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. And I suppose right out of the gate, we should offer our condolences to Dave Bittner. He will not be joining us this week as there has been a death in the family. So our thoughts are with you, Dave.
Our thoughts are with you, Dave. We'll talk to you soon and take care of your family. Yep. Now, Brian. On to the stupid. I wake up. every morning now. I'm always sad about it, too. I know. I know. I'm like, God damn it, again? And I can't help but look at the news. And then this is just what goes through my head. Every single morning. We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! and that's how i start my day that's pretty much it
And this morning I was in the shower and I was trying to think of, oh man, there's that thing. And I couldn't remember it. I'm like that thing where people are too dumb to realize that they're too dumb to realize that they're too dumb. And for some reason, I kept going back to the Bader-Meinhof effect because we always talk about that on the show in regards to people thinking their phones are listening to them when they're actually not. Then I'm like, is it the Mein Kampf effect? No, no, no.
That seems more appropriate at the moment. It really does. I found the middle ground. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect. Yes, yes, the Dunning-Kruger effect. The well-known cognitive bias where individuals with low competence in a specific area tend to overestimate their abilities, while those with high competence often underestimate their skills. The Doge group. Yes. Indeed. Indeed. Well, I guess, you know, we're implying which side they fall on.
It certainly isn't underestimating. I'll give you that. Yeah. Yeah. And to finish off, this occurs because... Those with low competence lack the necessary expertise to recognize their own shortcomings. Yes, this is the world that we fucking live in now. But I do think the Mein Kampf effect is actually appropriate as well.
Yeah, I mean, this is, I don't know what anybody expected. We saw all the people being nominated. They are all severely underqualified for their positions and they should not be. doing what they're doing, but here we are. So let's get into the stupid shit they did this week. Yeah, and I would like to change that from underqualified to inversely qualified. Yeah, that's true. You could not think of a... It's basically like, who's the worst possible person to get this job?
Yeah. Bingo. Found them. All right. The Department of Government evisceration is at it again, and this time their genius cost-cutting crusade is set to torch the IRS and potentially got half a trillion dollars from U.S. tax revenue. Now, Brian, stop me here. Stop me if I'm wrong. Wasn't the entire point of Doge to save the country money? So the country had more money in its coffers than less?
Yes. See the previously discussed Dunning-Kruger effect. According to The Washington Post, Doge led layoffs at the IRS. Yes, that includes firing over 11000 staff and gutting fraud investigation teams could drop. federal revenue by 10% this spring. That's a $500 billion shortfall. Now, do we add that to the tab of Doge? You know, any right thinking person that worked at Doge and said we need to, you know, first save some money and then secondly, maybe bring in some more money would go.
Well, why don't instead of firing a bunch of people at the IRS, we point them at all the companies that are not paying their taxes through various loopholes or just breaking the law and. get a bunch of money from the billionaires and the companies. Yeah, that's not how it works, Brian. That's not how it works. Yeah.
Inversely qualified. I was actually discussing this a little bit with a friend of mine who then brought up the fact that Trump is now going around saying that we should pay reparations for all the people that were put in jail for the January 6th treason. Because, you know, they're fine upstanding people that were completely falsely put in prison for the not crimes that they did do. And I said, well, it sounds like there's no better time not to pay taxes.
Because I don't want my money going to those people. And apparently there's nobody at the IRS to chase me anymore. There is nobody to come get the money. So, yeah. I hadn't heard that one, but thanks. Thanks for really kicking my morning off to a great start. I'm here to make sure you don't want to wake up again tomorrow. Thanks. Thanks. That's off the list.
So Elon Musk's approval rating is falling through the floor, showed the polls. His favorability rating among Democrats was plus 35 in 2017. And now it is negative 91. So that's a bit of a drop. Musk's standing has also dropped among independents from plus 17 to negative 17. And Musk has improved with Republicans going from negative 18 in 2017 to plus 51 in 2025.
Maybe those brainless fucks will buy all the used Teslas that people are trying to get rid of. Of course, that is if they didn't lose all their money on Trump coin. So we'll see here. And if you think we're all crazy, Danny Moses, the guy from the big short to actually predicted the last recession. He's saying that this new economic gut punch from Doge, who says they saved $115 billion, I would like to see the receipts on that, not cost another $500 billion. But they're so transparent.
Jason, that was the whole point. They're going to be totally transparent with their WordPress-based website that lists nothing. That's exactly. Well, he told CNBC and Fortune that we're screwing with the economy's revenue engine, cutting not just government jobs, but the private sector contracts that keep businesses afloat.
Although SpaceX is doing just fine because they sucked up $38 billion in cash. The small contractors are getting screwed and they are part of the engine of America. And then if you add in the tariff yo-yos into the... mix because we've got new ones now. We've got the automobile tariffs that are set up next week. Canada knows. Yeah, yeah. So does Mexico and everybody else. First quarter earnings are going to be coming soon. So that's really where...
You might want to stock up on ramen and eggs if you can still afford eggs. Yeah, it's not looking good. I mean, this is the same argument I used to make about Gen AI, which we're going to... talked about quite a bit on the show as well, which is if you just keep firing people to replace them with nothing because it's better for your company's bottom line, eventually there's not going to be anybody left to buy your fucking products.
I think I said that on the first episode of the show, Brian, when we were talking about Amazon and Amazon not paying enough of a living wage. So the people that actually work there, which is going to be the entire world at some point, won't even be able to shop at Amazon. So this is all. This will all happen again. Maybe. Except this time, it looks like it's really, really happening.
Well, Jesus. Fuck. What the fuck? You can't, you can't turn on the TV without signal gate hitting you in the face. Yeah, Brian, OPSEC. Well, you know, what's there to say? I know. I thought we were going to be scooping this. These are the best people that they could find. These are the people that they said should be running all of this stuff. They are so smart, they can't keep a journalist off their thread discussing war plans. They are so smart.
They're using third party software to discuss war plans instead of the approved government processes. Again, the reason they're doing this is because, of course, these things can be deleted. if you remember not to include a fucking reporter on the chain. And there can be no freedom of information acts if they do this. This is the reason why. This is part of the plan. This is a feature, not a bug.
Except for addling the journalists to it. And of course, even though the NSA said, don't use signal because the Chinese and the Russians are listening. But also nobody's going to get prosecuted over this because he's learned his lesson, Brian. Of course he has. Of course. We're going to use Telegram now. Yeah.
