This Week on Another Brother:
In episode #001, The Pavlovian Propane Predicament, Italians think Alex looks Scottish, but certainly not in a Sherlock Holmes kind of way… In Star Citizen, you can be all that you can be! From a package-delivering space cowboy, to a wormhole mapping space-fairer. You can even be a pirate who loots other players’ booty! Are the brothers full of hot air, or was that just another one of Alex’s many ridiculous non-resume-making jobs?
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And don’t miss this episode’s Alternate Reality…
Transcript:
The following transcript was in part created using the Deepgram API:
[00:00:00] This week on Another Brother
[00:00:32] Another Brother theme song
[00:00:55] Stewnerds Segment
Josh: My friend, okay, my friend Travis, who is totally, like, Utahn through-and-through, very Logan, Cache Valley, Utah. He looks so Slavic. Like, just, very, I don’t know, eastern European looking. And so when we were over in Europe making- it was so funny because everyone would talk to him, and he’d be like, “why is everyone talking to me?” I’m like, “Because they think you speak their language, dude, because you look like them.” He’d always gets so mad. He’s like, “I do not!”
Alex: Man, I heard that I looked like just so many weird random things when I was in Italy. Like, you know, I talked to one missionary about how we were starting to get into being Scottish. She was from Sweden. No. Sorry, Switzerland.
Josh: Swiss not Swede.
Alex: Yeah. I did know an Elder from Sweden, but this sister missionary, she thought- once I said it, she was like, “Oh yeah. Sure. Yeah. You look Scottish.” Like, okay. I don’t actually know what that even means yet. At that point, I had no idea what it meant to look Scottish and I still am not sure I really know. I mean, the only real literary description I’ve ever seen of someone Scottish is Sherlock Holmes, who is tall and lanky.
Jacob: And and that’s not what you normally think of for a Scotsman.
Josh: In um, oh, what’s the story and who’s the author? If I had my phone off of airplane mode, I could look. Kidnapped? Is that the story? He describes a Stewart even. Alan Breck Stewart, I think. And he describes him as a short of stature, dark haired, wild-eyed looking man with-
Alex: We did it!
Josh: -with, like, a pockmarked face. Which is the sign of-
Jacob: Ohhh. Spoke too soon.
Josh: No. No. No. So that’s the sign of having lived through what is it? Cowpox or something. There’s some… I can’t remember. But, yeah, so these pocked cheeks on his face. But wherever he went, he always had like two swords and two silver pistols on his hip and was, like, just a crazy, crazy guy.
Alex: Cool.
Josh: But when I was in Germany, the Germans pegged me for German.
Alex: I’ve heard that one too.
Josh: which is weird because all the Germans that I was around were, like, pretty much pretty tall, much taller than I was. But still, you know, darker hair and everything. Darker features.
[00:03:55] Citizens of the Stars Segment
Alex: Shall we be Citizens of the Stars??
Josh: Before you start since you’re trying to figure out what you’re gonna do.
Alex: I’m waffling.
Josh: I saw a morphologist video today.
Alex: Morphologist, yeah…. His new one today?
Josh: Yeah. On three dot eighteen, or is that Python?
Jacob: I don’t know.
Alex: It’s three dot eighteen. Is the next update. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: He talks about the soft kill. Right. Yes. So newest and greatest.
Alex: Yeah, I was gonna talk about that a little bit. Cool. So Star Citizen is a massively multiplayer online game that is nothing like World of Warcraft, the most commonly known massively multiplayer online game. Massively multiplayer online game just means it’s played by a bunch of people all at the same time and it’s online. The point of the game is to kind of just live a fantasy life out in space in the year 2952, doing something that you think would be a cool thing to do in the future. Like, if you really wanna be, if you wanna do something that some people call really boring, you can deliver packages. That’s a type of job you can have. You can be a cargo hauler, which involves a lot more, it’s more like wild west cargo hauling where like you gotta have somebody riding shotgun in your turret to take out the pirates that are definitely gonna come for you because the law isn’t a great resource out in space. Because how do you police all of outer space?
