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Overview
Alan’s wife is retiring – YAY! And they are choosing to celebrate at a local place called B.A. Sweeties. This is one of the biggest candy warehouses anywhere. They have a giant sucker as their company sign.
So the two diabetics are going to the candy store – but we’ll be playing putt-putt golf. 😉
We talk about a lesser known graphic novel series – The Department of Truth. This is a great story that deals with conspiracy theories and some supernatural and cryptids.
And Apple’s annual conference with announcements has happened (though not when we recorded this). The Apple VR Vision pro goggles look real cool.
Recommendations
https://www.thomz.com/cupids-arrows/
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/the-department-of-truth
YouTube
Transcript
Stephen: Yes. Good morning, Alan.
Alan: Good morning. Let me turn off that phone call coming in. There we go.
Stephen: Hey, when’s Colleen’s retirement? Was it Friday? Her last
Alan: day? No it’s at the end of this month. Okay. So 30th is big, and we’re gonna have a big party for her. We’re gonna go to ba sweeties, which is the biggest candy warehouse
Stephen: in the area.
Here’s what you need. Exactly. We’ll be talking about diabetic stuff in July.
Alan: I’m allowed to go, say, go pick out whatever you want, everyone while I go over here.
Stephen: But we’ve said this before and this is something that is, people need to understand that. They go and oh, you’re diabetic.
Here’s some sugar free stuff. But what we’re finding is the sugar free stuff may not spike your blood sugar in the same way, but sometimes it does. But a lot of those have some addiction to ’em that they make you wanna eat more, and they also do bad things to your bowels at times.
Alan: But like the devil gummy bears that I’ve read about on Amazon, right?
Yes. Where they have ery or whatever it is, right?
Stephen: Yes. Too much of that. And yeah, you’re, it’s like eating too bad Mexican. But. The other thing is that like the erythritol and stuff, they’ve linked some of that stuff to cancer okay, great. You’re not spiking your blood sugar, you’re going to get cancer and die.
Anyway. So me I personally have found, and I’ve told people this, I’m like, if you give me a plate with some mashed potatoes on it and a Snickers bar, it’s healthier for me to eat the Snickers bar because it does not spike my blood sugar as much as the potato. So yes, you can still go to ba sweeties, you just can’t eat 50 of those things ev every day.
Alan: Exactly. Just actually Colleen and I have been, there’s a, the other thing where we wanted is mini golf is there, they have two great mini golf courses with purple grounds, purple putting greens and stuff like that. And it’s kinda funny to call them greens. But anyway, it almost every time we go there I go in and I like, what’s the one thing that I want from here?
I don’t go and start with a and just start loading a basket up. It’s I haven’t had a bun bar in forever. Oh, good. That’s one of those things that Good. Yeah. And or others. There’s things, local stuff, because I came from Chicago, I never had a chance to try it. Whatever the kind of Cleveland local stuff is.
So I really do pick out also little, it’s funny talking about how we shouldn’t do this, but here’s all my fetishes. There’s little bullseye, there’s little like car they’re not caramel, but they’re like a brown guy with a white guy in the coffee. Fa, maybe that’s not even that cause they’re flat.
Okay. I think they’re even called bullseye and there’s 10 to a package and I just, if I’m going to do that, I’m gonna fall off the wagon and give myself just what I want. But I don’t get a case of them, mean I used to just, I really like gummy bears, but. There’s nothing in the house.
Like I, whatever I have in the house that’s anywhere near sweet is fruit or it’s baked goods. Like I make quick breads like banana bread or almond poppy seed or something like that. And then I don’t have some in it, but it’s not that I added sugar to it and I always use e everywhere that I can make a substitution.
I’m better about it anyway. I think it’s not that it’s totally unsafe, it’s more like just give yourself one little ice cream and then don’t do it for a month. Yes. It’s not like you do it and then start up again with bad habits. Occasionally when we go to Amen gathering like mind games, I’d give myself like a bunch of peanut m and ms.
You know what I mean? That used to be when I was a Play-Doh guy coding all the time or playing games all the time, I’d go through like a pound bag of peanut m and ms overnight. Wow, that’s a lot. And, but I didn’t, I don’t know. It didn’t, I’m that set the stage for what I’m now dealing with, but.
I, I don’t know that plus sugared soda. I’ve switched to diet soda. I’ve done all kinds of little corrections and I’ve never had, when I was on my monitors and stuff like that, that, we’ve talked about the freestyle li bread and stuff like that. Even when I was at my worst, my plate of mashed potatoes or something, I spiked, but I didn’t go into a coma.
I really didn’t have the real high or the real low that it I think that I can still do those things and my body’s insulin response is not none. It really still scales up and down and it just acts surprised when I give it more than what I usually do. You know what I mean?
Stephen: The other thing I’ve noticed, okay, back when I was in, still in high school my father had his first open heart surgery and, he diabetes, he had lots of health issues. But because of that, my mother started cooking a little differently. We cut out a whole lot of salt because there’s so much salt in most food anyway, that you don’t really, you don’t need to
Alan: add any, it’s already in there.
Yeah, that’s right. Every soup, every
Stephen: yeah. But so many people will eat it and they’re like, oh my God, this needs salt. And we’ll eat it and go, oh my God, this is too salty. It’s because they build a tolerance and they need more and more, but you get rid of it. And the natural flavors come out a lot.
And it’s the same with sugar. I don’t drink hardly any soda, except for some like sparkly watered flavored stuff that I’ll drink just cause I, I like, I want some bubbles to,
Alan: or whatever.
Stephen: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But so every now and then, like we have our hotdog roast. I’m like, oh man, that werner’s looks really good.
I’m glad the werner’s. And I drink and I’m like it’s just, it’s too, I’m like, eh, it’s like syrup. It’s no enjoyment. Yeah. You lose that taste, that tolerance. So it’s too overwhelming and I don’t even wanna drink it now, yeah.
Alan: I Colleen and I did Weight Watchers a while back honestly, like 15 years ago.
And in fact I had to stop because that’s when I had my bot with melanoma. But what they told you really came true that as you change your dietary habits your taste changes, your eat the buds don’t require as much to stimulate them. They get reset. Instead of, if I’m always having peanut m and ms, then I’m gonna expect you always need a little bit more if you’re addicted, and we have any number, whenever I have whole milk nowadays, I always drink like fat free milk, or 2% at most, and you have whole milk.
It’s what is someone like, Melt ice cream and put it in a glass for me, cuz this is really thick. And any other thing that tastes like whole soda tastes too syrupy and ultra sweet and stuff. And it, and always one of those things where you can be at a restaurant and order a diet Coke and if someone brings you a full one, you just need one sip to know it.
It’s not oh, almost, maybe. No, it really tastes differently and I’m actually very happy about that, that my body doesn’t crave it like it once did and actually finds it repulsive so that I’m not tempted to be like, oh, I miss that so much. If only I can have, a bowl of what is chocolate frosted sugar bombs, cal and nos.
Then you count it. Yeah, exactly. The kid cereal that’s just this mound of sugar, so
Stephen: anyway I for drinking, I drink a lot of unsweetened tea and. There’s different, we went to Hartville Marketplace and I saw a thing they had, it’s a pouch 10 to a canister, and they have these cool canisters that draw my Okay, drew my attention.
