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The episode opens with a conversation about gift-giving and the challenges of online deliveries during the holiday season. Topics then shift to comic books, including changes in the industry, artists, and upcoming events like Comic Cons. The discussion moves to broader themes such as the polarity in modern culture and the evolving nature of language and literature. Finally, the hosts delve into the impact of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and technological advancements on society. The episode wraps up with reflections on how rapidly emerging technologies can both thrill and unsettle us.
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[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: Stuff as we’re capable of doing that. Okay. All right. Sounds good. So did you open your present? No, we I was waiting till Christmas and until I knew that mine for you had arrived. Oh, okay. I didn’t check Amazon lately, but you have something coming that I think you will enjoy. So you
Stephen: said 10th, so that should be today.
I’ll let you know. Be today. [00:01:00]
Alan: Exactly. It, it’s funny. People have been commenting on that delivery has become really weird. Like they get it scheduled and it doesn’t show up and no explanation whatsoever. But I’ve also had things show up before they were scheduled. So I’m not, there’s now, it’s not a single, like Amazon handles all its own or golf goes all through UPS.
They seem to have this whole I can’t even call it network. This hodgepodge of private contractors and some company trucks and stuff like that and I, we’ve had things delivered like on Sunday night. And I’m thinking, buddy, go home. You don’t need to be, I don’t need my this next book now.
And yet, there’s all kinds of different market forces that are driving all of this and
Stephen: I heard during the big snowstorm last week when, the east side area over that way was getting four feet of snow that people were calling Amazon to complain because their delivery was, I was supposed to be that day and it got remarked for two days later or something like that.
And it’s folks, there’s like a snow emergency if they,
Alan: hop online and see that [00:02:00] 90, like a major highway was closed because there was four feet of snow and it kept accumulating. I don’t know, people, they get to live in their grievance bubble instead of just looking outside and saying, maybe I should give everybody a break, while the snow emergency is going on.
But anyway, we’re doing. Yeah, and increasing them up this year like we talked about every year, almost all of our stuff is done like via online. We go to the mall as a token thing. Hey, let’s go hit the kiosks. Let’s go to a couple of craft shows or art shows and see if there’s anything in particular for those kind of hard to buy people.
But otherwise, We for instance, Colleen’s family exchanges a Secret Santa list, instead of everybody buying everything for everybody else because there’s, she’s one of nine. We’ve narrowed it down and I was able, I won’t say early in case the guy who I have a Secret Santa for listens to the podcast, but I was able to get all of their, not even he or she stuff just like by doing a little wise shopping and saying, okay, that’s this for a good price.
I [00:03:00] want to get them. I never, I don’t want to get anybody cheap, I don’t want to get anybody used, but it’s still if you’re, if they’re talking about getting a drill, you get them like the Consumer Reports best drill, not just a drill. You know what I mean?
Stephen: You know what though? I’ve always gotten You know my family and stuff if it’s something i’m at the yard sale at a thrift store and it’s a used item But it’s something they really like and what we’ve had never had a problem with getting it and it’s not and I explained it to my kids when they were younger and it’s not greed But it’s look this costs twenty dollars in the store if I could even find it because it’s from a couple of years ago, but I got it at this thrift store for eight and I’m not trying to be cheap about it, but it’s the exact same product.
It was all there. What’s that?
Alan: More dollars to spend on people, that’s where the green card comes in.
Stephen: Now I have more money. I’ll spend more.
Alan: Exactly. The things that I worry about, I use Amazon in a lot of ways, like it was first designed for books. And places have become [00:04:00] very specific now about, it’s not a former library book, it doesn’t have any writing inside.
Like I want people to get the experience of, hey, I got a new book, I don’t want to have them open the thing and say, hey Bill, not their name, Merry Christmas from three years ago. That, yeah, that’s. It doesn’t have to be virginal, but I don’t want it to be, occasionally get things for Colleen where, funny, Tavale, like old Laura Ingalls Wilder books, they’re not usually newly available, she’s passed out of favor.
So I found things for her that I knew were used, and then actually it’s funny to see wow this thing is a library book from 50 years ago. You know what I mean? Where it, it only is back on the market because the library decided to have a sale, someone bought it and then put it online.
So that’s cool.
Stephen: Yeah, I saw a Spider Man comic that was a collector’s one. And I was going to get it, but somebody Romito, somebody wrote their name in it. So I told him I didn’t want it.
Alan: Okay, that’s I think that all, we’ve talked about this before. I have many comic books and I have done very little marking. Maybe when I was [00:05:00] very young, I have a couple where I like, Like almost drew a mustache like it was, on a poster in the subway or something like that. But I quickly learned that condition matter and that nothing that I was going to add was going to make it better.
It was going to, I don’t even have my name in them. You know what I mean? A lot of people actually have put either with a stamp or something like that. Sometimes there’s newsstand stamps where it was the date of the sale, but that’s, I think, all these things are like what you learn about when you get comics created.