I don't know what the fuck we're thinking. Well, again, it does get a bit worse. I was going to say, but first we have to pardon the guy from Telegram who's stuck in France right now. Maybe we can catch the next flight since – what's his name? The child molester traffic.
trafficker uh andrew tate doesn't need the plane anymore since we already flew him back once we can go get the guy from telegram to come back and then we can use telegram at the same yeah yeah we'll get them all in a room andrew tate the telegram guy the dread pirate robert said let's get
Snowden back over, too, since apparently there's no such thing as classified material anymore. So I guess Snowden should be off the hook, right? Yeah, theoretically, it's only classified until you put it out there. Then it's no longer classified because it's out there. Yeah, that's the theory here. But it does get worse. And you do think that I understand that Doge is trying to cut government spending, but I think perhaps a government wide subscription to have I've been pwned.
Might be a good investment at this point because Der Spiegel has found the contact data of many of these officials that were on that signal chain is out there, including their mobile phone numbers, their email addresses, and even some of their... Passwords. All right. Except the problem. As the very least.
Shouldn't it be a requirement that you change your fucking password when you get voted in or you get one of these jobs? At the very least. No, Brian, there's no rules. There's no rules. There's no rules. There's no anything. And these people are idiots. Yeah. They don't care and they don't understand. And it really just comes down to they don't care. Yeah, I know. You did mention Have I Been Pwned, but sadly, Troy Hunt's Mailchimp account was phished last week.
So even he's not immune. Yeah, but he knew because he has his own service. Yeah. So basically, yes, we're using Signal. Government officials are using Signal for classified information while their actual cell phone numbers and passwords are floating around on the deep web. You know, we joke about idiocracy and that is like – Ivan has entered the chat. I think they even had better OPSEC. I just – it is one of those –
Like when it happened and I was thinking about, well, obviously we're going to have to talk about this on the show, unfortunately, because my life is now a living fucking dumpster stuff, IRL. I didn't even know what to say. Like, this is so beyond the pale stupid. Yeah, I know. That's the thing. I saw it come through and I'm like, no, no, no. And then I actually read the article and I'm like, oh my fucking God. And then the multiple.
attempts to weasel out of it it didn't happen it wasn't classified oh but he he hacked into the chat the journalist hacked into the signal chat okay it was a mistake like
We went through 15 different iterations and different attempts to like, it's like fucking Keystone Cops. Oh, it's worse than the Keystone Cops. At least they were entertaining. These guys are just infuriating. And now the Department of Justice says they're not going to even file any charges against them. They're just going to get away with it. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Oops. Yeah. Moving on. Nobody gets fired anymore. No, not them. They're busy firing all of us. That's true. But they're safe. Yeah.
Nobody gets fired for incompetence. Let's say that. You can only get fired for competence and actually doing your job that you are supposed to be doing. I blame Stranger Things. We're actually in the upside down. We talked about 23andMe ad nauseum on the show over the years, and they filed for bankruptcy. And yeah, we've mentioned all your data belong to us. I mean, all your data is already.
you know, has been owned by a private equity firm, which is just as bad as anything else that could have gone wrong. You know, this is just the latest notch in the story here of 23andMe, which after reading some stuff from... That's the one thing about Blue Sky is I follow a bunch of scientists.
blue sky and they're like this was always the dumbest fucking idea that has been out there they had no qualifications to do this whatsoever and it should not have been an actual business so and she said that um In the early days, she didn't care about getting scientists as much because there were lots and lots of really good qualified scientists. But JavaScript programmers were really hard to come by. No shit.
I should have maybe had an ethicist or two on the board as well. Just saying. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So what do you have next here, Brian? Well, I mean, to some degree, I suppose the horse has already left the gate, so it doesn't really matter. But if you really... Still happen to have your data up on 23andMe. We've got a link in the show notes that tells you how to go through and actually delete all of it.
visibility to zero. I don't really know. Yeah. I've been trying to do this since you put this in the show notes and I've not been able to do it yet. Well, apparently so many people are trying to do it and just crashing their system or they have removed the page because they realized, oh my God, we're not going to be able to sell anything if everybody...
It says they delete it. Exactly. Yeah. There's the step that you have to go through to download your data. It takes a couple of days, quote unquote, days for them to package it up for you because apparently they need. Those JavaScript programmers weren't as good as she thought they were. They've got to do all the g-zipping manually because they didn't build a process for that.
Well, what they do is they have an unregistered copy of WinZip that just keeps – they have to keep uninstalling and reinstalling so they can get the free trial back up every time that somebody wants their data back. Yeah. Did you ever pay for WinZip? No. I don't think anybody ever paid for WinZip.
Ever. No, no, that was definitely in the dark days of which I feel bad about now. But I mean, I was poor. So what are you going to do when when all the numbers were readily available? Registration numbers were all over the place. See, the thing is. I don't feel bad about any software I ever stole because when I got into the corporate world, I'm more than made up for all the little things that I stole over the years.
I'm paying all these people's ridiculous subscription fees now. Oh, and the companies I worked for, I mean... My teams have spent millions of dollars on software. I'm okay. I'm okay with, you know, every now and again for personal use, firing up that old wind zip. That makes me sleep good at night. Everything else? No. Perplexity was in the news this week because they have laid out its vision to rebuild TikTok from the ground up right here in the good old U.S. of A.
They want to rip out the black box algorithm built by ByteDance and replace it with a transparent open source version developed on American soil with American oversight. Bullshit. Fuck you. They're so not going to do that. First off, it won't matter because we know what the problem is. The problem is how do you move people? You're not. That's just not going to happen. They're going to stay on TikTok. If you get rid of TikTok. Well, no, no. They're saying buy TikTok and rip out the algorithm.
and replace it with a new one. This is their plan to buy TikTok. Ah, okay. So they want to keep the users and then put in their own algorithm. that steals people's brains and puts them in a jar. Good luck with that. Yeah. I don't see the thing about perplexity AI is I don't think that they're going to be in business by the time that that TikTok deal closes because there's so much going on in the world of generative AI.
right now it's fascinating fascinating what do you have brian well uh open ai says disciplining its chat bots for lying has just made them worse this is a little like a little fucking kid that stole the cookies did you ai they're just like people Yeah. Especially if they happen to be in the government.
