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Overview
Hosts Alan and Stephen engage in a multifaceted discussion for their podcast, “Episode 173 – Riding the Challenges of Reality.” They start with a profound exchange about climate change, highlighting the impact of pollution and how it affects different regions differently. They express their frustration with petro-industry people and finance people for ignoring real science and continue polluting the planet. Alan and Stephen also mention the societal consequences of ignoring these issues and bear their discontent for political hypocrisy.
Further in the discussion, they delve into the world of television and comic books, referencing shows like “Monarch,” “What If,” “Echo” and “Percy Jackson,” and discussing a comic series called “Mystery.” They also express their admiration for bands like “Porcupine Tree,” mentioning how discovering and sharing such interests sparks joy for them.
They continue with a critique of the societal behavior towards intellect versus physical strength, discussing the disparity in admiration for mental and physical accomplishments. Finally, they wrap up with a candid critique of religious and political prejudice. In this engaging conversation, the hosts lead the listeners through various aspects, from global issues and entertainment to societal norms and individual values.
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Transcript
[00:00:00]
Alan: Yeah, now you can. Oh here’s some smoke. Let me just get some smoke on me. There we go. Okay. All right. Harbor main, which probably is getting hit pretty hard. Ooh, yeah. I love, I’ve got nothing. We’ve got some stuff like that. It’s a, it’s always we notice often that in the Cleveland area, we don’t get that hard compared to Chagrin falls or down South on Snowville road, like in Brackville, we like would seem to be just to the.
West instead of the east of the city, and however, things come sweeping down from the lake or across the city. We just seem to be in this nice null zone if it doesn’t hit us that hard compared to many other places that get it worse and then expand it outwards from Cleveland to like the whole nation and thing patterns have shifted now so that the east coast is regularly getting lambasted as well as like uncharacteristically in the south that they never used to get this.
And I must say, for the people that caused this, all the petro [00:01:00] people and all the finance people, the people that wouldn’t look at real science and statistics and say, we need to calm the hell down about how we’re damaging the planet. It’s nice to have it visiting them much more than the innocent people all around.
I just, I, it used to be that you’d invariably hear. from the crazies about how, hey, New Orleans just got hit by a hurricane. Oh, that’s because it’s a city of sin, and they deserve somehow to get it. And I just, that’s so grotesque that you would think so.
Stephen: At least in your own logic,
Alan: hand of God, I guess you guys are the worst of the hypocritical sinner, non Christian bastards that you are.
And It isn’t about religion all the time. Sometimes it’s just, the guy that used to sit on the top of the hill in West Virginia, where all the tailings and slag flow would go downhill and hurt the people that were in the little things. It’s nice that not everybody is immune. You can’t run a terrible polluting concern [00:02:00] and not get hit by it nowadays.
Just read a big article, sadly, that PFAs, forever chemicals, as they call them, parafluoro why do I not know? I should be able to just have it roll tripping off the tongue. They’re the, there’s things that don’t deteriorate based on sun and environmental concerns for tens of thousands of years.
And they’re not good for us. There’s an increased incidence of kidney malfunction and circulation difficulty and all that kind of stuff. And they’re now so much in our environment. That it’s not just don’t live near the Superfund site. They are part of the cycle that continually evaporates and then comes down as rain.
So there is no safe rain water left on the planet. It’s got an overabundance of PFAs and other evil things by Roma meal. I just read this and so I’m sorry, it’s like knowing dinosaur names. If you know them, they just roll right out. But if you don’t, you can’t conjure them up.
But I guess. The fact that we’ve killed the planet [00:03:00] like that and that now nobody is safe. I don’t want it to be like that. I don’t want to be the planet, but At least the bad guys are having to deal with it as well. There’s always been an argument about, depends on whose ox is getting gored.
And as long as they could shelter themselves and their families and drink their bottled water and live in a place where they don’t have to deal with. The horrible pollution and death that they’re creating. But now they’re in the path of the snowstorm. They’re in the path of the acid room.
They’re in the path of all of this stuff. And finally, the, they’re going to have to deal with it because they have to deal with it finally, instead of being able to hide from it. So here’s hoping, and I don’t know, I know I’m really venting about this, but there’s 30 years of articles about who are the first people that took this seriously?
Because they had something at stake. Insurance companies long ago had to figure on what’s going to happen when we have climate change and we get flooding and we get the not only climate change is [00:04:00] such a This is a terrible thing to say, it was a bad choice to go with that. Instead of just thinking about pollution, you’re killing people with their down river from you.
And you’re putting things in the water and they’re going to die from all of the, what it used to be phosphates from all your detergents, because they really screw ecosystems up. And now that I know I’m jumping around, but not really. I just read in there’s a thing called project censored. That talks about which are the most important but underreported stories of the year.
And no lie, seven out of 10 of those stories this year were all the ways in which polluters are getting away with literally murder and not having to pay because they’ve learned how to pay off the press and not in the United States, but around the globe. They don’t pay them off. They kill the journalists.
There’s 400 deaths of people that are reported on [00:05:00] terrible pollution in Brazil, Argentina, Indochina, Africa, all these very different places where that’s the best way to get silence. You don’t sue them, but they, and those articles about all the slap suits, where they just, they sue you and are so persistent about making life uncomfortable.
If you speak the truth that you shut up after a while and all the people that they’ve bought off and they just had. Article after article about how, why isn’t this in the news? Why isn’t this being shouted from the tops of buildings about these people are getting away with killing our planet. And we’re just like, I’ll just watch another episode of dancing with the stars until my city is the one like Flint that has no drinkable water until it’s in the air and my kids are all getting learning disabilities in school.
Oh, so it, the fact that all of the things that we’ve had, say for the last 40 years since deregulation oh, all that anti pollution control, we got to get rid of that because that’s interfering with our ability to make a profit. No, it was in place for all the right reasons [00:06:00] because the science long ago said that lead.
Lowers people’s education levels and that
Stephen: there’s which explains our current political situation.
Alan: It really is a political thing all along. If we make the population dumb enough, they’ll buy anything that we tell them and anything we hide from them. They’ll just say that doesn’t matter because I got TV and yes, I hardly ever do that.
I don’t go. I’m sorry about that, but it’s just the weirdest thing to be how underreported it is and how it isn’t only that the press, is it the fourth estate, the fifth estate, they’re getting intimidated or they’re ineffective, but that. We aren’t the only ones that know this. There’s a whole division of government that’s dedicated to speaking scientific truth to Congress and Congress has, they’re the ones that have loosened the environmental regulations.
They pass new regulations that they [00:07:00] call the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act. And they’re absolutely not. They’re totally releasing. Hey, let’s get some more drilling going on in our Arctic wilderness. Let’s get some pipelines going across the United States with a thousand communities along there that if they have an oil spill, that community will cease to exist and that it’s already in the environment because it’s leaking all the time.
And then you find out Wow, you think flames shooting out of my water tap. Maybe something’s wrong there. My kids are not able to learn. Maybe it’s because they’re drinking the result of all the fracking. Chemicals leaching into our groundwater and then coming up into my fresh water, my well water. Oh, my God.
