737: Monetizable Content

13 Mar 2026 · 1 h 4 min · 34 chapters

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In short

Monetizable content and the internet’s ongoing failures, with heavy focus on AI monetization, regulation, copyright, safety, and data privacy.

Guests

No guests appear; only hosts Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister (plus recurring references to public figures).

Key claims

  • Social media bans for under-16 are spreading internationally (Indonesia, Spain, Malaysia), while the U.S. resists.
  • AI companies are increasingly sued for copying and for operational risk; “supply chain risk” labeling is financially damaging.
  • AI moderation and labeling are inadequate; real-time “rephrasing” can still reveal the original meaning.
  • LLMs can flatten creativity into predictable “beige” outputs.
  • AI systems used in military targeting can hallucinate or use outdated links, with lethal consequences.
  • Data collected from games (Pokemon Go) is becoming a high-precision robot navigation “living map,” raising surveillance concerns.

Notable examples

  • Anthropics sues the Pentagon after being labeled a supply chain risk.
  • Grace Note (Nielsen-owned) sues OpenAI for copyright infringement of metadata structure/sequence.
  • Roblox AI chat filter rephrases profanity in real time.
  • COPPA 2.0 passes the U.S. Senate unanimously.
  • Pentagon missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school allegedly triggered by bad AI intelligence.
  • USC study/meta-analysis: LLM outputs cluster and reduce group ideation.
  • Niantic Spatial Vision + Coco Robotics: centimeter-accurate delivery positioning from Pokemon Go imagery.

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

Personal Milestones

0:46 to 2:43

Hosts share personal updates, including sobriety and health milestones.

“I am one year out from being considered, I guess they just say cancer-free, but, you know.”

Global Social Media Regulations

2:44 to 4:00

Discussion on various countries implementing social media restrictions for minors.

“We have more news about countries banning social media bans.”

AI and Lawsuits

4:01 to 5:15

Overview of AI companies facing legal issues regarding data usage and copyright.

“Let us remind everybody that it has been said time and time again through both first-hand accounts as well as second-hand accounts that people who work at these companies refuse to let their children use the products.”

Roblox's AI Language Filter

5:16 to 7:20

Discussion on Roblox's new AI feature to filter inappropriate language in chats.

“But, you know, they could be, was it Hirohito, the Japanese emperor back in the day?”

COPPA 2.0 Legislation

7:21 to 9:10

Exploration of the new COPPA 2.0 legislation aimed at protecting children's online privacy.

“I didn't know they were owned by Nielsen and actually grew up.”

AI's Role in Military Operations

9:11 to 14:00

Discussion on a missile strike incident linked to faulty AI intelligence.

“kids that say, I want to fuck you, it'll replace it with something else.”

Reflecting on Past Leadership

14:00 to 14:59

A discussion on past governmental leadership and intelligence figures.

“Well, that's a fucking bridge too far, my friend.”

Critique of Meta's AI Policies

16:22 to 17:53

A critique of Meta's handling of AI-generated content and its oversight board.

“That's joindeleteme.com slash GOG, code GOG.”

Meta's AI Recruitment and Challenges

17:53 to 19:49

Discussion about Meta's hiring in AI and the perceived uselessness of the technology.

“Also, it's worth pointing out that they don't even mention Meta's own AI that has shoved down our throats on Meta at all times, which is also often factually inaccurate.”

AI Agents and Cost Implications

19:49 to 20:50

Exploring the implications of using AI agents and their cost to users.

“It's been proven that it wasn't even true.”
Show all 34 chapters

Elon Musk's AI Initiatives

20:50 to 22:20

Discussion about Elon Musk's control over AI developments and the challenges faced.

“I'm sorry, I'm worked up about this shit today.”

AI's Impact on Creativity

22:20 to 24:12

Analyzing how AI is affecting human creativity and originality.

“Well, he's put in a new bit of a control to help you.”

AI's Uniform Output Problem

24:12 to 28:00

Discussion on how AI homogenizes creative outputs, leading to lack of originality.

“Well, a new analysis of more than 130 studies says large language models may be flattening human creativity and thought.”

AI and Security Concerns

28:00 to 28:39

Discussion on potential security breaches involving sensitive data.

“At least Hot Topic can get shirts that are knockoffs of shirts that you liked back in the day.”

Nintendo's Legal Battle with the U.S. Government

28:40 to 30:51

Analysis of Nintendo suing the U.S. over tariff policies and the implications for small businesses.

“The person reportedly asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive to his personal computer so he could sanitize the data before using it.”

Impact of Tariffs on Small Businesses

30:52 to 32:34

Exploration of how large companies benefit from lawsuits while small businesses suffer.

“court basically said that Trump's tariffs are completely illegal and they have to be rescinded.”

Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Relocates

32:35 to 35:14

Details about the relocation of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony due to political climate.

“SETI researchers think we might have missed a few calls from the aliens, and the culprit could be space weather.”

Last Year's Ig Nobel Winners

35:15 to 36:40

A look at the quirky winners of the previous Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

“Now, see, this is going to start happening.”

Clash Royale and Gaming Updates

37:51 to 39:48

Discussion about the Clash Royale game and personal experiences with it.

“Brian, I cannot believe I'm saying this, but it has been eight years since we started the Clash Royale clan for the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast.”

Open Audible and Audiobook Management

39:49 to 41:44

Insights into managing audiobooks with Open Audible and the legal implications.

“your audiobooks off of Amazon's Audible platform, it will cost you$24.99.”

Blue Sky's Leadership Change

41:45 to 42:01

Updates on Blue Sky's CEO transition and its implications for the platform.

“Now, remember, he got a stylist for a while.”

The Evolution of Niantic's AI Navigation System

42:01 to 44:29

Explore how Niantic is transforming gaming data into cutting-edge navigation technology for robots.

“Yeah, let's get some marketing people involved here.”

The Creepy Side of Precision Mapping

44:30 to 46:04

Discuss the implications of centimeter-accurate data collection and its potential misuses.

“Some of us might have known what was going on there.”

Humanoid Robots and Public Reactions

46:05 to 47:53

A strange incident involving a humanoid robot highlights public fear and technology's impact on society.

“The problem is nobody ordered a fucking pizza at that school.”

Reviewing 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'

47:54 to 50:11

A critical look at the second season of the series, evaluating its production quality and storytelling.

“but then it turned up in my ads, so I was like, okay, I guess I'm going to go watch it.”

Live Nation's Antitrust Settlement

50:12 to 53:04

Examine the implications of Live Nation's recent settlement and ongoing legal challenges in the live entertainment industry.

“So basically slap on the wrist for them.”

YouTube's Dominance in Media

53:05 to 55:18

Analyze YouTube's rise as a media giant and the implications of its monetization strategies.

“And that's why I'm glad they were named and I hope nobody fucking hires them.”

Paradise Season 2: A Mixed Review

55:19 to 56:03

Discuss the shift in tone from the first season of 'Paradise' to its second season and its reception.

“No, because the only reason I paid for it initially was the kid was getting on YouTube and the filters sucked and shitty stuff got through all the time anyways.”

Review of Paradise Seasons 1 and 2

56:03 to 56:46

The hosts discuss their thoughts on the Hulu series Paradise, comparing its first and second seasons.

“Paradise Season 1 is available on Hulu as well as Season 2.”

Excitement for Upcoming Series

56:46 to 57:35

The hosts express their enthusiasm for new seasons of Daredevil and The Boys while reflecting on past shows.

“Not really my type of show but have you ever been to Graceland?”

Thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy Movie

57:35 to 58:51

The discussion shifts to the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy movie and its appeal to both children and adults.

“And the final season trailer for The Boys is out.”

Gravity Falls and Parenting Insights

58:51 to 59:31

The hosts talk about their children's interests and the concept of monetizable content in relation to children's media.

“Like, you know, Gravity Falls, that was...”

Creative Zombie Apocalypse Ideas

59:31 to 1:01:37

One host shares a humorous idea for a zombie apocalypse script set during an AA meeting, exploring character archetypes.

“if i had a kid that's what i'd name him monetizable content AMC.”

Shoutouts and Listener Engagement

1:01:37 to 1:02:30

The hosts offer shoutouts to patrons and listeners, emphasizing the importance of fan support for the show.

“And just because you mentioned England really quick, we're not going to read all of this.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:04Brian 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.

0:10Jason DeFillippo:And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I almost leapt in after you said welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks because I'm still not used to the new intro. Me too, me too. It takes a bit to get used to.

0:18Brian Schulmeister:Sorry, Bob, we just didn't have time for it.

0:20Jason DeFillippo:I just want to interject really quick. We have made note, Jason, of your sobriety milestones, rightfully so. There's something to be very, very proud of and we should all applaud. I myself have had a milestone, Jason. I had my yearly cancer checkups now. I've gone yearly instead of like more than a couple times a year. and everything came back clean. That is four years cancer-free. I am one year out from being considered, I guess they just say cancer-free, but, you know. Okay.

