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In this video script, two self-proclaimed geeks discuss various topics ranging from their personal interests and technology to investing insights and entertainment recommendations. They touch upon their use of Zoom during the pandemic, the financial challenges faced by tech companies, and their investment strategies with references to market experts like Louis Nivellier. They delve into the importance of making efficient use of time and outsourcing tasks. The conversation shifts to reminiscing about old and current TV shows like Scrubs and Creature Commandos, the significance of buying collections, and the anticipated reunions and new releases from bands like Led Zeppelin. The script also explores broader societal issues about censorship, the relevance of historical events, and the impact of political changes. Personal anecdotes and seasonal sentiments are sprinkled throughout, leading to a warm conclusion about their Christmas plans and gift-giving traditions.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.
It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.
Alan: Let me
Stephen: you got a different background.
Alan: I do. I downloaded a bunch, so I’d have something to choose from. And let me turn on night shift so that I am a little bit less glared by the screen there. See more than that. You go turn on the Commodore. Exactly. Here we go. [00:01:00] And, oh, and here’s the today’s shirt.
Oh, nice. There we go. The Batman shirt. That’s nice. Mine’s. Very good, the Yoda, exactly. Yeah,
Stephen: now if I am not, I’m becoming the invisible man.
Alan: That’s funny. Instead of standing up, I made a point of doing that because I thought that maybe it wouldn’t do that. That green screening, but whatever it does, when you’re moving, then it Zoom’s got some smarts to it.
Yeah. When is Zoom going to make some money? I think I told you, I invested in Zoom when it was like start of COVID. And unfortunately, they are a great product. Everybody use them. They’ve become eponymous, but they haven’t found a way to monetize that. And they Oh I just I wish that I don’t want this to go away because I don’t want another important product to be in the hands of Microsoft or Google or Meta or somebody like that.
I like that they were. And independent and yet they haven’t found a way to make money. So I would say because I
Stephen: would have [00:02:00] bet they were making money, there’s so much zoom. Zoom is almost the Kleenex of online, no matter what service you’re using, people now say, soon they, for a while, it was the Microsoft, whatever the pre teams thing was, I forget,
Alan: yeah. I don’t know for all the telepresence things that really it’s. Oh I just, I have all kinds of bafflements. As I continue doing Investing, there’s all kinds of places that really opened my eyes to like, no matter how much you think this is the future, it’s a great product, et cetera, et cetera.
If you’ll look over here and see where the big money bets are and see where it’s consistently like moving from. Pre IPO to IPO, or to paying dividends if it’s a stock and that kind of stuff. Some things just don’t they have to play many facets of that game in order to become a longstanding successful company.
And Zoom hasn’t been one of them. It’s doing okay. It’s not insolvent. It’s not going to be going away, but compared to the market dominance it has, you’d think that’s a license to print money. And yet. And yet not yet. [00:03:00] So I as I, I think I mentioned, I’m making use of a gentleman named Louis Nivellier has really been a successful trader for a long time.
And I like, I discovered a service that he provides that has a good combination of the fundamentals, which I’m used to getting from Motley Fool and the quantitative, which I’m used to getting from Tradesmith, and combining that together as well as following like where the big money is going to say, these are really good bets right now.
It might not be for the long term, but if you’re looking for where the market has suddenly said, hey, how about AI? How about vaccines? There’s various different mega trends that drive the market, and here’s the companies that are really well trained. Positions to take care of that, and you don’t have to make that, I don’t know, I did really well in the market early, then watched it go back down when the market has corrections, the market has it’s very hard to be a successful company or a successful investor forever because things are always changing.
And now nowadays I, as opposed to only [00:04:00] a buy and hold strategy, I’m more pursuing how do I get into things right when the time is right and then really monitor it for the signs that maybe it doesn’t have to be that the market, that the product has gotten any worse, that the company is any worse, but the market always turns its face to new things.
And then when. big money goes away, it doesn’t have that same not only volatility, but just sheer presence in the number of trades and the amount of support that the big institutional, the big hedge funds or whatever. And nowadays, because you can get a lot of that information, it’s the system that I would have been designing if I was still really into it, like I was with Gambit.
But Nivellier has so many things that I like that it’s like, why don’t I just Pay a little bit and take advantage of he’s doing all the analysis that I wouldn’t done anyway. Hey, investor place folks on a bash plug. If they’re really an interesting company for how they are getting me to think about not just an end.
And boy, I know this is a different direction that we intended to head. But, when you hit like When you’re [00:05:00] 25 and you got your whole life ahead of you, and there really are all kinds of great stories about buy the stock and wait for it to do well in 40 years, reinvest the dividends, be Warren Buffett, own the big railroad and the big Coca Cola and the big Apple, and you will become a millionaire because you just stuck with the company for that long.
I don’t have necessarily 40 years anymore, 65, I think my life expectancy is 82. And I still think long term, but I don’t know that. I want a little bit of more money now so that we can, Hey, I made some money in the stock market. Let’s go to Europe. Let’s go to Australia. Let’s do travel.
Let’s get a new Mac mini or whatever. So my horizon has changed and maybe a little bit my risk tolerance, because now’s not the time to go bankrupt. You know what I mean? I don’t want to be the proverbial eating dog food and whatever else it might be. So just that. Yeah, we haven’t had a big Investment update report from LA.
Stephen: One of the things you said that I find interesting, that is very difficult for investing or business is [00:06:00] the equating your time and to money, because this was a problem my father had, and I grew up with this and I think it’s been very difficult for me to extricate it from myself is that, okay, yes, I can sit and I can do And then I could also do Y and I could do Z and I could do all these things.
But if I’m going to do all these things, it takes three hours of my time and I’m getting paid 10 an hour elsewhere, that’s 30 worth of time. Whereas if I could find somebody to do part of that for less than what I make per hour I’m saving myself that time to then keep doing more of the thing that’s earning me the 10.
That’s a difficult concept
Alan: ships talk all about that, that by the thing that you do really well, that the rest of the world doesn’t do well and really needs and then farm out lots of your other responsibilities, have somebody else clean your house, have somebody else, and, It’s funny. This is long ago. I learned that lesson a [00:07:00] little bit in terms of, so I’m in grad school and I’m taking my regular course load to get to my degree and I’m also taking honors courses because they have brilliant people there that I want to learn from and certain topics that I’m interested in.
But I also have that obsessive nature of, wow, I’m taking a one hour honors class and I’m putting so much time into it that I’m putting my three hour or four hour class at risk. And it’s a lot about the same thing. Where’s my time best spent and I didn’t stop learning. I didn’t, if anything, I slept less.
