A weird hobby

This episode is a walk through the mind of JP Clark, a man who had a hobby of collecting old VHS tapes and documenting what was on each one.

To Be Recorded Over volume 1: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Recorded-Over-Documenting-Media-ebook/dp/B0BSSC719V

To Be Recorded Over volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Recorded-Over-Documenting-Tapes-ebook/dp/B0C2NPQKJS

Jamie's Tarot Dictionary: https://www.amazon.com/Tarot-Dictionary-Jamie-McDonald-ebook/dp/B09KGGL2SM

Ghost Vampire (by a different JP Clark): https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Vampire-J-P-Clark-ebook/dp/B07PY5321V

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
Hello, Welcome back to Jamie's Club. It's been a little while since I've
been here in the studio, andif I'm being honest, it smells a
little funky. I might have toopen a window. But if you birds
chirping in the background, just justignore it. That's not the most exciting
thing that's happening today, though.I think the most exciting thing is going
to be my chat with a veryinteresting bloke by the name of JP Clark.

(00:29):
Now. I met Jp on anInternet for him, and he had
a pretty out there or weird oroffbeat kind of hobby. I think he
was getting old VHS tapes that hewould find anywhere car boot sales, op
shops, flea markets, wherever.And he was then watching all of these

(00:53):
VHS tapes that he found and documentingwhat was on each one. And when
I'm talking about the VHS tapes thatyou buy from the shop blank, you'd
put in your VCR at home andyou'd record whatever, right, And he
was just going through them and documentingit as his hobby. And I wanted
to know, I guess initially,why would you do that? And then

(01:15):
to learn more about just him asa character and I've got to say that
he has a ton of interesting stories. And well, when JP was documenting
these tapes, he ended up writinga book and then a second volume of
this book, and the book iscalled to be Recorded Over. You can

(01:36):
find it on Amazon. There's volumesone and two. And he is just
documented what is on each blank,previously blank VHS tape that he found.
Now, when I was looking intoJP before I interviewed him, I was
looking at some other books and theywere by JP Clark, but turns out

(01:59):
it was him. So I startout this interview in a pretty embarrassing way.
If I'm gonna be honest, Istart asking him about books that he
didn't even write. So let's let'sget into it. This is my interview,
including a very awkward start, withJP Clark, the author of the
books called to be Recorded Over thatyou can find on Amazon. I was

(02:23):
looking at your I was. Iwas just looking through the other things under
your name on Kindle, and I'mlooking at all the stuff you've written.
You've written tons of stuff, includingtextbook? Is that you? Is that
you? I've only written two thingsand those are both to be Recorded Over.
I just have a common pen nameI guess right, yes, okay,

(02:46):
I'm gonna have to cross that allmy questions about hydro meteorology because I
was going to ask you about it. No. No, that is somebody
who's far smarder than me, whoI didn't know had to see name or
else they would have probably published undera different name or got built a time
machine. And I asked my parentsto name me something a little bit more

(03:07):
or unique, and I had damnI was looking at talking about looking forward
to talking about ghost vampire. Iwas the same lord, I know really
and well, there's an seo rightthere. I guess I could just start
publishing about ghost vampires and I'd alreadybe already have an end. So I'm

(03:30):
looking into ghost vampire now. NowI'm going to talk about it because I've
actually done a little bit of research, but a lot of the wrong stuff.
It's a guy who was working ata company and got killed by his
boss, who was a vampire.But he didn't get made into a vampire.
He died and got made into aghost, and then his wife got
turned into a vampire by the samecorporation, and then they teamed up as

(03:52):
a ghost vampire duo to bring downthis large corporation that is just a front
for Vampire is this is this partof a larger series. Brilliant. I
don't think so. I think it'sa standalone book. And yeah, well
okay, that's yeah. I reallydig the I never really I used to

(04:15):
read a lot, like ten yearsago when I kind of stopped, I
want to say, for various reasons. But I started getting back into it
since I wrote these two books.Wrote these two books, and I've noticed
this, like the offerings on theHandle store are just wild. I mean,
anybody could publish anything basically, andit's just I mean you you basically

(04:40):
just get a go with a conceptand just write it, and you know,
with the full intention of like thisis never going to get picked up
by anybody, and it's going toget but by anybody, I mean any
of the traditional publishing houses. ThisI would have no chance of ever getting
actually published. But hey, youknow what, charge to ninety nine four

(05:01):
ninety nine or sign up to KindleUnlimited and you'll make what is it like
third of ascent a page and heyit's it's a few bucks coming in,
man. I mean, I absolutely, I've I've actually started working on a
piece of fiction myself that I mayor may not finish. I'm hoping I
will. It's you know, Iwas like, well, what's the most

(05:21):
outrageous thing I could It's like,well, how about the Mormon Church of
abducts the Ghost of Elvis? Youknow, it's like that that sounds kind
of interesting. Let's go with that. Cool if somebody would read it once
paying four ninety nine for it,and like why not? So yeah,
it's a it's it's really kind ofkind of interesting. The amount of power

(05:42):
that is shifted from the traditional publishinghouses to you know, and then in
the seventies in eighties and nineties islike printing technology improved. You'd get a
lot of self published cranks and stuff. But and you know, you're Bill
Cooper's for example. But then youknow, now we've kind of taken that

(06:04):
power and you're managed to publish justabout anything you want. Well, anybody
buy it. That's a completely differentthing. And they have whole marketing element
that goes into it is another thingaltogether. But hey, you know what,
you can get your words out man. It's it's a it's a new
it's a new world out there andit's it's full of ghost vampires. Evidently.

(06:27):
Look, I think that the theElvis thing, that's a really cool
idea, and that in fact,not long ago, I saw this,
this cult film, and it wasand I think Elvis fans, like my
wife is one. She's been toGraceland, she's done the whole bit and
shell. Those people will watch anythingremotely Elvis related. Now, well,
watch this film called Bubba ho TepBubba Hotep. Yeah. Yeah, oh

(06:53):
man, it's just this insane ideathat Elvis retired, lived in a nursing
home and was just hiding out andthen a mummy came back to kill everyone.
I can't remember what the monster.Yeah, mummy. Yeah, he
escaped from a he got knocked offa train in a train accident, so
Elvis has to team up with thewith John F. Kennedy, his brain

(07:17):
transported into forget what the actor's nameis, Osman or something like that.
Yeah. No, that's a classicof Americana. Oh man, that just
think that thing blew my mind.And my wife, being an Elvis fan,
had never heard of that, andthen she was so keen to watch
it. Then we just watched it. Gone. This is you know,
how some stuff is just some stuff'sjust bad and it's and it's bad trying

(07:41):
to be good, and this wasjust it was It was bad enough that
it was funny, yeah, andit wasn't so bad that it was pathetic.
It was like funny and engaging andand just the whole premise was so
ridiculous that come off as kind oflike, oh the kitch, maybe I
don't know how to discuss. Yeah, I think that would qualify as is

(08:01):
that my favorite genre of movie isactually bad movies, and there's a there's
a fine line between you know,bad movies and then like, oh this
this is enjoyable. Like I tellanybody who listened that my favorite movie of
all time is Death Stalker two andit's a bad movie, but it understands

(08:24):
that it was made in like sixdays on a budget of nothing, as
Roger Korman produced film, and itwas there. They basically have three bad
guys in the whole thing that wearhoods, and they just wear different color
hoods, so they're different bad guys. But all the all the henchmen come
up in various you know, iterationsof three dudes, and it has nothing

(08:48):
to do with the first Death Stalker. It has nothing to do with the
third Death Stalker movie, and it'sthe It has the classic line where he
are Titch, her hero is escapingin the beginning of the of the movie
and he's just escape the bad guyin the lead heel and and she she
says, I'll have my revenge andDeath Stalker two and cue the music.