0:53Brian Schulmeister:Not terribly exciting, but a big deal for me, so. It is a big deal. It's a very big deal. How many 12-step programs did you go to get that cancer out? No, I had a surgery, though. Oh, that's good.

1:04Jason DeFillippo:That's good. And chemo, you know. Okay, that's good. Yeah, okay. Didn't do meetings, you know. I'm happy. I'm happy for you. I'm very happy for you. So, yeah, it's good to be here. Well, no, it's not good to be here, but, you know. Actually, now that I think about it, looking at the news.

1:20Brian Schulmeister:Where you're at, it's probably fine. Yes, you know. Well, I'm in California, and you know what they say. Yeah, you got drone attacks coming.

1:29Jason DeFillippo:I'm sorry, false flag? What? Yeah, seriously. Come on. Come on. I saw a really funny map that was like, hey, Iran, if you don't know what California looks like, it looks like this. and it's about Florida with California written across it.

1:43Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, my roommate told me that with the support. It's like, yeah. She's like, oh, there's going to be small drones coming. I'm like, have you seen the size of the drones? They're like big. They're coming from ships. And it's like, slow news day.

1:56Jason DeFillippo:Slow news day. No, they're not.

1:57Brian Schulmeister:And even if they are, do you know how big Los Angeles is? It's big. Well, California.

2:02Jason DeFillippo:They just said California.

2:03Brian Schulmeister:Oh, California. Well, then fuck it. Who cares?

2:05Jason DeFillippo:California is like 15 times the size of Iran.

2:08Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, exactly. Come on. Anywho. Yeah, it's even bigger than Israel. So, hey, come on.

2:14Jason DeFillippo:Let's get to stuff that is actually not above our pay grade. Thank you. Although, to be fair, also above Kegstan's pay grade. Yeah. Let's be honest. It's a Fox News fucking correspondent. We're about as qualified as he fucking is.

2:28Brian Schulmeister:I think we're actually probably more qualified. So, yeah. We actually put two and two together. And I can ride a skateboard without hitting myself in the nuts. Thank you very much. Also, you don't drink anymore. That's true. That's true. Oh, fuck me. Moving on. What do we got? Please, save me.

2:44Jason DeFillippo:We have more news about countries banning social media bans. It looks like just about everybody's hopping on board, except for, of course, the United States, because why would we? Following in the steps of Australia and many other countries, Indonesia will be the latest country to limit social media usage for children under 16. India's Communication and Digital Affairs Minister announced a new government regulation will require high-risk platforms to delete any accounts from Indonesia that are under 16 starting on March 28th. This would include major platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox, and Big O Live, a live streaming platform based in Singapore.

3:25Jason DeFillippo:The minister added all platforms will have to fulfill compliance obligations from the Indonesian government but didn't specify what they were just yet. So while Australia was the first country to implement such a sweeping ban on social media, many other countries are currently in the process of doing the same.

3:41Brian Schulmeister:Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, of course that's his name, announced last month that the country is also ready to ban social media for users under 16, while Malaysia's cabinet approved a similar ban that will reportedly go into effect

3:56Jason DeFillippo:sometime this year. Everybody is hopping on the bandwagon, Jason. Woo! As they should. Let us remind everybody that it has been said time and time again through both first-hand accounts as well as second-hand accounts that people who work at these companies refuse to let their children use the products. For good reason. For good reason.

4:18Brian Schulmeister:There we go. Anthropic just sued the Pentagon after being labeled a supply chain risk, a designation usually reserved for companies from hostile nations. The drama started when CEO Dario Amadei said Anthropics AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons. Well, we got a story later about how that worked out.

4:36Jason DeFillippo:Also, to be fair, I do believe that the Trump administration considers most of the United States to be a hostile nation.

4:43Brian Schulmeister:This is true. We are technically a hostile nation for him. Yes, especially nowadays. So this will be interesting to see how this plays out because they're suing in federal court. And they're saying that, you know, they're going to lose hundreds of millions, if not, yay, billions of dollars, billions of dollars because of this labeling as a supply chain risk. Yeah. Yeah. OK. You know, I put this together, Brian. Now, if we've got the axis of evil, we've got Sam Altman. He's Hitler. Now we've got Dario. He's Mussolini. I don't even know who's at perplexity. But, you know, they could be, was it Hirohito, the Japanese emperor back in the day?

5:24Brian Schulmeister:So we've got our axis of evil going on with the, but, you know, I think we should just make Zuck the third wheel in this triangle, as it were. Because, you know, he's got Lema with his thing going on with their AI.

5:38Jason DeFillippo:Well, they're certainly trying to shoehorn it into everything. If there's any company that's actually like really trying to force everybody in the world to use AI, it's meta.

5:47Brian Schulmeister:Or Google.

5:48Jason DeFillippo:We'll get to them. We can't do a search without getting shoved this crap.

5:53Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah, that's true. We're going to need a bigger axis, Brian. We need a bigger axis. We're going to need a bigger axis. God damn it. Okay. Well, anyway, moving on. So Anthropics suing the government. Who cares?

6:06Jason DeFillippo:I thought that they were going with the, we're the heroes. We're not involved with these shenanigans. We say nay, but now they're like, but actually we would like some of that money.

6:16Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like that. I was actually watching Shark Tank before we started this because we're recording early today because I actually have a job tomorrow, believe it or not. And on Shark Tank, Robert Herjavec was like – was berating Mr. Wonderful saying, you know, your royalty deals are awful. They're evil. Why would you do a – why – tell the investors or the entrepreneurs never, ever do a royalty deal in perpetuity. And then Mr. Wonderful says, would you like to go in on the deal? He's like, yeah, as long as we can keep that royalty deal. You scumbag motherfucker. That's what all these people are.

6:51Brian Schulmeister:It's driving me fucking mad. I'm so mad I'm hitting my microphone. God damn it, Brian.

6:56Jason DeFillippo:Well, OK, let's keep let's keep going through our follow up here. It's been a little bit since we've talked about any of these companies getting sued for copyright infringement because we've kind of like given up on that for the most part. But it's back. The metadata company Grace Note is the latest to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. Grace Note is a metadata company that is owned by Nielsen. I am so old that I remember when Grace Note was nothing other than album track listings.

7:21Brian Schulmeister:That's all I thought they were. I didn't know they were owned by Nielsen and actually grew up.

7:26Jason DeFillippo:They now specialize in entertainment metadata, creating descriptions and identifiers for content that clients such as TV providers use to help their own customers with discovery. So they do everything now, Jason. They've moved on.

7:37Brian Schulmeister:what about what is it do they do pornhub too like stepsister meets you know stepbrother and yeah yeah that's a lot of categories they just do categories now but okay so most of the lawsuits

7:49Jason DeFillippo:against ai businesses have focused on focused in on the content used to train llms but the grace note case brings an extra layer with the alleged infringement of the structure or sequence for a data set in addition to the actual data that being grace notes bread and butter i guess defendants could have paid grace note to license the valuable grace note data or they could have sought to train and ground their models only in information in the public domain they chose to do neither defendants instead improperly copied and used grace note data to create their own commercially valuable ai products all without paying a dime the complaints the complaint states the company claims that its previous attempts to work with open ai for a licensing agreement were rebuffed or ignored and they have made deals with other companies including samsung and google But they said, you just stole all of our stuff.

8:36Jason DeFillippo:And we noticed that the other lawsuits didn't work out so well. So we're trying a novel approach.

8:41Brian Schulmeister:Move fast and steal things. Yeah.

8:44Jason DeFillippo:And one final thing and follow up here. And of course, it involves AI, as does almost every single story we discuss now. Roblox, the company that I will never let my child use because they're horribly bad at safety, particularly for kids. but they've launched a new feature powered by AI that can rephrase inappropriate language in real time. So if my kid is playing Roblox with his headphones on and he's playing with some older kids that say, I want to fuck you, it'll replace it with something else. Jason won't do anything else about it, but it'll replace it with something else.

Read the full transcript

9:19Brian Schulmeister:Do we need to call these AI filters? Because Because I remember doing regex in Perl for the same thing in 1993.

9:28Jason DeFillippo:Well, we have to call everything AI now.

9:31Brian Schulmeister:Can we just say it's on the blockchain then, too? Of course. If I say, if somebody begrudgingly says something nasty to your kid, can it be on the blockchain? Can we mint an NFT from it as well?

9:43Jason DeFillippo:Let me tell you how smart this AI is, Jason. from the Roblox chief safety office. For instance, if a user sends hurry the fuck up in chat, the system will replace it with hurry up exclamation point.

9:58Brian Schulmeister:Wow, that's some technology right there, kids.

