716: Release the CrackerBot!

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 DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, fuck getting old. That's all I got to say. Okay. Anything specific happen this week? It's been one of those weeks. You may have noticed that you did the bulk of the heavy lifting this week on the news.

Because, yeah, this week was dealing with a 97-year-old woman with a broken hip trying to figure out assisted living, in-home. healthcare, MRIs, travel, all sorts of shit. It's been a fucked up week. Yeah, that's not good. Although, you know, I have to say I'm...

I was, my wife and I were talking a bit about this earlier this week because, you know, the AI thing is getting pushed everywhere. And we were, it started with like, oh God, what the hell is our kid going to do for a living? He's just going to like. hopefully there's like, we've hit peak idiocracy and you can just sit in a couch and survive. Cause it goes just like, and then it became like, thank God we're at the point in our careers where we're getting out before all this AI stuff.

Completely takes over. Speak for yourself. Well, you know, we're in the twilights of our working years, theoretically. You are. Except for Walmart green ears and that sort of thing. And then, of course, you know, on the opposite end of the spectrum. we also grew up without social media. So I'm not thrilled about getting older, but I'm certainly happy that I'm right where I'm at in terms of the grand scheme of things and timing.

Oh, good for you. Good for you. I wake up with his sweat and existential dread going, yeah, my retirement plan is basically a bullet. So we're good with that. I'll stick with that one. yeah all right well that's that's not legal in the states but it is legal up here so if you decide i'm on my way except you can't buy bullets in canada fuck well no no we do it we do the humane way you don't you don't shoot yourself you get in a little pod and say good night

Oh, you know what I was going to do? I was going to get Dave to help me get a furry moose suit, and then I'll just go stand out in the woods. That'll do it. Yeah. Fuck death by cop, man. I want death by moose. Okay. Moose and squirrel.

Well, speaking of AI, on September 29th, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53, a first in the nation law requiring frontier AI developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta to publicly disclose safety protocols and reports. serious incidents. Good luck with that. Yeah. Where's that? Where's the bill for the internet cops? There are no internet cops. So I mean, you know, it's, it's good that we're putting out the legislation. Good luck enforcing.

Yeah, well, the law covers high compute systems and mandates incident reporting within days to state authorities alongside whistleblower protections for employees who flag risks. So the whistleblower protections, I think, is the best part about this. Absolutely. You need the whistleblowers to.

It's the only way we'll know. They're not going to self-report. Yeah, yeah. They're not. They're just absolutely not. The only way that their self-reporting is going to come a couple days after it's all over social media. Exactly. Or the families filed the lawsuits for the wrongful death. That's how it's, that's public disclosure. So, and I saw this one come through and I just, I just had to laugh. The title is NVIDIA is quaking in its boots. Okay. No, they're not.

They're the most profitable company in the world right now. So NVIDIA's Jensen Huang is out there clutching his leather jacketed pearls, warning that China is just a nanosecond behind in chip making. This isn't a geopolitical prophecy. It's a sales pitch. China banned its big tech firms from buying Nvidia chips, so now Wang is spinning tales of a formidable, hungry competitor to make Washington panic and keep the cash spigots open.

This whole thing is just him going on record and saying that, you know, the US tech is a national treasure and we must proliferate around the world. It's like the only reason he's doing this shit is because he. you know, there might be some competition soon. This is Elon's playbook. Yeah. Well, they're buds. They're buds.

Of course they are. Makes sense. All those billionaire buddies. All right. Yeah. So when you hear that news that NVIDIA is saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky ain't falling. Unless the sky is $3 trillion and it's falling right into their bank account. True that, true that.

I put this one in our follow-up just because we have covered it before, and it's a bit of light news compared to everything else we'll be talking about. After over four years of litigation and 34 years following the release of Nirvana's Nevermind, a federal judge has again dismissed the child.

pornography complaint filed by Spencer Eldon, the child who had been pornographied, apparently, who appeared on the famed album cover as a baby. As some will recall, this is only the most recent dismissal for this suit. which he levied back in 2021. We've been talking about this. Defendants included Nirvana's namesake company, the photographer Kirk Weddle, and Universal Music. They say that they knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography in the form of the...

Never mind cover photo. Long story short, he alleges suffering psychological and reputational harm as a result. There are pictures of most of us as babies with her. we willies hanging out exactly but but you got to admit he does have the this side of ron jeremy he does have the world's most famous willy so what about the guy who got his cut off do what was his name well i remember her name

Bob, Lorena Babbitt. Bobbitt? John Bobbitt, yeah. There you go. I don't know what his looks like, though. Well, it looks like a hot dog thrown in this corner. Yeah. Now, Judge Fernando Algonquin, or Alquin, I guess I'm thinking about taking a vacation, has officially granted the defendant's summary judgment motion and again tossed the suit with prejudice after explaining the ruling with a point-by-point breakdown, exploring, among many other things, the intent behind the photo.

and the presence of Eldon's parents at the shoot, the judge concluded that the album cover is not child pornography. Furthermore, the court also emphasized that Eldon had embraced and financially benefited from being featured on the album cover. The plaintiff also tattooed the album's name across his chest. The judge proceeded and even sent a thank you postcard depicting a hand-drawn illustration of the album cover to the photographer Weddle.

These actions relating to the album over time are difficult to square with his contentions that the album cover constitutes child pornography and that he sustained serious damages as a result. He just needs some money. That's it. He's broke. You know what would have solved this whole thing? If we would have had AI back then, because somebody would have just fired up Gemini and said, give me a picture of a baby in a pool chasing a dollar bill. There you go.

Because there aren't any guardrails for child pornography. Oh, Jesus. In the news. Daniel Eck is. Getting the heck out of the way. Did you work all day on that one? No, I've been trying all week to find anything decent and nothing came there. Ecked out. Except it's more eeked. You know, I just tried. He's stepping aside as Spotify's chief executive officer in January, but he's not leaving. He's becoming the executive chair. He is an Aeron now. God.

From January 1st, 2026, two current senior officers, Gustav Soderstrom, currently co-president and chief product and technology officer, and Alec Nordstrom. Co-president and chief business officer will become co-CEOs of Spotify, reporting to Eck, the company, which basically if they're reporting to Eck, that means he's still chief executive officer. I don't care what you name it.

They likened his new role to that of a European company's chair with power to determine capital allocation, plot Spotify's long-term direction, support the senior team, and invest heavily in defense contractors. A lot of people are pissed off about that. He's invested heavily in the weapons contractor Helsing.

like van hels van helsing which has uh prompted an exodus of artists from the platform including hotline tnt godspeed you black emperor king gizzard and the lizard wizard juju deer hoof dear durian and if they exceed in pulling their music massive attack one of the only band that i've heard of by the way from the list i've never heard of any of those people okay and here's the funny thing they're pissed off that they're they're you know he's

investing in defense companies but they're not pissed off that they're not making any money come on both yeah you know pick a side man come on Facebook and Instagram users in the UK will soon be offered paid subscriptions that remove ads in the coming weeks. Those over 18 can pay three pounds or approximately $4 per month on the web or four pounds or. approximately $5 per month when using Meta's iOS or Android apps. I wonder if you have to pay both fees if you want to use both.