(09:16):
Oh been in the line, I'llhave my Revenge and Death Stalker too,
just to say the name of thefilm just a jam and so it was
too t so the movie the nameof the film. And I'll also have
Death Stalker. Get it. Ohthat's brilliant. Oh yeah, for a

(09:37):
five thousand dollars movie, that's prettygood writing. That's worth it alone to
sit and watch it. Now,Oh I love that? Oh man,
you know yeah, and I liketo watch one of my favorite genres.
I think it's its own genre nowwould be zombie films, right and TV
series now, something like The WalkingDead is brilliant, absolutely amazing, mind

(09:58):
blowing great, It's got an insaneamount of money thrown at it, and
especially in the first sort of earlierpart of the series. But then World
War Z is was it World WarZ? No? No, z Nation
Z Nation. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, is kind of like the
B grade Walking Dead, and Ithink the asylum version of it, literally

(10:20):
the asylum version of the Walking Dead. Yeah, and you can tell that
they make this on a shoestring budget, you can tell. And they make
fun of it, and they makefun of themselves and they don't take it
seriously. And I think that theydo it enough that it's still an extraordinarily
entertaining show. It's great, butthen there's like just terrible. I guess

(10:43):
I hate it when they combine comedyand horror normally because it's normally just an
excuse to make a really bad horrorfilm. Yeah, yeah, you can,
you can do one or the otherusually, but usually the humor doesn't
translate well into horror for the mostpart. Who I've noticed, it's kind
of the you know, if Iwant to watch a comedy movie, I'll

(11:07):
watch something funny. You're you're tryingto be you're being scary. You're very
good at that, but this isn'tall that funny. Yeah. Yeah.
When I when I talk to peopleabout like having a chat with you about
your books, and I'm like saying, okay, so I know this guy
Ryan, he's got he's got aweird hobby man. He found VHS tapes

(11:33):
and just watched blank VHS tapes thatguests sold blank, and he was just
watching them and writing down what hefound on all of them. And the
first question that everyone had, andso I'm gonna have to ask on their
behalf, is why why why wouldyou do this? Well? I had

(11:56):
a side hustle for a long timethat was I sold stuff on eBay,
and I would sell stuff on eBaythat was just basically anything I could,
and I started, you know,you sell primarily, I told people all
I sell pants on eBay because youcan go to a thrift store and you
can find they were selling, youknow, pants for five six bucks,
and then you could turn around andsell them for thirty. And so then

(12:20):
I started just like, well mymom, I was helping her clean out
her house and she had a bunchof VHS tapes in there. I'm like,
oh, I remember these? Whatyou mind if I just get rid
of these? Are you ever goingto watch them? She's like no,
no. So I'm like, well, see how much these tapes are going
for? And they're like, youknow, you can get thirty bucks for
a pack of ten, give ortake. And so I'm like, well,

(12:43):
no, no, actually new ones. Nobody nobody wants new VHS tapes
anymore. These are, yeah,it's stuff that people just recorded off a
TV. And and so I waslike, I just started watching them.
I'm like, oh, there's old. This probably won't relate to a lot
of your audience, but i'mus inthe Morning, who was a disc jockey
in the in the nineties and eightieswho had a TV show a signal cast

(13:07):
on MSNBC. Here. Well,my mom is a news junkie and she
recorded just hours and hours of thisguy. And so I just advertised it
as uh, you know VHS tapesand ays a bunch I'm's in the Morning.
And then it got a fair amountof money for it, you know,
fair amount relatively speaking for junk youknow, fifty bucks give or take.
So then I was like, hey, this is kind of fun.

(13:30):
I don't really have a lot goingon otherwise to fill my time, so
I'll just start writing, you know, watching this stuff and writing it down.
And then you know, you canpick these things up for basically nothing
at a yard sale or garage saleor sometimes on eBay, they'll the people
will just they clear out the storageflockers or something. So they're selling this

(13:54):
stuff for you know, fifty centsto a dollar a tape, and then
you can turn around and sell themfor three to five dollars up to ten
dollars sometimes depending what it is.Yeah, and s guy lots some actual
money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it takes a it takes a
you know, I can do basicallyone tape a day. I mean,
I work full time. This isn'tthis is something I can do in retirement.
But it's not. It's not necessarilyI'm just going to be doing this

(14:18):
full time for the rest of mylife. I because it would drive me
nuts, but you know, youcan, you can. It's so And
I noticed that the more descriptive Iam, and what the descriptions are on
the tapes, the more interesting peopleinterested people are because then they actually know

(14:39):
what they're buying and who's buying thisstuff. I don't know exactly, it's
it's a lot of people who arelooking for nostalgia, especially for eighties cartoons
that an old TV wrestling stuff thatis kind of difficult to find on DVD
or streaming, and it's also peoplewho are like, there's an entire community

(15:03):
of people who are looking for Copsthe TV show for people who don't know.
In the eighties and nineties, therewas a TV show called Cops and
it was just a camera crew wouldfollow around local police departments around as they
went and did their normal cops stuff. In Australia, we love that show,
by the way, we got that. We loved it and it would

(15:26):
say some people regard it as thefirst ever reality TV show in a way,
in a way it really is.Yeah, But the thing is you
can't find Cops on DVD. Youcan find a couple of compilations on DVD,
but the production company never made itpublicly available, and up until recently

(15:50):
it might be streaming, but Idon't know if it is or not.
So what people do They look forspecific episodes of Cops and then they upload
them to arcod dot org. Isthat necessarily like it's gray area illegal kind
of as far as copyright goes,But you know, it's it's kind of
it's something people do and people takea lot of time to do it.

(16:14):
The other one other ones that arekind of hot sellars at times is old
soap operas because they're if you wantto go look at days of your Days
of our Lives from you know,episode in nineteen eighty five, there's no
way you can. That stuff isbasically effectively lost the time it's sitting in
the tape archives, and unless somebodyjust was recording it on the day that

(16:40):
it aired, you know, unlessit's you know, a Luke and Laura
or you know, Steve type ofepisode, an important episode, the day
to day ones, you're never goingto see those things again. And honestly,
it's probably for the best because it'sso much of these archives are no

(17:00):
one's gonna no one's gonna pay toget this stuff digitized or you know,
you know, put it into adatabase and figure out all what you have.
So it's up to kind of thiscommunity of weirdos who just do this
because it's it's their hobby, whichyou know, it's kind of it's kind
of it. I give respect tothese people. It would not be anything

(17:23):
I would ever want to do.I get that. It's like, I
get that you're being a bit tonguein cheek when you sort of do say
like weedo's I mean, you're sayingit now, not in a derogatory I
get that because these people, thesethese weed eyes, I'm happy to call
them. That would be I'm preservinghistory. This is smart. You're saying

(17:44):
it would be lost. Oh yeah, yeah. And we kind of it's
we're kind of going back to thattoo in in a way. I mean,
you there, it's a the wayI kind of look at it is
that from broadcast television. It startedin the late nineteen forties. I call
it nineteen forty seven just for ease, because of reasons. But you know,

(18:08):
when a show was broadcast, itwas basically if you didn't see it,
it was gone after that. Andyou know, unless they aired it
in rerun form and it was you'dnever see that thing again. So you
know, that was the way televisionwas up until really the eighties when it's
became affordable to start. And eventhen it wasn't really that affordable. I

(18:30):
mean, the first VHS tage thatcame out, they were one hundred dollars
apiece in eighties money. So youknow, as it became more affordable,
we managed to start archiving some ofthis stuff just on a local individual level,
and so then you were you andthat kind of went away with the
DVR, and you know, everythingbecame easier and easier, and so now

(18:56):
DVRs have kind of started to goaway or PBRs as a seeing Canada,
I know, so, but youonly have so much space on your DVR
before you got to start like,well, do I do I really need
to keep this random episode of Friends? It's probably gonna air four or five
more times in the next two weeks. Yeah, And so then as we

(19:18):
get into dreaming, well, wedon't need to record anything because it's always
going to be there. Until youget shows that just disappear because of various
reasons. Either the rights get pulled, or it gets the rights get sold
to another streamer who then does neverput anything up on it, or you
know, so the I tell peoplea lot like, hey, you know,

(19:41):
if you're if you really really likea show and it's not produced by
like one of the big companies,like Stranger Things on Netflix, that thing's
never going to go away. Butyou know, they'll There was a time
when Netflix is basically buying anything thatthey could and just to just to put
content out there, and now it'sit's starting to go away. You were

(20:03):
seeing this with some of the stufffrom Disney Plus too. And if you're
if you really like a show andyou're just recorded on VHS, the tapes
are cheap. You can get aVCR at a thrift store for like tend
of bucks and then it's all It'llalways be there, at least until the
tape degrades. That is the coolthing about VHS. Yeah, it's very

(20:26):
hardy. Like I remember when VHSchanged to DVD and in that kind of
interim period, we're about we're probablyabout the same age, right, and
so in that interim period, andyou just realized how hardy VHS tapes were,
like a DVD would have. Inthe early players, especially, you

(20:48):
get like a speck of dust onthe disc, or you drop the disc
on the carpet, it's like,oh no, it's not going to play.
Now. A VHS tape. Youcould shower with it, it'll still
play. It won't give us stuff. You can microwave, but it'll ply.
It doesn't matter. Yeah, no, no, Yeah, that's kind
of the same way with cassette tapestoo. I lamented my my Mojo Nixon

