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[00:00:00]
Stephen: Yeah,
Alan: it’s a little boring with the pyramids twice in a row. Let me see if I can go get something maybe not quite as cool as Bigfoot, but let’s see what I got here.
Stephen: Yeah, nothing’s as cool as Bigfoot.
Alan: How about just another? No, that’s not a forest. That’s a forest. Okay.
Stephen: It could have been a forest.
It was just matrix code for a forest.
Alan: Exactly. Raining down on us.
Stephen: Yeah, this is going to be my book cover of my next book, the Oddish Questor series, book one. Fantastic.
Alan: Yeah. So like, how did you get that done? Was it an artist? Was it AI assisted? Lots of
Stephen: crayons. Yeah. No, this is a hundred percent AI.
And this is a worthy of a discussion, in today’s world. Cause there’s a lot of people like, oh, you’re putting artists out of business and you’re blah, blah, blah. Okay. I totally get and understand that. Here’s the problem though. [00:01:00] I got quotes. The lowest was 850 to do a book cover for the book.
And I’m like, okay, that’s a whole lot of 10 kids books to, to make that money back. I’m not trying to put anybody out of business, I’ve never had a artist go, Oh, Hey, I got this great book cover. Could you write a book to go with it? It’s a rough, Thing and I have used, my, my town magician, Tom Zoller up there in Cleveland, he does those and he does fantastic work.
It’s just not the style I want for this.
Alan: Exactly. I’ll tell you, overall, philosophically, is there any advancement that hasn’t been immediately accompanied by, but that’s going to put people out of work? I say that all the time. You know what I mean? The Luddites on, and that’s 200 years ago now, 400 years ago, I’ve lost track of when the steam engine kicked in.
I have never been an artist, and so I’ve always wanted to be able to do it for myself, and then having to hire somebody else to [00:02:00] do it was always that’s just the price of doing business, but art is not the first thing it used to be that clothes makers were quite the artist, everything was handmade, homespun, bespoke, and then they discovered that they could do that with looms and all kinds of ways of Automating and it’s funny.
It’s not only that you’re changing art. You’re also changing drudgery that used to be what was necessary for mass production. And so we still have sweatshops. They just may be changed from one country to another. But for some. More than any computerized, automated AI type solution. It’s the easiest thing to do is to put a hundred people in a room and work them 12 hours a day for next to nothing and turn out t shirts for America.
And so it’s a whole bunch of there’s a great quote that goes along the lines of the future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed. And as we’re seeing what’s going on in the United States, where we’ve already got. Some people [00:03:00] you, no matter what they want bespoke clothing, they do it themself or they go to a tailor and they’re willing to pay $600 for a student, a suit instead of 300 because it matters to them that they have personalization or that they know that like a person’s care, a person’s love went into it.
There’s a whole bunch of people that just say, what I need is something to cover my body. It’s not the statement that it is. It’s not the social circle in which I move around in. When we were growing up, my mom and dad shopped at Robert Hall, which was one of the first places that had, I think, clothes that weren’t made by like individual tailors, but that were relatively manufactured and therefore less expensive.
And if you’re Clothing three brothers who wear through clothes quickly, you had to find solutions like that. Colleen, my wife, even more of a story. She was one of nine. You can’t go to Gymboree and buy 90 gym shoes to do super gym shoes like heads and you have to hand them down and hope that they’re not too worn out and that people’s foot [00:04:00] shapes aren’t exactly alike.
Stephen: The reality of this book cover issue is, and again, I’m not trying to put anybody at work, but when Photoshop came out it was, oh my God, it’s go put all the graphic designers out of business. It didn’t, it changed it. When digital cameras came out, same thing. When real cameras came, oh my God, digital cameras are go put all the photographers out of work.
Guess what? When the photographers came about, they said, oh my God, go put all the graphic designers that write the ads out of work. They didn’t. It did, but you had more photographers taking those pictures. And honestly, okay, great. This book covered designer isn’t getting my pay, but they were probably going to use stock images anyway.
So they’re not hiring a photographer to take new pictures. So they’re not supporting an industry by continuing that. And here’s you’ll totally agree with this one. Most of the people saying, Oh you’re putting so and so out of business. Go to Walmart to buy [00:05:00] everything.
Shut up. End of story. If you’re going to Walmart to buy everything, just shut up about complaining about any of this, because there are plenty of small businesses that have gone out of business because of Walmart, that you could buy your groceries from, you could buy, I could go to a small bookstore and buy a book, right?
We’ve done that. But how many people just go down to Amazon and do it? Because it’s easier. Don’t complain if you’re contributing to the problem in other ways.
Alan: In other ways. Another thing that I would say about this is It isn’t only taking away artists, it’s making everybody an artist. What I used to have to do to go get someone to do an album cover, a book cover, whatever for me, was describe it in a way that I really wanted it to be what I wanted to, but I didn’t have the skill, the craft, to be able to do it.
Now I really can. Go to the magic. Describe it in various different ways, and instead of being a person, it’s an omniperson that has all those past person’s talents into it. It’s closer to what I want it to be [00:06:00] because I keep trying things, tweaking it, seeing how it turns out, learn to put in exactly the query that creates that piece of art according to my vision of it.
I like the advantage of not having to go through somebody else that’s going to interpret what I have to say, but that I get to do it. And in a lot of ways, I’m now the artist. Putting pen to paper putting color to screen. It’s always been not always. It has moved to being relatively artificial. And the fact that I don’t have the hand that does that, but have the mind that can think of it and get closer to what I see in my mind.
Yes. I like that. That’s been said, how many there’s no end to the number of. skills industries that we can start talking about when we started to have sequencers and synthesizers that enable people to not and honestly playing guitar hero you know what I mean they don’t really play guitar and yet it has democratized and the means that’s not quite the word but made it so that everybody can make beautiful music without actually having to Develop calc is on their fingers and take all the [00:07:00] lessons and everything else that goes into really that
Stephen: particular is a fantasy.
You live the fantasy in a video game and it has and people used to bitch about that. But I’m like, do you know how many kids got interested in playing music because they did? Rock band and guitar hero. And here’s a fact for you that did you know that the typewriter is going to put authors out of business and anybody could write any schlock and get it published.
Wow.
Alan: That’s the next step I was going to go to is I don’t think it kills an industry, but what it does say is that top 20 percent are going to stand out because even if you try to go to this amazing creative tool, it isn’t. Human. It isn’t. Something that is immediately identifiable as this particular singer, this particular graphic artist I don’t know, autotune came in and now everybody could sing perfectly.
We had some people that really played with it and abused it and share [00:08:00] their career. I was going to go share. Oh, I’m trying to think of who the guy was that originally made use of it. But the fact that those kinds of things like, wow, I can, A little off key singer that I am, I can now make it perfect, but you can tell the difference between someone who really has a voice and someone who tweaks it.
And then what do they do? They can’t go out and live perform because they’re a studio creation in some ways. And for everything, people, Colleen and I love watching our baking show, and you can tell the difference between people that are really good at recipes and precise measurements and do exactly what it says.
And the people who have a flair for it, the people who can, adjust the recipe so it’s got a little bit more ginger than it should but in combination with the rose hips or whatever it you only mean that they’re either super tasters or they’re good guessers or like america’s test kitchen they’ve done something a hundred times and They put all that experience into my 101st is going to be the sum total of all the things that have gone [00:09:00] really wrong as well as gone really good.