It’s terrible. I’m pretty sure I like to return to the first thing. I know. I’m sorry. I’m not letting you get a word of enterprise. They have regular tests of municipal drinking water and Cleveland comes [00:08:00] out roses. We have very clean. There’s like only. There are a lot of important number of particles per million or particles per billion of the stuff that really harms people.
And our system works pretty well, but that is not the case all around the United States that they’ve loosened these things in major cities. And if they want to have the opportunistic disaster, they never returned to that. The water system is functioning correctly. So New Orleans, it’s all of Texas has.
Next to no regulation on how close you can have like oil wells compared to where people live. And there’s all kinds of proof that says, if you’re within five, I think 3200 is often a number that I see cited as to how far you have to live before you don’t get just. Environmental effects. It means you have a 20 percent more chance of birth defects and premature birth and all that kind of stuff.
And yet there they have within 50 feet, not [00:09:00] 3200 feet. So I just how is it that we don’t have isn’t part of the government supposed to be protect the voters, the people and shouldn’t the voters be holding government accountable for? I don’t want you to get a new swimming pool from the oil concern. I want you to save me and my children from breathing in death and drinking in death.
All the freaking time. So
Stephen: anyway you gotta give Texas and other places a little bit of a break. Because they do, you can only address so many issues at 1 time and they got to address the important issues that really affect us. Like the books that they don’t want everybody reading in
Alan: the library exactly that.
And, yeah, because There’s nothing like reviewing textbooks compared to our electrical grid is one tree fall away from destroying the state. You know what I mean? When they’re going to get, if they’re getting hit by snow they not only have created the conditions that create this more often, they’ve never then [00:10:00] said, wow, we should probably start to have snow removal crews and you.
Fixing the electric grid crews that are on call when people lose power. They don’t lose power for a week and all their food spoils. And all of that they haven’t at all ratcheted up. There’s all kinds of studies about which cities grew too fast that they didn’t have their road system and their sewage system and their everything system.
They didn’t do regulations that would say, if we’re going to have this level of population, it has to be this much. And then we have to keep budgeting for more. If we grow from 300, 000 to a million, that doesn’t work unless you really plan for it and react quickly to it when you see it happening.
And there’s all kinds of examples of San Diego grew very smartly. They really did not let like rampant suburbanization and all kinds of stuff without making sure that they had the road system in place. And once in a while, they got 10 lane wide roads. Because that’s what it was going to take when you got one quarter that goes north south from San Diego to the rest of [00:11:00] California, and they had to have that because they could count number of cars on the road.
And if you don’t want to have a four hour traffic jam every day, then you have to do something. Whereas it’s funny. I don’t know that https: otter. ai
For instance we have been to multiple national parks and often national parks are right next to natural resources that somebody wants to exploit. And there’s nothing more chilling than, wow, this used to be like a two lane curvy road. Now it’s a four lane mega highway. So that the trucks that are carrying out all the coal and natural gas and, refract LPNG and when you’re there at night, yeah.
It used to be that you could look up and see, as we’ve talked about, the Milky Way, all those wonderful stars, and now what is the glow from all the industrial concerns right outside the National Park, and the flares from where they’re burning off some stuff that you know that shouldn’t be in the atmosphere, but they got something that says if you burn off 30 percent of it, then we’re still within And environment [00:12:00] regulations instead of how about 0%.
How about not doing that at all? Leaving it in the earth would be a good idea if you’re trying, if you know that there are consequences to it. So we, one of the reasons that we did a lot of our state capitals and a lot of the national parks that went with them over the last 20 years is we kept thinking.
I don’t know how long this is going to hold out after we were up in the Dakotas and saw that they had whole like company towns that had been built up to be able to dig right near Theodore Roosevelt National Park and not to be weird, after they had exhausted all the available hotel rooms and stuff like that, then company towns come in.
They build terrible shanties and they have an inflow of prostitution and gambling and all the vices that all these guys making all this money because those jobs pay well, because there’s hazard pay involved, then you’re like when that dries up, you’re going to be left with this. Ghost town of like terrible vice outlets and it used to be Dickinson, Dickinsville, something [00:13:00] like that was just like a little place you could stop by and get your hearty county country breakfast and stuff like that.
And now it’s what is Vegas doing up in North Dakota? How in the world is it that this place looks so seedy and so used at night? It’s all Oh, pretty lights during the day when the lights are gone and you really get to see like New Orleans during the day. Oh my God, it’s. It’s disgusting.
It really is compared to what you expect to find up there that you’re in the middle of beautiful National Park territory, and instead, the additional litter, and the additional Oh I didn’t realize I was in such a today. Yeah,
Stephen: man, the weather really got to you. I,
Alan: you know what it is like. All the, I love the fact that I subscribe, we subscribe to, Time and The Week and various different things online, and everybody had their year in review.
And so in a lot of cases, it was, okay, I got some, I’m [00:14:00] turned on to, I should read those books and watch those movies and play those games and do those TV shows so that you’re like what we have done. And yet you can’t also not have faces in the news. And 80 percent of the faces are criminals and rat bastards that are abusing our Congress or getting away with terrible things across international borders or everything.
It, the fact that they’re the year in review, isn’t the tales of mother Teresa tales of, like good people doing good things. And sometimes. It is a good thing. Every time that they have the innovations and inventions issue of Time Magazine, it rewarms the cockles of my heart because there really are people that are figuring out how we’re going to live longer and more safely and fix food and be able to to handle pollution in a way that instead of just, strip mining and raw exploitation they’re showing here’s how you can do things sustainably, whether it’s agriculture and avoid the runoff, or whether it’s how you’re going to mind that it [00:15:00] doesn’t just have to be open air mines and putting all these tailings into a river that 50 years ago was beautiful and pristine.
And now it’s a fucking sludge run. So I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to avoid the news. Because my life isn’t often impacted by the worst of what’s going on in the world. I live in my happy Cleveland area and we seem to be If I go to my comedy clubs, and we go for walks in the woods, and I get my comic books coming into the house, that’s a pretty good world without having to worry about the terrible bigotry here, and the terrible environmental invasion there, and all that kind of stuff.
And yet, if you read these end of the year things, you can’t help but catch up on all the evil that you’ve been avoiding up until then. You know what
Stephen: The fact that we have
Alan: The Russian bear attacking Ukraine, and that the United States is at all wavering in paying for that, that we’ve got these evil reds, which lets you know on what side they are because hey, that [00:16:00] used to be reds and pinkos or what you call people, defamatory early in the 50s, that they’re holding the US hostage for giving the appropriate aid and making sure that Ukraine doesn’t get eaten by the Russian bear.
When in your lifetime could you have pictured that? Oh we lost another country. Oh Putin is evil, but he just rolls across places. Every one of those countries that’s next to the Soviet Union, my Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, my crews that we’re doing in September, hope we are, because it could be that nope, not allowed to land at those ports anymore because the country’s at war.
And that’s a different country now. It isn’t about my freaking crews. You know what I mean?
Stephen: It is. It’s illustrating the point. True.
Alan: Exactly. The fact that I know how much Lithuania has been a thorn in Russia’s side for generations because they won’t give in, because they do say we will be free, and they do, they were the first ones to do that.
