226: We're Baaaaaack! Old Buck Milestones, The Usual Stuff, More to Come

After eleven blissful yet possibly boring months without us, the Bucks are back to share our stories, life events, and views of the world with you. This is a short episode, mainly because Dave in production and Dave in editing couldn't remember how to do stuff after nearly a year off. 

In future episodes, we'll review some of our past topics like crypto [way down], AI [way up], Ukraine [still hanging tough], and more. We'll also be sharing our reading and viewing habits with you. 

Right now, Del is reading The Odyssey, the one by Homer, not Nolan. Dave thoroughly enjoyed Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Dave liked the movie, Project Hail Mary.  Maybe more than the book.

Anyway, you get the idea. What's on your mind? Let us know what you think, what you'd like to hear us talk about. Remember, we'll be posting clips on Youtube as well.

Until next time, think about what The Flaming Lips are telling you here.  We mean YOU. You know who you are. It's an important message even if the video is a bit weird.

Give us your thoughts:  BUCKSTWOOLD@GMAIL.COM
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WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

We're back.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Guess who's here? It's a two-old box, believe it. We are still among the living. We were compelled to do it again. Yeah, so hey, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Yeah, welcome back on the pod, certainly. It's always good to be back.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

This has been this has been like 10 months. You know that.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

A lot of things have happened in that 10 months.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

A lot of things have happened. You know, we've uh we kind of missed some of our listeners here, and I'm a couple of them have missed us apparently. Uh here's the weird thing is we've been down for 10 months. We have gotten thousands of downloads since since we went off quote off the air. Thousands, not millions, but thousands. We had some weeks we had over 300, 300, 400.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

So nobody's more amazed than we are.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

It could be somebody or something out there, yeah, that is uh listening to the bucks.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

I suspected the things. I I think with AI, I really thought they were just scouring the internet, and we're out there on the internet. Uh well, I mean, it's good to be together, and we have a lot of experiences since then, and we we always share some ideas and thoughts about stuff, and maybe it helps somebody. It certainly can put somebody to sleep at night.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Uh, we're we're known as the Melatonin brothers of uh we're gonna save saved some people a lot of money and sleeping medications, so that'll be good. That's another plus. Yeah, it's uh well we'll see see how far our downloads decrease now that we're back.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Well, all I know, Dave, is the milestone we both were shooting for. We uh in a sense, we were just preparing for this. Once we crossed this, we said, oh well, we have a second chance. Uh let's carry on with this. Uh, and that is what?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

What's that milestone was age 80?

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Yes. We believe it or not the generarians.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

We both made it. We both made it.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Who would have thought that we we can claim wisdom.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

When when you were when you were driving your Buick with me in the passenger seat in high school, and we almost ran into a culvert. Who'd have thought we'd still be here to talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

That's right. We didn't think we were going to live past Friday night. That's right. On those days, and here we are together again at 80, almost heading towards 81. So, well, welcome back to all our friends who might just happen to get a uh subscription notice that we're there, so it's good to be back. Hello.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Oh, yeah, so uh so so we I I had some specific feelings about turning 80. I'm sure you did too. How did you feel about the whole process?

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Well, you know, the success of turning 80 is being mobile. In fact, uh every time the clock ticks over now, if you can if you can still get around on your own, still get up and out of your chair without assistance, because we see all the time the the maladies that people suffer with that don't have the mobility that we have. And we are still pretty cognitive of the world around us. Uh although in my view, one of the things we don't want to be. And though in my view, I think a hard thing that's uh coming up to face us is when we have to tell one of our friends that they are really starting to be very forgetful. I mean, it's almost it's almost something I I don't even wish to do. But um, but we've made it that far and we're still uh still able to uh hook up the computer and do some things. So that part of it is okay. So to all our questions.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

I mean I uh I uh I was kind of happy about uh having reached that milestone, actually. Uh I felt pretty good about it once I turned 80. You know, you're kind of apprehensive as you as you sneak up on it. And I know a lot of people that have just dreaded it and have been real unhappy about having arrived, having reached it. Uh I'm sorry, but uh I think it's a good thing. I uh you know, I got all that behind me, I got all that angst behind me, and uh hopefully, you know, life will just to continue to be good. Hey, you know, one of the nice things about being 80 is uh you talked about being forgetful, is we can do dumb things and we don't worry about it. Perfect example. Last night, all right, getting ready for bed. Brush, I'm gonna brush my teeth, and my wife's uh nearby. Um I'm talking to her, and I pick up the tube, put it on the uh brush, and put it in my mouth, and like, oh, that's moisturizer. Yeah, it's wrong stuff. Yes, wrong stuff. And she just went, eh, you're old.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Well, that's true. In my episode, was I had put my shorts on inside out. Only once it was dark, you know, and I put them on inside out. So that means my my pockets, my pockets were hanging out, you know, on both sides. So Lily uh and my wife said uh to me, are you you going uh you going outside like that? And I said, What do you mean? I I'm fine. She said, Why don't you take a look in the mirror? And I said, I could have been walking around most of the day, and you know something no one would tell me. No one would say, Hey Dale, you're wearing your pants inside out.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Well, you know, I had a similar thing happen. Yeah, I I think we we've both talked about this at coffee. We have clothes that we're not allowed to wear outside the house, right? By our our supervisors have instructed us.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

