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Overview
Our conversation starts with recycles and how people choose NOT to do things to help the environment. Recycling has improved over the years, yet some people willfully still do things like bury trash and burn trash.
Alan recently saw Neal Stephenson, whose new book – Termination Shock – has to do with global warming and how it may affect our world. Fantastic writer with great books.
We also discuss the newest national park at New River Gorge. This also is part of the conversation and how we need to preserve our land, yet people are destroying even these areas.
https://www.nps.gov/neri/index.htm
Al heard Kansas on tour – https://www.kansasband.com/tour-dates/
Stephen saw a Christmas Parade – https://www.wfmj.com/story/45204532/hermitages-holiday-light-parade-to-return-saturday
Stephen Book recommendation is Mark Leslie’s Canadian Werewolf in New York
Trivia of the week:
What was the first home video game console with changeable cartridges?
Bluesman Robert Johnson has a famous story of selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. A movie called Crossroads featured a guitar duel with what 2 people? hint: one’s an actor and one’s a guitarist.
Listen to the podcast for the answer!
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Transcript
[00:00:37] Stephen: Alrighty. Now,
[00:00:39] Alan: good morning, Stephen. How
[00:00:41] Stephen: are you?
[00:00:43] Alan: Um, or about this trashcan and I still have the bat cave. I probably should have changed that to something more.
[00:00:53] Stephen: It’s
[00:00:54] Alan: actually one of those nice generic got it from target might be, I don’t even know. [00:01:00] I don’t tend to get ornamental things. The only thing we’ve done special for crash Kansas in the kitchen, where often you have things in your hands, what are going to the trashcan?
[00:01:09] Alan: So you want the pedal cam so that you’re not having to juggle all that kind of stuff. So there we have one for recycling and one for regular and are able to, that’s probably where we generate the most, you know, waste, not just trash. Empty two liter bottles and paper,
[00:01:29] Alan: even like scraps from breakfast. They’d go down on the plate with me to the kitchen where they go. So anyway,
[00:01:34] Stephen: when I was younger, I had an, this really going back. I had two trash cans. They were metal. Okay. Now everything’s plastic, but one was tall and skinny. It was planted at the apes. And then I had another one that was a little short squat, but it was buck Rogers.
[00:01:49] Stephen: And if I had both of those in okay shape, there were like 80 to 100 bucks a piece.
[00:01:56] Alan: Anything I’ve ever gotten like that, it’s probably had the logo [00:02:00] worn off of it, or it’s a trashcan. I just have, I don’t expect to keep a trash can in good shape. You know, I’ve had any number of plastic. You think plastic is like landfill 10,000 years of things that eventually they get brittle or something like that.
[00:02:13] Alan: And then you get that interesting. How do you throw on a trashcan? They might empty the trash can. So you gotta put it out there MP to know that it’s not full of trash. It’s the actual trash itself. You just
[00:02:23] Stephen: have to get a bigger trash can to put it in
[00:02:26] Alan: and I’ve actually torn them up. I’ve cut them up so that it’s obvious.
[00:02:29] Alan: This is no longer usable item, but
[00:02:32] Stephen: it’s like, those are the Troika stacking dolls. Exactly
[00:02:37] Alan: what I figured. If anything I put away, our trash in Arkansas works is they have a big truck that comes along and they actually have a metal arm that comes out and we have official trash cans for the village that it’s got the lips so that you put the arm out and then it just twins’ it over and dumps it out.
[00:02:50] Alan: And I’m pretty sure they don’t look into cans. Whatever happens to be in the candidate, put it out. So I never put anything like there’s no body parts. [00:03:00] There’s no combustible fuel. That whole list of can’t take it on the airplane. That’s not in my trash can either. There, there must’ve been times where, when I was wearing things out, just like when they heard a big thump, they must won.
[00:03:12] Alan: What’s the
[00:03:15] Stephen: right. We have a coffee, can blind that whenever we get a cough, Canon and we’ll put grease and some scraps and stuff in there, uh, if it’s cold, we don’t wanna go outside and we’ll put that in the trash. So I’m sure that clumps really loud.
[00:03:29] Alan: I think all of I’m looking for like this isn’t just a homemaker’s corner.
[00:03:34] Alan: The geekery part of it is there used to be restrictions on certain things that you couldn’t throw away various different batteries because they shouldn’t go into a landfill. But now that we have this whole mainstreaming of all the trash and they take things out that they don’t want to go into it. So now you are supposed to throw out batteries except for chargeable.
[00:03:51] Alan: Cause those were supposed to take, luckily our liquid is progressive enough community that they have. Take your fluorescent light bulb here, take your batteries here, take your paint here. [00:04:00] Things that even any of it, getting into the ground landfill, it gets into the ground water. Then it can really just despoil your community.
[00:04:08] Alan: So I’ve had to unlearn some of my, what I used to do with various different trash. That’s not ever supposed to be thrown away and had to add to all the recycling guys have numbers on them, right within the triangle. And like liquid has changed where they don’t take one to nine. Now they talk about how they want like one to seven, but not internet.
[00:04:28] Alan: And I’m not even sure what those are, but I never had to check that in. Before I had to do was glance for the recycling. So into the bin, it goes, so I, it’s not so much hassle that I’m not willing to do it because I really am one of those people that this is a good idea. Everyone don’t make it as if in the act of throwing away trash
[00:04:48] Alan: Admission that you don’t care about the world don’t care about your neighbors. Some people really don’t. And I know there’s, some communities have actually put things now where they, if you are an offender that they find trash [00:05:00] that’s traceable to you, that really is hazardous. They will find you for no, you’re not supposed to be sweating away.
[00:05:06] Alan: Paint hazardous materials.
[00:05:11] Stephen: I say one of the things I don’t think it’s clear and well-known enough to everybody. What things are hazardous that you shouldn’t throw away. And I still run into a lot of people. I don’t think that education is quite good enough yet though. I think the kids are starting to get it a little more, but where I live this community.
[00:05:30] Stephen: Yeah. Forget it. We have recycles, but half these people grew up. With that farmer mentality. They grew up with a mindset from their parents and grandparents of a hundred, to 120 years ago. So to a lot of people around here, and I’m not saying everybody, but a lot it’s oh, I have trash. How do I get rid of I’ll just dig a big hole and throw it in the, I got hundreds
[00:05:53] Alan: of acres.
[00:05:54] Alan: If I bury it, it’s not going to get into the atmosphere. And they don’t think about the ground water and stuff. And actually [00:06:00] shades of, since we’re coming up on Thanksgiving, Alice’s restaurant drive down, I 71, pretty often Columbus and Cincinnati and other places. And there’s a place where there’s a little cliff on their property.
[00:06:13] Alan: And at the base of that, cliff is all kinds of trash that they just said, if I throw it over the cliff, I no longer see it. It’s still on my property, but it’s no longer my responsibility somehow. And so it’s that whole thing of, they threw things over where you shouldn’t throw them. It’s not a dumping site.
[00:06:28] Alan: And especially when you start, I, again, I don’t know enough about it, but I’m pretty sure. There’s a hazard to it. If you create something like that’s a rotting car or bicycle, anything, metal, little Billy comes along and gets tetanus off of it because he thought it was something to play out and then cuts himself.
[00:06:46] Alan: There has to be some sense of community. It’s not just one I’m throwing away. What’s going to happen to 10 rains and winds and routings. And that it’s really going to be a bed Springs coming out of a bed that’s fucking evil, [00:07:00] dangerous.
[00:07:01] Stephen: Oh yeah. You know, but again, a lot of the people I live with around here, they have, oh, we’ll just burn it.
[00:07:08] Stephen: It’s trash. We’ll just burn.
[00:07:10] Alan: Exactly. And boy, I know we’ve seen that where you get the set of leaves and I know that’s itself, not a good thing, but a lot of people do because they don’t have a better way to dispose of it. But then you see that they’re actually. You don’t even know old furniture treated wood.
[00:07:25] Alan: I know I’ve read about that one. If you’re like burning up an old deck, cause you got a new deck that old dead wood is loaded with carcinogens of every description and you’re putting it into the atmosphere. Oh,
[00:07:38] Stephen: that’s not that the auction barn next to us, that half burnt down and this guy has been working out for six years, turning it into a house.
[00:07:47] Stephen: Why you would want to use burnt cinderblocks as the base for your house? I don’t know. I’ve seen him throw roofing tile, throw plastic, throw just boxes of whatever. And it’s like black [00:08:00] oily smoke into the air and I’m like, I’m breathing,
[00:08:03] Alan: treated to resist the elements. You know, it’s got old style creosote, new style, all the electric wires.
[00:08:10] Alan: It’s got PCBs, it’s got salads. It’s got all this stuff that like one part in a billion can really to. Oh, man. I’ve said this a number of times in like for eight different reasons. I really want to be shocked about the level of selfishness and not caring about your neighbors as evidenced by the COVID pandemic.
[00:08:30] Alan: But man, all you gotta do is go back to the first time that somebody saw bubbles in a Creek that a whole town makes use of and whoever the person or company that was doing that they just did not. Nope, that’s not me. That has nothing to do. No, it’s obviously your phosphates and you obviously your oil. I can see myself in the water because they fought against being responsible for that.
[00:08:52] Alan: So there’s been those people that really think the ocean is big enough. This Creek carries things away forever. They’ve thought [00:09:00] that I don’t need to care about it. As long as I’ve dumped it, I’ve disposed of it. And now we have the Pacific gyre. That’s a continent sized thing of. Microplastics you’re showing up in fishes.
[00:09:12] Alan: Kids are now showing up with micro-plastic because gave him a tuna fish sandwich. There’s things that can get into the environment. And I always like laugh about this, but it’s tragic if I don’t see it, I can’t see it. It’s so small. It doesn’t exist. That’s going to get into your body has parsed that you can’t see it has affects on you.
[00:09:31] Alan: If you, why did this otherwise huge, healthy moose or bear die? Not because it died of old age because it swallowed something plastic. It clogged it up. The long-term effects of the chemicals that it killed it. And I don’t know how many lessons we have to learn decades worth of lessons that we still are just in denial about cigarette smoke about pollution in the environment, this whole thing about global warming in so many ways, it shouldn’t only have been fought about carbon in the atmosphere.
[00:09:59] Alan: Oh, Ooh. [00:10:00] That’s scary. It should have always been fought in the crying Indian way of showing the results of pollution, the horrible litter, the horrible trash. Septic fields that have been created by mining and metal processing and every other carbon thing. And then say, we just can’t do this. Your children are going to have to deal with, but
[00:10:19] Stephen: the, I get a little harsh, a little black, white cynical, and I understand that, but there’s just too many people that are stupid and uncaring.
[00:10:29] Stephen: Just bottom line. If you want to say that, just how many times do you drive down the road and you see someone throw their cigarette out or worse? They take their McDonald’s bag and toss it out the window. It’s not mine, the crowd and
[00:10:42] Alan: burst and spread it everywhere. Except we’ve talked about this a little bit to some part of how we’re going to fix the world is not harsher and harsher laws.
[00:10:50] Alan: It’s the mimetic war. It’s when you had all those great anti-littering advertisements on TV, because lady bird Johnson started the thing of let’s clean up our highways. [00:11:00] We’d be wanting to drive along these like only ten-year-old highways from the Eisenhower system. And they already look like doping fields.