Throw off the Soviet Union to have their [00:17:00] own real government again, instead of just being a puppet government and the rape of their land and the use of their resources. And we need a port on the Baltic Sea and all that kind of stuff. So the fact that
it’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe the first I saw the sign that said rather communist than Democrat. That’s fine. Someone wearing a T shirt. And and
Stephen: I love the outcry, the Republicans, Oh, impeach Biden because he wants to support Ukraine and the war. And we need to focus on American stuff.
And I’m like, folks, do you understand that’s not going to just stop that we’re part of a whole global community and part of what goes on that eventually that will come back and affect us. And then people are, we go see, we should have done this. It’s
Alan: there is my, my, my latest phrase that I use is every accusation, a confession. I haven’t seen any of the dirt bags say something [00:18:00] about Biden or Hunter Joe Biden or Hunter Biden or about liberals in general, or about specific states and rules and all that kind of stuff that isn’t them saying we do that and far worse.
But as long as we’re on the attack, we distract you from noticing that we are the ones taking bribes that we are the ones suppressing the vote and having everything you hear about how we have to have fewer ways to vote because we’re trying to make sure that the vote is correct. And then you find out that they’re the ones that have been continually finding votes gaming the system.
Trying as much as they can to win the election no matter what not just having an honest election again. Isn’t that the, and there isn’t any societal ill that isn’t like that now, all the institutions that they make about, Hey, these guys won’t come to the table and negotiate. They’ve been offering to come to the table for 18 months and now because it’s two weeks to go and you wanna play this game of fucking chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States.
Now you’re gonna say those [00:19:00] things. They’re, they either are. Galactic level hypocrites that they don’t see it, or they’re galactic level liars, and they know that they can get away with saying those lies, and there aren’t enough people saying, you’re full of shit, you’re evil, the emperor has no clothes, sit down and shut up, and we’re going through the Trump trial, one of the four right now.
Stephen: Oh, I was married to an expert level narcissist manipulator and I can see that it’s like ping, ping. You can recognize all the little signs and you wouldn’t believe the amount of people that at one point would get my face say this is your fault and you’re the reason blah, blah, blah.
I’m like, are you kidding me? And I’m looking at the news. I’m looking at the politician, not just politicians. Transcribed Which are the major ones, it seems, actors and radio jocks and it’s just oh, my God. And unfortunately, again, [00:20:00] elitist. I understand. But if 100 percent IQ is our average, that means 50 percent of the people are below that.
And maybe just a little above and they can speak to that. Because, like you said. Hey, I got my TV. I can watch the Super Bowl on 75 inch TV because Walmart was on sale. I’m good. Forget who cares about what’s going on in the Ukraine. We’ve got books that kids should not be reading. I want to control what books your kids shouldn’t read and don’t take my guns away.
I need 300 guns that all shoot 75 rounds every half second. It’s needed for protection. You
Alan: know what it is? It’s funny. We never intended for relentless geekery to be about politics. No,
Stephen: we tried to avoid it.
Alan: There are fact resistant human beings. And if there’s anything that is at the heart of relentless geekery, it’s a reverence for facts and data and mathematics.
And like, [00:21:00] how does the world work? You know what I mean? When you look into I don’t know. You want to go to them a make session and you really understand how your materials operate and how electronics work so you can use your Raspberry Pi or Arduino and stuff like that. And anybody that has that weirdness of, I’m going to rant about horrible technology while I hold a phone in my hand to do it.
Like that, again, the galactic level of hypocrisy or. Blindness, willing or unwilling that we have to comment on it because that’s in the world, much less geeky, much less fact based. And there’s so much proof of it, but we’ve used again and again. Oh, I think you’re frozen. Am I talking to the
Stephen: wind? No, I hear you.
I was trying the cloud recording, hoping that it would record better and it doesn’t seem to be. But again, I think it’s mostly me and my connection. Bad weather. I always get less internet with bad weather.
Alan: [00:22:00] Got it. Because you’re out more in the country than I am where I’m right, right next to a point of presence from AT& T, literally like across my backyard.
Stephen: I think the cows got off the wheel. So it’s not spinning as fast to keep the electricity internet going.
Alan: So to summarize my rant. The reason that we talk about these things is because I like facts. I like science. I like the things that make the world a better place. The advancement of civilization is based on understanding more and continually being curious. And there’s so many forces in the world nowadays that are not about that.
I got A 2000 year old book that was written by nomadic tribesmen, and yet somehow this book has all the answers to you name it refrigeration and satellite communication and medical technology where they didn’t even know how germs worked yet. They didn’t have any idea of the scale of really small or really large.
That is at the heart of how computer [00:23:00] chips work, and we know about the size of our universe. And there’s automatically conflicts where what we love and appreciate other people are like that’s magic. And if it’s too much magic, then it’s the devil. What is wrong with you that you would say something like that?
It was just a mental illness brigade that is emboldened to say those terrible things. I
Stephen: was just talking to somebody that works for hospitals and hospitals has gone completely cashless. You cannot pay for your appointment with cash at all. They don’t take it. And you have to do your appointments and communication through the app and use the app.
And. They were saying how there are so many people informing them how this is against God’s will and that it is wrong is in the book of revelations that going cashless like this will destroy the it’s What are you talking about? [00:24:00] Literally, they were told those
Alan: things are is now the mark of the beast.
Yeah, they
Stephen: were told that
Alan: for all my life. It hasn’t been so much about Republican versus Democrat, but it definitely has been about conservatism versus liberalism. New ideas are good. It’s where progress comes from. And indeed, you have to be careful. Not all new ideas are good, but you have to have the process, often called science, of how to evaluate them.
How to prove if it’s really true, and if it really is beneficial, and to be able to compare between new ideas, because they’re all alternatives, and say, Where should I put my time, attention and money and the fact that there are people that say, nope, I really want things to be as they always are. If you would have said that 50 years ago, let’s say 70, then you’d be worrying about which of your kids is going to get polio.
It’s just
Stephen: devastatingly, the vaccines are just tracking us. That’s all those are for. And just that, that
Alan: level of craziness that [00:25:00] instead of acknowledging this as. What a wonderful miracle, a man wrought miracle that people devised how to do it. They actually had people that were brave enough to be able to test it and that we figured out how to do it.
And then two generations later, people are rejecting it for the most specious, ridiculous, idiotic reasons. And as we always talk about, sponsored. By some blonde cheerleader type on an MTV show was the first one to talk about it. And people rushed to embrace it instead of being, what does she know? What can she possibly know?
I’m sorry that she had problems with her child, but it isn’t. It’s like saying, Hey, my child got sick and I think it’s because they were wearing too many blue jeans and there’s nothing behind that. And yet the fact that you’re going to destroy the blue jeans industry because someone didn’t know how.
To think rationally how those people are shouted down when they say stupid things that instead it’s like well celebrities and then of course there’s a weird place they’re like [00:26:00] let’s listen to her but then when someone who really is an intelligent celebrity speaks up they play the celebrity card what does a movie star know what do you mean a well read movie star who speaks
Stephen: articulately has three master’s degrees like that
Alan: and like you i just The fact that maybe it’s no surprise, people aren’t Christians, they aren’t Bible readers, they pick and choose what they want, to do whatever they want, and every time that I hear someone profess to be a Christian, Nowadays, it’s not a variation on every accusation of confession, but it really is if they’re going to go to Jesus early, you know that, wow, the three things that you really are against, you don’t care about the other 400 things that are prohibited.
