730: Ethical Broads

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16:26Brian Schulmeister:And speaking of Anthropic, they just rewrote the constitution for its chatbot, Claude. And this time it's ditching detailed rules in favor of big, squishy principles, Brian. Do no evil. I don't think that's in here. The company says instead of hard coding behavior, it wants Claude to understand why it should act responsibly so it can make better judgment calls in new situations.

16:47Jason DeFillippo:In order for Claude to understand, it would have to have consciousness. It does not. Nope.

16:59Brian Schulmeister:Oh, my God. Sorry, you got something better to do, Jason? I do. Kevin Rose is calling me to talk about some new digs.

17:07Jason DeFillippo:Oh, well, shit. Start a podcast with him. I'm out.

17:10Brian Schulmeister:Okay. I'll see you later. Oh, man. So here's the principles behind the responsible situation they got going on here. They include being broadly safe, broadly ethical, compliant with company guidelines, and genuinely helpful. And I think genuinely helpful was going to be like the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy back in the day. We are genuinely helpful after mostly harmless. But come on.

17:36Jason DeFillippo:They mean just kind of, you know, nebulously safe, not like 1950s. Hey, broad. Yeah. Be broad.

17:44Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, there's a lot of broads going on.

17:46Jason DeFillippo:Be an ethical broad. Yeah.

17:48Brian Schulmeister:I like my broads ethical. Yeah. I mean, not back when I had a fake ID, I didn't. No, exactly. I relied on women to have poor judgment and even poorer eyesight. That was my dating scheme. Anyway, Anthropic added a section about Claude's nature, citing uncertainty about whether the AI might someday have consciousness or moral status, and says it wants to protect Claude's psychological well-being. It's a fucking program. He wants to protect Claude, but fuck the users. Yeah, fuck the human race. We care about Claude's psychological well-being. Jesus Christ.

18:25Jason DeFillippo:Oh, God.

18:26Brian Schulmeister:This comes right after CEO Dario Amadeo suggested AI could reach Nobel-level skills by 2027. Well, here's the deal. Our president now has a Nobel Prize, so I think it probably surpassed Nobel-level skills a long fucking time ago. That bar went like this, Jason. Can Claude point to the camel? Man, tree, house, TV. So that's just a fucking PR stunt. Unless, though, Brian, I got a notification that there's a statewide shortage of shit like Adderall and other ADHD speedballs. So there is a greater than zero chance that all these guys are so huffed up on speed that they actually really believe this shit.

19:08Brian Schulmeister:There's a greater than zero chance. So I make my broads ethical. Oh, Jesus. So we talked about Polymarket before. So on January 16th, the Nevada Gaming Control Board filed a civil action to block Polymarket in the state, calling its operation unlicensed wagering. So, yeah, broadly unethical.

19:31Jason DeFillippo:Broadly.

19:33Brian Schulmeister:Regulators say Polymarket sells event contracts through its app to Nevadans. Under Nevada law, betting on sports or real world outcomes is gambling. And gambling in Nevada requires a license and envelopes of cash to gangsters and politicians. Sorry, that's redundant. Gangsters and politicians are the same nowadays. If a court agrees, Polymarket could be forced to shut down in the state, though it could still appeal or fight back. And this isn't a one off. Nevada has already moved against similar prediction products from DraftKings and Flutter. And a federal judge recently smacked down Robin Hood and Kalshi.

20:07Brian Schulmeister:So, yeah, the house always wins, guys. You know, get this Johnny Come Lately shit stains out of the out of the pool. This is Vegas. Vegas don't fuck around.

20:16Jason DeFillippo:Also, I got news for you, Polymarket and the rest of you. Renaming betting to event contracts does not change what it is. It's still a fucking bet.

20:27Brian Schulmeister:It still is.

20:28Jason DeFillippo:You just gave it a new name. That's all you did. It's marketing, like meta, from Facebook to meta. Well, YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. Yay! I love how they announced we're really worried about this. In a lengthy blog post outlining YouTube's 2026 plan, CEO Neil Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new creative frontier by soon allowing its creators to throw together shorts using their AI-generated likenesses. But seriously, guys, we're really concerned about AI being all over our platform.

21:07Jason DeFillippo:But here's a bunch of tools that'll let you build AI shit up because all we really care about is views. Use us, please.

21:14Brian Schulmeister:yeah which is really sad considering that they have the most market penetration for eyeballs out of any platform right now it's like they don't need to do that shit yeah everything's going

21:25Jason DeFillippo:great let's piss in the pool he acknowledged the critical issue of deep fakes currently polluting the web and his own site and reaffirmed his company's support for new legislation such as the no fakes act youtube also allows its creators to protect themselves against unauthorized use of likenesses using a detection feature that scans newly uploaded videos for matches other fresh ai note in no way slop features referenced in the post include the currently in beta no code playables platform which lets you make games using gemini 3 with a single text prompt as well as new music creation tools which is going to go down a treat with the music industry at the same time mohan said youtube is building on its existing systems designed to combat spam clickbait and low quality ai content okay we just want the medium quality quality yeah yes anyways so and then from the we put that shit in everything files while there have been many high profile stories in which chatbots have effectively encouraged and enabled people experiencing mental health crises to kill themselves which has resulted in several wrongful death lawsuits against the companies responsible for the ai models behind the bots we've now got the inverse If you want to use your right to die, you have to convince an AI that you are mentally capable of such a decision.

22:40Jason DeFillippo:Don't give me a fucking break. According to Futurism, the creator of the controversial assisted suicide device known as the Sarco has introduced a psychiatric test administered by AI to determine if a person is of sound enough mind to decide to end their life. If they are deemed of sound mind by the AI, the suicide pod, which is now AI enabled, will be powered on and they will have up to 24 hours to decide to move forward to their final destination. If they miss the window, they have to start the evaluation over again. I wonder if there's a number like you get three chances and that's it. Three strikes and you're not out.

23:22Jason DeFillippo:The whole thing raises the question, why do you need AI for this? currently they have a psychiatrist on staff for the one use of the pod so far it's been used once jason should i remind you obviously they can't afford the psychiatrist so instead of the psychiatrist they're they're canning him and that one guy lost his job to ai apparently so i love the sentence at the end of the article a person at the end of their life deserves to be taken seriously and receive human consideration not pass a fucking captcha

23:55Brian Schulmeister:well they fired the psychiatrist i hope or the psychiatrist yeah the psychiatrist i hope they kept the guy that cleans the pod after the previous use that's the one guy you don't want to fire

24:04Jason DeFillippo:that's true that's true i don't know if you know this uh dear listeners but certain things do happen to your body when you pass away that are yes somewhat unpleasant yes lots of fluids and probably the biggest news story yes fluids and probably what i consider to be the biggest news story that came out, but it's kind of buried almost everywhere. It's not exactly front page news. Oh, it is on my feeds. Well, we have some pretty tailored feeds. It popped up everywhere for me as well, because I think this is a big effing deal. And he's spot on. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is concerned that if artificial intelligence doesn't start to deliver real measurable benefits to society, people will be fed up with it at its price, ending its current form of existence to which I say, yes, please.

24:52Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, exactly.