Or if it's rolled in. If you're wondering why the mobile version is more expensive, then it blames that fee because of the fees levied by Apple and Google in their respective app stores. A no ad subscription will apply to any Facebook and Instagram account added to a meta, I guess if you pay for the one, that should count. Yes, you buy it on the web and use it on the app. Yeah.

which is what Meta uses to let people connect to logins on its different platforms. So they're getting what we all want. Yeah, I know. Might be firing up the VPN and trying to convince Meta that I'm now in the UK so I can just pay them a couple bucks and not have to deal with all the ad bullshit. Or just don't use it. That's cheaper and easier and better for the planet. And sanity.

So yeah, that as well. Anyways, they're doing that. More UK news. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a new requirement for all working adults in the country to carry a digital identification card called the Mark of the Beast. I'm sorry, the Brit card.

Supporters of the plan say digital ID cards can ensure that people have the right to work in the UK and thus could help crack down on illegal immigration and exploitative employment schemes. It will send a clear message that if you come here illegally, you will not be able to work deterring people. Or get hired by somebody who doesn't give a shit and gets you cash under the table.

Almost every illegal immigrant does today. Yes, the UK government also plans to have an outreach program, including face-to-face support for those who aren't able to use a smartphone or those who aren't as experienced with the digital world, like the homeless and older people. The announcement claims the scheme will use state-of-the-art encryption and authentication technology and that digital credentials will be stored directly on people's own device.

however critics say the id may infringe on civil liberties by requiring citizens to give the government additional personal information i can't see what the additional information is other than your phone number I don't know. Because we're all supposed to have IDs anyways. It's always like when people are like, the government's spying on you. They know everything about you. Wait until these guys hear about driver's licenses. Yeah. God.

I'm all for this. I think we should move these things digital. I wish we had those here as well. Well, not with the current administration, but you know. Well, sometimes when I go places, I don't want to take my phone, so I like the little plastic card. You should be able to have both. Yeah. Options. Options are good. Options are good. So.

Sora 2 has been in the news. This is OpenAI's new video tool. I have not been able to get in because I don't know why I'm a paid chat GPT subscriber for many, many moons now. But I don't get access. But apparently a lot of people have. And oh boy, it's been a roller coaster. Because the big thing that they did, OpenAI's genius team over there decided that... What we're going to do is we are going to just say, yeah, fuck copyright.

There's no more copyright. If you want your stuff removed, then you have to proactively tell us that you want it removed, which, okay. Opt out, not opt in. Totally opt out, not opt in. which has been phenomenal for the meme makers. Blessed are the meme makers because there's just about everything under the sun that you can imagine right now. But the funny one is everybody's dumping on Sam Altman, which I think is even funnier.

Well, you know who else this is good for? The lawyers. Oh, it's big for the lawyers. Oh, my God. Like they weren't busy enough with all of the other copyright lawsuits. But the funny thing is all the lawyers are probably using ChatGPT to fill out their legal briefs and their forms. So, you know, how's that going to work out? I don't know. But yeah, since it is invite only, if anybody has an invite, hit me up on the Discord. I wouldn't mind playing around.

Because I have a very vivid imagination and an evil streak. So come on, let me at it. Let me at it. But yeah, so that's part of the triumvirate of OpenAI news this week. because OpenAI also rolled out Instant Checkout, which is a new feature that lets US users buy products directly in chat, starting with Etsy sellers and expanding soon to more than a million Shopify merchants. Oh, great.

Yes, it runs on their agentic commerce protocol, which they made up themselves. Well, they sort of made it up themselves. They asked the guys at Stripe to help out, which is a good partner to have because as far as I can tell, every time I check out somewhere.

It's Stripe. Yep, Stripe has kind of taken over online stores. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is, when they started, they had the easiest checkout flow. That was their secret sauce. They made it so easy to check out that it was... You know, it's a no-brainer. I mean, we use them for stuff. Everywhere I go, it's like...

If you remember the days, Brian, and I'm sure you do, of getting a merchant account, setting up all that shit. Oh, God. It's like Stripe was a godsend on how easy it was to set up and just start taking credit cards. It blew PayPal out of the water. everything out of the water. So yeah, the fact that they're everywhere, not a shocker, but so the, the big catch is that you have to give open AI, like all your personal data to actually work.

Yeah, I am not giving an AI agent carte blanche with my credit card. Hells no. Hells no. I have not seen the terms of service update from any of the my card carrying companies that say, yeah, you know, look, if somebody in a basement steals your credit card. We'll give you the money back. If Chad GPT steals your money and send you like 3000 Rolex watches, because, you know, Ty Lopez, you made an Instagram post that you clicked on wrong. Well, you're out of luck.

So until I see that, that's not going to happen. Nope. It's probably not going to happen anyway because no. No. Now, here's the final nail in the coffin. OpenAI just overtook SpaceX to become the world's most valuable private company. The chat GPT maker is now valued at half a trillion dollars after employees sold about $6.6 billion worth of stock to investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and T. Rowe Price.

So that puts SpaceX at about 400 billion, TikTok at about 220 billion, and yes, OpenAI at 500 billion. These valuations make no fucking sense in the world. No, they don't. It's strange to me that something called a private company has billions of dollars worth of stock that employees own and are being sold to investors. Well, you know, you do have. It's private in terms that you and I can't buy it.

Yeah, yeah. But everybody else, you know, all the fat cats get in. Exactly. And yeah, that's kind of how that works there. They didn't have that when I was in tech and had stock, which really sucks. I wish they'd had that. Because I could have unloaded my Technorati stock. Yeah, you could have. But, you know, they hadn't figured out the better way to game the system yet. Nope. Nope. Yeah, they got that now.

Well, Disney has demanded that Character.ai stop using its copyrighted characters, and I'm sure they're just boilerplating that motherfucker and sending it over to OpenAI right now. Copy, paste, repeat. Yep. Axios reports that the entertainment juggernaut sent a cease and desist letter to Character.ai. claiming that it has chatbots based on its franchises, including Pixar films, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In addition to the claiming of the copyright infringement, the letter questioned whether these protected characters were being used in problematic ways. Oh, I fucking guarantee in conversations with underage users, for now at least, the platform appears to be responsive to Disney's demands. It's always up to rights holders to decide how people may interact with their IP, and we respond swiftly to requests to remove content that rights holders report to us.

