Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Email | RSS | More
Overview
In this episode of Relentless Geekery, hosts Alan and Stephen delve into a wide array of geek topics. They kick off with a discussion about the appeal of varied conversations and their podcast’s spontaneous nature. They delve into personal experiences with changing desktop backgrounds and how AI-generated images have enhanced this for them, touching upon various tools like Olama, OpenWebUI, and Foucus that enable personal AI and image generation on home computers. They explore old TV shows like Columbo, and how revisiting these classics can offer fresh insights. Lastly, they review the Bob Dylan movie starring Timothee Chalamet and reflect on the history and influence of iconic musicians and bands.
YouTube
Transcription
[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.
Stephen: There we go.
Alan: Okay. I think I have the same snow as last time. Sorry, I’m not keeping up with changing.
Stephen: Yeah, because, you know, AI takes so long to get a new picture.
Alan: I really, you know, I just, I need to put things into my routine [00:01:00] that are like, hey, it’s kind of funny way back when they first had like a background on your phone or on your screen, you know what I mean?
A desktop. I used to change that with regularity because. It was cool to see a new one. And then some on my phone, I have a picture of a brain, you know, because, oh, that’s just so Mensa, but I’ve just gotten kind of used to it or something like that, and I, all the things that I had stacked up that I could like do a rotation, I must have 50 pictures, you know, one a week, and I just, somehow that fell out of my, my routine, is on Monday I change, or something like that, you know, on Sunday I change the towels.
I guess I should include it as part of my background for my phone. But, So,
Stephen: yeah, I never got into the backgrounds and changing them and all the different screen savers and stuff. I’m like, I just don’t care to spend my time on that. And I just whatever I got. I put it plain and generic and let it go.
Alan: Right?
It’s kind of funny. What I used to do is I wouldn’t do it like all the time, but I do like a batch. I guess. Okay, today I’m going to find a whole bunch of background patterns and like, Like, It’s kind of [00:02:00] funny when you’re looking for something that you won’t mind looking at every day or that you wouldn’t mind people seeing it on your phone and going, Oh, that’s interesting.
It would often be beautiful nature pictures or be geometric patterns or something like that. It wasn’t any of the celebrity photos. You know, when you go out there and see the sets of things that are put together, it’s holidays, for instance, you know what I mean? And I might do that specifically, but it wasn’t the Cavaliers, my team or right.
It was very interesting to see how I. What I care about, how I portray myself, that combination of things, you know what I mean?
Stephen: And that’s what I really love about the AI stuff so much more. Because, like the last couple years, for my phone, for my screen or whatever, I’ve said, ah, you know what, I’ve been really digging Doctor Who lately, been in that Doctor Who groove.
I said, so You know, give me a Christmas scene of an elf village with the TARDIS, you know, and boom, I have my own personalized Christmas Doctor Who image, and that’s, that’s a lot
Alan: better, you know, [00:03:00] really, like I said, I need to start not only playing with that, but actually thinking of how I could use that to better my life, you know, and maybe that’s segue time, you know, yeah, you.
You just talked about how, you know, it isn’t only this lurking server farms in eastern Washington state that are supplying AI and chat GPT and everything to us. You’re setting up your own rig. Tell me about that.
Stephen: You know, we did talk about this a little bit before that there’s some things out now that anybody can set up this crap to run.
I mean, you know, people pay for chat GPT, people pay for mid journey, let’s say, you know, 20 bucks a month for each one of those. And they get all the chat and help, you know, which is a whole discussion on what, what’s helping, what’s not, and they get all the access to the images, blah, blah, blah. Well, There are several programs you can run right on your own computer, and even on a Mac, they even allow that.
Alan: You mean, because you wouldn’t want to use the fastest personal computer [00:04:00] in the world, the one that already has AI built in. No. No, no, no. So. Does AI have a cure for platform bigotry? Well, let me go ask it. I’ll go see what it tells me,
Stephen: what I’m supposed to think, I’ll let it tell me. So, the couple programs, and the thing is.
The one thing is you need some power to do it. It really, even the, the smallest foundational models running take time to process my computer. We’ll go as it’s trying to do it. If I try and run a huge one, that’s like a 403 billion. Whatever they call it points it will, it will sit there and I’ll come back three hours later and it’s written like one line, you know,
Alan: so when it has a progress monitor and you can see it crawling along, you’re like, okay, is it going to do like a little bit per hour?
Is it going to do a whole bunch of preparatory work rush at the end? You don’t even know. What it does to do its [00:05:00] processing and what real signs of progress are, right?
Stephen: Running it on my computer that I’m using for work Doesn’t do a lot because I can’t do work stuff and run lots of chat GPT and images all at the same time Yeah, it just bogs the computer down too much,
Speaker 3: right?
Stephen: So it’s always best to have a dedicated machine to do it. But what I do have, if anybody is listening and cares, I use Ollama, which is an open source that has many LLMs to download. Gemini and Meta and Mistral and the, the previews for ChatGPT and several others. And you download It’s
Alan: fascinating because I think of those things as being like proprietary to various different companies, but they’re not.
Like a lot of big development projects nowadays, there’s open source bases for these and yeah, so Microsoft and Meta and and Google were allowed to License these and make use of them was they had to say we’re not going to make this proprietary we’re [00:06:00] gonna be just the mightiest user of them, but the data and the Engines are still out there at open source.
So that’s very cool
Stephen: in some degree and again, you’re not getting the full open AI chat GPT because I, I guarantee you and I don’t have a big enough computer to run that. We don’t
Alan: have a server
Stephen: farm.
Alan: You know what I mean? Yes. That’s the reference that I made. You know that it isn’t a single computer nowadays.
It’s racks and racks and racks of things that are specifically designed to do this. And then they multiplex it over 1024 or something.
Stephen: Right. Yeah. Not a single one. For a single user they’re plenty good. And there are some big ones, like I said. And they have ones that are like, focused on just coding that it fed in like several of the coding sites for community sharing of code and all that.
They fed it all into there and it helps you have a code which just like any of the other stuff. Great. I can go in and tell it to give me a Python program, but I still have to understand. I [00:07:00] need a function to do this. And it ties in here. Yeah. You sometimes still have to guide it a little bit and you have to, and if it doesn’t give you the right code, Well, fix it!
No, I mean, you gotta know a little bit.
Alan: That’s right. Honestly, see, I always loved that. You know, we can so geek it up about this. You know, part of any kind of computer developer was early learning on, you don’t want to write every single routine you might need. You want to buy foundation classes and libraries of those kinds of things.
And after a while, certain sets of those things became known as the best. This was the best for arithmetics. This was the best for simple graphics, etc., etc. And even then, once in a while, you’d get to Huh, it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do. So then, because you’re doing open source stuff, it’s incumbent on you.
If I solve this, then I give it back to the community. And always, it really created that dynamism in your mind of, how much time am I going to put into this for either a single solution or an ongoing thing that I’m going to need? And I never minded putting things out into the public. It’s, Kind of cool to be able to contribute to those things, you know what I mean, show off a little [00:08:00] bit.
But it was always the idea of how much time am I going to spend on this. I started to do so many things, like when you go to coding instead of macros and stuff like that, there’s all kinds of things in Excel. I used to do like the Mensa lists within our newsletter for whose birthday, whose Mensaversary, that kind of stuff.
And I tried writing Excel macros once in a while to do that. And what you find out is if your data is dirty, if you’re trying to like, if the date formats are not correct, if the naming stuff is not correct, we talked about this a little bit. Is it O’Hare or is it O comma, apostrophe O’Hare? And having to write all the stuff to not just make it work, but to make it bulletproof.