[00:11:08] Alan: So there was like let’s appeal to civic pride, let’s appeal to some reverence for nature. Let’s like be members of our community. And those means fight the selfishness and the I’m thinking nature that you’re talking about. So that sometimes the only way you get people to do it is out of shame out of embarrassment, that if someone saw me doing this and as we’ve swung the pendulum, that other way I don’t lose, it’s going to come from yelling at them louder.
[00:11:32] Alan: Like when their little kid chimes in with, oh, daddy, smokey, the bear says, don’t throw that out. There has to be something good like that, that can work again.
[00:11:42] Stephen: Uh, you know, we have all these celebrities and sports figures that are influencing people, not just kids, adults, too, through what they do and the headlines and tick talk and things like that.
[00:11:55] Stephen: Hey, some of them more, more of them, some of them do you get like you too, they’ve always [00:12:00] been a big advocate for like human rights and stuff like that. And they push that. Yeah. We talked about bill gates and all the things he’s doing. And so there just needs to be more rather than selfish. Oh, I’m in the spotlight because I bought this $300 million car.
[00:12:15] Alan: Th that’s their way of doing carbon. I bought this car. So I’m going to make up for it over here. You know, I, I don’t know, again, it’s been a medic war. It’s like the first time that somebody said nanny state. And so what you had was a picture of someone waving their finger at you. You needed to say that’s the mommy state, all the love that your parents put into raising you about teaching you to be a decent human being.
[00:12:34] Alan: That’s your mom saying clean up after you. That’s your mom saying don’t litter it, you know, your mom is, there’s no one that loves you more. There’s no one that wants the future world to be better for you than her. And so that’s where that comes from sneeze in public. Your mom said cover your mouth has always said it.
[00:12:51] Alan: And so there’s gotta be a little bit of jujitsu. That’s gonna happen still.
[00:12:57] Stephen: And I know some of those figures can do that. I think we [00:13:00] mentioned a while back a Dolly Parton with what she does. She gives books to the students and invites them to her house and she reads to them and it encourages them to reap very passively, not forcing it down their throats, not yelling at people or yelling at the parents, just, Hey, here’s a book.
[00:13:17] Stephen: The kid reads it’s you it’s that you get on the good path and you keep going. Hopefully
[00:13:23] Alan: of course. Th there’s many proofs that say how you act as much more influence than what you say. And so when your kid sees, you’re reading a book, when your kid sees you are turning your cart to the cart corral, instead of leaving it to where it’s going to bump into, when your kid sees you like separating food into the appropriate bins, so that this is compostable, and this is, do you know what I mean?
[00:13:44] Alan: Then those are the habits of a lifetime. I know that how I keep my kitchen clean is because that’s how my mom and dad did it. That’s how their parents did it. And whenever we are at a restaurant, maybe a fast food restaurant, we’re just on the road. So we stop at a subway. And when you see, like they didn’t [00:14:00] bust their own table, they just got, they were done with their meal and left their trash.
[00:14:04] Alan: And it’s like, how. Did you have such terrible parents that they never said, carry your stuff to the kitchen and pour out. If you’re not going to finish that drink and scrape your plate into the trash, what animals were you raised by that? Now you’re an animal too. I don’t know, man. I know that sounds so condemning, but I don’t know where else do you get that?
[00:14:24] Alan: And maybe when they go to school and for the first time they don’t have to clean up after themselves. The lunch ladies or the table monitor is going to clean up after that. And yet you still go home and have to do it. So it’s not just,
[00:14:36] Stephen: and this is something that I’ve seen with people. Um, and I’m not bad and not condemning, but it’s just the mindset that Gina has felt guilty because she was a single mom for most of her life and had to work long hours and sometimes more than one job.
[00:14:55] Stephen: So she didn’t see her kids as much. So when she did see them, she didn’t want to be [00:15:00] pushing and yelling and arguing and oh, for two hours. And that’s all you think. Right. But, uh, but it went to the part where the kids would make some cereal, leave the box out, not put the dish away. So she would just do it and pick it up because she didn’t want deal with it.
[00:15:15] Stephen: And so they got in the habit of mom will just clean up after me. So now it’s like, if I say, Hey, throw your wrapper away. You just open that. You’ll have to sit. And I know there’s some people like that. Like my mother, I had to fight that with her. She always wanted to do everything. And I’m like, I am quite capable of doing this myself, but you got to reach that self awareness.
[00:15:39] Stephen: Exactly.
[00:15:39] Alan: Honestly, I haven’t had that many. I don’t know why I had a really good roommate in college. My best friends do. And he was also, I had a good mom and raised, but when I’ve been in situations where. Anything that you don’t do for yourself? I still live here. You’re not saying the magic fairies are going to do this.
[00:15:56] Alan: You’re saying, I make you do this. I’m going to leave this behind. And [00:16:00] especially, wow. When you won’t have a kitchen and destroy it, there’s no place on the counter. Put down a plate. It’s not only that, it’s my choice. I have to do this. And I’m going to have any working space here. Same with the bathrooms, any other communal room.
[00:16:13] Alan: And so the first time in college, we had that experience of people who don’t clean up after themselves. Luckily the tide of the house, Mr. Rogers neighborhood with a dozen friends, and there were enough pick up after yourself. People that they weren’t going to cotton to then never pick up after yourself people.
[00:16:30] Alan: So when people like dunno left clothes in the laundry room, they didn’t get like 90 nicely folded and put away they were thrown out on the floor. You know what I mean? If you’re not going to get on the cycles, everybody else, if you’re going to leave. Dishes on the table next to you where you were watching TV.
[00:16:46] Alan: Those dishes didn’t go to the sink. They wanted him, the guy’s bed,
[00:16:52] Alan: weird and petty, but it makes an impression. And they didn’t do that multiple times before he started to tow the line about the house has to [00:17:00] have some discipline in order to have pulled people together.
[00:17:02] Stephen: I’ve done things like that with the kids, my kids grown up and now step kids in that, that not clean, like the cat litter box.
[00:17:11] Stephen: And so pick up, how are you going along?
[00:17:13] Alan: You’re going to let that go. I’m Jack the house. And I know that we have cast it poop in a box in my house. I don’t want to have that be the first impression
[00:17:20] Stephen: I, it, yeah, so I’ll put the litter box on their bed or my thing is they all forget. I’m the one with the wifi password.
[00:17:29] Stephen: I can change that. And any,
[00:17:31] Alan: isn’t that funny that you actually, you have to do that kind of, I often go to philosophical. Prisoner’s dilemma. There’s a, well-known philosophical exercise that people that can either cooperate or defect on each other and that you get a good benefit. If you both cooperate, you can get more.
[00:17:47] Alan: If you defect, if you screw there for your personal view and that, according to that, it’s not a single shot. If you live in a house that every single day people are going to interact again, the person that is the nice one, the mom that cleans up after their [00:18:00] kids all the time, they are obligated based on how this system works.
[00:18:04] Alan: To defect on the other person the next time, because otherwise they’ll never learn. They’re not going to change their behavior. If they find out I can screw you over and continually get ahead and never pay a penalty, why would I as a, a resource or accumulating human being ever do anything except that, right?
[00:18:20] Alan: You have to train them to at least do one at a reasonable person does. Right. You know what I mean? Even if you feel bad about being the bad
[00:18:28] Stephen: guy, there’ve been a couple of times, even things like you got to take a shower, clean the litter box, take the trash out, pick up this blanket and clothes, put away this stuff from the rapper, wipe the counter off and later it’s still not done.
[00:18:42] Stephen: And it’s okay. We have to run out to the store. Oh, can we come? Cause I’m wants McDonald’s no, you are not coming to get McDonald’s. Whoa, those little things. And I
[00:18:51] Alan: don’t, I never having raised kids. I haven’t had the dealer. Well after he was someone to do at 10, a hundred times, and they’re just not doing it.
[00:18:59] Alan: Does it wear [00:19:00] you down? Do you finally give up because Colleen has stories about her son, Tim. He was really like smart, but rebellious from an early age. And so a whole bunch of stuff about not wanting to do the reading from school because he already knew it. And many cases that was true, but then you start, he gets real cunning about just never towing the line about a bunch of stuff.
[00:19:20] Alan: And like what you said, if there’s only going to be a certain amount of interacting time, Gina with her children, when you get home for a long day at work, you just don’t want to be. Now I have to be the disciplinary and all I’m going to do is always be yelling, correcting, et cetera, et cetera. But you’re not doing the world a favor by raising a
[00:19:39] Alan: Sometimes they’re going to have to deal with other people with an employer, deal with roommates, whatever else it might be. So what you said about. I’ve read in parenting books that kids do need boundaries. They actually want that they want, what do you see? Straight out of the animal kingdom? Like little galumphing Cubs are trying everything.
[00:19:58] Alan: And the parent continually has to say, [00:20:00] eat that don’t eat that this is the way you work in pounds. There’s all kinds of behavior that they’re modeling on. And if you don’t do that, you’ve really done them. A disservice you’ve created. I agree how to survive in this environment. Not at all. I hope that I get it back to this is the world they were creating, where you keep seeing stuff on the side of the road, a cart, not pulled away.
[00:20:22] Alan: That I don’t know that, that thing of, Hey, and honestly, one of the, one of the things so Callie and I often point out things that we really love at each other. And any number of times we’ve been, we go for our walks at night and one night we saw a kid like pulling on a tree as if he’s trying to be. And Colleen, her best mom boy said, Hey, what are you doing over there?
[00:20:42] Alan: Oh, with that amount of indignation and mom voice. And he had a couple like two or three girls with him. So he was doing that to be macho. He’s the idiot young bear. That’s going to destroy something in order to show how strong. Apparently the mom doesn’t do that enough that he didn’t think, Hey, I shouldn’t tear a tree out of the [00:21:00] ground, but that made an impression while we stood there and watched them, at least they stopped that one time.
[00:21:05] Alan: So it’s not that you stopped you forever, but at least for that one starfish, we saved it and threw it back into the mix. My
[00:21:13] Stephen: metaphors. And I’ve come to realize this because you don’t remember it. You don’t think about it, but kids’ brains are wired different. They do see the world different and think different.
[00:21:24] Stephen: And sometimes you got to step back and say, are they really doing this? Cause he’s destructive and wants to destroy? Or is it just, oh my gosh, I’m nervous around these girls, but Hey, I get that type of thing because I just had an incident this morning. It was 25 degrees out there. It was freezing. It was very cold.
[00:21:41] Stephen: And Jason was going to get water to feed hunter. But the tap outside was frozen, but solids, I would bring it in and get the water inside. Not a problem. He’s digging through the cover and I’m like, what are you doing? So I’m looking for a wrench. I’m going to yank that. I said, no, it’s so cold. It’s just going to break.
[00:21:58] Stephen: And then we’re going to have problems. [00:22:00] Oh, if he would have done that, he wasn’t doing it to be mean. He just wasn’t thinking the suit the way I would or what I would think he should do. But in his mind he was doing the right thing because I’ve shown him other things. Don’t just like, his big thing is, oh, that’s getting worn out and old, throw it away.
[00:22:19] Stephen: Unlike it’s not that old. So different generation, different thinking. He’s the youngest. I can see where he was thinking, this is it. It’s stuck. Something’s got to, but, and I’m not saying kid was like that, but occasionally I do step back sometimes just doesn’t work. It’s like, what the hell are you doing?