And you put boiling water to steep it. Then you add ice and cold water and, pretty soon you got two quartz of this steeped, unsweetened tea. And I’m like, this stuff is really good. So I can drink that and enjoy it, and I don’t feel the need to get Kool-Aid or a Coke or something.
It’s, it tastes good and it’s better for me. So yeah. You’re, your taste’s changed so much.
Alan: I feel a little bit weird about that. Janice, a good friend of mine named Janice sent, she has a great tea making Raf and actually she had tried a whole bunch of different teas from the tea lab, where they have all different things to try and said, this was the one that she had discovered was her favorite.
And she like sent me some of that and this really cool. Carav so that I could wean myself off of soda pop. And I really worked on it for a couple months and I just, it didn’t give me the sip ability, if I wanna stay hydrated, I wanna have something that I really enjoy sipping each time.
And those were one of those things when people talk about, oh, you gotta have eight, eight out glances of water and people give you the face cuz they can’t imagine drinking that much water. It was like that for me with this. It just wasn’t, and I thought I’ll try a variety of things.
Sometimes variety helps me that if you just alternate between three, four things, you don’t get tired of any of them and somehow there’s an an astringency to tea. Maybe it’s the tannins, whatever’s going on that it doesn’t, it tastes okay, but it has an odd aftertaste and after a while I don’t want the next step and then that’s not gonna serve me in terms of staying hydrated and keeping right liquid, coursing through your body.
Sorry, Janice. It didn’t take, whatever really worked for you, it doesn’t work for
Stephen: everybody. I’ve gotten to drink and enjoy tea a lot more. Colin helped show us how to do it properly and stuff. There we go. But the one sparkling wa, so a lot of the sparkling waters taste donkey dung they’re horrible tasting.
I just can’t drink them. The one I did find that I liked was called Spin Drift, and they only make a lemon and a raspberry, and it’s water with CO2 injected into it. So it’s bubbly and then it says natural flavors, lemon or raspberry. And it’s funny, the box says over 28 raspberries in here. I’m like so what’s over 28 mean?
You have 29. Over 28
Alan: people always say that, Sarah Silverberg just had a thing where she was like, someone’s, you’re in my top four comics. And so she’s that means I’m number four. They wouldn’t be so specific about the number if I was one, two, or three. I’m four.
Who’s better anyway? It’s funny. One of, we, I think I’ve mentioned Colleen and I love watching the British Baking Show. Yes. And one of the things that it often talks about is people have quite refined palettes. They really can tell what ingredients are in various different things. And something is, to me, as delicate as rosewater, if you put too much in, they’ll be like, oh, that’s it.
Overpowers it. And so when they talk about essences, I’ve often put that in I don’t know almond Essence or something like that. And they’ll say this tastes false. It tastes chemical, if you will. And I think that’s really true for some people. It’s a make or break thing. Is it a real banana or is it banana Esther?
And then it has, whatever’s wrong with it, a chemical taste, a metallic taste. It’s too strong. The proportion of what it tastes of is wrong. Fruits and bananas. Others are very complex and it’s not just, The essence of banana. It’s all the other things that are part of it, that little bit of fiber and that little bit of whatever banana meat tastes like.
So I really try to do that too. If I’m gonna make banana bread I put a whole banana in. I don’t add banana essence, or, and I have certain ones that I had to get because recipes call for it. And if it’s in a big batch, you don’t notice that pumpkin essence. It seems to dilute well or something like that.
So I’ve learned to, I can do certain ones, but not others anyway, yeah.
Stephen: My, my ex-wife Colin and Megan’s mom, she just, if it was artificial strawberry, she would just take a bite or a sip nope can’t do, I tasted the artificial straw, she could tell like right away no matter what it was.
Alan: Yeah. Colleen is like that too. In fact, I often talk that she’s bene serrate level where it’s, she tastes something. It’s here’s like the five things that I taste. And then it’s to me it tastes like bread. You know what
Stephen: I mean? That’s what people do with wine and stuff.
Yeah.
Alan: Or like I’ll, it’s again, the British Baking Show says, that’s the hero flavor. If you combine let’s say coconut with anything, coconut tends to overpower other things. I think I’m right about that. And so Colleen will still be able to tell there’s an under note of pineapple or and she’s really good about herbs.
She really can tell partially sage, rosemary, thyme, sage, all those things. I usually, I can tell garlic and I think I can tell certain ones that I know, okay, this is, it tastes like licorice, so is it annis? But I can’t tell you. Is it star annis or is it, and all the different kinds of ginger, there’s stem ginger versus, anyway it’s cool.
I guess I’m happy because I don’t need the perfect thing in order to be happy, but I wish I did have a little bit more discriminating taste, cuz it must be very cool to have that, whatever that is, how your mind processes it to have more information coming out. Yeah. Oh, there’s a little, and we’ve laughed about this, if you’re a wine connoisseur Yes.
And you’re like, oh yeah, this grew on the south side of the slope and it had some lavender in the ground and I think a tiger walked by and it’s are you just BSing me or is this for real? I think there really are super tasty. It can do that, but I’m not one
Stephen: of them. It’s something that you can work on and train, because we had somebody do that with us, a wine tasting, and they explained what you gotta do and what helps.
And, and they really walked you through it. Now, we weren’t doing the professional where they get a sip and they spit it in a bucket. I’m like, hell no, I’m not spitting this stuff out. That’s, I wanna feel a little tingly. But they said, ok, so first, take a smell of it, and now they said this should, you should be able to smell a little bit of vanilla and maybe this, and it’s not really.
They’re like, give it a moment and I’ll try it again. And oh wait. Once you’re thinking about it’s like your senses can process it, it’s like sight, our brain filters things out. We don’t even know about it. The other senses are similar. And then they’re like, no, take a small sip should be able to taste almost a woody flavor and earthy, it’s not.
Oh wow. I do, so it, you gotta learn it essentially.
Alan: Exactly. I wonder, some certain amount of that is, don’t tell me what it’s gonna taste like and let me see if I can pick it out because it, I there’s your mind is so mighty that it will have you tasting. Yeah, there’s vanilla. If
Stephen: taste vanilla, I taste playdough, I taste Play-Doh
Alan: and there’s a certain amount of, what is the craziness where they keep diluting stuff and it’s supposed to be like the water remembers and it’s even more potent.
It’s a quackery type thing. And it’s there’s no way we know that our taste buds. We have tested them enough to say they can taste things maybe at one part in 40,000 or something like that, right? They can’t taste it at one part in a hundred or a million or a billion, and so there’s a certain amount of Bs going on there, but just if people’s noses are such that they’re a little bit more like a dog and they can tell more of the volatile compounds and stuff like that, I can see how there’s more differentiation and maybe they can pick out really slight trace elements.
But not everybody. That’s just not, we’re not designed that way. Otherwise, we like, I, like you said, we tune out things sitewise so that we’re not continually bombarded by too much sensation. It’s like that to us too. Why do certain things smell like bad? Because they’re rotten. Because they’re poisonous.
Because stay away. Nature has given us signals that we’ve read into ourselves to make sure that, who didn’t smell that they die, they didn’t go into the next generation. So that’s why we can smell ammonia or things like that, that’s how we react to it, is get out of there.