Good Lord, it explodes. There’s an exponential explosion of things you have to do to make it perfect. And oftentimes I would just say, What did I just do manually? And then I’ll get that to where I have a, like, I make myself notes. You do this and this and this in this order because it matters. And after a while I’ll be like, I can spend [00:09:00] 20 minutes doing this again and 20 minutes times 12 on the year, that’s just not enough time to justify making the perfect listing macro and stuff like that.
And so I never did. And I got chided by people that were like, well, haven’t you automated? You’re a computer guy. It’s like. Because I’ve had to learn the lessons of, it’s not worth, even if you love doing it, it’s not worth certain things like that. So for everybody who, like, then this ties into, well, can’t you just take that button from this, you know, Microsoft Word page and put it over here?
Because that’s not how coding works.
Stephen: Yeah.
Alan: There’s always, and I guess artists, anybody who does creative work, You must have something about this. You know, people, I don’t know, Todd Rundgren, Thomas Dopey, people that not only make music, but they make the sounds that other people are going to make use of.
And how much time are you going to spend tweaking and making that sound perfect versus, I made 30 different sounds that seemed useful to me. Hear everybody. See what you can do with it. You stop caring about the perfect, and you move on to kind of the next project. And if the project was to make a song in the first place, you don’t do any more work than you [00:10:00] need to do to get to the song and then move on.
Swing. Maybe everybody’s like that. A mechanic doesn’t fix everything about a car. They fix enough to get the car running in a way that the customer will be satisfied. And it might be that they actually see, oh, I should have done that. But that’s not how time works. . Right. You know what I mean? The, the, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
And all those sayings they’ve come up with of perfection, cost a ton of money. Excellence is almost always the reasonable trade off. You know what I mean? Yeah. So there will be bugs, there will be functions left out. ’cause you had the. Do something that was more important at the time.
Stephen: That’s a whole discussion about projects that I’ve been, I’ve been dealing with for
Alan: a couple of years, you know, like, I don’t know, Colleen and I keep a neat house, but the house is not perfect because he’s like, I’ve done, I’ve done my vacuuming or house cleaning or whatever else it might be.
But if I don’t have people coming over. Every month, like we used to with Penny University, you don’t need to do what Colleen likes to call the mother in law cleaning. You know, where she puts on [00:11:00] the white glove and runs her finger off the shelves. You might do that once a year to get to that baseline of, well, we’ll let it deteriorate from here because it doesn’t go horrible in a month, it goes horrible in 12 months.
But you don’t do it every month because it’s just not worth it. A whole Saturday cleaning. Some people playing mini golf or something like that.
Stephen: Some people. Yeah. So Ollama, you can install that easily. It’s open source has multiple LLMs to download, to use, and you can switch between them. You know, like I said, Your computer may or may not handle different ones depending on size.
This
Alan: X as to what a, a decent rig has to be able to do, like the amount of memory, the speed of the CPU, does it add minimal? I’m running
Stephen: 32 gig.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: And I have a I seven something I don’t even remember. I bought my computer like three, two and a half years ago. And it was already a several generation older set cause I got a good deal on it and it, [00:12:00] I don’t play a lot of games on it, so I don’t need the highest everything now, now I’m like, well, maybe I should have, but the pricing for.
Graphics cards with GPUs that run this stuff are out the door because stupid people keep investing in it more.
Alan: You know, when somebody buys 100, 000 of the latest run, it makes it that the little consumer, can I get the 100, 000 in first? No, they’re the price goes up because there’s scarcity created by those kinds of big buys.
Stephen: Yeah. So just about, I’d say any. computer you get on the general market nowadays would run most of these fairly well. It’s not like I said, I can run some of the lower models while still doing other things. And, and I know people look at my system and go, Oh my God, how many things do you have open and running?
Oh, not that many. Well, I guess I do have quite a few.
Alan: What do you call round robin processing? It’s your time that matters, not the computer’s time. It can handle all those things and not slow down so much that you notice.
Stephen: Right, I have 100 percent capability [00:13:00] of CPU for a reason. I don’t need to keep it.
Actually, it’s memory. Memory is more the problem than the CPU most of the time. And this is a little side note I’ve been running into with a lot. Is the biggest killer of memory are the browsers and the extensions in the browsers. And people say, oh, my computer’s just running so slow. And all you gotta do is load the chrome browser in, uh, developer mode or whatever it is so it doesn’t load any plugins.
And they’re like, oh, my computer’s running so much better. You know?
Alan: That’s right. That’s really true. They, they, they really should have some place should review, well, here’s, this is the coupon app. That you think it’s saving you a 1. 70, but what it’s doing is slowing down your computer by 20 percent all the time and selling your information
Stephen: to people and stuff
Alan: and collecting it like that.
But you’re
Stephen: so worried about your ATM card getting stolen. That’s a whole nother discussion anyway. So a llama is a G Y or a command line [00:14:00] interface. So a lot of people that’s not going to be their thing. I don’t want to
Alan: experience with that. They’ve never known DOS and things. Okay. Right.
Stephen: So there’s an open source thing called open web UI that creates basically a web server that runs and interfaces to the Olama and it creates a web page and you browse to that locally.
So I have a web page open that the interface looks just like chat GPT. I can start a new discussion. It keeps my history over here. I can archive them. I can even upload a file to analyze images, upload a PDF. To analyze a PDF, I can, I can set it up with the right APIs, a little more advanced to go out and search the web through whatever browser API I have access to.
So it works great. And so
Alan: my tool like that exists, like. A year or two after Chechi became first out of the scene, someone said, we’re going to have people that don’t want to do this clandestine thing, what can I do to put a nice wrapper [00:15:00] around it? Very good. Okay.
Stephen: And along with that, there’s another thing called anything LLM, which is very, very similar, but it allows you to upload groups of files and it does a RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation.
And it’s basically when you go to open AI chat, GPT, you type stuff in. It’s from all over the web. If, for example, what I’ve been playing with it, if I’m working on, let’s say a game, and I want to base it on this, the rule set of this other game and use some of the mechanics from these games, So I can have PDF files with all those rules, all the mechanics and upload it.
So when I talk to it, it pulls the info from the PDFs first, and then it’ll go to the web. So I’m getting the specific PDF local and exactly.
Alan: Okay. So,
Stephen: you know, like as a writer, if I’m working on a big series, let’s say I’m on book 12 and I have background info and all these other books, I put all that [00:16:00] information into this.
anything LLM, and then I could talk to it about my own stuff. Hey, what was Sam doing when he was in Michigan? Was, was he using this, was he using a motorcycle or was he using a bicycle? I don’t remember. And, oh, he used a motorcycle. It was this color, you know, it’s the, the researcher for you on your own stuff.
Alan: Honestly, isn’t that fantastic? Because that used to be, you know, Dave started to have. for series for in books or on TV, they’d have like a continuity comp that had to learn all that stuff so that this is long ago in D. C. they used to go talk to a guy named E. Nelson Bridwell. Yeah. Was the one that had that near photographic memory of all that had ever been done in D.
C. And they could say, has Superman ever ran into purple kryptonite? Well, no, it’s been red and blue and green. You know what I mean? They, they Someone really knew all that stuff, and if you didn’t have a resource like that, you had to depend on your own. Well, I’m going to use this kind of, oh, it wasn’t the same motorcycle.
I have to explain that he went out and bought a new motorcycle. You know what I mean? Right. [00:17:00] And not everybody’s brain works like yours and mine do, where you retain a lot of stuff every time you’re writing, you have the idea of what you want to do. But if it’s 11 books ago, you really might not remember.
