682: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Luigi

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 DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we've talked a lot about pink slips and how everybody's getting fired nowadays. Including me. Yes. And including me.

We also talk a lot about millennials. We've always had a soft spot to shit on millennials on this show. I was about to say, I don't think it was a soft spot, but yeah. Yeah, soft spot like that, that soft spot on the back of the skull when they're babies and you can hit them really. hard really quick and just okay moving on uh so i think we need to to to move the sites a little bit to gen z yes because you know easier pickings why not

I saw this come across the wires this week. Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them, and here's what they say needs to change. After two years of complaints about young hires, bosses are taking action. Six in ten employers say they've already let go recent grads who weren't up to the job.

So this is a survey, six in 10, 60%, a survey of nearly 1,000 U.S. business leaders by intelligent.com. We know they're intelligent, Brian, because it says it's right there. It's what we named our company. That's right. They found widespread dissatisfaction with Gen Z workers. Yeah, I can see that. Do you hang out with Gen Zers very much, Brian? No. No, I can't say that I –

do. My time in the music industry, everybody was my age or older. When I did come to take the job in Toronto, we had some younger hires, but I would say they were solidly millennial, not Gen Z. Yeah. Yeah. Look, millennials are going to be retiring soon. It's time to put them off the table. We're fucking old now. Yeah. So here are the common issues. Being late, dressing inappropriately, and struggling with workplace etiquette.

To me, that just sounds like Gen Xers. So I'm OK with that. More than half of hiring managers say today's grads simply aren't ready for the workforce. Some colleges are stepping in like Michigan State, which are now teaching networking skills. Great. I think it's a bit late at college level. Yeah. Okay. The grads have left the farm, as it were. So the thing is, they don't give a shit. That's the thing.

And I think we all saw that coming. I mean, we just saw, you know, from my understanding, and I personally don't hang out with any Gen Z people, but I do have friends that had kids, you know, I had my kid a little bit late than most. I have a lot of friends that have had kids earlier, and they're...

They're Gen Z now. They're entering the workforce. And I remember hearing stories from them about the trials and tribulations they had raising their kids and just a lack of interest in almost everything except for being on their phone.

They haven't wanted to get out of the house and socialize with friends when they can do it online. Zero interest in driving a car because never leaving the house. And if they do, they'll take an Uber. Zero interest in getting a job because they don't really need money because almost everything that they do is free.

or being subsidized by their parents, i.e. their Wi-Fi and their phones. So I'm not surprised to hear this. Yeah, zero interest in dating thanks to Pornhub. We are rocketing towards idiocracy. We're three steps away from Brano. Kind of, kind of. But, you know, part of me, you know, I have a little kind of affinity for these folks because, you know, that's your lifestyle.

Gen Xers were always like that. I mean, I'm sorry, but this is to me to a T. No, no, that's a thousand percent untrue. Yes, okay, late to work, dressing inappropriately. I don't think we struggled with workplace etiquette. We were able to separate, you know, I need...

this job and i need this money so i will be what you need me to be uh or at least i'll play the game enough to get the paycheck and then i'll shit on you on my smoke breaks um and certainly we weren't isolationist the way that gen z seems to be we got we met up at malls. We met up at parking lots. We met up at the, the reason they started playing crappy classical music and soft rock in every open space is because we filled them. It's true.

Now, on workplace etiquette, I was taken aside by legal on several occasions and asked to not talk the way that I talk. On the bell curve, Jason. Remember, I actually worked with you. I saw you in action. I know. The vast majority of us were not you. Yeah, I guess telling the VP of the company to blow me in the middle of the office was really not a good idea. No, you had to do it the way the rest of us Gen Xers did. And we said, that's a really horrible idea.

Not blow me. See, but the thing is I was so good at my job they couldn't fire me. So that's – I go from the Cal Newport school of be so good they can't ignore you. The problem with Gen Z is they have no skills. That's that's that's this is where we're headed. So anyway, I saw this come by today, too, which kind of which made me kind of think maybe this is what's happening. Declassified CIA guide to sabotaging fascism is suddenly viral.

So it's basically a guide from the 1960s written by the Office of Strategic Services, which is a guide to basically saying, don't do shit at work. Slow everything down and be. you know, be a wrench in the machinery of commerce. And I'm like, okay, that kind of tracks with what Gen Z is doing. You know, so simple sabotage. That's great. But then...

Then I finally found the cause. U.S. students post lowest reading scores in decades. The problem is nobody in the damn country can read. We're tick-tocking too much. They're uneducated. It's plain and simple. The education level has decreased so badly. The education system has failed. And no, I don't.

think that you just tear it down the way a certain administration that's in power now does. You fix it. You don't destroy it. Yeah, this saddens me because I mean, I know I'm in a rarity and I was even in a rarity back in my day when I was young. I love reading. Reading is one of my absolute favorite things to do. I tore through books as a high schooler. I tore through books in college. I still do. And it's important. And I've made it a priority for my son. And he loves reading.

now too, and I hope that sticks with him. But I know half, again, we're talking eight-year-olds, a lot of his peers don't like to read, don't want to read, and aren't great at reading. And God knows that's been going on for quite a long time. I mean, we, we know, we know because we know book sales and we know, you know, library attendance, and we know that people just aren't reading.

I remember when I was in school. I'm going to bring this back to tech in a second to land this plane. Trust me, people. Trust me. I remember when I was in school, we had the bookmobile. When the bookmobile showed up, that was an event. Then you'd get those sheets that you had to fill in and pick your books. Scholastic book sales, yes. And beg your parents for some spare change so you could buy the next edition of...

the Hardy Boys or whatever, or Benicula, which was, I loved the Benicula series. Those were great. Vampire Bunny. I don't know if you ever read those. Dude, I was such a nerd. I had read 1984 in fourth grade and I had written slogans on my backpack. OK. OK. But either way, when you put it in, you'd give them your money and then like you'd forget about it. And then like a month or so later, it probably might have been next week. But back then, time was different.

This box of books would show up at your desk when the when the books would arrive. And it was so cool. Yeah. And reading was fun. And but when we when we first started with the Internet, you and I were there at the beginning. And, you know. We thought that this was going to be the great leveler for education. We thought, quote unquote,

thought that things like Wikipedia would be a game changer with all of human knowledge at our fingertips. Khan Academy, let's democratize all of education. No, none of it worked. None of it worked. And now what do we have? We have AI that just makes shit up. That's right. Speaking of making shit up, let's get to the news. In the news. Well, Jason, we've got the Gulf of America. America!

outside of the fact that making making shit up making shit up just making shit up and what of our what are our courageous tech leaders doing they're pacifying the fucking moron yeah google maps is renaming the gulf of mexico to the gulf of america but only if you're in the U S because they're not changing it anywhere else, which actually kind of tracks that this does happen. And it is their policy where if a country, if different countries have different names for something, it will.

either put both labels or geo restrict which ones it shows. So fine, I guess. I wonder if I can rename the plot of land where I live. Fucko Stan and petition them to change that. So. The sovereign land of fuckostan. I mean, the only good thing that's coming out of this is the just sheer amount of memes. It's been phenomenal. Like Greenland put out a map where they decided to rename all their bodies of water and every single one's an insult to Trump.

It's fantastic. Yep. And the president of Mexico even hit back, which is very well played. So she found one of the old maps from 1607 where – The U.S. was named Mexican America. Funnily enough, though, in that map, it was still called the Gulf of Mexico. So what are you going to do? It's been the Gulf of Mexico forever. It's never been the Gulf of America. No, no.

Well, let's talk about our dwindling impact on the world. If you have turned on the television, the news, the carrier pigeon this week, you may have seen the sheer... insanity about DeepSeek AI, the Chinese AI startup that is ruffling feathers across the tech world. You know, fine. I'm glad OpenAI took a few knocks, but what's actually turning out to seem to be is just not much there. The thing is, yeah, well, there are some things there that are kind of important. The first is...

Everybody's getting sick of AI. It's the most important thing. We're all sick of it. We're all fucking sick of it. The schadenfreude this week that OpenAI got very upset because DeepSeek may have stolen some of their data is just... I have never seen the world come together in Memosphere quite like this week. Yeah. You know.

