748: Space Bone

22:19Jason DeFillippo:How fucking dumb are you? Yeah, well, I'm surprised it's only five, honestly. Have you been to... Well, I haven't told you where they're rolling out. Walmart is currently rolling out electronic shelf labels nationwide, though the company says human managers still approve price changes and denies plans, denies plans, they say, for dynamic surge pricing today. Yeah, yeah. So, well, there is some good news. Maryland recently became the first state to ban the practice in grocery stores. And some at least a dozen other states are considering regulation and legislation around surveillance pricing. Surveillance pricing and surge pricing and demand based pricing.

23:01Jason DeFillippo:All of it should be banned. It should all be illegal. The price of the price of the price. I don't care how many people are trying to get it at the same time. You should be able to do that. We know what happens. Right. We're getting fisted already at the grocery store. Why are you trying to make it even worse for us? Yeah, pretty much. We already have, we're already employees and we have to check ourselves out every fucking day. So come on, cut us some slack. Can we at least get the employee discount since we're doing all the fucking work? I agree. Well, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement this week and I have not thought about Ansel Adams since college.

23:33Jason DeFillippo:Ansel Adams, covering dorm rooms everywhere. Everybody had Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico. Everybody had that poster. Well, apparently some other people are still trying to get it because they condemned the unauthorized use of the photographer's name and work for the creation of an AI-generated color version of Adam's Moonrise Hernandez, New Mexico. According to the Trust, the piece was up for sale last month at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers The Photography Show. The exhibit by the Danziger Gallery exploited Ansel's name, reputation, and his most iconic image while failing to identify any human artist responsible for its creation, the statement says.

24:10Jason DeFillippo:Interestingly, the trust didn't take issue with the involvement of AI, noting that Adams was remarkably prescient about and excited by the potential of computers to transform photography. I don't think he meant this much, though. Yeah, this much. Yeah. The issue is that the exhibitor allegedly just straight up ripped off the artist's work to make money off of it. Yeah. You know, I mean, the AI originally ripped it off and then they use the AI to rip it off again. So it's been double ripped off. Yes. But. Yes. Yes. And in more wonderful uses of AI, AI is starting to become like, I don't know, crypto.

24:42Jason DeFillippo:Like, you just use it for bad shit now. Okay. That's all it's for. The National Transportation Safety Board has pulled its docket system offline after people used information uploaded to it to recreate the voices of pilots killed in a plane crash with AI. As CNN reports, the agency recently uploaded files filled with details about the November 4, 2025 crash involving UPS Flight 2976, one of the plane's engines separated from the wing during takeoff from Louisville, Kentucky, killing three crew members and 12 people on the ground. While the NTSB upload accident reports that the public can access, it is not allowed by federal law to release cockpit audio recordings due to the highly sensitive nature of verbal communications inside the cockpit.

25:24Jason DeFillippo:So no audio recordings. That's too much. We'll give you the details. That's it. However, they do upload a spectrogram of the black box recordings, which shows a graphic representation of the recorded audio in the cockpit. and you can basically take that, give it to AI, and AI will spit back out exactly what all the sounds are. And that's what some really fucking disgusting people did. It's fucked up. Then they ran it through Eleven Labs' voice and made them say all sorts of fun shit. Yes, pretty much. So one user on X said it took them 10 minutes using OpenAI's codex to reconstruct audio from the Spectrogram the NTSB released.

26:04Jason DeFillippo:So now the NTSB says, no more for you. You can't play nicely. we're taking the toys away. I'm not going to put them up anymore. I want to know why they're putting the graphics of the spectrogram up anyway. I don't understand that at all. It's like, what does that show? Besides, I guess, the timing. I mean, can we have, if we can't have the audio, we can just have a basic transcript of, a redacted transcript to the show timing. I don't know what, it's just weird. It's fucking weird that they would put that up there. I don't know why they put it up anyways. At this point, I say they should just hire those Chinese companies that do those really horrible AI 3D graphic.

26:47Or the Lego people, the Iranian Lego ones.

26:49Jason DeFillippo:Let's just have those done. Let's just have those done of everything from now on. That would be phenomenal. When I'm in charge, this is what I will decree. Okay. Spotify is continuing its push to become the everything audio app by adding narrated long-form magazine articles to the platform. Now, premium subscribers can now listen to more than 650 articles from publications, including Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Pitchfork. You can listen using your monthly audiobook listening credits. And free users can buy individual articles for$2.