10:01Jason DeFillippo:They are burning oceans for that, Jason. Wow, amazing. By the way, everybody in the chat will see a note that the message has been rephrased, thus letting the kid figure out what the fuck you said in the first place because they're not stupid. what you said in the first place,

10:19Brian Schulmeister:not what the fuck you said, what you said. You have to, let's get with the vibe here, man. It's the vibe. As Rajiv Bhatia,

10:26Jason DeFillippo:Roblox chief safety officer says, as these systems scale, they create a flywheel for civility, Jason, where real-time feedback helps users learn and adopt our community standards. Yeah, because that's going to make kids stop cussing. We've made a flywheel. 12-year-olds are known for hopping on the flywheel of civility.

10:50Brian Schulmeister:In the news.

10:56Jason DeFillippo:Well, speaking of the children's, today the U.S. Senate unanimously passed proposed legislation known as COPPA 2.0. This measure, fully named the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act, aims to create new protections for younger users online, such as blocking platforms from collecting their personal data without consent, or we could do what every other country in the world is doing and ban it for kids yeah take the fucking kids offline we could do that but no we're gonna pass copa 2.0 the modernized take on the original copa 1.0 from 1998 which attempts to address recent changes in common online activities like everything because that was 1990 fucking eight 19 you know what's fucked up right

11:38Brian Schulmeister:That was 1998. My first piece of open source software I wrote in 1998 and released it publicly, which was a library to check birthdates to see if they were COPA compliant. That's fucked up. And nobody used it, apparently, because we've had all these problems. Yeah, it's just like, huh.

11:57Jason DeFillippo:Well, industry groups such as NetChoice have previously opposed COPA 2.0 and other measures around minors' online activities such as COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. NetChoice members include all the big hitters that you would expect. Google, YouTube, Meta, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, X. Basically, everybody getting banned everywhere else in the world. But Google changed their tune to support COPA 2.0 recently. But there has been a bigger push, both domestically and internationally, towards restrictions on when and how younger people engage online. Several states, including Utah, California, and Washington, have enacted laws requiring some level of age verification.

12:33Jason DeFillippo:Trying to do what the rest of the world is doing. but until this becomes a national thing it won't make a bit of difference and copa 2.0 having read through it won't make much of a difference either at the copa i'm gonna have

12:45Brian Schulmeister:that song stuck in my head all day now copa cabana where we steal your kids data and sell it uh barry let's get barry let's call it barry and have him do a version of it i think he's still he's still kicking around but speaking of protecting the children in what may be the worst case of AI hallucination imaginable. Pentagon investigators say a missile strike on a girl's school in southern Iran may have been triggered by bad AI generated intelligence. Gasp. The system apparently pulled outdated data that linked a nearby compound to Iran's Revolutionary Guard and the targeted logic may have included the school by mistake.

13:23Brian Schulmeister:The military has been rapidly integrating a Claude-based AI system into operational planning. Claude. The company, Claude is run by the company that we just said is a supply chain risk for the entire United States of a fucking America. And now they're using it to target innocent school children. So, yeah. How's that? Fuck you.

13:45Jason DeFillippo:By the way, this is the U.S. military would apparently eat pizza with glue on it because wasn't that one of the first.

13:54Brian Schulmeister:That was the first. Yeah. Google. You have to check your results.

13:59Jason DeFillippo:You have to have somebody with operational intelligence before you unleash the fucking hell. Or just intelligence. Well, that's a fucking bridge too far, my friend. I know.

14:11Brian Schulmeister:I miss, you know, when we had Dr. David Teeter on the show, one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. Love that man. And, like, knowing that people like him were in charge of the government behind the scenes back in the day. Made you feel all right. It feels like watching the West Wing now. You just get pissed off because it just doesn't exist.

14:32Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

14:33Brian Schulmeister:Oh, yeah. Okay.

14:35Jason DeFillippo:All right. Sorry. Let's move to just annoying AI stuff and not AI stuff that actually killed a bunch of people because Kegstan can't fucking do a goddamn thing. GI joke is what we're calling him nowadays. I like that one.

14:48Brian Schulmeister:That's good.

14:49Jason DeFillippo:A real American zero.

14:51Brian Schulmeister:Oh, good one.

14:53Jason DeFillippo:Thank you.

14:59Brian Schulmeister:This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Here's the thing a lot of people don't realize. Data brokers are making money off your personal information. Your name, contact info, home address, and even details about your family can be compiled, packaged, and sold online to basically anyone willing to pay. That kind of exposure can open the door to identity theft, phishing attempts, and harassment. Now, as someone with a pretty public internet presence, I deal with this constantly.

15:34Brian Schulmeister:People are looking me up all the time, scraping whatever information they can find. It's just part of being a public figure online. But that's exactly why I use Delete Me. They go out and remove your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites, which gives me a lot more peace of mind and honestly helps me sleep better at night. And it's not just me saying it. The New York Times Wirecutter has named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners.

16:07Brian Schulmeister:Get 20 % off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. The only way to get 20 % off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash GOG, code GOG.

16:32Jason DeFillippo:The Meta Oversight Board is once again urging Meta to overhaul its rules around AI-generated content. Let us remind you that all they can do is urge them to do things because the Meta Oversight Board has zero operational capabilities, no teeth, no nothing. They just exist.

16:50Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. The only thing that they have power to do is cash those giant fucking checks. Yes, that's it.

16:56Jason DeFillippo:This time, the board says Meta should create a separate rule for AI content that's independent of its misinformation policy, invest in more reliable detection tools and make better use of digital watermarks, among other changes. Yeah, they're basically just saying what you do is next to nothing and you got to do more. Meta must do more to address the proliferation of deceptive AI-generated content on its platforms, including by inauthentic or abusive networks of accounts and pages, particularly on matters of public interest, so that users can distinguish between what is real and fake. The board was also highly critical of how Meta uses its current AI info labels, noting the way that they are applied is neither robust nor comprehensive enough to contend with the scale and velocity of AI-generated content, especially in times of conflict or crisis.

17:41Jason DeFillippo:A system overly dependent on self-disclosure of AI usage and escalated review, which occurs infrequently, to properly label this output cannot meet the challenges posed in the current environment. No shit. Also, it's worth pointing out that they don't even mention Meta's own AI that has shoved down our throats on Meta at all times, which is also often factually inaccurate.

18:06Brian Schulmeister:Do you see when you go into Instagram every day now, like how many of your friends are starting to use Meta AI?

18:12Jason DeFillippo:Yes, I think less of them every single time I see their names show up. Every single time.

18:15Brian Schulmeister:Yeah.

18:15Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

18:15Brian Schulmeister:I know.

18:17Jason DeFillippo:I'm like, sucker. But Mark Zuckerberg read this report from Meta's oversight board and said, hold my beer. You don't want me to do anything with AI? You want me to scale back AI? You want me to report AI? Ha ha. Well, after striking out trying to recruit the creator of open source AI agent OpenClaw, Metal has settled for the guys who got OpenClaw agents talking, supposedly. They have hired Moldbook, the social network for AI agents that went viral earlier this year. They're bringing the creators, Matt Schlitt and Bell Parr, into the fold as part of its meta super intelligence lab.

18:54Brian Schulmeister:I want to stop you right there, Brian. Yes. This was a weekend project that these guys vibe coded up. This is no big, like, giant thing that Mark's going to get here, but go ahead.

19:05Jason DeFillippo:Not only that, Jason.

19:07Brian Schulmeister:Yeah.

19:07Jason DeFillippo:What we have found out is all the posts that went viral basically involved people. This is the ultimate case of AI is people. Yep. Yep. Nothing happened on this platform. It was basically a fucking, it was a goddamn message board that people went into and did some crazy stuff to make it look like the AIs are going nuts. and then people took screenshots and everybody went crazy. And now these motherfuckers are probably getting millions of dollars in the salary. What the hell are we doing with our lives, Jason? We're fucking up because, you know, Matt and Ben, bravo.

19:42Brian Schulmeister:Take all the fucking money you can. You spent a weekend vibe coding this piece of shit that went viral. And it is useless. It's been proven that it wasn't even true. Yeah, there are some bots on there. Sure. but the thing and here's the other thing that nobody's really talking about here with the ai agents that everybody's saying these agents are going to run our lives they can run like you know 24 7 and be in the background and do things for you you're charged while these things are running for every call they make of course these companies want agents to be the next thing because it's their fucking cash cow they want this to be the thing so you know you know how much it costs when

20:22Jason DeFillippo:you book a plane ticket yourself? Nothing. You know how much it costs when they do? No. $8 ,000. Not until you get the bill.

20:30Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. That's, yeah, that is the problem. You just don't know. And a lot of these times, like, I would like to put a cap on my spending per day, like you do with an ad buy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, because sometimes it's vibe pricing, apparently, because sometimes you get paid, you know, well, fuck. What? Just move on, I guess. All right. Wait, I'm next. God damn it. Shit. I'm sorry, I'm worked up about this shit today. This is what happens when we do the show in the afternoons now. I can get momentum, you know? That eight in the morning thing doesn't work for me. All right, Oracle is reportedly preparing to cut thousands of jobs as its massive AI ambitions start hitting the balance sheet.

