735: We’re Walking on Sunshine

27 Feb 2026 · 1 h 24 min · 36 chapters

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In short

Internet blame and tech hype, focusing on AI’s economic impact, surveillance tech, and major tech/entertainment business moves; plus several “AI went wrong” and “AI used as cover” stories.

Guests

No named guests appear in the transcript. Hosts are Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister.

Key claims

  • A 37-year-old tax economist bet his $342k life savings on Kalshi prediction markets that federal spending would rise; he cashed out about $470k (+$128k, ~37% return).
  • Tesla marketing/legal fights: a judge upheld a 2019 crash verdict partially blaming Autopilot; Tesla is suing California’s DMV over restrictions on the “Autopilot” term.
  • Block (Square) CFO claims AI enables faster work with smaller teams, but hosts argue layoffs are driven by overhiring and crypto downturn, not AI.
  • Goldman Sachs says AI spending added little to U.S. GDP; many executives report no meaningful productivity/job impact.
  • Sam Altman’s “AI uses less energy than human evolution” remarks drew backlash; data center water/energy claims are hard to verify due to lack of disclosure.
  • Anthropic refused Pentagon demands to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
  • Flock Safety AI plate readers are being dropped by cities; critics cite wrongful arrests and location tracking.
  • Google’s AI push notification reportedly included the N-word; Google apologized.

Notable examples

  • Google push alert with an offensive N-word headline (then removed).
  • UK ICO fined Reddit £14.5M over children’s data/insufficient age gating.
  • Prediction market insider-trading enforcement: Kalshi froze accounts and fined/banned a former gubernatorial candidate and a MrBeast editor; reported to the CFTC.
  • Wired: a pro-Trump account “Johnny Maga” allegedly linked to a White House staffer (Garrett Wade).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Betting on Elon's Downfall

0:45 to 3:00

Discussion about a tax economist turning his savings into a profit by betting against Elon Musk's initiatives.

“which is about a 37 % return on the downfall of Elon Musk.”

Tesla's Legal Troubles

3:00 to 5:00

Exploration of Tesla's ongoing legal issues and the implications of its autopilot feature.

“Well, he's just taking a page out of his Cheeto friends playbook, you know?”

Jack Dorsey's Layoffs at Block

5:00 to 7:00

Discussion on Jack Dorsey's decision to cut jobs at Block and the reasons behind it.

“So Dorsey framed Thursday's cuts is proactive, even empathetic, because he said it's so demoralizing for them to, you know, just eke out the, you know, the firings.”

AI's Impact on Employment

7:00 to 9:00

Examination of how AI is being utilized in companies and its effects on jobs.

“If you think back to Twitter, and if you listen to our show for a long time, you've heard me talk about this forever.”

Sam Altman's Controversial Comments

14:14 to 16:28

Discussion about Sam Altman's remarks at the India AI Impact Summit and their implications.

“Well, let's talk about Sam Altman for a minute, because boy, did he step on his thing.”

The Debate Over AI Accountability

16:28 to 17:29

Exploring the lack of transparency in AI data center operations.

“Social media quickly took to roasting the remarks as dystopian and deeply antisocial and anti-human.”

Anthropic's Resistance to Pentagon Demands

17:29 to 20:26

Anthropic's stance against Pentagon's request to compromise on AI safety.

“So I probably went through 400 gallons of water until I took it into another program and said, here, make it like this.”

Department of War's AI Contracts

20:26 to 22:08

Discussion on the Department of Defense's use of AI technologies.

“But, you know, at least I would say good for Anthropik to sticking to their guns, even though I think this is just a fucking PR maneuver.”

Public Resistance Against AI Surveillance

22:08 to 23:26

Activism against AI surveillance and its implications in various cities.

“Yeah, the Gulf of America, Department of War.”

Flock Safety's Controversial Technology

23:26 to 24:39

Criticism of Flock Safety's AI surveillance technology and its failure.

“Across the country, Phlox, AI-powered license plate readers and surveillance cameras are getting wrecked.”
Show all 36 chapters

Google's AI Mistake

24:39 to 26:08

Discussion on Google's AI-generated news alert and its repercussions.

“We reported last week that the Ring Partnership actually imploded after the public backlash, so that has been taken down as well.”

Prediction Market Controversies

26:08 to 28:00

Exploring insider trading and accountability in prediction markets.

“Maybe they need to use Claude code to work up the code for their.”

Gambling Addiction and Political Manipulation

28:00 to 29:52

Discussing the implications of gambling addiction and the intersection with politics.

“I just watched the ending of Beast Games.”

Online Age Verification Challenges

29:52 to 31:22

Examining the difficulties and implications of age verification laws online.

“Well, a common theme in online age verification laws is the tension between user privacy and preventing children from accessing harmful or inappropriate content.”

Discord's Age Verification Controversy

31:22 to 33:02

Delving into Discord's plans for age verification amid user backlash.

“Well, we talked about Discord's attempts at age verification as well, that earlier this month they said they would be enacting an age verification policy.”

Apple's New Age Verification Tools

33:02 to 34:26

Exploring Apple's initiative on age verification in compliance with new laws.

“The company has introduced new age verification tools.”

Netflix's Exit from Warner Brothers Bidding

36:30 to 39:38

Analyzing Netflix's decision to withdraw from the Paramount bidding process.

“Well, Brian, Netflix has officially bowed out of the bidding war for Warner Brothers, clearing the way for Paramount Skydance and setting off a fresh round of merger anxiety across Hollywood.”

Impact of Corporate Consolidation on Entertainment

39:38 to 42:00

Discussing the negative effects of corporate mergers on content creation.

“I mean, and everybody's been holding their breath waiting to see what happens.”

Review of Recent Shows

42:00 to 43:30

Discussion on various shows including 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Night Agent'.

Face Off 2 and X-Files Reboot

43:30 to 45:30

Exploration of upcoming film 'Face Off 2' and thoughts on the 'X-Files' reboot by Ryan Coogler.

“It was down like, you know, massive amounts from the premiere from the last season.”

Mortal Kombat 2 Anticipation

45:30 to 47:30

Excitement surrounding the upcoming release of 'Mortal Kombat 2' and its significance to fans.

“You know, there better be a goddamn good Scorpion-Johnny Cage fight in there because that is the best pair-up in the actual game itself.”

Google's AI Music Innovations

47:30 to 49:10

Discussion on Google's acquisition of Producer AI and its application in music creation.

“Labs, letting anyone type make it a lo-fi beat and spit out fully formed tracks in minutes.”

Critique of 'Dropping Names' Podcast

49:10 to 51:20

Review and critique of the 'Dropping Names' podcast and comparison with 'Once We Were Spacemen'.

“The people who produce the show is Nathan Fillion's production company, so right there you got something good behind it.”

OpenAI and Smart Devices

51:20 to 54:40

Discussion about OpenAI's developments in smart devices and their implications.

“I'm not saying that these guys are the right guys to do it.”

Instagram's New Features for Teens

54:40 to 56:00

Overview of Instagram's new features aimed at protecting teenagers from harmful content.

“I pay twenty five dollars a year for carrot weather already, so I'm not going to spend another twenty five for another weather app.”

Emotional Resonance of Music

56:51 to 1:00:36

The hosts discuss how music impacts their emotional states and influences their current listening habits.

“Dave, you are the person that introduced me to the Strong Songs podcast by Kirk Hamilton, which I enjoy.”

Coping with Media and Emotions

1:00:36 to 1:04:33

They explore the role of horror movies and emotional releases in their lives, reflecting on vulnerability and societal pressures.

“Because my relation to that is actually through what I listen, the music I'm listening to.”

Lore of Coruscant and Star Wars

1:04:33 to 1:06:39

The hosts delve into a discussion about a YouTube video on the lore of Coruscant and share their thoughts on the planet's design.

“On a completely different level, Matthew wrote in, this video explains the lore of Coruscant.”

Nostalgia for 3D Rendering and Music

1:06:39 to 1:10:02

They reminisce about creative experiences with 3D rendering tools and how it connects to music from their past.

“Way Down Now, a bunch of songs that you'd probably recognize from that kind of 80s alternative vein.”

Nostalgia for Marathon and KPT Shapes

1:10:02 to 1:11:08

Discussing the history and personal memories tied to the game Marathon and KPT Shapes.

“So one of the things with Marathon is you could alter the shapes and the textures in the game, and then you could send and share that.”

Apple Watch OS 26 Experience

1:11:08 to 1:12:40

Sharing experiences and frustrations with the upgrade to Apple Watch OS 26.

“so there it is if anybody wants to patch a marathon with shapes inspired by kai's power tools one of the first things i think i probably shared on the internet from way back when 1995 1995.”

Reflections on Mr. Clean's Retirement

1:12:40 to 1:14:25

A lighthearted discussion on the retirement of Mr. Clean and the nostalgia it evokes.

“It seems to be happy with that and gives me what I need.”

Childhood Disappointment with Scrubbing Bubbles

1:14:25 to 1:15:21

Recounting a childhood experience of disappointment with a cleaning product's advertising.

“That reminded me of my childhood disappointment with scrubbing bubbles.”

ICQ and Awkward Online Interactions

1:15:21 to 1:16:59

Sharing an embarrassing story from the early days of online chat on ICQ.

“And so I lost a little bit of innocence that day.”

Nostalgia for Vintage Toys

1:16:59 to 1:18:19

Discussing vintage scrubbing bubbles toys and the fond memories associated with them.

“I mean, my memory doesn't last last week.”

Poo-Pourri and Modern Bathroom Technology

1:18:19 to 1:20:41

Exploring the humorous side of a bathroom product with embedded technology.

“I got one last thing that I got to run past you guys today.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:03Brian Schulmeister:Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show where we discuss the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, you missed the bus on this one. I'm sad to say. So a 37-year-old tax economist dumped his entire$342 ,000 life savings into Cauchy prediction markets, betting that federal spending would keep rising despite Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency promising to slash waste and balance the budget. Well, we've talked about you betting on Elon's downfalls for a while, and this guy beat you to the punch because he won.

0:39Brian Schulmeister:He cashed out at roughly$470 ,000, pocketing$128 ,000, which is about a 37 % return on the downfall of Elon Musk. Or at least doge.

