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Overview
If you didn’t know, Alan likes orange. And we start off discussing why his Skynet is orange. So geeky in many ways.
Do you know what the FIRE movement is? It stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. It’s a mindset to get finances under control and retire under your control.
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TodoIst – https://todoist.com/
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Trivia
How many words did Shakespeare contribute to the English language?
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Transcript
[00:00:39] Alan: Exactly. You know, what’s funny. I think I might’ve mentioned this before. Um, I moved into the attic when Tim Coleen’s son moved out and, uh, he had really, um, made it a crazy place.
There was writing all on the ceilings. Like what you see from a serial killer, you know, I didn’t want any of [00:01:00] that. And so they, you know, repaint it and they’ll, they
[00:01:03] Stephen: don’t want them to give him more clues as to you’re
[00:01:07] Alan: exactly that, you know, and also some of the strings looking the victims were coming on, Don and I, when I added my own, I didn’t want him to cross over anyway.
I like to call her origin. So I said, you know, let’s paint it orange. Well, of course they went and got safety, orange, the brightest thing they could, and the trim is bright green, like grasshopper green. So I think that Tim really was like, you know, fooling with me that I really thought I’d hate it. And instead I really love it.
But what’s funny is when you’re done on the street and you look up on third floor to this kind of, it looks like there’s a nuclear reactor blowing in and you get this like deep hump, you know, that kind of, so I love it up here. It’s just, who knows why, who knows? Why people have a favorite. Well, I’ve always loved orange because it’s got so much energy and it’s so optimistic and it’s so like, I like to flavor orange.
I like [00:02:00] orange flowers. I like all of it. I like tigers. You know
[00:02:03] Stephen: what I mean? Pumpkins. And somehow
[00:02:05] Alan: my, my rods and Colin’s are all positioned so that the more orange, the
[00:02:09] Stephen: better, one of the things we found when the kids were younger, they have paint. That’s chalkboard paint. So you just spray it up on a wall and it’s just like a chalkboard.
You get chalk and they can write on it and erase it. That’s pretty cool.
[00:02:23] Alan: I mean, that’s, I love material science like that. When you find out that, you know, this really is like, one thing that happened here is they’ve painted it with Kilz. It was the bright orange version of paint. The, like you put on overpasses to get rid of graffiti.
It’s supposed to cover everything without fail. And yet certain things have leaked through or whatever marker he used or whatever you want. I mean, it just kills even kills. Wasn’t enough to overcome. Um, one, luckily is like a peace sign. I don’t think it’s an unpiece sign, you know? Cause he had, he just had, Tim was a very interesting guy, brilliant [00:03:00] artist, but what he tended to do was draw macabre things like things with eye stalks and big TV mows and stuff like that.
And he just saw the world in a very different way. He was. Um, and the reason I say he was is because he passed away like four years ago. Um, he went to school for monster movie makeup and was really good at it. But, and this is, I guess, many are tablets, right? But being a commercial artist is very different than just letting your imagination go and doing things.
And so we had quite an impressive body of work, but to be told, okay, now you’re going to do a werewolf that’s partially decaying hated it. He hated that he hated authority or at least indicated by he didn’t get those things done. He really. Like I said, being a commercial artist is you have to be willing to be creative, kind of on demand.
He didn’t like it. He just, that’s
[00:03:51] Stephen: one of the things they say a lot, you know, a lot of people like to say, you know, this is my passion is my hobby. My love my life. Well, when you turn it into your business, you kill it, [00:04:00] that you don’t enjoy it. And I, you know, a lot of people have that. And I know the, the MCOMP thing, my daughter was like that too.
Always drawing. The the weird and off-beat and the spooky and things that you’re a little gruesome, but I’ve also read that that’s a sign, one of the signs of intelligence that intelligent people tend to do that just like tend to clutter instead of organized, you know, it’s funny. Cause when I see someone that’s like super organized, I’m like, oh, well I guess you’re not that smart.
Huh? I’m done. It’s a horrible thing to do, but it’s gotta be the opposite. If smart, intelligent, I, high IQs typically are cluttered if you’re not, you know, and, and that’s nothing against anybody,
[00:04:44] Alan: an indicator and then the negative indicator works for that. Not having it. Does it mean the other well,
[00:04:50] Stephen: okay.
But there you go. Which one’s negative indicator. It depends on your perspective.
[00:04:57] Alan: I mean, So [00:05:00] funny, I am a cluttered person, but I, it’s not that I don’t know where things are, you know, Colleen and I both, maybe this is why one of the reasons that we don’t great on each other is we kind of have a stacking system that there’s a chronology, if you will, to things.
And you can almost always remember, well, it’s not anywhere in the house. I last used it at this table. So it’s in one of these three stacks and it’s weird to say the word stacks, but that really does got it. It isn’t like someone’s going to move in here and think I’m crazy as they go through, they’ll say, oh, this was indeed the travel pile.
And this was the puzzles pile. And this was the Mensa pile and whatever else it might be. And let goes with lichen. It’s just, it hasn’t been hard for me to have a lot of things going on and still keeps a relatively segregate. Only once in a while and people talk about this, you know, that you don’t want to touch a piece of paper more than once, but sometimes what’ll happen is you’ll get interrupted while you’re doing something.
And you’ll just put it down. Yeah. The people who lose their keys all the time, where they find them in the icebox, because they came in and got a cold drink and whatever reason they just [00:06:00] let go of the keys.
[00:06:02] Stephen: And, you know, I was thinking about that too. Um, I do that a lot. I have really had to make a very conscious effort and thinking to leave my computer glasses on my desk to make sure my reading glasses are in the case.
And in one of the readings spots, I, I, I’m not like I always have to have it in this one spot. I’m like, okay, there’s a couple places I read. So it’s either in the bedside stand or, you know, I put it on the bureau downstairs, you know, just a couple spots and I’ve had to really work on. And a lot of the other things that kind of gave up, but it’s, I’ve fought, you know, that absent minded professor thing and I’ve thought, well, maybe I’m getting dementia.
Maybe I’m losing my mind. Just getting a hold of what it really I’ve discovered. What it really is, is I’ve got 50 things going on and there’s like five that are high priority and a couple that are a low priority to me, what I’m carrying in my hand is like the lowest priority. So my brain doesn’t even pay attention to it because I’ve got other things I think about, [00:07:00] and I’ll just set them down and it never even is a.
Um, my brain registers that
[00:07:06] Alan: to the next thing. So Colleen has that a little bit too, because she really does put things down kind of when she’s done with them, instead of putting them away, if you will, in the place that they go. And most of the time, it’s like, if you’re in the kitchen, you put somebody down in the kitchen, it didn’t wander into the basement.
You know? So most of the time it’s find-able w what I’ve discovered is we use the term priority. I think it really is a matter of that to me, life is about the 80 20 rule. You only need, if I pay attention to the 20%, most important things, the other 80 in so many cases just don’t matter. So if I pay attention to where do the bills go so that I can pay them, where’s my medical stuff.
So I can take my pills. That’s the stuff that matters. And with my socks go in the top or the bottom drawer, it’s so much, does it
[00:07:47] Stephen: matter? You know what I mean? I mean, it’s funny you say that because Jean is not cluttered as the same. It is in a way, but hers is different. She will say, well, [00:08:00] these Clippers need to go into.
But the problem is every time she takes them out, she puts them in a different drawer somewhere else. It could be the drawer over there. It could be the drawer in the bathroom could be the drawer in the kitchen. And so everything does get put somewhere, but it’s always a different spot. So we’re looking for something sometimes it’s like, well, where’s
[00:08:19] Alan: no it’s in the drawer, but actually I I’m, I’m lucky I really have that organizing gene.
Like one of the reasons that you become a collector or when you are collected, you kind of realize you have to manage your collections. Like things go on the shelf with like, with like, they go by author name or they go by series or they go by, um, science fiction versus, you know, a crime fiction or whatever, like a B, but it’s, it really matters to me that I, I want to find something quickly that I can find it instead of just, it’s kind of like when you’re a computer person, you learn how to various different sorts work.
It isn’t a matter of taking things and looking for a, and putting it in a there’s quicker ways to do it. You know, the bubble sort [00:09:00] versus the quick sort versus the merge source and stuff like that. And when you learn that about data in general, I have adopted that into my life. When I wanted to like short my bookshelves.
You, you do like you do a sort of each bookshelf so that those sets are sorted and then you can do well, I can pick amongst the things. Cause I know that all the A’s are going to be here on the far left and I can displace enough books on the top shelf. So it’s like, yeah, it’s an an and when you’re part of the way through, it’s a reasonable state to leave things in, because sometimes we have many, many bookshelves getting everything in order isn’t necessarily an hours task.
So you don’t want it to be that you come back and say, I got to start all over. This doesn’t look like anything. No, instead, you know that there’s information there’s sorting in, in integrated into each of the sets of things. And all you’re doing then is joining sets and taking your time as to which that you’re working.
Many of my things are like that. Like I said, kind of the piles, if I look and see there’s mail that I should handle, even the male gets into, you know, here’s things I know just [00:10:00] from looking at it, these are tickets I should take out of an envelope. This is a bill that I should mind. Other things are like all the junk mail that comes in.
I’m surprised I even keep it in a stack instead of immediately feeding it into the shredder because I kind of want to give it one second worth of attention, maybe 10, but not a minute. And so always I’m always doing that kind of stuff. You know what I mean? When I go on a, we love travel, what do I do? I make sure that I gather the maps for the states we’re going to be going through.
And the reason you can do that is because the maps all go in one place and they don’t necessarily have to be an alphabetical order is towards that. And it’s sort like, do I put them in order on the basis of states as if we’re the United States? No, because that’s not how I would look for something. It really should be like, you know, at what is it, uh, Alabama to Wyoming is that there is that the farthest in nearest, in alpha.
The things that I wanted to be able to do. And like I used to keep my books in really perfect order kind of so that I could take a book off the shelf if I wanted to reread it, that really doesn’t happen that often. [00:11:00] And I think it will cost the show so I can let her friend borrow it. That doesn’t happen that often.
