Episode 146 – Activity

Overview

We talk about our busy, but fun, Memorial Day activities – including Putt putt golf and CD music shopping. We debate whether it is better to get lots of music or attend concerts.

Recommendations

Hartville Flea Market

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blossom_Music_Center

Trivia

Before they were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, what was their band called?

Who is the 2nd greatest British person in history?

YouTube

Transcript

Stephen: Okay. There we go. Hear me, Alan.

Alan: All right. Good morning. I can hear you a little bit quiet. Okay.

Stephen: How’s this? Is that better?

Alan: Still a little bit low maybe. I think I have my, lemme see if I got mine turned down. Yeah. Because I was watching of course, something with guns and explosions and didn’t want to keep Colleen awake,

Stephen: ok. Ok. Hello, how are you after the holiday weekend?

Alan: Very good because for once we had like very little planned, any number of Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends are picnics and shows and whatever else gets sprinkled in there and three day weekend, I always encourage you to do more and instead we didn’t.

We didn’t resist. We just didn’t actively seek. And it turned out to be like every morning we could sleep in instead of having to be somewhere at 10 o’clock because hey, it’s a hike, or let’s go play the clued up game, or whatever else it might be. It was really delightful. And we also didn’t, sometimes we, we have done this in the past, Hey, we’ve got a three day weekend, we can really work on something on the house because we’re gonna have three days to tear it apart and clean it back up after a while.

And we did indeed make progress on various different things on the garden, on, I don’t know, just general cleanup and boxing, but didn’t take on let’s fix the bathroom or whatever else it might be. So it really was a tonic. And it’s funny, Colleen’s getting ready to retire and this was a little bit of one of those, like a trial run for if you really have total control over your schedule, very few obligations and stuff like that.

What’s your day like? What do you make a point of, Hey, if you don’t know what else you wanna do, what are you gonna put into it? So we did go for a nice walk in the Metro Parks. Good four miler. One of our favorite paths where it’s got a little bit of elevation gain and loss and gets into the trees instead of a long, where cars are driving, it’s just that air bath and that quiet and the dappling sun and stuff like that. It’s such a rejuvenating, wonderful thing. I have plantar faciitis nowadays in my left foot, and so it sucks because so much of how I intend to. Keep moving, keep going. Make sure my heart and lung function are good is cuz you go for walks all the time.

And now there’s a penalty for after I go for the walk, I get home and my left foot is sore and I actually change from gym shoes to hiking boots. You get a little bit more virum. And support for the ankle and stuff. And even that doesn’t seem to help. So this is stubbornness on my part.

I really have in the past I get aches and pains, but then you give it, when I was young, overnight, I’d sleep and heal up. Right then it was two or three days, and then it was a week and now it doesn’t go away, right? And I’m like how in the world am I getting, enough wear and tear on my body that it doesn’t heal up?

And so I really have to go to a podiatrist or a physical therapist or whatever else it might be when I’ve, and of course, I’m not many people. I don’t wanna be only ignorant going in, so things, bro, fix it. You’ll look up things and I’m pretty sure it’s plantar fasciitis. And apparently what it seems to be based on is I have mighty calf muscles.

I’ve had to get big leg muscles to carry all of me around all the time. And you can actually get a disproportion where your calf muscle is. Unless you actively do stretching exercises and massages and stuff like that, it continually pulls on the muscle that goes across, that wraps around your foot.

And that constant tension, that loss of elasticity or return to a resting, a good resting state, it really can screw you up. So I’m hoping that it’s not just what I read online because it can be full of, quackery and stuff like that, but it had diagrams. It really seemed to show what I was experiencing and what exacerbates it and stuff like that.

So I’m hoping that the podiatrist will say, yes, if you get these particular elastic bands and do these workouts, and do you maybe, oh no, I have to go in and get calf massages. I can do that for myself, but I just need to know what I need to do because I’m not gonna live like this. It’s been like a month, more than a month.

And I just hate not recovering. I’m used to being rugby tough and now it’s not. Yeah. I like, that’s that, soaps with the plans are, we still have national parks to visit and all those national parks require hike up to the top of mountain. And look at the vista. I can’t do that if I’m living in pain.

You know what I mean? Absolutely. I’ll put it this wayly. I can will myself. I did a four mile walk. With pain. So I can do it, but I don’t want there to be such a penalty that now I’m a hobble the old guy around my house. My house is made of stairs. When I go up to Skynet, it’s four flights up and I got two flights into the basement to do laundry, which is also on my list of things to do.

And it just it’s too high a penalty. I don’t wanna do it.

Stephen: And I think on the health topic, I think You talk to your doctor, talk to your podiatrist, whoever, and they’ll tell you, okay, yeah, it may hurt. And yeah, you shouldn’t work through the pain. There’s things you can do and you should balance that.

But don’t stop, because that’s the problem. People like, oh, my back hurts, my knees hurt, my foot hurts. And they stop. And my mother she’s 75, she’s gonna be 75. Yeah. And she does not look 75, she looks 60. And I know people in their fifties that look older than her, and part of it is she pushes herself to keep walking, keep trying to exercise, not just sitting there.

Yeah. She doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t do drugs, she eats well. So she’s a good testament to that. She kept my father alive for 20 years when they thought he should be dead. So there’s a testament there too, yeah.

Alan: Really absolutely. What you say. In, in, in Colleen’s family, there was a aunt June.

Maybe a little bit the same trajectory as my mom, had a fall or was had to be in a wheelchair following a certain point, and she didn’t have to be, but she chose to be because it was just enough pain and just enough inconvenience. And her son pretty much said, if you sit down, you’re never gonna get back up again.

And it was a throwaway line, but it absolutely proved to be prophetic that unless you like, keep your heart and lungs working keep your muscles, we’re bipedal people and so much of our lymphatic and circulatory systems are based on that. You’re using it, just like you can’t leave a car in the garage and expect all the hoses and everything else.

Like they, they deteriorate if they don’t get regular flexing and use, that’s what happens to the human body as well. And I don’t do enough stretching and all body work workout, but for sure I’ve always been a big walker and Calvin and I pride ourselves. We can regularly do a five to 10 mile walk and we never get out of breath and we, like some part of when you’re first. Starting a program and you really are. Wow. I went two blocks and I had to pause. We’ve, we haven’t been at that gate in that state for a long time. We really are pretty hardy. But I want it to be everything. All my joints and muscles, all that stuff has to keep working, right?

Because if I’m realizing, mighty me, I can be put down by two feet, if my feet don’t keep working like they should, all of that system. So it’s humbling. You know what I mean? I guess now for all the things I’ve managed to hold onto most of my vision and hold onto most of my lung capacity at 63, it’s just weird to be all that stuff with aging, it really does happen that your muscles get four shortened, your tendons and ligaments don’t do what they once did. You don’t heal from injury as quick. I really hate it. I really hate that admission that we’re, I go grade five in our head. Yeah. Honestly when I, all through the first 50 years of my life, I was always the guy that was called to help move because I was big and strong and I could grab one end of that couch, especially like the, the folded bed couch where it’s made a white dwarf star material because it’s got like metal folded inside of it and stuff like that.

And I, the next day I wouldn’t feel anything unless I did something wrong, unless I like did an awkward lift or something like that. But just muscle workout. I might get tired during it, but I didn’t seem to get cashed in by and now it is that, oh I, I. And it’s funny, I never mean to be the complainer, but again, trying always to geek it up.

Like, how do you fix this? It isn’t just, oh it’s more what can I learn? What, how, what can I adjust data. I had good success when I was first starting to get any kind of foot soreness to go to the shoes that were good about helping with pronation and was arch support. And they really made it that I didn’t have to worry about walking for the last 15 years.

And now this new thing is I actually got some inserts that were planter facia friendly and they haven’t fixed it miraculously like that previous version of Just wear different shoes and you’ll be okay. So it isn’t only that I’m getting it, it’s even some of my tricks that used to work don’t work anymore.

Fuck. You know what I mean?

Stephen: And not only that, health wise what you said about, running around and doing things I still get that oh, there’s this and this and this to go to, and now I feel bad. I missed it. I can’t do it again. It’s, and but it, it is very difficult to say, yeah, 20 things on memorial weekends is just a little too much and the relaxation and just taking that time.

