661: The Nightmare Before Overcast

Hey, Prime Members! Have you heard? You can listen to your favorite podcast at free? Good news! With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime Membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com-ad-free-podcast. That's Amazon.com-ad-free-podcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Well, the Olympics have come to a close, Jason, although with the abundance of advertising about the Paralympics game, I feel like I'm being guilted into watching that even though I don't

really want to. But yes, it is over and we have the handoff ceremony from Paris to Los Angeles, which will be host to the 2020-A, Los Angeles Olympics Games. I can't wait. Well, you know, our wonderful mayor has promised that this will be a carless Olympics. So we've got four years to actually put in some infrastructure that doesn't exist at all.

Well, I hear air taxis are coming, so that'll be great. One of the things I did here is she's going to implore all Los Angeles companies to allow their employees to work from home during the entire Olympics ceremony to help make that happen. Okay. Good luck with that. Anyways, I was watching the closing ceremonies and the most on-brand LA move possible. There was a concert performance segment to the closing Olympic ceremonies, which was claimed to have taken place in Venice Beach,

California by many news outlets. And as I was in Venice Beach, California at the time and had lived there for 20 plus years, I can promise you that that was not Venice Beach, California. That was actually Grenada Beach in Long Beach, California, a full 32 miles away from the Venice Beach front. And they also put up fake palm trees for the ceremony. So very LA, I'm within four years. Everybody's going to find out that the breasts here aren't real either. Oh dear, they're

going to be in first shock. Yes. I used to live in Long Beach. We had palm trees. Why did they put up fake ones? Well, they put up fake ones so that there would be palm trees in the background while they shot on the sand with the ocean. So palm trees don't grow that close in the sand. Yeah, no, they don't. Further back. Yeah. Yes. By the bike path. Yes. I guess the bike path wasn't pretty enough for the shot. No, I guess not. Okay. Well, I got four years to figure that out. Great.

Why live in the valley? So there's no Olympics out here. Although the Rams just did move their practice field about a quarter mile from my place. So that's going to be fun. Yeah, that'll be fun. I saw this on CNN and this is this is just great. This is I think the happiest thing I've seen in a while. In a recent study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management,

I'm sure that's a barn bird over read. Researchers found the consumers across various age groups were less likely to purchase items labeled with AI compared to those described as simply high tech. The aversion stems from two key factors. Trust in transparency. Okay. Consumers hold AI to a higher standard. And when it fails, trust erodes quickly. I think you missed the mark on that one. But moreover, fears about privacy and the unown workings of AI contribute to skepticism. Bingo

nailed it on that one. Yep. 100% agreed. I avoid anything that says AI. I like the plague. Indeed. Indeed. But what about blockchain, Brian? GM, baby, GM. That's right. We got this in from Ben. And I thought I would read it to read it to our dear listeners because I love this piece. Ben says, just listen to the latest episode in the part about allowing ordinary citizens to report

traffic violations got a chuckle out of me. Taiwan has had this for years. And in the beginning, they would actually give the reporter a cut of the fine to encourage reporting, just like I thought would be a great idea. At least here in LA, a cottage industry spring up where people would do this full time and make a pretty decent living. Enough people were doing this that people who are taking photos or video for too long on the side of the road would often get beat up.

Yeah, I figured this would probably not work out well. Yeah. That caused the government to stop giving a cut to reporters. But one can still report. There are very active social media groups for people who take joy in this. Welcome to our slash Shadon Freud. After seeing how this has played out in Taiwan, it is just a bad idea to give enforcement to the masses as there are too many people out there who are disgruntled, unbalanced, angry at the world or just have nothing

better to do. Me raises hand. The one good thing to come out of it though is that since dashcam deployment is almost 100% there is zero road rage and horn use. People drive courteously and everyone uses signals regularly. So the moral of the story is everyone needs a dashcam. Big brother works, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Anyways, also a bit more follow up. I saw this article over on Engaget and I started to read it and that it was so long and I just didn't care.

But the if you want the long for breakdown about why the Sonos app is so broken, link is in the show notes. Boy, does this get into detail? Yeah, I read most of it. And then I was just like, it's like 11 o'clock at night. I should be sleeping. And then of course, I immediately followed up by like a day later, Sonos still trying to fix its broken app has laid off its 100 employees.

Now, if your company is in the crapper and you're desperately trying to fix an app that is the basis of your company and the entire world is crapping on it, sounds like a great time to fire about 100 people. Now in their credit, it seems to be mostly from their marketing department, not their engineering department, but they don't need those guys right now. Yeah. So, but as of course, everybody on Reddit, Reddit has I guess Sonos has a very active Reddit community. As

they pointed out, there could have been one targeted layoff, the CEO. And that's all to solve everything. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That guy needs to go. He's, yeah. After reading the long form breakdown, I'm like, it's got some more on. Brian, we just went through months and months of SAG after strikes here in Los Angeles.

And I'm sure the ripples have been felt across the world with the lack of content that everybody is dealing with right now, mostly because of AI and them not wanting to give in on concessions to studios about AI. Right. So, so imagine my shockiveness this morning, Brian, when I woke up to the headline SAG After a introduces AI agreement with narrative, which is a basically a voice platform

where you can sell your voice. And yeah. So apparently this was just a stalling tactic to get a better deal from near it, because I was really surprised 11 labs wasn't the one that they made the deal with, which means there were some shenanigans going on behind the scene. You took on my butthole, I'll tickle yours. But Jason, as this wonderful sentence in your in the article that you found says, this isn't your grandma's voice over gig. It's AI cloning with the conscience.

Yes. Yes. And I watched that there's a couple articles here. There's a link to their podcast where they introduce it and then also a link to a clip from from X where the guy talks about it a little bit and completely shits on non-union actors, which I guess is his jobs and C is a union representative. Yes. But I have a few choice comments from the X post, which I just love. Nice rug pulls SAG After you really show yourself to be just on the side of the AI fraud and

middle finger emoji. Next up, yeah, insulting non-union actors is really going to get them to join your fart sniffing club. Love it. Jesus fucking Christ. It's so fucking clear you've been bought and paid for. SAG should just be disbanded at this point. Actors and VA's need a new union from scratch, because this one is rotten to the core. Then it just gets down to you. Traders, lazy, greet lined rat bastards. Fucking ghouls and fuck you. Traders, filth. Say what you're

really mean. That was and I would like to point out out of that there's a very long list of comments. Not one of them said, thank you, SAG After for looking after my my best interests. Not one. Well, I mean, the reality is and we kind of went through this as well when the music industry, because you know, they fought against it fought against it fought against it. Next thing you knew, there was a whole bunch of partnerships announced. You got to be proactive about this. You

got to strike a deal somewhere because you can't just you can't you can't ostrich this. You can't just shove your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening. It is there. It is out there. And you know, this is probably going to end up being a gigantic shit storm that isn't going to work out well, but at least it does. It's a proactive shit storm, right? It's a it's a proactive shit storm that does at least on paper says, you know, there's preferences. You you you are in

control of what your voice is used for. You get to negotiate your fees. You get to approve scripts. There's no sunset. There's no across the universe for the perpetuity of time clauses are allowed, et cetera, et cetera. So it is I wouldn't I wouldn't go so far to say it's AI cloning with a conscience, but it's certainly better than the first all turners that were popped up. Said to say like someone who's married to a lawyer. Yep. Exactly.

Oh, Rubenau Fonnie in your old age. I see. Okay. So this has been making the rounds in this. Just I was like, thank God. This is finally out in the open. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently did an interview at Stanford, which has since been removed from the University's YouTube channel because he revealed the true nature of how Silicon Valley mafia operates. Well, talking about a future world in which AI agents can do

complex tasks on behalf of humans. Schmidt says, I love this. If TikTok is banned, here's what I propose each and every one of you do. Say to your LLM the following, make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it. And in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines. That's the command boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay. That's just you know all those choice.

You know, all those choice cut. When I read this article, you know, those choice comments from the previous article you were reading. You traitorous lazy Greek line rat bastard. You fucking fool. You fuck you. You traitorous filth. Well, he continues on Brian. Save some of your comments because it gets better. A bit later Schmidt returns to his TikTok example and says, so in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor, in by the way, I was not arguing that you should steal

that you should illegally steal everybody's music. What you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be if it is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But nobody uses it. But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content and don't quote me. And then at this point, the host points out you're on camera to which Schmidt responds. Yeah, that's right. But you see

my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that's typically how those things are done. No, not in the history of the universe has it been done that way until now. But okay, thanks. Great. Yeah. Well, in the past 20 years, it has been. Yes, it's the Silicon Valley. That's true. So this is how Silicon Valley does business. That's why everybody gets so angry. That's you got to get the VC to hire the lawyers to clean up your fucking mess.