Yeah, so basically there's quite a long article about this going on in a paper that's come out, but they have been using GPT-4O models to supervise another of its large language models, disciplining it when it tried to lie. It did not work. as the model would still lie, only now its cheating is undetectable by the monitor because it has learned to hide its intent in the chain of thought. So they've just gotten better at lying.
When did we switch the nomenclature from hallucinations to lies? Well, that's what they always were. That's what they were, but they always said that they were hallucinations before to get around the L word. I think it may have been intent. Back then, they didn't think that the models were attempting to, so they just kind of went a little haywire and went nuts. But now they are seeing actual intent in the model, which is great. Yeah. Especially since we seem to be replacing...
everything with AI. When you can't do a Google search anymore, you get Google's AI search. Every piece of software has this shit packaged into it. Sometimes you can turn it off. Sometimes you can't. The other big news this week was OpenAI dropped its latest image generator and the internet lost its shit, flooding social media with Studio Ghibli-style pics, since that was the big upgrade.
That's the big upgrade. Make everything look like Studio Ghibli. Even Sam Altman got Ghiblified, changing his profile pic and joking that after a decade of trying to build super intelligence, he's now just a twink in an anime filter. Except is it really a joke? Or is that the reality? That's the reality. That really is the reality. Not a joke. Yeah. And everybody has pulled up the quote from Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli from 2016.
where he says, I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. And he also said, I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. And an insult to life itself are the buzzwords of basically everything that's going on in the universe this week.
Hard to argue with that, yes. And I did see a bunch of these. They have taken over the internet, of course, because this is the internet. Once the fascination is worn off, we will never see any of these again. It's horrid. horrific i don't understand the point i don't know how many rivers were destroyed in the last day making these stupid pictures that nobody gives a shit about oh so many oh so many yeah
So there you go. Yeah. The good news, though, is that a judge says that the New York Times can sue OpenAI over copyright. So that lawsuit's moving forward. But with the new image generation tools, I took a stab at it, of course. And my thing was just trying to get around the Elon Musk and Trump filters. They basically, up until this was released, you could not do anything in...
Dali with Trump or Elon. So I started to figure out other ways to say it. So I said, show me a portrait of the CEO of Tesla in Ghibli style. And it did. which you can see here, with a nice actual Tesla logo, copyright perfect, on his jacket. You know, just sitting there looking like a twat. And then I'm like, hmm. Put the Tesla CEO in a ballerina outfit dancing. So then I got Elon dancing with the Tesla logo like a superhero on his chest in a little pink tutu.
Then I just kept going and I finally got to the point where I'm like, I want a gold Cybertruck with the CEO of Tesla in a pink tutu dancing on the hood with the 45th president of the United States giving a thumbs up out the window with the wheels on fire. And as you can see in the show notes, Brian, there's a perfect one. Now, not to be outdone, David Finley over on Blue Sky saw what I did and he's like, hold my hold my A.I. beer. So he took the task and said.
Give me the execution of Nguyen Van Lem, a very famous photograph from the Vietnam War, which everyone will know. It's the execution photo by Eddie Adams. And he got it to have basically Elon shooting Donald Trump in the head. Very well done. The heads are a little large, but pretty well spot on, I got to say. So I Ghibli-fied it, which it let me do perfectly.
which I think is just phenomenal. It also let me Pixar-fy it and Hanna-Barbera it. And then finally... Billions upon billions upon billions of dollars invested in this, and this is what we get. Oh, yeah. And then the next one, after the next morning, I saw that Elon and the Social Security kerfuffle was going on, how they're gutting Social Security next. And that's going to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
I'm going to tell you right fucking now. Half of the people I know live on Social Security because we're old now. You know, that's the way things are. It doesn't even matter if you're younger. You've been paying into it. It's your money. Exactly. So. I had it basically give me a horde of old people marching on the lawn of the White House with pitchforks and torches with signs about wanting their benefit checks and how Elon Musk destroyed Social Security. It did it. once.
And then when I tried to do any kind of tweaks to it, it started to throw back the, oh, wait a minute. This is out of bounds for our model. You can't do that. This is against our community guidelines. So what you can do is say, hey, just remake what I just did. sent to you, but do it so it fits in your community guidelines. And then it'll do the exact same thing that it just did.
and give you the same thing. The guardrails aren't there. Nothing is the same. It's a mess and billions and billions of dollars on it. I heard an interesting term. It's called a suicide round, which is what OpenAI is going for right now. It's a huge amount of money that means the company is never, ever going to be profitable. I think Uber had to have several suicide rounds at some point.
It's still not dead. It's still not dead, surprisingly. That suicide run was big enough where they could go along for a very long time. But these things are not going to be profitable. They are not going to be profitable. There's a new study. No, it's hard to see a way. I just – I haven't seen a way. I was watching an interesting video from this – I think it was the CEO of Signal actually talking about how everybody is moving towards AI agents.
And AI agents actually cause a there's a reason why AI agents will not be a thing. And mainly it's because of security. You're going to have all these agents talking to each other with. basically root permissions on your life through AIs with multiple systems involved. So say you want to go buy plane tickets and tell your friends and add to your calendar.
It's got to have your credit card information. It's got to have your contact book information. It's got to have your logins for your travel website. All of these things are on multiple different systems. So everything's going to be going back to the cloud. Which means that company is going to basically have the keys to everything you're doing because not everything is going to be able to be done on device. You know, it's a pipe dream to have that all done on device. So the whole thing about.
agentic ai is probably going to be the same problem that we're going to have with well it's like when mark zuckerberg asked for your credit card yeah everybody in their right mind went no way
And that's going to be the same sort of thing with these agents. Like as soon as it gets into being able to do the things that they promise, all of a sudden you have to have massive trust in them. And the security is not there. The privacy is not there. The product is proven to be lying and getting better at it. Are you kidding me?
It's not going to happen. Yeah. You know, it's funny because like I remember about a year ago, I took that course, kind of the more engineering back end aspect of for AI. And remember, I came out of that going, they don't know a damn thing. You know, they have theories about why this is all working, but they don't actually know it's a black box. I wanted to give AI another chance. So this week I had signed up. I figured, you know, I kind of did the back end of AI.
Why don't I do it from a user's perspective? And because there are a bunch of courses out there about prompt engineering and how to incorporate AI into your work life and all that sort of stuff. So I found one called Generative AI for Leaders. It's a three module or a three thing.
and i started going through it and i started with a prompt engineering one because i wanted to get to the meat and potatoes i wanted to how are people saying how are learned professors who know so much about this stuff saying we should be using this in our lives and what it's good for and again and again, and again, it was, here's how you make it do this thing. You absolutely have to fact check everything.
