Transcript for my conversation with Bob LeMent 2/28/2024

Speaker 1: Bob LeMent

Speaker 2: Mark Puls

[Speaker 2] (0:22 - 0:33)

Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Knocked Conscious. Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Bob LeMent. He's part of staticradio.com.

It's one of the first 50 podcasts ever created.

[Speaker 1] (0:33 - 2:51)

Here's our conversation. I hope you enjoy it. The foot is on the other shoe.

Oh my, what's that mean? I don't know, but I think it's your turn. So how are you?

How you been? I'm good. How are you?

It's been super cold here in the Midwest. It's been freezing. Tell us about the Midwest coldness.

I hear you guys have some. You're crazy. Yeah, it was like negative, I don't know, like negative 10 degrees or something the other day.

That was just the actual temperature. The wind chill was like negative 25, I think, two nights ago. So not fun, as they say.

You're like mid-Midwest. You're like smack dab gateway to the West. Yeah, the gateway to the West, yeah, St. Louis. Normally we don't have that. I mean, you know, we have weather, but not like that. This is a little unusual.

Well, I'm not going to lie. I mean, I'm in Pennsylvania, or I'm from Pennsylvania, but I'm in Arizona, and we even had 30s. Yeah.

Oh really? In Arizona, you did? Oh my gosh.

In Phoenix, yeah. So for us to have that, it's rare. It's rare.

I mean, I think I've seen 19 once. It's a rare thing. By the time I get to Phoenix, it'll be 19 degrees.

Hey, we've hit 120, 120, 121. Yeah, the news said we were colder than Antarctica on that day. I think it was Monday.

What's today? Monday, yeah. Very cool.

And it's January 2024, so. Right, yeah, for reference, in case you listen to it in the future. For posterity, as they dust it off after the nuclear annihilation.

Right, yeah, right. If you picked up an old Sansa clip, and you're listening to this because somebody put it onto that, then now you know what you're doing. Oh my gosh.

We need one of those Max 100 megabyte tape drives. Oh my gosh, yeah. iOmega?

iOmega, yeah, that was iOmega. I think it was iOmega. Then they had the Zip drive, and then they had the Jazz drive, and they had, yeah, oh my gosh.

[Speaker 2] (2:52 - 2:52)

Memories.

[Speaker 1] (2:52 - 4:26)

We could wax poetic on every tape we have sitting in our house, right? I waited for the Zip drive, and then it was here and gone. Yeah, I remember the Sony disc, the mini disc thing that was like a cartridge as well, it was like a floppy disc that you put in for music.

A lot of cool stuff. A lot of cool technology has already zipped past us, and now nobody gives a shit. Yeah, no kidding, right?

I mean, we're just kind of making the more perfect wheel, but we're not really making anything new, right? Right, yeah. I mean, we had floppy discs for a long time, and then they were going to come out with the Zip thing, which was 100 megabytes, I think, at the time.

Jazz was a gigabyte, and Zip was 100 megabytes. You had a little floppy disc, which was 1.44 megabytes, and you're like, oh my god, the Zip disc is going to be the best thing ever. And then, yeah, who cares, right?

And we come from Carmen San Diego, TNT 1000 floppy. Right. Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?

Yeah, no, exactly, yeah. People are like already tuning out of this shit, I'm telling you. You know, I don't care, man.

I remember actually disconnecting the speaker so I could play it at night. That little speaker, I clicked it, cut it, and then re-taped it. Oh, so you could keep playing it without it making too much noise.

Yep, yeah, just cut out the ground. Sneaking, sneaking in some game time.

[Speaker 2] (4:27 - 4:31)

So, Bob, you are an early adopter, sir, speaking of technology.

[Speaker 1] (4:32 - 5:49)

Yeah, that's probably why I know about all these things, is because I'm stupid, and I jump in early and spend all my hard-earned money on things. So, tell us about Static Radio. What's the beginning of how this happened?

I mean, you tell people what you are, and when you told me, I'm super excited for it. But when you tell me that you tell other people, and they're like, yeah, whatever. Anyway, so what about my Bitcoin or something?

Yeah, exactly. I wish I was a little more into Bitcoin back in the day. I know.

I remember when it was $300 a Bitcoin. Yeah. Those Bitcoin ATM machines, there was like one in the entire valley.

And I remember driving by and going, who's going to spend $300 for $1? Right. I mean, what the heck did I know as a stupid college kid?

I actually, I didn't pull the trigger on it, but I was listening to Security Now, which is now a podcast, but it was back then prior to podcasting, I think, where, what's his last name? I can't remember. Steve, I'm blanking on his last name, but he was mining Bitcoin and he got 50 Bitcoin in the early days.

[Speaker 2] (5:49 - 5:50)

Wasniak or something?

[Speaker 1] (5:51 - 6:56)

No, no. What is his last name? Jobs, maybe?

No, no, no. He's a security expert. Oh, okay.

He's also named Steve. There's a lot of Steve's out there. Yeah, there's a lot of Steve's in that time period.

But anyway, yeah, he got 50, he mined 50 Bitcoins. He just had a couple of machines, old Pentium machines running. I was like, oh, I should do that.

And then I didn't do it. Here we are today. Although I do know a Bitcoin millionaire.

Really? Yeah. And that actually works into the history of Static.

He was one of our first, we didn't have, we don't have too many guests over the years, but early on, John Hargrave is his name. Yeah, I know the name. Yeah.

He's also an internet pioneer, internet media pioneer. And he became a Bitcoin millionaire because he paid attention. And now he talks about it and does a whole, you know, writes and does shows and stuff on Bitcoin.

So good for him. He's a really nice guy too, by the way.

[Speaker 2] (6:56 - 6:59)

Very nice. How did you get in touch with him? How did you guys?

[Speaker 1] (6:59 - 12:44)

So he used to do a show. This actually gets to the beginning of this show, the Static show, not this show, but anyway, you know what I'm saying? And so he used to do a show called Computer Stew.

And Computer Stew was a daily video show on the internet back, would be probably in 1999 ish, 19, no, 1998. And he worked for Zef Davis, a computer magazine. And they, he had to do other things, but one of the things that he was able to do there was to make, try to make this video show, which was really quite difficult during the time, because there wasn't all the tools like we have now.

So. Right. And you basically actually had to invent the wheel at that point.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the idea was that it was a, I think it was for an article originally.

And they're like, hey, we can take off the shelf electronics and make a like a little, little television show and put it on the internet. And then it spun off from there where they made many. And he basically did it for, I think, I don't, I'll probably be misquoting it, but he did it for a while.

And I remember watching it and that kind of spurred me on and I'm like, well, I don't want to do a video show because that's a lot of work. Back then it was a lot of work and even now it's a lot of work, but, and so I, we could do an audio show and that was kind of part of the process. It was that and a few other things, cause I was very, very into listening to things online when there wasn't a lot of things to listen to.

And, and so I said, well, I had done college radio with my friend, Miles, who's also my coach still to this day. And I said, Miles, how long now? We're just in our 25th year on January 1st.

Yeah, I know. Well, you say, congratulations. My wife says, why are you doing this?

But Miles and I did a college radio together and we were out of college and working, you know, regular boring jobs. And I said, oh, I've been watching this stuff. We could do a show.

And I said, I think I know how to do it. And he goes, and he's like, okay, I mean, whatever. So motivated person, I guess I'll put it that way.

He doesn't mind being taken along for the ride. But he balances you. Yeah.

He's not going to initiate the ride. He'll just take it. He seems like a fun hang.

Yeah. He's like, yeah, if you want to do it, I'll come in and participate, but I'm not doing work. Kind of like me tonight.

I'm Miles in this scenario. You're doing all the work tonight. I'm just hanging out.

I hope it's well worth your kind. So, at that point in time, I just had the idea, but I didn't have everything. And so I got a book from a friend of mine, how to code HTML in seven days.

And I read that book. It may still be available. I have no idea, but.

I think it's on one of those shelves that you can dump. It could be. And it took me a little longer than seven days, but I read the book and then I put together a website, which you actually can still look at.

The HTML version of the old website is still being hosted, although it's kind of frozen in time at this point. But, and voila, I had a website and that was we actually started recording Thanksgiving night in 1998 was the first test show. And I was still coding the website, but I had it done by Christmas.

And then we kept doing shows, test shows. We did like, I don't know, three or four test shows between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then everything was ready to go and launched everything on the 1st of January in 1999.

So, and yeah, and pretty much all the shows are out there. I mean, there may be some holes in there just because of time, because there was no WordPress, there was no organization. And so we've gone through several iterations since the original HTML.

And now obviously WordPress is kind of king in those regards as far as that goes. But so I think I've got pretty much everything out now if you wanted to go look at staticradio.com. So there may be a few holes here and there, but I have all the files.

So thank goodness I have all the files, but yeah. And so we just kept doing it. And the weird thing is I thought we would do this for a year, maybe two years, something like that.

And actually Hargrave came in, I think he was in the first year. We had him, I sent him a note because Zug was still, the funny thing is I sent him a note about, not Zug, I'm sorry, about Computer Stew. He did another website called Zug.com, which is a comedy website. And I said, you know, hey, I want to do an interview with you. Would you want to do this? And this is all over the phone.

This was before, you know, Skype and Zoom and all this shit. People answer the phone. Yeah, it's so easy.

People actually, like when you called, there was like a purpose.

[Speaker 2] (12:45 - 12:45)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (12:45 - 13:40)

And when you got a phone call, you figured they were calling you for a purpose. Interesting, yeah. When you say that, it used to be, at least when I was younger, if you didn't answer the phone, there was hell to pay.

Yeah. With my parents, right? I wouldn't get back to that.

I don't want to take you away from the story. But we grew up very similar in that. There was no phone left unrung.

Right. Exactly. You go pick up, somebody pick up the goddamn phone.

So we had a phone interview with him and he was gracious enough to be on. And the terrible thing was he got laid off. He didn't get fired.

He got laid off. And so Computer Stew ended right as he was, you know, it was known when he was doing the interview. And so I actually made fun of him about it, which is horrible in hindsight, but.

Oh, wow. You were young back then.

[Speaker 2] (13:40 - 13:43)

You were young and brash. You were just having fun back then.

[Speaker 1] (13:43 - 20:43)

Yeah, that's true. I was, well, and that was kind of his, he had a little bit of a sticky thing on Computer Stew where he was young at the time too. And so, you know, it was, it fit in with his persona.

I'll put it that way. So, but yeah, that was one of the earliest things. So, yeah, we did the, but we, Miles and I don't do a lot of interviews.

Typically just, it just hasn't worked that way. We do our bit each week and it, we love it and it makes us happy, I guess. And so we just have to.

So what is the bit? What do you do? Tell us what you do.

We do stories. So each week, the whole premise of the whole thing was, because we used to do this on college radio as well. So he didn't have as much freedom in college radio because even though it was college radio, they still wanted you to play rotation.

And then we had A, B, and C rotations, I remember. Yeah. It would depend.

Yeah. It depends on the program directors. It would change because in college they don't last super long.

And, and then we had to do PSAs and then some every once in a while we'd actually have an advertisement. But with the college radio, those are kind of few and far between sometimes. Or they're, you know, don't forget homecoming's coming up.

You gotta get your homecoming carnation and stuff like that. So we, in between that kind of stuff, we would tell stories and they were always centered around something that happened. Right.

So, you know, oh, I was on campus today and I watched, you know, this guy fall out of a car, just weird stuff like that. Right. Cause on campus, something always happens.

Or I had this situation where, at the time I was living with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. And at the radio station where we're at, there's this guy who always told me how good looking my girlfriend was. So that was a story, right?

I'd be, I'd be like, right. Jason, Jason gave me a ride back to my apartment and he wouldn't stop talking about how good looking my girlfriend was. And I'm like, do you find that odd, Miles?

And then Miles would, cause he knew who this guy was too. And so we would tell these little kind of weird things that happened to us. So after we got out of college, I got this all going and it just continued.

Cause essentially we were doing this on the phone every week or two. We would, you know, touch base cause we, we didn't live, we don't live near each other now. We didn't live near each other then.

Only time we came together was at college. And so he, he's actually from Chicagoland and I'm from downstate Illinois. And, um, now I'm by St. I'm in St. Louis and he is, uh, up on the river in Iowa. And so, um, close to the Quad Cities. Right. So, um, so we're not anywhere near each other, but we would talk each, each, uh, every couple of weeks or whatever we talk anyway and see what we, you know, was going on.

And that became, we would do this anyway. And so that became the show because, you know, it's just kind of fun. And then we, you know, break each other's balls, whatever you want to say, um, telling the story, you know, and, uh, and that just all became fun.

And so, uh, we've just done it. And we've, I thought for sure we'd run out of material, uh, a long time ago, but as things happen, life happens. Right.

And so we both had kids, kids became material, you know, we got, we both got married, you had kids and. And then you're different, you're different than you were. So you're actually a whole set of ideas.

Everything changed literally a whole person. Yeah. So it, yeah, everything just took off and, and just weird interactions with people.

And, and the, it's just full of really weird and odd stories. We call it the strange and funny happenings in the lives of two Midwesterners is kind of the tagline. And that's really what it is.

I mean, it's, it's one week it it's, you know, embarrassing stories about, uh, you know, farting on the bus or something. And the next thing you know, we're running into, you don't actually fart on the bus. You let one loose on the bus.

You try to hold on. You never actually do it just lack containment ability. It wasn't me.

It was the funniest letting one loose story for me. It was my son. We, uh, got the opportunity to go to Europe and we were on a train, uh, heading, um, from, uh, I believe it was, uh, Germany into Switzerland and we're on, we're on the train and he rips one really loud, like, and there's people everywhere.

Right. And then like, everybody's looking at him and I was sitting there and I'm laughing. And then later I go, I go, why did you do that?

And he goes, I thought they, I was just thinking it was a different language. So it would be okay. I don't know what his logic was.

He farted in a different language. He farts in English. So it would be okay.

He was thinking it's a different language. I'm like, well, it's just a fart. Everybody farts.

I don't know what you're doing. So embarrassing. He didn't, he didn't, obviously he wasn't even embarrassed cause he thought, well, no one will know what this is.

But, uh, yeah, it was hilarious. I don't, it was just the, one of the weirdest, uh, I'm like, where's this logic coming from kid? He was, uh, he was like a, you know, what, I think 12, 13, 14 years old, maybe at the time.

So, you know, he's the CEO of Disney. Yeah. It's that logic kid logic, you know?

Oh, well they won't know what this is. You know, it is, I have a worse story than that, but I'll spare you. That's great though.

Like, yeah, it's like, I'm going to fart in a different language. They won't even know. But it is funny.

Like the fart versus like burp culture. Cause I heard in like Japan, I think if you fart it's rude, but if you burp, it's okay. If you're eating, I think in some Asian cultures, yeah.

It's a sign that the food was good. Right. There's something to it.