That’s acceptable, but not your cousin’s name on it or something like that. And like we talked about recently, I’m going to be buying comic books again soon. I’ve got my first couple orders in. through M& M comics, which when I stopped buying 15 years ago, they were fantastic and everything arrived in good condition and stuff like that.
And I was delighted to find that they’re still open for business. So that’s why I put my first couple of orders in. And yes, indeed it’s more money than I expected because everything has gone up in price. But I really wanted to do. the survey of the market and [00:06:00] say now I know which new artists, writers, characters I prefer.
And then I probably will winnow it down after I say I was hoping that Walking Dead was still a continually good book, but now that it’s not Robert Kirkman writing it or something like that, it’s just not the same magic. And that’s an example of, I’m not even sure of the accuracy of what I just said, but for sure there’s different people writing different things.
The main characters, Batman, Superman, Fantastic Four, Avengers, and I’ll have to see, do I like James Tynion? Do I like Tom King as much as classics, Neil Gaiman, whoever else it might be? And if anything, it’s also cool to find out that Neil Gaiman is still doing things once in a while. I really wasn’t sure if he was still doing comic books or whether he’s only a book author nowadays.
And so to find out that someone’s still doing things like from 20 years ago. Sometimes they get a little long in the tooth, and they’re like old fashioned, but once in a while, it’s you really have kept in the game. You’re really current. Your vocabulary has changed. You’ve done new twists on old characters that I know you’ve been reading for as long as I have.
How did you get that wonderful [00:07:00] creativity to say, We’re taking the fantastic four in a different direction because there’s like how many cumulative like 800 issues of fantastic four Oh, they’re rebooting
Stephen: fantastic four. Oh, this sucks. They didn’t do the exact same stories in timeline again we’ve got those we’ve got those in epic collections.
We’ve got those in omnibuses. We’ve got those in trades We have those reprinted We don’t need those again and again.
Alan: The reason for saying that is you’ve talked about having Alan on, because he’s the you’re, he works in a comic book store, he’s very current and I really would love now that I’m coming back in after 15 years to say, so what the hell happened here?
Who are these new characters? Why is Thor now a frog and whatever else it might be? And hopefully we’ll be able to fill in some of the gaps for me.
Stephen: Yeah, we need the schedule on it. It’ll probably be. He’s off on certain days. So it will probably be on a different day than we normally do.
But, we’ll just have to find a good time. His schedule has been back and forth a little [00:08:00] bit just because lots of shows that Adam goes to and and the. The scheduling for shipping has changed so much for them that you never know what day it’s coming. And
Alan: like Wednesday night going into Thursday was big delivery day, right?
And then everything came out and now
Stephen: sometimes they deliver Mondays, sometimes Tuesday, they get them on Thursday, unless the driver’s too busy. And then hopefully Friday,
Alan: one thing I’m looking to do, as we Cleveland as well as many other places have still have Comic Cons. Wizard World Fan Expos.
I think that’s the current name for whoever bought it late, latest. I’ve done talks, I don’t know, four or five times now for the Cleveland one, and I think this year’s is going to be what we just talked about. Hey folks, I’m not only the archivist anymore, I’m buying again, and here’s my impressions of wow, the Spider Verse is different.
The, and I want to, I don’t want to be the crusty old guy saying it was better back in the days. I’m sure there’s going to be some things that are new, but it’s going to be very interesting just to talk about, like I said what [00:09:00] creativity was that? How did they get here?
It, does it seem more oh, now we’re catering to the movies. And so they’ve adopted some of the things from the Marvel cinematic universe that, that wasn’t canon in kind of books before, but now it is, I’ll, I’m sure I’ll have a lot
Daredevil? Yes or no. You know what I mean? Avengers? Yes or no. New characters that and I really did, in order to keep my order at a reasonable level, I really specialized in maybe like the top half dozen publishers, very much Marvel, DC, Image, Top Cow, I’m trying to think who else is going on nowadays.
But in order to get creativity and freedom in it, some big creators have left to go do other things. And so I followed Neil Gaiman to wherever he is or I think what I noticed in particular, maybe Matt Wagner, that I’ll be curious to see Even, and it’s funny, I’m expecting certain things because I’ve seen it before.
Bill Sienkiewicz has changed his art style like three times now, and I’m looking forward to see he’s no longer like a Neil Adams pseudo imitator. Then he got really scratchy and [00:10:00] Like DI don’t know, off putting almost with, but I’m looking forward to seeing who’s still experimenting.
Does John Romita Jr still look like him? Or who are the new artists that, that Oh they’re a prelude to, what I’m looking forward to talking about is all, and that will not be one episode. That’s probably gonna be every episode I be coming in was like, oh Kang is now actually I just saw coming in.
Dr. Doom is a big thing for the coming year in the Marvel Universe. Because of the movies. Because of the movies, and because he’s always been a good arch villain but was fantastic for, going out of publication and coming back. They didn’t know how to reposition him, perhaps, as to who should he be the new arch enemy of.