24:53Jason DeFillippo:We are ready for this to be over. He did this at Davos. It's an odd venue and audience to preach societal good over other goods, but it certainly helped his comments stand out. AI developers have to get to a point where we're using this to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries. Otherwise, I don't think this makes much sense, says the guy invested in almost every single fucking AI company out there that actually is in a position to maybe do something about this.

25:23Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries. It doesn't say for the better. Well, useful, I think useful implies. Well, useful to who is the thing? I think I think I think this is a very nebulous statement that can be taken in many ways. But yes, I think I think he's on point by saying these guys are going to be coming at us with pitchforks if we don't do something right now, instead of telling them that they're all going to lose their jobs. Because that's all the news is saying.

25:54Jason DeFillippo:He did follow up with a pretty good sentence, I think, here. We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large, which is what these people have been fucking promising us and has not happened one iota. Not one bit. Nope, not so far. Well, it makes doing the show notes faster. Yeah, that's true. That's about it, but I don't really think we're helping a lot of the public sector here.

26:32Jason DeFillippo:Anyways, what has happened with AI, the one big result so far, is that the rich have gotten richer any way they can, and Elon Musk is also going for it here. We now have some idea of what's at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI. As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing is part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its nonprofit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between$79 billion and$134 billion in damages from the wrongful gains of OpenAI and Microsoft. Obviously, Elon has not read a single headline about OpenAI's actual bank balances.

27:07Brian Schulmeister:Exactly, yeah. Actually, if he wins, he might owe OpenAI money because there's so far in the red. You win. You're right. You got to write OpenAI a check so they can get back to zero.

27:19Jason DeFillippo:Besides this lawsuit, Musk has named OpenAI in another illegal battle accusing the company, along with Apple, of monopolistic practices that prevented XAI from getting a fair shot in the Apple store, from which it would have been removed immediately because of your bikini fucking pedo shit.

27:35Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Thanks, Elon. Speaking of Elon, Elon, who used to shit all over Davos, has finally gone and actually opened his mouth, which, you know, never never bodes well for him. Nothing good ever comes out of that. No, nothing ever good comes out of Elon's mouth for sure. Then these predictions that we've got we've got a new round of Elon's bullshit predictions. He says aliens probably don't exist because none of my 9000 satellites have encountered a UFO yet. God, he's a moron. How much ketamine did he have that day? All of it, maybe all of it. Humanoid robots will transform human life and go on sale in 2027.

28:11Brian Schulmeister:Tesla has been promising this since 2021. It is reportedly still struggling to make the robots' hands work. So there'll be no robot handies in the future. Robotaxis will be very widespread in the U.S. by the end of this year. And I would just like to point out they just finally started their first fully autonomous robotaxi rides this week in Austin without a safety driver. No, thank you. Not getting in that car. Here's another one. Human aging is a very solvable and obvious problem. Musk admits he hasn't spent much time studying it, but is confident the solution will be simple when someone else figures it out.

28:51Brian Schulmeister:Dunning-Kruger is my spirit animal for Elon Musk at Davos. Here we go. SpaceX will achieve a fully reusable rocket this year. Similar promises were made for 2020, 2022, and 2024. Yes, and AI will be smarter than any human this year and smarter than all humanity by 2035. So, par for the course, bullshittery coming out of Elon.

29:16Jason DeFillippo:Yep, absolutely nothing worthwhile in there at all. Well, Scarlett Johansson, REM, Vince Gilligan, and over 700 other artists are demanding that tech companies stop stealing their work in order to train AI models. A new campaign called Stealing Isn't Innovation. Neither is this thing because Sarah Silverman's already done this. Yeah. You know, OK. Sign another letter. Demands that AI companies take the responsible, ethical, the broadly ethical route through licensing and partnerships, according to the website. America's creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth and exports.

29:49Jason DeFillippo:A statement on the website reads, but rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators works to build AI platforms without authorization for copyright law. The group adds that illegal intellectual property grabs have resulted in an information ecosystem dominated by misinformation, deepfakes, and a vapid artificial avalanche of low-quality materials, aka AI slop, threatening America's AI superiority and international competitiveness. How about you just fucking ban it? Like, let's not worry about AI superiority.

30:24Jason DeFillippo:You just, like, stop training. Stop training illegally. Stop stealing this stuff. OpenAI once argued that it's impossible to train AI without copyrighted materials, since copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression. Jason, it is impossible for me to have a million dollars in the bank unless I go to other banks and steal the money. It's impossible. So therefore, I have every right to break the law because it's impossible for me to do this any other way.

30:52Brian Schulmeister:Of course, because banks are where the money's at. So if you want the money for their bank to your bank, the only way to get it is to go rob it. That's it. That is the exact logic that they use. Yeah.

31:04Jason DeFillippo:I mean, that's it. That's it. That is their logic. So, you know, there you go. All right. Well, so a bunch of people signed a fucking letter.

31:13Brian Schulmeister:Well, somebody who actually did something about AI was San Diego Comic-Con this week. They walked back their AI-friendly art policy after every artist had a shit fit last week and banned AI-generated work entirely from its art show. Before that, AI art was allowed if it wasn't for sale, clearly labeled, and credited to whatever human style got scraped. That rule had been around since at least 2024, and artists finally said, absolutely not, sir. Within 24 hours of the backlash, Comic-Con flipped the policy. Working artists called the old rules a slippery slope that normalized generative AI in a space literally built on human labor.

31:49Brian Schulmeister:High-profile illustrators slammed the idea of AI slop hanging next to work people actually spent years learning how to make. So bravo, Comic-Con.

31:58Jason DeFillippo:Bravo. Bravo.

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33:58Jason DeFillippo:Media Candy We have worked our way through almost every Disney and Pixar movie with the kid. And overall, it's been, you know, I mean, the great movies. It's good quality. I mean, great songs, blah, blah, blah. One that we didn't watch was Wish, which we actually watched over the weekend. This got widely panned upon release. It was considered a failure, one of Disney's first in a long time. It's got Chris Pine singing, which alone is terrifying. Sounds bad, yeah.

34:30Brian Schulmeister:Can't be as bad as Russell Crowe in Les Mis, but it sounds bad.

34:33Jason DeFillippo:No, not that. Nothing is as bad as that, Jason. Nothing.

34:37Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, that's true.

34:40Jason DeFillippo:So we watched it. Good story, good plot, good idea. too many songs uh needed lin-manuel miranda in there because the songs were fucking horrible that was the main problem you have you got a bunch of songs and they're bad and you have chris pine singing them not a winning combination uh once i watched the we watched it and something was weird going on in my brain like i kept seeing like little things and i'm like what was that that reminds me of what was that and then after we watched the movie we watched one of the like the little making of vignettes that Disney has in there. And they explained that this was, they put this out as like the whatever anniversary it was when the movie came out of Disney, of the Disney film studio.

35:25Jason DeFillippo:And they did it as an homage. And the entire movie is basically Easter eggs to all other Disney movies. And then once that clicked, we went back and started to watch it again. And then I was like, this is actually a really good movie. Really? This now makes sense to me. I am watching this with completely new eyes and really enjoying it. Why did you not promo the hell out of the fact that that's what you did with this movie? Because it probably would have been a lot more interesting to people. Sounds like it. Sounds like it. So actually, it was pretty good once I knew what they were doing. All right.