And I’m going to do more one and less of the other. So I really love that. It’s opening the field up in a lot of ways, even if it. It’s also, this is a sad thing to say, maybe it’s just like social Darwinism, that they’re going to be survival of the fittest, and the people that were journeyman artists that had regular work being a graphic designer or a sign painter, but weren’t great at it, maybe they’re going to have to learn how to use the tools themselves, and they can still be the intermediary, but they’re not going to, whatever that is.
Top 20 is going to make it the next 70%, 80%. They’re really going to have to say, how am I going to survive? Do I have to switch to something that I can’t be replaced? It
Stephen: is near and dear to my heart because I am a creative. I played in bands and with musicians and I’ve seen how the world has changed with that.
I write stories and I see the people that are using AI to write stories, which is the one thing I don’t [00:10:00] do. And I see the book covers and the art and I see artists, my one side, I totally get it. And I’m like, man, I feel for you. But on the flip side, the world has always evolved and changed because of technology.
We have always had jobs that then go away. People just look at, Oh, the 30 years of my life. This is just how life is always. No people in the 18 eighties weren’t lip making necessarily a living as an artist. So how is it totally different now? I can take this book cover and I can go get my local a graph designer artist or whatever and say, I have this, but I need modifications and pay them.
No, you’re correct. I’m not paying the 850, but if I paid them the 850, they’d make a great living and I’d be poor and I wouldn’t make any more books. So where, where’s the balance there and all that. So
Alan: yeah. It all depends on whose ox is being gored. And so a coal miner, and they bring in the mining machine, like John Henry, right?
Man, that means that, [00:11:00] wow, some of the first things that they bought it automated were the things that were so dangerous. They shouldn’t have people doing them, or they were such drudgery that people, Died at 40 from black lung instead of having a full life. And so the people that fight for I got to maintain my way of life.
Even if we really are doing a whole bunch of different people a favor of not having to if you’re going to do recycling here in the United States, it’s a relatively clean business. If you look at how it’s done in India, there are people who like. Live right next to the trash heaps and they go out and pick out electronic components, whatever else might be valuable, but while they’re out there, they’re coming in contact with all the debris of society.
Much of which is not good for you. So if you’re out there breathing in most of society, isn’t good for you. Really? Yes, that’s true. But I would hope that as we see that as we advance many of the things that we’re doing it’s sad to think that humanity doesn’t really have the spark we want to think that we’re very different from the machines.
That’s really a big part of it is it shouldn’t be replaceable that [00:12:00] I should be able to write a book that a machine possibly couldn’t have done. And I, did I mention this last time that I got the letter? The letter from Colleen, it’s like, Oh my God, you fooled me. I just, it really was a shattering thing.
It really is. And I just want to fool fast, Motley Fool with which I use for some of my information for how I invest as a conference, it went away for COVID and I was back. And one of the things they showed is here’s the ways in which all those displacements of various different industries and people are something that the industry is going to take all that into account.
When you think of how you should. invest. And so a company called Five Air that was really good at helping technical people find spot work, job work, that it wasn’t a matter of getting employed, but you could make as an independent consultant. Things have fallen off the cliff in terms of, wow, you mean the AI can create a website for me, create code for me, debug code for me in ways that, [00:13:00] and The numbers are staggering.
It’s not, it can do it twice as fast. It can do it a hundred times as fast. And even if there’s a slightly higher error rate, then you have a human being who stops in and oversees it. And the corner cases, the things that it can’t figure out, then you jump in. But who needs someone that was really good at writing one more report?
One more like we used to laugh about it, like there are people working for the government where they have never moved off of old technology like WOT4 or FORTRAN or COBOL, and they have a whole career because they are irreplaceable. There’s nobody learning those new skills, but they need to be able to adjust this report every time that.
There’s a four digit date instead of a two digit, like we’ve laughed about with Y2K. Every time that they expand a field, change the format, have to include new information, and it’s a little bit the fact that I, Ox being Gord, as a software developer, was my best skill, the fact that I wrote [00:14:00] great code.
Not really. I wrote great code, but it was because I had the ability to see how everything fit together and know, like, how to estimate it so that I could go to a client with a really accurate estimate and not eat it when I couldn’t produce something as quickly as I thought it would be. I’ve had friends that were really great coders.
And they didn’t have that spark. And so I thought they’re going to hit a little bit that ceiling of you’re going to be the guy that they need to do all this tough coding, but you’re not going to be the one that moves into design, into architecture, into those other big terms like that. So it, the fact that my industry is changing like horribly drastically.
And then if I wanted to be in it now, I still have my hand in, we’re still both coding and goofing off, but that ain’t going to last. You know what I mean? And it might be that it doesn’t last in the United States, that we’re still going to be necessary overseas or in third world countries that need all the displaced coders from the United States to come and figure out how they’re going to do things.
Or, and for that matter, there’s a lot of second [00:15:00] world countries like India that they knew that was a huge opportunity. They’ve been training good coders for generations now that were already the H2 1B. I’m trying to think what the exact, That they, we wanted to hire them. We went offshoring and we brought ’em in on spec special visas That did displace some of those people.
But in the overall, Colleen used to give her son Tim, really good advice. You don’t want a Joe job. You don’t want a job that someone coming in off the street could take your job away. You have to have a skillset, be a butcher, a plumber, a coder, an artist, whatever it is that rises you up among, I’m willing to stand in the same place for eight hours.
And short clothing, or, cook things at your apartment. There’s different levels of skill, and that’s really how you get there. better reward, and you’ve got to be willing to put in the time to become great at that skill. And so hopefully there’s still going to be enough things that we’re going to find out.
I just read about this, all the stuff that we worry about, like AI can now write things for you, but [00:16:00] apparently it can’t really do his logic well. That you can’t, it can maybe do a cross proposal, but it can’t do a pseudocode. That’s a sweeping statement. I don’t really know if that’s true, but the brute force thing and the way our logic works in our mind, it’ll follow rules of logic to absurd conclusions instead of having whatever it is in us that says that’s like.
Socratic dialogue falsity. You got me to say yes 10 times, but the final conclusion is not true. But I have to go and look at all those 10 prepositional phrases, if you will, to see where the flaw is that led me off the cliff.
Stephen: Actually, the exact comment. So yes, I’ve used AI already to not create a whole website, but to create some pages.
The page builder I have has an AI thing and I’m like, yep, let’s add it. Let’s check it out. Got to know. And I used it to create a couple landing pages for some Friends books, websites, and it’s not anything that would take forever. But to be able to just say, here’s the website, here’s what we want, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then go get a drink and [00:17:00] come back.
And it’s there. And I change one or two graphics in 10 minutes. And it’s a drudge page, it’s not anything unique and it’s the same format and you tell it and it goes, I think what’s going to happen is, yes, there’s going to be 1000 web designers that are no longer go be able to really make a living at it, but they weren’t The ones that were super skilled, they were the ones that came into an industry.
That’s easy to get into. That’s easy to use the tools and create a simple website. And what’s going to happen is that the guys have more skill. That can do the specialty items are going to do and they’re gonna be like, yeah. I used to charge a hundred bucks for that, but everybody needs it. So it’s a thousand now.