Stephen: Okay. So I wanna point out my background here. Yes. That I chose this is Cupid’s Arrows from Tom Zoller. Tomer. It’s one of his new series. I, I did the Kickstarter and we got some digital back wall prints, and so I figured, hey, we’ve been doing shout outs to some local friends and stuff, and I don’t think we’ve done anything with Tom.
He also did my book cover for my town Magicians, so Very cool. Exactly. I wanna give him a little load. Have him
Alan: on for an interview. You know what I mean? That’s we love, I, it was funny, another one of those guys like John Burning that we came to know each of them separately. Yeah.
From our own, all we have such vari interest Tom and I we played at Mike D’s pub quiz for decades, and we knew of each other because, the Jeopardy connection and the Conal connection and all that kind of stuff, and it’s kinda like we were on opposite teams. So you don’t get to know somebody if you don’t get to sit at the table with them.
You don’t get all the wonderful back chatter and stuff like that. But we always said hello at the start and the end of things and like the fact that only besides me, only he would’ve known that, he’s the comic book guys right beside me. And so it would be a pleasure because he’s had a very interesting trajectory in the course of his career.
He is, an independent success story. He’s got a distinctive style. Yeah. It’d be. Very fun to talk to him about how does he do what he does and what music does he like and all those kinds of things.
Stephen: He’s been harder to get ahold of in a couple recent years, so I don’t know if just busy or what’s going on, but yeah.
So last year went to Fan Expo and he wasn’t there. He was supposed to be this year I didn’t go and he was there, so he was like, exactly. Ok. But I ran into somebody else. I mentioned to you, so you mentioned John Bruning. Over the weekend I ran into his publishing partner, Jim Beard. Jim Beard, a Crypted convention down in Canton, which me and Colin went.
We were going down to see some people we haven’t seen for years. So it was really nice. I talked to Jim for a while. First thing he says is, oh yeah, I’m mad at you. You got John on and not me. What’s going on? I’m like, okay, I’ll get you on the, and didn’t bring me in. Yeah. So I said, you gotta be from Cleveland, Jim.
But there,
Alan: there’s an opportunity, now we’ll have him on and he can get his time and we can all, he’ll give us the dish, the dirt on
Stephen: John. Yeah. And they’re like, before they’re both gonna be down at Pulp Fest. Yeah. I, Colin wants to go to that.
So we might run down on Saturday. Okay. And see
Alan: that’s in Pittsburgh, right? Like August
Stephen: 3rd or something for Yes,
Alan: sometime. I’m really tempted. I know we have our stringer piling into August, so my birthday is the eighth. And so often the weekend before, the weekend after we do things, and if I remember right, I wanted to go to FedEx Exo was in Chicago that weekend, but now we got tickets to three dog night, if I remember right.
Where Colleen and I have always wanted to see them and I think it’s exactly that weekend. So same thing, we won’t go for the weekend, but we might zoom over for a day, make a long day of it, and then come home. Something like
Stephen: that. Yeah. So that’ll be fun. Okay. And yeah the Crypted it’s the first Crypted convention show that we’ve been to in.
Probably five years. Okay. I think since 2018 when we went to Maine and Colin got the Young Cryptozoologist of the Year award. Okay. Oh, I don’t, I So is that
Alan: mostly cause of Covid or Cause Colin’s interests have
Stephen: shifted. Yeah. His, it’s interesting, his interest shifted. He got a little burnt out and there was a lot of toxicity in the community.
There were people attacking him and others and it’s like, why? Yeah. It was pretty
Alan: horrible. What? Oh, yeah. What you, because sometimes, unfortunately, when you have an interest, there’s people that are the purists that are the Yes. The gatekeepers.
Stephen: Oh boy. It was like Colin was saying and agreeing with certain things.
They’re like, no, that’s wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And they like, Wouldn’t leave it at that. They started like publicly attacking him at their meetings or at other shows, if somebody would say, oh yeah I’ve met Colin. Oh, don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and on it.
And it’s what does he know he’s reporting the same stuff you are from the same sources that you are, exactly. Wow. And he just got tired of it, that there was a, but he, I told him a while back, I’ve got these books I’ve been working on, I’m missing it.
Let’s get back into it a little bit. And he said, I don’t know. So he said, oh, maybe I’ll go now. He’s you know what? I miss this. I wanna do more. So we’re actually talking of doing a little bit more again with it. Yeah.
Alan: Sometimes what’s funny is it’s not that the whole place is bad, it’s one or two of the loud mouths.
And if they go away or if they just turn over a new leaf or whatever like that, I’ve had that experience with any number of different situations in college or events or whatever else it might be. And it’s weird how, One drop of urines can spoil a whole gallon of milk, but all you have to do is get rid of that one drop and things get better.
Yeah. And it, and I’m philosophically, I’m always sad with so you heard that thing of Bobby, you know what you could have done? Talk to me. Yeah, we’re friends. I could have told you the truth. I could have given you the full story. You like, love the gossip game so much that you just decided to
Stephen: be shitty to me for a while.
It’s like they, oh man, that’s so disenchanting. They want their power and their flock. I wanna be, king fish of this little pond. So they cut other people down and get very much like a certain high political leader we’ve had. Telling always on the attack.
Always. Yeah. Everybody sucks. Listen to me. And got there following. But it’s interesting cuz Colin’s been looking around and. Like you said, a lot of those guys are gone. I think people quit listening to him, went away and so That’s right. Yeah. Now it’s a good time.
Alan: And I think that’s what’ll happen is that it’s not gonna be up to Colin until I carry the standard forward and fight on his own.
Everybody looking at that situation must say, alright, that guy’s gone. He’s, I he’s gone over the edge. He’s so aggressive now and I don’t know why he cares about this so much, but he cares about it in the wrong way. Yes. And so sometimes the whole community has to ostracize someone and just stop paying attention to them, and then the air clears.
Yeah. You know what I mean? So it I’m glad that it’s now a better environment for Prop Colin and you. Yeah, because it, I, I have that same thing of, I, I really like that kind of stuff, but man, I can’t handle whole weekend of being just dipped in poison. I, it’s just not me, you know what I mean? And some of the things that I like, I hardly ever go on the attack against somebody.
But what I will say is that guy can’t be trusted. You know what I mean? That matters a lot to me. That I have integrity when I speak or that I strive for it. I’m not always right. I’m not always. Far from perfect, and yet you gotta be striving for it instead of knowingly passing along, rumor, gossip, bullshit, et
Stephen: cetera, et cetera.
Yeah. And some of those same guys, and our one friend Stan has been in this literally since 66. He’s had a big foot research network. He’s got more reports and he’s very trusted and all that, and he never says, I think Bigfoot exists. He never says this is a Bigfoot. He says, this is what was reported to us.
This is what they told us. And it’s interesting that this was the fourth case in that month from that area, from different people that said the same thing. He makes these connections. I’m not saying it’s Bigfoot, I’m not saying it’s aliens. I’m not saying it’s this, that, or the other thing.
But we got four reports within two and a half weeks from four different people in adjoining towns. And he, Stan did a talk on Saturday. We listened to it. We haven’t heard him talk for a while. And it was about some stuff we had heard, some stuff we hadn’t heard. But this one guy at the end says I think that’s just a lot of disinformation that you’re providing there.