You do those things every freaking day, and we’ve laughed about it. If you’re going to talk about, there are really are dietary restrictions. Nobody that has a tattoo can call themselves a Christian. Not if you’re going to go by what is really in these books. [00:27:00] And again, I just that cherry picking that hypocrisy that the craziness of my world, I try to have it make sense, have it be consistent and hang together.
And if things don’t fit with what really all the what we know already, then you throw it out. You don’t accept that and say it’s a mystery. No, it isn’t true. Because the vast preponderance of evidence and data and experience of science say this is how the world works. It’s not a flat earth. It can’t be a flat earth.
They did experiments 4000 years ago showing that you know what I mean? You can’t just Oh oh I think is you can’t. People regularly do it. You can say, if you think this and this is true, then it comes to this conclusion. And they’ll agree to three yeses and then a no, because they don’t like the conclusion.
But you can’t. If logic works as it does, and these things all link together to come to this conclusion, you can’t. Say, yes, you can breed dogs to inherit characteristics. Yes, you can breed [00:28:00] crops so that you get inherited characteristics, but no evolution is false. No, that doesn’t work that way.
Oh, I am often just so stunned. And what I want to say is, I don’t, I can’t talk to you anymore. I can’t talk to. Someone that I know there’s no communication really going on here.
Stephen: I think I might have a solution.
Alan: I called that term a long time ago. Yes,
Stephen: I think I might have a solution. So that, these type of people that stress us out here the most, that seem to be the most illogical causing the most problems.
They really want to jump on some weird bandwagons and believe things. So let me tell you, Allen. Do you know why the government tries to hide nuclear waste? Do you know why they put it in barrels and keep it away from everybody? Because actually no, that’s that, that they’re lying to you about that.
Because actually, if you take a spoonful of nuclear waste a day, it will keep you living for [00:29:00] longer and it will cure all your stuff. There’s what we need to spread no basis in fact no basis in science. So so all those people should believe it And they’re going to fight to get that nuclear waste so they can take that spoonful every day We need to use them against themselves
Alan: You know mockingly any number of times when someone has really been hurt by electricity hurt by exposure to radiation I follow up with so what cool superpowers did you get right?
Because people really think
Stephen: that,
Alan: If you’re struck by a meteor, it’s not only that a huge flaming rock fell out of the sky and almost killed you. It’s that, Hey, you won the lottery. Your superpowers come in your way. I’m like, I just I love reading all kinds of fantasy fiction. I love reading fiction.
I can distinguish between the book that I just read about the secret government organization that’s really doing that. He [00:30:00] made it up. The author made it up. And maybe there really is the line blurs between fiction and nonfiction because there really are people. It decided as long as we don’t have nobody believing that could possibly happen.
I can hide the shadows and do very similar things with automatic rejection of the possibility that someone could be that manipulative and that evil, so I think you’ve read some of the same things as I, the reason that conspiracy theories work is because the people that doing that have really learned how to package those things, press the right buttons, make it that there’s just enough.
In it for the person to be the first one to know and now they’re special because they’re the one that’s telling you the real secrets of the world that they speak against whoever you happen to hate anyway, or every happen to love. And it like there’s really a formula for how you can start a good conspiracy theory.
And it has nothing to do with whether it’s true or not. It’s because memetically, that meme is so strong, and it does all [00:31:00] the right things about repetition, and it fits what you think that the world is sneaky anyway, and all that kind of stuff. And yet, people often talk about this. If we’re looking at what we’re going to try to do in school, it isn’t only about, hey, we should be having certain books being read, some of the books, or not read.
Like where’s our critical thinking class that school isn’t about memorizing the alphabet and the times tables though that’s very important just to be like a communicating human being, but there have to be some classes and maybe science is where it starts, where you can say, how do I know that’s true, because I.
I did an experiment, I made up a hypothesis, and I accounted for the various different things, and I narrowed it down to one thing that I’m going to prove one way or the other, and then you took careful readings, and you didn’t let anything infect the experiment, and you came to the conclusion, and if you did it right, Then what that conclusion comes to is it inspired six more experiments.
It’s now that I know this, I wonder what happens with this other element. I wonder what [00:32:00] happens if I change the length of the spring. Or remember, we used to do these things in chemistry and physics, that’s how you learn how the world
Stephen: works. And how instead of listening to a meme and instead,
Alan: instead of let’s,
Stephen: And just, I’m sure
Alan: that’s a part of it.
Stephen: I’m sorry. I was going to say just for those. That what I said earlier, obviously was sarcasm and isn’t real, but see, I’m not worried about the certain people listening to me saying that wasn’t real because they don’t listen to all of it. They just listen to what they want. So it would be, they said that here,
Alan: It’s I, there was a time again, let’s say 40 years ago when I was like, if half the world doesn’t get math, I have an advantage.
I’m the one that can pick what investments to make. I’m the one that can look at statistically what trends are happening and see the future and get in front of it. And at that point it really seemed to me that’s cool. I get a little bit of advantage, but [00:33:00] now that there’s so many of folks that are not only they don’t get math, but they’re actively rejecting of it.
It’s it’s become dangerous. Now it’s not 10 percent and they’re crazy and that kind of stuff. It’s more. Wow. We really have 50 percent of the people will at least 49 for now voting on. It doesn’t make any logical sense. It doesn’t make any statistical sense, but I just, the first thing that I heard is what I’m going to believe.
No matter what I really am never going to question. And unfortunately, if the first thing they heard was not a science class, but it was Sunday school, then they’re already set up to not understand. All kinds of things that are at the heart of how the world really works, or at least they’re set up to be in conflict about it.
And I know this is a terrible thing to say, but I’ve read a number of the Catholic Church says, if you give us your child for the first five years, we’ve got them forever. And I think that’s true, mimetically, if you really have it, that you really think that God watches over you, or God arranges events in a certain way, or whatever [00:34:00] else it might be, and that becomes your explanation for how things are, instead of, no, there’s a certain amount of randomness and luck and statistics, and you can, you don’t go to a casino and say, and pray, you go to a casino and count cards.
You know what I mean? There’s ways of dealing with what the true odds are. And, oh it, I really am. A good person, and so many of the things that religion professes to teach people to do, the Ten Commandments are a great idea for how to run a pretty orderly society. You know what I mean? It really is.
Don’t steal, don’t kill don’t covet your neighbor’s goods or their wife, all those kinds of things. They just happen to also leave out a whole bunch of stuff that’s part of a civilization when you’re not in a society that lives within 100 miles of itself, and it’s only a thousand people per village instead of 15 million in a city and there’s degrees of scale and degrees of newness that the Bible and most religious things.
It’s not only the Bible. It’s the Koran. Oh, no, here goes all [00:35:00] those listeners. You can’t think that whatever they thought, like in 900. is really how the world is today. You know what I mean? We’ve had a doubling of the world’s knowledge in the last hundred years. That’s how much that curve is asymptotic with how much we’re learning more.
And the more that we learn to apply it, it can’t be that what we thought about how to take care. of your food before refrigeration is still how we should act. And yet that’s where a lot of those dietary restrictions come from, right? Don’t eat shrimp because it goes bad and can kill you, not because shrimp is the devil’s food.
