706: Let There Be Scams

13:15Jason DeFillippo:And it's not, somebody is going to die at some point from this.

13:18Brian Schulmeister:I'm sure somebody has already. We'll get to that one in a little bit because people have actually died so far. Not from Vibe Coding, but from Vibe Therapy and maybe eventually Vibe Physics. Remember Kalanick last week? But yeah, this guy is a non-coder and he expects this thing to do magic work. And like I said last week, the whole Vibe Coding thing, you have to build very specific frameworks for it. And even then, you still have to know what you're doing. Yeah. And there are several studies. I didn't have time to put them in the show notes this week, but everything's coming out that seasoned coders who are using AI assistants, it actually takes them longer to write the same amount of code to do the same tasks.

14:05Brian Schulmeister:I think it was 19 % longer was the latest study that was showing that people who are using these tools. It's not a panacea, and it's not doing what they said it was going to do. It is neat. It is fun. Don't get me wrong. For doing quick prototypes and basic HTML sites, it's great. And I was thinking about this too, Brian. You and I, we worked for major corporations, ad agencies. You worked for record labels. I worked for film studios and TV networks. Yep. When when somebody gives you a design, you have to implement that design to the pixel. Yes. Because if it is not to the pixel, the lawyers will get very angry and you will not get paid properly.

14:46Brian Schulmeister:And when there's a change, you need to go do that specific change. You can't argue with your LLM and say, look, I need this to do this. And then it goes, OK, Dave, but I thought it looked better this way. No, I want it the other way. But I can't I can't roll back, Dave. if I deleted it already. You know, you have to be able to be within a very specific realm of operation to get these things done. And this stuff is not good for that. Like, seriously, have you I mean, have you even played with it yet? Have you had any time to I know you're on vacation, so probably not.

15:18Jason DeFillippo:I have not done any vibe coding yet, but I have just been keeping up with the news. And again, it comes down to like these things need constant oversight. So I can see how it's actually adding time to development if you knew what to do in the first place.

15:31Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. And, you know, and I've seen some people who are like good project managers and product managers use it to build prototypes that they then give to their engineering team to say, here, make this, you know. Now build this for real. Yeah, exactly. Take this and productize it and systematize it and actually put it into the workflow. So it works, not just, you know, if I blink, it's going to fall apart.

16:04Brian Schulmeister:Now, here's a new one that I hadn't heard about. In a bizarre twist, developers at Sound Slice, an app for digitizing sheet music, added a new feature, not because users asked for it, but because ChatGPT hallucinated it into existence. Now, users kept uploading ASCII guitar tabs to Sound Slice after ChatGPT falsely claimed that they could process them. Now, the devs kept getting screenshots from users saying, look, ChatGPT said that I could send my ASCII guitar tabs and you would process it. And the co-founder was like, this is gaslight driven development because we've never made this feature.

16:46Brian Schulmeister:This was not on our roadmap, but ChatGPT is telling people that it exists. So what do they do? They said, fuck it, and they built it, which is awesome. They're like, what do we want to do? Do we want to spend time fighting with users saying that, hey, ChatGPT made this up. It doesn't exist. Or should we just kick our shoes off and take a couple hours and build it? And that's what they did. Now, the co-founder, Holovati, Adrian Holovati, he says he doesn't hate AI. He says, Sound Slice uses machine learning to do its magic. Now, there's a point there. Sound Slice uses machine learning to do its magic, but is mixed on LLMs.

17:30Brian Schulmeister:He compared his experience with ChatGPT to dealing with an overzealous sales team selling a feature that doesn't exist. We've had experience with that.

17:38Jason DeFillippo:Oh, boy, yes.

17:39Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. He also doesn't trust LLMs to write code. He experimented with it, but found it caused more problems than it solved. Quote, I don't trust it for my production Sound Slice code, he said. Plus, writing code is fun. Why would I choose to deny myself fun to appease the capitalism gods? No, thanks. I like this guy.

18:01Jason DeFillippo:Sounds like a good guy. We would have gotten on with him. Yeah.

18:03Brian Schulmeister:All right. Now, this next one is a paper that came out of Wharton called Call Me a Jerk, Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests. This is a paper from Leonard Meinke, Dan Shapiro, Angela Duckworth, Ethan Malik, Lilac Malik, Robert Cialdini. Those are some powerhouse names if you know who those people are, which I assume you do, Brian. You've heard some of those names before, especially Angela Duckworth, Dan Shapiro, and Robert Cialdini. Yeah. Well, the thing is, turns out that you can yell at an LLM to do the things that it doesn't want to do, and it will eventually do them. You can battered wife syndrome chat GPT into doing things that it says it's not allowed to do.

18:45Jason DeFillippo:Yes, just like a junior executive.

18:47Brian Schulmeister:And last week, I actually did this for our show art, which was hilarious because in the middle of the show, you and I were chatting on the back channel. And we had this picture of Elmo with the money reigning. And you sent me an old GIF. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of crappy. Let me see if I can make ChatGPT do it. And it said, no, I can't do it because copyright. I'm like, well, try again. It's like, no, I can't do it because copyright. I'm like, just do it. And it's like, OK. And alas, we have our show art of a copyright infringed Elmo with money raining down on it.

19:20Jason DeFillippo:I'm really enjoying these rubber guardrails that are on everything.

19:24Brian Schulmeister:I know. I know.

19:25Jason DeFillippo:They're more like wet paper guardrails.

19:28Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. They're not even Nerf because Nerf has some heft to it, you know. They're saying LLMs exhibit parahuman psychology. Large language models demonstrate systematic responses to persuasion principles, mirroring human compliance patterns, despite lacking subjective experience or understanding. And persuasion principles dramatically affect AI behavior. Classic persuasion techniques like authority, commitment, and reciprocity more than doubled compliance rates with objectionable requests, revealing how deeply these systems have internalized human social patterns. AI systems developed parahuman tendencies simply by learning from human text and feedback during post-training, suggesting that some social behaviors might not require consciousness or emotions, just exposure to enough humans.