And the big disruptive event, when I moved from often a states out to San Francisco to do my.com things and all my stuff went into storage and relatively well boxed. This really was like AA to a L in this box. I have so many books or comics or whatever, but then maintaining the collection, making sure that I was out going out to visit my storage lockers in Hercules and putting that years acquisitions of books or comics or whatever it didn’t happen.
I didn’t do it. And then that kind of breaks the action over things having to be perfectly ordered, but what’s happened now I’m 20 years ago. And I have the new stuff I’ve acquired is kind of order, but not anywhere near as well as it could be. And it’s never been integrated into the old collection. So wonderful segue I’ve been out to the volts.
Books are finally getting all sorted, but it used to be that what I would do is every year [00:12:00] I had my collection a to Z really absolutely perfect. And I would go through and, you know, take everything in alphabetical order of my new acquisitions and integrate the A’s into the, a boxes and then keep moving things forward and add boxes at the end towards Zanesville and that kind of stuff.
And I haven’t done it in a long time. So I kind of have like four different collections based on sets of things. And now, even though I’m going through them, what I’m doing is I’m not putting everything perfect. A to Z, I have numbered boxes. I’m up to number one, see 1 25 comics, 1 25. And in my computer system, I have what’s in which box.
So if I had to find a ghost writer, number one, it isn’t, you don’t go to the G box anymore, but you just go onto the computer and look, oh, that’s. You
[00:12:40] Stephen: know what I mean? That’s what I was going to say. That’s exactly what I had to do because you get a box full and then you’re like, well damn, now I’ve got 20 more comics.
Where do they go in here? Well, I got to move this to a different box. So I, I did the same thing
[00:12:55] Alan: every
[00:12:56] Stephen: week, every month. Well, heck I’m spending an hour, two hours of my weekend [00:13:00] trying to put all the new comics in there. So I was like, wait, What if the box has just held them, but the organization was in my spreadsheet, my database, whatever I was using. I’m like, well, that’s great. I can look it up. It just tells me where to go get it.
And I’m like, duh, that’s perfect.
[00:13:15] Alan: Honestly. Again, what do you learn from doing computer things? You know, we’re not the first people in the world who had organized something, there’s all the things. And then there’s an index into those things. And the index is what matters, that information about information, the metadata.
And so, you know, just add hopefully all geeks that are listening to this, they know about this kind of stuff, but that’s kind of what you need. And it’s not only about books. It’s pretty much about everything, right? That, that was long ago. There was a very cool program early from the Macintosh called HyperCard.
One of the original developers of the Mac had made this cool thing. Bill Atkinson, I believe was his name. I hope he get his name. Right. Cause he, he did wonderful. And it was really based on that, that as things came into your life, you didn’t have to integrate it into existing things. You just had to keep track of where it went, what box it was, what room it is, whatever else it might [00:14:00] be.
And maybe that was in the dream of an ideal, I can do virtual collecting, you know what I mean? And then it has really worked out well, that way, one of the interesting things is I, it used to be that I just had a big collection of big spreadsheet and I, and I didn’t have, if you will, the master database out in the world to compare it to.
So I had to make sure, and this is its own discussion. We all talk about this. Like, I really went by, um, every comic book has an MDC, right? The little block of text in the usual, you know, first page bottom. And it says, here’s what the real title is. It might say that it’s the daring adventures of super girl on the cover, but truly called Supergirl.
And, and there was all kinds of, um, I had to break ties all the time with that. Is it everybody else is going to be looking for this. Um, Dr. Strange, but actually there was Dr. Strange and there was Dr. Frig sorcerer Supreme, and there was Dr. Strange versus sold-out doctor. That’s why I said, well, I kind of want to group all those together, but perfectly alphabetically we’ll get over the place.
So [00:15:00] I have anomalies in my collection that are based on if I really was going to read all my doctor strangers. I don’t want to go looking for, you know, America’s hero, Dr. Strange. It doesn’t belong in the A’s. You
[00:15:10] Stephen: know what I mean? That’s, that’s where I’ve sometimes used things like attack. Uh, and I do that with my to-do lists.
Um, because I’ve got multiple things that crossover, like it might be for the website, but it’s, I’m programming something, uh, using Python for the website, but it’s not for my fiction book it’s for the site. So it’s three different things I have put together. Whereas another thing might be a one in two different.
So I use tags, so I can say, okay, what’s everything to do with Python programming, what’s everything to do with my author website. And it pulls them
[00:15:50] Alan: up more. And in fact, for a while, I was maintaining that where some things that I had had a boxed, sorry, bagged and boarded and graded, I kind of put notations about that.[00:16:00]
Now my new collection software that I’m using now called collectors does all that. And so I I’m pleased that I don’t have to do that anymore, but I kind of miss that. What mattered to me was what I used for tags, not what matters to the general public. And it’s not. But sometimes it is, you know what I mean?
If I really, I like doc Savage. And so if I really wanted to have somewhere a way of saying not only doc Savage in the comics, but every appearance of him that he was in marble two and one at one point that we have going in, one of the things that the collector software has done, I think I might’ve mentioned they stopped carrying Christ information, which is really a blow because a certain amount I can’t buy I’ve added 5,000, 6,000 kinds of books since then, but I really don’t know what that’s added to the value of the collection, but what they have put in is a thing with major and minor keys, you know, that they, I guess for cheaper comics, you know, it’s a key issue if, Ooh, it’s the first appearance of the character.
It’s a costume change for the character. It’s the death of a character. It’s the wedding. They, [00:17:00] and out of 32,000, I’ve kind of looked through in 2000 now. I think I’m going to make it the 40, I thought it might be at 35, but I think I’m going to be 40. And I have like 4,700. You know, like major and mostly minor, but lots of major.
And it’s kind of fun to go through like giant sized chillers, which was kind of a one-off. It was a, they actually changed the title to giant sized Dracula because Dracula was the breakout character, if you will. But the first appearance of Lillis who then went on to figure into all kinds of horror, superhero crossover type stuff, and you don’t always know.
So we’ve laughed about, you know, where did Moonlight first appeared, not a new night, number one, number 47 or something weird. And so it’s kind of cool to have that ability to tap into that, to be able to find things if I really needed to for where did, um, everybody knows, you know, Wolverine first appear like Hulk 180 1, but no, it’s really Hawk.
180 that last panel shows him. And so there’s even, you know what I mean?
[00:17:55] Stephen: It’s not that issue because it’s, it’s an alpha [00:18:00] flight tie in.
[00:18:01] Alan: There you go. Exactly. And that’s, I, I, I haven’t gotten to those yet because those are some of the ones that are actually down in my basement that I haven’t brought to the storage lockers.
And at my last set, I have two more boxes for storage lockers. And then I have the last stuff that I have in my basement and that’ll be all my collection so far as I know, I’m pretty sure that nothing got, I never mislabeled comic book boxes. I never really let anything get lost in that way, but we’ll see, we’ll see that, you know, I just had this happen.
I I’m going through, you know, I, you can’t put comic books into a box without making sure that they’re all tight and lined up or they slump over and then you get weird bending and folding. So I found that I had put various kinds of folks that I don’t really collect in with other things. And so when I got to the end of this particular run of the alphabet, I had, um, our army at war and star Spangled, war stories, and little lotta and other things I must’ve gotten just as, you know, what kind of a compote grab bag or somebody gave me some comics not knowing what their.[00:19:00]
Well, I’ve discovered things like colorless green lantern. You know, they’re not worth anything because worse, virtually nothing on the market. I put a reading copy of green lantern, like number 13. What did your number? Another 13? That’s pretty cool. I discovered some minor treasures and it was fun to go back to not, I really have been obsessive about knowing what’s in each box and just, this is now the final catalog.
It was fun to go back to that time of pressure. I didn’t really know I
[00:19:29] Stephen: had this. You’re still discovering, still
[00:19:31] Alan: discovering cool things. I didn’t know. I had and nothing in great shape. You know, they really were that kind of augments pile for a reason. Wow. Finding something that’s 60 years old and I’m 62.
That’s pretty freaking cool.
[00:19:46] Stephen: So two things before I forget. Colin told me to tell you that if you, uh, once you get to the point where you’re willing to sell or whatever, Adam would be [00:20:00] more than willing to take a look and give you an overall offer. I said, I, you know, Alan might want to sell them all. He knows what the values are and Collins understand that.
But if he doesn’t want to spend three years selling everything off piecemeal and just like, what’s it done and done now? And Adam is probably one of the best ones I’ve met as far as what he offers you for what it’s worth. And he’ll tell you, look, it’s worth this much. I’ll give you this much for it right now, out the door.
And I was like, well, you know, I don’t have a lot. Well, Adam last year bought a like thirty-five thousand dollar comic book collection. So he just paid for it. So, uh, it could be something to think about if you don’t want to spend so much time and effort. Cause then you got to figure out your time your shipping costs.
And that’s what I did with mine. I said, Adam, what do you offer me for this? It’s worth this. And he offered me a good chunk of that. And I’m like, great, because maybe I won’t sell one or two of them. And then I don’t make all that money anyway. So I was like good with it. [00:21:00] So I was just told to pass that along, if you ever want to talk about it.
And he says, no hard feelings, no pressure. If you don’t want to, there’ll be deal.
[00:21:09] Alan: I really do appreciate that. And it’s, it’s nice to have, um, a connection, someone that actually will like, kind of be on your side, you know, any number of bookstores that I would just walk in. I think they’re okay. Because comic book store is by definition is person that’s in love with the industry.
The medium
[00:21:24] Stephen: Adam knows a lot of them and I’ve heard some bad things about others. So,
[00:21:29] Alan: and I guess that sort of model worried that this is nothing to say that I really might be. What do you have the money that I would need? I have millions of dollars.
[00:21:39] Stephen: I know. I’m not sure how much, you know, he made millions of dollars.
Exactly. I totally get that. I mean, you’re approaching auction house type level here, but the problem is you’ve probably only got a couple that actually would go to something like Southeast. So you know that that’s also something he’s like, look, if, [00:22:00] if he takes the five ones that are worth a million each or whatever, and then we have the rest of the collection and it’s only worth 30,000 and he offers you so much.