And Stan goes, Okay. You’re great with your own opinion. He laughed. Next question. He is not even dealing with you, it’s just
Alan: like any other, there’s such a battle, and this will segue right into the Department of Truth. Yes. Such a battle for what’s true and how do we know it.
And people really think that yelling louder and just assertion is the way to win nowadays. Where and I can’t tell you how many bullshitters have attacked Wikipedia and it’s like it’s not. Wikipedia provides all the sources so you can go check that out for yourself. You have not only one, but multiple sources from original verifiable people and their reputations are good and so forth.
So I hope you can understand why you’ve gotta rise to that level as well in order to dismiss it. Or else I will just dismiss your assertion because you have nothing, right? You have no data, you have no veracity. Your reputation is not as good as this guy. You’re just hear and yelling
Stephen: about it and yelling louder doesn’t make it more
Alan: true.
That’s right. And actually add a little froth to the corner of your mouth. No, that doesn’t convince me either. You know what I mean? And going on the attack. So just that the, I just started, I had not, hadn’t had this on my radar a series called The Department of Truth by James Tinian and Maddie Simons, if I remember right.
Yep. It’s a good one. It’s a good one. It’s very much about conspiracy theories and me mimetics, the power of what do people believe does enough people believing it, make it real. That is either the thing does come to exist, which is a little bit of a stretch, but it has the impact of existed because it, they have had more and more people believe it with them, and that’s how they act.
That’s how they respond. So whether it’s and it’s funny, this really is like the survey of the field. It is, Bigfoot in Sasquatch, it’s the Kennedy assassination. It’s the, pizza parlor where they’re eating babies and all that kind of stuff. And he’s very good. The author is very good about tying all that together.
And is there a conspiracy behind the conspiracies that’s really been feeding America these things so that we come to not trust the truth or only trust? Their truth cuz they’re the ones that regularly issue either information or disinformation and they’re very crafty about how they mold it and stuff like that.
And that, of course, the United States wasn’t the only one that had that, that in, in the Soviet Union, they called it the Ministry of Lies instead of the Department of Truth.
Stephen: And all that. How
Alan: does propaganda work? And it didn’t start now, it started you can go back to Nazi Germany, you can go back to what started World War I.
You can go back all through history, back to when human beings started to just speak in public and write 10,000 years already. There were people that found out, I don’t need to do the thing. I just need to be able to craft the story that will convince people to give me rewards and resources because I can be a really good liar if I can’t be a good adventurer.
Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so it’s very disconcerting while you’re reading it. To be like, man, this makes too much sense. I don’t wanna believe that there really is the Illuminati and the secret brotherhoods that have run the whole shoot and match from the start. And how much money is really involved here.
And if they’re doing it, are they doing it just for themselves? Are they doing it because, oh no. Satanic influence, what about Alistair Crowley and the fact that there’s multiple people competing to do this and that there’s different meme plexes that are kinda like, battling against each other.
It’s very entertaining and very unsettling. Yes. All this time. And the artwork very much matches that. It’s not like comic book classic style. Yeah, it’s very bill sin kevi, scratchy and collages of stuff and there’s little
Stephen: almost serial
Alan: killer. I can’t quite make out what’s in the corner, just like when you see have a sighting.
You know what I mean? Yeah. It’s like something went through the bushes real quick there and it looked like the size of a man. Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah,
Stephen: that’s a Department of Truth is one of those really good ones that if people are like, oh, I don’t read kids book comics, those are for kids, or Yeah, those stories suck.
I, it’s a good one because it’s not for kids and it’s got a good story right to it. And like you said, the art is not cartoony and, superhero even. So it’s definitely a good choice if you’re like I’ve heard a lot about graphic novels and comics lately. That’s a good one to check out to at least be shown that, hey, maybe these aren’t the kitty books
Alan: they used to be.
That’s right. And I thought of this when I was reading it, like you and I have talked about before. I love where people have enough knowledge of what has come before in comics, that they actually do reconning, retroactive continuity, where it’s Lucky didn’t really die. He actually got captured instead of in ice like Captain America did.
The Soviet Union captured him the Russians then and made him into the Winter soldier. And they make it so that they really know enough about what had gone before that it, it fills in gaps or it doesn’t directly refute or whatever it refutes. They say, that’s just because only this person told us that and they didn’t know the full story.
So that comic books have had some very successful series in that regard about the origin of the vision from the human torch. Yeah. And that they actually have changed that a couple times. And having said that, this is is it Tinian or tinian? Like I’m ret conning the history of the United States, but it’s Lee Harvey Oswald. He didn’t just kill jfk then he got dragged Gooned into spoiler alert, running the Department of Truth right. And all the things that can happen where, alright, I guess if they, if what they specialized one was controlling the flow of information and putting out disinformation and hiding various different things.
It’s not, Hey, we’re just, throughout history, there’s just enough ties into what really happened that you can get convinced. Yeah. At least you can get it plausible deniability and plausibility. It’s really cool to have someone that like, if they know enough about history, they could throw you enough bones at you and say, oh I hadn’t thought about that.
You know what I mean? Yeah. So it’s not an automatic rejection, it’s just meant to give you uncertainty.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s a good series good one to check out, especially if you’re getting burnt out on superheroes and you need something different.
Alan: Yeah. Cause there’s no nobody flies in to save the day during this series.
It’s the. The power of government, the power of wealth, the power of who control. It’s not only the victor’s, right? The history, it’s that we’re always writing our own history. I often, if you, in your own story, don’t you want to be the hero? We always are thinking about not only what happened, but what am I gonna retain from this?
What’s the moral of the story? Or I don’t wanna, I’ve had any number of embarrassing things. When I tell stories at a party, I don’t go to the embarrassing ones. I go to the fun ones and the interesting ones. And after a while though, those are real. Just because I don’t repeat them, they get slopped away because who else would know but me?
And so then I wonder about am I being truthful? I’m, like I said, I’m not a far from a perfect guy and yet it’s human nature to put your best foot forward. Especially if you’re like meeting a new group or like trying to win the girl or something like that. You don’t wanna be, yeah, I remember that one time that I vomited on someone.
No, you don’t want to tell the George Bush story. You know what I mean? You wanna, anyway, and that’s unfair. George Bush was actually a reasonable, decent in-control human being. And like when you get sick and you have that spontaneous sickness that you can’t stop yourselves. That’s so much like the horrible paparazzi gossip that happens nowadays.
Every time that. Joe Biden, like stumbled on a sandbag. I stumbled on a sandbag a hundred times working backstage. Yeah. And that doesn’t mean that I’m clumsy, that I’m an old man, that, it’s like they latch onto what they want to build the narrative, and sometimes they’re very unkind.
Oh yeah.
Stephen: So definitely. So that makes the Department of Truth even better to read. Exactly. Because you look, if you look at those things in a different light,
Alan: it really, honestly I highest recommendation. It’s one of those things that like I have made a point of not just devouring them, I’ve read them over the course of a bunch of days so that I had a chance to have my mind kind of percolated, eliminate on it background and think, what am I, what’s going on here?
What’s being told and putting in something. Les Grim, I’ll go and read the Gangster of Love, an a vice columnist book that Dave Barry wrote the foreword for. That’s hilarious in terms of how wrong it is. Like it really, it isn’t this is far from serious. Good. Then I’ll go back to this series.