Cuz I remember in scouts some of the best times were all of us sitting around the campfire for three or four hours doing nothing but talking and poking the fire and stuff. And that wasn’t planned, that wasn’t an activity event or anything, and we missed those sometimes. So you’re trading one thing for another.

Plus then you don’t realize how much stress it really is to jump outta bed, run to this thing, get to this thing, get the potato salad made to get to the cookout and get the fire going and cut the grass. And then you gotta go do this. And it act You’re having an enjoyable weekend, but there’s actually stress there and you don’t realize it’s, and you wanna talk about aging and hurting your body, stress will kill.

And it’s horrible for everything It does. The hormones and the chemicals in your body when you’re stressed and pe Oh yeah. Know people don’t realize cortisol. Yeah. And they, you actually will keep more weight on the more stress you are and the less stress you are. You could lose weight just by being less stressed and people don’t realize that, think about it or understand it.

Yeah. So there’s a lot of health to that too. But it’s so hard to say. No.

Alan: Like I said, we by a lot of time, like instead of as usual, we would have a family thing or a mental thing or whatever else it might be. And just by not actively seeking those things, we did still, we went and played mini golf.

And then, and it other like I said, kind of training. If you go mini golf one in the afternoon instead of first thing in the morning or instead of whatever else, like we, we went to a place that was loaded with people. We weren’t the only people to have this bright idea of perfect Saturday of Memorial Day weekend.

Weather’s beautiful, let’s go play mini golf. And yet we got that idea of this is what we’re going to do for in retirement. And I just read a great article that’s part of a book that talks about you really should look at how the world works and if you want to get more satisfaction, a better life, more opportunities, just time shift.

Just activity shift enough so that you don’t go to the ballgame where everybody else is at, because then it’s waiting in lines behind 80,000 people, and it’s waiting in lines to get a hotdog and whatever else it might be. So I understand more and more how like older people go to lunch at dinner at four o’clock at the Golden Corral because they don’t have to deal with any of the, put your name in for a reservation at the new snazzy popular restaurant.

Colleen and I really don’t have a love affair with new food, with trying new things all the time. And so we’re off that treadmill. And I guess even like playing mini golf instead of going to the beach or going to the ballgame or the things that are mega popular, we just don’t do a lot, do that a lot. And in fact, even the things we want to do, we still have lots of national parks to see and lots of, vacations like that.

But we’re gonna go in the collar times of April, may and September, October, where the kids aren’t outta school. And so you don’t have to combat that. Everybody else has to take their summer vacation while the kids are available to do it. And in fact, even like middle of winter, I don’t know. I want to go to Yellowstone and see the snow capped peaks and instead of hiking around, we’ll put on some snowshoes or some cross country skis, and there’ll be a different experience.

And what it is we’ll have this lodge like to ourselves, you know what I mean? Cost will be lower, less people there. So I don’t think it’s a matter of like hermity that is getting we don’t like people, but the overhead of all of that of more packed roads, more packed airports that you can’t go to any restaurant you want because they’re all full.

We’ve had some taste of that when we’ve done things, with the Mensa ag, often being around the 4th of July, we’ve learned to not do much more around the 4th of July, even though we’re right in the city that we want to explore because everybody is, everybody’s gonna be going to the fireworks, everybody’s gonna, so I guess.

I I’ve always thought that, and really always, as soon as I was in college, so I guess, 17 on, and I discovered that you, I went to University of Illinois big school, 35,000 students. But if you hung around for the summer and did some summer school, it was 5,000 students. And it was amazing how having all of these facilities available, I could always go play racquetball at the gym.

I could always go to the union and play. I would get a table and shoot pool by myself or with one other person and just so much more value. Yet this is back when it was like 90 cents an hour, but 90 cents was a lot to a student that only has five bucks a week. All of those things, and especially intercession when nobody else was there.

I loved the Omega man thing. I loved being the only guy in what used to be a huge populated place. And. And I just, so we’re looking like I, I have a book called What to Do When, it’s not only where to go, but it’s also, there’s certain things, if you’re gonna go see the Passion Blade, it only runs for these couple months.

If you’re gonna go see the Tarantula migration, it’s like this weekend. And it isn’t predictable, so you have to be ready to go with, okay. Without knowing it, it’s gonna be this weekend. Do I have the quick fare that I can just hop on a plane and go to Albuquerque or what? What I and I’m, we’re, I have a huge spreadsheet of all of those things.

I think I might have mentioned that Colleen and I signed up with Frontier Airlines for their Go Wild program. We pay 500 bucks for each of us for a year, and that’s not nothing, but you fly for a buck. Wow. Everywhere you go. And of course they know how to get you, they, it’s like you take a bag, then it charges you.

And if you want a particular seat, they charge you. But if what we want to do is just. Get on with one personal item that has changes of underwear and socks. And, kinda like maybe one pair, one change of clothes. Make it so that all that overhead doesn’t add to the cost of it. And we have a whole list of 30 cities that I wouldn’t mind going to Boise, Idaho is not a destination city, but there’s a, whatever, a cool zoo, a cool art gallery.

There’s all kinds of cities that have the right, when they put their best foot forward, there’s cool things to do everywhere. Yeah. And so we talked, it’ll be a certain amount of, I don’t know where we’re gonna go, but and not, and also not do it on the weekends. Go like Tuesday to Thursday again and again, turn the mail off the house, looks like there’s somebody living there, so are not gonna get broken in.

And just start to do these little extended three, four day trips where you explore as much as you can of Austin, Texas or like Boise, Idaho or Grand Rapids, or Cedar Rapids or Rapid. What? It’s, we’re rapid. Rapid, we’re making all these kinda contingency plans. And I know that some people like live in Miami in particular because they’re on those mailing lists that say, Hey, The cruise boat’s about to leave.

But if you can get to the dock by two o’clock tomorrow, you can be on the cruise boat for 10 bucks, a hundred bucks instead of 500 or a thousand. And we’re not big enough fans of cruises, but we’ll put that into the mix of, if I can get down to Florida, I can drive to Florida in 18 hours. You know what I mean?

Or I can fly if I get a good airfare. And the more that we make all these little contingency possibilities, like I wouldn’t mind spending another weekend in Milwaukee. There were cool things. We’ve already done it, but there’s cool things that we didn’t do yet. And I guess for lots of retired people, the travel is a big thing.

While we’re still spry enough, despite my having complainant, but I can’t walk anymore. You really, I think that we can still do this kind of stuff and for the next, I don’t know. 20

Stephen: years until we hit 80 and we really can’t do

Alan: it anymore. We can pack a lot of, yeah, exploring the United States and Canada and Mexico and most of Frontier is in that sphere, if you will, but you start to look at Europe or Australia like that too.

You’ve gotta do a little bit more planning. You’re gonna be over, I don’t want to pay a thousand dollars airfare and be there for three days. I wanna make it so that it’s worth it. So going to Alaska is still here in the United States, but it takes a certain amount of cost.

We’re gonna be wiser and wiser travelers. And again, to geek it up, I’m not having to do all this research only by myself. Just a little bit of research. And you find out that there’s all kinds of place called like Fair Drop and travel sites that specialize in finding those interesting deals. That if you have a little bit of flexibility in your schedule, you can get remarkably good prices or Right.

Hell yeah. Things that nobody else knows about, you know what I mean? And I’m looking forward to doing that solidly, like for a year and say, okay, we spent this amount of money, did we get that amount of satisfaction out of it? And if so, then do it for another year in two and three and five years, or have it be, wow, we really thought we were gonna enjoy a lot of traveling, but what we want to do is go on our driving vacations where it’s low stress like we just laughed about.

You know what I mean? All I know is I got a hotel that I’m gonna be in Ogalala and all I gotta do is get there and in the meantime I can stop at silly historic sites and the biggest frying pans and the mini golf course and whatever else it might be. Yeah. Yeah. And I, so it’s, somebody’s gonna be, by being impromptu, that adds a certain amount of stress.