But that lesson stayed with you for the rest of your life. What am I doing as a consultant, as a trying to be successful software developer? And if I’m really a good coder or a good database designer or whatever else it might be, and I couldn’t care less about writing another report, yet another thing, I’m making sure the row column is all pretty and the fonts are right and stuff like that.
Find a way to bring somebody in, like you said, at half my rate, and farm it out to them. I do a good thing for America because I create jobs, and I also I multiply myself. I leverage myself across more things, and not in an [00:08:00] abusive way. Not hey, share cropper coder. You know what I mean?
I’m gonna pay you under the table. I’ve never done anything like that, though I know places that absolutely do that kind of stuff. And I don’t know, that’s a really good lesson is to continue to be aware of what you’re worth and what you’re really good at that others aren’t and specialize. Don’t just be, way back when, the next COBOL programmer or the next Oracle developer or whatever else.
Find a good niche that is in demand, especially in rising demand, and parlay that into a little bit more money and a little bit like, Always be learning. You know what I mean? Everything that you do should put a new light on the resume. We talked about this a little bit just last week, I think, right?
Don’t be the guy that’s a specialist in a fading technology, because eventually that’ll, it’ll clunk out, and maybe before you want it to. And then if you haven’t kept your skills current, what the heck do you do?
Stephen: And it’s so easy to keep skills current nowadays. There’s so many online opportunities.
LinkedIn bought Coursera, not Coursera one of the online learning or
Alan: something like that. [00:09:00] Exactly. Yeah. Greetings. That’s right.
Stephen: And there’s Udemy, which I have a lot of courses I’ve done with Udemy. There’s edX, which has some stuff. It’s more college based type things. There’s just so many online things you can keep up easily and humble bundle.
Right now Humble has some courses for AI programming or something, and they’re all video courses. It’s 25 bucks. They have a series. I should
Alan: look into that because I try to keep current, but I’m very scattershot in what I’m pursuing. And it would be nice if someone had put together a curriculum, here’s the things you need to know to be able to work in this field, to talk the talk and okay.
Stephen: Honestly, I really hate Humble bundle. It’s so horrible. Because every week there’s something new up there. I’m like, Oh, it’s only 25 bucks. I have 3000 video courses to go through. Yeah. I don’t. Okay.
Alan: I have had that. Like the, wow. The abundance of things nowadays is really beset by [00:10:00] not the abundance of time.
We’ve talked about like through either Gog or Steam. I’ve bought many games that I’ve played a day on not explored it, not really enjoyed it, but. It’s 5. 95, why would I not want to have a copy of Bard’s Tale, which I loved when I was younger, and even though it’s dated, it’s still got good gameplay, and yet I gotta sleep.
I gotta do other things with my life. And Humble Bundle. I once bought, Like all the Terry Pratchett books, all the Discworld books, ebooks, and that’s another reason I prefer physical is, it doesn’t just lurk in the background of my computer, where there are many things lurking.
If I got a stack of books, it, every time I walk past it, it calls to me saying, you should start that series. I Humble Bundle is its own kind of addiction because the bargains are always so good. Oh,
Stephen: a little bit goes to charity. So you feel good about it, even though it’s a pretty small amount to be truthful.
But honestly, I get resources for unity for characters and backgrounds and [00:11:00] houses and it’s this huge amount. If I’m helping support a creator that would have not been seen, would not have gotten much money, I’m good with that. Some goes to charity. Fine. I’ll give some to Humble because they’re getting all this together.
They deserve some of that too. I’m not that jaded person. I’ll tell you. I’m not sure why I didn’t go into this in my life. Being a big collector, there are some people that have become really good as the curators of bundles, old stuff, things where they really put together a great Rhino box set of the complete works of the cars or whatever else it might be.
Alan: And in every, in games and books and that kind of stuff. And just the act of investigating, hey, where can I find not just the albums that have been released, but the cool live recordings and the B sides and put it all together into a really. Comprehensive or at least compelling thing that the collectors would want to get and repeat.
I could do that all my life and just keep on digging into more Frank Zappa, more, especially not The Beatles. That might have been done a lot, but the kind of [00:12:00] obscure bands. I just bought a box set from the Bonzo Dog Band, which maybe you’ve never heard of, but it’s Neil Innes was in it, who then was the guy that wrote, along with Eric Idle, many of the songs in Monty Python.
Incredibly witty, and irreverent, and they just, that’s, it’s, what’s the American equivalent? Maybe like Spike Jonze or something like that, where Nobody else did work like them, and I want to have that where, because it was always obscure, now it’s harder and harder to find, and before it goes entirely away, don’t you want to have the archival set?
That now, whenever you want to listen to that novelty record, now I can. And I just, in reading The Week this week, they had a little blurb about, Hey, here’s six new box sets just in time for Christmas. And I’m like, I want four of these six. It’s a great David Bowie one. It’s a Joni Mitchell one. Just.
Even if I’m not a huge Joni Mitchell fan. Don’t you want someone who really loved Joni Mitchell that put together? This is a great career retrospective. These are great live recordings that there’s not they’re not really available elsewhere I love that kind of love that goes [00:13:00] into it and take advantage of the fact that someone obsessed enough over it You know what?
40 bucks or whatever like that. I can
Stephen: get all that love so You mentioned the Beatles earlier this year, Paul released an unfinished track of the Beatles and they used AI to get the voices, finish the lyrics, do the music, and it came out. I don’t think it changed the world. I don’t think people were like fighting to go get it because all they had to do is click on their computer.
It was a good enough song. My son really enjoyed it.
Alan: What a cool experiment. New Beatles music coming out 50 years, they disbanded in 69 or 70. Yeah. That’s a long time to go without new Beatles music, and yet. Very cool. Free as a Bird did that, right? Way long ago, they had a John Lennon track that the rest of the Beatles who were still around contributed to.
Stephen: Oh, really?
Alan: Yeah, exactly. That’s probably 20 or 30 years ago, and what’s interesting is when you get people Todd Rundgren or Adrian Ballew are people that really [00:14:00] know the Beatles and they could put together something like, man, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have known that was a Beatles song on their own stuff.
They have, I think Rundgren has one called to face the music that is very Beatles esque, that kind of thing. And then maybe they’re going to be called in to help on that recreation. That would be cool. No, they love them. You know what
Stephen: But on top of that, did you hear Zeppelin’s putting out a new album?
The three remaining members.