And I’m really looking forward to reading about, there was, like, at one point, maybe one of the secret wars was Doom World, and I’m trying to think what I know about the interim things, but. He’s always been a really fascinating character because he’s almost as smart as Reed Richards and hates that he’s not.
You know what I mean? But he’s got incredible willpower. He is both in the science and the [00:11:00] magic camps. And I’m looking forward to what they do with such a formidable character. And like as much as he is a maniac, a megalomaniac, he also takes care of his people in Latveria.
So there’s got to be that. Like benevolent side but we’ll see what it’s all about.
Stephen: I, compared to our world and politics or whatever. I often tell people, in star Wars, in the empire, when the empire took over and we see the side of how evil. The emperor is and all that, but there were worlds.
There were people like, Oh my God, the empire is our saviors. We’re safe. We have better buildings. We have jobs. We have food. We love the empire. The rebels are the bad guys. The rebels are trying to destroy everything. It’s perspective.
Alan: Exactly. Wonderful segue. What did we see just last night? Wicked. Oh!
Movie? And, I don’t think it’s a big spoiler. Anybody who saw the Broadway play for the ten years it’s already been running or whatever, the whole premise of it is that the Wicked Witch of the West didn’t start off as [00:12:00] being wicked. She actually was a rebel against the Wizard of Oz, instead of just being the bumbly guy from the movies.
He’s actually It’s really manipulative and has minions that are like, Don’t worry, all the population of Oz will keep you safe. Safe means terrible control. And restricting the use of magic or all kinds a big thing is, of course, there’s lots of allegories to modern back in Oz, in the Oz books, for instance animals could still talk, and they’re trying to take that away, that they’re like the, I don’t know, the dangerous minority that we have to shut down in order to have a more orderly society, and it really shows how you can get radicalized by saying, this isn’t right, but the only way to fight it when it’s systemic is to really be a rebel and really not only speak up, but Shut down the worst of it.
And then if the people want there to be nice and orderly, yeah, you look like the destructor. You know what I mean? You broke the bridge that they were herding all the animals across. They don’t care about the animals. They care about now my bridge is gone, etc., [00:13:00] etc. Very well done. You gotta see the big theater.
It’s, it really is epic in its span and it’s big music. And it’s only part one, right? It’s only part one. That’s exactly right. So we were, it’s long. It’s like maybe two hours and 40 minutes or something like that. But, and I heard a lot, a whole bunch of people in the lobby afterwards saying, Oh, it was so long.
I was like, maybe your attention span is short because it wasn’t. a lot of wasted anything in the movie, it’s that they put a lot into it because the story is big. And, people nowadays, they even have a category on Netflix or Prime or something like that where it’s a 90 minute movie. You can’t even watch a two hour movie anymore.
You say, I have this much time, and that’s what you slot into. It’s like some stories don’t take 90 minutes. They take an entire series or they take a piece book or whatever else.
Stephen: I never got to see the play. It was always on the list. I was going to take my daughter to go see and it only came around at a bad time.
And so we never made it. So I was interested in the movie and I went yeah. Ariana Grande is in it. I’m like let’s put the pop star in it. I don’t care [00:14:00] about her being that. That kind of turned me off of it. But then Colin said, you know what? I’m not a fan of hers. I could care less about her.
She seems a little bitchy and stuck up and stuff, but she was the one that got the whole movie project going and off the ground because
Alan: our power. Okay.
Stephen: No, because she got into a singing. Because she went and saw the play wicked, she started seeing, and she was so passionate about it that she put her own power and wealth and whatever else to say, this needs made.
We need to do this. Now, of course she said, and I need to be one of the stars, still always Rocky, but that’s a little different though. But Rocky’s different, which by the way, that was just a week or so ago was the anniversary of that. Okay. But that’s a little different because Stallone Tried multiple studios and was turned down because well, you’re we don’t know you don’t know anything Why do we even want to bother with this?
So he had to Fund it himself and [00:15:00] get it going himself When he had nothing And it became big. You can say whatever your
Alan: story, my, my knee jerk throwing that out there was not accounting for. I don’t, I get it. But it’s I feel bad now because he really made that thing come to be in a way that nobody believed in him instead of exactly, or you can do whatever you want.
Stephen: He lived a real life version of Rocky, and I, you can get on some of these actors and stuff. But Stallone’s an example of look he wanted this he got it done He lived on the streets basically and now look where he’s at. So he earned what he got. So shut the hell up everybody That’s what everybody wants, right?
so
Alan: The next thing about the movie by the way is the people that originated the roles on broadway christian chenoweth and mendel men mendez Sorry I, yeah, I don’t remember. Go one more than the other. They’re in the movie. Oh, nice. And nice reprising their characters, but as characters in it. But like, when you hear they have good voices, big voices, and you can see, and you can tell a movie voice from a [00:16:00] Broadway voice.