I mean, yeah, half the country is on the anti-Trump meme and the other half is on the pro-Trump meme. But everybody can get together and mock open AI. It is truly bringing us together. The criminals got crimed. I know. I know. It's like, oh, somebody's upset that you stole their work. Hmm. Wonder who else could be upset by that. Yeah. And Gadget had a great headline. Open AI suddenly thinks intellectual property theft is not cool. Seriously.

Because again, it is important to point out, just in case you've been living under a rock for some time, OpenAI did admit last year that it would have been impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Again, OpenAI is built... on stealing IP. Yep. So is Llama, Facebook's open models? All of them are. They all are. Yes. They all are. So they basically all steal from each other. And, you know, all of this tech comes out of academia anyway.

Everybody's stealing from everybody and everybody's taking these giant, huge, ungodly sized bags of money to waste on this shit. And I was just thinking this morning, I'm like, this just harkens back to Uber. Uber just took all the money that they possibly could from as many investors that they could to waste it on their business model saying, we're just going to make it up at scale by losing money.

And never turned a profit except one year or one quarter even where it was just some shenanigans in the bookkeeping finally came back to roost. Haven't turned a profit since. I guess maybe Uber Eats did a little bit, but... The point here is that they're spending all this money and people are wondering why nobody gives a shit about AI because they're losing their jobs to AI and seeing these people spend all of this money on server farms that they don't get to work at.

It can probably drive by for 20 minutes on their way to their, you know, minimum wage job if they can get it. It's just it's pissing people off hearing about how much money is being spent on this. Well, and again, for for what? For what? What are we actually really getting from this? Yes, okay, it helps you write an email. But if you try to use it for research, it...

makes up facts. They all hallucinate. They all tell you incorrect things. Do we need more AI art? We absolutely do not. I do not need to destroy a lake to have AI make a picture of a platypus eating a pineapple. I just don't. Shrimp Jesus. Shrimp Jesus. Shrimp Jesus. I mean, this stuff is genuinely, for the most part, useless.

What they're saying, though, Brian, if you listen to the words that come out of their mouths, they're saying that someday soon they're going to be able to cure cancer and give us all back the time that we so desperately want to spend with our kids. Our dogs, our pets. Huddled in a tiny apartment with 17 other families eating dog food.

Yeah, eating the dog food because we've already eaten the dogs because we just can't afford anything else. Yes. And then Sam Altman comes out, and I don't know if you caught this clip on a podcast. He's like, not just yet, but maybe by like 2030. Definitely going to have to rethink the social contract. I'm like, who the fuck are you to walk into our world and tell us because your little computer program is so good at making shit up that you can rewrite how the entire.

of fucking society works. You arrogant piece of shit. Also, I'd start on that now, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, let's not wait until it's too late, which is kind of what we're talking here. They also don't disclose how much money they spend on security because these guys make the Secret Service probably look like amateurs compared to, you know, with how much security these guys need around them.

And there's so many good memes about that. Like we're going to need a bigger Luigi. I have not seen that one. That was so good. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, shrimp. Shrimp Jesus. So, yeah, that's been the week in AI so far. This episode is brought to you by Factor. Ready to crush your nutrition goals this year?

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Well, there's a little bit more. I did want to talk about this one really briefly because I found this one hilarious. And, you know, again, on this show, we've often talked about we need regulation, we need laws.

As we always talk about with Dave, when Dave comes on, it really only affects, this stuff only happens if it affects the people that are in power and making the laws. So it never really happens and it's always way too late. Well, the California's AG is trying to get ahead of the game here. Bonta, he basically came out and issued a statement that basically says everything that you AI companies are doing is illegal. Everything.

Mic drop done. Pretty much. The link is in the show notes because it gets really in depth on this. And I don't want to. We've already. babbling away like no tomorrow. And it's kind of dry and boring as it should be because he's the AG and he has to present a lawsuit. But yeah, it's just basically everything that you're doing is illegal.

Why are you being able to get away with this? Didn't stop Uber. Nope. Nope. Never did. But how about, you know, we spent 10 years on the show screaming about Uber. Yeah. Nobody listened. Nobody listened. Yeah. It's almost like, it's almost like. Blockchain and NFTs never happened. They might have listened to us there a little bit. A little bit. I think we may have moved the needle a little on NFTs. Maybe just a little bit.

But the U.S. Copyright Office is back saying that, yeah, you can copyright some AI stuff if humans had a hand in creating it, a significant hand. Right. So you have to have significant creative input. Yes, such as modifying or arranging the AI's output, but merely providing prompts does not meet the threshold. All right, so if I take Shrimp Jesus and I put a blur Gaussian filter on it, we're cool. Yeah, that might do it.

OK, that might do it. Yep. Oh, God. So and here's another one, Brian. You know, you asked what is it good for? What is AI good for? OpenAI says it plans to let the U.S. National Laboratories, the Department of the Energy's network R&D labs, use its AI models for nuclear weapons security and other scientific projects.

Great. Now, I'm just going to point out something here. You did a little experiment on our Discord channel where you asked various AI models who you were as a podcaster. Yes. None of them got it right. None of them. And then I put myself in and I did it as well. And somehow I'm hosting, basically, I'm hosting a lot of murder crime and real crime shows, apparently. This is the tech that is now going to control our nukes.

Yeah, yeah. Apparently, Joe Rogan owes me a bunch of money because I came from the Joe Rogan show. And I, too, am a true crime podcaster. Yeah, no, it was just. pure poppycock, as they say. And I am going to point out that, you know, old school Google could tell us who we were. Yeah, even Gemini Googles.

actual ai kind of fucked it up too if you just googled jason de philippo podcaster you got the actual results of what i've done but if you ask the ai yeah it just doesn't it just kind of makes shit up so So let's put them in charge of the nukes. Exactly. So OpenAI will work with Microsoft to deploy a model on the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The model will be a shared resource for scientists from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs. Yay! Going back to nobody ever reads anymore, obviously, absolutely nobody has read a dystopian sci-fi book over there. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's Sandia. I think I mispronounced that. David Teeter will let me know if I'm wrong on that one. It's going to be a big gaping hole in a few minutes. So who cares? Great. Great. Well, some people are fighting back.

I don't know if you've seen this. Faceless YouTube channels are gaining traction, Brian, because many creators are using AI tools to automate everything from scripts to visuals. And while some see this as a quick way to profit, others are fighting back against unethical practices. Like transcript theft. Well, one YouTuber, Fami, has taken a creative stand by poisoning her subtitles to confuse AI systems attempting to summarize her content. And this is the only reason I put this in here.

Using the .ass subtitle format, she embeds invisible junk data that disrupts AI processing while remaining undetectable to human viewers. Nice. Yes. I did not know that there was a .ass format, but I am all about the .ass. I like .ass and I cannot lie. All other AI I deny. Why don't you get AI to write you some song lyrics for that? I'd rather hire Weird Al because then it'll make sense. That's true. That's true. I'm sure he could use the...

No, he has all the cash. He doesn't need cash. He's fine. He's fine. He's touring. He's fine. Yeah, he's going to tour until he's dead. I've never seen him in live. Oh, he's great. That's what everybody says. It's phenomenal. I highly recommend. I mean, you don't have to do it more than once. Trust me. But yeah, the one time that I was actually going to go was the year that he was doing the tour of just his original work.

And which I'd have been fine with because I don't know if you notice, but Weird Al's original work is pretty fucking good. Christmas at Ground Zero, one of my favorites. Nature Trail to Hell. Come on. Come on. All right. Moving on here in the most onion, but not onion headline this week. Everything I say leaks, Zuckerberg says in leaked meeting audio.

At an all-hands meeting Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg did not discuss the company's recent $25 million settlement with, what did I call him last week? P. Donnie? P. Donnie. Yeah, which includes $22 million for the future Trump presidential library, which is fucking ironic since most of his followers can't read. It's going to be one fucking copy of his ghostwritten book sitting there.

It's the Trump Bible. That's all it's going to be. However, he did acknowledge increasing concerns over internal leaks, stating everything I say leaks and it sucks, right? Actually, no, we think it's fucking great, dude. We just go to Llama and see what's in your model since you're stealing probably from your own meeting notes. Due to repeated leaks, Meta has changed its Q&A format, moving to a pre-voted poll system instead of open questions. Zuckerberg admitted some topics were...

quote unquote value destroying to discuss publicly, but promised employees could provide feedback. I know something else that Zuckerberg has this value destroying. Everything? Meta? Meta. Yes. During the meeting, he reiterated past comments predicting open source AI will surpass closed systems and discussing Metashift to align more with the Trump administration.