Alan: I had not heard that. Yeah I’d be fascinated with that because I know that they’ve made any number of times people talk about, will there ever be a reunion? No, John Bonham was like that incarnation of Led Zeppelin. We don’t want to do it without him, even with Jason Bonham, the son who’s very proficient.
But I guess maybe there’s enough in the vaults. I guess they still have something to say.
Stephen: Now they haven’t actually, I’ve heard also people say yeah. Robert Plant has said this several times through the last 40 years, and then it never materializes. So we’ll see if it really comes out, but supposedly they’re planning a new album and a tour with the three remaining members.
No idea who’s on [00:15:00] drums, but it’s wow that’s going to be one of the biggest tours ever. Honestly, I would say as
Alan: much as I’ve ever paid for a concert to see Zeppelin one more time. I really did see him back in 77. So again, 50 years ago, they were one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of concerts, so I still remember how fantastic they were, what a great band, what a great sound, just the energy of it, wow I, like I said, I still got to see Thank you.
Paul McCartney one more time before he stops, because that’s the last of the Beatles, really. Ringo Starr does some stuff, but McCartney, it’s his voice and his songs that really do it. And just that, there’s a couple that, God, before they leave us, I really want to see them one more time. You know what I mean?
Wow. Zeppelin! Yeah! This segues, I just read, that Scrubs is having a reboot.
Stephen: See,
Alan: I never
Stephen: watched
Alan: Scrubs. Man, I loved that show. It was as much as you could laugh in 22 minutes once a week. You know what I mean? I don’t think I watched it while it was on. I think I mostly caught [00:16:00] up on it when it was now available via Netflix or Prime and all.
You could binge it. And that was one of the things that Colleen and I would sprinkle in between various other things we were watching. And after a while, it’s like, Why don’t we just watch three scrubs? Because the characters are great, the setups are great, the writing is witty as hell! And just, when you, it’s not just a chortle, but a real belly laugh, because it’s really witty, or really surprising, or whatever else it might be.
I’m glad they’re doing it. Brooklyn Nine is our current discovery for, it really is reminiscent of that. A great ensemble cast, and they haven’t jumped the shark, and there’s eight seasons of them. Wow. There’s a couple places that have maybe two or three good seasons, and then they get a little repetitive, or they lose some of the key players or whatever, and that’s heartbreaking, because you want to have, Please more.
I, please coming back and I guess everybody needs
Stephen: to update the prompt in AI to get better
Alan: episodes. I know exactly. You’re going to start having like shimmery figures where it’s he died, but we’re going to include him anyway. Wait, what? So I hope that [00:17:00] as many as possible will come back for that reboot.
I’ve seen some reunion shows that were a little sad, because we’ve talked about this before. When you see someone that’s really lost a step, and they used to be the firecracker, the wittiest guy on it, and now everybody gives them a little extra time. Not everybody has to be perfect forever and stuff like that, but It sometimes hurts to see someone that really was Groucho Marx, and they’re not anymore.
Stephen: You know what I mean?
Alan: Oh
Stephen: two shows I’ve got so the first one is Dear Santa on Prime with Jack Black. Okay. I love him,
Alan: so I’m surprised I haven’t seen this. Oh, it’s new.
Stephen: Direct to Prime, I believe. It’s pretty good. Is it a tour de force and the best thing Jack Black’s ever done? No, probably not.
Is it fun enough to watch at Christmastime? Absolutely. We were chuckling watching it. We always
Alan: seek out new things for Christmas because we’ve watched Love Actually and various other Christmas staples enough. I still [00:18:00] Love Actually, and yet, after five, six times, there’s no surprises. It just is nice to see it executed.
So perfectly. Yeah, I can,
Stephen: I can bake bread now while I’m watching this. I’ve got so the premise of dear Santa is this kid with dyslexia writes a letter to Santa. But says, dear Satan,
Alan: that would have been my guess
Stephen: is Satan and he visits the kid and it’s got some good lines in it. And it’s funny. The whole thing is, it’s a misadventure type movie, but the kid and Jack Black are great together.
It’s a fun one. So the other one and I was gonna bring this up last week and I totally forgot. Have you watched creature commandos yet?
Alan: No, but I just added it because I, it’s I love the, I love animation. I love the premise. And apparently it’s like a big lead into the next DCU stuff that is doing right.
James. Yes. But
Stephen: So penguin has been my [00:19:00] absolute favorite show this whole year. It is such a great show. This is slow, not slowly, but quickly becoming my second favorite show of the year.
Alan: Excellent.
Stephen: It is not a kid’s cartoon. Listen, do not watch it with your kids. You’ll be scrambling to turn it off with the remote.
Okay. There is
Alan: monsters. So there’s gotta be a certain amount of viscera flying and people, a certain
Stephen: amount over the top. It’s evil dead eyeballs flying across the room and heads blowing up in slow mo. They don’t just show blood. It’s like the head, the viscera and the gorse there.
And it splatters and it’s very, and there’s sex in it with naked parts and stuff. And it’s a cartoon. Even
Alan: though it’s a cartoon, exactly. And they can do whatever they want to make it Exaggerated and horrible and okay,
Stephen: but it is so good. We are enjoying it so much. It’s a great time Alan tunic is in it fantastic.
Okay, harbour has a small bart [00:20:00] so but yes
Alan: On the next season of resident alien for tunic still waiting on the next season of the rookie for I got it. I’m going to watch it. So very good. Okay.
Stephen: So it is connected to the Peacemaker series, which Peacemaker season two is supposed to be coming out.
And it is connected to the Suicide Squad movies because weasel from the second movie is in this one. Got it.
Alan: Okay, I just re watched Peacemaker for who knows what reason, except when they’re talking about all the big things that are coming into DCU from James Gunn, that apparently is his first work for DCU.
And it was witty and well informed about comics and lampooning of certain comic elements from the very start. So I’m looking forward to Creature Commandos it is. There’s a Christmas joy.
Stephen: Yes, you’ll love it. It’s just, it’s got a lot of the quirkiness that Doom Patrol had, that.
When you’re watching it, you’re like, wow, that was just so weird. It’s got that in there too. So
Alan: did you ever, I’m trying to think of exactly what it was called. It was called something like [00:21:00] happy, fun time. But it was a series of animations that like were the most gruesome deaths you can imagine. They’re all like little bunnies and kittens and that kind of stuff, but they just arrange for them continually to fall into the combine harvester.
