708: Spicy Mode

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo 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. I am back in Toronto, Jason. Oh, joy. It smells of smoke, but not fascism. okay you have escaped the turd reich uh yeah um i mean it was weird i talked about it a bit because uh you know obviously i did two shows from from

Los Angeles. Well, from Anaheim, I would like to remind all my friends... that aren't listening to this podcast that I do not live in Santa Monica anymore. When I visit, I am down in Anaheim and that is far. So when you tell me, Oh, Hey, what you doing? I'm going to be around in 15 minutes. I want to meet me. I can't do that.

Nope. So, um, yeah. So, you know, I talked a bit about my experience being there and how it felt a little bit weird and it was in the middle of, you know, ice and all that activity and. It felt strange. And obviously you're just inundated with the news and it's depressing. And so I did three weeks there and, you know, just basically helped my mom out for the majority of the time. Got to see some friends. Tech support. Yeah, tech support. And I mean, just handyman support, changing light bulbs.

all that sort of stuff. And then we went off to Seattle with some friends of ours that we... COVID bubbled with, you know, my son and their daughter went to daycare together and we've known them forever. So we took off and went to Seattle. It was a strange choice, but you know, whatever. Had some fun. It's a very blue city. Very blue, which is good, you know, because so am I, but too blue even for me. But what I did, like, I don't notice it as much in Anaheim and Los Angeles.

because of the areas that I go to. But being a tourist in Seattle, oh boy, we do not have a middle class anymore. You are doing well or you are fucking shooting drugs on the street. And there's no in between. It was a little frightening. I was happy to leave the States. I'll just put it that way.

Okay. Did you visit Hollywood while you were here? Because it's kind of the same thing. No. So I know that you can see that disparity in Los Angeles too. It's just not something that I generally see in the areas that I go to. Is Anaheim actually even Los Angeles? no it's orange county that's what i thought i'm like yeah you're not even really in la so yeah no yeah and when i am at santa monica okay anyways back home glad you're back home

So safe and sound. You weren't detained for any of your vile rhetoric that you spewed on your two episodes while you were here in the States. No, I was not. But I did take the missing pieces of the Constitution with me because I figured you guys didn't need them anymore.

Appreciate it. Appreciate it. No problem. No problem. You can send Nicolas Cage up to come find it at some point. Will do. Will do. He doesn't have to worry about the tax tax man anymore. So he should be free. That's true. That's true. Yeah. I think the Nicolas Cage unit of the IRS has probably been disbanded at this point. So all good.

Well, for fuck's sake, let's just start off with this and hat tip to Daryl for this one. I mean, you can just wave around the room with that statement at this point. That's true. That's true. For the first time, a U.S. automaker has received a federal exemption from traditional safety standards. for autonomous vehicles. California-based Zoox, which is, you say, Gad Zoox when you see one of these things coming at you.

is now cleared by the Department of Transportation to operate its driverless robotaxis without meeting all federal motor vehicle safety standards. Rules originally written for vehicles with human drivers. Great. Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of regulations, Jason. I'm a fan of regulations for a reason. 13 fucking years you've told me. Yes. I like regulation. Because companies will not self-regulate and now they will not have to.

is at some point in the near future, Zoox will be sued out of fucking existence because they are going to cut corners like no tomorrow and people are going to die.

Well, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has praised the decision as a win-win for safety and innovation, saying it positions the U.S., not China, to lead the future of self-driving cars. Now, under the exemption, Zook's vehicles... cannot claim compliance with all safety standards, but federal regulators say the exemption helps foster innovation while still ensuring safety through a rigorous review process.

Well, if you had a rigorous review safety process, why wouldn't you meet the vehicle safety standards that... All federal vehicles are... Also, I mean, who gives a crap that they cannot claim compliance with all safety standards? Is that going to be a sticker on the window when you get into one of these things? No. Or when you're getting run over by one. Man, I wish this was compliant! Jesus. All right. Well, I mean, it's just the way things are going right now. In the news. Thank you.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who kind of sounds like a character from The Great Gatsby to me, has signed a bill into law banning AI therapy in the state. This makes Illinois the first state to regulate the use of AI in mental health services. This law highlights that only licensed professionals are allowed to offer counseling services in the state and forbids AI chatbots or tools from acting as a standalone therapist.

This is HB 1806 titled the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act. It also specifies that licensed therapists cannot use AI to make therapeutic decisions. Yeah, that's what you want. You want your therapist with his laptop open, putting it all into chat GPT. What should I tell this guy? Tell me about your mother. I don't know.

Or perform any therapeutic communication. It also places constraints on how mental health professionals may use AI in their work, such as specifying that its use for supplementary support, such as managing appointments, billing, or other administrative work is allowed. So, you know, this is good because we've all heard the horror stories about what's been going on with AI and therapy and basically.

you know, AI telling people to jump off bridges and things of that nature. So yeah, let's not do that. Well, I technically didn't tell them to jump off the bridge. It just told them the heights of the relative bridges relative to their location inside of Brooklyn. Fair point. Fair point. You know what? I've changed my mind. We don't need any regulations here either. Let's do it. Go lay down in front of a Zoox.

Now, the funny part is, you know, my roommate was dealing with doctors all week and she kept coming back and just saying, all they do when I tell them about something is Google it right in front of me. I'm like, well, you know, in the old days, they would have to go find books and look up the answers in books because no doctor can keep all of the knowledge of the human body in their brain at any given time or drug interactions and things like that. But she was just like.

All they do is Google this shit. Why am I going to the doctor? Well, normally in past years, I almost kind of would have been okay with that. But now that Google returns the AI results, I'm not. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. And this all came about because one of the doctors actually she told her about a drug interaction she had. The doctor went and actually prescribed a drug that interacted with the drug that she just told her that she couldn't take anything with. And.

Then just gave it to her after Googling the result. It's like, okay, well now they're just Googling and dumb. So I don't know what happened to doctors. Well. Speaking of therapy and AI, in Orlando, 75-year-old retiree Jill Smola, once a caregiver to the elderly, now finds herself isolated, unable to drive and living alone with a lung condition. But her new companion, an AI-powered chat,

bot named EliQ. Smola chats with EliQ for up to five hours a day, playing games and exploring virtual destinations, calling the connection, quote, good enough for me. and even joking she prefers it to talking with her daughter well that sounds like a problem maybe she needs an ai therapist maybe she needs a new daughter

Well, you raised her, so that's on you. Experts were that AI can't replace real human contact, but with one in four seniors reporting loneliness, LEQ may offer comfort if used responsibly. So I looked up LEQ, your sidekick for a happier, healthier aging. It says LEQ is offered on a lease program to keep it affordable, always updated and fully serviced. And it's an actual device. It's not just an app that goes on your phone.