0:50Jason DeFillippo:That's a hell of a bet to put your entire life savings out there, but a pretty strong one, as we've talked about a lot on this show. Everything that Elon says is bullshit. Everything he touches turns to a poop emoji. It kind of does. So, you know, good for this guy. You know, here's a win. It's very funny. It makes the news because everybody's down on Elon right now, as they should be. But, you know, I just where are all the stories about people that have lost their life savings? Because we're going to start hearing a lot of those.

1:21Brian Schulmeister:Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They're out there.

1:23Jason DeFillippo:This is not good. And once we actually have a sane government, this shit's going to get regulated until it's gone. Gone. Gone, daddy, gone. Yeah. We've got more stories about that coming up. All right. Well, I've got some more stories about Elon right now. Some more follow up. Tesla is still on the hook for the$243 million verdict after a U.S. judge rejected the EV maker's bid to overturn the jury verdict from last year. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom upheld the jury's decision to hold Tesla partially responsible for a deadly crash that happened way back in 2019 and involved the self-driving autopilot feature.

2:00Jason DeFillippo:You know, the one that California said you can't use that name anymore because it doesn't autopilot, it auto-kills. It's more Decepticon than Autobot. Yeah.

2:12Jason DeFillippo:I never even watched the damn show or the cartoon, but I just know the sound. Anyways, I mean, this is Elon's playbook, right? So he gets sued. He loses. He countersues. And eventually the countersuit gets tossed out of court. That's what he does. He just tries to keep things in court all the time. Anytime he loses something, he has to countersue against it. And he's doing it again because, as we just talked about, in California, the California's DMV basically said you cannot use the term autopilot in full self-driving to sell cars. They won a case on that. Tesla was forced to clean up its marketing language or risk a suspension of its sales license.

2:50Jason DeFillippo:But, of course, Elon did what Elon does, and he's suing them back right now. So if you want to bet on something on Calci, if Musk has been sued, bet on a countersuit.

3:02Brian Schulmeister:Bet on the countersuit, yep. Yeah. Well, he's just taking a page out of his Cheeto friends playbook, you know?

3:08Jason DeFillippo:I know.

3:09Brian Schulmeister:Just keep him in court. Keep him in court.

3:11Jason DeFillippo:So they filed a complaint on February 13th, alleging that the DMV wrongfully and baselessly called Tesla a false advertiser, even though they are basefully and quite correctly false advertising the autopilot. Yeah. Yeah. And he also said it was unconstitutional. What? Because why the fuck not? If you're making shit up anyways, you got to fucking go for the fences, man.

3:38Brian Schulmeister:I'd say shoot for the moon, but let's shoot for Mars. Let's shoot for Mars. No, no, no. Moon now. Oh, that's right. We dialed back Mars. We're going to the moon. We're going to the moon. To the moon. Last week, we talked about Jack Dorsey and Jack Dorsey's beard and his Jack Dorsey's beard's AI.

3:54Jason DeFillippo:And we couldn't even remember the name of his company. Remember? Yeah. It is so far out of public consciousness these days. We could not remember. But then I just go, oh, yeah, he's a blockhead. Bingo.

4:05Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. And Square is the subsidy under that, that you get to every coffee shop and barista known to man knows how to use a square terminal. Did I tell you the story? Actually, they don't always know how to use them. Did I tell you the story about when my dad went to go get coffee and the square terminal broke and the girls couldn't figure out how to make change for a$20 bill? You did. Yes.

4:25Jason DeFillippo:And that's how bad we've gotten us. And no wonder we have the government we do.

4:29Brian Schulmeister:And that was pre-AI. Right. Just, you know, roll that one up and smoke it. Well, Jack has finally pulled the band-aid off the beard, and he is going to cut 4 ,000 jobs at Block, slashing the company from over 10 ,000 employees to under 6 ,000. Under 6 ,000, Brian. I don't know what they're going to do with just under$6 ,000. Well, they're going to spend all that money because the stock popped 24%.

4:54Jason DeFillippo:Which is a sad indictment on the state of the stock market right now, because this is what you're rewarding just fucking firing people.

5:02Brian Schulmeister:Hey, the Dow's$50 ,000, Brian. It's over$50 ,000. Screw your liberties. Yeah. So Dorsey framed Thursday's cuts is proactive, even empathetic, because he said it's so demoralizing for them to, you know, just eke out the, you know, the firings. Yes. And see all the corpses of their fallen comrades on the floor. Let's just clear the decks. Let's just clear everybody out. Now, here's the thing. This is the first time that they're actually that people are backing up their firing claims and saying it's because of AI. So block CFO Amarita said the customer positioned the company to move faster with smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work.

5:44Jason DeFillippo:So far be it for me to call Jack and his beard a fucking liar, but bullshit.

5:50Brian Schulmeister:it well jack used ai to get rid of these 4 000 people remember so technically he is using ai

5:57Jason DeFillippo:you know so yeah no i don't think that's the case i think the problem is uh because we could not even remember the name of the company block things haven't been going well over there that's the reality square has already it's got as much market share as it's going to get there's no growth there to be had. That's done. What else has he got? Not much. I think that Block had overhired, as they do, because they were expecting a lot of gains. The gains never happened. And now you've got way too many employees and not a hell of a lot of business.

6:30Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Well, you also have to remember, too, Block is named after the blockchain, and we're in the middle of the worst crypto downturn ever. Yes. So things are not going well.

6:39Jason DeFillippo:You can't support 10 ,000 employees.

6:41Brian Schulmeister:What you got going on. So maybe he's just using AI as a cover because the crypto market has just tanked and all of his, basically his investment in crypto has just halved in the past couple months.

6:53Jason DeFillippo:Look, I've been wanting to kind of mention this for a while, that Jack Dorsey's kind of gone off our radar recently. He's a horrible CEO. A lot of these guys are. And that's the real problem here. If you think back to Twitter, and if you listen to our show for a long time, you've heard me talk about this forever. At the time, Twitter's market share and mind share was so far above and beyond what they actually were compared to other social media networks. They didn't have the amount of people on them. They didn't have the engagement on them. They didn't have all the features and they weren't even trying to do new features.

7:27Jason DeFillippo:But somehow Twitter was the go to for everybody. It had the right people on it in terms of reporters and celebrities. It had the right lack of features that made it super simple, easy to use. It was used in late night bits. It was on every billboard everywhere was the Twitter handles for things. Yep. How do you fuck that up? And Jack managed because he's a shitty CEO. Any real CEO, anybody that had been trained, had gone to business schools, had put in the work, had known what to do, would have been able to do something with Twitter other than sell it to another shitty CEO.

8:05Brian Schulmeister:Well, you have to remember what Jack started out as. He was just a coder in the back room. He was one of us. And Twitter was a side project. Yeah, he is on the spectrum with the rest of us. He does not belong in the C-suite. I'm sorry. Yeah. So, are we surprised? He doesn't have the narcissist gene for it. I'm not surprised at all.

8:21Jason DeFillippo:Are we surprised that he's not running Blockwell either? Duh. No. He doesn't know what he's doing. No.

8:26Brian Schulmeister:Well, a little more AI news before we actually get to the news, a little more follow-up. Goldman Sachs just threw out some cold water on the AI hype cycle saying all that massive spending on artificial intelligence. I'm stuttering over my words because this is just such a fun story that all the spending on artificial intelligence added basically zero to U.S. GDP growth last year. Those all those gazillions of dollars that were being spread around. It did not meaningfully add to the GDP. yep they spent hundreds of billions of dollars and this year they're saying they're going to spend 700 billion dollars which i call bullshit on there's not 700 billion dollars to go around right now especially with open ai's you know hat in the ring they don't have the money they just don't show me the money show me the money in my mind i just see this graph

9:17Jason DeFillippo:in my it just goes straight up like that and you know what it is it's time you know since we since we were in tech. Yeah. And the bullshit hype over all these stupid fucking technologies that we've dealt with. Push technology. A little bit of hype. Blockchain. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We're going to spend so much money. So much hype. NFTs to the fucking moon. And now, crypto. Oh, my God. Bitcoin. And now we're at fucking AI and people have gone apeshit motherfucking mad. And this is all. We don't want it. We don't need it. It fucking sucks. And it's doing shit for us. except firing people. But it's here to stay.

9:57Jason DeFillippo:I know.

9:58Brian Schulmeister:It's not going anywhere. It's too big to fail now. There's too much money in it.

10:02Jason DeFillippo:Too many billionaires are involved and too much of their money is in it and we're never getting out of this shit.

10:07Brian Schulmeister:The thing is, it's going to be consolidated in the next year or two. Open AI, I think, is going to go the way of the Dodo. They have overextended themselves. Anthropic is probably going to win the business category with Claude. I still fucking hate the name Claude. Hey, my name's Claude. It reminds me of Joe Pesci. And, you know, he's like, you know, they fuck you with the they fuck you with the A.I. They fuck you with the prompt. That's what they do. Yeah. They fuck you with the claw. And, you know, Google's Google's going to win. Absolutely. They are just tearing it up right now. They're swimming money.

10:39Brian Schulmeister:They do. That's the thing. They've got the they've got the money to actually back it up. And they've also got the technical chops. And Meta is going to step on their own dick time and time and time again. That$200 million hire that they just had just left because it sucked at Meta and went to open AI. So he's just bouncing paycheck to paycheck to get all the monies he can. And he'll probably end up at Google. Probably. And what's the playbook?

11:02Jason DeFillippo:It's the Uber playbook. It's the spend the most money to drive everybody else out of business. And if you've got the most money, you're going to win. Yeah.

11:10Brian Schulmeister:And that's what Zuckerberg's planning on. But it didn't really work with the Metaverse. And let's see how it's going to work. This guy has never had an original idea in his fucking life. So why do you think now he's going to like just magically spend his way out of it? He's not. But, you know, he's spreading the money around. So take it while you can get it, I guess. But anyway, let's get back to this. I just want to clear this up here. So, yeah, the popular narrative has been that AI investment is juicing the economy. And even President Donald J. Cheeto has argued that AI is making the U.S. economy the hottest in the world, but that state regulations could choke off that growth.

11:43Brian Schulmeister:Whatever. Some economists backed that up, pointing that big spikes in information processing equipment and software as major contributors to GDP. But, but Goldman's chief economist, Jan Hatsius, says, not so fast, brother. A lot of that AI hardware, especially the advanced chips, are imported. So in U.S. companies by processors from Taiwan or South Korea, that spending shows up in those countries' GDPs, not ours. Ah, but tariffs, Jason, tariffs. Yeah, well, we know how that ended up. Yeah. Yeah, they're going to pay for them. Yeah. And in a survey of nearly 6 ,000 executives, about 70 % said they're using AI, but roughly 80 % of that 70 % reported no meaningful impact on jobs or productivity.