You're not going out looking like that.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

You can't go out, you can't wear that outside. She says, you know, she really wants to trash it, but I said, No, I'll make a bargain. I'll just wear it in the house. Well, I I'm I had a major faux pas the other day. I wore my in-the-house shorts, which are all like paint stained and they have a tear in them, and uh kind of Robin Egg blue. Not just, you know, it's not the greatest color for me. But uh I ended up, I don't know, I went out of the house, I did something, and I thought, I'm just gonna go for the go to the mall and you know, walk a mile in the mall, walk two miles, whatever. And as I'm walking, particularly this is only women. As women come towards me, I can see them give me the once over. They look, they look at me in the eye, they look down to knee level, and they look back up, and they just kind of you know, they're just stone faced. It's like, you know what they're thinking. They're thinking, how did he get out of it?

SPEAKER_00 7:09

There's another old man that lost it.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Yeah, another lost old man.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Poor old man doesn't have a wife to you know to guide him or something. Yeah. Well, that that's those are the things that are happening. And I I as I ran into things, that there's still lots of stuff I haven't, you know, I'm still learning a lot of new things. Like uh, I pretty much in that month or months we were apart, uh, I discovered something called Netflix. And of course, and I quickly became addicted to that. Yeah, and and then uh of course, uh we got our uh emerging um uh AI uh system, and I you know I clicked on that button once and asked it a question, and I said, Whoa, that's pretty clever. You know, I think I'll like this. Uh even with all the consequences, it does it does give you a pretty good thorough research on anything, ask anything. So I'm I'm still discovering new things that I'm adjusting to. Um I mean, I have thoughts on a lot of stuff. I mean, the world is large as I do, but it's uh we're over the hump of now.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Everything is yeah, well, we could talk, let's talk about some of those things, but before we do that, I just want to say, you know, I'm using this year as like a year-long birthday celebration. I'm I'm really milking it. I've I've had a lot of birthday cakes in different places, and it's a lot of fun. Uh the the big deal, and uh I'm we'll get into this today, but we'll talk about it on the a future podcast, assuming I can figure out how to make all this stuff work twice in a row, is uh I took the family to the Galapagos Islands off of uh Ecuador and uh went on a national geographic uh cruise. And I'll say it was spectacular, and it was just unbelievable. My grandsons were just delirious with all the the activities that they could do. Say, well, we'll get into detail here, but uh maybe next podcast or the one after that, we'll give that give that some airing.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Um so there is life after 80, yeah, no doubt about that. We both can agree to that.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

There is life after 80, yeah. Well, some of the things that we've talked about over the year, maybe we can get back into these over these next couple episodes, like uh crypto. Uh see all that stuff has changed.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

It's all gone.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Yeah. AI? What about AI? Who would have thought AI would have galloped off even faster than we or I think anybody else thought could be possible?

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Other than my research, uh my Googling use of AI, I I found something interesting about that when they said the the news says the AI escaped and got into a hacking mode on something. I'm thinking that's right out of the terminator.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Yeah, that's pretty scary. That's pretty scary. It is scary. It is scary. For anybody that hasn't seen that or heard that, what happened was that uh OpenAI was doing experiments on an unreleased uh version of an AI model and AI bot or where AI agent, da da da. And they were asking it a series of challenging test questions. It was it was unable to figure out the solutions based on the you know the huge database that it already had. So it broke out. It broke out of its container. How does it do that? I don't know. And it it surreptitiously gained access to the internet and it went over to Hugging Face. Now, Hugging Face is a platform for AI models where people can uh put their models there, they can develop them there, they can share them there, that sort of thing, as well as I can tell. So uh, so actually it went over there in search of an answer. So it figured out that well, I I don't have the answer here, I'm gonna look out somewhere else. So it hacked into their database. And uh ultimately OpenAI figured out this had happened, and they went over to to hugging the hugging boys and said, uh uh we apologize, but uh we got bust, you got busted here, and uh it was just weird. It was just weird that it's scary, is what it is. It's scary. It's it's yeah, it's it's beyond anything I understand.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Hey, I I would say to anybody that uh may tune on to us off and on now and then uh uh be prepared for a lot of uh interesting insights and uh ideas, and we we may live, David, to see Man on the Moon again. Men on the moon. That's right. That could happen. Yeah, what a milestone that'll be when you go that far. Yeah, but hopefully the world will still be in one. Hopefully, that'll be the only place we don't find humans is just on the moon, you know, because the earth now is in uh you know a ball of dust or something. Yeah, and in a state of distress. Jeez. So anyhow, welcome back to all our viewers, uh our listeners, and uh stand by. You know, the old bucks have got uh got a drawer full of thoughts on every item.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