[00:22:40] Alan: It’s a lot of this is not only about raising kids. It’s just, how do you live in your. I’ve been in charge of any number of teams and groups over the course of time. And you have to make a decision and sometimes you do it by taking a poll. What is everybody thinking? You let a vote. Oftentimes, what I would say is, so what are the principles we’re operating out of here?
[00:22:59] Alan: And you try to [00:23:00] crystallize, it’s a matter of like three. Perfect. And now if you will, what’s the cost of it and how good you have to get, what does it cost to go from? Excellent. To perfect. And what’s the urgency of it. And that you can put a price tag on all those things and being able to get that kind of mentality of another way is Iraqi us.
[00:23:17] Alan: It’s a matter of increased revenue, avoided cost, improved service, and you’ll look at those things and then you’ll let that guide you towards, I put a number on each of these things, cause that’s how you can compare. And you’ve made a decision and it’s not only that you’ve made a decision it’s that when someone asks you how you made the decision, you can describe it.
[00:23:33] Alan: And that when you, if something goes really right or really wrong, you can do more of the right. Or if it goes wrong, you can say, so I made the best decisions that I could at the time, but then new information came out. And so that’s why we don’t have to play the blame game of going back and saying what a stupid thing.
[00:23:47] Alan: No, we did the best we could, but then you build in a feedback loop that lets you monitor how well it did. I can’t tell you, every out of every team, there’s at least 20% that are just impatient. They don’t want to go, what principals are we operating out of? What’s [00:24:00] the methodology that we could use here?
[00:24:01] Alan: Is there a heuristic? Can we learn from experience all those kinds of things? They just they’re perpetually winging it, or no matter what you can say, you can new look at this and this and those three yeses lead to this big. Yes. And they get to the big guests and say, I don’t want to do that. So there was no choice.
[00:24:16] Alan: If what you’re saying is that this matters and this matters, and it leads to this kind of invariably, give me something, that’s going to say how you refute it, not just your rebelliousness, your stubbornness, or for that matter. You must have had this in your teams. So we made a decision and we’re going forward.
[00:24:34] Alan: And every team meeting after that, for months, they want to revisit that issue. Do you have any new information? Do you have any new way of looking at the factors that we use to make that decision? And if you don’t, then we’re not even going to open the discussion. There’s nothing to redo here except. I know you don’t liking it is nothing.
[00:24:53] Alan: It’s only an opinion. It’s not even an alerted depending on everybody else. You know what I mean? But having said that living a [00:25:00] principled life makes you sound like, are you a churchy guy? Are you a, are you as a stick in the mud that everything has to happen? It’s weird to just say, don’t choose thoughtful.
[00:25:09] Alan: Don’t you want to have. And honestly, this has been how weird this has been to find this in Mensa, where I really thought that everybody was rational. And if you put together a spreadsheet of here’s the factors that matter, and here’s the weights and here’s the, how much each of those things is true. In brief, you’re going to pick a hotel as to where you might want to have a meeting.
[00:25:28] Alan: And in most cases, it’s what will matter that they have reasonable room rates. Then you have the meeting space that you need, and that has reasonable parking lot. And there are certain factors. Those are most important. And it might matter that you have a swimming pool or a workout thing, or a nice lobby, but in the overall I would trade 10 nice lobbies for having a good room rate for 300 guests.
[00:25:47] Alan: And so that’s what you do. And yet I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve made, where all that matters. If somebody in the parking lot. Well, they’ve got some trauma that says they were once a cost in a parking lot and they’re scared of the dark. So we can look into that, but
[00:25:59] Stephen: that’s [00:26:00] not how we’re going to make a decision.
[00:26:01] Stephen: The ones where they say this one gives us a free cookie. So let’s go with it. Even though it’s $50, there’s more
[00:26:07] Alan: magnified that tiny little factor into something. And it’s funny even to get to that methodology, I’ve had to actually have this huge conversation and not in Chicago so much, but there’s an event that takes place all was on the 4th of July.
[00:26:22] Alan: Okay. We have a really good offer from another hotel that says we can get room rates half. If we do it on July 10th instead of July 4th. And that’s that really, that sacrosanct thing of it’s always on the 4th of July that they want to make a litmus test. It’s there. It’s not that it helps to carve off exclude a whole bunch of hotels.
[00:26:40] Alan: If someone came to you with a deal that softened all these really important factors, but said, except it’s not the fourth, that a lot of people, some people will fight tooth and nail that none of these things can matter as much as that. And others will just do that little chin scratch and say, wow, that’s really persuasive.
[00:26:57] Alan: And I got to tell you, I hate this. Any number of [00:27:00] people that really fought for the 4th of July being safe. When they find out that it’s something other, another factor that really matters to them. Let’s have it at Disney world, but they don’t have July. They have August. Oh, I guess we’re doing it in August now.
[00:27:16] Stephen: I can’t be
[00:27:16] Alan: anything except
[00:27:17] Stephen: this. Oh, it’s weird. Because the way my brain works, a lot of times, things are just completely logical. That’s if it makes sense, because that’s the logical way, whether it’s right wrong or the best, or I like, or whatever, it’s just, what’s logical. And how many times at companies I’ve worked with, people I’ve worked with is okay, wait, why are we doing it this way?
[00:27:41] Stephen: That’s the way we’ve always done it. Oh, okay. But that doesn’t make sense. There’s a better way to do it. No, this is how we’ve always done. But this is
[00:27:48] Alan: better. And it was interesting is there’s of course generational transition happening in any number of organizations, not every company, not just men. And I really liked the youthful spirit of we do it a [00:28:00] new way.
[00:28:00] Alan: There’s now it’s, everyone’s got a phone, so we don’t have to worry about, do we have a website or whatever else it might be. But having said that there’s any number of times that they just embraced the new without realizing what they’re giving up or why they might not be a better way. It’s just their way.
[00:28:13] Alan: Cause that’s the one that they know. And then even opening that discussion. It’s not really about the thing. The decision being made. It’s. Generational conflict. You’re only doing that because you are indeed. It’s always been done this way. Nope. I’m saying that I want to be able to explain how do we stop doing something that has worked successfully for 30 years to shift to this?
[00:28:32] Alan: It shouldn’t just be, we rolled the dice and did know there should be some persuasive thing that said, and the things are, we do want to appear modern. You know what I mean? Things on paper that you can do on a web, because now everyone has a smartphone. Everybody can get to a website, whatever else. But having said that in order to make that, if you really are trying to be inclusive and you can’t count on everyone having a smartphone, or you can make smart phones available to the guests that don’t have one, or are you going to see the people that really prefer paper, that there’s not going to be any [00:29:00] paper available?
[00:29:01] Alan: And I know some of those are really petty examples, but in other cases, it’s just, Hey, it’s an investment time. Now we’ve got a new way. What was the way to figure out someone’s credit score? These big companies experienced, they had ways of tracking all of your financial history and they came up through an arcane algorithm with your credit.
[00:29:20] Alan: And you had to go to the Oracle and say, I’ve cleaned that up. I paid that off. I don’t have it. And then you’d get a better score. Now there’s new ones that are saying based on that same data, but treating it in AI way that doesn’t have any preconceptions about anybody that has debt is a bad person.
[00:29:34] Alan: Cause that’s not the way the Puritans did it. You know what I mean? I think assumptions built into some of these algorithms. They get revealed over the course of time when I was trying to get a house and was told you have to pay off this loan in order to really be in the top category for getting a good mortgage.
[00:29:50] Alan: You mean, I got to pay off this half a percent student loan in order to get into an 8% mortgage. What sense does that make? Oh, your honor. Algorithm having said all that, it really is [00:30:00] interesting to just talk to people about how they think most people they’re stimulus default engines. They take something in and they do it because I that’s the first way I did it, or that’s why my parents taught me to do whatever I learned it in school.
[00:30:13] Alan: Or it’s just a matter of, not a rationality, but a matter of fear or of pursuit of. And when you really ask people to think about how they think that’s its own battle, to be able to get people to say, tell me how you made that decision just popped into my head. It just for my mom, dad always did. Right, but your mom and dad grew up in a time.
[00:30:33] Alan: You know what I’m trying to
[00:30:34] Stephen: say. It all ties back around to the earlier discussion with recycled. My parents didn’t recycle, I don’t, my parents threw trash out the window. I do. So they buried things. They burned things. So
[00:30:46] Alan: you had parents that actually changed with the times that gives you that thing.
[00:30:52] Alan: They did actually say
[00:30:53] Stephen: it goes back to our discussion, uh, about that study about openness open the new ideas and thoughts. [00:31:00]
[00:31:00] Alan: That’s right. That’s right. And in fact, honestly, you’re often the one that does the very smart segues, but I’ll try to jump in.
[00:31:08] Stephen: I don’t know about, you’re very smart.
[00:31:13] Alan: I heard Neal Stephenson
[00:31:13] Stephen: speak,
[00:31:15] Alan: ask you about that.
[00:31:17] Alan: To me, his claim to fame in the world of science fiction and speculative fiction is he’s really smart at taking what do we have now? And what’s possibilities for the future and tweaking it a little bit to make it interesting a little bit maybe out of what people haven’t thought of before, but then following that to its logical conclusion, sometimes logical extremes.
[00:31:37] Alan: And he talked about that last night. The new book is called termination shock. It’s about global warming, but it isn’t about us now and fighting it and the situation we’re in it’s efforts already. When he, his first part of his talk, he did a talk and then some Q and a, and the first part of the talk was a whole bunch of historic things about [00:32:00] when we’ve had similar conditions apply that a volcano went off and it puts so much ejected into the atmosphere that we had the year with no summer, no sun was so occluded by Ash in the atmosphere that crops failed in Europe, because something went off in Pinatubo or something like that, or a year where three volcanoes went off and one of them was an Iceland quite close.
[00:32:21] Alan: And how much of an impact it had. And back then, we didn’t have instantaneous. Wow. Because of Krakatoa, this is going to happen. It was much more people just like when’s the sun going to come out. God’s mad
[00:32:34] Stephen: with anger. Exactly. And.
[00:32:38] Alan: When he talks about the kinds of things we’re going to be seeing happening in the world because of global warming, we are going to have the things we’re already seeing in terms of more severe weather, both droughts and floods, the changes in the weather patterns.
[00:32:50] Alan: So that what if we do get the north Atlantic card that has warmed Europe for hundreds, if not a thousand years, what if that shifts and for its [00:33:00] northerly latitude, Europe should not be as viable for agriculture as warm and it seasons as it is. And that’s because of the north Atlantic current, what if that stops?
[00:33:08] Alan: And he just got all kinds of big and small. The perfect exertion conditions exist now for fire ants to be much more of a problem than they currently are, because they’re going to get driven out of where they currently are. They’re going to go to elevation, to escape, floodwater where the people put their houses in Taleo elevation.
[00:33:25] Alan: How do you deal with a thousand fire ant cases in the hospitals? Two or three, just all those and totally in a way that, like I care about the people that are going through this, I care about this is how will you deal with something that seems like nature gone wild, but it’s not nature gone. Wild. We have leverages, we’ll have levers if we want to use them to try to get back to this, but it’s also, but it’s going to take a hundred years to do it.
[00:33:48] Alan: And people care about the next quarter, not the next a hundred years. And so what a horrible, difficult problem we’ve already confronted ourselves with. And so the reason for saying all of that is [00:34:00] he’s very thoughtful in his books. And it’s funny, the introduction to him was wonderfully flattering because it’s a lot of proof.