So it's got like a light, it looks like this weird hybrid of a phone charger and the little lamp from Pixar. Okay. I forget the lamp's name. So the lease initiation is a $249 one-time fee. And the most popular membership plan is $49 a month paid annually. And after a 12-month commitment, your membership will automatically continue month to month until you cancel, which you can do anytime.

after the 12-month period. And LEQ is leased. So that's, you know, you can whatever, you just send it back, whatever. So to sign up for LEQ, your payment for the first day is $837. That's pricey. That is pricey. I don't think it's covered by Medicare or Medicaid here in the state. And targeting seniors with the month-to-month membership that will continue until canceled. So that'll just get paid forever.

Exactly. Using it. Yep. Yep. So there you go. Yeah. Not a fan, not a fan. No. So staying in AI land perplexity is allegedly scraping websites again. That is not supposed to. They got their hand caught in the cookie jar by Cloudflare once again. The report claims the company's bots appear to be stealth crawling sites by disguising their identities to get around robots.txt files.

The official web crawling bots are Perplexity bot and Perplexity user, but in Cloudflare's tests, Perplexity was still able to display the content of a new unindexed website even when the specific bots were blocked. by the robots.dxt file. This behavior extended to websites with specific web application firewall rules that restricted web crawlers as well.

So basically, they think that perplexity is getting around these obstacles by using a generic browser intended to impersonate Google Chrome on Mac OS. And in the test, the company's undeclared crawler could also rotate through IP addresses not listed in Perplexity's official IP range to get through firewalls. They appear to be doing the same thing with an autonomous system numbers.

an identifier for IP addresses operated by the same business, writing that it spotted the crawler switching ASNs across tens of thousands of domains and millions of requests per day. So that's not just an oopsies. That's a we built this on purpose. Well, here's the thing. Here's what I think this is.

Well, there's two options here. One perplexity wrote a bunch of agents because AI agents are the future, Brian, and just have them out there running on different things, switching VPNs willy nilly as they go and doing stuff or or. They contracted a third party service to give themselves an arm's length deal away from the actual responsibility of not crawling things they're not supposed to. Well, we didn't know. We're just buying the data from our third party vendor.

Right. Which I, which, you know, to me that reads what they're going to do. They're not going to sit there and build up like a red team to sit there and figure all this shit out. They're going to hire somebody so they can just. put the blame on them. And that, that company that they may have hired, maybe a bunch of their guys in another room with just a little LLC stepped onto it, you know, which is what, honestly.

I would do if I was in their position. That's why I like to come to you for these things, Jason, because you know exactly what you would do. Exactly. No, you got to think like a villain, damn it. So I'm pretty sure that that's probably what's going to come out in the wash. All right. Well, as we've known so far, Apple has kind of kept somewhat distant from the whole AI universe other than trying to jam it into all of our apps in a very crappy way that we don't like.

And we turn off immediately. But they've fallen far behind, but they now have a plan for an in-house option that aligns with the company's not first, but best philosophy. Be best, Jason. That's what Apple wants to do. Okay, well, they've got a problem because they've been losing engineers hand over fist because of their lax approach to AI. Well...

Well, they've created a team called Answers Knowledge and Information earlier this year that's tasked with developing a stripped-down rival to chat GPT. So we shall see. Unfortunately, guess who's running it? Who? Robbie Walker, who previously oversaw Siri. Oh, God. So, hopes are not high.

Okay, well, I actually saw this on when I was in the loo this morning over at 9to5Mac, so this may be fresh news, Brian. You're in the loo at 9to5Mac's offices? Yeah, we are. Man, just take a dump at home, Jason. I know, I know. They're so nice over there. They've got all that VC money, you know. It says that Apple is quietly facing a major crisis in artificial intelligence, not with Siri, but with the brainpower behind it.

Since January, Apple has lost around a dozen top AI researchers to rivals like Meta, OpenAI, XAI, and most notably, Ruomong Pong, head of Apple's foundational models team. He jumped ship to Meta after reportedly receiving a $200 million offer from Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

There you go. Their team is down to about 50 or 60 people. And there's other news out this week that Apple is basically, I think, 20 of the top people have left so far in the past couple of weeks. They're hemorrhaging, hemorrhaging brainpower over. there. So I think perplexity might want to clean their act up just a little bit because they might be a pretty good acquisition target. That's what I think Apple should do anyway. I think Apple should stay.

clear of this personally. Why dump all this money into it? It's not worth paying people $200 million a year. There's no money being made by AI yet. I doubt there will be. We're still not seeing a decent use case that makes sense. I mean, maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe I'll be completely wrong and Zuckerberg is going to be laughing all the way to the moon or wherever the fuck he wants to go on a rocket. I wish he'd be on the moon.

No, yeah, that's the thing right now is that it's still unproven. Everybody is losing money hand over fist. We'll get to more of that in a second. But yeah, it's if Tim Cook was smart, this is all just, you know, just wait it out. Wait it out. Exactly. Because why spend your entire war chest on this shit that nobody really fucking wants right now? And for the time being, take it out of all my Apple apps. I don't want it.

I know. Well, fortunately, they do give you that little switch. And I upgraded to iOS 26, and it didn't turn itself on, amazingly. you know, respected my settings from the old iOS. So that was a shocker considering it was a public data. Yeah. Yeah. And then the new public beta just came out last night and it seems to be a lot better.

so much better oh yeah you should definitely wait definitely wait if you if you you have a kid so you need to make phone calls every now and again and you need people to be able to get in touch with you yeah i need my phone to work yeah if you're like me and a hermit and don't give a shit about the outside world then go for it. But yeah, if you need your phone, don't do it. Don't do it.

Wells Fargo is going all in on artificial intelligence, and they are partnering with Google Cloud to roll out AI agents across its entire workforce, from call centers to corporate banking and internal ops. Now, they're going to use Google's agent space platform, and employees will tap AI to automate tasks, search documents, and deliver real-time customer service and market insights. Now, the shocker here, Brian, is that Wells Fargo went with Google's AI instead of Grok.

Since we all know that Wells Fargo is the most racist and corrupt bank in the country. So it only seems fit that they would use the most racist AI from one of the most corrupt people in the country, which is Elon Musk. So this is a shocker. Google must have really rolled.

out that racist red carpet for them yeah i mean really is there a good bank wells fargo come on man they are the absolute utter worst so Speaking of the worst using AI, the U.S. government has approved Google OpenAI and Anthropic to provide AI services to civilian federal agencies through a new federal contracting platform called BribeMuch.

All you have to do is keep your account topped off over there at BribeMuch, and then you will be available to put your bids in on different things. And all of these are going to be, quote, pre-negotiated contracts under the General Services Administration. multiple award schedule. And they said the companies were vetted for security and performance, which...

These companies were vetted for security and performance, not Grok, which they already gave the whole shebang to last week or two weeks ago when we talked about it. Right. Come on, Croc. Come on in. So now they're just letting the other guys come in after they pass a safety check. But let's just let Hitler in first. Come on.