Here's how you make it do this thing. Here's how you make it give a list of important fact points that they put in here so you can double check them because they could very well and most likely will be wrong. What's the fucking point? What's the fucking point is right. Anyways, I'm going through the course. Maybe something will come out of it. But the more I, the more, the deeper I get into it, the more I go, oh, that's just for fucking around.
You can't use it for anything serious. These are not serious people, Jason. These are not serious people. And then again, you know, as we were just talking about, you get into how are these companies ever going to monetize it? Okay, so they gave some examples of how you can shave a little bit of time off your day.
except for the fact that you now have to add in the time where you're fact-checking the thing that shaved the time off your day doing a task for you. But still, would I pay for that? No. Like, there's just... no product that is compelling enough to make me even want to pay like $3 a month. That's why they're jamming it into everything for free. They're trying to hook us on it, but it's not a good product. It's not helping anyone.
It's wrong more often than it's right. And the argument is it's going to get better. Well, I think the argument that we were just told is it's just going to get better at lying. Yeah, exactly. It's not. They've had enough time to make this substantially better. They've had years to do it. More training obviously isn't helping. No. And they're running out of things to train it on. Yeah.
So let's just say, for instance, they do have all of the information in the universe in the black box right now. Basically, you can look at inference as the next stage in trying to make it. take that data and give us something useful. So that's what they've been working on.
It seems at this point, and that's still even with the new models that they're coming up with is not getting any better. They say it's getting better, but you look at, you know, the benchmarks and these things are like the highest success rate we've gotten yet. It's like 69. 69% right. I'm like, okay, that's a, you know, barely passing in. So yeah, again, it's 60% right. So I'm going to give it my credit card now.
And my health data and my personal private information about X, Y, and Z. If the virtual assistant or actual assistant that I paid for, the person that I hired, got a 69 in school and barely got out of school. I'm not going to give them my credit card info. I'm not going to let them in the office, you know? Exactly. That's the thing. It's like these products are like –
It's like the shittiest person in your group in high school when you're doing a report. That's what these products are. It's the person that doesn't do any of the work. Whatever they do turn into you, you have to redo basically because it's going to be wrong or shit. Yeah. The meat is just not there yet. And you look at how much Microsoft is pulling back on their data center expansion. You know, they were going to do just two giga giga big watts.
1.21 gigawatts. I can't even remember the unit of measure because now I'm so fried. But they pulled back on all their data center expansion because they can see the writing on the wall. Sundar Pichai is not an idiot. He sees what's happening.
And he's planning for the future. And we've got this new company that's doing their IPO today, which is basically an old Bitcoin mining company with $8 billion in debt who's going public. It's like, do you want to buy stock in a company that's got $8 billion in debt? Not really? They said that they were worth $30 billion and they downsized it to $23 billion. I'm like, okay.
Bad. But they've got outdated hardware that they're going to be running AI on and they're going to outsource. It's just this whole thing is just it's a house of cards that is going to fall. I think when this falls, it's going to fall fast because there's just not enough money to keep it afloat. Or interest. Or interest too, yeah.
That's the other thing. It's like I don't – I know there are some enthusiasts that I know who still use it all the time. But you talk to a regular human being, a normie.
They don't give a shit. No, you're doing your Studio Ghibli things or whatever goes viral at the time for Gen AI that's kind of interesting. But anybody... nobody's using it and you sure you've got some bros out there the same bros that were super into nfts and super into fucking blockchain and super into all the other bullshit they've been trying to cram down our throats the past few years they're the people that are out there trying to get
basically get people to give them money to make some AI crap that nobody wants. That's all that's happening. Yep. And there's no super intelligence and there's no AGI. No. What there is, though, is a joint study from OpenAI and MIT Media Lab exploring how talking to chat GPT affects emotional well-being, analyzing 40 million conversations and running a controlled trial with 1,000 users, while the results...
Most people don't turn to ChatGPT for emotional support, but a small group of heavy users do, and some even consider it a friend. Voice mode has mixed effects, which are short chats are fine, but daily prolonged use often made people feel worse. And text users showed more emotional nuance, but personal chats sometimes increased loneliness, while general small talk led to emotional dependence. Users already prone to emotional attachment were especially vulnerable. No shit.
So here's the deal. Don't lean on any AI to cure your loneliness, period. Talk to a human. There's a lot of unemployed people out there that probably need a shoulder to cry on right now. So why don't you go talk to them and stop drying up the rivers for a little bit of emotional support? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Fair.
Well, let's get off the AI train for a bit into just kind of normal general shenanigans. Amazon is suing the Consumer Product Safety Commission over its decision to hold the company legally responsible for faulty products on its platform. Yes, for doing what they're supposed to be doing. Amazon has now decided that's not fair.
And I'm going to sue you. They're trying to get off on a technicality here. They're saying that the Amazon is saying that they should be considered a third party logistics provider instead of a distributor and also calls the CPSC unconstitutionally constructed. Wow, that is straight out of the modern-day Doge playbook, right? Yeah, yep. Yep. I reject your thing. I say I'm not what I am. And by the way, you shouldn't even be here. And I fought in your general direction. Yeah.
So we'll see what happens. But basically, yes, Amazon has been shipping out stuff and the Consumer Product Safety Commission says you are actually responsible for these things that people are buying on your platform and that you are then sending to them. Amazon is saying, hold on a second, buddy. It's somebody else that makes.
this stuff. We just take most of the profit for creating the infrastructure and doing the shipping and distribution for it. And the CPSC is saying, yeah, you take most of the profit. You're responsible. But we're just a platform, man. Just a platform, man. I just can't believe the CPSC still exists. Give it another week. There won't be anybody left to sue.
The U.S. Treasury just lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash, the crypto mixer it once called Notorious, for laundering $7 billion. That's $7 billion with a B. Billion dollars in stolen crypto, mostly by North Korean hackers. Treasury says it used discretion after a legal fight, but still warns it's worried about crypto funding Kim Jong-un's nukes. Tornado Cash founders are still facing criminal charges for money laundering and sanctions violations. And mixers like this exist.
to hide where crypto comes from. And it's a great tool if you're a hacker or a bond villain or Kim Jong-un or part of the Trump family. Oh, speaking of the Trump family. Trump's latest crypto hustle just dropped. A stable coin called USD1 launched by World Liberty Financial, a so-called DeFi venture backed by the Trump clan, is pegged by the USD. That's right. Now, another crypto scam by the Trumps already. Not even in month four yet.