They get shot to pieces and. And that, the loving illustration of if you’re going to show someone getting shot by many bullets all in slow mo, how many cells did they have to draw of this terrible, grisly thing? But they sure did it lovingly. Yes.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Alan: That was I couldn’t watch a lot of those in a row because it really was, man, I’m not like a sadist, am I?
I’m not this weird that I think this is fun. It just was the outrageousness of it, to see what they do next. Like that, where you’re at a gaper’s block. It’s Oh my God, this is a terrible accident, but I can’t turn away. So
Stephen: I’m going to, I’m going to touch on that and get 2024 PC incorrect here for a moment.
Okay. So [00:22:00] you watched it. You’re over 60. You’re a grown man. You chose to watch it and you choose not to watch it, right? That should isn’t that what we’re all about in this country? The fact that there are so many people trying to boycott and ban those types of things It astounds me that the banned books, I don’t know if they’re all true But you always see those memes from stephen king hey kids you see this list of banned books Run to your library, get all of them, read them all,
Alan: they still have them all.
They can’t take it out of there. The schools, exactly. So they keep trying. There’s a library right down near Cincinnati that has had terrible, like three years running of the library board versus the funding versus the local government. And and crazy people. You can’t. Get them to back off.
You can’t convince them that maybe it’s somebody else’s choice besides theirs. You know what I mean? Hey,
Stephen: you know what? Your church offends me. Let’s shut it down. How, I’m allowed to do that. Cause you’re allowed to do this, right? That’s the same thing. That’s the point. They say these are the things that offend us.
So [00:23:00] nobody’s allowed to do it, but if something offends you, we don’t care because we like that.
Alan: I don’t know. One of my favorite memes is along the lines of, The people who ban books, they’ve never been on the good side. You know what I mean? They’ve probably
Stephen: never read the books. That’s the thing.
Alan: There is a lot of that. Whenever you see a movie, especially being boycotted, and they go to people, interview people holding up the signs. He goes what didn’t you like about it? Oh, I haven’t seen it. I’m not going to watch this trash. Then what are you basing your judgment on? One guy not liking it.
Then you all zoom go into
Stephen: protest mode.
Alan: It’s crazy.
Stephen: I’m an adult. I can make my own choices on what I want to watch, what I want to read, what I want to listen to, just like you can. And I was a parent. Let me make the choice as to whether D& D is satanic for my kids to play with,
Alan: Just that the fact that we all get to choose that for our children and we are as well, but we don’t anymore meeting.
They’re trying to make it that way. You’re like, whatever. It’s funny. I just hate the hypocrisy of somebody accusing people of, we can’t have the nanny state that you’re not allowed to get [00:24:00] a fully, a big gulp of sugar soda. And we can’t have that. And then they just turn their face over and say, but the nanny state about controlling books.
Yeah, we really agree with that. So be about whether you think people have the right of choice and the right to determine their own fate or not, but don’t pick and choose because you have no leg to stand on if you do both. You know what I mean? It’s just
Stephen: horribly
Alan: hypocritical.
Stephen: And you’re not allowed to write a story or have a movie or something that shows schoolyard bullying because it teaches kids to be bullies.
Wait a second. How do we know how to react to it? How do we know what People overcome bullies. How do we get the hero’s story? If they’re not bullied on the playground How do they get to that point where they’re fighting back or they’re changing the world or whatever? You start there and nobody cares.
You gotta have the bullies for anyone to care. I don’t get that
Alan: I’ll tell you, I’m going to go out on a limb here, as I always do, about science I really do believe that there are some things that are going on that we probably should [00:25:00] have control over. You can’t have big guns in the wrong people’s hands, or or poison gas, something drastic, let’s say.
Then let’s do the science that says if you allow that to happen, and there are some countries or some situations where we’ve had that, how bad did it get that we were able to monitor the To decide to stop it. You compare between things that are really harmful to society in terms of number of deaths, or lowered test scores, or whatever else it might be.
And what I notice all the time on the sensors part is, There’s no science. There’s no data at all behind what they don’t like. I could make a case for it. We have an obesity epidemic in the United States, and if one of the things that has accompanied that going right up the chart is to have sugar in everything, still the sugar, salt, fat thing that we’ve determined makes things really addictive as food, our palate is not what it once was.
If we do some control of that, then maybe we’ll have less obesity. And that isn’t just about, oh no you are bad. You look fat. It’s that you put [00:26:00] a burden on the healthcare system. You don’t take care of your kids by dying early and things like that. Every time that I’ve seen anything for don’t read Huckleberry Finn because it warps young minds and will wreck the world.
And there’s, not only is there no proof of that, there’s actually proof in the opposite direction for, much in the way you just said. When you read about it, you learn about it. You don’t just learn the worst of it that they all seem to point to. You also learn that was that time and now I understand it better.
Or, a bad thing happened, but look how they recovered from it. And that’s part of learning resilience. Learning how to be a functioning human being that isn’t upset at the slightest
Stephen: thing and goes off. And you get empathy. I was going to bring the Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer thing up because they say it portrays slaves.
It uses words we don’t like anymore. But okay, I will totally grant you that. And if Mark Twain was going to write that book today, he wouldn’t write it that way. We wouldn’t accept it that way. But he wrote it 120, 140 years ago. It was a different [00:27:00] time. He was writing about that time. Let’s look at this and use that As a learning thing.
And if we block it and kids never do that, then you get what we have with people now saying, I don’t think the slave thing ever happened. Of course you don’t, because you’ve never learned about it or seen it. You think someone
Alan: history, you create the opportunity for other people to cancel some history.
You have huge holes. So then it becomes even worse. How do we get here? And how do, if this was a bad part of history, let’s not go down that road. Let’s exactly stop that. Cause now we know better. Not if you don’t teach it, not if you don’t, so
Stephen: you hit somebody with 35, they’ve never learned about slavery in school.
They’ve never learned about the civil war. They’ve never read Huckleberry Finn or some other book of that time period and you say the blacks were slaves. What are you talking about? I’ve never heard of that. You’re crazy. How does that fix things
Alan: and work? It’s epidemic by that meaning, especially about epidemics.
Hey, you never had to deal with someone that kids dying or going sterile or going deaf of measles [00:28:00] or polio or smallpox. And so it doesn’t exist. No, you just you thank God that we fixed it. We found a way to overcome it and yet all the anti vax people act as if those really aren’t terrible childhood diseases and even more terrible as you get an adult and that the best way to fight it is with vaccines and herd immunity.
But we’re going to throw that away. It will be, we can’t let Kennedy get in any position of,
Stephen: I don’t think we have much choice on some of this now.