You know what I mean? It’s just, it’s absolutely. I think that those,
Stephen: Actually hospitality,
We can point to how bad the world is and like proof of how bad the world is just for you again. Oh, I’m here. Okay. It’s probably going in and out. I’m sorry. We’ll try something else to fix things, but [00:36:00] proof of how bad the world is.
And this absolutely proves it that Cthulhu hasn’t even wanted to invade and destroy us all.
Oh, did you hear that? Oh, this is horrible. Can you hear me?
Alan: I missed your main point. I heard the world before. Okay. No, absolutely. Snips instead of the whole
Stephen: thing. Oh, I’m sorry. Absolute proof of how bad things are. Is that Cthulhu hasn’t even wanted to come in and destroy the world?
Alan: As you might imagine, one of the ways to get religious people, especially incensed is to say, Hey, there’s a thousand religions.
Why is yours the true one? And especially the really grim ones like the fool who, or Hey, my flying spaghetti monster, which is relatively recent invention, but it explains things much the same way that yours does. And I like him better. You know what I mean? He seems to be on humanity’s side, instead of looking to send you to hell.
If [00:37:00] you don’t obey his various different. Oh, all those things about how people talk about, if you’re an atheist, you’re a bad person. No, I really am a pretty good person. But reason I do it is because that’s how society operates best. And because it makes me feel good to be generous and truthful and smart.
And, all those things that are like, that what I think is important to be a human being, and it doesn’t come because I’m trying to avoid the punishments of hell. It’s because I want to be that way. And I want the world to be that way. So if people see me and see me as a reasonable example, he not only does those things, but his life seems to go.
Okay. It isn’t that if you’re too truthful that the world is going to screw you over. It’s more wow, that makes so many things easier. You know what I mean? If you’re reasonable in business, if you, Okay. Colleen and I were just having this conversation the other day, and how in the world do people fool around?
You know that person that you profess to love with the most in all the world, how [00:38:00] much it’s going to hurt them, how much it’s going to create a rent in your relationship that can never really be healed. And People will talk about it oh, it just happened. You know what I mean? We just fell into bed together.
I got drunk and I didn’t know what I was doing. And like, all those excuses, they really didn’t penetrate the fact that, if you do this, there’s no going back. You really have destroyed something beautiful by that. And I was stupid when I was young. And thank God, the pain that I caused someone else, or the pain that I had to feel from someone doing that to me, that I learned that early.
And just said, man, you no matter what, no matter, that’s not the way to go. No matter what opportunities arise, no matter what difficulties you’re having a relationship, like maybe end that and start a new one instead of becoming a sneak instead of lying to someone’s face that.
They trusting you [00:39:00] matters more than anything else in the world, and you found it in yourself to be that liar. Oh, my God, shoot yourself. You’re a fucking
Stephen: waste. So
Alan: I am very condemning of those kinds of things in ways that other people have just seen. You’re so true. Wild oats. You they were exceptionally charming.
You never thought the other person would find out. That’s why you did it. How are any of those reasonable things? And so one of the reasons that Colleen and I are in a relationship is so successful is we’re just so certain that’s not going to happen. You know what I mean? We don’t just love each other.
We really like respect and want each other’s lives to be good. And why would you introduce Such a terrible thing. There’s no way that sex could be good enough. Attention from somebody else could be good enough. There’s no way that could be. And I’m pretty sure that this is statistically proven to make it back to relentless geekery.
You know what I mean? That it’s just, you know that it can’t be the right thing to do. It goes ahead and
Stephen: do it. [00:40:00] It goes back to it’s not rational, normal thinking, just like everybody we’ve been talking about this whole episode because what I dealt with wasn’t it just lying about it. It was sorry.
I lost you again. Oh, I think it’s recording. So I’ll try and really. Yeah, I’ll try and keep going and hopefully it’ll record it all. But, it’s the same thinking as these people we’ve been talking about. It’s not just I’m going to lie to you. It’s I’m going to do it multiple times. And even with.
Proof written email proof that you can show I will tell everybody that it’s false and they’ll believe me and then I’m going to try and get you in trouble and get you thrown in jail. That’s where I came from. So that’s very, anyway,
Alan: It’s funny. And actually, it’s not funny. It’s tragic when you have people that are all about the accusations about what’s wrong with [00:41:00] other people and you find out that they not just were but are actively now in a sex club that thing doesn’t mean a lot to them, or that they like there’s Something about who can be trusted, how you do anything is how you do everything.
If you find out that they’ve been a relationship cheat and a business cheat and a person that doesn’t take their friendships seriously and stuff like that. But then yeah, they’re going to be a good congressperson because that’s when they’re going to, they’re going to put their hand up and hand on the Bible and they’re going to take an oath.
And then when they break that oath a thousand times in the time that they’re in Congress, why in the world are you surprised? You know what I mean? So the biggest thing that I see is that kind of hypocrisy that sickens me. How does it not sicken everybody else? Like it used to be that if that kind of scandal came out, it was enough to make somebody drop out of the race now that George Santos just pulls his way for, [00:42:00] as you said, despite all the proof, all of the
Stephen: how does he think he’s going to
Alan: get away with it because the boldness of where Someone just got caught and they’re like, wasn’t me.
It’s I just saw you. It’s on camera. There’s no question. Wasn’t me. And I guess they think that they can just assert, I deny your reality and substitute my own. And yet then it isn’t up to them. To ever feel guilt. It’s up to us to say, I don’t care whether you feel guilt or not, but I know that I’m getting you out of my life.
I know that I’m not letting you be in any position where your integrity is what matters because I know you have none. And so that’s what I always think is shouldn’t all those people that are proven to be liars and cheats and bribe takers and they got to get tossed out. That there’s an acceptable level of that.
They, there’s none acceptable
Stephen: level. They obfuscate the reality and the truth, and they know they’re, we’re seeing this so much. I know these people will [00:43:00] believe me if I repoint you know what I couldn’t have done that because that person’s lying to you because they want this book in your library.
Yeah. We don’t like them and totally forget about what the real problem is.
Alan: They create connections between things that aren’t there, but it’s. It’s enough of a distraction that you’re going to say I, I don’t want wow. All of our kids are going to grow up. Satanist. It’s we can’t have that.
So then anything that they say about whatever I tell you to do now, at least it stops the kids from becoming Satanist. That’s right. Sure. People are that stupid. Yes, they are. Yes,
Stephen: they absolutely are.
Alan: Oh the luckily what’d you get for Christmas?
Stephen: Yeah. I got a millennium fat, I was thinking that I’m like, wow, this is like the downer way to start the year.
You know what I mean? We just got done with a great Christmas season. Okay. So let’s talk about this. I discovered a new band for myself. They’ve actually been around for a while. [00:44:00] They just hit, we’re on a break for years. 10, 15 years or something. They haven’t put an album out, but they’ve been around since 90s ish.
They’re called porcupine tree. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them.
Alan: I absolutely have is, so they Stephen Wilson, I think so. So there’s all kinds of Neo Prague, there’s a whole bunch of bands that came out that, that had some of the trappings of Prague where it’s odd time signatures and interesting sounds and so forth.