Something about the community. So, you know, there are some interesting cultural sounds that we make. Farting doesn't seem to pass in any language.

No, it doesn't. It's it, well, it passes. All right.

I think his other part was he didn't think it was going to be that loud, but for sure. Well, that's awesome. So this is how long ago when he was, he was just a teenager.

Yeah. So this is, yeah, he was like a, yeah, early teens. Uh, but this is what, uh, I don't know, 20, 20, 17, I think 2016, 2017.

Oh, okay.

[Speaker 2] (20:44 - 20:45)

So it's not too long ago.

[Speaker 1] (20:45 - 25:09)

20 ish. Yeah. Young man.

Yeah. Well now he's at least 20 something. Now he farts with purpose.

Yeah. Now. Yeah.

I don't, yeah. He, I don't know if he'd do it in another language anymore, but he's got it in a constantly extended finger. Pull my finger.

But, um, uh, you know, that's the kind of, I mean, that's the kind of great fodder that you'll, uh, that you'll get on the show, but it's always just weird. I mean, it's, uh, people have told me now, you know, I'm not, uh, from the East coast or anything. And so people tell me though, it's a very Midwestern view on, on humor.

Uh, I've been told that. And so I'm like, oh, okay. You know, so the, but I don't, you know, that's not something that I can perceive, uh, easily.

So, cause I'm, it's just humor. Hey, I'm just like, oh, that's funny. Farting is fun.

Right. And you know, it's been, and it's funny and there are, there are definitely levels of it. Like I I'm a dark humor person and it's, I, I just, I think I go right to like the worst thing where someone can say, and I don't know why I do that, but I'll sit there and find myself chuckling.

I, I watched Will Smith hit Chris rock. And when he said, keep your wife's mouth out, keep your mouth. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And Chris rock had the joke at the tip of his tongue and he pulled it back. Yeah.

I will. As long as you keep other dudes out of your wife's right. Exactly.

And he didn't say it. Right. Well, I got to give him credit.

The whole thing I thought was a setup. I thought so too, but in hindsight, yeah, yeah. Allegedly it's not.

And I watched the new Chappelle show, the dreamers on the new one. And he actually references it cause he, he says he called Chris rock after it happened. Oh really?

And he answered the phone and said, you're the only guy picked up for he's been getting called from Oprah and Obama and all right. That's wild. That's just too wild.

I'm like, ah, I think it was a setup, but yeah. You know, the first time it really did look like a setup, but then you watch like how Chris rock got like heated and like, couldn't talk for a second. And that's that fight or flight cognitive dissonance thing that goes on in your head.

I think he, he kind of lost his train there, but like that, he, that, that Mr. Smith won an award after that. Right. Yeah.

Well, I'm like, I'm like who in their right mind in the middle of, you know, like one of the largest television broadcasts that happens in the year walks up and does that, you know what I'm saying? That's just not normal behavior. And he's had some personal stuff going on that week.

That was one, the week when even so about the son's best friend or something. Oh, absolutely. Oh, that gives him no, right.

It's more of just like, I totally, I get where it happened, but there's like, it's ridiculous to get to that level from where you are. Just weird. Just totally weird.

It's something about when you have that amount of power to wield like refraining from using it on someone is probably a better bet. Yeah. No kidding.

You know what I mean? I mean, he's more, I guess in, in a global sense, he's wet better known, right. As an actor.

Yeah. So yeah, the weird, the weird thing is, I don't know if it was this week or last week, but the, the, um, the guy who was in the courtroom in California, I think it was, he jumped over the, he was getting sentenced and all of a sudden he hit the bench and jumped over. You know, that's essentially what Will Smith did and no one stopped him and no one stopped Will Smith.

It's like, really? I mean, just because he's Will Smith, you don't think he's a threat walking up on the stage when he's not supposed to be on the stage. I mean, they all had the script, right?

There's nothing true. Uh, there's nothing in the script that says Will Smith walks up on stage and slaps Chris rock.

[Speaker 2] (25:09 - 25:10)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (25:10 - 25:19)

You know, where was, there's all these people who are obviously of, uh, our targets in this audience. Right.

[Speaker 2] (25:20 - 25:27)

And no one acted, you know, it, it's weird. Cause like, it is weird.

[Speaker 1] (25:27 - 26:26)

If you saw Will Smith walking up to you, I guess you would assume the guy's not going to slap me out of nowhere. I guess I would assume all bizarre. Yeah.

It was a whole thing, but I mean, it was interesting to watch it. That's some ego right there. I'll tell you that right now.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's big, big fucking ego to think it's okay for me to do this and no one's going to be mad.

And then somehow be the victim of it after. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, I didn't mean, I mean, you know, that week. Oh yeah. Well, when I have a bad week, I usually, you know, find the largest public, uh, display of something happening, walk into it and do something inappropriate.

That's what I do. So, so your show is it literally weekly? Do you get together every week?

Every week? Yeah.

[Speaker 2] (26:27 - 26:30)

Is it scheduled day and time or is it?

[Speaker 1] (26:30 - 28:26)

Yeah. So we usually typically, um, uh, over the years we usually did, um, Sunday night or Monday night right now we're on Monday nights. And the, and the reason for, uh, that typically was, um, we did Sunday night.

Cause you no longer have a football team. Yeah, no, I'm not into, Miles is very much into football. That's why it switches over on the two night.

Honestly, it does. He's like, okay, bears are playing. Let's yeah.

Yeah. For me, I'm like, I don't care. And, um, but, uh, it started out on Sunday nights every week because, uh, we both had kids pretty early into the run here.

And, um, that was the best, you know, we would do it, uh, late on Sunday when everybody was sleeping and it, you know, it wasn't a family time, right? Everybody's got to get, you know, situated for work and what have you. So it just worked out and it's, it shifted from Sunday to Monday, depending on, uh, oddly enough, the television schedule.

So football games, uh, game of Thrones for a while, pushed it to Monday because game of Thrones is not Sunday and, uh, walking dead for a while. So right now we're on a Monday schedule. Um, and I don't know why, cause there's nothing happening on Sunday and maybe, maybe it's still football.

I don't know, but yeah, we, we typically I'm, uh, what do you want to say? I'm, I can be very regimented. And so I love that, um, kind of a system, you know what I mean?

I know Sunday I'm going to, this is what I'm going to do. Right. And it's a good excuse to get to catch up and always do it.

Right. It must be a fun for a guy that you know, what, 30 years now? Yeah.

Oh gosh. Yeah. Uh, how about 30, 34?

Yeah. Something like that.

[Speaker 2] (28:26 - 28:26)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (28:27 - 29:18)

Um, the, um, but yeah, the, uh, uh, you know, I love the regiment, regimented nature of it. And Miles is not so regimented. In fact, you'll hear if you, if you, if you were to brave through all the shows, you'll hear several of them where I'm just berating him because he doesn't answer, uh, on Sunday night.

I'm like, we've only been fucking doing this for two decades and you can't answer whenever I call you or whatever I was doing. We were doing Skype at that point. And, um, I'm like, you know, he's like, oh, I forgot.

I'm like, Holy shit. You know what we do? We do catch up every time we talk.

Um, we talked for, I don't know, at least a half hour or more. Every time we connect, that's not recorded. That's not part of it.

[Speaker 2] (29:18 - 29:19)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (29:19 - 31:51)

And then we, we record after that. And, uh, the terrible thing is sometimes we'll be talking and we're like, oh shit, I don't have a story. I should save this for this recording.

And then we ended up stopping and just starting recording. So yeah, because we don't, just like you and I did, it's basically you jump on and go. There's not any kind of discussion ahead of time where it's like, I need to get through these talking points.

Uh, you know, I want to talk about the URL. I want to say stack radio five times. Okay.

And then now I got to sell my book. No, it's not. It's just, we come out of the gate.

It's like a rodeo. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I was just on a, on a podcast called idiot mystic. And they reached out to me through that, that matchmaker, uh, you know, uh, dating site. And, uh, and, uh, it was a two hour conversation.

And at the end he's like, oh, before you go, do you want to plug anything? And I'm like, okay. Like, you know, it's like, I'm just enjoying the conversation.

You know what I mean? I mean, don't get me wrong. I would love to monetize this and do like ads and just have this be my thing.

But you know what, I'm, I just, I've talked to some very interesting people. I've been blessed. Yeah, no, exactly.

It's, and it's hard. Um, we have, uh, early on was probably 2007. We actually were monetized for a very short period of time.

Maybe it was 2005. I had to look it up, but, um, we were on Medio, which was Adam Curry's company. So Adam Curry, after he invented a podcast or after he and Dave Weiner, actually Dave Wiener did all the heavy lifting.

Yeah. Adam Curry is good looking and can talk. And so he's the politician of podcasting.

Yeah, that's right. Um, he, he, uh, set up a thing called pod show and we weren't on pod show and then pod show eventually changed his name to Medio. And at that point we, um, uh, we're on Medio for, I don't know, probably about a year or so.

And then immediate Medio folded or transitioned to some other thing and they dropped everybody. And so, yeah, our show was on Medio for, uh, about a year, I guess, maybe a little longer. I had to I mean, I had to look through the shows to see if, uh, what the dates were because I didn't, I didn't write anything down, unfortunately.

Um, but we were on Medio.

[Speaker 2] (31:51 - 31:54)

You don't even think about what it is until it's over and you look in hindsight.

[Speaker 1] (31:55 - 32:25)

Yeah. I was talking with people about like wars. It's like the civil war wasn't the civil war until you look back.

Like World War I wasn't World War I until World War II happened. It was, it was just a little, it was a skirmish with the Germans and then, oh wait. The Great War, right?

Who all, let me make a list. Who all was involved? The whole fucking world.

Holy moly. I think that's catchy. It's, I think, uh, Stan Lee came up with that because it's an alliteration.

[Speaker 2] (32:25 - 32:26)

Yeah, no kidding, right?

[Speaker 1] (32:26 - 32:33)

It's got the alliteration and everything. Yeah. He's Mr. He's Captain Alliteration. Bruce Banner and Lois Lane. Well, not Lois Lane, actually. That's a story.

[Speaker 2] (32:33 - 32:34)

No, not Lois Lane.

[Speaker 1] (32:34 - 33:49)

Did DC culturally appropriate Stan Lee? I think alliteration was kind of one of those things that came, uh, through the forties and fifties that people just loved it. You know what I mean?

It's kind of funny. I think it played to it for sure. I mean, still people do now today, but, uh.

Yeah. Yeah. It's fun.

Yeah. It's fun. So they just, they just always catered to it.

I think it was a little more, you know, cause then they had to do the mid Atlantic, uh, you know, Peter Parker today, he was up in New York and he was swinging around playing Spiderman. Yeah. In other news.

In other news. The Russkies have crossed the line. Bruce Banner was found in his underwear.

He was bitten by a spider, I tell you. That's right. J Jonah Jameson.

Holy moly. He's as big as an inch if he was a mile. Those old timey things.

Those old timey things, exactly. Uh, you just need one of those slide whistles from, uh, Groovers in the Heart. That's right.

And with a gong and some rattles and do, do, do, do, do, do, do. So you were, so you were actually terrestrial radio before you did podcasting or did you go right into a digital format? Uh, so we were on the college radio, which had.

[Speaker 2] (33:50 - 33:50)

Right. Right. I remember that.

[Speaker 1] (33:50 - 35:37)

Yeah. But I mean, like when you started your own like private. Oh no, right into digital.

So. Oh, okay. Cause you didn't even have that.

No. Yeah. I, my, uh, we had, you know, both had regular jobs, you know what I mean?

So it wasn't like we're, um, the, the weird thing is I have a degree in cinematic photography and so, and so does Miles. We both have the same degree. We got the same degree.

And then after college, I mean, the, the thing was you can go to New York. Uh, you can go to Los Angeles. Um, you could go to Chicago, maybe at the time there wasn't a lot going on.

Uh, I mean, there's stuff going on, but. And you think the eighties, right. With Landis and some of the other stuff was Chicago prior to put Chicago back on the map.

Yeah. But, but, you know, it's like for, for any of that kind of stuff. And I have friends who, from college who did that.

Right. But, um, you know, this would be the earlier nineties is when I was there. So the, um, but I went, I actually did, um, my free, I get corporate stuff.

So I went into the corporate world for a while and, and did stuff there. And then it just morphed into, you know, what it is today, which is, I don't really do anything with cinematic photography. Uh, I, those all, all those jobs spun off into other things.

And, and I have a, a nice, uh, a nice cushy stable, uh, means of, of making money. And so there's miles. And so there's no point, you know what I mean?

So this, this, this is the creative outlet, um, cause we're both creative people. And you, if you're a creative person, you gotta have an outlet or else you, uh, do bad things. You take drugs or do something else.

[Speaker 2] (35:37 - 35:41)

You're doing, you're doing something to take care of that itch.

[Speaker 1] (35:42 - 42:52)

Yeah, no, honestly, I, there's so many creative people who don't, who think they have to be in a mold, I think, or whatever, and, and can't, you know, survive in the real world as people say. Um, but no, you gotta have something because otherwise then you, yeah, you veer into drinking or drugs or, um, you know, just doing, or you just go into bad places sometimes because I think that's just part of the territory. Don't you with creative folks?

I mean, I'm not saying that there's something wrong with them. Well, no, I mean, creativity goes into a weird darkness, even though there's beauty that comes out of it. There's a weird darkness you have to go to, to get to that emotion, right.

To get a feeling. So I think they delve deeper. They picket scabs.

I mean, you're going to bleed if you picket scabs. Right. But there's something soothing about doing that.

There is. Well, you have to do it. I mean, it's kind of like a compulsion because if you don't, then you're doing something else.

Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, so this just became the thing, right. So it was, you know, it was better than the other stuff, especially if you're going to, you know, progress in the regular world.

The daylight world, as some people call it, you know, we're all night people in the daylight world, right. And so if you're going to make it in the daylight world, you got to need to have a hobby that gets that out of you. So you can, you know, so you can do the stupid Atlantic voice and make funny voices and be kooky because then during the day, I mean, you don't always get to do that because everybody's got to work hard, play hard attitude.

Yeah, you got to be stoic and serious and you can't, you know, because then otherwise you don't progress in whatever, whatever, whatever we call this thing. So, yeah, no, it's been weird like that. No terrestrial radio, to get back to your question, we're bouncing around a little bit, but the weird thing is.

No, that's totally fine. I'm loving it. I'm loving the conversation.

So we were doing this for a while. And so over time, I love to try different things. This is all part of the creative process, as it were.

And I contacted XM Satellite Radio and I got a call back. And the hilarious thing was, I was, and this will be in the days. Oh, gosh.