But this is Long ago when Priceline came around first. Yes. I dunno if you make use of it a lot. Oh yeah. I used to have such luck with, hey we’re gonna be doing this series of cities on the way to Denver. And so I’d say let’s stay in, like not the big city, but someplace smaller, but it with enough hotels that there’s some price competition.

And I would start bidding it like 20 bucks, 25 bucks. And I can’t tell you how many times we got a hotel room and not in a no-till motel dump that these were best westerns and either names or established properties. That Priceline did a lot of the research for you. So you work in a walk into a, a terrible stinky place but for 25 bucks and prices for travel have gone up a lot since Covid, since whatever else, but they’re still whatever that interesting dynamic is between.

There’s nothing more worthless to the hotel than Friday night at 6:00 PM that if they don’t get someone to take that room, it’s zero. It’s $0 that they’re getting, right? So why not get 25 instead of zero, even if it would regularly go for a hundred. So we’re gonna see what we can do with Priceline type places, or Airbnb, booking.com.

There’s all kinds of places that have much expanded where you can stay. And so I’m sorry, I, oh, it’s funny. I think I just must like, I bottle all this up for you. As I love progressive rock. Yeah. And there’s a couple of progressive rock festivals that are taking place in the United States.

One in Chicago called Proto Fest, and one in New Jersey called Prague Stock. Both of those are drivable to me. Yeah. Prox Stock just moved to a new location in New Jersey in Rutherford instead of doesn’t matter, but I looked at it and said the nearest hotel walking distance is 500 bucks for being there for three days.

Wow. That’s a lot. Yeah. I go to Airbnb and I can stay in and it’ll only be me because Colleen, as much as she loves this music, doesn’t like the music immersion that I like doing, where I don’t mind going to see 12 hours of bands and stuff like that. I found a $40 room. And in, let’s see, I’m in, this is in Ruthford, so this is like in Clifton.

I know nothing about New Jersey. So I did a little bit of gee checking to say, oh, is Clifton the crime capital of New Jersey? Cause you know, I, no matter how much the rate is cheap, I don’t want to be that my car was then broken into. And that became a more expensive proposition than I thought. And Airbnb does, there’s it is the conduit for direct connections with various different people.

So here’s a young lady that like has two cats and it’s I like cats. And it just, I haven’t explored Airbnb enough and Colleen really doesn’t prefer it because Colleen likes a certain amount of privacy, like especially a bathroom. She wants it to be that we have our own bathroom, that you’re not walking down the hall in your robe with your toilet kit and whatever else it might be.

So as I explore this more, it’s gonna be cool to say in this gig economy, the places to stay has expanded tremendously. And in some cases it’s cool and unique. I get to stay in an A-frame in Alaska that is actually somebody’s home but spectacular view of Denali or whatever else it might be.

And that would never appear in a hotel listing or, and, but that’s still gonna cost because they know they’ve got this great view. Or if, I’m just trying to find that Priceline thing of 25 bucks, 40 bucks, whatever. And in this place in New Jersey is like minutes outside of New York.

And so I’m thinking that, we, Colleen and I have talked about going to New York any number of times of seeing all kinds of Broadway hot tick shows. Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s the cool Broadway experience as well as go to the Guggenheim, go to Central Park, New York is loaded with things you don’t even know what you want to do, but you just show up and start doing things.

And this place would be right off public cran lines that go into the city, so I’m not staying in the Ritz, downtown Manhattan where it’s ridiculously prohibitively expensive. But we’ll be out here safe, we’ll park our car, not worry about going in and doing the fight with traffic and the $50 parking.

Then instead it’s gonna be go there and take the train in, take the subway in or whatever. I’ll be a bridge and tunnel person, I’ll do that for a couple days.

Stephen: Definitely do not drive into New York and park at a hotel in New York. E either get a hotel that’s close to whatever event you’re doing so you can walk and then you’re just paying the cost but it’s, stress and stress free and easy or get something outside, like you said, that you can jump on the train and take it in and walk around and stuff.

Cuz man, there is nothing worse than trying to park and drive in New York City.

Alan: Exactly, and we’re the, that’s, like I said, there’s that list of maybe 30 cities I wouldn’t mind going to, but there’s still half a dozen like destination cities. I really haven’t spent enough time in New York. Colleen and I have not done it together yet.

And San Francisco and Boston, there really are world-class cities that you want to go to. But then it’s that how do I do it without the overhead and the hassle of now I’m driving in Boston where a street changes names three times in three blocks because it’s built old style, not grid style.

And it’s kinda, I have not driven in Boston and I was as white knuckle as I ever have been. And

Stephen: worse with New York, with all the skyscrapers, I lost GPS signal. So I’m like, I have no idea where I’m at. Pull out the Rand McNally. So yeah, there’s that too to

Alan: is like that.

We’ve been to Toronto for our comedy festival, and they have a row that’s 16 lanes wide. And I’m not exaggerating. And so it’s like, how, what do I do to stay in a place? And for September we found a place called, again, through, I think through booking, not Airbnb, condo in the city.

It’s like right downtown where we want to be. And it’s right along the cable car lines. And it, this was not inexpensive. It was actually a little bit pricey, but all the venues that we want to go to are going to be like, these three are two blocks away. The rest of them are all reachable by public cram.

And in between, like while you’re downtown, there’s we can stock the room off. It’s a condo, so it actually has a working kitchen and stuff like that. So it’s not eating out every night, which can run into money or every meal you go and get, a dozen bagels and cream cheese and you got your breakfast cupboard or you get a dozen eggs and they got, I could just, make some eggs for colli and I,

Stephen: Or heck, you can buy hard boil eggs now at the

Alan: store.

And that’s true too. Exactly. They’re even more portable. Yes. You know what I mean? So we’re We’ve really gotten good at travel already, but this is gonna be the next phase, of if it doesn’t have to be all purposeful in the plan. In the past, I’ve had my spreadsheets with day by day, where am I starting and finishing and what am I seeing along the way?

And it just, it’s ki it’s very handy to know today is a 300 mile day, so we really have a lot of time to goof off. If you’re going 60 miles an hour, that’s only five hours and we got 12 hours to get that done. So we can stop in any number of, jolly Green Giant Museum type places and not worry about getting in at one in the morning when the guy is even blue-eyed and maybe will not even respond to the buzzer at the door and stuff like that.

Stephen: Putting all your schedule on a spreadsheet minute by minute, that’s very Sheldon theory there.

Alan: See that’s what it’s not minute by minute because that would be stressful. Yes. But it is, I got the start and the end and where we’re staying and I got the address so that we know we can just put into the gps.

It’ll take us right to it. But then I got, I should bring this up on screen. I got a whole series of columns where it’s like, what’s the national park nearby? What’s the state park? What’s the museum? What’s the art gallery? What’s the oddity? You know what I mean? I have all these sources that I tap into where if I’m gonna be near Des Moines, what’s there to see?

Where’s Car Hedge? They got a place in Iowa. Yes. Or Kansas somewhere where they’ve got, they’ve built Stonehenge with putting in cars. Yeah. And regularly when we drive, we’re like in get, in order to get to the biggest ball of Twine, that’s an hour off the road, see it and then back that’s three hours deviation.

Whereas we’re coming up on, some guy did a sculpture garden where he made these himself and it’s just 20 minutes off the road in South Dakota and we’ve had such luck with, you don’t know what you’re gonna do, but you just scan the list and say, is today a Viking Ship Day? There’s a Viking ship here for some reason.

Let’s go see a Viking ship and that kinda stuff. And so that’s what I’m looking forward to is, I love reading those travel books, Atlas Obscure and there’s some things that really are destination type stuff. But there’s other things like Colleen loves Laura Ingles Wilder, who did the Little house on the Prairie Books?

And we’ve been to multiple sites where it’s the city that it was sat in, or it’s the city that she wrote in or and because they’re, they are, All over the Midwest, there’s multiple places to do this at. And if we managed to squeeze in half a dozen of those by now and not being like, we’re going to Missouri specifically to do this, but as long as we’re in Missouri why not?