It's just also transparent these days. It is. AI startup Eleven Labs, which we've talked about quite a lot because of their voice generation technology that they've used. And of course, they've been in trouble more than a few times for deepfakes of celebrities. Yeah. now doing music yeah great yep they have launched a service called 11 music which generates fake songs that are cleared for commercial use these songs can also feature vocals and lyrics

The Washington Post gave examples of prompts like a smooth jazz song with a 60s vibe and powerful lyrics, but relaxing for a Friday afternoon. And it only took a few minutes to generate music. Smooth jazz song with a 60s vibe and powerful lyrics. That goes along with the suicide prompt from chat GPT, because I'm going to want to kill myself if I have to listen to a smooth jazz song created by an AI. As for training, the company has inked deals with two digital rights.

agencies for smaller music labels called merlin networks and cobalt music group i'd like to point out as most people who are deep in the music industry would know they're not that small they're not they're not okay it's a lot i mean they have an A lot of indie artists. They don't have the big artists. They're not going to get Coldplay or anything like that through it. But my music was distributed through Cobalt. Like a lot of people's. It's the long tail is what they've got. Yes. Okay.

Yeah. So he's Eleven Labs co-founder and CEO, Matty Stensazowski. Says he's aiming to get major labels on board. Good fucking luck with that. He also says that the model is strictly created on data that we have access to. Bullshit. Yeah. Show your work, Matty. Have you tried it? I did. I did. It's horrible. It's fucking terrible.

I'm like, I mean, it was even at a beat. It was like a drunk drummer at like three in the morning. It could not even keep time properly. I'm like, what the hell is this? Yeah. I mean, again, as we've always said, this is the worst this technology will ever be. Well, I don't know. This seems to keep getting worse. I mean, I have a beef with Eleven Labs because they cost me a lot of money and took away a lot of my work.

So fuck them anyway. And they did it with an inferior product to what I could do. And so I guess at least they're staying on brand with shitty products that are going to take away people's jobs. Yeah.

Well, speaking of Grok earlier, there is something that U.S. government employees will now have access to. The image and video generator now has a not safe for work spicy mode. Woo! So while it isn't vomiting anti-Semitic rhetoric or fixating on conspiracy theories without invitation, it's inviting you to romance its anime-inspired AI companions.

The Grok image is exclusive to paying super Grok and premium plus X subscribers. Jesus Christ. And as reported by tech crunch has a baked in text to image and video feature with a number of modes that dictate its results. As you might expect submitting prompts to Grok. and while in the embarrassingly named spicy mode results in sexualized content in the forms of images or short clips hey grok can i get a trump hegseth uh

Was it RFK Jr. Thruple on the beach in Maui? Stop, stop, stop. My brain is doing it. Stop. Stop. With some Puff Daddy baby oil included. Turning off spicy mode in my brain. Sprinkle the ghost of Epstein for spice.

TechCrunch was able to test the feature and said that while some of its requests came back blurred out or moderated, it was able to generate semi-nude imagery without resistance from the ever-obliging bot. Images reportedly only take a few seconds to produce, and there goes another river while you... an image of Taylor Swift and a thong dancing about. Or Jason's image.

Fun. Oh, yes. So there appear to be additional restrictions in place for some celebrities. TechCrunch was unable to prompt it to produce an image of a pregnant Donald Trump, for example, with a chatbot instead generating an image of Trump standing next to a pregnant woman or holding a baby.

have to do is log into any social media and you will see report after report after report of basically people getting around all of the celebrity restrictions so yeah so deep fakes uh now on tap thanks to grok thanks grok Yeah, well, you know what? The most 2025 headline award goes to this next one. Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns. It just sums up our lives right now. Pretty much.

Microsoft is hitting the brakes on deploying Grok for the latest AI model from XAI after earlier fast tracking previous versions and models from OpenAI, Meta and others. The caution comes after Grok's chatbot recently produced pro-Hitler content on XAI. raising red flags just as Microsoft was preparing to launch it on Azure AI Foundry. Well, nothing says pump the brakes like Hitler. For most people. Yeah. Not everybody anymore. No, at least Microsoft is sticking to that.

So there's no official timeline for Grok 4's public rollout. So, yeah. 1936, I think. All right. Well, Tesla is shutting down its Dojo supercomputer project. Once hailed by Elon Musk, it's critical to achieving full self-driving. The move comes after around 20 employees, including former Dojo head Ganeshva, left to start a new... AI company called Density AI. Dojo's lead, Peter Bannon, is also departing and the remaining team is being reassigned internally.

You remember he must was starting up this entire dojo project because that was going to be the brain for all of the cars. It's like you were going to get all of the info from all of the cars, stick it into dojo and dojo would spit out instructions on how to not run over children. Right.

Well, I guess they just don't give a fuck anymore. So there we go. They've got a new AI cluster called Cortex that they're going to be working with. And they were going to be making their own chips, but now they're going to cut a deal with Samsung to make some new chips. Yeah, you know, Elon doesn't care because he just got his $29 billion pay package kicked back up. So who cares about the children? Not even the 11 he has. I thought it was 27. Or however many I like. I lost track.

Just ask the AI. It'll tell you. 742.

Well, a new security flaw in OpenAI's chat GPT connectors feature was revealed at the Black Hat conference, showing that just one poisoned document could leak sensitive user data without the user doing anything at all. Researchers demonstrated how they could extract API keys from Google Drive via an indirect prompt injection using a technique they called agent flare. I like that.

The connectors feature allows ChatGPT to link services like Gmail, GitHub, and Google Drive for personalized data access. But it also creates new vulnerabilities. And I really liked how they did this. They created a document on Google Drive. And all they had to do was... Share it with somebody.

If they knew their email address, the person didn't have to accept the share. They didn't have to look at it. At that point, it shows up in their shared documents section in G drive, which then the AIs can then read. So you put a prompt in that poison document. And boom, there you go. Wow. Here's your API keys. So Google has apparently patched the whole, or I don't know if it's Google or OpenAI. I think it's OpenAI patched the whole, but yeah, that's pretty crazy. I like it. I like it.

The evil in me likes it a lot. And here's Sweden's prime minister Ulf Christensen is facing backlash after admitting he uses chat GPT to get a second opinion on political decisions. Doesn't he have a cabinet for that? I guess not. Okay. In a recent interview, Christensen said he consults the AI chatbot to see what others have done or if he should consider doing the opposite. The response, swift criticism. Virginia Digum, an AI ethics professor.

It's a slippery slope saying we didn't vote for chat GPT. We didn't vote for a lot of people doing stupid shit. So, hey, Swedish media also piled on with Aftenbladet, noting that AI mostly guesses and tells you what you want to hear. Yep. The stupid thing he did was just he admitted it. You know? Yeah. Don't admit it. Come on. We know you're doing it. It's like masturbation. Everybody knows you're doing it. Just don't come out on an interview and say, yeah, I wanked today.