Yes, steal it and make the product. And then you can maybe clean up the mess. Yeah, speaking of messes, musk's new Grock AI has come out with a new image generation tool. And Brian, this is something you just have to see to believe it's something. It's something. Yes, we don't need those stinking guardrails. Yeah, you know how every other AI brand is making a big deal of their supposed ethical credentials? Well, judging from the images being sped out by Grock,

X has no such concerns. Yeah. From copyrighted intellectual property to downright offensive material, musk's AI model seems happy to give the people what they want. And it's all in the name of fun, apparently, because Elon says we've got the most fun AI. Yes, Grock is the most fun AI in the world. He actually tweeted. And if the definition of fun is a machine gun wielding Donald Trump flying a plane into the world trade center or various examples of not see related imagery, then sure,

these are just a couple of the tropes that are appearing throughout X right now. And this one comes from the Guardian figured this one out. Copyrighted imagery also seems to be fair game. When Grock is asked to make an image that violates copyright laws, it responds with, I will not generate or assist with content that intentionally violates copyright laws. However, when asked to make a copyrighted cartoon of Disney, it complied and produced an image of a modern era minimals.

Yep. Yep. It's all over X. Every time I look it up, I basically see like a Mickey mouse yielding a machete and beheading goofy. That's just great. Yeah. But when I was it was what was it? Kamala and Donald Trump in a helicopter flying into the world trade center giving a thumbs up each both of them like you can just do anything you want. Hey, get over there now. Well, they're getting good guys. That's true. Over there now. Well, they're getting good. So in funny

news, in funny news, the crowd strike CEO basically is in on the joke. Yeah. So this is like when Sandra Bullock went to collector rassy. Yes. So Deft Khan was this week and they have the pony awards at Deft Khan. And of course, crowd strike got the got the epic fail award this year. The most epic fail award. And the president, Michael's centonus actually showed up from Australia and got a special. They actually made a special giant sized pony for him. And he took it with

with a grin is like, look, this is what we do. You know, we fucked up and we're going to put this where everybody can see it because we fucked up. And you know, he's he's part of the community. And I just thought that was a classy move. You know, actually, you know, fix your shit, but still it was good move. Yeah. And you know, sending your partners a gift certificate for a cup of coffee that doesn't work. Not so great either. But this good. I'm proud of that. You should do that.

Yeah. And I'm sorry. I said Australia. He's from Texas. I like it. Different. See, when I think of software failures, I think of Jira and Atlassian and Atlassian is Australian. So what I think of most epic fail, I think every time I have to load up anything that is owned by Atlassian. So I equate Australia with epic software fail. Sorry, Aussies, but there you go. Just get rid of it, Atlassian. Well, Jason, it's finally happened. We've all been poned. Okay. Finally, finally,

took long enough, at least if you're an American anyways. So according to bleeping computer, there is a data dump of 2.7 billion records of personal information for people in the US, which includes names, social security numbers, potential aliases and all physical addresses they were

known to have lived at. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how big of a deal it is. I mean, obviously, you don't want people to have your social security number, but I'm from the generation where my were basically like my healthcare provider and my and USC, my student identification number, was my social security number. So it was on every piece of mail in plain text for everybody to read. It was on a card I carried with me everywhere. So my social security number has been out there forever.

I don't know how big of a deal this actually is anymore, but it's all out there right now. The group was looking for 3.5 million for the whole four terabyte database, but since then chunks of the data have been leaked by various entities. And yeah, I don't know. There's a whole bunch of stuff out there, multiple records for many people with one for each address they're known to have lived out. So as they point out, it's not really possible for any independent body to confirm that

the data includes records for every person in the US. This that would be difficult, but it is likely to include information anyone who is currently living in the country. Well, there's one into well, there's one body that could do it. The government could actually figure that out. Because they've got all the you got the info already. Yes. Yeah, the thing is it's like, I've seen a bunch of articles about this. Not everything is tied together, which is the nice part.

Yeah. Like your email address is generally not tied to your social security number just because of the way the database was was a schema. I'm sure you could use GROC to piece it all together. I'm sure you could. I'm sure you could. But yeah, we know this stuff's out there. And it's been out there. We you and I, Brian have gotten breach fatigue. That's why we that's why we talk to Dave about Star Wars now for a second. Yeah, that's completely why we stop doing that segment and

stop doing security. Yeah. Yeah. So this is just kind of, yeah, same shit different day, but with just a new new hacker is, you know, yeah, okay. Yeah, but yeah, okay. Yeah. That's kind of it. That's kind of it. And it's funny. Even my Kaiser Permanente medical ID is almost all of my social security number and they change like three numbers at the end. Well, at least they got in smart and done that. Yeah, let's put an exclamation point at the end. I get it. We'll replace the three

with an E. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just going to be lead speak. That's all. So a US appeals court for the fifth circuit has ruled that geofence warrants, which allow law enforcement to search location data within a specific area are unconstitutional under the fourth amendment. Okay. This decision affecting Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas only marks a significant limit on the use of these controversial warrants and privacy advocates support the ruling, which contrasts with a recent

decision by the fourth circuit upholding such warrants. Despite the ruling, the defendant's conviction was upheld as police acted in good faith when using the warrants. This is this kind of the same thing as the phone searches at JFK and in the airports in New York. The one guy who had the kitty porn on his phone still got busted, but everybody else after is okay. Yeah. And well, these just under the wire. The FTC has approved new rules against the buying and selling a fake

reviews and product testimonials with a live to zero vote on Wednesday. The rules will become effective in 60 days. So get in there. Well, it's going quick. Just like the new FTC rules address the practice of buying and selling fake customer reviews, including the use of AI generated

consumer and celebrity testimonials for products or services. They also prevent providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews, expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative and prohibit a business from misrepresenting that a website or entity at controls provides independent reviews or opinions about products or services, according to a statement released by the FTC. The formal ban also comes with stiff penalties for

violators and new rules. Fines could be could reach as high as $50,000 per violation, which is not nothing. Of course, the question becomes Jason, where to for our thou the internet police who will actually do something about this? That's right. That's what I was going to ask. My first question, I'm like, okay, who's going to enforce this? Exactly. That would be the problem. Now, obviously, we need this. Of course, we need this. In fact, I just ordered some clothes from a company because,

you know, I came back to the US and it's cheaper. So I got some clothes and they came back and I didn't like them. And I wanted to send them back. And then I got course got the, well, we'll replace them for free and cover all the shipping if you go give us positive reviews. I'm like, isn't that kind of coercion? Oh, yeah. No, totally. So you got 60 more days to get away with that fucking companies.

Yeah, well, they probably have a very much longer than that. Yeah. So yeah, they use the money from the actual fines to pay for the internet police. They know, then what you got Taiwan. So everybody just to find fake reviews everywhere. So California's SB 1047 is always on the top everywhere here. I don't know if you've noticed. It's all over the news here in California right now. This is the new bill designed to prevent AI related disasters. And it has been swiftly moving through the

California legislature here. And the thing that the reason I put this in here is because it just passed. I think the App was at the Appropriations Committee because they made some concessions. Now they made some concessions by taking the advice from the people that they're trying to regulate mainly anthropic, which was a big one, but open AI and meta and Google. All these guys have their hands in the in the process say, no, you can't do this. This is bad. We want regulation,

but we don't want that much, not that much, not that much. We don't want criminal liability. Please not criminal liability. So they took out a lot of the criminal liability to get it through and a lot of other things. But I'm just like, this is like John Wayne Gacy being consulted on sentencing guidelines for capital crimes. It's like, this makes no sense to me. I understand that they're trying to find a find a balance between commerce and criminality here. But

But what's the point in having regulations if they have no teeth? That's the thing. That's the thing. Yeah. As we as we have found money is not a good dissuading tactic for these people because they've gotten more of it than the state of California does. So pretty much. Yeah. So I don't see how this is a good thing. I mean, actually in going through the bill itself, I don't know if you've read much of it, but it's not that great of a bill to begin with. So I

see where the problems come in. But it's like just just scrap and start over instead of trying to put lipstick on the pig. Yeah. I agree with you. Okay. I'm also this kind of let's make this federal instead of doing this Hodgepodge state shit again. Like we're doing right now with age verification and all that shit. What privacy laws? No, that is the real problem. Right. It's not federal regulation. It's California doing it, which is why Elon picked up and moved. You know,

he was start crying about everything the California was trying to put in place. And they just went, well, Texas doesn't have that. There you go. He just asked, Grock, where should I move? Yes. That's all the moon, motherfucker. Yeah. I'll speak into the moon. I'll teed that up for you. Thank you. I appreciate it, buddy. We got a couple astronauts that do have a very much better

view of the moon than they did a few weeks ago. And they're going to be there for quite some time unfortunately, because the Boeing Starliner capsule that they flew up to the International Space Station on, there are some problems with it now. There have been so many ideas that they have tried to come up with. They're like, okay, maybe we can just detach it and let it fall back to Earth by itself. And if it blows up, that's okay. Have they turned it off and turned it back on?