[00:34:07] Alan: He, how, what a polymath, he is so much evidenced in how many big topics he’s tackled the Victorian era. And what would have happened if a technology shifted slightly about how cryptography is going to affect things about crypto coins or about different non international. It is non-country currencies.
[00:34:26] Alan: This latest one about global warming. And so I, one of the things I asked him was I had a chance to ask her the question, are you a big guy? If we’re in the red shirt natal, it was. So you really might be like both the next guy after a Tesla that knew a lot of how the world works. Nowadays, people silo and it’s over specialized, but he’s really this polymath just the day before I went to see this talk, there was a little article in the week magazine this week magazine of, Hey, give us your reading.
[00:34:55] Alan: And Neil Stevenson was the author. And instead of it being honestly the latest [00:35:00] pop confection of, Hey, here’s how to organize your closet, or here’s a nice story about two girls getting it was here’s this philosopher, here’s this psychologist here’s heavyweight works and his books, if you’ve ever seen them, they’re heavyweight, they’re told for a subject and they really, they don’t stint on vocabulary.
[00:35:19] Alan: They don’t stand stent, descriptive stuff, and not, as they say florid pros, they’re just really, wow. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to look at this Juul thing, all the facets. And so what I was all this is getting to, he mentioned a very cool project that he had involved, been involved with called the constitution of not.
[00:35:38] Alan: Is that correct? I think it is. And it’s at maybe open books.org. There’s a book that’s like an independent bookstore type place. And they said, what are the things that you’re reading to be take all the benefit of the past, stay current with now, there’s been great, any number of books that were the great books of the world.
[00:35:55] Alan: And if you’re trying to be a alerted person, you want to read from Plato and [00:36:00] Socrates, you want to read and Kafka, you want to read and you want to read the invisible hand by Adam Smith. And this is their current version of it. And he’s very cool because he drops into, I got involved with this because my friend Mike Cochran gave me a call and him and an apple.
[00:36:14] Alan: And it’s like, Jimmy, Godwin’s like from Godwin’s law, God, when you know, Revere and on the internet with any of the questions that, so it’s the fact that he travels in these cool circles and has wonderful, smart people that he associates with. And they’re continually pinging, bouncing sharing information and trying to like inform each other, impressing each other.
[00:36:34] Alan: I’ve I haven’t, I can’t believe I didn’t go out before we even had our podcast this morning to go to the constitution of knowledge. And like, that should be my reading list for the rest of mine. One of the things that I really should read to be this is what framed modern psychology, modern economics theory.
[00:36:49] Alan: And if anything, do you understand the past? When they talk about the first book that described the elements, how did we get to the periodic table, then delay and so forth that I find it very cool to go [00:37:00] back and read the original because you have to put it into that wonderful context of, they can know how everything worked.
[00:37:05] Alan: They can know that pitch blend had uranium that was radioactive, and it has these benefits, but also these harms, there’s all kinds of stuff that we have over the course of time discovered. How does mercury work? How do antibiotics work? And when you read before that, there still was all kinds of, it’s a miracle.
[00:37:22] Alan: It’s the work of that? You know what I mean? That’s it. Fuck, whatever else it might be. It’s not only about learning the knowledge, it’s about learning how to learn. It’s about being able to put yourself into the mind. They have a great reference to Newton and likeness where like very much contemporaries were born within two years of each other.
[00:37:43] Alan: And the one invented the calculus and they really had best scientific breakthroughs, but they hated each other. And so is that a good thing in terms of whether they’re very competitive and they criticize each other’s work, but it’s also, if they would’ve collaborated, could we have gotten even faster to cool things?
[00:37:58] Alan: And I love [00:38:00] that you have that. I love when I see those timelines and wow. At the same time that the in Europe, not only, but the Chinese were inventing gunpowder at the same time that these guys were inventing seed weapons, but they didn’t both have them. And so it makes for interesting speculative fiction, but it just also helps to say, well, there really were a whole bunch of different civilizations that.
[00:38:20] Alan: Deep languages, deep religions, deep economic systems and so forth. And so this, the white male European perspective is very important because we really have changed the world, our colonization, and our continued progress compared to a civilization that didn’t have a written language. And so couldn’t store information and spread information widely.
[00:38:42] Alan: That’s why one is not the right term, but it sure is why when there were differences between, so your information only gets done because they tell the stories around a campfire or sing a song about it, as opposed to movable type Gutenberg, they win. Now that information can be everywhere and it might be, there’s going to be some restrictions because the [00:39:00] church doesn’t want it all to get out, or because there’s alerted elite that doesn’t want us to get up to the little man or whatever else.
[00:39:04] Alan: We still have that the fact that this thing should have made the entire world better. Nope. Immediately there are. Here’s the reasons why it won’t. Here’s the reason why still. But he really seems to have that wonderful kind of brain that’s able to put himself back into those times or move himself into the future.
[00:39:24] Alan: And like I said, extrapolate just guessed, but make it so that it’s a believable guest. And then you get to decide, well, I like the utopian future. I don’t like the dystopian. So straight out of global business network, which I think I’ve spoken of before they did scenario planning. They didn’t say, this is the way the world’s going to go.
[00:39:42] Alan: Here’s the 10 ways the world could go. And you want to pick the ones you like and avoid the ones you don’t. And then what are the leverage points? What are the inflection points in history that you want to make sure a good government gets elected here? This invention gets circulated widely. This one gets suppressed.
[00:39:57] Alan: It’s very cool to play golf a little bit [00:40:00] and say, when we’ve made those choices, what have we made them good? That is soundly. The world got better. We had life expectancy get better because of public health and because of antibacterial, antibacterials and stuff like that. Not because we invented a new. Um, that’s what a terrible direct comparison, but maybe it’s done things for the solace of people and maybe for the control of people, but perpetually the arc of civilization that we’ve expanded to be who we are today.
[00:40:28] Alan: Able to go to another planet, maybe soon able to like increase crop yields by a hundred fold compared to subsistence farming. That didn’t come because you guessed because you prayed because you stumbled through it. The scientific method of experimentation and improvement in capture. I don’t want to give up on that.
[00:40:46] Alan: That’s gotten us a real good distance in all kinds of important ways and refuting it now to say no matter what you tell me about vaccines, I just choose to not believe it. That’s almost like you just said the enlightenment that happened that got us out of the [00:41:00] dark ages that made it, that human beings.
[00:41:02] Alan: We’re all human beings worthy of life and equality and so forth. You, you want to abandon it. Make
[00:41:09] Stephen: a case. Why exactly. Now some of the people we were talking about earlier that throw things out, windows don’t recycle, they should read these books, but they don’t, that’s the problem and Stevenson he’s in that same group as like Michael Crighton taking some notes.
[00:41:29] Stephen: Yeah. Or even a hairy turtle dove. He does it more with like history and changing what could have happened.
[00:41:36] Alan: You’re exactly right. I love speculative fiction. That really doesn’t just say what if a cell phones were twice as fast, it’s more huge shifts in what if this big battle went the other way? And the world shifted from the Nazis
[00:41:48] Stephen: one w what if a red Dawn really happened?
[00:41:52] Stephen: What would we really do? I
[00:41:56] Alan: can drop a copy of that book was given out as part of your ticket to this thing. So I’ve just started to [00:42:00] read it and already it’s high. I want to know what happens. Any book that immediately, it’s not just. What, what makes for a quality read characters, you care about situations.
[00:42:08] Alan: You want to see how they unravel a little bit of a mystery that it’s right in my sweet spot of, I care about how the world’s going to go. You know what I mean? Some of the early stuff in the book is about feral hogs. I have no experience with feral hogs cause I lived in the suburbs all my life. And yet I get how species invasiveness.
[00:42:26] Alan: I’ve seen that we have to worry about Asian carpet, Illinois. We have to worry about when the cicadas were turning every 17 years, that’s a newsworthy phenomenon, but that’s not the same as locust, just devoured a third of the crop in Africa. And why did, how did the, how in the world did that happen? And they go into that.
[00:42:43] Alan: So we’ll, let’s avoid that. How about if we find ways to stop malaria, stop locus from sweeping through. And it’s not only a matter of, I don’t know, spray more DDT on them. It’s can we have a little thing that’s going to make it, that it turns all the males sterile. You know what I mean? It’s school the way that, [00:43:00] so some speculation that the way that this.
[00:43:04] Alan: The big thing that happens in this book is that, um, of a billionaire, a plucky billionaire says, I, we can’t wait all the discussions that are happening with the various different players that have multiple agendas that are not having to do with the continuation of our society. You must’ve seen the cartoons that said, sure, we now all live in.
[00:43:23] Alan: Hovels like caveman, but for a long time, we created shareholder value. Those last few beautiful years, he talks about this guy just said all solve it. He shoots a whole bunch of sulfates into the atmosphere, which do indeed cause global cooling, but also come down as acid rain. So they head off the heating of our planet based on, uh, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, but with unexpected consequences, because it’s not evenly distributed, some places get worst floods or worst routes.
[00:43:53] Alan: And the fact that it’s cavalier it, didn’t go through the committee process and the government. He had the [00:44:00] money to be able to act as if he’s his own independent nation. And so then there’s, I have read this far, are there going to be huge protests? Is he going to be like condemned? Is he going to, what’s going to happen with him, but there’s also people that they saved the world because of that.
[00:44:11] Alan: I’m the one that grabbed the, when the library at Alexandria was being destroyed, someone grabs some stuff so that we have some history that was now maintain them. And at the time that was a Heredic action. That was totally rebellion. And yet over the course of time, we’ve seen people that, wow, I think I got a cure for smallpox and no one believes me.
[00:44:31] Alan: I’m going to inject myself. Then maybe I’m going to create a hap a horrible. And yet, if it works, I just saved the world. That’s a pretty standard star Trek or
[00:44:42] Stephen: mission impossible to
[00:44:45] Alan: not only the law of the bravery, but the laws of unexpected consequences and all that kind of stuff. And so he’s using kind of one of those fictional tropes.
[00:44:53] Alan: So someone took a stand and maybe they were right and maybe they were wrong. So will,
[00:44:59] Stephen: uh, [00:45:00] Steven said is definitely one of the authors. I enjoy reading, but I didn’t know he had a new one out. So there’s our, we’ll put a link. There’s our big book
[00:45:08] Alan: recommendations. And it’s funny as you go back to look at the rest of his books, he didn’t, I should have mentioned this earlier.
[00:45:15] Alan: He had snow crash, Zodiac, the diamond age, the Baroque cycle, and cryptonomic on all kinds of, I’m not sure which ones I’m missing. It was one of the earliest ones in snow crash is where he first used the term of the metaverse. And gosh, what did F B just do? Facebook just became metal platforms. And I hope that he’s getting.
[00:45:35] Alan: Chunky residual that, how am I being so foolish who created the term cyberspace,
[00:45:41] Stephen: give her
[00:45:43] Alan: William Gibson. Exactly. And so sometimes the contribution to the world, isn’t I own that term now, but it’s more, well, he created an entire new genre of fiction to imagine, uh, a real space in a virtual place and that people live in it and all that kind of stuff.
