: So we’ll talk more about stray cats in the future. There we go. Exactly.

[01:37:31] Alan: Exactly long session. Thanks very much. Steven.

Episode 84 – COVID Talks

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Trivia

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When's the Fun Kick In? Short-Sleeve Unisex T-Shirt

Episode 84 – COVID Talks

Overview

Recommendations

Trivia

YouTube

Transcript

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When's the Fun Kick In? Short-Sleeve Unisex T-Shirt