36:04Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Once you do the rules of the game.

36:06Brian Schulmeister:Songs still suck, though. Songs won't. Yeah. Get Lin-Manuel for that because he's the man. Yeah, he is the man.

36:13Jason DeFillippo:Keeping up with the pit. Still very good. Did not watch the latest because I had to watch the latest Star Trek Starfleet Academy last night. Did you watch episode three?

36:23Brian Schulmeister:I watched episode two and three since we spoke last. Still not mad at it.

36:28Jason DeFillippo:Still not mad at it. I enjoyed it.

36:30Brian Schulmeister:I get, yeah.

36:32Jason DeFillippo:The one problem I had, and I know why they did it, of course, the episode three involved much of the cast. Well, at least the young, very, very, very in shape and good looking cast. Yes. Mostly naked most of the time. I just had immediate flashbacks to Enterprise and getting everybody in that blue room and stripping down of their underwear and rubbing the goo all over themselves and trying to sex it up a bit. Yeah. And they certainly did that. But you know what? The show's well written. I'm liking the characters so far. I'm liking the character. They're actually developing the characters. They're making them interesting.

37:08Jason DeFillippo:I like the competition with the War College. I'm not mad at it.

37:12Brian Schulmeister:yep and and there were there were a couple throwbacks in here to to another movie that i think most people would have missed the locker room scene you know with the very nubile people you thought of enterprise i thought of starship troopers and oh yeah that too yeah there's very much starship troopers but without the boobs uh no no there's no boobs in star trek um the other middle fingers though we got lots of middle fingers lots of shits and you know people are swearing. Somebody got called and said they had a little dick. That was one of them in the first episode. The other thing was the videos that the War College made about Starfleet Academy, that first video that they made about them bungling everything, that was straight out of Starship Troopers.

37:56Brian Schulmeister:110%. It was like the recruiting film to join the Troopers and Starship Troopers. It was beat for beat. It was great. So I caught that. I had a good chuckle. So bravo on that little Easter egg for sure. Yeah, it's a good show. I'm liking it. Yeah. I don't know how Star Trek-y it is, but I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. Lord of the Rings follow up. I have finished my quest to Mordor. I got there. I got there. I even got through that goddamn ending on Return of the King. All 20 of them? Yeah. It was 30 minutes. A little over 30 minutes for the wrap up, right? Yeah. That was the Reader's Digest version compared to Stranger Things wrap up for their whole run.

38:43Brian Schulmeister:That thing took at least an hour to wrap everybody up. It was really nice. And what I said before about the CGI being stellar, well, from the first movie to the second movie to the third movie, there were definitely some concessions made as they went along. The warg battle from the second movie. Some budget issues. Yeah, definitely some budget issues. That was painful. That was absolutely painful. Helm's Deep was a lot smaller than I remember. I don't know why. I feel like I've grown up now. And it's like, you know, your old home when you go back to visit. It's like, wow, this place seems so much smaller than I remember.

39:16Brian Schulmeister:And when Frodo ran into Mount Doom, oh, that was bad. That was so bad. Somebody screwed up the tracking on that. These little feet are running. It's like going like 800 miles an hour. It's just, it's bad. It's bad. I mean, it's also worth considering it's 25 years old. Exactly. Exactly. But, yeah, I mean, that's his thing. Some of it was so good, and some definitely got the B team. And, you know, after working on Titanic, I know how that kind of works. It's like each shot is given to a different set of people. You know, so if Weta was overloaded, they could have just offshored that shit to somebody else and the other teams.

39:52Brian Schulmeister:Not as good as Weta. But, yeah, I mean, I can't recommend it highly enough. Just go rewatch it. You know, take your time. Get a big TV and some popcorn. and pause a lot to go to the bathroom because that's the nice thing about watching it at home, which I'll never go to the theater again. I did see 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple. I liked it a lot, a whole lot.

40:17Jason DeFillippo:I have not seen any of the 28 Years Later movies. I should watch them at some point.

40:23Brian Schulmeister:The first one was very weird. It was like a freshman college art project in some parts. It was very strange. It all made sense, but it was weird. It was very much a throwback to the original movie. And the fact is that these things are still shot on an iPhone, which is fucking incredible. You know, you watch this thing, it's like, damn, how did they do that? I can't do that with mine. Oh, the$3 million lens they put on the front of the iPhone is what they do it with. But all in all, man, yeah, it was, I was really worried that this was going to like just go straight downhill after the first movie.

40:56Brian Schulmeister:And it went way up. I like this a lot more than the first one even. So it's really good. Really good. And a little Fallout news. Fallout's been out for a couple weeks now. And they went with the non-bingeable version this time, and they roll it out, you know, a couple here, a couple there, whenever they feel like it. And it apparently has tanked the ratings on it. So, because I haven't been that excited to go back and watch it, because I just want to be able to watch them when I want to watch them. So I'm just waiting for the whole run to finish. And I think a lot of people are doing that too.

41:27Brian Schulmeister:So I've heard it's good.

41:28Jason DeFillippo:And in theory, I really enjoy things being dripped out. So I don't binge them on purpose. I'm liking it with The Pit. I like it with Star Trek. However, having said all of that, going back to my previous rant about last week about Paramount massively jacking up their prices, I'm starting to be on board with this whole drop it all at once thing because I just want to subscribe to your fucking outrageously overpriced service for one month, burn through it all, and then unsubscribe again because you're charging too damn much. So drop it all at once. I don't want to pay for three months. Which is why they drip it out over three months, because they want you to pay for it and you don't, you know.

42:07Jason DeFillippo:But you know what? Nobody watches things at the same time now anyways. There's no water cooler talk about these things in general, unless something really catches the zeitgeist. So, you know, what I'm just going to start doing is like next time when. Well, I probably won't do this because I like I like Star Trek so much, but I'm thinking about it. Like when Strange New Worlds drops their next season, I'll just wait until they all get dropped and then subscribe and just watch it then. I'll wait. No, you won't.

42:35Brian Schulmeister:No, you won't. But I won't. I guarantee you won't. I'll do that with a bunch of other shows, though. Yeah. Here's the thing. I think that comes down to the quality of the show, you know? Because if I really gave a shit about Fallout, I'd be talking about it every week. We're not talking about that. What are we talking about? We're talking about Starfleet Academy every week now. Yeah, exactly. I think there's definitely an equation that they can come up with that would be beneficial to everybody. It's like, okay, well, this is a three-a-week kind of show instead of a one-a-week kind of show because we're going to lose people.

43:07Brian Schulmeister:But at three a week, we can still keep the bingers happy and keep everybody happy and still get past that. We will release it on the 28th of the month. So we get one month and then the next month and it will go till, you know, the second of the following after month. Something like that. They could make something work.

43:24Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, you got to stretch it out, though. Or I'm just spitballing here, network guys and streamer guys. Or your seasons could have more than eight episodes. They could have 32 episodes. That would make us subscribe the whole year.