[00:45:59] Alan: So that’ll be one [00:46:00] of his big contributions. I, that he created the metaverse. So how do you deal with when people are starting to have augmented reality and virtual reality and that they actually prefer it to the world and that places create those things. So I’m, I’m curious to see what’s going to happen with Facebook, really putting some.
[00:46:16] Alan: Money and muscle behind the idea of the metaverse. Now we’re going to start seeing everybody having VR,
[00:46:21] Stephen: they own Oculus. So they’re creating virtual worlds and stuff. Yeah. You’ll get into the cyber space world and they’ll have advertising. It’ll look just like we’ve seen in
[00:46:34] Alan: the runner, just like bebop.
[00:46:37] Alan: Exactly. Because you started watching by the way. And I find very fun. And in a terrible kind of disc topic way. Here’s the, what’s the biggest satellite floating around the planet, but casino
[00:46:48] Stephen: and watch the manga series, the cartoons know, oh,
[00:46:52] Alan: watching the live action movie, never having done that. And I’m feeling a little bit wish you’d get the backstory and I should see how they [00:47:00] translate it.
[00:47:00] Alan: But some part of me will just want to say, I don’t want to do all the work of that. I just want to dive into the new series and see what they’re doing. I’ll go back and reread that. Reread, read the manga and say, oh, they left out some good stuff. Or, oh, they really did prim a whole bunch of crap that is better in the new Siri.
[00:47:14] Alan: You know
[00:47:14] Stephen: what I mean? So I like it. I always like cowboy bebop. It was one of my favorites because it had that actioning war jazzy feel, but it was like a space opera. So it was Firefly. That’s a great way to put a space opera.
[00:47:28] Alan: You know what I mean? That they. Rebels that can’t handle life here on earth.
[00:47:33] Alan: Where would they go if they, if it comes available, we’ll go out to the stars. I am my own man out here. I got to deal with a certain amount of authority, but if I find an asteroid that is full of Smurf light and I can sell it for a lot, I just, there’s a certain kind that our explorers Pike’s peak Carson people.
[00:47:49] Alan: It wants to
[00:47:50] Stephen: map new territory. And yeah, I haven’t watched the movie or a series yet, but I like the old cartoon animated. Okay. So there’s Neal [00:48:00] Stephenson. How is Kansas? Oh man. It was so,
[00:48:06] Alan: and. So Colleen and I took a little road trip this weekend. I, Marianne Ohio was about three hours away and that’s, what’s all the way at the bottom state, bottom of Ohio on the Ohio river.
[00:48:18] Alan: It was once the capital back when we were first colonizing, the people’s bank theater is a beautiful place that has been revived and made beautiful at a great venue again. And so we’ve seen a couple of shows there over the course of time that it’s worth the drive. We make it into that weekend. Let’s go down there.
[00:48:34] Alan: Let’s go on a pedal Wheeler on the Ohio or river. Let’s go hiking, et cetera, Kansas. We’re in such great form. There’s only two of the original members left rich Williams, the guitarist and the drummer, but the people that have got to replace them are virtual solo musicians. And you can’t, I can’t believe it.
[00:48:53] Alan: Steve Walsh, his voice is very Kansas. It’s very much what I think of when I think of Kansas. And yet Ronnie plant, I believe is the guy’s name. [00:49:00] He really fills the shoes very well. Very. Captures the emotion and the, you gotta be able to sing both three personal and very like orchestra, big songs. When you’re doing Icarus, born on the wings of steel or the wall, or carry on wayward son, you kind of have the chops to be able to do this Anthem, this perfect, powerful song.
[00:49:20] Alan: And so we heard they did the tour is like it was the 40th anniversary. I don’t think it’s the 43rd because they continue to tour with no return, which is a great Kansas album. It’s got a portrait and he knew and hopelessly human and nobody home and Dustin, the wind. And at that point of no return, a lot of those got great airplay and they really did them just the way you wanted to hear them live.
[00:49:44] Alan: That it’s like the album, but it’s got extra energy it’s got, and it wasn’t even like, Hey, now it’s time for the jazz interlude, but they really didn’t just go through the motions. They really seem to be themselves enjoying it. Kansas music is intricate enough that you really have to have a tight band that can do [00:50:00] things in 13 and eight.
[00:50:01] Alan: Things that have multiple teachings is in the course of the song. And of course I was playing every airdrome air guitar, air keyboard. We were in the second to last row. Cause we got tickets just to get into the place. But I also got things are right at the top of one of the volumes, one of the openings that the Sheriff’s go down.
[00:50:17] Alan: So nobody in front of me to stand up, to get in front of Colleen who was petite railing that I could play. And then people behind me after the show was over, we all have watched you because you were so you knew, I know all their music love they’re out every, and, and not only did they play the hits, they played all kinds of wonderful obscurities and new stuff.
[00:50:37] Alan: And so I was able to sing the lonely wind with the very first album we were masked up. So it wasn’t like, oh, stop singing louder than the band. Now don’t be a Dick. I just, it went, they played two hours and 20 minutes without a break. So some of the band is be in their late sixties to when I think I got, they got a couple of years on me.
[00:50:55] Alan: It was everything I wanted it to be. It wasn’t just going through the motions. It wasn’t a [00:51:00] nostalgia tour with, oh, and they got one of the original roadies and he bought the name such at the height of their powers. I’m just so I was
[00:51:09] Stephen: on air walking out of that show. I mentioned me and a buddy went and saw a Sebastian Bach from skid row.
[00:51:15] Stephen: And we were talking a bit about how rock and roll isn’t dangerous anymore. And that kind of is it right there? You don’t have that energy when it’s one person with some dancers and canned music. You miss the energy.
[00:51:30] Alan: I agree, man. When they like how many of their songs really, they have structure to them.
[00:51:34] Alan: They start out there a little bit, maybe power ballad. As he start off slow, they build a build, they get to a crescendo. They actually have a little code at the end. If there’s just like, you’re just taken on a journey that it,
no,
[00:51:45] Stephen: journey’s a different band. It’s taking a journey to Kansas. It’s it’s that classic rock.
[00:51:52] Stephen: It’s the, almost a theater rock performance, rock, opera stuff. They have that the chops, but the [00:52:00] sticks, same
[00:52:02] Alan: type of thing. It was very good. Like stage presence. They have, they have great lighting. They had great backdrop where they had the little seed dragons as part of the heads, no return. They did very cool things with highlighting the right people and it being in sync with what they were doing, but not slavery cells so that he had to go into robot mode in order to keep us up.
[00:52:21] Alan: It was honestly, I was really happy. And when you see, and the crowd was really pretty good, a little bit too few, everybody jamming. Like I was somebody watching their cell phones, not recording it, checking their email. What fucking sure you asked, you can tune this beautiful.
[00:52:39] Stephen: Did you pay to
[00:52:40] Alan: see this?
[00:52:41] Alan: Honestly, some people left early it’s because they haven’t gotten to the point of no return left. And how much of a Fairweather fan or that you didn’t recognize it? Cruise born on wings of steel song for America? I can’t believe, I didn’t mention that as the first song that I like. If you’ve ever heard song for America, it is beautiful [00:53:00] braking.
[00:53:00] Alan: It is epically good. It was the first time I ever saw Kansas live. It’s the first song they played. I saw them at the rant, Hearst ice arena. It like 75 or 76. So I’ve got 45 years of Kansas under my belt. And they just, that whole, it just is immediately the riff that draws you in. And then it just builds and every instrument comes in.
[00:53:21] Alan: It just there’s more and more music and power. And so when they did that and it, the fact that people can still tune that out, I’m glad that it was. I dunno, one of them was right in front of Colleen and we actually moved her one seat over so that she wouldn’t have to deal with it. And somehow I have that ability to just compartmentalize and fucking blinders on, because I can’t believe you’re checking your email and I’m so determined to enjoy the show that I’m just not going to let her spoil the show for me.
[00:53:49] Alan: You know what I
[00:53:49] Stephen: mean?
[00:53:52] Alan: One of the things that was cool was, and then when you get out and you’re full of energy and like downtown Marietta has fun things, but everything’s closed. But I had discovered because I always do this [00:54:00] what’s going on in Marietta. Oh, the tree lighting ceremony was that same night.
[00:54:03] Alan: We were past that because we got out at 11 o’clock or something like that. But then we walk a couple blocks over and like good. I wanted a block in the nice cold crisp air. And then here’s this beautiful bunch of lights and here’s the beautiful tree and stuff. And it just was, this is small town, America.
[00:54:18] Alan: This is a big thing for them, whoever wasn’t there, Kansas, they were probably here and wait while we were there. Tonya’s country kitchen. We hate at the busy bee for our breakfast. You only went to a place called a boathouse barbecue. And so it wasn’t just, let’s go to IHOP. You make a point of finding the places that this place has been open for 45 years now, it’s second generation.
[00:54:41] Alan: How are you doing when you come in and stuff like that? We really had a nice time safe enough so that we got in there sat far enough away from people that you could take your mask off and not be well, I really enjoyed that concert and that’s what
[00:54:52] Stephen: I died from and all that
[00:54:56] Alan: kind of stuff. So we were still smart about that.
[00:54:58] Alan: The next day we [00:55:00] went down to Tamarack, which is a very cool marketplace in West Virginia that has all kinds of arts and crafts and so many things. It’s the perfect place to go to before Christmas, because all the people that you don’t know what you want to get, you’re going to
[00:55:12] Stephen: find somebody.
[00:55:15] Alan: So we found.
[00:55:17] Alan: The little fun things. We found one thing, a wonderful thing. We found a little stepstool that gets up a little bench with a little handle that comes up so that we can have it in the kitchen tucked under the kitchen table. But when Colleen needs to reach the higher things in cabinets, it’s not just, oh, she can get to them now.
[00:55:33] Alan: And we’ve talked about having something like that, but what fits our kitchen will not get in the way while it’s useful. This was the perfect combination. It was just, it’s nice. When you serendipitously find something that’s going to fill a need you’ve had for a long time and it’s actually pretty. And it’s, I dunno.
[00:55:48] Alan: So we had real good success with that and I’m going on now, but we went to the new river Gorge, which is really cool because it’s the newest national park. The 63rd, if I remember correct. Wow. And once, once you’re [00:56:00] down there, it’s probably another two hours and 15 to get to Tamarack, but then it’s only 20 minutes, 20 minutes to the new river Gorge.
[00:56:07] Alan: And of course it’s West Virginia. So getting there is. It’s 20 miles. It’s 20 minutes. And so we ended up just going first. We let our GPS give it a try, but our garment, it really is okay. I’m going to get you to the fastest way. And all of a sudden, the fastest way turned into like late in the half roads.
[00:56:25] Alan: And there’s not a fence. That’s not going to frickin cliff. And we, I think we need to not go to where the hiking that we wanted to do, because this is really I’m white knuckled about this and come to hate even more than I do. So we got back out to a main road and we went up to the new river Gorge bridge, which is the largest arch bridge in the Western hemisphere.
[00:56:47] Alan: So once you get there and you get to go to the visitor center, and then there’s a whole bunch of stairs, 178 steps as the sign said to take it out of the observation platform that there’s this architectural Marvel, that it turned a 45. [00:57:00] Switchback road, et cetera, et cetera, to get from one side of this valley and up to the other 45 second drive across this beautiful bridge.