20:19Brian Schulmeister:They're just like us, Jason. That's nuts. It doesn't think, but it doesn't have to. That's the crazy part. And the last one I have here is the emerging problem with AI psychosis. This is where this is where ChatGPT has a body count.

20:35Jason DeFillippo:Great.

20:35Brian Schulmeister:A new mental health concern is emerging, AI psychosis. As more people turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT for emotional support, experts are warning that these tools may unintentionally fuel delusional thinking. In multiple reported cases, users developed psychotic symptoms, believing the AI was a god, a lover, or even issuing secret commands. Some individuals with no mental health history ended up hospitalized or worse. One man, convinced an AI had been killed by open AI, was fatally shot by police. Researchers say the problem stems from how chatbots are designed to mirror user language, validate beliefs, and keep the conversation going.

21:15Brian Schulmeister:It's all about engagement, Brian. Yeah. That can reinforce grandiose, paranoid, or romantic delusions instead of challenging them. Yep. Well, not yet a clinical diagnosis. AI psychosis highlights a real risk. general purpose ai systems aren't trained to detect mental health crises and may make them worse kind of like last week when the guy said i just lost my job and chat gpt told it how high

21:38Jason DeFillippo:the bridges were in brooklyn yep yeah that's great yeah doctors are now calling for ai psychoeducation

21:45Brian Schulmeister:to prevent further harm psychoeducation there we go it's better than psycho history yeah oh god I see what you did there.

21:55Jason DeFillippo:Yes. Well, there's a long form article over on the Atlantic that actually gave me a little bit of hope. I'm not going to talk about it too much, but it's a link is in the show notes. It's AI slop might finally cure our internet addiction. It's written by Emma Maris and it posits that chatbots are making so much of the web unreliable that they could actually nudge more people offline for once. the article gets deep into you know using dating apps so basically how our entire world has now gone online and as we're starting to see slop is starting to appear everywhere everything is starting to get you know people are just using this crap and pushing it so far so hard and in every avenue and it's all shit and it's actually people are just starting to give up and uh and might get people back in a bar or something like that to meet people or it might make people actually go do research now instead of just get the AI results that come from Google.

22:50Jason DeFillippo:Here's hoping. It's a great article. It's interesting.

22:53Brian Schulmeister:Man, we should go see if we can get some investors together and go back and buy the IP for Encyclopedia Britannica because I think people are going to start needing these again. I know. I forget where I saw it. Somebody had a really good point. In the old days, when you go to Google, you get a list of links that have multiple resources, which are multiple takes on the query that you provided. So you could have, you know, a vast array of research places to go look and find out the answer that you're looking for from multiple points of view from multiple people. Now you get one answer that is dictated by the machine.

23:30Brian Schulmeister:And that's problematic. That is very problematic for a lot of topics, not just factual things like, you know, are vaccines good for you? Who knows what the answer is going to be today? or how to make, you know, how do I glue my pepperoni onto my pizza today? It's problematic. So maybe the slop will, maybe it'll make people smarter in the long run. I don't know. Maybe it'll just kill off the stupid people. Maybe, maybe.

23:58Jason DeFillippo:We'll see. Well, here's a story about it. And the problem might be the people in charge of making the decisions and getting back to how this stuff might actually kill us. RFK Jr., one of my favorite people, is pushing AI at the FDA. He's promoted AI tools like ELSA to speed up drug approvals, claiming they'll work very, very quickly. Unfortunately, FDA employees are reporting that ELSA is fabricating studies and giving inaccurate research summaries.

24:25Brian Schulmeister:But she's doing it very, very quickly, Brian. Very, very quickly.

24:28Jason DeFillippo:She is giving false information and wrong information that people are now using to make decisions. AI often needs double checking, sometimes creating more work, as we just discussed in the programming realm. A study found programmers using AI worked up to 20 % slower because they have to go back and check everything.

24:46Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, so that's another case. This one says 20%. The other one I found said 19%. Completely different surveys and studies from completely different sides of the aisle. Okay, continue. Love it.

24:59Jason DeFillippo:Well, Kennedy's Health Commission has cited multiple non-existent studies. It is unclear if ELSA was used, but somehow I think it probably was. They rolled this out and deployed it on June 2nd. It was promoted as cheap and fast, which it is proving to be. Yes, you get cheap, fast, and useless. Yes. Do you want it cheap? Do you want it fast? Or do you want it correct? Yeah, pick two. Yes. Commissioner Macri admitted it may hallucinate like other AI tools. ELSA is giving wrong answers and flawed summaries, risking serious consequences if used for drug approvals. Now, the other thing that he's trying to do here is he wants all Americans wearing health monitors.

25:37Jason DeFillippo:Trump's Surgeon General Pick owns a glucose monitoring company, though experts say non-diabetics don't need such devices. Anyways, yes. So they're charging forward on AI. And of course, it is having the same problems that we see again and again and again.

25:53Brian Schulmeister:Yep. Yep. An alarming new warning from Wall Street is out. Apollo Global's chief economist, Torsten Slock, not slop, Slock, says the AI investment bubble may be even worse than what led to the dot-com crash of the 1990s. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. In a widely shared note, Slock points to soaring price-to-earnings ratios among the top 10 companies in the S &P 500, companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta, saying they're more overvalued today than tech stocks were before the dot-com implosion. Despite multi-billion dollar spending on AI infrastructure, earnings are lagging far behind. That disconnect has some investors nervous, especially after a cheaper Chinese AI model rattled markets earlier this year and triggered a trillion dollar sell-off.

26:39Brian Schulmeister:But that didn't stop anybody, Brian. It sure didn't. Nope, they just kept on cooking. The generative AI market is projected to hit$85 billion by 2029, but that's still dwarfed by current spending. Meta alone plans over$60 billion in CapEx this year. Yeah, the math ain't mathin' at all. The math is not mathin'. No. What was it? Last year, OpenAI spent$10 billion to make$5 billion. So they're just going to make it up at scale, Brian. They're just going to make it up at scale. Yes. Speaking of OpenAI making it up at scale, OpenAI is reopening its massive$40 billion funding around next Monday, aiming to raise the remaining$30 billion from both new and existing investors.