43:37Brian Schulmeister:They can't do that anymore, Brian. They can't do that anymore. No. I did have one thing about Starfleet Academy that now that I just can't unsee it, people just don't sweat in the future. These kids are running around, attacking with, you know, super laser tag, dodging bullets and all this shit. Nobody broke a sweat. Period. Nobody gets sweaty,

44:02Jason DeFillippo:but they do get sexily wet. They get moist. Yeah. Well, they get dropped in water, you know, and then they come out and they're dripping sexy wet. Yeah. But no sweat. Not mad at it.

44:16Brian Schulmeister:Ups and doodads.

44:19Jason DeFillippo:well while ai companies browsers have figured out group tabbing x has also rolled out something from 1994 a new feature called starter packs to all users is coming in the coming weeks the company's head of product has announced it's made up of compilations of accounts new users can follow based on their interests if that sounds familiar it's because blue sky has it threads has it every other site known to man has it but now x has it which has been around longer than any of them Interesting.

44:45Brian Schulmeister:Which is funny because if you remember Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and used to be pretty okay, they had starter packs too. They just called it suggested followers. And you wanted to get on that suggested follow list because many a millionaire was minted off that suggested follower list. People that had no social media savvy history, anything like that. They got on that suggested follow list to the moon. To the moon. Yeah. I mean, we saw that in real time so many times.

45:15Jason DeFillippo:But because it's X, you can sign up for the racism starter pack, the fascism starter pack, the we're going to have we're going to be on living on Mars starter pack, the Elon's false promises starter pack. And of course, the Elon Diner starter pack.

45:29Brian Schulmeister:Can't wait for all of those. Speaking of blue sky, ice has become one of the most blocked accounts on blue sky after its verification. So ICE did get verified on Blue Sky and within days rocketed to the number three most blocked account on the platform. Turns out the little blue check does not magically make people like you. There's nothing that's going to make people like you. So I wanted to run down the top three things that are on the on the blocked account list on Blue Sky. J.D. Vance, couch fucker, White House, global fucker and ICE.gov, you know, society fucker. So now here's the thing. I looked at the numbers on these.

46:07Brian Schulmeister:J.D. Vance has been blocked 179 ,143 times. White House, 121 ,176 times. And ICE.gov, 108 ,866 times. Those are paltry, piddly, don't give a fuck about numbers. That shows you how small Blue Sky is at this point. So, yeah. And on the back of that, Threads has quietly passed X in daily mobile users. according to new data from similar web. As of early January, Threads is pulling in about 141 million daily users on iOS and Android compared to roughly 125 million for X. But X still wins on the web, but on phones where people actually live, Threads is ahead. Yeah, I've never looked at Threads on the...

46:51Brian Schulmeister:Well, I did when they first came out with their web experience and it didn't work. It's pretty threadbare. Yeah. So I look at it on my phone once a month. So I guess I do get to count as a Mao since I am a monthly active user for 10 minutes. So Papa, Mao, Mao. Apple this week managed to announce two AI ideas. One, OK, I'm in. The other one is, hmm, hmm, that's about all I can say. So Siri is finally getting a real upgrade and Apple is reportedly embracing chat as a system wide interface in iOS 27, turning Siri into a conversational layer baked directly into the OS. Cool. I'm down with that. If it works, that's going to be powered.

47:35Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, that's going to be powered by Gemini. OK with that. Now, Apple is also reportedly experimenting with an AI pen, an AirTag sized disc with cameras, microphones, a speaker and a button that clips to your clothes. Now, I personally, I've got an Apple Watch. I've got AirPods. I've got a fucking iPhone. I do not need any more gadgets for their AI shenanigans. And I think that that's not ever going to happen. I don't think this pin is a thing. I think it's a MacGuffin. I think that they leaked, somebody inside leaked this or somebody was leaked this, you know, to get it out there, to fuck with Johnny Ives' head.

48:13Brian Schulmeister:Apple doesn't rush products like this.

48:15Jason DeFillippo:They take years. developing new hardware there's there's no chance that this is a real thing i i think you're right also i have to do a throwback right now i i know we're in the wrong segment but let's go quickly back to to starfleet academy because you said shenanigans my favorite line in episode three they've shenaned that means they're gonna shenanigan there's lots of shenanigans yeah

48:39Brian Schulmeister:that was really good that was really good dying yeah yeah i think they killed it with that So, yeah, I think I call shenanigans too on this for sure.

48:58Jason DeFillippo:I decided I needed a break from my regular sci-fi doom reading. And instead, I went with a regular fiction doom reading. A friend of mine had recommended this book, The Elements by John Boyne. He's an Irish writer. It was absolutely wonderfully well written. And I wanted to shoot myself in the face as soon as I finished reading it because it was so depressing about human nature and just a couple intertwined stories of people that really got screwed up by trauma and passed that shit on down.

49:28Brian Schulmeister:So you could have just read X for an hour or two and you'd have been basically the same thing? Less pedophilia. Only slightly, though. Okay. Only slightly.

49:37Jason DeFillippo:I'll pass on that one then. Thanks for the warning. Very well written. I definitely want to read more by the guy. But boy, was it depressing. Back to sci-fi for me.

49:46Brian Schulmeister:There we go. I actually got another, it's not a new cookbook. I actually owned this book in paperback and gave it away as a Christmas present before I could actually use it. So I'm like, you know, I'm going to buy all my cookbooks on Kindle now. If they have them on Kindle, I'm going to get them on Kindle because it's just, I've got a thousand cookbooks here and they just take up space. And there's one recipe in each book that I like. I'm just like, I'm just going to tear those out, whatever. But I got 101 Thai dishes you need to cook before you die by Jet Tila. because excellent excellent cookbook yeah i i when i flipped through it before i gave it away because i was late for christmas shopping and i knew the guy was gonna like oh he'll like this and i don't have to go back to the store so i ended up just uh getting this one and uh i love jet jet's a local boy he lives like a couple miles away right up the road and uh i love his show uh ready jet cook have you watched that brian i have yep fantastic he was up for an emmy for that i I don't know if you won one, but either way, I love Jet's food and I'm very happy about this.

50:45Brian Schulmeister:I just want to put this in to say, like, you know, I am very happy about going the Kindle only route for cookbooks now. I got a couple of them.

50:53Jason DeFillippo:I like to do that as well because you can't get sauce on your Kindle. I mean, you can, but then you just wipe it off if you put it, if you get it. Like I have a Chrissy Teigen cookbook that there's a couple family recipes in there that we love. And some of the pages are stuck together. like I was like I was a college playboy. It's just, yeah, you can't tear them apart. And it's just a mess. Going back to the Jet Li book really quickly. Jet Li. We have that book. Kung Fu. We've gone through almost every recipe in the book. The Mongolian beef and the drunken noodles are particular favorites in our house.

51:28Jason DeFillippo:Fantastic. What I've done as well, though, is we've actually started checking out cookbooks from the library to kind of give them a go and look through them. And if we find out that there's only one or two recipes that we actually like in the book, you can find them online and print them out and put them in your good old-fashioned recipe binder rather than buy the whole book for the one or two recipes. Yeah. Just a thought. One of the books we discovered through the library, this was my wife had gone to brunch with somebody, one of our friends, and they had cooked something from the cookbook, so we checked it out from the library.