Josh: What about probably one of the most fascinating jobs you can do? Which is mapping wormholes.
Alex: Yeah. There’s not a lot of information on that yet, but in fact, they’ve kind of changed that since a little bit since they’ve they’ve first talked about it back in, I don’t know, 2013 or something like that. But the ship that I bought originally was made for that purpose for mapping what they call jump points in the game. There yeah. There’s gonna be some undiscovered wormholes out there that if you have the right computers on your ship as you are piloting by hand, manually piloting your ship through this thing, the computer will be recording the course that you take to get through it correctly without falling out into I don’t even know where. We don’t- like, spaghetti.
Jacob: That’s how it works?
Alex: Yeah, your computer will record the course necessary. And then you can sell that data.
Jacob: But I mean, you’re piloting by hand.
Alex: Yeah. Right.
Jacob: Is this something that’s already live? Can you already be doing this?
Alex: No. There are no jump points that you can pilot.
Jacob: So, we don’t know what the visualization itself looks like so that you know you’re in the wormhole?
Alex: That’s not true. We do know- We know- Oh, well, you’re gonna know when you’re in the wormhole. They’ve shown some pre-vis effects that are probably gonna be what we end up with.
Jacob: Okay. Alright. I gotta look that up.
Alex: It looks very much like you’re inside of- it reminded me of what it would look like to be inside of a heart. Like, flying your ship through a heart. Through all these valves. And, like, if Like- Yep. There will be forks here and there, but I’m sure they converge again back into the same thing. And it’s constantly pulsing.
Jacob: Okay. So it’s very clear you’re approaching the edge.
Alex: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. It’s very close to real wormholes.
Alex: Yeah. They did a really good job.
Josh: It’s simulated.
Alex: I’m sure they talked to NASA and yeah.
Josh: Elon Musk and-
Jacob: Interstellar guy.
Alex: Right.
Jacob: Yeah. Shoot. Who was that?
Alex: Some supercomputer models. Jacob and
Josh: Matt Damon.
Alex: And then once you have those coordinates, recorded in your computer, you can sell it to- I mean, that’s that’s kind of the idea. It’s not very well defined right now how that’s gonna work. But that’s what I’ve been working off of.
Jacob: I watched a video of a guy with a sweet little four wheel rig on a planet with a laser. Blasting minerals to mine.
Alex: Yeah. That’s called a… shoot.
Josh: Mining. Isn’t it just mining?
Alex: Well, yeah, that the right career path that game. Yeah. But that piece it’s a rock, an R.O.C. Is it A little four wheeler with like a laser arm?
Jacob: Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. ROC. I mean, I’m not sure what other people in the community call it. If they call it a “rock” or if they call call it an ROC, but I’ve always called it a “rock”.
Josh: Is it a Remotely Operated something?
Alex: I don’t think it’s remotely operated because you’re sitting in it.
Jacob: Yeah you’re driving it. You’re controlling the arm with the laser and everything.
Alex: But that’s something you can do, you know. You can throw one of these into the back of, like, a pickup truck type ship and fly down to a planet, scan for minerals, go mine them, and refine them at a space station and sell that ore. You can I mean
Josh: Or if I don’t wanna do all the hard work, I wanna let I wanna let you do all the prospecting and mining, then I can just interdict your ship in flight and go into FPS mode.
Jacob: Tractor beam.
Josh: Well, there’s no tractor- yeah. Eventually, you’ll be able to tractor beam, but it’s not implemented yet.
Jacob: Oh, no ship tractor beams.
Alex: No ship tractor bealms. They have little hand held ones.
Josh: But but, yeah, I can just- I would have to force you to pull over and or sneakily board your ship. But then we’ve got, like, hand to hand weapons and first person shooter, rifles, battle rifles, lasers, percussive, like, kinetic munitions, anything from sniper rifles to battle rifles to handguns, and you can go into, like, full on FPS ship boarding mode, and then I can steal all your cargo and load it up in my ship.