So it, again, it’s changing. And I think that’s going to be that way for a while. I think so.
Alan: One big opportunity that I see is, as so much of what AI current Generalized AI depends on large language models to feed it, to give it all of what humanity has done before so that we can learn to [00:18:00] imitate humanity.
Someone’s gotta be doing data cleansing because if you throw all of humanity at it currently, like we’re discovering with social media, you can get a very ignorant, savant, bigoted, various different versions of humanity, because just that if you throw Conserv Edia at it. That’s not real history.
That’s bullshit. It’s all the altered stories that they want to be true but are not. I don’t mean to be super political, but that’s such an obvious example. If you’ve ever gone out there, you won’t believe the kind of stuff they have in there. Wikipedia works because it’s so many editors, and they catch each other’s errors, and the total accumulation of all of those people correcting each other gets to a final very good result.
Peer reviewed thing nowadays. Remember, it didn’t used to be that
Stephen: way.
Alan: Right now it is. Yeah, I will say this. I was really happy about this. Colleen for one of her classes did a change to Wikipedia where she put notable [00:19:00] people from Lakewood. Hey, I’m 1. I was on Jeopardy and I had the most hugs in an hour and stuff like that.
It was fixed in a minute. They have all the things that people monitor content and it puts it out and I’m not Bob Hope, I’m not Paul Newman, I’m not the people that really are perhaps of some fame, some significance that they’ve done things, and yet it didn’t take like it wasn’t out there for long.
It was out there for a minute. I’m not, I wish I was exaggerating. So there’s things that are already self cleansing and that people are like that. And if you feed that kind of curated well like the Encyclopedia Britannica or curated by peer review like Wikipedia, what you’re going to start seeing is you really have to, just like you’ve always had to be a consumer of a study to know, was it done according to real statistical correctness?
Did it have the right, the sample size and the distribution was across the whole thing instead of already being self selecting, all that kind of stuff. People are going to have to become ever Wiser consumers of information, because [00:20:00] if it’s churned out, but it’s churned out by someone that what makes for a good business letter versus a good personal letter, it’s like dull and inoffensive versus you can tell the person that’s writing and you can see their personality sparkle in it.
And if you don’t know how to turn it from one to the other, or you mistake one for the other, imagine we’re going to start to see lots of. Jokes and beings about that. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes because I’m a futurist. I want these kinds of things. All the growing pains are gonna be fascinating to see what really sets people off, what really gets good quickly, already, it’s amazingly quick compared to what most people think it should be capable of. But that’s ’cause they wanna think. He managed at the top of the food chain and no, the dolphins have been laughing at us all the time. We just
Stephen: created what’s going to kill us for the top of the food chain, and it’s not going to eat.
Alan: It’s the white mice, which are the pan dimensional, hyper intelligent beings, according to Douglas Adams.
Stephen: And that’s the thing. Yes. Jobs may be disappearing. There’s new jobs. There’s different [00:21:00] jobs. The people that are embracing and using what’s there. Me particularly, I’m in a Renaissance of what I’m doing.
I’ve been working on books and writing books for a while. And because I’ve incorporated it as part of my overall business, it’s more than just the books. I’m doing workshops and I’m doing talks and other stuff. But after I’ve been sitting around playing with the AI and Oh, this could do this.
And I could do this. I went from having a book or two eh, I gotta save the money. So I can get an editor. I can get a book cover and it’s going to take a while. So no bigger, no, now I don’t have even enough time in a day to get everything written because I’ve got the book covers. Not only that, I’ve got content that I’m creating.
I just worked on the. A voicemail greeting for a kid’s cryptid hotline for kids to call and ask questions about Bigfoot and Mothman. And the characters from my book run the hotline. So it’s a writing endeavor for me that I write the dialogue of the characters, [00:22:00] but I found voices. For each character.
So when you call the hotline, you’re getting a hold of my characters and hear their voices and multiple voices. I’ve got my books in audio now because of AI and it’s done. And I’m not spending 14, 000. Are
Alan: you grinding away at it or spending for that level of expertise? Is, wow, I’m taking a big risk in expanding the number of delivery platforms that I’m on.
I have to be. Yes. Maybe now you can just try things, and I’ve got
Stephen: a picture book for younger kids on the same characters that I’m working on, which I couldn’t afford or have the time to do if it wasn’t for ai. And the Aish Questers, I have a theme song for ’em Also, guess who created that theme song,
Alan: cool. It, it’s funny. I just thought of this and I put it out of my mind for a long time when. I started a number of companies over the course of my career. And one of the ones that I started out Lankmar Corporation which is city of Lankmar from Fafr to the Grey Mouser, where [00:23:00] you go to make your fortune or get killed trying.
We, Allied with a company called general magic. That was people that had been on the Macintosh team. This was their next project. It was one of the first PDAs and it had fantastic capabilities in terms of keeping track of, for instance, your calendar and your contact list so that you really didn’t have to worry about the email stuff.
But keeping track of where things came from, it it took away a whole bunch of the overhead of doing that kind of stuff, Dave and I concentrated it on, they had the idea of software agents that you create. little versions of yourself, if you will, expert systems that are good at keep track of all the concerts that are coming to Chicago.
And when it fits like the recommendation engine of here’s things that I’ve liked in the past, progressive rock, it will tell me about that instead of my having to go through six different publications over the course of every month, every week to try to get tickets early enough before Chicago being big, they were sold out in a heartbeat.
And it was so [00:24:00] difficult to go with. All new hardware, all new software, new development environment. It, we couldn’t get to, this was adopted enough and mature enough that we could write things that would be stable to make it worth our time. But the ideas were planted then of, wow, it would be really cool to have these kinds of agents, the ones that do the checkout interest rates for me to find out what bank I should be at.
Checkout and not only one time, but on an ongoing basis. That I have this. I’ve got a Shoesinator idea in my head that for a difficult problem, you don’t just give it a try. You really can collect enough objective data and objectify, objectivize, enough things so that it really puts numbers to it and you can compare instead of just being a gut feel, if you will.
I think we’re going to see a lot of that cool stuff coming up that the recommendation engines that we’ve seen so far for what movie, what restaurant, so forth, they’re going to become more and more sophisticated, but we’re also going to see that they make incredible errors. Thank you. I just was, I, we have all these segues and we can find out if we want.[00:25:00]
It’s prime day, now it’s not prime day, Amazon. And I went in and browsed around the various different deals, like just walking through the store to see what might strike my eye. But then as I went into things, it kept suggesting other things that were along those lines. And it’s I’m glad that I found a better deal for the same money, or maybe something more sophisticated.
I’m willing to put pay a little more money, but what the hell is this? Why in the world does it think. That I’m looking at, um, let’s see, little lights that don’t require wiring, that’s good enough battery and good enough LED because they sit with that, you can put up in a closet, all those things that I want to be able to do to our house that don’t involve by having to go into plaster walls and run wire where it’s all has to be according to code and conduit and all kinds of stuff.
But then why does it show me skis? How did it make the jump is because it’s in the name of the product that it’s sex wax. And all of a sudden I’m on a different site than I expected to be,
Stephen: I’m sure this and I’ve learned a lot of this in the book author world that they will look at [00:26:00] those lights.
And then they’ll look at the last 10, 000 people that bought those lights and everything that they bought and they’ll say, okay, these 10 items were bought the most by people that bought these lights. Here you go.