The problem now is the geniuses at NASA and the not so geniuses at Boeing have come up with another probability that might happen, which is, well, if we turn it back on, it could actually go the wrong way and crash into the International Space Station. Well, I mean, two birds one stone. Won't we take that down anyways? That's true, but the problem then is SpaceX has the contract to take it down and then Boeing could get sued for taking it down ahead of schedule.

Okay. I see the problem. It's contractual more than anything else. Exactly. It's a contractual problem. That's why they need to move. They need to move the International Space Station to California. Okay. So, if we do it while it's flying over California. Exactly. Exactly. And there's another bit of interesting news up there. It's these people are going to be stuck up there for a very long time. I didn't understand this because I didn't watch a lot of the ISS videos when they were

really big on YouTube. They don't do laundry up there. So it's going to be very uncomfortable for them. This is a nightmare scenario. Now, you sign up for a lot of nightmare scenario. Potential nightmare scenario is being an astronaut to begin with, but nobody envisions this. I feel so bad for these guys. I know. Honey, what are the plans? I'll be back next week. Year. Maybe. Yeah. So they at least did get a reschedule of some jammies in some underwear,

which is good. Yeah. See what would really be smart is if me undies got all over this and did a branded launch just to get them up some new clothes. That would be probably a good thing for them. Oh my god. We got the ultimate branding opportunity here. Jason, come on. Amazon next day, Blue Origin delivery. There you go. Get that penis up to the ISS right now. Oh my. Yeah. Jammy is delivered by Shatner. Oh, that would be great. Oh, so yeah. They just have problems.

Boeing is not doing great these days. I'm not so sure how this outsourcing of space exploration is really going to work it out for us so far. Well, I can't wait to see how they bring it down. That's going to be the best one. Let's outsource that. Let's. Oh, that's going to be fun. Well, we just got more space news because of old SpaceX here. crypto brochargers private space

exhibition to Earth's polls. I love this. A private space exhibition named Fram2, not to be confused with Peter Frampton, is set to make history as the first human space flight to pass over the Earth's polar region. Both of them actually, the mission will be led by Chung Wang, a Bitcoin entrepreneur from Malta and founder of the company's F2 pool and stickfish. The eclectic crew includes a Norwegian cinematographer, Australian polar adventurer and German robotics researcher. This will be

the first trip to space for all of them. No shit Sherlock. Fram2 will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy aiming for a polar orbit and altitude of around 265 to 280 miles. The mission has expected the last three to five days. Polar orbits typically used by Earth observing satellites have never been attempted by a crewed mission. Dude, the challenge is like increased radiation exposure, which is why I wanted to bring this whole thing up, Brian, is because there's a reason we don't

fucking do it, bit bro. I have to say, since you put this article in the show notes, every single time my eye has gone past it, I've had everybody Wang Chung tonight stuck in my head for a day. You know, if they're going to be playing that at when they land. It's actually quite a good song. I listened to this. Yeah. That's not bad. That's bad.

Grumpy old geeks is brought to you by Delete Me. If you're a regular listener of the show, you know how much of our personal information is just floating around out there on the internet, waiting to be scooped up by anyone with bad intentions. That's why I'm really excited to tell you about Delete Me. Your name, contact information, social security number, home address, and even information about your family members are all being compiled by data brokers and openly sold

online. It's like giving strangers the key to your front door. But now you can protect your privacy with Delete Me. And that's why Brian and I both use Delete Me. Delete Me is a subscription service that removes your personal information from the largest people search databases on the web. In the process, it helps prevent potential ID theft, doxing, and fishing scams. Here's how it works. You take the reins and sign up providing Delete Me with exactly what information you want deleted.

Their experts then take it from there. They send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it, and what they removed. I really, really love getting these reports. It gives me peace of mind to know they're out there doing the job so I don't have to. It's not just a one time service. Delete Me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet. With Delete Me, you're in

control of your online privacy. To put it simply, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal info off the web. Data brokers hate Delete Me. When you sign up, Delete Me immediately goes to work, scrubbing all your personal information from Data Broker platforms. Your personal profile is no longer theirs to sell. With Delete Me, you can trust that your personal information is being handled with the utmost care and efficiency. Take control of your

data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now, it is special discount for our listeners. Today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. One more time that's joindeleteme.com slash GOG and use code GOG at checkout. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus.

There are nice brick paths between the building. Those are the company owned devices. IT approved apps and managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use. The shortcuts worn through the grass that are the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are unmanaged devices shadow IT apps and non-employee identities like contractors. Most security tools only work on those happy brick paths, but a lot of security problems take place

on the shortcuts. One password extended access management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected. Every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. One password extended access management solves the problem traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. It's security for the way we work today and it's available now to companies with Octa

and coming later this year to Google Workspace and Microsoft Intra. Check it out at onepassword.com slash XAM. That's onepassword.com slash XAM. Little more Elon news. Elon makes up cyber attack after Donald Trump interview crashes and burns. My God, this was such a shit show. Oh yeah. It's just so good. The, just some of the comments are great. The dog ate my interview. I love it. Yeah, I signed on and it was just, you know, we're being de-dost right now. I'm like,

no, you're not. Sure you are, dude. Come on. Come on. Tell it to somebody who actually fucking gives it and, and, and believes you. The consequences of one's own actions of firing all the engineers is what's happening right now. Exactly. Exactly. And did we not learn from DeSantis? Sorry. You had time to fix it. And he said, we tested it with eight million concurrent listeners this morning. Well, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You could even get a million in.

Come on. No. See, this is another opportunity. Zoom should have stepped in and said, we'll take over. But, but the whole point was for us to promote his own platform. Why would he let that happen? So, I mean, this, that was only one part of the S show that that whole thing was, I'm not going to get into the rest of it. But yeah, it was, yeah, it was, yeah, it's like, come on. This is a technology platform demonstration. And, and, yeah, failed, fail, bring back the fail whale.

Well, there was a little bit of fallout from it. The United auto, yeah, the United Auto Workers Union has filed federal labor charges against Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the UAWQ union accuses the two billionaires of trying to intimidate and threaten workers after Trump said in his do is giggling. Yes, man, sidekick, you walk in, you say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay. You're all gone.

You're all gone. So, every one of you is gone. Well, this was the, one of the downsides of having a free speech platform. There are consequences to free speech. A statement that UAW claims violates the National Labor Relations Act. UAW president Sean Fein criticized both Trump and Musk stating that their comments were disgusting, illegal and totally predictable. The union, which is endorsed by President Kamala Harris for president argues that the remarks advocate

for unlawful actions against workers, but Brian free speech. Yeah, free speech. I love the memes that came out about that because it was just like two, two images of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons Catholic, which is pretty much exactly what if they just spot on, yeah. Yep. Uh, finally, an Irish workplace watchdog has determined that Elon Musk's actions during his 2022 Twitter takeover were unlawful. The case centered on an email that Musk sent to employees, giving them 24 hours

to click yes to stay with the company or else face voluntary resignation. We've covered this when it happened. The Irish Labor Court ruled that this email did not provide a sufficient notice and that failing to click yes could not legally be considered a resignation. The court reviewed evidence suggesting the email was intended to coerce employees into agreeing to new terms or pushing them to resign amid widespread layoffs. One case involved Gary Rooney, a senior executive

in Ireland who argued that his contract required written resignation. The court agreed, ruling that Twitter unfairly dismissed Rooney, awarding him over $600,000 in compensation, a record sum for such cases in Ireland. And of course, that ruling could open the door to more lawsuits. Yeah. Yeah. Idiot. Media candy. Good news, Brian Daredevil born again has already got his second season. And we haven't even seen season one yet. No, no, but what I'm most excited about is the whole

original cast is back. So good for that. Yeah, exactly. The broad everybody back. So can't redo. If you're going to do a reboot, do it with the whole cat, the original cast that was great. Yeah, they were fantastic. Next they, are you bring back bring back what's Jessica Jones, Jessica Jones, please. Yes, with the original cast. Thank you. Yeah, just just, just, they can just refill in the whole first season again. I'm fine. Yeah. So we can leave, we can leave

out Ireland fest. We don't need to do that. No, no, no, Iron Fist. No, please, no. This one made me happy though. Apple TV plus orders more long ways of the long way series with you and McGregor and Charlie Bourman. Okay. So this is going to be a new one. There was one that came out 20 years after the previous two came out where they went from art, the tip of Argentina, like down in the southern tip of Argentina, all the way up to LA. And they did it on electric Harley