Alex: FPS in this instance means first person shooter.
Jacob: Pew pew.
Alex: And, yeah, they’re actually changing that up. They’re changing cargo- the way cargo works. So right now, if you blow up someone’s ship-
Jacob: Yes. I just saw a video about this.
Alex: -a small portion of the cargo they were carrying will just be scattered around in tiny little boxes. They’re changing that up so that up to 95% of it can be salvaged, reclaimed in the larger cargo containers that everybody’s been wanting it to spawn as. I don’t I’m I’ve never really cared about cargo a whole lot personally, so I’m I haven’t been paying attention to the ins and outs specifically exactly how things are changing, but everybody’s pretty excited.
Jacob: I’m sure there’s a ton of people out there who are gonna wanna be pirates though.
Alex: Oh, yeah. A crap load. People that are just gonna wanna-
Jacob: So they’re following very closely.
Alex: Big time. Yeah. It changes everything for for these people. And in 3.18-
Jacob: It makes it lucrative now. If you can get that much of the-
Alex: Right.
Josh: The average is 45% of the cargo load will be dispersed.
Alex: I think 16 to 45%. Yeah. That’s what they’re shooting for.
Josh: It’s- Yeah. That’s- yeah. I mean, dang.
Alex: And in the next update to the game, 3.18, ships are supposed to be able to be disabled without them exploding. Right now, you shoot a ship enough it explodes. There’s no disabling a ship to, like, pirate it. It explodes, and then maybe you get some of the loose cargo.
Josh: If you can find it.
Alex: if you can find it because the boxes are teeny tiny.
Josh: And it’s, you know, you’re in space, so everything’s super black.
Alex: Well, you’re not necessarily in space. You could have taken them down in atmosphere. Josh Yeah. True.
Jacob: Or they could be landed on the ground, even and you sneak up on them, flying fast, attack.
Alex: That’s one of the greatest things about this game is that if you it’s it’s like the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If you can see the place, you can go there. You can put your feet on it. You can land there. There’s no animation that takes you from outer space down to a specific landing spot down on the planet, and you can only get out there. No you can fly anywhere, all the way down to a planet, get out, do stuff, explore a cave, maybe even take a mission where you’re trying to find someone who disappeared. And the last known place they went to was a cave. They were gonna go spelunking and they told someone, and you have to go find them in that cave. Which used to be the way that I made most of my money. I would take those missions and my little handheld mining laser and I’d go down into these caves, do some handheld mining while looking for bodies. It was kind of fun, you know, at the time. There wasn’t a whole lot of gameplay at that point in time in the game yet, but-
Josh: That that was the most mind blowing thing for me the first time I played, was starting off on a space station, getting my ship delivered to a loading point, getting on, flying out, and I didn’t know how to quantum spool or quantum jump or anything. And so literally flying for, like, an hour and a half in real time.
Jacob: Nooooo
Josh: Because there was a planet that had been developed already, and I really wanted to get to this dang planet, but I didn’t know how to quantum spool or quantum jump or whatever. And so I put a TV show on and just pointed my ship in the right direction and just-
Jacob: Are you kidding me?
Josh: -and just held the forward arrow key down- or the- W A S D- W- whatever. And uh-
Alex: I hope you knew how to decouple your engines.
Josh: This was so early- no. And still, a contention point I have is there’s so many controls, to remember. So It’s pretty complex. But, it’s worth it. But, yeah, just flying for literally like, an hour and a half, two hours of real Earth time, but then seeing the planet on the horizon, and then you’re just- your ship just enters atmosphere, and now you’re flying with atmospheric physics. And then you know, all the way up until you land. It was it’s just wild. Like, the whole thing just streamed in and it definitely made it feel like physicality, like, you were physically moving through this space.
Alex: Yeah.
Jacob: And did we mention the planets are procedurally generated? These aren’t, like, developers and designers going in there and hand crafting, building out every single planet.
Josh: Yeah. A lot of the a lot of the impressive things that your average two game player probably doesn’t understand. Not respect, but-
Alex: Or care about even, really.