He says this creates an opportunity for productive relationship with U.S. government. Right. Great. You know, the only reason he cares about this is because Trump said so many times that he's going to throw his ass in jail. Yep. That's it. We've got a president that ran for president to not be thrown in jail, and now we've got Zuckerberg kissing his ass to not be thrown in jail. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's it.

It is the fear of going to jail all the way down. Don't drop the soap. I guess you're not allowed to say that anymore. I guess that's not woken. Oh, you can now. That's right. Say whatever you want. You can bring back your favorite R word. But don't, please. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Don't worry. Don't worry. But you totally could.

Oh, yes, yes. Hey, MoviePass is back in the news. Let's get back to some – let's go back to the hits, Brian. Let's get back to the hits. Oh, can I go watch movies with it now? I think you can, but – They might be moving to crypto and blockchain and Web3. And digital wallets and NFTs. All right. Oh, my. Oh, my. Great. Yeah. Yeah.

See, the thing that gets me nuts, okay, pivot. I understand that companies need to pivot sometimes. Generally, it's when they have a brand name that inspires confidence and loyalty. Nobody gives a fuck about Movipass as a brand. Yeah. It's been destroyed and dragged through the mud. Just shutter it and start something new. You know, like Radio Shack had a brand, then that was purchased, and then turned into crypto.

That at least they spent decades and almost a century building the Radio Shack brand to destroy it with crypto. Movie pass. We don't even have a decade of MoviePass yet. Come on. No, and it's a brand that's now been destroyed at least three times. Exactly. There are documentaries about how MoviePass has been destroyed.

But I guess the argument would be all press is good press. You know the name, right? That's right. And they say, hey, subscribers watched one million films last year. And we have a mailing list. Yeah, the hits just keep on coming with crypto and MoviePass. What do you got? Yeah. Well, we got some unionization.

News. Whole Foods workers formed the first union since the Amazon acquisition. A majority of workers at a Whole Foods location in Philadelphia has voted to unionize, as reported by Reuters. Let's cast back our minds just last week. It's no secret that Amazon isn't exactly a friend to unions because when workers in Quebec unionized last year, but then they shut it down.

So I expect that the Whole Foods location in Philadelphia will be the soon to be closed location for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with unionization. So good luck with that, guys. Yeah. I saw a great joke this week. How do you tell a plumber from a physicist? How? Have them pronounce unionize. No.

Takes a second. Yeah, got it. Pretty good. And then either last week or a few weeks back, we were talking about the trend in stores everywhere about how everything is locked up and there's one employee who's Gen Z.

who's came late to work and is dressed inappropriately and has a bad attitude and can't be found to open up the thing so you can get your deodorant. So instead you press a button and you sit there and you wait for 15 minutes until he ambles over and opens it up and you can get your deodorant and then go pay for it.

probably with crypto and how annoying it is and how it makes us not want to shop anymore. And then we feed the fucking Bezos beast to have it just show up at our house because we didn't have to sit and wait for 15 minutes to get the fucking deodorant. And this is how we're destroying our lives. Well, CVS has a new app.

Yes, if you get their app, because they're trying to push you to get their app, and you've logged in and you've put in your credit card and you've joined the store's Wi-Fi and you've enabled Bluetooth on your phone, you will be able to unlock cabinets. by yourself now yay or you could just not have them locked up shop at amazon like you said come on yeah let's make some more big penis rockets for bezos

And going back to the hits, Brian, Uber's back in the news. Uber has filed a racketeering lawsuit in New York, surprisingly not against themselves. It has to be the wrong way around. Isn't it New York has filed a racketeering lawsuit against Uber? No, that's what I'm saying. Yes, it's a pivot, Brian. It's a pivot. Okay. So Uber is alleging a criminal scheme involving law firms, doctors and clinics staging fake car accidents to exploit the state's no fault insurance system. All right.

The company claims that since 2019, these groups have exaggerated injuries from minor collisions and subjected victims to unnecessary and invasive medical procedures, including spinal surgeries to inflate insurance payouts. Yeah, Uber, which is required by New York law to carry substantial liability insurance for drivers and passengers, says it has borne the financial burden of these fraudulent claims. But we're just an app, Jason. Yep, just a platform. Just a platform. Yep, we're just an app.

Yeah. This mirrors a similar lawsuit by the American Transit Insurance Company, which alleged $450 million in fraud. Okay. In response to rising insurance fraud concerns, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed reforms to strengthen fraud investigations. Meaning they're going to pump it through an AI. Probably. Probably. Meanwhile, Uber recently influenced legislation to ease insurance requirements for its drivers in the state. So, OK. Now, I –

I have some experience with this in California from the periphery, seeing some people that go through accidents and how they have to navigate the insurance systems. And there is. Basically, an industrial medical complex that is built around bilking the insurance agencies for everything that they can possibly get. I've seen multiple people go through this.

It's just mind boggling how evil it is. And I was on, I actually did jury duty in Santa Monica. I think I talked about it on the show when I was going through it. And one of the doctors that was up as a, as an expert witness. was one of the doctors I knew somebody had gone to that was actually trying to juice the system to get more money out of it. And I tried to call bullshit in the in the deliberation room and nobody believed me. And I'm just like, I give up. I give up.

If you're going to give them money, let's give them all the money. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't think Uber is probably at a turn. No, the whole system is so whacked. You know what happens if you get in a car accident here in Canada? The state comes by and gives you maple cookies? You get treated. Oh, that. Yeah. There you go. No bills. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, not here.

Tesla has announced plans to launch its robo-taxi business and begin pilot production of its unmanned humanoid robot Optimus in 2025. Wait, why do we even need a robot in it? I thought the whole point was the car is self-driving. No, no, no. The robots for the factories that make the self-driving taxis. Come on, Brian. Sorry. I thought it was like the Rex from Star Tours would be in front of every car. I remember that. OK, that's not going to happen.

We know that's not going to happen. We know it's not going to happen. We know it's not going to happen. And the funny thing is they – Tesla just – put out a video of, oh, look, our cars can now deliver themselves from the factory to the shipping stations using fully self-driving technology. And they think that this is their breakthrough that says, hey, we're going to make... it now we're so this is so awesome well

Turns out like BMW and all the German car companies have had that for almost a decade now. This car's been able to drive themselves from the factory to where they need to go inside of the systems forever. So this is nothing new. Sorry, Tesla. And sorry, Elon, you're fucking lying again. Again. And one article that I did not have time to put in here, which is, so.

Elon has said for a very long time now that all of the Teslas that have been delivered have the necessary hardware to be fully self-driving when the software is enabled. Well, he lied. Again. So now it turns out that he's going to have to take the cars back and retrofit them with the new computers that are going to be, quote unquote, fully self-driving enabled. Now, none of those computers come with LiDAR cameras or anything of the sort like the Waymos have, which we'll talk about in a second.

So this is a big thing. And he says, yeah, yeah, it's going to be painful, but we're going to have to do it. So apparently version two of the computers they have will not do it. Version three is somewhat OK. And version four, which I guess is shipping now, is the one that's going to be the fully self-drive. but he's lied about everything else so what makes you want to believe him for anything that he says i don't know why people would believe a bunch of liars

I don't know. I don't know. They sure as hell wouldn't vote for them. No, of course not. Somebody that just repeatedly lies and it's proven that he's lied multiple times. Somehow they're just running our government now. Yep, yep, yep. Now back to Waymo. We talked about how Waymo launched here in Southern California, and I've been kind of excited to try one out. This has made me not want to try one out as much. So the other night over by the Beverly Center.

Yeah, on La Cienega in 3rd. Yeah, yeah. Used to live right around there. Yeah, yeah. Used to be a nice neighborhood, right? Yeah, yeah. No, it's a dystopian hellscape now. A Waymo robo-taxi at about 4 a.m. was set upon... by about 40 to 50 hooligans and scoundrels and basically destroyed. They ripped this thing apart. While I applaud the sentiments.