Alan: That’s right. Oh, we all, they also like oregano for some reason. They also like scooters and all that kind of stuff.
So as I did a whole bunch of Bob around prime day, I kept getting those things. That really must be a very good explanation for what’s behind it. It’s not that it’s related to the product that I’m looking at, but my profile that it maintains of me, they’re thinking now we know all about it. He’s a retired guy in Lakewood, Ohio, and they all like he’s going to need some fungicide for his hanging baskets.
He’s going to need some, it was, and what’s funny is once in a while, when it did, What I thought was also a wild guess, it was like, yeah, okay, I need that too. So it was useful, even though it seemed random. So I do have a profile, I fit a type, but some of them were really out of left field.
You know what I mean? If you’re looking for, in fact, is it worth, I [00:27:00] have to be able to do this without losing our session here. Yeah, let me move this over so that I can still see you because this was what did I buy at Prime Day? What
Stephen: gadgets did Alan get? It’s like the new segment.
Alan: I went out looking for very specific things because Colleen and I had talked about, hey, it’d be nice to see this.
I think I mentioned last time we went to a place called Ralph’s Joy of Living in Tiffin, Ohio. And one of those like in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, Kind of the western part of the state. It had a very complete store where, we need funnels that handle peppercorn size, not just liquid size, because we’ve got to be able to guide the peppercorns into our pepper grinder right over here.
Sir. The person knew their stock. It was having an expert system, if you will, but they didn’t have something. For instance We had seen on one of we watch our British baking show, and they had most of the time when you like do ground beef, you just take a spoon to it, and you mash it up and then you end up with some chunks as well as [00:28:00] somebody had a cool thing that was like a four.
thing that really did that work in a third of the time and more correctly, more perfectly. Is that only in Britain? Nope. I got it here and it was like 9. 99. You know what I mean? I’m sure it’s
Stephen: gonna go on the shelf right next to your organic peanut butter mixer.
Alan: That, it, What was also interesting is, so I really would like this, if they’re start charging like 50 bucks for, I don’t need it that much.
Wooden spoon for the rest of my life works just fine. But it gets to whatever that magic point in your head of impulse buy or reasonable for the thing and it really is good. So I got we, we often have, we make We boil our corn, or we make a big pot of something, pasta, and then you dump it into a colander, and if you want to save some of the colander, the water, because you’re supposed to, according to various different recipes, that there’s a whole bunch of good Pasta particles that you wanna have, be part of what you’re going to make a li add a little bit of water back in to make it smoother.
That’s a whole [00:29:00] assemblage of, now I got a strainer and I got a captured device underneath it and I gotta I gotta walk from my stove to the thing and carry a big pod and et cetera. They have a thing where it’s like a little half of a strainer that you clip onto the pot, and then you just tip the pot, and it keeps everything in the pot, instead of it coming out of the pot and having to go back in, and again seven bucks.
You know what I mean? So it doesn’t even have to be that we use it every day. It doesn’t have to be essential to our life, but for those particular things that Someone must have thought of this, right? Yes, someone was smart and made an invention, and they actually came in multiple colors,
Stephen: so how about orange?
And I think Amazon’s so smart for this Prime Days, because it’s such a win, and all these, Companies jump on it because what happens is they’re like, look, this we normally sell for 25. It costs us 9 just to make it, but we’re going to sell it to you on these two days only for seven, because what happens is people are like, Oh my gosh, that’s a great, And they get 25, 000 [00:30:00] sales on that day.
So suddenly they’re number one in their category with a bestseller list. Then after prime, it starts popping up. People are like, Oh, so many people got it. I’m going to get it. And it feeds itself. It keeps going. And they’re like, now we’re making our money back.
Alan: If we haven’t talked about Oxo before, yes.
Hats off to Oxo because we must have 30, 40 different Oxo things because everyone that I’ve used, it’s like someone looked at a potato peeler and they said exactly what sizes should be and what grip it should be, and that you’re it’s perfect for the task. And they did that 30 times. It’s the best.
Garlic press, it’s the best set of spoons, whatever else it might be. So then you build brand awareness of Hey, if I got this thing from Avion or whatever, I own next time I’ll look for, if this was a good one, let’s go check out first to see what else they have. And then I’ll depend that it’s not.
It broke in two weeks or something like that it actually was right and it lasted and stuff like that. So you’re exactly right. [00:31:00] Even if it’s not necessarily a loss leader, it really might be that they did the thing that will have follow on benefits and it was worth that gamble, if you will. I just recently noticed, we’ve had a new washing machine for a couple of years now, and I regularly leave the door open when I’m done with my last load, because if you leave it closed, it can get a little bit musty, or whatever it is, from having anything wet that stays inside.
Washer cleaner descaler tablets that you like, you do a load with this, and it cleans it. It’s better for the next six months, and it starts, restarts the cycle of whatever, I don’t know. Mildew scaling. We have hard, not hard water, but we don’t have, we don’t have a water softener for our house.
And so that kind of stuff, I’ve seen it build up on our shower head. You know what I mean? There’s just enough of those little calcium bits and whatever else it might be. And like I said, each of these things is 7, 9, a pack of 24, 12 months supply, 12. I don’t know that I’m going to run it once a month.
I’m going to run it whenever I’m like, what’s up? And it’s just. Oh, you said there’s [00:32:00] more. I don’t really, it’s and this I got some like sheets. We have multiple sheets like flannel for the winter and nice and cool for the summer. We have some bamboo. We have everything, but this is the one that got 600 positive reviews out of all the sheets that are out there.
This is the one that everybody said, love it. Would buy again. It fits perfectly with a little deep extra holder on the mattress, all that kind of stuff. And yes, I’ll get another pair of sheets without really needing them. We have had some things that we’ve had for 20 years. And sometimes you have something that even if it’s got a little, like a little rip in it, you use it because you, it’s still okay.
99 percent of the way. But then every time you put your foot near the rip and it’s Oh man, it isn’t right anymore, but this will be a replacement for the worst of our pair of sheets. Anyway, the little stick on lights that I mentioned I got a. Wi Fi extender and I already have sorry, mesh throughout the house, but I want to be able to have Wi Fi in my garage so that I can use my phone to open the [00:33:00] garage door.
And for whatever reason, just enough outside the house receptionist spotting. If I put an extender there and it’s good at picking up the signal, and then all I got to do is attach to that guy and I got Multiple outlets in the garage and you know that kind of thing that just that little yen that I have of I don’t want to have to punch the buttons while it’s raining outside.
I’d like to be able to from inside the house, open my garage door, zoom to it. I, it might have been that I went a little mad, but not really. These are all little yens that I’ve had. And then you go out there and say someone solved this. Let’s see. I, maybe you’re like this. I don’t know. Yeah.
Apparently I smell great to mosquitoes. Some of us think sweet sweat. I’m diabetic. And so I’m having to contend with that, but it’s it’s the blood that tastes good is the sweat that attracts them. I didn’t realize I smelled like a little junk will, but they have. I, and I’m putting on bug spray.
I have to be careful when I get, because I really have a reaction to DEET. The best of the deep woods off type stuff [00:34:00] has DEET in it, and it really keeps the bugs away, but it makes me feel nauseous if I put too much of it on. I’m going to I got and it’s a whole process to make sure that everybody has done it where you put on your all your exposed skin and then the bugs are uncanny and oh, just where I was the bottom of my shorts, but not up under my shorts.