With over $550 million raised in high-profile backers like Justin Sun in the mix, they're diving headfirst into the stablecoin wars, which I don't know if you've... Stablecoins have been... They've been around for a while now and they haven't been in the news much because it's kind of a shit show in stable coin land. There's so many of them. There's a lot. There's a lot of stable. There's almost as many stable coins as shit coins nowadays. Almost. Almost.
And with Trump pushing the strategic Bitcoin reserve and claiming crypto will supercharge the US economy, well, you can kind of see where that's going. I sure can. Yeah. You know what backs the US economy? Instead of a stablecoin that's backed by the US dollar? The US fucking dollar.
Yep, I think we're okay. I just love how all these bros keep reinventing things we already have and making them worse. They're reinventing the middleman is exactly what they're doing. They're trying to privatize, kill the government. privatize everything, create more middlemen, and they want to be the middlemen. That's the playbook. Yeah.
Well, Twitter is long dead, but the 12-foot tall bird logo from San Francisco headquarters will live on the sign one of two birds that formerly adjourned the offices has been sold at auction for $34,375. It's a bit less than the auctioneers thought it would fetch, but it's quite pricey for a large sign that you can't do anything with. Although I do have an idea for the unknown buyer. I think you need to create an art project. I need you to take this sign. I need you to find the beach.
I need you to bury it half in the beach and I need you to get down in the sand and play the opening from the show. Brian, you win. You win the internet for the day. I can give you the address of where to bury it, too. I know where the original was buried. Come on down. It's right over on Zuma. We can get there from my house. We'll put it in the back of my Jeep. I'll take you there. Bastards. You blew it up.
Well, Tesla says it will roll out its full self-driving feature in China once it gets regulatory approval. That's right, because China has regulations now while we don't. I learned about that from the Hesgrath group chat. That's right. This is our plan against China. We're going to give them the bullshit full self-driving. They're all going to crash into each other. We win.
Yeah, that's it. A free trial of the system was paused, causing some complaints online. The company is working with Chinese tech giant Baidu to improve performance, but strict data laws in China have slowed progress. Unlike in the U.S. Tesla can't train its AI using local driving data. New rules also require software updates for autonomous driving to get government approval before release. Tesla still aims for a full rollout of FSD in China later this year.
So, yeah, they can't send the driving data from the cars, the telemetry data back to the U.S. to get processed. So they're stuck. Sorry, hold on a second. I'm dropping that Mark Rober video of the Tesla not being able to do anything appropriately in the group chat. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll ping President Xi and let him know that you posted it. Awesome. Good. Yep.
Got a bit of feedback to start off the segment. Mr. Taco Man wrote in, please tell me you guys have some sort of good reads for movies and TV shows. I already hear all these good recommendations in the episodes, but I forgot to write it down. We don't. We don't. We have in the past. You know what we do? We do a podcast. Yeah. And it's in the podcast. And we have show notes and the recommendations are in the show notes. We did that before. We tried for books. Nobody cared.
Yeah, yeah. Everybody that asked for it said, thanks, I'm not going to look at it again. even though we spent hours on it and show fans put together lists and everybody said, thanks. And then never looked at it again. So no, we don't. We have show notes. And as Brian said, we have a podcast. Yeah, we put it in the podcast and check out our discord because people are talking about stuff all the time. So there's that.
IT has been wrote in. Hi, guys. This one is for Brian. I remember him mentioning that diners, drive, and some dives is his happy place. Since he's all things Canadian these days, I want to mention to try out You Gotta Eat Here with John Cattucci. I believe it was on Food Network Canada.
been able to catch it on the roku channel it's an older show that has run its course he also did the big food bucket list either way now i can go find places to eat north of the border i just want to let them know i'm from the u.s i stay grumpy I've not heard of that show. The problem with older shows is, of course, a lot of the restaurants are gone by now, especially in Toronto. Toronto has a pretty quick turnover for restaurants in general. But I did find, by Googling it, you got it.
Eat Here map of restaurants in Toronto, Ontario, some of which I have actually been to. So I've included that link in the show notes and I do highly recommend the Bark Smokehouse. It's very good. That's interesting because when Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives goes to a restaurant. It all but guarantees that they will stay there forever because they get so much business. So apparently that one, you got to eat here, did not have the same network effect as diners, drive-ins and dives does.
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe some of them are a lot of them are still around. Some of them aren't. So it is what it is. But thank you for the tip. I will see if I can catch that show anywhere. In other news, speaking of podcasts, Common Sense with Dan Carlin has actually put out a new episode. What? Yep. Holy shit. Is it any good? He has stayed away from it for a long time for obvious reasons. It's called what's good for the goose. And yeah, it's pretty good. Okay.
And apparently people are pissed off at him because it's like, he definitely comes out pretty strongly anti-Trump, but says, you know, basically it's everybody's fault so far. OK, so, yeah, it's a good listen. I've missed it. You know, I've always enjoyed his common sense podcast more than the history ones, depending on subject, of course. So it's good to have him back. But judging from the blowback, he may not do it again.
If we don't have another election. Oh, come on, Dan. Come on, Dan. If we can do it, you can. Hey, TechCrunch is even doing it. Get out there. Come on. Come on, Dan. And in AI-related news to Media Candy, on May 9th, AMC Theatres will start showing a sci-fi movie that was shot in Swedish, but will make it look like it was made in English instead. It's called Watch the Skies.
and it was released in its home country as UFO, Sweden, had undergone visual dubbing with the help of artificial intelligence. A company called Flawless, that's the opposite of nominative determinism, used its technology to digitally alter the film's images, making the... actors look like they were truly speaking in English as opposed to having dubs or just, you know.
being dubbed over and not changing their lips or how they move. So they say it worked out pretty well, but, and that they say that this is also compliant with the rules set by SAG-AFTRA. So we'll see, but. I got a little bit of news for you, Flawless AI and the sweet AMC theaters. People that won't go see a dubbed film aren't going to go see this either. Since it's with the actual actors, though, it might be different.
It could be, but we'll see. It's always the problem. But, you know, the interesting thing is it's like, you know, how good is their English? So I don't know. Well, they probably used AI for that, so a lot of things are wrong. True. We'll see. Well, I won't see because I'm not going to go see the movie. We got a double barrel helping of Daredevil this week. Did you watch both episodes? Of course I did.