When was this now? Howard Stern just moved over. It was, it was pre Howard Stern came to St. Louis. It was pre Howard Stern coming to St. Louis, I believe. So that's been a while ago. Maybe, no, maybe he was in St. Louis. Anyway, somewhere in the early days, it had, I only think I can remember is I had a candy bar phone. That's what I can remember from this is I had like a Nokia, you know, one of those Nokia's you can drive with. And I was at my office and my cell phone rang, which never happened during the day at the time.

And I'm like, who could this be? And it was XM Satellite Radio. They were, I had sent them a note and they were getting back to me.

And I talked to some programming guy at XM and I thought it was hilarious what he said. So I can't remember what it was like. It wasn't lunchtime yet.

And so I was, I was like, oh, shit, do I got to be somewhere, you know, but I'm going to take this phone call because whenever my at the time, whenever my phone rang, it generally meant that my wife needed me to do something or something was wrong. And this was all before, you know, texting was fashionable. And, and you were still answering the phone just like, and you still answered the phone.

You still, you still had that beat into you. So I answered and I get this XM guy like, hey, this is, you know, I can't remember his name, Ralph or something from XM Satellite Radio. And you had sent a note in and I, it came to my desk and I wanted to talk to you about this show you're talking about.

And I'm like, oh, hey, yeah, you know, fantastic. Thanks for calling me back. You know, I'm like, what?

And so then I had to go find someplace because I'm walking around. And he's like, oh, it sounds really interesting. I went and I listened and la la la.

And I'm like, oh, this is great. Right. And he goes, I tell you what, I think it's interesting.

He goes, but first, why don't you get on a radio station there in St. Louis? And then after you do that, then give me a call. Like, what the fuck?

They didn't even get it back then when they were the new, when they were the new, they didn't even understand. They didn't get it at all. And I'm like, I just like, it's like crazy, right?

Yeah. I was like, OK, thanks. No problem.

Right. I mean, what am I going to say? I wasn't in my head.

I'm like, this guy is obviously not understanding this situation. And then now, you know, I mean, where's XM? Right.

It got sucked up by Sirius. And where's Sirius? I mean, no.

Do you know anybody has Sirius satellite? It's not a truck driver or something. Oh, and I do.

But only because we do road trips to Vegas. And oh, there you have Sirius four to five hours. Yeah.

Oh, it's 10 bucks a month or something. You're one of the few of these days, my friend. You know, yeah, to your point, it's like the only reason is we do lose cell coverage on the drive.

Ah, there you go. Little section where you can't get the Spotify through it. You know what I mean?

Right. Yeah. So, I mean, I was just like, OK.

And then I'm like, at that point, I was like, well, you know, the thing was I didn't want to do at that point. I'm like, this terrestrial radio is nowhere. This is not the right way to go in.

And it was already dying at the point. And you saw it because you weren't it wasn't an interest of yours to begin with. No, no.

And I had it. But I thought, well, my the reason I even contacted them was because they were doing a different programming at that time on XM. And right.

And you could be vulgar or do more adult stuff or just be different. We could slip stream right in there in some kind of compilation thing. Like Gopi and Anthony moved over, you know, those kinds of things.

And they have multiple channels. They could just have some channel that's just random shit. And we're on that.

So it was just an idea to to get the just an idea. And I'm like, oh, I should just let's see what happens, you know. And that's typically how all this comes about.

The reason I'm talking to you is about a year ago. I'm like, oh, I think I'll be a guest on things. Let's see what happens.

And that's and that's when I started doing stuff. Before that, I really didn't have any. I mean, it was I'm trying to think, I don't know if I even guessed it on anybody else's show.

Are you enjoying that part of it? I mean, how many?

[Speaker 2] (42:52 - 42:54)

Oh, no, I am. I am.

[Speaker 1] (42:57 - 43:00)

Got at least more than 50 at this point. Easily.

[Speaker 2] (43:00 - 43:01)

Oh, nice.

[Speaker 1] (43:01 - 45:12)

Yeah, at least more. Yeah, definitely more than 50, I think. The but the tools were the tools weren't there.

Wasn't easy. You know what I'm saying? So now with like you talked about Matchmaker and Podmatch and all these things, it's easy to to connect with people.

Whereas before I had to be honest with you, I pooh poohed it because that was what a lot of people back in like 2008, almost every podcast was about other people's podcasts. Because that was one of the the trajectories of podcasting. And so everybody got on each other's shows, talking about podcasting.

I'm fucking doing that. We're talking, you know, we're talking about funny stuff. We're talking about goofy stuff.

And because it's a comedian thing, right? I mean, we're not a community, a community. Yeah, that that's what podcasting they always say that podcasting community, because it really became like this bottom up kind of movement.

Now, I am aware that I'm talking about podcasts on your podcast. So just so everybody love me on that. It's been 20 some years now.

So I mean, and that's amazing. And full disclosure, I emailed Adam Curry or I emailed an email that I thought might have been Adam Curry's. It was like Adam at Adam Curry.

And I sent him an email saying that you were going to be on the show and hopefully he could join us. I did not. Yeah, I don't and I also do not hold it against him.

I just want to be clear that I was hoping that maybe there would be some click that might that would be so cool just to have him pop up. Well, that would be great. I would love to.

I would love because I think he'd have fun with you because I think he'd admire you. And what I think is so amazing is one of the top one of the not top 50, but one of the first 50 that is. Yeah.

And you're still around like that. How many or how many of the first 50 are still around? That's not a lot because I've really tried.

So in just to just to affirm you, it's Adam at Curry dot com because I've actually got email from him. OK, I did email Adam at Curry. I don't know if he's the one answering it, but I do know that I have I have that email and I have emailed that email and gotten response from a person who said they were Adam Curry.

So.

[Speaker 2] (45:13 - 45:14)

Oh, very cool.

[Speaker 1] (45:14 - 45:20)

And a long time ago, too. So I did send it. Let me see.

I sent it to Adam.

[Speaker 2] (45:22 - 45:23)

Adam at Curry dot com.

[Speaker 1] (45:23 - 45:30)

Yeah, there you go. Now, December 9th, I said, yeah, you know what?

[Speaker 2] (45:30 - 45:36)

He's going to see it tomorrow. He's like, hey, I just I saw your email. When are you guys doing your show?

[Speaker 1] (45:36 - 51:07)

Yeah, I should just have him on anyway. Just tell him I'm still happening. What are you kidding me?

I'm having it on right now. Did you not know it's literally happening right now? What a shock that you happen to be calling right now.

Oh, my goodness. So to answer your question on the first 50 in when COVID happened. So when COVID happened, I had a little more time on my hands because of everybody did.

And I came up with this idea called Prior Caster. And there is actually a website you can go to a prior caster dot com. And this is pre COVID or or during COVID.

Right when COVID started, I guess. OK, so early 2020, early 2020. Yeah.

OK, cool. I just want to get a time frame. So the deal was so I was like, I got some time on my hands.

I would love to talk to the people who were doing these things, you know, before podcast. I knew I knew a lot of them. I interacted with them because part of the thing once we started recording was I was constantly looking for other people recording.

And I did find a few. I mean, at the time, I found a few and I talked to them. And actually, one of the people that I talked to, his name is Frank Nora, and he runs a thing called the Overnight Escape, which he's been doing since 2000.

And he and I have communicated all these years off and on throughout the years. And because I thought, wow, there's somebody else doing this. And he has a totally different approach to things.

But it's fascinating. And if he lives in New Jersey and goes into New York every day for work. And so he actually most of his shows are that traveling.

So he's going in New York. He's talking about all kinds of stuff while he's walking around New York. It didn't start out that way, but that's what it is right now.

So, yeah, I've known these people, some of these people for a long time. Well, I wanted to go back and catch more of them. Well, there's a lot of them are gone.

I can't find them. And I mean, these are people that I, at the time, pre-podcasting. So back from 99 until 2004, I had interaction with, right?

So mostly e-mails and things like that. And, yeah, and if there's anybody who's listening who did a show before 2004, hit me up. So BobLament at Keymail.com.

And I would love to talk to you. And so I've got to talk to a few people, but a lot of them aren't around anymore. I mean, it is interesting how much of a turnover there is.

And I can't remember his name, but he did a thing called The Basement Show. And he was such a helpful guy to me because he was doing that just prior to us doing our show. And I found it after we started recording.

And I used to e-mail him quite regularly, asking him about stuff and, you know, setting things up and streaming things and all kinds of stuff. And he was incredibly helpful. But The Basement Show is gone.

There's nothing left. I've looked and looked and looked. And I still do.

So when this prior caster idea came up, I got it going and I was looking for him. And I still do. Every once in a while, if I've got a minute, you know, I'm sitting there.

I'm like, oh, I think I'll look up The Basement Show, see if I can dig into anything and find it. Nothing. And the terrible thing is I also looked into Curry's List.

And it's gone. So even on the Internet Archive. So that's a lot of digging on the Internet Archive.

You can go back in his website, but it does not. He switched stuff and there's no archive of the old, old stuff. I did an Internet search for it.

I was trying to find it because I was hoping to find a list I could share with you. I didn't do much digging, but we had a good connection. So I was like, you know what?

Let me see if I could find something cool that I could bring, which I didn't bring anything. Well, and the same thing with the first iTunes list, right? Because I love to tell this story and people don't even realize it.

And then when they hear it, they're like, huh? But that list that Curry kept, which I think he kept it for a while. So it was like, you know, they've gotten to the hundreds.

But the first people who were doing podcasts that would contact him, obviously. And you could get on the list. Then that became iTunes podcasting.

So between that and some PBS shows and a few other commercial things, right out of the gate, podcasting was Adam Curry's list. And he's mentioned it because I think I heard him on Rogan when he was on there. One of those.

He mentioned that. And and I remember that and I've told it to people and they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, because I got a note from a guy who I curated the list.

Yeah. It's like the grandpa keeper of the list. Like there was a thing.

The list. And it was the simplest thing. It was just like a literally a list like you would have.

It was literally like a CSV file. Yeah, exactly. But there was a guy.

I don't even know. CSV was a thing yet, to be honest. Yeah, I think it was.

It was a Lotus one, two, three spreadsheet.

[Speaker 2] (51:08 - 51:08)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (51:09 - 52:30)

Using one. I got an email from a dude named Scott Baker, who I've known again for since early 2000. And he says, hey, do you know you're on iTunes?

And I go, what? And that's how I found out. And then I went and looked around.

Now, the funny thing is we've been kicked off iTunes at least at least three or four times. The first round of kicking off was whenever they got all holy for a while and anybody was cussing and whatnot, they would kick them off. And then they made the explicit tag.

So we got back on for a while. And and so it's it's really it's hard to find. So I say these things right.

And I always feel bad because it's hard for me other than to give you the shows to say, yes, this really happened because all this supporting corroborating evidence has just been obliterated. Right. Literally, you just have like some hopefully there's a metadata tag to the timestamp of the original recording or something.

The problem with it is we didn't record an MP3 until in the 2000s. So everything everything was real media. Right.

Oh, my gosh. Real media. Oh, my.

And I've converted it all over to MP3. And then we did several. We did, I think, at least a year or two in real media.

[Speaker 2] (52:31 - 52:32)

And then we media player.

[Speaker 1] (52:33 - 53:06)

Yeah. Right. And then we went to QuickTime because I lost.

Here's my little deviousness. So I finagled a real media server at the time, which was thousands of dollars at work. And then I used it for myself mostly.

And well, I got to the point where I could not justify it. And it went away. And so then I made a QuickTime movies because I had access to a QuickTime encoder at that point.

[Speaker 2] (53:07 - 53:09)

And so times Apple.

[Speaker 1] (53:09 - 55:20)

Yeah, right. Yeah, I can't remember what the acronym was for M.O.V. Yeah, it was M.O.V. It was just audio. Right.

Yeah, it was. It was. And I did that.

It might have been A.U.D. even or something they had for audio. That's MP3. That's something else.

Yeah. Not what you do is the audacity. Oh, that's right.

So so we did a QuickTime for a few years. And then finally, MP3, MP3 was there. But we didn't have I didn't have access to any kind of encoding to do MP3.

But at the time, it would have cost money. I think money has always been a barrier because I'm a really super cheap skate. And so if I can finagle somebody else to pay for it, then I do.

Right. So that's my my angle. And so, yeah, I got the real super power.

Yeah, I got I got the real media server paid for. Larry Limit. Yeah, exactly.

Hey, I got a deal for you. So we went through iterations. So, yeah, all the MP3s, actually, some of them didn't become MP3s until a couple of years ago because I converted them all from those other formats to finally put them because it was five years before we were on before podcasting in five years before WordPress.

Well, I would think the file itself would have some kind of timestamp, I hope, right? Even if it's a movie or something, I had to re-encode everything. Oh, so those are even gone.

Yeah, I still have the original. I still have the original real media files, but I don't know if there's any. I mean, I guess there's something to read it.

I don't know. Yeah, I just wonder. I wonder if back then they had a date like a date stamp as a like a properties.

They probably didn't hurt because like then it definitely would. You could definitely chronologically, you know, you could definitely put it chronologically the way you did it. That's all fakable.

I'm, you know, whenever you want to pay for things, you learn how to fake a lot of stuff. So I was an early adopter of online dating and I had a lot of bad dates.

[Speaker 2] (55:21 - 55:21)

A lot.

[Speaker 1] (55:22 - 55:58)

I went on a lot of first dates, a few second and even fewer third, right? You know, a third later because you whittle down very quickly. Right.

But if I had any thought of making a book or like a coffee table book about my experiences of online dating, because I was an early adopter. I was on date.com back in. Oh, boy.

You know what I mean? Yeah. So I just kind of the same thing.

It's like if I would have just known that it would be a moment to look back on, I would probably put some kind of time or effort into documenting it.

[Speaker 2] (55:58 - 55:58)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (55:58 - 56:04)

That's always the that's the hard part, right? You don't know at the time when you don't know until you're in it and then it's over.

[Speaker 2] (56:04 - 56:05)

Yeah. And then you look back.

[Speaker 1] (56:06 - 57:09)

You want to you want to experience what you're doing and then you don't think about afterwards that you're like, oh, yeah, because literally, I mean, every, you know, every year I was like, I'm surprised we're still doing this. I thought for sure we weren't going to. So of the three formats between yourself and your partner and your and your co-host.

My partner. Interviewing someone else or being interviewed by someone else. Do you have now a preference that you've done like all three?

Do you have one that you like the most? Oh, no. I will tell you, hands down, talking to Miles every week has been some of the most fun I've ever had.

So he's got to be a brother at this point. Yeah, it's that's well, yeah, a brother from another mother. Yeah.

But we're not. We're not enough the same. How we get along is beyond me sometimes because we're not, you know, talk about odd couple kind of a situation.

[Speaker 2] (57:09 - 57:11)

My old co-host and I are similar like that.

[Speaker 1] (57:11 - 58:10)

Yeah. You know, and so I'd be Felix. I'm very fastidious on certain things and he would be Oscar for sure.