Well, in the old world, it was actually your responsibility not to use copyrighted materials in your products. That was your job. There's a phrase Brian that is commonly used. that I think is the bane of our existence with the internet age and copyright. It's better to ask forgiveness than permission. That is where we're at. That's what everybody wants to do now. They're like, oh, mea culpa. Yeah, no, fast and break things. It's the whole ethos behind all of this. And it's such fucking bullshit.

Yeah, well, when the financial rules tilt to the fact that they have got more money to pay for the, you know, to pay for the fines, which they can knock down and, you know. deal with later than trying to go through actual negotiations to get the rights to do it in the first place, which is going to cost more, take longer. It's like, no, let's just do it.

Just call the lawyers, have it done. Look, Eric Schmidt said that in flat out said that, you know, so he's like, yeah, we'll just let the lawyers handle it later. Just do what you want to do. Cause I've got more money than God. Yeah. That's the problem. There's another problem. Hollywood actors are furious over the debut of Tilly Norwood, a so-called AI actress created by Elaine van der Velden.

of Particle 6 Productions. Van der Velden defended the project, calling it a piece of art and insisted it isn't meant to replace real performers. But her comments did little to calm the storm. Because the backlash exploded after she revealed her new AI talent studio was in talks to have Norwood quote unquote signed by agents. A move that actors say directly threatens their jobs, which are jobs that they fought to protect during last year's SAG.

which really fucked this town up for a while. So everybody has got their, their panties in a bunch over this saying that she's not an actress. She's a computer program. Don't give her. writes like an actual actor or actress has yeah i mean we talked about the same thing in the music world last week there's the the woman that's basically using ai and an ai generated voice to do her music and people are like well how's that gonna work

Mm-hmm. Who owns what and who gets what. Yep. Good luck. You know what? Tilly just should start a podcast because we've already talked about the company making 3,000 AI podcasts a week. So head at it, Tilly. Go shit in the well with everybody else. Yeah. Well, somebody will fucking sign her. I'm sure. It's Hollywood, man. Come on. It. It.

Well, the FCC recently published a 163-page PDF showing the electrical schematics for the iPhone 16e, despite Apple specifically requesting them to be confidential. This is what happens when you give a... Big golden orb to the president. He fucks you anyways. Because I don't believe this was an accident.

Probably not. Well, is there even enough staff at the FCC to actually do anything right now? Isn't everybody getting fired and furloughed? One would think so. The agency also distributed the cover letter from Apple alongside the schematics, which is dated September 16th. The letter says, please request our privacy, indicating that the documents contain confidential and proprietary trade secrets. So they printed that too.

The cover letter asked for the documents to be withheld from public view indefinitely. Apple even suggested that a release of the files could give competitors an unfair advantage, but they just put it. out there. Now, yes, competitors could simply buy a handset and open it up to get this information as the iPhone 16E came out back in February, but this leak eliminates any guesswork whatsoever. It's schematics. Here you go. Build it.

Was it signed, thank you for your attention to this matter? Thank you for your attention to this matter. With a drawing of a nude woman in the signature right where the pubes should be. Yes. The FCC has not addressed how this leak happened or what it intends to do about it, which is fuck all. Fuck all. It's out. Yeah. where she left the barn so there you go that's what you do for the golden orbs yeah uh speaking of the president alphabet will pay donald trump 22 million

as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought against the company over the suspension of various YouTube accounts following the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol. The suit includes other plaintiffs whose YouTube channels were banned that will split an additional $2.5 million. Is this just a fucking payola bribe? It's all it is. It's all it is. $22 million. Please leave us alone. See how well that worked out for Apple?

Alphabet? Twitter, now known as X, since his acquisition and rebrand by Elon Musk, also paid President Trump roughly $10 million to settle a similar suit. meta also settled in suit with the president over does any of these fuckers have a goddamn spine nope not a one no not a one just business

Yep. And this is just the stuff that we know about. This isn't how much how much Trump coin do they hold? Yeah, this is the stuff that we can just follow the money on. This is just fucking court cases and people fucking. goddamn fucking spineless PR shit. It's PR shit to make him feel better, to make the little baby in charge, have his little, little, you know, moment in the sun. Yeah.

Well, if you're chronically online, unfortunately, as much as Jason and I are, you probably were aware of the whole cracker barrel thing that happened a while back. And maybe something felt off about that to you. It certainly did to me. Did you, in the midst of the endless stream of outrage directed at the Southern Country-style restaurant, pause and think, there's just no way anybody cares about the Cracker Barrel logo this much, right?

Well, honestly, I actually, it had the ring of truth, all the outrage, because I know Southern crackers. They kind of get up in arms over shit like this. Yeah, well, you may be wrong. The rest of us might have been on to something. According to the data compiled by the Intelligent Platform Peak Metrics, nearly half of the early posts about Cracker Barrel's logo change appeared to be generated by bots.

Who? Who did that? They grabbed a sample of 52,000 posts made on X within the first 24 hours of Cracker Barrel's announcement that it would be modernizing its logo. To a very plain and generic design, in that time frame it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. Those numbers climb even higher if a boycott was mentioned in the post.

So this was unlikely to have been an organic grassroots response, but a bot-assisted amplification seeded by meme and activist accounts. China. Putin! Putin's back there going, I like Cracker Barrel. Do not fuck with Cracker Barrel. It's all about dividing the populace and it's doing its job according to data collected by Open Measures. Similar conversations were happening on all the tech platforms like Donald Trump's True Social, Twitter knockoffs Getter and Gab, 4chan and Rumble.

Over those platforms, posters regularly tie the Cracker Barrel logo chains to terms like woke and DEI because apparently one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy. From August 19th, when the change was announced to September 5th, a few days after the company not only rolled back the logo change, but also deleted LGBTQX and diversity and inclusion pages from its website.

About 2,020,000 posts were made about the whole debacle on X. Peak Metrics estimates that nearly a quarter of those, or 25% in total, were likely posted by bots. So, yeah, it's just outrage cycles that aren't even run by humans anymore. I can just see it's Putin sitting there in the Kremlin going, release the cracker bot. Cracker bot. What the fuck? I hate this timeline, Brian. It's pretty shit. I mean, this is all over a fucking substandard biscuit and gravy.

I want the toilet, lazy boy. I want Owl My Balls playing on my big TV 24-7. And I just want to have Soylent fed intravenously to me. I fucking give up. I just fucking give up. Yeah. It's good times.

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Media Candy. Well, since I don't have Ow My Balls playing on loop for me, I would first and foremost like to thank Geeks Corner on Discord for all of the traitors and more that I asked for. And a new show, The Fortune Hotel. I mean, how far off from Ow My Balls? My balls are these shows, really. I am getting close, baby. I'm getting close. I mean, you're just sitting there. Getting there. I'm in search of. I am in search of, Brian. Pipe in reality into your reality shows in your veins.