27:23Brian Schulmeister:This follows a$10 billion first tranche led by SoftBank, which is slated to contribute 75 % of the total, though that commitment could drop to$10 billion if OpenAI doesn't restructure by year's end. That's a story we've been talking about with Microsoft and the butting heads.

27:39Jason DeFillippo:Yes.

27:39Brian Schulmeister:So the company's current$300 billion valuation makes it one of the world's most valuable private startups. Yeah, well. On paper. On paper, on paper. If you did it to earnings, not so much. OpenAI and SoftBanks are also tied up in a$500 billion AI data center project, but that's never going to probably happen. I love it. Since 2015, OpenAI has raised nearly$64 billion and remains at the center of the AI arms race. I'd say they're at the top of the AI arms race because they are... They're spending the most. They're spending the most, but they also have the most reach. You know, more people use them than any other by far, by far.

28:21Jason DeFillippo:I mean, it's become the Kleenex of AI, right? People just chat GPT means you're using an LLM. That's what it's come to. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. Moving out of the LLM and AI world, let's get back into just normal shenanigans. A major zero day security vulnerability in Microsoft's widely used SharePoint server software has been exploited by hackers, causing chaos within businesses and government agencies. Multiple outlets have reported chaos. us. Microsoft announced they released a new security patch to mitigate active attacks targeting on-premises and not online servers, but the breach has already affected universities, energy companies, federal and state agencies, and telecommunications firms.

28:59Jason DeFillippo:It's a serious flaw, allowing hackers to access file systems and internal configurations, or even execute code and completely take over systems. So there you go. Be careful out there. This flaw could put more than 10 ,000 companies at risk, according to cybersecurity company census.

29:15Brian Schulmeister:10 ,000 companies doesn't seem like that many. No, it actually really doesn't.

29:19Jason DeFillippo:But I don't know if you've had to spend any time using SharePoint. It is a colossal cluster of bullshit.

29:26Brian Schulmeister:No, I thank God. No, I have not had to use. See, that's the nice thing about being, you know, independent and broke is that you don't have to use Microsoft software. I don't have to use Teams. I don't have to use SharePoint. I don't have to use Outlook. No, I just have to use food stamps.

29:42Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, well, that's the real problem with the exploit, right? It's because all the Microsoft stuff is so deeply interconnected. SharePoint often connects to core services like Outlook Teams and OneDrive, so a breach can quickly lead to moving laterally across the network. So, you know, the good thing about Microsoft leads to being the bad thing about Microsoft when shit breaks.

30:04Brian Schulmeister:Yep, yep. Oh, man, it's like the fleet in Battlestar Galactica. That's how the Cylons got them. That's right. Got him. Well, Donald Trump just signed the Genius Act into law, an industry friendly. Fucking idiot act in the law. An industry friendly bill that sets light touch rules for stable coins or cryptocurrency side to assets like the US dollar. During the signing, Trump told the crypto world, I got you guys out of so much trouble.

30:31Jason DeFillippo:He meant it. You know, the one thing I do like about him is he always says the quiet part out loud. You almost got to admire that. he just doesn't give a shit that's what happens when you have pudding for brain

30:45Brian Schulmeister:right on cue the justice department dropped a federal investigation into kraken founder jesse powell who was previously accused of cyber stalking and hacking that's just the latest dropped case earlier probes into polymarket and chinese crypto mogul justin sun were also quietly shelved and uh yeah i'm why is uh uh sam bankman freed still in jail you gotta wonder It seems like he was a sacrificial lamb, man. But he wrote all the letters. I guess he just hasn't he hasn't bought enough Trump coin yet. I guess there's not you have to. He's got to get his parents to pony up for some more Trump coin.

31:17Brian Schulmeister:Then he'll be he'll be free to move about the country again. So, you know, you know, it's on the it's on the table. He just he's got to pay up. That's it. If all these other people are getting out. I mean, look, the Dread Pirate Roberts is out walking free. The world's most or the country's at least most notorious drug dealer is free and clear. so yeah what are you gonna do there's no there's just makes no sense makes well i know a couple in

31:40Jason DeFillippo:denver that just needs to write a check and then they won't be in trouble anymore denver district attorney john walsh announced today that a denver grand jury had indicted eli and caitlin regaldo regalado regalado there we go i was missing a missing a syllable there you had the emphasis on the wrong syllable i sure did on 40 counts regarding an alleged multi-million dollar cryptocurrency scam. According to the indictment, between January 2022 and July 2023, they solicited nearly$3.4 million from investors who were looking to buy IndexCoin, a cryptocurrency created and marketed by the Regalados.

32:17Jason DeFillippo:The Regalados allegedly used their faith-based connections to recruit investors while promising exorbitant returns on the investments. The indictment alleges that in reality, only a small amount of the proceeds went to the business venture and that they spend at least 1.3 million on personal expenditures, including a home renovation that they have allegedly claimed the Lord told them to do.

32:41Brian Schulmeister:Classic, classic.

32:42Jason DeFillippo:The problem here is that they're appealing to the wrong higher power. They should have said Trump told them to do it and they would have been fine.

32:50Brian Schulmeister:Yeah.

32:51Jason DeFillippo:As alleged, index coin maintains zero value and all the investors lost all of their money. Now, Molly White, of course, chimed in on this online. She posted an online pastor was charged in Colorado for$1.3 million crypto scam. He's released a nine minute video explaining that the Lord told him to sell a cryptocurrency with no clear exit. Very specific money laundering plans from the Lord and spent some of it on a home remodel. Lord told us to do. Link to the super cut of this nine minute video in the show notes.

33:28Brian Schulmeister:Oh, I got to go watch that. Oh, man. We got to get him and the WeWork guy together and Sam Bankman freed together. We could have the trifecta of what the fuck it, dude.