Well, I applaud the sentiment. Yes. No, don't do this. And nothing good happens at four in the morning. And why? Well, 40 or 50. It feels like a flash mob. It was one of the street takeovers. I don't know. You haven't been here much lately, Brian, but we have there's a play. in Los Angeles called the quote unquote street takeover where hordes of youngsters in their fast and furious mobiles will basically do donuts in hoot and holler and run each other over until the Pope.

Poe comes and are chased off and they scatter like cockroaches. This is a thing. It is a problem. People are getting killed at these things and they're just annoying and they're stupid. Well, this is apparently this Waymo kind of meandered into one. Okay. Well, I'm pretty sure we're not going to be able to convince these kids they should actually just go read.

No, we're not. This is the problem. So I want to know, is there a fucking panic mode on the Waymos? Because if I'm a passenger in a Waymo and I am beset upon by said hooligans, I want to press the get me the fuck out of here button. It's going to run them over and say, I will accept liability for any and all injuries that you may incur in getting me the fuck out of here. Right.

I don't think that that button exists. No, because they would get sued out of existence from the first person they ran over. Yeah, that's the problem. And if the people are dragged from the car and murdered in the street, there's nobody left to sue them, I guess, but maybe the family of the people. Again, make sure you kill them all. That's why they ask you for your personal family history when you sign up for a waiver.

account so they know how to clean the slate when it's done. It's kind of troubling that. I would like to know how they react in a crisis situation. That's what I would like to know. I would probably like to have bulletproof glass on them maybe too. That would be nice. But real bulletproof glass, not – Not Tesla bulletproof glass. Not Tesla's, which is, quote, quote, bulletproof, quote. Yeah. I want alphabet bulletproof glass. So, yeah, that's the latest news on Waymo here in Los Angeles.

Fantastic. But since we're still in California, a little more California news. California law enforcement misused state databases more than 7,000 times in 2023. Now, here's where it gets fun. Okay. A state report found officers access the California Law Enforcement Telecommunication System, or CLITS, for unauthorized background checks on concealed carry applicants and even personal vendettas. CLITS.

Well, I know, you know, you got to bend it for a little humor. Come on. Law enforcement is abusing the clits. So you have to you have to put this in the news. It's important. You just touch the clits and it reacts. I know. Yes. And clits violations are among the few law enforcement abuses that require mandatory reporting because, you know, you need to be reported when you're abusing the clits. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. No arguments here.

Misuse of the clits has led to 24 officers being suspended, six resigning, and nine being fired. So, why were you fired, Joe? I abused the clits. I can't help it. You know, it's one of the things. You've been waiting all week to do that story. I just found this five minutes before we went to air. Come on. It just made my day. I'm like, can we have something that's not AI, please? Media Candy. All right. So, yeah. We got a Star Trek movie. Did we? No.

We absolutely did not. Star Trek section 31 came out last week. This is the long discussed show about the shadowy. Not involved in any way shape with Starfleet, except for the Starfleet officer that was put on the task force from Section 31. And transporters. And transporters. With Michelle Yao.

It was going to be a series and we all looked forward to that. And then it got cut down to a movie and we were all still kind of looking forward to it. And then it came out and we're just never going to discuss it again. Well, you know, this isn't a Star Trek movie, Brian. This is a Power Rangers movie because Michelle Yeoh played Rita Repulsa in this movie. We've talked about this before.

It's not even that it was a bad Star Trek film. It's a bad sci-fi film. It's just a bad film. It's just a bad film. It's not good. Again, people seem to forget what the... point of star trek is and it's not to be sure there's some action but it's not supposed to be an action movie or an action series it's supposed to be deep thoughts and ponderings and philosophy and

deep questions about life. That's why we like Star Trek. And I don't even know why I'm unintentionally kind of going into a William Shatner cadence when I was doing that. but i did it has nothing to do with this uh and and but instead we get pumped out and that was the problem with the whole fucking reboot with jj abrams as well as we get pumped out these crappy action films that aren't star trek and it's just not good and again

As we just said, it's just not even a good movie anyways. It's just crap. And I heard that it has the lowest rating of any Star Trek film. ever. And to people that have put it that low, I would say, go back and watch the first Star Trek movie. Star Trek, the motion picture, it does not have legs. And I would argue that that is probably the worst Star Trek movie.

I beg to differ. The Undiscovered Country takes the cake. No, I'd still put that higher than Section 31. Okay. This guy, Omari Hardwick, who played Alak Sahar. I just think they couldn't get Common for the role because all I saw was – Because he was on Silo. Because he was busy on Silo. Exactly. I will say that I found some parts of the characters – some of the characters were very interesting. I think...

Had this been a series and they could have spent less time doing action and more time exploring the concepts, it perhaps could have been good, except for the stupid Vulcan that inexplicably had an Irish accent and was actually just a microscopic. creature driving the Vulcan meat suit that character was a fucking waste of time and the dumbest thing I've seen the men in blackification of Star Trek yeah so No, this was just a fucking hot mess. It was just a hot mess.

If you'd like to go watch some good sci-fi, you've got a little bit of time left. The Expanse's first three seasons are leaving Amazon very soon, unfortunately. We have to remember that it actually started on sci-fi.

sci-fi channel for seasons one through three and uh then amazon saved it and brought it back and revived it and kept it going for a few more seasons and uh the expanse is absolutely wonderful so if you've never seen it get on it really quick because i don't think anybody knows where those first three seasons are going to go obviously they're going to land somewhere uh but there's no deal in place as far as i know right now

for those first three seasons. So go catch them before they leave. You have until February 7th. And thank you Nerdist for the PSA about this. Nerdist. is something that I haven't heard in quite some time. Yeah, I used to visit that site basically daily, and I have not thought about them for at least a decade. Yeah, and this podcast would not exist if it wasn't for the Nerdist podcast with Chris Hardwick, who was the head of Nerdist. He was the creator of the Nerdist.

And who is he's him and Neil Gaiman are hanging out right now. Doing whatever those guys do. I think Chris Hardwick was exonerated, so they say, because I think he's exonerated. Now, this is obviously supposition and conspiracy theory because he married a first. We're just asking questions. Yeah, yeah. The fact that he married a Hearst and had a show on NBC had nothing to do with it at all, I'm sure. No. But what I remembered about Chris Hardwick was a fantastic show he did called At Midnight.

At midnight. After midnight. Well, it was at midnight back in the day. That was the thing because they used the at sign. It is after midnight is the technical name for it. Gotcha. Because there's a whole thing you have to – it was a visual pun. The thing about it is it was gone. It was a great show. I loved it. I watched it all the time.

It has been rebooted on CBS. Okay. And it is back with, what's her name? Something Tomlinson. Taylor Tomlinson. Taylor Tomlinson. I was going to say Lily Tomlinson. No, Taylor Tomlinson. I find her appealing. She's got the riz, as the kids would say. Yeah, she's great. She is great. I saw her years ago when she was just starting out. And I am so glad that she has climbed the ranks to making all the money now since she has a good show. So good for her.

You don't get paid like you used to. That's true. That's true. Yeah. And there's probably no residuals for that show because it is kind of a timely show. But anyway, I'm very happy that she has a gig and I cannot wait.

to start watching this. It's on regular CBS. I thought it was just on Paramount Plus and I'm like, oh God, I'm going to have to go steal this every day at Sweden. I'm not paying for Paramount Plus because they just gave me Section 31 and I'm going to boycott them on sheer principle. But until they bring back the Star Trek series. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. When's the next one dropping? Wow. It's going to be a while. I think they're actually here in Toronto shooting. Oh, God.

Come on. Hurry up. But yeah, it's on regular TV Monday through Thursday, just like the old series was. So I am very much looking forward to that. That was such a good show. Such a good show. Such a good premise. Lots of good stand-up comics. And I'm sure she... is going to be a fine steward of the brand. All right. And speaking of good shows that have been rebooted, kind of, remember good old MTV's Behind the Music?

I sure do. Well, that was great, and I loved it. It's on Paramount Plus now, and they say that it's been rebooted, but not really. So what they've done is for some of the episodes, they've gone back and shot new footage and new interviews with the bands that are still around, like Duran Duran, which was a good one. But for most of them, they have not.