Stephen: Oh, that is so easy to do. Yeah, yeah. So those are two of the tools that I use. And then the other tool I like is called Foucus. F O O O C U S. And it’s is an image generator which can take the place of just about any of the others. It has like 132 styles to choose from. And you put in your commands, you can upload an image to have it work off of or inspire it.
You can take an image and upgrade it or expand it or all sorts of stuff. So what are the styles consist
Alan: of like film noir and like Rembrandt? I mean, is it artists? Is it Style is it actually like anime? You know what I mean? I’m trying to think of what I would yes It’s got
Stephen: all of that and more it’s got watercolor one watercolor two [00:18:00] japanese ink ink dropping style line art doodles.
It has ad art for food, ad art for cars, ad art for other stuff. So you can create ads and, and, you know, business stuff. It’s got animated, it’s got photo, it’s got photorealistic, it’s got gothic, it’s got noir, it’s got. Dark fantasy
Alan: you know, and this is when someone gets their hands on this, they’re like, well, I could do a deep fake, you know, in spades with this kind of stuff.
And so you’re already seeing that people are getting really good at. I, it’s going to like the forgers have got to be having a field day, especially the digital forgers and the people that are trying to put out, you know, all the bad means of here’s somebody saying something they never said. And I’m going to make sure that the world turns against them or something like that.
Stephen: Yeah, so it works. Well, it works great. I can make just about any image with that the same as I would for any of the ones I pay for. And you know, you can combine
Alan: [00:19:00] styles. Is it? Is it like you do it and you let it run? Or is it like it comes back almost immediately?
Stephen: Well, that depends on the computer also.
So on my computer,
Alan: I was working on gambit, you know, for my G. A. Genetic algorithm based investing. I used to like set off runs when I left at five in the morning, and when I come back in at noon or five or whatever, I, it would be done. It took a long time to access the quantity of Telerate and Reuters data that I was doing and the functionality that I was trying to do it.
And you know, you run 10, 000 generations of a, of a genetic algorithm. It takes a while to do 10, 000 of anything, I guess. So, so is it minutes? Like, yeah. Oh, yeah, rig. You know, it isn’t like do this and then go take a bath. No,
Stephen: no, no. I can get usually two good images within five minutes, which again is a lot slower than mid journey or some of the others.
Those take a minute to two. This is slower. It’s my local rig and it ties it up quite a bit. The image generation is way more [00:20:00] CPU intensive and memory intensive than just chat by a, by a large
Alan: factor. We’re finding out, you know, like just that we’ve always talked about, you know, what’s rich media like so that you can do all kinds of things with text, but once you move to music or imagery, it’s A hundred times?
I’m trying to think of what even the multiplier would be, but by being rich media, you’ve got more pixels, more colors, more, there’s more going on to make it look good, make it look realistic, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas you can fake a writing style, I guess, pretty easily. You know what I mean? Yeah. It’s text on page, so.
Stephen: Right. So, they do have it set up in Google Colab, so you can go use Google’s servers. And I’ve literally created 25 images in like 7 minutes. Right,
Alan: give me variations on this thing and I’ll pick the one I like. See, that’s how, a lot of how I would do it would be that. Don’t give me the one and have me keep tweaking it.
It’d be like, give me a half a dozen that I’ll choose from. And almost always, I would hope, it’s gonna, like, that’s good enough. It’s just what I wanted or [00:21:00] whatever my reactions to that would be. I’m falling behind, I need to jump on this with you. This is very interesting.
Stephen: So I got a laptop I’ve got coming that I’m going to set up that just runs my AI stuff that I access remotely.
So it doesn’t tie up my computer as much. The problem is that the laptop isn’t quite as powerful as my desktop. So even though it may run all the stuff, it may be a little slower. Then it would be here, but if I did it here on my computer, it’d tie up the computer pretty much. That’s right. So,
Alan: trade off.
That’s a classic trade off. Exactly. You know, the dedicated processor, even if it’s slower, is still not running all the other things you’ve got going on. So, in fact, you know, I have, my new Mac mini is the mightiest thing in the world. It’s M4, memory, all that kind of stuff. It’s got a, I got a two terabyte SSD, and I bought a little extension of it that has all the different ports I might want as well as having another two terabyte SSD.
And that’s kind of what I was thinking is I got to become canny enough about this that if I do anything, it’s not going to go to the web or go to even my own physical hard drive. It’s going to go to the [00:22:00] SSD, which is a hundred times faster than anything. You know what I mean? Old, old. So I’m, that’s, I bought it in anticipation of doing it.
And I’m very glad that I did because I think I’m going to need that kind of stuff, at least for I don’t know, it’s not an entire separate computer, though I could do that, because for a long time I ran a server, and I would do exactly this kind of thing. Most of the time the server’s just like, I’ll handle your mail, I’ll handle your calendar and your contacts, and it was 99 percent always available.
But when I started to do development dedicated on that machine, then I could see, well, I can do all my other things, and have that be that it You know, you give an idiot savant a task and it goes away and it works on it comes back, but it didn’t slow you down while you were working on things. So, right. So a laptop instead of a desktop, a laptop is going to be fast enough or just that you have an extra or it’s what helped, what helped you make this decision?
Stephen: Just because I was looking around and I found a really good beginning of year deal for a laptop and I compared it to the [00:23:00] laptop I had. So it’s like, well, which laptop do I keep for my main? Going around working, which one do I just want to throw off the side and small and easily portable. I already have a media server up in the hallway.
That’s a big, big old desktop thing. So I was like, well, this could just sit on top and knowing that it could always use an improvement. Always use more. I thought I’m going to play with it for a while and see if I use it, you know, I want to use it from outside, get on my phone while I’m out somewhere else to do stuff and I didn’t want to
Alan: portable is impressive.
If you’re going to be doing any kind of conferences or something like that, that you can. You know, have it with you. That’s very cool,
Stephen: right? So, you know, that’s what I figured. I give that a try and see what happens. And if it worse came to worse, then I’d have a laptop that I could put Linux on because I want to have a laptop with just Linux rather than just Windows
Alan: exactly.
You know, it. So [00:24:00] whenever I think, oh, I got to get the latest and greatest, and I tend to, we’ve talked about it, we get a lot out of our technology before we move to the next stages. But then I also read all these stories about some guy in small town America, some guy in Africa, developed this great app, this great game, and it’s like, he’s sitting there like, with a phone, or with a, a, a laptop that is, I don’t know, it’s connected to barely reliable power and you know what I mean, maybe the screen is cracked a little bit.
Pedaling
Stephen: while he’s working to give it the electricity. Yeah,
Alan: exactly. So that there, it’s possible that if you just make best use of what you have and what you have is a great idea and you have a mighty mind, you really don’t need the state of the art. So whenever I, whenever I have this thing that it’s, Right now I’m, I have a rig that’s fast enough that most of the time I’m not waiting on things.
And, and this is an arrogant thing to say, but it’s been true all my life. Most of the time I’m waiting. You know what I mean? Even when things have done the next generation of computing and stuff like that, there just come times with the kinds of things I like to work on that I get ahead of it. And I hate [00:25:00] getting interrupted while you’re writing, while you’re coding, because it should be that I’m I want it to have so much power that it’s always kind of like, yes, master, what do you want?
Yes, master. You know, that kind of stuff. So I, I, right now I’m pretty much there. Like the M4 is really mighty. And the, the fact that it has, like, I got 14 cores. I got, you know, a dedicated neural engine and a graphics engine and stuff like that. I’m running three monitors as I’ve, as I’ve talked about, you know, I really am up in Skynet nowadays.
And And when I talked about this, a lot of people said, Oh, I just like having, you know, my, my laptop, this screen. It’s like, wow, I just love having all the things that I care about partially up on all my things. And I can just kind of glance around and say any activity there, anything I need to think about here, my to do list and my, my spreadsheet and whatever else it might be.