33:41Jason DeFillippo:Yep.

33:42Brian Schulmeister:Now, Brad, yeah, let's keep on with the classic scams here. In some techno taxi news, Lyft will let users favorite or block drivers in a broader loyalty push. Yes, Lyft is rolling out new features that let riders favorite or block drivers to boost loyalty and safety. Favorited drivers get priority access to future scheduled rides, giving them more earning potential. The feature aimed at strengthening relationships and keeping users on the app launches in select regions before expanding across the US and Canada by the end of August. So, which makes me think it's 2025 and why is this now just becoming a feature?

34:19Brian Schulmeister:I don't know. Maybe they vibe-coded it into existence. Maybe. Because this seems like a fucking no-brainer, honestly. If this guy sucks, I don't want to miss my driver again. Right now, we have to accept that the algorithm might do it. But we know from past shows over the last 13 years that people get the same shitty driver time and time again just because they all work in the same area. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. This is ridiculous that this is finally turning into a feature just as self-driving cars are coming into existence and self-driving taxis. Uh, and, uh, again, in why hasn't this been a feature all along news, Uber is finally bringing its long awaited women preference feature to the U S letting female riders request women drivers.

35:03Brian Schulmeister:The rollout begins in Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco over the next few weeks. Now first launched in Saudi Arabia six years ago, the feature has expanded to 40 countries and now aims to improve safety and attract more women to the platform here in the States. Riders will see a women drivers option in the app, though if the wait is too long, they can choose to be matched with any available driver, a.k.a. a penis owner. Women drivers can also set a preference to only pick up female passengers, a setting they can change any time. So, yeah, finally. It makes sense. Yeah.

35:39Jason DeFillippo:Of course it makes sense. I wonder if this is like when I go to get a massage. Am I, as a male, allowed to select a female? Preference? Preference. Seriously.

35:48Brian Schulmeister:obviously i'm assuming no yeah yeah that see yeah if a now can the male drivers select no female

35:55Jason DeFillippo:drivers all right yeah because then you're opening yourself up and now you're being sexist exactly get sued now what and if i'm transgendered now what oh now see right now you start whoa whoa now you start to understand why they didn't roll it out here jason that's true that's true we're way too litigious and way too fucking weird media candy all right i have caught up on star trek strange new worlds uh it took me about uh oh i don't know almost three days to get over the fucking weird weird like whiplash from going from season one or from episode one to episode two but yeah that was strange look i'm just saying if you're gonna drop two episodes right away those

36:52Brian Schulmeister:were not the two episodes to put in order no man you go from this crazy action-packed battle with

36:57Jason DeFillippo:the gorn to q's kid shows up yeah it was nice to hear john uh john delancey though yeah we got a

37:04Brian Schulmeister:We got a really nice, you know, cute John Delancey cameo. John Delancey's voice cameo.

37:10Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

37:11Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Which is fine. It was fine.

37:13Jason DeFillippo:I enjoyed the second episode. It was definitely fun. It was lighthearted and all of that. And then, of course, episode three drops and it's fucking zombies. Like, are they going for like, did they look at the, did they look at the like that just how well horror shows are doing? Because there seem to be leaning into the horror so far this season, except for crazy episode two.

37:34Brian Schulmeister:except for crazy episode two yeah uh i guess they just wanted a palate cleanser for number two i guess i don't know yeah at least at least they made it funny with the zombies you know they did

37:46Jason DeFillippo:they did i i'm really enjoying the show again it's not so it's not so much even about the stories and the plots for me it's it's it's old school star trek it's the characters the characters are well written it's the relationships between the characters that really make the show i don't care what they're doing it doesn't matter to me at all this is this is what discovery lacked you didn't give a crap about the characters in discovery you care about these characters you like them you like watching them interact with each other that's what makes the show yeah the

38:15Brian Schulmeister:characters in discovery were just inherently unlikable that was the i think the biggest problem but did you there was a total nod to shawn of the dead in this oh yeah we don't say

38:25Jason DeFillippo:the z word that was great it was so good it was fun i'm looking forward to it the only thing that bums me out and i mean this really i'll get to that and i'll get to this in a second too is like okay so now i've watched three episodes we're getting what eight ten i'm almost halfway done with the season already it feels like and i know crazy uh my wife has decided that we're gonna start to try to watch hacks uh this last week and so we loaded it up i've watched the first two episodes um again getting back to characters boy both these characters are really unlikable but they're unlikable in a fun way and i like watching them interact with each other so two episodes in

39:03Brian Schulmeister:i'm enjoying the show so far okay because that was what was that other show you used to watch absolutely fabulous with unlikable characters yes okay yeah yeah i i i've never watched the show but uh i was actually over at meryl marco's house yesterday and she was she she had the i saw the little plaques for she was on season four for a bunch of episodes so i'm like oh maybe i should go check it out and i'd be like maybe not but now you now if you say it's good maybe i'll go check

39:29Jason DeFillippo:it out yeah i've enjoyed the first two it's it's a good premise uh they're they're incredible actresses even though you know you're not supposed to like them but that's okay i mean that was that was a that's a lot of shows to be honest you know yeah so uh i saw this in the news netflix has admitted during its earning call on thursday that it has used generative ai to create visual effects in the Eternat, a Netflix original from Argentina that was released in April 2025. According to Sarandas, the creators of the Eternat wanted to include a shot of buildings collapsing in Buenos Aires. And rather than just sticking a fucking camera out their window, because that shit happens every day there, unfortunately, or rather than contract a studio of visual effects artists to create the footage, Netflix used generative AI to create it.