Josh: Or care about, is all of the effort going- and funding and resourcing going into developing the tools and the tech stack behind making this game work. There’s so many technical feats, you know, to this the servers, how the servers are doing this persistent universe. And just I don’t know. It’s amazing.
Alex: Yeah. A lot of it is stuff that just nobody has really done before. Some of it maybe has been done before, but not on this scale and because of the scale, you have to make some fundamental changes to make it work at this scale. Because like these planets they’re obviously not full scale planets. One thing that I’ve always been interested in is how the how are they gonna reproduce Earth? What what scale are they gonna do because our system- star system, the Sol system, will be in the game at some point.
Jacob: Really?
Alex: Yeah.
Jacob: That’s interesting.
Alex: Yeah. So I wanna know what what kind of scale they’re gonna give Earth-
Josh: For um, Foundry 42, isn’t Earth gonna be-
Alex: Squadron 42.
Josh: Squadron 42. Oh my gosh. Foundry 42. What’s Foundry 42?
Alex: I can’t think- I don’t know. It was on my- it was on the tip of my tongue.
Josh: Is that Warhammer? Foundry- there’s some- that might be the guys that do Warhammer-
Jacob: Okay it is sounding familiar now.
Alex: I can’t think of it.
Josh: But yeah, Squadron 42, there’s a big part on Earth. Right?
Alex: I don’t know. I know a a lot of the game is supposed to take place out at this mining facility. It’s a really intense looking place from what they’ve shown with like really if if I’m not getting confused with like Star Wars or something, giant hunks of rock, with, like, red lightning shooting between them. It looks like really intense. I might I might be confusing different things. Like-
Josh: Are there Stormtroopers in your memory?
Alex: The next the next star system coming to stars that is in in update 4.0 is called Pyro, and there’s a lot of red lightning in that system too. So I I may be confusing different visuals. But yeah. But that’s a good point too. Like, Star Citizen is an online multiplayer game. But there will also be- made by the same people, a single player / multiplayer cooperative offline focused campaign experience where you’re going through a story, where you play as- The original idea was that you will play as the character that you will be playing in Star Citizen, but this is your time in the United Earth Navy. Where, like, every citizen spends a couple years serving in the Navy. Kinda like in Italy, you either spend a couple years as first responder or a couple of years in the military. Every everybody does it. It’s mandatory. I’m sure they have like different health things that can get you a pass. But like that, you’ll be playing in this single player campaign doing your time in the Navy. And there’s gonna be a war on with, I think, the Banu. It’s a race of somewhat stereotypical, at least right now, we don’t really know how the story is gonna play out. Stereotypical looking like space piratey, alien, bad guys with sharp pointy teeth and limbs that articulate in directions that are not quite like ours. And it’s gonna be pretty freaking sweet. They’ve gone all out on this thing. There were, I think, 10,000 pages of dialogue or something like that that they had to shoot. And they got real, real frickin actors-
Josh: Mark Hamill.
Alex: Mark Hamill. Gary Oldman.
Josh: Oh, did they?
Alex: Oh, shoot. No. Not- shoot. What’s her name? Gillian Anderson from X-Files. Oh, shoot. Andy Serkis.
Jacob: Oh good one.
Alex: He’s he’s doing MOCAP, of course. He’s a MOCAP guy.
Josh: Well, I mean, they MOCAP everybody.
Alex: Tehcnically everybody was performance captured. Yeah. But he’s doing MOCAP acting for Banu-
Josh: For an alien-
Alex: Yeah for someone non-human.
Jacob: Of course. Of course.
Alex: Because he’s, like, the MOCAP king. And he is. I mean, Andy Serkis is the boss. He’s he’s gonna be playing, like, the leader of the the aliens we’re at war with.
Jacob: Okay. So is there an ETA for this? Not that it would be reliable.
Alex: Absolutely not.
Jacob: Dangit.
Josh: They stopped they stopped even-
Jacob: Promising?
Josh: Yeah.