All reality competition of a certain ilk, not, not love Island, please. Dear God. No, I don't want shows where they talk a lot. I want action shows. where they're trying to stab each other in the back. I just probably love him, but I can't fucking stand that show. But sir, you are a gentleman in a pirate of the first order because I could not find any of this shit anywhere. So thank you so much. Oh, you're making the evenings a little better in this fucking hellscape that I live in. All right.

And I want to throw a shout out to friend of the show MXV. He posted up his Riot Fest photos for this year, the 20th anniversary. They're stellar. And he posted some shows that are pictures of a show that I really wish I'd have gotten to go to. It was Naked Raygun's final show. Because Jeff Pizzotti, the lead singer, has Parkinson's. Right. It was apparently a really good show. They had lots of sing-alongs like they usually do at Ray Gunn shows. And it looked like it was a damn good time.

Pierre's daughter, Pierre Kedzie, was the bass player who died a couple years ago. His daughter came on stage and played bass, like his bass. So it was apparently a really heart-wrenching show. I wish I'd have gotten to see it. But go check out Mike's Riot Fest photos. They're pretty fucking good. All right.

Slow Horses Season 5 is out. They're doing one a week, and they didn't do the three, then one, then one. They're just doing one a week, which was a real kick in the nuts out of my balls when I went to go. I watched the first episode, and I'm like, oh, my God, I can't. What? wednesday fuck you so uh two episodes in it is phenomenal this season it really is good all right

I highly recommend going and get caught up, Brian. It's so good. Okay. They dropped the Frankenstein trailer yesterday for Guillermo del Toro's new version. I'm digging it. I'm in. I'm in. I'm hit or miss with Guillermo. We'll see. If nothing else, it's going to be really pretty.

It will be really pretty. It may not make any sense and it may not be interesting, but it'll be pretty. So you can not go see it in theaters October 17th because who's going to do that when it's going to be out on Netflix October 7th? Yeah, November 7th. November 7th. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, you know, I can wait two weeks. I can wait two weeks. No problem. Not a problem at all. Save me 75 bucks for, you know, some popcorn and some sticky shoes. Yeah.

And speaking of waiting, the third episode of Human dropped on PBS this week, Human Neanderthal Encounters, and it was just as good as the other two. And as some... friends uh on discord pointed out you can of course go to sweden and get the whole thing or you could uh use your vpn and make put yourself in the uk and just use the bbci player to to view the whole thing right away

This is one of those ones that I don't feel the need to binge. It's learned, heady stuff, and I can wait a week. It's fine. It's very good, though. I highly recommend watching these things. They're fantastic. Okay. And as I was scrolling about on the social media, because I still follow both Scott Galloway and What's Her Face, Kara Swisher, even though I don't really listen to Pivot anymore because, you know, you get tired of their shtick.

Uh, at some point, uh, I did notice that they're going on tour, Jason. They're taking pivot on the road live for the people to see, for the people to see Kara Swisher go, I don't know. What do you think about that? She's going to ask every single person in the audience what they think about it instead of giving her own fucking opinion. And Scott Galloway said, look at the dog's dick. That's good. Come on. That's good. So if you want to see that live.

The ticket price is here in Toronto. The cheapest ticket price, $142. Oh, I'm sorry. That's the most expensive one. The cheapest ticket price, $79, which is a lot for a live podcast of people giving their... thoughts. What's even worse, Brian, is it's basically sold out. I know. They're stars. You sent me this and I just looked around and I was just thinking of last week's episode. Get a rope!

I just want to hang myself when I read this shit. Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong, Brian? I don't know. We have opinions. We don't ask other people what they think. Yeah. I guess that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. So we were talking about the AI actress and last week we had the AI singing.

Groups. And now we've got AI DJs. Yes. The digital Wolfman Jack is coming to YouTube music. They have announced YouTube labs, which is being described as a new way for users to take our cutting edge AI experiments for a test drive. No, thanks. This looks like a YouTube-centric version of the pre-existing Google Labs, which is another place for folks to test out experimental AI tools. They have something new to play with there. YouTube Labs is testing AI hosts for its music app.

hate these hosts are designed to deepen a listening experience by providing relevant stories fan trivia and fun commentary about your favorite music and since it's all pulled from ai it will most likely be wrong As opposed to what real learned people who know shit about music will tell you. Regular YouTube users have probably noticed the proliferation of AI slop on the platform these past several months, but the prospect of virtual music hosts is rather innocuous.

not to me, it will likely lead to even more AI being forced on the platform. They recently added a boatload of AI tools for creators, including the ability to turn spoken dialogue into slop-filled songs. It's also handling over age verification to AI. That's going to be awesome. And it's testing its own version of Google's famous or infamous AI overviews, which is where the DJs are probably pulling their bullshit from right now, which again, will be wrong. Yeah.

Okay. Another one not to use. Yep. Oh, I love this. Here's the headline. How many streaming subscribers did Disney lose after suspending Jimmy Kimmel? And there's a very long article that you just have to scrub because 1.7 million. You could have just said 1.7 million streaming subscribers. Disney lost after suspended Jimmy Kimmel and saved everybody the fucking time. Yes, this could have been a sentence, not an article.

Yep. Well, there you go. 1.7 million. It's a lot. That's impressive. Very impressive. We can see why they backtrack. Yeah. So vote with your wallet, people, because that might be the only way you can vote. If anybody has anything in their wallet left, what's in your wallet? Crypto! Not much. Not much, Jason.

It's time for my annual rant, Jason. We are at the MLB postseason. We're down to the wire. We're down to eight teams now. We've had the wildcard games already. I subscribe to the MLB network to, you know, watch the baseball season. When do they stop showing games? The postseason. Because even though I paid a lot of money to watch the entire baseball season, ESPN, ABC, Fox, and TBS have all bought the rights for the postseason. So you have to have basically all of them.

if you want to see all the games. And you know where the games are not? They're not on the fucking MLB network. Unlimited does not mean unlimited anymore, Brian. It means the season, not the postseason, apparently. Yep. I went through this entire baseball season without even recognizing that it was baseball season. So I think I'm getting good at this shit. You were very good at ignoring things.

Well, we talked a few weeks back when iOS 26 came out about how to go ahead and turn down the transparency and many of the other features to make it look like it was before. And I finally just said, fuck it. I'm putting it all on. I might as well get used to it. You went full liquid glass. I went full liquid glass. I've gotten used to it. It's fine. Although I didn't turn on AI. I'm not stupid. I actually did turn on the AI stuff.