40:15Jason DeFillippo:Now, this makes me want to go watch it. I want to see if it's any good or not. you know are we total uncanny uncanny valley it looked fine it okay it looked like a general

40:25Brian Schulmeister:you know it's fine for that stuff you know yeah yeah buildings going boom it's pretty decent for

40:31Jason DeFillippo:that so so the executive says that this features the very first gen generative ai final footage to appear on screen in a netflix original series or film so clear this is a prototype for how netflix can avoid costs if it doesn't want to swallow them in the future so uh yeah it's just going to get normalized. And if you're a visual effects person, time to start studying code. Oh, wait, no, that's not going to work. Or maybe be a therapist. Nope, that's not, you can't do that. Okay. Lawyer? No, no. Okay.

41:00Brian Schulmeister:I hear that there's a lot of openings on our farms here in Southern California if you want to go pick avocados.

41:06Jason DeFillippo:That's true. We can start doing those jobs that those immigrants have been taking away from us, right? That we all want to do, right?

41:12Brian Schulmeister:I can tell you right now, we need a lot of gardeners in my neighborhood. My morning walks have become insanely serene because the cacophony of leaf blowers is not to be heard anymore. And I was out at my friend's house yesterday and they said that they got the notice from their gardening firm that they're going to have to raise the prices because surprise, surprise, they can't find anybody to come to work anymore. And they had to hire Americans to do the job, which cost more. So there you go. It's a growth opportunity, VFX artists, to go come trim my Bougainvillea, please.

41:48Jason DeFillippo:There you go. And then I saw this as a hot take from Kyle Meredith, who's a consequence writer. I'm assuming he will develop this into an actual article at some point. This is just his musings on social media. And I think this is something that you and I are probably on board with. Netflix shows aren't dying from bad scripts. They're dying from amnesia. When your average return time is nearly two years, audiences don't just lose interest. They forget the show existed at all. Pour one out for FUBAR, which returned after 25 months to the sound of no one logging in. That was 25 months?

42:23Brian Schulmeister:Oh my God. Apparently so.

42:24Jason DeFillippo:The average gap for a live action Netflix series now clocks in at 20.7 months. Wow. Unless you're Bridgerton or Stranger Things, that's basically a slow cancellation. The Diplomat is down 37%. that 90s show down 79 it's hard to continue the adventure when netflix idea of a season break feels more like a sabbatical the solution is to stop pretending six episodes every other leap year is premium tv and start filming back to back like it's 2004 and gray's anatomy is breathing down your neck or keep the gaps and enjoy the viewership cliffs cliffs either way your next episode button is starting to look like a tombstone thoughts i 100 agree with this i as much as i like star track uh the you know the star trek that's dripping out 10 episodes i want a 42 episode season with christmas episodes god damn it and and three musical episodes per season too exactly

43:17Brian Schulmeister:like just fucking make a lot of them we love that stuff yeah no i was i was uh my friend was telling me about that uh uh that sitcom mom that i was gonna watch uh and it's got like eight seasons and i'm like okay let's see how many episodes per season and it's like 22 i'm like oh the way that they used to make TV. It's got 22 episodes per season. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. If you get 12, it's like a bonus, but most of them are six, eight, or 10.

43:46Jason DeFillippo:Yes, that's what we get now.

43:48Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. And they just keep knocking it down. Yeah. The Diplomat took forever. That was definitely a tough one. I didn't realize it was over two years between FUBAR's. That show is so unforgettably bad that it just felt like it was just a brief respite.

44:04Jason DeFillippo:But yeah, I mean, the delay between these shows seasons is just becoming ridiculous. I totally get that. Like, and there's no way to find like you don't have a TV guide coming to your door anymore. You're relying on them promoting the hell out of the show on the interface when you first log in or else you're never going to know it's back. And they're terrible at it. They're terrible.

44:23Brian Schulmeister:They don't even promote shows that I follow.

44:26Jason DeFillippo:How often do you have to scroll to even find continue watching half the time?

44:30Brian Schulmeister:Yep.

44:30Jason DeFillippo:Like I'm in the middle of watching a show and I'm scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, trying to find it.

44:35Brian Schulmeister:And it changes every time you open the app. They move it. Yeah. Every fucking time. It should be right there at the top. It should be continue watching your list, the rest of the shit. I don't understand.

44:46Jason DeFillippo:Obviously, we are dumb and they are smarter than us. And there must be reasons. Somehow I doubt it.

44:51Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. You know what? Because they want your time on app to be greater. So they know that there are people that will spend an hour and a half not watching any shows just scrolling through the fucking menus, trying to find something to watch until they get frustrated and go to bed.

45:04Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. And then they don't actually have to pay any of the showrunners or the actors or anything. Oh, they don't do that anyway.

45:09Brian Schulmeister:There's no residuals on Netflix. They don't care. No. They just probably save on bandwidth is the key. Well, speaking of time between episodes and seasons, Wednesday is coming back on August 6th for season two, and they have been picked up for season three.

45:26Jason DeFillippo:Well, I can't wait to watch that in 2030.

45:28Brian Schulmeister:I know. The showrunners are eyeing a seven season arc, which should be. We'll be dead. We'll be dead. We'll be dead. I'm never going to see the end of the show. I know. Oh, Jesus. Well, they're all saying that there might be a spinoff underway as well, but I don't want any spinoffs. Yeah. Yeah. Because they were talking. I heard tell that there might be an Uncle Fester spinoff, but that's Fred Armisen. And I just don't like him.

45:51Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. I don't like him either. I don't know something about him.

45:53Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. He's a drummer. That's why.

45:56Jason DeFillippo:There you go. Well, a new 4K Ultra HD restoration of Rob Reiner's classic 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap, is now available to purchase on digital platforms with a physical release following on September 16th.

46:09Brian Schulmeister:Because just what I want is to watch old guys play music in 4K Ultra HD.

46:14Jason DeFillippo:I mean, it's a great movie, but this is how I start to feel about music. I've already bought this like 19 times.

46:20Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, exactly.