And whatever the mini golf course, like I always laugh about whatever, like this is the most famous pizza. You know what I mean? Does anybody in besides, Chicago and New York are the two styles of pizza and yet there’s pizza all over the United States and sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

Sometimes Khale wants a steak dinner cuz she’s a mighty carnivore and I’m still a Chicago boy where I want the deep dish pizza that if you drop it on your foot it would hurt because it’s so dense. So so we’ve had such nice vacations out of that combination of a little bit of planning, a little bit of a framework, but then everything else is, what do you feel like, today’s a bad weather day then I guess it’s more.

Museums and art galleries inside stuff. And the next day we’re gonna go to Hurricane Marsh where, and this is one of those things we’re absolutely gonna do. There’s a place called Hurricane Marsh that’s right over the border into Wisconsin from Illinois. And it’s where tons of migrating birds, like millions stop at this place.

And so you go there and like you and I could be a yard from each other and not be able to hear each other talk because there’s a cacophony of honking and chirping and whatever else it might be. And just to see that kinda a massive nature. Whenever you see a murmuration of birds in the air and they do that.

Yeah. Where they’re making their own little patterns, cuz that’s what they do with their little flight rules and stuff. This is, that times a million and I don’t know what it is. I love that kind of overwhelming experience where the sound of it and the sight of it is, I’m just gonna sit here and drink it in.

I can’t really make sense of it. You hope that you’re gonna find patterns and you hope that it’s not that was the most bird poop I’ve ever had put on me in all my life. You know what I mean? But those kinds of interesting what, when type stuff I’m looking forward to Hey, I read the thing about horic and Marsh’s happening this coming weekend, like bargo.

Breaks out where there’s a desert area and if it gets enough water, the whole desert bursts into bloom like at the same time. And there’s rivers of flowers and stuff. And so if you live near San Diego, like my parents did multiple times, they just kinda read the San Diego, pick aune or whatever the newspapers called.

Right? And when they would read about, they’d say, let’s hop in the car. And we’re going out to Palms Spring

Stephen: and beyond.

Alan: And I’m pretty sure that the fall colors report each year is where are they really intense this year. And sometimes it’s all the way in the northeast of the K August highway.

Sometimes it’s right over the border in Michigan. Or like for whatever reason, the alders are great this year. The lindens are great, the oaks and maples and stuff like that. And I’m just looking forward to like having a whim of iron. You know what I mean? At one point we read historically the Niagara Falls doesn’t freeze.

One year we had such an intense winter, it did. So our car will run in the cold. We drove up, it was snow mounded on the sides of the road. It was just as bad a winter as you can imagine. But we went to Niagara Falls and it hadn’t totally frozen over, but, here’s the one rivulet that was left and everything else.

Fantastic ice sculptures. And if you’ve been to Niagara Falls, they have like lights underneath the falls. And so now instead of being underwater, they were getting crystallized, refracted through all the ice. It was spectacular. Better than anything Disney does, a little bit of mankind and a little bit of nature.

There was horror frost on all the trees and Like the railings, we had an inch of ice on them. Wow. So you’d go to hold out of the railing and your hands would slip was like, I can’t depend on that stopping me from going over. So be careful. The whole place is ice slick. It was like, I don’t know when’s the next time that will happen?

I hope that it will happen again. But we really found out about it. Took advantage of it and I’m looking forward to more of those. You know what I dunno. I have all these subscriptions, I guess the various different newsletters and especially nature things will say, Hey, for whatever reason it is salamander weekend that this is when they’re out and they’re breeding and they’re mating.

And I really wanna be like, I don’t wanna intrude on them, but If you don’t go to where you can see more salamanders than you’ve ever seen before in your life, that’s a cool thing. By luck, we did that at Johnson Woods, and I think I mentioned that in the past where the frogs were all out and again, kick confidence, like everybody’s riveting and they all have their little part of the spectrum that is the oral spectrum where different frogs will find each other based on, that’s the rivet.

That means it’s the the red toed frog and this is the, the greenback frog and whatever else it might be. And that’s just a cool thing to to luck onto or purposely go to. Whenever there’s a possibility of Northern Lights, there’s a special amount of ionization in the atmosphere, right?

And instead of having to go to Iceland to do it, maybe it’s gonna penetrate down into like, where I could see ’em over Lake Erie, or up until Lake, I’d be willing to drive up to pretty high in Michigan or over into upstate New York. Get away from the cities where there’s not a lot of light pollution that’ll stop you from seeing it.

And it’s I, who knew that I, in my lifetime, I’d be able to see that just like by going up to Lake Huron or something like that. So I’m gonna have all that kind of in the mix. And this is interesting. I just wrote a post a while back about, I just read Time and Newsweek, no Time and the week, and it was relentlessly negative that it seems like so much of the world is just crazy politics and crazy business and war and famine and pestilence.

The four horsemen are upon us. It really was hurting me. I really was like, I don’t want this to affect me. It doesn’t really, I need to be aware of, I have friends that are affected by this and the economy the health of our country is affected by crazy people who don’t know what they’re doing, except I wanna see it all burn.

And so I have a desire to not be immersed in that every single day. But because I have this always learning, always curious, what am I gonna substitute for that? And so I’m looking for these kinds of travel lists and cool history lists and wow, I didn’t realize that there was some science tourism that I could go to right near here because you know about the Wright Brothers, they’re right down state in Ohio. There’s all kinds of cool things that are like that where if I drive a couple hours just to see, here was the first Combine harvester that was commercially viable and they still got one working. I remember seeing something like that down in Asheville North Carolina, et cetera.

And I want to go like, where’s the Commander Perry Monument? And found out that up off of, on one of the islands that are out in Putin Bay, they actually have a place where when the glaciers retreated, in some cases they really scarred the earth and things have been revealed now from erosion or whatever, that you can actually see exactly that kind of gr glacial scraping and that’s two hours drive away.

I just gotta make sure I get there when the fairies are running, you. I’m, I know that I think this is geekery, right? That you’re curious about everything. Yes. And a little bit of research puts it in your hands. You know what I mean? If I just, if I go actively looking or if I just set it up that I’ll be given every week 20 up opportunities to do things that I didn’t know about.

I, I love it.

Stephen: I love it. And we’ve talked about that, and you said this earlier too, for some people, the, oh yeah, we’ve got great events planned. What are you doing? We’re going to an a, a Guardian’s game. We’re going to a Brown’s football game. Really? Yeah. We’re spending $500 for the hotel, for the tickets, for the popcorn and peanuts and beer and and it’s like really?

Because what you just mentioned is that’s what they love,

Alan: More power to them. But I find those things repetitive. Yeah. There’s not a ball game that ever been to that was so significantly different than it was like, I can’t work Great to go to more. Once in a while you’ll get heroics. Most of the time it’s a three, two

Stephen: game.

And, but I’ve got, right here in Akron, we’ve got the rubber ducks, which used to be the arrows. And most of those games are like $9 and you can sit anywhere. So

Alan: We looked into that for this weekend. We were like, are the crushers or the captains or the rubber ducks in town? And actually Akron is a beautiful place, but it’s even bigger than I want to go to.

I want to go to a place where it really is like dollar hot dogs and you’re in the bleachers where there’s there you’re, it’s real sun and you can get like right behind home plate and that kind of stuff. That’s the, not even triple A AA single, a ballgame experience that I like.

Yeah. But it’s so American, it’s exactly,

Stephen: yeah. It’s more fun. He’s running the bases in between innings and

Alan: stuff like that. They shoot t-shirts out at you. Yes. I love that Cordy stuff.

Stephen: Yeah. And like you said, I’d rather spend, If we went to a guardian’s game and tickets were 50 bucks for me to take my son, maybe my mother, that’s $150 to go.

Whereas I could spend 40, take all three of us to a rubber duck game and still get the hot dogs and the banana split and exactly. And it’s closer if nothing else. So

Alan: That’s right too. The overhead is less. Yeah. By the way, I should. The I, so there’s a thing called fire that I think I mentioned before.

Financial independence retire early and col colleena not retiring early, but we’ve done so much stuff to get us to this place of we have no debt, own our house. We really we’re okay, we’re gonna be fine for the rest of our lives with what money we’ve managed to put together. And there’s a guy named Mr.