It's still bad. The summer is summarizing of, you know, the on the notifications list. They're so far off of anything that's actually in the messages that I'm going to go read. I'm like. Yeah, that still doesn't work. Not ready for prime time. Nope. What the one thing that they did do right, though, finally, is they the journal app is now available on.

all of their devices in cross-platform and syncable. So that was the original impetus why I went to the public beta for 26 on my MacBook Air, my old 13-inch MacBook Air. Right. just to test it out to see if it actually worked. And it works great. So now I have it on my phone, my iPad, and my laptops and my desktops. Basically everything with a fucking Apple logo has it on it now. So it's nice.

It made me have to go around to all of my devices and remove it. There you go. Because I don't care. Yeah, I mean, I was a fan of day one for a long time, which I'm glad I don't pay for anymore since Matty Matt Mullenweg owns it. And I'm still mad at him. for all the bullshit that he did with WordPress. But yeah, I think it's a great journaling app. You know, it's secure. You can lock it down so nobody can just wander up and, you know, read your deepest darkest thoughts.

And they can just listen to this podcast and hear them all from you. That's true. That's true. Well, Brian, just imagine how juicy it is if I don't share it on this show. So pretty, pretty good stuff, man.

That's good. I'm trying to tell the dog because maybe somebody will come see our show. I don't know. What do you think about that? I just don't know. I just don't know. Well, Apple doesn't know what the fuck it's going to do with its Vision Pro series because they just hung that up to dry. That's been clear over the last year plus. Well, they said that they were working on the new latest and greatest lighter and cheaper version.

of the vision pro headset, but it looks like now since a meta and Ray ban have gotten together and created that abomination of whatever the fuck it is that they're, they're going to pivot. So. Yeah, they're going to put that on the hold and see if they can make some glasses. I think that's going to be the next frontier are going to be smart glasses, which I'm fine with. I don't care if it's from somebody that's not fucking Mark Zuckerberg. That's true.

Yeah. Johnny Ive is apparently working on that for OpenAI, which would be interesting. Yeah. Well, they said it wasn't going to be, you know, like a... They said it wasn't going to be a wearable device, but they didn't say it wasn't going to be glasses, even though glasses you can wear. I think they're trying to play a little trick of semantics there, but yeah.

But, you know, everybody's like, oh, well, they wasted all their time on the Vision Pro. And I'm like, no, they didn't. I mean, if you pay attention to what Apple's done in the past, they will put out a product that will get them to the product that they want to be. They're interstitial products. Yes. They got really lucky that they're.

First interstitial product was the iPhone, because what they originally wanted to do was make the iPad, but they couldn't. So they had to make the iPhone first. So they're good at that one. Yes, that was that was a that was a lucky one, Joe. But yeah, I think they'll probably get something decent in the next. I don't know. I might be dead by then. Who the fuck cares? That's true.

Speaking of semantics, Logitech has launched the signature Slim Solar Plus K980, a new solar-powered keyboard that isn't fucking solar. Okay. Because you don't need to put it under the sun whenever it runs low on battery. This is pretty cool. The company says it can use light from...

any source to stay charged and ready to use, and that you can use it in complete darkness for up to four months once it's fully charged. As long as the light source reaches 200 lux in brightness, which is considered dim lighting during daytime, it can charge the keyboard. So this is pretty awesome. You don't even have to think about plugging the keyboard in or changing its battery. It's powered by a rechargeable battery that Logitech says can last up to 10 years.

And if it does malfunction, the company told Verge that you can replace it on your own because it's encased in plastic and is sold by iFixit. This will be available for $100. Basically, if I ever need another keyboard, this is the one I'm going to get. yeah is it backlit i'm trying to i can't see if it's no that but i mean the fact that you can just like leave it in a fucking sealed room with a overhead light and it's going to charge that's awesome

Yeah. Yeah. I'm cool with that. And I love Logitech keyboards. I use one. Because it pairs with the MX Master Series really nicely. I'm just seeing here, powered by a large light charge technology. Doesn't say anything about being backlit, which sucks. because I like backlit keyboards because I do work in a darkened room all the time. But, you know, if it's anything like the other Logitech keyboards, it's going to be good.

I like the key field, you know, all of that stuff. Yep. And the MX Master stuff is amazing. I love the mouse. It's fantastic. Yeah, I stopped at the two. I've got the three. See, the three did not do it for me. The scroll wheel by the thumb is just, they fucked it up compared to the one and the two. It doesn't work right. The buttons aren't right.

But there's an MX Master 4 out now, so you can go get that one. And that looks like it has the same stupid scroll wheel problem that the 3 had, so maybe not. All right. But for video editing and audio editing, they're programmable to hell and back. That's what's so great about them. I'll get this keyboard maybe some year. Some year. Some year.

Well, this one kind of bums me out. Amazon Fire TV devices are expected to ditch Android for Linux in 2025. Well, it is 2025, so get on it. The problem here is they're not going to. update the old devices which saddens me because i have a fire tv and it sucks

I've got fire sticks and I use them. I've sideloaded shit. They're my pirate sticks. And I won't be able to do that with a new one, which is one of the reasons they're doing it. They don't want to let people do the nefarious things that I like to use them for. Ah, okay. So stock up. Stock up now. Stock up. Get those 4K sticks now. Yeah, because my TV, I... The TV's beautiful. I cannot fault the TV. It's the operating system and all the Amazon shit. So when I turn the TV on...

I get ads. I get fucking Amazon ads that I don't want. And, you know, half the time it, half the time it will do the thing that it's supposed to do, which is auto switch to the Apple TV. The other half, it doesn't. So I got to go find it in the menu is terrible and slow. It's ridiculously slow. And the worst part is I'll be watching something on my Apple TV and the OS on the TV will auto update in the middle of whatever I'm watching.

and knock the TV out for like five to ten minutes while it updates the OS on the TV without even asking me to do it. It is so frustrating. So frustrating. Amazon Fire devices are shit. They're garbage. or at least the OS is garbage. Like I said, the TV is beautiful, but the, yeah, the OS gotta go, gotta go. Uh, yeah.

We talked about the mid-journey version of their little TV where you can go look at all of the crap that's being made on mid-journey, the little videos. Meta jumped on the bandwagon. They've got a little new thing called Vibes, where you can go and scroll through everything that's made on Meta's AI.

They say, think of it as MTV's liquid television meets a corporate algorithm except without the culture edge or actual human creativity. That sums it up. I looked at it for about five minutes because I just kept going hoping. I'm like, is there anything in here that's good? No, not at all. It's just garbage. So yeah, skip that one is what I'm trying to say. All right. I got something else for you to skip after coming out of nowhere, a viral new app that pays people.