So well, we still we have we have the wheel of maladies to talk about briefly.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Well, yeah. So what's been what's been your what's been your favorite malady over the over the last 10 months?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Well, the wheel of maladies is is a theory where we all have a wheel, we all spin it, it lands on something.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And I think you've patented that uh concept actually.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

I patent the concept. So you get a free day, you might get two free days, and you know there's something on the wheel that you don't want it to land on. But I know in my heart that if I spin my wheel and I get enough free days, eventually the first thing that comes up is dental. That's the first thing it lands on. Just when I think I'm gonna cruise through a couple months without the wheel landing on something rough, it lands on that, and after that, I think, well, you get you you sort of get through that and say, I still hope it doesn't land on that, to you know, to cope with your dental yeah crisis.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

So all your books out there are gonna be landing on that one because you have what 32 teeth or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

So there's yeah, a lot of people with teeth you're gonna find this interesting, right? Yeah, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

Well, I I had one big uh malady to to uh that I can share, which I already shared with you, and that was uh back on uh October 31st, which was Halloween, I had BPH surgery. For those of you, I think everybody, all the old people listening know what BPH is. It's hard to pee, or you pee too many times, or whatever. Yeah, and uh I had tried some medication, but it just made me crazy. So uh my my doctor and I agreed that uh doctor had a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

We'll have to wait on that one. Well, yeah, we'll have to wait on the rest of that story.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

We'll just uh we'll just park that one for next week because uh we've only got a few minutes left because of my struggles with getting going here. Uh well you want to switch to uh just talk about some uh the books and movies, get to get those uh there is a there is a plethora of uh books and movies that I have gone through in the last 10 months, but some were just amusement, some have come and gone in my brain.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Um have I have fleeting uh you know mediocre memories of uh but nothing uh nothing like some of the ones we read in the past at this point. I was just amusing myself.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

So well, I could throw a couple out there. Go ahead. Well, if you recall, I did a book review of uh Project Hail Mary, and it it subsequently came out as a movie starring Ryan Gosling. So we just watched it the other night actually, and uh it was pretty cute. I thought I thought it was pretty nice. It was it was this kind of a it was really a sweet movie in the end.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

So this is a movie review, not a book review.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

This is the movie review, yeah. It's uh you know it's based on the movie.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

I didn't read the book either.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

So it's based on the book, but uh of course Ryan Gosling is is the only surviving crew member of a of a crew that has been sent uh 10 light years away to uh find a cure for why the son is uh dying. Uh and he meets his buddy Rocky, and he meets Rocky, yes, yeah. So it was really sweet, I thought. Uh so I would recommend the movie. But I and a book that I read, probably the the the but the most interesting, fun book that I've read in the last six months or so is called Panin. It's by uh Vladimir Nvo Nabokov, the Russian. This was this was published in 1957. It was he wrote it in English, and it's a story about uh Timofi Panin, who was a uh Russian-born professor. He's in his 50s, he immigrates to emigrates to America, gets a job teaching Russian in a small college town. And it's really about him trying to adapt to this new world, you know, to the American culture. And he's really, he's really uh he should have been born a hundred years sooner, okay? Because uh, you know, he's just he's just he has a lot of trouble with getting along with people and you know where he lives, and uh, you know, he could be he could seem to be very pompous, but you know, you you you read the book and you go on and on, and you really and I ended up really liking this guy, uh feeling empathy for this guy. You know, he was a bit of an oaf culturally initially, and he starts to fit in, he starts to make friends. The other thing is there's an there's a new word on every page that I don't know what it means. He's Nabokov is just an incredible writer. Uh I really, really, really loved reading it. He's some of his sentences are just so so so beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

So, this is a new edition of a very old publication?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

It's an old yeah, this is an old book. Old book, published in the book. Oh, literally the old book.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

That's like me reading the Odyssey Odyssey by a guy named Homer.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

There you go. Yeah, you said you write in the middle of that.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

I'm just plotting through that slowly now because the movie was out there. I said, I wonder what the book's about. It's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Man has not changed much since he wrote that.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

So well, you know what? I think we should make this an abbreviated uh comeback edition here since we're running out of time. So it's it's good to see you, hear you again, and I hope uh hope some of our uh three, both our listeners or all three of our listeners.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Well, well, yes, we'll call it an abbreviated start. Uh, we're just getting uh back on the old uh treadmill here. So this is old Buck Dell saying thank you uh for anybody who's listening and uh tune in again sometime.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

This is old Buck Dave right behind him saying uh it's great to be back, and uh hopefully we'll do many more. Thanks everybody. Take care.