Money Mustache. I’m not making this up. That’s one of the main guys known in this movement and he’s currently putting out Like his greatest hits. He’s probably written 500 columns over the last 25 years. I think that’s about how it is. And he’s now culling out what are the best ones that really explain his life philosophy.

How did he get to where he is retired early. They live a great life. And so much of it, like it resonates with me in terms of do your research, be like, don’t get suckered in by expensive always equals better. All that kind of stuff. And so the references that I just made about time shifting that I thought about he just captured that really well.

He talked about what you just did. I’m, I don’t wanna go to the big concerts anymore. I don’t need to see Taylor Swift. I wanna go to a place where people are great musicians. They just haven’t made it yet. But that immediacy of you being 10 feet away from them instead of a stadium where you’re a stadium away.

Yeah. From whoever be performing, we’ve had wonderful time at the Elton John show where we were one of 80,000 seeing it or something like that. But we’ve also had. Equally, if not better, wonderful times where we’re seeing a band called Project coming Up, right? It’s guys who are in big progressive rock bands, but they don’t always tour.

And so they’ve gotten together and say, what are all the songs we love playing that we like grew up with? And so you go there and you don’t just hear Merian music or Kansas or whatever we love, you hear a bit of everything. Some yes and some genesis and some Gentle Giant, especially some songs that, the bands aren’t around to do it anymore.

They’re orphaned songs. And so when you hear it, it’s man, I was dreamed of hearing it and these guys can really play it. It’s not like toddlers, right? Playing to try to capture a Rickman solo or something like that. And that’s 10 bucks, 20 bucks, not 80 bucks tickets. I don’t think it’s being a cheesecake to say, how can Ima, if I do four of that kind of show instead of the, one of the amazing show, I don’t need to see Genesis or Pink Floyd or the big bands where it’s an arm and a leg for a ticket.

I love them, I want to hear their music. But all that overhead and all that expense, I keep thinking, man I could have four shows for that price. You know what I mean? It, yep. So I’m getting to that of, I just like live music. I don’t know that I need to hear exact exactly what I want to hear. And it being exactly perfect.

Just the energy of a live concert is enough. Yes. So you go to the Music Box supper club and especially there’s all kinds of bands as that they might have been popular 30, 40 years ago, but nowadays you can see Robin Trower when he comes to town, one of the best guitarists ever and see him for 30 bucks.

You know what I mean? So I’m what an injustice it is that the world has not made sure that him and Jeff Becken all my favorites are not like the towering people in the industry. That is, that it’s, dozer. Cat and Taylor Swift and yeah, good for all of them, but I’m not a 14 year old girl.

That’s not my kind of meat, God. You know what I mean? And I’m,

Stephen: and I’ve been to plenty of concerts that I spent some good money on that. It really sucked that I’m like, this is not worth it. You could be a huge band and st I went to my I talk about this. Multiple times, but I went to the Farewell tour of Motley Crue.

I’ve seen him since the Farewell Tour.

Alan: So who I think retired like eight ties before they

Stephen: we spent some good money on the tickets and we got it was blossom. We were in the pavilion. We made sure and got some good seeds, and the sound was horrible. And we were like, I have no idea what they’re singing right now.

I can’t tell what the notes are. And Vince Neil’s voice, it was like, oh my gosh, did he gargle bleach before coming? Did he hit the right notes? And it was just like, wow, that was a waste of time and money, yeah. So it doesn’t matter how big they are, you don’t necessarily get the best experience.

I I could have spent that money and bought all their albums and been just as happy at the end.

Alan: Honestly, it’s coming to that a little bit. Colleen really doesn’t like crowds a ton. And I never minded because I’m a big guy. I’m not the guy that gets elbowed in the face. You know what I mean?

I’m, I, so we’ve gotten, I’ve gotten much more selective about, I don’t wanna subject her to, there’s gonna be somebody in front of her that is gonna be standing the whole show and then she can’t see. Getting in and out is torturous for her because of the crowd madness that occurs when people are too tightly packed and stuff like that.

And I’d rather sit at home and listen to Elton John music, though. We went to see that one, Bruce Springsteen, we didn’t go. And I really love Bruce Springsteen and that’s actually our first wedding song and stuff like that. Nice. But the overhead was just, it was an expensive ticket and all of that.

I used to sleep out to get concert tickets. I used to really be the guy that would do almost anything to see a band that I wanted to. But it’s also, I’ve seen almost everybody, like the ones that I’d be willing to pay big bucks are the ones where I missed them. I’ve never seen Manfred vans or band, and that’s not even a big thing to most people.

But I would love to see them live because I haven’t yet. Whereas I have seen Pink Floyd and Genesis and all my other favorites. Only I didn’t see Queen before Freddie Mercury left us. And that’s another one. Like it’s not only, I don’t know that I wanna see him with Adam Lambert or Right.

Other substitutes. Paul Rogers, I think was in that with them for a while. A while. Yeah. I, and I’m worried about as the bands get older, like you were saying, I don’t want to hear that. Boy, that’s not the voice anymore. From what I, if Lou Graham, we went to see Foreigner and his voice was cashed, and maybe now he’s recovered, but when there’s so much a part of the band is Brad dealt for Boston, or Lou Graham for Foreigner or whatever else it might be.

And they’ve lost the step. It hurts, right? It hurts to be like, oh and oh, and Lou Graham like forgot lyrics. At one point. So it’s man, you don’t care about it enough. Why am I here giving you my hard-earned money? Exactly.

Stephen: Et cetera, et cetera. So it’s funny you mention all that because we went to the Harville Flea market over the weekend, which is huge on the holiday, weekends in the summer.

This, you literally can take four, five hours before you can stop at every booth and see the stuff. Yeah. Wow. It’s what Harville did you say? Hartville. Hartville, yep. Okay. Okay. Yep. I actually set up a table and had my book on there for author to get some interest. I sold a couple, got some interest, talked to some people, so I didn’t like, I’m like, oh, I’m rich now and everybody knows me.

That didn’t happen. But I was good with that. I had other things I was trying to do with being there, so I was okay with that. But, Afterwards for you. And in between here and there I walked around and Colin was there. We walked around and looked for whatever reason, we got the bug and we started hitting all the CDs.

And when my, when his mother and I divorced, she took a lot of the music. Now I’ve had some of it replaced. I’ve got it on boy Spotify, but I still love the cd. I wanna have the C and my car currently only has a CD player. I can’t do digital or cassettes or anything. So we walked around and started digging through all the albums and I’ve.

For years at Christmas, I always get call in a collection of classic rock albums. Now I haven’t gotten everything. Yeah. But I’ve gotten a lot. So he’s digging through. He is oh, you didn’t get me this one. He is blown out all the, I’m like wait, I want this one. And we started that frenzy almost of fighting over what we’re gonna take.

And I’m like replacing albums that I, she took and I don’t have anymore. Or you know what, I’ve got these two, but I don’t have this third one by this artist. I’ll take that or look our greatest hits I didn’t know about and grabbing that. And they were like a buck in two bucks for the CDs.

See, that’s what I was gonna say.

Alan: I love that treasure hunt where all of a sudden it’s, now that the world is becoming digital, there’s all kinds of physical stuff out there. So I talked about that with Colleen. The various different reasons that we have to drive around Ohio. It’s been, let’s go to this Amish buffet.

Let’s go to mini golf. I really want to add bookstores and CD stores to that. Yeah. Because. There’s one here in town called Record Den that I don’t go that often because it’s very dangerous to my wallet every time I go there. It’s like someone with my exact taste of music died and this is their estate sale.

Yeah. I walked out there with boxes of CDs. Yes. And they’re not $1, they’re probably like three to five to seven there. So I spent still bucks without even trying hard. Yeah. And yet and once they also seemed to get oh, here’s a, an import that didn’t even know existed. And I was pretty encyclopedic about everything the gentle giant ever did.

And yet, here’s something I didn’t even know. And so I’m so glad that you had that treasure, that feeding frenzy of I want all these things. And for a buck. For a buck. How fantastic

Stephen: is that? Yeah. Wow. And better yet, and this is a, why I don’t like Spotify for my only source. I will listen to Spotify on my computer and when I’m out, I do use it a lot.