To record their phone calls for the purpose of training AI has been yanked offline after security flaw allegedly exposed user data. Shocking. Neon launched just last week and quickly shot to the number two spot on iPhones. top free app chart before it was taken down on thursday why i have no idea users sign up with their phone number and grant neon permission to record calls made via the app every time they place or receive a phone call from the app

It automatically records both sides of the conversation if the other party is also using Neon, or in theory, just the Neon's user's side if the person isn't on the app, and I stress in theory. The recordings and related data are then supposedly anonymized. and stripped of identifying details, and sold to vetted AI and data partners. Why would you do that? You can earn a hot 30 cents per minute for calls with another Neon user, or even better,

15 cents per minute when calling a non-user capped at $30 a day. Oh God. It was pitched as a way for people to earn some money from their data, which tech companies have long profited from. Things took a turn on Thursday, just a scant three days after the app launched, after TechCrunch discovered and reported a major flaw that lets nearly anyone access sensitive Neon user data, including phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts.

So all those other AI companies could just scrape it all and not pay you. While testing the app, TechCrunch used the network traffic tool Burp Suite to analyze the data coming in and out of the app. Neon's interface only shows a simple list of a user's recent calls and how much they earned.

However, using this burp suite, they were able to get a lot more info from the app's backend servers, like full call transcripts, public links to raw audio files from other users' calls. They could also access all the metadata from users. which included both parties, phone numbers, time and duration of call and how much each call earned. But they said your data privacy is our number one priority and we want to make sure it is fully secure even during this period of rapid growth. Okay.

Yep. Now, 30 bucks a day. I wish I had known about this thing before they screwed up. I could get like a bunch of burner phones. Bunch of phones. Literally have them talk to each other with. chat gpt on voice all day long i hope somebody is doing that i seriously well they can't now but when it comes back it comes back

Yeah. I mean, shit, man, I just get a bunch of Google numbers and take the 17 computers I have around here and just have them all talk to each other all day. I'm sure that's not against the terms of service. I'm sure it's not. But, you know, hey, just like the big tech companies, don't ask permission. Do it first. Exactly. I'll apologize for my cell when I have six months to... Time to cool my heels. You can send back that cool $300 you made from them.

I haven't put my commissary before I go in. Keep me in ramen for the six months. Yeah. And speaking of security flaws, researchers have discovered major security flaws with tile tracking tags. According to a report by Wired, these flaws could allow both. the company itself and tech savvy stalkers to track users locations. The very thing that you're not supposed to be able to let people do.

The security issue could also let a malicious actor falsely frame a tile owner for stalking, as the flaw can make it appear as if a particular tag is constantly in the vicinity of somebody else's tag. So this is all static. They basically send the static MAC address and a rotating ID. The rotating ID changes all the time, but that also changes in a very discernible way, apparently. They never hide or do anything with the static MAC.

So yeah, this is all kinds of bad. I can't believe it took this long for people to find this. Oh God. Cause nobody, nobody buys tiles. Everybody buys the damn air tags. That's true. Yeah. Wired said the company stopped communicating with researchers who informed them of this back in February. So that's one way to deal with it. We're just another lesson. Another lesson. Yeah. When the researchers tell you that there's a flaw, they're not going to go away. Yeah.

Just because you stick your head in the sand doesn't mean they're going to stop talking about it. What did you do about this? Well, we blocked their emails. Yeah. Great. Jesus. Well, Brian, do you remember the Comet Browser from Perplexity? I do remember it being announced. Yes. Well, now it is available for everyone for free. Thanks. Yeah. It's available on Mac and windows right now and everybody can use it. I wonder if it has a neon plugin. Fantastic. Oh, so.

Yeah. Another piece of technology that I highly recommend you don't install, at least not on your computer, put it on your enemy's computer all day long. But yeah, I don't know if I have a, you know what? I just might make a new. A new account on a machine, a clean account, and then mess around with it and put in some bogus stuff to see what it does. All right. You do that. Just to try it. I'm not touching it. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, I used to have my Parallels account.

came up for renewal. And here's the thing this week too. So many services that I had renewed that I forgot were going to renew because I forgot to put them in the calendar. What, no emails telling you that this was about to happen? Fucking zero. That is bullshit. Zero emails. Yeah. No alerts saying, hey, you're going to renew next week. You know, just letting you know, nothing. The one that pissed me off the most was Grammarly. That was $144 hit.

I would have canceled it because it's like, no, I don't need you anymore. I use a bunch of other shit. It's nice to have, but it's not a need to have. What I need to have is that $144 because that $144 you took was going to my fucking... health insurance payment which i couldn't pay because you fucking took my money you assholes oh it's getting bad it is getting bad

So I did, from the nice people at Parallels, get an email this week that said, hey, you're going to renew. It's going to cost you a bunch of money. You sure you want to keep it? I'm like, no, I don't. So thank you, Parallels. There you go.

The Dark Side Ha! With Dave Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast superhost Dave Bittner decodes all things cyber on the cyberwire every single day. Exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans. Dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat. Breaks down industrial cybersecurity on control loop and... and brings the chuckles on only malware in the building, sometimes with extra hot sauce. Hi, Dave. Hello. So we we've talked about the Princess Bride and.

A surprising number, a surprising number of our Discord users, A, either haven't seen The Princess Bride, or B, have just seen The Princess Bride and hated it when they watched it. And by... A surprising number of our Discord users. I mean, a number greater than zero. Two. Two people. Two people hated it. Okay. That's a lot. No, but there's a very obvious reason for it, and it's what I call the Great Goonies Divide.

And which is you have to be a certain age at the first time you see these movies. If you were older when the Goonies came out, adults at the time, they did not particularly care for the movie. And if you manage to avoid the Goonies when you are, say. if you're roughly our age, when it came out and you didn't watch it until you were an adult, it's not that great. It's great because you have these awesome childhood memories of it and you saw it at the right time.

Yeah, I was following a similar line of thought, which is that there are a lot of movies that don't hold up for a variety of reasons. In my mind, the one I usually come to is Caddyshack, which we all love, right? Hilarious, but it does not hold up. My experience anyway is that it does not hold up. with the younger generation. I've shown it to both of my boys and they're like, well, I mean, I see how you think it's funny.

And I'm glad I saw it because now I understand a lot of the things that you and mom say all the time. You'll get nothing and like it. But, you know, it just doesn't hold up. So I guess my question is, has the princess bride has time. put the Princess Bride in that category where for pacing or just the type of humor that it has in it and so on and so forth, does it no longer resonate with the upcoming generation?

Well, I would say no to that because my son loved it. Again, I think it really comes down to the age at which you see it. I think it's very important that you see it before you're older and jaded. Yeah. Okay. I saw it in high school. I mean, I saw it in the theater. I was 17 or 18. Of course, loved it. Yeah. Somebody brought up the production value, too. They said that it was so cheesy because the...