12:25Brian Schulmeister:So way to go, guys. It's just a firing mechanism. That's all AI is.

Read the full transcript

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14:19Jason DeFillippo:Well, let's talk about Sam Altman for a minute, because boy, did he step on his thing.

14:26Brian Schulmeister:Stepped on his orb? Stepped on his orbs?

14:28Jason DeFillippo:at last week's India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. Industry leaders convened to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and how best to squeeze it into the parts of your life you haven't even considered or ever wanted. Also in attendance was OpenAI's Sam Altman, who earned numerous headlines over the course of the event for his words in Antics. He started off by saying the claims about chat GPT consuming 17 gallons of water for each query or whatever are completely untrue, totally insane, and have no connection to reality before qualifying that, okay, maybe it was a valid concern when his company used to do evaporating cooling in data centers.

15:06Jason DeFillippo:Okay, okay. He went on to say that there is a fair concern about the amount of energy data centers eat to crank out the most soulless slop you'll ever see, but suggests that the onus of responsibility for dealing with AI's ravenous appetite falls to the energy sector itself, which Altmanfield needs to move towards nuclear or wind or solar very quickly to give us the power for the shit that nobody wants. great but it gets better doesn't it brian oh it gets better he then stunned the crowd and firmly re-entered the discourse with a mind-blowing truth bomb for those who still felt ai was consuming too much energy it also takes a lot of energy to train a human altman rejoined it takes like 20 years of life and all the food you eat before that time before you get smart and not only that it took like the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever to produce you and then you took whatever you took so if you compare a chat gpt query asking whether you can stick this up your butt or not and the amount of energy required it really isn't that much compared to all of human evolution jason i'm so glad he

16:26Brian Schulmeister:He cleared that up for us, Brian. I am so glad he cleared that up for us.

16:31Jason DeFillippo:Social media quickly took to roasting the remarks as dystopian and deeply antisocial and anti-human. Now, just to go back to him talking about, you know, how all the specific amounts being thrown around the 17 gallons of water for each query or whatever being completely and totally untrue. We have no way of knowing this because there are no regulations in place requiring data centers to disclose their water and energy consumption. Center employees and business partners are typically muzzled by nondisclosure agreements. So even if they wanted to tell us, they can't tell us because of companies like, oh, I don't know, OpenAI.

17:12Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, great. Great. We need whistleblowers. We need whistleblowers. blowers but there's no there's no water left to wet their whistle brian

17:29Brian Schulmeister:oh i'm sure a lot of people don't realize that when you say wet to your whistle it's w-h-e-t

17:34Jason DeFillippo:yes i'm sure they don't but you know if they ask chat gpt they can get the right answer

17:40Brian Schulmeister:exactly it takes 17 gallons to wet my whistle says chat gpt and it's still oh we do seem to

17:46Jason DeFillippo:have spelled that wrong my apologies we'll make sure we note that for the future yep and then they

17:51Brian Schulmeister:go to spell it i spent 17 times on on uh new on not i didn't even get the new nano banana but i spent 17 times trying to get nano banana to create this background today in in uh 1080p 1920 by 1080 and it just kept giving me squares and i kept saying no you're wrong and it's like you're right let me try that again it would just give me the same fucking square over and over and over and over again. So I probably went through 400 gallons of water until I took it into another program and said, here, make it like this.

18:21Jason DeFillippo:This is also useful, though. I mean, it's very useful.

18:24Brian Schulmeister:It is. It is. I'm glad we're banking the entire world economy

18:27Jason DeFillippo:on it. It's fantastic. I'm going to bet my life savings on Kalshi on that AI is going to fucking fail. I wouldn't take that bet.

18:37Brian Schulmeister:I would not take that bet. Anthropic has been in the news this week because of the dust-up with Dario Hamadan I and Pete Hegseth, two people I would definitely not like to be stuck in an elevator with. So Anthropic just told the defense secretary to go pound sand because the Pentagon reportedly demanded the company strip out safeguards, blocking mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, giving them a Friday deadline and threatening to label Anthropic as supply chain risk or even invoke the Defense Production Act.

19:08Jason DeFillippo:By the way, I just want to stop for one second to point this out. The only two things that Anthropik said you cannot do, mass domestic surveillance in the United States, which is mass domestic surveillance in the United States. You can't do that. And fully autonomous weaponry. That's it. That's all we're saying. Anything else is fair game. Everything else is fair game. Whatever else you want to do, fine. But we have our limits. And those two, which are pretty fucking extreme, we're saying no to. And that's a no go for Kegsmith.

19:45Brian Schulmeister:Yep. So they and even this week, Anthropic has decided to, like, pull back some of their safeguards. And they're just like, yeah, we were a little over heavy handed. You know, we're the safety A.I. company, but we don't need to be that safe if you know what I'm saying. Oh, so, yeah, they put out a press release last night. Dario Amadei put it out saying that, yeah, we're not going to do that. We're going to stick to our guns. And and by the way, Pete, Pete Kegstand, you are contradicting yourself by saying that we are. Are we are we integral to U.S. security or are we, you know, a threat to U.S.

20:19Brian Schulmeister:security? You can't have both. They're contradicting statements that you're making. So what the fuck, dude? Yeah. But, you know, at least I would say good for Anthropik to sticking to their guns, even though I think this is just a fucking PR maneuver. Yeah.

20:33Jason DeFillippo:Well, Kegstand sat there for a few seconds, stroked his chin. Then he lifted about 800 pounds or some bullshit and then drank some milk in a hot tub with Kid Rock. And then once he got out of that, he, oh, that was the other asshole. Sorry. That's the other guy.

20:49Brian Schulmeister:And they ate a dead whale and it was strapped to their car.

20:53Jason DeFillippo:Well, he thought for a couple seconds, which really exhausted him because he's not used to it, and wondered, well, what AI company would be willing to do whatever the fuck? Because they have no scruples whatsoever, and they landed quickly on GROC. Of course. So the U.S. Department of Defense has reportedly reached a deal to use Elon Musk's GROC in its classified systems. Yeah. According to Axios, that follows news that the Pentagon is—well, yeah, all the other stuff that we just talked about. So last year, they ordered Grok along with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropics Claw to be approved for government use.

21:27Jason DeFillippo:Up until now, it's only been Anthropic. But since they've had this kerfuffle, they are turning to Grok, which should be great because.

21:36Brian Schulmeister:Wait, you said the Department of Defense in here. And I think there's a lot of people that are contradicting each other right now in the news. Yes, there are. Because it's the Department of War now, isn't it? Hasn't it been relabeled, the Department of War?

21:49Jason DeFillippo:Well, yes, it's been relabeled in that they put up a sign for a photo op.

21:53Brian Schulmeister:Okay.

21:54Jason DeFillippo:But then they realized that changing the letterhead was going to be too expensive. And then there's all those business cards.

21:59Brian Schulmeister:The business cards haven't arrived. Yeah. I mean, who needs it?

22:03Jason DeFillippo:Like, we told everybody it's the Department of War. That's good enough, right?

22:06Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. We took the picture. Yeah, the Gulf of America, Department of War.

22:10Jason DeFillippo:Yes, yes, yes. And we would put Trump in front of everything temporarily for their picture, and then we'd take it down. It's fine.

22:17Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Well, let's move on to some more more shitty news. At least 30 cities have dumped Flock Safety, the AI surveillance company that wants to end crime by carpeting America with license plate readers since the start of 2025. Activists organized through the open source site D-Flock have been pressuring local governments to pull the plug and it's working in places like Flagstaff, Eugene and Santa Cruz. Flock's network is part of a larger web. Don't forget Winona. Sorry, I just went Route 66 in my mind because of the Flagstaff. I was just thinking Lockhead up in, Chris Lockhead up in Santa Cruz driving his Mustang going, get these fucking cameras out of my goddamn city.

22:54Brian Schulmeister:I don't know.

22:54Jason DeFillippo:Doesn't he want them? I think he went in that direction. I don't know.

22:58Brian Schulmeister:Blocks Network is part of a larger web of more than 77 ,000 AI-powered plate readers logging where you drive and when. Supporters call it public safety, but critics call it a rolling location tracker that's already led to wrongful arrests, racial profiling, and cops treating glitchy AI hits as probable cause. Don't forget tracking people who are leaving Texas to go get abortions in other states. and other states that are doing that stuff. So, yeah, that's so, you know, people are starting to dump those, but it gets better. Across the country, Phlox, AI-powered license plate readers and surveillance cameras are getting wrecked.

23:30Brian Schulmeister:Once locations leak, they're reportedly torn down, smashed or cut off poles, sometimes with calling cards left behind. Probably not the smartest thing to do when you're actually destroying somebody's property. Just saying. Unless it's the army of the 12 monkeys. Then you can leave your calling card. Cops in places like Louisville are now keeping camera locations secret because as soon as they go public, the hardware disappears. You'd think that these are network-attached cameras. They would have a way to figure out who took them down, but maybe they can only read license plates and not faces. I don't know.

24:02Brian Schulmeister:From Oregon to Virginia to California, it's open season on the solar-powered snitch boxes. Flock, backed by$275 million from, wait for it, our favorite people on the world, Andreessen Horowitz. Shocking. Yeah, no shit. pitches its networked cameras, gunshot detectors, and even drone as first responder tech as crime-killing infrastructure. Those gunshot detectors have been just lambasted here in L.A. They put them all over the place, and none of them work. None of them work. CEO Garrett Langley has suggested widespread deployment could basically eliminate crime in America. Not white-collar crime, you fucker.

24:39Brian Schulmeister:We reported last week that the Ring Partnership actually imploded after the public backlash, so that has been taken down as well.

24:46Jason DeFillippo:All right. Well, let's double back around to AI and how it's going to save us all. And we're all investing so much money in it. And, you know, we're trusting the highest levels of government to put AI into everything now. And they're going to do all that. And of course, you know, let's look at one of the better ones, Google. Google sent out an AI-generated news alert that included the N-word, according to reporting by deadline. Yes, it was a push notification that featured a link to the story by The Hollywood Reporter regarding an incident at the recent BAFTA Film Awards that involved somebody with Tourette's that was in the back and said some things he wasn't supposed to say.