’cause they’re used to filling the room with a little bit of application instead of being all micd up. So they, they’re a nice. Addition, there’s all kinds of things nowadays where a movie gets remade and they bring back the previous star in a role to create that through link, as a little bit of an homage.
Stephen: It’s nice.
Alan: Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. So did you hear what Merriam Webster’s dictionary of the word word of the year was?
Alan: I have not. You mentioned we should talk about that. Tell me, is it terrible?
Stephen: No, their choice for the year is Polarization,
Alan: That is everywhere and more in use than I’ve ever seen it before.
So that’s a good choice. Yeah. Yeah. Like when they talk about new words. And I also like when they talk about just the word of the year because it’s so indicative of what we’re going through.
Stephen: That’s one of those things, writing, you get a lot of people and I know some People personally and especially some editor people that it’s like that is not proper grammar That is not proper construction and i’m just like you know what it’s only proper now It wasn’t [00:17:00] necessarily proper before because things change and there’s different thoughts on what’s right and what’s not and so yes I’m not saying throw all grammar out the window and anything goes, but sometimes people get way too Nazi on it.
Alan: I’ll have to see. They’re usually not a single word. They actually have a whole list of words that have entered the vocabulary and stuff like that. And that I always find fascinating because sometimes it’s, New slang. Sometimes it’s an old word that has been revived because it’s got a new use.
Yes. I like to see language changing like that. That list, the fact that they’ve been running that list for decades, it’s proof that our language changes. That, there was a time when cool, which is like the most long running, acceptable, word for multiple meanings and stuff. When it first came out, I was like, what the hell does that mean?
You know what I mean? It’s is that a beatnik word? Even using the term beatnik before hippie before, it’s, so I like reading and I guess I’m trying to think what they base it on. I think it’s in use in [00:18:00] print and in radio and like even the sources are there. YouTube words like yeet, where it’s wow, I hadn’t heard of that, but apparently the kids are all using it.
And so I try to keep up with those kinds of things. And some I’m happy to adopt because I’m a trendsetter because I think it’s a funny word and it’s useful. And others it’s that adds nothing. That’s just stupid. So I still say, dude, I like that. Or, You really can voluntarily date yourself or put yourself in what you want to, to the impression that you want to make by using things like, and I tend to be pretty, I’m very self aware of what I’m saying.
So once in a while, when you say EGADS, it’s I know that’s not current, but it’s funny because it is still useful in that corny way. Some things are only crossword puzzle words. Some things are only radio words. It’s funny to be able to call from that and especially to use it then out of context, or especially when you get that’s, is he using that [00:19:00] sarcastically or is he, cause he’s an older guy, is he doing that to tease me or is he really, has he adopted that word? So anyway, and I never say out loud, LOL, and stuff like that, but once in a while, I can’t say never.
Once in a while, it’s funny to say that with that little bit of LOL, where you know that you’re doing it for effect, not because that’s the one way of speaking that you have. And that brings up the whole swearing discussion and stuff like that. Every time that I hear someone tell me, wow, you must have a limited vocabulary, I’m Buddy, I probably have about 10 times as many words as you.
And right now We have all the best words. The best word is pigfucker. That’s the one I want to use right now. You know what I mean? So Ironclad. Like that. I make reference all the time to Maledicta, that talks about the origin of all those words. And it really is Of all the slang, if you’re looking for where things really have great culture and like history behind them, it’s almost always the way swear words transform to become [00:20:00] popular used or the compounding.
You know what I mean? You must have seen one of those little diagrams of any word from this column plus this column is going to be funny and insulting. Ass clown. You know what I mean? It’s just, it’s
Stephen: I always wanted to do. some t shirts or posters or something of victorian swear words because a lot of those were extremely insulting back then but we laugh at them now it’s like why is that insulting you
Alan: know yeah even culturally like things that are really pretty common parlance in england are not here and vice versa you know we say bloody as if it’s just like because I happen to see you in English Repertoire, but it’s really insulting.
Canada has sacrament or tabernac, where it’s like references to specific, very specific Catholic things are big swears up there. Whereas I think they throw the C word around the content, I, it’s funny. I hate saying that word. Cause it’s there’s no going back if you say it in the wrong context, that’s really.
Stephen: I just don’t like it. And like you said, different cultures, different time periods of different cultures. [00:21:00] Different things are considered offensive or not. Again, it’s language. It changes. It has changed. It will change,
Comma, somewhere in there. I’m sure some editor would tell me how to properly grammatize that whole sentence.
Alan: I think I mentioned one of the things that happened with me lately is, Maybe because it’s Christmas coming up, Facebook has had all kinds of little ads that say, Hey, this series has been going on for eight, 10 years, and you just don’t know about it, but here’s a special price on the first six books in the series.