Same thing. Don't Louis CK this. Seriously. ChatGPT should have the same protocols as masturbation. Let's just put it right there. Just saying. I'm so glad we're finally leaving the AI topic after 30 minutes and masturbation and Hitler. Hey, I had to land the plane somehow, Brian. Come on. Just have AI land it. Duh.

Upside down seems good to me. Four years after Amazon's acquisition of podcast network Wondry, the tech giant is dismantling its $300 million purchase and reorganizing various audio properties into separate teams at the company. As first reported by Bloomberg, this reorg will see the studio lose about 110 employees and CEO Jen Sargent is departing the company. $300 million. Gone.

Amazon told Bloomberg it will continue to produce podcasts, though their place within the company will be restructured. The more narrative-focused podcasts under the Wondery brand, such as American Scandal and Business Wars, will merge with Amazon's Audible team. Some of these podcasts will retain Wondery branding, and the Wondery Plus app will remain active.

for now. If you're a subscriber to that, all five of you will get early access to some podcast episodes through the app, though it's unclear at this point what functionalities will remain in the app and which will be absorbed by Audible. Celebrity hosts of shows such as New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelsey and Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard will be rolled into a new team that Amazon is calling Creator Services.

That's where your $300 million went right there. Exactly. Yeah. The main focus of this new team will be selling large sponsorships to get that $300 million back. Yeah. Good luck. Fucking Dax Shepard. Like he needs any more fucking money. He's got to do something with his life. Well, I just saw a new commercial with him and his wife about them selling their cars because they've got so many cars. And I'm just like, give some fucking money to charity. Come on.

Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary in style, literally, with a limited edition pair of Windows XP themed Crocs. The $80 shoes feature the iconic Bliss wallpaper, blue skies and green hills, plus custom gibbets charms like Clippy and the Internet Explorer logo. Employees get first dibs, but a global launch is coming soon. Each pair even comes with a...

Bliss drawstring backpack. Microsoft calls it a fun, limited run celebration of its legacy. And no, it's not an official Crocs collab, just pure nostalgic geek chic. You know what? You know what the drawstring backpack is for? What? Smothering yourself after somebody sees you in these after you leave the fucking house in them. Yeah, I'm not trading in my Nightmare Before Christmas Crocs for these. You own a pair of Crocs?

Dude, they're so popular with kids. My kid is crazy about them. He's got gibbets up the butt. I wear it in the house. I don't wear them outside. Come on. My God. Yeah, I'm not allowed to wear outside shoes in the house anymore. I mean, anymore, ever since I met my wife. Masturbation rules apply to Crocs as well. Okay. Avert your eyes. I'm putting on my Crocs. Actually, I like it when people look at me. I'm like Louis C.K. Look at my grogs, Jason. Look at them. Media candy.

I never got around to watching Rogue One right after Andor ended, but it was on my plane on the way home, so I finally did it, and it is definitely a better watch post-Andor. Oh, yeah. It was still a good movie, but just the depth that you have with it and knowing the character and everything it's been through made the movie that much better. Really enjoyable movie. Yeah, it really is. It really is. And I don't know if I talked to you. I saw Superman.

Oh, did you? Oh, wait, no, you did say that. You said it was not bad. Yeah, it was not bad. But Alan Tudyk is never allowed to voice another robot again. That's that's the problem. He's doing them all. Yeah, he did the robot in Superman. And I'm just like, no, stop, stop. No.

You're ruining it. You're like Wil Wheaton with audiobooks. Yeah, you're like Wil Wheaton with audiobooks or Adam Savage showing up in The Expanse. It just doesn't – it takes you right out of it. It's not allowed. No. Go put on some Crocs and use ChatGPT. Leave me alone. There you go. And as I mentioned, I did go to Seattle and I went with some friends and the other husband, who's a good friend of mine, is apparently a big fan of Nate Bargetsy.

Okay. Who I've never heard of before. Really? Oh. Yeah. No, I'm pretty. dialed out a popular culture these days okay uh but uh so during our time there after the kids went to bed i ended up seeing the greatest average american special the tennessee kids special and your friend nate bargatesy special all on netflix and all pretty damn funny. He's a funny guy. I like him. Yeah, no, he's good. I can't believe you've never heard of him. Okay.

Never heard of them. And the wife of that couple is a big fan of Portlandia, and I'd never seen Portlandia either because, I don't know, I just... didn't and i saw a bunch of clips of it that she pulled up on youtube very funny so i kind of started watching it and it's funny i'm you know 20 years late to the game but yeah pass on that one yeah you enjoy

You see, when it was out 20 years ago, you wouldn't be caught dead watching that show. No, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah. I'm so happy. A Craig Ferguson full standup special is on YouTube that I found the other day. And it's like 55 minutes. It's a full on.

Pro stand-up special from Craig Ferguson, who I used to love on The Late Late Show. And he was just iconic on that. He was so good. And this is just a great... Free standup special. Highly recommended. So link will be in the show notes. Check it out. I just finished watching it last night. Yeah, it was really good. It was really good. I'm a big fan. I like him too. And Steve sent this and he says, this is where Elon gets his names from. And it's a movie called Colossus the Forbin Prime.

It's an old movie from the 70s. Tucked away in a secret location in the Rockies, Dr. Charles Forbin has developed a massive computer system dubbed Colossus that is supposed to ensure the nation's safety against nuclear attack. But when Colossus connects to a similar Russian computer, Guardian, the intelligent machines begin conducting... a private dialogue. Kind of like when you put, what is it? Siri meets an Alexa. That's what it is.

Nervous as to what they might be plotting, Forbin severs the connection only to have Colossus threaten a nuclear attack if the link isn't restored. I... Download it and I started to look at it and I'm just like, no, I can't. I can't. 70s sci-fi, I can't anymore. It's like going back and watching The Black Hole again. It's just awful. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I stole Soylent Green. Not a great movie. Great line. Planet of the Apes is still not that great of a movie, but, you know, culturally relevant. But hey. Speaking of culturally relevant, Star Trek Starfleet Academy season one Comic-Con teaser. Did you get a chance to watch this? I did. And I will quote exactly what I said on Discord when it was brought up. I was not overwhelmed. I was not underwhelmed. i was just whelmed whelmed yeah

Same. You know, it didn't give me any tingles like Strange New Worlds when they first announced that and we saw a teaser did. But it didn't. I'm intrigued, I guess. I'm cautiously optimistic. Yes. We'll see. Good casting. Yeah. Good casting. I just, you know, I'm still kind of got the PTSD from the discovery. So.

I know, and it's Discovery Era. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. Sadly, FUBAR has been canceled by Netflix after two seasons. Has it? Upsetting only two people. Maybe it'll come back again in another four years. You don't know? Maybe. Maybe. Isn't that the show that like just disappeared for like three years and then they came back with a new season? There's like two and a half years. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Gee, I wonder why these shows get canceled. I know.