They've just cherry picked some of the old episodes and put them back up. So I only watched a handful on the genres of music I like. There's an awful lot of rap and hip hop, and I just don't care enough to watch the episodes. So as far as I can tell, it's only Duran Duran. that got the new version. None of the other bands that I watched did, but it's still, it's behind the music and it's great. And I just, it's a wonderful.

wonderful vehicle for musicians to talk about themselves and get the history and lowdown of what happened so that was a it's a it's a nice find Okay, still not going to get me to subscribe to Paramount+. No, but once you do for Star Trek, you can watch those too. Okay, yes. Once A Strange New Worlds comes back, we'll talk. We'll talk. And Questlove.

has put together a documentary called Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of SNL Music. So Saturday night I have music right up my alley. Definitely something I wanted to watch. Nobody I know subscribes to Peacock TV, so I could not get a login anywhere to go on and watch this movie.

thankfully went to Sweden for me. Here I come to save the day. Yes, Jason did save the link or save the day for me. You sent it to me. I started streaming it last night from my lappy toppy, but it is almost three hours long. Not three hours. It's like two hours. But this thing aired on NBC originally. So you got to figure that was a three-hour time block on NBC if it's two hours of straight video, right? Maybe it was a multi-night affair.

I don't know. God, when was the last time you watched NBC? Yeah. So who knows? But anyways, I've watched the first hour. I didn't finish it last night because I finished a book, which we'll get to later instead. Phenomenal. It's a really great documentary. It really does go back over the 50 years of...

of different performances with behind the scenes discussions and a lot of the comedy sketches that involve music and everything. It's just really great. And it really hits home to remind me how good SNL used to be. Oh, it used to be phenomenal. It used to be phenomenal.

Yeah, I don't know if it still is. I hear they're having a resurgence these days. It's better. Yeah, the 50 year anniversary episodes. There have been some some winners and a lot of losers. The news is still the best thing to watch. But surprisingly. The best episode that I've seen of the whole run was the Bad Bunny episode. He was hilarious. He's a funny guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was good. And the other thing that you alerted me to this week, which I kind of knew about, but then forgot, and then you reminded me right when it was happening, so I was able to take a gander, was one of my favorite industrial bands from my youth, Front 242.

decided to retire and they played their final show live in, in Belgium. And, uh, the YouTube link is, uh, in the show notes. If you want to go watch a bunch of 60 year old men that don't quite fit into those outfits anymore, stomping around very slowly.

50 pounds of shit in a five pound bag uh but some great songs i mean they're one of those bands that the first like three or four albums like i could put on at any point in time and every album after that has sucked so it is what it is So speaking of music, old music, I've had this song stuck in my head for a while because I've been having this recurring dream for the past couple of weeks.

And it basically, you remember the beginning of Shaun of the Dead, where they did this beautiful TV montage, like they were flipping the channels and there were just little snippets of each show that were telling what was going on with the zombie apocalypse that was coming. Some of the greatest filmmaking ever made as far as I'm concerned. But it starts off with...

The Smiths, Panic on the Streets of London, which is the song Panic. Great song. Most people don't listen to the Smiths as much as they used to anymore because they should, though, because, you know, we're old. The main refrain of that song is hang the DJ. Well, yeah. In my dream, now this is – I had to do a little bit of Googling this morning and I did it through a VPN just so I wouldn't get flagged for national security issues. Hang the DJ.

Also, you can replace that with hang DJT and have a completely different song and a completely different set of words. And that's what's been in my dream all week. OK, so I'm assuming someone out there has made a song like that. But if you haven't there, I'm just putting it out there. Feel free to.

Probably you don't want to do that in America because I think the Secret Service might pay you a visit, even though it could be done in good fun. But it was just, it's just, I don't know. But I got me listening to the show slash VPN. Exactly. That's my man right there. But that just got me listening to The Smiths again, which is a good thing because I love The Smiths. Let me tell you one of the reasons why people from our generation probably aren't.

listening to the Smiths as much as we should and newer generations aren't listening to the Smiths as much as they should. Morrissey has done an excellent job of movie passing the Smiths brand over the years. Okay. Does he have a meme coin? No, he's just a fucking ignorant asshole. Yeah, well.

Kind of been doing that since day one, hasn't he? Yeah, but he used to write better tunes. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, if you could tap your toe to it, that's fine. But if you do want to listen to The Smiths, I would recommend not going to Amazon Music Unlimited because they're raising their prices again. from $9.99 a month to $10.99 a month, which is surprising since I don't know anybody that voluntarily uses Amazon Music.

Yeah, certainly nobody that pays for it. Yeah. No, I tried it for a while just to road test it for the show, and it was like, meh. No. Surprisingly, it's got a worse interface than Spotify on the mobile app, which is difficult, which is extremely difficult because the Spotify mobile app is just fucking garbage.

It is difficult. But if you do happen to listen to most of your music through an Amazon Echo or Alexa or anything like that, and if you've got the screens like I do, so I can call my mom and things like that, it will actually display lyrics if you play the stuff off Amazon Music. Oh, how nice is that?

How nice is that? I actually just heard my Amazon Alexa from downstairs just try to talk back to me. They got ears. They're listening, motherfucker. They do. But speaking of things that suck, The Night Agent Season 2 on Netflix. came out this week. The Night Agent was one of those shows that was kind of like, you know, it's kind of like shitter sci-fi. It's there, you watch it, you know it's not very good, but then you got to get to the end.

Yeah, my roommate and I just, we got eight episodes in out of the 10 episodes and said, no, we're not going to waste two more hours. It is so fucking bad. It is poorly written, poorly acted. The plot is just. Stupid. And you can just see them in chat GPT going, we need another episode here. Write one.

And it doesn't have to make any sense. Don't worry about it. People are going to watch anyway. They'll watch anything on Netflix, which is how the season progresses. It's awful. Don't waste your time. That's all I'm saying. Ups and doodads. Well, iOS 18.3 is here, Jason. Whee!

Didn't really notice much, but they are trying to clearly label their Apple intelligence notification summaries so people don't lose their freaking minds like they were when they first rolled these things out. I left it on for like a hot second just to take a look.

It's slightly better. It's still ugly. It still doesn't fit in with their beautiful interfaces and their beautiful layouts. It feels like they just clutched it on still. I don't think that's ever going to be fixed. And I immediately turned it all back off. OK, that sounds about right. There you go. Yeah, I don't I have noticed that the little notification things come up, but I turn off that shit for almost everything anyway. So, yeah, it's like the opposite of the.

the hot sauce that you put on Buffalo wings, that shit on everything. I turn the shit off on everything. Seriously. Yeah. And I ran across a fun website that reminded me of the promise and joy that the internet used to be. It's called Stimulation Clicker. And did you play around with this at all, Jason? I'm doing it right now. It's kind of an art project. It's meant to show how the internet experience has matured and gotten and shittified and horrible.

Okay. And it takes a little while to get into it, but once you do, you'll start to realize, oh my God, we are just fucking, we are just nothing but mice in a cage clicking buttons. This is what our life has become. Well, fortunately, we have the new AI agents that will click for us. So we don't even have to do this anymore. Anyways, it's a lot of fun. So well done, whoever did that. All right.

A friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, sent me this one because this comes back to the like the old jet trackers that Elon Musk had problems with. We now have POTUS Tracker at POTUSTracker.us. So if you just want to know where the. where the felon is at any given time to keep your children away. So you don't want to take them to the park or anything. You can go to, yeah, potustracker.us. What are we, nine days, 10 days in yet? 17 months.

This is just going to be golf courses. That's all you're going to see. Yeah. 11 days. Today is day 11, I think. Something like that. All right. Well, you can track the POTUS if you want to be tracked by POTUS, at least until Musk and POTUS is a little thing blows up. You can start using X payment app because God knows they're not going to keep any of that shit secret. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they're getting ready to finally roll out the payments app the company's leaders have long been promising and absolutely nobody wants to use. The company will introduce XMoney later this year with Visa as a partner, according to Yaccarino. It will support person-to-person payments via user's debit card. with the ability to transfer funds to a bank account, much like Venmo. The service will also allow you to deposit money into an X wallet.