(21:11):
CD mixtape that I burned off anapster back in two thousand and one that
I dropped that the other you know, a couple of weeks ago, and
that thing's past it now, it'sit had a got some got some dirt
in, it's gone. So farewellto Mojo. What can you say?
So, so you've got these VHStypes at at your mum's house and you've

(21:36):
you've found that there's this market forthem. So then when you're when and
you're noting what's on them as yougo, is this is this now still
more about the reselling or is thismore about this notorizing history as you'll start
looking for more types. This thiswas completely about the resale. I would

(21:59):
I everything I just put in,and then I would just take screen grabs
of the put everything into a Googledoc, and then I just took screen
grabs of it and put that onthe on the listing. And so after
after a year and a half orso, I realized, like, I
have pages, hundreds of pages ofthis stuff. I should do something with

(22:22):
it. And I didn't have asocial media presence at all, and I
was so I was like, well, I wonder if I if I,
you know, some of these arekind of interesting, I could put them
on Instagram and that's I that completelyfailed because I don't understand Instagram because I'm
over forty. So I was like, well, hey, let why don't
you just try to squeeze another squeezea few more drops of water out of

(22:47):
this out of this very dry stone. Hey man, you've already done the
work. Yeah, I've already donethe work. It just takes you know,
it took me a week and ahalf of formatting just to get everything
into ebook form, and it's likeit's done, and then so yeah,
it's it. It It wasn't somegreat journey of science, scientific discovery.

(23:07):
It was like I've i more didit, and then now I've been trying
to justify it in my head,like why did why? Why are you
trying to promote this as anything morethan just a cash graph? That's any
I mean, as as far asas far as job's got, that's going
to be a pretty cool job.Yeah, yeah, payle racell and flipping
is a pretty fashionable thing to doright right now. It's and I would

(23:32):
I would venture to say it's toofashionable to do it is it is,
uh, basically killed my side bybusiness, Like I can't go to the
thrift store anymore and find anything ofvalue, because it's it's really weird.
Over the past year, like thethrift stores have been increasing their prices,

(23:53):
which I'm okay with. It's inflation, that's they have a business to run,
they have overhead, I understand,but it's just like there's nothing there
of value anymore, and the stuffthat is of value, it's out the
door so quick with people who arewho are reselling. It's it's wild,
and I don't know if it's goingto be a if this is something that's

(24:15):
going to continue to go on fora while, or if eventually people are
just gonna kind of get bored withit and walk away. I I'm kind
of to the point where I basicallyonly sell tapes, and I've actually gone
started venturing out into away from vhsand more into high eight tapes and mini

(24:38):
dvs and and started doing the theactual difficult job of researching like and looking
into lost footage, because I'm like, there could be more value here in
trying to find something interesting. There'snot necessarily anything interesting in them. Once
a while you find something, butmost of it's like here's some Christmas Christmas

(25:02):
Morning nineteen ninety nine, nobody caresabout that. So there it went from
being a pretty low risk, lowinvestment and you know, moderate returns to
like I'm starting to get into I'mstarting to dump more money into it,
and it's starting to get less returnsas far as that goes. Yet,

(25:26):
you know, I I like gambling, so I'm I'm going to continue on.
If you double down long enough,eventually something will something will pay off,
right the gamblers fellacy is that thesunk costs fallacy. Yeah, fallacy
is a harsh word for it.Yeah, it is. It is.

(25:47):
So you've cleaned your mom's possible ofas types and night's you're venturing out to
thrift stores or as we call them, in to stry up shops to get
them. It showed for opportunity shops. That is what we like that.
Yeah, but you're venturing out tothrift stalls and you just gradually like going
in a water and water circle outsideof your area to find them. Yeah.

(26:11):
Yeah, I've driven as far asyou know, I've driven as far
as one hundred miles to pick upa box. But or I just buy
them off eBay from you know,random uh eBay weirdos as well. I
call I call a lot of peopleweds no harm intended, but yeah,

(26:32):
so I picked I end up gettingthe you know, you can you can
find some pretty interesting stuff. Thea lot of times I've noticed is that
people don't pay their for whatever reason, they don't pay their uh uh storage
facility costs, and so yeah,their their storage units get auctioned off,
and then it's these people then selloff there. You know, there's a

(26:56):
storage facility full of old tapes andthey could be master tapes from auction company,
and then they just they don't havetime, it's not their business to
look at them. So I'll buythem, and then I'll look at them,
and then I'll resell that to whoeveris interested in it. The best
example of that was there was alocal, i mean hyper local production company

(27:19):
in Los Angeles area who they wentout of business who knows how long ago,
and they all their stuff got soldoff and I ended up buying about
sixty Yeah, it was about sixtytaps or so vhs from guy on eBay
who sent them over and so Iwatched a lot of them and they were
just random like stuff, a lotof church services stuff like that. But

(27:42):
there there was a bunch that werelike what is what is this? There's
a bunch of you know, there'sthere's people who are in some kind of
formal setting and they're they're giving speechesand whatnot. So I I eventually like,
well what is going on? Andit turned out it was a some
kind of professional fraternal organization that hadrecorded their yearly meeting in like nineteen ninety

(28:11):
two, and their it was like, well, this is actually kind of
interesting, and they you got tohear them talk about what their plans were
and what they're hoping to accomplish.One of their their keynote speaker was Ron
Brown, who, unless you're youknow, steeped in nineties era American politics,

(28:37):
doesn't mean anything. But Ron Brownwas I think he was in the
Clinton administration and he he died underpretty tragic circumstances. His plane crashed in
Croatia, I think during the BosnianWar when he was out over there trying
to negotiate. So and like this, he gave this keynote speech on this

(29:02):
tape like a year before his death, so you know, I I that
was actually pretty interesting. So ittook a long time, but I managed
to document everything that was on there, and I put those out for sale,
and I was contacted within a dayor two by a member of the

(29:22):
a member of the organization, theFraternal Organization, and who was like,
hey, I want these, andso I basically just sold them to him
at cost because I'm like, wellthis, these aren't mine to sell,
these are these are yours. Sothat was actually kind of kind of fun
to, you know, get people'sstuff back in a way. And you

(29:45):
know, it didn't didn't really costme any money. It didn't really cost
him much money, you know,sixty bucks and hey, here's here's part
of your history that has been reunitedwith you. You know. I've done
a bit of a bay flipping myselfand sometimes like finding finding just yeah,
lost toys and things from the eightiesor the seventies, and occasionally and I've

(30:10):
sold a lot of these got themfrom from thrift stores, from garage sales,
sometimes even from we have tip shops, you know, which is the
dump where people take their stuff andthey pick out the good stuff and put
in a shop. I've even goneto those places and occasionally when I found
something really nostalgic and sold it tosomeone that've been like sent me a really
nice message afterwards, going oh man, I had one of these when I

(30:33):
was a kid, and you've justreunited me with this rainbow bright doll and
it means the world to me.Thank you so so very much. And
it's just like that stuff feels good, man, I feel like you.
Right. Yeah, it's it's pretty. It's pretty easy to do, and
it's it's what what we associate valueto. And that's that's kind of That's

(30:53):
an interesting thing, isn't it?The what you know, this to one
person just something is just absolute junk. But to another person like this,
for whatever reason, this has deepmeaning to them. And to be able
to actually reunite them in a wayto part of their part of their past

(31:14):
that you know is gone, isthat's that's a that's a thing. Nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and you know, the flip
side of that is just like ajust like any other drug, it is
awfully addictive if you let it be, so you need increasingly hot doses to
get the same effects. Oh well, taking this analogy, you know,

(31:37):
you can take it as far asyou want. Yeah, it's uh,
I think you can just see seethe the popular films that have been,
movies that have come out, andTV shows, and they all seem to
be steeped in in a nostalgia andit's you get to a point where it's
like, Okay, yeah the ninetieswere cool, they weren't that good.
There's there's a reason, there's thein the end. Look, I think

(32:01):
with I think with any era,when we look back at it in a
nostalgic framework, you aren't just pickingout the highlights and the best bits of
that era. Now, if youwere one of the people that was alive
in that era, you saw allall the ship that was in there as
well as the good stuff, andyou're going like, it wasn't that good.
But the people that were there aregoing and the people that weren't there

(32:22):
are going, oh it looks awesome. Yeah, the nineties you had as
of basin slap bands. That soundsgreat. It's like, yeah, there
are bad things gone. We reada book about the seventies. Man,
it's like, hey, yeah,disco and you had the and and you
know, you got Star Wars,and it's like, no, there were