If you want to take it to the Neil Simon thing. And so and that's the fun of it is because we are so different. And but we get along great and and we have an understanding where we can kind of poke fun at each other.

Really. I mean, you know, deep, deep poking of fun to where everybody doesn't go home and cry or anything. And so, yeah, but that by far, I mean, it's been it's been so enjoyable and it's still so enjoyable.

I mean, this week we just had a show that went off, you know, into territory that I would never, ever thought that would happen. I mean, you start out and then the next thing you know, you're in the far reaches of weirdness. So, you know, it's not weird in the in the negative sense, but just in a fun sense.

[Speaker 2] (58:11 - 58:11)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (58:11 - 58:13)

Yeah, I would say that's my thing.

[Speaker 2] (58:14 - 58:18)

What day was that? Is that on Static Radio on YouTube? Yeah, you can go anywhere.

[Speaker 1] (58:19 - 59:28)

Which specific episode is that? I don't want you to spoil it because I'm going to look, I'm going to watch it later. Oh, well, there's some audio problems, but I'm not going to go back at that.

But if you do listen to it, it's something weird on the audio for some reason. But it's called the Cryptid Pitch. OK, it's the latest one as of today, as of this taping, as of this recording on January 17th, 2024.

But it's just it was just a weird, fun time. But that's what happens. I mean, it's like magic or something that sometimes it doesn't happen.

Sometimes it does. And, you know, because it's all kind of without a net kind of a situation and we're both very comfortable that, you know, who knows? I know we have all this stuff out there in our, you know, catalog or whatever you want to say.

And I know some of that stuff right at this point in time is very, very not what people like now. In terms of, you know, content and what we say and we're making fun of people and making fun of ourselves even.

[Speaker 2] (59:29 - 59:32)

And it's funny, you can't even be self-deprecating anymore.

[Speaker 1] (59:33 - 1:01:45)

Right. Yeah, it's almost like how dare you be a victim to yourself? Like you're making yourself a victim.

I'm like, I am. Right. I thought I was being funny.

Yeah, I was just trying to be funny, you know. Yeah, there's a if you want to get into that tangent, I always say right now. Yeah, I'm along for the ride, my friend.

I love talking all different kinds of things. So please, I don't get to share. I you know, it's been this my first real podcast in my or had maybe two in a month.

And I am exorbitantly curious about you. So share away with let's go down that tangent. Well, I was these days, I would say people are are overly sincere.

Right. You can't you know, you can't laugh at, you know, the embarrassing situations that people find themselves in and and and so forth. And I think I think that to me, I think that's bad because you have to you can't always say, oh, poor you.

You know, I mean, you have to be able to laugh at yourself. Yeah. And you have to be able to laugh at situations because you have to be able to not take it always so seriously, because when you show that you can't, that's when you show you've been corrupted.

Yeah. And everybody is so I mean, they're so sincere, like, oh, you poor person, you know, oh, you you know, my son this week, a little tasty, I suppose he he says, Dad, you know, you're like a cryptid. I'm like, what do you mean?

He goes, every picture I see of you is blurry and out of focus. And you know, everybody else will be in crisp focus and you're just kind of blurry in the background. And so I'm like, well, and so, you know, he was like, yeah, so you're just like a cryptid living in this world because you can't ever seem to be, you know, like normal person in here.

And so we riff on that for a while. But, you know, I just think it's kind of funny. And it's like, you know, I said, well, partially because no one wants to have a photo taken anymore.

You have to do a selfie of some kind.

[Speaker 2] (1:01:45 - 1:01:45)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:01:46 - 1:05:49)

And I've got typically I'm the tallest with the longest arms. And so either I'm taking the selfie and so I'm off to the side somewhere or I'm tall enough to where I have to be in the back. And so I'm never the, you know, the person up front.

And so it always happens. I'm taking the picture. So I'm like this half half my head's on there.

And then it's half, you know, somewhat blurry because you do the wide angle and everything is kind of fish eyed. So but anyway, it's just like it's a circumstance. Right.

And this isn't this isn't too terrible. I mean, there's you know, we talk about miles always having to go in for colonoscopies and snaking up his butt and talking about that. That's a fun situation.

Yeah, I mean, look, we could we could go and what movies 15 years ago. I mean, we're talking 2008. I don't think a single movie could be made.

That was like I was made in 2008 almost. There's no it's weird, isn't it? It's crazy how like it's just I watched a movie and I had to turn it off.

I just didn't I couldn't even follow it. It didn't have and I'm not I'm not criticizing the style because maybe the style changed and I just haven't changed with it. So I'll take I'll take the blame.

But it's like I just haven't changed with the times in that way. Yeah, I don't know. But nobody wants to talk about that stuff.

They're always like, oh, yeah, like I I have a tendency to in the I try to not to do it now because I'm getting older, but I fall down a lot. I used to fall down. I hurt myself constantly.

And so and so like I have really bad knees and one kneel just give out and then it'll pop and then my leg swells up. And so we've I've hurt my ankle and hurt my knee and and and then we make fun of it, you know, like, oh, you know, there goes Bob, pop the knee again, because I was mowing the grass. Right.

And I forget what I was doing. But anyway, I got off the mower and I got onto the ground to do get something or something somewhere. Anyway, I tried to get up, pop my leg.

Right. And then I started swelling up immediately. So I'm out in my front yard, laying on the ground by the mower like I died of a heart attack or something.

And and I. The mower's running, right? I can't.

Yeah, I can't get up. Oh, I literally because it can't bend my leg because it's in so much pain. And so I happen to have the fob for one of our cars and I hit the panic button and it's going on.

I see my son look out the window at the honking. Right. And so I turn it off and I'm waving at him.

He shuts the window, ignores me, I guess, didn't see me. So I have to do it again like a commercial. Next thing is sprinklers to come on.

Like a big truck has to come squeaking by. Well, I got bit by ants because there was ants there and I started getting by the inside to roll away. And so finally, my wife comes out.

She's like, what's going on? I go, I hurt my leg and I cannot get myself off the ground. And so anyway, she helped me get back up and then I got on the mower and finished mowing the grass.

But then I had to go see the orthopedist and everything. So but yeah, but stuff like that. If I were to tell that story, that wasn't even that long ago.

But if I tell that story, a lot of people would be like, oh, my gosh, you poor guy. Oh, you're OK. Miles is like, oh, your fat ass is on the ground.

That's hilarious. You're getting bit by ants. Oh, my gosh.

[Speaker 2] (1:05:49 - 1:05:49)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:05:49 - 1:06:36)

You know, go on a diet, you idiot. And just this kind of raking me over the coals. And we know that's fine.

I was survived, right? I didn't have to go, you know, seek medical attention, but not I didn't. It's not any worse than it was the day before, at least not much more.

And it was kind of your knee was going to pop at some point anyway. It's right. Exactly.

It's just a matter. Yeah, it's just a matter of time for me to step wrong and and screw myself over. So, yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing that I'm like, really?

I mean, can't you see the humor in that? I mean, you know, I'm trying to get everybody's attention. You know, I didn't want to roll up to the house.

And I think it's genius.

[Speaker 2] (1:06:38 - 1:06:39)

I mean, so, yeah, panic button.

[Speaker 1] (1:06:40 - 1:09:01)

Yeah. Well, I just I'm like, because I rolled around from these ants and I'm like, oh, I got something in my pocket. Oh, it's the key.

I wonder if I can get this thing to make some noise. But yeah, I'm just like, you know, that's the kind of stuff everybody's like, oh, you poor guy. It's like, no, I'm an idiot.

I know that I can't be jumping up and down on the ground and and expecting myself to be OK, given my circumstance. You know what I mean? This has happened many, many times before.

You'd be like somebody with a bad back picking up something heavy. I mean, you're an idiot, right? So, yeah, no kidding, right?

Yeah, well, I've been working with like blood sugar issues because I'm type two diabetic and I got them so good that I like had a blood sugar crash. Oh, no. And it was it was funny because, well, funny now, but like you survive, I I'm I'm working from home.

I'm in a two story house. I'm in upstairs office. I start getting a little lightheaded.

I'm like, maybe I should put something in my stomach to eat. Yeah, a good idea. So I start going downstairs while I'm still a little dizzy about three, four steps from the bottom.

I'm like, I'm going down. There's and I just took a header and I went boom straight on. And now I fell like all awkward and weird.

And I'm just laying there going, OK, did anything break? Huh? Let me see.

No, I'm like, I can't believe I'm alive. I should have snapped my leg. And I know I can't tell my girlfriend until she gets home because if I text her, so that happened, he's going to worry about that the entire time until she gets right.

Yeah. So I can't tell her fun stuff like that when it happens. Yeah.

And I mean, you know, it's part of life. And yeah, it happens. And you know that you have this situation and you know better.

Right. So exactly. But you don't act that way because you're, you know, a guy and you're like, I can do what I want.

Oh, holy shit. I can't. Oh, here we go.

You know, exactly. That's what everybody does. I got, yeah, I got in some X conversation about some something about transgender women in men, in, in women's sports.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, it's just not fair. That's just a personal fairness thing. It has nothing to do with ideology or anything.

It's just a personal thing.

[Speaker 2] (1:09:01 - 1:09:10)

No big deal. But someone, someone jumps on their thing. Like, I'm going to bed tonight.

I'm going to give you a big hug from a person, a woman, a young woman of color.

[Speaker 1] (1:09:11 - 1:11:57)

I hope you don't get triggered by that. And I'm like, I reply, I'm like, I'm generation X. We don't do triggered.

Like, what the, what the heck is triggered, man? People, I understand the triggering. I get PTSD.

And like, obviously, we're getting a much more nuanced understanding of it. But man, you can't just make it all X because it was discovered. Right.

Yeah, exactly. And you, and you, you, after the fact, you got through it. You know what I mean?

And you, and you do better. And so, you know, how are you going to, I mean, everybody is not living in a China shop. You know what I mean?

So you can't, you gotta live. Right. And you know, well, that it's now become the words of now hurt, right?

Like words have become. So like, it became silence is violence. And now words are violence.

So like, what do you do? Well, after, which one is it? Which one is it?

Can you just tell me? Which game are we playing? What's, what are the rules?

And can they not change for, I don't know, 10 years? No, they always change. That's, that's, unfortunately, the constant course of things is the change.

Yeah, well, change is inevitable, right? Change is hurt. Interrupt you in some way.

Changes, changes hurt, but we always change. So I have to ask about this avatar. Oh yeah, sure.

You mentioned Felix and Oscar. So you're Felix the cat, apparently. Yeah, Felix the cat.

So how did you come up with the avatar? When did this get invented? Is there a real you in previous episodes that we could dig and find?

No, actually, there's not. So the, I'll go in sequence here. So it got invented probably, and I have to, again, I have to look up, I think it's around 2018, 2019, somewhere in that era.

I wanted to animate the show. And again, it was one of these things where I was like, hey, you know what would be cool? And then I finally had access to tools that I did not pay for.

And that's a good, that's not a, that's not a Jetson one. That's a good, that's a fist bump in the, hooray, huzzah. That's up your ass, cheapskate.

No, the, so yeah. So I said, okay, I'm going to animate the show. At the time, this would be before, before really many avatars, before kind of the Zoom proliferation of Zoom and so forth.

You're an early adopter, I can tell. And so Miles can't, he's a Luddite. He doesn't, technology is not his friend and so forth.

And so what I did was where I recorded- Are buttons technology?

[Speaker 2] (1:11:57 - 1:11:58)

Is that the problem?

[Speaker 1] (1:11:58 - 1:12:16)

Yeah, anything like that. Anything, he doesn't get it. You know, he wrote, he wrote me the other day.

He's like, what's Venmo? People, he goes, do I have a Venmo account? I go, not unless you want to spend money.

What's Cash App? I'm like, same thing.

[Speaker 2] (1:12:17 - 1:12:20)

So like, who are you talking to, Miles?

[Speaker 1] (1:12:20 - 1:13:50)

That's what I would be asking. This is a normal, yeah, well, no, I did actually do that. I go, are you, I go, are you purchasing sex?

That was my first question. Is Tiffany, is Cinnamon on there? Is Kosher Sea Salt on the other side of this?

Who's, who's over there? Like, I was like, is everybody okay with you spending this kind of money? That was my other question.

Leaked twice. So he can't do it, you know, it's not going to happen on his end. And so I recorded us and split the channels so that he was on one channel, I was on another channel.

And then what we released was a mix all at the same time. So that was kind of fun. That was like another little thing to figure out.

And so then once I had separate channels, then I brought it in and then I would animate us. And you can go back on YouTube and you can watch the little animated shows. And that's where this character came from.

So I became the cat and he's a snowman. And, and I, you know, put together this little invite. Actually, there's a little lightning bolt there.

There's a, there's a snowman. It was other side of the lightning bolt is the snowman. And I just zoomed into it.

Cause at this point I was lazy and I'm like, I'll just use it for this. And look, I was so, I was so fastidious that I'm like, you're like set up this account on thing. I'm like, no, yeah, I have a Skype.

We're good. Yeah, I'm good. But the funny thing when we, I use Skype, I called his home phone from Skype.

That was the way we started with that. I finally got it.

[Speaker 2] (1:13:50 - 1:13:52)

You remember dial.com?

[Speaker 1] (1:13:52 - 1:16:50)

Yo, I never had dial.com. No, I had dial.com. You, it was basically just internet.

You dial, it was dial.com. You go on, you put in a phone number anywhere and you called them directly through the internet. I can't, I remember there's a site where you could spoof a number.

I was doing that for a while and I would call Miles's house all the time on a different number. He got really mad at me about that. But who is this?

I'd put in weird, like, you know, you can type in weird numbers and make them. Anyway, boob or what have you. So then I started doing the animated show, but I had to process all this, right?

So it lasted for a while. I can't remember how long, but I went on vacation. And when I came back, I'm like, I'm tired of doing all this work.

We've done the animated show now. I'm ready to move on to something else. And for a new challenge that is too much work for me.

I was like having to, you know, futz with all this the whole time. Well, then he's gotten, the characters gotten reused because of this. So whenever I decided to do this guesting, I was like, at first I'm like, oh, people will just be audio, right?

And then they're like, no, we want video too. And I'm like, well, shit, I'm not gonna be on video. Okay, I'll just dust off my cartoon character and I'll be that.

Because it's all happening live, right? So the software is running. It's syncing to my voice and my head's moving around.

I can, I've got to work on it so I can move my arms, but I haven't taken the time yet. So I can move my eyebrows. So yeah.

So your eyes are actually, it's tracking your eyeballs too, right? Oh yeah, it tracks my eyeballs. So my eyes dart around a lot apparently, cause I noticed that often.

Yeah, you look a lot to your left. So the camera must be a little bit to the left Yeah, I do. I can look this way and then raise my eyebrows.