27:25They want their$2, Brian, because Spotify needs that$2, apparently.

27:31Jason DeFillippo:How much money goes back to the author? That's what I'm curious about. I could not find a single article that talked about this story that told me what the deal was between Spotify and any of those publications. If you know, if you find one, send it to me, please, because I'm very curious to see what deal is, what kind of agreement they came to. Spotify says the stories are produced in-house and use a mix of human and AI-generated narration with synthetic voices clearly labeled. The company hopes shorter narrated articles will get users more comfortable with long form listening and eventually drive audio book engagements.

28:06They're trying to get you hooked on listening to articles. You know, they should have they should have gone to their local drug dealer and learned that the first one's always free, that two dollars is way too much money for what they're trying to do. They should just give them away and get them hooked. If that's what their if that's what their goal is, then come on. Yep. Come on.

28:25Jason DeFillippo:And I actually, I absolutely guarantee you the stories are produced in-house and use a mix of human and AI-generated narration for now. It's going to be all AI-generated narration within a week. I 100 % guarantee you. Yeah. I mean, why would they even put in human humans? You know? It's just, you know, the tides are changing, Jason, and it just makes them sound better. We use some real humans, I promise. Look, Spotify already killed the music industry, so they're on the hunt for the next frontier of creativity. To slaughter. Right. Well, magazines, I think they die before music. True, to be fair.

29:02Jason DeFillippo:Well, on Monday, Pope Leo issued his first papal encyclical, an almost 400-year-old tradition in which the Catholic Church shares its perspective on an issue. In this case, over about 42 ,300 words in the English version, the Pope warned of the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. So this whole thing was about AI. these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence in doing so they often surpass human intelligence speed and computational capacity he has obviously not done a google search recently offering tangible benefits across many fields he continued so-called artificial intelligences that do not undergo experiences do not possess a body do not feel joy or pain do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love work friendship or responsibility mean, nor guilt.

29:51Jason DeFillippo:Right, Catholics? Oh, yeah. Seriously. It's about all I remember. Anyways, I read through a lot of this. I think it's great. Everything that he said is fantastic. And he's basically calling for education. He's calling for leaders to make sure they put humans first, not AI. Make decisions related to weapons. Humans, not AI. Go Pope. I like this Pope. The Pope smokes dope. He's from Chicago. Come on. How can you not like them? Well, here's a joke for you. The Pope HR and AI walk into a bar. I have been getting inundated on Instagram for these videos of people claiming to be HR experts saying that, well, now you can cite religious preferences to a reason why you don't want to use AI.

30:41You have a religious objection to AI because the Pope said so. And they're saying, you know, it's a very good legal stance to stand on. And you may have a very interesting lawsuit on your hands if you get fired over it.

30:54Jason DeFillippo:Bullshit. That's not at all what he said. I know. I know. That's my point. It's like, A, do not listen to HR experts on Instagram, for starters. B, if you get fired over it, you fucking deserve it because you're part of the 5 % probably who think that the... Oh, my dynamic pricing is going to work out for me. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm just going to tell you right now. Don't believe the HR people on Instagram. Actually, you should never believe an HR person anyway, because you have to remember that they're not your friend. They don't work for you. They work for the company. Exactly. Given any chance, the HR people at your company will stab you in the neck and fuck you when you're dead.

31:33That's all they do. So can you tell I like the HR people that I worked with? Sounds like an HR violation for me.

31:40Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Saying. Well, if they've given you your paperwork already, then it doesn't really matter. Well, a new Mercer survey found that 99 % of CEOs expect AI-driven layoffs within the next two years. Executives think redesigning jobs around AI and automation will maximize profits, but only 32 % believe humans and AI can actually work together effectively. So replace people now, figure it out later. Entry-level workers are expected to get hit hardest because AI is best at automating the boring junior tasks companies use for training new hires. Again, what happens if we get rid of entry-level workers?