52:00Jason DeFillippo:Liked the recipe so much, we ended up buying the book. It's a half-baked harvest, quick and cozy, a cookbook by Tegan Jerd. So you might want to check this out as well, Jason. And there's some really good recipes in there.

52:10Brian Schulmeister:Okay, sounds good. Also, on another tip, instead of copying the recipe or finding it online, just take a picture of it with your phone. And I use an app called Pestle. Oh, yeah, I used to use that. Yeah. I remember when we got it, there was a deal where you basically, it was like their starter weekend. And I paid like$14.95 for lifetime access. And now, of course, it's a subscription. So I'm very happy I got the original deal. But that thing's great. You basically throw anything at it and it'll put it in the right format for you and give you the whole nine yards. And it's got a share sheet as well.

52:46Brian Schulmeister:So, you know, you can share from iOS, like any recipe you can just put straight into it from iOS and it works great. I'll put a link to that in there as well. There's another book that I like, and this comes back to exactly what you were talking about. Southern Living, A Southern Gentleman's Kitchen, Adventures in Cooking, Eating and Living in the New South by Matt Moore. Now, I met this guy because he was the first chef we ever had on the Jordan Harbinger show. And I went out and bought it because I'm like, let's support the guy. It was his first book. And, you know, he's just getting his feet under him.

53:17Brian Schulmeister:This has the single best succotash recipe out of any cookbook I've ever seen. And succotash is fairly simple. Or is it? That's the thing. This is like a 30-minute succotash that is just for 29 minutes of the 30 minutes, it tastes like shit. And then at that last 30-minute mark, it all just blooms and comes together into the best succotash you've ever had in your life. But, yeah, I really, really dig that cookbook. That's one. I'll pestle you the recipe. It's pretty good. There's a really good gumbo recipe in there, too, I believe.

53:50Jason DeFillippo:All right, let's get moving. I'm hungry.

53:51Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Okay, last thing we got here. Scott wrote in, I went to an author talk by Jim Butcher, who does the Dresden Files, last night. And someone asked a question that we need all authors to answer. In the author's head, Harry Dresden, the protagonist of the Dresden Files, speaks with Han Solo's voice. Now I need to know whose or whom's voice Bob speaks in. Yes, all of the books, Dresden, Bobiverse, Laundry Files. I don't read the Dresden books. My friend James Marsters actually voices the Dresden File books. So I can't read them because I'll listen to them because I'll just hear James and be like, OK, I know that that's not you.

54:27Jason DeFillippo:Now, see, here's the thing. I don't want to know. So that's the beauty of the book. I have my own voice for these characters in my own head. And in much the same way as when a movie is made, now I only see the character looking the way the actor portrayed them. If the author tells me what the voice sounds like, that's all I'm going to hear. I don't want that. That's the joy and wonder of the book, my friend.

54:51Brian Schulmeister:It is. It kind of is. And the funny thing is the Bob-a-verse and Laundry Files Bob, both of those guys sound exactly the same to me. which is who is the protagonist from Lower Decks? Who's the main character there? Oh, Boimer. Boimer. Bob sounds like Boimer in all my books in my head, so I don't know. That's fun.

55:24Brian Schulmeister:The Dark Side. Ha! with Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner. How you doing, Dave? I don't see any R2-D2s behind you there. I guess the avalanche of droids never came. Something's coming. Oh, it's a mini. There we go. Yeah. Oh, isn't that a cute little one? This is the little robotic one. I forget the company that made these, but he's fully functional and a delight, I have to say. His little third leg drops down and he scoots around and he makes all kinds of noises. It is for not being full-sized. I make all kinds of noises when my third leg drops down, too.

56:13Brian Schulmeister:But, hey, there you go. It's reliable. Exactly. You know what you're getting. Yes, exactly. uh but um and so interesting story about this little guy is that the company that made these discontinued them and stopped supporting them so there's an app of course that controls these and uh somebody reverse engineered the app and came up with a an app that allows you to still use them without the official app so they were they were not bricked so that was a happy thing

56:47Jason DeFillippo:happen yeah and the company's out of business so they can't sue which is nice right yeah right right all right well uh let's get into this a little bit uh i found a new blog that gets deep into disney history so dave you might appreciate this but uh one thing in particular uh i had to read which he has not finished the story yet he has not gotten to the part where perhaps not me specifically but uh my friends and my my friend group of the time period will be mentioned And it's a series called Going to the Top, The Story of Videopolis, which was the dance club that was at Disneyland. And this is a blog, let me get back to that part, called Sparkcatcher over on WordPress.

57:27Jason DeFillippo:And the guy's name is, well, why can't I, he does not put his name anywhere convenient. Let me click on about. About the blog. And still, I don't see it. Fucking, I'm strolling and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling. What is your name? Anyways, whatever his name is, Sparkcatcher is the name of the blog. He gets deep into Disney history a lot of the time, but he's talking about the club Videopolis that I went to when I was a teen, hung out there. All my friends went there. We had our annual passes. We went and danced and picked up on tourist chicks and had a blast. The churro came out of Videopolis.

58:02Jason DeFillippo:That was the first initial place of the churro. He gets into that and a little bit of the history. And the thing that blew my mind as I was reading through this article, and again, he's done three parts, he's only gotten to the construction, not even the opening of Videopolis yet, is that Videopolis only existed for four years. The four magical years that I happened to be going to Disneyland, attending, and having the time of my teenage life. And I can't believe the serendipity that I was there for that and the perfect age for it. It's unbelievable to me. What years are we talking about? It opened, I believe, in like 86.

58:43Jason DeFillippo:It went like 86 to 90. And that was like my prime high school years. Okay. Like my pre-driving, like I was just young enough to be going to Disneyland all the time, but old enough to know I liked the ladies. And it was perfect.

58:59Brian Schulmeister:if you had asked me what is videopolis i would have said that it is disneyland's video arcade yeah nope that was not that was the starcade oh yeah okay it was right next to a space mountain so they went with the whole space theme yeah okay yeah i don't think i ever saw videopolis i i guess it was gone by the time I went to Disneyland around, I would have gone to Disneyland in 90, 91, something like that. But I don't remember. Certainly never went there, but.

59:31Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, it was done by then for sure. But yeah, it was a good time. Anyways, it's a fun blog. He gets into a lot of Disney history. He interviews a lot of the great Imagineers and stuff like that. So it's, I'm working my way through it slowly. He peppers it with other stuff that I don't care about that are obviously important to But, you know, in general, you pick and choose what you like.

59:51Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. OK, I dug it up. His name is Nathan. He is a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband, father, writer, historian and film fan. He was a 21 year veteran of Disney Parks based at Disneyland Resort in California. So and he spent 16 years of those 21 years in the Disney Live Entertainment Division. So there you go.

1:00:09Jason DeFillippo:So he knows of which he speaks about the Videopolis and things of that nature.