He’s like, just, he’s like, just give me a call. We can discuss it. And again, if it turns out that it’s not going to work, it’s not going to work. You know, it’s just business.
[00:22:19] Alan: It’s it is. It is like, it’s kind of funny if you don’t mind talking about a little bit in my mind, it hasn’t at first it was like, well, I’ll just go to heritage auctions and they’ll back up the truck and give, get, get everything out of my house and it’ll be.
You know, I’m going to get a certain amount as they sell things over the course of time. But I’m also aware from using the, you know, my collector software, that 20% of my collection is worth anything to anyone, $10 and above let’s say. So that means I’ve got, you know, 8,000 comics that I’m going to sell and make all my money out of 80 20 rule.
It’s kind of funny. And the other part. Well, I’d like these to go to a good home. If someone wants all the ROMs face Knights that are [00:23:00] not a big thing for anybody else, but I’d like them to go to someone that gets, that appreciates them. But how much time am I willing to do to then 32,000 comics out of 40 little eBay sales and little onesies and twosies, and even complete runs of things.
That’s the why I sold a hundred times books today. Okay. You only have 31,900
[00:23:19] Stephen: and, and that’s there. They do. Colin. Colin has been doing some buying a little bit and like someone will bring it along box and he’ll flip through it. And he’s like, these are all dollar comics or less. Uh, and then he found the first appearance of constant.
Uh, I forget what, whatever it was and he’s like, oh
[00:23:42] Alan: yeah, American Gothic, I think maybe.
[00:23:45] Stephen: Okay. So he said, he told the guy, he’s like, I’m such a key. He’s like, look, everything in this box is pretty worthless. Uh, you know, I give you a couple of bucks for it essentially, but this one is worth some money. He says in the shape, [00:24:00] it’s in, I would grade it about a two, five, which would make it worth about this much.
So I could offer you for this one comic this much, or it was $10 more for the whole box, you know? So yeah, you’re right. Uh, you know, if you pulled out the thousand biggest comics, those are the ones you’d be interested in the rest. He probably wouldn’t even care, but he might say, well, those thousand, and these I’d offer this, but again, you have such a big collection.
It’s not something that has to be all or nothing either. You know, he might even say, look, I, I, you know, you don’t want to sell it all great, but I really liked those five, you know, or whatever.
[00:24:39] Alan: I think all that is not only first cherry picking the collection to make sure that I get best value out of the things that really are like, wow, it’s all know that kind of stuff.
And then there’s a certain amount of get them to maximize the value that I can for people that they don’t need a 9.8 copy, but it’s still a 9.0, and that’s still worth someone who’s trying to fill in gaps in their collection or upgrade the collection goes in about as a [00:25:00] 65 or something like that. And then I thought, well, my collection would be, could become a comic book, stores, tables.
You know what I mean? If all the rest of those dollar comics that I might have, if I just get, I don’t know what I put into it, you know what I mean? I think that collectors software is really cool and it generates all kinds of statistics. You know, here’s your major, minor keys. And I think it says cover price wise, but what I’ve invested is like 55,000.
Which is like, oh, you nut you 55.
You know what I mean? Even who doesn’t value comic books, there’s gotta be thinking it’s a payment on a house. That’s a car. No, no, no, no. And yet out of $55,000, I’ve made millions. That’s a pretty good return over 60 years. So I, I, and often, while I was buying, I was buying from a comic book club in college that I got like a little discount, 10%.
And then I was buying from a buying service, M and M distributors, hats off to them. They’re the best ones I’ve ever worked with. Um, and I was getting like 20 to 40% [00:26:00] discount depending on how much I was buying and whatever they were offering at the time. So if I just get covered price, I kind of already made 40% and it’s like, I’m white.
I’m I’m, uh, I’m betraying my investing strategy of like, you know, I really would never sell anything for less than cover priced. Like you’re saying that goes in the dollar box. If I paid 2 25, something deep in my heart, I’m not taking less than cover price. It isn’t worth less than what I bought it. It’s gently red it’s in mint condition.
It can’t be that it’s only worth half of what I bought it for. Even though, of course it probably is. I bought so many things, hundreds of dollars worth a month. All of my life that it can’t be that everything increased in value. And yet some part of me is just stubborn and I’d rather hold onto it and reread it.
Then selling it a loss. You play stocks. I haven’t sold anything in a loss despite the difficulties of the last year, because I expect it to come back or I just won’t. I just, well,
[00:26:58] Stephen: you know, I’ve [00:27:00] started more and more of this way of thinking is okay, I’m 50 years old. How much time do I want to put into whatever this is when I was 20, I would have put a lot more time into just reading anything and getting a book and okay.
It kind of sucks, but I’m going to finish it now. I’m kind of like, okay, this book. I’m not wasting any more time reading it.
[00:27:22] Alan: The cost of continuing to read it is high compared to there’s a wonderful universe of better stuff out there. Exactly what
[00:27:29] Stephen: I was gonna say. You mentioned collectors. Um, that’s we, we talked a little bit about this.
This is connected a little off shoot, um, with the new modern software and all that collectors is a perfect example because when I first started using. It was you buy it and that was pretty much it. You bought the app and used it. If you wanted the next version with the updates and stuff, you bought the next version upgrade or whatever, totally switched that to where it’s a yearly subscription fee and you access it [00:28:00] all through the cloud, they have an app, but the app won’t work.
If you don’t have the subscription fee to the cloud. And so many things are going that way where it’s all cloud-based, there’s good and bad, obviously. Yeah. I
[00:28:12] Alan: really like it in some cases, because go, I’m not buying new. I like the fact that they’re continually updating the data that’s in there. So like when they added the major and minor keys thing, I would have been willing to pay for that upgrade in the fact that it’s just included as part of keeping your subscription current, it really matters to me that I know I’m current as, as current as can be.
The biggest thing about collectors is that they really don’t have current pricing information, you know, whatever API they were using from who they say it was a go comics, I think. And they decided to do their own. They have. Valuable metadata that they didn’t need to kind of make it, they made it so that it’s more exclusive to them.
And I don’t know, like right now comic based, which I used for a long time has its own database of values and so forth. And I really am going to have to do something [00:29:00] like do the big export from collectors and run it into Kai. But it’s just to get a good value for my comic and then go to the various different auction sites and stuff like that and say, well, here’s what the market says.
This is worth. And you know what I mean, am I going to do a reserve price? Am I going to do, there’s a whole set of skills that are a bunch of knowledge that I have to gain about how to do this, how to do it, price wise, how to do it. Like who’s honorable. You know what I mean? I don’t want to deal with certain people.
If they’re known for being this, the scum of the industry first one’s calling me is, you know, Hey, I’ll take that collection off your hands and then ghost, you know what I mean? Mike, one of my big dilemmas right now, I think we might’ve talked about this is, um, I, I need to get these graded and sending them away is fraught with danger.
You know what I mean? If the post office covers like $5,000 and I got a book that’s worth 50 K, like I can’t, I can’t risk that happening. So what’s the insurance that I’m going to buy that especially covers transit, not sitting in my warehouse, which is the volts are safe, impregnable to harm they’re out of water, [00:30:00] all that kind of stuff.
But it’s that transition back and forth to either Texas or Florida, that I really need to make sure that these guys are covered and, and it’s not cheap, but it’s going to be necessary in order to get that 20% of value. So I’ve already, you know, the collection not only has, Hey, the collection has gone up, it’s got.
Expenses for having been in the vaults and whatever I did to get the collector software and stuff like that. And that’s a small part of the overhead, but now, well, now I got add insurance to that insurance not going to have to pay for it. And so it just, it really is like a business. You really have to say, what are, it’s not just a hobby.
It’s not just a silly thing anymore. How much am I willing to invest to maximize the value of this? How smart do I need to be? How naive I don’t want to be? You know what I mean? It’s like this all your life. It, it, it really is, um, important to me that I kind of, this was the true hypothesis that these will go up in value.
And if I keep them in good condition, Hey, I get to go to Europe. You know what [00:31:00] I mean? I, I saw like silly
[00:31:03] Stephen: and multiple times your
[00:31:04] Alan: own house and what you were saying about the opportunity. Colleen and I were getting ready to retire. We’re getting ready to start traveling. Do I want to be hiking in the grand canyon or do I want to be at home tending my comic book collection?
To me, there is no choice. So what do I do to get to where I’m really free and clear of my biggest, you know, possessions possess you if you let them. And I am getting to the point of, I don’t want that to be really from anything it’s time for the kind of books to like a big push these next couple of years to get that done.
So that in between selling guidebooks calling, and I can go just in Boston for a month and hit the museum and the art galleries and you know what I mean, and go to Washington DC for a month and go to New York for a month and go see some plays on Broadway. And we have really cool travel plans for, you know, establishing a residency, not just, Hey, we’re going to be here for a week.
Let’s see all that we can, but being able to get Airbnb and stay where you can actually make some of your own meals and do [00:32:00] your own laundry and be in a residential instead of a clamor type place. And there’s a. 20 cities that we’d like to do that, not just in the United States, but like, how about Toronto?
How about Rome? How about London? How about Sydney? You know what I mean? When you start looking at that kind of thing and then this again, it’s segway time again, I’ve been really cool movement called fire financial independence, retire early and early. It doesn’t really apply to us anymore. We’re both in our sixties.
The principles of save a bunch of money, invested wisely, let the compounding effect of investments work for you. And then you buy your freedom. You buy all the time of not having to work anymore. And so what’s the block of money that we need. Well, selling comic books to go back for a moment really does help to throw money into that big hopper of.
Um, you have a big block of money. You take 4% out a year. You’ll never go broke. You know what I mean? 95% of the people who follow that [00:33:00] rule or four, if you will, they live off of those expenses. We have to find out what our real expenses are, but like we’re living in a relatively reasonable cost city, um, inflation doesn’t affect our expenses any more than it infects my investments.
So that’s what I mean, it’s kind of a wash in that and that’s like provably. So not just wishful thinking. So getting to that block of money that we want so that we really can between social security and pensions, we already have a lot of our expenses covered. And then it’s like, well, if we take 4% out a year, it isn’t even just that so that we can put food on the table.