So the, but yeah, it's all happening live. And so I did that because of this whole guesting thing. And because I think that I was fortunate early on, I said, this is me, but it is a version of my persona that's a little bit more than my regular everyday, right?

So I'm entertaining. And so I have to be a little bit more than my usual because my usual is probably not that entertaining. So yeah, so I've always kind of been behind things.

So my name is not even Bob, just so you know. Love it. I should have just not told me that.

Well, we're talking about it. That's cool. Hey, I like it.

[Speaker 2] (1:16:50 - 1:16:50)

You know what?

[Speaker 1] (1:16:52 - 1:17:13)

So are you completely anonymous or can a couple little searches find you? I'm not trying to do it. I'm just wondering like in the, say in the anonymous digital world, do you have a personal footprint that connects you to this persona?

There's somebody looking around. There shouldn't be too many, if any connections.

[Speaker 2] (1:17:13 - 1:17:18)

Cool, cool. Very cool. That's awesome.

You know, I went the other way.

[Speaker 1] (1:17:18 - 1:19:00)

I'm like, here's who I am. And I'm just gonna like, you're gonna find me out anyway. So I might as well, once again, start with everything that I am and then you can fold in the rest.

Yeah, my friend Frank, he's Frank. His real name's Frank. I've met him.

And so yeah, there's a few people who can make the connection, I suppose. But because I've known him for a really long time and I ask him, I'm like, basically, you know, I'm separate from this and never the two shall meet. If they adhere to it, which they have so far, this is great.

So Miles is not, so Miles is a little easier to find. So because he's, but that's more his real persona. I always tell people they'd be surprised.

I'm very, if you met me in public, not like we didn't know each other, right? And we just happened to be at the same Panera and we were in line together. There was probably no way that you would go, oh, that's Bob.

Right. I could tell, I could probably do it with the voice, but unless your voice changed. Right, yeah, if I had to talk.

I'm really good at the masked singer. But I mean, as far as like, you know. Yeah, to your point, I use my full name more in like, not for the recognition of who I am, but it's like, I make a lot of ideas or I propose a lot of ideas that I want challenged and I want to change my mind.

And I need it to come from me because that's, it's not genuine then if it's not from me. And it's not to say that you're not genuine.

[Speaker 2] (1:19:00 - 1:19:00)

That's not.

[Speaker 1] (1:19:00 - 1:20:23)

Oh yeah, I'm probably more genuine in this version than I am in myself. Oh, probably, you're probably more real, right. And I'm real regardless.

Like I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot. And if I were anonymous, it's not gonna help because someone's gonna have to pay. So I might as well just be me.

That's kind of how I see it. You know what I mean? Yeah, but it really is.

I love that. I love that you can do that. It's really cool.

It's really from childhood. So in my childhood, I loved radio and I loved the people in the radio, right. And so.

Like different characters, like. Yeah, they were never, yeah, they were never, they were always, so if you, I don't know if you've ever had the experience when you were younger, but if you ever met somebody who was a DJ, like the coolest DJ on the radio station where you lived and then you met them out in the world, they're not the coolest. They're not.

They are old. They're generally older than you thought by about 10, 15 years. And they have a face for radio for sure.

Oh yeah. And their headshot does not look like that actual picture. And they're not usually boisterous.

They're usually fair. Like I remember I met, he's probably dead at this point, but his name was Larry Limbach was his radio name. His name wasn't Larry Limbach.

And he used, I used to work at.

[Speaker 2] (1:20:23 - 1:20:24)

Another alliteration name.

[Speaker 1] (1:20:24 - 1:21:19)

Alliteration, yeah. And that was, this would be back in the 80s, I guess. But, and I worked at a video store and he used to come in and he was not the voice on the radio.

He was very reserved, very quiet, soft-spoken. I mean, you could almost not hear him. He was so soft-spoken and, but he was the guy, right?

Cause back in the day when you worked at the video store, you knew, you were like, you might as well worked at DMV cause you had everybody's information. So, and nobody understands video stories now, but you had everybody's information. When, when you went to central bank digital currency, I'm trying to modernize it for everyone.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But we had all, we had a data, you know, we had a shitty system, database system with everybody's information.

[Speaker 2] (1:21:19 - 1:21:19)

You knew who was who.

[Speaker 1] (1:21:19 - 1:23:09)

You could pick it up, yeah. I could tell you how old they were. I could tell you their credit history.

I could tell you, you know, it was all there, right? So Larry Limbach came in and I'm like, that's Larry Limbach from the radio. And then he would come in semi regularly, not overly regularly.

And this was in the days where people actually rented pornos. So then I also knew your proclivities for what you like to rent. Right, your order history.

Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, it was- I think they call it a menu on OnlyFans now. It used to be called your porn, your VHS tape order history.

Now it's called your menu. Yeah, and so it was quite embarrassing because, I mean, I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, which is not a small, small town, but it's, if you're familiar with it, yeah, it's a supermarket to the world because it's the headquarters for Archie Daniels Midland. But so it wasn't small, but it wasn't big.

And so I had a lot of people and a lot of people who, you know, at the time, you know, I probably had a lot of information that spouses would have loved to know. And we were trusted. Yeah, we were trusted agents, as it were.

Okay, let me ask you this. Anybody ever, you ever see, like, you knew, like, they had a wife and they came in with their girlfriend renting a video, like? You know, a lot of times the guys would be by themselves.

So there wasn't a lot of, or if they did come in with somebody, they'd peel off and go to the porno room and then their wife would kind of look at the, you know, the latest releases or whatever. And it was always funny.

[Speaker 2] (1:23:09 - 1:23:11)

Was it door beaded curtain or cloth curtain? Which one did you call it?

[Speaker 1] (1:23:11 - 1:23:19)

It was, it was, it was cowboy style. It was, it was the, the. The half thing.

The saloon doors, yes. The saloon doors, nice.

[Speaker 2] (1:23:19 - 1:23:22)

Did they do the goosh, goosh, goosh when you went through to really make it shameful?

[Speaker 1] (1:23:23 - 1:23:28)

Oh, beautiful. Oh, and no one wanted to have that sound though. They would all hold the door.

[Speaker 2] (1:23:28 - 1:23:30)

Right. Oh, you're darn right.

[Speaker 1] (1:23:30 - 1:23:31)

Yeah. Cause it made you.

[Speaker 2] (1:23:31 - 1:23:32)

It's the reverse.

[Speaker 1] (1:23:32 - 1:23:53)

It's the men's walk of shame. Yeah. Walking up alone with the VHS of the adult movie.

Well, they, this is so far, this is discs. So little tickets, like little disc tickets that you'd bring up. All the movies were behind.

I had to go pull all the movies. Got it. B14.

Where's Annie Oakley does Hollywood.

[Speaker 2] (1:23:53 - 1:23:54)

Where is she?

[Speaker 1] (1:23:54 - 1:24:41)

Where is it? Like on the big. Yeah, I have it.

We have a show from a long time ago called Disney and a porno. Cause that's what everybody would get would be a Disney and a porno. And so parents would, parents would come in and get a Disney movie and set the kid up in front of the Disney movie and then go in the bedroom and put in the porno.

Oh, that's great. That is that Friday or Saturday night? Which one was that?

I mean, sometimes it was all weekend. I don't know. I mean, this was at the time when people would get, literally get seven movies for a night.

And I'm like, how are you going to fucking watch these things? And they would, it was crazy. They're just watching one after another.

It was just craziness. Yeah. Probably on like three different TVs or two.

Like, yeah. Well, they had Disney and a porno. So, right.

[Speaker 2] (1:24:41 - 1:24:41)

Well, yeah.

[Speaker 1] (1:24:44 - 1:24:47)

The problem watching like eight minutes of the porno.

[Speaker 2] (1:24:47 - 1:24:48)

I mean, come on.

[Speaker 1] (1:24:49 - 1:25:22)

I'd bring them back in the wrong box. And so, yeah. One of my jobs.

Did you rewind this? Well, we just have to make sure the porno wasn't in the Disney. Well, these are discs, obviously, but I know what you mean.

Yeah. No, there's. I just remember the old Be Kind Rewind days.

Be Kind Rewind tapes. Yeah. But the weird thing was always just, you know, because at that point I was, when was I?

About 19 or something like that. 18. And, you know, seeing the pillars of your area come in and get pornos was hilarious, you know.

And then they'd see you and they're like.

[Speaker 2] (1:25:23 - 1:25:23)

The mayor?

[Speaker 1] (1:25:24 - 1:26:04)

Oh, you work here. Right. So, yeah.

Yeah. It was. It was a great job.

I love the job. But yeah, it was very eye. It was very eye opening for the young Bob to see all this stuff.

I can imagine. And then everybody wanted me to be there. I would have people, you know, begging me.

Can you? The new Brat movie is out. Can you hold it for me?

I'm like, what? Yeah, I guess some people I would. Some people I wouldn't.

Right. But, you know, you had that power. Yeah, I did.

Yeah. Did you ever get drunk with it? Come on, Bob.

You got drunk just one time.

[Speaker 2] (1:26:04 - 1:26:06)

No, I'm really bad with alcohol.

[Speaker 1] (1:26:07 - 1:26:35)

Like Big or like Christmas Story on Christmas. Yeah, you had it. Everybody wanted it.

It's a wonderful if they just wanted it. I would. There were people who were regulars that we would help out, I suppose.

But I never I never sold the right. So, you know, I didn't say, give me a five or I'll make sure you get, you know, big or whatever. You know, they just need to be kind because you knew people that were movie fans.

[Speaker 2] (1:26:35 - 1:26:35)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:26:36 - 1:28:25)

Yeah. Movie fans. Exactly.

Yeah. No, it was a it was really a huge cross section of society from, you know, very wealthy people to very poor people and everything in between. Who doesn't appreciate entertainment of some sort?

Like, I mean, you want to talk about something universal, right? I mean, music, music's pretty universal in a bass way. I'm not saying taste, but like there's a rhythm that every human could probably like get, you know, get pulled into some kind of trance, you know, kind of beat.

That would just be some rhythmic thing, like some kind of chord progression that just gets you going. You hear it and you hear it in a lot of songs. You hear it a lot of things.

And you're like, oh, that's how they got you. They got you back here in the back of your brain, you know, between that and not letting me go to the bathroom. They really got me hooked.

That's exactly right. Holding your eyes open. Clockwork Orange.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Holy moly.

I can't. You're ruining it. But yeah, it was great.

It was a great a great time. I mean, it really it's just like, you know, you always see the I haven't seen too many of these memes where the video store, but there's always the meme of people at the record store flipping through albums. And that that time is lost and you don't get to do that.

So it was really a kind of, you know, at the time you didn't think about it, but it's certainly a magical time to have all of that media in front of you and you were perusing it. And I think that's why some albums are back now is a, you know, kind of a thing. Right.

[Speaker 2] (1:28:26 - 1:28:27)

It's a physical.

[Speaker 1] (1:28:28 - 1:29:01)

Yeah, it's exactly. Yeah, you flip through the albums. It's really fun to do.

And the same thing was at the video store. People, you wouldn't flip through them, but you look at the wall and see all the different things that were out there. And, you know, and I think you talk about we talk about progressions of the way people act and so forth.

That was a progression. So the video store, when I worked there, there was pornography. I mean, that was that was probably one of that was the only place that was acceptable to go to that had pornography.

[Speaker 2] (1:29:02 - 1:29:03)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:29:03 - 1:32:35)

I mean, the gas station with some magazines was acceptable at the 7-Eleven. Yeah, but you had the black bags that they were in or whatever. And then and then Blockbuster comes along and they ruined it.

Right. So they didn't want pornography anymore. And and and so, yeah, it was not that I'm a huge proponent of pornography, but I'm just saying that you're a proponent of like the availability of it being part of like part of the lexicon, part of the culture.

It doesn't have to invade or like be pervasive or be the culture, but part of it, for sure. Part of it. Yeah, there is a certain, you know, there's a certain.

I don't know, rite of passage in some ways, and then some people are more into it and some people aren't. And and when you take away the availability of stuff like that, I think that's where you're doing everybody a disservice because now you're the more you make things shameful, I think the more you hurt culture, because then you you homogenize and you, you know, funnel into being, you know, the reality is everybody wants to have a life. Right now, what that life consists of, you know, everybody has to, you know, we've got a financial system in place that no one can escape, unfortunately.

And so then everybody makes their decisions based on that. But to have these things be all shameful and everything, it I think that drives to people into worse things a lot of times. Right.

Well, it's like exposure therapy to an extent. Right. Like, I know it sounds crazy, but something about I heard some weird thing about like peanuts.

If you don't expose a child to peanuts by a certain age, and it's like two or three, then good luck. It's done. You're done.

They may be allergic to them. Right. And I and I read something.

I do audio books a lot. And there's Jonathan Heights coddling the American mind. And he's like, he was talking about being at the PTA meeting or something.

And they're like, OK, we're going to ban peanuts. And I'm like, well, why? Like, well, people have peanut allergies.

Do any of our children have peanut allergies? And it turns out none of them did. Right.

And they still wanted to ban the freaking peanuts. And you're like, why would you do that? Right.

I get it. If someone would be affected by this policy, but all this does is hurt you because it denies your ability, your body to adapt to something that it may really adapt to. It's just very hard.

Yeah, we're very that bubble bubble wrap society. Yeah, I think it's very similar age. How was parenting?

I mean, you said you had children pretty young, young at your age, young. I don't know if I was young, but. Oh, OK.

OK, so you how was that? I mean, oh, no, I love it. Oh, it was fantastic.

I'll be, you know, honestly, I did not think it was for me. Initially, you know, I thought, you know, this isn't going to go over well. But no, it worked out.

I mean, everything's worked out great. And and I think overall, I think I mean, overall, it's been a fantastic experience for me. Personally, I don't know.

You talk to my kids and they'll be like, yeah, this guy's an asshole. But, you know, I think it makes a good father.

[Speaker 2] (1:32:36 - 1:32:41)

Because you because you might have had a little toughness in you. Have you ever really?

[Speaker 1] (1:32:41 - 1:33:48)

I'm not that. But, you know, it wasn't it wasn't a goal. And then it all happened.

And I'm like, OK, this is cool. And, you know, I really do. I think, unfortunately, you know, this gets to other subject areas.

But even though I wasn't this wasn't something that I sought out necessarily initially, you know, it has been great for me, but it may not be great for everybody. And I think you really got to put some thought into all that. And I think if you if it's not for you.

You know, dip your toe somewhere, a nephew or something like that, somebody else's kids. And then if you're like, I don't this isn't happening for me, then don't do it. Because I think a lot of times the kids lives, you know, if you don't pay attention to them, then they get kind of mad at you.

And I think they know if they're not wanted.

[Speaker 2] (1:33:49 - 1:33:54)

Yeah, I think that I think there's a pretty good feeling of intuition of that.