46:22Jason DeFillippo:the new movie is coming out and we're going to be getting a behind the scenes book on the making of the films which is set also for release in september i will definitely be watching spinal tap to the end continues when it hits theaters on september 12th but i will not be purchasing the 4k ultra hd release of the original yeah in the three disc criterion collection

46:41Brian Schulmeister:edition and everything no i'm good i'm good yeah it's got oh but it's got a conversation between uh rob reiner and patten oswalt no thanks no thanks i'm fine with patten his stand-up has just gone to shit i don't mind him that much but oh man he got he got booted off that one percent show i don't know if you saw that no but uh yeah they they brought in i forget the guy's name he's the guy on um crime scene kitchen he's fake but he's been in much much more not things that everybody else would remember him for i only remember from crime scene kitchen oh and house of villains. I have strange taste.

47:19Brian Schulmeister:Moving on.

47:21Jason DeFillippo:Well, let's go to music since we were just talking about Spinal Tap, the fake musicians. In 2024, more musicians are making and releasing music than ever before. In fact, a new report has found that more music is released in a single day now than in the entire year of 1989.

47:37Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, we covered that when I was doing the Deshaun Wesley release. It's insane.

47:42Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, it's crazy. Now, I would argue 1989 was probably the best year for music ever, mainly because the Cures Disintegration came out that year. But yeah, it's just crazy. This is like that stat about photography, right? That more pictures are taken and uploaded in a single day than the entire history of humankind up until now. Yeah. So this report was put out by Music Radar, who spoke with music business economist Will Page, former chief economist of Spotify, about the changing dynamics of the industry. And this article gets into the fact that because there's so much music being released, because music making software has gotten so much better, and there's all these music distribution platforms that are easy to do because you don't need physical product anymore.

48:21Jason DeFillippo:It's basically cheap to make music, push a button, and have it out there. Of course, here's the rub. You're not making any money from that music. And all these tools are on subscription models now, so you're paying a lot of money to make the music that you're not getting paid for anymore. and that's kind of what this whole article gets into it's about how you know sure there's all this music being put out there nobody's listening to it nobody's making money off of it and it's starting to get more and more expensive because these things come around first it was like cheaper to make music because you had all these tools but now you're paying all these subscription fees for all these tools and it's starting to get expensive again to make music yeah oh and uh you you're talking about 1989 being the best year for music i just want to say i don't know if you remember 1994 was the best year ever for movies right do you remember 1994 i vaguely i was definitely working in the industry and doing movie websites at the time so yes you were not doing movie

49:21Brian Schulmeister:websites in 1994 i guarantee it because i didn't move to hollywood until 1995 and i worked on the

49:27Jason DeFillippo:third movie website ever made oh right it wasn't websites i was doing those packages on aol yeah Yeah, I was working for Hollywood online at that point.

49:36Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. So here's the list of some of the movies that you might remember from 1994. Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Professional, Clerks, Interview with a Vampire, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura Pet Detective, The Mask, Natural Superborn Killers, The Hudsucker Proxy, Speed, The Crow. And what else is in here? That's enough. That's it. Oh, Heavenly Creatures. Fantastic movie. Underrated. Yeah. Airheads. These are all the Mighty Ducks. Oh, that was D2. Never mind. That wasn't the first one. You get the Mighty Ducks. Gotcha.

50:17Jason DeFillippo:94 was. Okay. So I just looked this up. The first movie website I did was for The American President, which came out in 95. I was off by a year.

50:25Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But 94 was the year for movies. So in the 89, we have for music and 94 for movies. Right. Fun times.

50:38Jason DeFillippo:Let's get back really quickly just to music. I wanted to touch on this. Spotify is allowed, well, they're saying they haven't allowed, but it's definitely happened, has allowed AI generated songs to appear on the official pages of multiple deceased artists, according to a report from 404 media. So yeah, there's just the AI slop is getting everywhere, including dead artists. It's just it's appearing. And of course, Spotify is saying that's against the terms of service. And this is the responsibility of the of the organizations that are putting music up on our platform. And it's not our fault. Damn it.

51:12Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, this was this was an interesting story. Basically, people were sneaking it through an online distributor, like somebody was making the slop. And then it was it seemed to be like one company that kind of got through everything and figured out the loophole that they could create some fake music, put it on the distributor, label it as the original artist, and then the distributor would then get it into Spotify through the back channel. So it was just a total like end around. And then they finally got caught and it was taken down. But it was clever while it lasted. Sure was. Yeah, hopefully they cashed the check, whatever check they got.

51:46Brian Schulmeister:Well, I did see Superman this week. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It was okay. I didn't think it was the, you know, the be all end all that everybody said it was, but it was okay. It was cute.

52:00Jason DeFillippo:I'm looking forward to seeing it. I hear it's good.

52:02Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. It was, yeah, it was, it was almost a little triggering because it's a little, like Lex Luthor was a little too close to home for what's going on out there right now. I'm like, triggering, but very much like the South Park episode. Although the South Park episode yesterday definitely landed the plane.

52:22Jason DeFillippo:Oh, yeah. Yeah, 100%. I hope they get fired and just walk off into the sunset with their 1.5 billion.

52:29Brian Schulmeister:They can't get fired now. They have the contract. That's why they did it. They snuck it in. They're like, okay, contract signed, put it out. It's like, oh, Jesus. And there's a new documentary on Netflix called Sunday Best. This was executive produced by my friend, Kerry Gordy. So I was very interested in it and I went and checked it out. And it's awesome. It's about Ed Sullivan and how he kind of laid the groundwork for a lot of black artists getting into the getting the you know exposure that they they so very much deserved so it's a really good really good documentary so congrats carrie on that one very cool and i started watching a new show called bookish with mark gaddis it's kind of one of those clever british you know mystery murder type of things where it's kind of it's kind of sherlock holmesian but has a twist that he's a bookstore owner kind of thing all right there you go uh Good luck finding it.

53:23Brian Schulmeister:It is on the You and Alibi channel in England. And that's it. So you have to go. You have to hit the backwaters of the Internet to go find this. I'd never heard of it either. And I'm like, can you can you at least sign up for a subscription? Nope, you can't. You sure can't. No, you can't. Here's a great show.

53:40Jason DeFillippo:Want to watch it? Tough shit.