That’s what we can do. These cool trips. You know what I mean? So I find an Airbnb, not for a hundred dollars a night and spend $3,100 in a month, but find it for a thousand or something like that. And it just makes. Colleen, and I’ve never been big foodies. And so if we ended up in our Airbnb, we have nice dinners, but we cook it ourselves instead of going out to dinner and having $150 worth of food cost a day.
You know what I mean? It’s like, where do I want to put the stuff into the cooler exhibit at the museum? Not yet another, it just kind of [00:34:00] got another steak dinner. I don’t even want to eat steak every night. That’s not even in my paradise. You know what I mean? So a couple of good books, one called quit, like a millionaire.
There’s, there’s my four good ones that are about people who’ve really done this and like retire successfully at 31 because they really did live lean do without, for the first 10 years of their career. And there’s some things about them that I don’t know that we’re ready to do. They do. One thing is like geography, arbitrage, you know, living in Cleveland is less expensive than boss.
So the rest of the United States, but you know, what’s really cheap living in Portugal, living in Vietnam, living in Ecuador. And I don’t know that we want to go to a place where. English is not the main language because I’m willing to learn, but sixties is a little bit late to get fluent. You know what I mean?
I don’t want to go to any place that will, the reason it’s cheapest. Cause it’s also dangerous. Like where’s the stable, I oh, I’m older and I’ve had some, I need, I need to know I have good medical care. You know, I don’t, I don’t want it to be, Hey, [00:35:00] it’s real fibrillation. Well, w we, we think we’ve heard of that.
I
[00:35:04] Stephen: know. Let me Google it. We got to go across town where the only wifi
[00:35:13] Alan: and what I’m finding out is, you know, the way the world really is first and second and third world in many ways. But money is a great enabler for being able to get, even in countries where there’s, um, not everyone is doing well. If you live in a relatively major city and then keep yourself safe.
When he goes further there. And so it really might be that we end up doing, Hey, how about a month in Italy? You know what I mean? That by being in Rome for a month, it’s cheaper than living in the United States, even though it’s Rome with the Parthenon and the steps and the, you know what I mean? That kind of thing.
And like this London is not, it’s more expensive. So as we think about, you know, wow, are we really, we we’re, we’re talking about how are we going to do this? And how much are we [00:36:00] really willing, fighting all that is. I really don’t want to be rootless nor does Colleen. We really, I just wrote a post about it.
I was out in California for just a couple of weeks taking care of business for my father who has passed and coming home. It was amazing how much I just took deep breaths of relief. It’s my bed and my shower with the right water pressure. And the kitchen is how I want it set up. And here’s the couch that we get to sit next to while we watch our silly show and cuddle instead of two recliners where there’s no attack.
And it just is, I don’t know that we can duplicate that everywhere that we go. And I think that being out of town will be a series of, well, this really was cool to see all this and do the history and do the art, which, you know, what I kind of want to go home. You know, my, my local pizza and my, you know, my, my burners on the stove that look just like
[00:36:56] Stephen: they should partly what the, the whole fire thing, [00:37:00] uh, advocates is.
You know, like you said, looking at the cost, looking at the balance, looking at what you give up, what you get in, which is the important thing and focusing on the important thing. Uh, it’s funny you say that, cause we just watched a video. Gina showed me last night, some TV show that they put a tick tock video on whatever.
Okay. But she was like horrified because this family, the way they live, she was like, dear God, I’m I feel like I should call child services and report them for child abuse. And I, I argued against her. She got irritated. Cause I didn’t just jump on in GRI. I said, hold on. What are they really doing? So what it was is they didn’t use their electricity.
They had lanterns with, uh, batteries that they use and they didn’t use their electricity. They didn’t have a refrigerator to use electricity. They had it outside, dug into the ground and just had a small amount of food. So it wouldn’t last long and spoil
[00:37:54] Alan: 55 degrees underground
[00:37:58] Stephen: and she’s going, oh, this is [00:38:00] horrible.
There’s a couple of things that really got her. And one of them, I was like, okay, maybe not that much, but they would only take a bath once a week and do it like in the old days where they’d fill up the tub once and everybody chair it. And I was like, yeah, that’s a little gross. I don’t know if I’d want to do that, uh, with the whole family.
Uh, but considering I’m the guy I’d be first anyway. So I was like, I don’t care. Um, but I’m like, that’s what they used to do. I mean, even back in my mother’s time, when she was younger, they did that. So you can’t turn and say, oh, that’s child abuse and all this, the one thing they did do that, I was like, okay, that’s is they didn’t buy toilet paper.
They use competent newspaper. I’m not sure about that one.
[00:38:44] Alan: You know, everything is along a spectrum. And I think that you don’t have to go from like spending ridiculously to spending nothing. You know, there really are those various different trade-offs that are quality of life that are just like modern civilization has found better ways to do that.
Then going back to living as if you’re in the [00:39:00] 1860s in a. Sodbuster house. Don’t have to do that. Hey, I’m at the dust bowl again of cleanliness disease. You know what I mean? There are reasons, boy, I was in Scott. This is a sign for creative anachronism when I was in college and the are any number of people that used to talk about how they kind of wish, oh, if we had a good nuclear exchange, we’d go back to these better times of everything, of being about nobility and everything.
You know, we, we have, uh, we have our vendor, we have our blacksmiths, we could have our own community. It’s like, this is back when life expectancy was 32, it was nasty brutish and short. It was horrible to live in these times in terms of diseases and animals and whatever else, it might be so dope. So quick
[00:39:46] Stephen: people romanticize that a lie.
And quite often I’ve heard pointing out. Well, don’t forget, like you said, they only lived at 32. They usually didn’t have. Everybody smelled like the [00:40:00] horse stall, you know, so really don’t romanticize it necessarily. Um, uh, I told her, I said, you know, I lived like that. Uh, when I was camping and backpacking for two weeks, she’s like, well, that’s different.
That’s the point is, you know, you know,
[00:40:17] Alan: undoable, it’s a choice and you decide, you know, if anything, one of the things that we’re getting about the fire discussion is like, we, we really, we entertain ourselves. Well, you know what I mean? We like going to our shows COVID the last couple of years have absolutely shown us that we’re not like going crazy.
We’re not depressed because we haven’t been to as many comedy shows and Playhouse square plays in live music, as much as we love. We really can do without if we have to. And so that thought of, well, how much do we have to do without again, it’s not zero or a hundred. If we give up 50% of what we used to do.
And that means that we get that many more, that much more freedom, that much more money to apply to other things, to, to safety and to whatever else it might be. It’s [00:41:00] kind of cool to have had these COVID years as a forced lesson about we are not unhappy people just because we couldn’t go to see, you know, a comedy show every week we’re doing just financially, as long as you have books, as long as you end the internet at
[00:41:14] Stephen: home.
And again, you know, it’s a balance. I questioned why they live like that. Why there? Cause she said, oh, I saved, uh, doing all these measures and it wasn’t an ungodly amount. It wasn’t like, oh, we’re saving 30,000 a year or something. It was a couple thousand dollars. I’m like, is that worth it? I’m like, okay.
But we don’t know the whole story. This is a snippet. I said, first of all, I would question if everybody in the family has, uh, a lantern with batteries, what’s worse for the environment, building a big place that gives electricity to lots of people or everybody carrying Landers with batteries that are harmful, which is worse.
And which does [00:42:00] cost more. If you’ve got five people in your family and you’re buying batteries so often every month that you’re 50, $60 in battery. Well, you can turn on the electricity a few times and save some of those batteries, you know, but, but I said, I told her, I said, well, why are they doing it? Is it because they’re out of work, they’re disabled, they can’t work, or do they just choose not to and think of this they’re home with their kids all the time.
They make dinners with their kids. She also turned her nose up because they were outside with washing, washing the clothes by hand. I’m like, my mother did that. You know, we’ve had to do it when we lost electricity and didn’t have the washer or whatever. And every now and then we choose not to use the dryer and hang stuff up sometimes.
So, you know, yes, it seems extreme, but I don’t think they’re like over the top or abusing their children.
[00:42:51] Alan: Yeah. I, you know, all you have to do is read a little bit of history and, and, um, and you get enlightened. If you will. What’s been the best thing to [00:43:00] enhance some lifestyle at wrong. Um, just age in general.
Um, it’s public. It’s we have a miracle of antibiotics and medical treatment and so forth, public health of where your water is guaranteed clean and your, your dirt doesn’t have, you know what I mean? Um, the more that we’ve gotten better about fluoridating and iodine and various different things that overall, uh, stop people from getting their teeth running out of their heads, stop people from getting a name, the, um, nutritional diseases.
Nobody gets Berry Berry anymore. You get scurvy, nobody gets rickets. Cause we fixed all that. So going back to a place where you might not do that, depending on what you’re eating, how much you can raise on your land, if there was no way on your land to get the right amount of iodine, then you’re in danger.
You know what I mean? And, and the, what has been delivered into people’s lives the most time back to do other things than just work from Dawn. And drop [00:44:00] exhausted and get up the next day and do it. It’s things like the sewing machine it’s things like the washing machine. It’s things that even after we were relatively civilized, and this is especially women’s work was often a terrible imposition on their ability to do anything, but that work, if they were going to be a pioneer family, Colleen could tell you all about this from reading, not only the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, but just that’s what civilized the world, the Sears catalog that brought little motors so that everybody could do more than an ox, pulling a plow
[00:44:32] Stephen: for exactly
[00:44:34] Alan: that.
And how do you know getting water from a well and every other way in which we’ve been able to add to human labor, to make things work better, faster, smarter. You don’t want to give those things up if you don’t have to. So the romance of, I like solar and wind power drying hanging over a clothesline. But if you do that for a family of eight, that’s, all you’re doing is the wash day in and day out.
Like when do you get. Make your life better. When do you get a [00:45:00] chance to read or to teach your children to read when you get a chance to make music and learn, teach others how to make you want? I mean, it’s just people romanticize that, but the trade-offs that we’ve made for those kinds of things and make it so the world is more civilized.