Jacob: Makes sense.
Alex: The last time they said it was coming out, they was gonna be coming out in 2016 I think. They might have said 2020 at one point, but-
Josh: That’s part of the controversy behind this game because we’ve been crowdfunding it for so long.
Jacob: It’s a big controversy.
Josh: Yeah. And then-
Jacob: They’ve reached just over half a billion dollars in crowdfunding. So people, like, want the game.
Josh: I mean, it’s very playable- the Star Citizen aspect of The ‘Verse. It’s very playable. There’s still a lot of bugs and you’re you’re basically guinea pigs for for the development team, but gosh, it’s still fun.
[00:21:17] Interstitial Joke
Josh: Oh, man. I love the winter. It’s cold, though. Alright. I gotta get- make me some tea here. Hold on. Alright. Here’s some water. Gotta- Alright, let’s just put this on the stove here. Get that boiling. Oh, yeah. Oh, I’m so excited for this tea. You know what? I think really fondly of you boiling water. Gosh, you’re gonna be missed/mist.
[00:21:58] Storytime Segment
Soundbite: Hey, kids, do you know what time it is? Storytime!
Alex: So there I was. It was the year 2009, I think, maybe 2010. I had just spent a year or two applying to two jobs a week without getting anything. No interviews, nothing. I was apparently really bad at making resumes. And I finally got a job on a hot air balloon ground crew.
Jacob: Oh, yeah.
Alex: I have I just have the weirdest stuff in my resume. I mean I don’t put any of this on my resume anymore but I guess in my CV I’ve got just so much random crap. This is one of those things and it was a weird job. This the the founder and owner, one time owner of LDS Singles dot com was I’m not I’m not really sure what you call them. You don’t pilot a balloon. They’re not called pilots. I think they’re aeronauts.
Jacob: Aviators?
Josh: Oh, aeronaut.
Alex: I think I think you’re an aeronaut when you control a balloon. But, yeah, he he he was one. He had a balloon. It was a big basket and a big envelope. He’s an-
Josh: What’s an envelope?
Alex: That’s the balloon as it’s technically called an envelope. And Yeah. He was able to take 8 people up, not including himself. Yeah. So total of 9 people up there. And you know, everyone’s always asking me what was your insurance like that you got to do this for work. Oh, I didn’t get to do that for work. I was on the ground crew. You don’t hire people to go up in the balloon with you. They they’re useless. Up there.
Jacob: They’re just taking money away.
Alex: It’s one person controlling the balloon. What you need is people on the ground to weigh the balloon down once it’s time to land. Just you just jump onto the side of the basket as soon as it touches down to try and hold it there. But we’ll get there. You know, there’s a there’s a lot of stuff you do. So I get a call the night before at like 10 PM, maybe even 11 PM sometimes. “Hey, I need you tomorrow morning at 04:30. Just be ready outside.” Because he knew where to pick me up.
Jacob: Oh yeah. This is when all 3 of us were rooming together.
Alex: No. No.
Jacob: It wasn’t?
Alex: No. No. No.
Josh: I was alone at Grandma-
Alex: What?
Josh: -Grandma Robison’s house. I feel like I was at Grandma’s house when this happened. I don’t know why.
Alex: Uhhh… I think you were married. But maybe not.
Josh: I might have been- I never lived with Grandma, but I might have been chilling with Grandma… on the weekend?
Alex: Okay…? Oh, yeah. I should say this was a summer job. This was not during the school year.
Jacob: Okay. Okay. That’s right.