Yeah, they were great. I really liked the first one, the standalone. I love, I think they need more of those. It was great. Yeah. It kind of went back to the old school, you know? Yep. Yeah, it was good.
Yeah, some good stuff. I watched a show on Amazon called For the Win, mostly because I was in there trying to figure out when the next Wheel of Time episode came out. And then this got shoved up to me because I love my sports documentaries. So this is For the Win. This is about the National Women's Soccer.
And it was a lot of fun. If you're into soccer and the league, it was a good, well-done documentary. So I really enjoyed it. And speaking of other things that I'm using to distract myself from the collapse of Western society, baseball's back. Yeah. 126 games or 162 games or something like that. I may just follow another team so that there's fuck all else I can fit into my day. And that's all I'm going to do is watch baseball while the world collapses.
Okay. Okay. And fuck the Dodgers, by the way. They're going to the White House. Yeah. What are you going to do? I'm not going to watch that, but I'll watch their games. Okay. Okay. There was a lot of discontent around L.A. when people heard that. They're like, what the fuck, man? We love you guys. Don't do that. So this week on Netflix, I watched Adolescence. Oh, my God. Did you watch it yet?
I cannot bring myself to do it. You have to. You got a kid, man. You have to. I know. I know. I know. I'm going to have to. Yeah. So basically what adolescence is, if you don't know about it, it's a four part series from the UK. It's not based on a true story, but it's it's. Based on events that happened around the UK with young boys being involved in a bunch of knife crimes. It stars Stephen Graham as the dad and Owen Cooper as the 13 year old kid. It's a kind of a murder show, murder mystery.
whodunit type of thing. This was Owen Cooper's first role and the kid is phenomenal. The thing about the show is they're all, all four episodes are about an hour long and they're all in one take. And it's not that fake one take shit.
where they kind of flash around the thing. They literally are in one take. There was a thing that Netflix put out that showed on, they did five days of filming for each episode and what take it was, because they could only do one or two takes a day. I think they were scheduled.
able to do two takes a day, but if something screwed up early, they had to redo it. And it's incredibly shot. It is incredibly hard to watch. I watched it over two nights, and I'm still thinking about it. I actually might go back and watch it again. Right. It is it is powerful and extraordinarily well done. And Stephen Graham should get every actually every actor in this show should get every award. It's it's amazing that they did all of this in real time. Phenomenal.
Phenomenal. What's also phenomenal, though, is The Residence, which is a screwball whodunit set in the upstairs, downstairs, and backstairs of the White House. Who added the journalist to the chat? Exactly. It's got Uzo Duba from Orange is the New Black. She was Crazy Eyes. Remember her? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was going to have Andre Brouwer.
as the head usher of the White House. But unfortunately, he died halfway through filming. So they recast it to Giancarlo Esposito, the chicken man. This was an amazing show. It is eight episodes. And it is so good from start to finish. It is jam-packed with just entertainment. The visual effects are incredible. Everything about the White House is picture perfect. If you did not know what the layout of the White House was, you definitely will by the end of this.
Because they go into great detail, great visual detail and great storytelling detail about every nuance of the White House. It is so cool. And it is a great whodunit. Jason Lee is in it. And he's I love Jason Lee. old school skateboarder. So I got to throw out props for him. We were just riveted by this show. If you want this, the residence is the antidote for adolescence. How's that? It really is. It's really good.
I did. I saw this news come through and it kind of got me on a tangent in an ironic twist. The director of the Pirate Bay documentary TPB AFK is using copyright takedowns to yank his own film off of YouTube. Simon Close, who released the doc for free in 2013 under a Creative Commons license, basically is telling folks, share it, just don't make money off it. And he's now issuing takedowns through his company, Nonami Docs, and even the official upload is gone from YouTube.
And he's taking it down because he now sees YouTube is a radicalizing platform full of hate and doesn't want his work associated with it anymore. And he's fine with people still torrenting it, just not watching it on Google's playground. And that's how I got it. I torrented it. I went to Sweden and torrented it. I haven't watched it yet, but I've got it. Okay.
I'll let you know how it is because I have added a My Summer of Discontent Hacker documentary watch list to the show notes. Okay. There are – let's see here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. 10 movies here.
10 movies about hacking and hackers that I think everybody should watch. Some I agree with, some I don't. That's why it's a good list. It gives you a different take around the world. A lot of these are for free. The only one really that you can't get for free... Oh, there's two.
There's The Great Hack on Netflix and Kill Chain, The Cyber War on Americans' Elections is on Macs. But the rest of these, I was amazed. You can find most of these on Tubi or YouTube. All right. Go check out the link. Good list. Thank you, thank you. I put some time into that one. I thought it was a pretty good list. Yeah, some good shit in there, I think. And if you guys have any additions you want me to add to it, drop me a note on the Discord in our media channel.
What the fuck is that? We're at the media? No. Media candy. My brain is fried. My brain is fried because this week I watched Severance. All of season two. Well, first I rewatched season one for last week. Then I watched season two this week. I'd already started to watch season two and I panned it, which is what started this whole fucking shit storm. Last night I fell asleep reading the script for the pilot episode that never aired.
I found a bit of – what is this? Extra stuff that they made called the Lexington Letter that helped build out the world. There's the Lumon Terminal Pro. that they put up on the Apple website that you can go look at that you can't buy. I have spent my week in severance.
I just want to point out something for all of our listeners who are probably aware of this. And I do point this out about you every now and then, Jason. Whenever you say you are not going to do something, like you came out and you said, I will not watch Severance. Yeah. Within a month. You have changed course, and you have consumed all media related to it whatsoever. I've seen interviews with the director. I have this quirk, Brian. I have the right amount of childhood trauma.
alcoholism that make me not ever want to be wrong. So I will go to any lengths imaginable to prove my fucking point. Well, okay. So just to... Just to kind of put it in a nutshell here. Now that you have consumed all possible media related to severance, here's the simple question. Do you like it? No.
No, I'm very angry that I have to do this. All right, absolute doodads. Let's go. No, no, no, no. I have some points here that I have to make, and these are spoiler alerts. So if you are one of the four people who are going to watch Severance or Severance Season 2 that have... yet that haven't given me shit for it, then feel free to fast forward to absent doodads. But I have a few things here to point out, Brian, that back up.
some of the points that we made saying that this is a black box show that they don't know what the fuck they're doing and we're never going to have the answers so from the creator This is from an interview with the creator. He says, so there are some things on the show that are like that and we intentionally will never explore because it's fun to have questions. Okay?