They have not disclosed any specifics about how this will work for users or how it might make money off the service. X's business is, of course, struggling. Musk recently told employees that our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we're barely breaking even.

to buy the White House. Exactly. Memo reported by the Wall Street Journal. So, you know, nobody, absolutely nobody gave their credit cards to Meta. I'm not sure why Musk thinks they're going to do it at X. And the interesting thing about this is... Nowhere is mentioned Doge. I can't buy Doge with my X wallet? Or maybe my X wallet is just made of Doge. Hmm. That's where they're going to make their money.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I give you my fucking credit card. You ass at Google is testing a new AI powered feature called ask for me. which makes phone calls to local businesses on behalf of users to check service availability and pricing. Now, I just want to know if Bart Simpson is the spokesperson for this, because it seems like the ultimate crank call tool.

I would love to play with it. Do you have 10 pound balls? How do you walk? Is your refrigerator running? Well, you better go catch it. If only we had something called. websites that usually provide this information. Yeah. Or the telephone that you could call yourself with. I don't know how busy you are. You can't call to say, are you open? Well, remember, they've saved us from the scourge of clicking, Jason. So now.

This is not a new feature, though. Remember, they tried this like a couple of years ago. Yeah. And, you know, so you could call to make reservations for restaurants and. As far as I know, I haven't really seen much of it since the technology demo from their demo day stuff. It hasn't really popped. It's not hot. They're not dropping it like it's hot. So, you know.

Yeah. They just – they knew that they needed more headlines with the word AI powered in it. So they just pulled this one from the – What haven't we stuck AI into yet? Oh, the old telephone. Yeah, there we go. Soon, AITP. Let me wipe that for you. At the library. Well, one of the reasons I only finished an hour of that SNL music documentary instead of the full two hours is I actually finished Not Till We Are Lost, Babaverse Book 5 by Dennis E. Taylor.

It was delightful. I was so happy to read a really good book again. Thoroughly enjoyable. Massively left open for another book, which I went and checked on his website. Actually, I had Google. Call Dennis Taylor and ask him. But according to his website, he is working on future Babaverse books, but that's not going to be what's coming next from him. So we're going to have a little bit of a wait and even longer for me because I'm sure he's still in that shit Amazon Audible deal.

I love that Audible deal. It's great. And I love his one-off books. I think his one-off books are awesome. I like that he does – he follows our rule for series. Like he doesn't write – the books in order. He just takes a break in between books, writes something different, and then comes back to it. I think that is the way to do it because it just keeps those Babaverse books on coming. Yep.

I wouldn't mind going back and reading Babaverse book one again. I kind of feel like I want to, too. Definitely. Because it's gotten so big now. I want to go back to when it was just, you know, just Bob. Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because Bob was the man. Bob was the man. I am reading a fun book called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté. God, that sounds...

Sounds wonderful. Sounds like a barrel of laughs. It is a barrel of laughs. No, it's not. It's not at all. If you want to figure out why you do the things you do and who you are, why you are and all that stuff. And oh, Jesus. Yeah. It's an eye-opening read. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm learning a lot from it. And I highly recommend it if you are suffering from undiagnosed childhood trauma.

Which I think after reading this book, everybody is. That's why nobody's normal. Highly recommend it. Highly recommend it. Get right on that. Yeah. Just make sure you have everything isn't shit enough. Just make sure you have budget for your therapist or you live in a country with with state sponsored health care. I'm just going to use AI health care. Don't don't. AI therapist. Help me, Eliza. You're my only hope. The Dark Side with Dave.

Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast superhost Dave Bittner decodes all things cyber on the Cyber Wire every day. Exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans. Dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat. Breaks down industrial cybersecurity on control. and even brings the chuckles on only malware in the building hello dave hello gents got a bit of news here about star wars the acolyte which i think both dave and i really enjoyed and um i did too

And Jason and a lot, but a lot of Star Wars fans and fans may be questionable did not. And we're very loud about it. And apparently that may be the real influence that actually cut the series and got it, got it canceled. Because according to Deadline, which shared stats, citing research from Luminate, which breaks down television's highs and lows of 2024, it was the second most watched show on Disney Plus last year. Now, I don't know much about streaming business, but...

If you've got a show that is your second most watched show, you tend to keep it around. Yeah. Now, I do understand it was incredibly expensive, but you can work on budgets. Right. So it appears the toxic fandom that went after the show may have had more to do with it than anything else. That would be a shame. But they still watched. Who cares? Right. Well, Jason, I was thinking the same thing. Like, I think about...

Like Rush Limbaugh, right, who I try to think about as little as possible. But when I think about Rush Limbaugh, obviously he had a huge audience, but there were many, many people who listened to him. Because they hated him. Hate watching is a thing. Right. That's why I listen to Scott Adams podcast. Right. That's exactly why I listen to that show. Yeah. And I'm sure we have hate listeners to this show. I'm sure there are. Oh, we absolutely do. Oh, you should see the mail. All they want to do.

is say, what are these idiots going to say next so they can feel better about themselves? And that's okay. Just keep your opinions to yourselves and please don't email us. Apparently Trump is our daddy. That one always comes in around four in the morning and it's very misspelled. So unsurprisingly, there's a very, really drunk Trump fan out there. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, I wonder if it came down to the expense or who knows what's happening behind the scenes on this one. It was.

It was odd, it seemed. You know, it was its own thing, but I thought that was part of its charm. Well, yeah, and they certainly left it on a big, like... star wars lore cliffhanger like we found the evil daddy that led to palpatine you know right and now we're just not gonna tell that story even though it did very very well for disney plus okay

Well, you know, we can have the fan made show. Maybe they'll do a comic book or there's an animated version. There's certainly lots of options, but I'm disappointed that it didn't get. renewed. And this is surprising because this contradicts what I'd heard earlier, which was that it had not been highly rated. That's what they said initially. That's what everybody was saying, but apparently not true.

I wonder what ratings really mean these days on a streaming thing. Obviously, nothing will get back to the golden age of where half the nation was tuned in to watch the final episode of MASH. What is considered good for a show like this? How many viewers does that mean? And how do you monetize that? Measure it in minutes.

That's what they do nowadays. They measure it in minutes. So, yeah, if you look at the numbers, Percy Jackson and the Olympians got the top spot with over 3 billion minutes viewed and the Acolyte came in second place with 2.7 billion. That's 2.7. billion minutes of human lifespan has been consumed by a show we will never get to see the end of. 2.7 billion minutes feels like January. That's for sure. That's true. That's true.

I mean that's interesting because you think about the original blockbusters and certainly a movie like Star Wars is up there in the canon of those films. And the success of that was people going to see it over and over and over again. Spending $3 at a time. Right, right. And so I wonder if what we're measuring is minutes, then... Do things like this have many, many repeat viewers? People are watching it over and over again, and that counts for something as well.

If that's the case, DuckTales is through the roof in this household. I'll tell you that. That's right. I'm sure that there is some algorithm that they run that says, OK, we spent this much money on bandwidth for the 2.7 billion minutes. How many new subscribers did we get? How many, you know, because they can track.

the subscription attrition and all that stuff based on all the different metrics. I'm sure that's not just minutes viewed. There's got to be some more secret sauce behind it. If it's correct secret sauce. No idea. This just could be some exec at Disney going, well, it doesn't make us look very good right now, so we better take that show down because people aren't liking it. You know, it could just be that.

It's too woke and we have a new administration coming in. Yeah. Let's not go there. Why not? The whole rest of the fucking world has. By the way, speaking of rewatching things, we. my family has taken on a complete start to finish rewatch of gravity falls. I don't know if either of you have enjoyed that show, but it's a fun one. No, is it? Never heard of it.

Oh, really? Gravity Falls. It's an animated show. It's about two kids who go to live with their uncle in, I want to say, Oregon. And their uncle owns a roadside. like Mystery Shack it's called. So it's one of those places where there's like a jackalope and a, you know. Right. And, but the town is full of all sorts of mysterious things going on.