Yeah. And a friend said, they’re like if you bought their album but you listen to ’em on Spotify, you’re still giving them money. It’s not costing you any extra. I’m like, oh, that’s a good point. So I, back in the day, I loved the Flat or the Footloose soundtrack. It was very popular. I liked it.

It was fun. And I saw it in one of the CD bins and I’m like, I don’t think I have that. Do I really wanna, I debated I looked at it and it was the 15th anniversary and it had four extra songs on it. Extra cuts. Very at, very good. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I look at Spotify and they just have the normal album, but worse yet, One of those songs wasn’t even on there because of licensing issues.

So I couldn’t even listen to the full album on Spotify. I’m like, yep. The whole thing that you’re used to hearing in your head. Yeah. Yeah. And you know that’s and Collins said, yeah, that’s why I go through and I buy all these CDs because you taught me. I own it. I can listen to it whenever I want.

I can cancel Spotify and still listen to it, we had

Alan: a really good, I love that treasure hunt. Yeah. That’s very cool. And I, when I got to a certain point, this is no lie, I talked about the one who dies with the most toys wins, and I won. I have more books and more music and more everything than I ever imagined I would.

And I’m full. And yet I’m finding out that I’m not full. There’s, when I just was recently, I think I mentioned this, Columbia, I believe is putting out like, here’s five albums. Yes. From an artist for $15, three bucks a cd. What a bargain. And even things that I only had some like for not love for, I’d like to have a certain amount of Bread and the Association and Jim Croci and And all, like I could, I probably have bought 20 of those in the last year.

Like here’s chick Korea and romantic romantic warrior, all kinds of stuff. Joe Satriani, where I already had a lot of his, but it’s if I can get, all of what he has and not be missing anything, I’ll get a couple doubles, then I’ll sell the doubles. So it, it’s whenever I see that kind of thing it really is.

I like, I haven’t heard, I just listened to Chicago the other day. I have all kinds of Chicago from buying their box sets. Cause I really also have loved the big box set where it’s got the libretto and the photos and, interviews with band members. I love that. I like reading about Agreed.

What were they thinking while they were doing it? And I listened to Old Chicago and I love it. They’re like, the first seven Chicago albums are loaded with hits and they were a unique sound for the time. Them in Blood, sweat and Tears were the first ones to have the active horn section. And it wasn’t just Color my world, which was kinda like the stereotype of the Chicago Prom song.

There’s so much great music on there. Terry Cath was a fantastic guitarist. Denny Rafini, Sarah Fine. A great drummer and just I, as I rediscover them, it’s man, it’s been too long since

Stephen: I listened to you. Absolutely. I know

Alan: Dialogue parts one and two, Robert Lamb written were like, those lyrics meant a lot to me at some point.

And now they do again, some things that were written in 68 when the United States was ripped by protests. We’re there again. Yeah. You know what I mean? Were like trying to capture the spirit of the sixties in terms of turn away from the military industrial complex, turn away from the worst of the crazy.

We’re willing to popularize and kill the country in order to maintain power. Like the dirty tricks of Nixon and stuff like that. And tell me that we’re not, history doesn’t. Repeat itself, but it sure echoes. It rhymes, and we’re dealing with that again. So the protest music of the time is just as vital.

Yeah. You know what I mean?

Stephen: Yeah. So that, two things with that, we always say things and a million things pop in my brain. So you mentioned the greats and class. Here’s another one, the Doobie Brothers, IGRA. That, that just Absolutely, if you haven’t heard Doobie Brothers in a while, you listen to it, it’s wow.

The harmonies, the rhythms and the fun, playful music and horns and stuff at times. It’s just I remember Frankie my ex son stepson was really in the music and the stuff, and I mentioned the Doobie Brothers. He’s I have no idea who that is. I said, okay, you’re riding in the car with me.

And I put on Doobie Brothers. He’s this is great. I love this stuff. I’m like, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Alan: That’s I just either wrote about this or thought about it. I heard Let’s see, a very early brothers cut, maybe black water even before that, and it was like 1970 or 72. Yeah.

Contemporaneous with the Beatles were just stopping and like all kinds of, and like the Doobie Brothers were absolutely a part of this is how good music can be. Nobody else had that kind of swamp boogie song. Yeah. Maybe Queens Water Revival did and great musicianship like and I their live album once Were Vices Are Now Habits.

Fantastic. Good. Yeah, absolutely. That, that in fact, live albums at one point there was, I really loved the Leonard Skynyrd live album. I really loved Doobie Brothers. There were certain ones that really captured the band and the live version of maybe it was listening to the music or it was, I, or Freebird.

Of course the live version of Freebird is like the best thing that Leonard Skynyrd ever did. Yeah. He still that on the radio with the three guitar attack and it, going on. Not forever. Oh no, I’m tired of this. It’s more yes, keep building, keep getting that crescendo and like you’re exhausted at the end of the song in the right way.

You know what I mean?

Stephen: So you mentioned the protests and politics. So here’s something I just heard that there’s a new movie coming out, kind of documentary ish, but a fiction fictionalized movie about the Kent State shooting that’s coming out. And do you know who’s in it?

Alan: Joe Walsh.

No, please go ahead. Alec

Stephen: Baldwin. Is now not the right time to choose Alec Baldwin to be in a movie about shootings. That stuff interesting

Alan: though. Hello? He’s been politically active for a long time. Yeah. You know what I mean? He’s a very bright guy and he’s one of the first guys that I heard idiots say, shut up.

You’re just an actor. It’s wow, you’re so much not the guy that should be talking to or compare intelligences, yeah. But that, so that you’re right. That’s a little bit, I don’t know. He’s still exonerated of all charges. Yes. They so much tried, whatever that crazy part of the country tries to pin things on people cuz they don’t like him, not because they committed the crime and so he, he impersonated Trump too much.

And so all the trumps are out to get him and it’s turns out, nope. Facts still matter. Yeah. He really didn’t do it. And in fact, I, if I remember right, they’re going after the armorer, the guy that it doesn’t even just look like he was careless. It looked like he might have been set up. And I’m not trying to spin the conspiracy theory but there’s no way that gun should have been active.

Not no. Loaded with a bullet, nor loaded with a blank.

Stephen: There shouldn’t be a bullet anywhere near a film set Exactly that. So

Alan: how big of a mistake do you have to make? How, when does incompetence become malice? Because you were so unca in that right. Lethal way. And so we’ll see what that turns out to be.

Yeah. You know what I mean? It’s definitely. But you’re right. An odd. Lightning bolt. A lightning lot.

Stephen: Yeah. We’ll see what happens. Ok, I got a trivia for you, speaking of all the music. So obviously with all this classic talk and I have trivia

Alan: for you today as

Stephen: well, I have a trivia. Okay, we’re good.

Okay, so Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Classic band, classic group, classic artist, wonderful music Throughout the years before they were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they actually were another group that ended up breaking up and then they got back together. What was that initial group called?

Alan: So I think I might know this cuz I realize, was it Mud Crutch?

Stephen: Yes, it was Mud

Alan: Crutch. Ok, that’s, yeah. Cause I, they I remember getting stuff where they had, regrouped and they did an album or something like that, or a live album or something where me, it was like a capture of them performing at a club and I was like, what an interesting name.

I won’t forget that because it’s so crazy. Yeah.

Stephen: Okay. So yeah, that, I thought that was an interesting cause, I never thought about it, but yeah.

Alan: So here’s one, unless you just read what I wrote I’m almost certain you won’t get this. Okay. You did a big poll in 2002 of the most the Greatest Britains of all time, greatest British people.

Number one was Winston Churchill, as you might imagine, who was number two.

Stephen: Oh geez. So obviously with trivia, a lot of times it’s that twist. It’s not who you would expect or it’s not something like, so I’m trying to think what famous dog or cat has there been for British, something like that.

It, it’s not gonna be some obvious person, but Right.

Alan: That’s honestly, if you got this, I would be over to know. Yeah. Give you the crown. Yeah. No clue. No clue. Because I almost as a quick preface, I like books where they give you the there was a great book called A thousand Years, a thousand People, and it really did a turn of the millennium try to capture who are the people in all the world that had the biggest impact, had done the most amazing things, had influenced the most did something singular where the world changed with their presence in it.