And just not lyrics aren’t only, I love you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they dealt with weightier stuff and they’re like active listening type things. You know what I mean? Sometimes they go a little bit more towards the discordant, where you really have to listen to it and say that’s not pretty, but it’s accomplished.
You know what I mean? The musicianship is great. It just is not only odd time signatures, but I’d like total scales and stuff like that. And sometimes synthesized music can be also off putting. It’s colder, not as human [00:45:00] as certain things. But having said all that, I admire how much they’ve made great music, but not had a single song on the radio.
Isn’t it all radio airplay friendly. So I’m glad you discovered it. They’re very interesting and they have loved. So let’s see, I hope I don’t have this. Okay. I thought that, so what happened was a number of the band members did make solo work and now they’ve, they out of the blue regathered and made an album after
Stephen: almost 20 years.
So the way I discovered it and this seems obvious and I’ve heard other people do this. I went into chat GPT and I said, Hey, these are some of my favorite bands. And I know I listened to a lot. So I wasn’t wanting to mix up different genres, different styles. I was like, I took rush and some bands like rush that I like these bands.
I like this type of stuff. Give me some other bands that are similar. And boom, I got a list. And then I’m like, okay, I like. [00:46:00] Def Leppard and Bon Jovi and these bands. Are there any new bands that are like these guys? And boom, I got a list. I started looking them up. So it’s a great. music discovery tool.
Again, you got to know the prompts and how to get what you want out of it.
Alan: Long before chat GPT, I used to do that on Pandora that I put in a whole bunch of bands or even individual songs, and it would start suggesting things for me. And I’d be taking notes and going out to Amazon. And so discovered all kinds of things.
If you like Zeppelin, they’re going to tell you about Greta Van Fleet nowadays. And you want to meet it.
Stephen: Which they’re from Michigan. I thought they were Swedish. Actually,
Alan: I did not that too. They’re from Michigan. I really didn’t know that. Yeah.
Stephen: Oh my God. And their first album, their first EP album is going for 250 bucks on Amazon.
Alan: Wow, because nobody bought it. It was a limited release or whatever like that. Okay. I bet you I have [00:47:00] it. I think I have it on CD. I don’t have vinyl, but you want to meet, but I, one of those things where I heard a cut from them and it really was enough of a Zeppelin sound alike vocalist and the guitar, especially, that I was like, I got to try this.
And I wait for an artist to have a whole LP instead of an EP, but I just was okay. It’s 8 instead of 15. So I guess it’s half an album, half the price. I’ll give it a try. So yeah, I’ve been into them for all three of their albums. That was a new discovery of mine. Yes. I
Stephen: love them.
Alan: If I could try it. And I discovered mystery that I think I talked about. I was at Prague stock and a band came on that just blew me away. There The rock band out of Canada, and we might have laughed about this. There’s only so many bands out of Canada that can get international recognition because that just doesn’t seem to happen.
Indeed, one rush takes up too much space and Celine Dion the rest. These guys have 12 albums out. And I got a bunch from my Secret Santa for Christmas. And then I was like, Oh, but I’m really liking these and so [00:48:00] spurred by having a little extra money and my like, Okay, I’m not going to wait for them to go on sale for seven bucks because they never will they’re just obscure enough.
They’re just quality enough. So I actually, Oh my God, spent like 12 and 15 on each of the CDs and they’re great. I just they are so what’s
Stephen: the name of the
Alan: band again? Mystery. Mystery like, spelled like you expect, but as you might imagine, when you go onto Amazon and type in mystery you get a whole genre of books and you get a whole bunch of titles that have nothing to do with the band mystery.
I don’t want the mystery of Edwin Drood. I want, so you have to go to make the subclassic classification CDs and vinyl. And even then, there’s all kinds of things that have mystery in the title. And it took me a long time to find enough of them. And then by. Put him in my cart and finally following them that then I got all the various different things like they have two live albums that are great.
They probably have eight others that are studio and the there’s [00:49:00] one guy, Michael St. Pierre or somebody. And probably it’s Michelle, I’m trying to Canadian French eyes it because I think they’re out of Montreal. They, he really writes all the music. So it’s this musical genius that also happens to have a great backing band, six people in the band, if I remember right.
And the big claim of fame is they’ve had a series of vocalists, but for a while their vocalists were like the training camp for Yes. Benoit David, who went on to be in Yes for a while, was in the band. And just it’s that’s how they sound. They’re big in symphonic and great dynamics.
I love things where it’s not every single song is an anthem. Got really beautiful ballads. They got really beautiful crescendo based. A lot of their songs are 10 minutes instead of three. There’s there’s more to them. They’re really good. And their titling of things is odd.
That they’re Prague like delusion rain. It’s what could that mean? Not delusional rain. It’s they don’t even, they have direct translation of French terms or whatever else. So I’m trying to [00:50:00] think about, yeah. But, as usual so what do I have? I have Live in Progman, I have Delusion Rain, I, this is my latest stack they’re, everyone that I’ve listened to, I’m like I’m going to have to listen to that again, because I really liked it, but I didn’t take it in all the way, but I want to hear it again certain songs that really stick, you Like, when I heard it on the album and then listened to one of the live ones, it’s like, Man, that’s even better live!
No, and no wonder, because it really has those great dynamics, and there’s great Like passion to it. You know what I mean? That it is no wonder that the band got up and did this so well live because it really works as a live cut. So anyway I that’s my offering. Hey everybody, if you haven’t heard of mystery before and you like prog rock there, they’re right up there with porcupine tree is a great undiscovered vein that you can mind because they’re like 10 albums in.
That’s pretty cool.
Stephen: Yep. Alright, have you watched any of the shows? There’s a lot of shows that seem to be dropping.[00:51:00]
Alan: I watched the first episode of Monarch. Okay. And it’s it’s interesting because they really are doing, as you, I think you mentioned before, like old style special effects.
Actually, is that the
Stephen: movie versus that was the minus one movie?
Alan: Yeah. That’s what it was where they really like black and white at it and made it look like it was an unreleased Godzilla movie, right? Like teen fifties and stuff like that. So I like it. You know what I realized that There’s a disconnect with the horror that I like my like vampire werewolf Frankenstein type stuff where it’s more human, a big monster coming to destroy your city.
What would I do run? I don’t really have any response to I just feel there. It’s. They’re much the same. There’s not a lot of if there’s a Saw 3 and 4, they get trickier. The plots are interesting, the murder devices are. But Godzilla just seems to be, okay now there’s a monster from under the earth.
Now [00:52:00] there’s a monster from outer space and they’re going to have a fight and he’s going to lose at first, but then he’s going to go stock up on radioactive power and then he wins in the end. You know what I mean? So it’s I think I got the Godzilla. down.
Stephen: I like monarch because it’s tying into the new world, the king kong universe world and the new movies coming out in hollow earth.
So this is tying into all of that. And I think they do A fun job of taking the stuff from the fifties and bringing it with the modern and, the trying to build up the whole universe. That’s the part I like the
Alan: most about where you can see that they’re building it. And especially when they’re.
They have fey to the past, but they’re trying to modernize it. So what’s Godzilla in a world of cell phones and flesh, weapons and stuff like that. Very interesting. By the way, I know that you got planetary. Did you get to that specific
Stephen: issue? No, I haven’t gotten there yet. Oh. Besides, oh, then
Alan: I, [00:53:00] you might have a treat coming up that’s in line with what we’re talking about.