32:20Jason DeFillippo:Nobody gets trained up. Nobody gets experience. They don't care. They just don't care. CEOs have no foresight anymore. And they haven't even, you know what they need? They need to look at the menu first before they start coming up with this, because now that the pricing has changed, they're going to say that, oh, wait, this doesn't actually make any sense. So, yeah. Yeah, it's not going to be a cost cutting tool anymore because your token maxing has dynamically priced it up. Yeah. And unless you can go to China because DeepSeek just knocked their prices down like amazingly low just to get the competition.

33:00but here's the problem China I don't know if your company and the data laws where your company are you know founded if they will let you actually use a Chinese LLM to do the business that you need to do so you're going to have to be paying good old American inflated AI prices from scam Altman and Claude so yeah

33:22Jason DeFillippo:well one related CEO survey found companies cutting junior roles jumped from 17 % to 43 % in just one year Tech companies are increasingly using AI as both a cost-cutting tool and a layoff explanation generator. Despite the hype, many executives admit they still can't prove AI is delivering the productivity gains they promised investors. Employee morale has cratered, shockingly. Workers report their thriving at work dropped from 66 % in 2024 to 44 % in 2026, with AI job anxiety being a major factor. Silicon Valley has spent years promising AI would augment human creativity, and now the corporate translation appears to be augment quarterly earnings.

34:04Yeah, these guys just, and here's a side thing that I just, this came to me in the shower today. It's vibe coders and all these AI kids, you know, these ex-bros that you see that are all, you know, just everything. I got my agents doing this, that, and whatever for me while I'm sleeping and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. These uncreative little fuckers are the script kitties of today. That's all they are. We had the quote-unquote hackers back in the day when it used to be cool. You had your little DDoS machine and shit like that. These kids never wrote a line of software. They were just script kitties, which means they would download a script off the internet, put in a few parameters, and then become a hacker.

34:45Now these guys are coders and have never written a single fucking line of code in their life. I've personally written probably over a million lines of code over the 25 years that I was a programmer. So, you know what? I got some fucking chops. These kids got no fucking chops. And the people who stayed in the business, the old guys who had chops, they're losing their chops because they're stuck using these fucking agents to do their job for them that they used to do and were really good at. They were craftsmen. They're not becoming craftsmen anymore. They're becoming the next version of script kiddies.

35:15So, you know what, guys? I hope you get what you deserve for using this shit every day. That's all I got to say.

35:22Jason DeFillippo:I think we see it. We see what happens. Google. Google can't roll out AI. Google cannot roll out AI that works. Bingo. Right there. We're there. Nobody is rolling out anything with AI that works as it's supposed to. There's problems, problems, problems. Can't spell. Can't think. Can't drink. Don't drink. Don't eat. Don't smoke. What do you do? Sorry. Went out of man. A fine choice, a fine fucking choice, I must say. So it's just bullshit all the way down. Because I loved being a software developer. I loved figuring out the problems. That was the fun part. You get a brief, you look at it, you go, how are we going to do that?

36:02Can we do that? Is the technology there? Well, let me go think about it for a couple of days, and I'll come back to you with an answer. Now it's like, well, let me type it in. Oh, I don't even type anymore. I talk. I press a button, and I talk to my computer like fucking Scotty tried to do. But, you know, at least Scotty could still type even after all those years in space. But it's getting to the point now where it's just pissing me off that these little bitches are out there saying we're going to do everything. Have you seen one piece of software, Brian, that is revolutionary since this whole thing started?

36:34I'm guessing no, because there aren't any. There aren't any. Why has not one person rebuilt WordPress, that giant steaming pile of shit that runs a quarter of the Internet that everybody hates? Nobody's done it yet. And with all the AI that's out there, why not? Because it doesn't fucking work. Moving on. Space Force has awarded SpaceX a$2.29 billion contract to build the Space Data Network Backbone, a new low-Earth orbit communication system designed to connect military sensors and weapons platforms in real time. The network will use technology derived from SpaceX's Starlink and military-focused Starshield satellites, It's creating what the Pentagon calls resilient, globally connected sensor to shooter targeting network.

37:17Jason DeFillippo:You know how I know the name came from the U.S. Space Force and not from not from SpaceX? How? Because they called it the Space Data Network Backbone, while Elon would have called it Space Bone. Yes, he would have. That's how I know. That's it. I'm going to build Space Bone. SpaceX must deliver a fully operational prototype by 2027. The thing here is SpaceX is a multinational company, or at least as, you know, they have clients in basically every country around the world that is somebody. You know, except a few of them that have just turned out to be really bad actors or their regulations won't allow it.