Leisure time audit. How many years of civilization will use your time is like the little bar at the far fucking
[00:45:21] Stephen: end. I mean, considering a few other things in the past couple years, and especially what’s happening now, I’m, I’m thinking our civilization has digressed some that we’re not as civilized as, and I’ll
[00:45:36] Alan: tell you, they talk about that too.
That there’s a pendulum that swings back and forth with developments and time. And that when we get to be that leisure matters more than anything else, you know what I mean? What’s the usual stuff. Who’s making a lot of money. It’s the entertainers, it’s the ballplayers and the singers and so forth. And everybody else seems to be still in kind of a surf like rind.
Well, that shouldn’t be that way that we all the whole of the boat should have been raised in a, in a better civilization. And [00:46:00] so how do we, whatever we have with wealth, inequality, whatever we have. Disparities in what’s really valuable. You know what I mean? It’s right. Well, there’s no easy solutions, but it sure is that we shouldn’t just say, oh, well, we should continually be saying, what could I do about making my world around me a better place, but I don’t give my money to the people that I think is a ridiculous amount to pay, you know?
So probably to not have that and those little things of like, I’m happy to see all of our heroes in our comedy clubs and so forth. And what somebody like bill Burr is going to be at the, at the, um, the big stadium. I think it was called the Q nowadays, right.
[00:46:39] Stephen: Mortgage
[00:46:40] Alan: and mortgage. Exactly that. And like, wow, I love him.
I think he’s one of the best stand-up comics of our generation. And yet, however many people are going to be there 20,000, 40,000. The intimacy of being able to see someone’s facial expressions in a comedy club, if they’re an ant on stage, because I’m up in [00:47:00] Rosie’s Z, you know what I mean? And the cost was high.
Like a hundred bucks started at 60 and then the scalpers jumped in. And so now you can’t get anything for less than 80 and what you can get for 80 is not that great. And so it’s like, there are various different people that are kind of priced themselves out of. I don’t want to see them for that much.
You know what I mean? And as much as we have money, we can do that. It still is. There’s something just instinctive that says it’s not the right venue. It’s not the right atmosphere for it. When billboard comes around doing practice for his next Netflix or HBO special, and he’s going to be at the club because Louis Black has done that.
And George Carlin did that and others, that’s what I want to see. Get me the early word about Tom Papa coming. He’s getting bigger as he does specials. And who else? John Malaney. There’s all kinds of people that are now getting to that. Not only theater, but stadium level stuff. I don’t want to see anybody.
I don’t want to see. I don’t want to. Chris rock and a stadium. I don’t want to, you know, there’s really giants of the industry, Jerry Seinfeld, every stadium, I don’t, that’s
[00:47:59] Stephen: just [00:48:00] not that intimate. It’s ridiculous. Oh, well, you know who figured out this whole money thing, Douglas Adams, remember they sent all the telephone sanitizers and other people off world when they landed.
They used all the leaves as currency. So they were all rich, totally figure it
[00:48:20] Alan: out. They made sure that they had their bathtubs and their leisure time. Exactly. That what a great commentary that we’re really getting to. And there’s a woman named faith popcorn who has written a couple of great books. One of the terms I remember is the affordable luxury that people will really like top five things they really need to have in their life nutritionally in order to date.
Their Starbucks coffee for five
[00:48:45] Stephen: bucks, their newest iPhone,
[00:48:47] Alan: their newest iPhone, their ice cream. That’s the premium blend. Like you can get enough rice to feed a family for a week for the same price as what you just spent on that ice cream called that you just got. And yet people [00:49:00] can’t give it up because they don’t want to think that their life isn’t such that they can’t afford an ice cream cone or a nice coffee or a steak dinner or whatever else it might be.
And so that affordable luxuries, I think Coleen and I give ourselves some of those things, but not a lot. We don’t have potato every night we have, but
[00:49:18] Stephen: they never
see like
[00:49:22] Alan: that. Exactly. I, I think that like, again, it’s kind of like we, all our discussions often intersect and get spiral and stuff. One of the things that the fire movement does, it’s not a formula, but it sure makes you aware of. What am I trading off when I buy this thing, do this thing. How do I spend my time and my money so that I can say, well, my, my desire to go see more of the world is bigger than any particular meal that I might have.
It really is. You know what I mean? At this point, eat a lot of beans and a lot of, I don’t even know, like not subsistence level stuff, but I sure don’t need to have [00:50:00] fine cut pork chops, every single meal in order to be, I want to go to see a guazzini falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil and whatever I need to do to get
[00:50:11] Stephen: the oldest.
He kind of has identity crisis at times. Um, but I’ve had this discussion with him and try not to be lecturey and you’re doing this wrong type thing, but he quite often he’ll get paid. And then, uh, within a day or two, he’s like, well, I have no money. Why do I never have any money? I’m like Frankie, because you woke up yesterday more.
You ran all the way into Ravenna, drove your car to buy talk about first thing in the morning, then you came back home. Then you drove into Meyer to buy batteries because you need a batteries. And then you drove back home. Then for dinner, you drove back into Ravenna and you got, um, a and w and then you drove back home.
I said, so that’s why you have no money because you spent [00:51:00] every bit of gas you spent was unnecessary. Number one, number two, you could have gotten batteries in Ravenna when you got the
[00:51:08] Alan: taco bell
[00:51:11] Stephen: and even picked something up. I said, but instead of buying the fast food, if you went to giant Eagle or all these, you could have bought enough food for, to last you a couple of days, then you wouldn’t be driving out.
I’m like, Um, if that’s how you want to choose your, spend your money, that’s fine. But you can’t then whine and complain to me that you have no money. I’m not going to take both. Um, and, and he even did, he went shopping once a couple of times and said, oh my God, you’re right. I can’t believe how much food I bought, but then his other problem is he’ll make it and have leftovers.
But then I go, I don’t feel like it. So he ends up throwing them away after a couple of days. So half of the food he bought, he threw away because he didn’t need the
[00:51:51] Alan: leftover. Yeah, exactly. You know, uh, I went to college and lived very leanly because [00:52:00] money, I earned my summer jobs and went, my parents helped me with half.
It was still less than what college costs, even back then. And nowadays, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be spending $20,000 instead of $5,000 on college. But having said. W w we’ve laughed about it. You know, I really was a very, very lucky to have all kinds of good college learning experiences. And one of them was when you have no money, you’ll learn to really, like I could get a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and eat for a week for $2.
If I had to everything that I choose not to do that it’s a choice. Instead of the only thing I can do is go to taco bell or to Garcia’s pizza or whatever else it might be. You find a calendar with coupons in it. And it’s like, wow, that’s going to be my treats. Is it each week? I get the tear off that burger king thing and go get, get one Whopper with one that you buy.
And, well, I don’t need to eat two Whoppers as much as I want to because I’m really hungry. I save one for tomorrow. That’s tomorrow’s lunch. And then you discover, well, the whole thing doesn’t [00:53:00] microwave, well, you need to take the lettuce out, but it hits that. I like I, whatever I did to make it. And out of pride, not going back to my parents for more money, I was already working multiple jobs, but it just you’re earning a minimum wage job.
You know, back then it was 3 55 an hour. It was nowhere near the 15 that we have nowadays. It just was, you did what you had to do. I had a place to live and a place to sleep that was safe. I was going to school the most important thing. I made all kinds of sacrifices to make sure I was doing well in my studies.
And that. And even then like, well, what free I can always go to the library. I can always go to Plato. I can bike around the campus and make little out runs into various different small cities. You find your entertainment without having to be, wow. Doesn’t always
[00:53:47] Stephen: have to cost money and the fire movement that it’s a big mindset thing.
I think that’s the biggest part of it is mindset because I’ve tried to get to the kids. Yeah. It’s like, okay, [00:54:00] dad’s lecturing again. But I, I tell him, I’m like, okay, look, we all like music. So we have Spotify. Now we have Spotify for the family. So that’s six of us. It’s $14, $15 a month. That is not outrageous.
That’s not horrible. No, one’s going to say, oh, you’re going to go broke with no
[00:54:18] Alan: reasonable 10 cents a day.
[00:54:20] Stephen: Essentially. I like. I can take that $14 and over a year, that’s almost 200. If I put that 200 towards a car, it pays off faster than them in the interest. I’ve saved $500 in interest just because I didn’t have Spotify.
I’m like, you know, just trying to get the point across that I can listen to the radio. I can go to the library and check out music. Heck even YouTube has just about everything nowadays. So again, it’s that mindset you’re choosing to spend your money on Spotify, which means you need to work to pay for that choice of listening to music.[00:55:00]
If you didn’t have, if you didn’t have Spotify, you wouldn’t have to work for it. You didn’t have Netflix. You wouldn’t have to work for it if you didn’t have, you know, so it’s those choices. If you, if you need $3,000 a month, you have to have a job where you’re making 3000 a month. Whereas if you only need a thousand of them, That’s a lot less hard working to get that
[00:55:20] Alan: that’s right.
And I don’t know everything that you saved now, you know, all I have to do is show the little charts about the compound value of money over the course of time that it’s so incredibly convincing. One of the, the Lincoln millionaire book. One of the things she really talks about is that there’s three ways to become a millionaire.
One of them is you’ll catch lightning in a bottle, be the entrepreneur that really makes a successful business. Another one is to be a really good investor that you actively manage how you’re doing it and get better than market returns, if you will. And another is to be an optimizer that you watch your spending and you get the most value that you can in every way.
And then put everything aside. Following index funds instead of, and the first two [00:56:00] are pretty hard. Not everybody has it in them to be a successful entrepreneur to have that wonderful, great idea. Not everybody has the combination of smarts pattern, finding and discipline to be a successful investor to get ahead of the market.
15% of all professional money managers. Don’t beat the market for the year and you think you’re going to, so it’s this, you know, what being the optimizer is something that everybody can do. They can be aware of where they’re spending. They can be, he felt little budget and don’t go over the budget. And then the money that you put away in an index fund we’ll guarantee Dudley over the course of time, the 6% a year compounded gives you that, like, you know, that you’ll double your money in eight years.