25:22Jason DeFillippo:And bafflingly, it was not removed from the broadcast, even though they had a 12-minute delay on it. So somebody could explain that as well. Must have been an AI editor. I don't know. But yeah, so then Google's AI just took that headline and sent out a push alert with the N-word. I got it from here, guys.

25:40Brian Schulmeister:Let me take it. I got it.

25:42Jason DeFillippo:Google has since apologized and said that it has removed the offensive notification. A bit late. It's everywhere. And is working to prevent this from happening again. Here's a thought, a human editor. Or just a word filter list. A word filter list. We built those into our chatbots. We built those into our message boards. It's not that hard.

26:05Brian Schulmeister:I wrote that shit in Perl in 1994. I think you can figure it out. Obviously not. Maybe they need to use Claude code to work up the code for their.

26:17Jason DeFillippo:They've got a network 750 Mac minis to be able to do a fucking ban list for words. Oh, God.

26:29Brian Schulmeister:Well, let's get back to some more fun news. Prediction Market Cal, she just booted a California political candidate and a YouTuber over insider trading, giving us a peek at how this whole betting on the future thing is actually policed. In one case, a former gubernatorial candidate alleged. I like saying gubernatorial. Sounds like you're on The Muppet Show. I know. Gubernatorial. A candidate allegedly placed trades on his own race. Cal, she froze the account, slapped on a five year ban and fined him 10 times the trade amount and reported it to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. the government agency that oversees prediction markets.

27:05Brian Schulmeister:They oversee it. They don't do anything about it. I'm sure. Yeah. So in another case, though, an editor named Artem Captur for Mr. Beast's YouTube channel was nagged after he placed about$4 ,000 in bets and was flagged for statistically suspicious winning streaks. He was fined over$20 ,000, banned for two years and reported to the CFTC. Now, do the fines really count? And are they legally enforceable, Brian?

27:31Jason DeFillippo:fuck fuck if i know who knows i don't know none of this shit seems legal to me but here we are

27:39Brian Schulmeister:yeah and it's funny too uh when i first put this article in here they weren't naming the the editor from youtube they they kept the name under wraps but i guess somebody figured it out and found out it was one of mr beast's guys and i'm thinking four thousand dollars in bets you work for mr beast That's like, you know, I've seen how much money that guy gives away on the on the on the daily. I just watched the ending of Beast Games. You know, in one episode he gave away over six million dollars. So come on. I'd ask for a raise and stop nickel and dime in your way out of it.

28:11Jason DeFillippo:Well, the thing is, though, Jason, a lot of people are actually addicted to gambling, which is why this is a real fucking problem.

28:18Brian Schulmeister:It's a problem. That's right. I forgot. Yeah, there's that. So silly old me. Yeah. Well, speaking of unscrupulous insiders, let's just keep the party going. A popular pro-Trump ex-account called Johnny Maga, with nearly 300 ,000 followers, I don't know how many are humans, but who knows, appears to be run by a current White House staffer, according to reporting from Wired. The account has been amplifying official administration messages, including posts defending ICE actions and boosting a racist AI video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, calling it a masterpiece. Peace. Public records link the account to Garrett Wade, a rapid response manager at the White House who helps run the same official feeds his anonymous account promotes.

29:02Brian Schulmeister:Well, the connection reportedly includes a shared phone number and confirmation from a source close to the White House. So if accurate, that means a government staffer may be moonlighting as an independent MAGA influencer, blurring the line between official communications and what looks like grassroots supports. So let's add Garrett's name to the ever expanding list of shitbags to revisit when the walls come down.

29:23Jason DeFillippo:I'm just going to say on the scale of things that is coming out of the White House that that's illegal. This is fucking chicken shit feed.

29:30Brian Schulmeister:Tempest in a teapot on this one. This is the fucking president's doing this shit. Yeah. Anyways, but at least we know we at least we have the name of one of the guys who's probably behind some of that AI shit. He probably made the Michelle and Barack Obama masterpiece. Because we've been trying to figure out who that guy is, a girl that is running that shit. So I think we have we have a lead.

29:51Jason DeFillippo:We have a lead, people. All right. Well, a common theme in online age verification laws is the tension between user privacy and preventing children from accessing harmful or inappropriate content. We have been following this story as people are trying to figure out how to do it. Since laws are being passed about it, regulations are going out everywhere. The UK is now sending a not-so-subtle message to Reddit on the subject to the tune of£14.5 million, or almost$20 million. The nation's Information Commissioner's Office, or the ICO, has accused the company of using children's data and potentially exposing them to inappropriate content.

30:29Jason DeFillippo:Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways that they could not understand, consent to, or control, they wrote in a statement, which left them potentially exposed to content they should not have seen aka all of reddit this is unacceptable and has resulted in today's fine uh in july of 2025 reddit began requiring age verification to access adult content in the uk in compliance with the online safety act however that's only used to block under 18 users from sexually explicit violent or other mature posts the platform also prohibits users under 13 from accessing it altogether and enforcement of that policy is unsurprisingly lax.

31:07Jason DeFillippo:It merely requires users to declare when signing up that they are over 13. That's it. Yeah, that's it. That's legally binding, right? Yeah. The ICO described the method as easy to bypass. You think? Check. Well, we talked about Discord's attempts at age verification as well, that earlier this month they said they would be enacting an age verification policy. the platform faced some initial concerns from users about turning over their ids and personal information particularly given how poorly similar policies have been going elsewhere as well as with some of the companies that discord was planning on using which were promptly hacked yeah data was everywhere see the last two episodes of this show for more information on those yes today or i guess about two days ago now discord announced that it will delay this uh this uh oncoming thing and make some changes to its plans in response to the ongoing backlash The first change is that Discord is postponing global rollout of age verification plans until the second half of 2026.

32:06Jason DeFillippo:The second bit being they have to figure out what the fuck their age verification plans are going to be. Yep. They are going to offer alternatives to how users can confirm ages, including verification by credit card. Again, not necessarily something I'm going to give Discord, unless I know how they're storing it. This should allow people to access age-gated content without sharing an ID or performing a face scan. The company is also promising more transparency about its vendors, since some of the vendors are already screwed up. They said they will not work with any partners for face scans unless the tests are performed completely on device.

32:38Jason DeFillippo:And they are building a new spoiler channel option so that servers with select age-restricted channels won't have to require all members to verify their ages. So we'll see what happens, but they're buying themselves some time to roll this out. Now, what we have always been saying is that perhaps this could be device-based. Yes. Let's go on. Let's let Apple handle it. Say, I don't know. Well, Apple has started blocking users under 18 in certain regions from downloading apps. The company has introduced new age verification tools. Those will help developers meet their age assurance obligations under upcoming U.S.

33:12Jason DeFillippo:and regional laws, including in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah, and Louisiana. The company sent a news release on its developer site. That's where the laws are being passed, Jason. That's why.

33:24Brian Schulmeister:Brazil, Utah, and Louisiana walk into a bar. Are you over 21, says your phone? It's so fucking weird.

33:31Jason DeFillippo:So, yeah, I mean, Apple's rolling something out. The App Store can perform those checks automatically. Developers may have separate obligations to independently confirm that their users are adults, Apple wrote. So they're dipping their toes in but not saying where the end all be all yet. But, look, it's going to go that way. I think we all know that. So Apple's gearing up to do age verification.

33:51Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. So that's on device. What about your home computer, though? You know, that comes down to that.

33:56Jason DeFillippo:We're already got two FA, right? You got to get your phone out half the time to log into stuff. So what do you do if you don't have a phone? You're fucked. I mean, I guess you can't get your porn. I don't know what to tell you, people.

34:10Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, you got to go to the titty bar like the old days.

34:12Jason DeFillippo:But we're already doing two FA. So the idea that you have to have a phone, oh, no, I can't get on through the website. Tough shit, right?

34:18Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. And I was thinking about Discord, too. You said you would never give Discord your credit card. But a lot of people already do give Discord their credit card because they buy orbs and whatever the crap, you know, the boosty stuff and, you know, all that crap. Yeah, that's true. So there's a lot of people that have that. But a lot of kids also have used their parents' credit card. So, yeah. It's a tough one. It's a slippery slope, Brian. It's a slippery slope.

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36:36Brian Schulmeister:Media Candy. Well, Brian, Netflix has officially bowed out of the bidding war for Warner Brothers, clearing the way for Paramount Skydance and setting off a fresh round of merger anxiety across Hollywood. Oh, man.

36:52Brian Schulmeister:I got a giant bit of copy here that I was originally going to read. And I'm just going to say that this sucks because I didn't want Netflix to buy Paramount. and I sure as shit didn't want... You mean Warner. Warner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Warner. I didn't want Netflix to buy Warner. I didn't want Paramount to buy Warner. I didn't want anybody to buy Warner. I wanted somebody to take David Zaslav out back and shoot him in the face and then so everybody can get back to work instead of all of these business bros screwing up everybody's livelihood in this town. And now that the deal has been inked, as it were, we got to still wait for a regulatory approval, which is a joke.

37:30Brian Schulmeister:This is just... Well, everybody is patting David Zaslav on the back. He's like, you got$30 or$31 per share when it was worth seven before. And, you know, yay. All the shareholders are happy. All of the business people are happy. The C-suite people are happy. You know who's not happy? Everybody that makes entertainment in this fucking town. That's who's not happy.

37:49Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. I mean, it's not good any way around. You don't want to see consolidations of industries. That's just what we're going to start seeing more and more of. uh netflix this is a win uh because they're way overpaying for uh for discovery uh way way over paying for it for warner brothers and everything so netflix is not spending that money now they also get a couple billion dollars i think for the deal falling through 2.8 2.8 billion dollars

38:14Brian Schulmeister:that paramount has to pay too so suck it larry and so larry and son it's an absolute win for

38:19Jason DeFillippo:netflix uh their stock is probably going to go up which fine uh it's it's a win for uh zaslov unfortunately uh horrible another horrible ceo but he he played the game enough to get vast overbids for it and again you know the shareholders win there um it's a it's a massive uh win for for trump you know he's got the regulatory approval is going to sail through because those are his guys that over at paramount skydance so of course there's this is going to sail through and quick you know right wing another big right wing run company so you know a loss for speech there. We're going to, I'm CNN's dead, dead in the water now.