Alex: And if it was during the school year then we only really flew on weekends. But yeah, I I think I got out of the job before school came back around. But over the summer, I did this 04:30 in the morning He picks me up out on the street on what was that? Canyon? Canyon Road? He’d pick me up. There would usually be someone else that he had picked up before me in the in the truck with him and we’d hop in the truck and behind the truck there’d be a trailer that had the basket and the envelope and we’d drive out to one of two parks. One was in Lehi very close to the Timpanocas temple. There was a pretty big park to the southwest of the temple. That was the place that we that we preferred to launch from because it was a really big park and there were other ballooners that would often launch from there too. And they’re an important part of this story because whenever there were other ballooners that you launched with, it was tradition to go get breakfast together after you landed. The people, I guess the customers, your passengers meet you at the park, and The first thing you’d- we’d do is we lay the basket out and the envelope. We get the envelope all hooked up to the top frame of the basket and get the envelope laid out on its side nice and straight and flat. And then we get- a oh yeah, we’d make sure that the various lines that are used to control the balloon to open different flaps and stuff are all straight and whatnot, that they’re- that the crown line was attached to the top of the balloon. The top of the envelope is called the crown and there’s a rope that goes from the top of the balloon out away from the basket and you just pull that all the way out. It was like, I don’t know, maybe 200 foot rope. And then you set up a couple of fans down at the- I’m not sure what the technical term was anymore, but like what I would call the mouth of the envelope, the part where the torches would like heat everything up. Yeah. You get you get a bunch of fans just pointed inside of that as one person holds that open and they just start blowing air in. Once there’s enough air in there that it kind of starts to blow up a bit, you can start using the burners to start heating that air up. And eventually you start to get the envelope to stand up. And I was always put on the crown line. I hated it. It’s the worst job. I mean, it’s not supposed to be, but my boss was such a turd about doing this right. His instructor would constantly berate him for being terrible at getting his balloon up. He was way too slow. So my job was to just hold this giant balloon down as much as I could so that when it stood up, it didn’t go past all the way up and then start pendulating- doing doing a pendulum thing back and forth.
Josh: “Pendulating”.
Jacob: I love it.
Alex: I’m supposed to keep it from going up too fast so that it just goes all the way straight.
Jacob: Until it stands. But they had just you doing that?
Alex: Yeah. Usually, it was just me. You shouldn’t- because I mean, the way he was doing it, we should have had three people.
Jacob: Yeah. That’s crazy. Yeah we’ve gone to a bunch of festivals and balloonist have had me come and and jump on a rope with their crew before.
Alex: Well, they were probably better at their job than this guy.
Josh: They probably thought if they could get you involved, you’d pay for a ticket too.
Alex: Right. There were no handles. You know, it was just a rope. So I had to like wrap the rope around my hands and it was just squeezing my hands. I it felt like my hands were gonna break. And then, you know, whenever I wasn’t perfect at keeping it from “pendulating”- I swear that’s a word.
Jacob: It should be.
Josh: I really don’t think it is…
Alex: You know, I’d get-
Josh: Oscillating?
Alex: I would get berated by my boss. I’m like, “dude, you’re doing it-” even I knew he was doing it wrong, like, you’re going so slow. You’re you’re taking all of the strength out of me. I don’t have the endurance just hold this giant balloon down for forever. But anyway, you get that thing standing up. You’ve got extra ballast weights in the basket, you know, like sandbags or something. And you get all the passengers in.
Jacob: Are those gonna come into the story at any point?
Alex: No.
Jacob: Can I ask you a quick question then? Yeah. You always see like on TV. They wanna go- They wanna change their their buoyancy, I suppose. And so they they cut one and they drop it.
Alex: Yeah.
Jacob: Do they really just cut those things?
Alex: I mean, probably once upon a time they did that, but that is not a part of normal ballooning nowadays. Maybe if you’re like racing or something or there’s some kind of-
Jacob: I just suddenly had an image in my mind-
Josh: Is that a thing?
Alex: Oh yeah.
Jacob: -someone just getting clocked with this bag of sand that fell from the sky.
Alex: Yeah. No. That’s not- I mean, honestly, I don’t even remember there being those weights in the basket. I’m just saying it because I’ve been programmed by television for my whole life. I honestly don’t remember any extra weights except for us. Once the balloon was standing, other people on the crew would just be hanging on to the outside of the basket to be that extra ballast weight.
Josh: Yeah. I just picture some guy’s face like in a just straight dire panic just like, hurry up, get on the balloon!