[Speaker 1] (1:33:54 - 1:33:59)

I got to be honest, like to think children are just dumb, stupid things put in a corner. Not at all.

[Speaker 2] (1:33:59 - 1:34:01)

They are nothing but sponges.

[Speaker 1] (1:34:02 - 1:34:23)

Yeah, smarter than me. But yeah, it's been a really good experience. And so, yeah, I you know, I think at least I think and they've either got me fooled or not that I get along really well with my kids.

So that's awesome. Maybe maybe they're just pandering to me and I'll wake up on my deathbed and be like, you fuckers, you're.

[Speaker 2] (1:34:24 - 1:34:26)

I need to change my will.

[Speaker 1] (1:34:28 - 1:35:56)

Get me my lawyer. Yeah. What is going on here, you guys?

No, but it was, you know, it's all good. But no, I didn't. I was kind of no.

I'm like, no, I don't think so. No, I started off. I started out thinking I was like I grew up.

My parents are still together. So like, I guess it was an X for me. It was like, I'm going to have the two and a half kids in the way, pick a fence and whatever.

And then as I got older, I'm like, it wasn't for me. And then I actually made a decision to actively take that decision away. I just got snipped.

Yeah, 34. Yeah, and I didn't have any kids. Yeah.

So it's really interesting because like my brother just had a boy the week that I had my mastectomy, three girls and a boy. So I'm like, well, whatever. We're good.

I'm like that. That was the sign, I guess. I don't know.

Whatever. So but what it was was like at 31 is when I did consider it, but I waited for three years. Like I really considered what the ramifications of this would be.

And I was like, look, I have a feeling at some point there's going to be one of these things or something. And I guess because I'm I got to be honest, like I'm like I'm personally approach like I'm pro choice for other people like I to an extent, but like, I don't know if I'm that for me. You don't want to make that choice.

Right. So it's like, you know what? I'll just eliminate the choice because I don't think it's going to be for me.

[Speaker 2] (1:35:56 - 1:36:05)

Right. So I was able to say I can't have children like I was able to like some, you know, if I were going on dates or something like, oh, yeah, by the way, just so you know, I can't have kids.

[Speaker 1] (1:36:05 - 1:36:08)

Yeah. Likely story. You just want to screw.

[Speaker 2] (1:36:08 - 1:36:08)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:36:09 - 1:36:09)

Exactly.

[Speaker 2] (1:36:10 - 1:36:10)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:36:10 - 1:36:29)

Well, it's funny. I go on a date. Woman was really pushing kids and she was highly aggressive on date number two and then called me like a day later and said she was she missed her period or two days later.

And I'm like, I had a vasectomy. Not bloody likely. My doctor.

Right.

[Speaker 2] (1:36:29 - 1:36:29)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (1:36:29 - 1:37:17)

Not bloody likely. Right. Exactly.

So you knew that some some jig was up or whatever. But it was interesting that I did that. And it was like literally the next like within a few really like a few other times that that was probably within a year or two.

Like, let's. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah, I know.

Once again, I actually encourage family like I know the family is the stability that allows like an outsider like me to be different. But I don't think I should be the culture, you know. But I know that sounds really selfish, like like I'm allowed like rules for the not for me, but it's like, no, I'm kind of wired this way, but I've not no one made me this way because they pushed me to be something I'm not.

I just happen to walk by the beat of my own drum. It's not.

[Speaker 2] (1:37:17 - 1:37:18)

I think that's good.

[Speaker 1] (1:37:18 - 1:38:32)

Not where you have to be. I mean, you have to know what you want. You know, I mean, the I think the I I coached like Peewee basketball with my kids.

They asked me to I'm not a coach material, let's be honest. And then I don't like sports per se. And they asked me and there wasn't a lot of volunteers.

And I said, oh, sure, I'll do it. You know, I know basketball and well enough for Peewee. You know, I mean, I'm at the same level you guys are.

So we're all good. Right. So I did this taller.

Yeah, I'm just I'm just taller and can drive. And then but it was it was really a bit of a melancholy experience, I suppose, because there's so many kids that don't get enough attention at home. And then I was the attention.

Right. Right. And, you know, coach, coach, coach.

And then they were like all over you. Wanting you to, you know, be for therefore, you know what I mean? Which I was as a coach.

[Speaker 2] (1:38:32 - 1:38:35)

But that's like breaking my heart just hearing your story.

[Speaker 1] (1:38:37 - 1:39:20)

And some were worse than others. I mean, there was. So if you have a little kid that is yours, right, it's socially acceptable for my little kid to crawl around on me and sit on my lap while I'm talking about whatever coaching.

And but then, you know, certain one and most of the kids understood that. Right. And and they were fine with that.

But some of them, I just assume that they were not feeling, you know, like they got enough attention because they wanted to get on my lap and they didn't understand that they can't do that. You know, I mean, it's not it's not acceptable for this guy. It's socially unacceptable, right?

[Speaker 2] (1:39:20 - 1:39:21)

It's not socially acceptable.

[Speaker 1] (1:39:21 - 1:41:41)

You know, and so I get it. And then I had to say to my kids, you know, no, you can sit next to me, but you can't sit on me anymore because these other kids want to get on me because they think I'm there. They want me to be their dad because I'm here and their dad or whoever is not.

And so then that was a whole situation with my children. Then as we were doing that was, you know, it's OK at home, you know, you crawl around on me and what have you. When we go out, you got to you can sit next to me, sit on me because nobody can sit on me at this point, because then it just it gets it gets weird, you know?

Yeah, for sure. I get it. Yeah.

I mean, those types of lessons must be hard to balance as a parent. Like those are the ones that are like, you know, how do you even think of that in your head to start navigating that conversation? Well, it's about that for everything.

The terrible thing is, is that so many of the kids understood it and they would just sit there nicely because they didn't like, I don't know who this guy is. I'm not sitting on his lap. That's true.

But there's danger. Yeah, there's there's others that they're just like, oh, I need somebody to love me. And here's somebody who's sitting there and I want them to love me.

And so they want to get on you. Oh, my gosh. And the terrible thing was, you know, at the time, as you go through this, you know, I'm not thinking anything at the time.

And then I'm thinking, wait a minute, this isn't right. And then I have to go through the whole thing. Right.

So I have to go through all this. And and I coach for both my kids and they're a few years apart. So I went through it for several years.

And so then, you know, and as they grew up and I watched other kids, you know, because we've been in the same area for a long time. Watch all the other kids grow up. And and I'm like, you know, that kid who's got all his problems.

Like his his dad never showed up. Ever. Right.

He was he was the one as as a four year old, five year old trying to get on me. Right. And now he's he's graduating from high school and he's a mess.

Wow. You know what I mean?

[Speaker 2] (1:41:42 - 1:41:43)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (1:41:44 - 1:41:59)

It there is everybody's like, oh, how could this happen? You know what? I watched it happen from afar.

And I mean, I can just if you like, you know, if we were just to walk through the high school, I could go trouble, trouble, nice trouble.

[Speaker 2] (1:41:59 - 1:42:02)

I mean, you pretty much could. Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (1:42:02 - 1:43:49)

And these were all kids who were not even in kindergarten whenever I first interacted with them and I would come home, you know, and I talked to my wife and I'd be like, oh, God, this kid, you know, Charlie, he's going to be he's going to be a son of a bitch. Oh, it's so heartbreaking because I totally understand it. You know, it's it's not.

And the thing is, you don't. I was probably because I mean, there's only so many people who can coach and there's more kids on the team than there are needs for coaches. Right.

You don't have for sure. You don't have to do more than the minimum. Right.

But you got to do that. And that's what I don't think people get. If they're I don't think they get it.

It doesn't matter if they're young or old or whatever, you know, at at six o'clock when it's basketball practice, if you can't stand around for 45 minutes for a little kid, you know, and you're off somewhere else, why you have to keep having a beer? Yeah, whatever. It doesn't even matter.

I know. I'm just saying it's like it's like that's the thing is like, I'll get I get it. It's like if you take on the responsibility to be that, then be that.

Yeah. And it's not even that hard. I mean, you just have to hang out for a little while and then you can go home and do whatever you want most of the time, because once they're at home, it so it's there's a weird competition with children in the wild, as it were, when they're out in public because they want to be recognized.

Right. Just like anybody does. Just like anybody.

And they don't understand yet that there's a that social line yet or they're or they're experimenting with where that line is.

[Speaker 2] (1:43:49 - 1:43:49)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (1:43:49 - 1:45:35)

They don't know. They don't understand it. They're there.

And all they want to do is be, you know, in our case, dribbling the ball and turn around and there's mom or dad. Right. Cheering.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I always one of my things I have my kids make fun of me constantly because I love to come up with these little sayings, life lessons, sayings for them. And I'm like, everybody needs a cheerleader.

Everybody does. It doesn't matter what age you are or who you are or, you know, anything. You can be a grandpa.

You want to have a cheerleader because that's you want to have that feedback that says I'm worth knowing. Right. Right.

Yeah. I mean, I've had I've had people on a podcast where they'll tell me something like, that is so awesome that you do that. And then they'll say, what do you think?

If I go, oh, that's absolutely ridiculous. But I love that you do it. Like, yeah, like it has nothing.

I don't need to believe in what you believe in to believe in you. Right. Like, right.

Exactly. Let me let me just be there for you. Like, you go, you go do your thing.

I'll encourage you to be you. I'll disagree if you ask me. But until that point, I'm happy to encourage you.

It's just it makes everybody everybody needs it. I mean, you know, everybody thinks they don't. But the reality is no matter where you go through in life, you're always going to feel better if that's happening.

And that's all these kids need. They don't need somebody to to be the do all, you know, all the money and everything. They just need somebody to be sitting there.

So when they turn around, they know that they're there. And so many of them, they need a hug every once in a while.

[Speaker 2] (1:45:35 - 1:45:39)

And they need a couple of words of encouragement. They need to be like known that they're there.

[Speaker 1] (1:45:39 - 1:46:11)

Yeah, it's it's not even I mean, it's not really that hard. And and I think sometimes. Well, we're really getting really deep here, where they think sometimes people really they think they got to shame these people.

It's like, no, you they don't I don't think people understand where the minimum is. Right. And it's just you just got to do the minimum.

To be honest with you, it's just like work. If you want to have a job for the rest of your life, do the minimum. And guess what?

You probably won't get fired. Right. Right.

And the same thing.

[Speaker 2] (1:46:11 - 1:46:16)

Yeah, you will you will be not recognized, but you will not get fired. You are going to exactly going to stay there for sure.

[Speaker 1] (1:46:17 - 1:49:52)

Yeah. And that's all you need to do as a parent. Do the minimum.

And, you know, so many of them were just dropped off. And then, oh, I got a free hour, you know, you know, right. Like teachers or babysitters, like, come on.

Right. So but they're barely educators, but like babysitters on top of it. But, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the thing.

And so, yeah, I say that in jest because the love of my life is a teacher. Yeah. Yeah.

They have the hard job. Oh, gosh. She she had a special special education, and we've been together over five years.

And neither of us have children or want children of our own. But we see the amazingness in children. Like she'll come home and she'll be like, OK, I brought this vegetable in.

And they all looked at me and one of them goes, what's that white broccoli? And I'm like, I know exactly what that is. I don't know how smart of a child.

Like this is a like a communication delay child who can communicate to me what that is without me. I wasn't even in the room. Right.

Exactly. She'll text me like white, white broccoli. I'm like cauliflower.

And then she goes, baby lettuce. Oh, boy. Brussels sprouts.

Yeah. They boom. Right.

Two for two. Yeah. How like seeing that in a child to me is amazing.

Watching how they can connect something they know to something they don't know. Right. Yeah, exactly.

And that's the beauty of it. Yeah, yeah, totally. And we sit there and we slap the damn thing out of their hand as they're working it.

Right. Like, what are we what are you doing? Like, let him finish.

Let him finish the thing. Yeah, no, exactly. It is frustrating.

It's funny because like I'm not a parent. I'm like frustrated for parents. I'm frustrated that children aren't getting the recognition.

But I know that I would be concerned that I wouldn't be able to give that either, you know? So. Well, I mean, it can be tough at times.

It's not all, you know, peaches and cream. But yeah, I mean, that's been my experiences. And I think it's you have to have a certain amount of patience for that.

And the funny thing, I always joke with my wife because I'm like, I'm I'm always the more patient was always the more patient parents. And I was talking to them. They're older now.

I've grown up pretty much. And I'm like, you remember, I used to take you to the park all the time. They're like, oh, yeah, we love to go to park.

I go, yeah, because your mom was tired of your ass and you were making her. She wanted to kill you. And she'd be like, can you take him to the park away?

And I go, OK, I'll take him to the park. And I'd take him out and run around and what have you. And then we would come back and she would be OK.

Right, because her right. My levels of patience for the nonsense of, you know, you know, playing and yelling and running around and everything was was way up there compared to hers. And so it's like, OK, they need to go to the park.

You're taken. Right. OK.

And so but the thing was, rather than then, you know, yelling and carrying on at them and making them try to settle down, which they weren't going to do now, they at least, I think, have some fond memory of going to the park.

[Speaker 2] (1:49:53 - 1:49:54)

So, yeah, exactly.

[Speaker 1] (1:49:55 - 1:52:33)

And they have to burn the energy. Little young boys have to burn the energy. So, yeah, I'm not there's a slight crisis in this country of young men don't have direction right now.

Right. They'll have to burn their energy up. Every every bad civilization burns to the ground when young men are trying nothing to do.

Right. Literally, like bad stuff just happens. It's just, oh, yeah, you get bored.

You got to do something. Come on. Right.

And men need. Look, there's this the toxic masculinity thing. Look, I get it.

Assault on women. Yeah. No.

Thank you. Like, no. OK, but like a man being a boy or a boy being a boy and like running around.

Yeah, I think you should allow that. You know, well, I was another. This is my talking.

My old guy here. We used to play to the bark off the tree and there weren't any winners. We were all.

Yeah, we're all losers. My dad's mad because like. Not too long ago, I guess it was probably about two years ago.

Anyway, my kids were out running around at night. And it was I mean, it wasn't late. It wouldn't been that or anything.

It's by 11 o'clock or something. Anyway, they were they went by a bank and they thought they saw a cat. And they pulled into the bank and we're trying to get this cat to get to come to them because it seemed like a stray cat.

They're going to try to be nice and help out the cat. And the cops came up. And I started hassling them.

What are you doing in here? What are you doing in the parking lot? They're like, we're trying to find this cat.

It was running around. You know, we're trying to, you know, find take it to someplace where it can get some food or something like there's no cat. Is there?

What are you doing here? You're by the ATM, you know, take their license, run their license, give it a bunch of crap, right? And scaring them.

And then finally, there was nothing was happening. And they finally let him go. And I'm like, what the hell?

I mean, yes, they're in a bank parking lot. They give a very plot. They're not, you know, they don't they don't look like anything menacing, you know, just a couple of kids.