(32:44):
there were skyjackers. That was acommon thing in the seventies, and the
oil and hijacker. It was aguy who would who would hijack airplanes?
What like it was. Yeah,it was so common a thing in the
seventies that these had a like specialespecial units to deal with it from the
FBI. There was a there wasa I mean, people would just hijack

(33:07):
airplanes and like, hey, youtake us to Cuba or hey, yeah,
famous case. One of the morefamous cases is H. D.
B. Cooper, who's h hehijacked an airplane in the in the Pacific
Northwest here in America and basically toldhim give me two hundred thousand dollars and

(33:28):
then he jumped out the back ofit and was never seen again. And
yeah, it's like this, thiswas this was common in the seventies.
Besides, you know, running outof gas in the ever present threat of
nuclear annihilation, you know. Butyeah, you look at it like,
oh, yeah they had funny pants, and yeah, we look back and

(33:50):
just go cool. We just gotthe good bits. And I didn't even
know the skyjacking was a thing.There you go. So, as you're
going through VIHS types, have youever found what have you found that's been
been disturbing? I'm imagining and peopleand people want to know, have you
have you found homemade poorn? Ithink that's the I think that's what we're

(34:12):
getting at. Yeah, honestly,not not much, if any, you
know, depending what you There wasone way there was a punk concert and
a girl flat took off her shirtand flash, and that's really about it.
You can go into the reasons behindit. I have. I have
my theories on that. I thinkthat the reason might be that, especially

(34:37):
with VHS homemade movies, is thatit was so expensive back back when it
first came out. I mean,you're talking in nineteen ninety one camcorder was
eight hundred dollars in that money,so you can you can do the inflation

(34:58):
math and yeah, you know,so who's going to buy that. It's
probably going to be old people,and they're for better or worse. They're
they're not going to be engaging inthat sort of thing, at least recording
it for posterity, because their posterityis is not very far ahead of them.

(35:21):
Oh man, So no, noserial killer confessions, no, no
alien lost footage. No. I'vethe closest I've come to see in something
truly disturbing was I had a someuh bikers recorded their trip to Sturgis,

(35:42):
South Dakota, which is it's likeone of the biggest biker rallies in the
US maybe the world that's held everyyear. It's at the kind of on
the outskirts of Mount Rushmore, andthey just I thought, oh man,
there might be some there might besome cool stuff here, you know,
bikers and they're going to a bikeralley, might see some might see some

(36:04):
rumble or something. Yeah. Uh. The closest thing I came there.
The camera kind of was going aroundand showing stuff off, and it showed
this guy who was kind of behindsome bushes and he was just doing like
this kicking type of motion with hislegs. Like, oh man, my
mind starts to race, like anddo I just have a murder tape?
Is he stomping some dude's head in? And then it turns out you you

(36:28):
know, you hear the engine kickon. It's like, oh, he's
just starting his motorcycle. And thenthey drove over and they got burgers and
that was that was the end.So no, unfortunately, nothing nothing super
disturbing or really interesting. Honestly,you know what it's like interesting? Is
it? You know is what's interestingto one person is completely banal to someone

(36:53):
else. And I think that,I think that just that loss of life,
like that that voyeuristic peake into someone'slife, that in itself is interesting,
Right, Seeing the inside of someonein someone's hasse from nineteen ninety nine
would be fantastic. Yeah, Andyou know, there are some that are
like, there are some that areactually the best word I have to describe

(37:17):
its beautiful. There's one tape Ihave that it's a shot on high eight
camera and it's just a guy gettinginto his car and then driving through the
streets of New York City in circanineteen ninety no nineteen eighty nine, and
he's playing some kind of new wavepunk radio, so you hear Talking Heads

(37:45):
in the background, and you hearsome other bands that I couldn't even identify,
and he's just driving and you're justseeing, You're just seeing the way
the city used to be. AndI've never been to New York I probably
never will go to New York,but it's it's just this, like,
man, this, this is thisis pretty cool. And this guy just
shot this because he wanted to.I don't know what he ever did with

(38:07):
it obviously. You know, whatwhat do you do with a with a
whole movie in nineteen eighty nine toshow up to your friends and then put
it on the shelf, and soit's like this, yeah, this is
this is like is it? Isit artistic? Yeah? I would.
I would consider this like, oh, this is this is beautiful filmmaking.
I probably would end up putting thaton YouTube one day. It'll be difficult

(38:30):
with the rights, but you know, with the because of music and stuff.
But you know, as long asit doesn't give me a copyright strike,
I I'll put that up just becauseit's like this, this is something
that needs to be shared to therest of the country, you know,
the rest of the world. Peoplein New York would love that. Oh
yeah, yeah, hey, thisis this is what your this is what

(38:51):
your city used to look like before, you know, when it was still
kind of when it was when itwas dirty and nasty and before it turned
into just an adising Bill Ford.It's not still dirty and nasty. Have
you No, you haven't been.Yeah, I hear, it's pretty nice
nowadays. Oh is it okay?Yeah, I hear, I hear.
They did a good job and it'sit's been uh yeah, a lot of

(39:15):
uh, a lot of advertising billboardsand you know, just stuff like that.
It's kind of a tourist destination.Probably always has been, but more
so now mm hmm. So,so when you're collecting your books and you've
called them to be recorded over andthere's two volumes and you're uploading them to
Amazon, are you thinking that thesebooks will will ever have someone by them?

(39:39):
Do you think that they won't?Do you think they're going to be
best sellers with millions of copies orjust oh no, no, I I
I've I broke even with them.Basically, you know, I I ordered
about two dozen authors copies of eachjust so I have ones to give away
to people. And so that costme in forty fifty bucks. And you

(40:02):
know, with with the sales I'vemade, I've I've about recouped it.
I've honestly sold as about as manyas I've figured I would and probably you
know, maybe a dozen, whichis which is a lot. And this
I look at this as something thatis more of a this is a reference
book. This is this is somethingthat somebody who's putting together working on their

(40:30):
doctorate of the modern or nineteen eighties, nineties, early two thousands media culture
can look at and refer to forsomething this is. This is more of
a secondary source. I guess itwould be for a future historian. It's

(40:52):
not necessarily something that you can readas entertainment. But I I didn't.
My wife's friend. She she's anurse practitioner of psychology, and she was
in hospital for a little while withsome ailments. So she got bored and

(41:12):
I gave her. I gave herone of my books to read. I'm
like, oh, you got yougot nothing to do here? You can
read this, And so she readthe whole thing to to her uh,
her amusement. And but she actuallyhad an interesting point that I hadn't thought
about, and she said, thisis actually interesting from a psychological perspective because
it shows what what people assign meaningto and what they want to, what

(41:37):
they want to return to and watch, you know, you know what,
what kind of entertainment has meaning tothem. And there's also the element of
you know who, who would beable to record all of this stuff.
And most of the time I've noticedwith these tastes is that the people who

(42:00):
do the most recording are generally elderly. I can tell that just be based
on what they're recording. It's alot of CBS UH dramas and your Doctor
Quinn's and your your legal dramas,your your jags, your it's it's stuff
that that appeals to an elderly viewer. So you know, you can kind

(42:22):
of start putting together in your head, well, what this is. Probably
why they're they're recording this is becausethey're they are old, and this is
just the only thing on TV atthe time. You know, before you
had one hundred and fifty channels ofentertainment to choose from, you had just
a handful. You had what wehave four here five in the US.

(42:46):
So you know, you're doctor Quinnstarts looking a lot better. And for
whatever reason, you know, coolcool dudes who are recording stuff from MTV
and Sci Fi Channel that those arereally hard to find from the nineties.
Is it could have bee because they'remore collectible. I think there's an element

(43:06):
to that for sure. I mean, you know, uh, Mystery Science
Theater, that's a that that's ashow that's been on forever and it's it
has a fairly large presence online,but the early episodes they're difficult to find.
And there's some that that aired andnever never repeated because of rights issues

(43:29):
and and so those are actually highlycollectible on the on the blank market,
on the second hand gray area,not bootleg kind of bootleg market. And
there's there's other shows, Uh,Sesame Street, that's a that's another one
that's a huge seller. Old SesameStreets, I guess are hard to find.