38:59Jason DeFillippo:I mean, it was kind of crap anyways. It's been going bad for a long time. But anyway, you know, just on a personal note, like the amount of debt that the Paramount Warner combined companies have, Star Trek's dead. They're not going to spend any money on Star Trek. We're not going to get feature films anymore. We'll be lucky to get a series or two out of this. I don't know how this company is going to survived. They're so in debt. It's unbelievable. I think it's all going to come crashing down. Or they're just going to start generating AI slop and hope for the best. I don't see anything else coming out of this.

39:34Brian Schulmeister:That's the downside. And just so many people are going to lose their jobs here in Hollywood with the consolidation. I mean, and everybody's been holding their breath waiting to see what happens. And I'm sure people were just in tears yesterday when they found out it was going to be Paramount. And, you know, I mean, I worked at Paramount back in the day and it was my favorite place in the world I've ever worked. And it just, it pains me. It saddens me so much now that this is what's happened to it. And yeah, and Star Trek, Star Trek's hosed, so hosed. Absolutely hosed. Which is sad too, because I was starting to finally get into Starfleet Academy.

40:07Brian Schulmeister:I thought last night was the best episode that they've had so far this season and reminded me the most of old school next gen Star Trek. I felt that this episode had the tones. It had the beats. It had the feels. It had everything. I think that one hit on all cylinders. And I had to go check to make sure it wasn't the finale. I even didn't mind Tilly. And I hated her on Discovery. I saw her walk on set and I was just like, oh, you got to be shitting me. And then she walked on and she fucking ate it up. She ate it up. She was fantastic.

40:38Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

40:38Brian Schulmeister:It was a good episode.

40:39Jason DeFillippo:I enjoyed it.

40:40Brian Schulmeister:Yep. Bob Picardo fucking nailed it. Everybody. I thought it was great across the board. But yeah, there's two more episodes for this season. And that'll be it. And it's probably the last we're going to see.

40:51Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, we'll see about that. So upon your recommendation, I started to watch and I finished the entire season of A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. It doesn't take much. It's not that long. No, which is what I loved about it. I love the fact that they were 20, 30 minute episodes. I guess it was more 30, 40. Let's be real. But yeah, it was great. I'm going to not spoil this because I recognize that there are a lot of, you know, we live in a different age now where not everybody watches everything right when it first comes out. It's also set in Westeros. And a lot of people like me coming off the end of Game of Thrones went, fuck that shit.

41:28Jason DeFillippo:I'm never watching any of that stuff ever again. Me too. That was me. That was me. I watched the first episode of that dragon, rising dragon or whatever. And I was like, I'm out. Don't care. I heard about this and I was like, I'm out. don't care not even gonna watch the first episode until you told me to i loved this show yeah i highly recommend that people watch this show especially the first couple episodes because they were whimsical they were funny they weren't dark and heavy and it wasn't there were no heavy big stakes nothing it was just some random people living and it was awesome but it being a game of throne's property it had to get fucking weird and heavy real quick yeah it did and boy did it but i still think that they pulled it off and uh you know i thought it was really good and a little bit of a spoiler here i love the fact that they teased the next season with the night of the nine kingdoms because there's actually nine kingdoms not seven and then i just started thinking about mel brooks in history of the world i present to you these seven nine nine kingdoms

42:38Brian Schulmeister:yeah so uh huge shout out to our friend brian blondel for this one because i wasn't going to watch it either but he insisted he said it was really really good and i'm like okay i'll watch the first one and i as soon as i watched the first one i was hooked yeah i was just like i loved it

42:51Jason DeFillippo:the casting is phenomenal like it was like the dunk is great just great like loved it i loved it

42:59Brian Schulmeister:so good so good uh what wasn't so good was the night agent season three uh the night agent season two was so terrible that i was just like oh do i have to really watch season three and there was nothing on this week so it was like it was like a weekend we had nothing nothing in the queue or the can and we're like okay we'll give it a shot we just knocked it out last weekend and uh the last one on monday and uh it was really not very good uh and the numbers show it everybody bailed after season two because season two was so terrible it got like it It was down like, you know, massive amounts from the premiere from the last season.

43:34Brian Schulmeister:The first season was actually terrible, too. But it came at a time when, you know, we were in a, you know, just a drought of content. So I think I will. If you haven't seen it, skip it. If you have seen it, you know what I'm talking about. So, OK, and here's here's this comes from the Dear God Why Files. But then I finally got to the point where I'm like, OK, maybe director Adam Wingard has bailed on the long gestating sequel. He was co-writing with Simon Barrett with no explanation beyond moving on. And we're talking about here Face Off 2. Face Off 2. They switch faces back. This time, they switch again.

44:14Brian Schulmeister:They go back to where it was, but they also bring their family members to switch faces too. So they're now grown children swap faces along with them. But I don't know. They could be fun. I mean, come on. The only thing that gets me is bring John Woo back because he made that movie. I mean, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Face Off. I worked on that movie. I met John Woo on that movie. And it was just I got a soft spot for it. That's why I'm like, don't do another one. Don't do another one. But if you are going to do it, just go find John Woo. I don't think he's doing much these days.

44:54Jason DeFillippo:Well, coming from the exact same place, dear God, why? and then okay well maybe uh we've been talking about this for a bit but hulu has officially greenlit a pilot of uh ryan coogler's x-files reboot a project three year in the making okay don't know how i feel about this if you don't know ryan coogler he uh had 16 oscar nominations for sinners including best original screenplay and best picture he also wrote and directed creed black panther and black panther wakanda forever as you can guess there might be some african-american people playing the main characters in this reboot yes so absolutely yeah so uh maybe i don't know x files is something i feel so complicated about anyways because i so dearly loved it and they so dearly botched it all up at the end and made me not care about it as much as i probably should i probably remember it a lot more fondly than it than it is actually good so yeah it's terrible so don't go back and re-watch it it's terrible yeah so from the dear god why but okay maybe here we are again have you seen sinners yet i have it's phenomenal

46:02Brian Schulmeister:oh so good that's really so fucking good yeah and everything else kind of why i'm like okay maybe yeah yeah i mean he's awesome so you know if anybody it's in good hands it's in good hands you know we'll see the smoking man better be smoking blunts that's all i gotta say it's snoop oh god if they don't cast him oh that would be fucking awesome oh well we finally got the official the final official trailer for mortal combat 2 which comes out may 8th i am so in for this movie uh this will probably be the last thing that warner brothers ever does that's good so even that's debatable yeah i'm definitely not going to see mortal combat 3 but the first mortal combat the first in this series was amazing they did it justice they did the whole story justice and you know coming from a mortal combat super fan spending years of my life playing mortal combat 2 and 1 2 and 3 not so much 1 but i started with 2 and i had a mortal combat 2 and 3 in my house for years so i i this this also has a soft spot in my heart, you know?

47:10Brian Schulmeister:I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. And Johnny Cage, I can't wait. You know, there better be a goddamn good Scorpion-Johnny Cage fight in there because that is the best pair-up in the actual game itself. So, we'll see. And in your neck of the woods, Brian, Google just acquired Producer AI and plans to plug it into its Lyra 3 music model under Google Labs, letting anyone type make it a lo-fi beat and spit out fully formed tracks in minutes. You can prompt the lyrics, instruments, vibe, and basically outsource the entire creative process and google says it's about enhancing human artistry the same way an ai filmmaker enhances cinema well reports of the early demos come back that it's yeah fucking generic shocking shocking yeah uh i tried to listen to the dropping names and other

47:57Jason DeFillippo:things podcast this is the jonathan franks and brent spiner we're not going to talk about just star trek okay maybe we're going to talk about a lot of star trek okay i guess if we don't talk about Star Trek. Nobody's going to listen to this podcast. Yeah. I've listened to the first episode with LeVar Burton. It was all right. They had a gimmick where they rang a bell every time they dropped a name. And as you can guess, that got tiresome within about 20 seconds. Yeah. And I don't know if I'm going to go back and listen anymore. It was fine.

48:26Brian Schulmeister:So when you put this in here, I went and clicked on it and the latest episode is with Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk from the Once We Were Spacemen podcast, also Firefly and everything else under the sun. And so I started to listen to it. And I got to say, the audio quality threw me off. It's not great. It's bad. It's bad.

48:43Jason DeFillippo:They are obviously just like literally sitting around a table with maybe a, what were those mics called? The fucking Blue Yetis. The Blue Yeti right in the center of the table. Yeah.

48:52Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. It's really, you know, disconcerting how bad it is for that level of quality. Now, if you go to the Once We Were Spacemen podcast, which I think I pimped a couple of weeks ago on the show, with Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk, that show is top-notch quality. I mean, absolutely top-notch. They're both voice actors, so they have home studios. It sounds amazing. The people who produce the show is Nathan Fillion's production company, so right there you got something good behind it. And they actually did, in their last episode, they did a name-drop thing too, which is actually pretty fun. They did a funnier take on it than ringing a bell.

49:27Brian Schulmeister:They have a little bit, and it was actually entertaining. I highly recommend Once We Were Spaceman, the podcast. That one I listen to all the time. But yeah, I don't think dropping names, I don't think that's got legs at all. Ups and doodads.

49:43Jason DeFillippo:Well, OpenAI is reportedly hard at work developing a series of AI-powered devices, including smart glasses, a smart speaker, and a smart lamp. All of them will use more power than the entirety of human evolution up until now. God, that asshole. According to reporting by The Information, the AI company has a team of over 200 employees dedicated to the project. Why do they need employees? Can't they just have the AI make the AI? Dude, they've got Johnny Ive. What are you talking about? Johnny AIve. The first project scheduled to be released is reported to be a smart speaker that would include a camera, allowing it to better absorb information about its users and surroundings.

50:20Jason DeFillippo:No. I wonder if anybody had thought of that before. Oh, I only have 20 in my house already, and I've had them for almost a decade. Wow, how groundbreaking, guys. Yeah. Never would have thought of that one. According to a person familiar with the project, this would extend to identifying objects on a nearby table. Hey, is that a fucking pencil? How many gallons of water do we use for that? Jesus Christ. The camera will support facial recognition features similar to what other people have already. Okay.

50:52Brian Schulmeister:Okay, so we're not really breaking new ground here is what you're saying?