I mean, like I'd be like, hey, kids, get out of here. Right. Yeah, exactly.

You say the bank really doesn't want to have people parking here. OK, you're looking for the cat. He ran off.

You know, you guys probably had to move along. That was as simple as it needed to be.

[Speaker 2] (1:52:33 - 1:52:35)

Right. Right. But maybe it's quite a week or something.

[Speaker 1] (1:52:36 - 1:53:08)

I don't know. But but they treat him like that. Yeah.

And, you know, there's a culture inside that. And I know a lot of people who are law enforcement and I can't imagine that job. No, you're going to get killed every time you turn around.

But I yeah, everything now is a potential. There's a potential death, I guess. But when I was a kid, I mean, we would do way worse.

I mean, I don't know how many times I got alcohol taken away from me underage. They find you. They look at you.

They're like, OK, he's not drunk yet. We're just going to take all this.

[Speaker 2] (1:53:09 - 1:53:09)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (1:53:10 - 1:54:36)

And we're breaking up the party. He's got to walk home. Yeah.

But there was no it was all kind of cool. You know what I mean? It's all like you guys know you're not supposed to be doing this.

No, you don't want me to call your parents, do you? No, no. How the heck did we get here?

And I'm totally fine with it. But it's like the show should be called Tangents. I swear to God, because it's like, man, we just like are running the game.

And I'm totally cool with it. It's not a complaint. It's like we're talking about underage.

We're an underage drinking and getting the hassle and your kids being at the ATM machine. I just think that there needs to be more. I mean, I understand that on the one side, being a cop or whatever is a really tough job.

Right. And and you can get into predicaments that are life threatening. But I mean, you know, it's it's not.

The percentages are so slim where I'm at currently that it's not the way to handle it. You know what I mean? You can't probably deescalation from the from the get go might prevent that from escalating.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So I mean, imagine I'm like imagine the cop giving you like your your son, like a little push shove on the shoulder, you know, just something weird like, hey, what are you doing here, kid?

And then he's got something, you know, in his back, back waistband or something.

[Speaker 2] (1:54:36 - 1:54:36)

Right. Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (1:54:36 - 1:54:41)

Right. Like. And I don't want either one to happen, but I think that there needs to.

[Speaker 2] (1:54:41 - 1:54:43)

Oh, no, you don't want anyone. Yeah. You don't want any of that.

[Speaker 1] (1:54:44 - 1:55:37)

A little more, a little more understanding and a little more. The thing about I think maybe when we were younger was there was kind of a coolness, right? If the cop was cool, then I mean, you knew when you were stepping over the line and you knew when you were caught.

I think most people in that. And I think there was a personal accountability to it back then, too. Like we knew that we were screw ups.

We weren't a victim when we were the ones drinking. Right. Exactly.

Like somehow we could justify it now. It's like, but my mom and dad yelled at each other all day. So I'm coping.

Well, that doesn't make it OK. Right. That's not the reason you're drinking.

OK. Like, I mean, I think that's part of it, too. Right.

It's almost like the excusing of it in a lot of ways. Well, and then if you want to get into the whole European model, underage drinking is not an issue if everybody.

[Speaker 2] (1:55:37 - 1:55:39)

It's not even a taboo. Right. It's not a taboo.

And I'm coming from a German family.

[Speaker 1] (1:55:40 - 1:56:40)

Yeah. I mean, you know, if you if you learn about alcohol as you grow up, you're better off than learning about alcohol when you grow up. Right.

And it's funny because you've got your European and then you've got your Eastern European, like Russia, where you just grow up drinking. Right. Yeah.

That's all you do. So it's like a totally different thing where it's like you're born with a vodka bottle in your hand and it's like part of the culture. You know, it's like what cigarettes were at some point.

Oh, yeah, exactly. Well, cigarettes still are in some parts of the world. Oh, in some parts for sure.

That's probably even more like Europe. It's like vodka is to Russia what cigarettes are to Europe. So probably Italy or something.

Oh, yeah. Well, France, for sure. So we've been down this rabbit hole for two hours, Bob, and I'm I'm good to go and I can continue.

It's up to you. You've got work, I'm sure, and all this stuff, but I'm enjoying the conversation. Well, we'll wrap up here soon.

I forgot what my last relevant question was. I don't know. Think of a new question for me.

[Speaker 2] (1:56:41 - 1:56:42)

Oh, boy. Well, we can.

[Speaker 1] (1:56:43 - 1:59:00)

We've been riffing here for about 35 minutes. You've gone through this. Of all the guests you had, you had a couple.

Yeah. Is there one besides the last one you mentioned, the Bitcoin guy? Is there anyone else that stands out to you?

Oh, yeah. The crazy thing is, get back to that. The crazy thing is we had more guests before podcasting was invented than we've had since podcasting was invented.

So, yeah. So Scott Baker was a guest and he at the time he was on a new venture because he was with a thing called streamingmedia.com, which at the time was like cutting edge stuff. And he had us on, this is another weird story, but he had us on a show.

I was on a show along with Miles and the CEO from Live 365. I don't remember Live 365. Back in the day, this would be about 2000-ish, 2001.

We were on the show together. It was supposed to be a third person from a community type station out in San Francisco. I think it was called WPIG or W something or other.

Anyway, he didn't show up. So it was just me and Miles and the CEO of Live 365. So you're talking about a venture capitalist project with a lot of money at the time, right?

I mean, this was when it was starting out. So they had millions and these two idiots, because I happened to meet Scott Baker, who told me I was on iTunes. And he was doing a little show for streamingmedia.com.

And he's like, hey, you want to be a guest on this show? I said, sure. And not thinking about it, you know.

And so the hilarious thing was at the time, my daughter was a toddler and I had to take care of her after work for a while because of the schedules. And so I'm trying to do this serious talk show with this guy. I got a toddler walking all around me, making noise.

So I had to, this is when you still had regular, I had wireless phone, cordless phone, right?

[Speaker 2] (1:59:01 - 1:59:01)

Oh, right.

[Speaker 1] (1:59:02 - 2:00:02)

And I could mute. And so I'd be muting myself whenever she, because she'd get up in my face and would be playing with my face and talking to me. And I didn't want to shush her or anything.

And so then I would mute. Then they'd ask a question, they'd come on and be like, I'm talking. And then this kid's going, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm sure the guy really loved it. But he was such a serious guy. I'm sure he was like, how the hell am I doing this?

And then Miles was hardly saying two words because we were talking technical stuff and he didn't know. I don't know. And but it was a fun kind of thing.

And it's a really interesting juxtaposition at that time of how things were, you know, it was kind of the haves and have nots, which I thought was funny. But then afterwards, we did a show about that because it was a weird situation. And Miles was like, you took over the guy's show.

You kept asking the CEO all these questions. And I'm like, I wasn't doing that. What are you talking about?

And I don't know. I guess I was. But it was just kind of a weird thing.

[Speaker 2] (2:00:02 - 2:00:04)

Yeah, but you were curious. That's a beautiful thing.

[Speaker 1] (2:00:04 - 2:00:07)

I was a curious guy, yeah. But that was fun.

[Speaker 2] (2:00:07 - 2:00:07)

It's funny.

[Speaker 1] (2:00:07 - 2:03:43)

I've been on the other side of the mic, like with you, for example, when we flip flop, but it's like I've done that where I find myself asking the questions because I find myself more curious about. Why wouldn't you? I mean, I do it in real life.

I don't care if I'm right. It's like I almost like the show's all about like, think about I'm sitting in the middle of a coffee shop. You do not know who I am.

But someone outside told you if you walk to the middle and sit down in this thing and just dump your soul, right, you will not be judged and you walk away clean and like refreshed. That's how you go to like just comfortable talking to me. I'm the understanding stranger.

The I mean, that was just hilarious. The I can imagine that being like geek talking. Yeah.

The guy was weird. Miles got put off from this guy because he thought and I didn't even think about it at the time of the interview because the CEO guy was going, well, we don't have any hate talk or anything on Live 365. And Miles took it that we were the hate talkers.

And I'm like, we're not the hate talk. What are you? Why did you typecast this as hate talk?

Right. Well, that's unfortunate, too. He kind of had a weird I mean, he was very aggressive, right person.

And he took it that way. And I'm oblivious. I'm just like, oh, whatever.

Hey, by the way, how much does it cost to run all those servers? Yeah, exactly. You know, and but how many hamster wheels are running at this moment?

So that was that was like the first incarnation of Live 365, which I think is still going on, to be honest with you. In some ways, it still sounds familiar to me. I remember Live 365.

I remember all the early stuff. It was I remember the 90s when, you know, 90s and 2000s where it got swallowed up. And then, you know, yeah, everything goes around and around.

I got up one time at like three thirty in the morning to talk to a guy from England about doing audio on the Internet from a defunct magazine. They were a multimedia magazine called Now.com out of London. And somehow he found the show.

This would be, again, like 2000 ish and contacted us. This time it was just me. And I talked to this guy was most fascinating.

I got up three thirty and and went downstairs at the time and got on the phone and did a phone interview with this guy from London. And it was the most I thought to me it was the most fun and most bizarre thing at the time. I'm like, wow, this is so fun.

I'm talking to this guy from England. And then, you know, now it's not that big a deal. But back then it was like a whole, you know, thing.

And they didn't get long distance call charges. And he called me. So, OK, so what I'm saying, like, I think that still was a thing.

So, yeah. Oh, yeah, probably. I'm sure I paid something.

They always pay something. Right. And so, yeah, I did that thing.

And then it was like I tried to I couldn't be too loud because my kid was sleeping. My wife was sleeping. And then we got done and it was like, you know, five o'clock in the morning or something.

Nobody's awake. And I just had to sit there and wait for everybody to wake up because I was buzzing. You know, this was like a very exciting thing.

And it was weird. And then it came out, you know, was on the Internet. And I'm like, wow, that's so interesting.

Again, lost.

[Speaker 2] (2:03:44 - 2:03:47)

But I know, you know, it's so cool.

[Speaker 1] (2:03:48 - 2:04:17)

It was fun at the time. But nowadays, I mean, I've I talked to I've been on other shows and in overseas in Australia and Canada, everywhere. I mean, via this kind of stuff, you know, it's no big deal.

And everybody does it every day. It's not a big thing. But, you know, back in those days, it was it was something else.

I would say I've got a couple more highlights, I suppose, guest highlights.

[Speaker 2] (2:04:17 - 2:04:17)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (2:04:18 - 2:05:02)

So I always joke that we worked our way up. So, you know, we we did this thing for streaming media, which was online and only, you know, I talked to Hargrave. He was online.

And then I finally got I actually took a step up and then back. I made contact with Will Wheaton, who was from Star Trek. And his audio book not that long ago.

And unfortunately, it never totally happened. But I think the three of us could figure out something. Another liberation child.

The deal was he was at the time was not on Star Trek anymore. He was kind of faded into the background, but he was.

[Speaker 2] (2:05:02 - 2:05:04)

Yeah, that was his downtime. Yes.

[Speaker 1] (2:05:05 - 2:05:15)

He was writing a blog and I was reading it quite regularly. And I. Will Wheaton dot net, wasn't it?

Right. Will Wheaton dot net. Exactly.

I think it's dot net, not dot com. I remember.

[Speaker 2] (2:05:15 - 2:05:16)

Correct.

[Speaker 1] (2:05:16 - 2:10:05)

Yeah. And I think it's still going. Actually, I think it is.

And so he hadn't written his first book at this point. He was just writing the blog. And I interacted with him and finally said, hey, would you love like to could you come on and do a little phone interview?

And he was up for it. Now, here's my big mistake. So at the time, I included miles in all these emails and he would generally not ever pipe in.

But for some reason, I guess because it was Will Wheaton and he knew who he was, as opposed to all these other people that, you know, I talked to. He had no idea they were. He decides to pipe in and he asked he goes to Will Wheaton.

Hey, I heard you're going to do an interview with us. That's going to be fantastic. Let me ask you a question.

And he's asked Will Wheaton in stand by me, which one of you guys had the biggest unit in the email? And guess what? Will Wheaton would not talk to me anymore.

He got so angry, which I don't blame him. I can. Will Wheaton was this weird in that moment of his life from what the chronology of his story is.

I can imagine how awful he would have been to about it. And like, I can imagine how he would have felt about it. Yeah.

And so miles, he was trying to be funny. He's trying to be funny. He's trying to be cute.

I get it. Yeah. Like he didn't.

It didn't come across that way. Yeah. Well, the sympathy is like you didn't put yourself in a struggling actor's shoes who hasn't gotten a job.

And that was even pre that was right. You're trying to talk to him after the last thing he did. You're trying to get him for like the first thing he did.

That doesn't work because you're talking about typecasting him back to back to the beginning. It's like, right, exactly. Yeah.

It's like it's actually humiliating for someone. It was a horrible question. And I was so mad at him.

But and then again, I also get the ignorance that miles had. And when I say ignorance, I do not mean it with disrespect is like he I don't think he understood the ramifications of that question in the context that it was. No, not at all.

Because, you know, we need to fix that. Like, we need to repair that, because, like, I think that would be a fun conversation. Well, now, obviously, he's had much more success.

And it's he's not in that weird phase between child actor and adult actor. And even though he was really more of an adult after Star Trek anyway. But but anyway, so, yeah, that's what happened with it.

So that I just wrote that up. Actually, there's a whole show about me berating him for doing that. But so then I'm like, OK, yeah.

And there's there's a bit of constructive criticism for him, too. He's like a victim of his parents. I could yeah, I could take that route.

I could totally take that route. And I never have. I can promise you I never have.

And I could I'm happy to share with you. But like, you notice we talk about stuff. I haven't brought stuff up because it's like it's not it's not what this is about.

This is about other stuff. But like, oh, yeah, he did become like he talks about like divorcing his parents and how he was like, yeah, them about the gas. And it's like, I get it, too.

But dude, you're a boy. You're in a man now, too. Like I and I understand there's trauma like I under I get both sides of it.

So like I try to empathize. But it's like at what line is it to is the line like enough already? Like, well, I think he went I mean, he wanted to act and then he did.

And then he didn't want to for a while. But he was kind of forced into it a bit because he earned so much money. Yeah, yeah.

And don't get me wrong. I know what his parents did. I know the exact gaslighting.

And I listen to that book. I think it was the it was the remake of his book because it added like another 20 hours. It's like 40 hours.

So he certainly I'm happy when he wrote his first book. So, yeah, right. Right.

It was a reflection. I think it was like 10 year anniversary or something. So with the annotations.

Right. Basically, yeah. Really interesting.

And I admire the guy. I'm just saying, like, I was I thought the way he spoke out, it's like not everyone's exactly like that was. Right.

Yeah. Although you can argue that they had elements of that or something. My thing for him was the I mean, he was doing again, all my things in the early times, especially when driven by the fact that he was doing something that I thought was really cool because it was so out front.