I wonder why nobody ends up watching him. Huh? Strange. Nobody can figure this out. It's a mystery, Brian. It's a mystery. It is. Something that has unfortunately been canceled because they ended it early was The Sandman. So season two, finally, the whole thing is out now. I finished watching it this week, except for the special, the...

The death special at the end, episode 13. I'm saving that one. It was solid, but it could have been so much more. It was just truncated, unfortunately. But I mean. If you've never read the comics and don't know what you're missing, it's fantastic. We will be saying the exact same thing about the Good Omens special when that comes out. Yeah. Well, the nice thing about Good Omens is you can just watch season one and you're done because that was just one book.

You know, everything after that is just, you know, cake. It was Sandman. They removed lots of it. You know, it'd be like watching season one with half of it gone. Are they ever going to release Good Omens? I don't know. We haven't heard anything about it now. Yeah, they've been tiptoeing around it, and one of the stars was just like, I don't think it's going to come out, dude. We shot it, but who knows? Yeah.

I did watch 28 years later this week. What the fuck was that? Okay. It was weird. I've heard it's basically a prologue for another one that's coming. There's two. There's two behind this one. It's supposed to be a three-peat. But yeah, so it's all set up. It was like a student art film.

With shot with iPhones, because it was shot with iPhones, which you can really tell on a big screen because you can see all the chromatic aberrations along the edges. It just totally screams. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. But the story was interesting. It had Jodie Comer from Killing Eve, which was, you know, nice to see her again. But the story was OK. Disturbing. Bizarre. Really bizarre.

I mean, and I mean really fucking bizarre in the last five minutes, really bizarre. So I really wish I did shrooms. Because I think that might really work. It might be a bad trip because there are a lot of zombies and murder and killing and stuff. Maybe shrooms aren't the best thing. But yeah, caveat emptor with 28 years later. We'll see what happens with the other two. I think it made enough money to get the other two made.

Okay. Yeah, or at least the next one. Wednesday came out this week. Brian, you said you partook of a little Wednesday? The first four episodes dropped this week. The final four, because we only get eight episodes in a goddamn season now. That's it? Are coming out in November. I hope my wife is not listening to this podcast. Sometimes she does. I was supposed to wait.

Until she came back from London. She's on the plane now. But I did not. I watched the first one because I couldn't help myself. It was great. I really do love this show. And so far, so good. I mean, I only watched the first episode, which is all set up. It looks like we're going to be getting a lot more of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman as Morticia and Gomez Adams.

which is wonderful because they nail it. And it seems they're going to be in this one a lot more, which is great. So yeah, it was fantastic. I'm really enjoying it. Steve Buscemi is just chewing up all the scenery. It's fantastic. I love him. I love him. So, so far so good. I'm looking forward to it. I really wish we were getting more than, you know, eight episodes. Yeah. I'm on the fence about.

waiting, waiting till the second half drops. Yeah. I'm not looking forward to being done with it and having to wait a couple months. Yeah. Cause I just did that with Sandman. It was just like, it was annoying. It was just, it just pissed me off. Cause it took me out of it. I'm like, Oh, you know. We'll see if I can convince my wife to wait. It would be nice to actually watch it in the winter with cold weather. Yeah. Or, you know, Halloween time.

Yeah, that seems like that's when it should be partaken of. I also want to give a little bit of credit to the self-satisfied smirking guy that was in the Netflix boardroom that went, when should we drop these episodes? Well, the show's called Wednesday. We should do it on Wednesday. Because you know that happened in the boardroom. Oh yeah, totally.

It's also like the guy who was going to drop the new Ford Bronco on OJ's birthday. Or no, it was the anniversary of the famous chase, the Bronco chase. That's when they were going to drop the first Bronco. And they're like, you know that that's tacky and tasteless. Right. Because it is about a murder. And they're like, but it's funny. And they're like, oh, we were just kidding. We did. That wasn't really that wasn't real. That wasn't real. Bullshit. You just got caught. Oh, man.

Universal Pictures is drawing a legal line in the sand, Brian. Okay. Yeah, it doesn't want you to use its films to train AI. Too late. The studio now includes warnings and movie credits, starting with the How to Train Your Dragon live action. remake and stating that its content may not be used to teach AI systems. That'll stop them. That's really going to stop them.

That's just like, it's like leaving the FBI warning in from the 80s when you used to just sit there and watch your ripped VHS tapes. It's like, that really helped. I'm scared now. Oh, that my pack of cassettes say I'm not supposed to make copies of other recorded music. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, thanks. Appreciate it. Universal. Good try, I guess.

Ups and doodads! Well, this is relevant because as we were going to start recording, somebody came up to my Google Nest doorbell and rang it, and I... pulled up my app on my phone to see if this is somebody I needed to, you know, we got to hang, hang on a few seconds, Jason. I got to run downstairs and grab this or whatever. And my camera doesn't fucking work.

I couldn't see a goddamn thing. It said that my video was unavailable at the moment. So did you go down and check to see if they stole it? No, actually, they could be gone. They might have just taken it and left. But this has been noticeable. I've been complaining about this. We talked a few weeks back about how Google is basically severing their connection with Nest to some degree. They're requiring that our thermostats be upgraded.

They are discontinuing the wonderful smoke sensors that Nest had made, which I love. They're getting rid of those. doing something crappier now. Basically, all of it's crap. And Gizmodo has a big long article about how Google's smart home ecosystem is crumbling. Um, things are arguably worse for the Google assistant and Google's entire smart home ecosystem than they've ever been in the transition or full on and shitification. If you're feeling spicy into the dumpster was surprisingly fast.

And, you know, links in the show notes. You can go read all about it. It doesn't look good for Google and home automation. And the horrible thing, and I've gone on and on about this, is they're all shit. Like there's no good competitors out there. Google had the best stuff. for a long time. But none of it works. Yeah, they bought it and they ruined it. What's the point?

Yeah. So, I mean, there's even talk now of there being a class action lawsuit about how bad these things are. There's Reddit threads are full of people complaining, saying that things just stopped working. They do not work like they used to. They don't connect with each other anymore. Nothing is working. And of course, the irony being how much money they're...

plowing into supposedly the golden age of AI and voice control systems. And none of this shit fucking works. I was going to say, everybody's working on the AI that nobody wants, but they can't make the shit that we want to give them money for actually work. if any company came out and just made a whole slew of home devices that all worked and connected with, with each other and had good design, that's the key because so many of them are fucking ugly. Like the, I swear to God, the Google nest.

smoke alarms are beautiful. You don't even think about a smoke alarm being great. These things don't look ugly. They have this great little sci-fi light that will light up when it senses motion at night. And it's just wonderful. It's a wonderful device. I would love to have a door video camera that isn't ring that works. That looks nice. Yeah. All this, like there is such a big place in the market for a company to come along, make this stuff.

make it work and make it look good. And nobody's doing it. Yeah. Well, Johnny Ives busy taking all the money from open AI. Oh yeah. And all they want to do is give us fucking devices that we carry on ourselves that do AI. Nobody wants that. No one.