It’s, yeah. I guess I have that kind of mind that does this kind of, I’m not a full guy. Guys tend to be very focused on a single task and like get it done. Like maybe the old hunter thing is you really got to focus on [00:26:00] the prey. And they talked about how ladies have more of a networking mind because you’re out gleaning or you’re doing multiple tasks at home and you kind of have to juggle amongst those things.
Transcribed For a long time, I’ve known that, like, my corpus callosum is good. The way that my right and my left brain talk to each other, I have a lot of sharing between those kinds of things, that I’m not only visual or mathematical, I’m kind of both. And this is another way in which that shows that as much as I can focus really deeply, I also like to have the glancing most of the time, and And that, if anything, even putting a little bit of distraction like music, it helps me focus, whereas for other people it really is a distraction.
So I don’t know, you know, I shouldn’t say I don’t know. I’ve read a lot about how that works, how people’s minds are structured differently and stuff like that. And I’m not sure how I got to that early. You know what I mean? It wasn’t like I was in a chaotic household. My household was wonderful with parents and two brothers and, you know, all the puzzles I wanted to do and stuff like that.
But I’ve also always been It’s pretty good about [00:27:00] being able to listen to multiple conversations and parse all of them. And, and some people, they can’t hail a crosstalk after a while. My father couldn’t, and that hasn’t developed for me yet. Like if I walk into a room, I could really step up into any conversation and kind of like contribute and then step over to another one that I really hadn’t lost by focusing on this one.
What was going on there? It’s a little freaky. People wonder what’s going on. But. It’s a thing that I have. How, how, and, and it doesn’t always work. So it’s like if people try to test you on it, it’s like, well, you know what I mean? I, I kinda like, if I, if I now focus on does it work, then that kind of breaks it.
But if you just do the ambe beyond, then you really do. I have multiprocessors going on in my head and they can handle music and the conversation and the whatever else. You know what, it’s like a quantum brain. It, it changes when you, when you look at it. That’s right. Y’all have all the possibilities, and not only does it collapse into a single choice, is what makes it real.
Right. You know, they’re, so much of what we’re learning [00:28:00] about neural nets is they really do, it’s not quite quantum because they, now that we’ve got qubits and we really have a thousand of them, it’s doing amazing things. But there’s a lot of things about trying to explain how a neural net works and the, the gestalt of it, the it’s an overall system and it’s not like linear.
It’s not coding where it has if then elses. It, It has a whole bunch of data, and then it comes to a conclusion through all kinds of little touches and conversations and firings between your electricity and your chemistry, and things pop out. And maybe that’s part of how a sense of humor works, is that it doesn’t say, I heard that and I’m going to say this.
It’s more, well, I have 10 things that I could say, and then you kind of focus a little bit to choose which is the, the funnier one, the unexpected one, the one I haven’t used before. And then you, you, You come to rely on my brain always does that. You know what I mean? I like we’ve left about the conversation on the ghost on the staircase, you know where people think oh I I left this party and I should have said this back then and and for so many people it’s in the car while they’re Driving [00:29:00] home and for me, it’s kind of like a 15 or 20 second max If I can’t think of something right away I just put my attention on something else and then something funny will pop out and as long as the conversation is still valid where it doesn’t sound like Why are you talking about what we were talking about 10 minutes ago?
It can really seem like you, you’ve got a lot going on, you know what I mean? So I, I, I don’t know that I depend on it, but I sure do appreciate it whenever anything cool like that happens, you know what I mean? That I couldn’t think of who, so, and I guess another segue, we’ve been watching old Columbo’s. I love Columbo.
He’s great. They’re wonderful. And it’s funny, the acceleration of how they started off, and they were kind of finding their way, and Peter Falk wasn’t always the same character. He found his way to be more friendly and bumbling. He actually had some pretty intense, like, yelling at people, intimidating people, almost, in the early things.
And they said, that’s not what we want this guy to be. We don’t want another Popeye Doyle from French Connection. We [00:30:00] want, in fact, Might even be that it predates that. If this is from like 71, I think French Connection was 72. Who knows why that’s in there, but I think it’s that way. And, and so it’s kind of cool to see how they portray, well, What I like is, it’s much, so let’s see, similar to let’s say Twilight Zone, when you see a show that has all these great actors later in their career, they got their start somewhere, and a lot of cases it was on an episode of Twilight Zone, on an episode of Columbo, and even people that we kind of lost from the 60s, 70s, 80s, because People smoked like chimneys these first episodes.
He’s always got his cheroot going and everybody else always has Lighters and things to enable him to do that and then you find out remember Jack Cassidy, you know That was married to the late. Well, he died from I think lung cancer as did So all kinds of these people, they didn’t make it past like 50 or 60 because everybody smoked and everybody died from it.
Right. It’s terrible. [00:31:00] And yet, it’s very cool to see, wow, he really was a good actor. Dick Van Dyke, when he’s not just a goof, but he’s really can be menacing as hell. Oh yeah. And Ross, Ross Martin, remember Ross Martin from Wild Wild West, I think. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, already, there’s this run of My God, every one of these guys was a great adversary.
Bob Culp, Robert Culp from I Spy and various other things. And so, I, I, I’ve tried some things where I really want to watch them all and you hope that it’ll hold up. You know what I mean? If you’re watching something from 50 years ago, sometimes they really are dated. And yet these are, they’re clever as hell.
Because
Stephen: it’s character
Alan: focused.
Stephen: That’s what holds up, is the character focused show. I think
Alan: so, exactly. And, then you’re looking at the credits, and like, that one was directed by Steven Spielberg. Right. What, what? I had no idea that he had ever been involved in that. And Steven Boczko is like the story editor for a lot of these.
And he went on to do great things. Didn’t he do Hill Street Blues and stuff? Yeah, yeah. When you’re seeing all these old names, it’s like, [00:32:00] Everybody had to have their journeyman time, and that’s when they got, like, people threw money at them and said, Make me a series like that, but with Irishmen. Or, you know what I mean?
I’m, I’m teasing. I don’t, I’m not teasing. There really was like that, that people would say, Well, you know, we already got the good Italian guy, so give me a variation on that. Make it a woman. Make it an Irishman. Make it a dog. You know what I mean? That’s how TV worked back then. Right.
Stephen: I, I, I love club movies.
It’s like, well, yeah you’re probably right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll go now. I’ve got one more thing. Hold on. And you know, that one thing, that’s what’s solving the case right now. Everything else is irrelevant. This one question is where he’s going to nail it at the end and you know,
Alan: this is kind of weird.
I, so I watched it when I was young and it was part of the white movie of the mystery of the week, whatever, Wednesday nights, they had that and McLeod and Banachek and McMillan and wife. They had a series of rotating things. So honestly, that’s 51, 53 years ago. I think these are from 71. Yeah. Yeah. [00:33:00] I just saw an episode where it’s like, I remember that’s what it is.
And, and Colleen, you know, she, she, we both have, this, I don’t mean to have, this is the back padding for Al’s session, but, you know, she laughs about, sometimes on new things, I like predict the next line of dialogue, like I’ve laughed about, but in this case, it was like, I must have watched that, like Laying on the floor while I was doing my homework and yet that thing is still in there.
That’s that’s the thing not that good What’s the term? It’s not the MacGuffin, but it’s that’s the thing that’s gonna really matter later Just like you said, you know, just one more thing or like pivot Yeah, and and I was like, I didn’t give it away I don’t want to be spoilers for Colleen Street because she I don’t think has seen as many as I have But it’s very cool to be You know, I worry a little bit nowadays as I get older.