Alan: We do the Congress and various others can say there still is. It’s not just a rubber stamp. He’s actively dangerous. He’s actively not right in the head about the kinds of things he said and what he would do if he was put in power.
And so if you’re looking for like How do we save lives? You know what I mean? It doesn’t have to be like I don’t like Doritos, so we shouldn’t have Doritos. It’s actively. Vaccines work, and they don’t have any of the side effects that you talk about some crazy woman on [00:29:00] MTV saying, Gritty Blonde made this pronouncement based on a Lancet article that has been long withdrawn, and yet it has had impossible legs in terms of, you name it, the QAnon people.
The people that are looking for a conspiracy theory. The latest that you’re hearing about, don’t get a vaccine because it’s got little transmitters in it. Are you insane? No, it’s not chemtrails. No, it’s not. All those that people that don’t that not only do they not have the science, but you believe
Stephen: it’s got little transmitters.
You got to believe that’s come from alien technology. That’s the only way we get it at this point.
Alan: Oh, my God. I just so it’ll be some. I have to find a ray of hope in the craziness that we’re coming up on. There’s not a single proposal that he’s had that isn’t the most fanatic, the most fun. Potentially dangerous.
And I wish I wasn’t saying it in that absolute way. But you don’t run down the list. It’s like he couldn’t have chosen the worst candidate for I’ll give him 19 out of 20. There might be one person that actually has some [00:30:00] experience in the field that has some respect of his peers that actually seems to That there will be something done about, you name it, about agriculture, about finance, about health.
But in many of those cases, it’s not that. It’s absolutely the worst person you could choose. So is it a big game to just see how far he can push the world? How far he can push the United States? And that, and the more people that roll over, the more it emboldens him to do even more crazy stuff. I will have to see if there’s any rays of hope to be found.
I
Stephen: was going to say you keep the ray of hope because I can’t prove this. I could be speaking completely out of the side of my head here. But I’m going to say that I’m betting. More of those people are getting their positions and there’s money underneath it changing hands and people are and it’s a power thing And there’s gonna be a lot of money from people and to people and it doesn’t matter anything else just because hey Let’s do this and we’ll all get rich.
Alan: I Think I think you’re accurate in 99 percent of the [00:31:00] time and I’m open We’re gonna have at least Santos getting booted at least Kennedy getting there’s people like I said, they’re actively dangerous You If we’re going to sell out, at least don’t like, again, I, I. No matter how rich you are, don’t you have to live in the world?
Don’t you have to live in the world somewhere? Why would you want to live in a world that you created? A wasteland out of climate change and out of non vaccinated people. That’s
Stephen: irrelevant. Because they have big houses, big cars, and a yacht.
Alan: They, I think that they gotta want to travel to another country.
They gotta want to go have a nice meal somewhere. It can’t be that they’re creating, This crazy world where they’re in as much danger as everybody else. They don’t understand that security part of the problem. How big is your security team to stop microbes, to stop viruses? You know what I mean?
I just
Stephen: don’t really understand that. Honestly, they live in a rich world and how, and it’s, Narcissistic and we have power so [00:32:00] we’re we can do anything we want and we’re immune to everything because all we got to do is pay for it. We’ll be fine. It’s idiocracy come to life. It’s not idiocracy in 200 years.
It’s idiocracy now. We’ve said it before.
Alan: Go watch that movie. This is really a weird thing. I understand that maybe more than I ever have because having gotten to retirement and having looked at how much money do we have, how many years do we have left, we’re going to be okay no matter what. We sure have gotten to that place of, that’s a little problem.
Is there a way that I don’t have to solve it, but I can pay for its solution? A little bit of what we were just saying about farming out things I don’t want to do. You know what I mean? If it really is that I really want a reward, I don’t know, tipping, as simple as that. The tipping that I do for good service is higher than it ever has been, but I also have a real, not a mean streak, but a rejection of You’re pushing me for a tip where you’ve done nothing extra for me.
You’ve actually given me worse service than I would have gotten if none of this was involved. You’re not even acting like friendly. You know what I mean? I can see how [00:33:00] money is a shelter in those little tiny ways. If I buy a car and it’s a lemon, in the old world, I would have been I’ll go through the process and make sure that the government and that kind of stuff, and nowadays what I want to do is, Go to the dealer and just stand in the middle of it yelling at the top of my lungs, because even if I get what, accosted by the police, my money will bail me out?
My I’m, these are not fully formed thoughts, because I have all kinds of decency in me that’s not going to let me become an asshole with money. I don’t have so much money that I can be a full asshole. I can see, however, how absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you get to that place of you think you’re untouchable, you really will do whatever the hell you want, even terrible things, like going to Epstein’s Island, or whatever we’ve seen evidence of, you just lose sight of yourself.
You lose sight of, there’s nothing that I shouldn’t do. I can find my way out of trouble no matter what it is. And not only me, but my children, my neighborhood. You know what I mean? People don’t always have the most [00:34:00] successful kids, and yet if that kid doesn’t learn to not be the person that rapes the woman behind the dumpster because they’re a really good swimmer, Society has to make some judgments about, you can’t buy your way out of trouble.
You just can’t. It, you can’t allow that example to exist of, but that’s not where we’re at right now. And that’s not what. I know. And there’s so many examples where we’re already there. It’s just terrible to think of. I don’t want to be on that upper tier. I want it to be that it’s equality, justice for all.
We all get treated equally. And every day you see too many demonstrations, very in your face demonstrations of. Yeah I’m beyond, I’m, you, there’s no law that applies to me. But the one
Stephen: that brings me up is this past week, I had a couple people before the elections, friends, acquaintances, Oh yeah, I’m sick and tired of the high gas price.
I’m sick and tired of the grocery prices. Trump’s going to lower that, blah, blah, blah. And here we are a month after election, he’s yeah, it’s really hard to get that down. It’s hard. [00:35:00] Oh really? It’s annoying. So you basically lied you said, whatever and things aren’t going to go down So yeah, and I had some people jump on me for saying this.
I’m like, but seriously whether I’ve said this and I could be totally wrong someone take me to task if I’m totally wrong But it’s hard to disprove take the 50 years You know of my life here take every single Republican or Democrat who won and flip it. So their opponent really won. Would we really be in that different of a situation?
I don’t think so. Take any a major election and instead of Clinton, whoever he was running against one and change that. Would we be in a different situation? I don’t think so. I think we’d pretty much be where we’re at because the politicians are in it for themselves, have we really gotten so far ahead because somebody won or somebody lost arguably the macro view of that.