I didn’t put any on and then while I’m walking along, apparently they snuck underneath there. And now I got, who wants to be scratching the back of their leg near their popo in public. But I got this mosquito bite that just won’t stop. So having said that. Little bracelets that have citronella type things in it and put one on each wrist and it makes a little, cone of discomfort for the insects as you’re walking along.
And I don’t have to be a little bit of the bear thing. I don’t have to like be faster than the bear. I have to be faster than you. And so I once, both Colleen and I have these little bracelets on, but I’m the one that they seem to flock to. So at least keep them away from me, that kind of thing.
Stephen: And with that said, today’s sponsor of the episode is [00:35:00] Soap Goats Lotion. Chickweed lotion to help with your bug bites. Soapgoats. online.
Alan: Exactly, that this would trigger that you guys are making these all natural things that do a lot of these things, I I bought little colored pens.
I used to carry all the time a red, a black, and a blue pen. When I really wore more things with pockets when I really wrote more instead of immediately putting into my phone what I’ve noticed is not just carrying around. I hate having not here at my desk I have a piece of paper and I really want to highlight something And instead of making a big star or circling a couple times if you do it in red, it stands out You know what I mean?
So I bought up a bunch of good like art pens again five bucks or whatever like that so that I could I’ll have my mood come out. I’ll have that little alert thing come out when I want to write something on a piece of paper. Colleen and I both she really likes, cheese dust on broccoli, not a whole cheese sauce, but just that little bit.
That’s a really good flavor here. So in the past, I found it like getting marks and it’s, there’s a brand [00:36:00] of them to have it for popcorn and veggies and that kind of stuff. So I went looking for that and then they have, there’s four different flavors now, but it’s not just cheddar. It’s smoked cheddar.
It’s white cheddar. They’re like, how could I get the four sampler packed? And we’ll try them all and then see which one we want to get in the big size. And that initial, I want to go get this, turned into, that’s cool that they’ve actually diverged, that they’ve branched out and they have four flavors now.
Stephen: I just. The pop that I drink, I found that it’s the same price at Amazon as Meijer and Amazon has a way bigger variety and they actually have a half and half iced tea lemonade one. Yeah.
Alan: So exactly. And let’s see I take pills, for my I’m 65. I’m about to be 65. And I have taken good care of myself.
So it’s not like I, if I don’t take the pill, I’m going to die, but definitely for diabetes, you want to hold it off as much as you can. And I I think that I’ve been getting white coat fever, but blood pressure, hypertension is really one of [00:37:00] those silent killers that I’ve not had with it all my life, but just lately I have.
And so now I’m on a little pill to see if it helps and one for high cholesterol. This is a weird thing to say. If you’ve taken a pill 500 times, a thousand times over the last five years, six years, you’ll lose track of, did I take it today or not? I never thought I’d be like that. I have my pills like right here.
And first thing in the morning, before I even have breakfast, I pop my two pills. And yet there’s still sometimes where I sat down at my desk at a meal, I had something to do and it disrupted my schedule. And then every day is like the same. I look at it. It’s I could swear I reached for. So that’s a long way of saying I got one of those little pill boxes That I’ll arm in the week for here’s my day, morning, noon, night, like they have four slots, seven days, and I’ll put my stuff in.
I already had something like that for when I was taking a lot of supplements, but now I really am going to take the do the pill taker to make sure that I don’t miss my metformin or my atorvastatin or whatever else it might be, [00:38:00] because I never did. And then only recently did I have those little, man, I, my mind is not perfect like it used to be.
What an arrogant thing to say. But about that, it really was perfect. I never doubted. I never hesitated. Did I do this or not? And only recently has it been perfect. And this aging thing is just not for the weak. It’s not for the timid. I don’t want to have to think about it hard every day. I want it to be automatic.
That’s why I found a solution. That’s why we have our AI system and then not pay attention. Exactly that. And it could be that I have it. Pop up on my screen. I put I could have put a tickler in and said, Hey, it’s 10 a. m. Take your pill. And then hopefully I wasn’t distracted doing something else that I had to say.
I’ll take it in a minute. And then how long am I going to leave the alert up there on the screen? All that stuff. This just seemed to be. A silly practical. I hope it works. And if it doesn’t, then I’ll find another thing. But once again, five bucks for a solution to my [00:39:00] trepidation over. Did I take my, did I take my pills today?
Stephen: Oh, you know that, you like walk into a room and then you’re like, I forget why I’m here. What am I looking for? That those instances, what that really is not you forgetting something. That’s when you were abducted by the aliens and they had to wipe your mind.
Alan: That’s exactly, yeah. I would remember if I gotten probed.
So it’s not that, but yes, they wiped my mind for that last. And then of course I got Several books that like that I had in my wishlist, but now they went on sale and instead of being 10 percent off, they were 35 percent off time to spend 80 on six books that I like. So thinking in bets a book by any.
Why did I miss her last name? She’s a great poker player. And so the book is all about how to make decisions when you don’t have complete information. That’s not
Stephen: Richard. What’s his face? His daughter. Is
Alan: it exactly? It’s Annie Duke. Thank you. Exactly. That’s that Richard letter. He has Howard and Annie are [00:40:00] two of his children that are world class poker players, and he’s a great poker player too.
I’ve had a chance to play with him out in California when I was going to visit my mom and stuff like that. And he didn’t actually are. We’re, we both love words, and we’ve had wonderful conversations at Mensa gatherings and stuff like that, and he’s Very kind to me. He’s what he’s seen some of my presentations as well as mine, some of him, some of his, and it’s just nice to have a guy that you really respect.
Think you’re okay. It’s like you made the team somehow. You know what I mean? He’s written all kinds of good wordplay books and histories of history books and stuff like that. And just, if I. For a Menson, if I don’t know what to get them, getting them a couple, getting them a couple letterer books is a good, it’s a good bet.
Stephen: When I went to my first AG, he was the first person I ran into almost literally. I noticed he was walking around and he had a name thing on. I’m like, are you at the Mensa AG? I’m lost. And he goes right this way. So
Alan: exactly. I don’t know. He, when his talks are, [00:41:00] there’s so much information imparted in a short period of time that it, I just, I love that overwhelm.
When people are a little bit too, they doing it as a business talk, you got to tell them what you’re going to tell them. And then you’re going to tell them, and then you’re going to tell them what you told them. And they pause in between a letter to catch up. And instead I speak like this. I love the Mensa barrage where it’s like, We got a lot to get through.
Here we go. And you just, and you really respect the fact that everybody there is like you in the room. They drink it in quickly. They listen quickly. I have fast speech, but good diction. And so I always say, if I really am talking too fast, put your hand up and I’ll slow down. But that hardly ever happens.
They love that. It’s they can see enthusiasm. They can see my love for the topics that I’m talking about. I was
Stephen: doing a thing the other day for work. Where I was having to show people. And to me, it was, this is a very simple concept, a very simple thing. I looked at it for 30 seconds. I got it. Now I’m presenting it to you.
And I went through it, I was showing them and explaining, and this is what a lot of people [00:42:00] miss. They say, okay, click here, but they don’t explain why you’re clicking there rather than somewhere else
Alan: while you’re doing it. Exactly. Yeah. I
Stephen: went through it and explain why you do this, why you do this, what you’re clicking blah.