38:01Anyway, here's the thing. So they make a lot of money from Russia and China and, oh, I don't know, our adversaries. So tying themselves to the U.S. government military branch saying we're going to build all of this shit for the military and at the same time we're trying to IPO is very dangerous. Very dangerous.

38:25Jason DeFillippo:Also, it's Elon. It's Elon. Just full stop. Yeah. The ketamine queen. so I would I'm just I'm throwing this out there because people are talking about you know how much money they're going to invest in the SpaceX IPO zero do not invest in the SpaceX IPO because there are so many variables if you read that prospectus and you're hearing this every day the the valuations they're putting on the company there's this two point something trillion dollar valuation that they're saying oh because if we're going to do this this and this we're going to have space-based data centers is part of it. And I'm like, no, you're not.

39:03If you're here with radiation, motherfuckers, the chips are going to be too cost prohibitive just even to start with that and the bandwidth. That's the technical side of it. Either way, it's a really stupid idea to invest anybody in SpaceX for this IPO because it is going to be, it's going to be a shark fin. It's going to absolutely be a shark fin. Just trust me on this one. Trust me. I mean, look, I don't have any money in stocks right now because I'm poor. but when we did, I did the, I, when we had our, our, our challenge, Brian, I won the challenge. I did. I did. Yeah. And guess what I, guess what I wanted on Nvidia and Apple.

39:39And if I still had that stock right now, we would not be doing this show. I had 229 shares of Apple. God damn it. And I sold them for gas money. I'm an idiot. That's not true.

39:51Jason DeFillippo:I still have those stocks and I'm still here doing the show. I wouldn't, I don't have a kid. So yeah. Or a house. There's that. So, yeah. Yeah. I live out of the back of a Jeep in a garage. My monthly nut's a little bigger. Yeah. Brian's got bigger nuts. All right. So you talked about space. I found one of your favorite things, a single-use website. Yes. I don't know where this came from. I feel like it was somebody on Discord, but it could have been just somebody on social network somewhere. It doesn't matter. It's the Star Trek title card generator. It's pretty cool. It's got almost every, it's got the original series, animated series, next gen, Deep Space Nine, Voyager.

40:29Jason DeFillippo:It's funny, the Deep Space Nine one is actually in better quality than you can actually stream Deep Space Nine. That is true. It is. It actually is. And it's got Enterprise and Lower Decks. So I guess it doesn't have the newest of the new, but this is great. You just pick one and you type in a name and it's got alternate, some of the different alternate images that they use for different titles. Fantastic. I love it. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. And another website that, well, let's be honest, I'm never going to look at it because, again, I'm in Toronto where there are regulations and we have concerns about health and things of that nature.

41:06Jason DeFillippo:So I don't need a map that shows me where all the AI data centers are going. But you Americans, good old Erin Brockovich, the American environmental activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in the film named after her, has launched a new project that aims to give people a platform to speak up and voice concerns about AI data centers in their community. the new brockovich ai data center reporting website centers on a map showing major operational ai data centers and facilities under construction in the u.s along with projects reported by the community some of the reports could be for rumored or proposed projects so not every dot on the map represents the actual functioning as of right now data center that's running the website has received 2 716 reports so far with the biggest chunk coming from you guessed it texas who of the 612 reports from the state, 297 coming from Sulphur Springs, where MSB Global is building one of the largest AI data centers projects on the continent.

42:00It smells like sulfur. Fun. So yeah, this is a cool little website.

42:05Jason DeFillippo:It's frightening when you actually see how many data centers there are already and how many are planned and how many are coming. So that's great. Here's what gets me. Why aren't they building data centers in Alaska? It's cold. There's a lot of Alaska that they can put them in that nobody gives a shit about. So run some fiber, put them up in the woods, you know, play with some bears. I don't know. I just it seems like a no brainer to me. Why would you put them here where everybody lives? Go up there where nobody lives. And we got lots of space. Because these are the concerns. Most people are worried about water, followed by electricity and then the health of the residents in their communities.