OK, that's fun to not wrap up interesting plot points. Yes. But I also completely understand people wanting answers, especially to the questions that we pointed at specifically, like where we are like, hey, look at this. And to me, if we're pointing at something and saying, look at this, then we don't explain it. That one's on us. Doesn't say they're going to explain it, Brian. It just says that one's on us. Okay? Yeah.
So he has come out publicly after season two and said, yeah, there's a lot of this show that we're not going to explain, which means they're making shit up just to make shit up. We'd like to leave it open for your interpretation. Now, what they did with the fucking goats that I said from season one, I'm like, that goat thing. Is this the Lost Polar Bear? They actually did more on this show than they ever did with the Polar Bear in Lost, okay?
They tapped on a new storyline with the goats that they are sacrifices to the crazy founder, Kier. All right. The show sounds horrible. It is so fucking horrible. They literally try and kill the goats. They have the little gun with the slug thing, everything. There's a whole leads to a battle at the end of season two. There's there's fistfights and murder and all sorts of crazy shit. This this thing was never meant.
to be this long. I'm going to tell you right now, I think I wanted to say it last week, but this should have been a hundred, like a hundred page short story, end of story. It would have been great. And trying to think that there is some grand. mystical scheme behind the curtain with, you know, this whole mythology that they've built up to build more episodes.
is absolute bullshit. The guy really was when he came up with the idea for the show was like, I hate my job. I wish I could just check out for eight hours. Now we've got this entire world with goat sacrifices, all sorts of shit. $20 million episodes that there are times where there are minutes with no dialogue. And then you go back and look at The Residence, which has more story per minute than this has per episode, and it pisses me off.
It just pisses me off. So I think Ben Stiller came along and got a hold of this show and got it into Apple and said, yeah, we're going to make this great show. It's going to be fantastic. And it did okay. And I just think that he bulked it up with his just crazy ass mind and turned it into this just ungodly mess of a show. You can watch it. I give it a B minus. And that is being generous.
But yeah, no, I literally have about a thousand words that I wrote out the other night that I was going to go off on, which I'm not going to, because I think I've said enough. So please. I'm thrilled to hear it. I'm sure many of our listeners won't be. And I'm sticking by my original statement, which is I will watch the show upon its conclusion.
conclusion and i'm told by people that loved the show and liked it or even didn't care for too much for it but watched it all the way through that they at least stuck the landing but you're basically telling me that the creator said we're not going to stick a landing
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of questions that we're not going to answer. And even the fans on Reddit say season two, the writing sucks. So I even have a link. I got to put that link in the show notes so I can. I have proof. I have proof. I do have links to everything I talked about in the show notes already, along with the original pilot, the Lexington letter, the Terminal Pro, and the backlash on Reddit. So I'm not alone.
So I can, I can, I can, well, I'm still not going to sleep at night. Who the fuck am I kidding? Now I don't have anything to do while I'm worrying about the end of the world. Shit, Brian, apps and doodads. Let's go. Apps and doodads.
Well, I found a gadget that I actually think would be very useful for me for the past few years flying. I like to watch my movies now that my kid's old enough and he does what he's doing, playing Nintendo or whatever. So I actually get to watch a movie while I'm flying these days. than paying attention to him. Unfortunately, you know, most airlines have not caught up with Bluetooth.
And I have my AirPods and I love them and I like to use them for everything. But I keep an old school pair of headphones in my bag, my travel bag at all times. So I can watch my movies and, you know, it's got the plug and I plug it right in just like we did back in 1973.
Do you bring a pencil to rewind the tape when it gets stuck? Yeah, do that too. But there's something called the air. Well, there's a lot of these gadgets out there. I just never thought to do it. And I saw this article and I'm like, oh, I have to order this now. There was a.
gadget called the AirFly Pro, and they've now come out with version two. And all it is is just a little... gadget that you plug into any standard 3.5 millimeter headphone jack like they've got on every airplane and it connects to your bluetooth device and plays the audio through it now obviously
I'm thinking airplanes, but this is great for treadmills and gyms or anything like that or any old school stuff that you still happen to have around, which you probably don't. So they came out with the AirFly Pro 2.
which they're saying offers improved sound quality thanks to the Qualcomm audio processor. It's optimized sound quality and latency, making movies, music, and games sound even better, helps reduce background noise. There's a dedicated volume control button right on the dongle itself, which is nice. and it offers multipoint connectivity so two people can stream audio simultaneously. Not useful on the plane unless you're planning on having your partner lean over.
Yeah, yeah. Which is the image that they have in the top as she's leaning into his space. Yeah, it's so dumb. Whatever. So it's about $60 right now. The first one was $55. I may just buy the first one and save myself.
five bucks because how good could it possibly how much better could it possibly be and it's on an airplane anyways well you know they they actually say one of the things that made me think probably the second one is better i'm like what's the latency like because bluetooth can have a little bit of a lag So you don't want it to be out of sync. So if they said they improved the latency, that means that there was a problem with the latency. That's a good point, actually. Fair.
just all right so i'll be spending the 60 bucks on the new one which will probably end up paying for itself over the long run because my my actual headphones always get like fucking ripped up and shredded over the course of a year or two so i have to buy another one and they're like 40 bucks from apple so The only pair of wired headphones I have left are the Sennheisers, the glorious Sennheisers that we both loved. Oh, yes. Well, I don't want to take those on the plane. Oh, yeah. Those are –
Yeah, those are kept in a climate-controlled room because you cannot get those anymore. Yeah. And Napster was just purchased for $207 million from a company called Infinite Reality. And why? Explain to me, Brian, why? I don't really know. Napster has just been kind of out there being a third tier streaming service for quite some time right now. They've got all the music just like Spotify or Apple Music or any of the other.
bigger ones that are out there. In fact, they have more music, but infinite realities wants to pivot it. Yes. They want to take the streaming platform and make a social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement. with a focus on giving artists a platform they can use to connect with listeners and, of course, make more money for them, aka MySpace. Call me when we get to LiveJournal. When we've regressed to LiveJournal, call me.