21:09Brian Schulmeister:Well, they just had their earnings call a couple days ago, or maybe the day before yesterday or yesterday, and they're saying, okay, we're making more money now. Things are going good. We're going to fire about 16 ,000 to 30 ,000 people because we need more money because we're going to be spending more money so we can make all this money that we're going to maybe make with all the data centers. We have to build because we're contractually obligated to open AI. It is such a clusterfuck right now that they are just trying everything right now to make it look like this is the next big thing. And so, yeah, they're just going to be cutting heads over there at Oracle just to save the money to pump back into the data centers so Scam Altman and the axis of AI can do what they're going to do.

21:51So, yeah.

21:52Jason DeFillippo:Isn't it great? That's wonderful. Well, let's cast our minds back to another fun thing that happened with AI. Good old Grok, and it's a porn AI bot that basically it created, which then got shut down and then didn't get shut down. And people found out you could still kind of do it, but then it got shut down again. But then people started to shut down across different countries because they were like, this is some bullshit here. So then Elon finally kind of shut it down because he didn't want to get shut out of a whole bunch of countries. Well, he's put in a new bit of a control to help you. You can block XAI's Grok chatbot from creating modifications of your uploaded images on the social network X.

22:33Jason DeFillippo:Isn't that nice? It's a simple toggle that isn't totally buried in the UI. They didn't really announce it. People kind of found it. And there's absolutely nothing that would stop you from saving the image and then re-uploading it to then do whatever the hell you wanted with it. But if you tried to do it directly through X without saving the image and then re-uploading the image, it'll stop you.

23:00Brian Schulmeister:Oh, dear God. This sounds like the people in the music business back in the day.

23:05Jason DeFillippo:DRM meetings that I took.

23:06Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, exactly. The fucking DRM meetings.

23:09Jason DeFillippo:So we're going to spend thousands of, hundreds of thousands of dollars to put DRM on this so that you can't take it. I was like, well, you could just play it and then start another app that records and then stop. Yeah.

23:24Brian Schulmeister:Exactly.

23:28Brian Schulmeister:But this goes to 11. Exactly. In those meetings, I just wanted to take a picture. Actually, I'd rather just pick up a boom box with two cassette recorders and put it in front of them and say, see how this works? You play it here. I don't care what you say is DRM'd on this one. If you hit record over here, you have another copy. Amazing how that works. I would have just stood there like John Cusack.

23:53Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, exactly. Out the window of the meeting with a dual deck fucking moon box. That's it. Oh. Anyways, good job, Elon. Thanks for saving us. Good job. Good job. Love how you're saving the world from yourself.

24:10Brian Schulmeister:Love your work, man. Keep it up. Well, a new analysis of more than 130 studies says large language models may be flattening human creativity and thought. Researchers at USC found that even though LLMs train on massive data sets, their outputs cluster around predictable patterns. That means I was waiting for you. You're winding up there. I thought I was going to get something out of you. That means the ideas they generate are less diverse than what humans produce on their own. And when people rely on AI to polish writing or brainstorm, they often start mirroring those same patterns. Yes. And it gets worse in groups, Brian.

24:47Brian Schulmeister:Teams using AI actually produce fewer ideas than groups just talking to each other because the model nudges everyone towards the same line of thinking.

24:55Jason DeFillippo:But Jason, they keep telling us that we should, oh, it's an idea engine. We should use it to ideate. We shouldn't, we're never going to replace human actual work with it. It's just supposed to help us come up with the, we're going to establish our creativity. It's going to give you the tools to make you bigger, better, brighter, stronger, faster. The same as everybody fucking else.

25:18Brian Schulmeister:Have I not said since day fucking one that this is a mediocrity engine and it takes the brightest and flattens them to equal the dumbest. It is putting everything into the same fucking bucket, swishing it around, and all you get is beige. That's it. Fucking beige. So now we have a meta study of these 130 studies to say the same thing that you've been getting on this show for free. Or if you're a better listener for$3 a month at patreon.com slash GOG.

25:48Jason DeFillippo:I got to tell you, I haven't just to bolster your point here. I haven't really talked about it on the show because I was kind of waiting to like coalesce my thoughts. I was going to have to go to AI to ideate to how I should describe this thing. You needed your agents to figure it out for you. I have been playing around with all the major music AI systems. Not enough to pay for them, but I've been playing around with them. And your description of it as everything is beige is so right. Like initially it is very exciting. You're like, oh my God, I've written a ton of music in my years. None of it very good.

26:25Jason DeFillippo:Obviously I have not set the world on fire. I'm sitting here doing a fucking podcast for next to no money. I am not out in the road touring. so my music has not been fantastic but i think it's been interesting and innovative and some people have liked it so i played with these tools and it is very exciting initially because you're like i i have no idea how to write a country song holy shit this sounds like a country song and then i realize it sounds like every fucking country song yeah and oh this pop song this is a good pop song it sounds like every fucking pop song oh this rap song this is a good sounding rap song because it sounds like every fucking rap song.

27:02Jason DeFillippo:And that's what all these engines produce. They produce the grayness in the middle. Nothing is very interesting. Nothing will blow you away, but it sure sounds like what it's supposed to sound like.

27:14Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, it does. I've tried to do the same thing. I've tried to do that with punk songs. You know, I have a very nuanced ear when it comes to punk rock music. Like you have a very nuanced ear towards shoegazing, emo, I hate myself and want to kill somebody, you know, music. My favorite. Same kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So when I go there and I try and make a punk song, it sounds like fucking Blink-182, which is not really a punk band. They're just fucking mall garbage as far as I'm concerned. It's beige boring. It is. It is beige boring. They are the, what's the store that you sell? Hot Topic.

27:47Brian Schulmeister:T-shirts. They are the Hot Topic of the internet. That's what all these generators are.

27:51Jason DeFillippo:I was able to come up with that, isn't it?

27:53Brian Schulmeister:I can't believe that I couldn't come up with it anymore. So AI is Hot Topic-ifying the world is kind of it. At least Hot Topic can get shirts that are knockoffs of shirts that you liked back in the day.

28:05Jason DeFillippo:I mean, credit where credit's due to Hot Topic. I don't want to just besmirch them with this AI label. I would say that AI is Old Navy-ing the world.

28:14Brian Schulmeister:Better, better. It's not even as close.

28:16Jason DeFillippo:It's not even as good as the Gap or Banana Republic. It is fucking Old Navy-ing it.

28:21Brian Schulmeister:Moving on, Brian.

28:22Jason DeFillippo:Anyways, I'm going to have to mull on that one for a while. The Inspector General's Office of the Social Security Administration is investing allegations of a security breach by a member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency operation spearheaded by Elon. A whistleblower has claimed that a former software engineer from Doge said he possessed two databases from the SSA, Numident and the Master Death File.

28:47Brian Schulmeister:Oh my God.

28:49Jason DeFillippo:The person reportedly asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive to his personal computer so he could sanitize the data before using it. An unnamed government contractor where he's currently employed reported. Those databases included personal information about more than 500 million living and deceased Americans. And by the way, when we say personal information, we mean all of the information.

29:15Brian Schulmeister:All of it. Yes. All of it. By the way, Brian, we do have a name now. His name is John Solly, S-O-L-L-Y. Write that down for your list of people that need to get taken out behind the woodshed after this is all over and do what you will with them. But John Solly is the guy's name that just came out a little bit ago. Great.

29:33Jason DeFillippo:Well, the Washington Post reported that the whistleblower complaint was filed with the inspector general back in January. When the Post contacted the agency and the company in January, both said that they had not heard of this complaint. Both said they subsequently looked into the allegations and did not find any evidence to confirm the claims. The publication said it's unclear why the complaint is now being investigated, probably because they fucking found the guy. Yep. And found the fucking drive.

29:59Brian Schulmeister:They found the thumb drive. We found it. The internet police have found the thumb drive.

30:04Jason DeFillippo:Charles Borges, a former data officer at the agency, claimed that an SSA database was stored in an unsecured cloud environment and said, this is the absolute worst case scenario. There could be one or a million copies of it now. We will never know.

30:20Brian Schulmeister:Especially if it's on S3. Yep.

30:23Jason DeFillippo:So, fantastic.

30:24Brian Schulmeister:Way to go, Doge. Just chunk that one up to Elon's grand scheme. All that money he saved us and shit. That was about six seconds of the Iranian war right there that he saved us. Yeah.

30:37Jason DeFillippo:Fun. Well, Nintendo of America is suing the U.S. government.

30:41Brian Schulmeister:Get in line, motherfuckers.