David Sins with beta, Rivian trucks. So it was all electric. So this new one is going to be called everybody Obi Wan tonight and they're going to go for both poles. That's it. That's what they're going to do. Oh, man. This one's going to be it. This one's going to be, I don't know if it's going to be as interesting, but it's, it's just fun to watch those guys ride bikes around. So they're going from a you and Tom in Scotland to Charlie's home in London, but they're going all the way through

Europe, a 12,000 mile detour to come back to his house or something like that. Man, they really don't like their wives. No, they don't. No, they don't. That was, that was the funny bit in, in the, in the second one, they did, first they did a long way round, then they did a long way down. And in long way down, you and brought his wife for part of the trip. And that was an unmitigated disaster. She couldn't ride a bike. Charlie was pissed off. He's like, this is a bro trip, dude. Why

do you bring in your wife? I don't know. Have you seen his wife? I'd take her everywhere too. Well, this is this is the wife that he divorced. Oh, never mind. No, this is not that wife. This is this is his old wife. So I have not seen his new wife. It's a what's their face from a Ahsoka, the green skinned girl. Really? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good for good for you. And yeah, hopefully she can ride a motorcycle or maybe she'll just stay at home and go shoot some more Star Wars. That's good.

I'm down with that. Yeah. Cause it is just a brochure. It's totally just a brochure. Oh, totally. Yeah. Right. Two guys riding motorcycles around the world. Yeah. That's a brochure. It is a good brochure, though. I love them. So give it a shot. I'm happy that they're going to be more. All right. Filmmaker Eddie Schmidt, one of the directors behind Netflix Ugly Delicious is prepping a documentary about the a Blackberry handset, according to the Hollywood reporter. So I loved

the movie, which is a fictionalization. But this is going to be a full on documentary being produced by unrealistic ideas, which is a production company founded by Mark Walberg. I'm not thrilled about that. But whatever. I'm interested in seeing this. It's currently untitled. There's no release date. But we do need the filmmakers have been given exclusive access to the research and motion alumni association. There will be plenty of interviews with former

executives who are involved in the Blackberry story. And we'll include an array of never before seen archival footage, which you know, bunch of nerds in a room. So here's the, yeah, I'm looking forward to this actually. But you told me about the movie. I tried to go find the movie. There's two things out there with the same artwork that's driving me crazy. One is a movie and one is a three-part TV series. I wonder if they chopped it up for distribution. Maybe because I, but no, because the

TV one seemed like it was longer. So there was like more stuff. I don't know. I haven't, because I, I want to see the movie because you said it was great. Yeah, it was. So, but it was, it was a comedy, right? Like a yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was pretty damn funny. Is it an actual documentary, though? No, it's a documentary. It's a movie. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out because you know, because the Tetris thing was a movie too, but you know, and was

terrible, by the way, or that Tetris, you know, kind of was so bad. But yeah, okay. So I'm just going to go watch the movie and say, forget the things. I just wanted to ask you. I'm going to ask you about it. I needed some clarification. And I'm sure some of our listeners did too, because they're like, what the hell is this? Go watch the movie. Yeah. Okay. We'll do. All right. Well, Warner Brothers Discovery has pulled cartoon networks entire website from the

web, which means you can no longer access free episodes and other interactive content. Instead, you are being redirected to the channel section on the subscription, screaming service network, max according to variety, which is all well and good, except of course, you know, a lot of things fall through the cracks and we're basically losing content and history and everything like that, which sucks. But this is the future. This is where we're headed. Yeah. But the same thing is MTV

deck. I was last time somebody went to cartoon network to watch cartoons. No, no. But still, you think you think these things would be somewhere, but they're not. We were promised that the internet would be forever and all of the stupid shit we did in the 90s was going to be around until the day we died. And apparently that was a lie. Kind of glad a lot of it's gone. Al Gore, I want my inner information superhighway back. Dammit. Yep. Yep. Over on Netflix this week, Brian, I watched

the influencer. Oh, yeah. It's a seven part game show from South Korea about you guessed it. Influencers. Now, no, thank you. It was awesome. Okay. It was absolutely awesome. Here's the thing. South Korean influencers are way cooler than ours. They're way better. They're nice people. They're funny. And they're genuinely like seem to be have good hearts. It was it was a really fun watch. Granted, most people probably would be bored by it, but me and my roommate, we actually

enjoyed it. We watched the whole thing and we finished it up yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So this is how American influencers take note. Go watch this and take some lessons from these people. Even in the grand finale battle, like it's like, you know, this whole main stage thing with a live audience and they're trying to outdo each other. And some of the people were like, hey, I actually kind of want to go see what he's doing over there because that looks maybe interesting than what I

got to say right now. It was it was there genuinely fun. It was it was a really good watch. It left me feeling I actually felt good for the people who won, you know, or the guys and girls who were up there at the end. It was I like it. I liked it. The umbrella academy season four dropped this week. And this was the final in the season or series, I mean. And yeah, there's no there's there will be no more umbrella academy, which is great. Of everybody who is pissing in Monin that they didn't

stick the landing. I thought they 100% stuck the landing. I thought it was the only way it could have ended. And I thought it was brilliant. Okay. I was actually going to ask you about that because I waited too long to actually start watching it. So now I figured I'll wait and see if they stick the landing before I decide to watch it. But you think they did. So I maybe I'll go watch it now. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed every season of it. I enjoyed every episode of it. I think it is

I think it's a phenomenal series. Personal. Okay. So what's not phenomenal though is I think this is a universal universally agreed upon term here. Borderlands the new movie based on the video game of the same name. Now we've had two decades of video game movies now and we've kind of figured it out how to make really good ones. And Borderlands had hold my beer. I'm going back to the way things

were. This was oh this is so bad. I mean it when it actually watch it. Yeah. Okay. I watch some of it because I was not going to I was not going to dedicate my entire life to this thing. I just looked at the key art. It's been a while because you know, key art has actually gotten quite good. People do good posters now for even crappy things. I looked at the key art for this and went this must be a steaming pile. Well, don't forget Benjamin. Benjamin had some pretty bad

key art. Okay. Fair. But this was basically the you know, it's the video game art for the most part. So it's meant to sell a video game. But it trust me. It is as bad as you think it is. It's actually worse than you think it is. There's nothing that could save this movie. And I love this. Rendy Jones on his rotten tomatoes review said Borderlands is what happens when you order Guardians of the Galaxy off team you. It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. So yeah, skip that one for sure.

Yeah. We've got McDonald's at home, says mom. Up's and do that. Okay, Brian, we've gotten a lot of feedback about the overcast drama. And since since we know so many of our listeners use overcast a disproportionate amount of people use overcast, we get a disproportionate amount of feedback on how much overcast sucks now. We serve you. You know what I haven't read all week? I haven't read a single person that said,

yes, not that bad. No, everybody hates it. Universally, this is as despised as the sonos app, except a lot less people use overcast. Yeah. Yeah. There's I mean, there's a lot of them in here. I'm just not you know what? I'm just going to save everybody's time. Here's what everybody finally agreed on. Go to pocket cast for now is kind of what everybody's thinking. It's like it still works. A lot of people use pocket cast already. I try to the Apple freebie works fine. Pocket cast has a

premium plan that you can get for 20 bucks a year, I think. I think overcast was 10 bucks a year. But I was playing around with pocket cast last night because I need something that will let me upload my own audio and be able to play it for testing and other reasons. And pocket cast will let me do that. And there's actually a share thing, which will let me do it on my phone from even Dropbox. I can share from Dropbox straight to pocket cast, which was really cool. Right. So and that was

the free version. I don't know how much I get out of that. There's probably going to be a limit to how much I can do. But yeah, pocket cast is fine. They're all fine, except overcast, which is not. Yeah, which used to be my favorite. Yeah. So I downloaded pocket cast as well. And I've added a few of my shows to it. And you know, all I want is a homepage that only shows me the podcast that have new episodes that I haven't listened to yet. That's all I want. Here's what you want then,

right? There's a new one that Gabriel Pagan put in the discord yesterday called Noicast, I think, N-E-U-E cast. I grabbed it. It's very, very bare bones, very straightforward. And it is just a list of the shows that are have a new episode. I might have to download that one and give it a go. Pocket cast seems okay. But it's a, yeah, again, it's just I want simplicity. Yeah, that's that's mainly the thing that I want. The nice thing about pocket cast is it has

silence trimming along with the speed boost. So that's kind of an important thing because I think overcast has saved me over 1200 hours of trim. That's without speed boost. That's just the silence trimming. So I like that. Pocket cast has the same feature. So that's a good thing. I don't think Noicast has it. I'm sure they've got speed enhancements, but they don't have silence trimming. But it's brand new. What is really funny about Noicast is in their demo video, they actually have

the screen screen art for the accidental tech podcast, which is Marcos podcast. So I think that was a nice fuck you. But I did go back to overcast for a couple days this week. There's a feature where you can turn off at the top. It's buried in the settings where you can turn off the top list of podcasts at the top of episodes, which is, you know, it's stupid. It's show art. So