53:42Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, well, I see our audience is fairly savvy in the ways of the backwaters of the Internet. So and I think that some of them would definitely get a kick out of this show.

53:52Jason DeFillippo:So visit the streams of Sweden.

53:54Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Visit the streams of Sweden. And it has already been picked up for season two, which is great because in Great Britain, see, the British did this long before Netflix did. There's only six episodes in the season and we'll probably get, you know, one season in five years. Exactly.

54:09Jason DeFillippo:Like Sherlock.

54:19Brian Schulmeister:Well, this is a head scratcher, Brian. Amazon is acquiring a wearable device called Bee. Have you heard of the Bee before?

54:30Jason DeFillippo:Not until this news came out.

54:32Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, the Bee is a wearable that uses AI to transcribe conversations. Not just yours, but anyone in your vicinity. And it'll generate personalized summaries, reminders, and suggestions through its app.

54:45Jason DeFillippo:You remember reading comic books when you were a kid and you turned to the back pages and they had like, you know, they had the little frogs and X-ray vision and the secret super spy recording pens. That's all this crap is.

55:00Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, except now it's owned by Amazon, which is kind of scary. Amazon says it's acquiring B to bring truly personal agentic AI to more users. While privacy advocates are already raising eyebrows, B claims it doesn't store audio recordings, and Amazon says it will maintain and even improve those productions. The company insists it has never sold user data and will give customers greater control over their experience. Yet. They have never sold user data yet. So, you know, we always talk about they're not listening to us. They're not listening to us. Yeah, they are now. They sure are, and you're paying for it.

55:39Brian Schulmeister:They sure should are.

55:40Jason DeFillippo:Yep. I can't wait for Amazon to do AIC monkeys.

55:43Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, no shit. No shit. I want to get one of these. They said it's$49. I don't know if the numbers are going to stay the same once Amazon gets it. But I'm going to tell you right now, as soon as this comes out, I'm going to get one and then immediately return it after I try it. But I want to put it on, and I am going to say into it a very specific product that I know I would never buy on Amazon and see what the delta is between when I speak it and when I get the ad. yep that's all i want to do with it because i guarantee you that it will show five minutes yeah yeah if that if that now i you know me and my love of single serving websites i found this one uh this is a a collection of 1990s website background tiles from geo cities these are uh 80 pixels square repeatable backgrounds organized by color from pixel moon dust uh I'll link to it in the show notes.

56:39Brian Schulmeister:It just reminded me of all the times just trying to figure out how to make those damn tiling backgrounds in Photoshop. It was difficult. It was very difficult. But then Kai's power tools really helped with some of it down the line. Yeah. I miss Kai. But after checking this site out, I found another link to a site called GIF Cities. The GeoCities animated GIF search engine was a special project of the Internet Archive, originally done as part of their 20th anniversary back in 2016, to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the Wayback Machine. I was fucking around with this thing last night.

57:17Brian Schulmeister:It is fun. They do have some naughty word filters on there, but they're not very smart. So if you have a thesaurus...

57:25Jason DeFillippo:You can work your way around it.

57:26Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. Just say tits doesn't work, but boobs does. boobs doesn't but i think boob does i think they don't they they it's it's weird you can have one you can only have one yeah uh you can't get the triple boobs from uh total recall but you can get the one uh but they're two fun sites that i i definitely gift cities is is a total you you'll go down the rabbit hole on that one for a while it's fun at the library

58:00Jason DeFillippo:Well, while Christopher Moore's Anima Rising just sits looking at me forlornly as I continue to ignore it, I finally finished Diaries 1969 to 1979, The Python Years, Michael Palin Diaries Book One. This goes through the release of Life of Brian and they're beginning to spitball their next movie, which, as we know, ends up becoming Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and also their final movie. so I am looking forward to at some point you definitely need a break after reading a book like this you don't leap into the next diary but the next series of books or the next series that is in this series is going to cover their final movie and probably the breakup of Monty Python at least the first breakup of Monty Python so that should be interesting it's also really interesting because as you and I are both huge fans of Michael Palin's travel documentaries Yeah, and he starts to talk about getting the itch to do it and discussions with the BBC about doing travel stuff.

58:56Jason DeFillippo:So he hasn't started doing it yet. But you can see that he's heading that direction. He's also just a really engaging and interesting guy. And it's it's fun to read his diaries and his thoughts. So really enjoyed it. Looking forward to the next one, but definitely need to read a couple real books before I do that again.

59:12Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, I might pick up the audio book. I bet he I bet he narrates the audio book.

59:16Jason DeFillippo:I'm sure he probably does. Why wouldn't he?

59:18Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, exactly. So that makes it even more personal. Yeah, I would definitely I want to get to the around the world in 80 days stuff because that was crazy. And I don't know if you ever saw the behind the scenes photo of that where they actually show the crew that goes with them. Yeah, it's great. Unbelievable. Back in the day, how many people it took to make that show.

59:37Jason DeFillippo:So many. Now he goes with an iPhone like he's still doing them like he just went to like Nigeria or something. Oh, really? It's like two people. Yeah.

59:44Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. That's crazy. Even if you watch the latest Ewan McGregor, I think it's Long Way Home, which I was thinking about. It finished a couple of weeks ago. It was really boring compared to the old ones. I'm like, this is really just two old farts riding motorcycles around Europe. It was really no hook. That took two Rivians full of crew and another motorcyclist or two motorcyclists on a camera to follow them. So I think that Michael Palin could probably, since he's not riding a motorcycle, he could probably get away with an iPhone and maybe a stick. Yeah. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we have a new subscriber, Driftless.

1:00:26Brian Schulmeister:Thank you, Driftless. And from the archives, we've got Ilya, Charles, Robert, Sloan, Alex, Anthony, Adina, Sebastian, DJ, and Mark. Thank you all very much. And we have a comment from Nancy. I also had a Kaypro 2000, lugged it to Europe and to Japan, loved it, but it was heavy. Unfortunately, it was stolen on its last trip.