30:42Jason DeFillippo:It's not just because of Luigi Mangione, including the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection over its tariff policy, aftermath reports. So this is because basically the U.S. court basically said that Trump's tariffs are completely illegal and they have to be rescinded. And then every single fucking company went, how do we get our money back? Excuse me. Those were illegal. So we would like the monies. Refund, please.

31:15Brian Schulmeister:Can I get a refund?

31:16Jason DeFillippo:And Nintendo's going, well, nobody seems to know. So it looks like we're going to have to sue because that's the only thing that Trump ever responds to. So now they're suing. And that's basically it. So we'll see what happens. But yeah, companies are basically starting to decide that filing the lawsuit is the only way they're going to get refunded. And you know who that screws, Jason? Us. The tiny companies. The small companies. Everybody that can't afford the$500 an hour lawyers and can't afford to file these lawsuits. It's only these big companies that are going to get any money back. Every mom and pop shop.

31:47Jason DeFillippo:Every medium-sized company. Even 100 to 200 employees. They're all going to get fucked.

31:53Brian Schulmeister:If they're still in business, because a lot of these companies went out of business because of the tariffs.

31:58Jason DeFillippo:Who are they? Yeah, you can't sue if you're already out of business. You're already in the poorhouse. It's a brave new world, Brian.

32:03Brian Schulmeister:I am so glad that this is the way things are turning out. And we're only, what, a year and change in?

32:09Jason DeFillippo:You know, between the two fucking terms this guy has served, I'll go back and take the plague from the first one. Yeah.

32:20Brian Schulmeister:I'll take the plague. Yeah. Can we get COVID-2 electric boogaloo, please? Anyway, let's move on to some science news, Brian. SETI researchers, this is actually a callback to what we talked about last week. Exactly what we talked about last week. See, we're ahead of the curve always. SETI researchers think we might have missed a few calls from the aliens, and the culprit could be space weather. Calls coming from the house. Yeah. They need to get that new version of carrot. I just forgot in this house, I'm the alien.

32:50Jason DeFillippo:I'm the one that's not the Canadian citizen.

32:52Brian Schulmeister:That's true. That's true. So these guys need to get space carrot. That's what we need so they can figure out what the weather is. A new study suggests plasma from stellar winds and solar eruptions can smear narrow radio signals across multiple frequencies. That's a problem because SETI searches usually look for extremely clean, narrow signals. So if an alien transmission gets broadened by its own star's environment, it could slip right under our detection thresholds. To test the idea, scientists analyzed radio transmissions from old human spacecraft like Pioneer, Helios, and Viking. Well, it turns out even our own signals get distorted by solar activity, especially during storms or when probes are close to the sun.

33:32Brian Schulmeister:The takeaway is extraterrestrials might not be ghosting us. We may just be filtering them out, which is pretty much exactly what we said last time. Sorry, I'm going to lose you.

33:40Jason DeFillippo:I'm driving past the airport. I'm flying.

33:47Brian Schulmeister:So for as smart as you're speaking up, I'm going into a tunnel. Yeah. There you go.

33:52Jason DeFillippo:Well, that's good news. Some other science news. One of my favorite things to do every year when they announce the awards is to read through the ignoble prizes. Okay. It's absolutely one of my favorite things. the satirical prize with the playful approach to scientific research, is not playing around this year when it comes to the safety of its guests, opting to relocate its annual ceremony to Europe from Boston in order to ensure the safety of attendees. The 36th first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be held in Zurich, Switzerland in September. The awards ceremony has been held in Massachusetts for the past 35 years, but growing hostility towards international travelers entering the U.S.

34:35Jason DeFillippo:prompted a change of location. Growing hostility to citizens of the U.S.

34:39Brian Schulmeister:probably also prompted a change of location.

34:42Jason DeFillippo:We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners or international journalists who cover the event to travel to the U.S.A. this year. In 2025, four of the ten Ig Nobel Prize winners chose not to travel to the U.S. amid President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigration and freedom of speech. In March 2025, a French scientist was denied entry into the U.S. after immigration officers at the airport searched his phone and found messages criticizing the current administration. For future ceremonies, the event will be held in Zurich every other year, with the next one scheduled for 2028. During odd-numbered years, the organizers will host the ceremony in a different city in Europe.

35:17Jason DeFillippo:Now, see, this is going to start happening. We knew this was going to start happening. Not only are we having a brain drain, which is people, the best and brightest used to come here. Now they do not. They will not come here. The best and brightest are starting to leave here. They will come here, get their education, and then they're out because nobody wants to be here. And scientists don't want to come to the country anymore, not even for anything. So we're losing all these conference centers, everything. It's just not happening. So good job. And all the grant money has been taken away, so there's no reason for the scientists to actually come here, you know?

35:53Jason DeFillippo:Exactly. And let's end this segment on the high note. Let's talk about last year's Ig Nobel Prize winners, just because I love this stuff so much and I love to read it every year. It included a team from Italy who investigated the phase transition of cassio e pepe sauce when it clumps into an unappealing goopy liquid, an international team that studied the pizza preferences of different lizard groups, and a European team that demonstrated alcohol sometimes improves a person's ability to speak in a foreign language. That is so true. As anybody that's ever been to Scotland knows, even though that's not a foreign language.

36:24Brian Schulmeister:That's so true. Oh.

36:28Jason DeFillippo:If you don't know anything about the Ig Nobel Prize, Google it, people. You will be delighted. Links are in the show notes. Go check it out.

36:41Brian Schulmeister:This episode is sponsored by CleanMyMac. Look, if you spend your life in front of a Mac like I do, editing audio, exporting video, juggling 40 browser tabs, and wondering why your machine suddenly sounds like it's preparing for liftoff, you know the feeling when your workflow grinds to a halt. That's where CleanMyMac comes in. It's basically the silent system engineer for your Mac, cleaning out junk files, duplicate clutter, broken downloads and background junk that slowly drags performance down. It's Apple notarized, built by MacPaw, and designed to keep your machine running smoothly without you digging through weird system folders at 2 a.m.

37:16Brian Schulmeister:I especially like tools like Space Lens, which gives you a visual map of what's actually eating up your storage, and SmartCare, which handles cleanup and optimization from a single dashboard. The whole point is keeping your Mac out of your way so you can stay focused on the work instead of babysitting your computer. Get tidy today. Try seven days free and use our code oldgeeks for 20 % off at clnmy.com slash oldgeeks. That's oldgeeks all in caps. I know. Just click the link in the show notes and get clean today. That's clnmy.com slash oldgeeks for seven days free and 20 % off.

37:58Jason DeFillippo:Caps and doodads.

38:01Brian Schulmeister:Brian, I cannot believe I'm saying this, but it has been eight years since we started the Clash Royale clan for the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. I think I lasted eight days. Eight minutes, more like it. I took a break for like a year or so, but I've been playing for about the past seven or eight months. There's a few of us left, not many. But the crazy thing is Clash Royale just actually celebrated their 10th year anniversary for being in business. It's a fun game. If you play, come check us out. Send me a note and we'll get you into the clan. We've got plenty of spaces. Plenty of spaces. Like I said, there's maybe like eight of us there that play every day.

38:38Brian Schulmeister:But it's fun. It's still there. And I'm enjoying it. It is something to do on the crapper every morning. That's about it. All right. Another piece of software I've got is Open Audible. Open Audible is a cross-platform audiobook manager designed for Audible users. Manage and download all your audiobooks with this easy-to-use desktop application. I have 1 ,020 books in my Audible library. One of the things that OpenAudible does is let me back them up and convert them to MP3 for easier listening on different devices, which I do believe is technically illegal. But you shouldn't do that. You could say you just Pinterest it.

39:20Brian Schulmeister:Yes, I found them on Pinterest. uh what so so to not illegally take my 1020 books uh has taken over eight days so far and i still have 300 and some odd books to go so it is not quickly and i'm running on an m4 uh macbook air with 32 gig of ram it is not a slouch of a machine but it only does three at a time and it's kind of junkie. But OpenAudible is not free. If you do want the conversion process to back up illegally your audiobooks off of Amazon's Audible platform, it will cost you$24.99. Which I may or may not have paid since I said I was actually converting all of my books to MP3. You do the math.

40:06Jason DeFillippo:Every AI company is now purchasing their subscription to OpenAudible and we will now convert all of this and throw it into our AI engines. Yes, thank you very much.

40:14Brian Schulmeister:I'm pretty sure they got that off of Annie's archive already, so I'm sure they're good to go.

40:19Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

40:19Brian Schulmeister:Actually, that's what all the GPUs are for. They're converting all the audiobooks. It's not actually training the AI. Just sitting there, chugging through fucking audible.com. That's funny.