Once in a while, I can’t quite find a word or that, you know, things are a little fuzzy. I don’t have all of the Saturday morning cartoon theme shows in me anymore, but still a lot. And then you’re pleased by this little, like, I couldn’t have told you that it was exactly that one with Ross Martin [00:34:00] and that that was the situation.
But once I saw it, it’s cool that my mind has that ability to go and say, Ding, reactivate memory, and it’s got to be this tiny, tiny little one neuron, one neuron in my entire brain, but it’s still stored. That’s significant. And it’s, it’s kind of cool. I guess both I and Columbo have aged well. You know what I mean?
It’s like Anyway, that’s very fun.
Stephen: Yeah. I haven’t seen much Columbo in a long time, but it’s You grew up with it, and you know that character, and you know, we all can do it. Same with like, I never watched it much. But the murder she wrote with Jessica Fletcher, you know, I got, I got Jessica up there as an inspiration for a writer.
Alan: So an episode where it was mrs, not mrs. Marple, but mrs. Melville, if I remember right, there was an homage to take off on that. So already, Ben, they were very, you know, you get to see, this is kind of, you know, we’ve talked about how [00:35:00] some people won’t want black watch. Black and white movie, because they think that they’re primitive or something.
But if you watch a good one, they were just as witty. They were just as involved and, and cross cutting in some ways and stuff like that. And this is already done. They had Easter eggs. They had, you know, like little touches to the real world of like, you know, everybody likes Agatha Christie. We will let everybody know we’re aware of Agatha Christie.
We can’t use her because that would be copyright violation. And yet they teasingly include her. You know what I mean? So. Honestly, I’m not even sure what inspired us to say, except we just got done with a couple series. You know, we watched our Black Doves and we watched our Brooklyn Nine Nine and we’re like, you know, I kind of want something that maybe there’s like six or eight years of it that’s not going to be three years and out.
And that’s even still like nowadays, 60 episodes, it’s a lot, but I, I kind of wanted also not just comedy. I wanted something that you really have to pay attention to. It’s nice to not just have, I watch it while I’m folding laundry and it’s getting partial attention. And you really get. You know what I mean?
From, [00:36:00] from watching Columbo and, and, and trying to stay with him, trying to say what is, and, and I will say this also, it’s not perfect. You know, once in a while when he makes a little, here’s what I’m suspicious about, where did that come from? That’s just to move the plot along. That, nobody would really think that it’s odd that this guy had a three button vest instead of a four.
Do you know what I mean? Right. But, but. I guess they, they had better and worse writers. It’s not, it was consistently Link and Levinson, Stevenson, I’m trying to think, Richard Levinson maybe. And so they were all the overall originators and stuff like that, but they started to have early on multiple writers and some people are better at, you know, mystery and, and you know, by pacing it and stuff like that.
So I’m sure that it’ll be. I’ll start to like. Oh, another good one. This is by Dan Dewey, and who knew that I liked Dan Dewey better than others, and yet every one of his was a good one. You know, so anyway.
Stephen: It’s crazy going back to some of those old shows, or even like [00:37:00] sometimes some old books, and you run into Names.
You’re like, Oh my gosh, like you were saying, and some of the writers, especially if you watch some other stuff they’ve done, you get, you see that on Star Trek at times. And you’re like, Oh my gosh, I recognize that from Alfred Hitchcock, you know, or something. That’s right.
Alan: I’ve got working for 50 years in the industry that will turn out a good script or, you know, I’m sure they’re going to have guest directors that are going to be like, well, that’s like they stepped up from cinematographer to director because Another thing about the show that’s really, it was like, I don’t think this was weekly, I think it was like every month, you know, they rotated amongst things, but to put together a really good hour and a half mystery every month for years and years and years, that’s not an easy feat.
You can tell when shows jump the shark because they lost the ability to be funny without fail, to be interesting without fail.
Stephen: I have a a choose your own adventure style book from the early eighties. It’s [00:38:00] Indiana Jones, and it’s a choose your written by R. L. Stein before
Alan: goosebumps. That’s fantastic.
Exactly. So. Yeah, I, I, I love that and I love once in a while when some comes out with a book that they had one for 20 years and you’re like, Oh, I guess finances are tight and they had to turn another one out. But then it’s really good. It’s like they just decided to play guitar for a while. You know what I mean?
That money and they didn’t have to do this. And after a while you can kind of say, I don’t want to be a hack. I don’t want to just turn these out. And then they do have a bright idea and they say, I think I got another one in me. I got something in the attic that I should have bring down. And that’s very cool to see that kind of longevity, I guess.
Yeah.
Stephen: And I just grabbed some other, just over the weekend, choose your own adventure books, various companies and themes and styles, whatever. And I noticed several different companies, series, the same author. Writing for like five different companies five different series, which I thought was kind of cool.
[00:39:00] Yeah,
and speaking of Did you see the first episode of rookie season 7 yet?
Alan: No, we tried tuning in and we found it again It’s got no segue. We recently changed our carrier from Verizon to AT& T because we got a great deal from doing a little bit of research for exactly the number of lines and the situation that we have for Colleen and I.
But then one of the things we’ve laughed about is some of the things that carriers do nowadays to addict you to them is make it hard to turn away. And by giving up Verizon, we gave up Disney, Hulu, and I don’t think, I don’t think we ever had ESPN, but it was at least that. And so we got. Used to having those things available.
Well now that I don’t have Disney I can’t watch the Marvel movies when they come on TV and now without Hulu There’s all kinds of things like the rookie that I don’t have unless I pay 1. 99 episode or whatever like that So we’re getting to are we gonna pay for the paid version of Hulu and then there’s like the with ads and without ads And we’re probably gonna do it because I [00:40:00] don’t want to miss the rookie
Stephen: Well, I will say I had Hulu, Disney, and Max, and they offer that bundle, and I checked into it, and it was actually like 15 cheaper to bundle the three together going through Hulu than it was to do them separate.
So I’m like, well, if I got Hulu and Disney, this is like Max for free. For free,
Alan: exactly. We already, we have Max, I think, through AT& T. And so, I’ll have to see. Now that they’ve got, The big spreadsheet worthy thing of who’s bundled with who and how much do I pay. And what we try to do is, we get Peacock because we wanted to watch a specific thing.
And then as long as I, it took more than a month so that we renewed for a month. And it’s like, well, before we renew again without having a lot to watch, I’m going to see if I can exhaust all of Peacock. And we did that with Paramount when that was the Olympics. And we did, you know, there’s various different things we do it.
And so I kind of want to. Finish watching things on Peacock before I go in for Hulu. But the Rookie is on and now they’re teasing me. Now that I got, am I really going to have two subscriptions? [00:41:00] Because we laugh about it. I’ve already got two infinities when you have Amazon and Netflix. You’ve got two infinities of
Stephen: good content.
Honestly, honestly, Netflix is probably the least watched streaming service in our house. Yeah, Colin and I.
Alan: Comedy and stuff like that all the time. Documentary. So anyway,
Stephen: well, we watch Disney because it’s got when the Marvel and Star Wars stuff comes out. We got Disney then we’ve got max which we found we watch max a whole lot Because they seem to have a lot of good shows and a lot of good movies old stuff and all that so that But then when it comes down to the others You know, Hulu because they have Rookie, but I get Paramount through Amazon because of Star Trek, so I got Paramount with Amazon, and I get Amazon with that, so between all that, Hulu, I, I think Colin and my mother watch it, she watches it for like Blue Bloods, and some of the old cop shows, she’s, long running shows that she doesn’t [00:42:00] stop, exactly, yeah, she’s been catching up on all 800 series of NCIS, whatever that is in every city with everything.