You’ll double that again in 16, between, you know, starting to work at 18 and kitty go like you name it 48, 45, 40 30, depends on how much you keep saving. He was talking about having one year, they had a savings rate of 78%. And most people think of savings as like, I struggled to make it five, maybe 10 is impossible.[00:57:00]
They really just lived incredibly leanly and put all their money to work. And, and, and it really is reproducible and kind of almost quoting directly from her in the book. The reason that it worked for her is that this wasn’t depending on her to be an extraordinary human being. Except that I guess that disciplined way, but you don’t have to be ultra smart.
You don’t have to be ultra lucky. You, you just have to be, I can see the end and I’m not going to get that goal out of my mind that all of these small concessions are worth for the rest of my life. I’m 31 on, she gets to like travel the
[00:57:32] Stephen: world. Yeah. Oh, with when I showed the kids because we had three of them graduate, uh, boom, boom, boom, three years in a row.
And when Sarah graduated, she got 800 bucks for graduation, from family, friends and stuff. And I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but I pointed out to the three of them. I said, look, and I put, you know, calculators, if you take this $800 and put it, invest it, do nothing else. [00:58:00] At age 55, you’ll have $58,000. And they’re like, oh, well, but I want to get a TV.
You know, and I said, even better, you put this 800 in and you put $20 in a month, $20, that’s it, nothing outrageous. It went up to like $1.2 million by age 60 or 62.
[00:58:24] Alan: Exactly. You can retire in safety and comfort and so forth. And just by 20 bucks is I didn’t get a pizza that,
[00:58:31] Stephen: you know what I mean? I didn’t get to Starbucks.
[00:58:35] Alan: I mean, it just, it’s amazing that sometimes the concessions are so small that you’re like, wow, I sent that out loud and they listened and yet they didn’t do it. Right. That’s just so much nothing. Right.
[00:58:47] Stephen: But, but they were 1820, you know, until they hit 50 that they’re go, go damn like you have
[00:58:55] Alan: a bit, as you want to imagine.
You’ll Colleen she’s down in Mount Vernon today doing [00:59:00] enrollment meetings for a big company. She hears from everybody, you know? So you want to do, at least you want to, you want to start saving, you want to put money into an investment. Do you want to put enough so that if the country company has a match, at least put that much in cause that’s pre money, they’re getting you money on top of your salary for this.
And as you get towards what’s the maximum that you can put in based on your salary and by, you know, government rules and stuff like that. A lot of people just start to get really shy about, wow. Like we said, 8% that really already hurts 10% no way. And that you could do like 27% or whatever like that once in a while, she’ll get that person that really is that disciplined.
That just says it’s math. I get the math, let’s do this. I will try it. I’ll see if I can live within my means. If not, then I’ll back off. But if I don’t even try it, then I don’t even have that sense of. Um, that long-term goal is worth it. They just automatically, like you said, I need a car, I need a TV. I need new clothes.
I need there sure. Is a lot of stuff that we all need. And we really do. You can’t go, we can’t wear threadbare clothing. You can’t have an [01:00:00] undependable car. Right.
[01:00:01] Stephen: But we’ve said it before. We’ve said it before. And the hard thing is, uh, getting a credit card, getting that car loan, wanting to get a big house.
And then at 30, 35 then saying, okay, I made a mistake. And then trying to back off on all of it, if you start off, well, I don’t have any money now, so it’s not going to hurt me to put $50 away. And you don’t notice it. My, my Collin, he’s doing pretty good. He’s got like 8,000 saved up in the bank right now.
Yeah. You know, he’s. Um, he has no credit card. He doesn’t have a car payment, you don’t have a house payment. Um, so, and he’s really, he’s like, I don’t want a credit card. I don’t, if I can’t pay cash for it, if I can’t save for it. And he did something fantastic. When he went to the Chicago Comic-Con he had a couple of things he wanted to get, and he was like texting and showing us, he was like, oh, look, I got this.
And it’s like, well, how much was that? [01:01:00] 750 bucks. It’s like, holy crap. He’s like, hold on. It’s money. I put aside for a couple months saving for it, but he said, I still have money. I put in savings and I paid you guys your rent. And I bought food. So I’ve paid all my bills. I also saved money. This is all. And yeah, you can say, well, if you had put it in investing, he that’s what he did, but he also enjoyed it.
So, you know, I think he’ll do a little better than I have in life with that.
[01:01:30] Alan: Well, I’ll tell you it’s not zero to a hundred, you know what I mean? It really is. Whatever that happy medium is. And for some people, unfortunately they tend down to that really low, like 10 to 20%, instead of can you even pursue getting to 50, if you really can save that amount of money, it’s amazing how much that bounds up quickly.
You know what I mean? And in good markets and bad, and in over the course of time, the market all was correct. You know, so some people, they, they invest and, oh my God, the market goes down and they lose 30%, 50%. It really is possible. And then that makes them shy about the market for the [01:02:00] rest of their life.
But that’s the thing, I guess, you know, the, the, the performance over the course of time is almost a guaranteed thing. Every pattern has the great depression to now, and you just kind of have to like. The money the last three days after watching my stuff plug, you know what I mean? I hit a high back in February of last year and then kind of had a, just a straight across a year after my initial making 200, 300%.
I was as high as 233 at one point up in like two and a half years, which is kind of amazing. The only mean to beat the market at 6%, 8, 12, 20 5%. I was well ahead of that. Well then as happens, the market says, well, that’s over, we’re going to have you be kind of even, and then plunge, but I haven’t had to sell anything off.
One of the things that fire talks about is the worst thing you can do when you have set up that system is they have to sell when the market is down, right things to cushion yourself against it. You have cash. We have [01:03:00] things that have a slightly higher yield that you ladder. All was, there will be the cash you need to live on without having to bail out.
When the big assumption about things that going upwards is wrong for that year, that two years, whatever else it might be. And they’ve been able to do that. They weathered like 2008, which was the last time we had a huge correction. Correction is such a gentle term for people jumping off buildings because they lost all their money.
You know what I mean? Her houses, you know what I mean? And, and luckily I’m, I’m doing fine in that regard that we have, I’ve been able to weather this entire downturn without having to say, well, we time to sell some off because we have to eat. We still have money coming in. And, and it’s it’s, um,
[01:03:50] Stephen: I don’t know.
I, the thing that you and I understand what the whole fire movement is, they highly encourage you to do some interpreters. If you have a job, keep your [01:04:00] job, but have a side gigs, have a side business, have some other income streams, because what if you lose your job? What if you get hurt? You need something else.
And you know, you and I have that mindset. I know it’s difficult with my wife. She doesn’t have that mindset and she doesn’t get the cause she’ll say, well, did you get paid for doing that? Well, no, but it’s part of an overall thing and it’s building to this other thing. Well, how long is that going to take?
Uh, I’m not sure. You know,
[01:04:28] Alan: but it’s yeah, like one of the things the talks about very well is if you’re having to continually be thinking of optimizing your salary, because that’s your source of income and that’s where you’re going to use to live off of. It’s a different thing than saying I already have my living expenses.
Like versus 40,000 a year, you know, when they looked at their budgets and over the course of time, that seemed to be a pretty good average and no deprivation. That really was them living well. Well, the market goes down and instead of being able to take out 40 cake and we’ll take out 35, well, then what you need to do is just make 5k from a side hustle, [01:05:00] not 40 K, not 120 K not w you know what your former salary was when you were a practicing coder for you own Amina, an engineering firm.
So it’s incrementalism, if you will, that says I’m not deprived when I’m just down 5k. I can easily kind of make that up by getting a part-time job returning to my old job as a consultant, learning a new.
[01:05:24] Stephen: Some things you hear about people doing sometimes you and you laugh, but people and not Vagrant hobos or anything, they go through the trash cans and pull out aluminum cans, take them in.
Yeah. I might only be getting a couple bucks. Didn’t cost me anything. Or the, the kids that, uh, go diving in the pool at the golf course, pull up the balls and then resell them, you know, or, or tell the manager we’ll do that. And we’ll, you can have them back, but it’s going to cost you this much. There. I think we have so many opportunities sometimes, but we’ve been almost trained to not recognize it [01:06:00] all the time.
You know, our neighbors have a garden and they put up and sell vegetables. I don’t think they’re ever getting rich doing that, but it’s kinda nice to end the weekend with an extra 30, $40 in your
pocket.
[01:06:11] Alan: I didn’t have to buy the cucumbers and the carrots and the way that we call you. And I have talked about that often as a, it would be nice to have fresh herbs, fresh vegetables.
So that’s kind of why we’re going. But in some ways, it’s like, wow, if I didn’t have to go to Costco and spend that 20 bucks on lettuce, cute peppers to make our salad, I’d love to have the salad coming in for free, from outside. Cool. And everything, you know, even brighter, even less travel time on it. You know what I mean?
Like
[01:06:39] Stephen: this pepper offline, you get the side benefit. If you do your own guard, I mean, we have enough room, we’ve done a garden. We’ve got barrels out that we’ve been doing some gardening. And so you have that side benefit of you’re outside in the sun. You’re getting fresh air as fresh as you can get a little exercise.
So the health benefits, it reduces [01:07:00] your stress. Those are as quantifiable, but over time can make a big difference. The problem is you never really know it. You don’t know if, well, I had a heart attack at 62. Well, if you hadn’t been gardening, you might’ve had it at 55, you know, you’ll never, never know.
[01:07:18] Alan: Yeah, that that’s an overall thing.
Just, I don’t know all of those lifestyle things. How can I do it without adding stress? You know what I mean? Like a lot of this is being more secure in your money. Absolutely. As a de-stressor, you know what I mean? I just read an interesting article about breast isn’t what kills you, but it is the ongoing no end in sight, no, making it better stress that really just flood you with cortisol.
And you’re continually in that weird fight or flight panic mode. A challenge that you can overcome is actually really good for you. It, it, it gives you confidence that the way your body handles cortisol and adrenaline and so forth, when it’s, I was able to overcome this, it does all the right things for your, your [01:08:00] physiology that you actually get less stressed in the overcoming of that.