40:29Jason DeFillippo:Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber, who has led the Upstart social platform since 2021, is stepping down from her role as his top executive. Tony Schneider, who has been an advisor and investor, will take over the job temporarily while Graber stays on as chief innovation officer. as blue sky matures the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution while i return to what i do best building new things graber wrote in the blog post also known as we need to make some fucking money and i built this thing and got it up and running but i don't know how to do anything else yeah schneider who was previously ceo at wordpress parent automatic will be that experienced operator and leader while blue sky's board searches for a permanent ceo her history with blue sky dates back to its early days as a side project at jack dorsey's twitter graber was officially brought on as ceo in 2021 as blue sky spun off to an independent company which ended its association with twitter in 2022 and with dorsey in 2024 she led the company through its launch at early viral success as it grew from invitation only platform to the 40 43 million user service it is today during that time she's become known as an advocate for decentralized social media and for trolling Mark Zuckerberg's t-shirt choices.

41:44Jason DeFillippo:Doesn't he only have one? Only ever seen him in one shirt.

41:48Brian Schulmeister:Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Now, remember, he got a stylist for a while. Yeah, no pants. That's why she's not. That's why she's trolling his pants choices. I can't believe it's only 43 million. It's been around for so long. Yeah, well, that's probably why she's stepping down as CEO and somebody else is coming in. Exactly.

42:05Jason DeFillippo:Again, it's scaling and it's money. And yes.

42:08Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's get some marketing people involved here. The technology works great. You can keep working on that. All right.

42:15Jason DeFillippo:Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, has spun out an AI company that's turning a decade of players pointing phones at buildings into a navigation system for robots. Yes, all of us when Pokemon Go came out, those of us that got super into the game, not me, but certainly plenty of people did. We're like, this is the best thing ever. and the rest of us were looking at this going, this could be a privacy nightmare, and it certainly is a data nightmare. And what are they going to do with all this data? Well, that shoe has dropped.

42:46Brian Schulmeister:Well, I mean, we talked about this before. Neontech Spatial was something that we've had on the show when we first discovered it. It's like, oh my God, they've got all this stuff and they're selling this data. But now they've tacked on AI. So continue, Brian. This is where it gets creepy.

43:00Jason DeFillippo:Well, when we say they've got all this stuff, let's say we're talking about 30 billion. Images of urban environments with location data accurate to within a few centimeters.

43:11Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. That is a lot of fucking data. Well, if you want to map something, put a Pokemon over there and tell people to go look at it. That's why they had to remove it from Epstein's Island. Yep. Uh-huh. So. Yep.

43:26Jason DeFillippo:So this is not just a data set you build. This is one you accidentally collect over 10 years of a global gaming craze. It turns out that GPS is a bit of a mess in cities in dense areas with high rises and underpasses. That blue dot on your phone can drift by 50 meters. Putting a delivery robot on entirely the wrong street. Visual positioning is the workaround. And that is what they are delivering. They're delivering by the centimeter location data to delivery robots.

43:54Brian Schulmeister:Okay, okay. Why don't they sell this to Elon and his fucking Tesla since Tesla's run on visual reckoning like this? This seems like the perfect thing. Elon should buy this company.

44:04Jason DeFillippo:It's absolutely insane that probably the best mapping of the planet is going to come from Pokemon Go. But that's looking like it is. So they've already teamed up with Coco Robotics, which runs about 1 ,000 robots across five cities and has already made over half a million deliveries from Pokemon arenas to pepperoni. That seems to be the way we're going. Accuracy improvements are genuinely impressive. Instead of stopping somewhere near your door, Coco's robots will now be able to position themselves precisely at restaurant pickup spots and right outside customers' doors. Hundreds of millions of people contributed detailed, geotagged imagery of cities worldwide while playing a game, and most of them had no idea it would one day train commercial robotics, except for some of the people on the show.

44:48Brian Schulmeister:Some of us might have known what was going on there. Yes, maybe.

44:51Jason DeFillippo:And the system is a hacker's dream target, a centimeter accurate, continuously updated world model that's physically connected to robots moving around city streets. That's an extraordinarily attractive thing to spoof or manipulate. As Coco's robots move around, they feed fresh mapping data back into the system, so every delivery run makes the surveillance map more detailed and more accurate. The whole idea of what a map is is starting to change. We're moving from maps that help people find their way around to richly tagged data sets designed for machines to understand the world and then kill us.

45:27Brian Schulmeister:Or find where all of the man poo is down to a centimeter in San Francisco.

45:32Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Niantic Spatial Vision is a living map, a real time digital replica of the entire world. Whether that excites you or terrifies you probably says a lot about where you land on the AI optimism spectrum.

45:45Brian Schulmeister:Okay, well, forget the AI optimism. Forget the AI shit. It is, from a data perspective and what they've created, it is absolutely stunning. It is a phenomenal piece of technology. And I applaud them for that. Absolutely applaud them for that. The AI shit, that's all just bolted on marketing bullshit. But yeah, I mean, what they're doing with it, maybe they should sell it to Claude so they're not bombing fucking school children. Maybe, just saying.

46:12Jason DeFillippo:The problem is nobody ordered a fucking pizza at that school.

46:16Brian Schulmeister:Anyway, moving on to some more robot news. God damn it. I couldn't think of a fucking Pokemon's name. Otherwise, I was like, I couldn't find a... Pikachu! Charizard. There we go.

46:26Jason DeFillippo:I got one from my kid.

46:28Brian Schulmeister:The only one I know is Pikachu. That's it. And I played that game quite a bit. I'm just like, okay, whatever. So police in Macau escorted a humanoid robot away after it reportedly frightened a 70-year-old woman during a late-night incident near a residential complex in the Patane district. The robot, identified as a Unitree G1 owned by a local education center, had been used in the area for promotional activities. According to the operator, the robot stopped behind the woman after she paused in the walkway to check her phone and it could not pass around her. The woman noticed the illuminated robot behind her and became distressed, telling bystanders it was making her heart race.

47:06Brian Schulmeister:Video from the scene shows the robot raising its arms as people gathered nearby. Police responded, escorted the robot away, and returned it to its operator, warning to use greater caution when operating robots in public spaces. The woman reported feeling unwell and asked to be taken to a hospital. After examination and treatment, she was discharged. Now, police confirmed that there was no physical contact and no injuries, and the woman chose not to file a complaint, but it is still fucking creepy as hell that this guy is following this old lady with a robot.

47:40Jason DeFillippo:But Elon's going to sell them all to us and it's going to be great. It's going to be fantastic. It's going to be great.

47:50Brian Schulmeister:Media Candy.

47:52Jason DeFillippo:Well, Jason, I forgot that this was out, but then it turned up in my ads, so I was like, okay, I guess I'm going to go watch it. Monarch Legacy of Monsters Season 2 is out. I think the first three episodes are out now. I watched the first two. I kind of enjoyed the first season, and I've got to say the second season's kind of more of the same at this point. My thought on the series is they spent enough money. It looks great. The monsters look really good. All the sets are really beautiful. It's nicely designed. It's well shot. The music is pretty good. The acting is a little bit hit or miss here and there, but mostly pretty solid.

48:36Jason DeFillippo:There's something you're not listing.

48:38Brian Schulmeister:Out of all the things that you just listed, Brian.

48:40Jason DeFillippo:What have I left out, Jason?

48:41Brian Schulmeister:What have you left out? Maybe writing? The writing. I didn't hear writing in there.

48:46Jason DeFillippo:Wow. Yeah, the writing is a little. There's so much potential there, and it ends up just feeling like one of those fucking shitty episodes of Monster of the Week X-Files. Just on repeat. Brian, is it a little beige? it's a bit beige i would say it's a bit beige yes okay i thought so too i lasted about halfway through the first episode and i'm like i'm gonna go watch something else or actually better yet

49:11Brian Schulmeister:i'm just gonna go to sleep because it's more productive than watching this show and i had that problem with season one too honestly i you know there were there were spots where it was fine but most of it was just a treasury to get to the good stuff so yeah it should feel a bit more lost

49:26Jason DeFillippo:except for the ending. It should feel a bit more X-Files except age better. It should feel, yeah, it should, there should be,

49:34Brian Schulmeister:there's so many things that could be compelling about it,

49:37Jason DeFillippo:but they just, it never hits the gas. It just doesn't. No, they spent all the money on Kurt Russell. I guess so. And his son, right? His son, yeah.

49:47Brian Schulmeister:It's good reverse casting that they did there. So good, so good.

49:51Jason DeFillippo:It's a show that should be good and it is just beige. You're right, it's just beige. Well, Live Nation has reached a settlement with the Department of Justice in its antitrust case that accused the live entertainment giant of monopolistic practices. This is unfortunate because I really wanted this to just go to court and not settle. But they will pay at least$200 million in damages to states that were part of the lawsuit filed in May 2024, but avoid selling off Ticketmaster. So basically slap on the wrist for them. Yep. They will be required to make a few changes to their business practices, according to NBC News Ticketmaster, the subsidiary of Live Nation, will be required to create a standalone ticketing system that allows third-party competitors like SeatGeek and Eventbrite to sell tickets on.