Not a teaser because it’s already the Inconyer series, but I’ve had many reviews, positive reviews have inspired me to not buy a single book, but actually buy the series. And I so much don’t want to buy a pig in a book and have it turn out terrible because now I spent 60 bucks and, you Many of them I made a point of getting all my different favorite genres, right?
Here’s the Harry Potter esque, boy coming of age tale. Here’s the post dystopic Adam bomb living in the wasteland tale, and all those kinds of things. And often what [00:22:00] has really made me buy into things is where they have a great tagline. Like for the dystopian future, it’s even mushrooms clouds have a silver lining.
Which is just, that’s so funny. You know what I mean? Someone found a way to combine two things and they’ve proven there’s a lot of swearing going on in there. It’s you’re living in this hellscape, you know what I mean? There’s mutated things trying to eat you all the time. You can’t ever, you, everything is insecure.
You might pick up a few swear words, .
Stephen: So anyway, I just did a bit of a rant post about this stupid Christmas movie list I saw. And they were all ridiculous. It was, 17 classic Christmas movies. We shouldn’t be watching anymore. And the very first one was Rudolph and we shouldn’t be watching it because the reindeer are mean and bully Rudolph.
And we’re trying to create a culture of something. Or I’m like, okay, take that out. What do you have? Nothing. That’s not a story. Oh, look, everybody’s nice and happy. [00:23:00] Oh, look, we have a snowstorm and Rudolf led the way. Oh, look, the end of the story. Nobody cares. We would have forgot about it 50 years ago.
That’s not a story, folks. There has to be some sort of conflict and they want to take oh, my God. All the conflict out and the life and or not life and times, but the Santa Claus movie, the one where he has burger Meister burger that it’s, it shows too many Nazi type of things that are just could bother children and and just yeah, exactly.
Let’s that’s come on. Yeah, I’m reading
Alan: the whole point of the story is they have that and then it gets overcome and we just went to see Scrooge the musical and you get to see There really always have been misers who abuse people if the people let them do it. And so that was on the list to terrible, but just I guess I wrote a ranty post about I’m so done with identity politics. That, that from both the right and the left, anything where you just claim you’re not allowed to use this word anymore, or that because you’re this way, they have this entire like [00:24:00] block of information, supposedly about, You name it what how long your hair is like when you used to be a hippie.
What’s your current religion is? What’s your whether you carry a gun or not? And people have gotten so lazy and so cancel culture II about that people are not that simple People are 17 layer cakes You might see the frosting but you have to be aware that there’s so much else going on in anybody’s life virtually and that it’s I’m tired of the laziness of it.
I’m tired of the knee jerk reaction of it Especially now I’ve always been a big free speech, near absolutist, that there’s hardly anything that people can say that should make it that they’re not allowed to say it. It really might be, like, they’ve got the court documented things, and when it’s not being fire in a crowded theater, because that’s a clear and present danger, that people started to make it, like you just said, that you’re not allowed to talk about.
Historic fact. There were Nazis. The fact that we overcame the Nazis is part of that story. Did you not read to the end of the story? It’s not that didn’t ever exist, [00:25:00] because then when you people start to accept that, they really start to excise things from history. We really did have slavery.
We really did. You know what I mean? There’s all kinds of things. even good people have made terrible mistakes and oftentimes for a hundred years before they corrected it. But the whole point is we kept evolving and thought kept getting better. And then you see why we had to finally do the right thing.
There’s a great quote about, you can count on the United States to always do the right thing after they’ve exhausted every other possibility. I think that was Winston Churchill, as I recall. So there’s all kinds of examples and you don’t. Stop that stuff from being talked about the first time that everybody that wants to ban books There’s never been a book banner on the right side of history.
And it doesn’t matter whether it’s coming from the right or the left. It doesn’t matter whether it’s too gay or not gay enough. Or, nigger Jim or not nigger Jim. Boy, sorry everybody, I know that’s such an explosive word, but Mark Twain wrote it, and I’m gonna go with Mark Twain is worth reading no matter what you think.
Yes, [00:26:00] he was. Mark Twain was writing. You know how important he was. If he was writing
Stephen: today, he probably wouldn’t say it that way. But, if he was writing about that time period and writing that same book in today’s world, it would be inauthentic not to write it that way today. So then, People would jump on him about it’s not very authentic.
It’s not what things were really like. So you can’t win. And what you were just saying about all this stuff, some of the other ones on the list, they didn’t like any of the Christmas Carol in general, because the characters were too stereotype. Okay, but they pointed out Mickey’s Christmas Carol, the Disney one as having too many non diverse characters.
You’re watching a talking mouse. How much more diverse can you get?
Alan: That is one of those things that I can’t believe that people talk about that with animation where it’s they’re not black or white. They’re blue. The Smurfs are like, what’s wrong with that? There’s not enough diversity there.[00:27:00]
Oh you’ll learn a lot by the things that people focus on and have, I don’t think it’s feigned outrage, but it’s inappropriate outrage. Often they’ll get outraged not about something that personally affects them because it’s just like they’re going to take somebody else’s battle on and sometimes the other people like, How about if you let that go?