And so I’m reading through this and I’m like, yeah, of course it’s Gutenberg and of course it’s Einstein and that kind of stuff. And I think I was like to number 70 when I got there, I was like, I’ve never heard of this person before. And that’s really humbling to be like I read a lot, right? I have interests the 70th, most important person in all the world, and I’ve never heard of them.

What’s wrong with me? What? And it turned out to be that it was a Chinese dynasty runner, if you will, but it was like maybe that’s why, because I’m very western in my canon of what I get. And I only know certain things about middle Eastern culture, right? Indian culture, Chinese culture, and so forth, but still 70th.

So the same thing occurred to me when I saw this guy. His name is Emb Bard, kingdom Brune.

Stephen: Oh my God. Yeah. I would’ve never got that. Heck is that? Yeah, this

Alan: is the guy that. Pretty much built the modern era of Great Britain. He was a civil engineer and he built their railway system their tunnels that like go under the Thames, big boats that crossed, that, that had more capacity being out of steel in ways that had never been done before.

He built suspension bridges over places that like, where otherwise you went to where it was shallow and crossed over. He changed the face of Britain and but because he’s very British and he didn’t do work outside of the country, I’ve never heard of him before. Yeah. Because I’m not British enough.

But when they, when like the TEMS tunnel and they, when they started to name some of the structures I had heard of various different things. This is the guy that innovative and out of will, out of being that whatever, that combination of brilliant, but also able to find financing.

You know what I mean? These things don’t happen because you did a pretty picture. You had to get the Royal society, the big company, whoever else it might be to sponsor you. He’s the guy, Eisen Bard, kingdom Brunell. So now that’s, if that comes up on jeopardy in like the next couple weeks, you’ll be like, just the time

Stephen: I’m knew this guy now.

And that’s so interesting cause we had a hotdog roast the other day. Cuz we have a great area for it. It’s, a lot of people sitting up there chatting and stuff. And with Colin and his group we were chatting about teaching and education in our school system and how basically for all that we learn and teach in school, there’s so many things that they don’t teach us and we don’t learn.

So why isn’t his name at least part of our learning and our world history? And you gotta wonder if over in England, Britain, that if his name is part of their history, like we have American history, if they have English history and his name’s in there, I wonder, see,

Alan: that’s what I gotta think is that.

Every country has its own people, who would the American equivalent of this guy be? Is it I don’t know the Wright brothers because of flight, but then he’s kinda world famous. They’re world famous. Yeah. Not only United States famous and there’s a famous French architect a similar and less a civil and engineering mor architect and what’s his name?

Single word name like Zo. But it’s not that it’ll come to me. And like Christopher Ren built all kinds of cathedrals in Britain and him I had heard of, so I was trying to think of that. There’s probably all kinds of somebody built the Sydney Opera House and yet I don’t know who that is.

And that’s you would think that whenever they mention that city opera house and they show the picture and it’s so unique in all the world that they would say, bye bye. Yeah. And spot corny or whatever else it might be. But they, I’ve not seen it

Stephen: arguably for us, you could easily get Ben Franklin in there for all of his inventions and ideas.

Not even just what he actually invented, but like the library system, and just other thoughts and stuff he had. So

Alan: he definitely, that is exactly the answer to the question because he really was much more the United States, other places adopted his, but so much of, he’s very much identified. He’s like the only president of the United States.

There was never president of the United States. Yeah. He’s absolutely a founding father and that influential and cited in the great works of literature and great works of invention and all those kinds of things that, thank you. That’s a great answer.

Stephen: Yeah. That’d be my first thought, but, I think it would be interesting to find that one or two other people, like this guy that we’ve never heard of that’s oh my gosh, they had how many patents and how many inventions and how many things they worked on and were influenced and did this, but we’ve not heard of them.

And it’s like, why I bet there’s somebody, cuz it’s one of those things that we don’t know.

Alan: There’s gotta be like, I know Bell Labs, for instance, has tens of thousands of patents and there has to be the guy that like ran Bell Labs that was responsible for the yeses and nos on various different projects and making sure that he brought in the great people and encouraged them and all that kinda stuff.

Yeah. There’s about to be a movie out called Oppenheimer. Yes. It’s about his influence on, the Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project. And we’re gonna find out, like there really were brilliant people working on it, but apparently it really was Oppenheimer who’s, whose will and brilliance in organizing as well as physi, physicist wise, that, you know and is he the guy that had the quote about, I am created Death Scatterer of

Stephen: worlds, yeah. I have become God. But we’ve all felt like that one time or another e Exactly

Alan: that. So I’m looking forward to that movie a lot because I don’t think they have to do anything to build it. They don’t have to like what’s the word I’m looking for? Sensationalize it. What happened? There was an amazing achievement in the history of the world to have all those bright people with this incredibly important goal.

And they did it. They really.

Stephen: Figured out atomic. Yeah. Fishing, right? Oh my

Alan: God. Not fishing. Yes. Okay.

Stephen: Yeah, he’s actually an example. Cuz Colin and I don’t disagree, don’t argue and disagree, but we have different feelings and thoughts on it that whenever I mention something about quantum physics or quantum theory and that, hey, we can’t explain such and such, but maybe that’s because we haven’t discovered it yet in quantum world, and he rolls his eyes.

I’m like, but you know what? Back in the 19 hundreds everybody said, oh yeah, we know everything about physics and the world and we’ve got it all down. And then less than 50 years later we have an atom bomb, which they had no idea about, and the other thing about that movie that just cracks us up is the director is what’s his name?

Nolan. Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan, who is known not for sensational story in movies, but huge explosions and stuff. And I’m like, you couldn’t get a bigger explosion than the bomb. Exactly. What’s he gonna do later?

Alan: Get me the bomb guy, get me the explosion guy. That’s who I want.

Stephen: You can’t get bigger.

So that’s like the epitome of his career. It’s time for him to retire then.

Alan: Yeah. I’ll tell you I really like his stuff. Not only because of the bombs, which I even would’ve given to Heimer or something like that. Yeah. But, cause he’s had deep philosophical things behind many inception, any number of movies have been, this isn’t, you really gotta kinda Except the premise of how, what the internal logic of this movie is, cuz it’s different than what you think reality is. And I love that kind of thing. We’re like, wow, having to catch up a little bit. Usually I’m ahead, usually I can predict what’s gonna happen.

No, he’s had any number of things that played with my mind. Did he do Memento early on? Was it Christopher Nolan or his brother? Yeah. Where it’s let’s see. The guy has, he forms no new memories and so he has to keep leaving notes to himself so that when he wakes up, he knows who he was and how he got to be where he was.

And the movie is told backwards where, unravels the story of how he figured things out or how he was totally buffaloed by people that discovered that no new memories thing and led him down a terrible path, et cetera, et cetera. You know what I mean? So it’s that’s a, that if you’ve never seen Memento, it’s absolutely worth seeing.

Yeah, I haven’t seen that one. You gotta pay attention And one of those movies that. I watched it and then like I, I let it go back and then I re-rented it cuz like, I really gotta appreciate it more because I didn’t catch everything. He was very clever about how he left clues little red herrings to mislead you, but also just told you what was gonna happen, but you didn’t know to watch for it.

And it cleverly constructed really

Stephen: good. So nice. Oh, I’ll put that one on my

Alan: list. Yeah. Guy Pierce, the guy who was in LA Confidential as the straight cop. Anyway, it’s impressive and let’s anyway, I, there, I’m trying to think, there’s a couple other, once in a while a science fiction movie comes out that isn’t the aliens landed and they can change shape that it really is.

What if they’re really, we figured out time travel. What if we really figured out teleportation and the impact that it would have and the unexpected consequences that it would have. And I love those kind of speculative fiction type movies. Arrival is, A really good thing of what it would be like to finally make contact and what it would do to the world and what it would do to the people involved and really well done.

So anyway, I and Carl Sig and wrote the originals. Okay.

Stephen: All right. Yep. So as always a pleasure.