[00:57:07] Alan: And so we got some walking in, we got some hiking and walking and that kind of stuff. And then I think I mentioned before we were going to go to Oglebay, which is where they have a real cool, but having gone, what we did to go down to Tamarack and get to here, we then looked at okay, the most direct route is to take like either somebody six years, it must be 79 up and it’s three hours and 45 minutes away and it’s already four something.
[00:57:30] Alan: And so we’re going to get up there and eat. We want to get up there because it’ll be dark by then. But if the roads are any kind of stuff, like what we had to deal with, I just didn’t want to, out of those four hours to be white knuckle driving, like rain slash snow and driving at night in that. And so I just, Colleen, I think that I would be okay with kind of going back.
[00:57:54] Alan: Fell on me in a hug because she was so much not looking forward to this was orange literary, [00:58:00] and we’re good to go.
[00:58:02] Stephen: I’ve been there done that, but I have a question, honestly, I didn’t think and realize that they still are making national parks. So how do they go about that?
[00:58:16] Alan: The new river gorgeous. Very interesting, because it really is something worthy of preservation.
[00:58:19] Alan: It has geographic logical and historic significance. Like how West Virginia came to be a mining power, how it went, all the railroads, all there’s all kinds of stuff that goes through West Virginia,
[00:58:31] Stephen: whitewater rafting
[00:58:32] Alan: down there. What is that? The new river is known for having the best whitewater rafting besides the Colorado and maybe more extensive like class five where you’re really in your hands type rafting.
[00:58:42] Alan: I don’t think that’s in the park. I think that’s outside so they could maintain all the commercial stuff that’s been set up to do those pontoon Bodie type things. It’s like great smoky mountains, national park, where, because it’s got the Gorge, it’s got multiple ecosystems based on the depth into I’m sure you’ve got a [00:59:00] huge variety of plant life, animal life, so forth.
[00:59:02] Alan: They have all these different towns that came up to me. This is where the railroad first opened it up. And so the McKell family did all this investing and reaped a whole bunch of benefits for, from taping by two minutes. Cool. That was the quote, smokeless coal. But then when you get to know them, by two minutes, they kept going.
[00:59:16] Alan: And so it turned it. If I had been in Virginia and West Virginia previous, we had gone to a place called Oregon cave. Really beautiful. I love spelunking. You wouldn’t think for a big guy like me, but I love it. And then as we were going along the river road to go through it beautiful. And then all of a sudden you emerge into where they had done all that mining and it was blighted and blessed it and slag hippie and all that kind of stuff.
[00:59:40] Alan: Wow. I here’s hoping that they don’t just continue to do this all along the new river. There’s this beautiful cathedral of nature. Screwed over destroyed by doing this. And so somebody must’ve said that was, I don’t know, 25, 30 years ago that I was there. All the people said it really is encroaching [01:00:00] too much.
[01:00:00] Alan: Now there really are these terrible pools of slag that when they go sliding down the mountain side, cause they’re finally breaks through there, there, it destroys the entire environment. Cause that’s as toxic as you can get mining tailings. So somebody finally convinced him and I’m sure that the convincing thing was not only, Hey, we Revere nature.
[01:00:17] Alan: It was also all that land. That’s pretty valuable, but he can’t use for mining anymore. If the government buys it, you’ll get a pretty penny for each mile and we will preserve it. And so whatever combination of things had to happen, I other national parks had been created because honestly the Rockefellers owned all the grantees.
[01:00:36] Alan: They gave it to the government so long as it’s maintained, never to be sold again, but to be a national preserve. Something must have happened similar here where some land was already in public trust, but not a lot because it really had been much developed. So then they got a good price for their land and they, that is along a main section of the new river, but not entirely whatever deal, lots of deals were cut to make this [01:01:00] happen.
[01:01:00] Alan: Cuyahoga valley before the new river Cuyahoga valley was, I remember not fit for number 59 compared to 63. They had to do all kinds of, and maybe Shenandoah as well. I just read a little thing that in the Shenandoah, when they made it out of all those private parcels of land they grandfather did, and anybody who lived there that they could stay there, even though it was not public land.
[01:01:20] Alan: And the last person like died off in 1998. I’m not sure I shouldn’t do. It’s been a long around, but I think it’s like 70 or 80 years to someone who was a teenager there and kept living all the way until they just the last one. So it’s very cool. There’s a number of interesting there with me. Has a great series about, um, national parks America’s best idea.
[01:01:44] Alan: And it not only describes what makes each of these parks wonderful and unique. This is the best desert. Here’s the geysers, here’s the Everglades, whatever else it might be. It’s how they came to be. And you hear about all the stories that there’s a certain model of wonderful public spiritedness, and there’s a certain amount of [01:02:00] wheeling and dealing and
[01:02:04] Alan: to come to be. And especially in the aftermath, I’ll prompt having,
[01:02:10] Stephen: having
[01:02:11] Alan: said, this is, we don’t care about the preserve. Now you can have mining rights. We’ve been up to theater, Roosevelt, national park, where the drilling, the fracking that’s going on is right outside of the boundaries of the park. And so it used to be that it was great night sky country.
[01:02:24] Alan: Now that whole section is nothing but all the flames, all the light that’s coming off from the 24 hour, seven day. Camps that are extracting things from which one is it? The Burgess shale, there’s different shale fields that were on the edges of the oceans that used to cover some part of north America.
[01:02:42] Alan: And that’s why they have all this good stuff. Sometimes that’s limestone. Sometimes it’s oil that it’s, despoiled it. You know what I mean? We say to Dickinson, if I remember correctly and besides our little hotel room, every other hotel room is taken up with people that are making their [01:03:00] hundreds of thousands of year working in terrible hazardous conditions.
[01:03:03] Alan: And they have no place to stay because Dickinson is a tiny place. It’s 40 50 miles outside of where the mining is. But as that radius expanded outwards from where they’re doing their job, little mountain towns started to get. And I, cause we always talk with our new friends at the locals and stuff like that.
[01:03:21] Alan: And one of the women volunteered, used to be that it was like my little mountain town, crafty, hippie go hiking. And now there sure is a lot of prostitution here because all those young 25 year old men who are making big money and have natural needs and they’re there, if they’re not drinking, they’re wild west town.
[01:03:40] Alan: And so she talked about, she doesn’t let her daughters out anymore fear that they’re not that it’s a business deal, but that it’s a terrible taking situations. And it just has transformed the town in bad way. Wow. All anecdotal. I don’t know really what has happened. They must’ve been some [01:04:00] handling of it.
[01:04:00] Alan: Can’t just become a Walnut. So you can’t just be that dry drinking and driving and whoring and whatever else it might be. But that’s how the reasons of preserving the national parks is because they really do have things not found anywhere. And then if you find oil there too, somebody just says, oh, you don’t have beautiful.
[01:04:20] Stephen: Exactly. So, okay. So we went to our first Christmas thing this weekend, we went over to crane acts, which I think you’ve been to yeah, Hermitage. They have a Christmas tree display, uh, with all these decorated Christmas trees and it’s very fun and pretty to walk through. And then they have all these cool toys and stuff, but we stayed for the
[01:04:44] Alan: magnet for crafters and stuff like 90% of your sales in two months.
[01:04:49] Alan: Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:51] Stephen: Yeah. But then they had a Christmas parade that we stayed for. It was very cold, but it was way fun. And I’ll tell you, I go to a lot of [01:05:00] parades. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been to the one in new Orleans they had recently,
[01:05:05] Alan: how do you beat the new
[01:05:05] Stephen: Orleans parade? This one I liked. Honestly, the small little one in Hermitage, because in new Orleans I was disappointed because 90% of it was just people with Jeeps that they decorated or they danced behind or something.
[01:05:20] Stephen: And it was like, and they had these not even really pseudo floats, but they did have some really big floats that were well done, but they’re like permanent float. So I’m assuming it’s the same float.
[01:05:33] Alan: I’m in a warehouse,
[01:05:36] Stephen: but this was just your average people, but they had trailers and stuff. They decorated, they made floats and they were long, big floats with, they had tons of decorations.
[01:05:47] Stephen: Tons of cool. Cool. Yes, exactly. That’s what they were. And I’m like, wow, this is for a small little town parade. This is fantastic. These people went all out and they said, oh, they’re having a judging there. I’m [01:06:00] like, are they giving away $10,000 or something? Because these people spent time and money on this lights and wood structures and just themes of whatever.
[01:06:11] Stephen: And I was like, very impressed. And it went, we’re like, okay, a small temporary 20 minutes. No, it was an hour and a half of stuff going by. I was like, are you kidding me? And so it was really good. We had a really good time with that. I
[01:06:26] Alan: feel looking for those things. I mean, it’s only the one of the 23rd today, the whole month until.
[01:06:31] Alan: So we didn’t make it to Cambridge, Ohio, which has, uh, it gets lit up beautifully.
[01:06:36] Stephen: That’s on our list, crickets town. Uh, they decorate it a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Far from us. It’s 30 minutes, 40, 40,
[01:06:46] Alan: 45 from us. So we can make it at an hour and a half or so.
[01:06:48] Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. The closer gives the Christmas, the longer the lines get, if you want to see the trees and the 23rd, the last day, they don’t do [01:07:00] it after Christmas because people buy the trees and actually set them up in their house.
[01:07:04] Stephen: So it’s done. Yeah.
[01:07:06] Alan: When they’ve had the displays in cities where they had, he already gets a guitar, everybody gets a cow in Chicago. I always liked that. That not only was it sponsored by various different places, but then they also get another charitable contribution because people actually get to have that as part of the permanent thing in front of their house, in front
[01:07:22] Stephen: of them.
[01:07:24] Stephen: Okay. All right. Hey, give us our two minute investing update for the week. That’s hot.
[01:07:31] Alan: Man yesterday was terrible. Oh God. I was out to doing other things. And so we went, ended up going to on the way home, TIS the season to get some more advent calendars and things like that. And I took a $4,000 hit yesterday.
[01:07:49] Alan: Wow. And that’s a lot in a day. Like it doesn’t matter what proportion that is or anything. That’s just, man, I would run out into a street full of takes in order to pick up [01:08:00] $12,000
[01:08:00] Stephen: little
[01:08:01] Alan: cars like that before. But just out of, I have a hundred stocks and I think 10 were up and 90 were down while it wasn’t on the basis of the woman’s coming to an end, that there really is a whole bunch of good economic news.
[01:08:16] Alan: They just passed the build back better bill. It was a whole bunch of profit taking. I think that as people go into the holidays, they lose the ability to track everything day to day. And in some cases. Take things off the table. They want to have cash in hand or put into something very stable so that it isn’t that Thursday to Sunday on certainty that they’ve felt like twenty-five percent of that didn’t even couldn’t do anything about it.
[01:08:40] Alan: They just can’t competence that. So I’m pretty sure that my stuff is all growth stocks. It will recover my stories behind various different things, Tesla and the trade desk. Maybe it was Tesla and Etsy out of like my top 20 we’re the only ones that still went up. So the stories there were not only a profit taking, but they were still, I [01:09:00] dunno, as you might imagine for what’s happening with Christmas shopping that sees doing great contrast is doing great.
[01:09:06] Alan: Um, there are certain ones that seem immune from that, but all the men, tech stocks, all the telecom stocks, everybody saying, I don’t know, I’m not going to be buying any new, uh, technology in between now and then, unless it’s commercial technology, like from apple, like from Google or. Samsung. So I, and it doesn’t even have to be the more that the market shifted towards consumer spending and standard S and P 500 things.