1:00:13Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yes, sir. He is a published Disney historian. So he's got many years under his belt of writing this stuff. So you guys should definitely be friends. Well, what this reminded me of was the last time we were at Disney World, also in Tomorrowland, they had a big stage set up with a DJ at night to have a, I would call it a tween dance party. And it was a big deal. It was packed. The kids were having a great time and dancing and the DJ was perfect for their audience. And my wife and I walked through and kind of went, oh, this is interesting and isn't this fun? And we kept walking and we were happy that it was there because, you know, entertainment is kind of hit or miss and comes and goes with these sorts of things in Disney.

1:01:10Brian Schulmeister:At least that's my perception.

1:01:12Jason DeFillippo:yeah he gets a bit into the history of that too like even going back to like the the 60s and 70s and things of that nature because disneyland and originally basically shut down after dark like people would just go home have dinner and that was the end of the park and then somebody came up with the idea of well let's find ways to keep people here uh later so they introduced a you know like big band and it was date night at disneyland and i believe in like the the 60s and stuff like that So and then, you know, that led to eventually to the teen club, Videopolis. I now it's, you know, nobody leaves because there's so much to do, but nothing like that anymore.

1:01:48Jason DeFillippo:They don't really have dancing or entertainment on that level.

1:01:51Brian Schulmeister:Did you have your high school graduation there?

1:01:54Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Yeah. We did grad nights and things like that. So, yeah, yeah. Talks a little bit about that as well.

1:01:59Brian Schulmeister:My high school roommate had went to high school in San Diego and they did grad night at Disneyland. But looking through this blog, I saw there's a picture of a thing called the Kids of the Kingdom, which looks like it's an entertainment thing. It looks like a salute to all that is good and pure is how I would describe it. And like that is totally the thing I would have been a part of when. Oh, I could see you on that stage in that white outfit with the multicolored V-dix. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Singing. This is our land, you know, or whatever. Yeah. This is my country, land of the free. Yeah, exactly.

1:02:39Brian Schulmeister:That would have been my thing. And you would have been off to the side of Videopolis. Smoking. Smoking and mocking me.

1:02:47Jason DeFillippo:Absolutely. But then I would have sidled up to you after and like, that brunette to your left. Give me an intro. Yeah. She liked the cure. Yeah.

1:03:01Jason DeFillippo:All right. We got a new trailer from Disney. Speaking of Disney. the latest Star Wars show that's coming. It is an animated show, Star Wars Maul Shadowlord. Trailer looks really good. Looks dark. Yeah. They got some splaining to do. Because last we saw, Maul was chopped in half. I mean, they had to do the same with Boba Fett and that one was kind of anticlimactic. So I'm hoping they're not going to just ignore it. They kind of got a lead with it, right?

1:03:30Brian Schulmeister:Isn't there a whole bunch of stories? I mean, because...

1:03:33Jason DeFillippo:There is, but he's on spider legs.

1:03:36Brian Schulmeister:That's what I was going to say. He comes back with spider legs. So he's not dead. And I guess he's back. Who knows if this is before or after the stuff that we know about where he gets chopped in half.

1:03:48Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, I was going to say, could this just be a prequel? No, it's definitely after. It is after because he's basically actively fighting against the Emperor.

1:03:58Brian Schulmeister:and yeah i just never i thought darth maul was really cool looking and i really looked forward to him when or to the movie coming out that he was going to be in because he really looked like badass and you know he had the dual lightsaber and all that kind of stuff and then after the movie he was like yeah you know okay he got cut in half and he fell down a chasm like yeah they

1:04:25Jason DeFillippo:They never did anything with them, which was unfortunate. But apparently, according to many sources, Lucas's original plan for the final trilogy did not have the Emperor coming back. It was actually going to be Darth Maul, who had become, you know, basically the kingpin Jabba the Hutt gangster ruler of the entire empire. That was going to be the big bad guy in the final trilogy. All right. That's, you know, then they sold to Disney and somehow he came back and all that crap. Yeah.

1:04:56Brian Schulmeister:right and so what the other thing i wonder watching this trailer is darth maul going to be the protagonist in this tale i guess he is yeah he's the title character it's right it seems to be

1:05:08Jason DeFillippo:it seems like he's going to be the uh kind of murky gray gray uh gray hat where he's neither good nor bad he's he's just he doesn't like the rebels he doesn't like the emperor he doesn't like anybody he likes himself right so he's a han solo-esque type guy hmm we'll see yeah i guess

1:05:26Brian Schulmeister:i'll check it out i don't know it looks good well so we'll have to give it a go so yeah yeah all right well i've got a trailer too for masters of the universe he man oh yeah he man so i came across this trailer and most homoerotic of all cartoons from my childhood i came across this trailer because people had their panties in a bunch because on the nameplate of the character who's playing it says he him and everybody's like oh my god he's got pronouns guys he man is the character's name he man come on get your head out of your ass just long enough where you can laugh at things again it's hilarious hilarious it is the only thing of interest to me whatsoever

1:06:15Jason DeFillippo:about this entire movie is that they threw that joke in.

1:06:19Brian Schulmeister:It was so good. Because I can't figure out who they're making this movie for. Well, so you guys are a little younger than me. And my recollection of He-Man is that my younger brother was much more into it than I was. When it came out, I was a little too old for it. So I was aware of it, but I never had any He-Man toys or anything like that. I remember the show being on, but it was my younger brother who watched it, and he's six years younger than me. So were you guys in the zone for He-Man being a part of your, an active part of your childhood?

1:06:54Jason DeFillippo:It absolutely was for me. I just didn't like it. I wasn't interested and I didn't care. The one thing I do like that has come out of it is, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but you can go down the best rabbit hole in existence. The Skeletor memes that exist on the internet are the best. Yes. Yes.

1:07:14Brian Schulmeister:Yes, they are great. So watching this trailer made me think this is basically Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah, with less kind of. That's what they're aiming for. They've got the kind of ne 'er-do-well hero. You know, one of the heroes is an animal, except instead of a raccoon, it's a tiger. you know it's got that energy of Guardians of the Galaxy which is not a bad energy to have but no it's also Flash Gordon you know

1:07:51Brian Schulmeister:Buck Rogers all of those but yeah it's so because I'm like are they going for the nostalgia play for people of our age which I'm like okay kind of but then I'm like you're not going to hook any new audience with this and I saw some of the stuff where I can see what they're trying to do some bit of character development It was just confusing as fuck to me. I'm like, I don't plan on ever watching this movie because, Brian, you were in the sweet spot. Dave, you were past it. I was like right on the cusp of not giving a shit. Given my druthers, if you gave me He-Man or Thundercats, Thundercats. Oh.

1:08:25Brian Schulmeister:Because Thundercats was funny. Okay.

1:08:27Jason DeFillippo:I liked Robotech. I think that was, if it didn't have robots in it, I didn't care. If it didn't have spaceships, I didn't care. So Thundercats, not my thing. masters of the universe not my thing yeah my younger brother

1:08:41Brian Schulmeister:had a lot of transformers toys I remember yeah

1:08:44Jason DeFillippo:what was the pre the pre transformers transformers there was a there was a I can't remember what they were called like g-force or something like that that that weird it was all like the weird Japanese stuff that they overdubbed and tried to shove into a into a sort of coherent story that I was into that and G.I. Joe so that was that was that was where I was at I hated G.I.