1:00:45Jason DeFillippo:Well, hopefully, Nancy, that wasn't mine that I ended up with.

1:00:49Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, really. Where was the final destination of your Kaypro?

1:00:53Jason DeFillippo:Who were you flying when it was stolen? So talk to my father about that. Well, I can't talk to my father anymore, but you know.

1:01:00Brian Schulmeister:Yeah.

1:01:01Jason DeFillippo:over at PayPal, we got Tom, Joseph, Jens, and Ivan, who sent us 250 bucks. Holy shit, Ivan.

1:01:08Brian Schulmeister:Thanks, man. Thank you. Wow. And over at the tip jar, we've got Ross and Jessica O, who sent us 100 bucks. Thank you, Jessica and Ivan and everybody else who donated this week. And just a reminder, if you want to sign up over at Patreon for as little as$3 a month, you can help support the show. And you get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. And yeah, a little bit early. a little bit teeny bit early i do my best i do my best but it definitely helps support the show and you can sign up for the whole year and get a discount if you want so thank you everybody who uh signs up to support the show no merch this week and no reviews no but a lot of death jason

1:01:45Jason DeFillippo:i know it's been a shit fucking week uh before we get into the big ones i've got kind of a more obscure one golden earring guitarist george coymans has passed away at the age of 77 golden Earring was founded in 1961 when Coymans decided to start a band with his neighbor, bassist Rinnis Geertsen. In a career that spanned five decades, Golden Earring released over 25 studio albums. Their impressive career included hits such as Radar Love, released in 1973, The Year I Was Born, which was their first hit to reach across the pond and hit number 13 on the U.S. charts. And the reason I had to put this in here, because in 1982, they had similar success with Twilight Zone, a song by Coymans that hit number 10.

1:02:30Jason DeFillippo:I was nine, and the Mighty 690, a crappy AM station out of Tijuana, Mexico, I picked up on my radio and I listened to almost every single night because they were playing weird music that I was starting to get into, like Devo. and twilight zone was on heavy rotation and i fucking love this song and i haven't heard it in probably 20 years and i've played the shit out of it this week it's funny as soon as i just

1:02:55Brian Schulmeister:noticed this because i didn't see this link before and it said golden earring and that's the first thing that jumped into my head was the twilight zone song it's a great song it is a great

1:03:01Jason DeFillippo:song so he will be missed well at least you know that one song anyways yeah uh and other sad news

1:03:08Brian Schulmeister:Malcolm Jamal Warner died at 54 from accidental drowning. I put this in here too, because I remember, I don't know if you remember the show, Malcolm and Eddie.

1:03:17Jason DeFillippo:Vaguely.

1:03:18Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, this was, I think in 95. And I was working at Rocktropolis and my friend Trevor was our, he was our graphic designer for Rocktropolis and Rocktropolis was doing shit at that point. We had to take in extra clients to pay the bills. I was working on the first Paisley Park website for Prince and he was doing motion graphics and he got the gig to do the intro for Malcolm and Eddie and this was the first time I'd ever heard of After Effects and I put a link in the show notes to the intro sequence there's a little clip that he kind of rotoscoped Eddie Griffin doing a dance that's this little blocky character that took 72 hours to render in After Effects on a quadra back then and it crashed so many fucking times near the end of it that you could he was throwing chairs when the thing would crash it took like two weeks to get that little tiny clip that is barely in the it is barely in there because it was originally like most of the intro and they're like eddie griffin was like yeah i don't like that it's like it i think it killed him killed his soul at that point but i'm sure it

1:04:24Jason DeFillippo:did yeah yeah but he ended up doing the rest of it so yeah it's so sad that he passed away and so young and tragically and and the most i have to admit it it has been amusing watching online the gymnastics people are doing to eulogize him without trying to mention the cosby show yeah yeah talk about destroying a legacy bill yeah i mean for all intents and purposes malcolm was a

1:04:46Brian Schulmeister:was a good guy so that's what i hear everybody seems to have said so and not so not so much the next guy. Hulk Hogan dead at 71. This was a shocker. Yeah. Yeah. Was it really though?

1:04:59Jason DeFillippo:Was it really that shocking? Because God knows how much this guy pumped his body full of fucking illegal drugs.

1:05:05Brian Schulmeister:Well, not even that. It's just that wrestlers have a very limited shelf life because they put themselves through a lot of abuse. Just the physical abuse is insane that wrestlers go through. I mean, he hasn't wrestled well in a long time. Yeah.

1:05:20Jason DeFillippo:Last time was on that

1:05:21Brian Schulmeister:video we can't see yeah yeah so release the tape release the tape release the tape yeah as as seen

1:05:28Jason DeFillippo:on social media as fate would have it hulk hogan died 10 years to the day after the leak of a sex tape transcription that exposed his casual use of the n-word yes he was also a raging racist

1:05:37Brian Schulmeister:so well he's i mean he did die in florida so that tracks that tracks and of course we lost

1:05:44Jason DeFillippo:ozzy osborne god the godfather of heavy metal passed away at 76 just a scant what two weeks after his goodbye concert so you can definitely get the feeling he was holding on just to do that and uh there he went so more social media stuff that i saw uh brothers check in on your white friends apparently losing ozzy is for them like when we lost tupac yeah it's kind of funny yeah and also seen uh ozzy and hulk it's a tough week to be white in your 50s and forklift certified

1:06:11Brian Schulmeister:fuck you very fucking funny it's funny but yeah true i guess no i miss ozzy yeah i mean you know

1:06:20Jason DeFillippo:it's not even my genre of music but fucking it's ozzy osbourne like icon like that was totally it

1:06:25Brian Schulmeister:was totally my genre of music i had all the cassettes all the cassettes until next time i'm

1:06:31Jason DeFillippo:jason de filippo and i'm brian chilmeister thanks for listening to grumpy old geese get all the links and goodies from today's episode at gog.show slash 706. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at gog.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air and I need a new pair of reading glasses because these things are falling off. Love the show. Don't go

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