It's an eerie Indiana kind of thing. Yeah. It's Goonies meets Twin Peaks. Yeah. And it's very funny. It is way more sophisticated than you think it is going into it. It's only two seasons. But it's one of those shows now I'm watching. it through the second time and knowing how it ends, I'm seeing all of this stuff that leads to the end. Even in the first couple episodes, they're dropping clues about things that are going to be important.

way down the line. And so it's really fun. It's a smartly done animated show and it's funny and silly and there are lots of fun guest stars on it. So check it out. Yeah, it's worth a... Where would one stream, said Gravity Falls. I think it's on Disney. It's on Disney. Yeah, all right. I'll have to check this out with the kiddo.

Yeah, exactly. The kiddo will love it. My youngest, Jack, who is 18 now, we started watching this together when it came out, which is probably 10 years ago. Okay, perfect. Yeah, it's great. That's got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. There you go. Wow. Never even heard of it. Awesome. Thanks, Dave. My gift to you. Yeah, enjoy. Speaking of old shit.

The Video Game History Foundation has officially launched early access to its digital library, offering a treasure trove of video game history materials for free. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, the online archive includes over 1,500 out-of-print magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power, as well as rare industry trade publications. I don't know about you guys, but EGM was my go-to back in the day. Did you guys ever read that?

No. I was aware of it. I can't wait for somebody to bring back all the out-of-print Tiger Beats. I'm sure you still have all of those hidden under your bed, Brian. It's okay. Time for a date with Sean Cassidy. Only the Corys. I kept those. Oh, come on. Leif Garrett. I mean, all those. Oh, yeah. Classic. Classic. Right. I was reading computer magazines back then. I was not reading.

gaming magazines uh i was not into any of the platforming stuff at that point in my life i was playing lots of video games but i was playing them on computers Right. Although this mentions Myst and Riven. I definitely played Myst. Me too. I played that on a computer, though. Right, exactly. I mean, I think Myst was the reason I bought my first CD-ROM drive. It's also interesting to think back to those days, a game like Myst, where...

It was just barely able to play video off of a CD-ROM drive. Barely. You needed to have a 2X CD-ROM drive to just get these little postage stamp things of video. God, I'm so nostalgic for the hours I spent in Egghead buying new gear and games and leisure suit Larry and thinking that's going to be all salacious and it wasn't.

I remember while I was playing Myst, I had a friend who was also playing it. I have a specific memory of saying to this friend, have you gotten to the thing with the severed head in the box? And he went, what? No. I said, oh, okay. Spoiler alert. That is so my kid right now, because he got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, and his conversations with his buddies at school now are all about, did you get to the level with the boss yet? It's so fun to watch.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember around that time, Spaceship Warlock was... one of my favorite games. It had the same kind of production quality as Myst as far as just like screens with a little bit of video over it. But it was about the song. It had a really catchy...

terrible song. The game itself was garbage, but the song is what stuck with me. I remember the name, and had you not said it, that is not a memory that I think I ever would have pulled out of my brain archive. The other one I remember was... There was a game that was, there was a band and their, like their logo, let's say, was an eyeball wearing a top hat.

Do you remember this? Oh, yes. Yes. The residents. The residents. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. The residents. Yes. They had an interactive experience that I remember. going through. And it was very, that was a time when there was so much experimentation going on and people were doing weird things. And, uh, yeah, I remember the residents. I don't remember what the name of the game was, but it was pretty weird.

Yeah, I remember Penn Jillette had something to do with that too. She was in with the residents. A bunch of people played with them without ever letting anybody know. Even like Mickey Barini from Lush is on some residents songs. Interesting. I'm curious. Bad day on the midway. There it is. Yep. Bad day on the midway. The residence. Right. Right. Wow. So I'm curious for both of you.

What was your favorite game on the first computer you used? So I'm not talking about an Atari or an NES. I'm talking about a home computer. What was the computer and what was the game that you played that made you think, oh. We can play games on computers. Brian? Well, I had PCs. This is MS-DOS. I had to Google it to be sure about this. So my MS-DOS PC, 1983. I was all of 10 years old. I played hours of Bushido, The Way of the Warrior.

Bushida. I don't know that one. I remember that. That was a lot of fun. Hours. Is it like a side-scroller kind of game? Side-scroller like karate game, yeah. Okay, yeah, that tracks. What about you, Jason? Zill. It was on my, our IBM as well. We only had a dual floppy drive on it. And it's from 1984. And yeah, it was just a text adventure game. Okay. That was it. See, I'm a little ahead of you guys in years. So my first interaction was I went to a computer summer camp and we had TRS-80 Model 1s.

And so there was a text adventure game. And that was the first time I'd ever laid hands on a computer. And we had a text adventure game called Lost Dutchman's Gold. On cassette.

On cassette. Yes, it absolutely was on cassette. And I've included a link to kind of a retrospective review of Lost Dutchman's Gold. And of course, you know, Lost Dutchman's Gold has... problematic portrayals of native americans it was 1979 yeah it was 1979 uh the other thing that's interesting about these old text adventure games is that

In my mind, I have the image of this vast environment that I was wandering around in and exploring and spending all this time. But then if you actually look at the map. It was like 12 places, right? And of course, they all had a maze to get lost in just to kill time and annoy you. But yeah, it was the first text adventure game I ever played and I was hooked on that thing. It was great fun.

See, looking at that page, I'm looking at that map in awe because when I was a kid, I never thought to do that because the one game that drove me mad was the Hitchhiker's Guide game. I was about to say that was the first text adventure game. ever got and it upset me so much i never played a text adventure game again bingo yeah yeah there was another one uh

It was called Madness and the Minotaur that I played. And it was like you go into this pyramid and wander around and hope, you know, there's a Minotaur in there. And so you got to stay out of his way because he'll kill you and that sort of thing. He's randomly. wandering around.

I remember that, yeah. I didn't play it, but I remember it. And the cassette games, all my friends had them because they had Trash 80s, but I would go over there and most of the time we would sit around and wait for it to load.

change cassettes and all this and nothing would ever play. And I'm like, I'm going to go home and play my Atari and play pinball on my Atari. Right. Right. Come over if you want. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I like the Atari. And then, but the thing for me, the, one of the reasons I never really got into computer games and everything like that is.

You recall I had an annual passport to Disneyland. Yeah. And there was an amazing arcade that was just next to Space Mountain. That's where we would go play games. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, if you have an arcade in walking distance, that doesn't get much better than that, other than the fact that it costs money. Well, there's that, but, you know.

The second game I had on the XT, the IBM XT, was I had a bootleg version – bootleg already – of Flight Simulator 1.0 from Microsoft. Oh, I remember that too. I had that as well. Yeah. That was awesome, especially when the old – keyboards on the ibms back then the function keys were on two rows down the left which worked perfectly for throttle and flaps when they moved it to the function of key function keys across the top

I just never played it again. I got so used to playing it with that. I'm like, I could land anywhere, man. Driving my Cessna. It was fun. But yeah, once they changed the keyboard, I'm like, screw this. I'm going to go outside and ride my skateboard. Yeah.

We had a game on – I had a TRS-80 color computer and there was a game called P-51 Mustang, which was a flight simulator. But what was great about it was you could actually – play with someone over a modem oh wow yeah so you could dogfight someone at you know two frames per second but you could dogfight with someone connected over modem which in 1984 let's say was mind-blowing absolutely magical basically magic yes yeah

Yeah. I've got to say that the best flight simulator game ever made in combat game, Star Wars TIE Fighter. That was the best one. Oh, I love that one. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. That was a PC game that was just awesome. Yeah, it's interesting how every now and then somebody will just nail the combination of the physics and how the physics relate to the fun. It doesn't mean that the physics are perfect or the physics are accurate. They just make the physics fun. Yeah. And that's what works.

We had that in Quake or Quake 3 really had that because the physics were a little bit off. You could do this thing called strafe jumping, which was just kind of a glitch in the game physics. And if you knew how to flick your mouse just right, you could go like 50 percent farther on a jump and you could tell the pros.

could really like master a map because you could jump to places you weren't supposed to be able to jump. And it just made it so much fun. I still have dreams about strafe jumping in Quake. I remember that in the game Marathon on the Mac, you could do...

a thing like that, you could use your, I think it was your, if you aimed your grenade launcher at the ground. It was a rocket jump. It was a rocket jump. Yeah. Do the same thing. They moved that to Quake 3-2. There was actually a version of Quake 3 Arena called Rocket Arena, where they turned down the self-damage from the rocket.

so you could basically use it as a propulsion system. And it was a whole thing. I was part of a Rocket Arena League. I had a sweatshirt. Wow. I actually had a hockey jersey, a Rocket Arena hockey jersey. Oh, wow. Yeah. No. You want to get into the old school. Better times. Better times. How about that? All right. Yeah. Oh, man. Old days. Well, I don't know if you guys were big into the Blade Runner 2049 movie.