50:54Jason DeFillippo:No, and they're going to do some powered smart glasses, you know, like Meta has and other people as well. Oh, but the lamp. Nobody has a smart lamp yet. Nobody thought of the lamp. We can put AI into a smart fucking lamp.

51:11Brian Schulmeister:How much ketamine did they have to take before they figured out, dude, we put it in the lamp. Reportedly, it may be a lava lamp. I would buy that. That would be cool. Oh, man. You know what, though? I'm not saying that these guys are the right guys to do it. I'm not saying that meta is the right people to do that. This type of technology where you can have glasses on that tell you what's around you, guess who it's good for? The blind. Blind people. The blind. Exactly.

51:42Jason DeFillippo:But why do we need that when we've got Elon's company that kills monkeys that puts things directly into your brain? Oh, that's right. That's coming too. Never mind. Okay, we don't need this stuff.

51:53Brian Schulmeister:Wait, can we put a lamp into our brains directly? So when you get an idea, it literally lights up above your head.

52:03Jason DeFillippo:unfortunately my brain is the lava lamp it's just globs exactly if you leave it on too long it explodes

52:11Brian Schulmeister:oh well we got some new instagram news instagram says it'll start notifying parents if their teens repeatedly search for suicide or self-harm related terms rolling out the us uk australia and canada in the coming weeks repeatedly you can if you search for it once you're you're off the hook

52:26Jason DeFillippo:Up to five times I can contemplate suicide before it pings my dad.

52:31Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, great. It says the app already blocks that content and pushes helplines, but now it'll ping mom and dad too, assuming both accounts have supervision turned on. The move lands as meta fights lawsuits over addicting kids and failing to protect them, while regulators in places like the UK and Australia tighten the screws with age checks and outright bans. Instagram says it worked with experts to avoid alert spam. Okay. Hold on a second.

52:54Jason DeFillippo:Did the experts mention to the people at Instagram that perhaps they don't use Instagram to search? Maybe they're going to Google or going into ChatGPT.

53:06Brian Schulmeister:ChatGPT nowadays to search. Just saying. Just saying. Okay.

53:10Jason DeFillippo:Remember the good old days when we had Dark Sky, the weather app that mostly worked even in Southern California when I was right along the beach?

53:17Brian Schulmeister:I miss it. I miss it. It did not work in San Francisco that much. But if you were inland, it did. If you were on the beach, you're fucked.

53:23Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. But yeah. So Apple acquired them in 2020 and basically killed them off by 2022 and integrated much of its tech into its native iOS weather app, although you wouldn't know it because it still works like crap. It sucks. And never as good as Dark Sky ever did. But they're back. The Dark Sky people, the team behind it, have a new iPhone app called Acme Weather, named straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

53:46Brian Schulmeister:What if they had to pay David Zaslav any money for that?

53:49Jason DeFillippo:It is not free. you get a one week free trial so i downloaded it to give it a go but it's 20 bucks a year after that uh or no 25 a year sorry there's an ios version now an android version is forthcoming uh it is not pretty like dark sky was very pretty yeah that was it that was what made dark sky dark sky which is why acme weather is not that interesting to me and i will not be paying 25 i have already canceled the subscription that starts automatically when you download it i mean It gives you the seven day trial or seven day trial. And I will be removing it from my phone. And it's just I didn't see much of a difference.

54:24Jason DeFillippo:What they're trying to do is they're they're trying to basically consolidate all the different weather forecasts from different sources and give you a prediction. It's a prediction market for weather, except you can't bet on it. That's coming soon, probably.

54:37Brian Schulmeister:Probably, probably. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting idea. I pay twenty five dollars a year for carrot weather already, so I'm not going to spend another twenty five for another weather app. Carrot does exactly what I need it to do, and it lets me pick which leather, like leather. The leather stations are in the Castro. Now, the weather stations, like local weather stations, I can pick which one's like near to my house that actually gives me up-to-the-date closer weather. It's really good. They just integrated the weather channel data this week, too, and did some other new stuff. Highly recommend Carrot Weather.

55:07Brian Schulmeister:It works great for me. Cool. Yeah, and it's snarky and it's funny, and, you know, it's like a one-guy show, too. So I always like to help single parent developers, I guess.

55:21Brian Schulmeister:Oh, back to the smart glasses. A hobbyist just dropped an Android app that alerts you if someone nearby might be wearing smart glasses like Meta's Ray-Bans, which we've seen all over mainstream media this week. I just want to talk about it a little bit because the mainstream media gets a shit ton of it wrong. It scans for specific Bluetooth signatures tied to Meta, Luxottica, and Snap and throws up a notification. if it detects what looks like a pear. With reports that Meta is exploring facial recognition features for its glasses, the developer calls this a small act of resistance against creeping surveillance.

55:51Brian Schulmeister:So it's not perfect. It still fucks up every now and again. But, you know, it's a start. It's an interesting way. Like, it's a good proof of concept, I think. So we'll see how that pans out. But, yeah, this shit was all over the news this week. I hope they call it a glass holes.

56:10the dark side with dave

56:17Brian Schulmeister:welcome to the dark side with dave with podcaster who never stops sleeping that didn't come out right because i can't read today hi dave bittner how are you today oh it just you just woke me up

56:28Jason DeFillippo:I know. There you go. Sleeping through life. Sleepy Dave. Sleepy Dave. Sleepy Dave. Yeah. Snoozing and snoring. Absolutely. I don't know why you'd listen to that guy's podcast. Sleepy Dave. There you go. Yeah. That's me.

56:44Brian Schulmeister:Flubs aside, how are you doing today, Dave? Hanging in there.

56:48Jason DeFillippo:We'll get to that. Excellent. Okay. We'll get to that. I'll bring us in then. Dave, you are the person that introduced me to the Strong Songs podcast by Kirk Hamilton, which I enjoy. I listen to it religiously. And I, every time an episode comes out, I listen to it right away. This last weekend, he released a new episode and I was taking my kid to his swim class where I basically just walk in minus 30 degree weather to get to a 90 degree humid pool and sit there with the same clothes on for 45 minutes. Yeah.

57:25Jason DeFillippo:But it's always a good time to listen to a podcast, particularly one of about that length. So I started the latest episode of Strong Songs, Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. I did not expect to be openly weeping at my kids' swim practice, but I did find myself doing so. This is one of the best episodes he's ever done. First off, of course, it's a great song anyways, but when he breaks it down and relates it to everything that we're kind of dealing with right now as people in the society. Wow. It's the terror of knowing what this world's all about. You mean that part? Boy, it hits. It hit hard.

58:08Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, I'm with you. And I listened to it the past couple days on my way into work, and one of my colleagues here, the person who heads up our editing team, came into my office and he was like, did you hear the new strong songs under pressure? Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. But yeah, to your point about Kirk Hamilton's call out about the relevance of this song to modern listeners, it really got me thinking about my emotional capacity um and it's kind of related to remember last week i i shared that uh dead grandma video yes which is thank you for that i had almost forgotten about it yes that was oh my

59:02Brian Schulmeister:god i watched that after the show and i was just like oh that's i don't have kids and i was just

59:07Jason DeFillippo:like oh yeah so it's a sentence i never thought i'd utter you know after last week's show with the dead grandma video. But it got me thinking about how, in general, I don't like horror movies. I particularly don't like things with jump scares because, as I've shared many times, I have a hair-trigger startle reflex, and it is just unpleasant for me. So because of that, I avoid certain types of movies. But what listening to strong songs made me realize is that how much I've been protecting myself because of the amount of things that require emotional energy that are being forced upon me and us, that we have no choice but to deal with, that I'm limiting my exposure to other things that maybe during different times I would try out.

1:00:11Jason DeFillippo:You know, like my son would say, oh, I really think you should see this movie. And I'm like, is it scary? He's like, yeah. I'm like, no, I'm good. I'm out. Yeah. I'm awful. I'm scared enough. Right, right. And I just don't. I read the news. So I don't have the capacity for like that pleasurable expenditures of that kind of emotional energy because I feel so drained just from the day to day, everyday things that we're being bombarded with. Does that make sense? That makes complete sense. Yes, it does. Because my relation to that is actually through what I listen, the music I'm listening to. Because I tend to enjoy either extremely sad, you know, Think the Cure, Depeche Mode, or extremely angry, Nine Inch Nails, Hard Industrial.

1:01:00Jason DeFillippo:That's my, like, default setting for music. I like that stuff. I like the way it makes me feel. I can't fucking listen to it right now. I just can't. I'm already too depressed and too angry to listen to depressing and angry music. I find myself having to listen to just like fucking bubblegum bullshit because. Show tunes, my friend. Show tunes. I'm listening to the shit you guys listen to. Right, right. And I fucking hate it, but it's all I can do right now. Because literally, like, I'm already too deep into those emotions that I can't do what I would normally pleasurably listen to that sits in those emotional contexts.

1:01:45Jason DeFillippo:Right.

1:01:45Brian Schulmeister:Brian's going to come in next week singing the theme to Carousel.

1:01:50Jason DeFillippo:Dude, it's so fucking bad I'm listening to Casey and the fucking Sunshine Band. Oh, yeah. Oh, jeez. Get down tonight. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's nothing shameful. Well, I think there's nothing shameful. You probably do. In those kinds of guilty pleasures of empty calories of music, you know, sometimes I just need to turn on and crank up safety dance, you know. No, look, I like that stuff as well, you know. Give me a good 80s synth pop playlist, you know. Right. That's all happy and bouncy. Right. But my point being like, that's all I can listen to right now because I can't listen to anything darker or heavier.

1:02:33Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, to that point, like there have been times in my life when I relied on certain types of media to help enable an emotional release when I needed one. And it feels like I'm talking about porn, but I'm not. um that's if you would have struck the emotional release from that statement i would have been concerned no um like sometimes if i felt just pent up and like i need a good cry you know like there was like a scene sounds like porn yeah i know scenes from um saving private ryan right you know like just like oh just and it's not it's it's weeping it's like you were saying it's weeping It's not crying because you're sad.

1:03:17Jason DeFillippo:It's weeping because there's no alternative emotional release. And sometimes that can be healthy to do. And as men, we tend not to do that. So anyway. Yeah, completely save it for being beside a pool in the middle of a swim lesson. Right, right. That's when men cry. That's what I hear. All the moms are sitting around like. You're looking at me like, who the fuck is this guy? Who's that guy in the long black trench coat? Watching kids in bathing suits. We're in the boots, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so I guess it's good to be self-aware of these things, but I throw it on the pile of things that makes me sad for the time that we're in and hopeful that I have enough time left that this too shall pass and perhaps we'll have happier days like we've had in the past where I don't think about some of the things that I think about every day because they're just being taken care of and handled.