I’m not convinced,
Alan: man. [00:36:00] So that’s a whole that’s 10 episodes. Yeah, it can be. I get it. There are absolutely are differences in terms of where the money has been spent. Who it was spent on, what kinds of the tenor of the country and how we got in and out of international things, business things, health things.
If we would have, honestly, we can start naming, if we wouldn’t have had Bush in office that catered to the, oh no, stem cells, that’s a really little fetuses. We have to protect ourselves. We would be 20 years ahead in terms of solving diseases. The whole attitude of the country would have been.
Stephen: Okay, I don’t disagree.
I can see that, but let me ask this though, let me look a different way of looking at it, take any president, right? Can you say, here’s the list of things they did good. Here’s the list of things they did bad. Are they? Yes, they screwed up. Every single one of them has a list and it’s different for every president and things change.
And also many times you get one [00:37:00] president that cancels whatever the last president did. So we may have got something good, but then they get rid of it the next time and then it comes back again. So that’s what I’m saying. Maybe it’s Throwing a big thing out to try and make a point that
Alan: it’s worth investigating.
Another thing that I think about this is it’s a matter not of the list and the length of the list. It’s a matter of the sense of proportion as to what was on that list. Climate change would be entirely different. If Gore had gotten in instead of Bush, we would have applied science. We would have taken it seriously from the very start.
And there’s an example
Stephen: where it would have been better, but you can also probably go through and find things where it would have been worse going the other way. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. There’s a balance at some point. Yes, we’ll find a lot of good things, but we’ll find just as many bad and you switch it and we’d have different good and bad things.
Alan: And again, I say it’s not a matter of how many of each of those we would find. It’s a matter of the [00:38:00] proportionate impact on the world. Quality not quality. Climate change is screwing us in so many ways it’s hard to comprehend. So just that one issue being corrected from 25 years ago would have a huge impact on the quality of life for everyone in the world.
And I would say for any number of other things, how, like the difference in how we’d have real elections instead of gerrymandered, intimidated voters being dropped from the rolls, all of that stuff came in with various different candidates and we it’s. It’s inculcated in our system now that we can’t get away from it.
So some part of it is not only the pendulum swing that you just talked about, some people came in determined to make it a permanent thing. And they’ve been terribly canny about almost making that happen. So absolutely, the people that believe in democracy, the people that believe in the real vote, the people that believe in the rule of law, we wouldn’t have had criminals getting Pardoned that are [00:39:00] not just Like a protest.
It’s a real criminal. They absolutely committed the crime and they should indeed be paying the price that society has decided. And instead, you get this thing that we have to live in a lawless nation, a banana fucking republic, and that affects everything. All the people that are saying, your body, my choice.
That are emboldened by how many rapists we’ve let off
Stephen: the fucking hook, but I agree. I agree, but here’s the other aspect of that. You and I can sit here and discuss good, bad, but I can go find somebody else who thinks the exact opposite and thinks that, oh, the stem cell thing, that’s stupid. That ruined us because we spent way too much money without anything that really helped.
We really should have been looking at, Transcribed the issue with the incoming Mexicans way before that. Screw the stem cells, you know what I’m saying? That’s part of what I’m trying to say with all of that is different people are different things. So you switch it and different [00:40:00] people agree.
Things are good or bad.
Alan: And the sad thing about that is, and you and I get to say this, because we’re incredibly smart. The kinds of things that have taken about someone saying, Hey, nothing matters more than immigration compared to health, compared to energy, compared to education. They’re ignorant. They’re wrong.
They’re total asses about it. And the fact that they actually get to have some influence on us, of course I want them to have a vote, but I don’t want them to be so stubbornly ignorant, proud of their ignorance. And again, issue by issue. I can’t stand that we have what name the candidates that have been, I’m about truth and about science and about rationality and the ones that were instead the demagogues and the fear mongers and the people that threw things out there just to get votes, not to try to convince people with facts and logic, but because I’m going to scare you or I’m going to anger you.
And those, that’s all those candidates. Absolutely. It’s a very different country because we let the jerks in and [00:41:00] out, and it’s not just the candidates. It’s all how the media, but again, Fox News has changed the world. Absolutely. For the worst. If we would have stayed with a Canadian standard of you have to be able to prove its truthfulness.
You can’t call it news while lying about it. We’d be in a very different country. If we were Walter Cronkite standard instead of Good lord name the ass name
Stephen: name. But again, you know again, there are people that would look you in the face and say of course our country’s in a shambles and of course our country sucks because obama screwed everything up everything He did ruined everything about our country and I would look at my wrong.
They’re so provably wrong. Absolutely but the
Alan: economics about education about everything any real it matters, but the large
Stephen: group of people that believe that Is probably part of the reason Trump got to where he is today, if we went back again, take that whole stupid scenario, I said, a flipping it instead of flipping everybody right at once, go back to Nixon.[00:42:00]
Let’s say Nixon didn’t get in there and somebody else did. Ford or whoever he was running. How would that have changed
Alan: way back when exactly, how would that have changed
Stephen: our country because the next vote would have been different, maybe whoever got in, got partly got in because, Oh my God, Nixon really sucks.
You get a different guy in. And The timeline, the quantum leap timelines, it’s, but again, I go back to the point. We got to the, where we are of our own choice as a country from a macro viewpoint and anything that would have been good. Has been offset many times by later, somebody doing something bad that’s, yes, I say things in a shocking manner, but that’s my point, even though Trump sucks and is doing so much.
And yes, there’s going to be a lot of repercussions and all that, but you go 50 years from now and. His impact is not going to have as much influence 50 years from now as it does this [00:43:00] day.
Alan: So we’ll have to see. Yeah, we will definitely see. Because if we look at what most people would say are pivotal points in the history of the United States.
That’s a quantum leap thing too. You know what I mean? It’s like. How did we get into the Great Depression tanked our country for 10 years, at least it’s because we have some of the same things happening now with the Gilded Age people trying to loosen regulations, all the things are put in place to never let that happen again.
They’re getting taken away. We can see we’re going to have we’re going to have a civil war. We’re going to have the Great Depression. We’re going to have a Vietnam War. We’re going to have a housing crisis. There’s the SNL crisis. The golden nightlife crisis, so and we’ll have an epidemic, we’ll have a pandemic and like those things.
If you learn from history would have been preventable. But the fact that we are looking at those things and saying, bring it back as compared to don’t ever let that happen again. It’s impossibly galling. And so [00:44:00] it isn’t only, year by year for year by four year and stuff like that. There really have been some things that they made such a huge mistake.