Alright, very good. Is
Stephen: that the, is that the one where I know. Does Godzilla show up or is he in the background in the movie theater? Because Colin and I had this big long discussion that there’s a big argument right now in the community comic book community of what is Godzilla’s first comic book appearance because If you take the first comic book issue one, or is it when he just did cameos and the one?
Comic somewhere has in the movie theater and it’s a Godzilla movie and on the screen and the reason it’s such a big hot debated deal is because that affects the pricing and what books you have, whether they’re worth 10 or 1000
Alan: that’s you know, it’s funny again to digress. So I use collectors for my comics and my books and my music and just for the first time in a long time, like seven or eight months refreshed.
Yeah. My, the key issues that I have in [00:54:00] collectors and the value of my collection and my issues went from 400 to 600, not because I added that many comics, but because more people are noting the various different first appearances and first combats and whatever else it might be. And my collection went up.
Quite nicely in value, because as with them continuing to make not only the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe, but these various different things that are being attempted. The Hammer Universe and the Hollow Earth and whatever out of my top five most valuable comic. It’s Amazing Fantasy No. 15 and Giant Science Expo No.
1, and the next one down is Tomb of Dracula No. 1, because it’s a No. 1, and it introduces him to the Marvel Universe, and it wasn’t a big print run. It wasn’t the hundreds of thousands of copies that were being printed. And maybe that’s also what each of those has that, when Spider Man showed up, there wasn’t a Spider Man before Amazing Fantasy No.
15. So no wonder that the print run was low, if I remember right. They put that into a title that they were getting ready to [00:55:00] cancel, and it got uncanceled because they were like, Look at these sales figures! What’s going on here? Must be the guy on the cover! And hence, Spider Man coming, to the fore.
And same with Giant Size X Men, the previous X Men had actually, the title had gone on, but it was in reprints, if I remember right, through number 93. And the Giant Size X Men came out with a whole new X Men from Claremont and Cochram, right? And Boom! The X Men universe exploded, but only the loyaltists like me that continued to read X Men with, I think it was like a reprint thing, and then maybe a continuing small story, like an eight pager in the back, that were the individual X Men, the Beast and Cyclops and stuff on various different smaller adventures.
And so after that, it’s Tomb of Dracula, it’s a Werewolf by Night, And I think it’s whatever the issue with that includes Moon Knight, and those kinds of things are becoming very valuable in the 8, 000 to 20, 000 range, [00:56:00] which is cool to be like and my amazing fantasy number 15 is not mint condition because it is old, but every one of those that I just named.
It’s really nice condition. So I will get the premium mint multiplier, if you will, based on what I graded and that kind of stuff. So nice to have, one day I’ll do it one day. I’m going to finish cataloging and get things graded and start to sell things off and return them to the universe because.
I’m 64 going on 65. I can’t lift books all my life. When I first time I like throw my back out and I got to wear a truss. It’s like time to call heritage auctions. I’m going to have to stop thinking that I can lift blocks of wood for a hobby. Get my books cataloged. You know what
Stephen: Okay. So have you watched. What if, or Echo, or even Percy Jackson. Those are all new shows
Alan: I’ve been watching. None of those yet. Those all just appeared. In fact, I just I think Echo, right? Her versus the Kingpin. I’ve read little excerpts of this [00:57:00] going on. And already it’s, people are saying, the best thing for Marvel Universe on TV since the Alias.
Since Jessica Jones. And that’s a pretty big benediction. I Because there’s been other good series.
Stephen: Yeah, I’ve watched. Okay. So I’ve watched all of what if we watched the first two of echo, they dropped all of them and I don’t like binging in one night anyway. So what if I thought was pretty good.
Just like the first season. There’s some better ones than others. They introduce a new superhero that is Mohawk Indian. Oh, sorry.
Alan: I can’t like season one, because they really did have some good variations on questions that people ask, what if you went bad instead of good? What if that civilization didn’t
Stephen: right?
Okay. But so they introduce a new. Mohawk Native American character in this, and I thought [00:58:00] that was pretty fantastic. The last four episodes are just really fun and really good. Echo, I’ve enjoyed. I know some people are like, Wow, this sucks. It’s too slow of a burn. And they’re just not moving fast.
Shut up. I like the show. It’s been pretty good. And I don’t know if you ever read the Percy Jackson books but that, that series has been really good. And I think Rordan is very happy with it. So all good stuff. Okay.
Alan: I’ve intended to start that series for a long time. That’s where he’s like the son of Perseus or Poseidon, exactly.
And so I really have, although I’m young adult books, I really do tend to like those, the fantasy series where they’re coming of age. Tales. They’re the hero’s journey. They’re and like the fact that those mythologies are in the public domain. They’ve done some very cool additions to that. You know what I mean?
So I watch the series and then go read the books. Do I read the books first? I’ll have to see what I’m going to do.
Stephen: Don’t watch the original [00:59:00] movies because Rorton does not like the original movies. He’s very involved with this series and he’s very happy with it. So read the books, watch the series, forget the movies.
Alan: Very interesting. Okay. That’s, that’s so true of so many people. Stephen King first talks about they made 10 movies out of my books before there was one that I liked, but
Stephen: his whole attitude is, I don’t care. I wrote my book. People got the book. They read the book. That’s all I care about.
You’re paying for the right to do whatever you want with the property. And that’s his whole attitude.
Alan: That’s right. You shoveled money at me. That’s right.
Stephen: Yeah. And he definitely, has the money, but Rordon really wanted to get involved. He’s actually in a scene. He doesn’t say anything, but he’s in 1 of the scenes in the 1st episode and also not a big spoiler.
If you’ve read the book, but there is Medusa in it. So there is a garden of statues and he’s 1 of the statues.
Alan: That’s pretty cool. Okay. I [01:00:00] just got, it’s funny. We were at a games night and I had I had been too smart. I know that’s a terrible way to put it, but we played a trivia game or association game and I was just on that night and I realized this isn’t making it good for anybody else.
It’s like me showing off. And so I say, but at one point, They talked about Medusa is, one of one of these sisters and everybody in the room, almost everybody in the room was like that’s crazy. I’ve never heard of this. It’s I can’t say that it’s the Gorkins. Everybody that reads Greek mythology knows that she’s one of three.
And it really was. A real conflict is of, am I going to be the dick one more time
Stephen: or am I going to be too smart to let this go? Okay, my little rant here before we go. I don’t hear that. So we have losing you, Stephen. I’m sorry. I know. And I don’t think it’s not you. I think [01:01:00] it’s more me and more of the recording.
I will try something else next week. So here’s my little rant before we go. So we have football players. We have. Bodybuilders and stuff that, and some of these movie stars like Statham and Rambo and these guys are big, strong, we admire them and these football players. Oh, let’s get our picture with them.
Let’s pay them a lot of money and they’re because they’re fit. They’re strong and they can do these things that normal people can’t. And we admire that and we honor it and, We make them rich because we will pay for this. Okay. But it’s because, and this is my theory, my opinion, but it’s because everybody knows what it’s like to pick something up or to pick something up heavy.