Yeah, you know, but so Netflix just ends up and we talked about this before when Netflix started, they were the streaming service. Everything went to them. Every movie came to them, no matter what company it was, it all went through them. But then all the companies said, Hey, We, we can get that money or something.
It, our own content got pulled it all away. Yeah. So if I’m going to watch Star Trek, I go to Paramount, not Netflix. If I’m going to watch Rookie, I whatever there I, you know, I can go to that. So Netflix just has become something we don’t watch very often.
Alan: That’s very interesting. I I, I, I guess it’s kind of funny.
I’m gonna have to be, I don’t need to be disciplined about this, but I’m aware of, you know. Apple TV has, once in a while, a really good thing, and then we’ll do that same thing, watch it for a month. Like, I really had to watch Ted Lasso, you know what I mean? So just that we can start to name, we have, we get the Criterion channel, because it [00:43:00] really is a good one for watching all the old movies that other people seem to have abandoned, or at least they did good negotiation with, MGM or whatever the big, libraries are, that if you want to watch Old Alfred Hitchcock or whatever, it’s on Criterion, so I don’t want to have it be that it builds up to, Oh, now I’m paying 150 bundle for cable, I want to do that kind of gradually, but then I really have to keep track.
Because I so much Yeah. Like, it’s a nightmare, but it’s like oh, we’re 13 out of 22 episodes. And then if I don’t renew this, I like, I didn’t renew it, and then it’s like, Am I really going to let those last 9 go? so I I’m going to have to like, just have a little spreadsheet, like I said, what are my expiration dates?
And then do a certain amount of binging to make sure that we can let it go without regretting that happening.
Stephen: Right. And Apple TV is another one because I, I wanted to watch silo, which was based on Hugh Howie’s books because he was like the first. Big name independent [00:44:00] author that became huge and that was his series was wool.
Okay. Yeah back in 2012 He was just an independent author put these books out for wool and they ended up blowing up They got picked up by a major publisher and now he’s considered a big name author And you know, so I wanted to watch wool. I read the book. But I was like I don’t want to get apple tv just for one tv show And then they came out with the monster verse Godzilla, Godzilla, the kaiju.
And I’m like, okay, well, we’re going to get it for a while. I watched what I wanted, but they also have the, the dune series, right? Don’t they have dune on apple?
Alan: Yes, exactly. That, that, that do dune prequel. Excellent. And
Stephen: I thought there were a couple other things. So, Apple, Apple is definitely our one, and Netflix is probably going to be this way too, where, okay, for May and June, we’re getting Apple and we’re going to watch this stuff.
And then in August, September, we’re getting Netflix, we’re going to watch this stuff.
Alan: We might do that. We’ll end up having seasonality to it and stuff like that, you know? Yeah. Also funny is like, I, [00:45:00] that each of those various different things. They’ve really gotten smart about, hey, you can turn it on and off kind of on a dime.
It used to be if you do this, you have a year subscription. And then I would say, I’m not committing to paying 250 bucks because of the 20 bucks a month or whatever like that. I kind of want to get in and get out if you will. And whatever they were trying to do to pay for a long time, they had, it’s an addiction.
You pay us upfront and then you have, and now they’ve gotten it. You can kind of pick and choose. I don’t know if you turn it off halfway through. Do you get a prorated refund? Probably not. But
Stephen: So Hulu will allow you to pause your subscription and choose a couple months or whatever to do it. And, and you can, if you’re traveling for the summer or something.
Yeah. You can’t access it. It just sits there. You don’t get billed and then it turns itself back on and, so I have used that a couple of times, and I’m like, I’m not watching anything on Hulu right now. It’s just sitting there costing me money. If anything,
Alan: turn it, pause it, and then let things build up, and then you can do a whole bunch of watching, because they’re all still out [00:46:00] there.
Right, because you know, I have
Stephen: all the time in my life that I’m going to sit and watch four or five hours a day. That’s what I do. We, we have not gotten to that yet. We
Alan: still don’t watch that much TV, and so that also makes it how much, and having said all this, so it costs. 10 to 15 a month. If Kali and I both watch the Go To Well movie, it’s that.
Yeah, oh yeah. One movie that we enjoyed out of each of these subscriptions each month, I kind of Made my money. You know what I mean? I have a subscription if you will to Cinemark, right? You know where my credits luckily they don’t expire they add up and like but what oftentimes when I go see a movie It’s like how did I accumulate 12 credits because I really haven’t been to the movies in a year.
I guess that’s really true I wait for some big screen thing some Marvel thing. Whatever else it might be and And so, it’s, it’s, it’s, I don’t want to spend 150 a month, but if it’s that instead of other ways in which I could go see that if I don’t need the big screen experience or if I want to watch six episodes in a row, man, I’ve already made my money [00:47:00] by saying six episodes for 15.
That’s like 2. 50 each. Or did I do the math right there? You know what I mean? That’s nothing that’s so reasonable. Yeah. Maybe the dollar 99 show. I really have this, I’m getting all this stuff kind of for free ’cause I’ve already paid for it, so I don’t wanna pay another dollar 99. ’cause then instead of paying 25 bucks a month, now I’ve paid 27 and 29 and I don’t wanna do that.
And yet something is gonna tip me over where it’s like, I really need to see the bookie. I’m not gonna wait. And
Stephen: so, right. And that, that’s the thing I, I’ve, I’ve noticed that. I, for a while, like when the, the DC Arrowverse was ending, I was like, well, is there anything left on TV for me to watch? And then I started looking, I’m like, oh yeah, there’s a hell of a lot of stuff I watch, but I noticed dangerous thing to go look at.
Yeah. I noticed this year there really isn’t, it is a lot less. And, and most of them are short run things like on Disney like skeleton crew and all that. It’s not rookies. One of the few ongoing series that’ll [00:48:00] go. All the time, but even that isn’t like what we grew up used to up. It’s fall new series.
Here it is. January is just starting, you know,
Alan: right? That’s
Stephen: right.
Alan: And by the way, creature commandos, your recommendation. It’s so good. Oh, isn’t it? It’s it’s it’s so much like great comic books. You want to mean by by getting rid of it has to be live action. You can do anything you want. You can deduce anything you want.
It’s really real and it’s witty and it’s dark and it’s yeah. It’s just great. So thank you for that.
Stephen: Yeah, it’s fantastic. And it’s like, well, this is a reason to keep Max right here. You know, and with some of the DC stuff, cause they have like all the, the DC animated movies, which are wonderful. If you don’t, if you haven’t watched them, they really take the comic book and make it into a.
A live action live action, but a movie per se, you know, so we love all of those and some of the new stuff coming out. There’s some new Batman stuff coming out in that. So the penguin. Oh, my God. Penguin.
Alan: You know, it’s got I, having said, I don’t want to [00:49:00] watch, you know, 5 hours of movies of TV, but because I often have something on on my Third screen like while I’m doing other things.
I really am working with like I just started re watching Fringe because I really liked it. I did too. Yeah, it’s I don’t know, I don’t mean to watch 10 hours of stuff, but if I always have either music or video going, because my mind is okay with, and the only thing, like I think I mentioned, can’t watch subtitle things like Squid Game, because you really have to like read the screen in order to kind of get what’s going on and all the intrigue, and yet, otherwise, I almost always, like, I just got bored.
New music as giftees for Christmas, and so the latest Peter Gabriel is great, the latest Trevor Rabin is great, and almost always I don’t have it quiet up here. I have, you know, I don’t disturb Colleen by being two floors away. She’s often on first and I’m on third floor. And then I can crank up my new Tears for Fears album or whatever else it might be.