Stephen: Very far I a little self plug insight. I’m working on some, I had an idea a while back for some crypted stories. I’ve got some short stories, like five of them that I’m expanding into some actual books for middle grade kids. Okay. But the first one I asked Stan and I actually have him in the book.
So I put him in it and. I’m putting a few of the cases in there as just we’re talking about it, mentioning it you’re not pointing out that this is an actual case from Stan. It’s inspired by, I guess you could say some of his cases. So it’s almost okay. I, I could put in, it’s a total fiction book and I could put in there inspired by real events, because that’s what it’s, yeah.
But the funnest part is now, Jim and I talked over the weekend about this cuz he does a lot of writing for various franchises. He’s done Planet of the Apes, he’s done XFiles, he’s done Green Hornet, he’s done cold check. Along with his own. And he even made a comment about how many people were so misinformed about licensing and being able to write for that type of stuff.
Interesting. Which I’d love to talk to him more about cuz I didn’t hear about that from him. But I told you I’d like to do legend and but I can’t seem to find who has the license for it. So I said maybe I’ll just start writing for it and wait till I get the lawyer
Alan: letter. They’ll find you exactly,
Stephen: and then I’ll find out where to get it from.
But I’m putting in, I asked Stan if I can use him in my book. He said that’s fine. And I’m trying to use some of his words and the way he talks stuff. I’ve got a couple characters in there that I didn’t. License, but I also don’t say exactly who they are. So if you know who they are, you know who they are.
They’ve done that
Alan: forever. Roman klas, that’s how you say it. I’m just full of phrases like, I’ve read that, but I’m not, you should be on Jeopardy. Exactly. It, I love that where it’s okay, I’m pretty sure I know who they’re referring to here, but of course they’re worried about getting sued or at least hurting a friend or something like that.
Yeah. But you can give three broad strokes of personality. It’s that sure sounds a lot like Harrison four or whatever else it might be, so
Stephen: Yeah. I’d love to. Be able to license, like legend and stuff. I really don’t wanna write it and then get a lawyer letter.
That’s not good practice. But they make it so difficult to find the license info, so
Alan: what a great talk that would be though, that you could say, here’s the seven different season desist letters that I’ve gotten over the course of my trying to do kinda fan fiction, continue this series.
You know what I mean?
Stephen: Sheldon with all his letters, projection letters. Exactly. Yeah. To keep away from people. Yeah. So what’d you do this weekend,
Alan: man? And actually it, I wanted to mention, ah, you mentioned the the night stalk sorry. Col check. Yes. Netflix is stopping as of September.
I rearranged my queue of all the DVDs that you get physically instead of streaming wise, so that I really would get the things that if these go away, What would I have difficulty finding in a library? What do I really want to catch in the next three months before it goes away? And that series was one of them because it really is the forerunner to X Files and Fringe and every other, episodic monster of the week, supernatural, that kind of stuff.
And I really like the series. It’s corny. The special effects are only so good. And yet Darren Mcg is a very convincing There’s a certain investigative reporter, insurance investigators, a certain type colombo, where they just win by being a, an annoying, won’t leave it alone type guy. And he’s really good at that.
You know what I mean? He’s really cunning in how he in vagos himself into situations and keeps getting a little bits of information and how he puts it all together in the conspiracy theory. We talk and so I just watched one where Richard Keel, who went on to play Jaws in the James Bond movies, he just played one of the, like a Spirit l Diablo and it’s very funny to see.
Is that there are all kinds of people, as they’re, they have early episodes of The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock presents, or now Colack, the Night Stalker where they went on to have other careers. It’s I think that’s this person is that cool and you look into credits, that’s them.
Stephen: It’s, I saw him on Wild, wild West recently. I was watching of that yeah,
Alan: exactly. Cause it’s hard to find like a, an eight foot tall Indian,
Stephen: yes. And that’s funny you mentioned Col check because that’s a great licensing thing right there because Jim has written some Kch stories and there’s other people I was talking to him about ’em that they have is hear for the comic books like Moonstone or whatever.
Moonstone did comics. Okay. James Aquilo did I, I think I showed you the 50th anniversary of Cold Check. Yeah. So there’s others that are doing that. And it’s just interesting that some of this stuff has lived through some of these new. Authors and stuff and that they, I’m
Alan: looking at the m you know, cm, L xx, I think it’s either VI or iv.
So it’s 74 or 76. That’s 50 years. Yeah.
Stephen: Five 50 years. How old are, geez man.
Alan: I said they hold up pretty well. There’s some good scares. There’s some they really do run through all the different monsters you might bump into. And it’s Chicago, so I’m like, I’ve been on the l I’ve been right along Lakeshore Drive. I will just
Stephen: hold it. And he reprised that character on the X-files, but they didn’t, yeah.
Callem cold Jack. It was just a hint, like what we were just talking about. You knew
Alan: who we supposed to be. Exactly. The investig be reporter that wouldn’t let it go. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.
Stephen: So that one,
Alan: that was fun. Yeah. So anyway, at I, I was joining that series. We Not so much the weekend. Kelly and I had a very calm Memorial Day weekend and this one as well.
We were the Worldwide Developer Conference, is what I’d love to talk about. Yes. I wanna it’s going on all this week. It’s Apple’s big conclave for all of its developers and there’s, there’s millions of apps I don’t think I’m exaggerating and millions of developers that are doing these various different things.
And it’s been going for 20, 25 years now, the app store. So every way you can think of their productivity things and communications and games and stuff like that. And Apple continues to change the world, there were cell phones before the iPhone, but they really weren’t smartphones yet.
And they created that category by saying what do people like and not like about their phones? And let’s do it. And they’ve done that with the first music player, that having the first 10,000 songs in your pocket compared to, and maybe MP3 players, but it didn’t have the interface.
Apple’s all has been really good about design and interface so that they make it very human and like you want to have it with you, it’s now your companion, not just I have this thing on my desk. And the Apple TV is great, but hasn’t really changed the world, but they’re still working on the Apple car.
And I kinda laughingly mentioned that when the apple sex robot comes out, you’re, they’re gonna break the bag. And I always quote this one, Dennis Miller talks about they’re working on virtual reality and stuff like that. And when you get, when you finally get it so that any journeyman laborer can have Claudia Schiffer in their house, that’s gonna make crack look like Sanka, that shelves.
All that is segue into the cool new goggles that they’ve got, which I think are the best pro. And immediately people are like I don’t wanna wear those things on my head. It everything that they could do to allay people’s fears. Get rid of motion sickness, get rid of the weight how you interact with the world.
They’ve cured it, fixed it, and this is only version one. It’s got an amazing array of the screens you have in front of your eyes are at a higher resolution than any monitor you could get. So it really is, there’s never any pixelation or awareness that you’re in a simulation. It’s your in that’s a little scary.
That’s your in and but there’s always you can you it doesn’t only immerse you, you really are aware of. Here’s the room, and I can do gestures that bring things up, floating in mid-air. So it’s a spatial os. So just like you’ve seen in Minority Report or various different sci-fi things, they bring up and you can grab objects in mid-air and turn ’em around and, bring up a menu, pick choice gestures.
It’s all either spoken commands or gestural and gesture isn’t big things. It’s more like little tiny guys like click or, expand and they have on a sensor array that is continually listening and monitoring what you’re doing so that it isn’t. Current VR goggles are like, if I’m gonna go ride a pterodactyl, I have to act as if I’m climbing into the saddle and all that kind of stuff.