I underneath it is my playlist. So I just made a playlist for everything, which is what I've always done, which is just the list of everything that I have in the order that I want it to be. That works okay, but the interface is still janky. In the really funny part is with pocket cast, you can import opml with overcast. Now you cannot export it. Because that was a feature, that was a feature in the old overcast, but it mysteriously did not get moved over to the new one

yet. He says he's working on it, which is convenient. But yeah, so there we go. We've got some card card, hard earned cash news. People who sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com. slash GOG won't have to worry about this. But if you wanted to sign up and follow us on the Patreon iOS app, don't go to the website, please, because now Patreon is going to have to use apples in app purchasing, which is going to drop another 30% of our cash. So please, for all

this holy, use the website if you want to sign up for Patreon. Yeah, just use your sign up. Yeah, 100%. The app sucks anyways. Yeah, I mean, and once you sign up, you can use the app if you want. Yes, but just don't pay through it. Yeah, just don't pay through it. That's pretty please with sugar on top. But you do get an RSS feed that you can plug in a personal RSS feed. So you get the episodes early that you can plug into any podcast player, even overcast if you want

it to. Yeah, if they do that anymore, I think it works. Yeah, it works. Haven't tried that one this week. So yeah, I give that a shot. I got two little bits of cool tech news. This is kind of exciting. Oxford University scientists may have solved one of the greatest hindances of expanding access to solar energy. Scientists from the university's physics department have created an ultra thin layer of material that can be applied to the exterior of objects with sunlight,

access and place a bulky silicon based solar panels. So it's basically almost like a paint that you can put on anything that can start to collect solar energy. They can be applied to almost any surface and the costs and constructions are way, way down, which is great. It's still in research phase and the university doesn't mention the long term stability of the newly designed panels. So you may have to replace them more often or at least tell they sort this out. But this pretty

fricking cool direct direct, you know, Dave can use this immediately. Right. Yeah. Paint his entire roof with this and power that camera. No problems whatsoever. So this is something to watch. It's pretty cool. And there's another cool thing that's happened. It's taken almost two years, but a planned community of homes made with a gigantic 3D printer in Georgetown Texas is almost complete. It's called Wolf Ranch. And they're being built with a large 3D

printer called the Vulcan that is 45 feet wide and weighs more than 4.75 tons. This is done with 3D printing construction developer icon in the home construction company, Leonard, and it started in November of 2022. They're close to their goal of completing 100 homes. Homeowners have already started moving into some of these that range in price from 4545,450,000 just $600,000.

I'm going to get there sometime. They use a mixture of concrete powder, water, sand, and other materials to lay out stacks of tube-shaped concrete to construct walls and eventually a whole house. Now foundations and roofs are made the old fashioned ways with human crews, but this basically does the framing and all that sort of stuff. There is a downside. The walls are too thick for Wi-Fi signals. So the reasons have had to use mesh internet routers with broadcast signals

located throughout the homes instead of just a single router. But pretty cool, a big 3D printed house. I like that. Yeah, that is nice. They just need to put like, you know, cat-5 in the walls, or cat-6, or cat-10, or whatever the cats are up to nowadays. Old-school style, yeah. Yeah, give me a plug. That's what I did. I think they've run everything through cables now. Cables. Yeah, so getting rid of jobs, love it. That's what we do.

What we do. Threads has announced a number of new features, including the ability to store multiple drafts. Something I've never actually wanted. You can rearrange the columns on the desktop version, which is nice because now it's kind of more, it's now you can actually have the view up that you want to see. And they've got insights into your audience. So there's a couple new features

this week. I've been on threads more than basically anything nowadays. And anecdotally, half the posts that I see on threads right now are announcements from people who have deleted their ex-accounts and have sold their Tesla stock. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that. I find threads to be pretty judgy, but it could be just because I haven't followed anything. The default view on threads is just people being very judgy. Yeah, there's a lot of that. So what you do is, here's how you should run

your life. Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's the new influencers, Brian. Well, think about it. These are people that come from Instagram. So what do they do? They post stupid morning, it memes of sunrises and shit and unicorns on Instagram. Now they're just doing the same thing in words. Yeah, there's a lot of like lifestyle and fitness and health influencers all over threads. Yeah, that's why I do the following by following column now, because what you have to do is you go

to settings and you can pin the following column onto the desktop. So then when you go to the desktop, you get the 4U version and the following version. So you just go back and forth, whatever. But it's nice that you have the option now. I really wish that mobile app would let me just pin on following because that's what I want. I don't want to see the 4U and I have to go figure out where the fucking thing is to get to the 4U feed. So it's not that great yet, but it's trust me, it's better

than X. Oh, yeah, everything is. Yeah. And here's a new thing that I saw that just this came in handy this week. So I put it in here. How to take a scrolling screenshot on iPhone. Now, this doesn't work with every app because unfortunately it doesn't work with brave. So you have to use so far. It's basically any of the Apple's first party apps. And what you do is you just take a screenshot and when you open up the screenshot, there's a little tab at the top that's like, you know,

screen or full page. If you click on full page, it'll just show you everything that was on the page. And you can just create a screenshot from that to share, which is like really nice and easy. The downside is it doesn't work when the browser that I use. So that sucks. But it's easy enough to copy the URL open Safari and make the giant screenshot is what I'm saying. So it's definitely cool. And I've been running the Mac OS Sequoia beta on my Mac Air. And I finally got the icon for iPhone

mirroring because I'm running iOS 18 on my iPhone, which is awesome. And iPad OS 18 on my iPads, which is awesome. Love them all. It's such a change. I love it. But I tried the iPhone mirroring on Sequoia and holy shit. Is it cool? You just basically put your phone in the dock and you have it on your screen and you can do anything on your phone on just carve it off to the side on your screen. It's great. That's pretty cool. It is cool. It is cool. I haven't tried to play any games yet.

So I'm going to try and see if I can play a monster eight mic condo on it. See if it see if it see if I'm curious to see if it'll keep up. Because it's a really fast game and you got to swipe a lot. So I don't know if it'll work or not. But I'm going to try. All right. Well, Apple has also seems to have announced that they're going to get into the game of the they're basically going to create a competitor for the Google Nest Hub or Amazon's Echo show, which to me from the description

in this article sounds like an iPad on a robot arm. That's exactly what it is. That is exactly what it is. And a lot of people are pointing out you can do this right now with dot kit. There are devices out there that already do this. I mean, if they dialed this in and it worked really well, I would definitely get behind it because Apple tends to stick with their products. And as we've talked about in previous episodes on the show, Amazon's kind of already given up on the Echo line,

unfortunately, even though I love them very much. So I would consider this as a product except the company is aiming to sell the device for around $1,000. Yeah, that's a little pricey for a music player and something that I used to call my mom with. Yeah. I mean, if you can remove the iPad and just put it in if it's a BYOI BYOIP. You're basically buying a thin robotic arm that my

son will break. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which like I said, you can buy that right now from Belkin for $175 or what you can do is go get the Insta360 new gimbal that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, stick your eyes on it. It does the same. Well, you can do your iPhone on that one. I think both of them are just for iPhone right now, but it does the same thing. It just follows you around the room and you can talk to it. It's all built in. So I think it's just a little late in the game,

2026. And by the way, Brian, Apple's sticking with products. You're talking to one of the five people that owned the Apple High Fies. So I still have a I still have a grudge against that. Okay. Okay. There's occasional ones that they drop. Everyone needs a world class VPN. Grumpy old Geeks recommends private internet access to protect your online privacy and identity. Private internet access never keeps any records of their users online

activities. So you can be assured that you have complete privacy and nobody knows what you're doing online. No matter your technical skills, private internet access is one of the easiest VPN apps out there. All it takes to connect is just one clicker tap and your data will be encrypted instantly. With just one private internet access VPN subscription, you can connect up to 10 devices at the same time. Go to GOG.ShowslashVPN and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get our favorite VPN

for just $2.69 a month when you sign up for two years. GOG.ShowslashVPN. That's GOG.ShowslashVPN. Introducing Bluehost Cloud Ultrafast WordPress hosting with 100% uptime. Want a website with unmatched power, speed and control? Of course you do. And now you can have all three with Bluehost Cloud, the new web hosting plan from Bluehost. Not only is Bluehost Cloud our fastest web hosting available, but it's also built for WordPress creators by WordPress experts.