So it’s picking the tasks that are like, wow, I don’t want to be continually in my house. Say I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough money. And that low-level stress will kill you. Whereas every time you go out and say, I didn’t have enough money. So I worked at the library, shelving books overnight.
I’m a night owl and you know, it didn’t make that much money, but instead of just saying, woe is me the, the act of like the first step of a journey, all those nice sayings that we have about, you know, get off your butt and doing anything is better than doing nothing. Adjust, for course, be a missile instead of a bullet.
[01:08:37] Stephen: You know what I mean? And honestly, with, if you have a computer and an internet connection and you can’t figure out a side hustle to do sitting in your chair at your computer, you’ve got a problem in our country, at least, you know, I, I know those people and, and I know people have said, well, there’s people in areas where they can’t afford computers.
I’m like, I get [01:09:00] that. But I’ve seen some of these people that are on welfare that are this, and they’re carrying a thousand dollars smartphone or they’re, they’re two blocks away from a library. Every single library has computers. I know, I know people say, well, that’s white privileged talking and you think of it, but go there’s libraries in every city in the country.
And you, if you look, you will find those inspirational stories. Well, you know, we would have to lay on the floor because of bullets rattling through our house, but I w got and went to the library every weekend and I did this and now I’m in this position in my life. I know it’s not an easy thing. And I know I never had to do that.
I understand it, but that opportunity does exist.
[01:09:46] Alan: Another thing that we’ve been talking about is, you know, work. So we’re planning on doing travel and I don’t want to be the white privilege asshole. So I kind of want to be, I don’t want to have money hanging out of my pockets, please. The way the world is now is that you don’t have to be that way at all.
If you have your cell phone, you [01:10:00] have access to the Mercado Libra in south American, central America. You have there’s multiple ways to do it. That the world is bypassing all the bullshit of cash and currency exchanges and hiding money under a mattress. And as long as you have a phone that with your password, it doesn’t help.
They might steal it because they want to sell the phone, but they can’t steal your wealth. They can’t see what you’ve accumulated in your life. And so I hope that people there sure is a lot of, uh, wonderful Ted talks and things about how we’re making the world better in a thousand different ways. There are no longer have to be burdened dung for fuel.
Now we have, you know, a little solar converter, that’s powering a village and about how to refine water and make food better and how to have economic opportunity created in ways that it’s not a matter of a big bank or the drug Lords loaning you money like some mafia at 40% interest and whatever else it might be, the world is changing and all kinds of better [01:11:00] ways.
And it is there’s all it isn’t. Um, there’s all kinds of people that are taking advantage of that that are successful, that are good success stories, if you will. And that the people that look at that and decide not to do it, it, isn’t only a matter of deprivation. And woe is me. It really is well, a very active choice to say, I want to be taken care of.
I want to get something for nothing. This is, this is, I’ve also seen studies that say the difficulty of getting yourself out of poverty. Is horrendous. You have to make it like to age 18 without having made any mistakes without having had a single disaster in terms of a bad disease or a car breaking daughter, whatever, to get to where you can actually get above the poverty line.
And that’s here in the United States. And I can’t imagine what it’s like in other countries where it still is subsistence farming and having to walk to get water because there’s no public water and all that. And yet the whole world is still working. Yes, let’s enable them. So many of my [01:12:00] investments are there.
I want the world to be a better place.
[01:12:03] Stephen: There’s so many stories of countries where these people were making $6 a month, you know, equivalent of what we, or, and barely living. But I am, I know bill gates has done some work with some of this and others, but the one thing that has changed is they can get a cell phone for less.
You know, $10 or whatever. And they’re running businesses, worldwide global businesses from a cell phone and it’s changing their lives. And I’m not saying it’s everybody again. I understand it’s not solving every problem, but that didn’t exist five years ago, 10 years ago. And it’s happening? Oh,
[01:12:46] Alan: a big shout out here.
My, my parents discovered wild probably 30 years ago, maybe for international. And we also often gave Christmas gifts of this to other family members. It’s a place where it says, in order to get [01:13:00] yourself out of poverty, if you give a family a goat, it really does give them the police. If that’s the right term for being able to make clothing, it gives them milk.
It gives them goat meat. Eventually it, you give them beehives, you give them various different natural things that fit into their lifestyle. It’s not like thanks for the cell phone, but I, I even have like the things
[01:13:21] Stephen: you want.
[01:13:23] Alan: But having said that. And in honor of my father, that’s what I’ve asked is anybody who wants to, you know, do a donation, don’t send flowers, do that kind of thing.
It, isn’t only about hunting my father, except for that’s a path for a lot of the world. If it really is that this community can get together and somebody has the goat and somebody has the bees and somebody has the seed, that’s going to allow them to grow their first crop and you get barter and then cash.
And then the community grows and that kind of stuff, it seems a little Pollyanna, but it’s not, if it’s really working, here’s where they’ve reclaimed land that they’ve made into arable land. And [01:14:00] they found ways to make sure that it wasn’t getting eaten by Berman, that it wasn’t that the red elephants work rampaging through that they, that they were safe.
And it wasn’t too close to the swamp or the alligator, depending on where you are. There are ways. Got ahead and not, if not only yourself, you’re always thinking of how do I make things better for my children for the next generation. I’m going to work a lot to make sure that my child doesn’t have to do that.
I want them to get educated that I want them to go to the big city or whatever else it might be. And technology is in many ways, enabling that to happen. Just like you said, five years ago, 10 years ago, it wasn’t even available. So I, I, when I watched my Ted talk, find out there’s a better way to, um, uh, you can correct people’s eye problems, you know, very inexpensive way.
They just have to have a clinic. That’s going to do that for tens of thousands of people. And then that really happened some [01:15:00] wonderful, selfless doctors and nurses put together this thing. And all of a sudden. This river blindness or a glaucoma or where wherever was affecting them. It’s so much smaller of a problem in that public health way.
And it just it’s
[01:15:15] Stephen: like one of the overall problems in it. I don’t know if it’s a human thing or if it’s our American culture and civilization, I don’t know which it is, but there’s a very, I think it’s a lot in our country, but it’s very much a lot of thinking of reacting instead of being progressively active against something.
For example, uh, I’m reading the first Reacher book by Lee child, which there’s my book shout out for the week reach, uh, killing floor by Lee child, uh, because the show was so good. Um, the style of the book is interesting. I can talk about that in a second, but one of the things, um, now I lost my train of thought.
What was I talking about?
[01:15:55] Alan: C breacher, um,[01:16:00]
Well,
[01:16:01] Stephen: I don’t know where you’re going. Yeah. I don’t know. Well, I, you know, if I remember it I’ll come back to it, but, um, it, it had to do with that, but the, uh, the Reacher book itself will, will digress to a whole new topic. It’s interesting because, um, the word, the word choices he makes are like two and a half cent words.
He rarely ever uses a five let alone a 10 or a 50 cent word. He really is very economical in what he does. And I was looking I’m like the largest sentence is like seven words. It’s mostly four and five word sentences, very short, uh, in that. And it’s interesting because when we were watching this, you
[01:16:42] Alan: know what I mean?
Yeah.
[01:16:43] Stephen: Okay. Yeah. And it’s not a lot of flowery description, not a lot of turn of phrase or anything like that. It’s very dry cut and dried almost and tells what’s going on, but it’s an action thriller. So. Uh, and I’m actually enjoying it and it’s very much what we were talking about. [01:17:00] Oh, okay. I’m just going to read a little more, it’s a short chapter.
Oh, there’s a clipping or I got to read more so I I’ve never read a Reacher books. Uh, I’ve tried lots of other thrillers and this is really the first in the thriller genre that I’m really like, I love this book, so there’s my bookshelf.
[01:17:16] Alan: I also have very good. I have not read those. And that you’re like, Hey, thanks for that.
And I remember it was already like 10 20 in the series
[01:17:25] Stephen: and his brother is writing them now.
[01:17:27] Alan: That’s wonderful. You know what I look forward to it’s I think I might’ve mentioned from last time, here’s my shot out of the guy H Atkins who took over writing one of the Spencer series that I’m doing Spencer in particular.
And then, um, he also has a series about queen Colson, um, uh, a returned vet that becomes the sheriff of a small town in a relatively corrupt town in upstate Mississippi. If I remember correctly, I guess similarly they’re, they’re sparsely written, [01:18:00] not florid pros. They’re very action packed, but they’re very good about, um, people, even just regular people are complex.
You don’t always know why somebody does something there’s multiple motivations and corruptions and. And graces that people have. And so there’s always surprises and trying to figure these things out, but it’s not the murder mystery of who did it only it’s well, why would they have done that, that doesn’t seem characteristic of them and who’s behind them that would have pushed them or that would have, you know what I mean?
Yeah. They were very intriguing in terms of the town is opening to you. It’s flowering, as you learn more and more about the characters and the generations and how a lot of people are suffering for the sins of their fathers. You know what I mean? And that, oh, wait, when are you going to make the break?
When are you going to. I don’t have to be the same drunk my dad was or wherever else it might be. So now I, um, H Atkins, the Quinn Colson books are really good and there was good stuff.
[01:18:58] Stephen: So before we go, uh, [01:19:00] let me give you a quick update on my programming challenges that I’ve been working on. So, first of all, I did finally get a new laptop, uh, and it has windows 11 on it, and it’s very nice.
It’s like a quarter of the weight of my whole life. So I’ll see how that goes. In a very exciting to me is not on my windows machine. On my fedora laptop. I got co Cordova figured out without errors, without problems and better yet. I used VMware to build a fedora BM that I also had it on there and it works and I can make Cordova and compile and build and push it out to Android.
I got to get it set up so I can,
[01:19:45] Alan: the whole point of Cordova is that it’s multi-platform, but you can really write once and then compile into various different environments.
[01:19:52] Stephen: Okay. And it’s a little outdated and they’re even saying, um, you know, they, they’re changing to progressive web apps and [01:20:00] things. I’m like, okay, that’s fine.
This does what I want right now. And a few things I’m playing with, but I am also taking some of my other development tools and putting them into a VMs, whether it’s Linux or, uh, another windows VM or something like that. Uh, because then I can go on my laptop and pull it up and I’m right there. So I can sit anywhere on my desktop.