Okay. that it really did wreck 200 million people’s lives, if not 5 billion people’s lives for a certain period of time. And it’s not only here, we’re seeing that in Germany, in France, in Great Britain, some of the other great powers, the, the group of seven and stuff like that. They’re making some of the same terrible mistakes that led to world war one.
And then world war two, like maybe the title world war would be enough to warn you away from doing that again. And yet, the jingoistic nationalism, the isolationism the hatred of the other, that is leading to the craziness that we’re seeing now, it’s creating openings for Russia and China to advance that don’t even have some of these democratic principles that we could pursue if we wanted them.
And, It’s exhausting to see how many people are like, Yeah, I don’t believe that. Yeah, that’s, I’m not going to learn. I all [00:45:00] the things, Great Depression? What was that? I think I saw a Star Trek. No, yeah, Star Trek episode about that, where Spock had a little hat on. Remember that? Ha. It’s crazy the way that people make decisions based on the nothing.
Oh,
Stephen: oh, speaking of story track, I was going to jump in and say, what we really need is the Oregonians to show up right about now. That’s what we need. But it’s so funny you say that because, and this is why, this is a large part of why we are where we are with things. Had a friend, I’m not going to say names, had a friend state yesterday.
You know what? I’m just not believing everything I read come over my phone through the internet. You’re just starting that now? Everything else is just fine. Oh, that’s good for you? I’m like, I gotta go now.
Alan: I visited a friend over the weekend. I have known him for 20 years in Mensa, and he’s a bright guy, played lots of cards, had lots of good [00:46:00] discussions, but sometimes things happen where they get scared or they go down a weird path and once you go down that rabbit hole, even for a Mensa, a smarty, it’s so easy to lose yourself.
So I heard conspiracy things. I saw Trump books on his coffee table. I I’m ashamed that we lost him to that, but he’s far from the only one. You know what I mean? Whatever those things are that make, if I’m a conspiracy theorist, then I have the inside track. I’m important because I can give you information that nobody else can tell you.
And I can see how that’s a very It’s a really good thing for somebody to be an insider, even about something that is just totally wrong, but for that little moment of, hey, let me tell you about this thing. It feels really good to be the guy first to, people used to on the internet. A post that just said first and I had no idea how powerful a thing that was, but it’s named the percent of the population that really thinks [00:47:00] getting there first is more important than anything else.
Getting
early on the difference between fame and infamy faded away when we started to see on the Jerry Springer show and the Morby poet show. And we’ve talked about this a little bit before people that, Hey, I’m on the TV. And I always drop into that. to me, ignorant accent, because I never saw people that were so willing to This whole episode is so politically incorrect today.
And politically incorrect is true, if you’re talking about, you really want to share that you had incest with someone? You really want to share that you were, you committed a crime that you’ve not let out until now? Because you get to be on the TV? You’re a terrible, horrible human being.
And yet It’s like watching Jackass. You’re like, hey, all the things about, don’t worry, we’re going to make sure our kids get bike helmets and that kind of stuff. These guys hit the polar opposite of hey kids, ride this shopping cart down a volcano [00:48:00] because let’s just see what happens. I can tell you probably what’s going to happen.
You’re
Stephen: going to break your fucking pelvis. Which is a large reason we get The school shootings and some of that other stuff, or some of the kind of a
Alan: through line with the irresponsibility of doing whatever the hell you want. Damn the consequences. They get caught. They’re like I didn’t think any was going to happen.
Everyone else
Stephen: knew. And I’m not condoning this, you hear our generation like, Oh hell, I wouldn’t have done that. My dad would beat my ass nowadays. Oh, you cannot anger, upset a child in any way. Yep. So they rode the damn shopping cart. There you go. It’s
Alan: honestly I don’t know.
I hate being the old guy that says because I’ve lived through it, I get to tell you a little bit about what works and what doesn’t because I’ve only had my life, but I’ve always been an observer of what’s really going on. And it just is. sad to see that, that disrespect for not that we almost talk about science, just thought, can’t you pause for a moment and be thoughtful about what [00:49:00] are you going to do and what might be the consequences?
And there’s an array of them. And you can choose whether you like the good or the bad side and then do the good instead of the bad, instead of thinking it doesn’t matter, or I’ll get away with it, or I just want to see what happens. And we laugh about that kind of nihilism. As if it’s a good choice.
It’s just a choice to make in life. And if I, is it nihilism? I, it’s one of those things I’ve read far more than I’ve ever said out loud. To have everything is the golden rule. If you act like that and so does everybody else, the world goes to hell. If you act in a better way, and everybody does, then we have a good world.
It’s so basic. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Don’t let be done unto you, etc. And yet people The first thing they see when they enter a new situation or system is what how can I get in the cracks here? How can I get away with something? I don’t want to be just like as if being normal and decent is being a schmuck It’s being you know, like I’m somehow not I’m not [00:50:00] taking a risk.
I’m trying to cheat I guess that is a risk, but you know what? Like how do we raise a nation of people? I so much want to just cheat. I don’t want to play by the rules of capitalism, by the rules of education, or by the rules of anything. I want to see what I can get away with, and then even if I get caught, I’m going to try to sass talk my way out of it, instead of I, you don’t do the crime unless you can do the time.
Man, the mafia has more time. Honor than the quizzling people that try to get away with everything. And
Stephen: Oh my God, we really need we need a SimCity, the idiocracy version, to see, look, if we vote this guy in, how’s that change our political lands, watch the city just implode. I shouldn’t have let that guy in because there’s a pretty clear, I don’t understand every choice I make leads to ruin and destruction.
Alan: The fact that we have, to me, such a clear example of so we had Obama, then Trump, then Biden, then Trump. Why in the world would you choose a second helping [00:51:00] of Trump compared to the advancement and the everything, the decency, the safety, the pride in being an American. There’s such a miss.
People are not processing things in a way that I fully understand anymore, because they have such an ability to just Put outside of their consideration. The most basic tenets of being a human being like don’t you want to take care of yourself and of your family? Don’t you want to have more instead of less but not at everybody else’s expense, but
Stephen: they’ve What they’re getting that’s you know My whole point of all of this is they think that’s what they’re getting and they think you know that this is better That’s you know why again you go back to Clinton or Obama If they didn’t win, where would we be at in the country?
Would it be worse? For a time, maybe things were better from our viewpoint. Some people obviously thought it wasn’t because they thought Trump would give them something better than Obama
Alan: did. And oh boy, I just, [00:52:00] what you said, we’re going to find out, hey, you know what? Gas and eggs didn’t go down.