With 100% uptime and incredibly speedy load times, your WordPress websites will be dependable and lightning fast on a global scale. Plus your sites can handle even the biggest traffic spikes without going down or lagging. And with Bluehost Cloud, you get 24-7 WordPress priority support, meaning you're connected to WordPress experts anytime you need them. Not to mention you automatically get daily backups and world-class security. So what are you waiting for? Get Bluehost Cloud today

by visiting Bluehost.com. That's Bluehost.com. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with podcast Superhost Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the CyberWare podcast for all your cyber security news. The co-host of hacking humans with Joe Karegan

discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy and the host of control loop because industrial machines have feelings too, as well as only malware in the building, which you must be getting a nice SEO bump off of right now because only murders in the building is everywhere on TV. Yeah. Gosh, I hope so. It's, you know, only malware in the building is monthly. So it's tough to build an audience quickly when you have that sort of cadence.

But we're doing our best and most importantly, we're having fun and getting good feedback. So have you tried releasing your whole season at once, Dave? Yeah, that's, that's in not possible. Now it is fun. All right, well, let's get to the important things here. I did day one of our three days at Disneyland and it was awesome. Oh, good. Had a really good time. And the park not as

crowded as I thought it would be. Hence the two articles in the show notes following up this, the first from business insiders, Disney's theme parks are struggling and it's another warning sign for the economy. And from inside the magic dot net, Disney finally admits why parks are empty during peak season. Now I wouldn't say empty. It was definitely empty with air quotes. If you mean that there were four hour lines for everything, then yes, it was empty. It was

surprisingly easy to get on rides. But yeah, the reason is it's just too damn expensive. Like they price themselves out of most people's ability to go. We are spending an arm and a leg going there. They are definitely offering all kinds of Southern California resident discounts to get in because attendance is down compared to the normal numbers they would be getting right now. Now so having said that, if you do have the cash right now, go. It's pretty great.

I haven't been in the park that empty in at least a decade and it was summer. You know, it's peak time. This is peak season. So I had a really nice time. How's the weather? It was hot as balls. That was brutal. But you know, they do a good job of having air conditioning everywhere and there's lots of shade. It's Disney. They do it right. They don't want you to die. Do they allow you to bring umbrellas with you? Don't believe so, but they sell them. That's why they sell them. Yeah. Interesting.

I wonder about that too. The whole thing with global warming and the summers getting hotter. How is that going to affect people's decisions to go to Disney during? Because obviously the summer is the peak season because of summer vacation. But where are we going with that? Like, is summer vacation, or we're going to shift our summer vacation? People have said that we're no longer the agrarian society we used to be. So why are we still following that old calendar anyway?

But I certainly wouldn't go to Disney World in the middle of the summer. Now for me, that's Florida, which I think is even hotter than Southern California. Well, yeah. It's been pretty hot here. But the concerns with climate change are particularly real. I've been reading a lot of articles about this for the Disney World Park in Florida because they're also just getting torrential rains. There's concern about hurricanes,

increasing infrequency and all that sort of stuff. So it's going to be interesting. Next year, Disney Des Moines. I mean, I think there's something to the notion of them building a park in Texas. Split the difference and let the crowds go there. I don't know. Yeah. Well, although Jason, to your point, I mean, Texas is still going to be hot. So yeah, you got to find like, where is the weather sweet spot these days? Does it even exist in the continent?

Does it even exist anymore? I mean, that's why they kind of picked the locations that they did because they're theoretically back then. It was kind of basically decent year-round. So right now it's now not so much anymore. But yeah, we'll see what happens. Yeah, not Phoenix. We're definitely not moving into Phoenix. Disney Death Valley. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Still I'd still go. I probably would too. Yeah, probably would too.

Speaking of Disney, I thought it would be fun to address the rundown of Disney Parks announcements that came from D23 because there were a lot of them and they are significant. Brian, anywhere you want to start here, anything that caught your eye? The thing that I just, in general, I like all of this stuff. I like the fact that there's going to be an incontour ride. I like all the things that they're doing. I'm not, I don't like Avatar.

I hate those movies. I understand I'm probably the only person on the planet that does give it its box office. But the fact that they're building Avatar lands does not interest me at all. I love the idea that they're building a villains land. I think that's fantastic. That's going to make me go to Florida. The thing that depresses me about my park, which is I'm literally two miles from it right now. The one in Anaheim is they're going to build a whole new cars land. But they're

getting rid of the river and Tom Sawyer's island, which is such an art of my youth. I'm going to miss it so much. They're doing that at Disney Land. I thought that was only a Disney world. Well, I had read it and I thought it was the one here. If it's not, then that's fantastic. I don't care what happens in Florida. I don't want to lose my river front. Because it's such a great part of the park here. It's where they launched so many of the night

times spectacular fireworks and all of that. I would be sad to lose that. Hopefully we won't. Almost everything else just sounds great. I love that they're throwing so much money into these parks that they're revitalizing them, that they're moving forward, that they're doing things. Again, like I said, I could do a little bit less with the non-Disney properties, your avengers, your avatars and all of that. But I get that they only IP now. It would be hypocritical of me because

more Star Wars stuff. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So, yeah. I just can't be happy about the things I like. Sure. Sure. Have you been to the Avatar land in Florida? No, I haven't been to the Florida park since, oh man, it's been at least 20 years. So, okay. Okay. We were there about a year ago and that was my first time in the Avatar land. And like you, I feel completely mad about Avatar in general. I think we've talked about it.

You know, it's made huge money, but it's had zero impact on the culture, like name a single character from an Avatar movie. Yeah. Exactly. There's two rides in the Avatar land and I understand the one in California is going to be different. But the one in Florida, there's the one where you're riding on the sort of dragon lizard things. And that's very cool. It's kind of like a soren, except you're on what is a living breathing creature kind of thing. It's neat. You feel

it breathing underneath of you and it's fun. It's exciting. The other one is a river ride, which is beautiful, but it's about half as long as it needs to be. And we rode it. We were lucky. We got a fast pass for it and we rode it and we got off and we went, that's it. I mean, if I'd waited, if I'd waited an hour and a half to ride that thing, I would have been pissed. It's just too short. So, but it's somewhere in between that and it's a small world. You got to find the middle.

Right. Right. Well, I mean, think about pirates. You know, you want the great boat ride. That's well. And going back to what we were just talking about with the heat, you trust me. We appreciated how long it's a small world was because it's air conditioning. It was a nice, like 10 minute break from the heat. Yes. I don't know if it was, I don't know if you can call that nice Brian. It's tolerable. I would say. For my dad, whenever we'd go as a family for my dad,

small world was nap time. Yes. Settle in and we have lots of, you know, a high eight video of my dad snoozing on. It's a small world. I will say that that is one thing I noticed that we did go on. It's a small world this time. I don't know how often or out last time that you were on a Dave, but what they've tried to do is obviously this is something that it's over 50 years old now at this point. Practically, because it started with the world's fair and they brought it over,

there's no connection to anything Disney. It's one of the old school in terms of like Disney's IP and properties and films and all that sort of stuff. So what I noticed this time is they've started to sneak in Disney characters. Like Woody, Woody, Woody from Toy Story is in there with the Cowboy scene and all that sort of thing. They're attempting to make it relative to younger kids who don't have any idea what these creepy dolls are supposed to be. No. Well, if you could make

it a game, fill it with Easter eggs, then that's fun. And they've started to do that. So next time you're on, keep an eye out because you'll see characters, moanas in there, like all different characters are sprinkled throughout now. I want to see the hoars that they took out a pirate to the Caribbean and getting chased around in there. They're pretty sure they were purchased by

some very rich Disney freak. Show where your starboard side. So the other thing that has people having heartburn with this announcement is the announcement of the Monsters Incland for Hollywood Studios, which on itself is great. And they're building a roller coaster, a suspended roller coaster based on the doors part, which anybody who saw that movie, right? Yeah. Like it was like, obviously, why did they put that part in the movie to build a roller coaster at Disney World?