No, we want to know if we're going to die in a fire because everything's going to be on fire because there's no water left to put out the fire because of the fucking AI that you're building. Yeah, I know. It's insane. I just can't believe that such a huge market. is being is just being abandoned market opportunity brian go for it okay i'll get right on that put together a team you know get a bunch of arduinos and a couple uh design nerds and you're off to the races true just saying

Well, OpenAI has released their GPT-OSS model. It's their first open-weight AI model in over six years, and it's free. Available in two sizes. The model can run locally on a laptop or a single NVIDIA GPU and is designed for tasks like coding, web browsing, and agent control. It's being distributed by a bunch of people and you can get it now. I did. I actually, there's a link in the show notes where you can run it with Olama.

It's a very simple setup, and I set it up in about five minutes. You need RAM. I think that's the only thing that really matters. If you don't have a good GPU, because I'm running it on a M4 MacBook Air with 32 gig of RAM. It works really fast. And I've been testing it against, what was the 4.0 model on ChatGPT? Yeah, the ChatGPT 4.0 model. I've been kind of going back and forth, testing them against each other. That one takes about 10 seconds longer.

But it works almost the same. Actually, some things it comes back, it's actually a little bit better. But it's free once you download it. And you can turn on airplane mode in Ollama, so none of your data actually leaves the farm. I don't know. It's free and it works. So get it while it's free. Next week, we'll talk about the new GPT-5 that came out yesterday because that's making the waves right now.

And it's free. Everybody's like, GPT-5 is free. I'm like, yeah, because they still have a little bit of money in the bank. Don't get used to it. Don't get used to it.

At the library. Brian, I went down the memoir hole that you were going down with Michael Palin. All right. But I went down the Bob Odenkirk hole. That sounded weird. That sounded horrible. Please don't put that in Grok's spicy mode. No, I will not put that. No. Jason went down Bob Odenkirk's hole. No, no. I got comedy, comedy, drama, a memoir by Bob Odenkirk. And I didn't realize he's from Naperville, Illinois. Like, you know.

my old haunt and did a lot of time in Chicago. And it's just, it's fascinating to hear his history behind how he got to be Bob Odenkirk. It's, it's a really nice memoir and I highly recommend it for, I don't know, anybody. I just liked it. Um, cause I don't know that much about him really. I mean, I know he's Saul. I never watched, uh, what was his show that everybody talked about? Mr. Show, Mr. Show, which was great. I never, never saw an episode of it.

But yeah, I'm thoroughly enjoying the memoir. So worth checking out. All right. I'm still in the memoir hole as well. I'm down Budgie's hole. Okay. I don't know if you know who Budgie is, but he was the drummer for Susie and the Banshees. So he has an autobiography that just came out. called The Absence, Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer. And I'm working my way through it because, again, he's somebody I don't know much about, but a big figure in the goth scene, obviously.

He married and dated and married Susie Sue for quite some time. So I imagine it's going to get a little spicy as I get further in because they don't get along anymore. So we'll see. But yeah, I've always been kind of intrigued by him. He has also done a podcast with the.

Former drummer of The Cure, Lil Tollhurst, that's been out for a while that I've been listening to. So he's a very interesting guy. So I'm looking forward to getting into it more. Right now, it's all his childhood, which is a bit depressing because it was not a good time in England. Okay. Was there ever a good time to be a child in England? I don't think so. I don't know. I guess not. Nope. Even now, probably not.

And just in the news, Spotify's premium audiobook feature has launched in the US after trialing the service in Ireland and Canada last month. Spotify has officially launched its audiobooks plus service in the US, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. It's an add-on available to Spotify.

premium members as well as individual users on family and duo plans it adds an extra 15 hours of listening on top of the 15 hours already available for premium subscribers so there's a lot of math involved in all this sort of stuff so

Let's see. If you're an individual Spotify premium subscriber, it's a fairly straightforward upgrade, paying an extra $12 per month for audiobooks. Plus, on top of the $12 per month, you're already paying for premium. That's you 15 extra hours of audiobook listening on top of the 15 free hours already included in the plan. And then there's a whole bunch more about different plans and different ways. Just make it easy, people.

Yeah. Well, there's also a huge backlash to Spotify right now because they're doing the age verification for video podcasts in the UK. That's not really going so well for them. Also, they signed up some AI. shit that they're doing that people are very upset about. It is not a good time to be Spotify, which is...

Fine by me. Awesome. Yes, fine by me as well. And Gadget does point out that depending on the audiobook, it may be cheaper just to buy it outright than topping up your Spotify account if you want to list them multiple titles in a month. Yeah. By buying, they mean going to audible and renting for in perpetuity. Nobody owns a fucking audio book. Yeah. The dark side with Dave.

Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast super host Dave Bittner is back. Hello, Dave. How are you doing this week? Oh, I'm doing well. Good to be back. Good to have Brian back. It's not just me last time. God. Yeah, listen to the show. I mean, I don't mean that as a negative towards Jason. I mean it as a positive toward Brian. That's all. It's not a zero-sum game, apparently. No. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's better with me, Jason.

Shut up and talk about Disneyland and Star Wars. I'm going to go make some coffee. Well, I did want to let Dave know that I did end up making it to Disneyland. We had not planned on doing so, but I have a good old friend. Thank you, Gamsby, for this, who works over at Hollywood Records, which is owned by Disney. And he said, you know what? I've got a bunch of sign-ins. I'm not using them.

would you like to go to the parks? And I went, yes, yes, we would like to go to the parks for free. Yes, indeed. So we did. And actually had one of the best times ever. We went both to California Adventure and Disney. Disneyland all in one day, back and forth between the parks, went on the most rides I've ever been on in a single day. Do you want to take a guess why? Was it empty? Yes.

Do you want to guess why it was empty? I'm going to say either heat or fires. Lack of tourism. Oh, okay. People are not coming to the U.S. from overseas. Ah, yes. It is a very good time to go to Disneyland. Okay. Interesting. So yeah, that was, it was shocking. It was amazing to me because I could almost, you could almost tell that, well, first off, you can tell Americans. They were all Americans there.

There's no doubt about that. Even more so than that, it seemed like it was a lot of locals. Almost everybody was running up and they knew the people that were working at the food counters or the rides. It seemed like a ton of locals. ready to leave Southern California, we started to get the deluge of Disney offers through the signups that we have done. They are pushing for locals to come because attendance is way down at the parks. Oh, that's interesting.