(43:51):
I I don't know, but that'sanother one with a it would have
an entirely huge back catalog. Ithink Time Corner owns that now, so
you might be able to stream that, but I don't know how far that
goes back. Yeah, So thehandy thing about that is they have a
number of what episode number it isat the start of every episode, right,
Yeah, they do, I thinkthey do, and that's not rarely

(44:14):
doing it. I don't know ifI've always done it, but I think
they have because I've ventured into Muppetmuppet Apedia it's like Wikipedia or Muppets,
and there's there's quite the quite thethriving community of Sesame Street people. And
I've I've had people interact with meand tell me, you know, just
based on a couple of couple ofscenes. They can tell me exactly what

(44:35):
episode it is, which is justabsolutely impressive when you can run into someone
who who knows something so so specificlike that, Yeah, and it's an
expert in it. That's that's justI like to meet people like that,
official people with that national age.It's it's it is just so impressive and
so and and and and interest andand just cool like a yeah, I'm

(45:00):
the same. I really love tointeract with people like that. It's it's
interesting for me at thinking about thefuture. Then, are our secondhand like
phones with video footage of them,of our lives in twenty ten going to

(45:21):
be collectible things? Or is itnow that we're uploading stuff online at an
insane rate. I'm going to it'sjust makes the amount of the amount of
stuff uploaded on YouTube is just wild, right, So we're are we documenting
our lives and putting it in adigital form now so that in the future
these things will be less collectible?Do you think? I? I that's

(45:44):
a that's a question I kind ofwonder about. You know, there was
there was a time when we weredoing a lot of you know, people
had blogs and you know, videoblogs and they were upload these fairly long
pieces, and it's shifted now toTikTok where it's thirty second just segments,

(46:07):
you know, thirty seconds to aminute. And you My wife's a big,
big TikTok fan, and she'll seesomething that she likes and it's like
okay, then she wants to showit to me later in the day and
it's it'll it's impossible to find nowbecause there's so much information. I don't

(46:28):
know if if there's going to becollectibility of it. I think that there
might be for purposes of if someonewere to get famous for whatever reason be
it, you know they're seeking fame, or fame snuck up on them based
on circumstances, so you know thatthen we can go back and try to

(46:54):
find it. But you know,it's kind of you're you're kind of shouting
into you're kind of shouting at aconcert right now, and there's so many
other voices that it's it's like,yeah, there, you effectively are there.
There is so many people out outon the internet with the presence that
you you can effectively be anonymous evenwith your with your name out there unless

(47:20):
someone is specifically looking for you.It's it's you know, it's like your
name means means nothing, and soI don't know. I know that there's
there's always going to be some elementof trying to look back at the way
we lived, and it'll be moreinteresting, not right now and probably not

(47:44):
for the next ten years, butprobably in twenty forty as we look back
on the you know, the eraof the pandemic and and the area that
we're looking living through right now withnostalgia, and it's going to happen and
we'll look back like, oh,man, do you remember where everybody just
had to stay home? Wouldn't thatbe great? And I think that that's

(48:07):
when, however, technology works andit we won't even be able to comprehend
it. It's all going to beAI and robots and whatnot, and we're
going to look back and we'll haveall this data to come through, and
I think what will be interesting isthat in it is how it will we

(48:28):
presented, you know, how howwe've presented the time we're living through right
now, in either the positive orthe negative spin on everything, and how
future generations will look at us andthink, this is how these people lived.
And because with the you know,you look at old TV footage from

(48:52):
the nineties. You know, wetalked about it earlier. It's it's with
nostalgia like, oh yeah, everyeverybody got along really good and it was
you know, everybody had equips andlaugh tracks and stuff. But if you
live through it, it's like,no, people didn't like each other then
either, So you know it,there's a lot more vitriol going around for

(49:13):
various reasons, because it's that's theonly way you can get heard online is
to be saying the shouting the strongestworded phrases at the other person. You
know that say the most outlandish thing, the loudest and the longest, and
that's the only way you're going tobe able to be heard. And so

(49:36):
it's both sides of that, peoplesaying that stuff to each other. So
I'm interested to see how historians inthe future will We'll look at this time
with the with all the all theraw primary sources that they have that they
can comb through, and it's goingto be it'll be a task. We're
living through interesting times and I Iwould like I don't necessarily end the historians

(50:00):
who are gonna have to calm throughall of it later on. Yeah,
it's I think a lot about aboutthe future and what people will think of
us. And I imagine a timewhen when with with mobile phones, they're
gonna go Can you believe people hadto stop using their mobile device and plug

(50:22):
it into a wall and wait forit to charge. How did they do
that? I carried it in theirpocket all day? Look at look at
these rooms. Look at them idiots. Why didn't they just get it implanted
like we have it. It's likein stone Age, that's what's gonna go
about. Yeah, fine, man, it's gonna it's gonna be great.

(50:45):
It could be. It could be. When you're reselling and and trying to
uncover things that are treasures from thepast, it's it's almost a difficult balance
of finding the line of what's justoutdated technology and of no value and then

(51:05):
what at what point does that shiftinto something that is an antique or a
retro thing. It's I see thingsmoving in these patterns, right, like
VHS tapes. As we were goingto DVD's, VHS tapes became less valuable,
they became junk, and then intime they've become something valuable again as

(51:30):
you've found right, Yeah, andI think the best example of that is
vinyl for you know, long playrecords. And this is anecdotal from what
I've heard from people you know who'vehad bands, is that CD pressing was

(51:52):
fairly expensive, which I don't knowif I necessarily agree with. It seems
pretty cheap to me. But thebands started putting stuff out on vinyl because
it was number one cool and theycould do it fairly affordably too, and
so vinyl came back. I mean, you go to the whatever equivalent of

(52:12):
Walmart you have over there, I'mfairly certain you can find you go to
the music section, you can findvinyl for any new release nowadays, and
it's I hey man, I don'tget it myself, but if if you
like the clicks and pops of somethingbig and bulky, you can't play in
a car. More power too yet, But I also heard that you know,

(52:38):
bands on like Oh the you know, very like band camp, you
know indie bands that are that aren'tsigned, they also sell a lot of
cassette tapes. And the reason isis because it's so cheap depressed though it's
compared to vinyl, which I guessis getting more and more expensive to do

(52:58):
as companies have figured out, hey, we can make money off of this,
so they the cassette is actually startingto come back from what I hear,
so in the future you could actuallyand datement cassette players are a dime
a dozen literally, I mean placesand they jump yeah yeah people, Oh

(53:22):
yeah, yeah they are. Butyou know, and everything old is new
again, so you and we're nevergoing to stop making hipsters to one extent
or another. So you know,the kids, as they grow up,
they're going to start like, oh, yeah, you got that on vinyl.
Where'd you get that trash from?Oh you got it from Walmart.
Cool Man, I got this froma guy who sent it to me in

(53:43):
an envelope, and it's a tape. Man tapes. It's the way to
go. And I think that wewere we're seeing. I don't know if
as far as vhs, if theif the wave has crested on collect ability,
you know, Studio released vhs fora while, they can potentially go

(54:06):
for a lot of money, especiallyif they're factory sealed, like the movie
Aliens. I found one in athrift store that was factory sealed, brand
new. Someone had bought it andthen they never watched it and then they
eventually just got rid of it,and that sold for a fair amount of
money to collectors. And there's actuallya company that grades sealed new, brand

(54:32):
new VHS tapes like baseball cards.And I don't know if that's something that
happened just because of the pandemic andeveryone was cleaning out their closets and bored
and they were wanting to revisit thenostalgia of the old times and trying to
sink their money into something the nextbig thing. I don't know if that's

(54:55):
going to hold out forever or not. One thing I'd be I'd be wayward
if I didn't bring up the DisneyVHS tapes. Of course eBay have.
I don't know if you've ever goneto eBay and looked at the Disney VHS

(55:15):
tapes, But they're commanding absurd amountsof money. There are some black diamond
ones or something. Yeah, they'vegot a special mock on them and they
can go for between three thousand tofive thousand. I've seen them sell for
ten thousand dollars espectually. Sale willjust have that asking price. Well,
that's that's a that's a wonderful pointI don't know, because if you go

(55:37):
to the soul section on eBay,you'll see that they do actually sell for
three to ten thousand dollars. Wow. But if you do a little bit
of research and you click on andsee who's selling it and who's buying it,
I they they aren't actual users.They have like no reviews, they
have nothing else for sale. It'sit's a one time sale. And I
don't it's it's a mystery in thecommunity as to who's doing this, and

(56:00):
it seems to the general consensus isit's some kind of money laundering scheme.
I don't think it's that nefarious.I don't think. But yeah, sorry
to break it to your Your DisneyVHS tapes are worth less than nothing,
thousand, less than the postage.Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, So