And this is instead very responsive to what you do. And it helps you to learn what ways in are the best ways to interact with it so that you’re not having to make broad gestures. But it also doesn’t over interpret. Boy, I, I came up to scratch the side of my nose and somehow I closed the app or something like that, you know what I mean?
Seeing the spatial and it really, they call it ar vr, augmented reality as and virtual reality. It’s not just the, an overlay of, now I’m in the South Pacific and I’m myself. It really is your office environment cuz it’s got all that, it has the spacial, it does spatial audio so that you can hear noises coming in into what your inputs are or where they should be in the room.
And It when you interact with the room and there’s no motion blur at all, it really is like whatever the lag is. And you can do the overlays on top of it. I’ve said I’m jealous of if I’m gonna be out hiking, the thought of putting on a pair of goggles and not getting the panoramic view.
Really? Why would I do that? Why would I have that now? I’m looking at the world through a pair of binoculars, always minders instead, it’s always around you and you can it’ll tell you, okay that’s a bison, that’s Mount Rainier. That’s, and I’m pretty sure there’s none near Mount Rainier, so I just lied.
But it’s it really is. You can add to and subtract from the experience so that it’s, when I’m grocery shopping, I want it to be showing me, whenever I touch something, gimme the price that the market says this is, or whatever else it might be. It is immersive in terms of. It isn’t only about you interacting, it’s content delivery.
You can sit with these goggles on and be as if you’re in the middle of a movie theater that has IMAX wraparound like I always talk about. I love going to certain things where it’s the big screen and the big sound and I wanna be lost in it. So they a little demo of avatar the LA second one way.
And you are in the surf. You are it’s your wow and it’s all around you. And as you turn, it doesn’t clip. And all of a sudden you’re aware of, nope, there’s a wall. It’s really convincingly cool. And I don’t think in just a prepared demo, we’re gonna fool you away. They have had all kinds of, now people, of course the biggest, maybe it would’ve once been this from Chicago that I was like one of the Big Mac guys in Chicago.
Maybe I would’ve been invited to go out to Cupertino and be there for the ceremony of the reveal and stuff like that. But people that have tried it on, they were ready to tell you no. I get motion sickness really easy. And there was just enough lag that I couldn’t wear ’em for more than 30 minutes. No.
They were like, it’s just the right weight. The battery pack is not part of it. Cause that would be too much weight. The materials mold to your face, but don’t immediately feel chaffy and sweaty. Like it’s getting really good reviews from some really harsh critics. Wow. And the biggest thing, of course, is breakthrough.
Technology indistinct magic. It costs $3,500 available at the start of next year. And yet if I bought that instead of buying a ne, then our next big screen tv. Yeah. I guess coming, I each have to have one in order to have us be able to share our baking show. You know what I mean? I just,
Stephen: but wasn’t the Apple Watch initially like $10,000?
The first version?
Alan: It might’ve been a thousand. I don’t think, oh, was it a thousand? What they’ve done is they were aware early on from the watch that the base model was probably like 400. It could go to maybe 2000 because they’d say, if you want a gold band, if you want it to look like you got a Rolex on, we’ll give you Rolex level band and casing so that it’s snazzy instead of, oh, you’re wearing a Timex.
Remember the little Timex guys where you had a little stylist that you would poke with? And it made you like Geek. You would just yell that you were that guy. And
Stephen: BCRs in the seventies were like 1500 bucks, and that was in the seventies. So that would be equivalent of everything. Now, 3,500 now.
Alan: A big impression for me about what Apple was doing. For instance, they also put out what the Mac Pro and like fully outfitted, it’s like $7,000. It’s a big, it’s one of those things where you can run a server center off of it. It has six PCI bays and it can connect to six different monitors.
And it just, it’s, I so much don’t need it, and yet I, but, and yet I want it cause it’s just the fastest, it has 192 gig of memory is a gig or terabyte nowadays. I, yeah, we’re getting terabyte of storage, you know what I mean? Yeah. And Mon in every way that Apple keeps pushing the envelope so that you have all the battery power you need all the screen resolution, you need all the connectivity.
It’s just they put out these models that the lower price point is you can get a perfect laptop award winning better than anything else out there for $1,200. But if you want to go whole hog, you can upgrade it in various different ways to get $3,000 in this machine for 7,000 and stuff like that.
And that’s what these things will be is they’ll be a Tesla, they’ll come out 3,500 bucks and the early adopters will be like zza the have enough I think penetration that all the developers will be, what can we do with this? This is just an amazing, and then as the app a universe grows and as word comes out that you know that they’re good, then they’ll find a way to do it.
It’s, two thirds of the capability for a third of the price. So now it’s down to $1,200. And I’m looking forward to seeing as the whatever the cost of materials, the cost of manufacturer, the sunk cost of all the development that went into this. Cuz this isn’t two or three years development.
I think this is 20 years of development. When you first saw what people were doing in movies and at Apple and others, have done I, I’m gonna work on making a tricorder. I’m gonna work on making a phaser. I’m gonna work on, I’m gonna make, those things that were in Star Trek, star Wars, there’s gotta be a way to do coherent.
There’s gotta be a way to do, just pass it over about it. It’ll give you 30 different medical right. Statistics, stuff like that. And nowadays, This guy tells me if I’m having an atrial fibrillation episode or how my A1C is doing, not a1c my current
Stephen: blood glucose.
They’re working on the a1c.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. It’s I love, I’m just so heartened by, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magics that Arthur C. Clark and we’re getting there. Like when you see what this thing can do, I just, they miniaturized it and they, it’s not perfect, but it’s like Apple has also always done things, in my opinion, where it doesn’t just do the minimum.
As you experiment with it, you’re like, oh, that’s just what I would’ve wanted to do if I thought of adding a file system or if I wanted to have, how does it handle I meet someone and I can chew I wanna exchange perhaps names and phone numbers, some kind of contact information, but I don’t want it to be that anybody’s scanning me can get that.
So they’re really always very aware of privacy and that you control your own information and that all the things they’re doing with machine learning, ai, that it gets better and better about how do you interact with your computer and make it so that it’s yours, that it really is anticipates you and not in a spooky way where it’s railroading you.
But it’s more that’s right. I go to this place often and so when I think of pizza, it brings up my top three pizza choices. Not the pizza place that I visited in Boston, even though I really loved it cuz I’m not in Boston and it knows that and but all that is not.
Like in the weird people talk about for Siri or Echo or all the various different listening to you all the time type things, how much are they really? I just read a story literally an hour after I watched this keynote about how the Amazon ring cameras have been that all that data that gets stored at Amazon, it didn’t have good security controls on it.
So anybody in Amazon at a certain level could go looking at things and so you had people I think I’ll check in on my girlfriend. I think I’ll, and what really nervous people, let’s watch the baby in it’s tend is that the baby, I’m gonna kidnap terrible possibilities of this information not being secure.
And I think that Apple is really conscious of that and they continually talk about this is end-to-end encryption. It’s only stored on your device. It if when you set a password, only you, not even Apple, not the Department of Justice. Demanding it of Apple, they can’t make it happen. So if you’re wise about your passwords or your thumbprint, that they, if you put it in password 1 23, then I guess the government deserves to rake you over the calls.