I’ll let you know when I object. You don’t need to fight this for me.
Stephen: What I mean? I remember when episode one Star Wars came out people said Jar was making fun of black people with Ebonics. And that the
Alan: Neimoidians
Stephen: were making fun of the Chinese for their strict culture and stuff. There’s only so much varieties that we can necessarily get, and,
Alan: I don’t know, whatever the thing is that says, Hey, if I don’t like this, change the channel as compared to, I don’t like this.
So nobody gets to watch it. That mindset is really damaging in the, let
Stephen: me make my own choice. Let me make my choice for my children.
Alan: To [00:28:00] me, almost always, the censors that volunteer what they would censor are exactly the people you don’t want doing it. They’re the ones that are the least serious, the least evolving, the most knee jerk.
They’re just, they have an agenda that doesn’t match real life, that doesn’t match humanity.
Stephen: And I’ve said this before, they want to ban books. They want to ban what’s in the movies. They want this, that, and the other thing. I’m like, okay, you know what? I was picked on by a lot of football players and to see football players on the TV, it triggers me and I get uptight.
We should ban football. All that sports movies just to be safe, not movies, ban football, get rid of football. That’s stupid. How can you decide what we should be getting rid of? But when I say, Oh, this bothers me. Too bad.
Alan: This, I, another thing that’s very interesting to me Netflix has things from all over the world.
They’ve had, not only the British BBC type television, but things from Norway, there’s various different Scandinavian countries. Now there’s a big influx of Indian culture, and [00:29:00] you don’t have to know a lot about India to see just how they portray things is either stereotypical or at least indicative of Indian culture.
Don’t know that I like all of it. You know what I mean? There’s still a certain amount of not macho but like misogynistic dismissal of Women and in a country of a billion people really you’re excluding half, 500 million people from thinking that they’re competent, that they’re mentally and physically capable and in a spy movie or whatever else it might be, or that the only use is because they’re like the seductress, not the combatant.
And then you see they actually do, you watch a couple episodes and they might, I’m going to put that in to set it up so that you will get that kind of like reaction that when you say no whatever they were trying to set you up to feel, they’re going to defy that.
They’re going to have you have to learn that, yes, she can be just as tough as nails and he can be just as sensitive or whatever else it might be. And so they’re [00:30:00] very interesting to be playing with the stereotypes because, and I, a sweeping statement, I’m not sure how much this is true because I don’t know enough about Bollywood and Indian, they seem to be going through a lot of the things that we were going through in the fifties, when women were only housewives and the guys were veterans and stuff. And so are they really 70 years behind us? Or have they always had this, but they’re in their own culture now? having to deal with, there’s pockets of resistance to progress in India, just like there are here.
And they can’t help but have seen all of the United States movies coming out, and it’s no longer the quiet man that it became. You know what I mean? Um, I’m looking forward to watching more because a lot of times I don’t want to read the book that tells me about Indian culture, I’m going to watch what they put out themselves and pick it up.
You know what I mean? Not just Indian, but how about New Zealand and how about Brazil and like whatever the stereotype of the telenovela where it’s all overdramatic and it’s all, passionate. That’s [00:31:00] Mexico. Crazy. Exactly like that. For Mexico, for Brazil, those kinds of things, they’re crazy.
I agree. There’s some things that are like that, and then there’s other things that are much more nuanced. And always in the arts, there’s some people that say, we get to choose what message we send here, and it doesn’t have to just be Biff Bampow action movies, and it doesn’t have to be potboiler and Victorian costume dramas.
It’s all those things, and especially when you meld the genres and you have little surprises, it lets people say I was with you up until that point, and then I wasn’t. But that’s not about them. That’s about me. What is it in me that I can only go so far, even though it was absolutely in line with the way the story was told.
So there’s cool learning to be done. You know what I mean? And I
Stephen: think Netflix has been bringing over quite a few movies and TV shows from various other countries and they’ve got quite a bit. Tubi has quite a bit also. If you want to, experience them, go check those out, folks. They got some good ones.
And that’s the thing. Not all of them are great. But a lot of them are [00:32:00] way better than you would think. And personally, I like the captions. I like hearing their voices in the, Foreign language and I’ll read the caption. That’s how I prefer it rather than the overdub But this is something that AI is going to be changing because they’ll take the sample of the voices They will restructure the movie to make the lips move and match in the original voice But AI speaking in your language is like
Alan: old clutch cargo things where it was a solid animation, but then only the lips that’s interesting. They really AI is gonna change so many things that’s another I don’t know. We can talk a lot about that, but we’ll save that for a future thing.
Stephen: OpenAI just is releasing Sora and it’s backed up. I couldn’t get in to check it out. It’s, that’s the type in some text, get a video.
Exactly.