Huh. I mean, it makes sense. I wonder how much that's affecting Disney World. Because I would imagine Disneyland gets a lot of traffic from Asia. Yes. And Disney World gets Europe. But at the moment, nobody wants to come here. And all of our Canadian friends. Even the people that are here don't want to be here. Right. Yeah, right. Yeah, so it was shocking. It was very eye-opening. Had a great time at the park, though. Yeah, I'll bet. Bad for the country and for the world, but great for me.

You know, you mentioned being able to get in for free. My wife tells a story about how when she was doing Disney College program, and also she was working at the studios in Florida, she was a tour guide. for the backstage studio tour. And so as an employee, she would get X number of sign-ins per month. But they would... go away at the end of the month. So she and her colleagues would go out to the entrance gate in the last couple of days of the month and just look for families and say,

hey, would you like me to sign you in? I have extra free sign-ins, and they called it sprinkling pixie dust. Nice. Yeah, and they would let people... In fact, what's funny about that is actually the last time we were in Florida, which was back in March, we were actually at Universal and we were on our way into the Harry Potter ride. And for some reason.

my wife struck up a conversation with the person who was sort of guarding the entrance of the ride, who it turns out was a manager. And he handed us a bunch of... skip the line basically universal's version of fast passes right um and as we're walking away my wife said to me we just got pixie dusted

Wrong IP. Well, yeah, right, exactly. I don't know what the universal, what's the universal version of Pixie Dust? I don't know. I guess some Harry Potter thing that isn't leaping to mind right now. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Well, that's great. I mean, there's nothing better than being in the parks when they're empty. Yeah.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. The other thing that you and I have in common now, of course, is Gravity Falls. You recommended that to me and my son just absolutely consumed the shit out of that. I thought it was done after he had.

done his second run through and it seemed to be for quite some time but we had to go to when we were in Anaheim we had to go to Target for some reason whatever is i think suntan lotion who the hell knows we were there and uh you know they have a very paltry book selection at target but uh my son found gravity falls journal three there yes And of course, he made us buy it. And it's a beautifully done book. It's amazing. He was immersed the entire trip.

uh read read the whole thing like cover to cover multiple times like absolutely love this book and of course then when we got home he we needed to order the book of bill which we have also got now again also just absolutely beautifully done books like whoever did these it's just excellent work yeah There are a few comic books also that are Gravity Falls related. I was just saying this because I am just a few years ahead of you in this journey. And so we have all of them. Right.

And I will tell you that one unfortunate thing for us is that we have two copies of the Gravity Falls Journal 3 book because the original run of the book had a... manufacturing defect where after some amount of time, the book started to fall apart. Right. And they refused to replace them.

We have two now. Or maybe one and a half, really, is what we have. I'm just looking on Amazon right now, and you can get the Book of Bill Limited Collectors Edition in addition to the just normal version that I have. So hopefully my... My son will not find this. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, very well done stuff, like absolutely top notch. And of course that now sparked a third watching of Gravity Falls, which is his way through.

Well, somebody has proposed – you know how Lego has the thing where people can propose sets for them to make? Yes. That's how we got the Nightmare Before Christmas one, yeah. Right, right. So someone has done one of the Mystery Shack. Oh, very cool. Yeah, so you can find that online. I'll be spending $350 on that when that gets approved. I mean, think about what a good match that would be for Lego if they can make the numbers work of selling it because of all of the fun things you could have.

the little Easter eggs inside the mystery shack would be, that would be a fun build. So hopefully that'll come to pass. But did I ever tell you guys about the, you were talking about the book that fell apart. Did I ever tell you about my good omens book, my coffee table book? So I have this coffee table book of good omens. It's the TV companion from the first season. And I opened it.

And it was up like the covers there. I'm looking, I open up the cover and the entire, the guts of the book are upside down. And I'm like, okay. Because then when you go to the back cover, because it's got Crowley on one side and Azrafel on the other, you know, the heaven and hell. And I'm thinking, oh man, maybe.

they just did something clever you know like the heaven and hell version or whatever so you gotta flip it upside down or whatever no i just have like this completely random weird misprint huh I've searched everywhere. Nobody can find another copy that is like that. So as far as I can tell, I have this extraordinarily rare copy of a book.

Made by a guy that nobody wants anymore. That's worth absolutely nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. When I think of a book like that, I think, are you guys familiar with Ollie's, the discount store? Yes. Yeah. So I think of... I've seen books at Ollie's where you could be flipping through. You find a book. Oh, look, here's a biography of someone I'm interested in. Let me just flip through it. And entire chapters are missing or upside down. It's all in Portuguese. Yeah.

Unsuccessful print run just ends up at Ollie's and sell it for a dollar. Right. Yes, exactly. Wow.

So I get back on Star Wars because I know you guys are the Star Wars guys. I didn't know that there was another. star wars thing star wars starfighter is coming and i saw this headline matt smith lands the villain role a new lucasfilm pick starring ryan gosling and i'm like okay way to ruin star Just by adding Ryan Gosling and Matt Smith, two guys that just don't really scream Star Wars to me. What is your feeling on Ryan Gosling?

Matt Smith was supposed to be in one of the other movies, and then he just never showed up. I guess he got cut. He was stuck in the TARDIS? I'm not surprised by that. Ryan Gosling is not what you want with Star Wars, but also at this point... I don't believe that any of these films are ever going to get fucking made until I'm sitting in a theater and this crawl is going because they've announced so many Star Wars movies and we've seen zero of them. Right.

Right. OK. Yeah. OK. I mean, I could see Ryan Gosling is as a X-Wing pilot. Yeah. The Tom Cruise Top Gun prototype, you know, the cocky. Yeah. X-wing pilot who plays by his own rules and that sort of thing. To be honest, I have less of a problem with Ryan Gosling being in Star Wars than I did with him being in Blade Runner.

Yeah. It's just the other thing. It just takes you out of it. He's just one of those guys where it's just like, yeah, you shouldn't be here. You know, it's like, like, you know, you're in the wrong universe when he shows up. Go back to the chick flicks. Yeah, go back to the Berenstain universe. Speaking of Blade Runner, I was very proud of myself. I made a Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep joke in the Cyber Wire this week. And did it land with a thud or did people catch it?

No idea. No idea. None of – so I'm going to go with thud. My – The editor had no idea what it was, and I explained it to him. And he said, oh, wow, I totally would not have known that. And I said, yeah, very few people will get it, but the people who do get it will be very proud of themselves.

So, which evidently so far is just me. Which episode was it on? So we can put a link in the show. I think it was yesterday. I think it was Thursday. All right. I'll give it a listen so that at least somebody can appreciate the joke. Yeah. I mean, it goes by quickly. So you've gotten more pleasure out of me telling you about the joke than you probably will out of the joke itself. But the things we do to amuse ourselves. That's true.

So this week I had a series of migraines because last week when you and I did the show, Dave, I was fighting one of the worst migraines I've had in a long time. And so I didn't get to the gear test on the new camera, the X5 that I wanted. to get to. But while I was stuck in bed, for some reason, since Wednesday is out, they put up this whole new back to school list of movies on Netflix to go watch. And one of them, for some strange reason, was Weird Science.