But if you really make it secure, it really is. Like until quantum computing hits, it’s secure enough that it’ll take the government 35 years to break it. And by then, you’re not in jail anymore or you’re not going to jail at all. Let’s put it that way. I love not only this product, but in the continual commitment to I think we can do this.
Let’s work on this. Let’s get the brightest people in the world to work on it, get ’em talking, iterate again and again to see, find the materials that we need to make sure that we lock up the contract with technetium from the heart of Africa or Brazil or China or whatever else it might be Cranium.
Like a vibranium. Exactly. That adimant for the case and can’t your watch exactly. On Obta, that kind of stuff. They’re just I like seeing, it’s just so cool to be alive now to see miracles happening and like I can. I can watch any movie in amazing wraparound, I can listen to any music like the concert experience.
I love going to live concerts. If it really gets to where I can be in the middle of a live concert and maybe of the one that I was never at, who doesn’t wanna see the last waltz, that was the band’s last show, I would love to be able to go back and be as if I was in the audience. That might be my crack to be able to go back and see the Stones, the Beatles when they arrived at Shea Stadium.
I would love to recapture some
of
Stephen: that kind of stuff. On the Oculus, there is an app. Okay. That does concerts. It doesn’t have the old stuff, obviously, because the new ones, they set up 20 different cameras backstage, right? Middle and you can get off and you can keep moving around and look.
So they do have that for new, but with all this AI and deep fake stuff, all you need is the concert footage from the Beatles and run it through the software with the right tweaking and they can recreate it. It’s. Just getting they’ve got things now. I saw just for anybody to create like voiceover commercials using basically deep fake commercials.
Okay. Or technology. Yeah. Put Alan’s face on there and Alan’s doing a voiceover for I, I’ll take Mr. Alan’s face and put it on a thing for windows PCs and how much you love Windows PCs. You know what I’m saying? I could do all of that Exactly that
Alan: when I’m not smoking, I’m on a Windows box.
Exactly.
Stephen: Yeah. So that, that kinda reminds me talking about the movies. I’m gonna jump topics. So did they. Talk about the whole glasses thing. When’s it coming out? You said next year?
Alan: It’s available early next year. And that, that was to me the Big Nova announcement. Yeah. But of course they have new operating systems and enhancements for the Mac, the iPad, the phone, the watch, the tv.
They have new better laptops. New Macintosh desktops. Desktops. The studio now, like I have my little Mac mini and the studio is kinda like two of those on top cuz it’s got so much other juice in there. And, but it’s I don’t know, this guy cost me maybe a thousand dollars for $3,000. I can get something six times as powerful.
And again, I don’t know that I need it. Yeah. I have such want. And $3,000 is not and then I ate dog food for a week. I’m, if you save up, if you really want this thing and budget yourself. It’s not a $300, of course I can always buy it type VCR slash dvd blu-ray, those advance. But $3,000 is still, the amount of
Stephen: capability that you get for 3000
Alan: bucks is an amazing achievement.
Yeah. You know what I mean? And the other cool thing that’s going on all this week, and I’m don’t mean to sound like a shill, but I don’t know anybody else that does this all this week. There are hundreds of sessions where they’re talking about, here’s the development environment, here’s the new capabilities in each of these devices.
Here’s the new things you’ve added to the APIs and the various different development stacks. Here’s how we’ve done coding and debugging and error correction and stuff like that. All where you spend all of your time. I think I might even have talked about this in past apple’s gotten really good about don’t spend your time on the drudgery.
Don’t have to do. The memory reallocation routines and the error correction routines and stuff like that. Just use these particular constructs that manage all that stuff for you and it’ll put out an error message without you having had to think of every single error that it might be. It’s, they’re really good at.
Getting people to you wanna make a money a, a movie about band Dets running around. It’s easy cuz you don’t have to be a total coding head in order to be able to do that. And I’m Swift and c plus is now integrated with an Xcode. They’re amazing. Like the Swift language now is written using Swift, which is one of those like wonderful dragon swallowing its own tail type things, but they eat their own dog food.
They created a development environment that would enable them to do amazing operating system things and amazing application things. And so now we get the benefit of, oh, let’s share that with everyone because it’s so productive and so good. Yeah, and I’m just happy about that, that they’re. Used to even cost like a hundred dollars a year to be a developer, and now it’s free.
So no wonder they have a billion developers out there because every 12 year old is I could, if I write an app that really does well, that’s my college fund, that’s my retirement fund. If I do something that really Yeah. Sells, I don’t need to go to college if I’m already absolutely coding for Apple.
Very cool. I, and they’re really I’m a little bit out of, I used to have multi-platform coding type stuff, so it really might be the Microsoft Development Environment, virtual studio, or whatever they’re calling it nowadays has a lot of these things too. But it would be really hard to think of how they’ve been able to keep up with everything that Apple has and the integration, not only with all the Apple products, but they talked about here’s how.
New little avatar stickers all kinds of responses in your messaging that they’re now standardizing the way that you do messaging across platforms so that you really can share those things with any windows, any Samsung, any all that, Google, all those kinds of things. And how they didn’t make specific announcements about this, but the internet of things like how do you control your house and stuff like that.
There’s been wonderful convergence about that. So even if you’re using a really good development environment, you’re not only, we have used ourselves the phrase, the walled garden of Apple Boy. It’s open, it’s everywhere. It’s really easy to create for every single end to compile for various different, like historic cuz it’s not like a new Windows version is released and everybody switches to it.
They’ve still got people running Windows 95. Yeah. Windows xt. You know what I like XT xp. I knew I had it right? Xp. So how cool that they’ve got. Between emulation and awareness of what was in those chips and what was going on in those various different operating systems. They’re leaving, like they leave some things behind because it’s just not fiscally responsible to support everything that’s ever come out.
And yet the amount of stuff that they do support is amazing in its breadth and depth. I’m, I love going to this thing because it’s, apple used to have a they were the first ones that I knew that had a position called evangelist. Yes. That it wasn’t a salesman. It wasn’t like, I’m gonna say you this thing and I’m gonna convince you why you need this.
Evangelism was all like, With this, you can do anything. What do you wanna do? Anything? I’m gonna, I’m just gonna make the world bigger for you. And Guy Kawasaki a famous was like the famously, the first one, really bright guy and can created the way that this works. And Apple has often been like that, that they’re how can I get you to see that?
Whatever you want you can do, I’ll be the picks and shovels that you use to do it. I’m not trying to say you have to stay within Apple. Anyway, I’m, it’s heartening. It’s heartening with all the other crap going on in the world that this is like such a force for good. And I know that there’s gotta be some criticism about how, where are you making them?
And where are you getting your materials from? And indeed the world is a messy place and yet they really from what I understand, have been. And I’ve researched this cause I wanna be able to say it. Cause I don’t want to think they’re really good on top and then they’re really underneath, right?
They really care about the environment that they do incredible recycling of like round trip materials and stuff like that. They really care about the people who are making their stuff their laws are rules are far beyond the local laws for what you need to who’s allowed to work there. It’s not 90 year olds slavering until they drop dead from exhaustion.