But that's part of its charm. Yeah, see, you know, we didn't have like crazy CG and stuff back then. The ROUSs were literally a dude in a rat suit, you know? It was not good, but it was still funny. yeah yeah yeah i mean that's another interesting question is in this age of ai and computer generated special effects how much of How much is the current generation willing to suspend their disbelief? They tend not to be.

I mean, we would watch old – I don't know. Star Trek. Well, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, right? That sort of thing. Batman in the 60s. Yeah. Yeah, The Fly. uh, obvious. Well, I mean, look, the cantina scene in star Wars, which we'll, we'll get to in a bit, but, uh, Right. So, I don't know. I mean, look, there is no right or wrong when it comes to how someone perceives. And how someone perceives art. There absolutely is. Okay. Sounds like me, Brian.

If someone doesn't enjoy something, that's fine. And if they love it, then that's fine, too. I think it's surprising that people wouldn't enjoy The Princess Bride. For all these reasons we've stated, I don't question it. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's just the way it is. Yeah. Doesn't mean they're not wrong.

Well, my son watched Blade Runner over the weekend for the first time. He's taking a film class and Blade Runner was on his list of required. watching and so he watched it and overall he enjoyed it but he said to me yeah i mean it's kind of got it's got old movie pacing yeah yeah that's true old movies are slow Yeah, they're much slower. We don't think of Blade Runner as being slow, but by modern sensibilities, it is. What's interesting is I re-watched Blue Thunder this week. Oh.

That movie, there's more of that movie in my imagination than there actually was on the screen. It's a 90-minute movie. It's a 90-minute movie, and it moves actually really fast for a movie from the early 80s. And it's still really entertaining. I mean, it is a great movie, I think, start to finish. Is that the one where they put in, like, whisper mode on the helicopter to be able to look in the naked lady's window or something?

Yeah, there's the memorable scene for Dave. That's what I remember from watching it on HBO. And here's where the Mandela effect comes in. I love it's a Mandela effect. Whisper mode was not part of that scene where they're looking at the lady doing the naked yoga. They were in the regular helicopter staring in our window. Okay. Well, there you go. Yeah. And they got chased off because the neighbor looked out and like, why is this fucking helicopter next to my house?

But it is a fine scene to go watch the movie for again, I would say. Throwing no shade for my memory. No, no, no. That part, spot on. The naked yoga scene was... Awesome. You can just see Naked Yoga on various websites these days, I'm just going to point out. Yeah, but it's better on the big screen. It's not the same. Yeah, it's vintage. It's better. Retro. Exactly. It's more cinemagraphic. Cinemagraphic. You need to make t-shirts. Just have the word cinemagraphic. Big pixelated boobs.

Right. Cinemological. Cinemological. Cinemographic. But anyway, the pacing was actually really fast in that one. And it was so fast that I... made up parts in my memory too but um you know what's worth it for is the practical helicopter effects because they're not effects they're practical helicopter stunts and they are mind-boggling what they do with helicopters back then i don't know i saw the matrix Well, you know.

That was another one I watched with my son. I watched with him was The Matrix, the original Matrix, which I hadn't seen in probably 20 years. Right. Same thing. He said, hey, Jack, what do you think? He said, I enjoyed it. It was pretty slow in parts. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. But he was right. And in watching it with him, because some of the stuff like the high pacing of the fight scenes, which was brand new in The Matrix. is now routine,

And so in The Matrix, they go on a little long with it because it's new and interesting. Our eyes were wide open when we watched it, but now it's like, okay, we got that. We get it. Come move on. All right, fine. He's dodging bullets. Got it. Moving on. Right, exactly.

Brian, when your kid grows up, he's going to see John Wick and go, yeah, the pacing was just a little too slow. I couldn't handle it. What are you talking about? There's going to be 30-second edits of it on whatever the future TikTok is, and that's all he's going to see. That's true. Yeah. Right. Hardwired into his brain.

Yeah. He won't watch it so much as absorb it. Yeah. Well, we're both, well, Dave and I are both going off to our respective vacations pretty soon into our respective Disney parks. Dave, I believe you're going to Disney world and I will be. visiting Disneyland Paris for the first time. So I'm very excited about that. I did see this article in Gizmodo, the best Disney park ride overlays and where to find them. A lot of these are up to you.

to go see if you can because they're at walt disney world of course the most famous one i've seen many times at disneyland in anaheim the haunted mansion overlay where they do the nightmare before christmas stuff yeah i've never seen any of these other ones although i will say

The inclusion of It's a Small World is a bit of a cheat. That's not so much an overlay as that they've started to put Disney characters into the ride for the younger generations that are very bored by the very slow pacing of It's a Small World. So they're trying to throw in stuff that they'd recognize. And I've seen those as well. But a lot of these are definitely over at Disney World. The one I most wanted to see, which I guess nobody gets to see because they stopped doing it in 2017.

is the Jingle Cruise, the overlay for Jungle Cruise, where they make a bunch of Christmas jokes. That would be awesome. Yeah, that would be good. That one I've never seen. They will be doing the Tron light cycle, nine inch nails overlay while we're there. Very cool. Get to see that. I can't say that I know anything about Nine Inch Nails except the name of the band. Not surprised.

Yeah, if you asked me to name a Nine Inch Nails song, I would not be able to do so. I'm sure there are Nine Inch Nails songs you could play, and I'd say, oh, yeah, I know that. I claim ignorance when it comes to Nine Inch Nails. My poor goth heart is bleeding black right now. I know. I know. I claim ignorance on overlay. What is an overlay for those of us who are not disnophiles?

When they take the normal ride and augment it for a promotion or season or whatever, like they take the normal Haunted Mansion and they basically shut it down for two weeks and they put in all these Nightmare Before Christmas theme into it. Okay. So it's not so much a crossover, but a takeover. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. So you get a special version of a ride that you've been on a hundred times. Right. So yeah. More interesting. It's a small world as a crossover.

That's the difference. Yes. So I have seen the Haunted Mansion Nightmare Before Christmas, which is great. I've seen Space Mountain. uh, when they do hyperspace mountain, that's, I have not, I'm very, I want to very badly. Yeah. Uh, it's just space mountain with star Wars music and, they project things onto the. Like X-Wings and TIE fighters. Yeah. Yep. Yep. That's fun. I have not spotted baby Groot in It's a Small World.

My sons went on the Guardians of the Galaxy mission breakout after a dark thing. I wrote it during the day. They went back at night and wrote it and said it was amazing. And then this cosmic rewind. with a holiday remix. I guess they only did that one season. So that I'd like to see. Um, I have written, uh, this, the, uh, cosmic rewind.

I've been on it twice, and I think both times we got the music September on it, which was great. What I'd love to do, what I'm hoping for this time is that I get Disco Inferno. Oh, that'd be cool. Yeah, that'd be my other choice. I was not aware of the Jingle Cruise.