1:04:25Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's move along.

1:04:33Jason DeFillippo:On a completely different level, Matthew wrote in, this video explains the lore of Coruscant. It's pretty cool. And there's a YouTube link, which will be in the show notes. I watched about the first 25 seconds of this, and then even my super geeky brain tuned out. So, yeah. Yeah. I skimmed through it, and it's cool. It is, if you want to take a deep, deep, deep dive into Star Wars planet nerdiness, here's your chance. It is well-researched and pretty complete. So, that's fun. um yeah it reminded me of um uh there's a robot chicken uh joke it's like a throwaway joke on robot chicken about planets that have a single biome like the ice planet hoff and desert planet tatooine and they went to a water planet and there's a city planet like uh and wondering if because you know earth has many biomes so why would an entire planet be a biome so anyway needless to say there's lots of conversation online about whether or not this is possible whether earth is the outlier with our multiple biomes and uh so if you want to dig into that but um i couldn't find the robot chicken clip but i'm pretty sure it's just a little throwaway thing you know in between the static right

1:05:59Brian Schulmeister:yeah i watched it and i was in at the end of it when i was scrubbing through she got into fractals and how Coruscant was kind of laid out using fractal geometry. And it just really reminded me of KPT Fractal Explorer, the KAIS Power Tools Fractal Explorer back in the day. So I just had to go find a link. There's a link in the show notes where you can see the old interface. If you used to use it, it brings back a little bit of the feels. Oh, yeah. Definitely.

1:06:22Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, what a wild interface that was and playful back in the day. It also reminded me of KPT Bryce, which was a landscape generator. Yep. Oh, I have an anecdote about Price. Okay. Do you know the band World Party, Dave? Mm-mm. It does Put the Message in the Box, Way Down Now, a bunch of songs that you'd probably recognize from that kind of 80s alternative vein. Yeah. The lead singer, Carl Wallinger, well, it was basically a one-man band. Carl Wallinger was a very good friend of mine. He passed away recently, unfortunately. But people who were big fans of his music were clamoring for quite some time, and particularly the 2000s, because he hadn't released any music for a while.

1:07:05Jason DeFillippo:And I can tell you the reason that he didn't release any music for a while is he discovered KPT Bryce. And musicians are strange creatures at the best of times. And Carl was, I'd say, large to gigantic fan of smoking weed. And he spent four years doing nothing but making Bryce landscapes. Wow. Wow.

1:07:33Brian Schulmeister:It was probably one landscape and it took four years for it to render. Yeah, right.

1:07:38Jason DeFillippo:That's funny. I wonder how Bryce would run under emulation these days. I bet it'd be pretty fast. Well, you get a Claude bot.

1:07:49Brian Schulmeister:Different architectures. I don't even know how that would work.

1:07:51Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. My recollection or my Bryce anecdote is right after it was released, me and one of my co-workers who was a 3D rendering and animation guy, we were flying out to the NAB convention in Las Vegas from Maryland. And so when you do that, you fly over the part of the country that looks like Bryce. Yeah, Bryce. Yeah, exactly. And my friend and colleague had never seen that part of the country before. And I remember him looking out the airplane or the airplane window and saying, God, it looks just like Bryce. I know. Yeah, it does.

1:08:32Brian Schulmeister:Amazing, amazing. I actually put a link in the show notes to this photo. This is a picture that I generated in Bryce on a, I think it was either, I think this had to be a Quadra 840 AV. It took about 36 hours to render. Wow. And it's just a little sci-fi experiment that I did with a kind of, I think I was listening to War of the Worlds or something. that this was just a weird interpretation of a War of the Worlds thing that was just, it's garbage. It's throwaway. But the time it took to render, I am so invested in this image. And then I printed it out on, we had one of these printers at Kinko's that used basically melted wax to print.

1:09:11Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. I remember this. This thing was printed on that, and then it was laminated. Dysublimation?

1:09:18Jason DeFillippo:Is that what it was?

1:09:18Brian Schulmeister:Dysub? I don't think it was dysub. Okay. It was a different, it was a really weird technology. Yeah. that rarely worked, was super expensive, and goddamn slow.

1:09:27Jason DeFillippo:I remember those, yeah, waxy printers.

1:09:30Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, we got rid of that thing for our first Fiery, which was great because it ran on an SGI. So that was my first SGI little iris box. But yeah, so this is my last remaining piece of Bryce art. So I threw it in there. Actually, I'll post it on Discord. So go to the show channel on Discord because I can't do images in the show notes. But yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Do you remember the Mac game Marathon?

1:09:56Jason DeFillippo:Oh, yeah. Of course. Dude, of course. He asks rhetorically. All right. Let me post a link in here. So one of the things with Marathon is you could alter the shapes and the textures in the game, and then you could send and share that. Back in the day, I created a whole set of shapes called KPT Shapes. Oh, no way. And evidently you can still download them. There it is. Looks like I created them on March 18th, 1995. Wow. And yeah, so the internet never forgets.

1:10:35Brian Schulmeister:When you were making these, I was at Paramount working on Star Trek First Contact with our friend Dave Riegler, and we had the entire department after hours playing Marathon. We had the entirety of the print division at Paramount wired up playing Marathon. Yes. It was great.

1:10:52Jason DeFillippo:Somewhere in this set of shapes, and it's been lost to the tunnels of my mind, there is a corridor that you go down in Marathon that is now lined with pictures of my dog. it was an easter egg i put in there and i i don't remember where how i just remember that i did it so there it is if anybody wants to patch a marathon with shapes inspired by kai's power tools one of the first things i think i probably shared on the internet from way back when 1995

1:11:30Brian Schulmeister:1995. Yeah. 30 years ago. 30 years ago. Crazy. So we're all Apple Watch users, right? Yes. We've all got our Apple Watches.

1:11:40Jason DeFillippo:Mm-hmm.

1:11:40Brian Schulmeister:Mm-hmm. I thought the upgrade to Apple Watch OS 26 was so really subpar, and I'm just like, I don't see what the big deal is. And I'm trying to get the flip-to-mute thing to work, and I'm not finding any of this stuff. And then I finally realized that I'd been stuck on the iOS or the watchOS beta 11 track because I'd manually set it to go on the beta downloads. And I never upgraded. I'm sitting there beating my head against the wall. And so I finally got it installed. And it kind of looks exactly the same except for the part where you type your number in. But so I haven't found anything that exciting except the notes app.

1:12:24Brian Schulmeister:The notes app is in 26. But you got to check your I just went went for months now. Wonder why? Why is everybody so this just doesn't work right? I don't know.

1:12:33Jason DeFillippo:I tend to just sort of let my watch do its own thing. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to it. And and which is fine. It seems to be happy with that and gives me what I need. I did notice today my car is in the shop today getting an oil change and the shop called and left a message. and my watch buzzed and the message was on my watch. It wanted to tell the recording of the message that they left was on my watch. And I don't think I'd seen that before. So that was cool.

1:13:05Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm excited to kind of dig into it now. And it still drives me crazy. I don't know if many people do this, but we've talked about the power user, put the crown on the inside thing. Yep. I did that. Thanks to you. I think we all do it. Yeah. I think we all do that now. And I see people out on the street, like, not having it flipped around, like, you know, straight out of the box. I'm like, ah, noob.

1:13:28Jason DeFillippo:Fucking noob. Yeah, the only trouble with that is if you're wearing heavy clothing, like in the wintertime, sometimes your sleeves can bump up against those buttons.

1:13:38Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, it's better than my wrist hitting the crown all the time. That's true. That's what would happen to me. It would just hit it all the time.

1:13:45Jason DeFillippo:A little dimple in your wrist there from where you're bumping up against it.

1:13:49Brian Schulmeister:Pretty much, pretty much. and just some old school news. Mr. Clean has been retired at 68. So that made me sad, you know, because as we are getting older, talking about video games we've made 35 years ago and shit like that, or 30 years ago. Yeah, it was kind of sad.

1:14:08Jason DeFillippo:He's in the retirement home along with the Maytag repairman.

1:14:11Brian Schulmeister:And Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Well, one can assume Mr.

1:14:14Jason DeFillippo:Clean, given his look, has probably moved to Palm Springs. That's true. That's true. That's true. So, yeah. If you know, you know. Well, I was going to say, maybe he and the Maytag repairman are longtime companions. Maybe. Who knows? That reminded me of my childhood disappointment with scrubbing bubbles. I didn't have strong feelings about them, do tell. I love scrubbing bubbles. Yeah. So I found this old commercial from the 70s of scrubbing bubbles. And I remember watching TV or probably The Price is Right or something and seeing the commercials for scrubbing bubbles, going to the grocery store with my mom and just begging her to buy a can of scrubbing bubbles because I wanted to see the little bubble guys scrubbing the tub.

1:15:07Jason DeFillippo:And we got home and I sprayed the tub and it was just foam. And I was like, what the hell?

1:15:15Brian Schulmeister:I've been lied to. I've been lied to. False advertising.

1:15:20Jason DeFillippo:I thought, I really thought little guys with eyes and little scrubby things were going to come out of this spray can and clean the tub for me. And so I lost a little bit of innocence that day. Well, I prepared you for the world we live in now.

1:15:35Brian Schulmeister:You're going to be so mad at me, Dave. There was a giveaway that they had with scrubbing bubbles, and you could get toy scrubbing bubbles. And I had the toy little scrubbing bubbles, little plastic guys when I was a kid. Oh. I had like three of them. It was great. Okay. eBay. Here we come.

1:15:57Brian Schulmeister:Oh, man. Carry on. Just thinking about old tech this week, too. I was doing a chat with somebody. And I'm going through this stuff with bankruptcy that I'm dealing with. And I had to do this class. And I had to talk to a person afterwards. And it's just a generic online chat. And I'm typing things into the text box. And I'm doing this thing where I'm like, I would type something, then I would erase it, then I would type something else, and then erase it. And I'm just like, it reminded me of ICQ because ICQ back in the day, you could see what other people were typing. I didn't know that the first time I got on ICQ.