Alan: Yes. And so did we get to anything I think we talked about Yes. And books? Sure. We did pretty good. My real quick, my investments are starting to recover. Okay. As I was very stubborn as I lost half the value of my portfolio from its height back about two and a half years ago.

But I really have invested, I think, in things that they should work. They’re gonna change the world, they’re like whatever, the computer tech, med tech, security all kinds of things that are disruptive technologies. Covid was a big enough disruptor that it swept all that aside for a while, that everybody pulled in their horns and were still having some political and economic distress But there’s beautiful things happening now with certain companies.

And so Nvidia, for instance you must have heard of them. They’re the guys that make good GPUs. GPUs are essential to all the AI that we’re seeing. Yes. And so that after their last earnings report, their stock went up like 33%. That’s really uncommon in a place where if it goes off by a percent or two, you’re a happy boy.

You know what I mean? And

Stephen: I’m doing some AI development for work, so I may have some cool things to talk about with in that regard.

Alan: Wonderful. I’m experimenting with it. Not work related, but just outta my curiosity. And I’d love to have that conver that’s we the fact that we haven’t had that yet.

Yeah. In the face of kinda two months worth of chat, gp, there’s all kinds of interesting stuff happening and we should dip a toe in and see what it’s about. Yeah, not this week, but next week is the Apple Developers Conference. Yes. And they’re gonna, as far as I know, they’re introducing their ar, vr goggles, their headset, and it’s not classes where you can’t just wear it anonymously, but I’m just curious as heck as to Apple really doesn’t put things to the market except for the Newton long ago that it hasn’t looked at everything that’s out there and what everybody else has done and said, we’ll do this just right.

We’ll do just the right lag and connectivity and human interaction, all kind of stuff. So if it turns out that for the rest of my life I strapped the goggles on everywhere that I go, suddenly I’m a bug-eyed guy. Maybe it’ll be because Apple finally fixed it compared to Google, Sony, oculus, all the places that have done it. I’m

Stephen: so curious. I’m curious too, to hear about those and see those, because Facebook has a new version of their goggles, the Oculus coming out. And it’s in partnership with Microsoft, and Microsoft has dumped a ton of money into it, so it, it’s all hitting like it does in waves at the same time, so we’ll see.

Yes. What’s what and who laughs.

Alan: I like that competition Spurs development and I want them to be like neck and ever bettering each other for the next 10 years. Yeah. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I just, I’m looking forward to that dream of I’m walking down the street and I can say that’s the name of the mountain that I’m hiking at.

And, I’m in the store and it’s I think I’ll get this particular kind of cream cheese. Oh, it’s available for 20 cents less down the street. You know what I mean? Like it, yeah. All the ways in which my life will change of having information at your fingertips and not always having to, will it to come to you, but that it learns enough about you that it starts to make.

Hopefully non-intrusive, only helpful suggestions and what that’ll do for life. You know what I mean? If you’re meeting somebody for the first time, I don’t want it to be the nightmare of now I know all their finances and their, their sexual peccadillo history and stuff like that.

But it really would be interesting to have I don’t want care about, are they good? I care about that. They’re bad. Beware. This guy’s a known fraud, whatever you thought you were getting into he’s not the guy. I want to be able to look at every political figure and say, this guy is so rife with scandal and it’s

Stephen: not just me world.

And how should know and how’s that going to get altered? Because, AI isn’t. Thinking about this stuff and figure it out. It’s just taking such a big mass of what we have put out as content and it bases everything on what we’ve put out. You get all these bad apples putting out content to support their guy, and it’s all lies, it’s all made up, it’s all half truths and stuff.

So you’re like, oh yeah, this looks like a good guy. But it’s all fake. Just to get you to say,

Alan: there’s issues. So here’s what I think, here’s how I would approach it, and here’s how I’m confident it’s going to happen. All that disinformation, it, you really can classify it as what’s its provenance?

Is it reputable? What’s the source of it? And as they start to weed out, That all this crap comes from four Russian botnets that keep on putting that into our environment, cancel that crap out, cancel out the columnists that don’t know what they’re talking about. So you can’t trust what they’re saying and we’ll be able to start doing back to a reputation based economy where I don’t need to worry about what I just saw Glen Beck spewing last night on Fox and John Stewart is really good at.

Talking about what’s going on in a way that you really have to say, why in the world would anybody believe this? No matter how many times you hear it, it’s provably wrong. I think that’s gonna be part of the AI that’s into these goggles is that it’s not a matter of what’s the name of that mountain?

Cuz that’s a known fact, but it will be, what’s the reputation of this guy? And it isn’t because he planted a thousand reviews that he runs a nice, clean hotel. No, it’s going to be, he’s known for fraud. He’s known for trying to cover up that fraud. He’s known for affiliating with people that specialize in that activity.

Right? There’s going to be something that’s going to make it so that we get to shared knowledge. Not being a matter of what you heard last, but what’s the most

Stephen: true? This is where all the chain blockchain technology, NFTs and stuff like that will. Could possibly come into effect because you’ll be able to track back where this information came from.

They won’t, you have to verify the information and it’ll keep track of it. And where it got passed too. So here’s the original and, oh, look, now it went to this Russian news agency and now it’s on Facebook. And that, and that type of thing I think is going to get implemented in ways we didn’t even think about when they were talking about the blockchain before.

Alan: Yeah. So I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to Hey, I’m talking to a guy and it’s I guarantee you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Just stop talking. Just and it’s not, that’s not what I want from the goggles, but it’s more like the fervor with which you’re speaking is not supported.

And I can give you the first half dozen reasons why not. And if you’re gonna persist, then I’ll go to 10 or maybe I’ll just walk away. Yeah. But that whatever, that people that don’t have any filters in place, that don’t have any assistance in this way. They will start losing because you can’t yell loud enough to overcome fact.

John Adams said, facts are stubborn things and whatever they, the bad guys have tried to do to continually spew that cloud of disinformation that makes it, that people just start saying how can you know? How can you know that you still can, you really still can get to the truth. It just is, they’ve made it hard.

I will not let them win that game. You know what I mean? They don’t get to change how science works. They don’t get to change how transactions are trackable. Et cetera, et

Stephen: cetera. I am definitely interested in what the goggles will do and capabilities and stuff. Cuz I’ve looked at the Apple Watch, but I have to have Apple and I’ve not, that’s just not my environment for that.

So are these going to be Apple only? Which would be a good guess? And if so, how long until Microsoft and Google have the same features and put those into their stuff and, or new things are different, so I’m super interested right now in tech, which I haven’t been for a while, I haven’t cared as much.

Great. A new Xbox Great. A new this and that. Yeah. These,

Alan: What’s the product that would finally make it, could they build enough good, a good enough TV that you would say, I’m abandoning other TVs. I’m going with the Apple, I’m going with the watch, I’m going with the phone, I’m going with the VR goggles.

Nice. I’m happy to be in that because there is such interesting integration and they haven’t let me down, but I can understand why that you have that same for the system that you put together. And we’ll see. Maybe it’ll just be I’ll try to share the coolness of you and I’ll weedle you.

Yeah. You’ll

Stephen: say though, Steven, you could help me. Me and Colin did start watching. I’ve subscribed for a while to Apple tv because now I can see foundation and there’s something else coming out in the next couple months that’s oh yeah, we gotta watch that. But there was a Michael J.

Fox documentary about his Parkinson’s in life.

Alan: We just watched that too. It’s really

Stephen: good. So yeah, so I was like, okay, with the Michael J. Fox thing and this other thing, I, now I forget what it is. That’s how important it is. I had to get it, but I don’t remember. And with foundation being on there and a few other things, it’s okay, let’s get Apple TV for a while.

Let’s watch what we want and maybe we’ll get off of it and Yeah. I said that three years ago about hbo O so

Alan: you mean Max now? It’s Max. Yeah, it’s now it’s Max. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know the rebranding. Okay. I know I’ve gone longer than we should have. Sorry, I just had to get that last little Cause it’s gonna be exciting.

Alright.

Stephen: It’ll be great. I can’t wait to hear about it, alright, man. Later.

Alan: Bye. Bye.