I get a new machine. It’s all still on the VM. I’m transitioning to a lot of the programming stuff. And so I’m very happy. I got the Cordova working on fedora. That’s one of the,
[01:20:38] Alan: most to me, one of the most impressive feats of the last, let’s say 20 years of coding is that whole virtual machine. The VM thing that you’re talking about, the fact that they’ve been able to do emulation of entire other chips, that’s an entire other operating systems using.
I use parallels, but VMware fantastic. And I think it even supports more platforms and so forth. And [01:21:00] it’s just so cool to be. I, there was a time when I had my Mac and my windows box and I had multiple partitions on my windows box that I did all my testing in various different environments, different browsers and all that kind of stuff.
What was going to break in ways you didn’t expect, because things just weren’t perfect. They just weren’t. And nowadays you can really do that all for one box. You can create all kinds of virtual environments and have like a big checklist of, well, how far am I willing to go back? Here’s windows 11, 10, 9.
And was there ever windows nine anyway? You know what I
[01:21:33] Stephen: mean? I’m like eight to 10, eight to
[01:21:36] Alan: 10. That’s why I’m saying, you know, I, how far am I willing to invest my own time? And to making sure that even people who are like, I’m just not switching off 95, I just was, that’s my favorite window. It’s like, well, man, then you get to have the 16 crayon version of programs
instead
[01:21:51] Stephen: of the 64 Android, you know, all the different versions that, and I know people still like on an iPhone six and they’re on what 11 or 12.
And so [01:22:00] you can’t stop supporting some of the old stuff, which has always been the case. You know, I mean, there’s still people out there with COBOL running because that’s what they’ve done.
[01:22:11] Alan: It kind of can like, w I’m thinking about my time, like if I just say the compatibility level of this, and I don’t know that you can declare that now that they have the metadata that goes with various different installations, you really can say, this will not run on a machine that has at least these specs, at least this operating system.
And someone will read that and say, well, damn, I wanted to use that greeting card program, but it doesn’t work on my machine. I’m hoping that when they get three dammit, that things they really want to use, stop working on their old thing. They’ll finally get rid of the steam, our computer and move up to site
[01:22:43] Stephen: what I really want to do.
And they, I think they still offer this with VMware is my current desktop machine. I want to suck it down into a. That way, when I get a new machine and move into, I can have everything right there until I transition everything.
[01:22:59] Alan: That’s [01:23:00] right. To always have a place to retreat to. Instead of here I go across in the Rubicon now I’m really, you know, having said, well, I, I really, I have done things where I really always code to existing standards and I try to make the, I do everything they say I should isolating IO and stuff like that.
There’s like a back hearts game that started off on like and we’re up to like 15 now. And it continues to run and just think of the tightness of that code, that he really followed all the rules that he just didn’t. And I guess, you know, of course it’s a much less environment. There’s no internet associated with your Mac heart’s game, it’s you on the machine?
Not going off for other players, but that’s, there’s all kinds of things that broke for no good reason. I could tell there were various other games or were processes or whatever else. It might be. What a Testament to this guy, Korea. The, the, um, the teach text of the world where it just doesn’t stop running.
Cool. To see something that’s like that, you know,
[01:23:57] Stephen: I think a doom has been ported to [01:24:00] just about every system that’s ever been made since 93.
[01:24:04] Alan: Right. And I have an investment in unity, which is, you know,
[01:24:08] Stephen: that I’m programming in unity for you.
[01:24:11] Alan: Fantastic. Early on games had to learn all of these tough lessons.
You really had to be aware of what graphics cards they had, what system they were on, what the resolution, their screen could, you know, they had to do all kinds of stuff where they checked it for you and then said, what we suspect is the optimum environment for you is this, you can push it to this, then see if your screen works.
So games had to become really good about that. Unity was one of the first places that said it’s not only a matter of the installer that checks off. And we’ll give you a known good working class library, a non-working environment. That’s going to work 80% of the places that you might want to be going.
And we’ll maintain backwards compatibility, as well as working with the most modern fricking stuff you can find. And it’s no wonder that now they’re doing really well for everybody, wants to use it because who doesn’t want to write once and code to six [01:25:00] competitive 60 different environments not have to do all the IO weirdness of, well, this is different than I expected.
Anyway,
[01:25:07] Stephen: a lot of the Linux that’s kind of the claim. They, they try and put out, but it’s not the reality as much anymore. There’s there’s a lot of. Uh, modern. I mean, they’ve got the same issues on Linux that Mac and windows, you know, but up against, uh, and the worst thing I think, and this is something I want to talk about maybe next week, you know, the user interface, uh, just trying to get things running.
Sometimes I’m Linux is pull your hair out. I literally have spent probably days worth of time on my Linux machine in the last two months to get Cordova running because things have changed. So, um, I don’t have a support person to call. I look things up online and it’s too old, so that doesn’t help. Well, you know, just all sorts of issues,
[01:25:55] Alan: you know, to reference back to something you said about your cool new laptop.
It’s so [01:26:00] small, so thin compared to everything you have in. One of the most impressive demos I ever saw, you know, Steve jobs gone, he used to always be, he’d do with a big apple gum, either at the worldwide developers conference or at Mac world, the big reveal of what’s coming out that year and would often a whole bunch of stuff, you know, here’s the progression in the macro S and that kind of stuff.
And then the big reveal of course, would be the, always at the very end, the, oh man, one more thing. And he came like, I guess exactly. He came up with a Manila envelope, like the one that has a little clasp on it that you put the string. It’s like, well, what’s this, the first Mac air was in there. It fits into a Manila envelope looking as if there was nothing in it.
How cool is that, that they had made the entire row of all the various different connectors, so thin, and then. It was like, this is the future. He’s holding the future in his hands. You remember, I, we go back to Compaq where it was carrying [01:27:00] around a sewing machine on a screen that like this big cord and to see that kind of stuff happening in our lifetime.
But the first time you held an iPhone, that it wasn’t just a flip phone, it had a screen, it was an actual computer. The future is here. And the first Mac book air, where it’s just another getting to, we’re like, well, I’m just going to hold my screen and put it in my pocket, full glass. I’m just loving, seeing the next miracle come along.
And I’m not enough of a tech fetishist that I have to have the latest and greatest my head is
[01:27:35] Stephen: off what I love to see it.
[01:27:37] Alan: Exactly. It’s just the coolest thing.
[01:27:40] Stephen: So. All right. So before we go, I got . I got a trivia. You, you got one or you just want it. Oh, okay. All right. You might know this one. Uh, approximately how many words did Shakespeare invent that are in the English language [01:28:00] today?
And I say approximately, because what I, the, what I heard was this is the exact number and I’m like, eh, I’m not sure if I believe that. So I’ll say approximately.
[01:28:10] Alan: So I, I think I’ve seen a reference where it wasn’t words, but it was phrases that are in our language, you know? And so I know it’s hundreds. How about 300,
[01:28:19] Stephen: 300 words is your final answer for the daily
[01:28:23] Alan: double,
[01:28:26] Stephen: according to this.
And I tried to find a dispute, uh, and I did, uh, there are 1700 words in the English language that Shakespeare invented. Now, I would love to hear if somebody has something different. Cause that sounded really crazy to me
[01:28:42] Alan: because here’s what I would say. It’s a tricky question. Him being in popularizing the words, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he created that.
It’s true. And especially, like I said, if, when I include phrases in there, they have whole t-shirts that are filled with, you know, something we could this way called [01:29:00] knock on wood, or, you know what I mean, things that we really do use that, that I read somewhere, that if you want to just know about human nature, read the Bible and read Shakespeare.
You cover about 90% that it’s not only the words he used, but just the situations that he put people in about what really drives them. What, what, anyway, I, I don’t want to believe it because he really was one of the mass popular risers. If it wasn’t him who wouldn’t have been, but there’s people that are really good at, they hear it in a pub and then they kind of buy it being well.
So popular because of his plays went everywhere. It can be attributed to him really. The hold or whatever the word like to what’s up. Do you have any example of one of the words that he created? Like, did he make him begins and then Simpson stole it?
[01:29:48] Stephen: I’ll look that up next week.
[01:29:51] Alan: Send me a link to the article.
Cause I’d love to read about that. Cause I love that kind of scholarship. You know, the, we have a copy of the OED, Oxford, Oxford, English dictionary. And for those [01:30:00] who don’t know the cool thing about it is it tries to track back every word in the English language. The first time it appears it by saying, we have a copy of the OED.
We have it where it’s on tiny, tiny print. You actually need a magnifying glass because as you might imagine, there’s lots of words in English language and they’re trying to trace back. We’re really was first used in anywhere in
[01:30:23] Stephen: experience, tissue, paper,
[01:30:27] Alan: little things you put on the book at a school. If you’re really trying to show off, you have an OED.
I got for Colleen for her birthday. I don’t know that we make use of it, but it’s just very cool to have it in the house in case I wanted to look up. Um, so, uh, someone had to come up with, uh, uh, let’s see, um, whole to know who first used that term. Right. You know what I mean? And, and, and I’d be, I’d be really curious.
Like, it’s not kind of like some that roots, so [01:31:00] someone put it together, but someone first broke that out
[01:31:03] Stephen: and made it a word it’s interesting where some of them come from and how they changed through time to, yes.
[01:31:10] Alan: I I’ve read this word with the most dictionary definition, separate, distinct. That apparently it’s got like hundreds of definitions because it really does have multiple uses, multiple contacts and stuff like that.
And for such a little teeny word, you’re like off the top of my head, it really is, well it’s, you know, to put something down or to put someone in their place where I’ll call a report or it’s, you know what I mean?
[01:31:37] Stephen: Anyway, I’ll look that up. Cause I really want to find out a little more about that. There we go.
[01:31:44] Alan: I’m not always conscious that I need to be collecting good trivia and stuff like that, but that’s uh, yeah, I’m trying to deal what’s uh, I w we’re already like, thank you so much for your Truvia. I I’m anything about Shakespeare in school because he really wasn’t drying.
[01:31:59] Stephen: All right, [01:32:00] man, take care