42:42Jason DeFillippo:Larger facilities consume five million gallons per day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, which is approximately the same amount used by a town with 10 ,000 to 50 ,000 people. According to the same non-governmental organization, utilities are passing on the costs of those upgrades to consumers by charging them more. We've talked about that a lot on the show. And when it comes to health, people are worried about the air and noise pollution AI data centers will bring to their communities. So yeah, put them somewhere else. That seems to make sense to me. Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say modern Wi-Fi routers can identify people with 99.5 % accuracy just by analyzing how their bodies disturb the radio signals.

43:22Jason DeFillippo:Fancy! This technique uses something called beam-forming feedback information. Beefy. I'm beefy. I'm beefy. Find me anytime, baby. Data already exchanged between devices and routers to improve Wi-Fi performance. The problem? It's largely unencrypted and surprisingly easy to capture. Researchers say they can identify people by their walking patterns, even if those people aren't carrying a phone or connected device. Unlike older Wi-Fi sensing methods that required hacked firmware, this newer method works with ordinary Wi-Fi 5 plus hardware and cheap consumer devices like laptops or Raspberry Pis.

44:00Jason DeFillippo:Researchers warned this could let businesses, governments, or random creeps track people in places like cafes, offices, or apartment buildings without consent or even visible cameras. This isn't entirely theoretical either. Companies like Comcast Xfinity already offer Wi-Fi sensing features that can detect movement inside homes using router signals. Reddit reactions were exactly what you'd expect. Half burn it all down. Half this has probably been happening for years already. The researchers are now urging the IEEE to build stronger privacy protections into future Wi-Fi standards before every coffee shop router becomes a low-budget surveillance state.

44:38I would like to point out, Brian, a couple years ago, years, maybe five or six years ago now, we talked about the Israelis at Ben-Gurion Institute doing exactly this. This is not new at all. These guys have been doing this forever.

44:54Jason DeFillippo:But now any idiot can do it, Jason. That's true. That's true. Just need me a raspberry pie. That's right. And I know we always try to end our ever-long news segment with a high note, but best I could do is high up in the air. It's not really a high note. China sent artificial human embryo models to the Tiangong Space Station to study whether humans could eventually reproduce in space. The embryos aren't viable human embryos. They're stem cell-based models designed to mimic early human development without becoming actual fetuses. So it's ethically complicated but slightly less terrifying than I was initially thinking when I read the headline.

45:32Jason DeFillippo:Come on! That's all I was thinking. Like, oh no! Scientists want to know how microgravity and cosmic radiation affect the earliest stages of embryonic development, including cell organization and implantation behavior. One set of sample simulated embryos attached to the uterine wall, while another used microfluid chips to model the stage where cells start forming organs and tissues. After the embryos finished developing in space, researchers froze them, and we'll compare them against identical Earth-based samples to see what's changed in orbit. Scientists say this research is necessary if humanity seriously wants moon bases or Mars colonies that don't require every future resident to be shipped from Earth-IKEA style.

46:12Jason DeFillippo:So, yeah, that makes an awful lot of sense. Something Elon probably didn't even think about or consider when he told us we were going to Mars. Oh, shit. We're going to the moon. Oh, shit. Maybe we're just staying home. Because he's, well, this is a different kind of space bone. Yeah. No, space is hard. Space is fucking hard. It wants to kill us. We are not supposed to live there. that's why we have that's why the universe gave us a nice planet to live on can we just stop fucking it up william shatner told us all this once when when he went up in space penis when he went up in the real space bone bezos is though yeah yeah except we couldn't understand it because bezos kept talking over him so he tried to tell us yeah shatner tried to tell us but yeah anyways uh so we spent an awful lot of time talking about ai sometimes it feels like it's the only thing we talk about.

47:05Jason DeFillippo:And one of the things that I've always said to you, Jason, is like, especially when, what was that model that came out? Open Claw. I always think of White Claw, but it wasn't White Claw. White Claw was actually useful. That was actually useful. Yeah. Open Claw will just delete your, well, I guess if you have enough White Claw, you can delete all your email too on accident. But so especially when Open Claw was all the rage for that, the two weeks before people realized that it's not only a security nightmare, but it actually doesn't really accomplish much of anything. What I keep saying is, what are we using AI for?