(56:24):
you're not paying for college with aLittle Mermaid. Unfortunately, even if it
has that cover, the band cover, it's it's worth nothing. I'm sorry.
Yeah, Look, we've I remembergoing through with my with my wife.
Her parents were going through all ofher childhood stuff that that saved,

(56:45):
and they had at least like thesemy Little Ponies from the eighties and these
barbies, and they were like oh, these are going to be worth a
fortune, and you look them upand most of them are not. Some
of them are worth like twenty bucks. Like okay, it covers the cost
of putting it up on anybody andposting it. But it's not much more

(57:06):
than that. It's uh that thatyou hear about the treasure that's out there
and you don't that's the whole pointof it. You don't find it that
often, right, Yeah, Andthat's that's why it's worth so much.
That's why it's treasure because it's youknow, if it was literally sitting in
everybody's garage just taking up space,then it would be it wouldn't be worth
as much as it is. It'sit's rare. Those rarities are are what

(57:29):
what is interesting. So that's that'swhat that's what people spend the big bucks
on. So what they do withit. But dvides have been sold out
by the bag for next to nothingat thrift stores and at garage sales,
and people on Facebook marketplace put themout for nothing. Sometimes they go just
take these, get them away frommy house. Do you think that DVDs

(57:52):
will become more valuable in the future. I don't know. I think that
we might be going I'll preface thisby saying it depends on the DVD.
I know that certain certain Blu raysespecially are it can be worth some money
because they're they're put out in avery limited run, and you're always going

(58:17):
to have a genre collectors who aregoing to be who are willing to pay
money for hard copies. And Ithink is is media consolidates into the whatever
final iteration of the streaming systems wehave right now. We kind of already

(58:40):
lived through the golden age of ofinternet streaming with Netflix and Amazon and nothing
else, and then everybody got intoit. You had you had I mean
pro wrestling companies that three thousand peoplea year watch had their own streaming service
and they were trying to charge moneyfor it. I would, and we've
gone away from that, and sonow everything's starting to consolidate. You know,

(59:05):
you have Disney who's they have DisneyPlus and it's it's a success,
but they're also buying Hulu, Sonow that's consolidated. Then you have like
your NBC finally got into it withPeacock, and so they're trying to do
something besides just losing billions of dollars. And then you have CBS, which

(59:25):
you know they they actually have theirown streaming network. I'm surprised, you
know, to no one I knowknows about it, but you know,
they have the paramount networks. Soas as it becomes more difficult to keep
up with all the various platforms ofstreamers, then yeah, it kind of
makes sense to go back to aphysical media source that you can actually like,

(59:50):
Hey, I I just really wantto watch Transformers? Man, where
where do I find it? No, I'm not sub I'm not subscribed to
it on this one. Do Iwant to go through the friction of signing
up for it and then do thethirty day trial and then forget that I
signed up for it? Or Ican just pop it into my PlayStation and
I can watch it and never thinkabout it again. So I think DVDs

(01:00:15):
are there. There's a very realpossibility that we could be returning to some
kind of physical media popularity in theover the next decade. I don't think
it's ever going to be like itwas in the mid two thousands, where
it was the only, you know, the only thing, and you could

(01:00:37):
have to pay eighty dollars for afor the entire box out of one season
of Frasier. I don't think that'sever going to really go back to where
it was, you know. Andyou also have to think about the people
who are interested in physical media andwho are more prone to not want to

(01:00:59):
get in to the streaming, orthe elderly, and naturally they're just gonna
kind of they're going to age theirselvesout of it to the point where they're
not really consuming, they're not reallybuying that stuff anymore, and they're being
replaced with, you know, asbaby boomers, elderly baby boomers are replaced
by elderly gen xers, then they'regoing to be a little bit more Internet

(01:01:22):
savvy. They kind of grew upwith a little bit more at least they
they learned about it in their twenties, so they're gonna be able to kind
of sign up for, you know, get into this determine if they want
to get into streaming or not.And so I don't know, it's it's
it's interesting where it's going to go. If I had to venture a guess,

(01:01:44):
I would say, don't bother hoardingDVDs right now, buying them on
the cheap and hoping them to fliplater on in seven years, but my
retirement, I'm sorry, you're gonnahave to keep more can Well, well,
what would you think then that thatwill be the gold of tomorrow?

(01:02:08):
What what can we collect and holdon to and keep in pristine condition now
to have a payoff in ten twentyyears time if I'm still here, you
know, I I think about thisand the short answer is I don't know.
But the easy the the answer isbecause I don't have kids. The

(01:02:30):
what you need to look for iswhat your kids are. What are your
kids interested in right now and whateverthey're really into. Buy that stuff and
then hold on to it. Don'twhen they move out, when they go
to college or you know where theystart their life. Don't get rid of
it, because keep it, keepit in a box, because eventually they're

(01:02:51):
going to become forty year olds witha lot of disposable income, and they're
going to think, you know what, I really miss Paw patrol. I
had all the Paw patrols, andI want to I want to live back
through that. I would guess Idon't, but I don't know, But

(01:03:15):
I think generally you look toward whatwas popular with kids. So probably but
we also live in a different time, don't we. So, like,
you know, Marvel movies are reallypopular right now, and they have been
for the past however long they have. So there's a bunch of Marvel movie,

(01:03:36):
a bunch of Marvel memorabilia and actionfigures and T shirts and all that
stuff. And I don't know ifpeople these days are look at items the
same way just or even companies forthat matter, but just because of the
the absolute mass production and just thesheer amount of stuff that's out there now.

(01:03:59):
On the flip side of that,you also have g I. Joe,
which is something I grew up with. I mean, those those things
were all over the place too,and yeah, and teenage Mutant Ninja turtles
and those things only appreciate and valuethe longer we go. But we also
were of a generation that was specificallymarketed with these cartoons in mind too.

(01:04:21):
You know, they put out thesecartoons as commercials to us, to like,
hey, do you like you knowthey put these they put these shows
out as a commercial to buy thetoys, so then you could watch the
show and then buy more toys.So I'm sure, I'm sure it's the
same way right now. But yeah, I went into the toy section at

(01:04:50):
Walmart the other day and the theyhave he Men Masters of the Universe and
y yeah, and they're exactly thesame as the old ones. It has
bro I think put those out inthe in the late and the really was
it might have been Mattel. Yeah, I think you're right, And yeah,

(01:05:13):
it's it's like these are the sameexact ones. And it's the same
as with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.They're also putting those out from the early
the late eighties, early nineties ones. It's the same exact ones. And
so you got to wonder, like, who are you selling these two because
I kind of want to buy themmyself. Are you selling these to kids?
Or are you selling them to fatforty year olds like myself? I

(01:05:35):
don't know, you've got more despisableincome than kids, definitely, I know
something year olds on the market now. And then it's kind of kind of
neat because you know, theoretically youcould buy them and then you could also
play with your kids or I don'tknow, but yeah, I don't know

(01:05:56):
what the next big thing is,and that's that's kind of the thing.
I don't I don't think anybody doesor else we you know, it wouldn't
be the it wouldn't be the bigthing because it wouldn't it wouldn't be hard
to find. Yeah, I guessthat's the case. I know that I
know that Lego is a big thing, and I'm I'm kind of into Lego,
not deep into it, but I'vedefinitely got some that I'm keeping brand

(01:06:19):
new in box because I know thatthey make sets, retire sets, and
then they're never making them again.So those ones appreciate and value. And
there's actually very cool websites on it. Oh what was that. There's there's
one that I think maybe Brctopia,Brickpedia something like that, and anyway,

(01:06:40):
they show how Lego appreciates in valueand has done faster than gold at a
greater value than gold really yeah,as a percentile of what it costs to
buy and keep. And I'm goinglike Lego is going to be future gold.
I think that I think that's gonnabe. But that's probably something that's

(01:07:00):
I don't know, always been likeLego collectible Legos is a thing. Yeah,
yeah, that the Lego always hasa that that's always you know,
a community built around it is popularit's it's and they have their own TV
show on Fox right now basically,so yeah, like a like a Masters

(01:07:20):
where people are repetitively yeah yeah yeah, with a version of that in Australia.
Yeah yeah. Oh, and we'vegot we've got our own Lego Land,
We've got our own amusement park withit so down and down in California.
But no, the Lego Now that'sa that's a solid answer, I
think, Yeah, Lego. I'mI guess I know where I'm going after
this. Oh man, Look,I think that the the thing about nostalgia

(01:07:46):
and it's the power of it isthat it instantly makes me smile. Like
when you say he man or Cops, I just instantly just go yes.
I remember being kid and TV lateat night. They've got this show on
called Cops and they're just arresting randompeople, and it's like, this is
me at thirteen is watching this.Go. This is so damn cool.