Alex: I mean, that’s with this with this boss in particular, that’s kind of the way it was. Once it was up, it was time to go. You got everybody into the basket and you kind of we we timed when he started the burners to when we jumped off the basket, you know, and then away they went. And from there, our job was basically like the movie twister. Where we’re in the truck chasing the balloon, the balloon tornado, watching different signs of wind on the ground so that when it’s time for him to land, we know what to tell him. “You’ve got ground wind going in this direction at about this speed.” So you know what to expect. We’re also spotting power lines and things that he might not be able to see from up there, telling him where they are. We’ve got radios. We’re talking to him over radio. And the the way you control the balloon is by climbing or descending. And at different layers, there will be different wind directions and speeds, and you just use those to push your balloon around. That’s how you fly a balloon.
Jacob: Did he have any instrumentation with him though? to- that read that and and gave him that info? Or was he just-
Alex: No. You just have to yeah. You go up and down, you just kind of feel it as you’re going up. You’ve got to pay attention to what you’re running into. I mean, there might be stuff like that for- more professional people.
Jacob: so even Heather’s dad, you know, he he paraglides. He’s got stuff. To to use while he’s out there flying.
Alex: Well, I don’t know. Maybe he had some of this stuff I don’t remember it though. So, yeah, we just follow him around driving the truck. I I ended up driving the truck a lot too.
Josh: But you’re like, stay staying to roads and things.
Alex: Yeah. Definitely.
Josh: So you’re trying to keep it an eye on them.
Alex: Correct.
Josh: Are you radioing in?
Alex: Yeah. I wasn’t when I was driving, I was not on the radio. I had someone else next to me.
Josh: You’re following like roughly parallel to their direction of flight or whatever.
Alex: Right. Follow him. He’ll radio down that he’s gonna start his descent and he wants to land at roughly this place and we’ll try to get to that place before him while the other person is watching where he’s at trying to tell me he’s actually gonna touch down sooner or he’s gonna miss that spot and go over here probably.
Josh: Sounds so absurd.
Alex: It’s pretty crazy. And it’s super fun though. Yeah. I mean it sucked being up that early in the morning, but it was it was pretty fun. And then we would get out of the truck once it looked like, yeah, he’s definitely gonna touch down here. And we get out to where we can follow the basket until it’s all the way on the ground and then we just jump onto the side of it. And hopefully there’s not a lot of ground wind or else the basket will tip over and everybody will fall out and it’s it can be kind of violent. But most of the time we landed fine. Then it’s a matter of packing it out all of that stuff up into the trailer. You throw the passengers into the trailer along with the basket and they just sit in the basket.
Jacob: Really?
Alex: Yeah.
Jacob: Okay. That’s funny.
Alex: And at that point, driving is pretty intense because you don’t wanna stop too suddenly. You really can’t start too suddenly towing too much weight. I mean, and I mean not so much weight but, yeah, you just wanna be easy on the brakes. And then we would go back to the park, drop off the passengers to their vehicles, so they can drive back home, and then we would go refill the the the propane tanks. And as I said, if we launch from a park where there were other ballooners then it was tradition for us to go to Jim’s Diner in American Fork and get breakfast together afterwards. And this boss was pretty cool. He he paid for breakfast for us whenever we went. And we did usually launch from that park and when we did there were usually other ballooners. So we had breakfast afterwards pretty frequently. And we always refilled the burners- the the propane tanks- before going to breakfast. And it got to the point where my brain forged a connection between the smell of the propane and the food I was about to eat. For 5 years afterwards. If I smelled propane, I would salivate and my stomach would growl. It was it was a very literal Pavlovian response. I would get so so hungry.
Josh: I wonder if that’s why your boss, he was compelled to do this because he had like created the-
Alex: He had that same thing?
Josh: The pavlovian requirement in himself,
Alex: Right.
Josh: He’s like, “oh, man, you know, we we have to go get some food!”
Alex: “Oh, we’re about to eat breakfast? I gotta get some propane!”
[00:37:30] Another Brother Outro