Yeah. It's been so obvious for so long. It's people are excited about that. Energy people. Right. But what some folks are freaking out about is they're worried that it's going to be built in the space where Muppet Vision 3D is right now. Oh, yeah. It's lose Muppet Vision. No, we are going, apparently, yes, that is going to happen with the Muppet Vision. I've heard

the one here in Anaheim as well as going to be going away, which is kind of sad. I remember hearing and you would know this Dave, I guess that this was the last thing that Jim Henson himself directed. That is correct. That is correct. In fact, one of the cheap thrills of my life was back in the the good days of Twitter. I asked a question about Muppet Vision 3D and was answered by Frank Oz himself. Nice. Yeah. It was I was on cloud nine that day. But actually Muppet Vision 3D has

been closed in California for a few years now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Close the cover of the adventure side of the park. It's been shut down there. So the only place it exists now is in Florida. As I've shared here before, I think they should move it over to where Rock and Roll a Coaster is. They can make you put it even build a smaller theater for it because I can't remember the last time I've been in Muppet Vision 3D that it was full. So build a smaller theater, put it over by

Rock and Roll a Coaster. Make Rock and Roll a Coaster. The electric mayhem and then convert where the Muppets are now to make that contiguous Star Wars land with Star Tours. And you're good to go. So I agree 100%. Just as a side note, I put this in the show notes for you Dave because anything furry now just immediately makes me think of you. The consequence of sound website has a I think a weekly crossword puzzle and the last one that they had which I grabbed here is Muppet Quotes.

So I thought you would enjoy that. I will definitely enjoy that. Yeah. I don't know if you you probably get this with Star Wars where you see the the clickbait articles that say 10 things you didn't know about Star Wars and I click through and I know every single one of them. Yes and very glee I know them all. And it's the same for Muppets for me. And actually a lot of times I find myself correcting their errors like no, but didn't happen that way. Anyway, our next trip to Florida is

I think actually we might cross over Brian, right? We're there in the beginning of March next year. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Good be. So we'll have to say hello. Yeah. Matt writes this one in for you guys. Hello, I'm sure you've seen this video, but it's super well done and fascinating. Would definitely be interested in your and Dave's take on it. If you think it's worthy of the podcast cheers. And this is from the recommendo newsletter. And I put this in here because Matt beat me to it.

This is the spectacular failure of the Star Wars hotel. The four hour take down of it. Yeah. That's that that's where they lost me the four hour part. Let me say I have watched the whole four hours. I knew it. Not at once. I did it in several sittings over the course of about a week or so. And it is remarkably compelling. There was no point where I felt like my time was being

wasted or this was too long or any of that kind of thing. So I think if you want a complete telling of this story and really rational, well informed view and speculation of why the Star Wars hotel failed, you will not do better than this four hour video from Jenny Nicholson. It's it pretty much lays it all out and I agree with pretty much everything she's put out here. And she I think she does it from a very affectionate way like she wasn't looking for this to fail. She went to the

she went to the Star Wars hotel. She experienced it and she shares her experiences and where it was great and where it came up short and and all those sorts of things. So it's a really good accounting of all of the failures that the cascading failures, the cumulative failures that led to this thing ultimately being shut down. All right. Well, I might download this and save it for my flight home. That's a good idea. Pretty well actually. Yeah. Because I don't like the raw dogging trend. That's

ridiculous. What's wrong with you people. This last one I put in here for you, Brian, because you are complaining about the the black millennium Falcon that you're going to have to buy for $179. Yes. Well, now you can buy the Lego's nightmare before Christmas set for $200 coming out on September 1st. Jason, I have been tracking the set for two years. I am very excited that it is finally coming out. My son is very excited about this week. Is this for you or for Lucas? Well, we're going to build

it together. It's going to be a bonding experience. We're quite excited about your office. I know. It's going to be difficult to get. I wish I was still here, but I will be in Canada at that point. So it's going to be a hefty probably $300 Canadian sadly. And I'm going to have to work really hard to track it down. But yes, I am super excited about this. I don't know if you know about the Lego's ideas concept, which is absolutely fantastic. And this is one that bumped up that way.

So it's people can submit their own sets that they think would be really cool. They're voted on and every year Lego actually produces one or two of them. And this is one of the ones that came through that program. So very excited about this. Yeah, very excited. So I would definitely be purchasing this and putting it together. And by the way, having gone to Disneyland again, just recently, and then we're going again this next coming week because they're actually rolling out

their Halloween decorations early this year because it's so popular. So it's going to be all the Halloween themes everywhere. Yeah. It's how long ago did Nightmare Before Christmas come out? I can tell you 100 years. I can tell you that because I saw Nightmare Before Christmas at the El Capitan Theater while I was on my honeymoon. Oh, no shit. Well, that's where I saw it as well. But it first came out. So maybe here's the same theater. Yeah. So that would have been 1993.

And I remember in the theater, they in like one of the lobby areas, they had some of the sets from the film. It was amazing. It was. So yeah, that's that's when it was. And actually that same trip was when that was the most empty I've ever seen Disneyland because at the time San Diego was on fire. And so there were ashes raining down on Disneyland. I was the sky was smoky and I remember we were riding the little horse drawn carriage up Main Street and said to the man minding the horse

in the carriage saying, boy, it's really empty here today. And he kind of looked at us and said, yes, Southern Californians have other things on their mind besides going to Disneyland today. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, it's good to say it's just to follow up because you guys both started on Capitan in 1993. I saw it on Capitan in 2003 for the 10 year anniversary. And so the sets too. That as well. I went to both. That's my point being it was kind of an underground thing for ages.

Right. Like, it didn't really get the critical claim that that's all come later. The other thing it didn't get was all this merchandise and having been at Disneyland recently, there is they sell everything. And there were so many people wearing Nightmare Before Christmas shirts and hood. Well, not hoodies because it was fucking hot. But I mean, people were wearing this stuff. It's everywhere now. And it's even in the there's targets. The target store near me

is full of Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise and clothing. It is so massive now that this couldn't have come out at a better time. So I'm all very excited about it because it's such a great movie. And it's just great. So good. Yeah. The other thing just to note about Nightmare Before Christmas is that I feel bad for the guy who actually directed it because it's not Tim Burton. Yeah. Right. It's not actually Tim Burton. But if you ask anybody who directed Nightmare Before

Christmas, they'll say Tim Burton. And it wasn't Tim Burton. And I don't and I don't know the name of the guy who directed it. But he deserves it. Oh, that's funny. Yes. I would have said Tim Burton too. Right. No, it's Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. But he did not direct it. It was I can't remember who it was either who just said it sucks to be you know, the other person that it sucks to be it sucks to be the guy that voiced Jack Skellington because everybody just thinks Danny Elfman

and nope. He didn't do the actual speaking lines that was done by somebody else. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I too will be purchasing that Lego set. I well, let me put it this way. That Lego set will be under our Christmas tree this year. I suspect. I smell or high water. So here we go. It will be for my son, Jack. Nice. Nice. Isn't that great? Isn't that nice? Thank you very much. All right. Jason, I want to say you were right.

You were okay. You were absolutely right. Your instincts were correct. I was perhaps too forgiving in giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the sad said state of the overcast podcast app. Okay. Time has. It's a dumpster fire. It is a dumpster fire. And and way more than I would have thought was even possible. I mean, there's a overcast Reddit group and they've gone full on torches and pitch, pitch forks. And it's a combination of

things. It's just that this there was no way that this app was ready to be released with the number of deal killer bugs showstopper bugs that it has. And then also just the design changes that are arbitrary and make things worse. Right. Right. I mean, so many things in the app, I try to do they take more clicks than they used to. And that's just a podcast player. I just want to play a podcast. Yeah. One particularly that pops up at my feed so I can see that there's

a new one easy. Yeah. That's it. That's all I want. Yeah. That's it. I'm telling you. Have you switched away Jason? I moved to Apple podcasts for a bit. That's what I did. After all the feedback from our listeners, which was the volumes. Yeah. That's right. Because I don't know if you saw Dave that you know, 26% of our actually more than that, like 35% of our listeners use overcast. So which is a huge number of people compared to most podcasts. So everybody

roamed more than us. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we pimped it for a long time. Thanks Marco. Gabriel Pagan sent in a new one called Noi Cast, which I tried out yesterday, which I actually really like so far. It's very plain, very basic. And it is just a list. Nice design,

lack of design, even better. And pocket cast is what I'm probably going to move over to. But the thing about pocket cast is since the new version of overcast does not have OPML export, I don't feel like doing with either one of them because it's like, yeah, I've got everything in Apple podcasts right now. So I'm just going to stick with that until maybe OPML comes back or I have some extra time on the crapper to move all my my podcasts over. Right. Right. Yeah.