[01:09:33] Alan: And maybe even Dell things compared to my NASDAQ things. They’re just that shift of money at selling might off to get into those. And so I just took it in the face. So having said that Tesla, they managed to, even in the face of all of these things, they’ve got, maybe there will be new electronic self-driving cars bought.
[01:09:54] Alan: They’re not only into that. They’re into battery tech, they’re into space tech. I’m not sure how many people are buying a space ship that [01:10:00] ride for Christmas, which the fact that there’s still all the technology that goes into building these various different things. The AI, the battery tech, that all matters to other places.
[01:10:11] Alan: And in fact, like my Nvidia is doing well. I don’t remember how it did it particular, but if you know anything about Nvidia, they’re the ones that made graphics cards for a long time. Exactly and that’s, they’re very, they’re beautifully done to offload hard math that goes into modern graphics from the CPU.
[01:10:29] Alan: So that’s why you can get all of your texture mapping and all of your better looking games and so forth. Your FPS goes up. If you’ve got a better GPU, of course, they’ve discovered that all that hard math that gets done, that’s exactly what you need for crypto. That’s exactly what you need for any kind of financial modeling.
[01:10:45] Alan: They’re very necessary for all kinds of AI type stuff now. And so Nvidia is printing money. They’re doing really well. And the competitors that they have can MD others. They’ve mentioned that only have this niche of GPU [01:11:00] type stuff and big crunching type stuff, but expand into other places where there’s no server farm that doesn’t have a whole bunch of Nvidia in it now, because it turns out that it’s really also good for transaction processing just for the general web.
[01:11:13] Alan: So when they’re building those massive service for server farms in the east of Washington, It’s just rack after rack, half rack of Intel-based motherboards and Nvidia enhancement. That kind of thing. I don’t know what to tell you to bet on Christmas, because it’s not my ballywick to say what company do I think is going to sell more toys or more, you know what I mean?
[01:11:34] Alan: I’ve done on apple. I have apple stock going. It was a humbling experience to be like, okay, in fact, this is said, I think I’ve mentioned, I, I have certain benchmarks over, like, how am I 100, 200, 300% off, 40% off. And this brought me back down below a certain level that it was like good milestone and now ever upwards it’s wow.
[01:11:53] Alan: That was a big retraction to get.
[01:11:56] Stephen: And they always say stay the course, because you don’t want to panic [01:12:00] that you ended up losing
[01:12:02] Alan: the fact that it’s, if you don’t mind a little bit, we’re talking. For awhile, I was doing a combination of both fundamental and technical analysis by that meaning Motley fool was really good with the fundamental analysis of this company.
[01:12:14] Alan: Does it have good products? Good tech, can it set? Does it have pricing power that it can change that as it will? How has its management team and what does everybody think of them in the industry and from intern in inside the company, Glassdoor rates, a great person that everybody in the company hates working for all of those assets are eventually going to leave because they just can’t stand working for the snake anymore.
[01:12:33] Alan: Like what happened to Uber or whatever else it might be having said that I also had some idea of Tom picking good companies, but if I can not do market timing, but do something that says the market’s going to say based on other factors besides fundamentals, how is this stock doing in comparison to other stocks?
[01:12:53] Alan: And so I went with a company called trade Smith that had a very interesting system for here’s a technical [01:13:00] analysis, things go up and down and various different patterns, candlestick method, obviously that’s a whole. Kind of a crazy discussion because there’s not really any way of explaining why it was as they do, but it’s like chaos theory.
[01:13:13] Alan: When you see patterns in chaos that are a little bit better, a little bit ahead of what other people are seeing. You can gain some advantage, especially for me in terms of whether there’s going to be big drops. I had a whole bunch of stock losses in place where if I’m in a certain amount of profit, I don’t want to give it all back.
[01:13:29] Alan: If I can help it. I’ll I was always doing between 10 and 40% of whatever my high was based on the known stocks volatility as to what I might get out. But then what I was discovering was when a couple of those triggered and then it went down for a couple of days, immediately started rising back up. My overhead is ideal through fidelity and my trades clear within two days.
[01:13:53] Alan: Sometimes you’ll get me out of a stock, like immediately. And then when I want to get back in, because the rise is coming again, it was after I would have [01:14:00] already wanted to buy. So I had already lost some of that. And not only the, I don’t mean to blame my tools it’s that my constitution is such that I want to make good decisions, but not check it every minute.
[01:14:11] Alan: I don’t want to ever be the guy that’s in the restaurant yelling Soule style because my world is falling apart. And so as I got more and more, how much of an advantage was I really gaining from technical analysis? My gains have been 300 plus percent and going upwards from there and then do all this extra work to just get an extra 20%.
[01:14:32] Alan: I’d rather spend more of my time discovering new companies, putting new money in getting out of companies that have not fulfilled the story that was involved in like Zillow. I think I’ve mentioned last. Out of the people that are involved in real estate, open door, Redfin, still executing quite well.
[01:14:49] Alan: Zillow made a big mistake and doesn’t show signs of that. They understand why they did that, how they made their mistake. So it was worth really cutting back my position at them to get into other things. So that’s what I’m still doing [01:15:00] is when the fundamentals change, if the CTO that’s been running this company really well leaves, then it’s like, how much confidence do I have in the new guy without knowing what his track record is.
[01:15:10] Alan: If there’s a scandal within the company, that there really was financial chicanery, then I got all the numbers that they’ve done up till now cooked. And how much did I buy into the false numbers? If it’s, this is kind of weird. I have a certain amount of national versus international bias because the gap system you’re generally accepted accounting principles apply very well here in the states.
[01:15:29] Alan: And it’s really hard to gain that system. You might have to have certain criteria for what you’re looking at for growth stocks. It’s not only based on earnings per share. But it’s always based on the Cub on you, it’s going to grow bigger. So that right now they’re seeking market share instead of making money, but in the overall, if they gain market share, and this does well, there’s going to be a wonderful big multiplier.
[01:15:50] Alan: And then you see them getting better and better about cashflow, about free cash control and stuff like that. Having said that those standards don’t always apply in Chinese company, [01:16:00] in Malaysian companies in a whole bunch of Pacific rim, mostly Europe, yes. Australia. Yes. Middle east, maybe Israel, but not a lot of the Arabic countries sweeping defaming statements, but there’s so much proof behind that.
[01:16:15] Alan: You couldn’t always count on numbers coming out of Japan when it was con bond at the Japanese government controlled a lot of stuff and that they would do governmental interaction to make predictions come true. That weren’t based on the market that weren’t based on smart investing and China is loaded with that.
[01:16:33] Alan: And even having Hong Kong and Singapore. Have enough influence as opposed to, for instance, Taiwan, that is Chinese Taipei, but I still say Taiwan, I guess that they really are independent enough that you can’t cross them over. So is it a to applied materials? AMD, I have a certain amount of the position sizing that I take is based on how much do I really believe the story that’s being told?
[01:16:56] Alan: Or is there any kind of backroom weirdness any kind of governmental [01:17:00] weirdness that it had enough scandals that I just don’t want to be the guy that, wow. I bet too much something that didn’t come true and that there were signs that maybe it wasn’t true. You know what I mean? Isn’t that something that, again, going back to parenting, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is that skeptic hat on all the time.
[01:17:18] Alan: You know what I mean? So having said that I’m hoping. I’ll be part of the Christmas recovery. I’ll be part of the post COVID recovery. I’ll be part of the better telecom, better cybersecurity. You never wish this, but when they start, I just read, bear with me. Somebody got penetrated. That’s really important that they not got penetrated, started a big company.
[01:17:39] Alan: And that’s one of the things that usually drives interest in cybersecurity, because people are finding out that there’s persistent attacks coming out of east Europe. Let’s call it that Soviet union interference, former Soviet union. And that I really wanted to make sure that Yahoo experience, the ones that have gotten attacked that really released a lot of stuff.
[01:17:59] Alan: [01:18:00] I personally have gotten more careful about my password and my second two factor authentication. You know what I mean? But he’s going to use some kind of bio factor on my part or that my passwords are really robust and stuff like that, but I don’t want there to be a bad thing happened in the market to make any money.
[01:18:15] Alan: I want it to be that all work. Right. And I think I talked about this a little bit last time, but. Really what I am always doing. It’s not only about, it’s not only, it’s not even primarily about making money. I want to create a better future. And so I want to vote for, I don’t care about monster and energy drinks.
[01:18:33] Alan: I care about cybersecurity. I care about med tech. That’s going to cure diseases. I care about self-driving cars and ways that we’re going to get energy better of the economy, better our environment better. You may not care about all those things, the disruptive things that are making it easier for the little guy in the face of monolithic things that got a lot of control and then stop innovating stuff, trying to make the world a better place.
[01:18:56] Alan: It started with the grasp of war out of existing that there were, there were a [01:19:00] sight more than they are a genuine. I care about all that. And so some part of what I’ve done, I’m on, I got rid of monster because I really didn’t agree that I want my kids to be addicted to energy drinks, but I think that we should have more, I don’t know what’s in there, but it makes me feel great.
[01:19:14] Alan: And I want my eyes to be bulging out of my head. I actually have a company called Celsius holdings that does similar things, but I’m like, I don’t know that I’m comfortable with enhanced trigger water.
[01:19:25] Stephen: It makes me expensive.
[01:19:29] Alan: So maybe that’s a little goofy compared to the damage they’re doing. There’s so much worse company. People want to be in any gambling stock. I never want to be in any fracking stock. We know that there are companies that everything having to do with fighting this battle against climate change. It’s the oil companies and the coal companies and the places that are still trying to make it that all the carbon well, back to Neal Stephenson.
[01:19:54] Alan: One of the things that he said is in order to get us back to where we were, pre-industrial all the carpet were taken out of. The ground [01:20:00] has to go back in. Who’s working on that on carbon sequestration on not putting more carbon. And we just had wonderful things happen at the latest cop, 26 in Glasgow about how we’re making big commitments, but then you find out what the commitments are for 20, 30, and 50 and 70.
[01:20:17] Alan: And that the biggest polluters like China are not agreeing. That’s a pledge, but there’s no teeth behind it. They’re like we’re looking to open 14 more coal burning power plants to just catch up to the west. And then don’t worry, we’ll tail back. And so that’s like talking to an addict and saying, I know you can stop whatever you want.
[01:20:34] Alan: Sure you can. You know what I mean? That’s a story that I don’t believe. I don’t believe that the energy companies are ever going to really fix things until they’re forced to, until the government does, or until market forces are so persuasive that solar panels really are. Dollar spent in generating power and in our battery technology and our transmission technology, that really is vast [01:21:00] fields of things in Utah and Nevada can still get power to LA without large transmission loss and stuff like that.
[01:21:06] Alan: So I’m the cool thing about having gotten to investigate these last three years is I’m continually reading a lot about the real world, as well as my comic books and my speculative fiction and my TV shows and there’s heroes to be found. You know what I mean? There really are people that are solving. Boy, the latest issue of time magazine has the hundred greatest inventions of this year.
[01:21:29] Alan: Every year. They’ve had this running five, 10 years now, every year, if you want to just have hope for the future, this is the issue. It’s, here’s how to we invented a better. So that even in places, a very arid places, it can get water out of just unforgiving land and filter it so that it’s not true. You got water, but now you’re sick with all the parasites and all the particulates.