And that was another thing that I just read Prog Magazine, you know, [00:50:00] which is all about that. And there’s so much good prog coming out, both from my current heroes and my new stuff that I really want to try. And my breaking my 7 a CD standard that I did for a long time, oh no, have I really broken the damn, and now I’m gonna, how much am I willing to pay for, how much, like, if Steve Hackett comes out with something, I know it’s going to be great, and yet, can I outweigh it, that it’ll go from 15 to 12 to 10 or something like that?
Right. But then sometimes, it, it, My inner cheapskate is still wanting to like get it at a bargain at a good price. And yet, sometimes I just, I don’t want to wait two years for the latest Metro Toe album to come down in price. I want to hear it now.
Stephen: I mean, I, I, I totally agree with you and I still try and buy the CDs of new music that I want, or even old music that I’m trying to find and get.
But like a friend pointed out to me, he’s like, look, if you’re going to buy the CD, Buy the CD, the artist gets the most money from that CD. Not from Spotify, not from anywhere else. That’s right. [00:51:00] But if you’re going to listen to it, just go listen to it on Spotify because they get some money from that. And you know, and I’m like, I, I can understand the logic in that.
And if heck it comes out with something new and you can listen to it, then you’re getting that thing. And you wait till it comes down a bit in price and it doesn’t, you know, you get the best of both worlds and you’re still helping them out.
Alan: Right. I. I, I am getting to that point, I guess, because my tastes are so omnivorous that I would like to try some new things.
There have been some disappointments, you know what I mean? I get a, I don’t know, I love John Whetton, but almost all the John Whetton collections that they’ve put together, they’re just not great. They’re good. I have a lot of songs I like hearing, but it’s not like, wow, I just spent like 80 bucks, you know what I mean?
On a five CD with a little booklet and that kind of stuff, and yet, am I going to listen to this? How many times am I going to listen to this? I, I, I, I have to become a more canny consumer. And, like they used to talk about when, when file [00:52:00] sharing was rampant, a lot of times when you listen to something and you like it, you go ahead and buy the CD because you want to support the artist.
But also, it’s really a clinker. We listened to a, I bought a Jackson Browne CD once, sorry Jackson, I’m going to defame you, that was like, All the press were saying, this is his, you know, back to form. He’s great. Wonderful work. And I was like, it really wasn’t that great. And so I do have that little bit of desire to like, here’s something on the radio.
Here’s something on Spotify. Yeah. Al, did you just say, here’s something on the radio? Oh, you fossil. You genius dinosaur.
Stephen: I drove down to Pittsburgh a year or two ago for something. And I. I didn’t have anything except a radio. So I’m flipping through radio stations trying to find something. And I texted my buddy.
I said, Jay, because he grew up in Pittsburgh. I’m like, what the hell is wrong with Pittsburgh to have all these country radio stations, good station. What the hell are you listening to radio for?
Alan: Every time that I take a road trip, like down to Cincinnati, the [00:53:00] heart of Ohio is crap. It’s Country Western, it’s Jesus Radio, it’s, it’s Anger Radio.
You know what I mean? It’s like, does nobody rock out anymore? And not even, I don’t know. So that’s, I really have been left behind by radio. You know, when I do that, I am continually hitting the seek button.
Stephen: And I don’t
Alan: buy song
Stephen: because another way and I don’t drive enough to make XM radio worth it. And I’m not go sit here and listen to XM radio.
I have all my CDs and everything here. So an XM radio gets expensive. They do have a lot of choice. I’ll give it that, but Not that I can’t get elsewhere.
Alan: Well, that’s kind of funny. It’s just what we talked about. We’re talking about, like, what TV stations are going to watch. If I threw XM, like, how many subscriptions am I going to have?
Do I never sleep? I, I can’t justify the cost of having ten of these because I, I’m not going to use each of them to its worthwhile potential, I guess, you know what I mean? XM, I think I mentioned this, came in very handy when I was doing a cross country drive from [00:54:00] California, and by having XM in the rental car, I had all the comedy stations.
And it just made time fly by. Right. It wasn’t that I had to keep seeking out things. I turned it on until I got to someone that was really sucky, but then they have four comedy stations and just go to the next one and listen to another two hours. So, I worry, and it’s kind of funny, sometimes also, if you have something you’re really going to get addicted to, you know, the best way to do is to not start.
You know what I mean? If I’m going to have comedy radio on all the time, it’s like watching videos on Facebook. I’ll find out, you know, I watch my little puppies with yoga video. And then of course there’s other videos along with that. And after a while, I’ve watched like four of them. It’s like, I don’t think that’s where I should have spent 20 minutes.
What am I doing? And yet they’re perfectly designed. Yeah. Who are you in? and get you sitting there. You know what I mean? Click, click, click. Right. Oh, and not even click, click, click. It just puts the next one up there. It’s like, oh, watch this. Oh, look, it’s a little lion cub.
Stephen: So speaking of old music before we get rolling [00:55:00] here, I went and saw the Bob Dylan movie last night with Colin.
A complete unknown.
Alan: What did you think? Yes. That’s with Timothee Chalamet. Timothee Chalamet. He’s like a star of the moment. He’s in lots of good stuff and really seems to be able to transform. What did you think?
Stephen: Well, Bob Dylan has never been my favorite. Musician, artist, music. I know most of the hits. I know a few of the other stuff.
The band I was first in he was a big influence on the band and style and all that. So I didn’t go in with a whole lot of great expectations, cause I was like, eh, it’s Bob Dylan, okay, I’ll learn some more. Did it change my whole life and outlook on him? Not a lot. I, I have much more respect for the man, and I understand it’s a Fantasized version of real history.
I, I, I, a fictionalized version of real history and
Alan: composite characters. And time is different than, you
Stephen: know, did he play electric at Newport? Yes. That was in the film. Did he say the exact [00:56:00] lines he said in the film? Probably not. You know, there’s a few things that are. You know, but I did get a much better understanding and feel for the man as a rebel, which you don’t always think of them as necessarily and how much he really
Alan: yelling trader at Newport.
He went electric. So yeah. And
Stephen: how much he really influenced music and changed folk music and why it was such a big deal to people and how he just didn’t care. The thing that really hit me the most. What Chalamet. Oh my gosh. He said he spent six months, a little more than six months learning how to play guitar and sing like Bob Dylan, but also to talk and act like him.
And there were a couple scenes where I, I had to look. I’m like, okay, is this like stock footage of Dylan or is it he injected in Exactly, yeah. , you know, he, his, his movements were down just like Remy Malick did with when he did queen. And he did, you know how well he did? [00:57:00] This was very impressive.
Bill
Alan: Gilmer did a great Jim Morrison in the Doors movie. Yes, back in the day. Is that really him? What’s
Stephen: going on? He sounds great. He looks great. So, yeah. So it, it’s well worth watching. Is it necessarily going to change your life and something you go watch, you know, every month for the rest of your life?
Probably not, but it’s, it, Showed me definitely a time period. I didn’t know as much about and what was happening in the folk scene and why it made a big difference to him and him as a person, how much of a rebel he really was, but it was impressive because the, you know, in the movie, obviously it wasn’t Bob himself, but how he.
He would say people like, Oh, we can’t play that. It’s country’s like, so what, man? It’s music. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s just music. And I love that because I always told my kids that I’m like, it’s music. Don’t label it and say, Oh, I can’t listen to heavy metal. I can’t listen to the walls,
Alan: the division.
Stephen: So yeah.
Exactly. That was the big problem. You know, he wanted to play [00:58:00] music. Was it like folk? Was it like country? Yeah, it was like both of those, but he wanted to play it in a rock and roll style. Well, that’s sacrilegious. And I didn’t know his interactions with Johnny Cash and how big of friends that they were back in the day.