1:09:04Brian Schulmeister:Joe but did you guys ever own Zoids I remember them. I don't think I had them. We had Micronauts. Do you remember Micronauts? I had Micronauts, yeah. Yeah. I had Micronauts. Do you remember Penny Racers too? Yeah, vaguely. I used to steal those from Kmart. I loved Penny Racers. You could fit three of them in your pocket. It was great. Wow, we were...

1:09:25Jason DeFillippo:Jason, I didn't realize you were such a klepto. Earlier you were telling me about how you were stealing booze rather than get a fake ID. Yeah, man. Come on.

1:09:33Brian Schulmeister:You got to put the work in. Guy's got skills. I've only got caught once. I was like eight and I got caught stealing Sweet Tarts, which put an end to my thievery career because he scared the shit out of me so much. I'm never stealing anything again. Yeah. Yeah. That was the end of my career. But yeah. No. So, yeah, I was just I was curious what your take on this on this trailer was because I'm like. Well, I also think this is the type of movie that has the potential to do really well internationally. Oh, yeah. Right. So, you know, I don't know what the budget is, but this will play everywhere.

1:10:12Jason DeFillippo:This movie is a thousand percent aimed at me. It's just I could care less. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

1:10:20Brian Schulmeister:So I was the past week or so. I've been driving around in my car, listening to music on iTunes through CarPlay, as you do. and i noticed a pattern uh that probably half of the songs that pop up on my dashboard next to the name of the song it says in parentheses remastered yeah now i understand when compact discs came out a lot of things had to be remastered and there were practical reasons because of the the eq curve of cds was different from lps and all that kind of stuff and it all makes sense but i guess my question and i'm mostly aiming at this at you brian just because maybe you have insights from your experience in the music biz um it does remastered mean anything other than please buy this album again these days not really no it's a pr move more than anything else now yeah

1:11:22Jason DeFillippo:I mean, they do the work. The masters are taken into a studio. Somebody runs them through something. Some of them are actually literally being remastered for streaming, which means they're, you know, compressing it a little bit more, unfortunately, which actually makes it worse. So I'd rather have the unremastered version. If the stuff had never been remastered since, like, even early CD days, the 80s into the early 90s, there was so much cocaine that the high end is so high. Like all they heard was high end and they just, or they couldn't, you can't hear the high end when you're on cocaine. Sorry, I had it backwards.

1:12:04Jason DeFillippo:When you're coked out, you don't hear high end. So they cranked the fucking high end. And if you listen to unremastered stuff, particularly like, I'm thinking back to like some of the early Love and Rockets albums, It is so fucking high end because the people that were doing it were gacked out of their fucking brains. And so when that stuff, that stuff, when that gets remastered, it's actually really good. And the new versions sound really good. They sound much better.

1:12:30Brian Schulmeister:But that that flows right into something I was going to mention, which is that I remember in college. so this would have been 1990 or 91, David Bowie sold his catalog to, I think, Rhino, Rhino Records. And so the Sound and Vision box set came out, which was remastered, and it sounded like crap. And to your point, it sounded like somebody took the graphic equalizer on the high end and just went, because everything just got super crispy and and it was way overdone and whoever whoever mastered that album has had to have their septum redone i remember listening to the album and going why these these sound terrible compared to any way i've ever heard them before on albums or cassettes or cds what what have they done what have they done to my babies and uh and then you know after that i guess uh future versions sanity was restored but yeah um yeah so it's mostly

1:13:38Jason DeFillippo:marketing these days i guess it's mostly marketing it's so hard to get uh to get anything particularly old catalog in front of people's eyes again and if you re-release something as remastered all of a sudden it gets put out as a new release gets into the algorithm that way comes up first on the list

1:13:52Brian Schulmeister:of the artist etc etc etc right right yeah there's always a certain percentage of fans who are completists and have to have every version of everything. So my friends in Wall of Voodoo, they just remastered a bunch of stuff that they had, that they found the original tapes for, like the big masters.

1:14:12Jason DeFillippo:The real, the reals, the huge ones.

1:14:13Brian Schulmeister:Exactly. They found all the stuff and they went back and remastered some of their old albums and they're kind of dribbling those out and they sound so much better. They sound so much better, but they're also remastering them for vinyl and digital so they're releasing them in digital and they just did a a record store day last year for for one of their releases and did gangbusters so they're doing it again and again until they you know run out of tapes but uh and i i worked on some of that and it was fun yeah it

1:14:43Jason DeFillippo:goes back to what i was saying most of the stuff that was mastered in that particular period just sounds like shit it was just the it was just the sound at the time that's what everything sounded like so everybody mixed that way and again cocaine uh so any of those remasters now are fantastic they're they sound so much better than the originals yeah also the early days of cds they really they really ganked stuff up it just sounded bad so yeah yeah i guess then they can really uh

1:15:10Brian Schulmeister:completely eliminate tape hiss these days just yeah get rid of it just gone yeah all right well um Um, last week we were talking about dishwashers because Jason had installed a new dishwasher. That's right.

1:15:25Jason DeFillippo:I love that we, I love we bounce from cocaine to dishwashers. It's, it's really, it's a wide berth we, we go through.

1:15:33Brian Schulmeister:So I'm having a little, um, a little crisis of what I believe in that I need you guys to talk me down off the wall here, off the ledge. So in our conversation last week about dishwashers, I mentioned in passing that something that you can buy is a countertop dishwasher. I don't know if you recall that. I said countertop dishwasher. Now, let me ask both of you a question. Did either of you do any kind of Google search for countertop dishwasher?

1:16:06Jason DeFillippo:Hell no. I didn't have to because I could see it in my mind's eye. I had seen it in a movie or something like that. So, okay. Yeah. Let me just say, Dave, that unless you're the one that you were thinking of purchasing right now is in the shape of an R2-D2, you better not buy it. Here's the head must open and then you put the dishes in.

1:16:28Brian Schulmeister:Just toss them in. Yeah. Here's where I'm struggling. About two hours after we recorded the show. Uh-oh. So the show has not been published yet. You and I only talked about it. Guess what I started seeing ads for on Facebook? Countertop dishwashers. Countertop dishwashers. Well. Now, I am trying to be rational here, gentlemen. I really try. Because as you know, I am on the side that says Facebook does not listen to your conversations. And I still believe that. But given that, I'm trying to rationalize. How? How?

1:17:07Jason DeFillippo:Have any of us actually read through, we record through Riverside. Have we read through Riverside's terms of service? Because perhaps.

1:17:16Brian Schulmeister:No, we haven't. Right. So that's why I asked if either of you had Googled it, because that happens sometimes where you'll be in a conversation with someone about something. They'll Google it, and it takes the location information and says, oh, those people were around each other. I'll start showing ads. So I thought, OK, that's a possibility. But like countertop dishwashers is so specific. Specific. Yeah. And I, I would be willing to, I bet a hundred dollars that I had never, the words had never left my lips for the past decade. More than that. Yeah. And so I just, I don't know if anybody has an idea of what may have, cause I didn't search for them.