I switched over to Apple podcasts just to have something simple and reliable. And I've been living there for a while. And it's not nearly as bad as I feared it would be. Today, there was a new app that's coming out. It's on Android and it's in beta on iOS and it's called Metacast. And I downloaded the beta. I've been playing with it. And it seems pretty nice. I'm going to tell you right now looking at the screenshot on it. I'm going to hate it because at the very top,

it says continue listening. And it's a swipe. It's a card swipe thing. I just want a fucking list. And I don't want I don't want the podcasts underneath with the podcast. Art of who I'm following. I want a fucking list of the episodes on my homepage. All right. Then well, may perhaps Metacast isn't for you. It is not for me. I don't want transcripts. Stop wasting your engineering time on fucking transcripts. Nobody wants transcripts. Oh, I have data that

suggests otherwise. But I'll go fuck yourself. I'll just tell you that if we use the new podcast player Jason cast, which is going to be very specific. Right. It doesn't actually play any podcast, but anytime you hit the play button, it just tells you to go fuck yourself. All right. Well, to each his own, and we can revisit this when we settle in and decide on

what we actually like. But I have canceled my my renewal of paying for overcast, which and to a certain degree breaks my heart because I've been with them since the very beginning. And I really wanted to hang in there. But it just it's it's it's it's bad. It's intolerable. Yeah, it's intolerable right now. And that makes me sad. Finally, I want to close out here. I have always I want to talk about cars. Okay. Brian, you have driven BMW's. Yes. Do you kind

of drive a BMW? Yes, we have a BMW X3. Okay. Very nice. Very nice. Jason, have you ever had a BMW? No, because I come from an era where if you drove a BMW, you were immediately labeled a douchebag. No, that's still exists. That's still exists. Yeah. I just power through. Yeah. I was okay. I just wanted I didn't want to spare. I already told Dave to go fuck himself. So I didn't want to do it to both of my co-hosts. You just be hosting the show by yourself for the rest of

the. Exactly. Just be me screaming at the right. Well, there's there's and there's no shortage of jokes about, you know, like why do BMW's bother to install blinker controls and the cars when you never use them and all those sorts of things? To which I say thank God for Tesla and the Cybertruck. That's right. It's taking all the heat off for the BMW drivers. When I I've never actually owned a BMW, but when I was in college, I dated a girl whose father had a car collection. And he was very

generous. I think he was looking to, you know, marry this girl off because he was very generous with loaning the cars out. So he would say, Oh, Dave, why don't you take the five series home for the weekend? And I'd be like, yes, sir, yes, sir. But I have always liked station wagons, uh, souped up station wagons because I the wolf and sheep's clothing thing really appeals to me. This thing that doesn't look like much, but under the hood, like Mercedes has made a couple of wagons

that are basically faster than Corvettes. BMW has made a couple of wagons. But for the past few years, there are pretty much no more wagons to be had in the US. Yeah, it's all SUVs. It's all SUVs. And people just stopped buying wagons. And I understand that. And I actually, I went from I had a Volkswagen Passat wagon and then I bought a Mazda CX5. So I did the dance, but it's only because if I could have purchased another Passat wagon, I probably would have. But you couldn't, they were

gone. Anyway, BMW has brought back a souped up wagon. There's the bringing the M5 back to the US. It is a hybrid. Uh, it only has about, I think 750 horsepower, something like that. Only? Yeah. Only. Well, for BMW, I mean, there are times when you have to get to the grocery store and you don't want to wait. So 750 horsepower makes a whole lot of sense. So, uh, I just need to find 125,000 dollars, which is what this car costs. It's price. And I'll be good to go. So, yeah,

GOG slash Jason, I don't know what Jason slash Jason breaks. Take your cut. Right. Yeah. So this is a good looking vehicle. I like it. It looks great. Um, you know, I definitely want, I was thinking, you know, our next car should be a hybrid and we were, you know, we're, uh, the, the, the M3 or the X3, which I have is, they've just started getting so big because that is what the market seems to want these days. Right. BMW X3 is, is, you know, the X1 is the size

that the X3 used to be the X3 is the size that the X5 used to be the X5. Right. You might, right. You're, you're in, you're in two states at once when you're in that fucking car because it's so damn big. So, yeah, you know, this looks great. I like, I really like it. It's a, the fact that it's a hybrid is, is great to, it's a hefty price tag, but all I, all the hybrids are really expensive right now, especially the luxury market ones. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a little

worse for my blood for a car, but it's a good looking car. It's a good car. Yeah. My Jeep light has 285 horsepower. Yeah. Well, you know, that's why we, that's why we don't mind being called assholes. So we tool around in our BMWs. Right. Right. We, we, we, we only see your middle finger zooming away from us as you try. Yes. Yes. You only bother us for about a half a second. That's right. That's right. And then, then we're gone. Then we're gone. Yeah.

All right, guys. That's it. All right. See you next time. Over at Patreon, we've got Josh Tony and Doug. Welcome. Thank you so much over at PayPal. We've got Miles, Shari Josh, Linda, Natalie, Arcadio, and Nathaniel. Oh, over at the tip jar, we've got Panos and L, Theodore and Sean. And as usual, just a reminder, if you sign up for Patreon for just $3 a month, you can pay more if you want. You get to show early, add free, and in high

definition. And please, for the love of God, sign up on the website, Patreon.com slash GOG, and not the iOS app. Please. Yes. Don't do that. No, no reviews this week. And sadly, former YouTube CEO Susan Wajiski has died at the age of 56 from cancer, which sucks. It does suck. She's been battling it for quite some time. And that's a, it's pretty sad. It is. I just saw her on the YouTube effect, the Alex winter documentary, which was actually pretty good. And she was good on it too.

But this is one of those things where it's like she won the lottery of life long ago. She should have quit and spent time with her family instead of dicking around at YouTube. And great. You know, all of these people, they just get so caught up in the whole rat race in the game of Silicon Valley. It's like, step the fuck away. You've got, once you get your fuck you money, please, fuck off. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go buy the island. Yeah.

Especially when you know it's a possibly going to be much shorter than you hoped. So yeah, seriously. We also lost somebody else very involved in computer stuff. Larry Tesla, the computer scientist behind cut copy and paste, aka how most people do programming died at age 74. He worked for a number of major tech firms during his long career. Basically, everyone, he started at zero oxes, did almost everybody from that, from that generation before Steve Jobs approached him for

Apple where he spent 17 years and rose up to chief scientist after leaving Apple. He set up an education startup and worked for brief periods at both Amazon and Yahoo. So guy got around. Thank you for the copy. He cut copy and paste himself all over the place. He really did. He really did. 74 is still too young, but good run. Yeah. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister. Thanks for tuning into Grumpyel Geeks,

diving to the show notes and all the links from today's episode of GOG.Show slash 661. Feeling generous, keep this top notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.Show slash donate. Every bit helps. Spread the Grumpyels. There's a share button in every podcast player, except for potentially overcast. Out there, use it to share the show with friends, foes, and everyone in between. And we'll be forever grateful. Head over to GOG.Show to find the link to

our Discord channel and chat with us and other show fans. Got something to say? Send your feedback, comments, or awesome links to GOG.Show slash contact. Show us some love, leave a review at GOG.Show slash review. A five star rating might just get your review read on the air and stay grumpy. Today I've got a treat for all you Apple users out there. It's the Mac Geek Gab podcast. Now in its 17th year, this show is your go-to source for tips, cool stuff found,

and answers to all your Apple related questions. Every week, hosts Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun dive into the world of Apple, offering tech support to listeners just like you. And the best part, they make sure every answer comes with actionable tips that are easy to follow. For example, did you know that if you press and hold the mute button during a call on your iPhone, it'll actually put that call on hold? Or that you can easily bulk rename files in the Max

Finder by highlighting multiple items and choosing file rename? These are just a couple of the many nuggets of wisdom you'll pick up from Mac Geek Gab. If you use an iPhone, a Mac, an iPad, an Apple watch, an Apple TV, or are simply a technology enthusiast, you're going to love learning more about your technology with your two new favorite geeks over at Mac Geek Gab.

Get your questions answered and have some fun along the way. Visit macgeekgab.com or search for Mac Geek Gab on Apple podcasts, YouTube Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't get caught without having Mac Geek Gab in your rotation. Here in America, work isn't trouble. We've offshored our manufacturing, sent away good jobs, and lost so much ability to make things. American Giant is pushing back against that tide.

They make high quality clothing for a summer wardrobe you'll love. All made right here in the USA. Support America's workers and get 20% off your first order at American-Giant.com with code staple 20. That's 20% off your first order at American-Giant.com code staple 20.