There's living with the land, glimmering greenhouses. I don't know. I guess if that's up, we'll do that while we're there. There's a bunch of things that are closed while we're going to be there because that's one of the downsides about going off season is. Things are being refurbed. Same at Disneyland Paris. The one ride I really wanted to do was the Remy one, and that's shut down and getting refurbished. Oh, okay. Bit of a bummer. Yeah, no, that's just one ride.

Yeah. I mean, the other thing is the rides are around forever. So it's not like – I have a friend who did – motion graphics work for Disney World rides. And he was saying the cool thing is that you get to do... work for these rides so you get to see them he said but the pain is that the work you do for them will run for 20 years so yeah you're not getting royalties you're not getting royalties and there's not much repeat business

Because they so rarely change things. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I'm looking forward to our trip. I'm definitely ready. I think I mentioned before, this is the first time my wife and I have been... back to disney world since we had kids without kids right so uh i'm not sure how what we're going to make of our our freedom and well you're going to enjoy all the alcohol in the park

That is true. We're definitely going to do that. I think we're going to enjoy a lot of nice meals and go to restaurants that we normally wouldn't go to or in the past couldn't afford to go to. So that'll be fun. Full recap in a couple weeks from both of us. Yeah, there you go. Yay. Jason can take the segment off. I'll tell you where the button is. You guys can press it, record it, send it to me when you're done. Yeah, I'm familiar with that.

I put a link in here to a YouTube video. The Home Depot R2D2s are hitting stores and people are buying them and unboxing them and assembling them. I swear I'm not making this up. When we hang up here today, I'm going to be driving over to my local Home Depot to see if they have them in stock. It is impressive. Yeah.

If they do, I'm going to be buying one. I do like the fact that they have made it so that it is no effort at all to un... holiday your r2d2 well it's just a string of lights on it so right but but they didn't like make it so that you had to clip any wires or perform any serious modifications that just don't put them on and there's our judy too yeah uh so good for them so yes uh i will be getting mine as soon as i can find one to buy uh it is the hot item at home depot right now so wish me luck

Beware of all the ice agents. Right. He's fine. He's the right color. He's very pale. I do have dark hair, though. I know, but they're running through the aisles. They cause a trip and fall hazard. Oh, yeah. I like that the YouTube channel that you link to is 1313 Harbor Props, which 1313 Harbor is the address for Disneyland in Anaheim. Oh. Yeah. I didn't know that. All right. Nerd. Nerd. It was my fucking neighborhood. I just know the address.

Right, right. So, I mean, it was written right there on the restraining order. Yeah, pretty much. I have to stay. Luckily, it was only a two block radius and my mom's house is three blocks away. Right, right.

I do know the address for Paramount Studios. So I guess it works. Yeah. Okay. So here's a question for the two of you. My son Jack has a girlfriend. So she's 19 years old and she's never seen Star Wars. Oh, you're asking a question about Star Wars. I'm asking. I would recommend lube and the rubber. As my dad said, no diseases. Yeah. I have had all those conversations with Jack and I feel as though he's in good place. You guys watch the boys together. That's all you need.

Oh, yeah, that's true. Although we watched the first episode of what's the one? Gen V? Yeah, the first episode of season two. And we pulled the ripcord. We're done. You are? Yeah. It was just, we both looked at each other and we're like, that was terrible. It was terrible. I kind of liked it, but in hindsight, I'm like, I have not felt the need to go back and watch another episode at all.

So we'll watch the boys proper when it comes out and hopefully it won't disappoint us. But yeah, we're done with the Gen V thing. Okay, back to Star Wars. So back to Star Wars. So she's 19 or so years old, has never seen anything Star Wars. Right. Nothing. No movies, no TV shows, nothing. So, and generally she's not someone who's into sci-fi. Okay. So my son is trying to figure out what the best way. Right.

But the best way is... Lisa, no like you. I said, good day, sir. How to introduce her to Star Wars. And so basically what we've come down to is, does he... Does he show her a new hope or does he show her either and or, or rogue one, because those are the most modern star Wars that will. appeal to modern sensibilities. I'd go straight chronological. Chronological release? In-universe. No, in-universe chronological. I'd start with Phantom Medicine, go from there.

See, he doesn't want to start her with the prequels. Yeah, because they suck, but I mean... Apparently, but they've had this whole renaissance, particularly amongst the younger generation. That's the thing that... I don't understand and why I'm saying maybe you should go that way. According to everything I read online,

Those are their favorites from that age group. They love those movies because kids have no taste anymore. So it's perfect. It's what they grew up with. My argument was to watch A New Hope because it is still a roller coaster ride. It mostly holds up. It does not drag. I don't know. Every movie we just talked about having pacing issues, that absolutely exists in A New Hope. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. What would you consider to be a slow scene in The New Hope? Staring at the two suns rising. Oh.

But the music, Brian, the music. The long shots of the 1970s computer graphics in the X-Wing. The droids walking across the desert. I'll grant you that. Damn near everything. No, I'm not saying, again, obviously, A New Hope is a masterpiece, but, you know, there you go. See if you can find a TikTok cut of it.

By the way, what would you think is the worst movie of all time for that? For the pacing issues? And I can tell you what just popped into my head immediately. 2001 A Space Odyssey. Oh, yeah. That entire movie is a slow pace. Yeah, that's true. It's a great movie, but Jesus. Yeah. You have to be... committed stone or stone right you have to be in a frame of mind where time has no meaning yeah

Yeah, that's true. I don't know. My vote would be to go straight in universe chronological, but I do agree that Rebel won. Rogue One. Rogue One is probably a really interesting starting point because it is the most modern. It's pretty quick paced and it's vital really to the whole story. Right. Yeah.

Right. That's true. Yeah, it introduces her to the Death Star and all that stuff. Well, and you can roll from Rogue One right into A New Hope. Yeah, and there's very little force bullshit. It's pretty much a straightforward action movie. Yeah, that's true. Han Solo. Just take it with Han Solo. Chicks love Han Solo. Of course, the alternative is that he could just not show her anything Star Wars, and that way she gets to remain his girlfriend.

Option number three sounds the best. Right. Do you really want to go there? Option number four, you go to Comic-Con and find a new girlfriend. Yeah, right. Yeah, there you go. All right. Well, I'll let you know what he decides. Yeah, I'll let you know what he decides. And if suddenly she no longer shows up at the house, we'll know what happened. She's going to show up in a slave Leah outfit.

Yeah. Convertitor. Right. It worked. It worked. Misa likey. All right. Well, we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks, Dave.

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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 716. Shout out to 716, the Buffalo area code, where I spend a lot of time working with the Goo Dolls and writing my own music.

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