And then the boss goes, Oh, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Let’s back up a little bit. What this is for. I’m like it’s for our new tutor learning. And he’s you didn’t. I’m like, that wasn’t obvious. It said it in the meeting invite. And that’s what I’m looking for all here. I didn’t think I needed to do that.
He’s you’re just going a little too fast. I’m like, yeah. I am. Didn’t think I was, but okay.
Alan: It’s nice that he told you that instead of it being a less useful meeting, but it really is when you thought you were working at pretty normal person speed and it was still too fast. I’ve had that experience.
You know what I mean? I used to do many design meetings for Ameritech when we were doing things. Okay. We got five different states that have little baby bell systems. How to make them into one concerted system? And some things, You can just people give you that little sideways head thing that little, a, they give you the look that says they’re not quite getting it.
And so I go over [00:43:00] it. And not just repeat, I try from different angles, I try to like, so what do you have? And then we compare it to that, compare and contrast. And even then there were some people that it was like, wow, this is often said snottily, but I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.
Yes. Out of ways to try to get this across. Can I write it out? And then you can read it as many times as you need. It was not at all being patronizing, but. We got 30 people in the room here and we can’t stop. We have so much to get through. Oh boy, that was my thing.
Stephen: My most technophobe user had already gotten in there, played with and said, Oh, this is easy.
So I’m like, if my most technophobe user is saying this is easy, we don’t need a whole hour on this. Trust me.
Alan: And also I love it when just that you’re trying to explain. And then someone that has even more, the company background, the specific stuff, and they use. Words you might not have known that you should use a past, a memory of a past system.
Oh, it’s like the XYZ system, but it’s this. And then [00:44:00] Oh, and they’ll help have the light bulb go off. Cause I just didn’t have the context. Didn’t have the way in, and so it’s nice when people get it and then are also there with you to explain it to others. That’s very handy.
Yeah. Let’s see. I got the complete Rocky and Bullwinkle. Because who shouldn’t have that? Who shouldn’t have that? Like honestly, some things are, even though I could find it on streaming and stuff like that, a whole, I really wanna be able to watch it. When I wanna watch it. I wanna be able to know what’s the complete, so that there’s not a ized edition because, oh, they made too much fun of Nazis here and now we have to be kind to the Nazis.
So we’re gonna take that episode out. I say that obviously to be a little bit histrionic about it, but things have been taken out for far. Lesser reasons. And I hate the fact that someone made a decision for me as to whether I would be understand that it’s a joke, understand that it was of the time and stuff like that.
You know what I
Stephen: mean? And I think politicians on both sides of [00:45:00] us and Russia have watched those and used it as a playbook. I
Alan: think exactly that the Boris Baden off. It’s this is my guy, that kind of thing. So I got an expanded edition called a book called Nudge. And maybe you A lot of how you do user interface is to present the most, the best choice first, or the most obvious, or the most often chosen.
But there’s different reasons that you would not have it be just a straight alphabetical list. If you’ve got a straight alphabetical list of countries, and you’ve got to scroll all the way down to the United States, there’s a lot of times you want to say, I’m going to make an exception and break the alphabet and put my two main customers, Canada and the United States, at the top, because otherwise I’m just going to piss off everybody who goes to this drop down menu, and so it’s about how to, what the thought is that goes into how you, and that’s a very small example compared to all the societal things that you try to do, not with coercion. But with make it so that there’s an incentive to doing the right thing, making it so that it’s the obvious first [00:46:00] choice or that it’s here’s a little reward for it.
You know what I mean? If you want to have people do more recycling, then you say, Hey, you put it in three bags. You get a cookie over here at Mama Bell’s cookies or something like that. And so the first edition was great. And this is now a 20 years later. Here’s all of what we’ve learned about it. How to make the world a better place without being a dictator, without being a jerk, that kind of thing.
And then finally, here’s the most nerdy one, the algebra of happiness. A professor that specializes in, like Freakonomics, which I think I’ve talked about before, they get to the reality of things. They use math, they use statistics, they use real theories to explain why people behave as they do, because oftentimes it’s not the knee jerk ideological thing.
Why do urban people sell drugs. Not because they’re the wrong color, and how many people jump to that terrible bigotry. It’s because, given their social situation, and if they want to make a lot of money [00:47:00] quickly, this is becoming a rap artist, or becoming a drug dealer, or, there’s certain things that, if they have that desire to circumvent their humble beginnings and make it big, there’s ways to do it, and they’re not always successful. decent. They’re not always legit, but it’s not because we love using drugs or I want to wreck my neighborhood. You know what I mean?
There’s like economic motives, human motives for all different kinds of behavior. And this is, if you want to get to happiness, how could you chart that out? How could you say, if I put a number, since we talked a little bit more about to objectivize things, you really got to get to numbers and be able to compare between.
And if I was to like, keep track of where I put all my time in the day and then said, and how many of those things point directly to what I say are my long term goals, the things that make me happiest in my life. And then you can say why am I wasting all my time over here? It’s because it’s a bad habit.
It’s because I get distracted. It’s because I really can use that to do incremental advancement towards living a happier [00:48:00] life. You know what I mean? If I want to have a good marriage, Hey, how about regular communication? How about all the live, the love languages, which I know that you, I think you just posted the maybe decrying, oh, this is not entirely accurate, but.
All the vehicles that you use to get to those things that you want, this actually tries to put numbers to it. And as a geek, I love it! I will never go, Colleen and I make fun of, How did you know that you were in love? I checked my compatibility template and we had a 7. 6 percent match!
Exactly, it’s you gotta put on the German voice if you’re gonna somehow get to
Stephen: One of my buddies in high school, a big nerd, everybody knew it. He had a Casio calculator watch. That’s how advanced he was. He would just make people amazed because he would outside, he had a basketball hoop, and basketball, and he would go and stand there.
And then he’d walk towards it and he’d hit some numbers and he’d move around. Tech, the wind and he, hit some numbers and he go, okay, and then [00:49:00] just hit without looking up, just bounce the ball and he’d go right in the hoop. And people like, Oh my God, like arcs. Exactly. And I would laugh my ass off because you know how he did it.
Alan: Yes.
Stephen: Many an hour until he found the exact spot to practice and do it every time. And then he just did everything else for a fact, right? This was all a ruse. This was exactly
Alan: that’s hilarious.
Stephen: What you said about the, the stereotype, the drugs and all that, sometimes you got to listen to those because we know it’s a fact.
We know that we can trust white Republican males with guns, right? You got to watch some of those.
Alan: It’s, every, I try to have, especially, this is weird. There’s so many discussions nowadays that people immediately jump to the worst. They get offended. They turn off. And part of geeking it up is to do a little bit of, here’s a path that really might work for both of us.
Let’s try to get to the numbers. Let’s try to get to. Okay. Cool. [00:50:00] Facts we can agree on, not immediately to the ideology that’s behind it. And then you start dispensing facts in a lot of cases. And everybody does that. They have a big confirmation bias and all that kind of stuff. But I’m so much wanting there to be that you can have a conversation with anybody that’s not a yelling match, that there has to be something.