Haven't seen it. No. Oh, wow. That's a big no. I mean, I hear it's good. I just haven't gotten around to it. I found it boring. Oh, yeah. I thought it was kind of boring, too. I saw it in the theater. I saw it in IMAX in the theater. Yeah. But the people who did like it, there was an auction going on for another 20 days. There's 200 items up for auction. Some of them are pretty cool, I got to say. The interesting one that I found is there's a Dave Bautista.

is in the beginning of the movie. And he's got this little bag that he's carrying. And I saw this on Bruce Sterling's Blue Sky account. Right now, the asking bid is $300. And he's like, actually, for a bespoke... That's not a bad price. You should go pick that up. And I looked at it. It's actually a pretty cool bag. But there's some neat stuff in here if you're a fan of that.

Yeah, I looked through the auction and it is fun movie stuff, which is always fun. Yeah, just this prop stuff is fun to look at, you know, just the graphic design and how they put it all together. I think it's kind of cool. Yeah. I'm curious, moving on to something else. Are either of you actually using the new photo button on the iPhone? Daily. Okay. No. Yeah.

Brian doesn't have one. Yeah, I don't have one. I'm a generation behind you guys. Okay. Well, I have it and I've never touched it other than to try it out once. You know, when it was new, but I have not at all formed a habit with it or even I don't even think to use it. So, Jason, tell me more. I've just got it set. So it's like when I take it out.

Keep my phone on my phone. When I just pull it out, if I want to take a quick picture, it's boom, right there. Don't have to log in or swipe or anything. It's just boom, hit the picture and go. It's just nice for taking fast photos. And I mean, honestly.

The thing that I use my iPhone for the most with the camera nowadays because I'm kind of a homebody, I use it to take a picture of our dry erase board in the kitchen that has our grocery list so I can know what I'm getting when I go to the grocery store in the morning. So I'm a quick drama girl with the photo button on my iPhone to find out if I got to get potato chips or not. Yeah. I do that as well. And I sometimes think about – because all of my photos –

automatically get backed up to a cloud account. And we actually have a... We have a Google Photos account that is a family account. It's actually called like Bittner Family Photos or something. And so the idea is – Upsack, man. Upsack. Upsack. Hack. Hack. Whatever. You can take – enjoy a – picture of my son blowing out his birthday candles. Go for it. Look at all these pictures of this crappy solar panel system that's just not working. Well...

See, that's where I'm going with this, is that not only is it an archive of family events, but it is also an archive of successes and failures in life. Because you say failures. Yeah. All of those things that you're documenting along the way, just that don't seem to be important. Sometimes.

They're fun to go back and go, oh, that's right. I did try to do that. And I wonder what's going to happen with my kids. Becoming a homeowner. My photo album on my phone is half pictures of my kids and half pictures of stuff that I took a picture of because I went to Home Depot to go. try to find a replacement part or what did this look like or whatever. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Here's a leaking faucet. Yes, exactly. Go replace it. Yeah.

But I don't know. I think the fact that they're time stamped and have GPS coordinates on them someday, I wonder, will my kids get anything out of them or will they just look at the pile and go delete? I don't want to see anything weird.

Yeah, it's up to them. So far, I have there's been nothing inadvertently that I know I've been put in the archive, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's that time I had to go to the urologist kids. Sorry. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I was, you know, getting out of the shower. colonoscopy. Yeah. Accidentally pressed the button and didn't realize it till 10 years later. Oh, well.

Okay, well, that's interesting. The other use case for using the button is when I'm walking the dog and if I need to take a picture of something outside, I can just do it one hand. I just take my phone out, boom, take a picture and put it back in without having to unleash the dog. say, hold up, let me get the thing out and swipe and all that. It's just, it's very easy for just quick draw stuff. But once you get in that habit of it, it's, you know, second nature.

Well, I will revisit it. I'll make another pass at it since it has met your approval. Go into the settings and there's like tap. You can change some of the tap behavior for like auto focus locking and zoom swiping and things like that. It's a fairly robust button. It's not just a click button. It's got touch sensor.

on it, too. Right, right. It's definitely worth checking out the functionality of it. Once you do that, you might get a little bit more juiced about using it more often. All right, I'll give it a shot. Cool. All right. One last thing that I threw in the show notes here. It's been passed around a lot between my friends and I've never been a big John Mulaney fan. I've never watched his stand up or anything like that. But as we were trying to.

kind of deal with this 2.7 billion minute January so far and trying to encapsulate how we feel about it. This is how a bunch of my friends have decided. we feel about it. So I've left this link in the show notes. There's a horse in the hospital. This was his Netflix is a joke thing, which was five years ago. So first Trump term, but still very much.

Spot on. It's really good. Oh, it has legs. It has four legs. It's fucking hilarious. It's hilarious. So it brought a little joy to this never-ending January. And thank God today's the final day. But, you know, three years and 11 months to go. It's really good. And it used to be my favorite John Mulaney thing. It's now my second favorite John Mulaney thing after the thing with the space monkey. Did you guys see that?

I have not seen that one, so I'll have to pick it up. Oh, my gosh. Hold on. I'm a John Mulaney fan, so I'm sure I've seen it. But, Brian, I'm surprised you don't like him. I didn't say I don't like him. I've just never seen anything. Oh, you should definitely – you got a lot to go back and watch now. It's good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It was – here it is. I'll put it on the –

Put it in the show notes here. It's Beppo the monkey. And it was a sketch he did for Saturday Night Live. And it is absolutely hilarious. All right. And Delaney just plays a character in this sketch, but it is so funny. I'm happy for the both of you that you get to see it for the first time. Excellent. Yeah. All right. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you, gentlemen. And I'll see you next time. All right. See you next time. Take care.

Over at Patreon, we've got Ian, Robert, and Disloyal Broom. Why are you so disloyal, Broom? Fucking Roomba. As long as you're loyal to us, you know, that's cool. You can be as disloyal as you like. Thank you all so much. Over at PayPal, we've got David, Charlie, Judge, Simon, and Jonathan.

Over the tip jar, we've got Adam and Jennifer. And Jennifer sent me a little note on the Instagram. She's saying, listening to today's podcast, I'm the reason for those Instagram ads, aren't I? Oops, I will go put an apology in the tip jar. And Jennifer is the one that sent me the... the ham radio video about the guy talking to the ISS. Ah, there you go. Yep. And just a reminder for people who are thinking about helping keep the show on the air over at Patreon, if you drop us a little.

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Nope, these people are keeping it going. We're not making any money. But yeah, Shopify and Printful are. So we're on the cusp. We're on the – well, no, it's the end of the month. Never mind. Never mind. We'll start over. But we're going to have a – we're going to need a bigger Luigi shirt soon. Yeah. We got to do that, dude. We fucking got to do that. Tim M., Tracy B., and Joe R. bought some merch. So thank you all very much. Just head over to shop.gog.show if you want to pick up yours today.

All right. And I had to put this in here at the end. This sums up the week in AI better than anyone so far, I believe. And a hat tip to Vinny from this one. This is China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesman. Spot on. Yeah, yeah. And this is a Canadian site that put this in here at the Beaverton. It's well worth a read if you want a good chuckle. So go check it out.

All right. And we sadly had to say goodbye to Marianne Faithfull, English singer dead at 78. She was a defining voice in the 1960s. She first rose to fame with the song As Tears Go By, which was written for her by the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And then...

She continued to have a singing career, but really it was mostly her lifestyle and a high profile relationship with basically every 60s rock star that she ended up shacking up with at some point in time and her addictions and all that sort of stuff. She was wonderful. I mean, talk about living your life to the full. Like, just read her Wikipedia page. What a life. So, will be missed. All right. And by the way, that Bad Bunny episode of SNL, the cameo that week was Mick Jagger.

There you go. I'm tying it all together. Bringing it in for a landing, as they say, Brian. I'm doing my best. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 682. 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.

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