Alan: I really this was, I just read this, Yesterday or two days ago, quantum computing has been one of those things, it’s coming for a long time. And, it, that it really enables by using superposition of probabilistic [00:33:00] states, you can solve hugely difficult problems in miraculously short amounts of time compared to all the computing power that we have nowadays.
And Google just announced their latest one that has a hundred qubits that exponentially it can handle bigger things. The biggest breakthrough that they’ve made lately apparently is. that it’s not about adding more and more to the network. It’s about putting in error correction in how it dismisses bad paths, improbable states, and they continually prune it so that it pursues a good known best solution more efficiently.
And they just had some things like they’ve been talking about for a long time. Encryption is very much based on the difficulty of finding a prime factors in a big number is so large that it’ll be, hey, 243 quadrillion years, longer than the age of the universe, that we will all die from the heat death of the sun before this thing could be solved.
That’s not true when you can do things a million times faster, a billion [00:34:00] times faster. And that’s what we’re starting to see is it’s going to change. All like we’re going to be able to do weather simulations, difficult problems in real time, we’re going to be able to do encryption things like what it’ll change what we even think we can do to solve problems.
So I’m fascinated by right now it’s still. Lab simulation type stuff. It’s strict problems that they know they can do this much faster. When they start to apply it to real artificial intelligence, real, right now we have AI, we’re looking to get to AGI, artificial generalized intelligence, that it can apply to all different kinds of things.
It’s going to be, exhilarating and scary all at once. You know what, right now, how do you solve diseases? You do a million tests of various different, putting your little pipette into a test tube and that kind of stuff. And they’re going to do all the simulations so that there’s no disease we’re going to bump into.
They can’t say, we took it apart molecularly and we found out that here’s the stopper version of this. We did chirality so that it’s a mirror image of it, but it doesn’t get absorbed. We’re going to have better [00:35:00] nutrition. We’re going to have better disease fighting and all in like Next week, it’s not going to take years to fix COVID and bird flu and whatever else is coming out.
And of course I want everybody to use their powers for good, but I want it to be that there really are people like, how can I do even better language translation? How can I do better GPS processing? All those things that are Modern day miracles that didn’t come until we had enough computing power and like whatever the next science fiction is going to start talking about how you can do miraculous things in real time.
We will be amazed at what’s going to come both good and bad. Because that good is also for, weapon tracking systems and drone swarms and that it’s not only that you can cure a disease You can also weaponize a disease by saying hey I made 10, 000 different versions of anthrax and put them out there and they can’t fight them all because they have to find individual Solutions like a phage.
Boy, I’m really geeking it up. But you know what I mean? We’re gonna see for good and for bad who’s gonna make use of this and it’s gonna be I don’t want to call [00:36:00] it an arms race because it’s a civilization race. It’s a progress race. And some people are going to try to do it. What can I do to get ahead of the market and make money with it as compared to how do I make it so that everybody gets fed by better distribution networks?
You know what I mean? It is. So. I’m, I love being alive now. Don’t, aren’t you thrilled by the increasing pace of technology and that we really are like doing things that really were science fiction, not even like 50 and 70 years ago, but like last year, the things are getting invalidated by, Oh, teleportation will never happen.
We figured out how to map every single molecule in a person’s body and put it over there instead. I guess we really, and I know that there’s, They always talk about how there’s barriers in terms of the amount of energy it might take and the exactness of it. We’re getting a driverless car is no longer science fiction.
It’s like always next bring
Stephen: that up to Colin all the time I’m like, you know at the beginning of the 1900s they thought they knew [00:37:00] everything about science and in less than 50 years We had an a bomb which they couldn’t even predict 40 years earlier. So you can’t tell me that we know everything, that there’s no possibilities of something that we don’t know right now, and this usually comes up when we start talking about big foot, because there’s a lot of theories about big foot being a quantum traveler and traveling between worlds or realities and it’s yeah.
And he’s can you prove it? And I’m like, No, but can you prove it doesn’t exist? So I don’t have to prove it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t and I’m like, that’s not true. There’s plenty of things there. Scientists are like, some say this is real. Another say, no, it’s not. And they argue back and forth that I can, they’re both think they’re right, but neither can prove the other is wrong.
And I just saw an example of that, that they found, they got whatever from one of the telescopes, a star that’s being ripped apart by a black hole, and it created this spaghettiification, they called it a thing, and [00:38:00] it had been theorized for years, but there were two sides, they said, yes, it will happen, and some said, no, that’s not what would happen, but neither could prove that they were the ones right and the others were wrong, but now they have the proof.
A year ago, they were still arguing. Here we are today, we have an answer. You know what? Does Bigfoot exist? We can’t prove or disprove it necessarily. Does it travel between worlds? We can’t prove or disprove it necessarily. But it doesn’t mean that one of them is not right.
Alan: That’s right. Another great quote.