It’s not only that you didn’t get your way. It’s that, that mattered nothing at all compared to I would pay. three times the cost for eggs if I knew that the eggs were safe because we were still monitoring food and drink in the United States. You know what I mean? That’s an obvious thing. I’d, in order to, I’d pay more for gas if I knew that we didn’t have the big gas producers able to push the rest of the world around and continue to embrace fossil fuels so that we’re poisoning the planet and all those things it’s such a wonderful crystallization of i want to be able to pay more for gas at a time when we should all be finding a way to buy less gas period i mean we should all be moving towards evs we should all be moving towards the kind of like finally you know we’re going to get nuclear power returning because the big companies are willing to finance it and take the risks and do all the due diligence to make sure that we don’t get a three mile island.[00:53:00]
People have that in their mind forever, that we’re going to get a three mile island or a Fukushima, as compared to, you All the death we get every day from coal plants and oil use and gasoline generation, all this pollution, all the it’s just again, there’s no proportion. There’s no sense of, find how you can weigh that out apples to apples.
And you’ll see that the preponderance is unbelievably persuasive. But no, I want to be able to drive my big car because I get a macho thing out of advertising that has led me to here’s my, here’s the conspiracy theory.
Stephen: Possibly. Here’s my issue. Okay, great. We’re going to go these new, these companies were giving them approval for the nuclear power plants because it’s.
But I don’t feel comfortable that they’re not doing something. Okay. You know what? We’ll just not have the EPA come and inspect. You just do what you want. And Hey, give me a million dollars. We’ll approve your grants and stuff. It’ll be unsafe, but we don’t live there. So we don’t care about that
Alan: [00:54:00] too.
That even though that seems like it’s got to be. could be better than gas and oil and so forth and coal, and yet if it’s not done safely, then you can indeed get disasters. And when we’re talking about what’s the year to year thing, wow Chernobyl, still not safe. You know what I mean? There’s going to have problems with radiation forever from Fukushima.
And I think and I said it poorly. I, Doesn’t matter the fact that we seem to pick and choose even What our criteria are for making these decisions and you think if there was like how to run a world how to be a civilized place it would always be on the basis that like there’s proof That the more that you make sure that reproductive rights for women are in place the entire society benefits Everyone gets better educated.
There’s more peace. There’s better prosperity and The economic system is better You And yet, what do we have? The war on women and not reproductive [00:55:00] freedom, us actually taking huge steps backwards compared to how we were a progressive country. And the fact that progressive as a word has become another one, it’s like liberal, that’s thrown out as a swear word, it’s You don’t want better and new.
You don’t want new ideas. You oh my god. What’s wrong with you?
Stephen: We have fear about change. You mentioned the coal mine I know some people that refuse to listen or vote democrat for the sole reason that Too many democrats want to close the coal mines and they have friends that work there Doesn’t matter the impact in our climate doesn’t matter their health.
Everybody else’s health doesn’t matter that it’s a shrinking industry that You There are less people working in the coal mines than at Sears, which is a bankrupt company. They don’t care. We have friends that work there and we don’t want them out of a job. So we’re going to vote Republican.
So again, I go back to what I said earlier. I’ve heard
Alan: exactly those same things from my West Virginia friends, from my, the places where they’re still doing the net. They’re doing fracking in places they shouldn’t be doing. It’s actually an [00:56:00] expanding thing. The United States is now energy independent. We are one of the biggest producers of the things that we use, so we aren’t as dependent as we once were, but the specter of What’s wrong with us paying too much for gasoline from the OPEC countries?
We don’t do that anymore. Yeah, but what if it’s bad? That doesn’t happen anymore. But what if it, they just never let go. This old bogeyman that was pretty good in 72, and we had people in gas lines, they have such a horrible memory of, I couldn’t heat my house to the 78 degrees that I wanted because we had to, to All of us can serve together to get through this difficult thing, and we won, and yet people still fight that battle.
It’s, it is to despair.
Stephen: But we don’t want that, it’s Christmas time, we don’t want that anymore. We don’t want
Alan: that. Yeah, like I said, there’s whole kinds of good CD box sets for us to get. And let’s see I’m, Colleen and I have both, we’re going to have such a wonderful Christmas because, we really do listen over the entire year.
And you just [00:57:00] remember that someone mentioned, hey, they really like a particular author or a particular kind of book and you get him a couple of those things and you’re pretty sure that they haven’t gotten it for themself and you’re sneaky about how, you investigate, and so I’m hoping that each of she and I have gotten ourselves those little They’re trifles.
We’re not getting each other a car for Christmas. We don’t do those kinds of things. And yet, we’re going to have a wonderful Christmas because we’ll have a whole bunch of stuff under the tree. Nice. And we’ll go over, and Secret Santa’s going to be, the person that I’m Secret Santa for is going to be very happy because I got him a whole bunch of stuff on their list.
And even went a little bit further, if you’re going to get them a subscription, make it a three or subscription instead of one or something like that. Just that little bit of, I don’t know, generosity to the point of almost lavishness, because it feels so nice to be like, I don’t have to worry about that for three years.
Cool. You know what I mean? Thank you so much.
Stephen: For my birthday, Colin got me the Luke Cage omnibus. Luke Cage was always one of my favorites, so that’s really cool. It’s like the first 65 issues [00:58:00] of Luke Cage or something like that. Exactly. George Toczka
Alan: art. I used to love his art. He’s one of those guys that’s unheralded, and yet he did really good, especially for that kind of urban scene and stuff like that.
Yeah. He did some great Iron Man and some great Luke Cage, but anyway, okay. So
Stephen: it’s another one of those that if I fall asleep reading him go die. So like planetary But before we go because I got to get rolling. If you talk to your nephew tell him i’m still loving hogwarts legacy i’m i’m playing it when I get a chance not as much as i’d and i’m trying to find some more time I will thank you
Alan: for his contribution to that exactly.
So very good. Okay You We’ll talk again soon.
Stephen: We will do. Have a Merry Christmas. I don’t know about the next two weeks, because it’s the holiday day,
Alan: Depending on how, if we can fit one in, we can, and if not, then it’ll be the post Christmas thing. We’re like, look at the swag! And we’ll have a lot of fun.
We’ll see. All right. Take care, Stephen. Thanks. Always a pleasure.
Stephen: You too. Merry Christmas, Ed.
Alan: Merry Christmas.
[00:59:00]