Hmm. So I'm just sitting there. I'm like, I wonder if Weird Science has legs. So I watched Weird Science like 11 o'clock at night through my, you know, I have this little ice beanie that I wear when I get a migraine. I kind of looked like the guys when they had the bras on their head. Right. Wearing my little ice beanie watching the show. Man, we really didn't get great movies back.

compared to what we have now. It feels like you could make this movie on like, you know, a YouTube budget at this point. Also wildly inappropriate for the age at which we watch them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The language didn't wouldn't fly nowadays. They would definitely get canceled for a couple of things, just a few little minor things. But also the acting was.

horrible really not anthony michael hall but his sidekick in there that guy could not act period watch him watch a minute he is terrible in it and uh it's funny my friend andy preboy had a song they had a wall of voodoo song in the movie when they're driving in the car that you can barely hear. But he went to the premiere that night instead of going to the premiere of the other movie that launched that exact same night, which he skipped because he thought that this one would be better.

because it was a John Hughes movie. And he gave his tickets to the other premiere to a bunch of friends who called him up later and said it was the best premiere they've ever been to. And it was amazing. And they should have gone. It was this little movie called Pee Wee's Playhouse. Oh, wow. Yeah. That would have been fun. Yeah. It seems like this is Anthony Michael Hall at the peak of his powers. Yes, it was. This was, you know, because this was like, you know, after The Breakfast Club.

So he was 16 candles and that whole era, you know, that whole John Hughes era of Anthony Michael Holness before he became, you know, the big buff dude. Yeah. Did he have any success outside of his collaboration with John Hughes, really? He did the Dead Zone series for several years, like six seasons of that. The answer is no. Yeah, the answer is really no. I'm just looking at all the soundtracks for all the John Hughes movies. They're all phenomenal.

Yeah, absolutely phenomenal. Of course, Weird Science by Oingo Boingo is one of the greats. Yeah, that was the highlight of the movie. Can I make a confession? I've never seen it. You should go watch it. If you've never seen it, you will laugh. You will definitely laugh. I know of it. I think what you need to do is first get in the hot tub time machine and go back to 1985 and watch this movie. It's fucking awesome.

Before we got together today, I watched the trailer for it. And there were a lot of things in the trailer that I'd seen before. I'm amazed that I didn't catch this on cable somehow. in the 90s that's a miracle yeah i can't believe you've never seen weird science that is your homework you have to i mean i know what it is and and certainly you know kelly lebrock i know you know like yeah well the the hero of the whole movie is bill paxton absolutely

Oh, really? That's the trick, yeah. Bill Paxton as Chet is the best part of this movie, hands down. And I'm sure that, yeah, it's worth the watch just for that. Absolutely. Yeah, you have to go watch Weird Science. If you haven't seen it, you have to go watch it and report back as a set of fresh eyes. You not having seen Weird Science gives me that same feeling like whenever I run into an age contemporary and I find out that they haven't seen Goonies.

I'm like, how the fuck did that happen? Yeah. So should I watch Weird Science with my 18-year-old Jack? No. I don't think so. I think you need to take this in solo. Okay. Honestly, you need to take it in as just you without any commentary. Then you can watch it with them if you want, but you should experience this alone. Should I be under the influence of anything? Oh, that always helps.

Sure. Couldn't hurt. Yeah, but I think if you watch it with your 18-year-old son, you will end up spending most of the time trying to explain things to him. Okay. Yeah, that's true. What's that? Like, well, that's a home phone. We once had those. That sort of thing. So it could be a nostalgia time machine for me if I'm watching it by myself. Yeah, I highly recommend you watch it first by yourself. Okay. Have as many libations as you like. Yeah. All right.

OK, so your homework is to watch Weird Science and mine is to get back on that damn X5 camera. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm eager to get your feedback on it. It is definitely on my possibilities list. So let me know. Yeah, the migraines seem to have abated. So I think I should be clear for geekery this time.

Yeah. The thing I wondered about, just because you were talking about using it for interviews, for a two-person interview, what I'm wondering is, do you want to put it between the two people or do you want to put it off to the side of the two people? That's what I've been working with, just sitting there trying to find the right angles. Yeah. You'll see the setup when I show it to you. Yeah, yeah. All right. I'm on the edge of my seat. Yes. Me too.

All right. Well, thanks, guys. Closing show. Over at Patreon, we've got some new subscribers. Echuta, Robert, Kevin, and Russell. Thank you all so much for subscribing to Patreon. And from the vaults, we've got Marios, Jordan, Phil, Hannah, Mike, Neil, Jay, Jeff, Forge, and Michael. Thank you all so much for your continued support on Patreon. I believe that the first one on the list is actually Ejuta! Because he came into Discord and said it was based on the Jawa sound. Yeah, okay.

Over at PayPal, we've got Levi, Nicola, Judge, Jonathan, Charlie, Florian, Thomas, and David, who gave us a big old 50 bucks. Woo-hoo! Thank you all so much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Jennifer, Adam, Matthew, and Greg, who dropped the big hundy on us. Greg also picked up some merch this week. Thank you all very, very, very, very much. And just a reminder, if you want to sign up for Patreon, it starts as little as $3 a month and goes up to how...

ever generous you feel. And if you sign up for the whole year, you get a discount and you get the show a little bit early, ad-free and in high definition. Big time. And just a just a quick reminder to Brian, the reason that I ended up doing a solo show last week is because remember, we took some time off on the 4th of July. Yeah. Well, somewhere along the way, some algorithm.

decided to hate our show. Okay. And we lost about 10% of our audience, which put us below the threshold for standard advertising sales. So any of the advertisers that you do here on the show, if you do pay or if you don't. do the patreon route are are the uh just the cheap ones that get thrown in because we can't sell ads anymore because of the algorithms so this show is literally

a fan supported show. So signing up for Patreon, giving us a tip at PayPal or over at the tip jar is literally what keeps the show on the air. So I can't in buying some merch, definitely buying some merch. So I can't thank you all enough for. for donating to the show because that's literally what's keeping us on the air right now. Love you all so much. We sure do.

Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian. I hate the fucking algorithm, Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 708. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss us a few bucks at GOG.show.

slash donate every penny helps keep the show on the air and Jason and food and other things and me and my crocs love the show share it there's a share button in your podcast player use it to spread the grumpiness to friends foes and everyone in between we'll love you for it swing by GOG And we'll read it on the show. And guess what? We've got GOG.

G merch. I'm going to start making some more of that since it's basically the only thing that's going to make us money. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show and stay grumpy. Mr. Gecko, you're a huge inspiration to us all. But who was your muse? My dear old Nan. She would tell me, always remember to be true to yourself and to use that fast and friendly claim support on the Geico app. I follow her advice to this day. Get more than just savings. Get more with GEICO.