I mean, there were a lot of things you approach from a very from his from his perspective and miles approach.

[Speaker 2] (2:10:05 - 2:10:05)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (2:10:05 - 2:10:10)

Well, the human perspective that everyone approaches where we come from.

[Speaker 2] (2:10:10 - 2:10:10)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (2:10:12 - 2:10:30)

And once again, it's like, yeah, we know. Like, I don't think he would do that again, nor I don't think he would. I don't think he did that to someone else.

I think he'd realize that now. Maybe. Maybe he wouldn't.

But I would hope so. But it was inappropriate. No matter what.

And right. And yeah, so that didn't happen. But that's unfortunate.

[Speaker 2] (2:10:31 - 2:10:31)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (2:10:31 - 2:11:01)

Probably the you don't even know this person, but we got to talk to a guy named Martin Sargent. I was really into watching tech TV at the time and all the shows. And so he was on tech TV.

He had a new show called Unscrewed, which was their late night talk show. And OK. And so I did get through to him amazingly.

Somehow I got through to him and we did an interview and he knew Will Wheaton because Will Wheaton was on tech TV quite a bit back in those days.

[Speaker 2] (2:11:01 - 2:11:02)

Oh, yes.

[Speaker 1] (2:11:02 - 2:14:01)

I told him the story. He was like, you guys are assholes. But it's all recorded out there.

But he did talk to us. And so that was probably as far as a mainstream at the time. Obviously, no one probably remembers who poor Martin is now.

He was a really cool guy at the time. That was pay cable, you know, that was that was somebody. And so that all again, all before podcasting was the thing.

And and so, yeah, that was kind of that. And then we just kind of I think what happened was my kids were getting older and then I have other responsibilities. And so tracking all this stuff down became too much to do because, as you know, trying because you've gotten some, you know, good gets that there's work in that.

Right. So there's work to get people to agree. And you may have to go back and forth with them several times and and, you know, arranging things and all this kind of stuff.

And you kind of have to be persistent and it can be persistent and flexible and very understanding and patient because like you have to really and humble because you're a nobody. Right. Exactly.

And that someone's giving you any time you best be darn happy and humble and gracious that they're giving you that time. And when they change on you last minute, it sucks. And you have every right to feel angry, feel angry, but don't let that affect the right because you want to you still want to have months.

You just got a greater good. There's a greater good to get. And I think everybody gets hothead about stuff.

Well, you don't like it. Fine. Screw you.

I'm out. Yeah. It happens and you can't be you can't let it get to you.

Just got to say, OK, I'm at one. I'm at one right now. I've got a major guy who I had who gave me an hour of his time, who was so gracious.

And I'm trying to get him in a debate with the former U.N. U.S. ambassador to Russia during Obama. And I'm like, I've got the assistant and I got the guy through LinkedIn. I'm like, I bet he wouldn't.

I'm like, I bet he wouldn't debate this guy because he wouldn't have the courage. And the guy's like, he goes, I don't even know who that guy is. I go, OK, well, let me work on this because I'd love that.

And I go, I'll even go on the podcast. And before we even start, I'll say I said that you didn't have the courage, but I was 100 percent wrong. And like I'm like, I start with humility.

I'm like, I will start hat in hand, but then let's do this. But the guys pushed it back two quarters already. And I'm like, come on.

And now now I message like first of the year. And now it's been two weeks. I just followed up.

Both both emails were ghosted. And it's like, yeah, come on. And would you put a lot of time into that kind of stuff?

And it's just so. But it is a persistence like I'm not going to stop because like that if I can get that conversation about Ukraine with the two people that I'm talking about getting.

[Speaker 2] (2:14:02 - 2:14:04)

Oh, yeah, like it would be.

[Speaker 1] (2:14:05 - 2:14:10)

And it's like, I don't care that it's me. I do not care that it's I care that someone got it right.

[Speaker 2] (2:14:11 - 2:14:12)

You know what I mean?

[Speaker 1] (2:14:12 - 2:14:47)

Yeah, that's the fun of it, though. That's part of that for nothing else other than like I want some I want it out there. You know what I mean?

Yeah, so anyway. But man, it's so awesome that you've done this for 20, 25 years. Congratulations.

Yeah, I've been pretty lazy, though. So I mean, you get the highlights for this little shindig, but yeah, most of the time it's just, you know, the regular so. Yeah, but you know what?

Those stories are you find yourself like and especially when you're a simpatico and you start laughing. I'm sure you've had that where you just can't.

[Speaker 2] (2:14:47 - 2:14:47)

Oh, yeah.

[Speaker 1] (2:14:48 - 2:16:01)

Oh, my God. It's to be it gets to be too much sometimes. I don't know.

It's really silly. I love the silly. I love the, you know, kind of kookiness and the silliness and the going out to the edge and and seeing where you end up.

That's the kind of stuff. Well, I love that you kind of get to do like exercise. It's like once a week to purge.

You get to tap into this part of you that that's not always tapped into. Right. Because being a father, being a husband, those things, being a being, you know, your job, your career person, those things all take different skill sets.

And like it's part of you atrophy, you know? Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh.

Yeah. And I love, you know, maybe I don't think I've demonstrated it overly too much on this, but I mean, I love to be clippy and just kind of on my toes and and throw things off there and silly. Well, I've always found it to be that because in the short in the few conversations, I'm not sure they've all been excellent, but like and well, like long, but in a good way.

But in the few conversations we've had, we've literally been able to talk almost about every subject where we haven't been like, yeah, I know nothing about that. There's been a little bit about that.

[Speaker 2] (2:16:01 - 2:16:02)

Tell me more.

[Speaker 1] (2:16:02 - 2:19:36)

Let me catch up to you or. Oh, yeah, we can talk about that. Let me share some something with you about it.

You know, I always say if nothing else, our show is relatable on some way, in some way, shape or form. We're relatable either through I love pop culture. It's pop culture references or through, you know, just living your life and running into problems.

You know, I'm not I'm probably not super relatable to a crack addict who's on the floor of a bathroom in a dive bar somewhere. But, you know, maybe I don't know many people who are more. How about fentanyl?

How about fentanyl? Yeah, we'll get up to date. Yeah, fentanyl.

Oh, I got my fentanyl shots. I got my fentanyl and I'm, you know, tripping out my Narcan on me. So we're good.

Right. Exactly. Yeah.

But yeah, I got my I went and got my Narcan so I can do my fentanyl. And so that way I don't, you know, overdose because, you know, it's very fast. That Narcan is very fast acting.

So that's what I hear. Yeah, fentanyl's pretty fast acting too. Yeah, it's all quick.

But no, I mean, that's again, this is kind of gallows humor. You know, this is where the over since there. Oh, my gosh, these poor people.

I can't help it. It's a hundred thousand deaths you've had this year and they were all innocent. You know, yeah, I'm like, OK, I'm not saying that.

Nobody's saying they're not innocent. I'm just saying that, you know, it's kind of funny. I mean, yeah, in a weird, sad way.

And it is. You're like, man, I mean, well, yeah, it's sad. Nobody's you know, it's funny.

Well, we were talking about the the police thing, right? I watched like that live TV show before it went off and then came back on because BLM shut it down for a bit. But I'd say 75 percent of those interactions are like pretty cool.

Cops, to your point, like, hey, man, what are you doing? Are you sure you're cool? You're right.

You know, like and you watch it and you're like, OK, because it kind of humanizes it. But then you do have the ones where like that camera does, I think, does affect their actions, too, in a way that they don't get to do their job fully either. You know what I mean?

It's like weird. Well, it's like a fine line, though, because the body cam should be on, but they don't need to know it's on. You know, it doesn't need to have a big green light or something.

It just you know, like it almost needs to be like where they don't even you know, they don't even know where it's at. Like it's on them, but they don't even know. Right.

Yeah. Hidden. I don't know.

It'd be some interesting cops hidden camera. Yeah. Yeah.

So that would be interesting. I don't know. But yeah, it's like I don't know.

I was going to joke. Basically, nobody in their yearbook says I want to be a drug addict and I want to die in a ditch, right? Right.

I want to be I want to drive all the way out to L.A. I want to do a couple of adult movies, fall up into drugs and have my teeth fall out. Yeah, I'm going to model. Yeah.

For a calendar. I mean, that's that's not you know, that's not the thing. So anyway, that's why I always get well, you know, I don't think these people really want no one saying these people want to be here.

They don't want to be. But yeah, you know, they're here. And addiction is a real thing because.

Oh, gosh.

[Speaker 2] (2:19:36 - 2:19:36)

Yeah.

[Speaker 1] (2:19:38 - 2:22:34)

Yeah. I do hear stories of shelters being empty and you're like, why are they empty? It's like, well, we don't let people do drugs here.

Right. So they'll rather be outside and do the drugs than be sheltered and not do the drugs. Right.

And you're like, OK, so what do you do with that? That's the cop's problem. That's you know, how do we.

Yeah, like and then talking about it's like, are we against or for it? Like, no, we're not here to arrest anyone. Like, we're trying to be like, what is the problem?

How do we fix that problem? Yeah, no, you're right. That's the that is like a binary.

It's always binary, though. It's like if you talk against it, then you're some authoritarian police prick. And then if you talk for it, you're some hippie drug.

And it's like there's a nuance there. There's like a lane in the middle. Well, if you're going to help people, you got to you got to help them.

You can't just say, well, because you're doing that, you can't be helped. But if you really want to help people, what they have to have wanted to. And I mean, it's like one of those, you know?

Oh, yeah. But again, you just you gave the perfect example of an interview, right? They're going to come.

They're going to say, I want to do this. And then they're not going to do it. And they're going to do that again and again and again until they finally do.

And if you're not there to open the door. Yeah, it's never going to happen. Am I right?

That's so true. That's a true story. And to your point, persistence.

I mean, you do have to let your care show, right? Right. You've got to say, OK, fine, go back out in the world and screw yourself up.

But if you don't feel like not doing it anymore, come back, you know, because if you're not there to answer the whatever the text or the email for the interview, you're not going to get it. Well, they're never going to get better if you're not there to be there when they're ready to get better. So, yeah, it's all the same.

I don't know why it's so simple. I don't know why people don't understand it. You know what I mean?

I can see not wanting to put up with it because it's bullshit and you don't want the bullshit, right? It's their bullshit that you're going to have to take from a person. Yeah, well, from a personal perspective, I think I am of the opinion that you give it a number of efforts.

Mm hmm. And at some point, the it becomes an anchor versus the thing that can pull you down with your other loved ones. Yeah, but we're not talking about the letting them pull you down because, you know, what's going to happen?

It's a real right. We're talking something a little different, I think. To your point.

I mean, if you're I would I'm talking about actually the the care facility, not your mom and dad and your brother and sister or your friends or whatever.

[Speaker 2] (2:22:34 - 2:22:34)

Right.

[Speaker 1] (2:22:34 - 2:22:39)

Yeah, they they they need to draw a line, but the care facility should never draw a line.

[Speaker 2] (2:22:39 - 2:22:40)

Oh, no, certainly not.

[Speaker 1] (2:22:40 - 2:23:11)

No, especially they should be absolutely objective about all that. Right. Exactly.

Because it's a simple equation. They're either going to live and come back or they're going to not live and come back and not going to come back. You know what I mean?

So I mean, we're talking the the grim, unfunny aspect of it is is, you know, people get in a downward spiral and then they die. I mean, that's just the way. And and yeah, we want those facilities to be there.

We don't want people running the facility that says, oh, no, you can't be here because you're a drug addict.

[Speaker 2] (2:23:12 - 2:23:13)

Oh, for sure. Yeah, we don't.

[Speaker 1] (2:23:13 - 2:24:04)

I thought you were a drug addict facility. I think I need a little more familial and personal. But anyway, and now we're getting deep and serious again.

Holy shit. Hey, you know, let's well, we end on a good note with hope. So we end on this.

There you go. Take care of people. We should always have that opening to at least listen and acknowledge that people exist.

Yeah. How about this? Let's let's end on two inspirational.

I'll end on my story and then you can end on an awesome story. We'll call it that. Oh, boy.

I got an awesome story. I'm in Arizona, Phoenix, a little warmer. So we have a lot of homeless people walking around, a lot of people at bus stops, whatever.

I'm at the gas station, putting gas in my car. Gentleman walks up to me, goes, excuse me. He starts telling me his story.

I make eye contact with him. I listen to him. I nod at the end of I say, I'm sorry, I don't.

I only have this card. I don't have any money.

[Speaker 2] (2:24:04 - 2:24:35)

You know, unfortunately, I don't have anything. I, you know, he goes, he says, OK, thanks. He walks away.

He stops. He turns around. He goes, hey, thanks for listening to me.

And then he was like, I'm like. The guy wanted the guy engaged me. Why?

What am I going to like shut him? I know it's like I don't understand that he had that that was a thing. Right.

It's kind of sad. You know what I mean? Like that that needed to be acknowledged.

[Speaker 1] (2:24:36 - 2:25:54)

No, well, that was actually I mean, it was nice of him and it was nice. And so really, it was like that. That's even needs to be acknowledged.

We should all be able to look someone in the eye and say, I'm sure, you know, tell me your story and I'll listen to you or at least know you're here. Yeah. Acknowledge your presence.

So and it kind of comes to what you're talking about with the kids, like they just want to be seen, right? So, yeah, everybody just that's our callback. You don't have to agree with everybody.

Share all your all your socials, all your good stuff, Bob. Thank you so much. And it's been awesome.

I hope we get to do we talked about maybe doing like a roundtable of some sort. I think that would be a lot of fun. So, you know, like I said, we'll keep in touch.

But hope maybe Adam will get back to that email tomorrow and I can read it and laugh. Yeah, I don't know that, you know, he's made a lot of money between now and then. So then and now.

So who knows? But thanks for having me. Yeah.

And I mean, you know, it's it's a wild ride and it's still going on. So everybody just hang on to your hat, I guess. Bob Lament from Static Radio, sir.

Thank you so much. I know you can't lift your arms. I'm going to hit stop here.

But thank you again. Static Radio dot com. Is that where we can find all your stuff?

[Speaker 2] (2:25:54 - 2:25:54)

Oh, yeah.

[Speaker 1] (2:25:54 - 2:26:17)

You can find me there. And then Static Radio on any of the socials, really. On the socials.

Perfect. And I think we follow each other on X and some other stuff. So, yeah.

Well, thank you so much for the time. I'm really grateful. And one of the first 50 podcasts, I can only imagine maybe I maybe 10 of them possibly still exist.

Maybe 10. Oh, I hope more than that. But yeah, hopefully.

You think so?

[Speaker 2] (2:26:17 - 2:26:18)

I can't find them.

[Speaker 1] (2:26:19 - 2:26:37)

But we're like we're in the two millions now, right? But anyway, so thank you again. It's been awesome.