I really need to learn to Attribute mind so that I give it Neil proper credit along the lines of, the people who are telling you absolutely why it can’t be done are often interrupted by the people doing it . You know what I mean? And so that those, I like the fact that we have theories that seem to follow for what we know now, but and we just, if you’ve got curiosity, if you’ve got humility to be able to learn in my lifetime just how many tenets that were absolute rock solid have we seen.
Shattered or at least adjusted because [00:39:00] we learned more because our instrumentation got better because our modeling got more sophisticated and like to The heart of conservatism, to me, is what makes that so ridiculous to me, is that there’s nothing that’s happened in the history of the world, the universe, in humanity’s record that is it’s known all, of course we can learn from it, we can learn from history and see what patterns repeat and how human beings think and stuff like that, but there’s nothing that is it’s the only way we can have it, because all that we knew back then was.
within 100 miles of our home, all we knew was from looking up in the sky and thinking that we were, like, in a big dome around us instead of there’s an about, boundless universe of things. And the explanations that people came up with for those kinds of things were often fascinating while silly, oh, that’s the God in his chariot going across the sky with the sun, Phaeton, and stuff like that. And, And every time that you see that come out, disproven or at least adjusted [00:40:00] you don’t think that’s going to happen to everything? There’s so few eternal constants and people that volunteer that don’t worry, they’ve discovered it, especially.
And again, another those are exactly the ones you don’t want teaching other people because they’ve got their limitations that they’re trying to impose on you instead of the humility that would say here’s what we know so far. And we’re looking into it because that’s what. science is all about, is the common sense approach to how do I learn more about the universe and adjust my thinking when I learn something that doesn’t fit the current model.
And wow, there’s everything is that. We’re all learning if we allow ourselves to. So I’m, I still got at least 40 more years in me. I just, I’m looking forward to being like, we’re in the future already. I just, I just got, The new Mac Mini, it’s the fastest personal computer in the world.
I got fiber to the house. I’ve got devices that are just miraculous. This hard drive that I have used to be an entire room under the cornfields in [00:41:00] Illinois to be able to have that amount of memory on a computer. And the things that come from that, from Moore’s Law continuing, every 18 months you double your, and it’s really processors on a chip, let’s call it computing power, To extrapolate that, that I’ve been around for 60 years.
So let’s see, two to the 30th. That’s an unco hardly comprehensible number as to how much things change when you get that much faster, that much smaller, that much more powerful. It’s just cool to see it playing out. It, I don’t know, when you talk about, Open, like the fact that we’re applying it now, not just to photos, but to movies, which is a quantum leap in complexity, being able to do real time movies and music where it’s not just a single two dimensional image, no matter how well you manipulate it, that it’s actually the flow of how we see the world.
It’s going to be scary because of deep fakes, but it’s going to be exhilarating to say, if I can envision it, I can really have this thing create [00:42:00] things for me. You know what I mean? I can make a Bigfoot that looks better than Bigfoot. You know what I mean? We could prove he existed. I can prove he existed because I was able to say.
I’m, I, and I love, you see something beautiful. It’s who did that? A 14 year old who just didn’t have any shackles on his mind yet. He just said, what would it be like if I could do this? Everything, cool new entertainment, cool new games, cool new ways of voting, cool new ways of doing finances.
I’m having fun still with my investing and keeping up with what I know of the world. And I am, I’m really interesting. The. tuned in. When I tried to do gambit things 20, 25 years ago, I was state of the art with genetic algorithms. Things are, they’re there and beyond whatever I could do back then.
And so I love learning about what people are attempting. And then when they find out that it works, I just, let me in on that, I don’t know that I need to do it, I need to understand what it is enough to be able to make use of it and what’s the subscription [00:43:00] price, I put 2 years of my life and a lot of money into it but now I can get it for 1000, wow, I, if I Learn to harness that.
You know what I mean? It’s like everybody can be a songwriter because they have things that like enable you to do high quality songwriting without you really having that gift. But your gift will get better the more you exercise it. So we’re just compressing down the learning curve for all different kinds of things.
Maybe I’ll become the, Colleen is already the best bow maker in the world. You know what I mean? When she wraps Christmas presents, they’re works of art. I don’t want to like, hey, Pook, I can catch up to you in a week because I watched all these videos that show me all that, but it’s really happening that you can learn all the secrets and tricks of the Leonardo da Vinci’s and the Tesla’s and the Edison’s.
By having it injected into your brain, kinda. It’s really cool. Dundee mnemonic. Yeah, exactly that. Put me in a chair, and now I can build a campfire. I have all the outdoor survival skills and stuff like that. I can have fighting skills. We’ll see how much [00:44:00] that The brain is still relatively uncharted territory, but that’s going to fall.
We’ll soon understand the brain and us at a molecular level so well that we’re going to be able to do customized medicine, all the things I was talking about. Oh my God, it’s cool. It’s just so cool. Don’t be scared. Be excited, everyone. All right. I got to get rolling. Okay. Thanks for giving me 45 minutes.
You have a great, we’ll see you in a week. Yep. Yes. Okay. All right, man. 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.