47:39Jason DeFillippo:Like, how is it quantitatively doing anything for my life to make it better? Sure, it can draft some emails for me. I have to double check everything. But really, I don't get it. So I had heard about this book. It's getting a lot of press right now. I am not a robot. My year using AI to do almost everything by Joanna Stern. Joanna Stern is a tech writer. She's been around for a while. Mostly, I like a lot of her stuff. It's a little too whimsical, not enough meat on the bone for me in general. But this book seems to be talking about exactly what my question is, Jason, which is, all right, let's use AI.

48:16Jason DeFillippo:What can it do? How's it going to change my life? How's it going to make it better? This is a book where she purports to kind of try everything out and use it and see if it makes her life better. And I have not entirely finished it. I'm at like 85%, but I can tell you 85 % of the way in, the answer is it is useful for absolutely fucking nothing. Nothing. like everything that she goes through and uses it for does not work out the one case scenario is is okay okay ai is probably good in the medical field in terms of of being a backup or first case and then the actual human comes and looks at backups of scans and all that sort of stuff like breast cancer scans and all that sort of thing ai actually seems to be genuinely helpful in terms of catching things that maybe doctors missed or making doctors aware of something to take a deeper look at it and it being a faster process and a more accurate process because it is integrated into the human based proceedings but everything else she tried was useless i particularly liked she she was like one of the things i was going to do is okay i will ai is baked into my email and ai is baked into my into my text messages because she turned it on on her iPhone.

49:36Jason DeFillippo:I will have AI do the response to every single message that I get because I'm going to use AI for my life. She said, I had to stop in the first hour or else I would have been fired or divorced. I love it. I love it. It's been a fun read. And again, it's just, why are we doing this? Nobody wants it. It's not useful. No, it's getting worse and worse. I tried to do many things with it and I still have not found anything that is reliable to that makes my life, you know, better, you know? Yeah. I was using it for a long time to summarize the articles that we talk about on the show. And I found that, you know, what's better reading the article and writing a summary.

50:20That's what that's I understand it when I'm done with it. So I'm not just spouting back shit that the LLMs come out.

50:26Jason DeFillippo:I was using it for a while, too. And it was like, oh, look, it's giving me jokes. And then I started to realize it's giving me the same jokes every single time. It's the same tone, the same silly joke. And finally, I was like, no, I'm way better off reading it, cutting it down to bullet points and making jokes on the fly. It's so much better. I do have a new app coming out that I'm going to put in the in the app store this week that I did write completely with a mix of Claude Code and Codex. But this is this is scope to app development. It's not for my daily life. I still have not found anything in my daily life that it actually helps me with at all.

51:05Me either.

51:05Jason DeFillippo:Me either. Really, there's tiny little things here and there, usually involving just brushing up some wording or suggesting some things. That's it. Yeah, I've got Grammarly for that. So that's as much as AI that I want to use for that. And I've used that for a couple of years now. And it's been great. The more AI stuff that they add into it, the worst of a product becomes though. And, uh, Oh, I, I do have one use that I use it for every week. That is to make those God awful thumbnails that we have to use for YouTube. Those fucking horrible graphics that we use on YouTube. I use it for that because I don't care what they look like because nobody fucking watches this on YouTube anyway, at least not enough to make it financially viable for me to spend another hour making a thumbnail for something that nobody watches.

51:51So for that, I'm eternally grateful scam Altman, but beyond that, no. and I'm trying to get a little bit more healthy now that the weather has changed here. So I've been walking, I walk, I have a 60 minute block in my calendar every day, has no AI telling me when to go walk or anything like that. I've figured it out myself. I'm a big boy now. So I've been started walking for a 60 minute chunk every day and it's helped me get through some audio books and completely get through the audio books. And I started with Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein, no relation. and it is a phenomenal book.

52:27I stay on the island. I'm constrained by the island. If he never would have left the island, he never would have hung himself.