We know what it’s like to use our strength and do something. And we know our limits. If I really was Lou Ferrigno, I could lift the end of the car up. I can try. And I can almost feel it. I under. I [01:02:00] understand what’s going on to lift it. I just physically cannot do it, but you go on the other side with mental capacity.
So the people that are the mental bodybuilders, the ones that have the higher mental capacity, like the pro athletes, they do not get admired as much. They get shunned or made fun of because If you don’t have that mental capacity, it is very difficult to understand it. You can’t comprehend. How do you think that way?
How do you know these things? It’s just incomprehensible. I can understand strength that is better than mine. I can’t understand intelligence that is better than mine, which is, I think, why, being smarter is not. Honored is not revered. People don’t care and they feel threatened and will make fun of it or shun it or downgrade it or whatever, as opposed to the physical.
Alan: So totally agree. And I got to tell [01:03:00] you not to play. Can you top this? But I really have thought that for most of my life that and the way I explained it very similar to yours, when people see an Olympic athlete, they can say I can jump, but they can just jump. Like another foot or maybe twice as high and they can run twice as fast and they have that coordination beyond the balance.
We even do amazing things. Whereas I could try to flip and maybe wipe myself off, but I can see myself trying it. Whereas if you’re the guy that really recalls things quickly does math quickly. It looks a little witchcrafty to people because they don’t get. They can’t picture themselves doing that they’d like to maybe be able to do that to be the trivia hound or to be the, the person that calculates pot odds in a poker game and that they’re always on top of what they’re really betting on instead of just I go with my gut.
I, I really have thought that for a long time. And one of the reasons that earlier in my life, I often. [01:04:00] hid my intelligence was because what we just talked about, you display it too much and all at once. And it’s like opening a blast furnace door and people really get wow, were you just lucky?
Or, and it’s wow, you can do that all the time, but you choose not to, they like, don’t trust you because they think that you’re thinking ahead of them or because you’re getting and I don’t know I have, I think I’ve talked about. Other ways in which I pursue that, that I try to explain it to other people, and they’re never meant to be insulting.
I take it back. Once in a while, when someone asks me bluntly, what’s it like? There’s a great line from like Alan Moore writing about the Justice League where the flash lives in a world full of statues. There’s hardly ever a time where I’m not ahead, where I’m not thinking of what might be coming next, that I’m not thinking of my next thing to say, the next thing that they might say, that I’m, people laugh about it, correcting their grammar if they’re not [01:05:00] doing it really well.
I’m thinking of better vocabulary. I’m calculating what I’m driving. Okay, I’m going this fast. That guy’s going that fast. And the reason I’m going to be able to get ahead of him before the next turnoff is because I did that little calculation in my head And it makes sense. It always makes sense in all those various different ways.
Long ago, I did a talk at Mensa called like La Vida Inteligencia about how intelligence is not one thing. It’s this capability that you can bring to bear on
Stephen: everything in your life. You can solve
Alan: puzzles, you can remember recipes, you can diagnose a car and fix it. All of it, you can code, you can sing, you can, all that kind of stuff.
And so I was like, I celebrate those little things all the time because I love being able to remember the dinosaur names. I love being able to almost very often quick with quip. I not only think of what’s going to be said next, but I think of a joke that I can make, knowing what they might say and having it [01:06:00] preloaded.
And when you get in a conversation that’s also very quick, very punny, it’s a delight. It’s like a little, not even a fencing match. It’s a volleyball thing. We’re just trying to keep the ball in the air as long as you can. There’s no competition. It’s like the people that can do that, that can make the next literary reference or the next little pun or just, I love that.
And I try to do it now where I do that in a, not alerting it over others way, but in a happy way. Everybody likes to laugh. You know what I mean? It’s important to be the guy that does that and not at other’s expense. Those kinds of jokes that are about the absurdity of the situation or isn’t it funny how the world is like this?
Not boy, what a dumb you are. You know what I mean? What like, how did you not see that? Only occasionally do I like lose it. And when it’s something important I don’t know. You could have not crashed your car. You know what I mean? If you’re complaining to the world about how bad things happen to you all the time, like maybe you shouldn’t have been determined to drive home drunk.
[01:07:00] Maybe there is some culpability in this for you. I don’t always let people off the hook without chiding them a little bit for it isn’t just luck. It’s like you can hedge your bets in this world. We, me and the family and brothers have been talking a little bit about finance lately. So much of what I try to do is, finally, a lot of people will say, Hey, give me a stock that I should invest in.
And it’s I want to tell you why I chose this one so that I can get a feel for your risk tolerance and your understanding of these things. So that it’s not just, Hey, I made a bet on a pony that someone mentioned to me, at the race, but it’s more I followed the pony’s career and he’s really good on it when it’s raining.
He’s a good mutter. And they get into it. They agree with your analysis. CFE. And some people are like that, that they really want to understand more. And then I’m happy to have that talk. And others are just like just give me one. And then I’m like I don’t want to be responsible for it does happen that no matter what I think is going to happen, then it goes down.
And then you’re going to be like you suck as [01:08:00] a stock picker. It’s I don’t, because I really have a portfolio of stocks and overall, I doubled my money in five years and that’s the head of the market. And so that’s a good thing. Oh oh I just you said it very well that it’s scary and they get pissed that they can see how I was to work up.
I could lift another hundred pounds because I built my arm muscles up and I worked my core and all that kind of stuff. Somehow people don’t have the idea of, Hey, if you want to get a better vocabulary, maybe get one of those word of day calendars and you will learn more, you will have more fun words in your world, even if you don’t actively try to memorize them.
We are language consumption and emission engines and really will be a better vocabulary person if you put your mind to
Stephen: it. Maybe read books, instead of trying to ban them.
Alan: Like that there, that’s a good there. There’s a good way to close them. Maybe before you’re trying to ban something, you should even read it in the first place so that you have an experience of it instead of Nope. I’m sure from [01:09:00] the title, Billy has two mommies. That can’t be right.
Stephen: It’s gotta be bad because I saw it on a video
Alan: that this word gets over the level of stupidity that goes with bigotry.
You know what I mean? Those things like really how you’re going to judge a person is based on their color or their sexuality or their clothing that they wear. How in the world is that ever valid? And yet how many, how much of the world, the worst people in the world are the ones that say, let’s have a pure Hungaria.
Let’s have. We are a Christian nation. That level of prejudice is disgusting. And I wish that more smart people said, that’s not true. It can’t be true. Stop saying that, right? Just stop it. It’s disgusting that you say that out loud. Maybe we’ll get some people doing that. Maybe real Christians in Christian churches that have been taken over by false Christians will actually.
Step up and say, there is no way that is what Jesus would do. I got [01:10:00] my w. J. A. D. bracelet right here and he would not act as you want.
Stephen: Yeah I started we’ll see. I saw a little meaning that I started mumbling when somebody says, hey, put Christ back in Christmas. My response is why don’t we put Christ back in Christians?
Oh, now we’re all froze. Okay. All right. We better go.
Alan: Exactly. Good. Very good.
Stephen: Yeah. All right. We’ll try something better for the confession.
Alan: Stick with that. There we go. Yes. All right, man. I still have all kinds of like puzzles and music. I want to talk about. There we go. Take care, Stephen. All right.
Stephen: Bye bye.