50:34Jason DeFillippo:So they get a cut of the other people selling. Yeah, exactly. So it's really ruining the monopoly. It's just rebranding a ticket sale. Reshuffling the fees that you have to pay. Yes. The settlement aims to loosen some of Live Nation's control over venues as well. According to NBC News, the company will have to divest up to 13. Count them. It'll take less than a second. And be prohibited from retailing against venues that choose another ticket seller over Ticketmaster. Who's going to be policing that? No one. The settlement comes less than a week after its case went to trial. While the matter may be concluded with the Justice Department, many of the state's attorney general who are part of the lawsuit will be continuing their legal action separately.

51:15Jason DeFillippo:as they should. The settlement recently announced what the U.S. Department of Justice fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers. New York State Attorney General Letitia James wrote in the press release, we will continue our lawsuit to protect consumers and restore fair competition to the live entertainment industry. 26 other attorneys general have signed on. So good, because that was a nothing burger. You basically let them get away with it.

51:42Brian Schulmeister:Mm-hmm. So keep going. Keep going, people. Feet to the fire. Feet to the fire.

51:47Jason DeFillippo:We got an email just a little bit before we started to record from Crazy Florida Fan, who said, in case you missed it, and this is a link from the AV Club, court document reveals Live Nation employees joked about robbing and gouging stupid fans. In a reveal that will likely surprise very few people, new evidence brought by the Justice Department in its antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation shows two employees mocking potential customers and joking about robbing them blind, baby. the employees ben baker and jeff weinholt and good on you for putting their fucking names out there yeah good joked about planning to gouge fans and ancillary fees for extra perks like vip parking and joke about how the fans are so stupid for paying the fees here's the kicker of course most of these potential customers don't really have a choice if they want to see their favorite musicians that's why live nation is the subject of the antitrust lawsuit yeah there's no other

52:42Brian Schulmeister:options.

52:43Jason DeFillippo:We have to deal with you. These Slack messages have previously not been included as evidence in the trial. As Live Nation argued, they were irrelevant to the case and merely reflected off-the-cuff banter, not policy, decision-making, or facts of consequence, according to New York Times. They are correct about that. They are correct. It is just off-the-cuff banter, and it's not policy. These guys are just assholes. And that's why I'm glad they were named and I hope nobody fucking hires them. Unfortunately, we are currently in a culture where this kind of behavior is fucking rewarded and it's not punished anymore.

53:23Jason DeFillippo:You and I have made jokes at work many, many times. It was never against, to the expense of our customers. It was usually against each other because that's what we do. These guys are just assholes. Assholes, yeah. So fuck them. I hope they get fired. And I hope they don't get jobs. However, however, I think that there's plenty of open spaces at this current administration's as well as Elon's company or Meta or any of these AI companies or any of the companies that we talk about in our show that would happily hire these motherfuckers.

54:01Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, they're going to land on their feet. But here's the good thing. From now, well, I was going to say now until the end of eternity, every time you Google search their name, all of these news stories will come up. But we know that's not going to happen because it's all going to be AI summaries, and they'll just be glue experts in the future. Yeah. All right, got some YouTube news. Wall Street analysts say YouTube is now officially the biggest media company on Earth. Research from Moffat Nathanson reports the Google-owned platform pulled in about$62 billion in revenue last year, slightly beating Disney's media business and estimates YouTube could be worth as much as$560 billion on its own.

54:41Brian Schulmeister:The growth isn't just ads anymore. Subscriptions are booming with more than 330 million paid users across YouTube Premium, Google One, and YouTube TV. The analysts also think generative AI will help creators pump out more targeted bullshit. Oh, sorry, monetizable content. Because apparently the internet needed even more videos. Fuck you. Meanwhile, YouTube TV's skinny bundles and cheaper premium tiers are expected to bring in new subscribers with overall revenue projected to keep growing in the low double digits through the end of the decade. In other words, cable died and the algorithm inherited the earth.

55:16Brian Schulmeister:I still pay for YouTube premium. Do you?

55:19Jason DeFillippo:No. No, because the only reason I paid for it initially was the kid was getting on YouTube and the filters sucked and shitty stuff got through all the time anyways. So, no.

55:28Brian Schulmeister:Okay.

55:29Jason DeFillippo:We are pretty much a no YouTube house unless it is heavily monitored. And I sit there and pick it up myself and watch it with my kid. Perfect. Good plan. Oh, you're parenting. How about that? Also, by the way, I think we need to rename this segment from Media Candy to monetizable content. I'm in. I'm in. We'll get on that. Because apparently that's what entertainment is now.

55:51Brian Schulmeister:It's just monetizable content.

55:53Jason DeFillippo:I fucking hate the word content so much. I hate monetizable and content. Fuck it all.

55:58Brian Schulmeister:Speaking of monetizable content, I dove into Paradise Season 2. Paradise Season 1 is available on Hulu as well as Season 2. I liked Season 1. Season 1 was kind of a sci-fi whodunit. Season 2 is veering into walking dead post-apocalyptic territory, and I'm not having it. I am not digging it at all yet. The first episode, though, was very fun. It had to do with Graceland and somebody who survived the apocalypse living at Graceland. That was a fun episode. Episode two, I couldn't have given a flying fuck about. And I moved into episode three. And I'm just like, I hope they fix this because I really liked season one.

56:37Brian Schulmeister:I thought it was a fun show. And it moved really quickly with only eight episodes. And I'm three in and it's not really moving the needle so far. I am a little bit trepidatious about continuing. but we'll see.

56:48Jason DeFillippo:Not really my type of show but have you ever been to Graceland?

56:51Brian Schulmeister:I haven't. Well I feel like I have now because of the show. I'm curious.

56:55Jason DeFillippo:I kind of want to watch it just for that because I went to Graceland

56:58Brian Schulmeister:and I was wildly disappointed

57:01Jason DeFillippo:would slightly cover it.

57:04Brian Schulmeister:That's why I'm glad I watched this because it looked like a picture perfect replica of Graceland which means I would have been wildly disappointed if I went there in person. It looks like somebody's house. It's just like somebody's house with some shit around. Yeah. It's a total dump.

57:15Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. All right.

57:17Brian Schulmeister:It's kind of that in the show, too, so it's perfect. Okay. Yeah. What I am excited about is Daredevil Born Again Season 2. The official trailer, too, has dropped, and it is available March 24th. Jessica Jones is back. Okay, I'm in. We're good. Very excited. Yes. Yep. All good. Can't wait. Yeah. And the final season trailer for The Boys is out. That is April 8th. I'm looking forward to that. I'm getting my sadness porn hat on because that's pretty much what it's going to be. yeah, I'm looking forward to them wrapping it up. I think that they've done a really good job with the Gen V spinoff with the two seasons of that.

57:54Brian Schulmeister:And it's all going to tie in back together. And I am actually looking forward to them wrapping this thing up.

57:59Jason DeFillippo:All right. I never got into it. Never made it through the first season. I think it's fantastic. I really do think it's good.

58:06Brian Schulmeister:There are spots where you do have to fast forward because you know the next five minutes are just going to be something that's going to make you have really bad dreams for the next three months.

58:15Jason DeFillippo:so you can just get past that yeah i don't need that uh more up my alley is the final trailer drop for the super mario galaxy movie which uh i will unfortunately be going to the movie theater for on opening day because my son is incredibly excited this comes out april 1st i have to say i really did enjoy the first movie it was a lot of fun so if they if they keep it up and it's it's uh they throw in enough for the adults uh i will enjoy this one as well it was a good time i scanned

58:42Brian Schulmeister:through this trailer and it made me so fucking thankful that I never had kids that I don't have to go watch shit like this.

58:49Jason DeFillippo:This is not one of the better things that are out there. Like, you know, Gravity Falls, that was... Gravity Falls you would enjoy. Like, it's made for my kid, but it's awesome. This is not of that level, but this isn't fucking, you know, Paw Patrol where I want to shoot myself in the face.

59:05Brian Schulmeister:So, okay. Speaking of Gravity Falls, I just saw something come through my news feed that there's like some new art book coming out. There's some new stuff. My kid lost his shit.

59:12Jason DeFillippo:he cannot fucking wait i showed him the article i let him read the whole thing he read it 19 times he's like oh pre-order pre-order can we pre-order the fact that your kid knows what pre-order means is kind of fucked up welcome to the world man he he knows about monetizable content content exactly

59:32Brian Schulmeister:if i had a kid that's what i'd name him monetizable content AMC.

59:39Brian Schulmeister:Oh, shit. I was thinking of an old zombie show, because I've had this idea in my head for a while about writing a script about being stuck in an AA meeting when the zombie apocalypse happens. Because the funny thing about being in an AA meeting is that you have all of the different genres of people that you would normally have in a stereotypical zombie group movie. You've got, you know, the thinker, the hot chick, the scumbag, the criminal, all those types of people are at your general AA meeting, usually at my Wednesday mornings. Shout out to you guys. You know who I'm talking about.