52:34Jason DeFillippo:I stay on the island and planes of teenagers come to me. Yes. And politicians and celebrities and businessmen. But anyway, it is a very, very well-written book about how constraints are used in every walk of life and how unfettered access to everything, like the entire expanse of human knowledge, actually makes us worse at whatever we do. And I've always known that deadlines focus the mind, you know? And then I'm always reminded by Douglas Adams' great quote about deadlines. I love deadlines. I love the sound that they make as they whoosh by. Well, I mean, I always think about the Jesus and Mary chain uh which is a great band one of my favorite bands you know just got noise early post-punk and and just good stuff and they always talked about the fact that the reason that they wrote were able to write the songs that they wrote and sound the way that they sounded was because they didn't know what the fuck they were doing they were literally constrained by lack of ability and knowledge kind of how we started this show well that yeah you know sometimes it's best to just like fucking go for it so i highly highly highly recommend everybody read this book this is one of the ones that this is a gem this is absolutely a gem and it goes from creativity to politics to just general well-being and life in in all of its facets and how constraints are something that we should really really keep an eye on and uh it's fascinating it is so well researched and the audiobook is great the author reads it and this is one of those rare cases where the author actually can read a read his audiobook fairly well so i i'm i'm smitten by this book i i'm gonna probably buy a couple copies to keep around to give out so all right one of those well let me just tell you uh as we close this out about something that was not a gem and uh would have actually let let if we cast our minds back back when they were constrained by budgets and and and uh in a solid format that they used to follow, the show was really good.

54:40Jason DeFillippo:That show was called Top Gear. When they were unconstrained by budgets and could do whatever they wanted and didn't follow a format anymore, they did a show called The Grand Tour, which was not so good. Yes. Well, yeah, not so good as that is. You're being very generous with your with your appraisal of The Grand Tour. I actually forgot how bad The Grand Tour was until they released something even worse, which I launched Amazon Prime on my Apple TV the other day because I was looking to see if Wicked 2 was streaming yet on Amazon, which it's not. They still want you to pay for it. Whatever. I'll wait because I'm not going to pay for it.

55:21Jason DeFillippo:And I was struck with the new Grand Tour until I saw the little ish, the Grand-ish tour. And these are three hour 20 each recap episodes of them sitting around talking about it, except there's very little talking about it and a lot of just regurgitating clips from the grand tour. I watched the first hour and 20 minute episode. I will not be watching episodes two and three because the inside bits where they're supposed to be introing the clips and sharing behind the scenes thoughts are not funny. They are stupid scripted jokes, just like all of the Grand Tour was. And as I watched all the clips from the Grand Tour, I realized I remember none of these and they're all shit.

56:07Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when you posted this, I went and looked at it, and I'm like, there is no reason on earth that I would ever want to watch this. Half a bottle of wine, and my wife was out of town. Oh, there you go. You know what you should have done? Taking that half a bottle of wine, popped on red tube, rubbed one out, and then just called it a night. That would have probably been a better use of your time, and you could have done it in far less than an hour or half of your life. Well, I don't know. Takes a while to rev the motors up these days. Too much information. Too much information. Well, it's time to thank some people who support this show because we are a fan-supported show.

56:46And over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers, Andre and George. Thank you very much. And we'd also like to thank Divorced Pop, Richard, Dan, Brian, David, Rubik, Sarah, Brian, Luis, and Philippe. Thank you all so much for your continued support on Patreon. Thank you. Thank you. We have no donations that came through PayPal this week. You bastards. Fortunately, over the tip jar, we've got Joshua, Adam, Jennifer, and Thomas with the big 20 bucks. So thank you all very much. And we've got merch buys from Brian in Michigan, Sherry from Minnesota, and Andrew from my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

57:19Go Pirates. So thank you all very much. And if you would like to support the show, go to patreon.com slash GOG and get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. Or you can go to patreon.com. Not patreon.com. You can go to grumpyoldgeeks.com. Not even there. You can go to GOG.show. that's what I'm talking about. Go to gog.show slash donate. And there's a couple of different ways that you can support the show. But if you want to get this stuff early, ad free and in high definition, go to patreon.com slash GOG. We are a fan supported show for 99 % of what we do here. So your support literally keeps us on the air and we appreciate every single penny.

57:55That's right. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.

57:59Jason DeFillippo:Wow, you've got all like NPR on me. i know i was like oh wait it's your turn no shit it's my turn god damn it and i'm brian shilvester thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks get all the links and goodies from today's episode at gog.show slash 748 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 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 contact and don't forget to leave a five-star review at gog.show review and we'll read it on the show and we've got merch and we keep doing new merch we've got it over at shop.gog.show so check it out and buy something and stay grumpy