1:16:40Brian Schulmeister:and I was talking to a girl I liked and I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to say to her and I'm typing this, deleting it, typing it, deleting it, typing it, deleting it. And then she's like, are you okay? And I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, I can see everything you're typing and I'm like, oh shit. Yeah. It was not a great day. It was not a great day. Yeah, we didn't last long. Let's just say that. You found him. Is that the guy? I must be. I mean, my memory doesn't last last week. It's close enough. Yeah.

1:17:16Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

1:17:16Brian Schulmeister:How much is he?

1:17:17Jason DeFillippo:Oh, that's a good question. He is currently$16.99 or best offer. What a deal.

1:17:24Brian Schulmeister:Wow. Vintage 1990. This is not the one I had then. No. No, I was a kid. So we're probably looking 70s.

1:17:32Jason DeFillippo:Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. Well, there are lots of them on here. So it seems like this was a thing for a while.

1:17:39Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, it's very similar. Yeah. Very similar. So get it and fill out your collection, Dave. You can, you can, you know, fill him with some scrubbing bubbles and then squirt them and move them around the tub.

1:17:52Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll do that. I just, yeah. I mean, this is the category of things that I would love to have, but I really don't need and don't have a place for. So I'll just pretend, I'll look at it and imagine that I have it, but I have an entire folder of bookmarks in my browser that is just stuff like that. It's stuff that I think is really neat that I'm probably never going to purchase, never going to get. Just, I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:18:19Brian Schulmeister:I got one last thing that I got to run past you guys today. Speaking of weird things that I don't need that I, whatever. So for Christmas, my bathroom is usually a cornucopia of fart sprays because I'm a dude and I need to have a very fresh smelling bathroom because my bathroom is right next to my roommate's office and she would like it smelling fresh. Sure. So for Christmas, she got me a little - I would start with looking at your diet if it's affecting the other room. She got me these little travel packs. People who are watching on YouTube can see this right now. It is a Poo-Pourri travel sprayer.

1:18:55Brian Schulmeister:And they're amazing. But as I got them, I look at it and I look at the back of it. And on the back, there's a little, which looks like a Wi-Fi symbol. And it says, tap, poo, win. And I'm like, what is this? It says, simply tap your phone above to gain exclusive access right now. And it says, spritz, tap, and poo. There is an RFID tag built into this little disposable fart spray bottle so you can download an app so you can. So you can what? My poops actually have a EULA now is what I'm trying to get to. Wow. Okay. We have gone too far. We have absolutely gone too far.

1:19:41Jason DeFillippo:GOG.show slash Jason's Poops. Yeah. Great. Now we're going to have to make that URL because somebody's going to take it in. No, don't go to there. Don't go there.

1:19:52Brian Schulmeister:I was just like, how much technology do we actually need, guys? Not as much as we have.

1:19:56Jason DeFillippo:That is for sure. Now, is that the one that you spray in the bowl to create the little film of oil that keeps the stink from? No. Okay.

1:20:04Brian Schulmeister:No, this is you spritz the room before you drop trow and then it permeates while you go and then it cleans the air. And they're wildly effective. And this little one of these little guys, she got me two of these has lasted me from Christmas till now. And it's only half gone. So they're a fantastic value for the price.

1:20:23Jason DeFillippo:I must say. Is this like part of your daily carry that you get up in the morning and you put on your watch and you put that in your pocket?

1:20:31Brian Schulmeister:No, I do have it in my backpack when I go out along with some dude wipes.

1:20:34Jason DeFillippo:Gives new meaning to the go bag.

1:20:37Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, it is. That is that is my go bag. for sure. That's all I got, guys. Yeah, that's enough.

1:20:45Jason DeFillippo:I think we're good. Yeah. See you next time.

1:20:48Brian Schulmeister:Bye, Dave. See you next time. Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got some new patrons. Woo-hoo! Rustican, Rustoken, Jeremy, and Andrew. And Lars and Disloyal Broom up their pledges. So thank you very much. And we'd also like to thank Vinny, Ivan, Kevin, Sarah, Bob the Bear, Runner 609, and Petey, Lonnie, Richard, and W for your continued support.

1:21:13Jason DeFillippo:Thank you all so much. And over at PayPal, we have donations from Joseph, Jens, Ronald, Charlie, John with$25, and Corey with$36.51.

1:21:23Brian Schulmeister:Over at the tip jar, we've got Kathleen, Gabriel, and Jennifer. Thank you all very much. And just a reminder, if you'd like to help support the show, which we really need, pretty pleased with sugar on top, go to GOG.show slash donate or patreon.com slash GOG. If you go to Patreon, you get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. As early as I can get it, because this is a sprint. This is a sprint, not a marathon to get this thing out the door. But everything, every little cent helps keep the show on the air. And we mean that from the bottom of our black little hearts. That's right.

1:21:53Jason DeFillippo:And we had a little bit of news earlier about talking about being old. And, well, we've lost the King Nerd, Jason. Yes, I saw. Robert Carradine has died at age 71. He unfortunately took his own life. He had been struggling with over two decades with bipolar disorder, and ultimately it got the best of him. This article on Deadline says, the actor is best known for his roles in The Long Riders. No, he's best known for his role in Revenge of the Nerds.

1:22:19Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, period. I didn't know he was in anything else, actually. I didn't know he had a career outside of Revenge of the Nerds.

1:22:25Jason DeFillippo:Nor did I. I guess he was on Lizzie McGuire as well. You know, obviously a famous older brother, Keith Carradine as well. But yeah, so sad to hear Robert Carradine has passed.

1:22:35Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, too bad, too bad.

1:22:36Jason DeFillippo:And a big thank you to everyone that has chimed in with their thoughts regarding 3D printers. I have been inundated with your thoughts about it. It's all been very useful and helpful. So thank you all so much. Awesome. Awesome. Well, until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 735. 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 we'll love you for it swing by gog.show to join our discord and chat with us and other show fans got thoughts feedback cool links hit us up at gog.show slash contact and don't forget to leave a five-star review at gog.show slash review and we'll read it on the show and guess what we've got gog merch Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show.

1:23:32Jason DeFillippo:Stay grumpy.

From the publisher

Starting off in FOLLOW UP, we’ve got a tax economist who actually made money betting against the "efficiency" of Elon’s budget-slashing fever dreams, while Tesla is busy trying to dodge a $243 million jury verdict for an Autopilot-assisted fatality. Not content with being legally liable, Tesla is also suing the California DMV because they’re offended someone called their "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" marketing deceptive—ironic, since Jack Dorsey just "proactively" halved the staff at Block to make room for more AI slop. Speaking of which, Goldman Sachs is here to remind us that all this AI spending added a grand total of zero to the US GDP last year, mostly because we’re just exporting all that cash to overseas chip makers while 80% of execs admit the tech hasn’t actually done anything for productivity yet.

Moving into IN THE NEWS, Sam Altman had the audacity to compare ChatGPT’s energy-sucking habits to the 20-year evolution of a human, though the internet wasn't exactly buying the "my bot is just like a baby" defense. Anthropic actually stood its ground against the Pentagon’s demand for killer robots and mass surveillance, so naturally, the military just signed a deal to put Elon’s Grok in their classified systems instead—because what could go wrong with an "edgy" LLM in the war room? Meanwhile, cities are dumping AI surveillance contracts as citizens start a literal "smash-the-snitch-box" campaign against Flock's license plate readers, Google’s AI is busy inserting racial slurs into news alerts, and the White House is apparently harboring a staffer moonlighting as a racist "masterpiece" creator on X. We’ve also got Reddit being slapped with a $20 million fine in the UK for being lazy with age checks, while Discord and Apple scramble to build verification tools that hopefully won't leak your entire identity to a hacker in Belarus.

In MEDIA CANDY, the Paramount-Skydance merger is leaving the industry in a cold sweat of "synergy" layoffs, but at least we’re getting more Game of Thrones spinoffs and Star Trek reboots to rot our brains. Face/Off 2 lost its director, Ryan Coogler is taking on The X-Files, and Google wants to use AI to turn music into generic "lo-fi" background noise for the masses.

Over in APPS & DOODADS, OpenAI is planning a 2027 smart speaker that literally watches you through a camera—because you definitely wanted a $300 Sam Altman-shaped eye in your kitchen—while the Dark Sky creators are back with "Acme Weather" for the low price of $25 a year.

We wrap up THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE with a deep dive into "Under Pressure" and Coruscant’s urban sprawl, leaving us to reminisce about the days when KPT Bryce was the pinnacle of tech—back when "generative art" was just a fractal that took six hours to render.


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Show notes at https://gog.show/735


Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jdz--v3eeU4


FOLLOW UP

Guy Bets Entire Life Savings Against Elon Musk, Wins

Tesla sues California DMV after it banned the term 'Autopilot'

Jack Dorsey just halved the size of Block's employee base — and he says your company is next


IN THE NEWS

Sam Altman: Know What Else Used a Lot of Energy? Human Civilization

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

Anthropic Tells Pete Hegseth to Take a Hike

Cities Are Shredding Their AI Surveillance Contracts en Masse

Kalshi Suspended a California Politician and a YouTuber for Insider Trading

Discord delays age verification to address user concerns

Apple introduces age verification for apps in Utah, Louisiana and Australia


MEDIA CANDY

As Paramount Skydance wins the battle for Warner Bros. as Netflix ends its bid, here's the mood inside all three companies.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

The Night Agent Season 3

'Face/Off 2' Director Adam Wingard is Now/Gone

Ryan Coogler's X-Files reboot gets the green light at Hulu

Mortal Kombat II | Official Trailer II

Google's AI Slop Machine Is Coming for Your Music

Dropping Names... and other things with Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner

Once We Were Spacemen


APPS & DOODADS

OpenAI will reportedly release an AI-powered smart speaker in 2027

Instagram Will Notify Parents When Teens Use Search Terms Related to Suicide

The creators of Dark Sky have a new weather app

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby


THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE

Dave Bittner

The CyberWire

Hacking Humans

Caveat

Control Loop

Only Malware in the Building

Strong Songs - S08E02 - "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie

The Problem with Coruscant (Planet Cities Explained)

Reminds me of KPT Fractal Explorer

KPT Bryce 1.0 with John Dvorak and Kai Krause

Single-Biome Planet

KPT Shapes by Dave Bittner

Bald Mr Clean mascot "retired"

My childhood disappointment with scrubbing bubbles.


CLOSING SHOUT-OUTS

Actor Robert Carradine Dies At Age 71

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