And there’s a letter they referenced in the movie and Colin leaned over and said, that actual letter is in the rock and roll hall of fame. That’s crazy. There’s a line that, um, cash and how big of a rebel cash was and, and, you know, the black sheep, you know, and that’s what they really got along with.
And Bob Dylan, the whole got into it because of Woody Guth, Guthrie and Pete Seeger and how much they helped and kind of got betrayed. Pete Seeger felt betrayed, according to the movie, and Woody not so much. And, you know, how that all came about, but it was just, you know, pretty impressive, interesting life, I will say.
I’m a musicologist,
Alan: we will definitely go [00:59:00] see it, and one of those, like, I want to see it. Maybe midday when we can go and have the theater to ourselves and really, like, just let the music wash over you and let the story take you in and stuff like that. It’s, I also, never been a big Bob Dylan fan, and in fact, it’s one of those, I have a friend, Janna, who, like, studied him.
You know, was really, like, in college, almost getting a Bob Dylan degree and stuff like that. And the more that she devoted herself to that is, like, Really? Like, what? What are you seeing that I’m not seeing? Because maybe it’s because I can’t get past his voice. You know, that whole, it’s true, we make a bit a day.
It just sounds so like, you’re a terrible vocalist. How did you take this on as a profession? Didn’t somebody say, you know, write songs, but let somebody else do them or something like that? And yet nobody else had a voice like him. So he had uniqueness and it. I like a lot of his lyrics, but there’s certain, I just can’t get, I can’t enjoy the music because their voice grates on me.
And so maybe that’s what’s kept me from doing [01:00:00] it is that I have probably in my ears that for me, I appreciate Bob Dylan for me
Stephen: that never bothered me much. And I know a lot of people say that about like Geddy Lee from Rush. A lot too. I can’t see it. This voice Elvis. It’s another one that I just can’t hear his voice.
Anyway, to me, I think I’ve tried to figure this out through the years. I think to me, the vocalist just comes through as another instrument. Not so much as. The, the lyrics and the singing, and maybe that’s why I’m never been really good at singing. I don’t do it well, and I have a hard time staying in pitch, even though I, I can maybe sometimes know I’m out of pitch, but I, I don’t know a lot of lyrics.
I don’t pay attention so much to the lyrics as the melody and how the intonations of what they’re singing create that instrument. I think that’s how my brain interprets it.
Alan: Yeah. Colleen is really great about. appreciating music and talking about things like phrasing and sustainability of breath and breath control and that she can really hear [01:01:00] how, not only that they’re good, but why they’re good, how that really works.
And I’ve always been a big lyrics fan. I, you know, another one of those things I can quote and sing along with all different kinds of things. And I, I might be able to like mimic certain people because they’re right in my range. Like I can do a good Greg Lake or John Whetton or whatever else it might be, but I don’t know that I can do a good Getty because Nobody can, you know what I mean?
You start to strain your voice after about two songs and you just can’t stay up there, you know, so
Stephen: interesting. I will, I will say one of the other things that I learned through the movie a bit more was Joan Baez and her place in history and music and what she was to the folk community and then how Dylan changed that and stuff like that.
So. I never, again, I don’t listen to a lot of folk music. Obviously I know the stuff everybody knows and maybe a few more. But she was never one I would like throw down to listen to. Hey, let’s listen to the Joan Baez album. But she was huge before he even came around. And
Alan: also very much in the [01:02:00] rebellious way.
And like very much, you know, like there’s people that really, they risked their career. Being who they were in their career. They got like regularly attacked in the press attacked by a local Cops that would shut down the show if they thought they were singing too much of an anti american song or whatever else That was that that started the movie with Pete Seeger getting sued because of this land is our land It’s all like that by a ring Berlin, right?
Didn’t he right there because it was to be replied to that and anyway it I, I love seeing that people have really take like who, who nowadays is taking that kind of risk. I’m sure there are, and maybe I’m just not as tuned, but back then, you couldn’t be Lenny Bruce and do your act without thinking the cops might be waiting for you after every, every single show.
You want me to swear in public was just not done. Right. He not only risked himself, but he busted it open for everybody that came after him. So when people talk about not only influenced by, but what an incredible debt they owe to somebody that like that, that made it, that we really had free speech, that it wasn’t [01:03:00] only social convention.
And you know, you can’t play that on TV. You can’t, can’t have. Mick Jagger, let’s say, let’s spend the night together on Ed Sullivan. You know what I mean? Look, because people really were kind of uptight. Right. He’s going into the 60s. There, there’s a, I’m a hippie. They were so uptight, man.
Stephen: I couldn’t believe how Bob Dilkens had over 60 albums.
Alan: I knew that. I knew he was prolific and he had like not a country western period, but he regularly had a country western influences and they had a Christian period. And you know what I mean? He really has. I, I love that. So nowadays we see acts that like, wow, that I haven’t heard from them for a while because they do an album every six years.
There were bands that every single year they had new stuff and you’d
Stephen: Rolling Stones had several years where they had two albums out. We’re not a live one. It was like two studio albums. Exactly.
Alan: Bursting with all the things they had to say and play and do so. I love that. I love what bands can still put out a good [01:04:00] catalog.
You know, when you go to see a concert, you’re not sure you’re going to what you’re going to hear, which is the band only has like, I don’t know who do I really like? Then, then fleet then. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. The Zeppelin sounding band
Alan: Zeppelin sounding band. Yeah. They, like, had two good albums and an EP, and now they’ve gone quiet.
And, like, please keep putting out more music, but if, like, you made your money and you went to go goof off and play mini golf or something like that, I don’t respect them as much because the music wasn’t driving them to create.
Stephen: You know? Or maybe they I mean, I’m just saying this as a devil’s advocate.
I’ve heard of this. Maybe they, they got tired of the industry and they weren’t able to do what they wanted to do. They were being pushed in ways they didn’t want. I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the band. I do know. I love the albums
Alan: since we started off a little bit talking about prog rock.
I don’t think there’s a single prog band that didn’t have them. Somebody from the studio come to their great album, like close to the edge and say, I don’t hear a hit. I don’t see how we’re going [01:05:00] to sell units of this. And like everybody that had to stick to their guns of making beautiful music, like yes, or Marillion or whoever else it might be, because they weren’t producing three minute pop confections that were going to make it on the radio.
You know what I mean?
Stephen: So look at all the, the, the, the, the, the songs that were the side of one LP, you know, that, and, and, and.
Alan: Like, close to the edge, things like that.
Stephen: Yeah, somebody did one that, it was the whole album, you had to flip it.
Alan: Six is a Brick is like that. Is that it? Is that what I’m thinking of?
The intro, the second side, that’s right, it was the whole album that was one thing. Yeah. When, when When you first started to have CDDB and the way it would give you the fingerprint of the album, they kind of didn’t know what to have. What are you going to do with one thing that’s like 46 minutes long?
You know what I mean? Because if there’s another one that’s close to that, it’s like, I can’t tell you whether this is Van der Graaff Generator or Jethro Tull, because by coincidence, their one song on that entire album came in at exactly the same time. There was something that was exactly like that, you know, that the long [01:06:00] piece.
had a bad bump into another one. So anyway, interesting. So, okay. All right. I got to get rolling. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen: Thank you, sir. Have a great week. And I hope if you go see whatchamacallit Bob Dylan, you love it, but stay warm because it’s been freaking cold out there today.
Alan: If we go, it’s going to be like, what’s the closest one.
So I spent the least amount of time in a cold car getting there. We’ll go to. It doesn’t matter. We, we will be careful. Thank you. Be careful as well. Stay warm. Okay.
Bye bye.
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.