1:00:14Jason DeFillippo:You know which one of you is the scumbag.

1:00:16Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. And I was just thinking, yeah, it's probably or I know I'm the MacGyver of the group. I'm the MacGyver. But the thing is, it's like and I just got it in my head. I'm like, oh, man, you know, I still I'm still on this thing where nobody has redone the zombie genre yet. with EVs in mind, because in the old days, that was half of the thing. It's like, you can't get to the store because, you know, you'd start up the car and the zombies would come and you got to run. Then you have the horses and then the zombies eat the horses. But with EVs, you know, you just whisper along and then you can get your food and your supplies.

1:00:50Brian Schulmeister:But anyway, it got me thinking about this great old zombie show called Dead Set. I had to look it up. And it's a it's set. It's a it's a British zombie satirical series. It's like five episodes. and it takes place on the set of Big Brother in the UK. It is fucking hilarious. And it was even better when I looked it back up because it's by Charlie Brooker, which is the last thing he did before he went into Black Mirror. So I had to go find it. I actually had to go to Sweden to get it. I downloaded it. I'm going to watch it again. But I remember this being phenomenal. So I'm going to spend, well, actually I have to go watch the Star Trek Academy, Starfleet Academy season finale after this.

1:01:30Brian Schulmeister:But after that, I'm going to watch Dead Set. So if you can get it in your streaming provider, check it out. It is a fucking blast. I loved it.

1:01:37Jason DeFillippo:And just because you mentioned England really quick, we're not going to read all of this. We're not going to read this on the air. But Steve, I know you're listening. Aluminium.

1:01:46Brian Schulmeister:Oh, my God, Steve. Yes, we weren't making fun of it. I just love saying aluminium. Aluminium. Yes, I love that. Or as we like to say it in the rest of the world, aluminum. I prefer aluminium. but Zed, no, Zed's dead, baby. Also, I didn't push a pram.

1:02:04Jason DeFillippo:Closing shout outs!

1:02:07Brian Schulmeister:Over at Patreon, we've got no new subscribers, but Jason F. up their pledge, and we'd also like to thank Charles, Michaela, Val, James, Chris, Zingrid, Jonathan, Barnesinator, Andrew, and Roy. And aluminium.

1:02:21Jason DeFillippo:And aluminium. Over at PayPal, we got a donation from Miles this week. Thank you so much. Oh, light week at the old PayPal. Light week, I know. Usually we have a lot.

1:02:30Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, at the tip jar, we've got Patrick, Jeffrey, and John. Hi, John. And we've got Ian for the big 30 bucks. Thank you. So if you would like to help support the show, because we are a fan-supported show, we really are a fan-supported show, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and you can sign up and get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition for as little as$3 a month. You can give as much as you want. Or you can go to gog.show slash donate for other ways to give us your hard-earned money, which we really desperately would appreciate because that's what keeps all of this fantabulosity going.

1:03:01Jason DeFillippo:That's right. My washed out face and everything. This ring light's way too bright.

1:03:05Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, we got to work on your lighting next week. Well, it's dark.

1:03:08Jason DeFillippo:Like normally we have sunlight when I'm recording.

1:03:11Brian Schulmeister:Well, I'm in a studio and it's dark in here too. And look at my perfect complexion. And you like my new Chris Cooper artwork and my Shepard Fairey artwork? It does say make art not war, but I always get not war.

1:03:24Jason DeFillippo:I agree with that part. Exactly. Exactly. Okay.

1:03:27Brian Schulmeister:Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillipo.

1:03:29Jason DeFillippo:And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to our monetizable content. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 737. 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. Want the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. We're looking forward to swing by GOG.show to join our Discard 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.

1:04:06Jason DeFillippo:And guess what? We've got GOG.show.merch.show. You can do it. You can do it, Brian. Stay in your grumpy gear now. It's two fucking late. I want to go to bed. I want to watch TV. I want to watch monetizable content. Content. Shop.gog.show. Stay monetizable.

From the publisher

In this week's show we start with FOLLOW UP: The world keeps trying to protect kids online — Indonesia just joined Australia, Spain, and Malaysia in banning social media for under-16s, while COPPA 2.0 sailed through the US Senate unanimously. Meanwhile, Roblox is using AI to clean up its chat, because apparently "Hurry TF up" is the hill they've chosen to die on — even as they're still dealing with the whole "pedophile problem" thing from January. On the AI copyright front, Gracenote is the latest company to sue OpenAI for helping itself to proprietary data, joining a growing queue of plaintiffs who apparently didn't get the memo that everything is training data now.

IN THE NEWS: Anthropic is suing the Pentagon after being labeled a "supply chain risk" — apparently because the CEO said AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, which the Trump administration heard as fighting words. The delicious irony: the Pentagon is still running Claude in active operations while trying to phase it out. Speaking of active operations, investigators now think a missile strike on an Iranian girls' school may have been triggered by bad AI-generated intelligence from that same Claude-based system. So yes, the autocomplete that hallucinates your grocery list is also maybe accidentally bombing schools. Meta's Oversight Board is begging the company to get serious about AI-generated content after a fake war video from a Filipino fake news account racked up 700K views — while separately, Zuckerberg dropped cash on Moltbook, a "social network for AI agents" that turned out to be mostly humans larping as bots and had a security flaw that exposed everyone's API keys. The guy who built it basically vibe-coded the whole thing. Meta's own CTO said he didn't "find it particularly interesting." And yet. Oracle is hemorrhaging jobs and drowning in debt chasing AI dreams, its stock down 50% from peak — a timely reminder that "AI will replace workers" is currently manifesting as "companies set money on fire and lay people off to pay the electric bill." Researchers confirmed AI is homogenizing human thought and creativity — a thing some of us have been screaming since day one. A DOGE engineer allegedly walked out of the Social Security Administration with databases containing personal info on 500 million Americans on a thumb drive. The Ig Nobel Prize is relocating to Switzerland because it's no longer safe to invite international guests to America. Nintendo is suing the US government to get its tariff money back. SETI thinks it may have been accidentally filtering out alien signals due to space weather. And Pokémon Go players unknowingly spent a decade building a centimeter-accurate surveillance map of Earth's cities that's now guiding pizza delivery robots — which, honestly, tracks.

In APPS & DOODADS: The GOG clan in Clash Royale just hit eight years old — respect. OpenAudible is the cross-platform audiobook manager your Audible library deserves, especially if you've got over a thousand books sitting there judging you.

And finally in MEDIA CANDY: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 is here, and pretty beige. Live Nation settled its DOJ antitrust case for $200 million, kept Ticketmaster, and avoided a breakup — meanwhile court documents revealed employees joking about "robbing fans blind" and gouging "stupid" customers, which explains basically every concert ticket you've bought in the last decade. YouTube is now officially the world's largest media company at $62 billion in revenue. Bluesky's CEO is stepping down, which is either a bad sign or just the natural order of "person who built the cool thing hands it to the person who scales the cool thing." Dead Set — Charlie Brooker's 2008 zombie-in-the-Big-Brother-house miniseries — is worth a watch if you haven't. And trailers dropped for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 (March 24th), The Boys final season (April 8th), and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (April 1st — yes, really).


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Show notes at https://gog.show/737


Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DgSYnFF6twE


FOLLOW UP

Indonesia announces a social media ban for anyone under 16

Anthropic Sues Pentagon

Metadata company Gracenote is the latest to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

Roblox introduces real-time AI-powered chat rephraser for inappropriate language


IN THE NEWS

COPPA 2.0 passes the Senate again, unanimously this time

AI Error Likely Led to Iran Girl's School Bombing

The Oversight Board says Meta needs new rules for AI-generated content

Mark Zuckerberg Decides Meta Needs More Slop, Buys the Social Network for AI Agents

Oracle Axing Huge Number of Jobs as AI Crisis Intensifies

You can (sort of) block Grok from editing your uploaded photos

Researchers Say AI Is Homogenizing Human Expression and Thought

Social Security watchdog investigating claims that DOGE engineer copied its databases

Nintendo is suing the US government over Trump's tariffs

SETI Thinks It Might Have Missed a Few Alien Calls. Here's Why

Ig Nobel Ceremony Relocates to Europe Amid Safety Concerns in Trump’s America


APPS & DOODADS

Clash Royale

OpenAudible

Bluesky's CEO is stepping down after nearly 5 years

How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world

Robot Escorted Away By Cops After Terrorizing Old Woman


MEDIA CANDY

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2

Live Nation settlement avoids breakup with Ticketmaster

Court documents reveal Live Nation employees joking about robbing, gouging "stupid" fans

YouTube Is the World’s Largest Media Company, MoffettNathanson Says

Paradise Season 2

DAREDEVIL: Born Again Season 2 Official Teaser Trailer 2 (2026)

The Boys Final Season Trailer

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie | Final Trailer

Dead Set

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