[01:21:55] Alan: And here’s how to have a battery pack, like as big as a big [01:22:00] Hershey bar or something like that, that it can run a household. It’s so well concentrated with power. You take it to your house, runs the house, you take it back the next day to the battery depo and prayed it in for another one. That’s going to overcharge charge overnight and then come back.
[01:22:16] Alan: And so all the places that instead of having to go through, put wires in the air, put wires in the ground, run old transmission lines, we’re getting to where all those places that we’re able to skip whole generations of phone things, putting copper in the ground to just get to cell phones. They’re not finding that out with other technology, all kinds of medical things, all kinds of monitoring things.
[01:22:36] Alan: I it’s just so heartening to see. Yay. Smart. They continue to come up with not just pie in the sky innovation, but someone’s working on as a more than we understand material science. Here’s how this nanotechnology based smoother is going to reduce friction in a way that it costs us 10% of energy every year in dynamo or whatever else might be.
[01:22:59] Alan: And I [01:23:00] don’t know, that’s one of the ones I just read about, but you’re like in the past, there’s been all kinds of things that it’s not elite. People will be able to get it. Hey, I got the best SPF ever that everything that you do for an industry that when they first started to have complex fluorescent bulbs and now better incandescents that are just energy sipping, this bulb will last.
[01:23:19] Alan: It’s not only about, I won’t have to reach that for 22 years. It’s the vast office buildings that not only have that energy sipping ability, but they put a little monitor there. It says, if I detect motion, I’ll turn it off. So instead of going past these blazing with light building downtown Chicago, now there’s the few diehards that are working in their offices, have their lights on and everything else.
[01:23:41] Alan: And so that will reduce, reuse, recycle. We’re getting better at every aspect of that. It
[01:23:46] Stephen: goes right back to what we said, teaching the kids, turn the lights off when you leave the room.
[01:23:52] Alan: And honestly, like now I got an auto bomb instead of my having to follow them around my house, flush the toilet and make sure they turn [01:24:00] the.
[01:24:01] Stephen: You got Rosie from the Jetsons
[01:24:04] Alan: like that. So I just talk about that individual notes because every year there’s things like this is a miracle. It’s the coolest thing, Steven, it’s really heartening. You know what I mean? Just wow.
[01:24:20] Stephen: For this week, I didn’t really do raspberry PI updates too much, but I was, there’s a program on the PI that also runs on windows and Mac.
[01:24:28] Stephen: It’s called G developed. It’s a 2d game framework, creator, whatever it’s open source. But what I love about it is it works on all the platforms. It’s basically free though. You can give them some money to get a few added benefits, which I think is a nice compromise, but the great thing about
[01:24:51] Alan: each
[01:24:51] Stephen: platform, right? The great thing about it is you can ex. To multiple different platforms. A lot of the commercial ones, you [01:25:00] can do that, but then it costs extra money. This allows you like Android or iPhone or iPad or windows or Mac, because you can export to all of them, what it does do, it limits you to two a day.
[01:25:13] Stephen: So if you want more, you pay for more so
[01:25:17] Alan: licensing in a
[01:25:18] Stephen: way, right? So it’s open source. Kids can use it. Schools can use it, anyone can use it. You’re not paying anything. You just it’s like the games where now that you’ve been playing for fourth level, now you’d have to pay if you want it faster. Exactly.
[01:25:32] Stephen: So I was playing with that over the weekend and I created, I’m working on a game for a friend, blah, blah, blah. But it’s a simple, you’ve seen it a million times. You’re a guy with a baseball bat walking around hitting zombies. And I worked on being able to path, find the zombies. So they would find a way around the trees to get to me and follow me if I move it.
[01:25:52] Stephen: The worst part is right now. I, the character can move through the trees. And so I’m working [01:26:00] on the collision of the sprites. So I can’t walk through the trees, but be able to keep moving just some issues. So that’s I was doing, luckily
[01:26:09] Alan: I’ve had it that it’s not only a yes, no. That you can get through a tree, but it takes two movements because you’re brushing through it versus from land or whatever else it might be.
[01:26:18] Alan: You really can’t
[01:26:19] Stephen: stop. Yeah. So I’m working on all that ethic and showing the kids. I’m working on the function, the programming that’s the important part. So I have blocked, so literally I have square little blocks. I put an eye on and when I put a mouth that, you know, and they’re like, that looks stupid.
[01:26:37] Stephen: I’m like, but the functionality that doesn’t look good, I’m like, that’s art. I can get the art and replace it.
[01:26:43] Alan: What it will look like.
[01:26:46] Stephen: So you mentioned Stevenson, so I’ll throw out a book for the week. It is Canadian werewolf in New York by mark Leslie LaFave. I just interviewed him for [01:27:00] my discovered wordsmith podcast.
[01:27:02] Stephen: He is Canadian, but he loves Spiderman. He wore a Spiderman shirt because he and I have talked Spider-Man he’s also a rush fan. So we talked rush songs, but he, one of the guys that helped get Kobo, the Canadian ebook platform working in off the ground and launch all of that. And they’re there Kobo nook and stuff, but now he’s
[01:27:26] Alan: an author,
[01:27:27] Stephen: but an enabler, a market.
[01:27:28] Stephen: Yes, very much. And now he works with a company called draft, the digital, where in the indie publishing these guys they’re aggregators. So instead of going to apple and Amazon and Google and all these others, I go to draft to digital and they disperse it out. They take a small cut, but it saves me time.
[01:27:47] Stephen: The best thing about them is they have, they have some really good programmers, but they have a slew of free tools. So if you write a book, you can get an accountant draft to digital, put your book in their system. [01:28:00] Transformed into an ebook, nicely formatted and all sorts of stuff,
[01:28:06] Alan: and it’s free navigation.
[01:28:09] Stephen: And then they have all these art tools, universal book links. So I can send everybody to one page and wherever you are in the world, no matter what platform you want to buy on, it’ll send you to the right website for your country and the exactly
[01:28:22] Alan: your currency and your delivery respect.
[01:28:24] Stephen: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
[01:28:25] Stephen: So I talked to mark, we had a really good discussion book, Canadian werewolf in New York. I just picked it up. So I’m just telling everybody
[01:28:33] Alan: I love discovery news, especially when someone whose taste I’d like recommend something to them. So thank you very much. There we go. Probably just looking for things to get for me.
[01:28:43] Alan: And instead of it being, I don’t know the next yes album, which she knows the way I even have it. It’s cool to find out that all under some hints in closing, while we were at the Kansas concert, we saw a shirt that’s. Keep calm and carry on my way where it’s on.[01:29:00]
[01:29:03] Alan: It’s gotta be out there. And I think that maybe I’ll be getting,
[01:29:08] Stephen: she excused herself for the restroom and come back 20 minutes later.
[01:29:16] Stephen: All right. Before we go, do you have a trivia question to stump me on? Oh, I didn’t think enough about, okay. I got a good one. If you don’t. I was ready for this one. Can you name the first home console with changeable cartridges and bonus? Who designed it? Who’s the engineer.
[01:29:35] Alan: So this might be very personal.
[01:29:39] Alan: We had a Magnavox. Is it really that I know the Magnavox I’m one of those even before Atari, even before anything else that would have been my guests because, because that’s the first one that we had. And I didn’t know there was many out there besides that. I just watched a documentary about this, but nothing’s coming to mind that would give me [01:30:00] the
[01:30:00] Stephen: authoritative answer.
[01:30:01] Stephen: I agreed. I didn’t notice either. I would have guessed the Odyssey also. That was my first thought, but it was called the channel F and it was by a guy, an engineer named Jerry Lawson. And to even give it a little more perspective, he was a black guy in Silicon valley in the early seventies. So, um, I picked that for him to work.
[01:30:24] Stephen: Yes, that’s what they said. They were talking to his kids and talking about that. So he invented the first changeable cartridge home console. And I got that. I spent the weekend, we’ve talked about this before the program high school. And the one with the Nintendo Sega argument, the audio book is much better than the TV show, but I also watched the documentary where they dug up the ITI cartridges out in the desert, you know, picking up all these cool video game things over the last week.
[01:30:56] Stephen: And that was like, oh, I didn’t know that. That’s pretty [01:31:00] awesome. So
[01:31:01] Alan: I, that is enough history, modern history that there’s still so much. I don’t know about that. I love watching those kinds of songs about how video games were made. Toys were made early cultural phenomenon. Like when did star wars really take off and all the action figures and all that kind of stuff.
[01:31:18] Alan: I did that just fun. I like learning
[01:31:20] Stephen: that kind of stuff. I love it too.
[01:31:23] Alan: That’s why I have a question for a Robert Johnson, famous blues man. Maybe the prototypical blues man has a legend about him, that he got his talent by Benny, with the devil at the crossroads. Named crossroads that has a get tarred dual between our young hero and the devil’s guitarists and who played those two.
[01:31:50] Stephen: Oh, and oh, I know the guitarist. I know the guitarists because he played with David Lee Roth. You’re exactly right. I keep wanting to say the [01:32:00] devil. I want to say they mom, Steve, and that stuck in my head. I was not in bay. I know that,
[01:32:05] Alan: uh, riff like, Hey man, he really is a fantastic, it’s still making great music to this day.
[01:32:10] Stephen: The name, I know who it is. I can’t get Steve Vai that’s it?
[01:32:15] Alan: Yeah. So there the fact that you’ve got lots, yo, that might be the harder one because there’ll be links to guitar. He wrote by reference, whereas macho, especially when they started doing this little appreciation. Oh man, that guitar duel.
[01:32:29] Stephen: There’s a show me and Reece watched called Todd and the book of pure evil.
[01:32:35] Stephen: Yeah. It’s as silly as it sounds, but there’s a guitar duo in that. And we were trying to figure out who the actual guitarists were. Cause we know it wasn’t the two actors, but yeah. So if you ever find that out, let me know.
[01:32:53] Stephen: All right, man. So Saturday, yes.
[01:32:57] Alan: W first, no T S out the treads, have [01:33:00] you been working Patricia tribute band? I made, I don’t think that either Uniontown provisions or fiscal district, which you talked about take reservations, but I wrote an email to saying, if you do take preservations, please make them for four.
[01:33:13] Alan: And we’ll be there at five 30 for seven o’clock show. So I think that Uniontown is a little bit bigger and fancier, but not as close we’ll decide which one we’ve done. I think that we’re going to go with Uniontown because that. Let’s go be strong is like really healthy, very vegetarian. And if we’re looking for a trunk of meat, Colleen is my little Raptor.
[01:33:31] Alan: She’s quite the
carnival.
[01:33:33] Stephen: Gina likes a good steak. So let’s
[01:33:36] Alan: look towards that. Okay. We’ll see you Saturday at five
[01:33:40] Stephen: 30 little earlier. Cause they’re having their festival cookie day
[01:33:46] Alan: cookie festival and I laughed about you and me really shouldn’t be going no. We could probably go and say, do you have anything?
[01:33:55] Alan: That’s no sugar in the cook.
[01:33:57] Stephen: Any more places are getting that more places are [01:34:00] doing, understanding that stuff
[01:34:03] Alan: going on 30 different places. Somebody has to have say
[01:34:06] Stephen: something
[01:34:07] Alan: then just the most caramel dripping. Okay. All right, man. Pleasure. Have a great Thanksgiving. You too
[01:34:16] Stephen: happy Thanksgiving.