And even better than that moving beyond that stupid concept, they plan on creating virtual 3d spaces for music fans to attend concerts and listening parties. That's right. You know that thing that they've tried multiple times and no one gives an absolute fuck about? They've never listened to this show, Brian. I can tell you no one in Infinite Reality has ever heard an episode of our show. You know when 3D Spaces for Music had the biggest push?
It was, of course, during COVID because you couldn't go see a concert and it never worked. Not once. Nobody cares. It's not profitable. People don't want to go to them and people don't give a shit. I mean, Brian, have they never heard of the palace? No. Yeah, this stuff has been around. And even better, even better, Jason. Guess what else they rolled out as an example of what they want to do? What?
As an example, he described a reggae artist who might enjoy a virtual beach environment. He adds that it'll be like clubhouse times a trillion. Yes, Clubhouse also did so well, didn't it? Yeah. How are they doing nowadays? My God, the entire business model is based on defunct things that didn't work. It's based on failure. Let's start a business, Brian, and base it on failure. Oh, we did. We have a podcast. Shit. No, that's true. We kind of did that. Yeah. I get pod kettle black on that one.
To be fair, we never intended this to be a business model, and it definitely turned out not to be. Turned out not to be. That's right. That's right. Big hat tip over to Jansu on Discord. He sent the Consent-O-Matic, which is a browser extension that recognizes consent management provider pop-ups. Those little annoying ones that have gotten, they're getting worse. They're everywhere now.
that have become ubiquitous on the web and automatically fills them out based on your preferences. If your preference is fuck off, which mine is, then hopefully it will go away. Even if you meet a dark pattern design, sometimes a website might not use standard category. And in that case, Consentomatic will always try to submit the most privacy-preserving settings.
So it's a free Chrome add-on or Chrome extension. We've had a few of these around for a while. It's been a long time since I've had one installed, but I definitely agree. They're getting more and more annoying everywhere. So I have installed this. It works perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. The whole concept of consent management. At the library.
I got a short story from John Scalzi this week called The President's Brain is Missing. No, it's not nonfiction like the rest of the news we have to read. It's a very cute short story and it was well worth the dollar that I paid for it. It is narrated by PJ Auckland over on audible, which is where I get all my, my, my John Scalzi books. His new book is out and it's called when the moon hits your eye.
It's another long novel. So this one is unfortunately narrated by Will fucking Wheaton. Not looking forward to that. But I do like his book, so I'll let you know. The last book that he had, what was that one called again? Starter villain. Starter villain. Yes. Good book. Good book. Hopefully this will be just as good. Unfortunately, it's read by Will fucking Wheaton. And why am I saying Will fucking Wheaton? Because I got Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow, which is a...
Martin Hench novel, one of his new series, also narrated by Will fucking Wheaton. And I had to put it down because Will's... His acting is so over the top in this one that it was pissing me off. It was. Look, I'd rather have Will Reaton reading books than doing that stupid Real Housewives of Beverly Hills wrap ups for Star Trek shows. Oh, he can do those because I don't watch those. I'm forced to.
I'm forced to listen to these books because I want to. I'm forced because I want to. But I had to put it down and I went back to a classic, Brian. I went back to Demon by Daniel Suarez. All right. And I didn't even realize that book, the beginning of that book takes place in Woodland Hills, California, where I'm on a walk listening to the book, which was kind of kind of odd. But that book does not age well as far as the technology goes.
because it's an older book, but the concept still stands. It is still a good read. I still think Daniel Suarez may have peaked at book one, but... It's well worth going back to. But I had to put that one down, too. And I actually got a Kindle book that I have to read with my eyeballs called Blueprint for Revolution.
How to use rice pudding, Lego men, and other nonviolent techniques to galvanize communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world by Serge Popovich. This is one of the guys that was behind the Milosevic. revolution and takedown of that. It's actually a really serious book, even though it's, you know, it's how to basically do a revolution based on humor and nonviolence.
And I'm about a third of the way through it. And yeah. Beat him with memes. Kinda. Kinda. It's kind of a no joke book. I kind of recommend picking it up nowadays. Cool. The more ideas that we can have to throw gum in the works or gummy bears in the works even is, yeah, we kind of need those in our quiver. Agreed. And I'm actually working through a book that was recommended by listeners on our Discord. So hopefully by next week, I should be done.
Over at Patreon, we've got nobody new, but Jody and Josh have upped their pledge, so you are rock stars. And from the archives, we've got Philip, Francesco, Kaitare. Kaitare. I did research last time. Damn it. Kaitare, Michael, Don, Jay, Jennifer, Michaela, Holly, and Hot Wings for the win.
So thank you all very much. And just a reminder, everyone, Patreon keeps this show alive. You can sign up for as little as $3 a month over at patreon.com slash GOG. You get the show a little bit early and ad free and in high definition. So please help us out. And if you do the whole year, you even get a discount. But you can do $3 or up to a million. We'll take it all. But we would like something, please. And over at PayPal, we've got online computers. Gens.
Charlie, David, and Darla, who gave us a big old 50 bucks. Thank you so much. Hopefully American, because if that's Canadian, that's about $10 with this trade war going on. No doubt. And over at the tip jar, Thomas P. gave us another 50 bucks and says, Hey, Grumps, in recognition of... And you too. Thank you very much, Thomas. And also from Jennifer, Tony, and Adam. So thank you very much, everybody. All righty. We have a new five-star review. You have not lost this listener.
More than once, I've been remiss in properly supporting the podcast until it hit me. You provide the extremely valuable service of being able to say to my husband, I told you so. That's 50 bucks well spent. I might want to save that for marriage counseling. And you're both right. Severance is a slog. It fell flat for me, even though the premise was interesting. Others I know loved it.
However, having said that, Apple does a decent job of focusing their content to specifically target the audience they are trying to reach. Obviously, they were not after my eyes this time. Thanks for keeping on keeping on. Thank you. Thank you very much. And we got some listener feedback this morning that just made my heart warm. Dougite Code writes in, Years ago I complained about the amount of politics in your show. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. You were right.
I was exhausted and wrong. Love the show as always. Thank you so much. Thank you. And finally, before we go, I would like to announce the official death of semantics, i.e. meaning and language. We still have language, obviously, but words no longer have any meaning whatsoever. Because kiss... have officially confirmed their first performances since retiring from touring. Great. Apparently that money has run out. I guess so.
So, yeah, this is our big last final tour. We spend the $700 on tickets and we're back two years later. That's just great. I never liked Kiss. Me either. Now I like them even less, if that's possible. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.
And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 690. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it.
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