(01:08:11):
I can't believe I get to seethis. And and nostill just has that
power to make us happy and forbetter or worse, we do cherry pick
the best of past past periods.Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of the
same way with of all things earlynineties CBS sitcoms, because that's what my

(01:08:33):
parents watched when I was like ten, you know, eight to ten years
old, and you know, episodeof Murphy Brown comes on and like,
oh, yeah, I remember theshow. I love this show. And
then you watch it like this showskind of sucks, but yeah, it
puts you back in that like,hell yeah that was that was that was

(01:08:53):
a good time to be alive.And then started thinking about it, like,
man, that was in second grade, and no, I don't think
I really liked it much, butI liked all the feelings around it.
You know. Also you don't thinkabout it too hard. It's like,
yeah, man, this was.This was when the world was good,
you know, so definitely, andsome things, some things are worse when

(01:09:15):
you look back. I'll give youthat, because I remember going back just
recently and watching some episodes of DifferentStrokes and I was like, oh,
this will be good. And I'mwatching and I'm just seeing as they close
a door on the set, thewhole wall moves because it's just to set
wall, and I'm like, they'renot in the top level apartment of a
rich white guy. Ah. Justthe illusion was shattered and I could see

(01:09:39):
the message that every episode was tryingto give, and I'm just like,
ah, it's kind of preaching atme. Now, I'm just like,
I'm not enjoying this. In hindsight. Yeah, I missed the heavy handedness
of old TV though, you know, the when they did the very special
episodes where they tell you don't dodrugs, character would get randomly addicted to
drugs for one day and then it'dbe a resolved in twenty two minutes.

(01:10:01):
And I wish those would come back. And Look, even if your books
don't sell like an insanely huge amountof copies, like whenever I've created,
I've created some digital artwork, I'vewritten some books and release on my Amazon
myself, every time someone buys one, it's not about the money. It's

(01:10:29):
about the fact that someone cares somuch about what I've said or thought or
created that they're willing to spend theirmoney to own it and have it in
their life. And that feeling,to me, is so much greater than
the money that you get from it. Right. Oh yeah, yeah,
it's a it's a it's a blast. You know, I'll check it.
I'll check to see how sales aredoing. You know, once a day,

(01:10:51):
once a week or so, andyou know, every once in a
while usually it says zero, butevery once in a while, hey,
hey, you managed to trick somebodyinto buying this thing. It's like,
oh yeah, I didn't make itafter all. It's like, it's like
my wife doesn't care what I say. She doesn't want to hear me most
of the time, and someone's payingmoney to hear what I've got to say.

(01:11:14):
Right, Oh man, yeah,love's good. Love's good. Let
me just see where else was Igoing here? Why I've just gotten myself
a little bit lost. Oh yeah, I look, I definitely want to
your your pen names. So yourbooks are sold under JP Clark. And

(01:11:35):
this is actually that's by design,right, You're not just wanting to maintain
anonymity, nos protection or anything rightnow? Oh no, nothing, nothing
like that. No, My myfull name is Jefferson Clark and and here
you know, I live out inthe western US, and so it's it's

(01:11:55):
virtually virtually anonymous. Just with thatmeme, because there's a there's a county
in every state that's either Jafferson orClark County. Thomas Jefferson the president or
William Clark, the explorer who cameout to this this part of the world
in the early eighteen hundred. Soyeah, it's Jefferson Jay. It's too

(01:12:16):
many syllables. Man, I don'tI don't care for it. So I
figured I'll just go away, gobuy GP. That's cool. That's more
more Google friendly, is it?I guess evidently it's too Google friendly because
I can claim I've been writing booksabout ghost vampires and stuff. Well,

(01:12:38):
when I saw The Trees Have Eyes, a spooky novel, I saw,
what is it? Horror stories fromthe Forest? I thought that that checks
out. I know that. Iknow that you get with you with your
work. You spent a bit oftime in the in the woods, in
the forest, and I'm thinking itwould check out. Have you ever experienced

(01:12:59):
it? Anything spooky? Out?They? I mean, this is no
book, let's say that. Butyeah, no, no, not not
not my book. I might ownit physically here a little bit. I'm
going to probably buy it and readit now. Yeah, yeah, say
that. I've I don't know.Man, you work in the woods long
enough and you get you end upgetting superstitious about certain things. I work

(01:13:21):
in the woods, you know fortyfifty hours a week, and I I
don't know, I've I've seen youknow, you see like shadows of people
in the in the forest and thenyou turn and there's nobody there, and
that could just be nothing. Itcould be something, or you know,
there's been there's been cases where youknow, I work in and around a

(01:13:46):
fairly dangerous industry. I work aroundlaggers, so you know, they they
there's you know, it's it's oneof the most dangerous occupations in the in
the US on any give a year, it's right up there with like crab
fishermen, and I think like ironworkers, you know, high rise iron
workers or something like that, andso yeah, it's it's incredibly dangerous.

(01:14:13):
And there's you know, you don'ttalk to any of these guys and they
there's nobody who works in the woods, you know, on the logger side,
who doesn't know somebody's who's passed away, and there's you know, is
so there you get you get superstitionsout of out of certain things, but
you know, it's a lot ofit's just how you how you handle it.

(01:14:34):
As far as like booky stuff thatI'm mostly I don't really run into
that much. I've seen. I'veseen weird things out there. I've seen
the proverbial staircase in the woods.I've literally seen a staircase in the middle
of the woods leading to nowhere.I mean, yeah, and that's that's

(01:15:00):
like, well, what what?I don't know what's going on out here?
And then you just turn around andwalk away. No, no,
no, you're not tempted. Wereyou not tempted to climb the staircase?
No? Because around here, Iif you see stuff like that, you
my first thought is, this isprobably somebody who's high on meth is out

(01:15:21):
here, who put this out here, And I don't want anything to do
with them, with them, andeverybody out in the woods is armed,
and they may or may not bein a good mood, and I just
like, no, man, Idon't want nothing to do with this.
Man. I hate it when Ismoke math and build a staircase. It's
so annoying. So the story aroundthat staircase, isn't it like if you

(01:15:47):
climb it, then you will slipout into another dimension or another or do
you just die? What's thet Idon't know. I think that was a
I don't remember exactly, but Ithink I think something bad does happen to
you, but I I couldn't andrerecord hearing something about it. I think

(01:16:10):
it might be a portal, Yeah, probably probably, I mean the one
I the one I saw was probablyjust it was I don't think it was
anything as fancy as that. Itwas literally just stairs, so with no
building around it, right, yeah, yeah, so yeah, there there,
there is that. But it's weird. Did you get a photo?

(01:16:34):
Did you have an I didn't havea photo of it at the time.
I literally saw it, and like, no, I don't want anything to
do with this because I've come acrosslike people who are illegally a gold mining
and stuff out there, and I'vecome across their camps and the the last
thing you want to do is,you know, pull out your phone and

(01:16:57):
start taking pictures if you don't knowwho's around. So the best thing you
could do is just like pretend youdidn't see it and then just start walking
away because it's I mean, I'veI've had coworkers who have been you know,
not not here, but in otherparts of the country who have actually
been shot at and es, mostlyby pot farmers. Back in the bag

(01:17:21):
northern California, pot farmers are superterritorial, and I imagine they still are
to a point. But you know, it's it's that sort of thing if
if you see something, you know, I go out there unarmed every day,
so it's like, I don't wantto deal with this. Yeah,
you know, you watch you watchAvatar, and the beans there have got

(01:17:44):
this like beautiful symbiotic nature relationship withthe forests. But I think in talking
with you, you said, youdon't you don't think that the forest like
really wants us to leave. Itdoesn't really want us to do I hate
the run. It's indifferent to us. I think it doesn't. Yeah,
I think it's it's kind of ambivalentabout our about us, you know,

(01:18:06):
if it doesn't care that we're outthere. But you know, if you
for whatever reason, if you ifyou cross it the wrong way, then
it will take you. And I'veI've I've had I've had friends and co
workers that have that have uh,you know, passed away as a result
of you know, being out there. And it's like, you know,

(01:18:28):
you can you can chalk it upto real world stuff or you can or
you look at it like, man, it's what happened was clearly an accident,
but was it you know, ifis there something else going on here?
And neither answer really helps us sleepit. So yeah, I I
don't. I don't really look atthe I don't really look at forrest is

(01:18:54):
Uh. This is a magical placeof of you know, spirituality and anything
besides just you know, this isa collection of trees and animals that may
or may not hurt you. Butthat being said, I will not go
out into the woods at night.It's just I've lived in the city for
too long now that the absolute darknessdoes actually spook me. Just knowing that

(01:19:17):
something can be something or somebody canbe looking out at you, and that's
that's spooky to me. Man.So do you believe in things of a
supernatural night shure? Oh? Ipersonally I do. I mean, just
why it doesn't hurt not too AndI don't think that they're I don't think

(01:19:40):
they interact with us all that muchto to any extent. So you know,
if as long as you're not tryingto summon anything or you know,
I've I listened to D and Dcampaign podcast, so I know a thing
or two about summoning and stuff likethat. But you know, as long
as you are just doing the thingyou're supposed to be doing, then you

(01:20:01):
know they're they're not going to botheryou too much. No, granted,
I also made it. I liketo say, I made a truce with
the with the the gods of theforest, uh a couple of years ago,
because I we have they're called baldbald faced hornets and yellow jackets.
They're they're stinging bees, hornets andwasps, and they they are nasty creatures.