And I think science and numbers can be a stepping stone towards that unless the people immediately are, Oh, now you’re using science. You’re just trying to fool me. It’s that’s wow. I don’t know where to go. If you think that facts are fooling you, if I need to go get a drink,
Stephen: I’ll talk to you later.
Yeah,
Alan: I guess so. But just that I also a Kevin Nealon book. Remember Kevin Nealon from SNL? Apparently, he’s a good artist. And I had that on my list for years and years. When on sale, time to buy. So I think that might be all I wanted. All the cool stuff. I did. I did, by the way. We have powdery mildew on our [00:51:00] begonias.
We have hanging baskets and for the we’ve never had any problems. Last year, we had whiteflies. This year we had powdery mildew. I found the fungicide that was recommended to go after this kind of stuff and on sale. Yay me. And while I was there, I got some, spikes that you drive into the ground near your trees and shrubs that put all those good nutrients into the soil.
And then the next season, it’s whoosh, they really, so honestly, I just had so much. It wasn’t the big thing. Like we just had windows installed, but it was big money and a big decision. I really used the Choosinator. This was a whole bunch of all those little itches that I finally got to scratch and total spent.
Not nothing, a couple hundred dollars, but like 20 things that solve a little problem. A hundred dollars instead of six or seven. Honestly, it was the fact that if I’m going to buy it, eventually it’s been on my wishlist for a while. This is the time let’s strike while you’re there and stuff. So I hope that, I don’t know.
We can regularly have a segment on. Hey, what’s the latest? What’s the coolest little guy? I think we
Stephen: do [00:52:00] it anyway.
Alan: We do it anyway. Exactly. Sometimes it’s books. Sometimes it’s movies. Yeah, I always try to do this. The geekery part of this relentlessly is. I love the fact that someone thought about this.
What’s the right way to make a meat masher? So that it’s got is three or four or five the right number? You know what I mean? What should it be made out of? So that it doesn’t, if it’s metal, then it’ll do a real good job with cutting. But then as it touches the, it gets hotter in your hand and then I got to put a wooden handle on it.
And so I talked about this many times. I love materials science. I love the fact that They understand enough of you start off with this thing, but then if you dope it with a certain other thing, it withstands. So we just had to have a tempered glass window put in on for one of our landing windows, because you don’t want to fall out a window and have a clutch to ribbons.
And because it’s not a landing, you’re in motion compared to most other things where you’re just sitting near it. And so it’s a lot that they actually said. Do this right thing to prevent tragedies, because there’s been enough that this is the way we could have prevented. But [00:53:00] I don’t want to like what’s tempered glass?
And so you hop onto a website, and because the internet is wonderful, you can really find out here’s how they make it. They make a regular sheet of glass, and then they do a cool heating and cooling thing where it changes the compression of the outside of the glass compared to the tension on the inside of the glass, so that instead of sharding, making big jagged edges, it shatters into many little pieces.
And the strength of tempered glass is Thank you. Four times as much 3, 000 PSI that goes to 12, 000 PSI so that it not only resists like you want for a windshield or any kind of glass on a car or for various other places, it resists shattering. But then when it shatters elegantly instead of.
And so I’ve said the phrase tempered glass multiple times. Did I really know it? Not until I looked it up while I was researching. What am I buying? If I’m going to what’s the And same with, how does glass work that it keeps a little bit of sun out? It’s not just pure glass, it’s laminated.
They’ve got a thing that’s [00:54:00] very clear, but that is not clear to UV. It’s near opaque. And so I can see out my windows perfectly, but it keeps the sun out. And I just love the fact that people were smart enough, transparent aluminum on Star Trek. There really is now. A computer.
Transparent. Exactly. I get to be. Those damn Macs. God, he could and finding out like the reason that you use titanium is Because there’s not enough by bramium
Stephen: and it’s all in Wakanda. That’s why
Alan: They do have an octanium that’s really in short supply all over the world, you know You have to have the two rosins that combine so I just that’s part of this cool I don’t like to just like shopping wise.
I never know. I’ll take the green one. I like to know what matters to me and which products embody it the best. And so in my mind, I almost have a little bit of a choosinator running, but for a big thing like buying a car, like we just talked about, or buying, a couple thousand dollars worth of windows.
You really want to say, I got six different windows vendors coming in to [00:55:00] tell me all about they’ve got vinyl and they’ve got formaldehyde and they’ve got various different doping things and here’s all the glasses. I really wanted to be able to compare semi objectively and accurately between them, and so broke out the choosinator.
And and I just, I think that it’s one of those things that how many problems could be solved by people not just glossing over and saying that’s a thorny problem. I’ll just guess. But by actually saying, if I take a day to really figure out what I would care about, the factors that matter and how much they matter to me, and then judge each thing on the basis of those factors, it makes, solutions like jump out.
You know what I mean? It’s not that it’s everything comes out to be about 78 and I still don’t have a solution. There’s usually like a 90, 80, 70, 60 and dollars wise, you can say, how much am I willing to do more to jump from 80 to 90? Sometimes it’s too much and sometimes it’s just right. And so I just, it’s, Aline has said, and I’m happy to hear this, that We’ve bought [00:56:00] very few lemons by using choosenator type things for our vacuum cleaner and our garage and whatever else it might be.
There’s very little buyer’s remorse that we’ve had. There’s very little, that lasted a year. We’ve really had very good luck with doing the research upfront and not then having that disappointment and having to go into refund hell and warranty hell and that kind of stuff. So I’m glad that it got, Became handy for you with your car search.
I, and also I think part of doing the choose Nader is you don’t have to do it for everything. You know what I mean? If you’re caught by a candy bar, you don’t have to look at the coconut content in order to be able to judge, will I like this thing? And it’s only going to cost me a dollar. So part of wisdom is you don’t use the same hammer every single freaking job.
You use the tool as appropriate. And sometimes it really is. I feel like pancakes. I don’t have to know right between the buckwheat and the et cetera. It’s what
Stephen: you feel like. Yeah. Yeah. So slightly jumping this [00:57:00] past weekend what a freaking crazy weekend
Alan: book fair.
Stephen: Before that, besides that, let’s forget about the political gun crap, but we lost Richard Simmons.
We lost Dr. Ruth. And Shannon Doherty, which that one hit me the most because we’re the same age. And I used to watch 90210 a lot and charmed actually so to have, Oh, that’s my age. And,
Alan: especially weird one where someone that’s absolutely a peer of yours didn’t make it any further
Stephen: without being in the past retirement age, 53, She’s got 20, 25 years of acting left.
And, that was a kind of rough one. She’s been battling that for a while, and everybody says, yeah,
Alan: did she die? I didn’t. I don’t.
Stephen: Oh, she had breast cancer in 2018 and it’s no spread. And several times, and she couldn’t get rid of it. So like April, she announced that it had spread to her brain.
Alan: And that, that’s the kind of metastasis that you don’t come back from. No, [00:58:00] it’s not easily treatable. Oh boy.
Stephen: Okay. Yeah, that was like, eh, but then I was at the Columbus book festival, which you really should come down to that when they do it in July. It is a jam. The Columbus library is super fantastic.
So first of all, the big thing for me was I got to talk to John Scalzi. So that was exciting.
Alan: Like exactly old man’s war. So when that whole, that series is a really good series. I love a bunch of his stuff.
Stephen: Red shirts. Is the one that got me in the comedy stuff he did. One called the Kaiju Preservation Society.