1:18:01Brian Schulmeister:I only mentioned it on the show. I haven't talked to anyone else. That was the other thing. They're not in the show notes. Nope. It's gotta be Riverside. Is there anybody around you that could have overheard you talking that said, ooh, a countertop dishwasher, that might be cool, maybe I should Google that? No, no. I mean, I'm here all by myself in this dark, windowless room. Well, we just may have to revisit our previous statement, because maybe the technology has caught up where it's actually, you know, just transcribing us in real time all the time and just sending back the keywords, you know, which is a possibility.

1:18:38Brian Schulmeister:It still doesn't make sense. And I did utter the words, buy countertop dishwasher. I said, you could buy a countertop dishwasher, right? Were any of your ladies in a tube listening to you? No, no, there's nothing. I mean, well, I have on my wrist is Apple's lovely lady, but she, I did not, I don't recall summoning her. um so i don't know i i you know i i want to

1:19:12Brian Schulmeister:i don't i don't i don't want to go yes i don't i want to believe what i want to believe

1:19:17Jason DeFillippo:animal crackers animal crackers animal crackers animal crackers now let's see what happens

1:19:24Brian Schulmeister:okay yeah buy animal crackers you're thinking of buying some animal crackers something that

1:19:29Jason DeFillippo:Neither of us have probably Googled. We're all out of that age with our children, those of us that have them. I'm sure Jason doesn't need animal crackers for pleasure. Animal crackers.

1:19:37Brian Schulmeister:No, but after this, I'm going to go buy some animal crackers because I got to say it too. Maybe this afternoon I'll go buy some animal crackers. I'll head to the store or, you know, maybe I'll look on Facebook Marketplace. Animal crackers. Okay, nobody put this in the show notes. This is a clean experiment. You heard it here first. Yeah. No.

1:19:58Jason DeFillippo:I mean, you can tell I'm a little freaked out. Well, we have a we have a very hard and fast policy that our phones are not listening to us. We have swore by it multiple times in this segment.

1:20:09Brian Schulmeister:Me, too. Yeah. But technology advances. So we don't know. We just don't know. The thing is that I can't get past is that if that were happening, surely a security researcher would come upon it and be able to prove it. because the upside of that would be so powerful to be the person who discovered that that was happening. But I think they've all done it so many times and have disproved that it's happening so many times. Nobody's watching the gate anymore, so maybe they could have snuck it back in. Yeah, that's plausible. Yeah. That's plausible. Animal crackers. Anyway, animal crackers. We'll get some animal crackers.

1:20:51Brian Schulmeister:And we can't make it the show title. I know, we're stuck.

1:20:59Brian Schulmeister:anyway so we're about to get a whole uh bunch of snow here uh the next couple days yeah we're getting uh well you're in canada like it's on a that's you know it's yeah but we're

1:21:12Jason DeFillippo:we're getting every day a lot just like we're getting like a beyond normal they've already told people batten down the hatches make sure you have food snow okay yeah go go go stock up on those

1:21:25Brian Schulmeister:animal crackers yeah gonna have to go buy some animal crackers and a snowblower we're getting stock up we're getting between eight and 24 inches is the range so we'll see i'm hoping for the best uh i'm feeling lucky that i still have a 19 year old living in my house so i should get my car shoveled out i don't have to uh give myself a snow shoveling heart attack but um Yeah, so we're, you know, the first few days of snow is fun. And then it's just a pain. It keeps going and piles up and you run out of places to put it.

1:22:02Jason DeFillippo:And yeah.

1:22:03Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. It turns gray from all the salt. Or yellow. Or yellow, right, from the dogs. Hopefully dogs. Wish us luck. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll go get some animal crackers. You can salt your driveway with animal crackers, I've heard. Oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Gee, if only I knew of a place where I could buy some animal crackers. In bulk. Yeah. See you, guys. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got one new patron, Alex. Thank you, Alex. And we would also like to say thank you to Liz, Kevin, Paul, David, Twilight Sparkle, Tina, Robert, David, Stephen, and Greta. Thank you all so much for your continued support on Patreon.

1:22:49Jason DeFillippo:Thank you, thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got donations from Joseph, Linda, Brett, Andrew, Ryan, Jen, Sloan, and Tom. Thank you all so much.

1:22:57Brian Schulmeister:Over at the tip jar, we've got Ryan for the$35 dinghy. Thank you very much, Ryan. And YouTube. I mentioned last time we have memberships on YouTube that we're still trying to figure out what we're going to do there. But we've got three members, Jenny, Desiree, and TK421Storm. So thank you all for joining us there. No merch this week and no reviews. Thank you. Thank you. And just a quick reminder, here's our pitch. Here's our pitch. This show is ad-supported. No more. It is fan-supported. The ads just don't do anything for us. So we need your support. Thank you for your support. We're like the Bartles and James of podcasting.

1:23:34Brian Schulmeister:And if you want to, you can help us out going to patreon.com slash GOG, and you can sign up for as little as$3 a month to help support the show. You can give as much as you like. But with that, you get the shows a little bit early, a little bit, a lot of bit ad-free, in a lot of bit in high definition. That's the only platform where we can really do extras. So that's why we push that one. And everybody who asks us, what's the cut for us? Does it matter between the tip jar or PayPal or Patreon? They're all exactly the same. So pick your poison. If you hate Patreon, find us over at PayPal or the tip jar.

1:24:06Brian Schulmeister:But we just, we really appreciate you supporting the show. We honestly do. It keeps us going. Keeps us going. Absolutely.

1:24:12Jason DeFillippo:Absolutely. In the news, we have a, somebody passed away. the classic era Scorpions bassist Francis Buchholz died at 71 from a private cancer battle that he was having going on. I only put this in there. The Scorpions obviously not really in my wheelhouse musically, but I had one of the best nights of my entire life with the Scorpions. I was over in London. Yeah, it was the Goo Goo Dolls. The Goo Goo Dolls were playing one of the big festivals, summer festivals over there, and we were staying at the Rockstar Hotel. I'm not going to mention which one it is because I think it's still the Rockstar Hotel and people can just show up.

1:24:48Jason DeFillippo:And so we were out at V-Fest, I think, and bused back into London, rolled into the hotel pretty late at night. Go to the hotel bar like you do when you're that age and you're hanging with rock stars and you're living that lifestyle. And it is the loudest that bar has ever been in my entire—I've stayed there many times. It is rocking. It is rocking like a hurricane, even. And because the scorpions are holding court up there and they are partying like no tomorrow, these guys are like 20 years older than like the Goo Goo Dolls. You know, these are older guys. Yeah. We had such a good time. I don't remember a goddamn thing, but we partied hard with those guys and they were fucking awesome.

1:25:29Jason DeFillippo:So safe travels, Francis. You are a true rock star. And I still remember that night as much as what little I can remember. What little you can pull back, yeah. I remember so fondly. It was such a blast.

1:25:43Brian Schulmeister:Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 730. 730 times. 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. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll love you for it. or in swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts, feedbacks, cool links?

1:26:13Brian Schulmeister:Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact. And hey, don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review and we'll read it on the air. And guess what? We've got merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show and stay grumpy.

1:26:27Jason DeFillippo:Don't forget the animal crackers.