(01:20:26):
They you step on their nest andyou don't know that you're stepping on
and the next thing you know,you're just being lit up by these things,
and they hurt and you can you'lleventually, if it gets stung too
many times or the course of toomany years, you can become allergic and
you it will kill you if youdon't have been a driller or an ethy
tan or something on you. AndI I got stung one summer. I

(01:20:48):
got stung every day for a monthand it was just like so finally I
said, I said to the godsof the forest, I said, I
will make you a truce. Iwill never harm another b wasp, hornet,
yellowjacket anything, any type of stingingcreature if you just leave me alone.

(01:21:09):
And I've stuck to that, andI have not been stung in the
past three years since I did that, So you know, I think,
I think you can't make deals withthem. Now. What happens. What
happens if the truth gets broken andthey and I step on one of their
nests and they light me up andthen continue to light me up for a

(01:21:29):
month, Well then I just gotlucky for the past three years. Who
knows. The woods can have thislike calming, beautiful nature about it,
like during the day, and thenat noight it can can seem to become
a switch into something very adversive.Silence. Yeah, I think it's the

(01:21:56):
silence because you you go out duringthe day and you you know, it's
there's never a true silence out thereduring the day because there's always birds or
some kind of creature making noises orsomething or wind. But you go out
during the night and it's just there'snothing, you know, and there even
if you're close to a road,there's nobody driving around. It's it's just

(01:22:17):
the the silence. And that's that'sthe That's one thing I can't handle.
I always have to have some kindof some kind of noise or just the
the it's a present. It's likea like a blanket covering you and just
that that that's the stuff that spooksme. Have you well you worn in
the city? Is that? Isthat one you grow up? I know,

(01:22:41):
I grew up pretty rural. Imean I grew up you know,
miles away from you know, ourclosest neighbor was a mile away by highway.
And you know, I've I've spentthe majority of my adult life in
various places. I lived in afairly large one, a fairly large city

(01:23:02):
for a while, and I livein a you know, mid size city
nowadays. So I'm I think Ijust got used to people, and I
got used to street lights. Isprobably the other thing. I don't mind
going out, you know, anywhereanywhere in the city anymore at night,
you know, just walking around withmy dog. But yeah, you you

(01:23:25):
turn those street lights off, andit's like, man, that darkness it
comes for you fast. Yeah.Often when people get abducted by aliens,
it's a it's a rural location,it's a remote location. And you know,
if if that if that's really happeningof the aliens doing that because they
know there's less witnesses around. Imean, yeah, I mean there's there's

(01:23:45):
a famous case there, which whichwas it Fire in the Sky. I'm
sure you've heard of that one.They made the movie about it. Yeah,
that was a I get the factswrong. Feel free to correct me,
but don't at me. I thinkthey were a civiculture thinning crew.

(01:24:08):
They were like loggers, but theydon't do the cut smaller things in New
Mexico. And they had a fairlylarge contract to finish X amount of acres
and it looked like they were gettingit, looked like they weren't going to
finish it, and so they that'swhen the guy got of adductive by aliens,

(01:24:29):
and so it kind of put theentire contract on hold. But yeah,
it's it seems to be mostly rurallocations because well you can't see anything,
you know, there's few of witnesses, and I that that would be
what I imagine, although you know, people disappear at night from cities,

(01:24:53):
you know, suburbs. You goout. You know, I live in
a suburban location now, and youknow, I walke my dog at all
hours of the night, and there'sthere's you don't run into anybody, so
and no one's gonna no one eversees you because everybody's inside watching television,
so you know, and unless youget picked up on a ring camera,

(01:25:13):
then there's things can happen, andyou could be in a right outside of
an apartment complex of five hundred peopleand no one would ever know. Hmm.
Yeah, So I think we underestimatehow much footage they would be of
us just floating around, you know, from yeah, security cameras, all

(01:25:34):
of these STAPs of things. Yeah, it's it's kind of like, well,
there's there's so much of it thatit's there is effectively none of it
because unless someone is specifically trying todig through put it all together, then
you know, you're just You're justa one and a zero man, You're
just a you know, you canbreak it down by another piece of a
demographic data, a piece of themy trix. That's what I am,

(01:25:58):
damn man. Look, I lovethe idea of your book just documenting what
people have recorded, because people areinteresting and weird and funny, and I
want to know what people are recordingand holding and what's important to them,
and to read it from that perspective. I think that's going to be that's
going to be the value in itfor me, and also just that nostalgia

(01:26:19):
just the shows. I just wantto know that people are recording old episodes
Mcgiver and the Golden Girls. That'swhat I want to that's that's the kind
of thing. And then when Icome across these little things, it's going
to make me smile every time Iread it, and I think that's the
value of reading. To be recordedover both volume one and two, and
the links to your Amazon book willbe available in the notes of this podcast,

(01:26:42):
so definitely definitely check it out ifyou want to walk down memory lane.
That's JP. I think you're doinga fantastic public service man. Well,
thank you. I really appreciate yougiving me the giv me the time
and the platform, and I appreciateyour I appreciate your show. I'm a
big fan. So I just wantedto say he had a had a medium

(01:27:03):
on one of your early episodes andhe mentioned the Milwaukee Milwaukee Rangers. He
did, yeah, and this was, uh, this was I just wanted
to mention this as I was Iwas listening to your show and I was
driving, I was like, oh, I need to I need to mention
this. Well, the Texas Rangerswent on to win the World Series.

(01:27:26):
Okay, so if if you're ifyou're a sport man, you might be
looking into the Milwaukee Bucks as faras the basketball this year, agoes,
because he's as far as I cansee, he's he's bat in five hundred.
So he's put the two together.Maybe maybe definitely. And it's still
on my to do list to takethis guy to a to a roulette table

(01:27:47):
and and yes see if we canget something happening, because if we can,
I'm never working again. That's it. I feel like I'm going out.
I want to go to the casinowith rain Man or my own sake
working for me. And look,thanks so much for taking the time JP.
It's much appreciated, mate, Thankyou too. Best of luck with

(01:28:08):
your books and your future books andeven you know, look the books that
have got your name on them.If you click on your name on Amazon,
that's when you'll see all the otherpeople's books and just get them all.
They're probably all fantastic. Oh that'snice of you to give them a
free free plug. Good on youman. All right, Well, thanks

(01:28:28):
thanks having a chat today. Thanksbybe Hie. That was JP Clark,
the author of some books on Amazon, and these books are called to be
recorded over two volumes there, andlook what an interesting character he is and
what power I was thinking about thisas we were talking, just the power

(01:28:53):
that reminiscence has. Right, youcan create a real connection with another person
if you find this common commonality thatyou have in a shared memory, whether
it's a memory of an old brandor an old TV show or an old
song, that really sparks a connectionbetween people. And I think someone needs

(01:29:17):
to look into that. There's probablysome psychological papers on it, so that's
a rabbit hole. I'm probably goingto end up following it, probably later
today if I'm honest, But rightnow, I just want to thank you
for listening into Jamie's Club podcast andto encourage you to share your favorite episode
on your social media. That wouldhelp me out. If I could gather

(01:29:40):
a few more listeners, I'd beeiver so appreciative. But thank you just
for having a listening today. Andhey, if there was a brand or
a character or something that we mentionedtoday in our little trip down memory lane
that really resonated with you, headto the Facebook page and tell me about
it. To go to Jamie's Clubdot com dot au and follow the links

(01:30:01):
from there.