It’s not, it really seems to be that they up the game in the Hong Kongs or Singapores or Cambodias, or Irelands for that matter, that they’re really a force for betterment in as many ways as they can be. That they’re like a really good world citizen. I like that. I like voting with my dollars for Right.
These guys are doing good. And I’m hoping Apple stock is, skyrocketing. I think it has gone up. I’m wa my mark, I’m recovering a little bit like I mentioned, and Apple is part of that. I hope that they get just reward. They are, what am I saying?
Hope they’re like the, weren’t they the first billion dollar company and now they continue to be one of those top three them and Tesla and Amazon, Google that is meta and alphabet. They’re all vying in that, wow, there’s so much money in advertising, so much money in product.
Apple. One of those like really make something, they make the widget. They just, it’s so anyway end of the sermon and the advertising. But isn’t it cool to have a company that you’re really, like I’m, when I talk about Moderna and how they’re curing things with R Nna, them and Biointech.
Yeah. Like we’re in the middle of miraculously cool things happening and I wanna make money with them by investing, but really what I’m doing is investing in the future. I want them to exist and thrive. Cause I think they’re a really good bet at who’s gonna cure terrible diseases and who and it’s not just to make money.
That’s not the reason that you do the world. It’s so that the cost of living goes down and the miracles that can occur go up. And I’m, I don’t want to be for the company that’s gouging for insulin. I wanna be the one that’s we found artificial insulin and we’re gonna sell it for a penny and put those bastards out of business.
Stephen: You know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. It’s exciting. And I know this is the time for all of these. Things going on, Microsoft and PlayStation, I believe Sony have their developer conferences for games and stuff like that. And, that’s such a huge industry and people are like it’s not helping and changing the world so much.
Maybe not, but it’s, what people are paying money for. It’s what’s growing and huge. So yeah, there’s a big, there’s so many changes in what those glasses are going to do for the gaming industry. That’s exactly crazy. Yeah.
Alan: And just you honestly, you and I could just start brainstorming, how would I use that?
I can be the doctor that has these guys on and while I’m operating, it has real time overlays of here’s what these organs should look like and here’s where all the various different, venal systems, everything. And so that the chance of. Making a mistake is much lower. The efficiency with which you can do it.
It’s monitoring all of his vitals and so you can immediately know I didn’t have to wait for a blood spurt to come out. I’m like, okay, what’s going on over here? I, and if I’m a craftsman and I’m like working on. Fixing a car and it seems, yes, you’re working on all things, just how it should be and it actually says, okay, this is a three eights, or maybe it’s metric system, and you it’ll just be so enabling to have all that information at your fingertips while you’re in the middle
Stephen: of it.
Yeah, so very cool. Microsoft has their own thing. Yeah. Microsoft has their own thing called a HoloLens that they’ve been pushing for business aspects. And that, and the examples they showed was like just some poor schmuck at home has a problem with wiring electricity. He puts the HoloLens on calls. His electrician, who puts his version on his electrician can see what he can see and walks him through it.
Walk through. Yeah. So he gets a service call immediately and electrician doesn’t visit the house, so I’m like, that just the possibilities of being able to do something like that is just crazy. You’re, like you said, working on your car, you’re right. You’re mechanic can guide you through it without leaving where they’re at.
You don’t have to take the car to them and, but now then we’re gonna get, just like we get with all the other support, it’s gonna be all these guys from India Frank, from India. So
Alan: I guess that, but they’ll learn to interact at the right. Tone of voice in the right speed, stuff like that. And here, I’ll, lemme put on the big voice.
These things conquer time and space. Instead of you having to have a good mechanic nearby and you live in the middle of Kansas or something like that, and not from India. You really, you can get these things done because I’m not having to drive an hour to go to the doctor. The doctor can get online, like you said in a minute.
Yeah. I just I’m going to love the fact that kind of expertise, experience, knowledge, can be anywhere I. That is, they can be physically anywhere, but they can go anywhere because is there anything as ubiquitous nowadays is a net connection. We’re really getting to that point of it’s not a matter of money have and have not, it’s access, information, connectivity, have and have not.
Yeah. And we’re getting, if I can, have anybody has a phone, they’ve skipped all the copper in the ground, all the BS in all kinds of places around the world. Anybody that has a phone nowadays, another company that I’m into is Mercado Libra, where all the unbanked of South America, now they’re not that anymore.
They have the ability to do transaction processing and save money and, deal with the world because they have their phone. And same with Africa. And that’s how they’re curing diseases. That they’re being able to not just only bring medical supplies in, they’re bringing in the expertise about how to diagnose and treat and stuff like that.
And, I don’t know. I love that science fiction books have talked about that. The contraction of the world is flat or the, if you’re a teleporter and distance doesn’t matter anymore, it changes everything. You know what I mean? Energy cost is next to nothing to get things done compared to what it used to be.
Taking a boat across the, the Atlantic in order to bring tobacco and what was it? The tobacco, rum, arms, whatever the triangle trade was. Sls. Sls, I’m sorry. It’s gonna be really cool that so much, the first effect of the thing, the capabilities that we’re talking about are small comparison to the overall effects of I can live anywhere and still interact with 90% of the world because I really will be able to, I’d like I’ve talked about I don’t think I wanna do it instead of, I think I still really want to go Hawaii and go to the edge and look into a volcano, but if I.
Couldn’t. If I get, I’m 63, if all of a sudden I really seize up and I can’t walk around anymore, but I don’t have to say, oh, goodbye rest of the world. I can still go to the Great Barrier Reef and go to, kill the way up. Yeah. And I that it’s really heartening
Stephen: and it. If you have your goggles on, you’re at the Great Barrier Reef, I’ll be glad to just dump water on you so it’s realistic, simulate
Alan: the full experience.
Maybe bite me outta the leg. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, my barracuda is here.
Stephen: All well, hey I gotta get rolling okay. I did see the Spider-Man movie. We’ll have to talk about that next week. I’m seeing it
Alan: tonight as a matter of fact. Okay, perfect. We both have an experience.
Me me and Robert and Colleen are going tonight. So Nice. Yeah, and I’m and tomorrow night I’m seeing Martin Barr, who was the longtime guitarist for Jeff Rotel. And there’s a whole bunch of tall music and I think it might actually be Martin Barre, but maybe Martin, another one. Martin Lancelot.
I know his last name though. I don’t know how to pronounce his last name. His middle. So I’m glad you saw it and yes, let’s talk about it cuz it’s getting great
Stephen: reviews. Oh yeah. It was worth it. Also, I learned an interesting fact trivia here. Bachman Turner Overdrive, yes. Had an earlier iteration of them.
Do you know who their, the earlier iteration was? No, I just read
Alan: this recently too.
Stephen: It’s one I would’ve never got. So I know
Alan: that Randy Bachman was in the, guess who it was?
Stephen: The guess who, there you go.
Alan: Yeah. Was he was with cause Burton Cummings, one of Colleen’s favorite vocalists of all times. We’ve seen them and noticed Randy Bachman was like, that’s the same Bachman.
Yes, it was. Yes. It’s,
Stephen: oh yeah. So I learned that and I’m like, wow. That’s so completely different musical styles to go to, but you know that, that happens a lot, all right. All right. So hey, we’ll talk. Wonderful. We’ll talk
Alan: next week, man. It was a pleasure, Stephen. Later. Okay. Very good. Bye-Bye.