Exactly The newest one shows a cat with a suit, and it’s called Starter Villain .
Alan: Okay. So I got dog,
Stephen: but it’s it’s a fantastic based here in Ohio, it’s easy. Cincinnati.
Alan: That’s cool. I didn’t know he was that close. Okay. Yeah.
Stephen: So it’s just so fantastic. It’s only the second year they’ve done it. Last year was the first year they expected 10, 000 people and they got 30, [00:59:00] 000.
This year they hit 42, 000 people visiting. That’s
Alan: fantastic. Only the weekend or all week long or how
Stephen: no, it’s Saturday and Sunday just started on Sunday, but they do everything. So inside they have talks and they have three tracks going on all day and it’s authors. You pretty much know or you’ve heard of, or at least somebody has, and then you can buy their books and the books are from like the book loft and prologue, the bookstores sell the stuff.
And then they have signing tables so you can get stuff signed. So that’s the big name draws, but then outside not only do they have all that going on in, they have live bands playing throughout the day. They have vendor tents and exhibitors, and there must’ve been like a hundred, 120 exhibitor vendor tents of everything
Alan: topiary
Stephen: park.
So the vendors, there’s, a lot of bookstores, some. Cool book [01:00:00] people but a few other little things here and there, but it’s so many cool things. They have food trucks, like 20 different food trucks with lines, 42, 000 people lines forever. Best part was they set up this big circus tent and it’s in the author alley.
They embrace and pull in local authors to set up and stuff. And better than just that, because, 10 years ago, the library’s Oh, you’re an indie author. I don’t want to talk to you. Now they’re like, yeah, here’s a form, fill it out. We’ll get your book in the library. That type of thing.
But there were people walking through the tent buying books, that’s you can set up a tent all you want. But if nobody goes to buy the books, who cares? There were lots of people walking through looking at the in the authors buying books there. 100 and something in the authors, 95 100 authors, something like that.
So that’s a great spread all
Alan: different on resin. And that’s wonderful. Yeah, that’s a great spread. Most of what I do at Comic Cons nowadays is not look for [01:01:00] old comic books to fill in my collection. It’s look at all the new books, graphic novels, etc. and try to help out the starving artists. Exactly.
Stephen: And by the way, I owe you an apology.
I had a note to tell you last. Weeks episode and I forgot Sakura was down here at Adam’s action figures. But you see him all the time at the cons anyways. I do
Alan: exactly. He’s a great guy. That’s one of those local success stories. And he’s not a flash in the pan. He’s been going for 20 years now and has expanded the hero tomorrow line and stuff like that.
Wonderful. He’s a great guy.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. So I went down there. I grabbed the latest bloom issue. It’s the only one he recognized me. So that’s cool. It’s Oh,
Alan: yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. So it was a great weekend. Really? I know
Alan: in July and like this, maybe second weekend or something.
Stephen: Yeah, right around this time.
I’m sure they’ll do it next year. It was a huge success. It’s not that far away. It’s worth the drive down and checking it out for the day. And see what all’s going on.
Alan: It was longer because sometimes what they’ll do is they’ll have like industry days, be [01:02:00] Monday through Wednesday, where they have all the workshops and how to sell your books.
And then the public part, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or something like that, where they get a chance to meet their fans and there’s already been a whole bunch of good networking already done and stuff like that.
Stephen: They ask for, what suggestions do you have? And that may be something I may pass back.
It’s you know what? All of us authors, a Thursday, Friday. Author sessions and writing sessions or something that might be a cool thing to do, too, as part of this whole thing. Maybe it’d work. Maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know.
Alan: Did you sell many books? Were yours flying off the shelves?
Not
Stephen: flying off the shelves. I did sell more than anywhere else I’d been. I pretty much broke even. And when I say broke even, it means the profit paid for the table. And I count profit as, here’s what it cost me for the book. So here’s my profit. So that paid for the table and a couple bucks extra.
I got some cheesecake.
Alan: Very good. Okay. That’s the I, I know that’s like any number of. Art fairs that’s the dealers calculation is I [01:03:00] really, it’s not only goodwill and getting my name out there. I’d like to make some money. I’d like to sell.
Stephen: And honestly, I signed up for this like November.
And I should have had two books out, which are both the editors at the moment, but one circumstance and another, they didn’t get all done and get published and out. So I think if I would have had those out, it would have helped a lot, but they’re close. So next year, if I get in, I’m
Alan: For next year at that time.
It’s really nice. I am often attracted when I go at a comic con or something like that, that it’s not here’s my book. It’s more. Here’s my series. I’ve been doing this for 6 books already. So there’s a certain amount of I love series. I like the fact that I’m going to revisit these characters. I love that.
They had to stick to it in this and they’ve learned from their craft and that. Yeah, the 6th 1 looks better than the 1st 1 that is reads better. You know what I mean? So that next year, you can make a wonderful splash because you’ll have a, An array of things very
Stephen: good. And like I said, all the AI stuff I’m doing.
I’ve [01:04:00] got the hotline coming up. I’ve got a picture book coming up. I’m going to do a YouTube channel where the characters from the book are analyzing paranormal videos that people post. So I
Alan: still don’t get why I couldn’t. Listen to the mp3 I just I got every utility that should be able to open every weird graphic and sound and everything and yet I couldn’t when I tried to save that and then listen to it.
I couldn’t throw a player at it that could get it so I’m not sure. I don’t know why I’ll keep experimenting with it to see if it’s in a wrapper and I have to get past the meta information to get to the actual content. I didn’t work hard enough at it. I just, I kept trying various different things instead of using one to try to open it further.
You know what I mean? Because there’s things that happen like that way, way back in the days of MP3 players. There were things that even though called itself an MP3, they weren’t all equal. Yeah okay, cool. We got through some of our list, but it’s I’m very happy. I will absolutely, [01:05:00] Colleen and I are looking for these wonderful things.
Now that we have relative control over our schedule, zooming down to Columbus for a good weekend to like, Oh no books. That would, that really fits our target or what we want to do. So thank you for letting me know that. And I’ll look for it.
Stephen: There is something coming up in September. The weekend like the 14th ish, I believe I’ll get the exact date.
It’s up in Avon. Maybe I’ll have to go check, but it’s a skunk fest that it’s a skunk rescue that they have vendors come in. They have a whole day skunk fest and all the money goes to help this skunk rescue. And if you ever.
Alan: A Columbus group talk about that. It’s one of their RGs. And so I don’t, I’m sure there’s different for each city and stuff like that.
But I actually want to do a cool talk about it.
Stephen: Yeah. And if you’ve never held and petted a skunk, they’re super wonderful. Everyone’s Oh no they’ve all been the glands removed. They’re very,
Alan: yeah.
Stephen: They’re [01:06:00] very docile, gentle. Their fur is coarse and wiry, but it’s very thick and dense, almost like hunter’s fur.
That’s something coming up and it’s right next door to you. We’re going to sell soaps. We’re going to have a special limited edition, a skunk soap that does not smell like skunks.
Alan: I will look for that. Like he’s even is Avon is 20 minutes away. Exactly.
Stephen: So I know there’s a whole lot of stuff coming up.
We’re entering, we’re getting close to fall tons of crap going on in the fall.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Take care of Steven. Thank you very much. Good session, ma’am.
Stephen: Talk to you later.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.
